Faces of the Gone: A Mystery

by Brad Parks

  Unless their names are Wanda Bass, Tyrone Scott, and Shareef Thomas, all of which were too common for me to get anything definitive. The only name that returned much of anything was Devin Whitehead. I got his Department of Corrections profile, which included six convictions for possession and possession with intent to deal. I also got his last known address, which was in the Clinton Hill section of Newark.

  And that was a good break, because I happened to have a source there.

  M

  y guy in Clinton Hill is Reginald Jamison, but I think the only person who calls him “Reginald” is his wife. Everyone else calls him “the T-shirt Man,” or just “Tee.” Tee has a small storefront on Clinton Avenue. He and I became acquainted a few years back when I did a story about RIP T-shirts, which happen to be Tee’s specialty. RIPs had become a disturbingly prevalent urban fashion trend: anytime some tooyoung kid got killed, his boys rushed to have a T-shirt made in his memory. Every RIP T-shirt was different, but they followed a basic formula, featuring the deceased’s photo, the dates of birth and death, and the words REST IN PEACE. The people who wore them essentially became walking tombstones.

  More than half of Tee’s business came from RIP T-shirts. And while he hated the idea that he was profiting from these kids’ deaths, he was also a businessman who figured if he wasn’t making these things, someone else would. He assuaged his guilt by putting extra care into the design, so each T-shirt would be special to the grieving family.

  The story I wrote about Tee had given him some good publicity and I became a semiregular visitor to his store. We couldn’t have been raised in more different circumstances— while I was taking SAT prep classes, Tee was dropping out of high school to support three younger siblings. But we were close to the same age, shared a fundamental curiosity for the world, and enjoyed each other’s company because of it. Tee could explain the hood to me, while I translated white people for him. Plus, Tee had a natural eye for news. He could have made a great reporter.

  Instead, he was just one of my best sources. And as soon as I got buzzed into his store that afternoon, he greeted me with, “I wondered when I was going to hear from you.”

  “And why is that?”

  “You’re here about Dee- Dub, right?”

  Dee-Dub. D.W. Devin Whitehead. Got it.

  “Good guess.”

  “Everyone’s talking about it. Figured you’d get here sooner

  or later. I’m making his T-shirt right now.” I walked over to Tee’s computer, where he designed all his shirts. Sure enough, Devin Whitehead’s face was on the screen, waiting to be immortalized on a Hanes Beefy-T. I did quick math on his dates. He was exactly two weeks shy of his twenty- first birthday.

  “Can you believe that? Twenty years old.” Tee shook his head and I could tell he had been near tears. Tee looks like a badass—five ten, at least two hundred fifty, most of it muscle, braids, and tattoos—but the dude could cry from watching a car commercial.

  “You know him well?” I asked. “A little bit. He was one of those knuckleheads who hang outside my store. But he was a good kid.”

  The definition of a “good kid” in Newark was perhaps a little different than it was in the suburbs. Out there, being a good kid meant you did your homework, made it home by curfew, and participated in resume- building extracurricular activities that would compare favorably on a college application. In Newark, it meant you hadn’t shot anyone.

  “Gang?”

  “A llegedly.”

  “Allegedly” was one of Tee’s favorite words. He used it with the appropriate sense of sarcasm.

  “Which one?”

  “You ain’t gonna write nothing bad about him, are you?” Tee asked warily. “I know his mama. If his mama found out you got it from me, she’d smack me upside the head. And his mama is one big bitch.”

  “He’s dead, Tee,” I said. “I’m not gonna piss on the kid’s grave. I’m just trying to figure out what he might have done to get himself killed.”

  “Okay, well, allegedly he was part of the Browns.”

  The Brick City Browns was one of Newark’s more venerable street gangs—which meant it had been around since the late 1990s.

  “Are the Browns at war with anyone right now?” I asked.

  “No more or less than usual.”

  “Was he a dealer?”

  “A llegedly.”

  “What did he sell?”

  “Mostly smack, I think,” Tee said. “I don’t know. I ain’t into that stuff. Hang on a sec.”

  Tee went outside his store and had a brief conversation with the aforementioned knuckleheads. Tee could get more information out of those kids in thirty seconds than I could get in half a lifetime.

  “Yeah,” Tee said as he came back in. “They said he used to sell cook-up”—street term for crack-cocaine—“but he kept getting popped for it”—street term for sent to jail—“and when he got out the last time he switched to smack. Allegedly.”

  That made two heroin sellers.

  “So what are you hearing? What are people saying?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Tee said. “This one is weird. You know how it is around here. Someone has a beef with you, they find you on a corner somewhere, they drive up and shoot your ass and then they drive off. That’s a dime a dozen. You know what I’m saying? This don’t make no sense.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “I mean, what was he doing down there?”

  “I’m trying to figure that out. Is it possible he knew anyone in that neighborhood?”

  “Dee-Dub? The only times he left Clinton Hill was when he got arrested. He lived with his mama. He had a baby with a girl down the street. His boys are all here. He didn’t have no reason to go down there.”

  We mulled that over for a moment. Tee busied himself by rearranging the used DVDs and CDs he sold as a side business.

  “What are you hearing?” Tee asked.

  “Not much, to be honest. The police think this was retribution for some kind of bar robbery the victims pulled. Is that possible?”

  “I mean, possible? Yeah, it’s possible. It’s possible Busta Rhymes will decide to make his next video in the back of my store. But I don’t think it’s gonna happen, you know what I’m saying?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “I’m saying, Dee- Dub wasn’t no stick-up artist,” Tee said. “He just didn’t have that in him.”

  I pulled my pad out of my pocket and showed him the list of victims.

  “Any of these other names mean anything to you?”

  As he scanned my pad, I added, “Tyrone Scott goes by the name ‘Hundred Year’ sometimes.”

  “Nope. Don’t know none of them besides Dee-Dub,” Tee said.

  “Huh. Well, keep your ears open, okay?”

  “You got it,” Tee said, then went back to the task of memorializing Devin Whitehead in the way he knew best.

  My next stop was the South Orange Avenue chicken shack, hard by the Garden State Parkway. Like a number of Newark’s finer providers of well-crisped fowl, this one was a shameless knockoff of Kentucky Fried Chicken. It was called Wyoming Fried Chicken. Its mascot was “Cowboy Kenny,” who looked like the Colo nel after a hot shower. It featured “the Cowboy’s” secret blend of herbs and spices—as if salt, pepper, and MSG were a secret.

  Any corporate lawyer would have filed a lawsuit quicker than he could eat a five-piece basket. But that was the blessing of Newark that protected every bootlegger, boondoggler, and copyright infringer within the city limits: anyone who might have the inclination to file such a suit wouldn’t come within three zip codes of the place.

  I pulled up in front of the WFC, which had roughly a dozen guys hanging out in front of it—or at least it did until one of them saw my pasty face, at which point there was a rapid scattering. The sight of a well-dressed white man in the ghetto often has that effect. Only one of the loiterers stayed behind. He was wearing a North Face jacket, which was all the rage among discerning urban pha
rmaceutical salesmen. Lots of pockets.

  “What you want?” North Face asked, eyeing me suspiciously. “I’m a reporter with the Eagle-Examiner. I’m just working on a story. You know a guy named Tyrone Scott? Goes by the name Hundred Year?”

  “Never heard of him,” North Face said, spitting his sentence out almost before I finished mine. I could have asked him if he knew Mickey Mouse and the answer would have been the same.

  “Really? That’s funny, because someone told me he hustles around here.”

  “Well, good for him,” North Face said, getting agitated. “But you can’t stand here.”

  “Excuse me? This is a public sidewalk.”

  “It’s my sidewalk. Get out of here. You’re scaring away all the customers.”

  “Well, we can do this one of two ways,” I said. “Either you tell me about Hundred Year, or I stand here all night until I find someone who knows him. What’s it gonna be?”

  He glanced around, clearly not liking either choice. And perhaps he was considering a third option—pulling a piece out from under his jacket and reducing me to a bloody speed bump on Cowboy Kenny’s sidewalk—but I think he realized having dozens of cops responding to a homi cide call was going to be an even greater business disruption.

  “I talk and then you leave?”

  “You have my word,” I said. “What was his deal?”

  “I don’t know. He went to jail for a while. Then he got out.”

  “What was he in for?”

  “Dealing, I guess. He told people he shot someone, but if he did, it wasn’t no one around here. I ain’t never heard no one saying, ‘Yeah, Tyrone, that nigga shot me.’ ”

  “Was he in a gang?”

  “Naw. Tyrone’s just a mama’s boy.”

  “Did he hustle?”

  “Yeah, sometimes. Not all the time, you know what I mean? But more lately.”

  “What did he sell? Diesel?”

  “Diesel?” North Face said, screwing up his face like he had never heard the word.

  “You really want me out here all night, don’t you?”

  “Okay, yeah, he was selling diesel.”

  “You think it got him killed?”

  “I don’t know. Look, it wasn’t me or any of my boys, okay?”

  “Convince me.”

  North Face looked left, then right, like he wanted to make sure no one was eavesdropping. Or maybe it was just a reflex to keep your head on a swivel in his line of work.

  “Man, I’m saying, he just did his own thing, you know?” he said. “He had his own customers, the real hard-core junkies. He got a reputation for selling really good junk and then, bam, all the junkies started going to him.”

  “Didn’t that piss you off?”

  “Naw, man. I don’t sell drugs.”

  “For a guy who doesn’t sell drugs, you sure know a lot about it,” I said, cracking an I’m-kidding-please-don’t-shoot-me smile.

  “Who me?” he said. “I just read that in National Geographic.”

  I

  made good on my word to leave him and his business dealings in peace, and it was probably about time to do so anyway. It was getting dark. The streets of Newark aren’t quite as treacherous as outsiders think. But they’re still no place to dawdle once the sun sets.

  I returned to the newsroom to find it humming with its usual five o’clock buzz as deadline loomed. Our newsroom, like most newsrooms, had offices only along the outer walls and only for the most high-level editors. The majority of the editors—and all of the reporters—sat in a sea of desks that sprawled uninterrupted, without walls or partitions, over a vast open space.

  So it wasn’t hard to monitor the daily ebb and flow, and sometimes the newsman in me—the part of me that is incurably ink- stained—delighted in watching what we in the business call “the daily miracle.” My mother always wondered why her handsome son didn’t seek the greater fame and fortune to be had on TV (her dream for me was to be the next Charles Gibson). But there were too many things about the newspaper business I loved.

  The early-evening newsroom scene was one of them: reporters straining to burnish their prose before deadline; editors roaming about, hungry for copy, pestering and pressuring the reporters to give it to them; designers forcing the jigsaw-puzzle pieces of stories, artwork, and advertisements to fit on a page. Once upon a time, in the hoary old days of our business, the primary motivation for finishing was getting to the bar. The local watering hole was essentially a second newsroom. Going to work the next day hungover and wearing yesterday’s clothes was not frowned upon. It may have even been encouraged.

  Today’s newsroom bears little resemblance to the newsroom of yore. Sometime during the seventies, inspired by Watergate and the notion that a newspaper had the power to overthrow a president, journalism sobered out and grew up. Reporters became responsible members of society with degrees from respectable colleges and paychecks you could actually live on.

  So the end-of-day hurry-up was about getting home to the family, where a respectable, SUV-driving, diet-soda-drinking life would continue to be led. The old-timers will tell you something was lost along the way, that journalism went so corporate it surrendered its soul. But I disagree. To me, journalism is still a calling, just as it was to our ruffled, alcoholic forefathers.

  I believe the stories I write matter. I believe the world is a wonderful, chaotic, fascinating place and that I’ve done my job if I can help people understand it just a little better. I believe a free and vibrant press is an essential part of a free and great society.

  And sure, it gets messy sometimes. What used to be known as journalism has morphed into this ugly, chimeralike beast collectively called “the media.” And “the media” has its faults, what with all the princess-chasing paparazzi, the sleazy tabloid folks, and, of course, the cliché-drenched local TV newscasters. But I’ll link arms with all those malcontents and proudly state the world is a much better place with us than it would be without us.

  Take my current assignment. I’m sure someone who loves to bash “the media” would say I’m exploiting the death of four people by writing a story that sensationalizes violent crime. I disagree entirely. To me, I’m helping people make sense of a profoundly tragic act: the intentional taking of four human lives. And it would become even more tragic if we in the media—who have both the privilege and obligation of being society’s vocal cords—allowed such a terrible act to pass without commenting on it.

  I was lost in that thought when the voice of Buster Hays, our resident aging crank, jolted me out of my reverie.

  “Hey, Ivy, come over here a second,” he hollered. Hays grew up on 133rd Street in the Bronx and felt his common-man roots made him a superior journalist to an overeducated prep school boy like me. So he called me Ivy, no matter how many times I told him Amherst was not part of the Ivy League.

  “What can I do for you,” I said as I walked up to his desk.

  “This may be a shock to your delicate system, but it seems we’re putting out a newspaper that we plan to sell tomorrow,” Hays said. “You got anything to add to that effort or are we going to have to wait until January to read what’s in your notebook?”

  Hays was of the general opinion that reporters like me— who spent weeks developing more complex stories—were about as useful as paper cuts.

  “Well, I think this thing might be drug related,” I said. “Tyrone Scott and Devin Whitehead both sold heroin.”

  “Well, stop the presses,” Hays said, then announced to no one in particu lar, “Hey, Ivy boy here says two of the Ludlow Four were drug dealers! Can you imagine that? Drug dealers! In Newark!”

  “Dammit, Hays, this guy—”

  “Look, Ivy, let me explain a little something to you,” Hays interrupted in a condescending manner, peering at me over the top of his reading glasses. “Just because someone who sold drugs is involved in a crime, it doesn’t make the crime drug related, okay?”

  “Well, I know that, Hays, I just think your
cop sources may be throwing this bar-robbery theory against the wall to see if it sticks,” I said, sounding whinier than I wanted to.

  “Tell you what, Ivy, you get someone credible to say this thing is drug related, I’ll put it in tomorrow’s paper.”

  “And who, in your mind, is credible?”

  “I dunno. Why don’t you call the National Drug Bureau?” he suggested with a smirk.

  The National Drug Bureau was a federal agency that targeted international drug smuggling. Every so often, we’d quote them crowing about another big bust at the airport, along with a picture of NDB agents preening in front of a pile of controlled dangerous substances. But they didn’t really concern themselves with street-level drug trafficking. Hays telling me to call the NDB for a story about Newark homi cides was like phoning the Democratic National Committee and asking for comment on the Barringer High School student council race.

  Then again, if I could convince some bored federal flak to give me a line or two, it’d be fun to throw it back in Hays’s sneering face.

  “You know what, Hays? Fine. I’ll call the National Drug Bureau,” I said.

  “Have fun wasting your time.”

  “Yeah, well,” I said, groping for something to put Hays in his place. “It’s my time to waste.”

  Retreating from the Dinosaur’s Den, I stomped back to my desk, all the while stewing that I hadn’t come up with a snappier rejoinder. It’s my time to waste? Dammit. Couldn’t I have at least managed some kind of comeback that involved him filing his stories on an IBM Correcting Selectric II?

  I hauled up the National Drug Bureau’s Web site, which fea

  tured whole photo galleries of agents posing in front of large piles of powdery junk, then clicked on their “For the Media” link. After about sixteen more clicks—government efficiency at work—I found a number for their Newark Field Office and the contact name L. Peter Sampson, Press Agent.

  Agent Sampson’s voice mail informed me he was in the office today but currently unavailable. I looked at the clock. Five thirtytwo. No way a federal bureaucrat was still hanging around. Luckily for me, his recording concluded by saying that if I was a reporter on deadline, I could call his cell phone.