Brad Parks - Eyes of the Innocent

“Hey, Ivy,” he said. Buster called me Ivy because he apparently thought Amherst was an Ivy League school. My efforts to educate him that it was a proud member of the New England Small College Athletic Conference had, so far, failed.

“You really going to let a woman boss you around like that?” he asked. “You’re totally whipped.”

Normally I tried to come up with some kind of retort for Buster’s mindless zingers. But I couldn’t this time.

Not when he was right.

* * *

I was about to head back to Twitter-to see what else Sweet Thang had written about that delicious fellow, CR-when my phone rang.

“Carter Ross,” I said.

“Hey, it’s Pritch,” he whispered. “My guy says he’ll meet with you on the condition that you consider yourself a confidential informant, not a reporter.”

“Hey, whatever works for him. When?”

“How soon can you make it down here?”

“How does ‘now’ sound?”

“Sounds good. I’ll meet you in the lobby at Green Street. Try not to look like a reporter. I’ll be the guy who ignores you. But just follow my lead.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said, making toward the elevator.

Newark Police Headquarters, located on Green Street in the heart of downtown Newark, was another one of those municipal buildings that had probably been magnificent at some point in time, back when Newark was a manufacturing powerhouse and the home to captains of industry. Now you had to look hard-and charitably-to see the majesty. But it was still there.

I walked into the building and up to the lobby on the third floor. Rodney Pritchard was waiting there. He saw me, made the briefest eye contact, and started back down the stairs. I followed. But not too close.

He went out the door, took a left, then another left on Broad Street, past City Hall. What were we? Russian spies from Montclair? I walked a little faster so he was within earshot.

“The password is ‘Lesbian weasel,’ ” I said. “But I’ll warn you: everything I know you can probably find on Google.”

“Stop playing,” he said, without turning around. “I’m just doing this the way my man Raines said. He doesn’t want to risk being seen with you in the office. I told you, he’s by the book.”

“He also must be getting pretty desperate if he’s meeting with me this quickly,” I said. “He doesn’t have squat, does he?”

“He didn’t tell me either way. But you’re probably right.”

Pritch crossed the street, walked past a sandwich shop, then took a left turn into a pizzeria, where someone’s Italian mama was behind a counter, yelling at the late-lunch stragglers to place their orders. Pritch kept walking into a back room, which at this hour-it was now after three-was empty, except for one man sitting in a corner booth.

“Carter Ross, meet Sergeant Kevin Raines,” Pritch said.

Raines was a short, round black man who stored his extra weight in his ass. He was probably in the neighborhood of fifty and dressed in a gray suit, a white shirt, and a black tie. That made him unlike most Newark detectives I met-guys who knew they were going to work long hours and therefore swapped formality for comfort in their clothing choices.

“Nice to meet you,” Raines said crisply, in a way that made it clear he didn’t believe it.

He had a bland, slightly nasal voice and I was willing to bet most people who talked to him over the phone didn’t know he was black. He may have preferred it that way.

I immediately had him pegged. He was the guy who didn’t want to do favors for people and didn’t like to have them done for him. He was a sergeant because he scored higher on the exam than anyone else, not because he politicked better. He didn’t go to the bar after his shift with the fellas. He didn’t backslap. He didn’t bend rules. He was already at the edge of his comfort zone just by meeting with me.

None of which made him a bad person. I was just going to have to work on expanding that comfort zone and making him a little more pliant if he was going to be of any use.

“All right,” Pritch said. “Have a nice time. I got things to do.”

Pritch walked out, leaving Raines and me to stare at each other uncomfortably.

“Thanks for meeting with me,” I said.

“Detective Pritchard said you had information to offer the Newark Police Department,” Raines said officiously.

Yeah, and if he thought I was just going to dump it on the table and leave, he had another think coming. Whether he wanted to think of me as a reporter or not, I was one. And whether he wanted to think of himself as a source or not, I was going to treat him like one.

“Well, let’s just slow down for a second,” I said. “First of all, I haven’t had lunch yet. I’m going to grab something from up front. You want anything?”

I could have held off. But I needed to start loosening things up a bit. I needed to establish we weren’t a cop and a reporter. We were just two guys. And some guys require diet soda and pizza to get them through the afternoon. Hell, I might even spill the soda, because that’s what guys do.

“No, thank you,” he said.

“Some water? Anything?”

“I’m fine.”

“Okay, I’ll be right back.”

I went back into the main room and ordered my slice, which came quickly. Then I went to the refrigerator and selected a Coke Zero for myself and a bottle of water for him. Another important thing to establish: he wasn’t making all the decisions here.

I paid and returned to our table.

“I just felt it would be rude to eat this in front of you and not get you anything,” I said, sliding the water in front of him.

He didn’t touch it. He barely looked at it.

“We are clear that I am not meeting with you because you’re a reporter,” he said. “Officer Pritchard tells me you have information that may be vital to my case and vouches that your information is probably good. That’s all that matters.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “So I take it you’ve never dealt with a reporter before?”

“It’s against department policy to comment to the media without approval,” he said.

“Okay, no big deal,” I said as I opened my Coke Zero and took a long pull, making a big show out of savoring its artificially sweetened goodness. Then I picked up my slice and bit off a big hunk, chewing loudly.

Raines looked at the bottle in front of him. It was ice-cold and just starting to get a thin haze of perspiration on it. And to a cop who had probably been going for the last twenty-four hours on excitement and adrenaline-but not much hydration-I bet it was looking pretty good.

He cracked it open and took a sip. I was already starting to wear him down.

* * *

I put my pizza back down on the table.

“Okay. Well, just a quick user’s guide to dealing with reporters, or at least this reporter,” I said, wiping pizza sauce from my chin with a napkin. “First key phrase is, ‘off the record.’ That means you can tell me anything you want, but I won’t put it in the newspaper-unless I get it from somewhere else, of course. As far as I’m concerned, this conversation and every other one we have is off the record unless we explicitly agree otherwise. Okay?”

He nodded.

“Second key phrase is ‘not for attribution.’ That means I can use the information you give me in the newspaper, but I can’t attach it to your name as a source. And when I say you’re an unnamed source, I mean that in the most sincere way possible. Reporters have gone to jail to protect the identity of their sources and I would do the same.”

I had never been tested on that front. And I hoped I never would be. But I also hoped, if some judge ordered me to reveal my source, I’d have the stones to tell him to shove it, then take the contempt-of-court charge and spend some time as a ward of the state. Short of dying for a story-which I certainly didn’t plan to do-going to prison to protect a source was as balls-out a thing as a reporter could do. And I fancied myself the kind of guy who would do it.