Brad Parks - The Good Cop

So. How to handle him? If I told him I was a reporter, the guy’s mouth would cinch up tighter than Uncle Scrooge’s change purse. But there’s a rule about identifying yourself to sources: you only have to do it if you planned to quote them. And since there’s no way a beat cop would ever be cleared by his superiors to be quoted on something like this, I wasn’t exactly risking anything by posing as a nosy bystander.

“Did you know him?” I asked.

“We all did.”

“What happened?”

“Seems like you already know,” Hightower said, stubbing out his cigarette on the wall of the building, then dropping the butt.

“Was he a good guy?”

“You must be a reporter.”

Busted. Another rule: you don’t necessarily have to identify yourself, but if you’re asked whether you are in fact a reporter, you can’t go lying about it.

“Yeah, how’d you know?”

“White guy in this neighborhood? If it’s nighttime, you’re here to buy drugs. If it’s daytime, you’re either a reporter or a social worker. Social workers don’t wear ties.”

I nodded my head. “You got me,” I said.

I figured those would be among the last words Hightower and I ever exchanged. But, to my surprise, he pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and lit another one. He was going to get as much nicotine in as he could while he was still on break. And that suited my purposes fine.

“So I’m hearing a bunch of patrol guys found him drunk on bourbon, covered in puke,” I said. “They tossed him in the shower to sober him up. And then he did himself in in the shower.”

“You hearing all that, huh?”

“We got sources.”

“What else you hear?”

I paused, not sure how much further to push things. Mike Fusco damn near strangled me when I asked him about Kipps being corrupt. But at least I had a little bit of a size advantage on Fusco. Hightower? If he wanted to, he could fold me in quarters and stuff me in his pocket.

Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained. So I took a deep breath and said: “There’s talk that Detective Kipps might have gotten himself tangled up in something inappropriate, that he might have gotten caught, and that maybe that’s why he pulled the trigger. But then I’ve had other people telling me he was legit. So I guess I’m trying to figure out which it was.”

I braced myself, and Hightower’s face twitched a little. But all he did was take a drag on his cigarette. “What do you care?” he asked.

“Well, the way my bosses think, a crooked cop who shoots himself is probably getting what he deserves, and therefore we don’t have much of a story,” I ventured. “Then again, maybe the cop is straight. Maybe he didn’t even kill himself in the first place, in which case there’s a lot more going on than we might realize. You follow me?”

I had set him up to tell me all kinds of wonderful things about Darius Kipps. And mindful of what Pritch said about black officers in the Fourth being tight with each other, I figured that’s what I was going to hear.

But he flicked his cigarette on the ground and exhaled a long line of smoke. Without any expression, he said, “Sounds to me like you don’t got a story.”

“What makes you say that?”

But he didn’t reply, just brushed past me and up the front steps, disappearing into that long-infamous building.

* * *

It was starting to feel like I needed a scorecard just to keep track of who was in the “Darius Dirty” column and who belonged in “Darius Clean.” Pritch and Officer Hightower seemed to be in the former, while Mike Fusco and Uncle Bernie were in the latter. Me? I was right in the middle, in a third column that might as well have been labeled “Carter Clueless.”

I was trudging back to my car when my phone chirped with a text message. It was from Tommy Hernandez, our city hall beat writer and a coconspirator in what had turned out to be some of my finer capers. Tommy and I did our best to look out for each other in the newsroom. So I took it seriously when his text read: “TT on warpath. Watch ur back.”

TT was, of course, Tina Thompson. And I didn’t know what he was talking about until moments later, when my phone rang. It was coming from a number with a 315 area code, which I knew was Syracuse, N.Y. Over the years, we had enough interns from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications to know those three digits cold.

“Carter Ross.”

“Hey, Carter, it’s Geoff Ginsburg.”

Geoff was another Syracuse intern. In the modern newsroom-which has more demand for work than money to pay for it-interns have two of the things editors prize most: enthusiasm and affordability. Like some invasive species, interns started in relatively small numbers, but with no natural prey-beyond their own inability to survive on the near-poverty-level wages we pay them-they have been allowed to proliferate to the point where I think the interns now outnumber the full-time staff members.

Talent-wise, they were a mixed lot, though Geoff was better than most. He was a smart kid, an excellent writer, and a keen reporter. Because of his surname, some wiseacre on the copy desk had taken to calling him Ruth Bader. That turned rather quickly into Ruthie, the name that stuck. Mind you, unlike the Supreme Court justice, our Ruthie looked like he was about thirteen years old. He had an enthusiastic demeanor that made you wonder if he was getting his Journalism Merit Badge and a round, boyish face that I’m fairly certain didn’t require regular shaving.

That youthful appearance made his obvious crush on Tina Thompson all the more funny. It was unclear whether the crush was professional or personal. Ruthie struck me as the kind of kid who might go for an older chick, especially a hot one like Tina; but he also struck me as a total suck-up, so it could go either way. All I knew is he spent an awful lot of time hanging around her office, following her on trips across the newsroom, yapping around her heels like the lap dog he wanted to be.

“Hey, uh, Geoff,” I said, barely resisting the urge to call him Ruthie. You never knew whether the interns were aware of the clever nicknames we had awarded them. “What’s up?”

I started my engine, just to get the heat going. It had been a mild day for March, but it was starting to get chillier now that the sun was going down.

“Well, I remembered you were working on that project about public housing,” he said. “I happen to be really interested in public housing, so I was seeing if you wouldn’t mind me tagging along.”

I felt my eyebrow arching. It was highly unlikely he “remembered” anything. The only people who would know about that project were the editors who had access to the master work-in-progress spreadsheet that tracked all reporters’ activities. Plus, no one is really interested in public housing. Not even the people who live there.

Tina had obviously dispatched her little puppy dog to spy on me. The only question was whether he knew he was a spy or if he was just an unwitting pawn. One way to find out.

“Geoff, did Tina tell you to call me?”

“N-no,” he said, faltering slightly. “I’m just … really interest … interested in public housing and … the issues that go along with them.”

Okay. I could play that game. I felt a wicked smile spread across my face. Ruthie , I thought, meet my wild goose. Have fun chasing it.

“Well, in that case, you have great timing,” I said. “I could really use your help with something.”

“Awesome!”

“You got a notepad out? You should be writing this down.”

“Absolutely.”

“Good. Okay, first I need you to get some food coloring.”

“Food coloring. Will do.”