Brad Parks - Eyes of the Innocent

Instead, as my eyes fluttered open and I briefly replayed the previous night’s adventure, I felt good. Honorable. Noble, even. As I showered, dressed, and poured myself a bowl of Apple Cinnamon Cheerios, I felt even better. Not even the low cloud cover and the threat of more 34-degree rain could wreck my mood.

No, only one thing could do that. And it came from my cell phone.

“Duh duh duh duuuuuuuuhhh.”

Beethoven’s Fifth. Sal Szanto. I put down my spoon.

“Good morning,” I said.

“For you it is maybe,” Szanto said. “Windy Byers turned up.”

“Really? Is he talking?”

“I doubt it. He’s dead.”

Usually, the news of another human being’s demise elicits some reaction in me, even when I barely know the deceased, as was the case here. But a brief search of my emotional state revealed very little feeling for Windy Byers, one way or another. I never thought he was a particularly good guy, and nothing I’d learned over the past three days improved my estimation of him. His death did not register as any great loss to the city, state, or nation, nor as any great shock.

“Where’d they find him?” I asked.

Szanto rattled off an address on Avenue P in Newark, a place in a vast industrial maze in the East Ward, not far from Newark Airport.

“What was he doing there?”

“Not breathing, apparently.”

“Come on, you know what I mean.”

“At this point, you know everything I know,” Szanto said. “We just got a tip on this. Get your ass out there.”

He didn’t have to tell me time was of the essence. We had tipsters, but so did everyone else. As the home team, we still had a little bit of an advantage on the media horde that was about to descend on Newark. But it wouldn’t last long. I had to move. Now.

I tossed out my Cheerios, grabbed a Pop-Tart, and dashed out the door … only to remember my car was still in the parking lot at the Eagle-Examiner .

“Crap,” I said to my empty garage.

I briefly took stock of my situation, which was admittedly dire. I could call a cab, but that could take half an hour or more-Bloomfield was just suburban enough that you couldn’t run out to the street and hail one. I could call a friend, but that wasn’t guaranteed to be any faster. I could steal a car, but … oh, right, I wouldn’t know how to steal a car if my collection of pleated pants depended on it.

Suddenly, the solution came to me in the form of that ancient-but-still-running commercial that ends, “Enterprise, we’ll pick you up.” In my head, I could summon the ridiculous image of a rental car gift-wrapped in brown paper, motoring toward someone’s house. It always made me wonder: with brown paper covering everything but the windshield, how did the driver get into the car in the first place? And wouldn’t it be a little dangerous to drive?

But I didn’t have time to ponder such weighty issues. I dashed inside and quickly entered into negotiations with my local Enterprise franchise. I stressed to the lady on the phone that transaction speed-not make, model, or the presence of an onboard navigation system-was my primary concern. She nicely dispatched a driver who arrived in a car that, much to my relief, came without packaging. Within fifteen minutes, I was on my way to Avenue P.

Despite my ambivalence on the subject, I had been provided with a nav system anyway. So while I was reasonably certain I knew the way to Avenue P-I had done a piece about illegal drag racing there a few years back-I tapped in the address just to see if the computer knew a quicker way.

Soon, an alluring female voice was telling me my destination was, of all things, an Enterprise rental car location. It must have been an off-site facility of some sort, spillover from Newark Airport.

As Nancy-I decided to call my nav system Nancy-guided me ever closer to my destination, I began to suspect our hot tip had not, as Szanto might have hoped, bought us time over the competition. Not when I could hear news helicopters hovering overhead.

On the ground was more bedlam. Avenue P was a long, straight stretch of road with only two outside access points, at the top and bottom-which is why the drag racers loved it. From atop a highway ramp, I could already see an armada of news vans had created a small media city at the south end, where the police had erected a barricade that could stop a tank brigade. Certainly, I could join them … if I felt like spending my entire day in the cold to learn nothing more than what I could have gotten staying in bed and watching local news.

Ignoring Nancy’s advice, which would have led me straight into the gaping maw of that information oblivion, I took an end run around to the north side, snaking through the marshland past an abandoned movie theater and a variety of small warehouses and scrap yards. I was pretty confident the boys from the networks wouldn’t know about this way. Homefield at least had some advantage.

At the top of Avenue P there was a much smaller police presence-just a single patrol car and two officers who looked like they didn’t particularly want to be standing outside on a raw February morning.

“Hey,” I said, rolling down my window as one of them motioned me to halt. “What’s going on?”

“Police investigation,” the officer said.

“Oh,” I said. “I’m just returning my rental car.”

“How’d you end up over here? You get lost or something?”

“Nancy told me to go this way.”

“Who’s Nancy?”

“My nav system,” I said. “From the sound of her voice, she’s pretty hot.”

The guy stared at me like I had been given an extra helping of idiot at birth, which is pretty much the effect I was going for. He stepped away from my car for a moment, turned his back, and got on his radio. As an ethical reporter for a legitimate news-gathering agency, I cannot misrepresent myself in order to gain information or access to something. If the cop asks me whether I’m a reporter, it’s pretty much game over.

But if he doesn’t ask, I don’t exactly have to go volunteering the information.

He turned around and leaned on my window.

“Can I see your rental agreement?” he asked.

“Sure!” I said brightly, and reached for the packet that was still sitting on the passenger seat next to me. He took a cursory glance at the paperwork, handed it back to me, and waved me through without a word.

Primo didn’t wrestle much with the decision to kill Councilman Wendell A. Byers. It was just something that, when a certain set of facts presented themselves, became the only course of action.

It began with an argument about a silly house. Primo knew he never should have sold Byers that house, knew it would complicate a business relationship that was already tricky enough. Byers probably should have known better, too. But, ultimately, each man had his weakness. For Primo, it was greed-one more customer to buy one more house. For Byers, it was lust-he liked the idea of having a house for his latest piece of ass. Primo never understood it, but it somehow made Byers feel important.

So the deal was struck. Then it went bad. And, naturally, Byers couldn’t see it was his own fault. He blamed Primo, who pointed out Byers should have known what he was getting into. That’s when Byers started getting belligerent. And once he started uttering those threats- “I’ll cut you off … I’ll tell everyone on the council you’re a bad actor … no more land for you … you’re finished in this town”- Primo knew he had to act. He had worked too hard to get where he was to have this bozo councilman wreck everything.

It would mean finding a new councilman to bribe, yes. But there were nine of them. Surely one of them would be amenable-perhaps even Byers’s replacement.