Brad Parks - The Good Cop

“So how did you guys … get all this stuff?”

“Warranties,” Bernie said. “It’s all about the warranties.”

“Huh?”

“We’re a warrantied product reseller,” Gene explained.

“What’s … what’s that?”

“Well, take those boots you got there. Timberland,” Uncle Bernie said. “Now, Timberland is a popular boot around here. And these young black guys, they all want their boots to be crisp and new, all the time. The moment a boot gets a speck of dirt on it? Feh! They’re done with it.”

“But these look brand-new…”

“I’m not finished. Am I finished? Geez, this guy. It’s like he’s sitting on shpilkes. ”

“That means that you’re impatient,” Gene said.

“Anyhow,” Bernie plowed forward, “Timberland, they guarantee their product for life. For life, you hear me! So we have people all over, people who know us, people who know what we’re looking for. And they recover these kind of things for us-for a small fee, naturally. So say we get a pair of slightly used boots. We send them back to Timberland and, whammo, new boots.”

“They just … send you boots?”

“Well, there’s work involved. You have to write a letter-the letter is important, make ’em know you’re serious. And then sometimes we might have to, what’s the best way to put it, massage ’em a little. This is an art we’re talking about here.”

“Timberland guarantees its product against material or manufacturing defect,” Gene said. “So we-”

“Tut, tut,” Bernie interrupted. “What are you, making a megillah? He gets the point. Geez, Gene, someone asks you what time it is, you build ’em a clock.”

“So all this stuff,” I said, making a sweeping gesture with my arm. “The pots, the pans, the power tools. All of it is-”

“Straight from the manufacturer, never been used, good as new,” Bernie said. “Same as you get in the store. But for the right customer, Uncle Bernie gives you a discount.”

“But can you … do that?” I asked. “Is it legal?”

“Legal?” Bernie spat. “Was it legal what the Pharaoh did to my people? Was Auschwitz legal? Don’t talk to me about legal!”

“But don’t these companies, I don’t know, protect against this somehow? You must have twenty pairs of Timberlands there. Doesn’t Timberland eventually figure out it’s shipping all these new boots to the same place?”

Bernie just smiled and said, “We in the tribe have a saying for that: ‘ Mensch tracht, Gott lacht. ’”

“Man plans, God laughs,” Gene said.

I felt like laughing, too. Newark: there are a million scams in the naked city.

“So, I’m not here to dance with you, I’m here to sell stuff,” Bernie said. “You want the boots or not?”

“Yeah, I’ll take the boots. But I need a quick favor,” I said, extracting the picture of Darius Kipps from my pocket. “My guy Tee tells me you know all the cops around here.”

“The cops, the pawnbrokers, the shopkeepers, the machers , the kurves, the bubbas ,” Bernie assured me. “We know everyone. In this line of work, someone farts, you gotta be able to smell it, kid.”

“Okay. Well, I’m trying to figure out if this one detective is dirty or not.”

“Dirty? What, you mean is he on the take?”

“Yeah, something like that. I just want to know if he’s involved in anything he shouldn’t be involved in.”

“Time was, they were all on the take,” Bernie said, chuckling. “You remember that, Gene? They paid those poor shmendricks a hundred fifty bucks a week and then they wondered why they were all in the mob’s pocket.”

“Tell him about Addonizio,” Gene said.

“Addonizio! Remember him? He was a real Moyshe Kapoyer. He was the mayor. He used to be a congressman, but you know what he said? He said ‘You can’t make any money as a congressman, but as mayor of Newark you can make a million bucks.’”

“Said it right into a wire,” Gene added. “To the FBI.”

“Ah, but that was the old days,” Bernie continued. “Now? Not so much. The pay. The benefits. It’s all too good. These guys don’t want to risk their pensions. A few of them get involved in some funny business here and there, but nothing like it used to be. Let me have a look at this fella.”

I handed Bernie the photo, which he held out at arm’s length for perhaps a half a second.

“Him? Oh, he’s all right. He’s fine.”

“Are you sure? You want to look-”

“Sure? Yeah I’m sure! Listen to this guy, thinking I don’t know what I’m talking about. I got stains in my shorts older than you, kid. You gonna tell me my business? I say this guy’s okay, he’s okay.”

“Gotcha. Thanks for taking a look.”

“No problem. Now, hey, you need a briefcase by any chance?”

* * *

Somehow, I made it out of Gene and Bernie’s Warranty Emporium without acquiring any more merchandise, though not for lack of effort on Bernie’s part.

I tossed the Timberlands in my backseat, wondering when I’d ever have a chance to use them-I’m not exactly a steel-toe kind of guy-then turned my gaze to the Fourth Precinct headquarters, a hulking, fortresslike edifice whose windows had all been bricked over. The building had a famous-or, rather, notorious-history as the place where the Newark riots began in 1967.

Most folks thought the riots began when some cops beat up a cab driver (named John Smith, of all things) and then dragged his broken body back to the Fourth Precinct, resulting in the rumor the cabbie had been killed-and prompting a spasm of violence and looting from the outraged citizenry. That’s true, but it’s only part of the story. The city actually calmed down the night of Smith’s arrest, to the point where the local National Guard Armory, which had been put on alert, was told to stand down. Violence didn’t flare up again until the next night, when a protest outside the Fourth Precinct got out of hand, leading to four days of sustained unrest.

Either way, the Fourth played a central role in a cataclysm that left twenty-six people dead and caused ten million dollars in physical damage, to say nothing of what it did to Newark’s reputation. On the fortieth anniversary of the riots, a group of citizens and community leaders led an effort to have a small plaque mounted on the front of the building to commemorate what happened there. Otherwise, the Fourth Precinct was more or less the same place it had been in 1967. There had been talk about tearing it down, but no one had quite gotten around to it.

Now here it was, harboring secrets once again, playing an oblique role in another tragedy-even if I couldn’t quite measure the angle.

Lacking any kind of real plan, I locked my car and wandered in the direction of the precinct. I wanted to get a read on the place, imprint an image of it in my brain. I kept my eyes fixed on it as I walked up the sidewalk, then stood there for a while, like if I stared at it long enough its walls would start spilling what they knew.

I was still rooted there when a voice interrupted me.

“Can I help you?”

It was a patrol cop in uniform, taking a smoke break by the side of the building. I’m not sure how I missed him-he had to be at least six foot eight, with the arms of a seven footer-but somehow he startled me a little.

“I was just … I heard a cop killed himself in there last night, and I guess I wanted to have a look. Is that a problem?”

“No law against looking,” he said, taking a drag on his cigarette.

I did my best to study the guy out of the corner of my eye while I pretended to examine the building some more. Maybe I had watched a few too many bad eighties movies, but he was tall, black, and wearing a policeman’s hat that made him appear even taller, and I couldn’t help but be reminded of Hightower from Police Academy .