Faces of the Gone

CHAPTER 4

I picked up one of the dime bags and examined the picture on it more closely. It was an eagle, sort of like the one on the back of a quarter, except instead of clutching arrows, this one had a syringe in its talons-a national symbol for junkies.

Then I started combing through the stash box, staring at its contents until suddenly it became obvious what Wanda had been doing: the empty bags, the razor, the baking soda, the scale. Wanda had been running her own cutting operation. It involved opening The Stuff bags, diluting it with the baking soda, then repackaging it in the unstamped bags. It was a quick way to augment supply.

The Stuff was obviously the top-of-the-line name-brand product that she sold to her best customers. The blanks were like the generic brand that she sold to everyone else. On an impulse, I grabbed four of the bags-two of The Stuff and two of the generic-and dropped them in my pocket. I briefly debated the ethics of doing so, since I was sort of tampering with evidence. I also briefly debated the sanity. .

Why, no, Officer, that heroin isn’t mine. My interest is, uh, purely professional. .

But, ultimately, I knew I’d regret it later if I didn’t take some product samples while I had the chance. Heroin was clearly the link between those four bodies. Having some of it in my possession just seemed like a good idea. Maybe we could have it tested at a lab? Maybe it would make a nice photograph?

And maybe I was just out of my bleepin’ mind. But before I chickened out, I repacked the box, replaced it in the back of the closet, then rejoined Tynesha and Miss B in the living room, where they were sniffling into their tissues.

“Should we head to the funeral home now?” I asked.

Miss B nodded and began preparing herself for a trip outside, allowing me a few more moments to dwell on all those pictures of Wanda.

We often ran head shots of people who died quick and violent deaths in our paper, and there was something about them I found endlessly fascinating. Especially when they captured some happy moment-a graduation, a wedding, a retirement, whatever. I just couldn’t help but think: if the guy in that photo had known he had three years until he got splattered on some drunken trucker’s grill plate, would he have lived differently? Would he have left his wife or spent every second with her? Would he have gone on a cruise around the world? Or just gone to the racetrack every day?

If Wanda had known the choices she was making would have left her dead before her thirtieth birthday, would she have chosen differently? Maybe. Except, of course, Wanda probably never thought about her thirtieth birthday. It’s a common problem among the impoverished, the lack of future focus. People are so worried about surviving today they don’t have the luxury of thinking about tomorrow.

“Sometimes, I think I could just stare at her picture all day, too,” Tynesha said, walking up alongside me. I suddenly became aware they were waiting for me.

“All right, let’s go,” I said.

Our departure brought about much less Nextel blurping than our arrival did. The white man hadn’t been that interesting, after all-he had come and gone without arresting anyone or buying anything.

I fired up the Malibu, flipped the heater on high, and drove us downtown to one of the funeral homes that had been serving Newark’s black community for more than a hundred years. I had never been to this one before, but knew the type. And I could practically guarantee the folks there were tired of burying people like Wanda Bass. In this city’s death business, the customer demographics had skewed young far too long.

We didn’t seem to have an appointment, but we were still ushered into the office of Mrs. Rosa Bricker, who had the role of funeral director down pat. She was friendly, but not too friendly. She cared, but not too much. She was warm, but in a detached kind of way. She dealt with death the same way an accountant deals with taxes: as a practical problem worthy of attention but not hysteria. She was, above all else, professional.

After we were properly introduced-having a reporter in the room didn’t seem to faze her-she slid a packet labeled “Price List” across the desk at Miss B. The basic services included embalming, dressing, viewing ceremonies, transportation, and so on, and they went for around $3,500. That didn’t include the casket, which ranged from your basic three-hundred-dollar pine box all the way up to the Z64 Classic Gold Solid Bronze Sealer With Velvet Interior. It went for a hair over 10 Large. Calculating in monetary terms I could understand, that was about 2.8 used Malibus.

Miss B was doing her best to keep her composure, but it wasn’t hard to see how floored she was. She obviously didn’t have enough savings to get Wanda near the cemetery, much less in the ground. There was a grim joke in the funeral home business that the shorter the driveway, the more expensive the funeral. Rich people just wanted to get on with probating the will. It was the poor folks-the ones who couldn’t really afford it-who felt the need to have showy funerals.

Miss B didn’t even have a driveway.

“Do you. . do you offer payment plans?” she asked.

“Naturally,” Mrs. Bricker said. “But if I might make a suggestion, you might want to make an application to the Violent Crimes Compensation Board. They pay up to $5,000 for funeral costs. We can assist you with that.”

“I would appreciate that,” Miss B said, then started breathing normally again.

Mrs. Bricker pulled some paperwork from her drawer. Much of it had been filled out in advance. This obviously wasn’t her first time with a murder victim.

“We have a package we offer for families who are using Violent Crimes money,” Mrs. Bricker said, pushing a piece of paper across her desk at Miss B. “It covers all essential services, including a burial in a sealed casket with a headstone. You would be responsible for any additional costs, although we’ve tried to make the package as inclusive as possible.”

As Miss B began filling out the required form, I caught myself feeling relieved, which was odd. I didn’t know Wanda. Up until an hour ago, I didn’t know Miss B. And I grew up in a house with a long enough driveway that pricey funerals struck me as pointless. What did I care if Wanda Bass was buried in a pine box? More to the point: what did she care?

But I did care. I cared because of Miss B and Tynesha. I cared because the girl in those pictures had had a lousy life and an even lousier death. She deserved a little something unlousy coming her way, even if it was too late to do much good.

Miss B caught me off guard with her next question.

“Can I see Wanda now?”

My innards did a somersault-back handspring combination and for a moment I thought I was going to regret some of the previous night’s overexertion. Mrs. Bricker’s smooth surface didn’t ripple for a moment. Instead, she folded her hands on her desk and looked straight at Miss B.

“We can certainly see her if you wish,” Mrs. Bricker said. “But I will tell you we had to do quite a bit of restoration work. It may be difficult for you to view her right now. You may want to wait until we’ve had the chance to dress her, do her hair, and put on some makeup.”

“I can handle it,” Miss B said.

“It can be traumatic,” Mrs. Bricker said, more firmly. “I’d advise against it. It will be a much more positive experience if you wait.”

“I will see my daughter now,” Miss B said with a certain edge that seemed to settle the matter.

“Very well,” Mrs. Bricker replied, smoothly picking up the phone on her desk. She said a few soft words to the person on the other end and hung up.

“Come with me,” she said, rising from her desk.

I was hoping someone would ask me to stay in the office, which I would have happily done. It’s not that I have anything against dead bodies. I just prefer living ones.

Alas, no one said a word. So I brought up the rear as we were led downstairs and through a door marked STAFF ONLY. The room we entered was brightly lit, slightly chilly, and tiled from floor to ceiling. Jugs of pinkish liquid-embalming fluid, I assumed-were stacked against the far wall. In the middle were three stainless steel gurneys. Two were empty. The third was very much occupied and draped with a white sheet.

An underling, dressed in scrubs, nodded at Mrs. Bricker as he departed.

“We don’t allow families in here if there is more than one body present-out of respect to the other families. But as you can see, Wanda is alone here today,” Mrs. Bricker said, and it seemed to be for my benefit. I guess she didn’t want Eagle-Examiner readers thinking her funeral home lacked discretion.

Miss B, who didn’t seem to be hearing anything, stood about five feet from the gurney, her eyes locked on the figure underneath.

“I’m going to roll back the drape now,” Mrs. Bricker said.

When Miss B nodded slightly, Mrs. Bricker neatly folded back the sheet.

It wasn’t Wanda. Well, technically, it was. But it was some grotesque version of her. Her face barely resembled the beautiful woman I had seen in the pictures. The cheeks were swollen. The eyes were sunken. The forehead looked like it had been shattered and put together again-which it probably had been. All the features were just slightly off.

“Are you sure that’s Wa-” Tynesha began, then stopped herself.

“We started the work as soon as we received the body from the medical examiner yesterday,” Mrs. Bricker said, answering the question Tynesha sort of asked.

Miss B uprooted herself and approached her daughter’s corpse. She first touched the hair, then gently cupped the jaw, then brushed her fingers across the lips. The tears were rolling down both sides of Miss B’s face, onto her chin, and into the folds of her neck. But no sounds were coming out.

“As I said, the restoration was extensive,” Mrs. Bricker continued. “I worked on her myself for several hours.”

“Can I just be alone with her for a moment or two?” Miss B asked.

“Of course,” Mrs. Bricker said, nodding at me and Tynesha. I didn’t need to be asked twice, and made quickly for the door.

“Oh, Tynesha baby, stay here,” Miss B said.

Tynesha rushed to her side. As the door closed, I saw them embrace awkwardly. Miss B’s eyes never left her daughter’s broken face.

Back in the hallway, Mrs. Bricker leaned against the wall and crossed one foot over the other. The sudden relaxing of her posture surprised me. Up until that point, she had been nothing but formal. Now that she was out of eyeshot of the customer, she felt she could stand down just a little.

“Wow, that’s tough,” I said, slumping against the other wall.

“That’s why I told her to wait,” Mrs. Bricker said. “But I could tell she was going to be a stubborn one.”

I nodded, as if I, too, knew Miss B was going to be a stubborn one.

“You get any of the other bodies from down on Ludlow Street?” I asked.

“No, just this one.”

“You get used to stuff like that?”

“I’m around death all the time,” she said. “Sometimes it agitates me our society has so many superstitions about it. It’s really just a natural thing. It happens to everyone eventually.”

“No, I mean do you get used to what happened to Wanda?” I said. “I mean, what did happen to her? You heard that in there. Her own best friend barely recognized her. I’m sure you did what you could, but. .”

It was among the less articulate questions of my journalism career. Mrs. Bricker took it in stride. I suppose it was a nice change for her to talk with someone who wasn’t near-hysterical with grief.

“I’ve seen worse, but that was a pretty difficult reconstruction,” she said. “You have to understand, when that girl came here, she only had half a face.”

“I thought she had been shot in the back of the head,” I said.

“She was. And there was an entrance wound in the back of the head. It was pretty small. That was about a ten-minute patch job. It was the exit wound that was the problem. That bullet took a lot of the forehead with it.”

I cringed a little but tried to hide my reaction. There was no room for sentimentality in a discussion like this.

“Any idea what kind of gun it was?” I asked.

“Forty caliber,” she said without hesitation.

“That’s odd,” I said. “Are you sure it wasn’t a.38?”

I’m no gun nut, but it was my understanding.40 caliber was used mostly by law enforcement-local, state, and, primarily, federal. The thug or thugs responsible for this must have somehow gotten their hands on some cop’s gun.

“We serve the neighborhoods,” Mrs. Bricker said. “Trust me when I tell you I’ve seen enough bullet wounds to tell the difference. It was a.40 caliber. A.38 wouldn’t have done nearly as much damage.”

“Well, then explain something to me,” I said. “You said the bullet took out the forehead. I thought it would have come out lower.”

“Why?”

“Well, the cops told us the killing was done execution style. To me, execution style means the victim is kneeling and the perp is standing, meaning the shot goes downward.” I pantomimed a gun, putting a finger to the back of my head, tilting it at the appropriate angle. “Shouldn’t it have blown off the nose or jaw or something?”

“Well, in this case, she was standing, not kneeling,” Mrs. Bricker said definitively.

“Oh?”

“The entrance and exit wounds are parallel. That tells me she and the shooter were at the same level. You’re probably looking for a gunman who is tall, six three to six five.”

“I didn’t realize you doubled as a forensics expert,” I said, smiling despite the subject matter.

She smiled, too. It was her first one. “I’m not,” she said. “But in this case the math is pretty simple. Wanda was tall, right? Let’s say five nine or five ten?”

Tynesha had talked about what long legs Wanda had. “Sounds right,” I said.

“Okay, so we know the perp was holding the gun straight, because the entrance and exit wounds are the same height,” Mrs. Bricker said, now pantomiming her own gun. “Since he’s able to hold the gun straight and still be pointing near the top of her head, the shooter must be roughly a head taller, call it six or seven inches. That’s how you get six three to six five.”

“You’re good,” I said.

She smiled again but stamped it out the moment Miss B and Tynesha emerged from the examining room, sniffling and leaning on each other for support. Miss B’s limp looked even worse than before.

“Thank you for trying to patch her up,” Miss B said. “I think we’ll keep the lid closed for the viewing.”

“Of course,” Mrs. Bricker said, having immediately resumed her former ramrod straightness. “We’ll still want to get some clothes from you to put her in. If you don’t have anything suitable, we work with a charity that provides burial outfits for needy families. And of course we’ll bring someone in to do her hair. That’s part of the package.”

Miss B murmured something indistinct. Seeing her daughter laid out on a metal gurney in that cold room had taken all the starch out of her. It required some effort to get her back up the stairs and out into the street, where I feared even the smallest gust of wind was going to knock her over. Tynesha had her by one arm. I couldn’t grab the other because of Miss B’s cane, but I stayed close in case she toppled.

After a silent car ride back to Miss B’s building, we got her back out of the car and I resumed spotting. The Nextel guys paid us little mind as we slowly hobbled up the steps. We were just a couple of people escorting a crippled old woman home.

Miss B went straight into her bedroom and Tynesha gave me a little wave as she followed. I took one last glance at Wanda’s high school portrait, then departed.

Ireturned to the newsroom and to a desk that had been transformed into a veritable legalize-marijuana showcase. Someone had printed out twenty copies of a marijuana-leaf picture and taped them all around my computer. Another creative genius had twisted some used newsprint into a two-foot-long joint and left it next to the keyboard along with half a dozen smaller joints, a lighter, and a homemade bong that had been fashioned from a two-liter soda bottle.

Sitting on my chair was a brochure with a picture of a morose-looking guy and the headline “Seeking Help for Your Marijuana Problem?”

I had been hoping to surreptitiously slip the four pilfered heroin bags out of my pocket and into an envelope, which I would then hide in my desk for safekeeping. But that suddenly seemed like a very bad idea, what with half the newsroom wondering if I was developing a drug habit.

“Nice going, Ivy,” Buster Hays hollered at me. “Let me guess: you didn’t inhale, right?”

It was a tired joke, but some of Hays’s cronies laughed. I began clearing away enough drug paraphernalia so I had some workspace.

“Ha ha,” I said, with intentionally flat inflection. As usual, Hays had caught me completely without comeback.

Tommy sauntered over from his desk to snicker up close.

“So I guess I have you to thank for this lovely display?” I asked.

“Don’t look at me,” Tommy said. “Brodie made an announcement at the morning editor’s meeting and then sent out an e-mail to everyone at the paper, saying you were an example for all of us to follow. What you see before you is a collaborative effort.”

“I’m never going to live this down, am I?”

“By the time the night copy desk makes it in, you’ll be the most famous stoner this side of Cheech and Chong,” Tommy confirmed.

“Just what I always wanted.”

“C’mon, you’re a hero,” Tommy said. “The hippies over in the features department are thrilled because now they think they’re allowed to get high at work. I think they’re out behind the building getting stoned as we speak.”

“They do that all the time anyway.”

“True, but now they feel justified. You might want to negotiate with the vending machine guy about getting a cut. Newsroom snack food sales are going to skyrocket.”

I was just starting to enjoy our banter when the abominable Vowelless Monster became aware of my presence.

“Crrrrttrrrss!” Sal Szanto hollered, taking the trouble to lift his hairy girth from behind his desk so I could see him gesturing for me.

I immediately began formulating escape strategies. Would fake appendicitis be over-the-top?

“Hey, Sal,” I said, strolling into his office and pulling up a chair as if nothing were awry.

“I know you’re Brodie’s new cuddle-buddy and all, but would you mind telling me what smoking dope with a bunch of gangbangers has to do with our bar story?”

“Why, yes, of course,” I said.

“Well?”

“Glad you asked,” I said, then started squirming as if something were gnawing on my leg.

“Hang on,” I said, fishing my cell phone out of my pocket. “I gotta take this.”

“It didn’t even ring!” Szanto protested.

“It’s on vibrate,” I said as I flipped open the phone and gave my most officious “Carter Ross!”

“Like hell it is,” Szanto said, raising his voice. “There’s no one on the other end. I’m not falling for that again!”

“Huh,” I said, taking the phone away from my ear and looking puzzled at it. “I lost him. This must be a dead reception area. Let me try it from the other side of the newsroom.”

I lifted myself from the chair, but Szanto was having none of it.

“Sit your ass down. Give me a quick update on the bar story and you can go call from Botswana for all I care.”

“I thought Tina gave you the update on the bar story,” I said.

“If you’re checking to see whether your accomplice covered for you, the answer is yes. She tells me you’re making excellent progress. But when I asked her details she faked an intense menstrual cramp and ran out of my office.”

Menstrual cramps. Why hadn’t I thought of that?

“So stop dicking around,” Szanto ordered. “Brodie is talking about this being a page one story on Sunday and he keeps asking me every eight minutes what it’s going to say. I’d like to have an answer for him.”

“Right,” I said. “The bar story. It’s this. . bar. . where everyone in the neighborhood went to, you know, drink. Except there was something, something”-what was the word Szanto had used the other day? — “something sinister going on inside.”

“Fine. I like where we’re heading on this,” Szanto said. “Who have we talked to?”

“Oh, lots of people.”

“Like who?”

“People in the, uh, neighborhood. You know. . customers.”

“Have we talked to the bar’s owner yet? What does he say? When did these people rob him? Is he a suspect?”

“I’m sure he’s a person of interest,” I said, employing that wonderfully vague bit of cop talk.

“Goddammit, are you working on this story or not?” Szanto demanded.

He didn’t wait for my answer. “You know what? I don’t care. I’m going to make this real simple for you. You got this assignment on Monday. It’s now Wednesday afternoon. I expect that bar story to be on my desk by Friday at noon or I’m sending you out to Sussex County to cover bear scat for the rest of your life.”

I grinned despite myself. Sussex County was our farthest-flung bureau, about an hour away in the northeast corner of the state. Szanto threatened to reassign me there roughly every other month.

“Right,” I said. “You’ll have a story by Friday at noon.”

And I meant it. I just didn’t know what story it was going to be.

After my retreat from Szanto’s office, I went straight to Tommy’s desk, hoping he had made some progress in the past twenty-four hours.

“You might want to consider a smaller belt,” he said as he saw me approach.

“And why is that?”

“You’re going to need something to hold your pants up with the way Szanto just chewed your ass off,” Tommy finished, pleased with himself.

“I really walked right into that one, didn’t I?”

“Chin first, yeah.”

“Then I need a soda to recover from my wounds. Come on, I’m buying.”

Tommy trailed after me to the break room vending machine, which was in a cranky mood. After surrendering the first bottle with relative ease, there was no way it was giving up the second one without a fight. I gave the machine a slight shove, which did nothing. Neither did leaning into it a little harder. I was rocking the thing violently back and forth when Tommy spoke up.

“You know, ten people a year are-”

“Oh, stuff it already,” I said, finally getting enough wobble going to dislodge a fresh Coke Zero.

Tommy sat down with his soda. I went over to another machine to do something about the rumbling in my stomach.

“So how was your return to Shareef Thomas’s neighborhood?” I asked, selecting a sleeve of strawberry Pop-Tarts. Health food.

“Not bad if you like spending a lot of time with people who wear polyester blends,” he said. “Though I did meet a drunk who claimed to be Shareef’s uncle.”

“Was he?”

“He had a Social Security card with the name Marlon Thomas on it.”

“Okay, I guess that’s legit,” I said, tearing into my first Pop-Tart.

“He told me he’d tell me anything I wanted to know if I got him something to drink. So I bought him two bottles of Boone’s Farm’s finest sparkling wine from the corner liquor store.”

“I hope you went with the 2007. Growing conditions were excellent that year.”

“But of course,” he said.

It’s strictly unethical for us to pay a source for information. Tabloids do it all the time, but no serious newspaper would ever think about it. Information that has to be paid for is considered untrustworthy.

That said, what Tommy had done was more or less fine. I’m not saying I’d write in to Columbia Journalism Review to brag about it. But it wasn’t really that much different than, say, picking up the tab when you lunched with the mayor. This was just a less conventional method of building rapport with a source-a liquid lunch, as it were.

“How do you think I expense that?” Tommy asked.

“Just put it under ‘Miscellaneous Supplies.’ ”

“Sounds good,” he said, pulling out his notebook and reading from it. “Anyway, here’s what Uncle Booze-Breath had to say about his precious nephew. His daddy-Booze-Breath’s brother-was apparently a pretty decent guy who got shot in some kind of mistaken-identity thing back in the eighties. After that, Shareef’s mom started messing around with a drug dealer, and you know how that story ends.”

“I’m guessing poorly,” I said, moving on to my second Pop-Tart.

“You got it. Once Mama Shareef had enough possession charges, she got put away for ten years and Shareef got put in foster care.”

“I’m guessing that went poorly, too.”

“Very. There was no foster home that could hold him. He hightailed it out of every one they tried to put him in and always ended up back in the neighborhood, crashing with a different relative. The relative would usually put up with him for a few months. Then Shareef would do something to make the relative turn him back over to foster care, then he’d run away again. Somewhere along the line, he started stealing cars, landed in a juvenile lockup, and has pretty much spent the rest of his life in and out of jail. When even your wino uncle describes you as ‘that boy ain’t no good,’ that ought to tell you something.”

Pop-Tart No. 2 was now gone and I peered into the empty plastic wrapper, hoping that a third had somehow miraculously materialized. Alas, it was empty.

“That was your lunch, wasn’t it?” he asked.

“No. I also had a slice of apple pie earlier.”

“I’ll remind you of this moment when you have to go to the Ugly Pants Store to buy a larger size.”

I shrugged. My secret to weight loss: get busy enough at work and you end up skipping meals without realizing it.

“So did the uncle know anything about Shareef’s most recent mode of employment?” I asked.

“The uncle didn’t know much or didn’t say much. But I talked to some other people. Shareef was a drug dealer, obviously. He was a solo operation. He didn’t have any kind of crew or anything.

“Let’s see, what else,” Tommy said, continuing to scan his notes. “A couple of months ago he paid for a bunch of neighborhood kids to go to Great Adventure.”

“Ah, a real Robin Hood, this one,” I interjected.

“Yeah, it seems like business had been good lately. People said he bought himself a new Chrysler 300-you know, those Bentley knockoffs. Everyone in the neighborhood assumed he was getting too big for his britches so someone decided to permanently remove him from his turf. I guess he was starting to take customers away from other dealers.”

“Sounds a lot like our other three victims.”

“Uh-huh,” Tommy said.

“He sold heroin, I assume?”

“Yep,” Tommy said, still flipping pages. “Oh, this was kind of cute. Apparently the brand he sold was called ‘The Stuff.’ ”

I felt a jolt, like the wind had been knocked out of me.

“The Stuff? Are you sure about that?”

Tommy turned some more pages. “Well, I wouldn’t exactly stake my shoe collection on it,” he said. “I got that from a junkie who kept asking if she could borrow twenty bucks. So I don’t know if I could consider my sourcing beyond reproach. But, yeah, she said his brand was called ‘The Stuff.’ Pretty funny, huh?”

“In more ways than you know. That’s the same brand Wanda Bass was selling. I saw it myself in her bedroom when I visited her mother’s house.”

“Really? Huh. Think it’s a coincidence?”

“I don’t know. I mean, how many brands of heroin are sold in this city?”

“Beats me. A hundred?”

“At least. What are the chances two dealers from completely different parts of the city would end up selling the same brand?”

Lights were going on in Tommy’s attic.

“About the same as the chances two dealers from different parts of the city would end up dead together in a vacant lot at the far end of the South Ward,” he said.

I allowed myself to bask in the moment and savor the buzz I was feeling. There was nothing like the moment when a story started coming together.

“Tommy,” I said. “I do believe we’ve just found the missing link between the Ludlow Four.”

Of course, believing it and proving it were two different matters. And in the proof department, we still had some work to do. I knew I would only be able to talk Szanto out of that stupid bar story if I could definitively tell him that each of the Ludlow Four sold the same brand of heroin.

It would pain Szanto to hear it, of course. But in the twisted logic of newspapering, being wrong can be somewhat forgiven as long as you have something to right it with: another big scoop. And this story, if I could nail it down, would certainly qualify as one, especially with all the attention that was starting to surround the Ludlow Four.

The New York newspapers, which normally treated the other side of the Hudson River as if it were some distant curiosity, had been following the story each day. The grisly details of the crime and the brazen nature with which it was carried out made for good copy. One of the tabloids even put it on its cover, an unusual honor for out-of-state news.

With the newspapers beating the drums, the TV stations-who only decide how to play ongoing stories after they read the papers-had stayed on the bandwagon, too. Each local nightly news telecast was featuring sound bites from a steady stream of local antiviolence activists, who were eager to jump in front of the cameras and exclaim “this has to stop” or “enough is enough.”

None of it was actually news, of course, just reaction to the news. Only the newspapers were going to push the story forward. And being able to establish the connection between the victims would definitely keep us out in front of the competition. Szanto would like that. Brodie would love it.

Now we just had to make sure it was true. Tommy volunteered to head back to Shareef’s neighborhood and do some double-checking with his new friends there.

That left Devin Whitehead and Tyrone Scott. Devin would be easy enough. I picked up the phone and dialed my man Tee.

“Yeah,” Tee said. He always answered his cell phone that way. I guess it was part of the tough-guy image.

“What’s up, Tee?”

“You tell me, you’re the one calling.”

“Right. Are those knucklehead kids hanging around outside your store?”

“Of course.”

“You mind asking them what brand of heroin Dee-Dub was selling.”

“You mean what brand he was allegedly selling?” Tee corrected me.

“Right. Allegedly.”

“Hang on,” Tee said.

I heard the electronic bee-baa that went off whenever Tee’s front door opened, then could make out the sounds of the street and some muffled voices. I drummed my fingers for a few moments, checking my e-mail as I waited. Great news: Human Resources had an upcoming series, “Cholesterolapalooza.”

Tee brought his phone back to his mouth.

“You gotta do something for me,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“I’m going to put you on speakerphone. Just answer my questions honestly.”

“No problem.”

Suddenly the ambient noises were a lot louder.

“Carter, you there?” Tee asked, half yelling.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Okay, first question, ‘Are you Carter Ross, Bird Man extraordinaire?’ ”

“Correct.”

“Are you, in fact, white?” Tee asked, and I heard some snickering.

“As white as they come.”

“Just to be sure about this, I need to hear you say something really, really white.”

I rolled my eyes.

“And can you explain to me what would qualify as really, really white?” I asked.

“Actually, that’ll do it,” Tee said, and the voices in the background erupted with laughter.

“Order in the court, order in the court!” Tee howled, though he was laughing, too. “Okay, okay, now that we have established you are a card-carrying member of the Caucasian persuasion”-more snickering-“can you please tell the court, ‘Who you was hanging with last night?’ ”

“Uh. . Well, this woman took me back to her place. .”

“Oh, now you bragging,” Tee said, and the voices cackled again. “Order! Order, I say! Okay, before you and your lady friend did whatever it is white people do, what did you do then?”

Where the hell was he going with this?

“I, uh, spent some quality time with the Brick City Browns,” I said.

“Aha! And did that ‘quality time’ involve the use of any controlled dangerous substances? Let me remind you, Mr. Ross, you are under oath.”

“Uh, Tee, you don’t have any cops listening to this, do you?”

Tee clicked off his speakerphone, bringing the phone to his mouth.

“C’mon, man!” he said. “What self-respecting black man would be hanging out with the Jake?”

“The Jake?”

“Yeah, you remember that TV show, Jake and the Fat Man? Jake was the cop.”

“Oh, right,” I said, still thoroughly bewildered as to what he was driving at. “Anyway, what was the question?”

Tee put me back on speakerphone.

“The question, Mr. Ross, is, ‘What was you and the Browns doing last night?’ ”

Suddenly, it started to make sense.

“Well, Judge Tee, I would have to say we were smoking some high-quality hydroponic ganja.”

The background voices burst out in a chorus of disbelieving expletives.

“I told you! I told you!” I could hear Tee crowing. “Twenty bucks! Twenty bucks!”

I was taken off speakerphone again, though I could still hear a lot of indistinct noises punctuated with occasional laughter. It took another minute for Tee to return to the phone.

“Mind telling me what that was about?” I asked.

“They didn’t believe the story they’ve been hearing about the white guy who smoked up with the Browns then started falling all over the place.”

“Oh, so now I’m a story?”

“You ain’t a story. You like a legend. It’s been all over the hood today. I must have heard about four different versions by now.”

“I’m never going to live this down, am I,” I said. When I had asked Tommy that earlier, it was a question. It was getting to be more of a statement now.

“Not a chance. By the way, did you really give them a lecture on how tsunamis are created?”

I searched my memory. I couldn’t recall having done so. And I’m not sure, sober, I even knew myself. But the brain on drugs could cook up some interesting things.

“I suppose it’s possible,” I said.

“Huh. You’ll have to explain that to me sometime. Because I always wondered.”

“Right. Anyway, did you get the answer to my question?”

“What question?”

“About the brand Dee-Dub sold?

“Oh, yeah, that. Allegedly his brand was called ‘The Stuff.’ You know, like it was stuff but it was proper stuff so they called it ‘The Stuff.’ But remember, you didn’t get that from me. His mama would whup my ass.”

“Right,” I said. I would worry about how exactly my story would deal with the sourcing later. A simple “according to people in his neighborhood” would probably suffice.

“Thanks for your help,” I said.

“Anytime. Thanks for winning that bet for me,” Tee said. “Talk to you later, you old pothead.”

I hung up the phone and self-consciously fingered the dime bags of heroin that were burning a hole in my pocket. There were still too many wandering eyeballs around to make a safe transfer to my desk, so I turned to my notebook.

“Notebook,” I said, using my internal voice because otherwise everyone would think I was still smoking something. “Notebook, please tell me something about Tyrone Scott.”

I flipped the pages, ever hopeful. I know it seems desperate, asking a four-by-eight-inch pad of paper to be your savior. But there are times when this kind of pleading really does work, when you’ve buried some little treasure of a note that you uncover at just the right time. Maybe it’s some scribbled observation that brings an entire picture into perfect relief. Or a name and a phone number you never followed up on. Or something you forgot having ever written that perfectly synthesizes your story.

Or you can just end up staring at a bunch of worthless scribbles for twenty minutes.

The only way I was going to discover more about Tyrone Scott was to head back out to that chicken shack and poke around.

By the time I arrived at the Wyoming Fried Chicken, home of Cowboy Kenny’s secret blend, it was pitch-black. Still, the hooded figures who patrolled the sidewalk in front of the chicken shack became aware of my pale-faced presence the moment I stepped out of my car, and scurried off quickly.

Leaving behind only one guy. My friend North Face.

“What, you drew the short straw again?” I asked.

“Aw, come on, man. I already told you everything I know. Now you going to screw up my business again?”

“You can tell your customers your product is so good I just can’t stop myself from coming back.”

“Oh, great. We’ll put it on a billboard: ‘The guy who dresses like a narc only gets his stuff from one place.’ Man, get out of here.”

“Relax. I just got one question.”

“And I’m supposed to give you the answer? Do I look like Alex Trebek to you?”

I laughed.

“I ain’t trying to be funny, Bird Man,” he said, reaching into his jacket and leaving his hand there, the all-purpose winter-time signal that a gun was being kept nice and cozy underneath.

The last time we met, North Face had just been giving me a hard time for the sake of giving me a hard time. It had been earlier in the day. I wasn’t really costing him business. This was different. It was after five now-prime time for sales. A lot of Newark drug users are slightly more functional than they are stereotypically given credit for. They manage to hold down day jobs then go straight to their local dealer and buy enough to keep them high until the following morning. The early evening was rush hour for a guy like North Face.

“Okay, okay. Take it easy,” I said. “Look, I just want to know what brand of heroin Tyrone sold and then I’ll get out of your way.”

“I ain’t in that market.”

“Can you point me toward someone who is?”

“I ain’t the Yellow Pages, either. Now get the hell out of here.”

“Do we really have to go through this again?” I asked. “You know I’m going to hang out here until I get the information I need. So why not just help me out?”

“You know what? I ain’t helping you with nothin’. I ain’t telling you nothin’. I’m gonna ask you to leave and if you don’t I’m gonna stop asking nicely.”

His hand dug a little farther into his jacket. A good 98 percent of me was certain it was an idle threat. The other 2 percent of me was sure my bowels were about to loosen.

“Look, pal, I’m just a reporter here doing a job, that’s all,” I said, trying hard to project an image of everymanness.

“Well, then, let me ask you, when my cousin got killed out here two months ago, where were you then, huh? Where was his story?”

North Face glared at me. The cold fact was, in our business, some deaths mattered more than others. But I don’t think North Face needed to hear that. When I didn’t immediately open my mouth to answer, he continued his tirade.

“Oh, so my cousin is just another dead nigga, but Tyrone Scott is some kind of cause for you people? Tyrone is better than my cousin, is that it? Because he got killed with three other people and my cousin got killed on his way to the store for some milk? That makes Tyrone better than my cousin?”

He glared some more, which I took as my invitation to speak.

“I’m sorry about your cousin,” I said, keeping my voice as even as possible in an effort to deescalate the emotion of the moment.

I thought about adding more: that in a city where ninety or a hundred people are killed every year, no newspaper could write at length about every one; that we had to pick our spots or risk being tuned out altogether; that treating every single murder like it was a big deal, while it would honor the memory of the victim, could actually make the problem of urban violence worse by lending undue attention to it.

But those were all macro justifications for a micro problem. We should treat every murder as if it mattered, because what could be of graver concern to society than the intentional taking of human life?

So I just said: “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

It’s tough to argue with someone who won’t put up a fight. When he saw I had no more to say, North Face relaxed his shoulders and slowly slid his hand out of his jacket, then pointed up the street.

“You can go over to Booker T,” he said. “All kinds of junkies there. Half of them used to buy from Tyrone.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll get out of your hair now. And I really am sorry about your cousin.”

“No one reads the paper anyway,” he grumbled.

I let him have that parting shot. And as I pulled away, I saw the hooded figures start to emerge from their hiding places and resume their posts.

The Booker T. Washington Public Housing Project, otherwise known as Booker T, was a few blocks away. Booker T’s story was a sadly familiar one in Newark. Built not long after World War II-when it was hailed as a glistening, modern replacement for nineteenth-century tenement housing-it had once been a vibrant, thriving community where slightly down-on-their-luck families found their bootstraps and pulled themselves up.

But, in the long run, slack management, shoddy maintenance, and neglectful tenants made it just as bad as the tenements it replaced. And as the city died around it-with the middle class fleeing and the factory jobs disappearing-Booker T settled slowly into a mire from which there was no rescue. By the turn of the twenty-first century, it had gotten so bad the city decided there was only one way to fix Booker T: tear it down.

But even that wasn’t easy. There were disagreements among city, state, and federal governments about who should pay for the demolition. There were residents who didn’t want to leave. Then there were the illegal residents-the squatters, the drifters, the junkies, an entire underworld of people who hacked their way through the plywood that covered the windows and doors and used the buildings for their own shadowy purposes.

That was the Booker T I was venturing into, a place that was worse than a ghost town because the souls that haunted it were still alive. If you took a snapshot of Booker T at any one moment, you might not see anything living, besides perhaps one of the stray cats that came to hunt for rats.

But if you stayed for a while, you’d inevitably see some vagrant shuffling through. Or you might notice a tendril of smoke escaping from a window where someone had lit a fire inside a trash barrel.

Those were the people I was looking for, people who had slipped through society’s safety net, past the dozens of nonprofits and churches that may have tried to catch them, and hit rock bottom. They were, to say the least, a difficult cohort to interview. Many of them suffered from delusions and paranoias that made their grasp on the real world anywhere from tenuous to nonexistent. Some would be so high they might as well be mentally ill.

Still, I had to try.

I parked my car along the street that ran outside Booker T, a collection of six block-long, four-story brick buildings. In the middle was a massive courtyard, around which Booker T’s social life had rotated for fifty years.

The sense of desolation in the courtyard was overwhelming. This had once been a place where friends gathered, where stories were told, where summer days were passed, where lives were led. And now it had been surrendered to an eerie kind of urban emptiness: not the slightest bit of human activity greeted my arrival.

After maybe fifteen minutes, a lone woman wandered through, saw me, and turned in the other direction. It was no use trying to catch up to her.

Next came a man doing the junkie stumble, staggering in a chaotic pattern, unseeing and unknowing. He had a boisterous conversation going with himself, one that consisted of bits of words followed by loud, dry coughing. I considered talking to him but decided I’d be better off trying to interview one of the stray cats.

In the darkness, and with the cold numbing my senses, time became hard to judge. Had I been there thirty minutes or three hours? It didn’t matter. I would stay as long as needed until. .

There. A man. Walking at the far end of the courtyard. The buildings were numbered, one through six, and he was in between numbers one and two. The darkness and lack of moonlight made it difficult to see what he was doing, but, yes, he had momentarily halted. Had he seen me and frozen, hoping to elude detection? Was he going to flee?

No, he was turning. He was facing Building Two. And he was. .

Pissing on it.

Iwaited for the man to dispense with his business, giving him the kind of time and distance I might appreciate were I urinating on a public building. Once he restored his gear, I moved in, approaching noisily so he knew I was coming. When I was still about forty feet away, I hollered out the biggest, friendliest “Hi, there!” I could summon.

“I’m sorry to bother you, sir,” I continued, still trying to sound as harmless as I could.

I had gotten near enough to see the man was looking at me like I was his first extraterrestrial sighting. He was wearing sneakers that appeared several sizes too big and several decades too old. I guessed he was wearing all the clothes he owned, though even with all that padding he seemed gaunt and undernourished. He had one of those patchy-bald heads, the kind older black men get when they don’t have the good sense to just shave it all off. His age, as with most advanced addicts, was difficult to guess-somewhere between forty-five and seventy-five. All you really knew for sure was that life had been hard on him.

“I’m a reporter with the Eagle-Examiner,” I said, coming closer still.

“You sellin’ newspapers?” he slurred, even more puzzled.

I laughed. I was now close enough to see and smell his breath, which could have flunked a Breathalyzer from ten paces away. That was actually a good sign. In my experience, the drunks were slightly more coherent than the druggies.

“No, sir. I’m a reporter. I don’t sell the newspaper. I write it.”

“Izzat so?” the man said, smiling curiously. Thank goodness, an amiable drunk.

“Yes, sir. I’m working on a story about a drug dealer named Hundred Year.”

He recoiled.

“He dead?” the man asked. “Thas what folks been saying.”

I nodded. The man spat deliberately on the ground. “Good. I don’t like to speak no ill of the dead, but he pick on ol’ people for the hell of it. He one nasty bastard. You gonna tell people he wasn’t no good in your newspaper, yeah?”

“If that’s what’s true. That’s why I’m trying to talk to folks around here. You got any friends?”

“Oh, I got some friends. But let me ask you somethin’. You think if I help you write your newspaper, maybe you could help get me a little something to eat?”

Ah, Newark. The hustle never stops.

“That can be arranged,” I said, smiling.

“Well, then, all right. You all right.”

Having gained his approval, I decided I might as well get to the point. “I’m trying to figure out what brand of heroin he sold.”

“Couldn’t say. I don’ touch that junk,” the man said proudly. I love addicts and their logic: the guy who had been pickling his liver with alcohol for thirty years could express disdain at the thought of ever using a drug. Meanwhile the neighborhood crackhead was smugly thinking that at least she wasn’t some slurring alchy.

“You know anyone who might have bought from him?”

“ ’Round here? Shoot. Jus’ ‘bout everyone.”

He gestured as if we were at a crowded cocktail party. I looked around at the still-empty courtyard. “Know where I could find them?”

The man thought for a moment. “S’pose I do,” he said.

“By the way, my name is Carter Ross,” I said. Normally I would have stuck out my hand for him to shake. But having been subjected to such a graphic demonstration of where his hand had just been, I kept my fingers anchored in my pocket.

“Folks call me ‘Red,’ jus’ like Red Sanford, ’cept my family name is Coles,” he said. He was about 150 pounds shy of passing for Red Sanford. And he was so jaundiced, folks should have called him “Yellow Sanford.”

“I’ll follow you,” I said. “You’re my tour guide.”

“Okay, now I know a woman, she like the mayor of this place. I’m goin’ to see her now,” he said, then elbowed me in a conspiratorial fashion. “I kind of mess aroun’ with her a little bit.”

God bless the male spirit: here was a man who had no home, no job, no money, a raging case of cirrhosis and Lord knows what other maladies. But he still wanted me to know he was getting some ass now and then.

I tailed Red toward Building Five and watched as he scampered up a Dumpster, onto a fire escape, up a flight of stairs, and through a vacant spot in a plywood window. I was impressed at how smoothly he moved, given his condition. Obviously, he had been doing this for a while. With all my youth and relative health, I was struggling to keep up. When I reached the window, Red was inside gesturing for me. There was no sign of light or life.

“C’mon,” he said.

“How can you see a damn thing in there?”

“I cain’t.”

“So how do you walk?”

“Jus’ trust your feet. They know how to do it.”

I scooted through the small opening, then did my best to navigate the dark, trash-strewn room. Maybe Red’s feet knew. Mine were tripping over everything.

I followed Red’s voice into the hallway, where there was an array of candles casting a dim light. There were also two old mattresses and assorted flotsam and jetsam-a box of Ritz crackers, one woman’s high-heeled pump, a brass lamp that looked like it once belonged to Aladdin, bloodstained rags, and trash. Lots of trash. There was so much trash it was hard for my eyes to focus on what exactly it was. I was suddenly glad it was cold. I didn’t want to imagine what this place smelled like in summertime.

A human form was lying on one of the mattresses.

“Mary,” Red said. “Hey, Mary, wake up.”

Mary rolled over, slow and drowsy. Her eyes got huge the moment she saw me.

“What you bring a cop in here for!” she shouted.

“He ain’t no cop,” Red said. “Mary, this here a reporter. He doin’ a story on that nasty sum’bitch that jus’ got hisself killed. And then he said he gonna get us something to eat.”

Red turned to me. “This here Mary Moss. Folks call her Queen Mary, ’cause she been ’round here so long she like the queen.”

Queen Mary, Ruler of Refuse, Regent of Building Five.

“Hi, Mary, it’s a real pleasure to meet you,” I said. “I’m Carter Ross from the Eagle-Examiner.”

“Oh,” she said. She propped herself up on her elbow. There wasn’t much to Queen Mary, maybe a hundred pounds of loose skin and brittle bones. Her hair was a tangled, matted mess-easily one of the worst bed heads in human history.

“Did you know a drug dealer named Tyrone Scott?” I asked. “He went by the name Hundred Year.”

“Yeah, I knew him. Bastard.”

“I hear he sold a particular brand of heroin. Do you know what his brand was?”

Queen Mary peered at me blankly. Her face was so skeletal it made her eyeballs bulge halfway out of her head.

“You know how there’s a stamp on the bag?” I continued, making large gestures as if I were playing charades. “What did the stamp look like?”

“Oh!” she said. “Yeah, yeah! It was. . You know. . umm. . Oh, damn! I just. .”

Mary kept mumbling to herself until I remembered; I had a product sample in my pocket. I pulled it out, then picked up one of the candles so Queen Mary could see it.

“Did it look like this?” I asked.

Suddenly, from somewhere deep within the parts of her brain that still functioned, you could see about ten thousand neurons fire off at once.

“Yeah!” she said. “Yeah, that’s it! Hang on.”

She crawled off her pad and started sifting through the trash, then produced a torn dime bag, which she handed to me. Sure enough, I could see the familiar eagle with the syringe clutched in its talons. It was The Stuff.

“You mind if I keep this?” I asked.

“Depends. You really gonna buy us some food?” she asked hopefully.

“You bet.” I smiled and pocketed the empty packet.

With that, Red Coles, Queen Mary, and I collected ourselves, climbed back out the window into the night, and made our way to the corner bodega, where I bought them all the fruit juice, crackers, and cookies they could carry.

It was the best $37.12 the Eagle-Examiner could have spent.

The Director knew how crucial it was to maintain his brand’s quality. He understood it far better than any of those business-magazine cover boys.

The car company that once boasted “quality is job one” should have tried out the heroin trade for a few weeks. If automakers were as accountable to their customers as the Director was, they never would have needed a bailout. Fact was, an automobile manufacturer could skimp on the kind of head gasket it used, and it would take years for the buyers to notice-if they ever did. Likewise, soft drink companies freely switched between sugar and corn syrup based on whatever was cheaper at the moment. Consumers were never the wiser.

The Director’s customers noticed everything, immediately. A hard-core junkie may not know what day, week, or year it is, but he knows the instant someone is messing with his heroin. He knows from the way it makes him feel, from how high he gets, from how long the high lasts. He knows the instant it starts coursing through his veins. He knows because the drug has essentially turned his body into a finely tuned device for measuring heroin quality.

That was the entire principle behind The Stuff: that junkies knew. That’s why the Director had to guarantee The Stuff was the best, purest heroin they could find. If-and only if-he could establish and maintain his brand in that lofty spot, he knew he could eventually control the entire Newark market.

It was an ambitious goal, one others had tried-but failed-to achieve. Their mistake was attempting to control the supply side, thinking that if they simply crushed every other source of heroin coming into the city, they could own it. But the Director understood that the job couldn’t be accomplished with simple muscle.

The Director took a different tack, one that focused on the demand side of the equation. If the customers came to want The Stuff and only The Stuff, refusing to buy from any dealer who didn’t carry it, they would give the Director a monopoly all by themselves.

And once he had Newark, there was no telling what the Director could accomplish. Newark was the conduit between New York and Philadelphia, the linchpin of the entire East Coast. He could make countless millions.

Yet it all hung on the quality of The Stuff. The moment anyone started diluting it, the junkies would stop associating it with high quality and it would get lost amid all the other brands.

The Director had put Monty in charge of quality control, but was constantly checking on him. Was he sending enough straw buyers into the street for samples? Was he having the samples tested and retested for purity? Were the samples coming back as close to 100 percent as they had gone out?

Monty seemed to be doing fine. He had, after all, managed to catch the four dealers who had been cutting. He had told the Director about it immediately and the Director had acted accordingly.

It was unfortunate to lose four productive dealers. But the Director would kill many more if he had to-as many as it took until the rest got the message:

The brand was sacrosanct. And it would be protected at all costs.