Brad Parks - Eyes of the Innocent

Anyone’s. Cops were so short on imagination sometimes.

“By the way,” Pritch said. “You didn’t get this from me, right?”

“Of course not. I don’t even know you,” I assured him. “What is the current thinking on why anyone would feel like stealing Windy Byers?”

“It’s too early. Our guys either don’t know or ain’t sayin’. Between you and me, I don’t think they have a clue.”

“But it doesn’t sound like some botched robbery or something?” I said. “I mean, you take a councilman, it’s because you meant to take a councilman, right?”

“Well, I’ve heard his laptop was missing. But it was just the laptop. I’ve had too many cases where people report one thing ‘stolen’ and then it turns up somewhere later.”

“Sure,” I said. “So we’re told the wife reported him missing. What’s her deal?”

“From what I hear, she was out at some church group thing on Sunday night,” Pritch said. “She comes back home and her husband isn’t there, but she doesn’t think anything of it. She just thinks he’s out at a political event or something. Then the next morning she wakes up to an empty bed and calls us.”

“Our story said she called Monday night.”

“Yeah, we probably just told you guys that so you wouldn’t jump all over us for not calling you about it earlier. The public information office does stuff like that all the time.”

Didn’t we know it.

“Anyone think the wife has something to do with this?” I asked. “You know, she found him cheating, killed him, got rid of the body, then reported him missing?”

“That’s a theory.”

“Is it the official theory?”

“I don’t know,” Pritch said. “Look, I gotta run. I’m crouched in the stairwell talking to you like you’re the girl I keep on the side. And I just don’t like you that much.”

“All right. Do me a favor and keep your ears open. I owe you lunch.”

“You owe me more than one,” Pritch said, then hung up.

* * *

My next call was to Tommy Hernandez, our fabulous gay Cuban intern. Since Tommy was now one of our City Hall beat writers, Councilman Byers was one of his responsibilities. General rule of thumb in journalism: if one of your key sources vanishes suspiciously, you’re going to be busier than a paisley top with plaid pants.

He answered after half a ring.

“Hey, I’m in Byers’s neighborhood,” Tommy said, not bothering with salutations. “Come meet me here.”

“Got cross streets for me?”

“It’s on Fairmount, just north of South Orange Avenue,” Tommy said.

It took six minutes to get from Tee’s neighborhood to the scene and only a few seconds to figure out which house belonged to the councilman. If the police tape didn’t clue me in, the TV trucks parked out front did. I parked, got out, and had a look around.

The councilman’s neighborhood had clearly seen better days. Uh, make that better centuries. I’m sure sometime around World War II it had been a great little place to raise a family. Now, after decades of mortgage redlining and highway construction, absentee landlordism and slumping schools, the GI Bill and white flight-and all the other things this country allowed that led its suburbs to prosper at the expense of its cities-there were only faint memories of what had been.

The slate sidewalks, once a smooth runway for baby boomers’ strollers, were now a jagged moonscape of broken rock. The elm trees that once lined the street were down to a few straggling, struggling survivors, creating a more desolate effect than if they had all been chopped down.

The same could be said for the houses. Some had long ago been flattened and turned into vacant lots. Others looked so unkempt, unwanted, or abandoned you only wished they would have a sudden meeting with a wrecking ball. Then there were a few that defied the odds and, with regular painting and maintenance, had aged gracefully. It only made me more wistful, wondering what the street would look like if it had just been cared for a little more through the years.

And you could blame the federal government, whose policies helped create this mess. Or you could blame the whites, who turned and ran when things started getting tough; or the blacks, who let it get even worse; or the schools, which warehoused urban kids instead of educating them; or the churches, which too often had their doors closed when they should have been open; or the economy, which no longer provided the kind of factory jobs that made a city go; or, well, take your pick.

It was everyone’s fault. And no one’s fault. And I wondered if I would ever live to see the day when the sidewalks were smooth, the street was shaded by trees, and the houses all had fresh paint.

None of which was going to get my story written. So I started going up and down the block until I found Tommy, dutifully going door to door, talking to neighbors. I caught him coming down the steps of a sagging old duplex, having just been shooed away by someone’s great-grandmother.

“Do you shop in a catalogue that’s called ‘Old and Boring’ or do you go to normal places and it just turns out that way?” Tommy asked. “I mean, khaki pants, blue shirt, red tie. Was that your boarding school uniform or something?”

Tommy was not a big fan of my fashion sensibilities, which he accused of slipping into a coma sometime around 1997.

“Oh, it takes many long seconds of work each morning to look this dull,” I assured him. “How’s the canvassing?”

“The usual,” Tommy said, waving toward the houses. “It happened at night and these are all old people who wouldn’t dream of going out after dark. They didn’t see anything.”

“And they keep their TVs turned up high to drown out the sound of the sirens,” I said, nodding in the direction of University Hospital. “So they didn’t hear anything, either.”

“You got it.”

“Well, if it makes you feel better, I got a little bit of scoop for you,” I said.

“That the cops found blood in the front entrance?” Tommy replied. “Yeah, I know.”

Of course he did. Tommy was that kind of reporter.

“Who told you?” I said.

“One of the guys in the Crime Scene Unit hangs out at some of the same clubs I do, if you get my drift,” Tommy said, grinning mischievously.

“Ah,” I said. “But, let me guess: this is not well-known among his colleagues at the Newark Police Department?”

“At work, he’s so far in the closet you’d think he survives by eating hangers,” Tommy said. “But he’s definitely one of mine.”

Tommy and I started walking back up the block, toward an encampment of TV cameras.

“So what’s your theory about this so far?” I asked. “Did Windy Byers run off with his girlfriend?”

“His boyfriend maybe,” Tommy said.

“Boyfriend?”

“Oh, don’t act all shocked,” Tommy said. “Sometimes I think half the brothers in Newark like it on the down low.”

Sex “on the down low,” as it is known, involved otherwise straight, mostly married black men who get together under the pretense of masculine activities (poker, beers, bowling, whatever) and have sex with each other. I didn’t know how much of it to believe, but it was a never-ending source of gossip in Newark: who did what with whom and where, who pitched, who caught. It was never confirmed by firsthand knowledge-no one ever admitted being involved-but it was not unusual to hear it whispered that a guy liked it on the down low. And if anyone would know, it was Tommy.

“Okay, so why did his boyfriend kidnap him?” I asked. “Was he afraid Byers was going to go public or something?”

“Oh, I have no idea,” Tommy said. “I just always heard stuff about Windy Byers doing it on the down low with one of his council staffers. So…”