Brad Parks - Faces of the Gone

“He’s dead, Tee,” I said. “I’m not gonna piss on the kid’s grave. I’m just trying to figure out what he might have done to get himself killed.”

“Okay, well, allegedly he was part of the Browns.”

The Brick City Browns was one of Newark’s more venerable street gangs-which meant it had been around since the late 1990s.

“Are the Browns at war with anyone right now?” I asked.

“No more or less than usual.”

“Was he a dealer?”

“Allegedly.”

“What did he sell?”

“Mostly smack, I think,” Tee said. “I don’t know. I ain’t into that stuff. Hang on a sec.”

Tee went outside his store and had a brief conversation with the aforementioned knuckleheads. Tee could get more information out of those kids in thirty seconds than I could get in half a lifetime.

“Yeah,” Tee said as he came back in. “They said he used to sell cook-up”-street term for crack-cocaine-“but he kept getting popped for it”-street term for sent to jail-“and when he got out the last time he switched to smack. Allegedly.”

That made two heroin sellers.

“So what are you hearing? What are people saying?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Tee said. “This one is weird. You know how it is around here. Someone has a beef with you, they find you on a corner somewhere, they drive up and shoot your ass and then they drive off. That’s a dime a dozen. You know what I’m saying? This don’t make no sense.”

“Tell me about it.”

“I mean, what was he doing down there?”

“I’m trying to figure that out. Is it possible he knew anyone in that neighborhood?”

“Dee-Dub? The only times he left Clinton Hill was when he got arrested. He lived with his mama. He had a baby with a girl down the street. His boys are all here. He didn’t have no reason to go down there.”

We mulled that over for a moment. Tee busied himself by rearranging the used DVDs and CDs he sold as a side business.

“What are you hearing?” Tee asked.

“Not much, to be honest. The police think this was retribution for some kind of bar robbery the victims pulled. Is that possible?”

“I mean, possible? Yeah, it’s possible. It’s possible Busta Rhymes will decide to make his next video in the back of my store. But I don’t think it’s gonna happen, you know what I’m saying?”

“Uh, no.”

“I’m saying, Dee-Dub wasn’t no stick-up artist,” Tee said. “He just didn’t have that in him.”

I pulled my pad out of my pocket and showed him the list of victims.

“Any of these other names mean anything to you?”

As he scanned my pad, I added, “Tyrone Scott goes by the name ‘Hundred Year’ sometimes.”

“Nope. Don’t know none of them besides Dee-Dub,” Tee said.

“Huh. Well, keep your ears open, okay?”

“You got it,” Tee said, then went back to the task of memorializing Devin Whitehead in the way he knew best.

My next stop was the South Orange Avenue chicken shack, hard by the Garden State Parkway. Like a number of Newark’s finer providers of well-crisped fowl, this one was a shameless knockoff of Kentucky Fried Chicken. It was called Wyoming Fried Chicken. Its mascot was “Cowboy Kenny,” who looked like the Colonel after a hot shower. It featured “the Cowboy’s” secret blend of herbs and spices-as if salt, pepper, and MSG were a secret.

Any corporate lawyer would have filed a lawsuit quicker than he could eat a five-piece basket. But that was the blessing of Newark that protected every bootlegger, boondoggler, and copyright infringer within the city limits: anyone who might have the inclination to file such a suit wouldn’t come within three zip codes of the place.

I pulled up in front of the WFC, which had roughly a dozen guys hanging out in front of it-or at least it did until one of them saw my pasty face, at which point there was a rapid scattering. The sight of a well-dressed white man in the ghetto often has that effect. Only one of the loiterers stayed behind. He was wearing a North Face jacket, which was all the rage among discerning urban pharmaceutical salesmen. Lots of pockets.

“What you want?” North Face asked, eyeing me suspiciously.

“I’m a reporter with the Eagle-Examiner . I’m just working on a story. You know a guy named Tyrone Scott? Goes by the name Hundred Year?”

“Never heard of him,” North Face said, spitting his sentence out almost before I finished mine. I could have asked him if he knew Mickey Mouse and the answer would have been the same.

“Really? That’s funny, because someone told me he hustles around here.”

“Well, good for him,” North Face said, getting agitated. “But you can’t stand here.”

“Excuse me? This is a public sidewalk.”

“It’s my sidewalk. Get out of here. You’re scaring away all the customers.”

“Well, we can do this one of two ways,” I said. “Either you tell me about Hundred Year, or I stand here all night until I find someone who knows him. What’s it gonna be?”

He glanced around, clearly not liking either choice. And perhaps he was considering a third option-pulling a piece out from under his jacket and reducing me to a bloody speed bump on Cowboy Kenny’s sidewalk-but I think he realized having dozens of cops responding to a homicide call was going to be an even greater business disruption.

“I talk and then you leave?”

“You have my word,” I said. “What was his deal?”

“I don’t know. He went to jail for a while. Then he got out.”

“What was he in for?”

“Dealing, I guess. He told people he shot someone, but if he did, it wasn’t no one around here. I ain’t never heard no one saying, ‘Yeah, Tyrone, that nigga shot me.’ ”

“Was he in a gang?”

“Naw. Tyrone’s just a mama’s boy.”

“Did he hustle?”

“Yeah, sometimes. Not all the time, you know what I mean? But more lately.”

“What did he sell? Diesel?”

“Diesel?” North Face said, screwing up his face like he had never heard the word.

“You really want me out here all night, don’t you?”

“Okay, yeah, he was selling diesel.”

“You think it got him killed?”

“I don’t know. Look, it wasn’t me or any of my boys, okay?”

“Convince me.”

North Face looked left, then right, like he wanted to make sure no one was eavesdropping. Or maybe it was just a reflex to keep your head on a swivel in his line of work.

“Man, I’m saying, he just did his own thing, you know?” he said. “He had his own customers, the real hard-core junkies. He got a reputation for selling really good junk and then, bam, all the junkies started going to him.”

“Didn’t that piss you off?”

“Naw, man. I don’t sell drugs.”

“For a guy who doesn’t sell drugs, you sure know a lot about it,” I said, cracking an I’m-kidding-please-don’t-shoot-me smile.

“Who me?” he said. “I just read that in National Geographic .”

I made good on my word to leave him and his business dealings in peace, and it was probably about time to do so anyway. It was getting dark. The streets of Newark aren’t quite as treacherous as outsiders think. But they’re still no place to dawdle once the sun sets.

I returned to the newsroom to find it humming with its usual five o’clock buzz as deadline loomed. Our newsroom, like most newsrooms, had offices only along the outer walls and only for the most high-level editors. The majority of the editors-and all of the reporters-sat in a sea of desks that sprawled uninterrupted, without walls or partitions, over a vast open space.

So it wasn’t hard to monitor the daily ebb and flow, and sometimes the newsman in me-the part of me that is incurably ink-stained-delighted in watching what we in the business call “the daily miracle.” My mother always wondered why her handsome son didn’t seek the greater fame and fortune to be had on TV (her dream for me was to be the next Charles Gibson). But there were too many things about the newspaper business I loved.