Brad Parks - The Good Cop

“Maybe … maybe you’re just trying to keep my guard down. I just don’t think Pastor Al would-”

“Look, Mimi, maybe I’m Satan’s soldier and maybe I’m not-it doesn’t sound like anything I can say will convince you anyway-but right now I know one thing I am, and that’s a reporter with a job to do. I came here because I have some photos of your husband you need to see before I write about them in the newspaper. Will you please let me in so you can look at them?”

I heard the deadbolt slide and there was Mimi Kipps, standing on the other side of the screen door, still holding her phone.

“What photos?” she said. I guess her curiosity-to say nothing of her desire to clear her dead husband’s name-was stronger than her fear of whatever menace I posed as Beelzebub’s buddy.

“They might be a little hard for you to look at,” I admitted, slipping my phone in my pocket. “They’re autopsy photos.”

Her hand had traveled as far as the handle of the screen door, but it wasn’t going any farther. Still, I was making progress.

“I still don’t think I … Maybe, maybe I can have Mike look at them.”

Mike as in Mike Fusco, Darius’s sometime-partner. It sounded like a fine compromise to me.

“Okay. Can you call him? Have him come out here?”

“Just wait here,” she said, closing the door.

I shoved my hands in my pocket. I was a little miffed at having to stay out on the porch like I was a Labrador who had been playing in puddles. But, at the same time, it was hard not to feel empathy for Mimi. The poor woman had to be reeling. She had lost her husband and didn’t really understand how or why, but probably didn’t have much time to think about it, mostly because she still had two kids to care for. She had her minister filling her head with superstitious nonsense, a pushy reporter trying to get her to comment on his story, untold numbers of relatives coming and going and yet-through it all-she was, in some very basic way, alone.

I looked down at the flower bed, where the dead leaves had gone slick and shiny in the rain. Somewhere underneath, there might have been a bulb yearning to push through, or a perennial with roots full of possibility, or a seed waiting to germinate. The leaves had been like a blanket through the long winter, providing needed insulation. But unless someone got in there and cleaned them out, whatever lay underneath would be smothered, lacking the air and sunlight it needed to thrive.

The dirt needed to be uncovered. There seemed to be a lot of that going on around here.

* * *

Three, maybe five minutes later, Mimi again appeared at her front door.

“Mike is on his way,” she said. “Here. You look a little cold.”

She opened the screen and handed me a mug of coffee. I expressed my gratitude because that’s how my mother raised me. Mimi closed both doors, and as soon as I was sure she couldn’t see me, I emptied the contents of the mug in the flower bed.

After roughly another ten minutes on the porch, time I spent trying to fend off a case of the chills, Mike Fusco rolled up in what was clearly not a Newark Police Department vehicle. It was a shiny, black Ford F-150 with jacked-up suspension. Between that and all the muscles, I was beginning to think maybe he was overcompensating for something.

I watched him get out of his truck-actually “descend from his truck” might be more accurate-and walk with long but unhurried strides through the rain. He wasn’t wearing a jacket, just a different color tight-fitting sweater from yesterday, and he didn’t have a hat or umbrella. Yes, he was a tough guy. I tried to pretend like I hadn’t been shivering.

When he reached the porch, he nodded at me, then slid by me. He opened the front door, announcing, “Hey, Mimi, it’s me.”

He did a quarter-turn in my direction and said, “Come on in.”

I was barely inside the small entryway when Mimi appeared at the back of the living room, saw me, and said, “He can’t come in.”

“Why not?” Fusco asked.

Mimi immediately looked sheepish. But she still said, “Pastor Al says he’s an agent of Satan.”

“You gotta stop listening to that nut,” Fusco said, scowling.

“He’s not a nut, he’s-”

“You still giving him money?” Fusco interrupted. “I thought you said you were going to stop.”

Mimi looked down at her bare feet and started mumbling something. I couldn’t figure out the dynamic between her and Fusco, who not only felt comfortable enough to walk into the house without knocking-and invite me in-but knew about her finances. Maybe this was a battle Darius had been fighting, trying to get his wife to stop donating to the too-slick pastor, and now Fusco was stepping in, providing backup for his fallen partner.

“Never mind. We’ll talk about it later. Why don’t you go up and shower. I’ll keep an eye on the baby,” Fusco said, nodding in the direction of Jaquille. The miracle baby was sleeping in the Pack ‘N Play, wrapped in what appeared to be a baby straightjacket.

“Okay,” she said, disappearing upstairs. Fusco sat. I sat. And, like that, there we were again: eyeballing each other while Mimi Kipps showered. He broke the silence more quickly this time. “So you got some photos to show me?”

“Yeah,” I said, reaching inside the pocket of my peacoat and pulling out my folded printouts. I handed them to Fusco, who went through them one by one. He brought two of them up to his face for closer inspection, then put them down.

“You sure this is Kipps?”

“Yeah.”

“Jesus,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“And someone just leaked these to you?”

“Something like that.”

“You sure they’re not doctored or anything?”

“Positive. Saw it with my own eyes.”

He nodded.

“My source said it looked like someone tied him to a chair,” I added. “That how it looks to you?”

He grimaced. “Those photos are pretty blurry. Without really being able to look at them? I don’t know. But, yeah, he was restrained somehow, with something. A rope? Some wire? Shoelaces? Believe it or not, a good forensics guy can tell the difference.”

“Okay,” I said. “But just to make sure I’m not jumping to conclusions. I mean … this isn’t a suicide. Something weird happened, yes?”

“Yeah,” he said, staring at the screen of the television, which was off. Then he added a more emphatic: “Yeah.”

I let him sort through things for a few moments. He was no longer looking at the television but rather through it, at some distant spot that may as well have been a mile away.

“So what’s the scene like at the precinct right now?” I said, just to snap him out of it. “How did that whole Pastor Al press conference play?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“What do you mean?”

He turned his head toward me. “My captain basically told me to disappear for a few weeks, said I was going to be placed on administrative leave, said to call it a ‘mental health break.’ I said no way, I don’t want that nut bird stuff in my file. You get something like that on your record, it can seriously screw up a promotion. So captain said, ‘Call it what you want to. I won’t put anything in your file. I just don’t want to see you around here for a while.’”

It sounded like the cop version of that shirt at Tee’s place, the one that said, WHY DON’T YOU GO PRACTICE FALLING DOWN?

He shook his head in disbelief, adding, “I even had to turn in my service weapon.”

Mostly to keep Fusco talking, I said, “What do you make of that?”

He grasped the corner of his lip in his teeth. It was a very untough look. He might not have been aware he was doing it.

“You think the captain knew you were … looking into the Kipps thing?” I prompted.