Eyes of the Innocent

CHAPTER 2

People sometimes ask me how I write, whether I favor a particular method or technique. I try to tell them writing is an individual process and that one person’s system probably won’t work for someone else. But if they persist, I usually tell them the truth. For me, the essence of writing comes down to one simple thing:

Frequent urination.

The first thing I do upon sitting down is hit the caffeine. Usually it’s Coke Zero, but sometimes, in the early morning or later at night, I go for tea. I’ll drink Diet Pepsi if I have to, but only under desperate circumstances. I never drink coffee. I may be the only journalist in the world who despises coffee.

After consuming my caffeinated beverage of choice, I switch to noncaffeinated-usually water, to avoid dehydration. Then I jump back to the caffeine. I continue this alternating pattern until the writing is done.

The end result is that I pee like I’m about to run the Kentucky Derby. Once I get going, I can’t last more than about twenty minutes without a trip to the loo.

Maybe that sounds like an annoyance, but I’ve found it to be an essential part of the writing process. It’s during these many trips to the bathroom that the magic happens. Turns of phrase leap into my head, transitional sentences mysteriously appear, narrative structure makes itself apparent. The pee flows out, the words flow in. I’m not sure if this is some kind of cosmic balancing act-I try not to think about the physics behind it-I just know it’s happened too many times to be mere coincidence.

Clearly, I wouldn’t recommend this method for anyone with urinary incontinence. And it does come with some limitations: instead of worrying about writer’s block, I fret over sewer capacity; I could never consider a job as a foreign correspondent in Europe because the pay toilets would bankrupt me; and with longer articles, I end up getting so overcaffeinated I shake like an eighties hair-band drummer.

But I have come to accept over the years that this is how I do things. Some writers hunt and peck. I piss and peck.

Akilah Harris’s story was a twelve-flush job-more than I thought it would be, but by no means a record. When I was through, I decided to give Sweet Thang the lead byline. I figured it would help get her noticed in the office for something other than her breasts. Byline politics-who got them, whose name came first, who was appearing on A1, and who was getting buried on C5-were a constant source of chatter in the office. That, of course, was the only place people talked about bylines. I’m quite confident that the vast majority of our readers skipped right over them.

But for the small percentage who actually paid attention, the next day’s story would start “BY LAUREN MCMILLAN AND CARTER ROSS.” A lot of veteran staff members would have put their own names first, under the thinking that she was an intern-thus deserving of secondary status-and hadn’t actually written the thing herself. But I just felt even though I had been the one putting the words on the page, Sweet Thang had made the greater contribution to the story by getting Akilah to open up the way she did.

Besides, the quotes were what carried the story. The opening quote was perfect: “I know I shouldn’t have left them at home alone,” Harris said. “It’s my fault. It’s all my fault.”

What made it perfect was that it would keep Szanto off my ass. It established that Akilah was taking responsibility for the tragedy. Once she blamed herself, I could get on with the business of blaming everyone else.

It also set up the question that would hopefully pull the reader through my prose: what happened in this young woman’s life that led her to this rather desperate position, forcing her to abandon her young children? I took the narrative right up to this morning, her decision to make one final trip to the house and her reasons for doing so. Which set up the final quote:

“I just felt like it was the only place I could be close to my boys,” Harris said. “I knew I hadn’t been there for them in life so I wanted to be there for them in death.”

In the business, that’s what we call a kicker quote-and a fine one, at that.

By the time I was done, Sweet Thang had been back from the courthouse for a while. To keep her busy, I had put her on fact-checking duty. Generally speaking, one’s ability to check facts exists in an indirect relationship to one’s rate of publication. Those yawning, indolent sloths at monthly magazines can-and do-spend weeks fact-checking. At weekly magazines, they still have the luxury of a few days. At daily newspapers? It’s mere hours. If we’re lucky.

It was one fundamental vulnerability in any newspaper’s attempt to get it right on deadline. A source who lied convincingly could sometimes snow us. Fortunately for us, most of your hardcore liars-the real pathological ones-lie about lots of things. And you only need to catch them once for it to set off those alarm bells that indicate you should look sideways at everything else they said.

There was not much about Akilah’s story that could be verified one way or another. A spokesman for the hospital said she wasn’t an employee of theirs, but she still might work there-she could be employed by any number of cleaning services that had contracts with the hospital. The pallet company, which didn’t like the idea of its name going anywhere near a story like this, refused comment. But I suppose that was to be expected.

By the time Sweet Thang was done with those phone calls, I had a draft for her to read before I filed it.

“Oh, my goodness, this is soooo awesome,” she gushed after she finished. “You are totally going to have to teach me how to write like this.”

“It’s really nothing,” I mumbled false-modestly.

“Nothing?” she said, a little too loudly. “How could you say nothing? It’s totally brilliant-the way you work in all the important facts along with all those great details, the way you use the quotes, the way it flows so perfectly. I couldn’t write it that well in a week and you did it in, like, two hours.”

I often find it difficult to accept a compliment gracefully, so I just kept my mouth shut like the strong, silent cowboy I am and gave my best it-warn’t-nothing-ma’am shrug.

“No, really, I want to know how you did this,” she demanded.

I debated telling her about the frequent-urination method but decided such advanced concepts in fluid dynamics were better left to the professors at Princeton. So I gave my other standard writing advice:

“Writing is like a muscle,” I said. “The harder you work it, the stronger it gets.”

I immediately regretted the metaphor.

“I bet you’ve got the biggest muscle of anyone I’ve ever met,” she gushed.

I coughed uncomfortably.

“Well, I’m going to file this thing now,” I said, glancing at the clock. It was 5:45, which was getting to be the time of night when the acid in Szanto’s stomach compelled him to start demanding copy.

“Oh, definitely,” she said. “And thanks for giving me the lead byline. You totally didn’t have to do that.”

“You earned it. Without that interview, we wouldn’t have had a story.”

“That’s so sweet of you,” she said, then added in what was intended to sound like an afterthought: “By the way, some of the interns are getting together at McGovern’s after work for a quick drink or two. You want to join?”

“Sure,” I said too quickly. Then, in the second it took me to consider the implications, I added, “I’ll try to stop by.”

“Cool,” she said, giving me a little wave as she departed. “See ya.”

* * *

Sweet Thang wasn’t gone from my desk for more than fifteen seconds before Tina Thompson roared into the same spot.

Tina is our city editor. At most newspapers, the city editor is some frumpy bearded guy named Bruno. At our paper, it’s Tina, a too-hot-for-her-age thirty-eight-year-old with curly brown hair, a penchant for short skirts, and abs you could play checkers on. Her hobbies include yoga, jogging, and keeping me in a permanent state of confusion.

We were clearly … something. I liked her intelligence, her wit, her sarcasm. And did I mention her abs? We always enjoyed our time together. She obviously cared about me. She even saved my life once-long story.

But I couldn’t accurately say Tina and I were an item, because it had never been consummated by the appropriate adult gymnastics. It was difficult to speculate whose fault that was. There were times when I had clearly been invited to show her my floor routine but stumbled on the way to the mat. Other times, I participated in the warm-ups then withdrew my name from consideration before the competition began. It all made for a relationship that had never gotten past the preliminaries.

It was just complicated. What Tina wanted out of me was not companionship, commitment, or even recreational sex. She wanted insemination. Having spent most her life as a career-driven alpha female, Tina had recently decided she was going to try motherhood. And she was sufficiently type A in personality that she didn’t feel like wasting time with the whole dating-cohabiting-marrying paradigm. She didn’t want to fiddle around with anonymous sperm donors, either. As she explained it, she wanted her baby’s daddy to be smart, above six-feet tall, and have light-colored eyes-but didn’t want it to be some lanky, green-eyed homeless guy who managed to convince a fertility clinic he went to Stanford. That left her with six-foot-one, blue-eyed, Amherst-educated me.

She promised it was a no-strings-attached deal. She even offered naming rights. But I was still unsure about it. On the one hand, I had what Mr. Darwin would describe as the male imperative to spread my seed. On the other hand, I was a little conflicted about someday having to explain to Carter junior that his mother had been interested in me primarily for the fifty-fifty chance I’d pass on my bone structure.

Like I said, it was confusing. As was the fiercely territorial look she had on her face as she approached.

“Just stop it,” she hissed.

“Stop what?” I said, trying to summon my best innocent face.

“Oh, Carter,” she mocked Sweet Thang’s voice in a violent whisper. “You’re so wonderful. I want to write just like you.”

“What did I do?” I said, perhaps too defensively.

“Oh, Carter,” she continued in the voice, “you’re such a great writer. Why don’t you have drinks with me and then come over to my place and write for me all night long?”

“Oh, come on.”

“Writing is like a muscle, Carter? And which muscle is she supposed to think you’re bragging about? Your trapezius? Why don’t you just pull her into the supply closet and ask her to play Seven Minutes in Heaven?”

“Now you’re just being silly.”

“Am I? Or did I just see her give you the little wave?”

“That? That was not the little wave. That was just … a wave.”

She closed in and clamped her hand on my chin, lifting my face for closer inspection.

“I thought so,” she said, the whisper getting even angrier. “You have glitter on your cheek.”

“So?” I said, wiping both cheeks quickly.

“So Sweet Thang was wearing makeup with glitter in it. Is that just a coincidence?”

“Glitter has been known to become airborne,” I pointed out.

Tina stuck her fists into her side, glared at me for a moment, then stomped off. Three strides into her stomping, she turned around and jerked her head, like I should have known I was supposed to follow her. I trailed after her. It was either that or get scolded in front of the entire newsroom.

She went into the (thankfully empty) break room and was ready for me with an ambush when I entered.

“She’s hitting on you,” Tina hissed.

“Is not.”

“And you’re flirting back!”

“Am not!”

“I heard her saying you gave her the first byline on that story. You want to tell me if she was dump-truck ugly with an ass she couldn’t fit through an elevator door you would have done that?”

“She earned that byline-”

“Liar!”

“And besides, if her ass was that big she never would have fit in the booth at the restaurant and we never would have gotten the interview.”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“I’m not sure I know what the subject is.”

“The subject is that every male under the age of ninety in this newsroom has been following that girl around with drool pouring out their mouths for the last month, and you, of all people, are not going to join them. It’s improper, it’s unseemly, and it’s gross. She’s a child.”

I raised my right hand like I was taking the presidential oath of office and said, “I have absolutely nothing but the purest of intentions toward that young woman. And I have no indication her feelings for me are anything besides professional admiration.”

“You are and always have been a dreadful liar, Carter Ross. You’ve been screwing her with your eyes ever since she got here.”

“I don’t even think I said hello to her until this morning.”

“And let me guess, you let her tag along with you all day long because, what, you’re deeply concerned about the quality of instruction she receives during her internship?”

“Szanto told me to work with her,” I said, still sounding far more defensive than I intended.

“Oh, sure. Did Szanto also tell you to jump in her lap the moment she asked you out for a beer after work?”

Couldn’t exactly dispute that one. Tina sighed and waved her arms in the air.

“Look at you! You can’t even defend yourself! Of course you want to have sex with her. She’s twenty-two. She’s got helium balloons for tits. I should probably be worried if you didn’t want to have sex with her, because it would mean you were dead from the waist down, which would mean you’re absolutely no use to me. All I’m saying is, if you sleep with her, don’t even think about sleeping with me. I’ll find some other guy with good breeding potential to get me knocked up.”

With that, Tina stormed off.

I looked at my only friend in the room, the Coke machine. “Did you get all that?” I asked it.

The machine hummed back at me.

“Just to review,” I said. “A woman who has expressed exactly zero interest in a conventional monogamous relationship just berated me for flirting with an intern. Can you figure out what to make of it?”

The machine hummed some more.

“Yeah,” I said. “Me, neither.”

* * *

Before I could make it back to my desk, I was interrupted by a strangling sound coming from Szanto’s office. It sounded vaguely like my name, so I stuck my head in.

“You looking for me?”

“Where is it?” he asked.

“By ‘it’ do you mean the beautiful story I have crafted that you cannot wait to put on A1?”

“Something like that, yeah.” Szanto said.

“Just about to file,” I assured him.

“Good. You got a quote from the mortgage company, right?”

I looked down at my shoes and tried desperately not to look sheepish.

“We, uh, had a little problem there,” I began.

Szanto didn’t wait to hear the rest. He burst out with a long string of language that would have made my grandmother cover her ears, finishing it with, “… and I told you to write it hard. We can’t tell this sob story where we make the predatory lender the bad guy and not reach out to the bad guy and give them the opportunity to tell the other side.”

“I know, I know,” I said. “I had Sweet Thang run up to the courthouse and pull the mortgage. But it was missing.”

“Missing?”

“Yeah. She said the computer file didn’t exist, and when she went to look for the hard copy, it wasn’t in the books. So we don’t actually know who the mortgage company is.”

Szanto considered this news for a moment as he gulped some coffee out of a large Dunkin’ Donuts cup he had been reusing for weeks, judging from the stains on it. He frowned at the coffee, like it had just told him to lose weight and stop smoking.

“This coffee is crap,” he said, then took another large swallow. He frowned again.

“Well, we can’t run the story without talking to the mortgage company, the broker, or someone to give it some balance,” he said. “I’m holding it.”

Holding a story means it’s not going to run in the next day’s paper. While that may not sound like such a devastating thing, it’s remarkable how quickly something that’s been held for a day becomes stale. It doesn’t actually lose news value to the outside world. But it does lose buzz within the building. By the next day, the cabal of editors who make the decision about where to place stories in the paper feel like they’ve already been hearing about your story for an eternity. And given their attention spans-think: salamander-they get bored quickly. So even though it would still be new news to readers, it’s treated like old news by the editors. What is surefire A1 material on Day One becomes back-of-the-book fodder on any day thereafter, and the next thing you know your brilliant narrative is just filling space above ads for assisted living facilities.

“Aw, come on, don’t do that,” I said. “What if I was able to find the guy who sold her the mortgage and get a comment from him?”

Szanto grimaced. “I told the future ex-Mrs. Szanto I wouldn’t be home late tonight,” he said.

There were already two ex-Mrs. Szantos. And with the way he treated his wives-giving them about as much care and attention as most people give their rental cars-it was pretty much assumed there would be more.

“How about this: if I can get the broker by eight, we run the story. After eight, it holds. Deal?”

“Fine,” Szanto said.

“Great,” I said, peeling out of his office before he could modify the arrangement.

I looked at the clock on the wall-6:07-and was actually feeling pretty good about things until I got back to my desk. That’s when I sat down and realized there was only one way I was going to find the goateed, shaved-headed, so-called Puerto Rican man: Go to the Baxter Terrace Public Housing Project after dark.

Don’t get me wrong, going to the projects any time of the day wasn’t exactly my idea of fun. There were certain dangers constant to Newark’s rougher projects-junkies were not known for keeping stringent track of time, and a junkie that needed money for a fix was always unpredictable. But at least during the day there were normal people out in the courtyards. Old ladies sat on stoops, kids played ball, mothers watched their babies. The dealers were still around, sure, but the regular folks could maintain at least a modicum of social order. It didn’t matter how hardcore a gangbanger was, he still respected a grandma-his own or someone else’s-sitting on a stoop.

But then, after dusk, the old ladies, kids, and moms would go inside, fully surrendering the turf to more insidious elements. The dealers. The gangs. The vagrants. People whose interests clearly tended toward the antisocial. There something primeval about what the darkness did to a city like Newark.

About the only thing I had going for me was the element of surprise. Absolutely no one expected to see a well-dressed white man striding confidently into the middle of that environment. Sometimes I could actually see guys startle as I rounded a corner. As long as I kept moving-and didn’t stay long enough for them to recover from shock-I really had nothing to worry about.

Or at least that’s what I kept telling myself as I went down to my Malibu and got it rolling in the direction of Baxter Terrace.

Slated for a demolition that was forever being delayed for one reason or another, Baxter Terrace was among the last of Newark’s bad, old projects-a relic of the failed experiment that was high-density public housing. When it was first built in the 1930s, people clamored to get into Baxter Terrace. It was segregated, of course-blacks lived on one side of Orange Street, whites on the other-but desired by both races. Tenants were chosen only after careful consideration by the tenants’ association.

After moving in, the residents-all of whom had jobs and made timely rent payments-were responsible for much of the maintenance. They cleaned the hallways and stairwells. They swept the sidewalks. They kept gardens full of flowers. The Newark Housing Authority, which owned and managed the properties, watched closely, evicting anyone who failed to toe the line. A resident who left for work without cleaning their dishes might come home to a note from the superintendent warning them not to let it happen again: dirty dishes might attract bugs.

It’s difficult to say whether the housing authority or the tenants were more responsible for the decline from that golden era of public housing. But sometime during the late 1950s, the quality of the tenants began slowly declining, with more on public assistance-and fewer who cleaned, planted gardens, or paid rent-every year. Management became less conscientious about the white glove inspections, which allowed tenants to become even more slovenly. The housing authority fell further under the sway of City Hall, which was becoming increasingly corrupt, and many of the cleaning jobs were of the no-show variety.

Plus, as fewer tenants paid rent, the housing authority had less of a budget for maintenance. And once you start to let things slide in a high-density housing situation, they go in a hurry. The rats, mice, and roaches get a foothold almost instantly. The garbage piles up. The small leaks turn into big ones.

The tenants’ association complained as things got worse, and the bosses at the housing authority eventually got tired of hearing it. So they busted up the tenants’ association.

That meant the tenants were no longer picking their own neighbors, which brought even more decline in the quality of the people moving in. Rent collection dropped further, which meant even less money for maintenance. And the tenants-who no longer had any collective voice or empowerment through which to improve conditions-stopped caring about the buildings, which only strengthened the various negative feedback mechanisms already in place.

Which was how you ended up with stairwells that smelled of urine, booze, and rat droppings; hallways that hadn’t seen a mop in years; and apartments where the humans fought an ever-losing battle with the pests that had taken up residence.

Perhaps the most apt description of Newark’s housing projects I’ve read came from No Cause for Indictment, a book by Ron Porambo about the Newark riots, which described the projects in the late 1960s: “If never visited, these dwellings cannot be imagined. Once seen, they can never be forgotten.”

And, if anything, the last forty years had only made them worse.

* * *

I parked my Malibu at the fringes of the projects, then plunged into the haystack to begin looking for the needle. It had been more than three years since Akilah Harris encountered this guy. He could be anywhere by now. Or he could be around the corner.

My entrance into the courtyard caused a small stir among the lookouts. I could tell because in the middle of February, in the dark of night, Baxter Terrace suddenly sounded like an Audubon Society refuge-birdcalls being the latest in urban drug-selling counterintelligence.

As had been explained to me by a dealer I got friendly with not long ago, the old alert system was very limited in what it allowed. If a lookout saw something that didn’t look right-whether it was a cop or just a well-dressed white guy like me-he did the same thing: he yelled “cops” or the radio code for an officer, “five-oh,” and everyone scattered. The guy sitting on the stash was forced to abandon his perch, making it vulnerable to being swiped by anyone who might have seen where it was hidden.

Birdcalls allowed much more information to be imparted to other members of the operation, without the visitor being aware of what was being communicated. So while a crow’s harsh cry could harken the arrival of a member of the city narcotics unit-a significant threat-the sweet song of a chickadee might signal an officer who was merely escorting a social worker to an appointment, allowing business to continue in guarded fashion. Someone like me, a stranger on unknown business, might warrant a whippoorwill’s call.

Where exactly a city kid learned what a whippoorwill sounded like, I have no idea. But these kids were nothing if not resourceful. It makes you wonder what they could have accomplished under different circumstances.

And now I needed their help. If anyone would know my mortgage hustler, it would be the drug hustlers who worked the same turf, albeit different clientele. My only other alternative would be to knock on doors until I found someone who knew the guy. But given what you often found behind those doors-the frightened, the aged, the mentally ill, the belligerent, the chemically addicted-I would be better off trying to work the dealers than to waste time on trial and error.

As I pressed farther into the courtyard, the birdcalls quieted down to a mild chatter. By now, everyone who needed to be aware of my arrival had been apprised. And yet, while they obviously knew where I was, I couldn’t see them. It was too cold for anyone to just be hanging out. I dug my hands into my pockets and kept peering into the darkness.

Finally, two figures emerged from one of the corner buildings. I took my hands out of my pockets-no need for them to think I was armed-and walked toward them. They were both late teens from the look of them. One was tall and slender, with a head full of thick braids jutting from under a stiff-brimmed black cap. The other was shorter, with a hooded sweatshirt pulled over short-cropped hair.

“Hey,” I said. “I’m sorry to bother you guys. I’m a reporter with the Eagle-Examiner. I’m looking for…”

They walked down the stairs just as I was approaching them, brushing past me wordlessly, staring straight ahead like I didn’t exist.

“Look, I’m not a cop,” I said, following them. “I’m just a newspaper reporter working on a story.”

“Nah” was all the one with the braids could say. And even that was muffled.

“Guys, I just need a little help here,” I said.

“Ain’t no snitch,” the one with the hoodie said.

The no-snitch mentality-which had long been the rule for dealing with law enforcement in the projects-had been expanded in recent years to encompass all outsiders. And reporters were most certainly included. It was, quite frankly, a huge pain in the ass. My intentions were almost always benign-in this case, I was trying to track down a lender who may have preyed on poor people-but convincing a hardened no-snitcher of this could be impossible.

More than anything, it just pissed me off. It wasn’t because it made my job harder. Okay, it was partly that. But it was mostly because the no-snitch mentality-and the decline of law and order it brought-had been almost as destructive to the community as the drug trade.

“You’re a moron,” I said once they were out of earshot.

Or at least I thought they were. Apparently, not all of today’s youth have ruined their hearing with loud music.

“What you say?” Braids said, turning around and stopping.

He looked more surprised than anything. I hadn’t really intended to create a confrontation with this kid-especially when I didn’t know how many friends he might have nearby-but there was no backing off now. By himself, he wasn’t much to be afraid of. It helped that I outweighed him by about thirty pounds.

“You’re a moron,” I repeated, walking toward him. “I’m trying to do a story that will help shine light on a scumbag who preys on people from the projects. But you’re such an ignorant moron all you’re worried about is snitching.”

Braids and Hoodie were momentarily speechless. They clearly had not expected anything resembling aggression out of the mild-mannered newspaper reporter.

“Damn, yo, he just called you ignorant,” Hoodie said.

“Oh, you’re ignorant, too,” I said, drawing in even closer. “Because you know where all this no-snitch crap has gotten you? As a black man in this country, you’re six times more likely to be murdered. But, wait, it gets even better, because as a young black man living in an urban area, you’re thirty times more likely to be murdered. Congratulations.”

I knew the first factoid to be true. I made up the second one. But I didn’t think there was much chance these guys were going to call me on it. At the moment, they were just gawking at the strange white man who came into the projects to spout numbers from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

“So go ahead,” I finished. “Keep not snitching. I just want both of you to remember this conversation so that when I write a story about one of your funerals someday, I can find the other one and say I told you so.”

* * *

From an outsider’s perspective, I’m sure what I was doing would not seem particularly wise: picking a verbal fight with two young men who were quite possibly involved in the local drug trade, quite possibly armed, and quite possibly ready to call in reinforcements who could quite possibly separate me from my face.

But I had a hunch that wasn’t going to happen. You really only got yourself in trouble in the projects if you were so strong as to be a threat or so weak as to be a target. As long as you existed somewhere in the murky middle, you were okay.

Besides, Braids and Hoodie were basically kids. And it’s not hard to keep kids a little off balance, especially if you’re telling them something they’ve never heard before. People don’t turn off that natural curiosity until they’re further into adulthood.

I glared at them a little bit, just to let my last statement sink in, and finally Hoodie broke the standoff. By laughing.

“Damn,” he said. “You one crazy nigga, you know that?”

I chuckled.

“That has to be the first time anyone has called me that,” I said.

They both laughed.

“What’s your story about anyway?” Braids asked. “You said someone is messing with people in the projects?”

“Yeah, a Puerto Rican guy who sells people crooked mortgages.”

Braids and Hoodie just looked at each other blankly, then at me.

“He’s sort of short and squat,” I continued. “Shaved head. Wears a goatee. Probably drives a nice car-an Audi, maybe a Mercedes.”

“I ain’t never seen nobody like that,” Hoodie said.

“Only people who drive cars like that around here are…” Braids paused, not wanting to say too much.

Hoodie filled in the blank: “They’re people you already know. You know?”

In other words, they were pushing something with a little more kick than subprime mortgages.

“You ever see people around here selling mortgages?” I asked.

“Depends. What’s a mortgage?” Hoodie asked.

I suppose I shouldn’t have been shocked by the question. Why would a black kid raised in public housing-a kid reared in a family that had probably been in America for ten generations without owning a stick of property-know what a mortgage was?

“It’s…” I didn’t know where to begin. “Never mind. Okay, forget the Puerto Rican guy. You know someone named Akilah Harris?”

Braids and Hoodie exchanged glances again. But this time they were a lot more knowing.

“Maybe,” Hoodie said. And suddenly I realized they were both smirking.

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing,” Braids said.

They stood there, grins widening. Obviously, Akilah was known in these parts. That was hardly surprising. Akilah was only a little older than these two. They had probably grown up with her.

“C’mon,” I said. “Spill.”

“I ain’t saying nothing,” Braids said, holding his hands in the air.

“Why you want to know?” Hoodie asked, obviously curious. “You making a story about her?”

“Her house burned down,” I said. “There were two kids inside.”

“Damn!” Braids said.

“Yeah, I heard about that,” Hoodie said. “Someone was saying it was on the news.”

Despite the tragedy of the situation, they were still smiling. Something about Akilah Harris was humorous to these guys, though I couldn’t imagine what. I tried to think like a teenaged boy. What made them laugh? Toilet humor. Fart jokes. But how would that be connected with Akilah? It just wasn’t coming to me.

“What’s so funny?” I said.

More smirking.

Finally, Hoodie couldn’t help himself. “You sure there were only two kids?” he said. “I figured she would have had, like, six by now.”

Braids busted up laughing. “With, like, eighteen different daddies,” he added, which made them both laugh harder.

Of course. The only thing teenaged boys found funnier than fart jokes was sex. And apparently Akilah Harris was known to be generous in that department.

“So she’s a ho,” I said.

“She’s like the biggest ho out here,” Braids confirmed.

“Is she sleeping with someone in particular?” I asked.

“Akilah? Shoot, who hasn’t she slept with?” Hoodie said. The boys yukked it up again and I laughed along with them, even though-if I started thinking like a mature adult for a moment-none of this was really all that amusing. I let them giggle themselves out, then tried to push the conversation away from the topic of Akilah’s promiscuity.

“From what I’m told, she moved out of here about three years ago,” I said.

“Maybe, I don’t know,” Braids said. “You still see her sometimes. She visits her mom or something.”

I could feel my brow creasing. “I thought she was an orphan,” I said.

“Akilah? Hell, no. She got a mom,” Braids said. “Her mom and my mom are like cousins. I mean, they ain’t blood. But they best friends.”

“Are you sure that’s not her aunt? I thought her aunt raised her?”

“Naw, that’s her mom,” Braids said. “Whoever told you she don’t have a mom don’t know what they talking about.”

Lying was more like it. Those alarm bells in my head were starting to ring from one ear to the other. It’s possible the rest of Akilah’s story was true, that she only made up the orphan part just to engender a little more sympathy. But reporters quickly learn lies are like cockroaches: where there’s one, there’s bound to be others.

I was already starting to feel embarrassed I had been so taken in by her saga. Akilah had Sweet Thang and me figured out from the moment she saw us-a couple spoiled white kids who would bite on the hard-life-in-the-black-city cliche, chew it up, and swallow every last morsel.

“And you say her mom lives around here?” I asked.

“Yeah, she right over there,” Braids said, pointing two buildings down. “Third floor. Right side. You can ask her.”

“I will,” I said. “Believe me, I will.”

I considered trying to take down names and phone numbers for Braids and Hoodie in case I had any more questions. But they weren’t exactly quotable sources on the subject of Akilah Harris. And the chances I would get a real answer out of either of them was so remote, I decided not to bother. So I thanked them for their time and started walking toward Akilah’s mother’s apartment.

On the way, I had a quick phone call to make.

“Szanto,” grunted a voice on the other end.

“Hey, it’s Carter,” I said. “Can the Akilah Harris story for tomorrow.”

“Why?” he said, half gargling with a mouthful of coffee.

I told him what I learned, along with my guess that there were probably other aspects of the story that couldn’t be verified.

“Yep, smells like garbage day at the fish factory all right,” Szanto said. “Let’s kill it.”

* * *

As I walked through the gaping front entrance of Akilah’s mother’s building-whatever door was there had been ripped off long ago by neighborhood pharmaceutical salesmen-it occurred to me I could probably just drop the whole thing. Akilah Harris was no longer a gripping human interest story or a victim of tragic exploitation. She was a liar whose negligence killed two children. From a news standpoint, that made her a lot more run-of-the-mill: your basic two-faced criminal, not someone worthy of reader sympathy.

But there was something telling me to keep digging on this one. Was I outraged Akilah would dare attempt to mislead a gifted investigative journalist such as myself? Hardly. Was I just curious what else she made up? A little.

No, it was the missing mortgage record. Things like that didn’t just happen by accident. Someone wanted something covered up. I didn’t have the slightest idea who or what. But reporters love cover-ups only slightly less than they love their own mothers-more if their mothers don’t cook well. Whisper the word “cover-up” in a noisy room full of reporters, and I guarantee we’ll all stop and turn our heads to listen. There’s just something about cover-ups we can’t resist. And it seemed worthwhile to waste a little more time trying to figure out this one.

Besides, it beat researching manufacturer’s specifications on space heaters.

I reached the third floor, turned left, and found a door with “Harris” typed on a small, plastic piece of tape. From somewhere inside, Entertainment Tonight had been cranked to a volume that ensured that local corpses were now fully aware of the latest starlet to check into rehab due to “exhaustion.”

I knocked, wondering if it was even possible the sound could be heard above all the smugness coming out of the television. I waited.

Apparently not.

I knocked again, harder. This time I heard someone stirring inside. Feet shuffled up to the door. Then nothing. I had the feeling I was being examined through the peephole, which always made me slightly uncomfortable. I mean, do you smile? Look serious? Stick your eye real close and try to look back? What is proper peephole etiquette anyway?

An angry black woman inquired, “Who is it?”

“I’m a reporter with the Eagle-Examiner, ma’am,” I yelled, trying to be heard above the television. “I was just hoping to ask you a few questions.”

“It’s after dark,” the voice said.

“I’m aware of that, ma’am, but…” I began.

“I don’t open my door after dark.”

“Ma’am, I’m going to slip my business card under your door right now so you can see I’m Carter Ross from the Eagle-Examiner.”

“I don’t care if you’re Ed McMahon and I may have won a million dollars, I don’t open my door after dark.”

I rolled my eyes-could she see that through the peephole? — and groped around in my head for another approach. It was hard to work my charm through a steel door, even harder when I had to compete with Mary Hart’s breathless report about the weight loss secrets of Hollywood Hunks. I couldn’t concentrate.

“Do you think you could turn down the TV so we could talk through the door?” I asked.

No response. I had the distinct feeling she had gone back to her couch.

“Ma’am?” I pleaded. This was getting pathetic. I knocked again.

“I told you, I ain’t opening the door,” she shouted from somewhere inside the apartment.

“Could I call you?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

Of course not.

“If I came back in the morning, do you think you could talk with me?”

“You can try.”

The emphasis was on the “try,” which was not particularly encouraging. And, sure, I could try. But it would probably just delay the inevitable. I decided if this woman was meant to talk to me, it was going to happen now. I just had to push a little harder.

“Ma’am, I’m working on a story about Akilah Harris,” I hollered. “I understand you’re-”

Before I could finish my sentence, I heared movement inside-it sounded like a chair slamming into linoleum-followed by a strangled cry.

“Go away!” she wailed. “I don’t want to hear that name! Don’t you say that name to me! Go away!”

She kept yelling, but her voice had gone something beyond hysterical, so it was impossible to make out what she was saying. Between the shredded vocal cords and the uncontrolled crying, it was pretty clear the name Akilah Harris had been enough to put Mrs. Harris into distress.

And I wasn’t the only one aware of it. From downstairs, I could hear footsteps coming my way. A matronly black woman in slippers and a faded floral print housedress huffed up the stairs, froze me with a look of pure disgust, and brushed past.

“I just wanted to talk to her,” I said defensively. “I didn’t mean to-”

But she was not there to hear my excuses. She entered Mrs. Harris’s apartment without bothering to knock. The door had been unlocked all along.

An open door. In the projects. Who knew?

From within the apartment, I heard the new woman comforting Mrs. Harris, whom she called “Bertie.” For a while, Bertie kept crying and moaning unintelligibly. After enough shushing, she calmed down. There was dialogue between the women, though it was too muffled to hear.

And, for whatever reason, I just kept standing in that hallway of that hellhole housing project, hoping a big reset button would descend from the ceiling so I could press it and get a do-over on this whole encounter. Why had I pushed her so hard? Clearly the woman was agitated. No one in that state is going to suddenly settle down and cooperate with a reporter. In the morning, when she was calm, she might have talked to me.

As I cursed my lack of patience, the woman in the housedress reappeared.

“What are you still doing here?” she said, spitting out the word “you” like it burned her mouth.

“I just-”

“She don’t want to talk none,” the woman assured me.

“I know, but I-”

“She don’t want to talk.”

“I just wanted to apol-”

“And I’m telling you, she don’t want to talk.”

The woman crossed her arms and glowered at me, daring me to lob up another feeble rejoinder so she could smash it back in my face. It was Olympic verbal volleyball. But while she was Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh, I was the lightly regarded team from Liechtenstein.

“So what you’re saying is, she don’t want to … doesn’t want to talk?” I said.

“That’s right,” the woman said. “You best be moving on now.”

“Okay, I get it,” I said, then reached into my pocket for a business card. “Could you please just tell her I’m sorry I upset her so much? It was never my intention.”

The woman accepted my business card without comment, and I took that as my opportunity to leave with at least some shred of dignity intact.

* * *

I arrived back in the newsroom in time for a treat: a copy editor catfight.

Newspapers are full of strange animals, but the copy editors just might be the oddest of all the birds. A lot of them work a 6 P.M. to 2 A.M. shift, so they’re nocturnal. They are sometimes awkward socially, which is why they didn’t become reporters. And nearly all of them claim to be expert grammarians-and are not afraid to get into the occasional scrap over language or usage.

This one appeared to feature Marjorie, a tall, storkish woman with a voice like a foghorn against Gary, a small, nervous man with a somewhat legendary standing among his fellow copy editors. Gary was reputed to have memorized every word of the paper’s style manual, our Bible governing everything from capitalization to punctuation to spelling. Most of the copy jocks didn’t test him-except, apparently, Marjorie.

“… not the point,” Marjorie was booming as I entered. “I’m sure that’s what the style manual says. I’m saying, in this case, we shouldn’t apply the style manual.”

“You can’t argue with the style manual,” Gary countered. “It’s not called the ‘suggested’ manual or the ‘do this if you feel like it’ manual. A lot of thought was put into every entry and it’s not up to us to change it on the fly because it suits our needs.”

“It’s not about my needs,” Marjorie said. “It’s about the readers’.”

I walked over to another copy editor, a younger guy named Evan, and asked him for a translation.

“We’ve got a Buster Hays special: the fifty-ninth anniversary of the Battle of Sunda Strait, told through the eyes of some fossil from Linden who claims to have been a pilot,” Evan said in a hushed voice.

Buster Hays was himself a fossil: a cranky, crusty contrarian who should have retired eons ago, except he loved to stick around and remind the younger generations how much better things used to be. Among his specialties were World War II anniversary stories, which he did with special zeal. So, unlike most papers-which dutifully did the fives and zeros of the big ones, like D-day and Pearl Harbor-we did the threes, sixes, and sevens of just about every significant (and insignificant) military encounter of the time period. It was fairly useless from a journalistic standpoint, unless you happen to think there’s news value in the fast-fading memories of old guys rambling about details they were probably getting mixed up in the first place.

But, much as I hate to admit it, readers loved the stuff. Buster had at least a four-year backlog of future anniversary stories, all generated from reader letters he received in response to previous anniversary stories.

“So what’s the dispute?” I asked, keeping my voice down so as not to interrupt Gary and Marjorie’s blowup.

“Buster wrote the guy from Linden served in the Air Force,” Evan told me. “I don’t think they called it the Air Force back then.”

“That’s right! They didn’t!” Gary said, somehow picking up on our whispers over Marjorie’s booming. “From July 2, 1926, to June 20, 1941, it was known as the Army Air Corps. Then on June 20, 1941, it was renamed the Army Air Forces and it stayed under that name during the battle in question. It did not become the U.S. Air Force until September 18, 1947!”

“I’m not disputing that,” Marjorie interjected. “I’m saying if we put in the paper this guy from Linden was part of the Army Air Corps-”

“Army Air Forces,” Gary interrupted.

“Fine, whatever,” Marjorie said. “As I was saying, if we write he was in the Army Air Whatever, the Army part is going to confuse the vast majority of our readers who came of consciousness well after the aforementioned name change was made.”

I always wondered if readers knew how much we fought for their supposed interests. Many an impassioned argument in the newsroom was based on what was best for “the readers.” It was ironic in at least two ways: one, most people in the newspaper business have at least some disdain for readers, because the ones we hear from with the greatest frequency are confused octogenarians calling in to complain we weren’t giving enough ink to President Truman’s new jobs proposal; and two, most of the readers whose rights were being so highly cherished were going to take that day’s paper, briefly check the weather and the Yankees box score, then use it to potty train their puppy.

“So we should be factually incorrect to make it easier on the readers?” Gary said. “I don’t know if I’m ready to bend to the lowest common denominator that way.”

“Well, aren’t you just standing at the gates of Western Civilization, holding back the Huns,” Marjorie countered. “We’re a daily newspaper. We’re supposed to be written at a level eighth graders can understand. You think an eighth grader is going to care about alterations in military nomenclature made before their parents were born?”

“It’s in the style manual,” Gary replied.

“I don’t care about the style manual,” Marjorie shot back.

The air suddenly left the room. Gary looked stricken. At least three copy editors blanched. I expected one of them might need smelling salts.

“Don’t … don’t care?” Gary said.

Marjorie looked to her left and right, saw she had lost all support, and started backpedaling like Galileo at a Vatican wine party.

“Well,” she said. “I suppose we might get calls from military historians if we just wrote ‘Air Force.’ So I … I guess we’ll do it your way.”

The other copy editors exhaled. Gary straightened slightly, making himself a fraction taller in victory.

“Very good,” he said.

The catfight over, I was just about to walk away when Evan stopped me.

“Carter, you got a second for a small question on your story?”

“What story?” I asked.

“The one about the mom in the fire.”

“That story isn’t running.”

“Sure it is,” Evan said. “It’s going A1, above the fold.”

“Oh, crap,” I said.

“What’s the matter?”

“We’re about to strip a lie across the top of our newspaper.”

* * *

I charged toward Szanto’s office, knowing full well he’d still be there. It was after eight, the time by which he assured the future ex-Mrs. Szanto he’d depart. But I’m sure she knew that to be a meaningless promise. Newspaper spouses eventually learn to act as if they live on Central Time while their partners are Eastern Standard: Szanto’s 8 o’clock really meant 9.

The moment Szanto saw me steaming toward him, pained expression No. 42-which starts as a tight grimace around the eyes and spreads-washed across his face.

“What the hell?” I demanded.

“What?” he said, though he knew full well what.

“I thought you killed the story.”

“I did.”

“So why is it-”

“It wasn’t my call,” he said, spreading his hands as if to absolve himself of responsibility.

“I don’t understand.”

“Brodie saw ‘space heater’ high up in the story and his Willie started throbbing,” Szanto said.

It was long-standing Eagle-Examiner tradition that when Brodie liked a story, he was described as having a hard-on for it-or an erection, or a woody, or any number of the infinite variations to describe male sexual arousal. Why this usage evolved was lost to history. But the resulting imagery was seldom pleasant.

“I don’t care if he printed it out and dry-humped it on the conference room table so everyone could watch,” I replied. “How can we run that story knowing what we know?”

“Brodie said we could just take out the part about Akilah being an orphan. He said it was probably a misunderstanding that could be easily explained, and it was no reason to kill a story about the very important subject of space heater malfunction.”

“But I didn’t get a quote from the mortgage company,” I said. “What about getting the other side of the story and all that happy hooey?”

Szanto looked at me through tired eyes.

“We didn’t mention the name of the mortgage company anyway,” he rationalized. “So it’s not like you’ve maligned its reputation.”

I stared at Szanto as he fingered the cigarette he planned to light just as soon as he could run to the back stairwell where he-and untold scores of others-illegally smoked during the wintertime.

“So you agree with him?”

“I didn’t say that,” Szanto said. “I said it was his call. Look, you wanna argue with Brodie’s stiffie, you go ahead. Me? I don’t want to get poked in the eye.”

Neither did I. Brodie was a basically pleasant old man, but his management style did not involve toleration of open dissent. If he hadn’t made up his mind about something, he would stay quiet and listen to the discussion that ensued among lesser editors. But his decisions, once made, were notoriously final. I could storm into his office and make all kinds of noise, but it wasn’t likely to do any good. I’d have better luck trying to turn the ocean tides with a teaspoon.

“Fine,” I huffed. “But when we have to run a correction, it better not say ‘due to a reporter’s error.’ This isn’t on me.”

Szanto didn’t answer, choosing to end the conversation by turning his attention back to his computer screen and grumbling something too consonant-heavy to be understood.

That left me stuck in a curious spot. On the one hand, I was off the hook. I told my editors I had deep misgivings about a story. They ignored me. Woe to them.

But that was small comfort. I took a great deal of pride in getting a story right, or at least trying my damnedest at it. It went straight to the core of perhaps my deepest journalistic value: that the truth exists, and that it’s my job as a reporter to find it.

I realize that flies in the face of the moral relativism that has become so popular on campuses and in highfalutin big-think magazines, where the professors and editors will have you believe there is no such thing as the truth, only stories told from different perspectives. They’ll spin that marvelous bit of postmodern logic that says there are no absolutes and therefore we cannot possibly judge anyone else’s beliefs. And they’ll tell you journalists are hopelessly flawed creatures incapable of escaping their own innate biases long enough to ever approach anything resembling impartiality.

To which I reply: fiddle-faddle.

I’m not saying it’s simple to find and tell the truth. It takes a great deal of hard work, intellectual honesty, open-mindedness, and a willingness to keep listening to people even when your gut is telling you they’re full of it. Then it involves drilling through the layers of one’s cultural assumptions and prejudgments, all the way down to the mushy middle of all of us, where I believe there’s a basic humanity that tells us what’s right and what’s wrong. If we as writers apply that code-without the anchors of agenda or ideology-we can lift our prose to something that can be called the truth. It’s the very best of what journalism can and should be.

So to have a story running under my byline that I knew was suspect? It made my guts twist. I never wanted to be one of those writers who skimped on the facts simply because they got in the way of a good story. And it pissed me off, that’s what I was going to look like if Akilah’s story blew up in our faces-all because of Brodie and his space heater vendetta.

I went back to my desk, pondered what I might do with what remained of my evening, but couldn’t bat down my ire at the executive editor. Really, the man had left me only one option: go to McGovern’s and get drunk enough to start making bad decisions.

* * *

McGovern’s was your basic, beloved dive bar, from the ancient laminate floor tiles all the way up to the prehistoric corkboard ceiling. As an Irish bar that somehow survived white flight, it was legendary in Newark generally and among Newark newspapermen in particular. Many a generation of our trade had made it their first (and often last) stop after work to soothe the edges of a hard day on deadline with a few (and often more than a few) adult elixirs.

Long before it was our hangout, the guys from the Newark Evening News-the afternoon paper that once dominated the state, before its demise in the early seventies-used to hang out there, too. And somehow I hoped that if and when the Eagle-Examiner was ever replaced by some other news-gathering media, which looked increasingly likely given the dire shape of newspaper advertising revenues, those future journalists (or content providers, or information aggregators, or whatever they’d call themselves) would gather at McGovern’s as well.

By the time I arrived, the tables at the far side of the bar were filled by a few pitchers of Coors Light-why do kids drink that panther piss? — and a handful of Eagle-Examiner interns. The only one I knew that well was Tommy Hernandez, who was now in his second year as an intern with us. Only twenty-three, Tommy was one of the best natural reporters we had, a guy who knew how to hit the streets and find a story. He was still technically an intern-it’s how we got away with continuing to underpay him-but he had been given a promotion recently and was now our second reporter on Newark City Hall, a great gig for someone his age.

Tommy was the only son of the world’s strictest Cuban immigrant parents and he still lived at home, which made it all the more amusing his folks didn’t have the slightest clue he’s gay as Elton John’s eyewear collection. They just thought he had a lot of male friends who dance well.

“There you are!” Tommy sang out when he saw me. “Someone was loooooking for you.”

“Oh, yeah, who’s that?” I said, sitting down and fumbling with a salt shaker so I could pretend I didn’t care who or what he was talking about.

“Oh, you know who,” Tommy said, then switched into his best Sweet Thang impersonation: “Oh, my goodness, don’t you think Carter is such a good writer? Isn’t he just amaaaazing? Isn’t he sweeeeet?”

“Oh, stop,” I said.

“Oh, I will. She won’t,” Tommy said. “That girl has a bad case of Carter Ross Fever.”

I turned to the other intern sitting with Tommy, a young Korean woman named Mi-Ryong Kim who, in our brief interactions, always acted like she was afraid of me.

“The problem, Mi-Ryong, is that Tommy thinks he’s cute when he exaggerates. And he’s not.”

Mi-Ryong giggled at me.

“She has a crush on yooouuuu,” Tommy taunted.

Ignoring Tommy, I kept talking to Mi-Ryong: “How much has he been drinking?” I asked. “He’s blitzed, right?”

She giggled some more.

“Sweet Thang wants to have your baaabies,” Tommy continued.

“Do you think we should get him a cab?” I said. “I mean, he’s so plastered he’s delusional.”

Mi-Ryong, though still giggling, was starting to look uncomfortable, so I turned to Tommy.

“I’m going to go get a beer now,” I said. “And if you don’t cut this out by the time I get back, I’m going to get some of the rougher guys in this bar to reprise Brokeback Mountain on you. And I’m not talking about the scene in the tent.”

I went to the taps, casting a fleeting look around to see if Sweet Thang was elsewhere in the bar. She wasn’t. I ordered a Yuengling and scanned to the left. No Sweet Thang. I got my beer, tossed down a fiver-more than enough for a drink and a tip at a place like McGovern’s-and looked to the right. Still no Sweet Thang.

I’m not sure why I cared. Shacking up with Sweet Thang qualified as a genuinely bad idea. On the Personal Destruction Scale, it ranked somewhere between riding a broken motorcycle in the rain and piloting one of those superlight airplanes that have to be assembled from a mail-order kit. I should have been thrilled that she wasn’t there, because it meant at least one of us came to our senses. And yet, being a typical guy, I still wanted to be wanted. An evening of having a lovely young creature like Sweet Thang extolling my many great features was just what the ol’ ego needed. I scanned the place one more time on my way back to the table, but no.

“You can stop looking for her,” Tommy said when I returned. “She isn’t here.”

Mi-Ryong had already shoved off, so I dropped the I-don’t-care act. There was clearly no fooling Tommy

“Where’d she go?” I asked.

“She got a phone call and all of a sudden she was in a hurry to leave,” Tommy said. “I’m guessing it was someone hotter than you. Jealous?”

“Hardly,” I said, taking a long sip on my beer.

“You should stay away from her,” Tommy said. “She’s bad news.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Gay intuition,” Tommy replied. “She just seems like she’d get a little stalkerish.”

“Right,” I said.

“Besides, Tina would cut your dick off,” he added.

“Yes, there’s that, too,” I conceded.

Tommy and I settled into a typical after-hours reporter conversation-basically talking about the various ways the business was dying and how the people running it were hastening the demise-for another beer and a half. Then Tommy, who had clubs to get to and boys to see, announced it was time to go, and I figured it was time for me to do the same.

Except, unlike Tommy, the only boy I was going to see was my cat, Deadline. He and I shared a small house with a tiny lawn in Bloomfield, one of those great northern New Jersey towns that lacks in neither population density nor attitude.

Deadline and I previously lived in Nutley, another well-lived-in New Jersey bedroom community known for its concentration of Italians and, not surprisingly, its phenomenal pizza. We enjoyed it and planned on staying for a while. Then a source of mine blew up our house-he and I had some artistic differences over my work-and Deadline and I decided we needed a change of scenery.

My Amherst friends urged me to join them in paying way too much to live in way too little space on that small island just on the other side of the Lincoln Tunnel. But I liked having a dandelion or two to pull and, besides, Deadline was scared of those big New York City rats. I had first looked for a place in Montclair, a town made trendy about fifteen or twenty years ago when a small enclave of artists and writers discovered it. Unfortunately, the stockbrokers heard it was trendy and mounted a hostile takeover, meaning a guy on a reporter’s salary could no longer dream of affording the real estate. So Bloomfield it was.

Deadline was asleep in my bed by the time I got home, so I tiptoed in, careful not to wake him. If he doesn’t get his twenty-two hours of shut-eye a day, he gets ornery. I read the new Michael Connelly on my nightstand until the other side of midnight, when I finally wrenched it out of my hands. I was just drifting off, or at least it felt that way, when suddenly my cell phone was ringing.

I looked at my clock. Six-fourteen A.M. What kind of sick, depraved, thoughtless person calls a reporter at 6:14 A.M.?

I looked at my cell phone. “Thang, Sweet,” it said.

“Hello?”

“It’s gone,” Sweet Thang sobbed. “My necklaces, my bracelet, my earrings, my jewelry box, it’s all gone.”

At first, Primo paid little attention to the ancillary service industries that coexisted alongside his. He fixed up houses. That was enough.

But after a few years, as he began doing the development side of the business by rote, he became increasingly aware of-and annoyed by-the people making money off his hard work: the real estate agents taking their six percent, straight off the top; the lawyers with their exorbitant hourly rates; the title searchers, appraisers, and home inspectors, each charging their ridiculous fees; the mortgage brokers with their commissions, which became even richer with the more exotic subprime loans.

Parasites, all of them. Primo did the work. Primo took the risk. Primo made the sacrifices. All so they could get fat?

No more, Primo decided. He was not going to let those untold thousands of dollars slip away with every house he built. So, much like the robber barons of the nineteenth century, who expanded their businesses vertically until they controlled every aspect of production, Primo began spreading his reach.

He opened a real estate agency and gave it all his listings. He lured some young lawyers away from their firms and paid the start-up costs for them to hang out their own shingle-in exchange, of course, for a healthy kickback on all the business he sent them. He founded a title search company, a home inspection agency, an appraisal business, a mortgage brokerage. He even opened his own pest control business, because state rules required a house be certified termite-free before a certificate of occupancy was issued.

Primo did it all. He was a complete, one-stop shop for home purchasing. His customers, who were eager to jump into the late 1990s/early 2000s real estate market and start making easy money, were thrilled he streamlined it for them. They happily shuffled from one link in Primo’s chain to the next, and Primo profited at every stop.

It made the whole system so simple to manipulate. After Primo fixed up some dilapidated dump, he’d recruit some greedy-yet-naive investor and put him through the system. Primo’s real estate agents would make the house seem like a steal-the myth of the old lady who lived there forty years and meticulously maintained it was a favorite. His appraisers would inflate the price using bogus comparables and a generous tape measure. His mortgage brokers were trained in the art of fudging a loan application, overstating the buyer’s wages and rental income, and then selling the buyer on some dreadful subprime loan with a sweetheart introductory rate that made it all seem affordable.

And then the lawyers would tie a neat bow around the whole package. Each house was rehabbed and sold by a different limited liability company, or LLC. Each service enterprise was fronted by a different LLC as well. Primo had so many different LLCs-all with different postal addresses, all with fictitious names as their corporate agent-it was sometimes hard just to come up with new names for them.

Each believed it was independent, thus avoiding any conflict-of-interest laws. Each was encouraged to find as much outside work as it could, adding to the air of their legitimacy. But each answered to only one man, and that man was Primo.