Brad Parks - Faces of the Gone

“But, turn it around for a second, why would La Cabra want to work with Irving Wallace?” Tina asked as we climbed a hill, past rows of houses that got nicer as the elevation rose.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m saying, just imagine you’re a Colombian drug lord. You can probably convince just about any bad guy in America to work with you. Why would you want to collaborate with someone who works for the government?”

“Well, because. . because that way the government wouldn’t come after you,” I said. “Irving Wallace would be able to mislead them from the inside, push them in other directions.”

“No good,” Tina said. “I love conspiracy theories as much as the next girl. But there is just no way some bureaucrat with a chemistry set is going to convince the entire U.S. Department of Justice to call off the dogs on one of the world’s most notorious drug kingpins.”

“Good point,” I said. I should have thought of that myself. The La Cabra thing may have just been the National Drug Bureau’s ill-conceived way to explain four dead bodies, with no more credibility than the Newark police’s ill-considered barstickup theory. “I suppose it’s possible Irving Wallace is acting alone,” I conceded.

“Okay, so without the Colombian drug lord, how did Irving Wallace get the product he needed for his operation?” Tina asked.

“His lab tests thousands of kilos a year,” I said as we passed a sign for a hospital, then neared a train station. “He told me that himself.”

“And you think he got his drugs by skimming off a portion of whatever his lab got sent for testing.”

“Yeah, that’s it.”

“What about chain of custody?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” she said, “any drug seized by a law enforcement agency is eventually going to be used as evidence in a trial, right?”

“If all goes well, yeah.”

“So part of being used in evidence is having a clean chain of custody. Every person who handles it along the way has to sign something attesting that they didn’t tamper with it.”

“Uh-huh. And?” I asked, as we rolled past a YMCA, a library, a quaint little park, all the trappings of a well-tended, well-to-do town.

“I’m just saying that it’s not like John Q. Detective is going to fork over ten kilos of heroin to the lab and then not notice when only five kilos come back,” Tina said. “How did he get around that?”

“I don’t know. He’s a bright guy. He could have figured out something, I’m sure.”

“Oh, of course,” Tina said. “But then there’s the issue of purity.”

“What issue?” I asked, feeling increasingly worn down by Tina’s cross-examination. It was like being a rookie reporter again, and the editor was asking me all the questions I had been too feebleminded to think of myself.

“Well, Wallace told you-what was it you put in the paper? That it was the purest heroin ever sold?”

“Right.” I said, making a turn at a convenience store and passing several majestic Gothic churches.

“Okay, even assuming he was lying, everyone else has told you The Stuff was the best, that junkies adored it,” she said. “So we can assume it was pretty high purity.”

“Yeah, so?”

“So all Wallace has access to is heroin that has been seized off the street and comes into his lab. How is he possibly going to take that-a lot of which is garbage-and turn it into this product that drove all the junkies wild?”

“Christ, Tina,” I finally exploded. “He’s a chemist. Don’t you think he knows how to do something like that?”

“Okay, okay. Don’t get defensive. I’m just saying we have a few blanks to fill in, that’s all.”

“Editors,” I huffed. And she let me leave it at that.

Our destination, New England Avenue, was just on the other side of the downtown area, opposite the Grand Summit Hotel. We passed some apartments, then some town houses, then some smaller houses, then some larger ones. Then we came to the Irving Wallace residence. The place was completely dark, but I didn’t so much as tap the brakes as we rolled by.

“Hey, you passed it,” Tina said.

“I know,” I said, and drove two blocks farther down before turning around. On the way back, I turned off the headlights and we coasted to a stop. I didn’t know if the subterfuge was necessary, but it couldn’t hurt. Besides, with the lights off, it was less likely for a neighbor to notice a strange car and decide to call the cops. In Newark, my four-year-old Chevy Malibu was well camouflaged. In Summit, amid all the fancy imports and high-end domestics, it might as well have come with a neon sign that said JUST VISITING.

We took some time to stare at the house, looking for, I don’t know, signs of evil aura or something. But it was just your basic Tudor, slightly on the large side but not a mansion by any stretch. I was guessing five bedrooms, three baths, no more. Don’t get me wrong, it looked like it could keep the rain off your head. But it didn’t entirely fit what I was envisioning.

“I guess $1.4 million doesn’t buy that much anymore,” I said.

“Not in Summit, New Jersey, it doesn’t. Not even after a real estate slump.”

“Where do you think he buries his money?”

“Isn’t it always beneath the trapdoor that Scooby and Shaggy accidentally fall into?” Tina asked.

“Yeah, and he would have gotten away with it if not for us meddling kids,” I said.

I turned my attention back toward the house. There was a basketball hoop in the driveway. The hedges were neatly trimmed. There were two large trees in the front lawn, each of which looked to be a minimum of a hundred years old. There were no cars in the driveway, no sign of white vans anywhere-though I’m sure he would have been smart enough to stash his dirty-work vehicle elsewhere.

“I think I’ll go ring the doorbell,” I said.

Tina whirled to face me and voice her objections.

“Kidding,” I said, before she could get them out.

I shifted the Malibu out of park, turning the headlights back on when we had gotten under way. There was nothing to be gained by confronting Irving Wallace at this point. Fact was, as Tina had so effectively pointed out, I hadn’t even begun to figure out how his operation worked. And until I had a better idea, it was best that he not know I was closing in on him.

The newsroom was peaceful when we returned. By ten o’clock on a typical Friday night, there are usually more people working on the Sunday paper than are still fretting over Saturday’s edition, so no one is in too big a hurry. It’s not that we didn’t take Saturday seriously, but. . oh, hell, who am I kidding? We didn’t take Saturday seriously. It was our smallest paper of the week and the one day a week that didn’t count toward the numbers we gave to the Audit Bureau of Circulation. It was the closest a daily paper could come to taking a day off.

Tina had another two hours before she could abandon ship and focus her energies on entertaining me. I thought about borrowing her house key, crashing on her couch for a while, maybe rifling through her underwear drawer for fun. But-and maybe I just watch too many horror movies-I didn’t want to be the male equivalent of the dumb blonde at home alone when the axe murderer was on the loose.

Besides, if I went back to Tina’s place by myself, there would be nothing to do but mull things over, and there was no sense in letting my brain do too much catching up. I was afraid it would put me on the next flight to the Bahamas if it did.

So I ambled over to chat up Peterson, night rewrite man nonextraordinaire, to see what mayhem he was chronicling. Peterson started at the Eagle-Examiner as a clerk, when he was seventeen. As best I could tell, that had been 150 years ago-give or take. He moved into night work early in his career and had been doing it ever since.