Brad Parks - Eyes of the Innocent

“I think I know who he is,” Tommy said. “But he’s not Puerto Rican. I think he’s Brazilian.”

“Tell me more.”

“Remember how you asked me to check out all the dead donors and see if maybe there was something they had in common?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I was looking at the names for a while, and I wasn’t getting anywhere. They were just a bunch of dead guys who lived in the Ironbound and they … Red light, red light, red light.”

I looked up and saw, sure enough, a traffic light. And it was red.

“Sorry,” I said, wearing off a layer of brakepad but managing to get the car stopped just a foot or so over the line.

“No problem. Anyhow, after a while I stopped looking at the names and honed in on the addresses instead. You know, like maybe there was a pattern there?”

“Okay,” I said, gunning the car as soon as the light turned.

“And it turned out there was,” Tommy continued. “All of the houses had been flipped.”

“Flipped?”

“Yeah, you know, bought for a low price, rehabbed, then sold…”

“I know what flipping is,” I said.

“Sorry. Anyhow, once I caught onto the pattern, it was pretty easy to see. Basically, after all these old people died, their houses had been bought by an LLC-that stands for ‘limited liability company,’ by the way.”

“I know what-”

“I know, I know, sorry. I just didn’t know what any of this stuff was before I started covering it. Anyway, it’s all these different LLCs, never the same one twice, buying these houses and flipping them for, like, twice the original price or more six months later.”

“Okay,” I said as we passed under the railroad tracks by Newark Penn Station. “So, to play devil’s advocate, who’s to say these LLCs have anything to do with one another?”

“Well, they don’t appear to, except I recognized one of the names: Bahia Partners LLC,” Tommy said. “I remembered from a council meeting I covered not long ago where they were voting on selling some city land to Bahia Group LLC. Then I started looking through the council minutes from the last few years-our library has them on file-and I started seeing a few other land-buying LLCs that turned out to have very similar names to LLCs that had flipped properties. There was, like, Amazonas Associates LLC and Amazonas Company LLC, Esperito Santo Investments LLC and Esperito Santo Financial LLC…”

“I get it, I get it,” I said. “Someone got tired of thinking up new names so they just started recycling the old ones with a small twist on them.”

“Yeah, and it turns out they’re all names of states in Brazil,” Tommy said. “And you’ll never guess who was always proposing the land sales to those particular LLCs.”

“Oh, but let me try,” I said. “Councilman Wendell A. Byers.”

“Very good,” Tommy said. “You’re pretty smart for a guy who thinks khaki is the new black.”

* * *

I had to slow down once we crossed into the Ironbound and onto Ferry Street, the only road in Newark that is reliably crowded at just about any hour of the day.

As we crept along, I assembled the narrative in my head. A house flipper who wanted to get into new home construction knew it would be handy to have a city councilman in his pocket. So he started using the names of dead people to make campaign donations well above and beyond the legal limit. In return, the councilman supports the developer in making city land purchases, likely at generous rates.

It sounded like your garden variety Garden State corruption. So where did that cozy little relationship go wrong?

I couldn’t figure it out. Or, more accurately, I didn’t have the time to give it proper thought. Having passed Monroe, Madison, and several other dead presidents, I finally made it to Van Buren Street. It was one way, the wrong way, so I had to hook around on Polk. He was a better president anyway.

Finally I reached the address, which belonged to a small, wooden-framed, single-family house with no apparent sign of activity.

“Okay,” Tommy said. “What now?”

“Well,” I said. “Isn’t it obvious?”

“Not to me.”

“Damn. Me, either.”

I looked around for an aging white Datsun and saw it parked down the street, which wasn’t especially surprising. If this guy really was a contractor of some sort, he probably shouldn’t be real busy late in the afternoon on a raw day in February.

Another car pulled onto the block and I recognized it as a city-owned SUV.

“Let’s go,” I said. “That’s Denardo Webster, Windy’s chief of staff.”

“And down low lover?” Tommy asked.

“One and the same.”

I got out of my car and hailed Denardo, who pulled alongside with his window down.

“Okay, here’s the deal: this is the Spanish dude’s house,” I said, pointing across the street. “We need to figure out who his boss is. Then we need to figure out where the the boss is. And we need to figure it out fast.”

“And you’re thinking the Spanish dude’s boss is the guy that killed Windy?” Denardo said.

“I am.”

“All right,” Denardo said. “Just do me a favor: when we find this bastard, I want a few minutes alone with him to explain my grief over losing my friend.”

He could have all year, as far as I was concerned.

“No problem,” I said.

Denardo parked in front of us. He grabbed a city council badge off the dashboard-what was he going to do with that? Table some resolutions? Recommend further study? — and joined Tommy and me.

As we crossed the street to confront an unwitting Hector Gomes, I wondered what we must have looked like to an outsider. There was me, the whitest man in Newark; Denardo, the black man-mountain; and Tommy, a scrawny, nattily dressed Cuban kid.

What an odd trio. Yet here we were, the best and perhaps last hope Sweet Thang and Akilah had at making it to tomorrow.

We reached the front door, and as I considered the etiquette of knocking versus ringing, Denardo lowered his shoulder and barreled into it, grunting as his three hundred-plus pounds connected and splintered the wood around the lock.

“Cheap door,” Denardo said as it gave way. “That’s the problem with these house flippers. They don’t build stuff to last.”

Tommy and I followed Denardo as he stormed into the living room, where we found a slightly built Hispanic man dressed in a thin white T-shirt, frantically pulling up his boxer shorts.

“Police,” Denardo shouted, waving his city council badge. “Let’s see those hands.”

The hands shot into the air, and as we all took in the scene before us-the open porno magazine, the box of tissues, the small tent he was pitching in his shorts-we all quickly reached the same conclusion: Hector Gomes had been fondling his love monkey.

“Oh, that’s just un fortunate,” Tommy said.

“Would you look at this little pervert?” Denardo said. “I mean, what’s this?”

Denardo picked up the magazine, which had been bestowed with the very subtle title ?Gigante Tetas! As advertised, it featured some women whose breasts appeared to have been significantly aided by science. Denardo waved the magazine above his head as if it was evidence of the most heinous turpitude.

“This violates morals laws! There are codes and statutes-you’re breaking the Public Decency Act!”

There was no such thing, of course. And if any lawmaking body tried to render illegal what Gomes had been doing, it would have to first build some pretty big jails, because every guy in America would need to be locked up. But this was not a moment to split legal hairs.

“I ought to take you downtown right now,” Denardo continued. “Hell, I ought to take you to immigration services. You know they’ll revoke your green card for this!”