Brad Parks - Faces of the Gone

I wondered how Irving Wallace, high school basketball hero and proud graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, could have fallen so far as to get in with a scumbag like Jose de Jesus Encarceron. What a sad, fascinating tale-one I would no doubt flesh out in the coming days.

My legs had switched into autopilot and taken me to my desk, where I sat down and immediately went to our handy voter registration database. I typed in “Irving Wallace” and found three of them living in New Jersey.

One was in South Jersey, beyond commuting distance. One was in East Orange, which would have made him one of about three white people in the whole city. But one was in Summit, on New England Avenue. The one time pride of Summit High School had stuck around his hometown.

I typed the address from voter registration into our property-ownership database and found out that, indeed, Irving and Sharon Wallace owned a home on New England Avenue. And it was valued at $1.4 million. Not a bad little shack for a humble government scientist.

I turned next to Lexis-Nexis, which told me, among other things, that Irving Wallace did not have a mortgage on his shack. He owned it free and clear, no liens, no nothing.

“Must be very frugal,” I said to myself.

“What’s that?” a familiar voice said.

I looked up and Tina Thompson was sitting across from me.

“Oh, hi,” I said, a little startled.

“I’ve been here for ten minutes,” she said. “You’ve had your head buried in that screen the whole time. Another five minutes and I was going to start peeling off clothing and see if you would notice.”

“Well, in that case. .” I said, sticking my face three inches away from the screen and banging on the keys.

Tina giggled, then added an adorable smile/hair flip/eye bat combination. A little more than an hour ago, she had been breathing fire at me through the phone. And now she was. . flirting with me?

“I know it’s not unusual for me to be slow on something like this,” I said. “But I’m trying to keep up: weren’t you pissed at me?”

“Oh, very.”

“And now you’re. .”

“Sorry.”

“Sorry?”

The female of the species is, indeed, a most confounding creature.

“Yeah,” she said. “Look, I’m sorry I’ve been so hard on you. That’s why I came over here. You’ve had an awful day, the kind of day I wouldn’t wish on anyone. And as I was thinking about it, I realized I was probably only making matters worse being such a bitch. And I feel just terrible about that. So I want to apologize.”

“Oh, well, okay,” I said. As far as I could track, Tina had gone from nurturing consoler (last night), to worried friend (this morning), to overprotective bodyguard (this afternoon), to ranting quasi-girlfriend (earlier this evening), to remorseful supplicant (right now), to. . whatever she would be in five minutes.

“This is usually the point in the conversation when you should say something like, ‘apology accepted,’ ” Tina prompted.

“Oh, yeah, yeah. Definitely. Apology accepted. It’s been a long day.”

“So we’re okay now?”

“We’re great.”

She moved over to sit in an empty seat at the desk across from mine. My reward-the superspecial toe-curl smile-was followed by a more serious countenance.

“Are we good enough that I can give you a lecture?” she asked.

“I suppose I have one coming.”

“It’s real simple. Just be careful, okay? I care about you.”

“I thought you only cared about my reproductive capacity,” I said, fixing her with what I hoped was an endearing grin.

“Well, that, too. But I don’t want to have to tell my future child that his father got killed three days after conception.”

“Conception? Who says I’m going to sleep with you? Since when am I that easy?”

“Since puberty, I’m guessing.”

Couldn’t exactly counter that point, so I decided to lecture back for a moment.

“Okay, I know you’re just looking out for me. And it’s sweet, it really is. It shows your maternal side.”

She blushed a bit.

“But,” I continued, “this thing is, I don’t know, it’s like my responsibility now. I mean, there are four people in the morgue whose chances for justice are slipping away by the hour and it doesn’t look like anyone in an official capacity cares much whether they get it. Then there’s the matter of the woman in the hospital struggling for her life because of something I wrote.”

Tina reached out across the desk and grabbed my hand.

“That’s not true. You didn’t send that woman to the hospital. Some monster with a gasoline can and a lighter did that.”

“And the monster never would have known about Brenda Bass if it weren’t for me. It’s not like we have a Hippocratic oath in this business. But if we did, I think it’s pretty clear I violated it.”

“You’re being way too hard on yourself,” she said firmly.

“Look, I don’t kid myself into thinking I can fix this mess-it’s already too broken for that. But maybe I can make it a little better.

“Besides,” I said, with the requisite dramatic pause, “I think I may know who the bastard is.”

“Yeah?” she said, releasing my hand and sitting back, like she wanted to get a wide-angle look at me.

“Yeah. I was just about to visit him. Want to go for a ride?”

She drew back even farther.

“I’m not talking about a guns-blazing visit,” I continued. “Just an arm’s-length visit.”

She looked around at the copy desk, where the most pressing business seemed to be parceling out a group dinner order that had just come in.

“I don’t know if I can leave,” she said. “After I decided I wasn’t sleeping with you tonight I agreed to fill in as night assignment editor. Technically the paper is under my command right now.”

“Well, then I guess I just won’t tell you-”

“Oh, dammit, you’re impossible. Fine. First edition is pretty much done, anyway. It’s just a drive-by, right?”

Within five minutes, having bundled up against the cold, we were in my car, speeding toward the suburbs. I told Tina about the latest, ending with my brilliant deduction that Irving Wallace was “the Director” from the memo. Tina mostly just listened.

“So, basically, it’s that he’s tall, his title has ‘director’ in it, and he heard you make an offhand comment about your piggy bank,” she said when I finished.

“Yeah,” I said. “ And the murder weapon was a forty-caliber gun like a fed would use. And he seems to have an overdeveloped curiosity for our coverage of the Ludlow Street murders. And he just seems like the kind of uptight guy who would write memos about things.”

“Uh-huh,” Tina said, but I could hear her uncertainty.

“ And he’s got a fully paid-off house in Summit worth $1.4 million,” I added. “How does a government lab director swing that?”

“He could have inherited it,” she pointed out. “You said he grew up in town. Maybe that was the family manse?”

“He’s not old enough to have lost both his parents.”

“Mmm-hmm. And how did Irving Wallace find Hector Alvarez?”

“I haven’t figured that out yet,” I said. “But it stands to reason someone who does drug testing would have connections in the drug treatment community. The world isn’t that big.”

I turned off the interstate at the Summit exit, and not fifteen minutes after we departed Newark’s gritty streets we were driving along the tree-lined avenues of one of New Jersey’s nicest suburbs. This state could give you socioeconomic whip-lash that way.

“But you think Irving Wallace works for this La Cabra fellow?” Tina said.

“Well, I’m not a hundred percent sure about that one,” I admitted. “Call that a maybe. I mean, he did seem to go out of his way to try to throw me off that trail, like he was protecting someone. Why would he do that?”