Brad Parks - Eyes of the Innocent

“Sweet Thang let Akilah Harris stay at her place,” I blurted. “And sometime in the middle of the night, Akilah stole Sweet Thang’s jewelry and took off. I’ve been trying to get it back.”

I could practically hear the new hole being torn in Szanto’s stomach.

“Are you serious?” he asked.

“I am.”

“And this is what you’ve been doing with your morning?”

“I have.”

What followed was a rant spiked with language you are unlikely to hear from your local librarian. He strongly suggested that I, as his investigative reporter, ought to stop worrying about the missing jewelry and start worrying about the missing councilman.

Then he hung up.

“Nice chatting with you,” I said to the empty phone line.

I sighed. I knew exactly how this was going to play out. I would be assigned to put together some kind of Sunday piece that Told the Real Story-or however much of the Real Story we could assemble between now and then. In the meantime, it was Tuesday and we, as a newspaper, would spill countless barrels of ink during the coming days, covering every detail of the life and perhaps-death of Windy Byers, all the while pretending he was something other than a hack local politician who had ridden his father’s half-good name to a long and undistinguished career in service to the public/himself.

I wasn’t keen on canonizing him like that. On the bright side, at least I wouldn’t have to get a space heater reference high up in whatever I wrote.

My first step in this whole process was, of course, to do what I should have done first thing this morning: read the paper. I hopped in my Malibu and started looking for one, which was harder than you might think. This being Newark, we couldn’t keep newspaper boxes on the street. Otherwise, for seventy-five cents, some homeless guy-sorry, Housing Challenged American-was going to break in just as soon as we filled the box, swipe all thirty copies, and sell them on the street for reduced rates, netting himself the fifteen dollars he would need to keep his belly full of Wild Irish Rose until the next morning. What we did, instead, was cut the petty larceny out of the equation: we hired the homeless guys directly and put them to work selling the paper for us.

On the street, the Eagle-Examiner was known as “The Bird.” People who delivered or sold it were known as “Bird Flippers.” I think all involved enjoyed the double entendre.

Still, after the morning rush hour, most of the Bird Flippers had already made enough money to be happily inebriated the rest of the day, so it took a little while before I found one still manning his post.

I tossed him a buck, told him to keep the change-the last of the big spenders, that’s me-and settled in to have a look.

* * *

As Szanto said, the disappearance of Wendell A. Byers Jr. was stripped across the top of A1. It was obviously late-breaking, and the layout person-who was either too rushed or too lazy to redesign the entire front page-had simply swapped out the Akilah Harris piece in favor of the Byers news.

The story appeared under the byline of Carl Peterson, our night rewrite guy. When Peterson first came to the paper, his approach may have charitably been called “new journalism.” Now it was just called overwriting. He stuffed his copy with adverbs and adjectives, filling the small spaces left in between with cliches. He wrote how the disappearance of the “beloved Central Ward councilman” and “scion of a Newark political dynasty” was being treated as “a deeply suspicious event” by police who “strongly suspect foul play.” The councilman’s wife, described as “thoroughly overwrought with anxiety,” reported her husband’s absence Monday evening, setting off a “city-wide manhunt” in which “concerned constituents” were being enlisted.

The only problem with Peterson’s prose was disentangling the facts from the compositional exertions. And in this case it was especially difficult because Peterson didn’t seem to have many facts beyond: (a) the honorable councilman failed to return home to Mrs. Honorable Councilman; (b) she called the cops; and (c) the police had at least a half-cocked notion something untoward had happened. There was no mention of what led police to that conclusion, or whether there had been any ransom demands, or whether he had even been kidnapped in the first place.

Not that I blamed Peterson for the lack of information. As night rewrite man, he was hostage to whatever dispatches he got from reporters (usually not much for a deadline story like that) and whatever the Newark police felt like telling him (usually even less).

I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel. There were so many ways this thing could go-involvement with the mob, involvement with a girlfriend, involvement with a girlfriend who was herself involved with the mob. Without at least some hint of a direction, I’d be like Fred Flintstone in his boulder-wheeled car: moving my legs a lot but not really going all that fast.

I needed a cop to whisper something in my ear. And the cop that immediately came to mind was Rodney Pritchard, a homicide detective I became friendly with a while back. I had written a blow-by-blow story of how he tracked down and apprehended a fugitive wanted for murdering his wife. Pritch caught the guy so unawares he actually answered the door to his apartment hideout while eating a piece of jerk chicken-allowing Pritch to deliver the once-in-a-career line, “You’re under arrest, now drop the chicken.”

My story made Pritch mildly famous, helping to launch him on a long winter of law enforcement awards banquets. So now we were the kind of buddies who tell each other secrets. Or at least that’s what I hoped as I dialed his number.

“Yo, Pritch, it’s Carter Ross,” I said breezily. “What’s shakin’?”

“Sorry, you got the wrong number,” Pritch said, then hung up.

I was just about to drop Pritch from my Secret-telling Buddies List when he rang me back.

“Sorry about that,” he said in a hushed voice. “It’s hot around here.”

“So what’s going on with this Byers thing?”

“I don’t know, man, you tell me,” Pritch said. “I mean, who the hell just takes a councilman? You have to be either very pissed or very dumb.”

“Who’s handling the case”

“Fellow named Raines caught it.”

“He any good?”

“He’s okay.”

“Would he talk to me off the record? Tell him I won’t quote him, but I’ll find lots of ways to make him look like a dogged and heroic investigator in print.”

“I don’t think it would matter,” Pritch said. “Raines isn’t in it for the newspaper clippings. He’s pretty by-the-book. I’ll be honest with you, he’s so straight, I don’t even think I can ask him for you.”

“Fair enough. What about you? You hearing anything? Watercooler talk?”

“What have we told you guys officially?”

“That all of Newark is playing a game of Where’s Windy and your guys seem to believe he didn’t just wander off to Florida for the weekend without telling anyone.”

“Well, we got a good reason for believing that.”

“I’m listening.”

“We found blood in his house,” Pritch said.

“Really,” I said as I grabbed a notebook and started scribbling. “Like, a lot of blood?”

“A little blood, from what I hear.”

“How little? Are we talking ‘oops, I cut myself shaving’ or ‘oops, a samurai left his sword in my head.’ ”

“Probably closer to the shaving accident,” Pritch said. “But I don’t know a lot of people who shave in the foyer of their house, and that’s where we found it.”

“Is it definitely his?”

“We don’t know. Labs aren’t back yet. But who else’s could it be?”