Brad Parks - The Good Cop

“Wait, it’s not that easy. It has to be organic food coloring. Gluten-free, of course. Vegan, if possible. If you get the regular stuff, the hydrocarbons just mess up everything. You might have to go to one of those all-natural food stores, and they don’t have any of those in Newark. Millburn or Montclair might have one. Be persistent. It’s important.”

“O-okay,” he said.

“Then you need to get some pregnancy tests.”

“Pregnancy tests?”

“I’ll explain it in a second. Just write it down. Get some pregnancy tests. At least a dozen of them-we’ll need more, but that should get us started. Get First Response or EPT. Don’t mess with the store brands. We need reliability here. Pretend your girlfriend missed her period and you really have to know.”

“All right. What next?”

“Well, there’s a group of Newark Housing Authority town houses on Eighteenth Avenue that are brand-new, just occupied,” I said, giving him a range of addresses. “We’re hearing reports that the contractor in charge of the project never connected the toilets to the main sewer line. You know what it looks like when you try to flush a toilet that doesn’t drain to the sewer?”

“I would imagine it’s pretty gross.”

“Yeah, but not at first. There’s a lot of pipe to go through before you get to the sewer, so it doesn’t back up right away. It might take a month before that happens. There’s only one way to test.”

“Okay, how’s that?”

“That’s where the food coloring comes in. I want you to knock on every door on the block and tell the residents you need to test their toilet. Put a few drops of food coloring in the toilet. Then ask them to flush it for you. It’s important the residents flush it. It makes them feel involved in the process, you know?”

“Right. Sure.”

“Then you have to dip into the toilet and take a water sample. That’s where the pregnancy test comes in. Not many people know this, but if you use regular toilet water on a pregnancy test, it will come back positive every time. Every time. I’ll explain the science to you someday. It has to do with amino acids and naturally occurring lipids and, well, it gets pretty involved.”

“Okay,” he said. I could tell the kid’s head was spinning. It should have been: I was talking total gibberish. But there was no way this twenty-two-year-old Boy Scout was going to know enough to call me on it.

“Anyhow, there’s only one way that a pregnancy test will come back negative, and that’s if there are traces of organic, gluten-free food coloring in the water. You follow me? And if there’s organic, gluten-free food coloring, what does that mean?”

“Uh…” he said. Yep, I had definitely lost him.

“It means the pipes are backing up. So, again: if the pregnancy test on the toilet water comes back negative, some of the food coloring has bounced back at you. That means the pipe hasn’t been connected to the sewer and we have a scandal on our hands, because you can bet the contractor charged the Newark Housing Authority for pipes that connected to the sewer.”

“Oh, yeah. Yeah, you’re right.”

I grinned. Having spun him around on a verbal baseball bat, it was now time to push him in a random direction and watch him fall down.

“Now, if the toilet is backed up, I’m going to need a full social history on each of the family members,” I said. “I want to know everything about them-where they came from, how they got here, what brand of toothpaste their grandfather used. I want everything . It should take a minimum of two hours, possibly four hours to get all the information you need. I want to be able to really tell these people’s stories. Then, once you’re done with the first house, you have to move onto the second. We need to get the whole street.”

“Okay, got it,” he said. “Are you going to meet me out there?”

“No. I’ve got other stuff to do. I figured this is simple enough for an intern to handle.”

“Umm … uhh…” he said, because I knew his instructions from Tina were probably to follow me and report back to her. I also knew that the block in question had twenty-six new units on it. If he was diligent-and worked nights and weekends-he ought to be done in about three weeks.

Then I went in for the kill: “Now, whatever you do, don’t tell Tina. She’ll get really, really excited that you’re doing this and she might not be able to contain herself. She might force us to rush this into the newspaper, and we don’t want to rush it. We want all our ducks in a row on this one.”

“R-right,” he said.

“Okay. I want a progress update tomorrow afternoon,” I said before I hung up. “I expect to hear from you in twenty-four hours.”

Maybe then I’d let the kid off the hook. Maybe.

* * *

With Ruthie out of my way, I turned my attention back to the Kipps conundrum-and my knotted scorecard. I needed some kind of tiebreaker, some unimpeachable source that could give me a definitive thumbs-up, thumbs-down.

The answer, I suspected, lay with the Newark Police Internal Affairs. But that was a safe I wouldn’t be able to crack by myself. The kind of officers who gravitated to Internal Affairs are not your normal cops. To want to join the police takes a certain adherence to order and structure. To want to police the police requires an altogether different level of regimentation. It’s not the kind of makeup that makes one prone to blabbing with reporters.

Still, I knew there was one person who might have the keys to that particular kingdom. And, unfortunately, that man was our veteran cops reporter, Buster Hays.

I say “unfortunately” because Buster-in addition to being cantankerous, curmudgeonly, and condescending-delighted in lording this sort of thing over me. He came to the Eagle-Examiner by way of da Bronx, and he fancied himself the last common man in a newsroom overrun with elites who are overeducated and out of touch. And, in that respect, he believed I was the personification of everything that had gone wrong with the newspaper

And yet? Though I’m sure we would never admit it, we shared a certain commonality of purpose and values, inasmuch as we both believed in getting the story right. So he seldom could resist helping me. Buster had a network of moles, informants, and gadflies-contained in four bulging Rolodexes that he steadfastly refused to computerize-that could shame the director of the CIA. He had developed them carefully, and through a reporting career that spanned parts of five decades, he had never burned a source. And you better believe his sources knew that.

His Rolodex was a kind of treasure that he had shared with me, albeit judiciously, throughout the years. And in the hopes he would again show his grudging generosity, I sat in my still-running car and dialed his desk.

“Hays.”

“Buster, it’s Carter.”

“Whaddayuwant, Ivy?” I heard in response.

In Buster’s world, Amherst was an Ivy League school. I had stopped trying to convince him otherwise.

“I’m working on a story about Darius Kipps-”

“The cop who swallowed a bullet? They finally put out a press release about that. I already shoveled something into the Slop. You’re wasting your time. I don’t think the dead tree is going to want more than six inches.”

The dead tree is what even dinosaurs like Buster had taken to calling the physical newspaper.

“Yeah, I know, I’m just indulging my curiosity a little bit. I spent some time with the family this morning and learned some stuff that made Kipps seem like he wasn’t the type to go killing himself. But then I also got a guy who says Kipps might have been tangled up with IA.”

“I got a guy who said the same thing,” Buster said, because, of course, I could never be allowed to have sources who knew stuff his sources hadn’t already told him. “What about it?”