Eyes of the Innocent

CHAPTER 1

I made at least four mistakes that Monday morning, the first of which was going into the office in the first place. There’s an old saying among newspaper reporters that news never breaks in the newsroom. So if you’re not currently working on a story, you ought to be out finding one. If you hang around the newsroom with nothing to do, you put yourself at extreme risk of being assigned something to do by an editor. And-ask any writer, anywhere-editors are approximately ninety-eight percent full of stupid ideas.

Which leads to my second mistake: wandering by the open office door of my editor, Sal Szanto. I’m an investigative reporter for the Newark Eagle-Examiner, New Jersey’s largest newspaper. My last story had been what we in the business call BBI. Boring But Important. It was a piece about patronage hiring in a nearby county government. (My suggested headline, “County Keeps Nepotism in the Family,” was rejected as being too cheeky.) The thirteen people who actually bothered to read it-the same thirteen people who read all our BBI’s-were very impressed. To everyone else who picked up our Sunday paper, I suspect it was merely an impediment on the way to sudoku.

Either way, it was now yesterday’s news, making me an investigative reporter momentarily lacking anything to investigate.

And so we arrive at my third mistake: not feigning deafness when Szanto croaked out my name.

“Crrrtrrsss!”

That’s “Carter Ross,” for those who don’t understand the peculiar dialect of my fifty-something, chain-smoking, antacid-devouring, coffee-guzzling editor. Szanto has difficulty pronouncing vowels when he’s upset, stressed, or tired-which, with the way newspapers have been going the last few years, is most of the time. It usually takes him a couple of sentences to lift his vocal cords out of the gravel and start speaking coherently.

“Hvvsstt.”

I took that to mean “Have a seat.” So I did. Szanto cleared his throat.

“You read the fire story this morning?” he growled. “The thing with the two kids?”

A fast-moving fire at about nine o’clock the night before had swept through a house on Littleton Avenue in Newark, killing two little boys, Alonzo and Antoine Harris, ages four and six. The Newark Fire Department was offering no theories about what started it. The whereabouts of the mother, Akilah Harris, was unknown as of press time-which did not exactly speak well of her custodial abilities.

We had given the story the usual tragedy treatment, with a large photo of the blackened house along with smaller headshots of the little boys-smiling school portraits-along with a story gang-written by the herd of semisupervised interns we have working on the weekends. During my eight years at the paper, we had probably written variations of the story fifty times-albeit with changed names, dates, and places-so maybe I should be more callous about it by now. But it still rips my guts out.

“Yeah, I read it,” I said. “What about it?”

Szanto had this look on his face I couldn’t quite place. Just like Eskimos have fifty different words for snow, Szanto has at least that many pained expressions. Parsing them takes a certain amount of expertise. The difference between “I’m pained because an intern just handed me a story that might as well be in Farsi” and “I’m pained because I ate hot wings for lunch” could be as subtle as a slight lowering of the lip or an extra furrowing of the brow.

In this case, it was neither.

“Brodie wants a space heater story,” he said.

Now it was my turn for a pained expression. Brodie is Harold Brodie, a living newspaper legend who had presided over our newsroom as executive editor for the last quarter century. Now in his late sixties, he was basically a nice man, with a high-pitched voice and eyebrows that could use some serious manscaping. He was small and fragile in a way that sort of reminded everyone of their grandfather. As a leader, he was the most benign of dictators. And, more or less, everyone loved him.

But he was still an editor, and as such he was as prone to stupid ideas as any other editor. Plus, he had this tendency to get fixated on certain subjects.

Space heaters was one of them. Like many of the nation’s more depressed cities, Newark had its share of unimaginably horrid slum buildings where the heat may or may not be working-thanks to busted boilers, pilfered pipes, or landlords who decided the best way to combat the high cost of heating oil was to abstain from buying any.

One of the ways tenants survive this injustice is to plug space heaters into their already overloaded electrical sockets and leave them on 24-7. Fire-safetywise, you’d do just as well tossing an unsupervised ten-year-old into a room with oily rags, lighter fluid, and matches.

As a result, we write about the perils of space heaters at least once every winter. The only surprise was that December and January had been so mild we made it all the way to February without running our annual offering.

“Did a space heater have anything to do with it?” I asked.

“How the hell should I know?”

“But-” I started.

“I don’t care,” Szanto snapped. “Brodie asked for a space heater story, so write him a damn space heater story. You know how he gets.”

I did. Some editors cajoled writers into doing stories with threats or loud demands. Brodie went more for the Chinese water torture approach, drip-dropping in on you until you just gave in. Sometimes, when he approached you from behind, he jingled the change in his pocket just so you knew he was there. Most longtime Eagle-Examiner reporters, trained by years of Brodie jingling, stiffened reflexively when they heard nickels and quarters banging together.

“Can’t we just reprint one of the old space heater stories?” I asked. “I seem to recall from the archives the nineteen eighty-eight space heater story was a classic-fruity yet full-bodied, with hints of singed circuit breaker.”

Szanto hit me with pained look No. 28-upturned lip, creased forehead-and I gave in.

“Fine,” I huffed. “A space heater story.”

I went to lift myself out of the chair.

“I want you to work with Sweet Thang,” he said.

I sat back down. Sweet Thang was what Szanto-and most of the other cave-dwelling editors in the building-called our newest intern, a honey-haired twenty-two-year-old Vanderbilt graduate whose real name was Lauren Somethingorother.

Between her button nose, bright blue eyes, and a torso that rather nicely filled out a sweater set, she hadn’t lacked for mentoring from some of the men in the office.

The only problem was, there was a rumor out she had gotten the job because her father and Brodie golfed together at their country club. So while working with her would improve the scenery, it did come with certain dangers.

“Do I have to?” I asked.

“Just make her feel like she’s doing something important, then when it comes time to write, make sure she’s in a different county from your keyboard,” Szanto said.

“Fine. Whatever.”

It was only a stupid space heater story. I could knock it off in a few hours and then move back to real journalism. As I left Szanto’s office, I told myself it would be simple enough.

That, it turns out, was my fourth mistake.

* * *

With something short of my usual zeal, I moseyed across the newsroom and found Sweet Thang sitting in the area occupied by an ever-changing cast of interns. Newspaper economics have been so bad so long that our place, like most places, has a hiring freeze that is now old enough to enroll in the third grade. There have been buyouts, some more voluntary than others, and the threat of layoff is constant. The only people left behind are the foolish (people like me, who love the business too much to leave) and the desperate (people who can’t find anything else and cling to the newspaper like bilge rats to driftwood).

Whenever a full-time staff member leaves, taking their high-five-figure or low-six-figure salary with them, they are replaced by an intern who is paid wages that would shame an Indonesian sweatshop. Really, they ought to do these kids a favor and tuck food stamps in with their paychecks each week. Still, the kids keep on coming to us, in ever-increasing numbers, to soak in all the valuable news-gathering “experience”-read: overwork-we provide them.

Given their low lot in life, I always go out of my way to be friendly to the interns. If nothing else, they’re good for entertainment.

“Hi, Lauren,” I said, as I walked up to her.

She looked startled.

“Oh, my goodness, you know my name?”

“Yeah, I’m-”

“You’re Carter Ross!” she said, flashing a smile that surely weakened the knees of many a Vanderbilt frat boy. “You’re, like, the reason I wanted to come to work here. When I read your Ludlow Street story, I told my dad, ‘Dad, I totally have to work at the Eagle-Examiner.’ Oh, my goodness. I even tweeted about your story so all my friends would know about it. And they all retweeted it. And we looked for you on Twitter, but you’re not there, so we just tweeted round and round until we were tweeted out.”

“Lauren?” I said, mostly to stop the river of words spouting from her mouth. Instead, I only diverted it.

“You can call me ‘Sweet Thang’ if you want to. I know that’s what everyone calls me behind my back. I’m okay with it. I mean, it’s not, like, flattering or anything-I don’t think of myself as a Sweet Thang. I actually took courses in women’s studies and stuff. All I’m saying is, it’s not like I’m going to Human Resources or anything, because it’s like my dad told me, ‘A newsroom is still a man’s world. You have to have a tough skin.’ But then he also told me if anything got really bad, we could just tell Uncle Hal-sorry, Mr. Brodie-and he would take care of it. But I don’t think being called Sweet Thang is like an insult or anything, it’s more like-”

“Lauren,” I said again.

“Oh, sorry,” she said, looking downward. “I only babble when I get nervous. I’m so sorry. I’ll stop. Oh no, now I’m babbling again. Okay. That’s it. Stop.”

She put her hand over her mouth and looked up at me.

“Szanto wants us to work together on a story.”

“You and me? Together?”

I nodded.

“Oh, my goodness, that’s so perfect,” she gushed. “Oh, my goodness, teach me everything. I want to learn. I want to write just like you. You’re totally my favorite writer at the paper, you don’t even understand. The only writer I ever liked as much as you was Judy Blume, but that was when I was nine after I read Freckle Juice, and it was a totally different thing. Oh, my goodness, I have to shut up. So what story are we working on?”

The words were coming so fast it took me a second or two to realize she had, somewhere in there, formed a question I was expected to answer.

“It’s a follow-up to the fire story today,” I said.

“Oh, my goodness, that story was like the saddest thing ever. Can you believe those two poor little boys dying like that? I just about cried when I saw their pictures. Did you see their eyes? They were just beautiful little boys. I mean, I would have almost cried even if they were ugly. I don’t want you to think I’m superficial or anything. I’m just saying-”

I held up my hand like a crossing guard halting traffic.

“Sorry,” she said.

“Anyhow, it’s supposed to be a story about the dangers of space heaters.”

She tilted her head.

“Space heaters?”

“That’s right.”

“What do space heaters have to do with the little boys?”

“At the moment, nothing,” I said.

“No one from the fire department mentioned anything about space heaters.”

“I know.”

“So how are we going to…?”

“I don’t know,” I snapped. “Stop asking so many questions.”

The bright blue gaze dropped down to the desk. The heart-melting smile vanished. Even the bouncy, honeyed hair seemed to droop. I felt like I had kicked a puppy.

“I didn’t mean … look, it’s just…” I said, groping for the right words. “See, sometimes, Brodie-uhh, Uncle Hal-he gets these ideas in his head that a story exists whether or not it actually does. But because he calls the shots around here, we sort of have to humor him.”

“Well,” she said, considering this new information carefully, “I don’t think Uncle Hal would have us write a story that isn’t true.”

“Oh, me neither,” I said, hoping she wouldn’t hear the irony in my voice.

“Cool. So what do we do now? Where do we start?”

She looked up at me expectantly. The bright blue eyes were shining again. She plopped her elbows on top of her desk, leaned over and rested her chin in her palms, treating me to a rather unfettered view down her scoop-necked top.

I sat down to remove myself from temptation. Had I not resolved to maintain a perfectly professional demeanor around her, I might have enjoyed that vista. There was no denying the young lady was rather fetching-I mean, if you like shapely twenty-two-year-old blondes, that is-and she had a wholesomeness about her that put certain unwholesome thoughts in my head. As a tall, nearly broad-shouldered, thirty-two-year-old single guy with a reasonable body mass index and no facial disfigurement, I could entertain the thought she wasn’t repulsed by me.

But while there’s no official policy at the Eagle-Examiner against fraternizing with the interns, there were at least three factors to consider. One, Uncle Hal might decide his paper needed one less investigative reporter if I made a play for his buddy’s little girl. Two, I had some unresolved romantic issues with Tina Thompson, our city editor, and I suspected she would not be impressed if I summited Mount Intern. Three, I was getting exhausted just trying to listen to her for five minutes; an entire evening’s worth of conversation and flirtation might make me slip into a coma.

All in all, it seemed like enough reason to leave Sweet Thang to the Sigma Alpha Epsilons.

“Do you want me to call the fire department?” she asked. “Or find a national expert on space heaters? Maybe there’s a space heater awareness group out there? Or a space heater safety nonprofit or something? I want to do this story exactly how you would do it. How would you start?”

I was tempted to tell her I planned to start like any self-respecting reporter approached a story in which he has absolutely no interest: waste time chatting with colleagues, return several lengthy personal e-mails, take an extended lunch, check in with old sources on completely unrelated matters, then start making phone calls around three o’clock when there was absolutely nothing better to do.

But that didn’t seem like the kind of example I should be setting for an impressionable young person.

“Well,” I said. “I like to get a feel for what I’m writing about first. Visit the scene. Take in the sights. Talk to some neighbors. So what do you say we make a little trip out to Littleton Avenue?”

The question was barely even formed and she was already grabbing a notebook and her car keys.

“Can I drive?” she asked.

“That depends. What kind of car do you have?”

“It’s the cutest little BMW. My dad got it for me for graduation. It’s red. I call him Walter. He’s got an iPod dock and everything. I just love him.”

I immediately got this image of Sweet Thang bopping through the hood in her shiny red BMW, blasting Taylor Swift on Walter’s speakers. The carjackers would play rock-paper-scissors to determine who got dibs.

“No,” I said. “Better let me drive.”

* * *

My car is a five-year-old Chevy Malibu. It has traveled some undetermined distance beyond a hundred thousand miles: dead speedometers tell no tales. I bought it for a suspiciously low price from a used car dealer in Newark. I’m not saying the guy was unscrupulous, but the title work looked like it had eraser marks on it.

It wasn’t exactly a chick magnet. But the Malibu had certain benefits that were practical-no, essential-when operating in a rugged city like Newark. You didn’t have to worry about it getting beaten up by the potholes because it was already beaten up. You could leave it unlocked with the motor running outside a chop shop and not have to worry about it being there when you got back. And when it comes to blending into the hood, it does just fine.

Which is good, because in most Newark neighborhoods, I don’t exactly blend. It’s not just that I’m white. It’s that I’m a peculiar subset of the white race, one that disappeared from Newark long ago: a purebred, stiff-upper-lipped, can’t-dance-a-lick WASP. I’ve got carefully parted brown hair, blue eyes, and a way of walking and talking most inner-city black people just find funny. I wear well-pressed shirts-usually white or blue-with pleated slacks and a tie with a half-Windsor knot. Even white people tease me about how white I am.

So I’m perfectly aware, when I enter many parts of Newark, that I create a little bit of a scene. Some people, assuming I’m lost, will approach and ask if I need directions. Most merely stare like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man just went past.

People have suggested to me that if I acted like I have some street in me-wear hip-hop clothes, drop certain colloquialisms into my vocabulary, get a haircut that didn’t look so Leave It to Beaver-black folks might open up to me more easily.

But I don’t believe that. You can only hide who you are for so long. The simple truth is, I grew up in Millburn, a proper New Jersey suburb that is only a few miles away from Newark geographically but a full country away demographically. From the time I grew out of onesies, my mother dressed me in collared shirts. My upbringing featured things like tennis camp, Broadway musicals, and trips to Europe. I went to Amherst, a small, expensive, exclusive liberal arts college that doesn’t exactly do much for one’s street cred. I’m pretty much what black folks refer to as The Man. If I pretended otherwise, I’d come off as a fraud. And no one-of any race, gender, or creed-wants to talk to a fraud.

Besides, I like half-Windsor knots.

And, funny as it may sound to my fellow WASPs, I like Newark, too. And not just because of the gentrification that is slowly (very slowly) taking root or because of the new, shiny stuff being built downtown. I like the old parts of the city, too-the old neighborhoods, the old churches, the old stories that seem to be lurking around every corner. Say what you will about Newark, but it’s got character. And heart. Two things we could all use more of.

So I didn’t mind that as Sweet Thang and I pulled up to the scene of the fire on Littleton Avenue, two old guys on a nearby porch openly gawked at us. The Man-now with a bubbly blonde anchor in tow-tends to have that effect.

The air was still acrid from the fire, with that wonderful aroma of burned plastic and toasted toxin wafting about. Even if I didn’t have the address, my nose could have led me there.

The house wasn’t at all what I expected. Usually, when fatal fires broke out in Newark, they were in nasty, tottering, ninety-year-old tenements, the kind of places that had been fire traps for so long you wondered how they hadn’t burned down sooner.

But this one was a relatively new construction, one of those architecturally challenged boxes that started popping up around Newark at the turn of the new century. It had been quite a moment for a long-depressed city. Real estate developers had finally discovered that, for all its ills, Newark is still just a twenty-minute train ride from Manhattan. Soon, builders were falling over themselves to snatch up the abundance of empty lots and toss up one- and two-family houses.

At the peak of the boom, new two-family houses were going for more than $400,000, an astounding number to Newark residents who remembered the not-so-distant time when they couldn’t even give away their houses. Then the bubble popped, the foreclosures began hitting in waves, and it was back to reality.

Still, the city’s housing stock had been at least partially transformed. And most folks figured it would take a few years before the new construction started looking-and burning-like the old tenements.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” I said out loud.

“What?” Sweet Thang asked. She had been yammering nonstop on the way out-can’t for the life of me remember about what-but had been quiet since we left the car.

“Check this place out,” I said. “It’s nice.”

Sweet Thang looked at me, looked at the house-with its soot-streaked siding, blackened window frames, and scorched roof-then looked back at me like she couldn’t believe she had placed me next to Judy Blume in the writing pantheon.

“Well, okay, maybe nice is no longer the right adjective,” I said. “But it used to be nice. It couldn’t be more than a few years old. It’s got its own driveway, a garage, this nice sturdy gate here.”

I shook the gate for emphasis. She whipped out a pad and started taking notes. I could get used to having my own stenographer.

“Look at the landscaping,” I said, gesturing to some well-manicured shrubs. “At one point, someone cared about the way this place looked. I bet there used to be border flowers planted in front, maybe some impatiens. No, no, make that marigolds. Too much sun for impatiens.”

Sweet Thang wrote down every word, like I was dictating the next coming of Ulysses. I unlatched the gate and walked closer, with Sweet Thang trailing behind, still scribbling madly. The front door was … well, there was no front door. The firemen must have busted it off its hinges.

“Come on, let’s go in,” I said, walking up the front steps.

She halted.

“Are we allowed?”

“You’re not in homeroom. We don’t have to raise our hands and ask for a hall pass to use the bathroom,” I said. “Besides, I don’t see anyone here telling us not to. As far as I’m concerned, an open door is an invitation.”

Sweet Thang bit her lower lip and let out a whiny “But couldn’t we get in trouble?”

“In trouble?” I asked. “For all we know, there’s a melted space heater in one of those kid’s rooms. That space heater is our smoking gun, literally and figuratively. Can’t you just see it? With the charred teddy bear leaning up against it? Isn’t that the perfect start to our story? It could be. But I guess we’ll just have to go back to the office and tell Uncle Hal we’re not sure if a space heater had anything to do with this fire because we were afraid we could get in trouble.”

“Fine,” she huffed and charged past me up the steps.

Interns, I chuckled to myself. So easily goaded.

I pulled a pad out of my pocket and began jotting down a few notes when, from inside the house, I heard a loud thud.

Then Sweet Thang screamed.

* * *

I took the porch steps in two leaps and barreled inside the house to find Sweet Thang with a long kitchen knife at her throat.

The person holding said knife-a wiry, dark-skinned black woman-looked like she knew what she was doing with it. And when she saw me, her eyes opened wide and she pressed the blade even tighter against Sweet Thang’s neck.

“Step back,” she yelled, then took a fistful of bouncy blond curls and tilted back Sweet Thang’s head. “I’ll cut your little girlfriend here.”

Sweet Thang had gone stiff and silent. I suppose she didn’t feel like she was in a position to negotiate, so I did the talking.

“Take it easy,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “We’re reporters with the Eagle-Examiner. We’re just here working on a story.”

You could see the woman’s mind whirring, trying to decide whether to believe me. Sweet Thang was holding up remarkably well under the circumstances.

“My name is Carter Ross,” I continued. “This is my partner Lauren.”

“It’s Lauren McMillan, but people call me ‘Sweet Thang,’ ” she squeaked.

Now the woman looked downright perplexed.

“Sweet Thang?” she said derisively.

Her brow furrowed deeper.

“Y’all messing with me?”

“Here’s my card,” I said, digging it out and inching toward her, holding it at arm’s length. When I got just close enough, she released Sweet Thang’s hair and snatched my card. She barely bothered to look at it.

“That don’t mean nothing. Anyone could fake that.”

“How about I give you my phone and you call information and get a number for the Eagle-Examiner. Ask whoever answers if a guy named Carter Ross works there.”

She removed the knife from Sweet Thang’s throat and pushed her at me, which brought us together in an awkward half hug.

“Don’t matter,” she said. “Ain’t no scrawny white boy and his shorty gonna give me no trouble anyway.”

Sweet Thang rubbed her neck, which didn’t appear to have blood on it. I was guessing this was the first time anyone had held a knife to daddy’s little girl’s throat. I was just grateful I didn’t have to explain to Uncle Hal how his buddy’s kid had been decapitated while in my care.

“You must be Akilah Harris,” Sweet Thang asked.

The woman eyed her.

“I’m very sorry for your loss,” Sweet Thang continued. “Those little boys were just so precious. I’m very, very sorry. I want you to know I said a prayer this morning for Alonzo and Antoine.”

What happened next has to go down in journalism history as the fastest anyone has gone from homicidal to hysterical. The mention of those boys’ names instantly caused this woman, who was evidently Akilah Harris, to crumble. She dropped the knife, brought her hands to her face, and started sobbing. And not just little sobs, either-big, gulping-for-breath, snot-everywhere sobs.

“They was … they was my little angels,” Akilah said between gasps.

Sweet Thang rushed to Akilah’s side, enveloping her in an embrace. Soon, Akilah was hugging her back and they were both crying. It was hard to make out who was saying what amid all the blubbering, but it was something along the lines of Akilah repeatedly saying “my babies” and “my angels” and Sweet Thang saying “I know” and “I’m so sorry.”

I suppose somewhere there was some tweedy journalism professor who would have said that what Sweet Thang was doing-dropping that wall between reporter and source, allowing herself to connect emotionally with Akilah’s pain-was a Very Bad Thing. But then there’s also a reason why those tweedy journalism professors fled to academia in the first place: they were sucky reporters.

You’ve got to get your sources treating you like a fellow member of the species, not an alien with a notepad. Legions of kids come out of J-school each year having been drilled endlessly about objectivity, balance, and other semiuseful subjects-much to their detriment. Some of them unlearn it quickly enough. But for others, the inability to get real with sources becomes a crippling affliction they carry throughout their journalism careers.

Should we teach kids about balance? Of course. Getting both sides of a story is one of the foundations of what we do. There are many areas-politics, court trials, business disputes, and so on-where we’re absolutely obligated to play it down the middle.

But there are also stories where, frankly, there is no middle. A mother’s pain over losing her children in a fire would be one of those stories. There’s no “other side” to tell. There’s just one woman and her profound tragedy. I believe telling that story in a sensitive, compassionate way makes the news-and all those who read it-a little more human.

They finally released their embrace.

“I’m sorry I almost cut you,” Akilah said, sniffling.

“It’s okay,” Sweet Thang cooed. “You thought someone was breaking into your house. I would have done the same thing if I were you.”

Now there’s an image: Sweet Thang threatening someone with a knife. I’m sure they taught all the Vanderbilt debutantes proper throat-slashing technique just in time for their cotillions.

“I wish I could invite you in for some coffee or something,” Akilah said. “But they cut off the electricity.”

“That’s okay,” Sweet Thang said.

“And I’m sorry the place is such a mess,” Akilah added.

It was such a perfectly absurd thing to say under the circumstances, we all laughed. From knife-wielding to crying to laughing, all in about ten minutes. At least this job isn’t boring.

* * *

My keen reporter’s instincts told me Akilah was in the mood to unburden herself of her story. And as the good little scribes we were, Sweet Thang and I were not opposed to letting her do so.

But while this was the time, it was not the place. Too much debris. Too much smell. Too much death.

I made the suggestion we head to African Flavah, a hole-in-the-wall diner on Springfield Avenue that just happened to serve the best breakfast in the city. Akilah was unsure for a moment until I sealed the deal by making it clear the Eagle-Examiner would be more than happy to pick up the check.

Akilah asked for a few moments alone in the house to collect herself. I told her we’d be waiting for her out in the car.

The fresh air felt good and smelled better. As I fired up the Malibu to get the heat going, Sweet Thang flopped down heavily in the passenger seat.

“I’m so sorry,” Sweet Thang said.

“What for?”

“For crying.”

“Yeah, so…?”

Obviously, there had been at least one tweedy journalism professor in her past.

“Isn’t that … unprofessional?” she asked, biting her lower lip in a way that still managed to be coquettish.

“No, I’d say it was great. You made a connection and now a grieving mother wants to talk to us-to you, I should say. That’s pretty much the definition of a good human interest story right there. How did you know she was the boys’ mother anyway?”

“I spent all morning looking at their pictures in the paper. They both look like her. The younger one could be her little clone.”

“Good catch.”

“Thanks,” she said. She leaned back in her seat and, because she apparently abhorred silence, asked, “So when do we ask her about the space heater?”

“Space heater?” I said.

“I thought we were doing a story about a space heater.”

“No. Oh, hell no. Lump the space heater story.”

“But what about-”

“Lump it.”

“But we’re supposed to-”

“Lump it.”

“But Uncle Hal-”

“Even Uncle Hal will realize this is much better than a space heater story. If we do this right, this could go on page one tomorrow,” I said. “Hang on, I’m just going to run inside and check on Akilah.”

Sweet Thang grabbed my wrist.

“Wait a second,” she said.

Her hand felt soft and warm and lovely. And for the briefest moment, I started imagining what it might feel like to have that hand situated elsewhere on my person.

“What is it?” I asked, reminding myself I was old enough to be her … well, her older brother, for sure. Perhaps even her youthful uncle.

“You’re going to do the interview, right?” she asked with big, imploring blue eyes.

“No. You are. You’re the one she obviously trusts. At this point, I’m just the guy driving the car.”

“But what do I doooo?” she whined.

“You’ll be fine,” I said, trying not to look at her. “When we sit down, just ask her what happened and then let the conversation flow. Be understanding. Make sure she realizes you’re not judging her. Cry all you want to. It’ll be perfect.”

“Oh, my goodness, thank you so much,” Sweet Thang gushed, and touched me again, this time on the shoulder. “I knew working with you was going to be the best thing ever.”

“Well,” I said, gradually trying to inch away but finding the Malibu had restricted my westward movement. “I’m sure we’ll have fun.”

“I know we’ll have fun,” she said, fixing me with a serious look, placing her hand back on my forearm and giving my arm a pat.

Thankfully I saw Akilah coming out of the front door, which I used as an excuse to get out of the Malibu and wave for her. The air was cool on my face and I realized I was flushed. Carter Ross, star investigative reporter for the mighty Newark Eagle-Examiner, reduced to a blushing teenager by the wiles of one blond coed.

Akilah climbed into the backseat and soon we were pulling up alongside African Flavah. Granted, I’m probably not real typical of the clientele at African Flavah-and I have a hard time saying the name without sounding ridiculously Caucasian-but the restaurant’s owner, a guy named Khalid, was a buddy of mine and a real inspiration. Back in the mid-1990s, Khalid and his wife, Patty, had opened their diner in a row of burned-out, empty storefronts on a part of Springfield Avenue that still hadn’t recovered from Newark’s 1967 riots.

But their diner flourished. And soon, so did the neighborhood around it. A clothing store moved in a few doors up. A bodega and a barbershop opened a few doors down. Then came a small electronics store and a furniture store. It was a regular renaissance.

Along the way, Khalid and Patty’s diner became a local institution, one so revered that in all the years they had been in business, Khalid proudly told me, they had never been robbed once. It helped that Khalid treated all his customers with respect and dignity, which wasn’t always the case with business owners in the hood. The matching bulletproof security cameras-one inside, one outside-might also have something to do with it.

As we entered, Khalid and I exchanged greetings and before long we were seated in a booth along the wall with a pot full of coffee. Akilah attacked it like it was planning to run off.

In this different light-when she wasn’t threatening my colleague with a very large knife-she looked younger than I originally thought. Younger and prettier. Her body was slim but not without curves in the right places. Her hair was straight and pulled back into a no-nonsense ponytail, showing nicely formed cheek and jaw bones and a slender, graceful neck. There was definitely potential there. Throw on some makeup and a dress, and I bet she’d be a gal any guy would like to have on his arm.

Still, she had that ghetto hardness to her face. It’s a look that comes from learning at a too young age that only the strong survive and only suckers trust someone else to help them do it. You can see it in the way the eyes flit about, in the way the body seems constantly tense, in the way the brain always seems to be manipulating a set of odds.

Yet somehow Sweet Thang had slid underneath that tough, cynical exterior. Maybe it was because Akilah’s math told her that a white girl with a ridiculous nickname and nice clothes couldn’t possibly be out to hurt her. Maybe it was because she was too damn tired to keeping doing all the calculations.

Either way, Akilah’s reactions to Sweet Thang were different. She was allowed in, even when most others were not.

After we placed our order and handed back our menus, Sweet Thang looked at me imploringly one last time. I shook my head. She rolled her eyes. I nudged her under the table with my foot. She batted her eyelashes. I crossed my arms. She got the hint.

“So,” Sweet Thang said as gently as she could, “what happened?”

* * *

Akilah looked down at the table.

“I don’t even know. I mean, I know I shouldn’t have left them at home alone,” she began. “It’s my fault. It’s all my fault.”

Her eyes filled with water again. I grabbed a napkin for blotting. Sweet Thang took her hand.

Over the next hour or so, it all came out-sometimes in a torrent, other times in a tumble. It was one of those interviews that could have doubled as a therapy session. Sweet Thang nodded at all the right times, shushed when she needed to, supported Akilah’s every emotional need.

I was just the guy with the pen, furiously taking notes.

As I suspected, Akilah Harris’s twenty-four years on this planet had seldom been easy. Her father was never really in the picture. She said she was four when her mother died of a drug overdose. Akilah didn’t know what drug and didn’t provide many details. But I suppose, to a four-year-old, none of that would have been especially significant.

She had been taken in by an aunt who lived in the Baxter Terrace Public Housing Project, a grim collection of low-rise brick buildings not far from Interstate 280. It was not exactly what you would call a kid-friendly environment.

Akilah explained how she had gotten pregnant for the first time when she was sixteen, and the aunt-who was very religious and therefore very ashamed-basically disowned her. She dropped out of school to support herself and the child. With no other relatives in the area, she stayed with a succession of friends in Baxter Terrace. Then the baby died of a heart defect when it was less than six months old.

Akilah got pregnant again when she was eighteen, which is how she got Alonzo; then again when she was twenty, which is how Antoine came to be. Akilah didn’t say anything about the father, which was hardly unusual. Dads didn’t always stick around in that part of town.

Really, it seemed like Akilah had only caught one break in her young life. She managed to find a decent job. She said it was at University Hospital, and it “paid good”-which probably meant she was pulling down $30,000 a year, including overtime. That didn’t go very far in most parts of Northern New Jersey, one of the most expensive areas of the country to live in. But to a kid from Baxter Terrace, it could still feel like a lot of money.

And, naturally, the first thing she wanted to do was get the hell out of Baxter Terrace.

But that’s where things got complicated. About four years ago, not long after Antoine was born, she got connected with a guy-she was kind of vague about the details-who, in turn, connected her with another guy-she described him as “a Puerto Rican guy”-who, in turn, ushered poor, orphaned Akilah Harris into her very own home.

“It was a chance to raise my children somewhere else besides Baxter Terrace,” she said. “I had to do it.”

For a while, it worked out fine. Then, suddenly, she couldn’t afford it anymore. Sweet Thang-a guileless creature with the kind of naivete that only the young possess-asked a few follow-up questions about how such a thing could even be possible and seemed genuinely confused. I would have to explain it to her later. Akilah Harris had gotten slammed with a pernicious form of subprime mortgage.

People hear the term “subprime” and get confused, because the “sub” makes it sound like it’s some kind of good deal. It’s not. The “prime” refers not to the rate but to your status as a borrower. If you’ve got five years of perfect credit and a steady job, you qualify for a prime mortgage at a reasonable rate. Being subprime meant that something about you was less than perfect and you were going to get charged a rate that only barely failed to qualify as loan-sharking.

Except, of course, they didn’t start out that way. Many of the subprime loans that floated around the ghetto a few years back had had introductory rates far below what the permanent rate would be. It made an otherwise unaffordable house suddenly fall into just about anyone’s price range. For a while. Then-surprise! — the real rate kicked in. Just like that, you went from 4 percent interest to 12 percent interest and your monthly payment doubled overnight.

The Puerto Rican man probably told Akilah-and countless other dupes-not to worry about the interest rate reset. After all, it would only take a year or two before they had enough equity in the house to refinance to a regular loan.

And that was true-as long as credit remained easy and the housing market stayed supernova hot. For a while, it did. I had written about Newark neighborhoods where the average home price, driven primarily by real estate speculators, was doubling every two years.

The only problem is, nothing like that lasts forever. When the global credit crunch hit and the easy money stopped flowing, the bubble that was Newark’s real estate market experienced a big, messy burst. And people like Akilah Harris, who were led to believe the good times would never end, were finished. The foreclosures came in huge waves.

Some people figured out pretty quickly their days among the landed gentry were over and accepted it graciously, slinking back to the apartments from which they came with their credit scores in shambles. Others tried to do short sales or loan workouts, hoping to emerge with the shirts on their backs-and often nothing more.

And then, every once in a while, there’s a real hardhead, like Akilah. She was so determined to hang on to her house-in the face of a financial reality that dictated otherwise-she got herself another job. It was a second-shift job cleaning floors at a pallet-making company.

She just couldn’t find any second-shift child care-not for anything she could afford, anyway. And with her mother dead and her aunt refusing to be part of her life, she had no family to leave her sons with. So each day, she worked at the hospital from 7 A.M. to 3 P.M., picked up the boys from daycare, brought them home, and put them in her bedroom with the TV on.

She left them snacks. And then she locked the door “so they couldn’t get in no trouble.”

Which is why, when that fire started at 9 P.M., they had no hope of escape.

* * *

Akilah finished up the details of how the previous evening unfolded for her. None of her neighbors knew she worked a second job or where it was, so no one from the fire department-or the police department or child protective services-had been able to notify her about what had happened. She was just walking back from work a little after 1 A.M. when she saw all the fire trucks and cop cars still jamming her street.

A neighbor collared her before she could get to her house, explained what happened, and convinced her she would be arrested for child endangerment if the cops found her. Akilah spent the night weeping on the neighbor’s floor. When she awoke in the morning, the authorities had finally left. She went back to her house to collect some of the things that hadn’t been destroyed in the fire and get some items for her boys’ funeral.

That’s when we found her.

“I know I should have just let the police take me, but I just wanted to spend a little bit of time in the house,” she said. “I just felt like, I don’t know, like it was the only place I could be close to my boys. I knew I hadn’t been there for them in life so I wanted to be there for them in death. Maybe that sounds stupid, but that’s what I was thinking.”

Akilah sighed.

“So that’s my sad story,” she said.

It was, I had to admit, an extraordinary interview. I couldn’t believe she had shared so much with such brutal candor. Most people couldn’t be that honest with themselves, much less with two strangers.

At the same time, she was an orphaned only child who worked sixteen-hour days and didn’t seem to have a soul in the world she could count on. She was probably just desperate for someone to listen.

And in two newspaper reporters, she had found a more than receptive audience. Sweet Thang had been mopping tears off her own face for most of the last hour. My eyes were dry, though I felt like my insides had been cleaned out by a canal dredger.

“What do you think the police are going to do to me?” Akilah asked.

The question had clearly been addressed to me, the white guy with the tie.

“It depends on how hard-assed the prosecutor’s office feels like being,” I said. “If you had other children still in your care, there might be pressure to get the kids removed from you and put in foster care. And to make sure you never got them back, the prosecutor might throw the book at you-child endangerment, negligent homicide. But as it is, they might not feel the need to go after you as much. Do you have a record?”

She shook her head.

“Well, that’ll help,” I continued. “There’s a possibility if you cooperate with them, they’ll let you plead to something that’ll give you probation and nothing more.”

“I deserve to go to jail,” she said, without hesitation. “For what I did? I hope they send me away for a long time.”

I hoped they didn’t. I’m not saying I wanted to nominate Akilah for Mother of the Year. But throwing this young woman in jail wasn’t going to solve much of anything. I seriously doubted the state of New Jersey could mete out a punishment more severe than the life sentence of pain and regret she had already received for losing those two boys.

And ultimately, what was she really guilty of? Of making a tragically poor decision about child care, sure. But beyond that? She was a single mother who wanted to raise her children someplace other than the projects and had been too unsophisticated to avoid the usurious scumbags who preyed on that desperation.

The real villain here was that industry of scumbags. It started with that “older man,” whoever he was, whose job it had been to hustle fresh meat for the Puerto Rican man, whose job it was to sign them up. But it didn’t stop there. Next were the lending executives, who were underwriting the borrowing with impossibly reckless loan products, approving mortgages for people who obviously did not have the means to pay them back. Then came the investment bankers who were bundling and packaging those bad loans into securities that were somehow rated AAA, which proved to be the lipstick on the proverbial pig.

Some of those Wall Street crooks-the ones that didn’t get bailed out-got a little bit of comeuppance when those securities were suddenly worth pennies on the dollar. The crooks on the street? The Older Man and the Puerto Rican man? They were still out there, finding new ways to enrich themselves on the misery of others.

And while I couldn’t stop them from doing it, I could at least hit them with the only weapon a newspaper reporter had: public embarrassment. The Older Man’s role in the whole thing was probably a little too tangential to go at him, presses blazing. But the Puerto Rican man, if I could find him, was a nice target. A story with the headline “Sleazy Bastard” above it would do just fine.

“Tell me a little more about the Puerto Rican man,” I said. “You keep a phone number for him? A business card maybe?”

She shook her head.

“Do you remember his name?” I asked.

“It was like…” She groped around her memory for a second or two, then gave up. “I don’t know.”

“What did he look like?”

“He wasn’t tall or nothing, but he was built,” Akilah said. “He had a goatee he pet all the time, like it was his cat or something. He was dark skinned, for a Puerto Rican. He was bald…”

She paused to try and think of more, but nothing was forthcoming.

“About how old?”

“I don’t know. Forty? Fifty?”

Or more. Or less. To twenty-four-year-olds, I think any age over thirty-five becomes a blur.

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“Not in a long time.”

“Can you think of anyone who might know more about the guy?”

“I mean, you can go into the projects and ask around. People there will probably remember him.”

I nodded. They probably did remember. Whether they would tell a cracker like me was another issue.

“Did you keep any of the paperwork?”

“I never got no paperwork,” she said.

That was probably not true. But it didn’t matter. That’s why the Founding Fathers, in their infinite and righteous wisdom, created the blessing that is public records: so reporters like me could snoop around.

The county kept copies of mortgages down at the courthouse. And while that would only provide me the name of the lender, not the mortgage broker, I could work backward from there. Because while I had no legal rights to Akilah’s closing documents-which are not public record-Akilah did. I could gently assist her in getting the necessary papers from her lender. Problem solved.

I’d have my sleazy bastard in no time.

* * *

Our breakfast long since demolished, I threw a tip on the table, then paid our bill at the register up front. As we walked back to my car, tears started rolling down Akilah’s cheeks. Naturally, that set Sweet Thang’s waterworks going, too. They both hopped in the Malibu’s backseat, leaving me to chauffeur us to Akilah’s place. I felt sort of like a white Morgan Freeman driving a black Miss Daisy. Except in this case, Miss Daisy kept wiping her runny nose on her shirtsleeve.

When we arrived, Sweet Thang hopped out with Akilah. They swapped cell phone numbers, then hugged. Sweet Thang watched Akilah disappear inside the front door, then climbed back in the front seat.

“I told her she could stay at my place tonight if she wanted,” Sweet Thang said.

“That is such a bad idea,” I said as I got us under way.

“That girl has nothing and I have a foldout couch in my apartment,” Sweet Thang countered. “It’s the Christian thing to do. Don’t you ever ask yourself what Jesus would do?”

I was tempted to tell her it was a moot point: Jesus came along about 1,950 years before foldout couches. But I didn’t want to turn this into an argument about religion-or convertible furniture-so I tried to put a halt to it.

“I’m going to pretend you didn’t just invite a source to spend the night,” I said. “And you’re going to conveniently forget to mention this to anyone back at work. Fair?”

“Whatever,” Sweet Thang spat.

I realize I may encourage a slight blurring of the line between reporter and source, but there still is a line. I find a good rule of thumb for journalism ethics is to think of what the headline would be if another newspaper decided to write about how you covered a particular story. JOURNALIST SHOWS SYMPATHY TO MOURNING MOTHER is something I could live with. JOURNALIST HARBORS FUGITIVE FROM JUSTICE didn’t have as nice a ring. I hefted a large sigh.

“What?” Sweet Thang said.

“Nothing.”

“Come on, what is it?”

“Nothing.”

“Don’t ‘nothing’ me,” Sweet Thang scolded. “If you’re going to be my mentor, we need to have open lines of dialogue. Communication is the most important part of any relationship. We have to be able to share our thoughts and feelings.”

I was suddenly having a flashback to my last serious relationship. She had moved into my cozy little bungalow in Nutley and had taken to redecorating it room by room. Then she decided to redecorate me. She wanted me to put product in my hair. And wear flatfront pants. And pay more attention to men’s fashion magazines than I did to my fantasy football team. And, above all else, she wanted me to share my feelings, and share my problems, and share my fears.

I’m not saying I’m one of those emotionally constipated men who doesn’t have a clue what’s going on between his ears. At the same time, there are certain areas where a man has to be able to set his own agenda. Hair product is one of them. So, finally, I shared with her. I shared that no matter how many times she asked, I wasn’t going to join her for a manicure. She left me soon after for some guy at her advertising firm. You can probably find them at a nail salon right now.

“Hel-LO?” Sweet Thang said. “Feelings?”

“I feel,” I said, measuring my words, “that it’s a bad idea for you to have this woman sleeping at your apartment. I know this is hard to hear, but for all we know, Akilah is a nutbag who decided she didn’t want to be a mom anymore and burned down her own house with her kids locked inside.”

“Do you really think that’s what happened?”

I didn’t. But I still planned to have Sweet Thang call the hospital and the pallet company to verify her employment, just in case.

“That’s not the point,” I said. “The point is, we just don’t know. So not only is it a bad idea professionally to have a source living with you, it could be unsafe personally, as well.”

She turned to face me, smiling wide.

“That’s sooo sweet of you,” she said. “I knew you were the best mentor ever. I can’t wait to tell Uncle Hal what a sweetheart you are and that you’re looking out for me. I know he’ll totally appreciate it.”

I clenched the steering wheel with both hands and drove. Sweet Thang was playing me like a Stradivarius, which is probably what she had done to every Y chromosome she had come across since puberty. All I could do was remind myself once again that she was the female equivalent of the Strait of Magellan: thin, beautiful, and treacherous.

During the final few blocks to the office, she kept babbling about how wonderful I was. It wasn’t until we pulled into the Eagle-Examiner parking garage I was finally able to get a sentence in.

“Okay, here’s the plan,” I said, mindful of Szanto’s admonition to keep Sweet Thang away from the computer keyboard while any meaningful writing was going on. “First of all, give me your cell number.”

“I have two,” she said. “Which one do you want?”

“You have two cell phones,” I said, mostly out of disbelief.

“Yeah, I talk a lot”-I noticed, believe me-“so sometimes I run out of battery before I have the chance to recharge.”

“Two cell phones,” I said again. “First, allow me to scoff at you.”

I made my best scoffing noise.

“Okay,” I said, “now I’ll take those numbers.”

I file all work-related numbers last name, first name. So I saved these in my phone as “Thang, Sweet” and “Thang, Sweet 2.”

I gave her my number and she programmed it in her phone. Uh, phones.

“You program all your numbers in both phones?” I asked.

“Hell-OOO, what if the other one is out of batteries?” she asked.

Good point. Absurd but good.

“Okay, I’m going to start transcribing notes”-and write the beginning, middle, and end of the story-“and I was hoping you could take a trip up to the county courthouse and get a copy of Akilah Harris’s mortgage for us.”

“No problem,” she said, smiling sweetly. “I’ll do anything you ask.”

She held my gaze a beat longer than was necessary. Somewhere in my lower body, I felt a twitch.

* * *

I bid Sweet Thang farewell, wiped my suddenly sweaty brow, then went back up to the newsroom to search for a cold shower.

Instead, I found the one thing that worked faster:

“Crrrtrrr!” Szanto bellowed as soon as I was within radar range.

I walked into his office and sat down to find him munching a mouthful of antacid tablets-berry flavored, by the scent of things.

“Whtdgt?” he asked.

I took that for “what do you got?” and plunged forward, telling him how the intern almost got her neck slit, then about Akilah Harris and her remarkable story. It was a narrative so moving I felt my throat constricting at several points during the retelling. I touched on every tragedy that had shaped her young life, emphasizing that while her tale was unique, it was also achingly typical of the struggle faced by many working poor. I concluded that sharing her story in a thoughtful manner would offer a real insight into our local community and do our readers a tremendous service.

Szanto sat quietly as I spoke. He even stopped chewing his antacid. I felt like I was really reaching him. I was drilling through that hardened, old-time newsman’s shell and reaching that fundamentally decent inner core that remembered a good newspaper was ultimately about real people and their stories. And when I was done, there was only one thing he could ask:

“Can we strip the story across the top of tomorrow’s front page?”

No, wait. That wasn’t it.

“Come again?” I said.

“I said, ‘What about the effing space heater?’ ”

“Sal!” I exploded. “Haven’t you just been listening to me? This is human tragedy. Who cares about a damn space heater?”

Szanto clenched his fists.

“I sent you out there to get a simple story about a space heater,” he said.

“And I came back with something ten times better. Even Brodie is going to see that. We’ll have another chance to write space heaters next week. Come on. This is good stuff and you know it.”

Szanto released his fists and instead channeled his stress into grinding his teeth.

“Well,” he said at last, “could you at least mention the possibility of a space heater? I’m not saying you have to put it in your lede. Just sneak it into the nut graf somewhere.”

“Oh, for the love of … are you serious?”

Of course he was. Szanto and serious were like fruit flies and ripe bananas.

“Fine,” I huffed.

“Good. Now, I think we can make a run at A1”-that’s what we called the front page of the newspaper-“but I want you to write it hard.”

“What do you mean, ‘Write it hard’?”

“I mean, spare me the slant about the poor woman from the ghetto victimized by the larger forces of social injustice.”

That, of course, is exactly what I planned to do. And Szanto had been my editor long enough to know it.

“Are you really that hard-hearted?” I asked.

“Oh, I’ve got a heart of fluffy dryer lint,” Szanto said. “I’m just saying, let’s not let her completely off the hook here. The fact is, nobody forced that woman to sign a mortgage she couldn’t afford. And nobody forced her to compound the error by getting a second job instead of just getting rid of the place. And you want to tell me she couldn’t have tried a little harder to find somewhere to put those kids? Let’s remember, the victims here are those two little boys.”

Valid points, all. And in absence of a good counterargument, I pouted.

“Come on now, you can still make it read pretty,” Szanto said, and suddenly was rooting for something on his crowded desk. “Just remember the story is about this.”

He slid that day’s paper across the desk and patted two fingers on the pictures of Alonzo and Antoine.

They were two happy little faces, each with sharp features-like their mother-and a set of eyes that captivated me the way they had Sweet Thang earlier in the day. They were eyes that glowed with hope, love, and happiness. They were the eyes of two little boys who’d never hurt anyone or done anything to deserve this. They were the eyes of the innocent.

“It’s about those dead little boys and all the people who failed them,” Szanto finished.

I nodded. He was right, of course-just as I had been right about the space heater story being bunk. But that was a good editor-reporter relationship. You had to keep each other honest.

“Fine,” I said, then summoned my best parting shot: “But if you screw with my lede I’m going to have Sweet Thang complain to Uncle Hal. And then you’ll really be sorry.”

Szanto grinned, then shoveled in a fresh mouthful of antacid tablets. I retreated to my desk and started pounding on the keyboard. It was two-thirty in the afternoon, which meant I had enough time to craft a lovely story-but not enough time to dawdle. Our deadline for first edition isn’t until 8. But Szanto would start hovering over my shoulder by 6, if not sooner.

I was just starting to settle into the story when “Thang, Sweet” popped up on my cell.

“It’s not here,” she said breathlessly. “The mortgage. It’s not here.”

“What do you mean it’s not there? It has to be there,” I said, annoyed she couldn’t complete such a simple reporting errand.

“I know, but it’s not.”

“What address did you use?”

She repeated the number on Littleton Avenue that she and I had both seen earlier that day.

“You went to the Register of Deeds and Mortgages, right?” I asked.

“Yeah, and I typed ‘Akilah Harris’ into the computer, and nothing came up. Then I searched by address, and nothing came up. Then I looked up the block and lot number and searched under that, but nothing came up.”

I sighed and peeked up at the clock. It told me I didn’t have time to run up to the courthouse.

“So I flirted with one of the male title searchers and got him to help me,” Sweet Thang continued. “He was this total stoner, and stoners don’t usually go for me, because I’ve got more of that wholesome look, you know? Anyway, he couldn’t find it on the computer so he looked up the deed and got the recording date. Then he went into the books with the hard copies. He didn’t know where the book was and he was going to give up, so I flirted with him some more. Finally, he found it. The book had been misfiled. And then when he got to where the mortgage was supposed to be, he said it had been ripped out.”

“Ripped out?”

“That’s what he said. Then I had him show it to me. There was a space where it should have been. But it jumped from page 177 to page 195. He said it was totally weird and he had never seen anything like it before.”

“Yeah, me neither,” I said.

“Then I asked one of the office clerks, and he was this nice guy at first, really helpful. Then he went away for a little while, and when he came back he was all weird with me. He said it wasn’t there and I had to leave.”

I frowned.

“Did the clerk know you were a reporter?” I asked.

“Yeah. He was really nervous about that. He practically kicked me out. He was just like, ‘You have to leave. I’m sorry, you have to leave.’ ”

I frowned some more. Perhaps if I thought about it, I could produce a perfectly reasonable, perfectly innocent explanation for why documents pertaining to a scandalously predatory loan were missing. But nothing was coming immediately to mind.

Something wasn’t right.

Primo had been one of the first Brazilians to arrive in Newark during the late 1980s, never realizing he was in the vanguard of what eventually became a substantial migration.

His father, a well-respected civil engineer, begged Primo not to go, trying to reason with him. Primo was also an engineer. With his father’s connections, and with Brasilia in the midst of a building boom, there would be plenty of work for many years to come. Why leave for a country where he knew no one and lacked the proper credentials to continue in his chosen field?

Primo was adamant. The father threatened to disown the son. Primo told him to go ahead. He was twenty-seven years old. He wanted a fresh start in America. He was leaving behind everything-his job, his wife, even a small child. He told his wife he would send for her just as soon as he got settled.

But that was a lie. Upon arriving in America, he severed all contact. He changed his name. Then he changed it again. He learned how to manipulate the American system to give himself multiple identities, none of which were truly his own.

He settled in the section of Newark known as the Ironbound, so named because it was surrounded by railroad tracks on all sides. It was almost entirely Portuguese back then, but that was not a problem for Primo. They spoke the same language. And even though the Portuguese knew he wasn’t one of them-his accent was different, his skin darker-they tolerated him.

Primo took whatever job he could find at first. He parked cars at a garage in downtown Newark during the day. He bussed tables at a Portuguese restaurant on weekends. He lived in a cold-water flat above a jewelry store, making a deal with the store’s owner living where he lived rent-free in exchange for sleeping in the store at night with a pistol.

With virtually no expenses beyond food, Primo saved every penny he could. After a few years, he had enough to purchase an old row house, free and clear. He quit his restaurant job, spending every night and weekend for three months turning the dilapidated house into a tidy-looking home. He took some shortcuts, but only the kind a building inspector would notice. Then he bribed the building inspector. Before long, he sold the house for a handsome profit.

It was a start.

Primo bought another house, then another. He bought shrewdly, being careful not to overextend himself, always working harder and, most of all, smarter. He bid on houses that appeared to be worthless-the ones that looked like they were about to fall over-then used his engineering knowledge to prop them back up. It was amazing what you could do with a few two-by-tens, nailed in just the right spots.

And in a town like Newark, with its aging wooden housing stock, there were plenty of falling-over houses for him to buy. He continually reinvested the profits from his successes, taking only a bare minimum out for his living expenses. Most of the time, he just threw down a sleeping bag in whatever house he happened to be fixing up at the moment, dozing with a loaded gun next to him just in case any neighborhood vagrants got ideas.

Soon, he had more houses than he had time for. So he hired a team to work for him. They were all fresh-off-the-boat Brazilian immigrants who, under Primo’s tutelage, could prop up a house and primp it for sale in just weeks. As Brazilians continued arriving throughout the 1990s, Primo’s workforce grew. Two teams became four teams. Four became six.

He was slowly building an empire.