Brad Parks - The Good Cop

“What’s that?”

“She said that he said, and I quote, ‘What you’re asking me to do is unethical.’”

“What was he being asked to do? Did she know?”

“No. That’s just what she said he said.”

“Hmm…”

“Anyhow, I thought you’d want to know,” he said. “I gotta run. I volunteer at a funeral home on Tuesday nights. I’m doing it for credit, so I have to be on time.”

“Have fun with that. Thanks for the call.”

“Later.”

So the medical examiner was being asked to do unethical things. And he was understandably upset about it.

I just hoped he was upset enough to unburden his worries to the Eagle-Examiner .

* * *

From a reporter’s standpoint, public employees are wonderful creatures because they have no way of hiding from us. Within a few mere keystrokes, I can learn their full name, date of birth, and annual salary-time was, in the days before identity theft became so rampant, I could even get their Social Security number. Maybe that all sounds a little invasive of their privacy, but the framers of the Constitution didn’t want public officials to have privacy. They were deeply suspicious of anyone with authority and wanted citizens to have lots of tools with which to resist tyranny.

As such, I was able to learn in fairly short order that Essex County Medical Examiner Raul Ibanez was born on August 9, 1964, and was paid $177,716 a year to slice and dice dead folks and make pronouncements about them. A few keystrokes later and I was looking at a Google Maps overview of his home on Lenox Avenue in Westfield. It looked like a nice crib, though his trees needed some trimming.

I looked at the clock, which told me I had just enough time to ambush the medical examiner and still make it back to Tina’s by eight-but only if I hustled. So I grabbed my peacoat and made like a man in a hurry.

The best way to explain Westfield, New Jersey, is that someone cracked open an upscale shopping mall above it, then sprinkled all the stores onto the streets below. As such, I could have given directions to Ibanez’s place as I would give directions to a food court: take a left at the Victoria’s Secret, pass the Williams-Sonoma, take another left after the Banana Republic.

After making the turn on a suitably genteel suburban street, I found Ibanez’s nicely appointed home on the left side. It had a basketball hoop mounted on the garage, healthy shrubs lining a slate walkway, and a handsome red door with a brass knocker that I was soon putting to use.

A smallish man with a neat goatee and a thin semicircle of hair around his otherwise bald head soon answered. He was wearing suit pants and a button-down shirt-no scrubs for this doctor-but had ditched the jacket and tie. He had a wireless device clipped onto his belt.

“Dr. Ibanez, I’m sorry to trouble you at home, but I thought it would be better to see you here than at your office. My name is Carter Ross and I’m a reporter for the Eagle-Examiner . I’m the guy who posted that story with the autopsy photos today.”

He exerted an effort at keeping himself impassive, though I got the sense hearing my name was like a small kick in the nuts. I was, after all, the guy who had ruined his day.

“What … what are you … I have no comment,” he said quickly, with a slight accent, and I expected the statement would soon be followed by a whole lot of red door being slammed in my face.

But he kept the door open. This was encouraging. Maybe he didn’t want to comment, but he did want to talk. I might be able to leverage what little information I had into a whole lot more-with help from a little semieducated bluffing.

“Dr. Ibanez, I can totally respect that. But I gotta tell you, you seem like a nice guy, and I don’t want to have to end up writing a story about you needing to answer charges from the state ethics board, you know what I’m saying?”

I didn’t know if the state even had an ethics board for medical examiners-much less what this guy was being asked to do that was unethical-but the words “ethics board” were like another shot to his bits. Since pretending to know more than I actually did seemed to be working, I continued:

“I just see how this is all coming together-I’m sure you’ve heard the AG’s office has looked at this thing-and I hate to see you being railroaded on this.”

That got him.

“Railroaded?” he said. “Oh, for the love of…”

“It’s happened before. If this thing spills out all big and ugly, they might be looking for a scapegoat. Look at all the players here”-right, whoever they were-“you think any of them are really going to fall on their swords? Really, who’s going to fall on his sword? You’d be an easy target.”

I was really winging it now, but Ibanez was too wrapped in his own drama to recognize it.

“Oh, damnit. Damnit! Are you … Who’s saying that? Where are you getting that?”

“You know I can’t tell you. Let’s just put it this way: it’s the same place I got the photos from. And it’s someone who’s in a position to know you’re being asked to do something unethical.”

That, of course, was true, in a manner of speaking. That Paul/Powell was in that “position” because he happened to be skulking outside Ibanez’s office was immaterial. The doctor brought his hands to his forehead and massaged his temples. His cheeks were getting flushed. I went in for the kill.

“We’re off the record here. So why don’t you just tell me this thing from your perspective, beginning, middle, and end. And when I put this all in the newspaper, I’ll try to make it look as good for you as I possibly can.”

I thought I had him right where I wanted him: cornered, scared, a little off balance. Total capitulation was just moments away.

But I guess I had cornered him a little too much because he came out fighting. What I heard next was, I imagined, the same version of Raul Ibanez that Paul/Powell had heard earlier in the day.

“You know what? You know what? You want to write something in your paper? You write the facts . I’m not … I … I give them the mechanism. I give them the cause. But the manner, that’s … I’m not … I’m not a detective. I give them the science. That’s my job.”

He started jabbing his index finger at me: “ That’s my job. And I did my job. They’re the ones not doing their job. You tell that to the damn state ethics board! You tell that to your damn sources! You tell them I’m going to get this all documented. They want to railroad me? Let ’em try. Let ’em try!”

There appeared to be a Mrs. Ibanez coming down the stairs to learn what all the yelling was about. But I never got a glimpse of more than her feet because the next thing I saw was what I suspected I might get all along: an up-close view of his red front door being slammed in my face.

My last official act of the evening was to slip my business card through Ibanez’s mail slot, just in case he decided he needed to yell at someone in the middle of the night. Then, having done enough damage for the evening, I flipped the “off duty” light in my mind and started driving toward Tina’s.

Except, of course, my brain kept trying to pick up passengers the whole way. Even as I did my requested wine shopping-a connoisseur, I always insist on a silly name or a pretty label-I thought of what I could read into Ibanez’s performance.

The doctor was absolutely correct, of course: a medical examiner makes objective determinations as to the mechanism of death (in this case, a bullet traveling at high velocity) and the cause of death (that Darius Kipps didn’t have much of a head left by the time the bullet departed his person). When it comes to mechanism and cause, a homicide and a suicide can be virtually identical. From a purely medical standpoint, those ligature marks on Darius Kipps’s arms and legs were about as involved in his demise as a shaving nick.