Brad Parks - Eyes of the Innocent

“It’s pretty high up, so it sees a lot. Here, let me show you,” he said as he started fiddling with the mouse.

A few clicks later, I was looking at a reasonably wide angle view of Springfield Avenue, including the sidewalk outside the entrance to Windy’s place a few doors down.

“How long do you keep the data?”

“Oh, I got like a month’s worth. I got a big-ass hard drive and the way I got the camera set, it only takes a picture every six seconds. That makes the file sizes smaller, so I can keep it for a while before I got to throw it out for space.”

“So if I wanted to see a week ago Tuesday, around lunchtime, could you do that?”

“Yeah. Hang on a sec,” he said, and clicked some more. He opened a file folder with the appropriate date, then started choosing among data files that were labeled by time: “00:01–03:00,” “03:01–06:00,” and so on. He selected “12:01–15:00” and clicked.

“What are we looking for?” he asked.

“I’m not sure. But I’m hoping I’ll know when I see it.”

The full-color footage was relatively decent quality-several steps above the grainy black-and-white stuff you see on the news whenever there’s a convenience-store robbery-though the one-frame-per-six-second shutter speed made it like watching TV on jittery fast-forward.

After a few minutes of seeing nothing promising, I started feeling bad for Khalid, who had a restaurant to run. I assured him I could handle it by myself. He gave me a brief primer on how to work the controls before going back to his grill.

Over the next twenty minutes of footage-which covered about two hours’ worth of real time-there were one or two images that made me stop the tape and take a closer look. But nothing really seemed like what I was looking for.

Then I finally got a hit.

* * *

I watched it a few times all the way through, then started going frame by frame.

Frames 1–4: A small, white pickup truck-New Jersey license plate JNM 89V-pulls up outside Windy’s office.

Frames 5–7: The truck, now parked, sits still, with the driver inside. It’s impossible to tell what he’s doing-listening to a good song as it finishes up? — or whether he’s idling or has cut the ignition.

Frame 8: The driver, small statured and brown skinned, probably Hispanic, gets out of the truck. He’s wearing a black baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, a bulky sweatshirt with the hood off, and jeans. I don’t see any tools or tool belt. But he looks like a guy who might be a contractor of some sort.

Frames 9-11: The man walks to the front door of Windy’s place. It’s hard to tell for sure, but it looks like he’s moving with a certain amount of urgency.

Frames 12–15: I don’t actually see him ring the bell-that part must have happened in between six-second interludes-but he’s standing outside like he’s hit the button and is waiting for Denardo Webster to get off his plentiful rump and buzz him in.

Frames 16–31: The man disappears inside. Traffic continues moving up Springfield Avenue in that herky, jerky style.

Frames 32–33: The man reappears and walks back to his Datsun.

Frames 34–35: The truck pulls away.

Figuring six seconds per frame, the whole transaction lasted three and a half minutes. I briefly tried to figure out how to do a screen grab and e-mail myself some of the key images, but that was beyond my technical abilities. So I did the next best thing, printing out several of the frames on a nearby ink-jet.

I reemerged from the office to find Khalid in his favorite spot, in front of his grill.

“I think I found what I was looking for,” I said. “Thanks more than you know. I gotta run.”

“All right,” Khalid announced. “The PO-lice is gone, everyone can relax now.”

Most of them seemed to know Khalid was kidding. But a few of them gave me the stink-eye just in case.

I was fairly certain I had found my Spanish dude-or, more important, his license plate. But there was one man who could confirm it for me, and he was just a few doors down, still working through his chicken and fries.

“What’s going on, my friend?” Denardo Webster asked as soon as I had been buzzed in. Yeah, we were friends. Sure. Blackmail makes everyone fast pals.

“I think I found your Spanish dude on some surveillance camera footage,” I said, laying my printouts on his desk. “This him?”

“Yeah, yeah, that’s the guy. Damn, that’s definitely him. He’s always wearing that hoodie, too. I forgot about that. Don’t matter how cold it is, he just wears that blue hoodie.”

“This picture jog anything else in your memory about him?”

“You know, I don’t think I ever heard that little dude say more than like two words all the times he came in here,” Webster said. “I don’t know if he spoke much English.”

“Got it. Anything else?”

He thought for a second, then shook his head. “Here’s my card,” I said. “If anything else comes to you, call me.”

“You bet.”

By the time I walked out the door and got in my car, I had already dialed Rodney Pritchard’s number.

“Pritchard,” he answered.

“I need a quick favor,” I said.

“It’d better be quick,” he said. “I got a date with a ham sandwich.”

“Can you run a plate for me? New Jersey JNM 89V.”

“Yeah, hang on,” he said, and I heard him typing. “It’s a 1991 Datsun. You must be hanging out with the rich and famous again.”

“Yeah, I saw Paris Hilton driving it.”

“Well, it’s registered to Hector Gomes. DOB 1/16/74.”

He gave me an address on Van Buren Street in Newark.

“Thanks Pritch,” I said. “I-”

“I’ll say it for you: you owe me.”

“I do, indeed,” I said. “Enjoy that sandwich.”

“Mmphhll,” he said, then hung up.

I started the Malibu and did a quick illegal U-turn back in the direction of Van Buren, which was in the Ironbound. I was about halfway there when my cell phone rang and “Thang, Sweet” flashed up on the screen.

“Hello, darling, how have you been?”

“I’ve been great,” she whispered. “I found Akilah. I’m with her right now, but she doesn’t know I’m calling you. So shhh.”

“Good news,” I whispered back, even though I probably didn’t need to. “Where did you find her?”

“I texted her and told her I forgave her for stealing my jewelry and if she needed anything she could always call me and I would still be her friend. She called me like thirty seconds later.”

“Awesome,” I said. “So, what’d she have to say about her ex-boyfriend?”

“Oh, she confirmed everything. She said she and Windy dated for a long time and that he bought her the house, but then a little while ago he came and told her he had to sell it because he couldn’t afford it anymore. She said she got that second job because she was going to try to work out a deal with him where she paid the mortgage herself.”

“Why didn’t she just tell us that the first time we talked to her?” I asked.

“She said she still loves Windy, even though they broke up, and she knew if it got out he had an affair it could hurt him politically and she didn’t want to get him in any trouble.”

“That’s nice of her,” I said. The loyal, loving ex-girlfriend. How come I always got the vindictive ones who mailed back my favorite sweatshirt in ribbons?

“I think she knows who killed Windy,” Sweet Thang whispered with extra fierceness.

“Really? Who?”

“She’s hinted at it a couple times, but she won’t tell me. She says she doesn’t want to put me at risk, whatever that means. I can’t get her to … Hang on, she’s coming, call me right back.”

Sweet Thang hung up. I dialed her number.