Brad Parks - Eyes of the Innocent

I tried to look serious, like I was already planning out how the front page would look. It was, of course, patently unethical to abuse my position as a newspaper reporter to threaten someone like this. But Maury didn’t seem like the kind of guy who was going to write a letter of complaint to Columbia Journalism Review. And, besides, technically it was Mrs. Jamison abusing my position. That subtlety, I rationalized, absolved me of any wrongdoing.

“Tho what’th thith jewelry I’m thuppothed to have?” Maury asked

“It’s a charm bracelet.”

I thought I saw some recognition wander briefly across Maury’s face.

“I’m not thaying I have anything like that,” Maury said. “But if I did, when would I have acquired it?”

“This morning,” Mrs. Jamison said.

Maury turned toward the back room and shouted, “Manuel! Manuel, get me that thtuff from earlier today.”

Pedro appeared from the back room and said something in Spanish.

“Yeah, yeah, that thtuff,” Maury said, and Pedro disappeared again.

“Manuel?” Mrs. Jamison spat. “He told me his name was Pedro.”

“It ain’t neither,” Maury said. “Jutht like my name ain’t Maury. You got to keep your ammo-nimity in thith line of work.”

I grinned at the apparent mispronunciation and wanted to ask if he also had to keep his “anonymity,” but it wasn’t my place to intercede.

“Pedro, you have a truthfulness problem,” Mrs. Jamison shouted after him. “We’re going to have to talk about that.”

Maury again focused his attention on me.

“I mutht thtate for the record, Mr. Roth, thith ethtablithment doeth not traffic in thtolen merchandithe. But there are thome unthcrupulouth people in thith world who may mithreprethent the originth of thome itemth and take advantage of my generouth nature.”

Mrs. Jamison arched her right eyebrow, crossed her arms, and let out a perfectly skeptical, “Uh-huh.”

“Now, how would you dethcribe thith thtolen merchandithe?”

Again, a question for me. But this time I was going to have to come up with an answer. I had meant to get more specifics about the bracelet, but Sweet Thang wasn’t returning my phone calls for some odd reason-where was that girl, anyhow?

So I was on my own. What did Sweet Thang’s charm bracelet look like? I knew somewhere in my brain, in the part charged with important tasks like quoting movie passages and song lyrics, there was an excruciatingly detailed description of the charm bracelet-albeit one that was provided between 6:14 and 6:19 earlier that morning, when I was not yet functioning.

I rewound through my day, through my bouncing around Newark, my breakfast with Sweet Thang, my lecherous thoughts while she was in the shower, my hasty nonnewspaper-glancing departure from my own house, my jarring wake-up call, and …

There! Just after the jarring wake-up call. I was hearing Sweet Thang’s voice in my head now, saying something I wasn’t comprehending in the moment. But somehow it had stuck in there, in a small crevice next to the John Cusack Say Anything monologue. And I found myself pulling it up with near-perfect recall.

“Well, it’s a charm bracelet,” I said. “I’ve never seen it, but she told me about it. Some of the pieces include a sombrero she got in a trip to Puerto Vallarta. There’s also a darling little gondola her father brought her back from Venice.”

“Excuse me, did you just say ‘darling’?” Tee asked.

“Reginald!” Mrs. Jamison scolded. “At least someone listens to his woman.”

She drew her hand back but did not let it fly. Tee cringed anyway. Maury placed his chin in his hand, giving himself a moment to think about it.

“Thombrero, huh?” he said. “I may have theen thomething like that.”

He walked to the back room, Jheri curls bouncing, and returned moments later with a gold charm bracelet suspended between his fingers.

“Thith it?” he asked.

He held it up. It had to be Sweet Thang’s. It just looked like something a Vanderbilt coed would own.

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s it.”

“Well, now, thith ith a very rare piethe of fine jewelry we’re talking about here,” Maury said. “I don’t think it’th pothible for me to part with thith piethe for leth than a thouthand dollarth.”

“How about you part with that piece and we won’t press charges for receiving stolen merchandise,” Mrs. Jamison countered. “This gentleman’s fiancee is a white girl and she could go to police headquarters and fill out a report and everything. You know how cops like to help white girls.”

Maury considered this a moment.

“Hundred buckth.”

“Twenty.”

“Done,” Maury replied, and started hitting numbers on his cash register.

Just like that, I happily parted with a portrait of Andrew Jackson, and Maury slipped Sweet Thang’s charm bracelet through the revolving box in the bulletproof glass.

Maury pointed a finger at me.

“Don’t try coming back for the retht of it,” he warned. “I thtill have to be able to make a living, you know.”

Some living. The sheer sleaziness of the place finally overwhelmed me, so I just waved at him as we walked out the shattered front door. He didn’t have to worry about me coming back.

* * *

I bid the Jamisons farewell, thanking Tee for his assistance and promising his wife one last time I would make an honest woman out of Sweet Thang just as soon as I could find her an engagement ring that would shame the Hope diamond.

As I drove back toward the office, I turned on my radio, tuning it to an all-news station to see if any of my colleagues in the media had learned anything useful about Windy Byers. I didn’t have to wait long for the story, which led the top of the hour. The announcer referred to Byers as the “beloved Newark councilman” who hailed from a “Newark political dynasty” and so on. I love it when the radio guys just read from the newspaper. Sometimes you can practically hear the newsprint crinkling under the microphone. The station cut to a clip of the Matos press conference, going for the sound bite about how the Byers family was doing a lot of praying.

I flipped the radio to FM and felt myself frowning. Having successfully retrieved Sweet Thang’s charm bracelet-great journalistic triumph that it was-I now presumed I would return to real, actual reporting on the Byers story.

And I didn’t know where to start. Reporting can be a bit like exploratory surgery, except you perform it wearing oven mitts and a blindfold. Sometimes you’re not even sure what part of the body to cut open. As a general rule, you never know where you’re going until you’ve already been there. I often wished I could start at the end, having already acquired all the necessary hindsight. It would save so much time.

When I arrived in the newsroom, it had that big-story buzz about it. Editors who normally sauntered around like they had no place to go were walking with alacrity. Reporters who might ordinarily be leaning back as they gabbed with sources on the phone were hunched over, hard at work. Buster Hays, resident dinosaur, had three Rolodexes open at the same time, pulling out business cards that were probably older than I was. The forever-silly Tommy Hernandez was staring at his computer screen with a fold between his neatly trimmed eyebrows, perhaps the first time I had seen so much as the slightest crease in his otherwise unworried countenance.

And the beauty of our newsroom was that, like most newsrooms, you could see it all unfolding before you. There were no walls, no partitions, no cubicles to wreck your view-just tightly clustered islands of desks stretching over a sea of open space.

I marched over to mine, which was against a far wall, an auspicious spot whose principal advantage was that it allowed me to see the enemy (editors) approaching from a good distance. My desk had once been used by an old-time city reporter who chain-smoked like Chairman Mao and, as legend had it, quit his job because he refused to comply with the new policy when the newsroom finally went smoke-free in the mid-nineties. The desk sat empty for years after that-to aerate, I assume-but when I moved in, there was still an ashtray sitting atop. I don’t smoke, but I kept it there, in memory of my predecessor and as a monument to a bygone time in the history of our industry.