Brad Parks - The Good Cop

I managed to win that battle, making use of a spare she had in her medicine cabinet. Otherwise, it was all go-go-go. On my way toward the door, Tina pressed a pear and an apple into my hand-the closest I was going to get to any fruit, forbidden or otherwise, on this morning-and shooed me out.

The address Tina gave me for Fusco’s place was in Belleville, a small but densely packed slice of New Jersey just north of Newark. It was just under twenty minutes away, and I knew I had to hurry. Still, I stopped for a Coke Zero. I had gotten four, maybe five hours of half-drunk slumber in someone else’s bed and, while wearing yesterday’s clothes, was being horsewhipped by my editor into frantic action. Such things are not meant to be borne without at least a little caffeine.

Plus, I needed to get my head working properly. It just couldn’t seem to swallow the idea that Fusco was dead. The killer had become the killed. Was Mike Fusco’s last act to give himself the ultimate punishment for the crimes he had committed? Or was this another staged suicide?

I had just gotten back on the road when I heard a news tease on the radio that ended “… and another police officer is dead in Newark, apparently by his own hand.”

This elicited a rare but emphatic swear from my lips. There would be no head start for me this time. To return to my pasture metaphor, there were few things worse than being part of the herd. There was no way to avoid smelling like dung.

It came as no surprise that when I pulled onto the narrow street in Belleville where Mike Fusco had lived, until very recently, three news vans were already there. Undoubtedly more were on the way. I parked outside one of the tidy little clapboard houses just in from the corner, then walked briskly toward Fusco’s place-the one with the crime scene tape strung along the outer edge of the property-about midway down the block.

Outside the house next door, two of the three cameras present were trained on a hirsute middle-aged white man who was telling a story that involved a lot of arm-waving and hand gesturing. I wouldn’t say the man was exactly ready for his fifteen minutes of fame-he had a three-day scruff and a torn New York Giants sweatshirt featuring Lawrence Taylor, which made it at least twenty years old. But I also wouldn’t say he struck me as the kind of guy who was too bothered about appearances. The slippers on his feet were one hint. The parachute pants were the dead giveaway.

I let the TV cameras finish up with him, then moved in. In short order, I learned his name and that he was claiming to have been the one who made the initial call to the police. He said he worked “in the sanitation industry”-like there was somehow shame in just saying he was a garbage man-which meant he was up early and just about to head out on his route. It was shortly after four when he heard gunshots.

“Gunshots with an ‘s’?” I asked. “As in, more than one?”

“Yeah. Two of them. It was a bang”-he waited for approximately ten seconds, his eyes wide and casting about the whole time, like he was still performing for the cameras-“and then a bang. Two shots.”

“Two shots,” I repeated. “What, did he miss the first time?”

“Beats me. I’m just telling you what I heard.”

I nodded and started taking notes. Sad to say, but if Mike Fusco lived in certain parts of Newark, his body would still be lying undiscovered right now. In a lot of neighborhoods, people long ago stopped bothering to call the police when they heard gunfire.

“So what happened next?” I asked.

“Well, it was tough to tell where the first shot was even coming from. But the second shot, I knew it was coming from Fusco’s place. I was paying attention at that point, you know? I didn’t know if someone was robbing the place or if it was some kind of gang thing or what. I didn’t think we had any of that out here. But sometimes a neighborhood can turn, you know? I mean, I heard some, you know, some blacks just moved in the next block over. I’m not racist, I’m just saying.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. Because it was better than saying: “Actually, sir, that is the very definition of racism.”

“So, anyway, I went over to my window to have a look.”

“Did you see anything?”

“Nope. Nada.”

“And then you called the police?”

“Yeah, I figure that’s what I pay all those property taxes for, right? Let the police do their job. And I gotta give them credit, they were here in, like, two minutes.”

He continued: “So I went out and met them, told them the same thing I told the dispatcher. They asked me if I could hang out for a while, so I called into work-I got about a million sick days piled up anyway-and they went in. Ten minutes later one of them comes out and tells me what happened.”

“And what was that?”

“Well, Fusco was lying in bed with his brains blown out, that’s what. I guess he couldn’t take it no more.”

If there truly was anything Mike Fusco couldn’t take no more-sorry, any longer-the guy didn’t know. And neither did anyone else on the block. Over the next two hours of hanging out and chatting with various neighbors, I heard a lot of the same thing about Fusco. He lived by himself, no kids, no pets, no hobbies that took him outside with any great frequency; he would offer a nodding hello to people but otherwise didn’t say much; he drove a big red truck with jacked-up suspension; he had big muscles; and he was a cop.

At a certain point, I became satisfied there was really nothing more the good people of Belleville could tell me. And I was starting to consider pulling up the tents and hitting the trail when my phone rang.

The caller was Mimi Kipps.

* * *

I stared at the phone for one ring, two rings, trying to give myself a chance to come up with some clever idea how to play this thing. By the third ring, I hadn’t produced anything, but I answered anyway.

“Carter Ross.”

“Carter, it’s Mimi Kipps,” she said in a husky voice.

“Hi, Mimi.”

“Are you writing a story about Mike?”

“I am, yes.”

“Can you … can you come over? I was hoping I could … talk to you a little bit.”

“About what?” I said.

There was no immediate response. I thought I heard some hard breathing, definitely some sniffling. When she finally spoke, it was through a voice box squeezed with emotion: “I think … maybe the people who killed Darius might have killed Mike because he was … I don’t know.”

“He was what?” I pressed.

“I just … I think I may have gotten him killed,” she said. That was about as far as she made it before the sobs came. It was tough to tell what was coming out of her mouth. Words? Sentences? Random syllables? It was unintelligible.

I let her carry on like that for a little while. She was trying to compose herself, unsuccessfully. Finally, I said, “Mimi, I’ll be there in about fifteen minutes, okay?”

She blurted out something that might have been “thank you” and I hung up.

Say this much, she had addled my easily aroused curiosity. I wondered if she was warming up to make some kind of confession. She “may” have gotten him killed? What, exactly, did that mean?

I’m not saying I was ready to believe the worst about Mimi Kipps, but neither did I think she was just the pitiable, grieving widow. In a world where there are seldom coincidences, the two men she was sleeping with had both ended up taking bullets to the head. It was getting hard to imagine a scenario where she wasn’t involved in that somehow.

As I merged on the Garden State Parkway for the short trip down to East Orange, I called Tina just to check in and let her know I was on the move. I told her about how, other than the fact that there were two shots fired-which would require some explanation-I had gotten a whole lot of nothing from the neighborhood.