Two Jakes

by Lawrence de Maria

  The newsroom was quiet, a sea of empty cubicles. More than half the editorial staff had been let go over the previous three years, as the Internet decimated the paper’s traditional advertising base. Circulation, which had peaked at 70,000, was now around 40,000, and that didn’t tell the whole story. The 70,000 figure was reached when the Island had a population of 200,000. Since most papers were then home delivered, that meant that just about every Islander not in diapers read the Register. Today the population was half a million, the majority new arrivals with no affection for their “hometown newspaper.” There was talk of the Register going weekly. The paper’s new $25 million headquarters and state-of-the-art printing plant, built with cheap money four years earlier, was already obsolete and a financial drain. Pearsall often longed for the crowded and decrepit newsroom he started in, with its steel-desk ambiance and bustle.

  Pearsall put his feet up. His shoes were black, and clashed with the off-the-rack brown suit he was wearing. At least, he noted, his socks matched his maroon tie and suspenders. His daughter, a typically clothes-conscious teen-ager, tried to get him to wear a belt. With his thin face and balding pate, the suspenders made him look like a banker in a 1940’s Capra movie, she said. While delighted in her movie taste, he stood firm on the suspenders. When you have a pot belly, narrow hips and no ass, trousers tend to slip south unless anchored around the shoulders. He hoped she wouldn’t notice the damn shoes!

  Pearsall had worked at the paper all his professional life, starting on the night staff as a reporter writing a blizzard of “meeting” notices churned out by Staten Island’s legions of religious, veteran, political, social, cultural and metastasizing not-for-profit groups. All of them got three sprightly-written paragraphs, buried inside. Pearsall and his colleagues rarely went to any meetings; most of the stories were phoned in by participants, usually a designated “press” person who drew the short straw. The information was recited verbatim, and there wasn’t much room for creativity on the part of the “reporter” taking it all down. How many ways can you say that 35 Rotarians at the Mandalay Restaurant listened to a speech by the Commander of the local Coast Guard base? But Pearsall did his best, even surviving the prankster who reported that the Association of Gynecologists had elected Dr. Seymour Vulva as its president. He was more careful after that.

  But during the same nighttime hours when Rotarians were getting soused at local bars, other people were occasionally getting themselves murdered, raped or trapped in fires. Those stories weren’t phoned in. Since the paper’s “crack” police reporter at the time, an often drunk ex-flatfoot named Padraic O’Malley, checked his ambition at his favorite pub by 6 p.m., a night staff reporter might catch a juicy story.

  Unlike the other night reporters, Pearsall never ignored one of these stories, and soon his editors noted that he rarely made factual or stylistic mistakes, or needed much rewriting. He quickly moved up the editorial ladder, avoiding, for the most part, the petty squabbles rampant at a small-town monopoly newspaper. He was a natural for the city editor’s job, all he ever coveted, never aspiring to the executive editor’s position, which would have meant getting involved in office and local politics. Moreover, while he was fairly facile with computers and appreciated what they could do in a newsroom, he had no desire to lead the paper into the New Age and was happy when management brought in a young technocrat from a Silicon Valley daily as executive editor.

  The “techie” was Beldon Popp, who had never been a “line” editor, selected for the job because he’d been a computer teacher at one time. But he turned out to be a decent manager and deserved credit for revamping the Register’s award-winning computer system and saving what circulation was left. More importantly to Pearsall, Popp rarely interfered in the day-to-day operations of the newsroom.

  Robert Pearsall was part of a dying breed – the crusading newspaperman. Not that he’d fallen off a turnip truck. He knew a certain amount of corruption was inevitable in a small, insular community where the “old boy” network was ingrained. Indeed, he was prepared to look the other way when favors and accommodations between and among local elected officials and judges made life easier for Staten Islanders who were otherwise at the mercy of the larger city’s unfeeling bureaucracy. Islanders looked after their own – and Pearsall was first and foremost an Islander.

  But Pearsall always had his eye out for real corruption and hypocrisy, which, while never in short supply on Staten Island, had become bolder as the Register’s influence waned. Older residents who remembered a less-crowded and less-corrupt small-town Staten Island were fleeing to New Jersey and the Sun Belt, and the borough’s burgeoning immigrant population could care less about local news coverage. The politicians and crooks were having a field day, safe in the knowledge that the “Manhattan media” typically ignored Staten Island unless a plane crashed on it.

  Pearsall knew his days were numbered. He had come close to putting in his papers two years earlier, after the tragic, though not unexpected, death of his wife. Veronica Pearsall lost a two-year battle with breast cancer and he was left with a teen-age daughter to raise.

  Then came the nursing home scandal. Most of the nursing home and assisted living facilities in the borough were locally owned and operated and, for the most part, did a fairly good job. But one group of homes, run by an Arkansas-based corporation called Paradise on Earth Inc., wasn’t living up to its name. Indeed, its mortality rate was beginning to ring alarm bells even in the live-and-let-die world of Staten Island political and medical circles.

  Pearsall had his reporters look into Paradise’s operations. One of them went undercover as an employee. Within two months, he discovered gross abuse of helpless patients, including rape, Medicare fraud, instances of euthanasia among patients without relatives and black market sale of drugs. The hygiene in the clinics would have been a disgrace in the Third World and on its own would have counted for the high death rate. But patients were also being given outdated or diluted prescriptions.

  Pearsall ran a series, but suspected that Paradise’s corruption was systemic. He dispatched two reporters to investigate the company’s facilities in other states. Armed with the early stories, they convinced frightened administrators in other Paradise operations to open up. The subsequent revelations that, in addition to its other atrocities, the company traded in body parts, soon hit the national media. Congress stepped in. The Register’s series, led by thundering editorials written by Pearsall himself, won a spate of awards, including a Pulitzer Prize, the first in the paper’s 109-year history. There was even a slight, and temporary, surge in circulation.

  The paper’s downward spiral soon resumed, but Bob Pearsall wanted one more feather in his cap before retiring. He thought he might get one if his latest suspicions panned out. He reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a beat-up, coffee-stained Hagstrom map of Staten Island. There were newer, flashier Chamber of Commerce maps in the drawer that were in many ways superior, and certainly more current, but he liked the feel of the Hagstrom and the way its streets looked. Besides, the older map had been used so often it had a “crease” memory. It took him only seconds to refold it. When he tried to close the new maps it looked like he was having a seizure. Often as not the map cover wound up on the inside.

  He lay the map flat on his desk and stared at it. He had used a red magic marker to circle two areas: the former oil-tank farm in Bloomfield on Staten Island’s west shore and the mothballed Naval Home Port in Stapleton on the east shore. Unlike the newer maps, the old Hagstrom didn’t indicate the Home Port property in Stapleton, so Pearsall wrote the name in with a ballpoint.

  Someone was quietly buying up land all the way down to the water line surrounding both tracts. The name that kept popping up was Dr. Nathan Bimm, a millionaire former plastic surgeon turned real estate developer.

  Pearsall despised Bimm. He had built a fabulously lucrative chain of “nip-and-tuck” clinics on Staten Island but sold his practice suddenly just before a Federal Medicare Fraud
task force discovered tens of millions of dollars in overbilling. Pearsall suspected, but could never prove, that Bimm had a silent partner in the clinics – the Lacuna crime family – which warned him of the impending investigation. In any event, Bimm escaped prosecution and through political contributions and sweetheart real estate deals was now considered to be the right-hand man of Borough President Mario Blovardi – or vice versa, Pearsall thought cynically.

  In most cases it was obvious Bimm was merely arranging the recent land purchases for a third party. But who? The Lacunas? What could they get out of it? Both tracts, which each ran to several hundred acres, were presumably spoken for. In Bloomfield, NASCAR had purchased the oil-farm property and was planning a race track and stadium, a project Pearsall opposed but suspected would never get off the drawing boards anyway. And the Home Port land had recently been sold by the city to a Hong Kong-based firm for development as a mixed-use community of residential high-rises and shopping.

  But the editor’s distrust of Bimm, who he blamed for much of the recent construction blight on Staten Island, prompted him to assign his two best reporters to dig deeper. So far they had drawn a blank on both the who and the why. It was early innings, he knew, and they were hampered by the fact they really didn’t know what to look for and had been reduced to grasping at straws.

  The latest straw being a historical coincidence about the two properties that one of the reporters, Chris Tighe, dug up on the Internet. Pearsall had actually been snippy with the kid on the phone for wasting time on something that had no relevance.

  “It’s a nice human interest story,” the reporter argued.

  “Bimm isn’t human,” Pearsall retorted. “Just find out what he’s up to.”

  After he hung up he berated himself for his unforgivable lack of objectivity. The damn Pulitzer had obviously gone to his head. But the kid’s story idea was dumb. Who cared about a project so asinine that it was abandoned in the 1920’s?

  ***

  Pearsall had his back to the elevator when Everett Harvey walked in. He swiveled his chair only when he heard some other staffers greet the police reporter. Anticipating that Harvey was headed his way, he quickly folded the Hagstrom with an accomplished flourish. But the police reporter headed straight into the managing editor’s glassed-in corner office. That’s strange, Pearsall thought; Ev always checks in with me first. He watched the two men converse quietly. Popp looked out at the city desk and picked up the phone. A few minutes later the elevator opened and Jennifer Fish, the Register’s publisher, walked quickly into Popp’s office, looking neither left nor right. Suddenly the intercom on Pearsall’s phone bank buzzed. It was Popp.

  “Bob, can you come in here, please.” He sounded tense.

  Puzzled, Pearsall got up and slowly made his way to Popp’s office. Two minutes later, curious staffers were shocked to see him slump to the floor before any of the others with him could react.

  CHAPTER 5 – LAWS OF GOD AND NATURE

  Jake Scarne leaned on the railing of the deck outside his apartment. He’d slept badly and felt lousy. He’d had another dream. Or, rather, the same dream. In it he was swimming in a warm tropical lagoon when someone grabbed his ankle and pulled him down. When they reached bottom the hand let go and he saw it was a beautiful woman, blonde tresses waving in the current. He tried to kiss her. Her lips parted and a trickle of blood swirled from her mouth. Then she floated backwards, her dead eyes accusing him. Scarne had woken, gasping for breath, sweating profusely. He’d not been able to go back to sleep.

  Below him on Fifth Avenue the traffic was beginning to pick up. He watched an elderly woman walking two rat-like dogs struggle with a pooper scooper as one of the hairless animals wrapped its leash around her legs. The other creature strained to reach a tree where a tail-swishing squirrel was poised, head down, staring at it. If that leash breaks, my money is on the squirrel, Scarne thought. It’s bigger. A fruit vendor was setting up his stand nearby. Kids with backpacks ambled out of the NYU dorms just up the street. A Lincoln Town Car from a livery service pulled into the circular driveway of his building and disappeared under the scaffolding and net that had been installed to protect pedestrians from falling bricks.

  Scarne took a deep drag from his cigarette and immediately felt a slight constriction in his throat. Time to cut back, maybe even quit. He reached down to extinguish his cigarette in the coffee mug that served as an ashtray on the small plastic table that, along with a dusty lounge chair, was the deck’s only adornments, if one didn’t count the foot-high weeds growing through cracks in the cement. How did they germinate eight stories up? He knew he should pull them, but, admiring their tenacious grip on life, kept putting it off. Maybe they weren’t all weeds. One looked suspiciously like a sapling.

  The mug on the table was full of butts, and Scarne felt a momentary disgust, exacerbated by the fact that it was a beautiful day. He looked down the street to Washington Square and its famous arch. The 10-acre park was a neighborhood treasure and a magnet to residents, tourists, students and film makers. The brownstones on the north side, in particular, had appeared in innumerable movies and TV dramas, mostly police procedurals. Scarne was pretty sure every character actor in Manhattan had been murdered or arrested in front of one of those brownstones. The Square’s grass, benches, mature trees, street performers and chess players were magnets that made it a people-watchers’ paradise.

  Scarne thought the park perfect as it was, and had recently signed a petition decrying the city’s plan to redesign its fountain and move it 11 feet, six inches to line up exactly with the arch. He had never noticed that the park’s layout was “asymmetrical,” as the redesign proponents claimed, and frankly didn’t give a damn. The park had served Greenwich Village well for more than 150 years. Robert Lewis Stevenson and Mark Twain had conversed on one of its benches, and Scarne was fairly certain they never noticed the fountain was a bit off-center.

  From his vantage point he could read the inscription on the arch’s façade: “To commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the inauguration of George Washington as the first president of the United States.” He wondered how the Father of the Country, whose barefoot soldiers froze in the snows of Valley Forge, would have felt about spending $16 million to move a fountain.

  Scarne also wondered how long he’d be able to afford his view of the park. He’d gotten a letter from his building’s co-op board breaking down the cost of repairing the façade that was shedding all those bricks. The whole project was going to cost residents $31 million. Since he had a one-bedroom apartment, the letter noted, Scarne’s assessment, based on square footage, was “only” $84,500! Where is George when I need him, he thought sourly.

  Scarne’s cell phone began playing Aura Lee. It was Dudley Mack.

  “You want to get drunk in a church?” his friend asked without preamble.

  “How is anyone expected to say no to that?”

  “Get the 5 o’clock boat. I’ll pick you up in front of the one-two-oh.”

  ***

  Scarne was standing outside the ancient St. George’s 120th Precinct house – the “one-two-oh” to everyone on Staten Island – talking with Abel Crider when a black limousine pulled up to the curb. Or rather, he was listening to the police detective; he could barely get a word in edgewise. Crider was the fastest talker Scarne ever met. There were no pauses between words, no places where a comma could fit. The rear window of the limo rolled down and Dudley Mack said, “Rescue any more hostages lately, Abel?”

  Crider grimaced. “Up yours.” (It came out, “Uproars.”)

  Mack laughed good-naturedly as Scarne got in the back seat. Behind the wheel Bobo Sambucca, now Dudley’s official driver, smiled a hello in the mirror and pulled away.

  “Give it a rest, Duds,” Scarne said. “Abel’s a good guy. He’s off that detail now.”

  “What a surprise.”

  All three men had known Crider since college, but had lost track of him until Scarne spotted an article in the Po
st about a hostage situation in a Queen’s Hooter’s. A man put a gun to the head of a waitress and demanded to see the manager. The girl had previously dumped the gunman for said manager, who wisely locked himself in the freezer. The restaurant was soon surrounded by police, accompanied by a hostage negotiator, who went in to talk to the distraught suitor. Minutes later there was a shot and the hysterical girl ran out. The frozen manager, smelling like shrimp, soon followed. A SWAT team found the hostage negotiator standing over the gunman, who had taken his own life. The negotiator was Abel Crider and it was suggested, half in jest, that the poor bastard killed himself so he wouldn’t have to listen to Crider talk.

  Scarne and Mack laughed at the memory.

  “All the Criders talk like that,” Bobo said from the front seat. “I knew Abel’s mom. Talked faster than him. When they argued it sounded like dueling machine guns. Pentagon should draft them to run our communications. Enemy would go batshit trying to figure anything out. They could talk on regular phones, for Crissake! Be like them Iroquois code talkers the Marines used against the Japs.”

  “I think they were Navajos,” Mack said.

  “I screwed a Nava ‘ho’ once,” Bobo said. “She was awesome.”

  ***

  “Is this one of your new funeral cars?”

  They were driving along Richmond Terrace.

  “Can’t get anything by one of the city’s top private dicks. Like it?”

  “Yes,” Scarne said. “It still has that new dead body smell.”

  Unlike many funeral home operations, the Mack-Sambuca chain (now up to four sites on Staten Island and one in Sea Girt, New Jersey), had its own fleet of limousines and hearses. Dudley Mack was proud of his modern fleet and was famous for occasionally using the cars for his non-funeral enterprises, most of which were illegal. Mack believed the vehicles “set the right tone” for conversations in the back seat. Being taken for a ride in one of them was an unnerving experience for even the toughest of men. It was a home field advantage that turned many a deal in Mack’s favor.