Brad Parks - Faces of the Gone

“I’ll be careful, promise,” I said. He let go of my hand, grabbed his groceries, and stumbled off into the night.

I watched him until he disappeared around the corner, then got moving. I had pushed my luck long enough.

Having nowhere else to go, I drove back to the office to make peace with my new roommate, Tina. On the way in, I passed Buster Hays, who was in the lobby, pulling on a trench coat.

“Have a nice one, Ivy,” Buster said.

“You, too, Hays,” I said, and was about to get in the elevator when something stopped me, something that had been tickling my brain for the last few hours and had now developed into a full-blown itch.

“Hey, you got a quick second?” I said.

Hays finished wrestling with his coat and glanced at his watch. “I’m officially thirty-seven minutes overdue for my first Scotch of the weekend. Make it fast.”

“It’s about Irving Wallace.”

“Ah, Irving. He help you out?”

“He did. Twice, actually. I’m just curious: how do you know him?”

“Aw, shoot, Irving?” Buster said. “When I met him, you weren’t even a stain on your mom’s sheets.”

“So, it’s been a while. .”

“Oh, it’s been a while,” Hays said, enjoying himself. This was Hays in his glory: seizing the chance to remind a young whippersnapper how much more he knew about the world, how many more sources he had, or how much longer he had been around the neighborhood. And I, being a young whippersnapper in need of the information, had no choice but to listen.

“Let’s see,” Hays continued. “I met Irving Wallace in roughly 1970? Or 1972? The first couple years I worked for this paper, I covered high school sports. You might not believe it, but back in the day, Irving Wallace, the mild-mannered chemist, was a beast of a center for the Summit High School boys’ basketball team.”

“Really?” I said, genuinely surprised.

“Oh, yeah. You see more kids like it now, just because kids are bigger these days. But they didn’t make ’em like Irving back then. He was big and mean. He couldn’t shoot a lick from the outside, but he was a ferocious rebounder-on offense and defense. He made all-conference on put-backs alone.”

I became aware that my heart was pounding.

“How tall was he exactly?”

“Jesus, Ivy, it’s not like I’m still carrying the roster,” he said, sighing.

“You think he was maybe six four, six five?”

“Sure.”

“How much you think he weighs now?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen him in years. We talk on the phone.”

“Any chance he might have ballooned up a little bit?”

“We all do,” Hays said, patting his stomach. “You doing an expose on old fat men now?”

“No, I just. . Who does he work for, anyway?”

“I really don’t know. He’s real secretive about that and I never bothered to ask because he’s always been good about helping me when I need his expertise. He must have been in the military for a while, because he went to West Point. Irving tells me I wrote a story about it when he got accepted and I take his word for it. Forty years’ worth of stories can tend to blend together,” Buster said, then got a faraway look for a moment.

He continued: “Anyway, I don’t know how long he was in the army-we weren’t pen pals or anything-and I think he was in the private sector for a while. Then he switched to the government and we got reconnected when he ended up helping some sources of mine on a case. He remembered me from the old days, I remembered him. I still don’t know what part of the government he’s with-he’s big on that ‘I’d tell you but I’d have to kill you’ crap. But I do know his title is ‘lab director.’ ”

“Lab director ?” I said. “So the people who work for him, they would call him ‘Director.’ ”

The pounding in my chest had now spread. I could feel it in my head now, a tiny little jackhammer going at the base of my skull.

“I don’t know,” Hays said. “I guess so, yeah. Why is your face getting red?”

“It’s just getting hot in here,” I said, taking off my jacket.

“Well, I hear that Scotch calling my name. I better be going,” he said, pushing through the door into the cold.

So Irving Wallace was six four or six five, possibly three hundred pounds. He had been a ferocious rebounder back in the day, the kind of guy who might grow into someone who was ferocious at other things. He had no shortage of access to heroin. What had he told me? That his lab saw thousands of kilos of heroin a year? That would certainly be enough to fuel a major distribution ring.

Then there was the coincidence that Wallace had just so happened to call Buster Hays out of the blue a few days earlier. Hays had said something about not having talked to the guy in forever and then, bam, Wallace called to chat him up the moment Hays’s byline appeared on the Ludlow Street story.

Finally, there was that itchy spot in my brain: in the article, I had mentioned the Stop-In Go-Go, Miss B’s apartment, and Building Five at Booker T as places where I had found evidence of The Stuff, and they had all been torched.

I had never mentioned my house in the article. I had only mentioned it to one person.

Irving Wallace.

The elevator arrived, and as I rode up, I began to wonder if there was any other information I had gathered that might make Irving Wallace fit with the crime.

Of course. The gun. Rosa Bricker-the funeral director with the unexpectedly keen eye for forensics-had offered the professional opinion that the shooter had used a.40-caliber pistol. It had struck me as odd at the time, because.40 caliber is generally used by law enforcement. But I had dismissed it by assuming the perp had gotten his mitts on some pensioner’s gun-never thinking the perp was a pensioner.

What else? I began replaying each of my interactions with Irving Wallace. The first time he wasn’t even going to talk to me until I said the words “Ludlow Street,” and suddenly he was interested. He had seemed pretty paranoid, which I had chalked up to him being a fed. Really, it’s because he was a criminal.

Our next talk was after he did the testing for me. He freely told me the samples were more than 99 percent pure. Why tell me that? Wouldn’t that just lead me closer to the truth?

Then it dawned on me: free advertising. He told me I could write it was the purest heroin ever sold on the streets in America. He knew I would write it-newspaper reporters are suckers for superlatives like that. And once New Jersey’s largest newspaper reported The Stuff was 99-plus percent pure, junkies from Newark all the way out to the Delaware Water Gap would be trying to get their hands on it. If I had the dexterity to kick my own ass, I would have.

Then I thought about how he ended that conversation:

Is what you gave me the only samples you have?

I have one more bag of each-The Stuff and the generic.

And you’re keeping them in a safe place?

I’m going to tuck them away in my piggy bank at home.

Good. Wouldn’t want them getting out.

In my piggy bank at home. Lord. That one little throwaway line, which wasn’t even true, had nearly gotten me killed.

Then I thought about our latest conversation, when he tried to put me off the theory that La Cabra was responsible for Ludlow Street. What had he said? That someone like La Cabra wouldn’t reach down to the street level in Newark? That someone was “snowing” me?

I chortled. It might have been the only factual thing he told me-it just conveniently left out that he was the person doing the snowing. Of course he would steer me away from La Cabra: he wanted to protect his boss.