Brad Parks: The Good Cop

Often the road dead-ends. But every once in a while it leads to a major score, which you only got because you were willing to waste a little time on it. Except now I had deprived myself of the opportunity.

“Why doesn’t it feel right?” she asked. “Because his mom told you how happy he was as a little boy playing with his G.I. Joe?”

“Come on, Tina, it-”

“No, you come on. I know you spent the morning with his family, but we’re going to have to write that off. You’ve got that public housing story to finish.”

“And I will. I’m mostly just waiting for documents anyway. I could keep juggling that while I plug at this for a few days.”

Tina shook her head. “Brodie is really hot for that project. I told him we might have copy by the end of next week and-”

“Then I’ll get you copy by the end of next week. I can do both without-”

“No, you can’t. I can see it in your eyes. You’re going to spend all your time chasing this fairy tale while-”

“It’s not a fairy tale! Look, I know Brodie’s thing about suicide. But I’m saying this is one of the times when we should ignore it. Can’t you just trust me that I’ve been around long enough to have decent instincts?”

“Was I talking too quickly for you before? Let me slow it down for you: nnnooo,” she said, sounding like an annoyed cow. “You have important work to be doing on a real story. I’m not going to have you wasting time on a nonstory.”

“A nonstory, huh? You’re really so certain-based on all you know about Darius Kipps-that this might not be something?”

“Monkeys will fly out of my ass first,” she said. “As a matter of fact, I’m so certain I don’t want you spending another second on that, I want copy on the housing project story by the end of this week so I can read it over the weekend. So you might as well get out of here. You’ve got work to do.”

“Fine … fine! I’m going to have lunch now! And you can’t stop me!” I said defiantly as I stood up.

But Tina was already ignoring me.

* * *

I scooted out of the building and walked down the street toward my favorite pizzeria, a place where I often went to sort messy mental laundry. I’m not sure if it was the two steaming slices or the cold Coke Zero, but somehow it always helped me gain perspective on things. Plus, Pizza Therapy is a lot cheaper than counseling.

Except this time I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about Darius Kipps. Eventually, I began flipping through my notebook to look for something I might have missed-and to imagine what might be missing. Did happy-go-lucky Darius have a quiet, brooding side no one talked about? Was all that drinking he did in his early twenties self-medication of some kind? Was there some hurt in his childhood no one wanted to tell me about?

Midway through my flipping, I bumped into that photo of Darius at his birthday party. I sat there, studying it for a good three minutes, looking at his wall-to-wall smile, a smile with seemingly no reason to end.

A reporter comes to understand that H. sapiens is a highly unpredictable creature; that our large, cunning brains make us capable of a greater range of behavior than any other animal on the planet; and that the ability to hide our emotions, from others and even ourselves, is one of our defining traits. How many times had a neighbor told me that so-and-so “never let on” or “she seemed so upbeat” or “he must have just snapped.”

It happened all the time. But had it really happened to Darius Kipps?

Finally, just to sate my curiosity, I grabbed my phone and called Newark Police Department Detective Rodney Pritchard. When I met him, Pritch-as everyone called him-had been in homicide. He had recently switched to the Gang Task Force, though since gangs were responsible for most of the homicides in the city, I’m not sure there was much difference. We had done a couple of stories together, including several that made him look pretty good. We had developed a relationship where he knew he could whisper sweet somethings in my ear without having to worry about it coming back to him.

He answered his phone on the second ring, saying, “Hey, if it ain’t Woodward N. Bernstein!”

Pritch was under the belief that the famous Washington Post reporting duo of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein was actually one person. I never bothered correcting him.

“Not too bad, not too bad,” I said. “Though I did just come from Darius Kipps’s house.”

“Oh, you heard about that, huh?”

“Yeah. We’re getting word he offed himself in a shower stall at the Fourth?”

“Yeah, man, that’s the word. It’s sad. Dude just had a baby and everything.”

“You knew him?”

“Yeah. Before I came downtown, I was in the Fourth with him. I was already detective when he was hired on patrol, so I only knew him a little. He made detective not long before I went downtown, so we never worked a case together or anything. But, yeah, I knew him.”

“What’d you think of him?”

“Good dude. Real good dude. He was one of those cops who was all about the law, you know?”

“What do you mean?”

“There are guys in the department who look at the law like it’s an impediment. You know, like, ‘We’d really be able to clean up this city if it weren’t for the damn Fourth Amendment.’ But Kipps, he wasn’t like that. He understood the job was about upholding the law, even when the law didn’t make sense. You know what I’m saying?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Give me an example.”

“Like, say a scumbag you put away got off on some technicality or got himself some slick defense attorney who was able to get armed robbery down to PTI”-pretrial intervention-“or something like that? Some guys get really pissed, go on and on about how the system is effed up. Not Kipps. He took that stuff in stride. He understood that the law was there to protect everyone-even criminals sometimes. He wanted to bust ’em as bad as anyone. But he wanted to do it the right way. He treated everyone with respect. It’s like, if you were going to play good cop, bad cop with a suspect, Kipps was always going to be the good cop. You know what I mean?”

“The good cop,” I repeated. “Okay, I hear you. So what do you make of this, then?”

“What do you mean?”

I had been fidgeting with my empty Coke Zero bottle, the label of which was now completely removed. I took a deep breath and said: “I don’t know, Pritch. It just strikes me as a little off. I didn’t know the guy like you did. But I just spent the morning talking to his family and he didn’t seem like type to do something like this. There’s the new baby. He was talking about buying a new house. Heck, he was going to be taking his kids to Disney World. Those are pretty optimistic things, you know? Is there something here I’m missing? Something his family didn’t know or wouldn’t tell me? I’m not writing it. This is just my own personal curiosity at this point.”

“I know what you’re saying. But I’ll tell you what, this job”-he pushed out a large gust of air-“it chews you up. Being a cop, you see some stuff, man, especially in this city. Some guys, they can put a good face on it for years. They laugh it off and seem to be good family men, but inside it’s eating at them the whole time, you know? Some guys start drinking or they let it ruin their marriage. But other guys? It just gets to be too much. Then one day they go off and swallow their gun.”

“You think what’s what happened here?”

I continued folding and refolding the Coke Zero label as I waited for Pritch to answer.

“Well, probably, yeah,” he said at last. “I don’t know nothing. And I don’t want to go giving Woodward N. Bernstein a big scoop. But…”