Brad Parks - The Girl Next Door

“I don’t work for you anymore, remember?” I said.

“Sure you do.”

“Don’t mess with a soon-to-be-dead man. You fired me.”

“No, you quit,” she corrected me. “And I never accepted your resignation. As far as the Eagle-Examiner is concerned, you were on suspension, but it has been revoked.”

“All I had to do was get shot, huh?”

“No. Actually, your part-time translator and full-time coconspirator returned to the office this afternoon, telling us you were on the trail of a pretty amazing story and that we’d be idiots not to bring you back in the fold and let you work it. I took it to Brodie, who backed you immediately. You should have told us about the eyewitness.”

“I didn’t think you’d believe me.”

“Sorry,” she said, stroking my hand. “I’m so sorry, Carter.”

“I’m cold,” I said.

“I don’t have a blanket. Just hang on a little longer. Is there anything else I can do?”

I heard a siren approaching from somewhere. I was getting a little disoriented. Tina’s curly head was starting to spin.

“Tell that bastard,” I said, then got hit by a surge of pain and had to stop.

“That bastard over there,” I said. “Remind him.”

“Remind him what?”

“That we made our last interview on the record.”

Then I’m fairly certain I passed out.

* * *

If I had to choose one city in the world in which to get shot, I would pick Newark, New Jersey, above all others. No matter where you are, from Weequahic to downtown all the way up to the North Ward or out to the Ironbound, you are no more than a short drive away from one of several trauma centers that rank among the country’s finest. There, you will find a team of doctors more experienced with gunshot wounds-and more skilled at treating them-than you will in any of the world’s standing armies.

I ended up at Newark Beth Israel, just a few blocks away. When I came to, my parents were there, as was a rather unimpressed doctor. He informed me the bullet had passed clean through my leg, coming close to nicking both a bone and an artery-either of which injury could have been disastrous for various reasons-but missing both, rendering my wound neither very dangerous nor, to his mind, very interesting.

The night was a blur of bothersome nurses and rounding doctors, buzzing in and out through the evening and into the small hours of the morning. They made it damn difficult for a guy to get a decent night’s sleep, which is what I needed most. I may have grumbled about this, perhaps even created a few profane word combinations in expressing my displeasure. Eventually, my father took over, posted guard at the door, and made it clear to any and all-including my mother-that I was not to be disturbed. Dads are good that way sometimes.

By the next morning I was feeling pretty good. Though, admittedly, my mood may have been aided by the wonders of Percocet. Around ten o’clock, I assured my father I was sufficiently well rested, and he relented, allowing a stream of flower- and balloon-bearing visitors to begin entering my room and paying homage to the wounded hero. Dad only let them in one at a time, so I had to hear the story in bits and pieces-and all out of order, since my visitors were not thoughtful enough to arrange themselves chronologically-but I eventually assembled a fairly thorough account of the evening.

It started with Lunky, who had received my e-mail shortly after I sent it. He said I caught him at a good moment-he had finished Emerson and was just about to plunge back into Thoreau when my e-mail came-and he realized fairly quickly that something was amiss. The tip-off for him was that, apparently, Sabbath’s Theater has nothing to do with the stage.

“I was sure you knew Mickey Sabbath is a puppeteer, not an actor,” Lunky informed me gravely. “I considered it a cry for help.”

So while the part about suicide didn’t grab him, the bungling of Roth did. And he was thus inspired to take my note to “Missus Thompson,” perhaps not fully realizing she was one and the same as the “Tina” who was referenced in the note. Tina recognized the entire e-mail as gibberish and acted accordingly.

“I decided you had either lost it completely or you were in real trouble,” Tina told me during her first visit of the day. “Either way, I needed to intervene.”

Tina didn’t have my new number, so she couldn’t call me. And, in any event, my phone was already sitting at the bottom of a Hudson County retention pond, next to some radioactive fiddler crabs. So she asked Lunky for a translation of the Roth stuff, and he remembered our first conversation, where he had mentioned Roth’s childhood home at good ol’ 81 Summit Avenue.

Tina summoned Tommy, and the three of them decided fairly quickly to hightail it down to Weequahic and figure out what was going on.

On the way, Tommy had put in a call to Owen Smiley. Unfortunately, while Tommy remembered Smiley’s name, he didn’t have the detective’s cell number. So he had to go through the Bloomfield Police Department switchboard. And Smiley, whose gun just might have come in handy, didn’t get the message for a little while-which is why I only heard him on scene after the shooting had already happened.

But it didn’t matter, because Lunky was my secret weapon. The lady who lived at 81 Summit Avenue remembered him fondly and invited him and his friends in from the rain. They were huddled in her house, trying to figure out what to do, when they saw my car pull up.

I guess everything happened pretty fast from there. But Lunky said as soon as he heard the gunshot, he knew I needed help-he’s a quick study, that Lunky-and he bolted out the door and bounded down the steps. He saw McNabb walking toward me, ready to shoot, and went in for the tackle. The noise of Lunky’s rapid approach was drowned out by all the rain and thunder.

From there, all ended happily for those not named McNabb.

None of my visitors were allowed to bring in the Friday paper, which was deemed “too stressful” for me in such an early and tender phase of my recovery, but I managed to get the details of what we had printed. The Newark Eagle-Examiner reported that Jim McNabb, IFIW-Local 117 executive director, had been arrested for the murder of Nancy Marino and was being held without bail. A spokesman from the prosecutor’s office said McNabb could also expect to be charged with two counts of attempted murder, and a variety of weapons charges for both his use of an illegal handgun and his use of a Cadillac Escalade, which, it turned out, he happened to own and have registered in his name. A reference was made to an “outstanding local citizen” who would be receiving a $10,000 reward for her cooperation with the Bloomfield police.

They had put my byline-and mine alone-on the story. It was accompanied by an editor’s note, explaining to readers that the story had been primarily the work of staff writer Carter Ross, who had been injured during the course of doing his reporting. Tommy Hernandez and Buster Hays had completed the reporting and written the piece.

Since Hernandez and Hays were only beginning to untangle the mess with “Caesar 710” and the sexual harassment angle-and didn’t want to put guesses in the newspaper-they had left the matter of motive fairly vague. It was only in the morning, when Tommy got Peter Davidson of the NLRB on the phone, that things started becoming a little more clear to them. Now that Davidson knew Nancy Marino was dead-and therefore he didn’t have to worry about spoiling an EEOC complaint-he relented on the FOIA request. By lunchtime, Tommy had a small handful of documents, all of which named Jim McNabb as the target of Nancy’s complaint.

Gus Papadopolous’s “involvement”-if you could call it that-turned out to be minor. Nancy had listed the State Street Grill as one of her places of employment, so Davidson had paid a visit there, just to get a sense for what kind of worker she was. Davidson said that Gus had been a little leery, repeatedly saying he “didn’t want no trouble.” But Davidson was ultimately just looking for a character witness of sorts. And the affidavit Gus supplied extolled Nancy’s long history as a loyal, reliable worker.