Brad Parks - The Good Cop

“He was born two months premature,” Mimi said, reading my mind. “He weighed three pounds, four ounces. He was in the hospital the first two months, because of some stuff with his lungs. But he’s fine, now. He’s up to nine pounds.”

“He’s beautiful,” I said, which was a flat-out lie. Like most newborns, Jaquille looked like a spindly legged alien with a human diaper attached to him. But saying that didn’t seem like it would ingratiate me to Jaquille’s mother.

“Darius was so proud of him. We have a daughter who’s seven, and he loves her like any dad loves his little girl. But he always wanted a boy. He said a man’s gotta have a son. So we tried and tried. Darius only had one testicle.”

Now there was a piece of information that likely wouldn’t be making it into the next day’s paper.

“And we were wondering if maybe that had something to do with it,” Mimi continued. “We had him tested, and his count was pretty low.”

Yet another piece.

“But we kept trying and praying. I had just about given up, but then God heard our prayers and gave us a son. I always thought of him as my miracle baby.”

Mimi stared at Jaquille, while I furtively studied Mimi out of the corner of my eye. She had this calm about her that was almost eerie. A woman who loses her husband and is suddenly left to raise two children, one of them an infant, by herself? She ought to be oozing tears, snot, and despondence.

Instead, she was gazing down at her baby beatifically, like the Virgin Mary in a Renaissance frieze. She must have still been in shock, the tragedy so new her mind couldn’t yet process it.

One of the aunties, the one sitting in the corner, picked up the dialogue where Mimi left off: “You should have seen Darius with that boy. He visited him in the hospital every morning after his shift ended. He would just go in there and talk and talk and talk. He’d say, ‘You gonna be a Eagles fan, just like your daddy. And you gonna root for the Sixers, just like your daddy. And we gonna watch baseball together. And I’m gonna teach you to catch a ball and throw a ball. And you’re gonna be real smart. And you’re gonna go to college. And your daddy is going to be so proud of you.’”

Mimi chimed in: “Darius said our boy came out small, but he was going to love him so much he couldn’t help but get big. He was just going to fill that little boy up with his love.”

I looked down at Jaquille, the erstwhile miracle, and tried to swallow the cantaloupe that was suddenly growing in my throat. Right then, I knew what my story was going to be. It would be written as a letter to Jaquille, to be read on the day he graduated from college. And it would tell him all about the father he never got a chance to know.

* * *

Over the next few hours-as a succession of relatives, friends, and neighbors wandered to the house to offer their respects-I learned about who that man was.

Darius Kipps was born in Camden and grew up in nearby Pennsauken. Both places were in South Jersey, which explained why he rooted for all those Philadelphia teams. His father had been a cop, too, putting in twenty-five years with the Camden PD and retiring with a trunk full of commendations, which told me a little something about the tree from which Darius had fallen. Camden has long ranked in the top ten as the toughest American city in which to be a cop.

As a teenager, Darius was a bit of a prankster but also a natural leader, so he became the ringmaster of a group of quasi-misfits, who liked to party a little too much. It didn’t sound like they were bad kids, by any stretch. But it was subtly explained to me there may have been a mailbox or two that succumbed to Darius’s idea of a good time. I also heard an account of how he organized a group of fourteen guys to lift a principal’s car and move it back to the Dumpsters behind school. The distraught man ended up reporting it stolen before someone finally let him in on the gag.

After Darius graduated high school, he tried a variety of jobs, none of which really fit him. And finally he went to school and got an associate’s degree in criminal justice: police work was in his blood, after all. He took the police exam and posted a high score, such that he had a number of job offers-well-qualified black candidates were always in demand from departments looking to improve their diversity. His family urged him to accept an offer from one of the cozy, suburban police departments, where he wouldn’t have to dodge the same dangers as his father.

But Darius wanted to be where the action was. He wanted to be where he felt he could do the most good. He chose Newark.

Smart and hardworking, with those natural leadership skills, he rose quickly through the ranks, never going long without moving up. After a few years on patrol, with his potential obvious to all, he earned his detective’s shield. A few years after that, he aced his sergeant’s exam and got that promotion, too. Lieutenant couldn’t have been far away.

He was the kind of cop who kept the scanner on at home and listened to it as background noise-the way some people keep the television on-just so he knew what his fellow officers were up to. And if he heard something that sounded like trouble and was close? He stored his gun and his shield by the door so he could grab them quickly on the way out. He had once nabbed a carjacker that way. It was the kind of commitment to the job that had earned him commendation after commendation, just like his old man.

But he didn’t just look out for other cops. I heard another story about a witness he worked with during one of his cases. The kid had been shot up pretty badly and was in the hospital for a while. Darius kept visiting the kid, finding different ways to cheer him up, and kept doing it even after the case was closed. Last anyone had heard, the kid had recovered and Darius had helped him get a part-time job with Newark Parks and Recreation.

Meanwhile, it seemed the former prankster matured into a level-headed, responsible young man. Around the time he started working as a cop, he met Mimi, fell for her, and fell hard. They had been introduced through a friend of a friend. She had heard of his reputation as a hard-partying boozer, and being a teetotaler herself, she told him she couldn’t date someone who used alcohol. He quit cold turkey. They were married within a year.

“He said we were soul mates, so there was no point in waiting,” Mimi said.

A few years into the marriage, they had their daughter, Jasey. They bought the duplex in East Orange because Darius felt a family ought to have a house to call home. He took to fatherhood quickly, doting on his daughter.

“He’d kill me if I told you this,” said the corner auntie, “but he let that little girl paint his fingernails and toenails. He’d be running around before work, looking for the nail polish remover, trying to get that stuff off. Sometimes he ran out of time. I’m sure the guys down at the station just loved that.”

It sounded like Jaquille’s birth had cut into father-daughter time quite a bit. But once things settled down, he had talked of surprising Jasey with a family trip to Disney World as a present from her new baby brother. He had also been talking about moving his growing brood to a single-family house, maybe in a town with a better school system.

“He was all for the kids,” Mimi told me. “He was always saying, ‘It ain’t about us no more.’”

All in all, he seemed like a heck of a guy. I’m sure some of the stories were being embellished for my benefit, but I didn’t mind. Telling lies about the recently deceased is a long-standing tradition in our-and many other-cultures, and I wasn’t about to take too hard a look at them. As a reporter, I’ve learned to make a distinction between lies that could hurt someone and those that won’t. If I ended up making a slain police officer smell a bit rosier in death than he had in real life, it was hard to see who would be injured by that.