Brad Parks - Faces of the Gone

“Yeah, now you’ll finally be able to get your mother that syphilis treatment she’s been needing,” I said. Then I called out to Red, “I’ll see you when you’re done.”

Figuring I had a little time to kill, I went to a nearby pizzeria for two much-needed slices and a much-more-needed Coke Zero. On the way back, I swung by my car and retrieved the envelope the Browns had taken off Rashan. I had only glanced at its contents earlier and wanted to give them more serious scrutiny.

I slid the photos out and shuffled through them one by one, trying to study each in a variety of different ways. It’s amazing the things you can glean from a photo simply by breaking it down a little-looking at it piece by piece, instead of as a whole; cutting it up into an imaginary grid and only staring at one quadrant at a time; or holding it at certain angles or distances.

So that’s what I did, poring over each picture detail by detail. It was gut-roiling work. The exit wounds had mangled the victims’ features to the point where you weren’t sure if you were looking at human beings or roadkill.

Still, you could (sort of) tell how beautiful Wanda Bass had once been. Tyrone Scott (kind of) looked like a guy who always grabbed a second helping at Sunday dinner. Shareef Thomas (maybe) had been a lady’s man, with a scraggly little beard and a soul patch. Devin Whitehead? His shoulder-length dreadlocks covered part of his face, so it was hard to get much of a read on him.

Ordinarily, if you dissect a photograph long enough, it will gradually yield its secrets. It can tell you things not only about the scene being captured but the person who did the capturing. Over time, I think you can even begin to understand the intent of the photographer, how he felt about his subject and what he really wanted to show you.

But for as much as I examined these pictures, they never became more than what they appeared to be at first glance: four horrific portraits of people whose petty crime had been deemed worthy of death by a pitiless judge. Four faces of people now gone.

The memo wasn’t much more useful. In its own way, it was every bit as cold and spare as the pictures, leaving almost no room for interpretation.

I leaned back in my seat and looked up, slightly bleary-eyed from having stared at the photos so long. I was getting tired of playing detective. And it was only when I slipped off my detective hat and started thinking like a journalist again that I remembered the materials in my lap would make for a fantastic story.

A deranged drug lord who sent corporate memos to his dealers like they were middle managers in cubicles? Yep, Brodie would get such a boner over that he wouldn’t be able to walk.

I looked at the clock on my cell phone. 7:37 P.M. No point trying to squeeze it into tomorrow’s paper. We had plenty of news already, what with buildings blowing up across the circulation area. Besides, the Sunday editor would be cruising for something that would keep us in the lead on the Ludlow Street story. This would fit that need.

It occurred to me I also might want to make some copies of the Director’s gruesomely illustrated package and hand them over to the National Drug Bureau. But then I remembered my last interaction with L. Pete, which had left me hoping he contracted an incapacitating toe fungus. If he wasn’t going to be better at sharing, I would just keep my toys to myself. He could read about the photos in Sunday’s paper like everyone else; then maybe I would hand them over. If he promised to behave. Or if he subpoenaed me.

I looked at my phone again: 7:40. Red had been with the sketch artist for about an hour, and I couldn’t decipher whether that was a good sign (because Red gave them a lot of detail for an accurate portrait) or a bad one (because Red was so incoherent he was making the perp look like the Elephant Man).

He reemerged a few minutes later, triumphantly waving a sheet of paper above his head.

“This is him,” he said. “This is the guy.”

This was Van Man. I looked at the sketch, hoping it might spark some recognition. Red had described a doughy-cheeked, thick-necked, middle-aged white man with a receding hairline. The guy looked more like a candidate for erectile dysfunction medicine than a serial murderer. I don’t want to say the sketch was completely useless, inasmuch as I suppose it could rule out some people. But if you went by this picture alone, half the country club members in New Jersey had just become suspects.

“I tol’ the computer what he look like and the computer done made this picture,” Red said. “Tha’s one smart computer.”

“We just got the system,” Rogers told me. “It lets us tweak things until we get it just right. Cuts the time to get a sketch done in half.”

I looked down at the picture again, trying to imprint the face in my brain in case it should suddenly round a corner in my immediate future.

“So what will you guys do with this?” I asked.

“We’ll send it to our many friends in the media, of course,” Rogers said. “Then we’ll show it to the officers in the patrol division.”

“And then you give it to the National Drug Bureau?” I said.

“Yeah, I guess.”

“What do you mean, you guess? You said they’ve taken over the case.”

“Oh, they’ve taken it, all right. The lead guy in the Newark office called our chief and made a big stink. Then when our detectives paid them the courtesy of going over there with a box full of evidence, they gave ’em the usual ‘we’re feds, we’re better than you’ act. Bunch of jerk-offs, if you ask me. But you can’t quote me on that.”

Red wasn’t any more eager to hang at police headquarters than I was. So we cleared out and I took us in the direction of the Pathmark on Bergen Street, the only major chain supermarket in Newark. A deal was, after all, a deal. I encouraged Red to buy whatever he wanted-after all, it was sort of my fault his last haul of groceries had blown up. But Red’s tab only came to $41.05.

“Can’t carry but so much anyway,” he told me.

I took him back to Booker T with misgivings about dropping him back into such a cold night. The wind had picked up again, and the forecast was calling for a low of seventeen degrees. Red didn’t seem concerned by it. He was shaking a bit, but I didn’t think it was from the cold.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to take you to a shelter?” I asked.

“Naw, I gotta get me a little something to drink. An’ if you go to the shelter, they take it from you,” he said as another tremor racked his body. He was nearly sober and his nervous system was starting to go haywire without booze.

“Suit yourself,” I said as the car pulled to a stop outside Booker T.

“Say, you mind loanin’ me a few bucks?” he asked nervously.

I reached into my wallet and pulled out a ten. Perhaps it wasn’t the most responsible thing to do, enabling his disease. But it felt like the humane thing to do under the circumstances. “This do?” I asked.

“Oh, that’ll do fine,” he said, pocketing it quickly. “I sho’ do ’preciate it.”

“No problem. Is this where I can find you over the next couple days or will you be on the move?”

“Well, Mary ’n me got usselves set up in Building Three pretty good,” he said. “I s’pose we be staying there for a little while.”

“All right,” I said. “Stay warm.”

Then I added, “Thanks for your help, Red,” and stuck out my right hand.

He grasped it-which was like shaking hands with forty-grit sandpaper-and flashed me a two-tooth smile.

“You best watch out for yo’self, youngster,” he said. “This ain’ no place for a white boy after dark.” He thought for a moment and, still holding the handshake, said, “This ain’ no place for no one after dark.”