Bark of Night

by David Rosenfelt

  The land that Eastside is on was a cemetery in the 1800s. That is why Eastside’s sports teams are nicknamed “the Ghosts.” So I went from being a Ghost to being a Violet.

  School is not in session, so there are not many people around. According to the records, Haley did some interviews with kids on the basketball courts, but the ones we ask disclaim any knowledge of it and make it clear that they would rather play basketball than talk to us.

  The next two stops, farther into downtown, similarly yield nothing. It’s obvious that it’s much more important to know who Haley talked to and filmed, rather than where he did it.

  At a few of our stops, we are looked at warily by youngish males, maybe twenty years old. A bunch of them wear jackets with the letter X emblazoned on the back, which I can only assume means they are members of the gang Chico Simmons commands. Joey Gamble’s alleged friend Archie Sandler is one of them, but he does not in any way acknowledge knowing us. Nor does he wear the X-marked jacket.

  At one point, two of the jacketed ones walk over to us and one of them says, ominously, “What do you want down here?”

  It takes me a few moments to pull my tongue out of my throat, so in the interim Laurie says, “That really doesn’t concern you.”

  “Be careful who you’re talking to,” he says. “You could find yourself in deep shit.”

  “Be careful who you’re threatening,” she says. “Now get lost.”

  I’m sure that they have no idea she is an ex-cop with a loaded gun at the ready, but they don’t push it. Instead they laugh derisively and walk away, no doubt to report to their boss.

  “I guess we showed them,” I say, displaying my pathetic inability to admit embarrassment.

  “I think your boy Archie told them who we were. And within seconds their boss Chico is going to know we were here.”

  I don’t say so, but the knowledge of that makes me nervous.

  Laurie, not so much.

  I’m afraid there is not much to learn here. If Haley had chosen Paterson as a likely venue for his film about urban blight, then he picked the right neighborhoods in Paterson to shoot. Unfortunately, if he found anything dangerous to anyone, especially Adams, it’s hard to see what that could be.

  The last stop we make today, on Chambers Street, is a puzzling one. It’s a funeral home, but there is no indication in the discovery as to why Haley might have been here.

  There’s no service being held now, so we go into the funeral director’s office. We loosely tell the receptionist why we are there; I make a vague reference to police business, which draws a small frown from Laurie. I need to talk to her; if she’s going to work with me, she needs to stop being hung up on this honesty thing.

  The director is a woman called Linda Markman, who smiles when she welcomes us in. She almost seems happy to see us; she’s either lonely or finds it a relief to talk to someone who hasn’t just had a death in the family.

  I tell her about our trying to retrace Haley’s steps, without being specific as to why.

  “I definitely remember him,” she says. “Nice man.” My sense is that she has no idea that Haley became a murder victim soon after being here; I guess she didn’t get to host the service.

  “Why was he here?” Laurie asks.

  “He was making a movie of some kind; something about life in the city. I guess he was showing that death was a part of life. I really didn’t ask; I didn’t feel like it was my business.”

  “Was there a funeral here that day?” I ask.

  She nods. “Oh, yes. That poor man.”

  “Which poor man was that?”

  “Mr. Tolbert. He was killed and his body left in Nash Park in Clifton.”

  I think that might be the murder Jack Rubin mentioned, but I’m not sure. I turn to Laurie, and she is nodding. “Did he film the service?” I ask.

  “No,” Markman says. “I couldn’t give him permission. I didn’t have permission from the family, and I think privacy is important in these matters.”

  “Do you have contact information for the family?” Laurie asks.

  “It was just a cousin, I believe. I did see Mr. Haley talking to him after the service, but he was not filming.”

  Markman is a bit leery about giving us the cousin’s name, and if it was just me I don’t think I’d have a prayer of getting it. Fortunately Laurie has a trait that I don’t seem to have—I think it’s called humanity—and she manages to get it.

  Once we’re in the car, I ask Laurie if she was in fact familiar with the Tolbert murder.

  “Yes. Andy, I think you’d be a lot more familiar with current events if you didn’t watch The Andy Griffith Show in the morning.”

  “Laurie, I think you’d be a lot more familiar with modern investigative techniques if you spent some time watching Barney Fife.”

  “This doesn’t make it into coincidence territory,” I say. “Not yet, anyway.”

  “You mean the fact that our murder victim went to the funeral of another murder victim a week before he was killed?” Laurie asks.

  “I admit, when you put it like that, it sounds connected. But the guy found in Nash Park was homeless. Even before he was killed, he was a perfectly likely candidate to be profiled in a film about urban blight. Add to that the fact that he was murdered, and he could be the star of the damn film.”

  “Agreed. But you do think it’s worth talking to the cousin, right?”

  “Absolutely. More important, you think we’re going to run into any issues with Chico Simmons after our little run-in with his buddies?”

  “Probably not, unless we start shaking the tree. But it wouldn’t hurt to be careful.”

  “Maybe I’m missing something,” I say. “But do we at this point have any reason to believe that Joey Gamble was an enemy of Chico Simmons?”

  “No. Joey’s afraid of him, and he’s kept his distance, but unless he’s hiding something, there’s no feud or rivalry.”

  I nod. “Right. Gamble is a street guy. Maybe not a member of their gang, but on some level one of them.”

  “So?”

  “We’re helping Gamble, and we’re on the opposite side of their actual enemy, the police. So why are they taking that attitude toward us? Maybe they have no reason to help us, but why would they be opposed to what we’re doing? Why would they try to scare us off?”

  “We’re outsiders,” she says. “Don’t give them too much credit. We’re intruding on their turf and we represent the system. I wouldn’t think that they spend much time and effort distinguishing between the various groups in that system. As far as Gamble goes, I doubt that he’s important to them either way.”

  Laurie might be right, but I don’t think so. We were not doing anything threatening and yet they tried to scare us off. It may have had nothing to do with us, but rather some secret they are protecting.

  I say this to Laurie and add, “Maybe Haley threatened the same secret, and that’s why he wound up dead.”

  “I think that’s unlikely,” she says, “because that doesn’t account for Adams. He’s a Philadelphia hood; we have not come up with a reason for him to be worried about a secret on the streets of Paterson. Yet he’s the one who wound up with Truman.”

  She had just identified the problem, the inconsistency, that we keep banging our head against. If Adams hadn’t taken Truman, then we’d be thinking Chico Simmons and his gang might be the ones who killed Haley and set up Gamble to take the focus off themselves. That would make sense; it would all seem to fit neatly into place.

  But Adams did take Truman; if he hadn’t, we wouldn’t be stuck in this case in the first place.

  I drop Laurie off at home. She’s going to contact Tolbert’s cousin, while I head down to the jail to see Joey Gamble. I haven’t been there in a while, which I feel bad about. I’m basically Joey’s only hope, and I don’t like for him, or any clients in this position, to think he has been abandoned. So basically I show up to let my clients know that I’m paying attention.

  “
I thought you forgot about me,” is the first thing he says when he’s brought into the visiting room. The statement confirms my view and exacerbates my guilt.

  “Trust me on something,” I say. “My taking your case means I am working on it all the time. No other clients, no other diversions, nothing.”

  He nods. “Okay. I’m just freaking out a little bit.”

  “I understand. Now, tell me about Archie Sandler.”

  “What about him?”

  “Do you trust him? Does he have your back?”

  He thinks for a moment. “Archie has his own back. It’s not his fault; that’s the way you have to be on the street. So he probably considers me his friend, and he wouldn’t go out of his way to hurt me. But he’ll protect himself first; I’d do it the same way.”

  “Got it.”

  “Why do you ask?”

  I describe to him what happened when Laurie and I ventured into what I assume is the X gang’s turf, and how we believe that Archie may have told the gang members who we were.

  He nods his understanding. “That would be Archie’s way of getting in good with them, to show he can be depended on. But you should not go down there, and definitely don’t bring your girlfriend.”

  “My wife. My investigator.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Don’t bring her; those guys are rough, and they don’t give a shit who they hurt.”

  “Laurie is tougher than I am.”

  “Hey, I probably got nieces who are tougher than you are. I’m just telling you to be careful.”

  Why does no one respect my physical prowess? “Hey, if I run into one of your nieces on the street, she’s backing down, believe me.”

  He smiles. “What about my grandmother?”

  I shake my head. “I’m not messing with your grandmother.”

  His smile morphs into a really good laugh, the first one I’ve seen. I’m starting to like this guy. “You’re a smart guy,” he says. “Nobody messes with my grandmother. But…”

  He stops, so I prompt with, “But what?”

  More hesitation, and then he says, “Do you think it’s possible she believes I did this?”

  “Based on my conversation with her, I would say no, that’s not possible.”

  He nods. “I hope you’re right. I don’t think I could live with that.”

  Willis Senack is Christopher Tolbert’s cousin. “Second cousin on my mother’s side,” is his fuller description.

  He was quite willing to come talk to me, and since I was going to be in my office going over discovery documents, that’s where we’ve set this meeting. He works, so he couldn’t get here until almost six thirty.

  Willis looks to be closing in on sixty, and the dark hairs on his head are losing a pitched battle with the advancing gray army. He seems pleasant enough, and had told Laurie on the phone that he would do whatever he could to help, which obviously included driving up from his home in South Orange.

  He didn’t think he had much to offer, which would put him on par with pretty much every witness we’ve interviewed so far. But we live in hope.

  “How well did you know Mr. Tolbert?” I ask.

  “Not well at all, I’m afraid. I used to see him at family dinners, but the older members, the ones who held it all together, have mostly died off. I really don’t see any of the family anymore, which is sort of sad.”

  “When did you see him last?”

  He thinks for a short while. “Six years ago? Maybe seven? At my aunt Thelma’s funeral.”

  “You haven’t talked to him since then?”

  He shakes his head. “No, we were never close. I mean, I heard things; his life obviously spiraled downward. I wish I had reached out to him; maybe I could have helped.”

  “What did you hear about him?” I ask.

  “That he lost his job and was living on the street, though I don’t know where. Poor guy.”

  “Were there drugs involved?”

  He shakes his head. “Not that I heard, but you never know, and I couldn’t say for sure.”

  “Who paid for the funeral service?”

  Senack shrugs. “I did. I mean, it wasn’t fancy or anything. I’m not loaded. But I thought he deserved it. I mean, no matter what happened to him, he was family, and he mattered.”

  “Any idea who might have murdered him?” I ask, knowing that he won’t.

  “No. Sorry. I couldn’t begin to guess.”

  “According to the funeral director, there was a man there who wanted to shoot video of the service, but she wouldn’t let him. She thought it would be an invasion of privacy.”

  “Oh, really? I didn’t know that. I wouldn’t have had a problem with it. I talked to the guy afterward.”

  I nod. “So I understand. What was the conversation about?”

  “Pretty much the same as this one. He just asked me a bunch of questions about Chris, most of which I couldn’t help him on.”

  “Can you remember any of the questions?”

  “When did I see him last … was he on drugs … really the same things you want to know.”

  “Did he say why he was interested?” I ask.

  “He just said he was doing a film about the inner city and all the problems that could be found there, what life was like, that kind of thing.”

  “Did he film your interview?”

  Senack nods. “He did. He had me sign a release. I didn’t see any harm in it, so I signed it. You think I shouldn’t have?”

  “I don’t think it matters one way or the other,” I say.

  “You have any idea when the film will come out?”

  The question makes me realize that Senack doesn’t know Haley was himself murdered. He probably is like me and doesn’t watch the local news.

  I don’t see any harm in telling him. “It’s not going to come out,” I say. “He, Mr. Haley, was murdered not long after your cousin.”

  Senack is clearly shocked to hear this. “Damn, that’s terrible. Are the killings related?”

  “Good question,” I say. “Someday I hope to run into someone who can answer it.”

  I say good-bye to Senack and thank him for coming. His visit didn’t help me much, or at all, and in fact there is probably no way it could have. The idea that Haley was at Tolbert’s service merely to gather material for his film chronicling the difficulty of inner city life makes sense.

  Senack leaves and I start to gather up some of the discovery documents to take home with me. As I walk toward the file cabinet, I glance out the window and see Senack leave the building and start walking down the street.

  Unfortunately, I also see two young males standing across the street in a doorway, trying not to make it too obvious that they are looking toward the first floor exit of my building.

  They are the two guys who threatened Laurie and me on the street … the two guys with an X on their jackets.

  Shit.

  I am not without options here, and if my heart would stop pounding, I could focus on them.

  I could go down through the fruit stand and sneak out the back door into the alley. That’s not a great idea, in case they have people stationed in that alley. Alley fighting is not a specialty of mine.

  Another possibility is to call the police. The problem is that I don’t know what they would do when they got here. They can’t arrest the guys standing in front of that store; store standing is not a crime.

  I could get them to escort me to my car, unless I had really bad luck and they happened to be cops who know me or, worse, cops I’ve embarrassed on the witness stand. In that case, they’d probably let the gang guys borrow their guns. Either way, while I might escape this immediate problem, it would be delaying the inevitable.

  The third option is the one I take, and the one I always take in these situations.

  I call Laurie.

  Some people tend to babble when they’re afraid, but I’m the opposite. I speak clearly and succinctly; I can even stop my teeth from chattering in the process. So in very few word
s I tell Laurie exactly what is going on.

  “They’re just standing there?” she asks.

  “Yeah. I assume they’re waiting for me to come out.”

  “I’ll call you back in sixty seconds,” she says, and hangs up. She beats her sixty-second prediction by eight seconds.

  “Okay. Marcus is going to call you within fifteen minutes. When he does, go downstairs and out through the front, but make an immediate right turn down into the alley. Then just walk; Marcus will be there.”

  “What if they have guys stationed in the alley as well?” I realize the question is stupid the moment it leaves my mouth. “Never mind,” I say. “Marcus will be there.”

  “Right,” she says. “And I’m on my way.”

  “You sure we shouldn’t call 9-1-1?”

  “They’re not breaking any laws. And this way maybe we can get some information out of them. But try to keep an eye on them without them seeing you. If they start toward your office before Marcus gets there, call 9-1-1 and lock yourself in the bathroom.”

  “It’s not a vault, Laurie. It’s a bathroom.”

  “Andy, just be careful and protect yourself for the next twelve to fifteen minutes.”

  She hangs up, and now I am alone. These twelve to fifteen minutes are going to feel like twelve to fifteen months. I go to the window and peek out; the guys are still standing there. I hope they are the patient type.

  Marcus beats Laurie’s fifteen-minute prediction by one minute and thirty-eight seconds … not that I’m counting. His message to me when I answer the phone is a grunt that sounds like “Nwhn.”

  It could mean anything from “Now” to “No, I’m not coming, I’m home changing diapers.” But Laurie said he was coming and he has never not shown up before. I have to think that if he wasn’t going to be here, he would have told her that, and she would have called and relayed the message in comprehensible English.