Faces of the Gone

CHAPTER 5

In most aspects of my life, I have little use for the concept of karma, the universal cycle of cause and effect, or anything that might help me achieve total consciousness. Total unconsciousness just suits me better.

Yet when it comes to reporting, I am a deep believer in karma. It is the only way to explain the following phenomenon:

There are days as a reporter when you can do no right, when no one will return your phone calls, when all the elbow grease you put into a story gives you little more than tendonitis. Then there are times when you’re the King Midas of the newsroom, when you can get the Holy Trinity on a conference call for quotes, when everything with your story falls into place so perfectly, you start to convince yourself maybe you really are that good.

But, no, it’s just the karma. Eventually you start to accept that for every time you subject your hindquarters to four hours of deep freeze in some nasty project-and end up with nothing to show for it-there will be a time when some strung-out homeless lady named Queen Mary tells you exactly what you need to hear.

So all I could do as I drove back toward the world headquarters of the Eagle-Examiner was thank the karma. It was a pleasant feeling: the success of a hard day’s reporting, the warmth of my Malibu, the buzz in my left thigh. .

No, wait, that was my cell phone. It was Tommy.

“You won’t believe the luck I had.” His voice came bounding out of the earpiece.

“You finally had a threesome with the Hardy Boys?”

“Who are the Hardy Boys? You have gay friends you didn’t tell me about?”

“They’re. . never mind. What’s going on?”

“Well,” Tommy said. “I was hanging around Shareef’s neighborhood, just hanging around, looking for people to talk to, and this white kid pulls up in his daddy’s Pathfinder and asks if I know where I can find Eef.”

Huh? I pressed my ear harder against the phone. “Eef?”

“No, you idiot. RRRRReef. As in ‘Shareef.’ Try to keep up.”

“Sorry.”

“So anyway,” Tommy continued, “I play it all coy and I’m like, ‘Who’s asking.’ And this guy is like, ‘I hear he’s got The Stuff.’ And I’m like, ‘By The Stuff do you mean stuff? Or THE Stuff?’ And the guy is like, ‘Yeah, THE Stuff.’ ”

Apparently I wasn’t the only one with good reporting karma.

“Anyway, this idiot kid thought I worked for Shareef or something, so he practically starts telling me his whole life story. He came from some high school in the suburbs-Livingston, I think-because word is out that this dealer named Reef was selling the best heroin ever and it was called ‘The Stuff.’ How’s that for confirmation?” Tommy asked.

“Pretty good,” I replied. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. But I got more,” Tommy said. “I asked around the neighborhood a little more and apparently Shareef pretty much made a living selling to suburban kids. He would just hang out all day in that pimp-daddy Chrysler of his and wait for the SUVs to drive up.”

It made sense. Shareef’s neighborhood was right near the intersection of the Garden State Parkway and Route 280. Both roads led rather rapidly to a nearly infinite supply of rich suburban kids.

“I was thinking,” Tommy said. “This probably means we can rule out Shareef being killed in some kind of turf battle, don’t you think?”

“How so?”

“Well, it seems like Shareef didn’t even have a turf. His turf was his car. Wherever he went, those idiot kids were going to find him. I mean, the kid I talked to was driving around looking for him.”

I pulled into the company parking garage, letting the new information rattle around in my head for a bit. Sometimes when you’re working on a story, it can be difficult to parse data as it comes, to see both the trees and the forest simultaneously.

But this time the big picture was becoming pretty clear to me. None of the Ludlow Four were killed because of turf. The cause of death, proximate or otherwise, had to be the one thing they shared: selling The Stuff.

“Good work, Tommy,” I said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go tell Sal Szanto his bar story is deader than disco.”

It was past seven by the time I strolled into the newsroom. The reporters were starting to thin out, but the copy desk was humming through the process of assembling Thursday’s newspaper, doing what copy desks have always done: think up misleading headlines, add mistakes into stories, and devise new ways to muddle clean writing.

No, actually, I’m a big fan of our desk. There were some odd ducks-as is often the case among people who think 4 P.M. is early in the day-but by and large they were solid, dependable folks who could spot a typo at twenty paces and delight in having won the New Jersey State spelling bee six years running. Collectively, they edited the equivalent of a novel every night.

I paused briefly at my desk-turned-drug-shrine-someone had left me a copy of High Times, the stoner magazine-then continued on toward Szanto’s office. I might as well let him scream at me when there were fewer people around to hear it.

“Got a second, boss?” I asked, tapping gently on the frame to his open office door.

Szanto glanced up from his computer screen, aggrieved by the combination of Tums and Maxwell House sloshing around in his stomach.

“Srrtt,” he grunted.

I was uncertain whether he was trying to say “sure” or “sit”-I had left my Szanto-English dictionary behind-but I took it as an invitation to come in.

“Jsss gvvmmm scccdd.”

Szanto’s attention had turned back to his screen, where he was trying to lay hands on some abysmal piece of copy. We had some very good writers at our paper, people who made words dance on a page. We also had people who wrote as if full sentences hadn’t been discovered yet.

“Jzzss Krrsst,” Szanto mumbled through a sigh, then coughed, rattling loose the small amphibian that was trying to apply for residence in his throat. “What the hell are they teaching in journalism school these days? You should see this crap.”

I waited patiently. Szanto grimaced and grumbled for a few more minutes, then finally sent the story over to the copy desk with an emphatic “Aw, screw it.”

“It’ll be lining hamster cages by tomorrow afternoon anyway,” I said, trying to be helpful. Szanto grunted again.

“Okay,” he said, “what can I do for my star investigative reporter? Making good progress with the bar thing?”

In an effort to keep our discourse on a civil tone, I tried to say my next sentence in as small a voice as possible.

“Sal, the bar isn’t the story.”

My efforts failed. Szanto launched a string of obscenities so long and so loud it was difficult to untangle one from the other. All I know is I heard a thorough exercising of the Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television, including one in particular he used as a noun, verb, adverb, and adjective-all in the same sentence. He drew a breath and was about to relaunch when I put a halt to it with the Four Words Every Editor Loves to Hear:

“Boss, I got something.”

He let the air leak out of his lungs, then tilted his head to listen.

“I’ve got the link between the Ludlow Four,” I continued, getting up from my seat and walking over to the map of Newark he had on his side wall.

“It isn’t geography,” I said, then began pointing to different spots on the map. “Wanda Bass sold out of a go-go bar in Irvington. Tyrone Scott worked in and around a chicken shack on South Orange Avenue. Devin Whitehead was a Clinton Hill kid. And Shareef Thomas lived up off Central Avenue near the cemetery.

“It’s not clientele, either,” I continued as I returned to my seat. “Wanda sold to a hooker friend’s clients and whoever else wandered into her go-go bar. Tyrone sold to junkies and beat-up old homeless people at an abandoned housing project. Devin sold to guys in the neighborhood. Shareef sold to suburban white kids.”

Szanto was listening silently.

“The link,” I said, drawing it out a little bit, “is the brand of heroin they sold.”

I fished into my pocket and brought out my samples of The Stuff. I flipped one of the bags across Szanto’s desk.

“I found this in Wanda Bass’s apartment,” I said. “She had been selling it to clients at the go-go bar where she worked. Notice the stamp on it.”

As Szanto grabbed it and began examining the signature eagle-clutching-syringe logo, I held up the torn dime bag.

“I got this from a junkie who said she bought it from Tyrone Scott. It’s got the same stamp.”

Szanto squinted across his desk and I handed him the torn bag.

“I’ll be damned,” he said.

“As for the other two, I’ve got a very good source in Devin Whitehead’s neighborhood who talked to some local miscreants for me, and they all said Devin’s brand was called ‘The Stuff.’ Tommy spent a lot of time around Shareef Thomas’s haunt and found a kid wandering around looking for a guy named ‘Reef’ who sold a brand called ‘The Stuff.’ ”

Szanto started nodding. “Not bad,” he said.

“Boss,” I said. “The Stuff is the story.”

Szanto grabbed his industrial-sized jar of antacid tablets, poured out a few, and started munching on them with a faraway look.

“Do the police know this?” he said through a mouthful of chalk.

“I doubt it.”

He chewed a bit more, swallowed, picked up his phone and punched four numbers on the keypad.

“Hi, chief,” he said. “You got a second?”

Szanto only called one person “chief,” and that was our esteemed executive editor, Harold Brodie.

“Come on,” Szanto said after he replaced the phone in its cradle. “Let’s take a walk.”

The corner office of the Eagle-Examiner newsroom was a strange and foreign land, one I almost never visited. It’s not that Brodie was unfriendly or unapproachable. Quite the contrary. And with his unkempt eyebrows and womanly voice, he looked and sounded like your aging uncle Mortie-the guy who wasn’t really your uncle but was such a dear family friend everyone called him “uncle” anyway. Yet for whatever reason he still scared the crap out of me.

I suppose it was a bit of a stormtrooper-Darth Vader thing. Because, in my dealings outside the newsroom, I got to be the badass stormtrooper. I had my body armor, my helmet, my blaster. I could do serious damage-to someone’s reputation, anyway-and was treated with corresponding deference. Except when I was around Brodie, I knew all he had to do was wave his hand and I would end up writhing on the floor, gasping for my last breath.

More than anything, I just didn’t know the man all that well. In the seven years I had been working for the Eagle-Examiner-ever since being hired from a much smaller daily paper in Pennsylvania-I had spoken with him one-on-one perhaps four times. And one of those I was stoned.

In the management structure of our paper, there was never a need for me to speak to him. I talked exclusively to editors who reported to him, or sometimes editors who reported to other editors who reported to him. It’s like I had been playing telephone with him my entire career.

Szanto, who obviously had no such issues, walked into Brodie’s office without knocking. The old man had been playing classical music on a tiny radio, which he turned down as we entered.

“Hi, chief,” Szanto said.

I just smiled. This was my other problem with Brodie. I got so nervous around him I ended up sounding like a moron every time I opened my mouth. So I decided to keep it shut this time. I mean, think about it, do you ever hear a stormtrooper say anything around Darth Vader?

“Carter, my boy, how are you? A little headachy this morning, I guess?”

I kept smiling and nodded. The ganja guy was a man of few words.

“That’s a good lad,” Brodie said, his Mr. Potato Head eyebrows dancing. “So tell me about this new development.”

Szanto did the talking, laying out everything I had just told him in slightly more succinct fashion. Brodie absorbed it, looking more amused than angry that the story his paper had been putting forth the past two days had been flat wrong.

“Sounds like the police were just whistling Dixie with that whole bar angle, eh?” Brodie said when Szanto was done. “I’ll have to give the police director a hard time about that the next time I see him at a benefit.”

Brodie tented his fingers for a moment, resting his lips on them.

“So, Carter, do you feel like you have a story you can put in the paper?” Brodie asked.

The dreaded direct question. Must speak.

“Well, yes and no, sir,” I said.

“Which part is yes, and which part is no?” Brodie asked, managing to sound pleasant despite the rather pointed nature of the question.

“Yes, I feel certain that The Stuff is the connection between the four dead people. Yes, I’m fairly certain they all hooked up with their source in jail. No, I don’t know who that source is. No, I haven’t the slightest idea why it got them killed.”

“Do you have any good leads?”

I gulped.

“Not especially,” I admitted.

More tenting of fingers followed as the executive editor settled into what was known around here as the Brodie Think. The old man was legendary for it. Reporters who found themselves in his office more frequently than I did talked about it all the time. He would just sit there. And think. And think. And think. He would do it until an answer came to him, however long that was. Sometimes-as was the case here-he even closed his eyes. It had all the appearance of advanced narcolepsy.

Brodie didn’t seem the least bit uncomfortable with the silence. Szanto was accustomed to it, as well. For infrequent visitors such as myself, it was agonizing.

Still, it had its benefits. There was nothing worse to a reporter than a lack of direction from the top. Because more often than not, there were at least three different ways you could go with a story, any of which was at least somewhat defensible. You could reach your own conclusion about which way was best and start traveling that path. But if the executive editor decided differently, it meant you had gone the wrong way. Once the great Brodie Think was over, at least I’d know where to head.

Finally, he opened his eyes.

“Let’s take this one step at a time,” he proclaimed. “Eventually, we’re going to need to figure out where The Stuff is coming from. But I think in the meantime, we should write what we know and see what happens when we put it in the paper.”

I nodded.

“Have you heard any footsteps on this story?” he asked.

That was newspaper speak for “are there any other media outlets working on the same angle that might blow our scoop?”

“I don’t think anyone is even near this,” I said.

“TV has been repackaging sound bites,” Szanto added. “The other papers are just going with the usual shock and outrage.”

“Good. Then there’s no need to rush this into tomorrow’s editions. Think you can have it ready for Friday’s paper?”

I nodded again.

“Good boy,” Brodie said. “Now why don’t you go home and get some rest?”

I excused myself from the great man’s office, thankful to have escaped without sounding like an imbecile for once. And then I took the great man’s advice. I owed myself some sack time.

I aimed my trusty Malibu toward Nutley, suddenly realizing how eager I was to get home. I needed to unwind in my tidy bungalow, away from the world. I know that personality test-the Myers-Whateveritscalled-says we’re either extroverts or introverts. I think we’re all a little bit of both. The last million years of evolution have turned us into social animals, but somewhere before that in our family tree, there was a branch that just wanted to be left alone. That’s what my bungalow is: a place where I can be an introvert.

Deadline did not stir upon my entrance-Deadline could sleep through nuclear testing-and I settled into the couch and pondered Brodie’s plan to write what we knew, even though we only had half the story. The more I thought, the more I liked it. There are times when it makes sense to hold back and drop a big bomb on people all at once, when you have the full picture. This didn’t feel like one of them.

Truth was, publishing a story is one of the most underappreciated reporting techniques out there. Sometimes it lets the right person know you’re on the right track and it makes them want to push you a little further along. You just never know what it flushes out.

After a night of uninterrupted, undrunk slumber, it would stand to reason I would feel unhungover, uncrappy, and in all other ways more human than I had the day before. Yet as the sun crept around the shades of my bungalow’s master bedroom, I still felt lousy. Someday, science will have to explain why a bad night’s sleep hits you harder the second day.

Deadline had commandeered a disproportionately large part of the middle of the bed, leaving me wedged to one side. He grunted when I stirred, opened his eyes partway to shoot me a dirty look, then yawned dramatically. With his morning exercises thus dispatched, he settled back in for a well-earned nap.

By the time I got out of the shower it was after ten and Deadline was engaged in his other primary activity-pacing in front of his food bowl. So I gave him some breakfast, gave myself some breakfast, then grabbed my laptop and flopped on the couch.

I considered doing a little more reporting, maybe calling up the National Drug Bureau, feeding them what I knew and getting them to repeat it back to me-just to give the story a little more of an official grounding. Then I thought about having to deal with their press agent, L. Peter Sampson, Mr. I’m Not Authorized to Blow My Own Nose. And I decided to spare everyone the hassle.

No, it was time for me to write. People don’t always think of newspaper reporters as “writers,” inasmuch as our compositions are seldom confused with art. You know the statistical theorem that says a bunch of monkeys sitting at typewriters would eventually reproduce the complete works of Shakespeare-if you gave ’em a couple trillion years to do it? It would take the monkeys about forty-five minutes to come up with some of the slop that passes for raw copy around our shop.

Still, when you take into account that a newspaper reporter’s sole creation is the written word, we have to be considered writers. And, as writers go, we’re tough, resilient, dependable. We quietly scoff at the softer breeds. I mean, really, some magazine writers consider themselves “on deadline” when they’re three weeks away from having to deliver copy. Where I come from, that’s not a deadline. That’s two weeks off and a few leisurely days at the office.

Then there are those namby-pamby novelists who write what the critics deem to be “literature.” They’re the bichons frises of the writing world-they’re poofy, pretty, and everyone fawns over them. But the moment things get tough, they’re hiding under the kitchen table, making a mess on the floor.

Newspaper reporters? We’re the Australian cattle dogs of the writing world. Maybe we don’t look that great. We certainly don’t smell that great. But you can kick us in the head, trample us, stick us out in the rain or heat. Whatever. We’re still going to get the herd home, no excuses.

And so it was time for me to start herding. Or writing. Or whatever. I decided to start with something snappy. Something quick. Something smart.

“The Stuff wasn’t the right stuff for four Newark drug dealers,” I wrote, then immediately highlighted and erased it. Not only did it have a glaring cliche, it was about as smart as people who mistakenly drive in the EZ-Pass-only lane and then try to back up.

Okay. Maybe something a little straighter.

“The four people found murdered on Ludlow Street earlier this week sold the same brand of heroin, sources indicate,” I wrote, then erased that, too. If it was any straighter, it’d be a candidate for the papacy.

Okay. Let’s go back to snappy/quick/smart.

“It’s the heroin, stupid,” I typed, then immediately regretted the day I entered journalism.

I got up. It had been fifteen minutes, right? I peed, even though I didn’t need to. I scratched Deadline’s head. I noticed some cobwebs in the upper corner of my living room, grabbed some paper towels and cleaned them out.

Random bits of ideas started forming. Maybe I could start with something about the police being offtrack? No. It was possible they were just trying to throw us off with this bar-holdup angle, all the while knowing about The Stuff.

Perhaps I could start with something about Wanda, the beautiful girl whose dreams of being a dancer were cruelly snuffed out? No. It would take too long to get to the point.

The best thing I could do was follow the oldest and greatest newspaper advice ever given: write what you see. What had I really seen in this case?

Of course. Those dime bags. I sat back down and began typing a detailed description of them, and before I knew it, I was on my way. After a couple hours of typing-not to mention four Coke Zeros, two snacks, and thirteen mostly unnecessary trips to the bathroom-I was nearing something resembling a story when my cell phone rang. The caller ID was showing Szanto’s number.

“This is Carter Ross,” I said. “I’m sorry I can’t answer the phone right now-”

“Shhvvttt,” Szanto growled. “You got anything I can read yet?”

I glanced at the clock on my computer screen. “I’m close. But it’s only two-thirty, what’s the hurry?”

“The hurry is Brodie wants this to lead tomorrow’s paper and I don’t want to walk into the three-o’clock meeting without having seen it. So why don’t you just stop pretending like you’re the second coming of Bernard Malamud and send it in?”

That was one of Szanto’s favorite sayings.

“Okay, I’ll e-mail it to you in a second,” I said.

“How long is it?”

We measured length of stories in column inches-how long it would be if laid out in standard type and column width.

“About thirty-five,” I said, which is about twice the normal length.

“Maybe you haven’t heard this yet,” Szanto said. “But times are a wee bit tight in the newspaper industry. We’ve had a few little cutbacks in space that makes it difficult to run longer stories. Any of this ring a bell?”

“I know, Sal, I know,” I said. And I did. On some days, the number of column inches we devoted to news coverage was half what it used to be. I added: “Don’t worry, it’s worth it.”

“Jzzss Krrsst,” he grumbled, then hung up.

I gave the story one more quick read-it was decent, though Bernard Malamud had nothing to worry about-then sent it in.

“Well, Deadline,” I said to my cat. “What now?”

Deadline, who had slipped into one of his twenty-eight daily comas, had no answer.

Against my better judgment, I decided to go into the office. It was time to see if I could find someone who might tell me a little more about my heroin samples, preferably someone with a white lab coat. I knew that with the right assortment of gadgets, the right chemist could tell me how pure my heroin was and where in the world it originated.

Sadly, such people do not advertise their services. My knowledgeable-though-often-misguided research assistant, Mr. Google, pointed me toward friendly people who wanted to help me beat my company’s drug-testing program. I found one laboratory that claimed it specialized in identifying unknown substances and testing the composition of known ones. But when I called them and told a nice scientist the substance she’d be testing was heroin, she suddenly was in a hurry to get off the phone.

I called another lab where a chemist suggested I not tell him it was heroin, that way he could accept it without knowingly breaking any laws. He also said I could expect a three-to-six-week turnaround. For an additional fee, he told me they’d “put a rush on it” and get it to me in two weeks. I must not have mentioned I worked for a daily newspaper.

After a few more unsuccessful phone calls, I resigned myself to asking for help. Worse, I realized where that help was going to have to come from: Buster Hays.

Hays is a cantankerous son of a bitch, but he’s also a cantankerous son of a bitch who has sources and connections all over law enforcement. Somehow, don’t ask me how, he had managed to build up enough goodwill that everyone seemed to owe him favors. And ultimately he was enough of a team player-in his own grouchy, condescending way-that he’d didn’t mind cashing in a favor to help you.

But only after you groveled for a bit. And from the self-satisfied grin on his face as I approached his desk, I think he knew he was about to be the recipient of some concentrated groveling.

“Hi, Buster, got a sec?”

“What’s up, Ivy?” he said, practically taunting me.

I told him about The Stuff, about the story that was going in the next day’s paper, and about what I needed done to the heroin samples I had found. As I talked, a change came over Hays’s face. He didn’t belittle me, nor did he try to stick up for his story. He seemed genuinely miffed he had gotten it wrong.

“So the thing about the bar robbery, you think the cops are just making it up?” he asked.

“I bet your cop source probably believes he’s right. I mean, who knows? Maybe Shareef Thomas really did rob that bar at some point? Or maybe he just happened to look like the guy who did? In the absence of any other information, it’s probably the best theory they had to go on. And once they committed themselves to that premise, maybe they overlooked evidence that pointed in another direction. You know how it goes.”

Hays nodded. “I feel like printing a retraction,” he said ruefully.

If I’d wanted to bust Hays’s balls a little bit, I would have said something like, “Oh, we’ll be printing one. It’s thirty-five inches, it’s leading tomorrow’s paper, and it’s got my name on it.”

But I didn’t need to be scoring rhetorical points at the moment. I needed his help.

“So I’m trying to find someone who can run some tests on those heroin samples I got,” I said. “You know anyone like that?”

“You know, it’s funny, but yesterday I got a call from a guy who does that sort of thing,” Hays said.

I looked at him for a long second to see if he was busting my balls, but he appeared quite earnest. “You did?” I asked.

“Yeah, a guy named Irving Wallace. I hadn’t heard from him in a month of Sundays, but he saw my byline on the Ludlow Street story and gave me a holler. He was all interested in it for some reason.”

“You think he’d help me?”

“Maybe. He sure seemed curious about the story,” Hays said. “You’re not going to have to quote him, are you?”

“I guess not. He’s just doing a test for us.”

“Good, because he works for a part of the federal government where they don’t like to see their names in the paper.”

Hays started flipping through one of his Rolodexes. He had four of them-one from each century he had been working here. Naturally, he was one of the holdouts who refused to modernize and put his sources in a computer. He was into Rolodex number three by the time he found what he was looking for.

“Here he is. Irving Wallace,” Hays said as he copied the number onto a piece of paper. “This guy is the best forensic chemist on the East Coast. Drop my name and promise you won’t quote him. He’ll have that test done for you by suppertime.”

On my way back from Hays’s desk, I saw Szanto, who was returning from the three o’clock meeting along with a pack of other editors.

“Everything okay with the story?” I asked.

“It’s fine,” he said.

In Szanto talk, “fine” was a high compliment. If you were waiting for something that actually sounded like praise, chances are you would be waiting a while. He handed out a “good” about three times a year. “Very good” was a biennial event. I’m not sure anything beyond that-great, spectacular, superior-was even in his vocabulary. I was pleased with my “fine.”

Tina Thompson trailed Szanto out of the meeting. She gave me a thumbs-up. “Great work,” she said.

“Yeah, you like it?”

“Well, it’s a bit overwritten, but I would expect nothing less from you,” she teased. “On the whole, it’s a great piece of reporting.”

“How’d it go over in the meeting?”

“Well, Brodie made it clear he liked it, so. .”

So I knew how that went. When Brodie hadn’t made up his mind about a story, he’d be real quiet, which inevitably gave rise to spirited debate. But when he indicated he liked it, all the other editors would pile on to insist they also liked it-with the possible exception of Szanto, who was a notorious contrarian.

“Great,” I said. “Thanks.”

Tina was turning to walk away when something-the way her curls framed her face? the way her sweater hugged her body? — caused me to blurt out, “We should grab a drink tonight to celebrate.”

“Okay,” she said, like it was nothing.

“I’ll check in with you later,” I said.

“Okay,” she said, and gave me a little wave.

It happened so quickly, almost like my subconscious had been doing the talking for me. What the hell was my problem? The woman was less than twenty-four hours from ovulation. Hell, for all I knew that little watch of hers was off and she was ovulating right now. Once we got to the bar and had a drink or two, nature would take over. I might as well have volunteered to be her sperm donor.

Deep down, did I want to get Tina pregnant? Or was I just an incurably horny male who-because of hormones or pheromones or whatever-recognized Tina as an easy mark?

Then again, maybe it could just stay innocent. A drink or two between colleagues. A hearty farewell handshake. A return to the peace and solitude of my Nutley bungalow.

Uh-huh.

I did my best to shelve all those thoughts as I sat back down and punched in the phone number Hays had given me.

“Yes,” a terse voice said on the other end.

“Irving Wallace, please.”

“Yes.”

“Oh, this is Irving Wallace?”

“Yes.”

“Hi, I’m Carter Ross with the Eagle-Examiner-”

“No comment.”

He wasn’t trying to be funny, but I laughed despite myself.

“I didn’t even ask you a question yet,” I said.

“No comment.”

“Look, sir, I’m sorry to trouble you. But I’m working on a story about this quadruple homicide in Newark and I’ve got some heroin samples I need tested. Buster Hays tells me you can help.”

A pause.

“Heroin samples, huh?” he said, sounding intrigued.

“Yes.”

“And it relates to the Newark murders?”

“Yes.”

“And you know Buster Hays?”

“Yeah, I work with him.”

Another pause.

“I’ll call you back,” he said, and abruptly hung up.

“Sounds great,” I said to the empty phone line.

Feds. They were always so paranoid. I placed the phone back in its cradle and checked my e-mail, where there was more of the usual spam from Human Resources. I was just beginning to learn about an important discussion group on peanut allergies when my phone rang.

“Carter Ross.”

“Hi, Carter. Irving Wallace,” he said, sounding like he had undergone a robotectomy and was now human. “Sorry for the runaround. I just wanted to check you out.”

“Do people often call you up and impersonate newspaper reporters?”

“Can’t be too careful these days,” he said. “Buster says you’re okay. Actually, Buster says you’re a smart-ass Ivy League type. But he also said you’re a fine young reporter and I should help you. So what can I do for you?”

“I’m hoping you can tell me the purity and origin of some heroin samples I got off the street.”

“You want just standard GC/MS?”

“Uh. .”

“Because I can do that, LC, FTIR/ATR, IRMS, ICP/MS, Raman, whatever you need. We’re a full-service shop.”

“You’re talking to a newspaper reporter, remember?”

“Oh, right, sorry. GC/MS stands for gas chromatography/mass spectrometry. LC is liquid chromatography. FTIR/ATR is Fourier transform infrared. . I’ve lost you, haven’t I?”

“Thoroughly.”

“Okay, let’s start with remedial instruction,” Wallace said patiently. “Heroin is derived from poppy seeds. Poppy seeds come from poppy plants. Poppy plants grown in different parts of the world have unique chemical signatures. My equipment reads the signature.”

“Gotcha. How soon you can turn it around?”

“You’re in luck. My gear is calibrated for heroin right now. I can have it in a few hours.”

“Terrific,” I said. “I’ll drop off the samples right now. Where can I find you?”

“It’s better I have someone find you. Be outside your building in fifteen minutes.”

“Great,” I said. “What part of the government do you work for, anyway?”

“What, didn’t Buster tell you?”

“No.”

“That’s because he doesn’t know.”

The next sound I heard was the line clicking dead.

Fifteen minutes later-possibly to the second-a young man with close-cropped blond hair and an inexpensive suit hopped out of a late-model Crown Victoria in front of the Eagle-Examiner offices.

Obviously, my fed had arrived.

I had taken my two heroin samples-The Stuff and the blank one, both from Wanda’s bedroom-and tucked them in an envelope, which I handed to the man.

“How did you know I’m the guy Irving Wallace sent?” he asked.

“As a newspaper reporter, I’m a trained observer of the human condition,” I said with a grin, although he seemed to come from The Land Sarcasm Forgot. Probably Iowa.

“Yes, sir,” he replied, got back into his car, and drove off.

It left me, for the moment, with nothing to do. I had figured I would need to spend the afternoon protecting my story from the ravages of editing. But it had apparently garnered enough fans so that wouldn’t be necessary. So I drove back down to Ludlow Street, just to poke around. The shrine was more or less the same size as it had been two days earlier, although it was starting to look a little the worse for wear. Some of the candles had been knocked over and all of them had burned out. The cold nights had done a number on the flowers, which now looked like limp spinach.

I pulled on the door to the church, but it was locked. So I wandered around the neighborhood for an hour or two, halfheartedly interviewing a few more people to see if there was any interesting talk on the street. There wasn’t. And with the sun disappearing and the wind picking up, I was losing my will to canvass any further.

I had just turned over the Malibu’s engine when my cell phone rang. The number came up as “unavailable.”

“Carter Ross.”

“You’re not recording this, are you?”

It was, naturally, Irving Wallace.

“Do they teach you to be this paranoid or does it come naturally?”

“Hey, I got to ask,” he said.

“Fair enough. No, I’m not recording this.”

“Good,” he said. “And my name doesn’t go in your story, right?”

“Right.”

“Good. Question for you. Where did you get the sample that was labeled ‘The Stuff’?”

“From a dealer’s stash box,” I said.

“From an active dealer? Or from one of the victims in the Newark murders?”

“One of the victims-a woman who had been dealing out of a go-go bar in Irvington. The box was hidden in a closet in her apartment.”

“I see,” he said, like he was trying to make sense of something. “So you’re sure this is what she was selling on the street?”

“Yeah. Why do you sound so surprised?”

“Because it’s more than ninety-nine percent pure.”

“I take it that’s a lot?”

“The only time I’ve seen it that pure is when it’s been seized at the airport,” he said. “Once it gets to the street, it’s always cut at least a little bit. Now and then you get low nineties, but even the best heroin is usually seventy or eighty. I tested this one three times and each time it came back above ninety-nine percent. You can safely call it the purest heroin ever sold on the streets in America in your article and no one would call the paper to correct you.”

“What about the other sample?”

“The blank one? That was more like fifty. Run-of-the-mill.”

“Anything else you can tell me?” I asked.

“Without making your eyes glaze over with the details, I can tell you the chemical signature is consistent with South American heroin. I didn’t run the full workup, but I’d be willing to bet this came from the central highlands of Colombia, not far from Bogota.”

“Both of them came from the same place?”

“Yes.”

“And the purity is that extraordinary, huh?”

“Put it this way,” Wallace said. “The government takes thousands of kilos of heroin off the street every year, and most of it comes through my lab in one way or another. Yet in ten years of testing those thousands of kilos, I’ve never seen anything this pure. Junkies must have gone nuts for this stuff.”

Maybe a little too nuts, I thought.

“Well, I really appreciate the help with this,” I said, revving my engine a few times just to get the heater going a little more.

“Not at all. Those Newark killings are a heck of a thing, huh?”

“Everyone seems pretty rattled by them,” I confirmed.

“Yeah. Well, they should be. That’s a terrible thing, four people killed like that,” he said. “Is what you gave me the only samples you have?”

“I have one more of each-The Stuff and the generic.”

“And you’re keeping them in a safe place?”

“I’m going to tuck them away in my piggy bank at home.”

“Good,” he said. “Wouldn’t want them getting out.”

I assured him I didn’t, either, and with one more reminder to leave his name out of the story, he hung up.

It was nearing six o’clock-time for him to get home and for me to return to the office and make sure no one had spent the afternoon rearranging letters in my story. The editing process often reminds me of my favorite joke: a writer and an editor are stranded together in the desert. They’ve been slogging over the dunes for days and are about to die of thirst when, miraculously, they come across an oasis. The writer dives in and begins happily drinking the water. Yet when he looks up, he finds the editor pissing in the oasis.

Aghast, the writer screams, “What the hell are you doing?”

The editor replies, “I’m making it better.”

Still, once I returned to the office, I was relieved to find no one with a spastic bladder had been near my story. Szanto had made a few judicious nips and tucks, put a few train-wreck sentences back on track. I added one paragraph about the lab test results and shipped it over to the copy editors, thankful no one had made it “better.”

With my day’s toil complete, I went to round up Tina, only to discover her still chained to her desk, editing copy. She glanced up when she saw me approach, stuck five fingers in the air and mouthed “five minutes.” Then she winked.

I nodded and looked around to make sure no one had caught the wink. Like it mattered. Tina’s love life was an open book, one without the word “discretion” in it. The trade-off for getting to enjoy that slender body of hers would be that everyone was going to know about it.

I returned to my desk, prepared to unclutter my e-mail in-box for at least the next half hour. No journalist’s “five minutes” is ever really “five minutes.”

Except Tina’s was pretty close. After maybe ten she appeared, purse in hand, ready to depart.

“There’s this new wine bar that’s just opened up down the street from my building,” she said. “I’ve been dying to try it.”

“Great. Do they serve beer there?”

“I’m sure they keep something on tap for you and the other Neanderthals,” she said.

“It gives me strength for when I pull you out of the place by your hair.”

“Charming. I need to run home first real quick,” she said. “Why don’t you go and get us a table, order me a nice pinot, and I’ll meet you there?”

“Look for me in the knuckle-dragger section,” I said.

I made my way to Hoboken and easily found parking-a minor miracle-then proceeded to the bar, a cozy little yuppie breeding ground about a half block from Tina’s place. It being a Thursday night, the place wasn’t too full. I selected a booth with a semicircular table along the far wall. It was designed for a couple, and the lighting was just right, the kind of setup that announced to the entire establishment you intended to bonk like bonobos later in the evening.

I picked up the wine menu, but it was mostly just to kill time. I’m a total wine ignoramus. Making sense of the Torah in the original Hebrew would be easier for me. Eventually, I ordered Tina her pinot noir, selecting the name Fetzer because it amused me. Then I ordered myself a beer, earning a witheringly snooty look from the waitress.

When Tina arrived, she had ditched her work clothes in favor of a knee-length black cocktail dress with bare shoulders and a keyhole neckline. She looked stunning. It was all I could do to keep my jaw on its hinge.

“I just couldn’t stay in pants for another five minutes,” she explained.

I went to make a lame joke about how I wished all my dates felt that way, but my mouth was dry. It didn’t take much imagination to know that dress would go from body to floor in 2.1 seconds. As she sat down, the dress shimmied halfway up her thigh, making it impossible to decide which part of her to ogle first.

“You look great,” I managed to say.

She gave me an “oh, what, this old thing?” shrug. I couldn’t help but be impressed-not just at how stunning she looked, but at how effortlessly she was working me.

Most guys cling to this archaic notion we are the seducers and women are the seduced. And perhaps, where the less clever of the gender is concerned, that’s true. But in the presence of the truly skilled female, such as Tina, the myth of male domination is just another one of those wrongheaded ideas women allow to be perpetuated so guys never turn around to see the marionette strings coming out our backs.

It’s like lion prides. For years, researchers-sorry, male researchers-believed the boy lions duked it out for the right to breed with the girl lions, who were passive spectators in the whole thing. The record only got set straight when some female researchers came along and took a more careful look at the social dynamics in the pride that preceded the fight. It turns out much of the time the lionesses are really calling the shots, selecting the most fit breeding partner. The fights the boy lions have are merely a noisy confirmation of what the girl lions have already decided among themselves.

So there I was, as our drinks arrived, wondering if I had been selected to beat the other lions to the prize. I wanted to skip the flirting and head straight to the making out, because nothing is more fun than engaging in truly obnoxious displays of public affection-if only because it makes the loveless married couples so damn uncomfortable.

But Tina had subtly shifted her weight, crossing her legs in a way that made it impossible for me to move in without getting a knee in the thigh. Obviously, she wanted her puppet to talk for a while first. So she asked me about my story, and I answered.

Another round of drinks arrived, and I was still talking-but without her having to ask questions. By the third round, it really started pouring out of me, all the emotion of the previous few days that I had been suppressing for one reason or another.

I would say I was rambling, but it was worse than that. I was blubbering.

Somewhere along the line, a transformation occurred in Tina. She was no longer wooing me with her black dress and knockout legs. She was reassuring me with this look of tender concern. She had pulled a cardigan over her shoulders-where the hell had that come from? — and I could tell she was keeping a tissue at the ready, in case I started bawling.

What a nightmare. I had managed to wreck the surest thing this side of sunrise because I needed to share my feelings? What the hell was my problem?

By the time Tina had comforted me and I paid the bill-my one manly act of the evening-I was just sober enough to realize an eighty-dollar bar tab meant I wasn’t going to be driving anywhere. As we departed, there was intimacy between us in that we had just shared an emotional experience. But there was no romance and certainly no lust. Nor should there have been. Don Juan never blubbered on his lover’s shoulder.

Before long I was back in a familiar place: on Tina’s couch, covered in a blanket, very much alone.

The Director awoke early, a habit he picked up in the military and had been unable to shake, even fifteen years after his last salute. It pleased him to know he started his day while most of the world slept. He noticed it was a trait common among the high-powered CEOs profiled on the cover of those business magazines. They were all early risers.

The Director considered himself their peer, even if he never got his due for it. So he set his alarm clock for 4 A.M.

He tiptoed down to the gym he had built in the basement of his suburban New Jersey home. His wife and three children complained about the noise of iron slapping iron interrupting their sleep, so he had soundproofed it like a recording studio. Only the softest ping escaped, not nearly enough noise to wake them.

The Director had been working out six days a week since he left the military. He once swore he would never allow himself to get soft-he would keep the same iron-hard stomach as when he had been the fittest colonel in the army.

Alas, civilian food agreed with him too much. And as his metabolism slowed with age, he made a new vow: he would never allow himself to get weak. He took pride in still being able to bench-press over three hundred pounds. At an age, fifty-five, when some men were thinking about whether or not they would be able to pick up their grandchildren, the Director was still putting up personal bests in his basement weight room.

He completed his workout and shower and was midway through a breakfast of bran cereal and yogurt when he heard the thudding of the newspaper against the door. The Director glanced at his watch, annoyed. It was 5:33. He liked to have his paper earlier.

All those high-powered executives the Director read about started their days by reading two or three newspapers. The Director felt one was sufficient, and his paper of choice was the Eagle-Examiner. He retrieved it from the front porch and took it to the breakfast table, but lost his appetite when he read the first headline: “Heroin links victims in quadruple murder.”

The Director felt sweat pop on his brow. He wanted to break something. But no. His wife would ask what had him so upset. He had to control his rage.

How was this even possible? Had the police figured it out? It couldn’t be. He had informants inside police headquarters. They’d mentioned nothing about this.

The Director started reading and realized this was just some reporter who had stumbled across some things and had managed to make a few lucky guesses. The Director relaxed. The situation could still be controlled if he acted quickly. He picked up the phone and called Monty, waking him from a sound sleep.

“What is it, Director?” Monty said groggily.

“Wake up, Monty,” the Director told him. “We have some damage control to do.”