Faces of the Gone: A Mystery

by Brad Parks

  Over the next three hours, I learned a lot about the neighborhood: how the vacant lot had once been home to a crack house, until the city got its act together and tore it down; how the public housing across the street, which had been slapped together by a developer known to be cozy with the mayor, was already falling apart; how the bar down the street, the Ludlow Tavern, just kept getting rougher, with the patrons leaving their knives at home and bringing their guns instead.

  But I didn’t learn anything about the four victims, which suggested they weren’t from this part of town. Most Newark neighborhoods were tighter than outsiders realized, with familial connections that went back generations. If someone from the neighborhood got killed, you could always find a cousin or a friend—or a cousin of a friend whose aunt was distantly related to the victim’s stepmother. Something. But I had struck out. By the time I was done canvassing and had returned to the vacant lot, a truck from a New York TV station had pulled up outside the church. No doubt, they were ready to lend great insight and understanding with their ferociously dogged reporting, which would consist of taking off just as soon as they had collected one usable five-second sound bite from the first “concerned citizen” they could find.

  I don’t want to launch into too much of a rant against local television reporters. But if I were a modern-day Noah, I’d take the bacteria that causes the clap on my ark before I took one of them.

  This reporter (I loathe to even use that word) was a typical TV news chick whose good looks were an entirely artificial creation. It was possible, underneath the layers of eye makeup and expensively treated hair, she might have once been an attractive human being. But who could tell anymore?

  “I’m standing outside St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church in Newark,” she began breathlessly, “where four bodies were found stacked like cordwood in this . . . dammit.”

  A gust of wind had sullied her hair, momentarily halting her unflappable dedication to delivering the news.

  “Come on. My fingers are freezing,” her cameraman complained.

  “Shut up. You think I’m warm here?” she said testily, running a gloved hand through her hair.

  Then she saw me, instantly dropped the bitchy act, and affected a huge smile, as if she were happy to see me—which, I knew, meant she was going to try to leach information out of me. TV chicks believe they can get stuff from male newspaper reporters simply by flipping their hair and batting their eyes a few times. They do this because they assume male newspaper reporters are hard up. Most of the time, they’re absolutely correct. But I can proudly say I don’t let Mr. Johnson do my thinking when I’m on the job. I save that for after work.

  “Hiiiiiii,” she said, managing to fire off two hair flips inside seven seconds. “Alexis Stewart, News 8 Action News Team.” “Hi,” I said flatly.

  “Do you know where any of the victims’ families live, by any chance? I’d love to get a bite from a grieving mom.” “Yeah. They all live just a few blocks up that way,” I lied. “They’re in an apartment complex called Seth Boyden. You might want to hurry. I hear they’re just about to hold a news conference.”

  The News 8 Action News Team rushed off like they were headed to a free hairspray handout, leaving me alone on Ludlow Street. A strong gust of wind sliced into me as I gazed at the vacant lot, trying to imagine what circumstances had led four people to this spot for the purpose of taking their last breaths.

  Four bodies. It was a big number. There had only been one other qua druple homi cide in Newark in the last quarter century, mostly because the drug-related killings that typified the city’s murders tended to be one- or two-at-a-time type affairs. Contrary to what suburbanites believed, the drug trade in Newark was not highly organized. There were no kingpins, no major operators, no Evil Geniuses behind it all. The local gangs, who did most of the selling, were all neighborhood based, with little centralization beyond that. Even though all Bloods wore red and all Crips wore blue, each set operated independently. The violence they committed tended to be limited in scale.

  So four bodies suggested something new, something much more pernicious. To herd together four people, lead them to a faraway vacant lot, and kill them? That took planning, organization, coordination. And those were higher-order skills we hadn’t seen from the street before.

  I soon realized I wasn’t alone in staring at the lot. An older guy with long, salt- and-pepper dreadlocks was doing the same thing. He was wearing the uniform of a Newark Liberty International Airport baggage handler and was carrying some flowers.

  “Hi, there,” I said.

  “Hey, Bird Man,” he said.

  On the streets, the Newark Eagle-Examiner was known as “the

  Bird.” Its reporters were called “Bird Man” or “Bird Woman.” It was an unfortunate consequence of the long- ago marriage of the Newark Ea gle and the Newark Examiner into the Eagle-Examiner. And while the merger made us New Jersey’s largest and most respected daily newspaper, it also made us sound like we were the official publication of the Audubon Society. I suppose the reporters didn’t have it as bad as some: the guys who tossed the papers onto people’s front porches in the morning were called “Bird Flippers.”

  “Gee, what makes you think I’m a reporter?” I asked, trying not to sound too sarcastic.

  “You got that nosy look.”

  “You can call me Carter,” I said, sticking out my hand for him to shake. He looked a little surprised—people in the hood often are when a white person is friendly toward them—then grabbed it and pumped it twice. His hands felt like they had gripped a lot of Louis Vuitton knockoffs in their time.

  “You know one of them?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Tyrone Scott. Called himself ‘Hundred Year.’ He told people he was supposed to get himself a hundred years in jail for killing some guy.”

  “So I take it he got paroled.”

  “Ah, he was full of it,” the man said. “You know how these young bucks are. Always trying to puff up their damn reputations, trying to make themselves all bad. He was just caught selling near a school.”

  That was one of the Catch-22s of urban drug sales in New Jersey: There were stiffer penalties for dealing within a thousand feet of a school, the difference between jail time and no jail time. But the thousand-foot standard was set with the suburbs in mind. In the city, everything was within a thousand feet of a school. It was the main reason New Jersey led the nation in the disparity between its prison population (60 percent black) and its general population (12 percent black).

  “So how’d you know him?”

  “I go with his mama a little bit. She asked me to come down with this,” he said, holding up the flowers.

  “Any idea what he did to end up here?”

  “What you think?”

  “Dealer?”

  “Nah,” the man said. “He was just a hustler.”

  In Newark, the distinction between “dealer” and “hustler” was an important one. A “dealer” is a guy who does nothing but sell drugs, and is mostly despised. A “hustler” is a more sympathetic figure: he only sells drugs out of necessity, to keep the lights turned on.

  Which is not to say a hustler couldn’t get himself in the same kind of trouble a dealer did.

  “What was his hustle?” I asked.

  “Diesel,” the man said. Heroin.

  “Did he live around here?”

  “Naw. His mama lives over off South Orange Avenue by the Garden State Parkway. He hustled in front of the chicken shack over there.”

  I was keeping mental notes at this point. Sometimes people clam up when you pull out a notebook and I didn’t want to spook this guy.

  “So how come he ended up down here?” I asked. “I mean, that neighborhood has to be three miles from here.”

  “His mama was asking the same question,” he said, then started mimicking a woman’s voice: “ ‘What was that boy doin’ down there? Why he leave his hood? Don’t he know they ain’t got no respect for nothing down there?’ ”r />
  “She have any idea why this happened to him?”

  “She didn’t even know he hustled. She didn’t want to know. He’d be out on that corner hustling all day and she’d say, ‘Ain’t it nice of Tyrone to keep an eye on the neighborhood? He’s such a good boy.’ ”

  “He in a gang?”

  “Don’t think so. He was too old for that.”

  “How old was he?”

  “Tyrone? Hell. Twenty-eight, twenty-nine?”

  In gang years, that was the equivalent of about ninety-seven. Gang members reached middle age by eighteen. By twenty-three or twenty- four, after a quick stint or two in jail, you were considered OG, an “Original Gangster.” No one made it to thirty in a gang. By that age, you were either dead, in jail for an extended stretch, or you had finally found the good sense to change occupations.

  “Well, I best be moving on,” the man said. “My bones is getting cold.”

  “Mine too. Thanks for talking.”

  “Uh-huh. Just make sure the police catch whoever did this, okay?” the man said, as he began walking toward the shrine with his flowers. “I don’t know if Tyrone’s mama could take it if she don’t get a little justice.”

  W

  ith early-stage hypothermia setting in, I was making the teeth-chattering walk back to the car when I saw Tommy emerge from a house at the far end of the street. “Hurry up,” I hollered. “Pretend there’s a sale at John Varvatos.” “What’s the matter?” he shot back as he caught up to me. “You’re ner vous because it’s been four hours since you checked on your fantasy football team?”

  “Hey, that’s important stuff. I’m thisclose to pulling off a blockbuster deal for Peyton Manning.”

  “Let’s just say my fantasies involving football teams are a little different from yours.”

  We hopped into my car to escape the cold just as a gust of wind rocked it. I got us rolling and clicked on the radio, where an all-news station was midway through another report about the troubled newspaper industry. For those of us who had been living with the devastation, this hardly qualified as news.

  People think newspapers are struggling because the Internet stole our readers. But that’s not the problem; when readers go online, they’re still clicking on our sites for their news. Between print and online, most newspapers have more readers than they’ve ever had. We don’t make much money off online readers at the moment, because most advertisers are still learning how best to utilize the Web. But we’ll figure that out eventually.

  The real problem is that the Internet stole our classified advertising. Every daily newspaper used to have a nice thick section stuffed with nothing but ads—used cars, apartments for rent, houses for sale, secondhand pianos, job postings, and so on. We were the community’s marketplace and in most areas we were the only game in town. As an industry, our entire profit margin came from that one section.

  That’s gone now. Gone to Craigslist, to eBay, to Monster, to Autotrader. Combine that with some of our other issues— shrinking retail advertising budgets, soaring newsprint prices, increased distribution costs, and so on—and it made for a fiscal conflagration that was threatening to consume an entire American institution.

  “Can we turn that off?” Tommy said. “It’s like listening to someone narrate your own funeral.”

  “Happy to oblige,” I said.

  It was easy to get caught up in the sense of doom. The threat of layoff was constant and I didn’t care to think about how many good people we had lost already. Yet for all the Internet had done to shake up newsrooms, the basics of what we did— gather information and disseminate it in a speedy and sensible manner— were unchanged. So I turned my attention back toward that job.

  “You learn anything out there?” I said, holding my hand against the car’s heater, which was finally spitting out lukewarm air.

  “Not really. Nobody seems to know anything about these guys. I just keep hearing the same thing: there were four shots, no one called the police because gunfire in the neighborhood is so common, suddenly there are four dead bodies. Everyone is a little freaked out.”

  “Sounds like stuff you can feed to Whitlow and Hays for the daily.”

  “Yeah. What did you get?”

  I related the conversation I had with Tyrone Scott’s mama’s boyfriend.

  “Well, that’s a little something,” Tommy said. “Should we check out that chicken shack?”

  “No, I’ll do that. Let’s split up. Why don’t you visit that florist and see if they can tell you who ‘Tynesha’ is.”

  Tommy agreed and, as I drove back to the office, he subjected me to a harangue about how my shoes were just wrong, saying I should free myself from the bondage of laces and get slip-ons.

  “Tommy, I’m born and bred WASP,” I reminded him. “You ought to be proud of me for not wearing shoes with tassels.”

  Upon returning to the office, I made a quick Coke Zero pit stop at the break room vending machines. There, I found Tina Thompson, our city editor, reading Fertility for Dummies. Tina was excessively candid about her sex life, and the thunderous ticking of her thirty-eight-year-old biological clock could be heard as far away as the Pine Barrens. It never failed to amuse me how a woman whose life had until recently consisted of work, yoga, jogging—and a series of relationships that lasted between one night and two weeks—had suddenly entered a nesting phase. Her search for Mr. Right had taken on a highly procreative bent. She wasn’t looking for a life partner, just a mating partner: a man who was, above all else, fecund.

  “Hey, Tina,” I said. “Gotten yourself knocked up yet?”

  “Jesus Christ!” she said, without looking up. “Did you know that excessive time riding a bike can cause sterility in males? That’s it. No more bike messengers for me.”

  She threw the book down.

  “Might want to take it easy on the X-ray technicians, too,” I suggested.

  “Hey, if he’s six foot one, a hundred eighty-five pounds, with dark hair and blue eyes, I might let him throw one in me anyway,” she said with a flirty grin.

  I’m six one. One hundred eighty-five. Dark hair. Blue eyes. I’m not a bad-looking guy. Occasionally, I’m even somewhat dashing. But I’m not under any illusion Tina is attracted to me. Just my sperm. So far, my little swimmers had held off on her overtures. Though I’m a little worried about what might happen if she got them drunk someday. They’re weak-willed. And Tina has that hot-older-woman thing going on, with yoga- toned arms, never-ending legs, and expressive brown eyes that seemed to be winking at me even when they were still.

  “Too bad I’m a born- again virgin,” I said. “I’m going to Virgins Anonymous and everything. Just celebrated my three-month anniversary of celibacy.”

  That last part was actually true, sadly, though not by choice. I was just in a little slump. That didn’t mean I was going to hop into bed simply because Tina patted the pillow. I wasn’t ready to become one of those Modern Fathers who parade around with Precious Bundle strapped to his chest in a Baby Bjorn all day. Nor was I particularly interested in spawning a child who would someday refer to me as “my biological father.”

  “Fine, have it your way,” she said. “You’ll cave someday.”

  Alas, she was probably right. Tina was wearing a button- down white blouse that was just slightly see-through and an above-the-knee charcoal-gray skirt with black tights. And in one motion—she recrossed her fabulous legs and tucked a lock of curly brown hair behind her ear—I could already feel my resolve crumbling.

  “So you look like you’ve spent all day in a meat locker,” she said. “You get anything out there?”

  “Other than frostbite? No.”

  “Buster Hays has a cop source who says they’re looking into a theory that this has something to do with a robbery at the Ludlow Tavern,” Tina said.

  “What’s the theory?”

  “That one of the victims helped stick up the place a couple months ago then had the balls to walk back into the place and order a d
rink. Supposedly, the owner had him whacked.”

  “Which one?”

  “The one with the Muslim name . . . uh, Shareef Thomas.” “So who are the other three people?”

  “Accomplices?” she said, sounding uncertain. “I’m not sure they know.”

  “The police got any good evidence to back up this theory?”

  “Source won’t say. But do the Newark police ever have good evidence?”

  She had a point. I once covered a murder trial where—no lie— the whole case had been pinned on the eyewitness account of one drug addict who admitted to being high at the time of the shooting. “I was high,” she said on the stand. “But I have a really good memory.” The jury disagreed, deliberating for about thirty-five minutes before returning a not-guilty plea.

  “What does Hays think?” I asked.

  “That they may be on to something. His cop made it sound like this was a really hot lead.”

  “Huh,” I said. “Brodie still got wood for this thing?”

  “His flag has been at full staff all day long,” Tina said.

  Before that imagery developed any further, I ended our conversation and went back to my desk.

  I started punching the victims’ names into my computer, seeing what it might tell me. Between Lexis- Nexis, New Jersey voting records, the Department of Corrections Web site, and the other public records to which a reporter had instant access, you could usually piece together a solid bank of information on a person within a few minutes.