Brad Parks: The Good Cop

“What happened to him?”

“We don’t know that yet, either. The Newark PD hasn’t announced any of this. We’re just getting this from sources. We haven’t even put it online yet because we don’t have it confirmed.”

“So how do we know this mystery cop is dead?”

“One of the photogs was listening to the scanner this morning and said there was a lot of chatter about something going down at the Fourth Precinct. We figured it out from there.”

I knew the Fourth Precinct well. It was in the Central Ward, in the heart of a Newark neighborhood that had been making news, not all of it good, for a long time.

“Got it. What does Tina want from me?”

“Plans are still being formed. At this point, she just wants everyone in here. It’s one of those all-hands-on-deck things.”

That, of course, was the reaction of most editors to a big story. Gather up your reporters-they sometimes referred to us as “resources” so we wouldn’t be confused with human beings-and then figure out what to do with us later. It usually just meant we’d be bumping into one another all day long.

But, in truth, the only thing worse than doing all that bumping was being left out of it. I told Katie her message had been delivered, then hung up. There would be no dawdling in bed on this day. Anyone with reporter’s blood flowing in his veins-and I fancied myself as having a lot of it-wanted in on a story like this.

* * *

As a thirty-two-year-old bachelor with no significant encumbrances, I can be showered, dressed, and ready to ramble in fifteen minutes. Twelve if I really push it.

I streamline this process in several ways. One, there is nothing complicated about my hair. It’s brown and short-never more than four weeks away from being cut-and I part it on the side, the same way I’ve been doing it since I was old enough to hold a brush.

Two, my morning routine involves a bare minimum of lotionry and potionry. I’ve been told the modern male ought to concern himself with hair product, moisturizer, cologne and/or body spray, and perhaps a half-dozen other products from the health and beauty aisle, all carefully applied and then painstakingly primped. Me, I wear deodorant (primarily out of consideration to my fellow man).

Three, my wardrobe is, quite deliberately, the most boring thing you’ve ever seen. I have two possible colors of pleated slacks (charcoal and khaki), two colors of shirt (white and blue) and three colors of necktie (red, yellow, or blue). And if you notice, any of the twelve resulting color combinations match just fine. So I can pretty much dive into my closet and grab blindly for anything that’s clean, knowing I can’t miss.

The end result of all this is not particularly inspiring-I make a Land’s End catalogue look avant-garde by comparison-but it works for me. You have to know what flavor of ice cream you are in this world, and I am vanilla.

On this day, my closet dive yielded the racy blend of khaki pants, a white shirt, and a blue tie. I tossed a bit of kibble in a bowl for Deadline-not that he would be awake to eat it for another few hours-then opened my laptop.

I had no intention of going into the office to be one of Tina Thompson’s “resources,” which would just involve sitting around a conference table until someone told me to do what any good reporter should have been doing all along. Sometimes editors just get in the way like that.

So I got to work. After about five minutes of accessing a few of the databases on which a reporter makes his living, I learned the late Darius Kipps had been with the Newark Police Department for twelve years and three months. He was thirty-seven years old, having celebrated his birthday on the first of March. He was making $93,140 a year, which is not unusual in a state with the nation’s highest paid police officers. He had a variety of addresses associated with him-some in Newark, some in Irvington-but seemed to have settled in East Orange.

Sure enough, when I checked the East Orange property tax records, I found a dwelling owned by Noemi and Darius Kipps on Rutledge Avenue.

And that, I had already decided as I closed the lid on my laptop, was where I needed to be.

This was something of a calculated gamble on my part. Without knowing how Darius Kipps met his untimely end, there was no telling what would figure prominently in our story. But, sadly, I could proffer up a reasonable guess. He was a detective, which is usually a pretty safe place for a cop. Unless, of course, you’re undercover. Then you’re just as exposed to danger as anyone else who tries to make a life on the streets. If not more so. All it takes is some punk deciding you looked at him the wrong way and, not knowing you’re a cop, pulling the trigger.

Or maybe something else had befallen Detective Sergeant Kipps. Point is, we had cops reporters who were in a better position to figure it out, leaving me to work other angles. And in a story like this, it was safe to assume that the grieving widow, Noemi Kipps, would be one of those angles.

That meant every minute counted. This was not necessarily out of any concern for the paper’s production schedule. It was all about the competition or, more accurately, the lack of it.

A Newark police officer killed in the line of duty would inevitably attract the attention of every television and radio station in the Greater New York area, which only happens to be the biggest media market in the country. All of them would know a grieving widow was a big part of the story, too. And since they have access to the same databases I did, they, too, would soon be heading in the direction of Rutledge Avenue in East Orange.

The cumulative effect of all those reporters would be something like cattle in a field. Put one cow in a small pasture, and what you have is a nice, green plot of earth. She can roam freely, nibbling grass as she feels like it, and generally has a pretty good time of things. Put a whole bunch of cows in that same field, and what you have in fairly short order is a big, stinky, muddy mess. And none of the cows feel like they’re getting much of a meal.

So the trick is to be that first cow, then find a way to lock the gate so the rest of the herd can’t get in.

Bidding Deadline farewell-he would miss me, but only due to the absence of body heat-I went out into the gray morning, hopped in my car, and began the short drive from my home in Bloomfield to the Kipps household in East Orange.

Along the way, I called Tina. There was a time when Tina and I had a fairly simple understanding: she simply wanted my seed. After two decades of using her beauty and cunning to run roughshod over the male species, cycling through its representatives in a series of relationships that lasted anywhere from one night to one month, she had reached a point where she realized her baby-making years were running short.

She was far too practical and goal-oriented to engage in the imprecise business of courtship, so she mostly judged men on their potential to pass certain desirable characteristics onto her offspring. She was looking for a partner with blue eyes and broad shoulders (check). She wanted him to be at least six feet tall (I’m six foot one). And she was looking for a certain kindly, easygoing disposition (howdy, friend). Hence, she decided I was the ideal sperm donor-and that rather than making the swap in a laboratory, we might as well do it as nature intended.

She made it clear it was a no-strings-attached proposition, that I could taste the fruit without buying the orchard, as it were. The only problem was, I sort of wanted the orchard. So we had reached an impasse in our relationship: namely, I wanted one and she didn’t.

Then she got promoted and became my editor, which imposed further impediments to the possibility of our getting together. So we sort of decided to cool it. I say “sort of” because nothing felt very cool when we wound up together after work, especially after a drink or two.