Brad Parks - The Good Cop

If it was supposed to be a hit, it was incredibly sloppy (as evidenced by the fact that I was still around to critique it). Maybe they were just trying to scare me off. The stubbornly high murder rate that persisted in urban areas-most of which related to the drug trade-suggested that when a professional wanted you dead, chances are you ended up dead.

Unless these weren’t pros. What if they were amateurs who happened to drive a nice car?

I tried to think back on the sequence of events that had led me there. I had gotten a call from Mimi Kipps asking me to come see her. I responded to the call, only to learn she had left in a hurry minutes before I arrived, escorted by the anointed man of God. Then someone was shooting at me.

Oh. Right. The weepy woman calls. The gallant, dumb man answers-never knowing he’s walking into a trap. That’s how the shooters knew I was going to be there. Mimi Kipps told them.

In the immortal words of former Washington, D.C., Mayor Marion Barry: bitch set me up.

* * *

Having this knowledge, proving this knowledge, and then figuring out what to do with it were all distinctly different issues, of course. And I was stuck on the middle part. Could I prove that this was anything more than a bad coincidence? I knew better, of course, but there was nothing to definitively say the gangbangers weren’t just shooting up the duplex next door.

Another question: Was her pastor in on it? Since he showed up minutes before the shooting started to whisk Mimi away, it would suggest he was. Then again, was it possible Mimi was playing him like she was playing me? Maybe she called him all weepy, too, knowing he would come running just like I did?

Yet another question: Why would Mimi need me dead? How was I threat to her? Sure, I might be the only person who was really onto her. But how did she know that? I thought about my conversation with Pastor Al, where I had hinted about the affair but never directly stated it. Had he known what I was trying to get at and alerted Mimi?

But if that was the case, and Pastor Al was complicit in Mimi and Fusco’s conspiracy to kill Darius Kipps, then why would he have called for an independent investigation-and then dropped it? For that matter, if Mimi and Fusco had teamed up to kill Darius to get him out of the way-so their affair could blossom-then why was Fusco now dead?

Nothing made sense at all, unless … were Pastor Al and Mimi somehow romantically involved?

Now, that was just gross. He was old enough to be her father, and he hadn’t aged particularly well-he looked like he could be her grandfather. Merely the thought of them bumping uglies was revolting. Then again, could I rule it out? Not really.

Was it even possible-and, oh, this was really sordid-that Pastor Al was Jaquille’s real father? I thought all the way back to my first interview with Mimi, when she had told me about how much trouble she had getting pregnant, thanks to her one-testicled husband and his low sperm count. Had Jaquille’s conception been a bit less miraculous than originally advertised?

Short of getting Pastor Al to submit to a paternity test, I wasn’t sure how I would ever substantiate this theory. But it was a possibility I couldn’t rule out: that the call for an investigation had been a smokescreen, and that all these dead police officers were really just Pastor Al’s way of clearing away competitors for Mimi’s affections.

For all I knew, Mimi really was innocent-relatively-in everything. Maybe Pastor Al had called her, told her to invite me over, and then cleared her out of harm’s way just in time for me to get shot at.

These and other thoughts were doing laps around my cranium when I received a text message from Tina: “NPD presser @ 11. Command center. Can u make it?”

Could I make it? Yeah. Did I want to? Negative. I was starting to think the representatives of the Newark Police Department were the last people to know what was going on, so spending time with them seemed rather pointless. Given what I had just been through, shouldn’t I get special dispensation from having to attend pointless press conferences?

Then again, Tina didn’t know I had spent part of my morning ducking bullets. And maybe she didn’t need to know. For whatever her current feelings for me were-was going from potential baby daddy to booty call a promotion or a demotion? — she had shown the tendency to be plenty protective of me. If I told her about my little drive-by incident, she’d pull me into the office and not let me leave until I was eligible for Medicare.

And while I still aspired to reach a ripe and gummy old age, I didn’t feel like remaining at large was necessarily going to jeopardize it. As long as I didn’t agree to meet Mimi Kipps in any dark alleys, I would be okay. I just had to be a little more wary.

I texted Tina back, “On my way,” then shifted into gear, trying to pay a little more attention to traffic signals this time. The Newark Police Command Center was on University Avenue, not to be confused with its headquarters on Green Street. I guess whenever the Green Street facility had been built-by either the Holy Roman Empire or Alexander the Great, judging by how antiquated it was-no one worried about satellite hookups. The Command Center was, therefore, a little better suited to press events.

Arriving all of two minutes before it started, I was ushered to the conference room where they held these kinds of functions. The chairs in the middle of the room were filled with a variety of reporters. Along the back wall was a row of cameras on tripods, including some that belonged to cameramen I had seen earlier in the day on Fusco’s street. They were now going to have everything they needed-sound bites from the scene and from the police-in plenty of time for their noon broadcasts.

Hakeem Rogers was up front, fussing with something, but he still found time to shoot me a scowl when he spied me standing along the side wall. I nodded at him, but I was mostly distracted by who was-or, in this case, was not-alongside Rogers.

Typically, these press conferences consisted of Rogers introducing the police director, who, as an appointee of the mayor, wanted to be putting in a good word with the voters of Newark. The director usually appeared in front of a wall of blue-clad men, officers who were somehow involved in the law enforcement triumph the director was there to announce. The officers didn’t say much-they were just there for decoration-but they sure gave the director a good background for the cameras.

This time the director was nowhere around. Nor was there a wall of blue. Indeed, there was only one officer alongside Rogers: Captain Denise Boswell. She was in full dress uniform, right up to her hat, which she was nervously fussing with as she waited for the show to begin.

The other oddity about this was that I didn’t know what she planned to say. Generally at these kinds of gatherings, you had some inkling of what would be announced-a break on a case, a big drug bust, a fugitive from justice apprehended.

This time it was a total mystery. And as Rogers approached the podium, I found myself leaning forward, just a little bit curious.

* * *

Rogers opened the proceedings by introducing himself, thanking everyone for coming, and taking an unveiled swipe at me.

“There has been a great deal of speculation about the death of Detective Sergeant Darius Kipps, specifically in print,” Rogers said. “While ordinarily we prefer to let our investigation run its course before we make any major public statements, the Newark Police Department has determined that, in light of the death of Detective Michael Fusco and some apparent connections between the two investigations, it was time to put an end to the speculation.”