Brad Parks - The Good Cop

It introduced another actor-or, rather, several of them-into the equation. There had to be one person to do the tying and at least one other person to convince Kipps not to move while the tying was being done, presumably by aiming a weapon at him.

And in any reasonable person’s mind, it had to throw the Newark Police Department’s press release about a self-inflicted gun-shot wound into doubt. Serious doubt.

What’s more, it opened up another gaping, open question in my mind: If Darius Kipps didn’t kill himself, who did? And why?

* * *

I could tell Paul/Powell was of a mind to linger for a while, maybe visit with some of his other perished pals, but I have very strict rules about how many human remains I want to disturb in a day, and one is my limit.

Plus, Kira-now most assuredly out of the mood for love-was off in a corner by herself, taking occasional glances at a big biohazard container like maybe she wanted to make a deposit. I didn’t know if she was squeamish around the dead or around the 120-proof spirits we had just been imbibing. Either way, it was time to start bringing the illegal portion of my day to a close.

“You see anything else interesting?” I asked.

Paul/Powell spent a little more time looking under the sheet (better him than me), then went back up to inspect the head wound some more ( definitely better him than me), before finally announcing, “That’s all I got for you.”

“Would you have any way of knowing whether this guy was drunk when he was killed?”

“Well, they’ll test for that as part of the tox screen.”

“No, I mean right now.”

Paul/Powell rested his hand on Kipps’s shoulder-no, it hadn’t gotten any less creepy-and pondered this for a moment. “Well, maybe if we compressed his chest and forced some air out of him, you could smell his breath.”

“Ah, that’s okay. I’ll pass. It would be reported in the autopsy, right? The booze. The marks on the wrists and ankles. That would all be in there?”

“Yeah, definitely. Any kind of wound or scar, premortal, postmortal, it’s all in there. And of course the toxicology reports would be there, too.”

I knew that, of course. I was already thinking about ways to get what I had just learned on the record and in the newspaper. In this case, merely having observed it wasn’t good enough-it would raise the question of how the reporter had been in a position to see it. Journalism Ethics 101: you can’t commit a crime to get information.

The autopsy report was no good to me, either. Autopsies were not automatically public record. You could get them unsealed, but that involved making an argument to a judge that there was a compelling public need to view the information-a need that outweighed an individual family’s right to privacy. And you could bet Essex County, the Newark Police Department, and probably even the Fraternal Order of Police would have lawyers fighting like mad to keep it sealed. It would take forever, cost a fortune, and we might not even win in the end.

No, I had to find another way.

I looked at Paul/Powell, who was drumming his “D-E-A-T-H” hand on the metal tray.

“Your phone have a camera by any chance?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“Mind doing me a favor and taking a picture of his wrists and ankles and then texting them to me?”

“They’ll take pictures as part of the autopsy. They’ll be better quality than my cell phone.”

“Yeah, but the nosy reporter won’t be able to access them,” I said.

“Ohhhh,” he said, grinning.

As he set about his task, I congratulated myself on my small stroke of genius. My phone had a camera, too, but again that would have bumped into the problem of how I had gotten to the body in the first place. But that wasn’t an issue if Paul/Powell, a sort-of employee of the county, sent me the photos as a kind of whistleblower. With Brodie’s blessing, I could use them to anchor an explosive story about a police cover-up, with my angry family-and publicity-hungry minister-providing me all the needed outrage.

He sent the pictures one at a time, which meant the first was buzzing into my phone even as he was still taking the subsequent ones. They weren’t great quality, but they didn’t need to be. It’s not like we were going to run photos of a dead cop’s wrists in a family newspaper. We just needed to have them for verification.

Much to Paul/Powell’s dismay and Kira’s relief, I announced it was time to close up this little shop of horrors and head on home. We followed the same path out as we had going in, making a quick-and, hopefully, unobserved-dash across the parking lot toward the Malibu.

We rode back in silence, each of us with his own thoughts, and by the time I dropped off Paul/Powell at his loft/lair, Kira had fallen asleep in the front seat. Waking her and making her drive-still somewhat tipsy-back to Jersey City, where she lived, was out of the question. Then again, driving her there myself didn’t seem like much of an option, either.

So I made the executive decision to take her back to my tidy two-bedroom home in scenic Bloomfield. If you’ve seen The Sopranos , then you’ve seen a certain depiction of Bloomfield-or at least what is represented as being Bloomfield-on your television screen. And there are certainly parts of town that are like that: a little urban, a little gritty, very Italian.

But there are also nice, leafy little neighborhoods, and my house-nestled in one of those neighborhoods-was a welcome sight when I pulled into the driveway. Kira didn’t move when I turned off the car, so I went around to her side, unbuckled her belt, and lifted up all ninety-eight pounds of her. Having a girlfriend who is roughly half my weight has its advantages, especially when my beer muscles, courtesy of the absinthe, hadn’t quite worn off.

She began stirring as I brought her into the house, smiling and pulling herself closer to me, enough that I could tell she at least knew where she was and who she was with. I brought her upstairs to my room and lowered her gently on top of my bed. Deadline, who was in his usual spot-sprawled in the precise, geometric middle of my comforter-hopped down and meowed indignantly at being disturbed, finishing his protest by walking out of the room.

I was enough of a gentleman that I was going to leave Kira there and spend the night on the couch when she murmured, “Aren’t you going to help me get out of my clothes?”

I decided that would be gentlemanly, too.

* * *

The next morning, the Kipps story was stripped across the top of A1. We didn’t have a picture of the press conference-because we hadn’t been invited-so the only photo that ran was a canned headshot of Reverend Alvin LeRioux on an inside page. But that did little to diminish the impact of the story. We had gone big with it, which-along with the television news treatment of it the night before-would mean all the radio stations would continue to stoke it this morning.

Which meant, because media tended to feed on itself, Brodie would be hungry for a follow-up. And while ordinarily that might cause me some angst as I worked through my Frosted Flakes, Tony the Tiger and I were feeling pretty relaxed. If all went well, I had all the follow-up I needed stored on my cell phone.

Kira had woken up with me and was walking around my kitchen in one of my T-shirts-and nothing else-which soon led to a demonstration of the sturdiness of my couch. But, eventually, the fun and games had to end. I showered, did my blind closet grab, and came out with charcoal pants/blue shirt/yellow tie. See? Works every time.

After making sure Deadline had enough food to sustain a rigorous day of napping, I drove us to the office. Kira, who didn’t have to be at work until one o’clock, had plenty of time to head home and replenish herself for the day, maybe even take a nap.