Brad Parks - The Good Cop

So he had earned permanent, temporary status and, barring unforeseen changes-or Tommy coming to his senses and enrolling in business school-he might become the newspaper industry’s first fifty-year-old intern someday. Selfishly, I hoped he stuck around. He’s become one of my closest friends, not to mention a semiregular pizza partner.

Such being the care, I crossed the street and said, “Hey, what’s a handsome young man like you doing for lunch?”

“You know, if you really are going to convert to my side, you’re going to have to do something about those pants.”

“What’s wrong with my pants?”

“If I had to describe it in one word? Pleats. Pleats are what’s wrong with your pants. Pleats are what’s wrong with your entire world.”

I grinned, just because that’s Tommy: my own, personal episode of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

“So what have you been up to?” I asked.

“Nothing half as interesting as what you’ve been up to, apparently. You got any kind of follow-up working?”

As we continued to the pizzeria and ordered our slices, I told Tommy about my trip to the morgue, my time as a Peeping Tom, and all the various denials and contradictions I had heard along the way.

Tommy listened thoughtfully and, at the end, said, “So why do you think the cops don’t want to take this thing on? Usually when it’s one of their own getting killed, they go all out.”

“Yeah, except when it’s one of their own doing the killing,” I cracked. “But I don’t think that’s it. My guess is they really think it’s suicide, and they just want it to go away. You know how a lot of cop shops are when it comes to mental health issues. They deal with it like five-year-olds deal with cooties. I don’t think the thing with Fusco and Mimi is in their sights because they’re trying to keep the blinders on.”

“Are you going to tell them about it?”

“I hadn’t really thought about it yet. But … yeah, I guess I have to.”

And I did. I’m a reporter, yes. But I’m also a citizen, which means I have the same civic duty to report information about a crime as anyone else. Depending on how things worked out, it could also result in my being taken off the story, for at least a half dozen reasons-not the least of which is I couldn’t very well cover a trial in which I was also testifying. But I suppose that might be unavoidable. Such is the price of virtue.

“So is there anything a bored city hall reporter can do to get in on this?” Tommy asked.

I pondered it for a second, then said, “That depends. Are you still friendly with that secretary in the council clerk’s office?”

The secretary was a middle-aged Latina who was sweet on Tommy and, apparently, didn’t have much of a Gaydar. Tommy winked in her direction a lot and cooed at her in Spanish so the other secretaries couldn’t understand what they were saying.

“Yeah, what do you need?”

“Keep an eye out for any new city contracts involving Redeemer Love Christian Church or Alvin LeRioux,” I said. “It would sort of help complete a certain picture for me.”

“Redeemer Love Christian. That’s one of those churches that reads a lot of Leviticus-the whole man shall not lie with man thing, right?”

“I believe so, yes.”

“Okay,” Tommy said. “I’ll get right on it.”

* * *

Having revived myself through the miraculous combination of thin crust, tomato sauce, and mozzarella, I returned to the office, put my head down, and started doing some serious typing. It was two thirty, and since this story wasn’t going to be winning any awards-news like this required an unadorned, just-the-facts-ma’am approach-I vowed to be done no later than four thirty, so that the story could be posted online by five.

Once upon a time, sitting on a scoop like this, I would have continued cautiously reporting for another few hours, maybe hectoring some more sources or trying to round it out by having an independent forensics expert comment on the pictures. That was back in the hoary days of the late nineties and early millennium, when a scoop was something you guarded jealously until it could be revealed, in its full glory, in the next day’s paper.

At most, you would send a version of the story to the Associated Press around midnight-too late for the other papers to catch up but early enough so you could get credit for the scoop on the morning radio and television shows, which would be using that wonderful phrase “according to a story in the Newark Eagle-Examiner .”

The Internet has changed all that, of course, scrunching down the time of the news cycles to the point where it has obliterated the concept. When you have news, you post it. No one waits for the dead tree anymore.

I actually finished by four. I looked around for Tina, to tell her I was about to file, but she was nowhere to be seen. So I shipped the story over to the All-Slop and treated myself to a Coke Zero from the office vending machine.

Then I took the long way home, swinging by the Info Palace for a quick visit to see how Kira was recovering from any absinthe-related maladies she may have been suffering. I found her fully engaged by something on her computer screen. She was looking properly prim, dressed in a starched white blouse, with her dark hair up in a bun.

The room was empty except for her, so I said, “Tell me, are you going to do that randy librarian thing, where any second you’re going to let her hair down and start roaring like a lioness and demanding I be your lion?”

“Huh?” she said, looking up from her screen.

“Never mind. You just … you have your hair up, and I was … entertaining certain librarian-related fantasies.”

“Oh, that. That’s just so I know where I’ve put my pen. Otherwise I lose it fifty times a day,” she said, pulling a Bic ballpoint from the back of her head and letting her hair cascade around her shoulders. Sadly, there were no feline sounds involved.

“How’s it going?” I asked. “Feeling okay?”

“Oh, I’m fine. I don’t get hangovers.”

“I thought hangovers were God’s way of making sure the Irish didn’t take over the world.”

“No, that’s whiskey,” she said. “Hey, why does your editor keep coming in here and shooting me dirty looks?”

“Who, Tina?”

“Yeah, she’s probably sneered at me three or four times today.”

“I’m sure she’s not sneering.”

“Oh, she’s sneering. You think I don’t know what a sneer looks like? She keeps going like this,” Kira said, then twisted her face into a countenance I thought could only be achieved by eating jalapenos.

“Oh, she does that to me all the time. That’s just how she looks when she’s thinking hard.”

“No, these were definitely intentional, directed looks. Seriously, what’s up her butt?”

“I’m sure it’s nothing.”

“I barely even know her.”

“All the more reason why it’s not about you.”

“Well I…” and then she stopped, tilted her head and shot me a sly grin. “Wait, you guys didn’t used to…”

“To what?”

“Shag?”

“Uh … not quite.”

“But she wanted you to shag her.”

“I suppose so, yes. Periodically. Or, rather, nonperiodically. It’s a long story.”

“Did you guys have a fling or something?”

To most in the newsroom, Tina Thompson’s love life was an open book, and our former … whatever … was common knowledge among those who cared. But I guess that book somehow hadn’t made it back to the library.

So Kira didn’t know about me and Tina, and clearly it was in my best interests to tell her now rather than later. After enough years of singledom, one accumulates a certain number of former relationships-some might call it baggage-and I’ve always felt it best to deal with it in a forthright manner. It’s not like I’ve got some big heavy, nine-piece luggage set. Mine is just your basic, middle-of-the-line Samsonite: a few high school girlfriends, a few from college, a few post-college, one live-in who didn’t work out, and a smattering of random dates along the way. It’s so unremarkable I always have to check the tags when it comes through at the airport to make sure it’s even mine.