Faces of the Gone: A Mystery

by Brad Parks

  The corner office of the Eagle-Examiner newsroom was a strange and foreign land, one I almost never visited. It’s not that Brodie was unfriendly or unapproachable. Quite the contrary. And with his unkempt eyebrows and womanly voice, he looked and sounded like your aging uncle Mortie—the guy who wasn’t really your uncle but was such a dear family friend everyone called him “uncle” anyway. Yet for whatever reason he still scared the crap out of me.

  I suppose it was a bit of a stormtrooper–Darth Vader thing. Because, in my dealings outside the newsroom, I got to be the badass stormtrooper. I had my body armor, my helmet, my blaster. I could do serious damage—to someone’s reputation, anyway—and was treated with corresponding deference. Except when I was around Brodie, I knew all he had to do was wave his hand and I would end up writhing on the floor, gasping for my last breath.

  More than anything, I just didn’t know the man all that well. In the seven years I had been working for the Eagle-Examiner— ever since being hired from a much smaller daily paper in Pennsylvania—I had spoken with him one-on-one perhaps four times. And one of those I was stoned.

  In the management structure of our paper, there was never a need for me to speak to him. I talked exclusively to editors who reported to him, or sometimes editors who reported to other editors who reported to him. It’s like I had been playing telephone with him my entire career.

  Szanto, who obviously had no such issues, walked into Brodie’s office without knocking. The old man had been playing classical music on a tiny radio, which he turned down as we entered.

  “Hi, chief,” Szanto said. I just smiled. This was my other problem with Brodie. I got so nervous around him I ended up sounding like a moron every time I opened my mouth. So I decided to keep it shut this time. I mean, think about it, do you ever hear a stormtrooper say anything around Darth Vader?

  “Carter, my boy, how are you? A little headachy this morning, I guess?”

  I kept smiling and nodded. The ganja guy was a man of few words.

  “That’s a good lad,” Brodie said, his Mr. Potato Head eyebrows dancing. “So tell me about this new development.”

  Szanto did the talking, laying out everything I had just told him in slightly more succinct fashion. Brodie absorbed it, looking more amused than angry that the story his paper had been putting forth the past two days had been flat wrong.

  “Sounds like the police were just whistling Dixie with that whole bar angle, eh?” Brodie said when Szanto was done. “I’ll have to give the police director a hard time about that the next time I see him at a benefit.”

  Brodie tented his fingers for a moment, resting his lips on them.

  “So, Carter, do you feel like you have a story you can put in the paper?” Brodie asked.

  The dreaded direct question. Must speak.

  “Well, yes and no, sir,” I said.

  “Which part is yes, and which part is no?” Brodie asked, managing to sound pleasant despite the rather pointed nature of the question.

  “Yes, I feel certain that The Stuff is the connection between the four dead people. Yes, I’m fairly certain they all hooked up with their source in jail. No, I don’t know who that source is. No, I haven’t the slightest idea why it got them killed.”

  “Do you have any good leads?”

  I gulped.

  “Not especially,” I admitted.

  More tenting of fingers followed as the executive editor settled into what was known around here as the Brodie Think. The old man was legendary for it. Reporters who found themselves in his office more frequently than I did talked about it all the time. He would just sit there. And think. And think. And think. He would do it until an answer came to him, however long that was. Sometimes—as was the case here—he even closed his eyes. It had all the appearance of advanced narcolepsy.

  Brodie didn’t seem the least bit uncomfortable with the silence. Szanto was accustomed to it, as well. For infrequent visitors such as myself, it was agonizing.

  Still, it had its benefits. There was nothing worse to a reporter than a lack of direction from the top. Because more often than not, there were at least three different ways you could go with a story, any of which was at least somewhat defensible. You could reach your own conclusion about which way was best and start traveling that path. But if the executive editor decided differently, it meant you had gone the wrong way. Once the great Brodie Think was over, at least I’d know where to head.

  Finally, he opened his eyes.

  “Let’s take this one step at a time,” he proclaimed. “Eventually, we’re going to need to figure out where The Stuff is coming from. But I think in the meantime, we should write what we know and see what happens when we put it in the paper.”

  I nodded.

  “Have you heard any footsteps on this story?” he asked.

  That was newspaper speak for “are there any other media outlets working on the same angle that might blow our scoop?”

  “I don’t think anyone is even near this,” I said.

  “TV has been repackaging sound bites,” Szanto added. “The other papers are just going with the usual shock and outrage.”

  “Good. Then there’s no need to rush this into tomorrow’s editions. Think you can have it ready for Friday’s paper?”

  I nodded again.

  “Good boy,” Brodie said. “Now why don’t you go home and get some rest?”

  I excused myself from the great man’s office, thankful to have escaped without sounding like an imbecile for once. And then I took the great man’s advice. I owed myself some sack time.

  I aimed my trusty Malibu toward Nutley, suddenly realizing how eager I was to get home. I needed to unwind in my tidy bungalow, away from the world. I know that personality test— the Myers-Whateveritscalled—says we’re either extroverts or introverts. I think we’re all a little bit of both. The last million years of evolution have turned us into social animals, but somewhere before that in our family tree, there was a branch that just wanted to be left alone. That’s what my bungalow is: a place where I can be an introvert.

  Deadline did not stir upon my entrance—Deadline could sleep through nuclear testing—and I settled into the couch and pondered Brodie’s plan to write what we knew, even though we only had half the story. The more I thought, the more I liked it. There are times when it makes sense to hold back and drop a big bomb on people all at once, when you have the full picture. This didn’t feel like one of them.

  Truth was, publishing a story is one of the most underappreciated reporting techniques out there. Sometimes it lets the right person know you’re on the right track and it makes them want to push you a little further along. You just never know what it flushes out.

  After a night of uninterrupted, undrunk slumber, it would stand to reason I would feel unhungover, uncrappy, and in all other ways more human than I had the day before. Yet as the sun crept around the shades of my bungalow’s master bedroom, I still felt lousy. Someday, science will have to explain why a bad night’s sleep hits you harder the second day.

  Deadline had commandeered a disproportionately large part of the middle of the bed, leaving me wedged to one side. He grunted when I stirred, opened his eyes partway to shoot me a dirty look, then yawned dramatically. With his morning exercises thus dispatched, he settled back in for a well-earned nap.

  By the time I got out of the shower, it was after ten and Deadline was engaged in his other primary activity—pacing in front of his food bowl. So I gave him some breakfast, gave myself some breakfast, then grabbed my laptop and flopped on the couch.

  I considered doing a little more reporting, maybe calling up the National Drug Bureau, feeding them what I knew and getting them to repeat it back to me—just to give the story a little more of an official grounding. Then I thought about having to deal with their press agent, L. Peter Sampson, Mr. I’m Not Authorized to Blow My Own Nose. And I decided to spare everyone the hassle.

  No, it was time for me to write. People don’t always
think of newspaper reporters as “writers,” inasmuch as our compositions are seldom confused with art. You know the statistical theorem that says a bunch of monkeys sitting at typewriters would eventually reproduce the complete works of Shakespeare—if you gave ’em a couple trillion years to do it? It would take the monkeys about forty-five minutes to come up with some of the slop that passes for raw copy around our shop.

  Still, when you take into account that a newspaper reporter’s sole creation is the written word, we have to be considered writers. And, as writers go, we’re tough, resilient, dependable. We quietly scoff at the softer breeds. I mean, really, some magazine writers consider themselves “on deadline” when they’re three weeks away from having to deliver copy. Where I come from, that’s not a deadline. That’s two weeks off and a few leisurely days at the office.

  Then there are those namby-pamby novelists who write what the critics deem to be “literature.” They’re the bichons frisés of the writing world—they’re poofy, pretty, and everyone fawns over them. But the moment things get tough, they’re hiding under the kitchen table, making a mess on the floor.

  Newspaper reporters? We’re the Australian cattle dogs of the writing world. Maybe we don’t look that great. We certainly don’t smell that great. But you can kick us in the head, trample us, stick us out in the rain or heat. Whatever. We’re still going to get the herd home, no excuses.

  And so it was time for me to start herding. Or writing. Or whatever. I decided to start with something snappy. Something quick. Something smart.

  “The Stuff wasn’t the right stuff for four Newark drug dealers,” I wrote, then immediately highlighted and erased it. Not only did it have a glaring cliché, it was about as smart as people who mistakenly drive in the EZ- Pass-only lane and then try to back up.

  Okay. Maybe something a little straighter.

  “The four people found murdered on Ludlow Street earlier this week sold the same brand of heroin, sources indicate,” I wrote, then erased that, too. If it was any straighter, it’d be a candidate for the papacy.

  Okay. Let’s go back to snappy/quick/smart.

  “It’s the heroin, stupid,” I typed, then immediately regretted the day I entered journalism.

  I got up. It had been fifteen minutes, right? I peed, even though I didn’t need to. I scratched Deadline’s head. I noticed some cobwebs in the upper corner of my living room, grabbed some paper towels and cleaned them out.

  Random bits of ideas started forming. Maybe I could start with something about the police being offtrack? No. It was possible they were just trying to throw us off with this bar-holdup angle, all the while knowing about The Stuff.

  Perhaps I could start with something about Wanda, the beautiful girl whose dreams of being a dancer were cruelly snuffed out? No. It would take too long to get to the point.

  The best thing I could do was follow the oldest and greatest newspaper advice ever given: write what you see. What had I really seen in this case?

  Of course. Those dime bags. I sat back down and began typing a detailed description of them, and before I knew it, I was on my way. After a couple hours of typing—not to mention four Coke Zeros, two snacks, and thirteen mostly unnecessary trips to the bathroom—I was nearing something resembling a story when my cell phone rang. The caller ID was showing Szanto’s number.

  “This is Carter Ross,” I said. “I’m sorry I can’t answer the phone right now—”

  “Shhvvttt,” Szanto growled. “You got anything I can read yet?”

  I glanced at the clock on my computer screen. “I’m close. But it’s only two-thirty, what’s the hurry?”

  “The hurry is Brodie wants this to lead tomorrow’s paper and I don’t want to walk into the three-o’clock meeting without having seen it. So why don’t you just stop pretending like you’re the second coming of Bernard Malamud and send it in?”

  That was one of Szanto’s favorite sayings.

  “Okay, I’ll e-mail it to you in a second,” I said.

  “How long is it?”

  We measured length of stories in column inches—how long it would be if laid out in standard type and column width.

  “About thirty-five,” I said, which is about twice the normal length.

  “Maybe you haven’t heard this yet,” Szanto said. “But times are a wee bit tight in the newspaper industry. We’ve had a few little cutbacks in space that makes it difficult to run longer stories. Any of this ring a bell?”

  “I know, Sal, I know,” I said. And I did. On some days, the number of column inches we devoted to news coverage was half what it used to be. I added: “Don’t worry, it’s worth it.”

  “Jzzss Krrsst,” he grumbled, then hung up.

  I gave the story one more quick read—it was decent, though Bernard Malamud had nothing to worry about—then sent it in.

  “Well, Deadline,” I said to my cat. “What now?”

  Deadline, who had slipped into one of his twenty-eight daily comas, had no answer.

  Against my better judgment, I decided to go into the office. It was time to see if I could find someone who might tell me a little more about my heroin samples, preferably someone with a white lab coat. I knew that with the right assortment of gadgets, the right chemist could tell me how pure my heroin was and where in the world it originated.

  Sadly, such people do not advertise their services. My knowledgeable-though- often- misguided research assistant, Mr. Google, pointed me toward friendly people who wanted to help me beat my company’s drug-testing program. I found one laboratory that claimed it specialized in identifying unknown substances and testing the composition of known ones. But when I called them and told a nice scientist the substance she’d be testing was heroin, she suddenly was in a hurry to get off the phone.

  I called another lab where a chemist suggested I not tell him it was heroin, that way he could accept it without knowingly breaking any laws. He also said I could expect a three-to-sixweek turnaround. For an additional fee, he told me they’d “put a rush on it” and get it to me in two weeks. I must not have mentioned I worked for a daily newspaper.

  After a few more unsuccessful phone calls, I resigned myself to asking for help. Worse, I realized where that help was going to have to come from: Buster Hays.

  Hays is a cantankerous son of a bitch, but he’s also a cantankerous son of a bitch who has sources and connections all over law enforcement. Somehow, don’t ask me how, he had managed to build up enough goodwill that everyone seemed to owe him favors. And ultimately he was enough of a team player—in his own grouchy, condescending way—that he’d didn’t mind cashing in a favor to help you.

  But only after you groveled for a bit. And from the self- satisfied grin on his face as I approached his desk, I think he knew he was about to be the recipient of some concentrated groveling.

  “Hi, Buster, got a sec?”

  “What’s up, Ivy?” he said, practically taunting me. I told him about The Stuff, about the story that was going in

  the next day’s paper, and about what I needed done to the heroin samples I had found. As I talked, a change came over Hays’s face. He didn’t belittle me, nor did he try to stick up for his story. He seemed genuinely miffed he had gotten it wrong.

  “So the thing about the bar robbery, you think the cops are just making it up?” he asked.

  “I bet your cop source probably believes he’s right. I mean, who knows? Maybe Shareef Thomas really did rob that bar at some point? Or maybe he just happened to look like the guy who did? In the absence of any other information, it’s probably the best theory they had to go on. And once they committed themselves to that premise, maybe they overlooked evidence that pointed in another direction. You know how it goes.”

  Hays nodded. “I feel like printing a retraction,” he said ruefully.

  If I’d wanted to bust Hays’s balls a little bit, I would have said something like, “Oh, we’ll be printing one. It’s thirty-five inches, it’s leading tomorrow’s paper, and it’s
got my name on it.” But I didn’t need to be scoring rhetorical points at the moment. I needed his help.

  “So I’m trying to find someone who can run some tests on those heroin samples I got,” I said. “You know anyone like that?”

  “You know, it’s funny, but yesterday I got a call from a guy who does that sort of thing,” Hays said.

  I looked at him for a long second to see if he was busting my balls, but he appeared quite earnest. “You did?” I asked

  “Yeah, a guy named Irving Wallace. I hadn’t heard from him in a month of Sundays, but he saw my byline on the Ludlow Street story and gave me a holler. He was all interested in it for some reason.”

  “You think he’d help me?”

  “Maybe. He sure seemed curious about the story,” Hays said. “You’re not going to have to quote him, are you?”

  “I guess not. He’s just doing a test for us.”

  “Good, because he works for a part of the federal government where they don’t like to see their names in the paper.”

  Hays started flipping through one of his Rolodexes. He had four of them—one from each century he had been working here. Naturally, he was one of the holdouts who refused to modernize and put his sources in a computer. He was into Rolodex number three by the time he found what he was looking for.

  “Here he is. Irving Wallace,” Hays said as he copied the number onto a piece of paper. “This guy is the best forensic chemist on the East Coast. Drop my name and promise you won’t quote him. He’ll have that test done for you by suppertime.”

  O

  n my way back from Hays’s desk, I saw Szanto, who was returning from the three-o’clock meeting along with a pack of other editors. “Everything okay with the story?” I asked.

  “It’s fine,” he said.

  In Szanto talk, “fine” was a high compliment. If you were

  waiting for something that actually sounded like praise, chances are you would be waiting a while. He handed out a “good” about three times a year. “Very good” was a biennial event. I’m not sure anything beyond that—great, spectacular, superior— was even in his vocabulary. I was pleased with my “fine.”