Brad Parks - The Girl Next Door

She rose from the couch and walked out the front door, keeping it ajar behind her. Jeanne swayed gently. We both took sips of our water. Anne returned, bringing a burst of muggy air back into the house with her. She was carrying a brown accordion file folder. It was stiff and new and mostly empty, but she had selected a large one, obviously thinking it would expand with time. She unwrapped the band that secured the flap and handed me a sheaf of paper that had been stapled in the upper-left-hand corner.

At the top of the first page I saw: “IN THE SUPERIOR COURT OF NEW JERSEY, ESSEX VICINAGE, CIVIL DIVISION.”

It was, obviously, a complaint for a civil lawsuit, with the usual captioning. There was no case number, which meant it hadn’t been filed yet. The plaintiff was listed as “Marino, Nancy B.”

There was only one defendant. He was listed as “Caesar 710.”

* * *

My eyes began poring over the document. Its first assertion was that at all times relevant to the complaint, Nancy Marino was a resident of Bloomfield, New Jersey. The subsequent facts were similarly banal stuff-that she was an employee of the Newark Eagle -Examiner, Inc., that she was a shop steward in IFIW-Local 117 and so on. I was into pages 4 and 5 before I got to the meat of the thing, and on page 7 before I started having an inkling about what was going on.

“This … this is a complaint for sexual harassment,” I said, feeling my head cock to one side.

“That’s right,” Anne confirmed.

“But…” I said, then let my voice trail off as I refocused on the paper and continued reading.

Actually, I should say I was skimming. It usually takes me three or four trips through a document like this before I really absorb it. During my first run-through, I have a hard time keeping myself from speeding to the end.

But I was getting the highlights. It started with Caesar 710 making remarks about Nancy’s appearance, including comments about her breasts. One quote that jumped off the page was, “On several occasions, the defendant stated the plaintiff should wear tighter clothing to ‘show off your body more.’”

Then he began asking her out on dates. At first, it was just invitations to drinks, which “plaintiff rejected as being inappropriate.” It escalated from there to sexual advances, descriptions of proposed encounters that became increasingly lurid. At a certain point, the complaint alleged, Caesar 710 started initiating physical contact, fondling her thigh under a table. The complaint referred to this as assault and battery.

“Assault and battery?” I asked. “He hit her?”

“Those are legal definitions,” Anne said. “Assault is any attack that causes the defendant to fear physical harm. Battery is simply touching without consent.”

I thought of what I had learned about Nancy, how she didn’t really date or seem all that interested in it. Every description of her made her sound fairly asexual. What was it that Nikki said about her? That while all the other waitresses gabbed about a hot guy coming into the restaurant, Nancy didn’t treat them any differently from the old ladies.

I could only imagine how she would have reacted to Caesar 710’s behavior. She would have been shocked, horrified, humiliated. She probably wouldn’t have known what to do about it at first.

But eventually she would have decided to fight back. Nancy Marino was no pushover.

And this complaint was part of that fight. There were other names mentioned, also in code: Caesar 413, Caesar 168, Caesar 1224. But Caesar 710 was clearly the star of the show.

“Wow,” I said, looking up from the document when I reached the end. “So who is ‘Caesar 710’?”

“I don’t know,” Anne said.

“What do you mean?”

“She wouldn’t tell me.”

Anne continued: “She said Caesar 710 was vindictive and violent. We were e-mailing this document back and forth, and she said there was a possibility it would be, I don’t know, intercepted by someone. She thought if she put the real name in there, it would get reported back to Caesar 710. At the time, I just thought she was being paranoid.”

Or, more likely, she was using her Eagle-Examiner e-mail account and feared someone loyal to Jackman would have access to it.

“But … what’s the significance of ‘Caesar 710’?”

“I have no idea. It’s a little riddle she came up with,” Anne said.

It was a riddle that had me stumped. Because, on the one hand, “Caesar” could be a reference to Gus Papadopolous-with the subtle switch from Greek to Roman, because “Pericles 710” would have been too obvious. Then again, it could also be Gary Jackman, who as publisher of a major newspaper was a Caesar-like figure.

“But you’re her attorney,” I protested. “How could she not tell you?”

“No, I’m her sister, ” Anne corrected me. “I never would have represented her in this. I’m a real estate attorney. Workplace discrimination is pretty far from my area. I prepared this document as a kind of guide for another attorney, just so Nancy wouldn’t have to walk into someone’s office cold. I think it helped her organize her thoughts.”

“So who’s her lawyer?”

“She didn’t have one yet. She was planning to put an attorney on retainer to pursue this claim. She had even applied for a home equity line of credit so she could afford to pay for it.”

So that explained the $50,000 loan Tommy found in his background check.

“She said she was prepared to take this thing as far as it could go,” Anne finished.

Jeanne, who had managed to sit quietly through this whole exchange, was itching to add her input.

“Can you think what it would have been like to be Nancy?” Jeanne said, with tears welling in her eyes even as her voice stayed flat. “With this … this animal saying those things? And putting his hands all over her? You’re a man. I’m not sure you know what that would feel like.”

I get this a lot, of course. People assume that because I’m a privileged white male, I am utterly incapable of understanding discrimination or persecution in any form. It’s tough to convince them otherwise without sounding totally disingenuous-“but I have a friend who’s Jewish” doesn’t get you very far-so I ignored Jeanne and turned back to Anne. Somehow, she had to know something that would confirm the identity of Caesar 710.

“Had Nancy told you about her complaint to the National Labor Relations Board?” I asked.

“Well, yes … sort of. When Nancy first came to me about this-and, mind you, she wouldn’t tell me who it was-I said her first step was to take it to her employer’s human resources person. But I don’t think she got a very satisfactory response.”

“Well, yeah, if the problem was at the diner, I can’t imagine she would have,” I said. “A mom-and-pop restaurant like that doesn’t exactly have a human resources department.”

“Well, whatever happened, I told her the next step was the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission-the EEOC. But Nancy was very union proud, as you know. And I think she wanted to feel like she was getting some kind of solution that way. So she insisted on taking it to the NLRB. But I don’t know if she heard back from them before she was killed.”

That pointed the arrow back at Jackman because Nancy was a unionized employee of the Eagle-Examiner . There was no union presence at the State Street Grill. But why would the NLRB visit there?

“Well, the NLRB isn’t being very forthcoming,” I said. “I had a Freedom of Information Act request put in today, but I’m not optimistic that’s going to get them to open up.”

I returned my attention to the cover page of the complaint and found myself staring at the captioning on top. I wind up reading a fair amount of legal documents, and something about this one struck me as a little sparse. Then it hit me: it was the lack of codefendants. Generally, with these kinds of lawsuits, the plaintiff at least starts off with a big pile of targets, whether they’re named individuals, corporations, or just John Does.