Eyes of the Innocent

CHAPTER 6

As I drove back toward the office, I could feel one of those wiggling, niggling suspicions trying to work itself free from deep underneath my skullbones. Except, of course, the moment I became aware of it, my conscious brain began doing a little dance all over it. Whatever small hint of genius may have been forthcoming was stomped back down, hopefully to resurface at a later time.

Clearly, it was something about Rhonda Byers. Had she been too cool? Or too melodramatic with the near-tears? Had she given away anything I hadn’t noticed?

Nothing came to me. And Kevin Raines wasn’t going to be any immediate help-his cell phone went straight through to voice mail.

“Sergeant, it’s your confidential informant. Give me a call when you have a moment,” I said, then left my number.

By the time I got back, it was six o’clock and there was some serious typing going on in the newsroom. Tommy looked like he was holding a staring contest with his computer screen. Tina had her shoes off and feet curled underneath her, a sure sign she was rewriting someone’s lede. Buster Hays was banging on his keyboard with his usual vigor-having been raised on a manual typewriter, he still hit the keys like he was making sure his letters stood out nice and crisp.

I had barely sat down at my desk when Sweet Thang slid up to me and sat in an empty chair across from me, smiling. Somehow, despite a long day, she still smelled fresh and soapy.

“Oh, my goodness, I had the most amazing afternoon,” she gushed. “And I’m actually talking about the part after I left you. I mean, the part before that was great, too. But then it got better. Well, I mean, not better better, but really good, you know? You won’t believe what I learned.”

This was the first time I had seen her since I read her Twitter post, with all its CR consumption and floorboard grinding. I wondered if she put it there in the hope I’d trip across it, because it would embolden me to make a move. Or maybe she just figured it was one little tweet, and since I wasn’t following her, I’d never see it.

Or maybe I should get this silly girl out of my head, especially when she was right in front of me, still babbling in my direction at speeds faster than the human ear was trained to perceive. I was already four or five paragraphs behind.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t paying attention. Could you start over again?”

She shook her head and rolled her eyes-like, what was my problem? — then went back to full speed ahead.

“I was SAY-ing, I couldn’t get a hold of Akilah’s sister. So I didn’t know what else to do and I didn’t want to bother you, because I bother you enough already, you know? So I tracked down the guy who sent us that e-mail instead.”

“Uh, what e-mail?”

“The concerned citizen e-mail. Didn’t you get a copy?”

“Oh, right,” I said. With everything else going on, I had just forgotten about it. “How’d you track him down? It was anonymous.”

“I thought it was pretty obvious,” she said.

“Sorry. Still not with you.”

“Chuck-sorry, concerned citizen-said something in his message like, ‘I know why you couldn’t find the mortgage.’ And I’m like, hel-LOOO! We never mentioned that we couldn’t find the mortgage in the story. There are only two people who knew that. There was that title searcher, but I’m sure he was too busy getting stoned to read the paper. And then there was that clerk guy. So I went and found him.”

“Oh,” I said, impressed. “I thought he was worried about losing his job. How did you get him to talk to you?”

“I just flirted with him,” she said, like it was the most obvious thing this side of making toast.

“Oh, right,” I said. “Flirting.”

“You don’t think that’s bad, do you?”

“No. Flirting is good.”

She flashed me a knowing smile.

“Anyhow, Chuck-his name is Chuck-was all nervous at first. He was like, ‘I can’t talk to you.’ And then I flirted with him a little more and he was like, ‘I meant I can’t talk to you here.’ ”

“Well done,” I said.

She smiled quickly. “Hold off on your compliments until the end. It gets better.”

“Sorry,” I said, but she was already going.

“So we agreed to meet outside the courthouse at four-I accept your apology, by the way-and take a walk. At first he was like, ‘I can’t tell you, it’s too deep, you can’t handle the truth, blah, blah, blah.’ So he was like, ‘You have to guess, and if you guess right I’ll tell you.’ I couldn’t guess it, but he told me anyway.”

“Why, more flirting?”

“No, actually we were sitting on a bench at that point so I kept crossing and uncrossing my legs.”

“You realize you’re pure evil,” I said, but couldn’t stop myself from grinning.

“Well, I thought about what my journalism professors would say about it. And they would probably tell me all the reasons I shouldn’t do it. And then I thought about what you would say about it. And I knew you would tell me all the reasons I should. So I thought about what would ultimately have the greatest public benefit and I decided you were right.”

“I am,” I assured her. “Just remember to use your powers for good.”

“I will, don’t worry. Anyhow, Chuck said that his boss came up to him this one time and told him to erase this mortgage from the computer. Chuck said he didn’t want to do it, but the boss told him if he didn’t do it, he’d just find someone else who would, so it was like he didn’t have a choice. Chuck thought the orders were coming from somewhere up high-someone with a lot of pull.”

I nodded.

“Anyhow,” she continued. “Chuck said he had sort of forgotten about it, but when I came along and couldn’t find a mortgage, he thought I was just being a ditz at first”-imagine that-“but then he looked into it and he realized it was the mortgage he had been told to erase. Ex-CEPT he didn’t totally erase it. He wiped it from the computer but kept a hard copy and put it in a folder in his house.”

“And so you accompanied him back to his house to get it?” I prompted.

“Well, he said he just moved, so he wasn’t quite sure where it was. But he said he’d look for it when he got home.”

“Wonderful,” I said. “So why did he think he was erasing it?”

“He said he didn’t know, but he got the sense it was political or something.”

Of course it was. If you’re Windy Byers, you’re probably quite keen to make sure no one discovers you’ve bought a house for your girlfriend. So you yank some strings in the clerk’s office and get the mortgage removed lest it fall into the hands of your political enemies.

Or, worse, into the possession of a nosy newspaper reporter who knows a document like that would allow him to take that juicy little tidbit-something that would otherwise fall into the category of nasty rumor-and put it in print.

* * *

Sweet Thang started bouncing up and down in her chair like a third grader who has been told she must wait five minutes before going to the bathroom.

“So what now?” she asked. “What now? What now?”

“Well, first, can I compliment you?”

She pretended to think for a moment. “Yes, you may.”

“Great work tracking down this guy.”

“Thank you,” she said, with a smile that would have graded flawless on the diamond clarity scale.

“Okay, onward. You still have that phone number for Akilah’s sister handy?”

“Yeah, right here,” she said, using it as an excuse to wheel her chair next to mine, allowing our knees to brush. The girl was a master at creating incidental contact.

“Bertie said it’s a home number, which turns out to be a nice break for us,” I said, turning to face my terminal. “It means we can do a reverse lookup and see where she lives.”

My computer screen was dark for some reason, so I pressed the power button. As the monitor warmed up and the image snapped into focus, I suddenly remembered why I turned it off in the first place. But, by that point, it was already too late. There on the screen, in brilliant 256-color, 1024-by-768 pixel resolution, was Sweet Thang’s Twitter page.

I glanced at her out of the corner of my eye to see if she had noticed, hoping I could click it away before she got a good look. But no, she was peering at it curiously, head tilted, like it was something she had seen before but couldn’t quite place.

Then I watched as recognition crashed across her face. And it wasn’t a small, gentle-lapping wave. It was one of those tsunamis that wipes an entire Indonesian fishing village off the map.

“Oh. My. Goodness,” she said.

Her blush started from the jawbone, then progressed upward, going from her cheeks all the way to the top of her forehead, filling every available inch of skin in glowing crimson.

“Yeah,” I said, not knowing what to say. “I, uh, sorry about that. I didn’t mean to, uh, you know, leave it on the screen like that.”

Sweet Thang was, for perhaps the first time in her life, stunned to silence.

“I was just sort of wasting time and one click led to another,” I explained. “I didn’t mean to pry. I just…”

I could tell she was rereading the post to check if it was as bad as she remembered. And, of course, it was probably worse.

“I didn’t realize…” she started, then stopped. “I thought you … I didn’t think … You’re not following me or…”

“It’s Twitter,” I said apologetically. “Anyone can read it, even if they’re not one of your followers. Facebook is the one where people need to have permission to see stuff you’ve written.”

“I know, but … I…”

“If it makes you feel better, I didn’t read any of the other ones,” I said.

She buried her face in her hands and moaned softly. “I’m soooo embarrassed,” she said into her palms.

“It’s not a big deal,” I insisted.

“It’s like one of those bad dreams where the entire school has read your diary,” she said.

I decided to skip the lecture about how you have to assume when you type something that it could be read by anyone-one of the great perils of modern Internet living-and instead just said, “Sorry.”

“I think I might die.”

She whirled around and walked away without saying another word. I sneaked a glance to my left and right to see if anyone might have noticed-an intern turning a shade just short of purple might tend to attract attention. Thankfully, it appeared to have been strictly for my benefit.

I returned my focus to the screen and clicked the X on the upper right corner of the window. This time, naturally, it went away immediately.

Then I got back to my reverse lookup. Tamikah’s number was unlisted. But that was hardly a deterrent. Few people are careful enough with their telephone numbers to keep them out of the hands of a reporter who knows what he’s doing. The LexisNexis database has millions of unlisted numbers. Even something as seemingly innocent as voting records is a great place to get numbers-no one thinks about it, but if you fill in the “phone number” blank on the registration form, you’ve just made your digits part of the public record.

So it took about thirty seconds to find where Tamikah-last name Dunwood-now resided. It was an address in South Orange, a street I vaguely recognized as being near Seton Hall University, wedged up against the Newark border.

And while perhaps that made it sound like the Newark girl hadn’t made it very far, that wasn’t the case. Now that East and West Berlin are unified, there are few starker borders in the world than the one between the New Jersey municipalities of South Orange and Newark. Literally, you can be driving through the hood, on a litter-strewn street lined with tenements and bodegas; then you blink, and you’re in suburbia, with neatly trimmed landscaping and seasonally appropriate lawn decoration. Drive maybe half a mile farther and you’re in a historic part of town, dotted with million-dollar houses and fancy imported cars.

Yet the two worlds almost never collide. It’s not about race-South Orange is actually thirty-five percent African-American. It’s about caste. The Newark-South Orange line might as well have a sign that says, “Now entering upper middle class.”

So Tamikah was now a long way from Baxter Terrace. I Googled her address, then clicked on the satellite view. I zoomed in as close as it would go and, I swear, I could see a plastic Santa in one of the neighbors’ yards.

Then I typed the address into our property-tax database. The house was owned by Ryan and Tamikah Dunwood. It was 2,250 square feet, four bedrooms, one and a half baths, set on a 50-by-150 lot, and assessed at a very nonprojectslike $549,500.

And it was soon going to be visited by at least one Eagle-Examiner reporter. Maybe two, if the other one ever recovered from a potentially terminal case of Twitter-induced mortification.

* * *

After a few more minutes of document snooping on Tamikah Dunwood revealed little more of use or interest, I was revisited by Sweet Thang, who returned from her brief sojourn looking refreshed, considerably less flushed, but chastened.

“Let’s not talk about it,” she said quickly.

“Fine with me,” I said, to her visible relief.

I knew, at some point, we would have to deal with the fallout from my accidental discovery. You didn’t just drop a bomb like that into the middle of an acquaintanceship-let’s not call it a relationship-and expect everything to magically reassemble itself as it had been before. There were now bits and pieces of emotional shrapnel all over the place. Cleaning up the mess could take a while.

Still, for the time being, it seemed only pragmatic to ignore the eight-hundred-pound tweet in the room.

“So, moving on,” I said. “It turns out our friend Tamikah lives in South Orange. Would you like to pay her a visit?”

“Does South Orange mean we can take Walter this time?”

“Yes,” I said. “South Orange is definitely a more Walter-friendly kind of atmosphere.”

“I’ll grab my keys.”

“Meet you out front.”

Two minutes later, we were waiting for the elevator, staring at the numbers as they ticked toward our floor, stewing in an uncomfortable conversation lag where neither of us knew what to say. It was awkward, but I discovered there were benefits to having Sweet Thang in sheepish mode: it was much quieter.

We rode down the elevator. In silence. We walked out to the car. In silence. And we made it to South Orange with only the smallest of small talk-a few passing comments about traffic and weather.

We pulled up outside the house, which appeared to be your basic side-hall colonial with yellow clapboard siding and neatly clipped shrubbery. The driveway was short and led to a detached two-car garage. I could see a hint of a swing set in the backyard.

I disembarked from Walter’s passenger door. With Sweet Thang trailing, I walked a few paces on a concrete pathway, then up four steps to a small front porch. I rang the doorbell.

It was answered by, of all things, a white guy. He wore the unofficial business-casual uniform of the greater New York metropolitan area: black shoes, dark charcoal gray pants, light blue button-down shirt.

I instantly wondered how he and Tamikah met. I was even more curious how the rest of the Dunwoods felt the first time Ryan brought her over for dinner.

“Hi! Can I help you?” he asked. He said it to me but wasn’t looking at me-he was too busy giving Sweet Thang a thorough up-and-down.

“Hi, we were hoping to talk to Tamikah Dunwood,” I said.

He turned and shouted, “Tammy, honey, there are some people at the door for you.”

Oh. So she was Tammy now. I guess she left Tamikah back in the projects.

The guy turned his attention back toward Sweet Thang, his eyes shifting busily back and forth between her legs and torso. Then a little girl who was maybe four or five ran up and grabbed his thigh. She was unmistakably mixed race, with the light chocolate skin of a black girl but the straight brown hair of a white one.

“Daddy, I’m hungry,” she said earnestly.

“I know you are, sweetie, so why don’t you eat your chicken?”

“But I’m hungry for brownies.”

“After you eat your chicken, then you can have brownies,” he said, ever the model of fatherly patience.

He patted her head as she ran away, gave a “what can you do?” shrug, then cleared out of the way as his wife came to the door.

“Hi, how are you?” said Tammy/Tamikah in a tone that was friendly but not overly so.

Instant first impression? It was Clair Huxtable from The Cosby Show. And no, I’m not the kind of white person who thinks any African-American they meet looks like a black celebrity (because, as the whispered saying goes, “they all look alike”). No, Tammy Dunwood really did look like Clair Huxtable.

She certainly didn’t look like Akilah. I know they had different fathers, but there wasn’t even the slightest resemblance from their shared mother. Tammy was at least half a head taller, and while certainly not overweight, she was more rounded, without all Akilah’s sharp angles. Her hair, also straight-though perhaps straightened-was just below her shoulders.

She was dressed like she had spent her day in an office cubicle somewhere on the other side of the Hudson River.

“My name is Carter Ross; this is Lauren McMillan. We’re reporters with the Eagle-Examiner.”

I waited for her to have that flash of recognition, like she knew why we were here. But it wasn’t forthcoming.

“Okay?” she said, drawing out the y until it sounded like she was asking a question.

“We’re working on a story about Akilah,” I said.

And that’s when I got the reaction, the one that seemed to ask, Oh, Christ, what is it this time? Her face went ashen and her voice dropped an octave.

“I have two young children and I don’t want them to hear this,” she said in a low voice. “Can we please talk outside?”

* * *

She didn’t wait for an answer, just closed the door behind her and folded her arms, mostly for warmth. The temperature was in the thirties and she wore nothing beyond a thin silk sweater over her blouse.

“What is it?” Tammy asked.

“Have you seen the stories about her in the paper?” I asked.

“I’m sorry. We get the New York Times. What stories?”

Sweet Thang and I shot each other looks. Tammy had no idea what had happened to her two nephews. It seemed impossible: it was in our paper, it was on the local news; even if she did not consume any of those media sources, someone she knew did. Even if her mother hadn’t called her-and, apparently, she hadn’t-wouldn’t her neighbors or coworkers have said something? Then I remembered there was no way for an outsider to know that Tammy Dunwood from South Orange was in any way related to Akilah Harris from Newark.

Especially if Tammy never mentioned she had a little sister. Or that her real name is Tamikah. Or that she grew up in the hood.

I considered the best way to break the awful news about her nephews but concluded there was no good way. So I dumped it on her. I dumped it like the big steaming, stinking load it was.

“There was a fire at your sister’s house Sunday night,” I began. “Your sister wasn’t home, but your nephews were.”

Tammy’s hand flew to her mouth, but an “Ohgod” escaped before it got there.

“I’m sorry to say they didn’t make it out,” I said as Tammy’s eyes went misty. “We spent some time with Akilah the morning after the fire, and she told us she was an orphan with no family and had no choice but to leave the children at home alone because she couldn’t find child care.”

“Oh, Akilah,” Tammy moaned softly.

“We didn’t know she was making up parts of the story, so my partner here took pity on her and let your sister spend the night,” I said, gesturing to Sweet Thang as I talked about her. “But Akilah ended up running off in the middle of the night with Lauren’s jewelry.

“Then we located your mother, who obviously confirmed Akilah wasn’t an orphan,” I continued. “Your mom told us about Akilah’s affair with Windy Byers and about the house he bought for her. She said Akilah might still be in contact with you and gave us your number. We were hoping you could fill in some blanks for us or possibly even help us locate Akilah.”

The dumping complete, I let Tammy have a moment to sift through it. I glanced over at Sweet Thang, only to become aware she was shooting me a dirty look. I cocked my head quizzically, which only made the look dirtier.

And then I got it: maybe, possibly, I had been a little brusque. You don’t just waltz into someone’s otherwise fine life, introduce yourself, and then add, oh, by the way, we heard your sister is a big sloppy mess and, oh yeah, you’ve also got two fewer nephews to shop for at Chrismastime.

Tammy was reeling from the news, more in shock than anything.

“I … I’m not sure, I … I don’t know…” Tammy began, and I sensed our time on her porch was about to become quite short. But before Tammy could fully get the sentence out of her mouth, Sweet Thang leaped to my rescue.

“I’m so sorry you had to hear it like this,” she said, shooting me one more disgusted glance. “We thought you already knew. You must be just devastated right now.”

Tammy turned her attention to Sweet Thang.

“You … you let … you let my sister stay with you last night?”

Sweet Thang nodded.

“It wasn’t a big deal,” she said. “He shouldn’t have told you.”

“No, it’s just I…”

Tammy closed her eyes, brought her hands to her temples, and began massaging them. There was some kind of unseen battle going on between her ears. I didn’t know what exactly it was about. But I could tell she wasn’t winning.

Finally, she looked up at us.

“The last time my sister and I spoke-this was a week or two ago-she told me she was in danger of losing the house and asked me if she and her boys could come stay with us. And I told her no. Can you believe that? A perfect stranger”-Tammy waved toward Sweet Thang-“was willing to take her in, but her own sister wasn’t.”

Sweet Thang started rationalizing for her. “In some ways it’s simpler for a stranger. You must have a lot of history with her I don’t have.”

“Oh, we’ve got history,” Tammy said. “I don’t even want to start talking about that. You’ll be bored to tears, but I’ll be the one crying.”

“It’s not easy with family,” Sweet Thang said. “Sometimes you’re harder on your own family than you are on a stranger. It’s natural. We judge the people we love a lot harsher.”

“No, that’s not it. You know what it is? And, I’m sorry, I don’t even know you, but I’m just going to tell you this. What did you say your name was? Laura?”

“Lauren, yes.”

“Lauren, here’s how it is when you grow up where I did and then you leave. People back home-my family, everyone-think that because I went to college and live out here now, I must be living in some rich la-la land. Well, you know what? This isn’t Shangri-la. It’s South Orange. My husband and I have two children and we’re struggling to make ends meet just like they do back home, we’re just doing it in a place that doesn’t smell like piss.

“But anytime someone gets in trouble, it’s always, ‘Go to Tamikah, talk to Tamikah, she’s got money, she’ll help you out.’ But I don’t. And I can’t. I’d have half of Baxter Terrace sleeping in my basement if I didn’t draw that boundary. And even though I know I need to draw it, I still feel guilty.”

“But you’ve got your own family to worry about,” Sweet Thang countered. “You have to do what’s right for them. I understand that completely.”

“I bet you understand a lot right now. My sister stole your jewelry. So, congratulations, you’re part of the club now.”

“It’s nothing, really,” Sweet Thang said. “Honestly.”

“I still feel terrible about that and … you know what? It’s cold out here. Would you like to come inside?”

Sweet Thang smiled pleasantly. In less time than it had taken me to completely screw up this interview, she had completely unscrewed it. Like I said, the girl had a gift.

“That would be delightful,” she said.

* * *

Tammy walked inside ahead of us, asked us to sit in the living room, then went into the kitchen for some quick negotiations with Ryan the Devoted Husband with the Wandering Eyes. Within moments, there were excited noises and suddenly two little girls were scrambling into their jackets, rushing past us out the front door. Dad trailed close behind.

“Cold Stone! Cold Stone!” the younger one sang as she ran out into the driveway for what was obviously an impromptu trip to a nearby Cold Stone Creamery.

“Bribery,” Tammy explained as she reentered the living room. “I just wanted us to be able to talk without those little ears around. They don’t know about any of this sort of stuff and I want to keep it that way.”

“How old are they?” Sweet Thang asked.

“Emma is four and Gracie is six.”

Which meant they were the same ages as Alonzo and Antoine. They were cousins who lived perhaps three miles apart. Yet their lives could scarcely have been more different.

“They’re adorable,” Sweet Thang said.

“They’re also a handful, but thank you,” Tammy said, sitting down and smoothing her pants. “So I think I’ve figured out why you’re here. It’s Windy Byers, isn’t it? I heard about him. You think Akilah has something to do with his disappearance?”

“We’re not sure,” I said honestly.

“You don’t think she kidnapped him or something, do you?”

“No, nothing like that,” I said. “If anything-and this is just a hunch at this point-I think Windy’s wife may be involved. It’s possible she learned about the affair and went out for revenge, burning down Akilah’s house and having her husband killed.”

Tammy put on a confused face.

“But why would she do that now? She’s known about the affair for years.”

“She has?” I asked. Now it was my turn to be confused.

“Oh, sure. I don’t want to say she condoned it. But Akilah made it sound like she knew about it and was more or less okay with it. Or maybe resigned to it is a better way to say it.”

“Huh,” I added, ever the eloquent speaker.

“But, in any event, I don’t even think it matters anymore. They broke up. Or, I should say, Akilah broke it off with Windy. So why would Mrs. Byers go after Akilah now?”

Why, indeed.

I stared stupidly around the Dunwoods’ living room for a moment, as if the answers were somehow tucked neatly behind their Pottery Barn furniture. If Windy and Akilah weren’t an item anymore, that might suggest these two events-a bonfire on Littleton Avenue and a kidnapping on Fairmount Avenue-were not connected after all. But if that was the case, why was Akilah running around Newark saying everyone was after her?

“I’m still trying to sort all this out, and I know you are, too,” I said. “So do you mind if we start at the beginning?”

“Not at all.”

“Okay, your mother told us Akilah and Windy met about six or seven years ago, is that right?”

Tammy looked up at the ceiling for a moment. “That sounds about right,” she said.

“And, I’m sorry, but I have to ask: what exactly would bring a fifty-something-year-old councilman and a teenaged girl from the projects together anyway?”

“I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve asked myself that same question,” she said. “I think for her it was the power-and the money, of course. I mean, he got her a job. He gave her nice things. She called him ‘Boo’ or some ridiculous pet name like that. She felt special that someone so important would sneak around to be with her. And for him? Who knows? I mean, you know that family comes from the projects, too, right?”

“Really?”

“Oh, yeah. The Byerses and Baxter Terrace go way, way back. Both the boys were raised there. I think their mom, she’s dead now, but she kept living there right to the end. So I think, I don’t know, this is just me guessing here, but for people like us-people who made it out of the projects-there’s a lot of different ways to deal with it. Me? I got out and stayed out and I don’t particularly like to go back.

“But for some people-maybe it’s just guys, I don’t know-it’s like a point of pride. They still want to keep coming back around the old neighborhood. They say it’s to keep it real, but I think they just want to show off. And I think some of them also keep a taste for project girls. Windy, he married up-I think Mrs. Byers’s daddy was a doctor or something-but the word around Baxter Terrace was that he always liked to have a girl who was a little more down home that he could visit. So there he is, the big shot, coming back to Baxter Terrace. And there she is, the pretty young girl. It happens.”

And Windy was far from the first politician in our nation’s history to have it happen to him.

“So that’s how it started. How did it end?” I asked.

“Well, he cut her off,” Tammy said. “She broke up with him after he told her he wasn’t going to pay for that house anymore.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if he was suddenly having money problems or if his wife wasn’t letting him do it anymore or what. But one day he just came over and said, ‘You have to leave.’ ”

“Even after he had two children with her?” Sweet Thang interjected.

Tammy looked at Sweet Thang for a long moment, then cast her eyes downward and said softly, “They weren’t his.”

Oh.

“She told everyone they were his. I think she even tried to convince herself they were his. She liked the idea of the boys having a councilman for a father. But even before they split up, I started making noise about how she should go after him for child support. Make it legal, you know? She said she didn’t want the fuss, but I was going to hire a lawyer. Then she finally told me they’d never pass the paternity test. I guess Windy wasn’t always around, so there were other men. Please don’t tell my mother. She’s ashamed enough as it is.”

“We won’t say anything,” Sweet Thang said.

Right. Mum’s the word. We may end up printing it in a newspaper and distributing several hundred thousand copies of it. But we won’t tell Mom.

“So Windy kicks her out,” I said. “Then what?”

“Well, she came to me asking if she could stay with Ryan and me, and we-I–I just couldn’t. She was so mad. And she was saying how she had no place else to go. I told her she could get an apartment on her salary at the hospital, but she said there was no way she was moving back into some cold-water flat. When she left here, she was talking about how she was going to pay the mortgage herself.”

Tammy shook her head, like she was still in disbelief.

“I told her she wasn’t making nearly enough at the hospital,” Tammy finished. “But she didn’t want to hear it. She said she’d find a way.”

“That must be where the second-shift job came in,” I said. “She told us she was working at a pallet company, cleaning floors or something.”

“And that’s why she wasn’t home for those little boys when that fire started,” Tammy said. “So if I had just”-Tammy started losing her composure-“if I … I…”

She couldn’t finish her sentence. The guilty tears dripped down both sides of her face. Sweet Thang dove in to console her.

Meanwhile, I was starting to realize much of what we heard from Akilah-which I previously dismissed as one long fabrication-was really just a series of small twists on the truth. She wasn’t an orphan in the real sense of the word, but she was estranged from her mother and cut off from her sister. And she was struggling under the weight of a pretty hefty mortgage after all.

At the same time, my casting of Rhonda Byers as the vengeful wife was starting to look rather implausible. If Rhonda was of the mind-set to go after Akilah, she would have done it years ago-not now, when the affair was over. And if that was the case, Rhonda probably had nothing to do with her husband’s disappearance, either.

Then that thing that had been trying to wiggle and niggle its way out of my brain finally surfaced. It was that big, obvious blood smear. If Rhonda Byers was trying to hide a crime, wouldn’t she have been smart enough to clean it up before the police arrived?

So, to review, I had a missing councilman who threw around his weight to hide the existence of a now-torched love shack. And the former occupant of that love shack, the councilman’s secret girlfriend, was convinced the perpetrator of those crimes was now after her.

And I still didn’t have the slightest idea what was really going on.

* * *

It took a while to mop up the tears, meet the kids when they got back from ice cream, then say our good-byes. By the time we returned to Walter, it was starting to spit rain at us. It was also far later than I thought.

“Dammit,” I said, looking at Walter’s clock, which read 8:04.

“What is it?” Sweet Thang said.

“Damn, damn, damn,” I replied.

“What’s happening?”

“I, uh, I’m going to be late for something,” I answered.

“Something important?”

I looked over at Sweet Thang, with her bouncy blond curls and cute button nose, and I just couldn’t bring myself to explain that her tasty CR had a date with the city editor. I told myself it was because I didn’t want to break her heart. But if I was being more honest, it’s because I was a typical, despicable guy, and even though I knew I should have absolutely nothing to do with Sweet Thang, I still wanted to keep my options open.

“It’s, uh, just a dinner with a friend,” I said.

Except it wasn’t just dinner with a friend. It was a dinner at a four-star restaurant with a dress code. I looked down at myself. I was presentable, with my white shirt and my half-Windsor knotted tie. But I didn’t have a jacket. I needed a jacket.

I did some math as Sweet Thang pulled away from Tammy’s house and headed back toward Newark. It was going to take at least fifteen minutes to get back to Newark. From there, it was another fifteen minutes back to Bloomfield to grab a jacket out of my closet. It would take at least thirty minutes to get from there to Hoboken. At that point it would be after nine, even if I could find parking quickly. There was just no way I could be more than half an hour late for a date-at least not with a woman like Tina.

Okay, different plan: Bloomfield was ten minutes away. If I had Sweet Thang stop off there, I could run in and pick up my jacket. Then it would be fifteen minutes to Newark to get my car and only another fifteen minutes to Hoboken, if I got cute with the speed limit and decided to make some red lights optional. That would get me there only about fifteen minutes late. Anyone would forgive fifteen minutes. Hell, that was just being fashionable.

“Actually, would you mind stopping at my house in Bloomfield on the way back?” I said, as the rain picked up in intensity. “I’m a little pressed for time and I need to grab something.”

“No problem!” she said enthusiastically.

“Great,” I said. “Just get on the parkway and I’ll guide you from there.”

As Sweet Thang headed for the Garden State Parkway, I pulled out my phone and texted Tina: “Unavoidably detained. Running late but on the way. Wait for me.”

I shoved my phone back in my pocket, then settled into Walter’s passenger side seat. Sweet Thang had the radio on and was lightly singing along to some vapid pop song.

“So, Tammy seemed really nice,” Sweet Thang said between verses. “I just felt so badly for her because I know what it’s like to…”

She kept yammering on, but I wasn’t paying much attention. I threw in an “uh-huh” and “oh” every once in a while to at least pretend I was paying attention. Mostly, I was focused on the green Ford Windstar in front of me, which was inching along the entrance ramp to the parkway at precisely the same speed as the red Honda Civic in front of it, which was creeping like the white Mitsubishi Gallant farther up, and so on.

What was taking so long? Sure, it was raining-pretty hard now, actually-but why wasn’t the ramp moving? Where were all these people going anyway and how could it possibly be more important than my potential booty call with the ravishingly hot Tina?

Then, in the distance, I got a glimpse of the parkway itself. And there it was, 8:12 at night, and all four of its northbound lanes were a sea of red brake lights reflecting on puddles of water. The only thing moving was the puddles as more rain fell on them.

It took another six minutes just to get on the road, and I watched despairingly as the number on Walter’s clock grew larger. Sweet Thang was jabbering about something now-her recent trip to Turkey? The turkey sandwich she ate for lunch? I definitely heard the word “turkey” thrown in-and I kept trying to recalculate my various ETAs until they stopped having any meaning.

Then, at 8:31, I got a text from Tina: “UR late.”

I immediately fired back: “Stuck in traffic.”

Less than a minute passed before I received: “Not my fault. U close?”

I winced and tapped out: “Not really. Very sorry.”

This time it took a little longer to get: “Pulling waiter into supply closet now. Good night.”

I quickly texted: “Rain check?”

Her reply: “You suck.”

I sighed, buried my phone back in my pocket, and stared out at the brake lights of a disco-era Oldsmobile Cutlass.

“Something wrong?” Sweet Thang asked.

“Yeah, my friend had to cancel dinner,” I said. “I was supposed to be there”-I looked at the clock-“four minutes ago.”

“So? Won’t your friend wait for you?”

“I guess not.”

“That’s not a very good friend,” Sweet Thang said definitively.

And maybe it was the way Sweet Thang said it-like it was one of life’s fundamental truths-but the more I thought about it, I decided she was right. Who cancels on someone when they’re four minutes late? What kind of friend is that?

It’s not really a friend. It’s a control freak of a woman who is playing games and messing with a guy’s head. And who needs that? Not me. Not anymore. No, I needed something simpler in my life.

I reclined a bit in my seat, no longer stressed about traffic or worried about Tina’s wrath. Walter’s heater was working with quiet efficiency, and I savored the warmth of the car and the smell of the leather seats. I glanced over at Sweet Thang, who was again singing along to the radio, unbothered by the nasty weather, the long day, or any of the small inconveniences of life. She was just happy. And wasn’t it pleasant to be with someone who was happy?

“So it looks like I’m free for dinner,” I said. “What about you? You hungry?”

* * *

We decided that on such an inclement night, dining in was better than going out. And since my place was closer than her place-and we were headed in that direction anyway-we chose my place. Shortly after reaching that conclusion, the parkway started moving again, as if the Traffic Gods themselves wanted us to make good time.

My house is what Realtors would call “cozy,” but only because “so small you can vacuum the entire thing without having to change plugs” doesn’t fit as well on a multiple-listing service entry. But I liked it just fine. After all, it was just me and Deadline. And Deadline didn’t like to travel too far for the litter box.

As a modern bachelor, I shop on an as-needed basis and keep nothing beyond the bare essentials in my refrigerator: beer, processed cheese, salsa, and, possibly, milk (for morning cereal). Anything else will grow a beard and be applying for credit cards by the time I get around to throwing it out.

My freezer is a different story. The freezer, I have discovered, is the key for the on-the-go single guy such as myself, because you can keep things in there for months and not have to worry about it looking like a breeding ground for penicillin. Meats. Sauces. Side dishes. Entrees. They’re all in there, all premade. And they’re all frozen while still fresh. That’s the mistake most people make with their freezers. If you toss in leftovers because you know they’re about to turn, a couple months in the deep freeze is not going to make them perk up. You have to put some love in your freezer if you expect it to love you back.

After we dashed inside, dodging raindrops all the way, I did a quick freezer raid and-rejecting options that would require some assembly-came away with sausage lasagna and half a baguette. I tossed them both in the oven, lit some candles (another modern bachelor must-have), and opened a bottle of red wine.

Sweet Thang was checking out my living room, which also doubled as my family room, sitting room, great room, and TV room. She cooed at Deadline, who was pressing himself against her leg, in something near rapture. I’ve heard of people judging new acquaintances based on how their pets respond to them-because, after all, if Fluffy likes you, you must be okay.

That wouldn’t work with Deadline. He accepts affection indiscriminate of the source. A masked, knife-wielding assailant could break into my home and hack me into a dozen pieces as I slept. But if he stopped to rub Deadline behind his left ear on the way out, Deadline would be purring so loudly you’d think someone started a lawnmower in the next room.

“Your cat is soooo cute,” Sweet Thang said. “What’s his name?”

“Deadline,” I called out as I puttered around, getting things just right.

I can’t say I was actually trying to seduce Sweet Thang or was even cognizant of how my actions might be construed. At a certain point in time, when you’ve been dating long enough, some gestures just become automatic. Like the candles. Or the iPod playlist with just the right music (my rule: no Barry White. It looks like you’re trying too hard). Or remembering to bump up the thermostat a few degrees. It becomes like a dance you know so well you can just lose yourself in the song and let your body react to the rhythm. Especially once the wine starts working.

So I wasn’t considering the ramifications when, after dinner, I invited Sweet Thang onto the couch with another glass of wine. And I wasn’t thinking when I sat within arm’s length of her and we talked about old relationships and the wisdom we gained from how they’d gone wrong. And I wasn’t paying attention as I started absentmindedly tracing the outline of her cheek with my hand as she spoke of a particularly heartrending breakup.

But the next thing I knew, we were kissing. And sometime after that, her dress became a floor decoration. More garments soon followed it there. The breathing got urgent. The blood got pumping.

And then, just when things were about to get interesting, I heard five words that drained all the blood out of me: “I’ve never done this before.”

She what?!?

I pulled away abruptly.

“What do you mean?” I said. “You don’t mean you’re a…”

I couldn’t even spit out the word-“virgin”-because it was so thoroughly inconceivable. Sweet Thang? A virgin? What about all the dirty talk about floorboards and whatnot? The ability to flirt information out of people like a hot double agent? The light brushes with the hand that made my arm hair stand straight?

For that matter, how was it possible a body like hers had gone through high school and college without some guy being clever enough to put it to the use nature intended?

But there she was, nodding at me earnestly.

“It’s not like I ever planned it this way,” she explained. “It just sort of never happened. I didn’t want to be the girl who hooked up at prom. And I didn’t want to be the girl who gave it up for some frat boy after a mixer. And I didn’t want to have some bar hookup with a guy who was going to give me a fake phone number. And, I don’t know. It’s not a big deal.”

But I knew better. No matter what she said, it was a Very Big Deal. I’m not saying Sweet Thang needed to be a blushing virgin on her wedding night. But I was just old-fashioned enough to think her first time ought to be a little more special than re-heated lasagna on a rainy Tuesday night in February.

I had no business being her first. I was attracted to her physically, but I didn’t really like her in that way, and I had finally reached a maturity level in my life where I knew the difference.

Besides, at a certain point, a guy gets too old for deflowering virgins. I just didn’t have the energy to deal with the drama of the newly plucked, the guilty phone calls to Mother, the recriminations when the relationship went sour.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought you were…”

Don’t say “more experienced.” Don’t say “well traveled.” Don’t say anything.

“It just wouldn’t be right,” I finished.

I half expected her to convince me it was-she probably wouldn’t have to try that hard-but I think she realized it wasn’t right, either. So we began the awkward task of disentangling our mostly naked bodies, collecting the various pieces of clothing strewn about the room, and assigning them to the proper owner.

“I’m going to go,” she said after she was dressed, going up on her tiptoes to kiss me on the cheek. “Thanks for being a gentleman.”

She let herself out. Deadline walked over to me and brushed himself against my leg.

“Come on, cat,” I said. “It looks like there’s going to be plenty of room in the bed tonight.”

* * *

At risk of sounding like a spokesman for the Republican Party’s sex education platform, I will say this on the subject of intercourse and the morning after: for all the times I’ve regretted having sex with someone, I’ve never once regretted not having it. As I woke up the next morning, I realized the previous evening had been another example to prove the rule. Had I sullied virtuous young Sweet Thang, I’m sure I would have felt like Carter the Conqueror in the moment. But I would have inevitably felt like a scallywag by the next dawn.

Instead, as my eyes fluttered open and I briefly replayed the previous night’s adventure, I felt good. Honorable. Noble, even. As I showered, dressed, and poured myself a bowl of Apple Cinnamon Cheerios, I felt even better. Not even the low cloud cover and the threat of more 34-degree rain could wreck my mood.

No, only one thing could do that. And it came from my cell phone.

“Duh duh duh duuuuuuuuhhh.”

Beethoven’s Fifth. Sal Szanto. I put down my spoon.

“Good morning,” I said.

“For you it is maybe,” Szanto said. “Windy Byers turned up.”

“Really? Is he talking?”

“I doubt it. He’s dead.”

Usually, the news of another human being’s demise elicits some reaction in me, even when I barely know the deceased, as was the case here. But a brief search of my emotional state revealed very little feeling for Windy Byers, one way or another. I never thought he was a particularly good guy, and nothing I’d learned over the past three days improved my estimation of him. His death did not register as any great loss to the city, state, or nation, nor as any great shock.

“Where’d they find him?” I asked.

Szanto rattled off an address on Avenue P in Newark, a place in a vast industrial maze in the East Ward, not far from Newark Airport.

“What was he doing there?”

“Not breathing, apparently.”

“Come on, you know what I mean.”

“At this point, you know everything I know,” Szanto said. “We just got a tip on this. Get your ass out there.”

He didn’t have to tell me time was of the essence. We had tipsters, but so did everyone else. As the home team, we still had a little bit of an advantage on the media horde that was about to descend on Newark. But it wouldn’t last long. I had to move. Now.

I tossed out my Cheerios, grabbed a Pop-Tart, and dashed out the door … only to remember my car was still in the parking lot at the Eagle-Examiner.

“Crap,” I said to my empty garage.

I briefly took stock of my situation, which was admittedly dire. I could call a cab, but that could take half an hour or more-Bloomfield was just suburban enough that you couldn’t run out to the street and hail one. I could call a friend, but that wasn’t guaranteed to be any faster. I could steal a car, but … oh, right, I wouldn’t know how to steal a car if my collection of pleated pants depended on it.

Suddenly, the solution came to me in the form of that ancient-but-still-running commercial that ends, “Enterprise, we’ll pick you up.” In my head, I could summon the ridiculous image of a rental car gift-wrapped in brown paper, motoring toward someone’s house. It always made me wonder: with brown paper covering everything but the windshield, how did the driver get into the car in the first place? And wouldn’t it be a little dangerous to drive?

But I didn’t have time to ponder such weighty issues. I dashed inside and quickly entered into negotiations with my local Enterprise franchise. I stressed to the lady on the phone that transaction speed-not make, model, or the presence of an onboard navigation system-was my primary concern. She nicely dispatched a driver who arrived in a car that, much to my relief, came without packaging. Within fifteen minutes, I was on my way to Avenue P.

Despite my ambivalence on the subject, I had been provided with a nav system anyway. So while I was reasonably certain I knew the way to Avenue P-I had done a piece about illegal drag racing there a few years back-I tapped in the address just to see if the computer knew a quicker way.

Soon, an alluring female voice was telling me my destination was, of all things, an Enterprise rental car location. It must have been an off-site facility of some sort, spillover from Newark Airport.

As Nancy-I decided to call my nav system Nancy-guided me ever closer to my destination, I began to suspect our hot tip had not, as Szanto might have hoped, bought us time over the competition. Not when I could hear news helicopters hovering overhead.

On the ground was more bedlam. Avenue P was a long, straight stretch of road with only two outside access points, at the top and bottom-which is why the drag racers loved it. From atop a highway ramp, I could already see an armada of news vans had created a small media city at the south end, where the police had erected a barricade that could stop a tank brigade. Certainly, I could join them … if I felt like spending my entire day in the cold to learn nothing more than what I could have gotten staying in bed and watching local news.

Ignoring Nancy’s advice, which would have led me straight into the gaping maw of that information oblivion, I took an end run around to the north side, snaking through the marshland past an abandoned movie theater and a variety of small warehouses and scrap yards. I was pretty confident the boys from the networks wouldn’t know about this way. Homefield at least had some advantage.

At the top of Avenue P there was a much smaller police presence-just a single patrol car and two officers who looked like they didn’t particularly want to be standing outside on a raw February morning.

“Hey,” I said, rolling down my window as one of them motioned me to halt. “What’s going on?”

“Police investigation,” the officer said.

“Oh,” I said. “I’m just returning my rental car.”

“How’d you end up over here? You get lost or something?”

“Nancy told me to go this way.”

“Who’s Nancy?”

“My nav system,” I said. “From the sound of her voice, she’s pretty hot.”

The guy stared at me like I had been given an extra helping of idiot at birth, which is pretty much the effect I was going for. He stepped away from my car for a moment, turned his back, and got on his radio. As an ethical reporter for a legitimate news-gathering agency, I cannot misrepresent myself in order to gain information or access to something. If the cop asks me whether I’m a reporter, it’s pretty much game over.

But if he doesn’t ask, I don’t exactly have to go volunteering the information.

He turned around and leaned on my window.

“Can I see your rental agreement?” he asked.

“Sure!” I said brightly, and reached for the packet that was still sitting on the passenger seat next to me. He took a cursory glance at the paperwork, handed it back to me, and waved me through without a word.

Primo didn’t wrestle much with the decision to kill Councilman Wendell A. Byers. It was just something that, when a certain set of facts presented themselves, became the only course of action.

It began with an argument about a silly house. Primo knew he never should have sold Byers that house, knew it would complicate a business relationship that was already tricky enough. Byers probably should have known better, too. But, ultimately, each man had his weakness. For Primo, it was greed-one more customer to buy one more house. For Byers, it was lust-he liked the idea of having a house for his latest piece of ass. Primo never understood it, but it somehow made Byers feel important.

So the deal was struck. Then it went bad. And, naturally, Byers couldn’t see it was his own fault. He blamed Primo, who pointed out Byers should have known what he was getting into. That’s when Byers started getting belligerent. And once he started uttering those threats-“I’ll cut you off … I’ll tell everyone on the council you’re a bad actor … no more land for you … you’re finished in this town”-Primo knew he had to act. He had worked too hard to get where he was to have this bozo councilman wreck everything.

It would mean finding a new councilman to bribe, yes. But there were nine of them. Surely one of them would be amenable-perhaps even Byers’s replacement.

So, no, the decision wasn’t hard. Killing Byers and getting away with it? That was the difficult part. Primo knew the police would investigate a dead councilman with great vigor. He had to make sure none of the suspicion would land on his doorstep.

At least officially, there was no relationship between the two men. Primo had always been careful to ensure there was no paper trail that could tie them together. Any investigator looking for one would only bump into Primo’s seemingly unconnected archipelago of LLCs, none of which led directly to the man himself, and to campaign contributions that would have appeared to come from all over. Primo used aliases for everything. Even Byers didn’t know Primo’s legal name.

The real danger, Primo knew, was Byers’s penchant for blabbery. The man was a human leak, incapable of keeping his mouth shut. What if he told someone about his arrangement with Primo? What if there was something in Byers’s personal files? What if he’d told his little whore everything during their pillow talk? It could get messy.

Primo had to make sure there were no loose ends.