Brad Parks - The Good Cop

But I’m open-minded enough to give anyone a try. And, hey, freaks are fun.

“I’m Powell,” he said.

“Powell, this is Carter, he works at the paper with me,” Kira said.

I couldn’t help myself: “Powell. What an unusual name. Spell it for me.”

Kira stuck an elbow in my side as he said, “P-A-U-L.”

“Isn’t that … Paul?” I asked innocently.

“Yes, but it’s pronounced Powell.”

“How exotic,” I said. And I knew-because I was a few years older than him and dressed like one of those squares who didn’t understand his music-he couldn’t tell that I was messing with him.

“Come in,” he said. “Can I offer you something to drink? We have beer and wine or, if you’re not afraid, we also have what the French would call la fee verte- the green fairy.”

If I’m not afraid? I thought. I felt like telling skinny jeans boy that I trafficked in a part of Newark that was far more frightening than anything doled out by some hundred-and-forty-five-pound guy who wore eyeliner. But that might get our relationship off to a bad start. So I just said: “Sure. I’ll try some of your poison.”

“Kira?”

“Of course!” she said.

Paul/Powell led us over to a stack of milk crates that was serving as a bar. From one of the crates, he extracted a bottle of mint green liquid that was either absinthe or mouthwash. From another crate, he removed two glasses, each of which had a bubblelike bulge toward the bottom, which he filled with the liquid. Then he produced a flat utensil that reminded me of a pie cutter-albeit with holes in it-a jar with cubes of sugar, a lighter, and a bottle of Dasani water.

He did this all with great flair-Paul/Powell was clearly one for the dramatic-then, in that Vincent Price voice, announced, “You might want to stand back.”

He positioned the pie cutter over one of the glasses, placed a sugar cube on top of it, then sparked the lighter. The sugar must have been treated with something because it caught fire, much to the delight of Kira, who started clapping. He let it burn for a moment or two, then dumped it into the glass-which also went aflame.

He quickly doused the flame with a shot of Dasani water, then handed it to Kira. “Ladies first,” he said, before performing the same magic trick on my drink.

As he handed me the concoction, he said, “You know, legend has it this is what van Gogh was drinking when he cut off his ear.”

“I’ll try to stay away from sharp objects,” I said, accepting it. “ Prost. ”

I downed a large gulp. It tasted kind of like burnt licorice. But all things considered, it went down pretty smoothly. So did the second one. Kira and I had joined the party, which included maybe ten other people arrayed on pillows. All of them were younger than me, much more casually dressed, and talked to me like I was their father. In truth, it didn’t bother me because without anything in my stomach, the alcohol in the absinthe had temporarily muddied most of the synapses in my brain.

Sometime during the third drink, I decided that Paul/Powell-for as ridiculous as he looked, talked, and acted-was actually a pretty good guy, full of useful information. He told me, for example, that of all the currently accepted methods of state-sponsored execution, the firing squad was actually considered the most humane. (“They’re dead before they hit the ground,” he said cheerily.)

I wound up telling him about Darius Kipps and how I had my suspicion whether he had really killed himself. At the end of it, he said, “Well, you want to go have a look?”

“A look at what?”

“At this dude.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I have a key,” he said.

“To what?”

“To the Essex County Medical Examiner’s Office.”

* * *

As the party died down and the other guests went home, Paul/Powell explained how this had come to be. His “Death Studies” Ph.D. was, technically, in the School of Arts and Sciences, but it was multidisciplinary, looking at death through a variety of lenses, from social to financial to spiritual to literary. As such, it involved a lot of external study and cooperative learning experiences-including an internship at the Essex County Medical Examiner’s Office.

“It’s a perfect place to study the physical manifestation of the expiratory process at its end stage,” he informed me.

“You mean, it’s a good place to see dead people?” I translated.

“Exactly!” he said, gleefully.

Apparently, Paul/Powell liked hanging out with stiffs so much that he didn’t get enough of it during the day. So he sometimes snuck in late at night to spend time with them. He called it research. I called it creepy. Then again, I wasn’t the guy with “D” “E” “A” “T” and “H” tattooed onto the fingers of my left hand.

He wasn’t supposed to have a key, of course-they don’t just hand those out to interns. He explained that he and a janitor had made a swap: a copy of a key in exchange for some embalming fluid he had swiped from a funeral home. Believe me, this is not something I’ve experienced personally, but apparently when you dip a marijuana cigarette in embalming fluid, it gives it certain psychotic effects.

It also means you’re smoking chemicals that are only put in dead people for a very good reason. But, hey, to each his own.

So Paul/Powell had a key to the Essex County Medical Examiner’s Office. It was all very shady and nefarious, and I’m sure had I been remotely sober, I could have come out with dozens of very good reasons why a responsible reporter for the state’s largest newspaper should not take advantage of it.

Except, of course, I had a head full of absinthe; and I had wild-child Kira goading me on, because to her it seemed like a fine adventure; and, well, to be honest, it was actually Paul/Powell who sealed the deal when he taunted, “Yeah, man, we can go see him. Unless you’re, you know, afraid of corpses at night.”

So, really, I had no choice. We waited to shove off until midnight, when the place would be empty. According to Paul/Powell, the midnight to 8:00 A.M. security detail-which he, naturally, referred to as “the graveyard shift”-had been axed in some recent budget cuts. In theory, the Essex County Police were supposed to have added the office to their patrol. But Paul/Powell said he had never seen them.

I drove-yet another stupid decision, but by that point I was actually the least drunk of the three of us. We were laughing the whole way, though for the life of me I can’t remember about what. Though I do seem to recall Kira making an off-hand comment about how she always wanted to have sex in a morgue, and I had to resist the urge to drive faster.

I managed to get us in one piece to the Essex County Medical Examiner’s Office, a brick building at the corner of Norfolk Street and South Orange Avenue.

Paul/Powell instructed me to park in the employee lot, which I balked at. Then he explained that’s how he always did it, and I suppose illegal parking was chump change compared with the variety of crimes I was about to commit.

I felt incredibly conspicuous as we spilled out of the Malibu: three stumbling, giggling white kids in a Newark parking lot late at night. We went around to an unlit back door, where Paul/Powell seemed to know what he was doing. He slipped his key in the door in a practiced manner and turned it easily.

“I think if you tried the front one, the alarm would go off,” our tour guide explained. “This one isn’t wired, for whatever reason.”

With Paul/Powell in the lead, we went through a series of antiseptic corridors and then down some stairs until we reached the morgue, which was, appropriately enough, in the basement. He went through the door into a room that felt colder than the others. When he flipped on a light, I saw the bank of large, stainless steel drawers on the far side. They must have been refrigerated. Did each of them have a body inside? Or was there still room at the inn? I didn’t see any neon “No Vacancy” signs.