The Girl Next Door

CHAPTER 3

Having finished with her story, Mrs. Alfaro brought the back of her hand to both sides of her face, wiping away the small tear tracks that had formed. Tommy gave her a moment to compose herself, partly out of kindness and partly because he needed to catch his breath. Mr. Alfaro stood rigidly by his wife, a hand on her shoulder in a small-but-important gesture of consolation. I paged back in my notebook, filling in key words while they were still fresh in my mind. My self-invented shorthand hadn’t quite been able to keep up, and I wanted to get as much of it as I could.

Of course, the details only mattered so much. The main point was that it was now undeniable: Nancy Marino’s death was no accident.

Unwitting hit-and-run drivers don’t stalk their prey for days on end, wait patiently down the block and then accelerate when someone gets out of her car. This was a homicide, as cold and simple as if someone had brought a gun to her ear and pulled the trigger. This weapon just happened to take unleaded gasoline.

Eventually, Tommy started asking Mrs. Alfaro some follow-up questions, providing me the short version of the answers. No, she never got much of a look at the driver. No, she didn’t catch the license plate. No, she couldn’t say for sure the make and model of the SUV. No, she had nothing else to add to her story. She had told us everything she remembered.

When we were done, I thanked the Alfaros for their hospitality and for their willingness to talk, reiterating my promise not to go to the police or print their names in the newspaper. Soon I was following Tommy back down the front steps to our cars. It was getting toward the middle part of a hot summer afternoon, but it felt like Antarctica in my guts.

“So what now?” Tommy asked as we reached the sidewalk.

“I don’t know exactly. At risk of stating the obvious, someone killed this woman and the Bloomfield police sure won’t be able to figure out who or why.”

“And you can?”

“Well, I certainly have to try. This may sound strange, but I feel like I owe it to Nancy. She was one of the good guys. And who am I as a newspaper reporter if I don’t look out for the good guys? Besides, I’ve gotten to like her. And whether I knew her or not, she was a colleague.”

“It would be a hell of a good story, too,” Tommy added.

“Well, yeah, and there’s that,” I conceded.

“Can I do anything?”

“No, no. I got this,” I said, knowing it would only make Tommy more eager to help. “You have your own reporting to do.”

“Yeah, but it’s just some stupid city council stuff. I can make time for something like this.”

“I don’t know,” I said, setting the hook a little more. “If Tina found out…”

“Tina doesn’t need to know anything about this,” he assured me. “Come on. You know you can’t do this all by yourself.”

“Well, okay,” I said, smiling inwardly as I thought about what task my newly recruited assistant should tackle.

Nancy’s sister obviously knew something. But after a quick glance at my phone-no missed calls from the 510 area code-I decided I could continue playing it cool and let her come to me.

In the meantime, I had to learn more about Nancy Marino. Because while I could fake my way through her obituary, that didn’t mean I really knew her. Sure, she seemed like a reliable newspaper deliverer and could apparently keep a lunch order straight. But it was also entirely possible Nancy Marino was a hopelessly addicted gambler, a hundred grand in debt to a bookie who finally lost his patience.

Was it likely? No. But put in enough years as a journalist, exploring life on the margins of society, and you start to realize how cunning humankind can be. The gentle Little League coach turns out to be a vicious mobster. The humble parish priest is an embezzler. The prim kindergarten teacher has a raunchy Internet site. It happens.

I’m not saying I assume the worst about people. But it also doesn’t make sense to assume the best. That’s what being a reporter teaches you: don’t assume.

“Hello?” Tommy said, pantomiming like he was knocking on a door. “Anyone home?”

“Sorry. How about you head back to the office and see what kind of paper you can find on Nancy Marino,” I said. “Pull her mortgage, search the court filings, look for liens against her house-the usual.”

“Okay.”

“Oh, and if you bump into Tina, remember: you didn’t see me, you aren’t working on this, you don’t even know me. I’m supposed to be off chasing a bear in Newark.”

“Oh,” he said, as if this made perfect sense. “So what’s your plan while I’m doing all the boring work?”

“I’m heading to the restaurant where Nancy worked and asking some questions. Call me if you learn anything interesting.”

“You, too,” he replied and we parted ways.

I climbed into the Malibu, the interior of which was only slightly cooler than the surface of the sun. The Malibu’s air-conditioning may once have worked well, but that was many years and several owners ago. So it was still sputtering lukewarm air when I reached the end of my two-mile-long journey to the State Street Grill.

The restaurant just in from the corner of Bloomfield Avenue and State Street used to be one of those prototypically scuzzy/wonderful Jersey diners, named after its original proprietor-Willy? Henry? Something ending in a y-until the current owners decided the best way to renovate was with a wrecking ball. They tore down the old diner and in its place raised the State Street Grill, an attractive stucco-faced building with Art Deco metal awnings and a hip, retro look.

I had been to the new place a couple of times since moving to Bloomfield two years earlier. So I knew that while it looked the part of the modern eatery-and had gone somewhat upscale as compared to its greasy spoon days-it was still a Jersey diner in its soul, with a twenty-four-page menu, neon signage, and a keepin’-it-real vibe. Visit during a busy lunchtime, and you’ll see an America the Founding Fathers could only have barely imagined, with people of every different hue and ancestry dining next to each other. Old Italian men. Young Hispanic families. Blacks and whites and ambiguously browns.

I entered and was immediately greeted by the hostess, whom I recognized from my previous visits. I’m also pretty sure I had seen her at Nancy’s wake the day before. She was in her late twenties and attractive in that way that hostesses tend to be, with dark hair, green eyes, and nice curves, all put together in a neat, medium-sized package. Her nose announced her Greek heritage, but her accent was all Jersey. So when she asked me if I wanted to sit at the “bar,” it came out sounding like “baw.”

“Actually, I’m not here to eat today,” I said. “My name is Carter Ross. I’m a reporter with the Eagle-Examiner, and I’m working on a story about Nancy Marino.”

As soon as I said the name, the hostess went stiff, as if she was reliving the shock of Nancy’s death. She took a moment to collect herself, then motioned to one of her colleagues.

“Jen, could you cover for me? I need to talk to this reporter,” she said, then turned in my direction. “Come with me, please.”

* * *

I hurried to keep up as the hostess walked briskly toward the side of the restaurant, through the kitchen and toward a wooden door, which she held open for me. We walked into a small office decorated with sports memorabilia, pictures of the Parthenon, and posters of women eating gyros.

“I’m sorry, this is still so weird, you know?” she said, closing the door behind me. “My family owns this diner, and Nancy had been working here since I was a kid. She was like my older sister. I can’t believe what happened.”

We made eye contact and I found myself momentarily swept into a sea of green iris. In that instant, something clicked between us. And I’m pretty sure it wasn’t merely my overly active male imagination, because she was gazing back at me with unusual intensity. Call it pheromones or whatever, but sometimes you just know you like someone, and it comes with more than an inkling that the sentiment is returned. There were future possibilities between us, even if the current circumstances would not allow it.

After a pause-more pleasant than awkward-she recovered and walked over to the desk, where she began picking through a pile of invoices, order forms, and time schedules.

“Did you see the story about her in the paper today? We got it here somewhere,” she said.

“Yeah, I saw it.” Then added with perhaps false modesty: “I wrote it.”

“You did?”

I had long since reconciled myself to the extent to which readers ignored bylines. Even people who knew me-and knew where I worked-would come up to me and start telling me about my own stories. No one ever bothered to read the first three words: “By Carter Ross.”

She found my story, which had been tucked in the upper-right-hand corner of that day’s obituary page. I walked toward her and pointed to my name at the top of it.

“That’s me,” I said.

She studied it, seemingly in some kind of trance.

“So that’s my name. What’s yours?” I prompted.

“I’m so sorry, I’m just out of it today. I’m Nicola Papadopolous. But call me Nikki.”

“Hi, Nikki, nice to meet you. Do you mind if we sit down and talk?”

“Yeah, sorry, yeah, have a seat,” she said, sitting behind the desk while pointing to the chair on the other side. “This whole thing is just, like, wow. It’s thrown me for a loop, you know?”

“I understand,” I assured her.

She nodded, and I had a brief debate with myself about how much to tell my new friend, Nikki. Past mistakes had taught me to be cautious with information when you don’t know quite who you’re dealing with. Even people who seem benign-or at least neutral-could turn out to be malevolent. And you never want to give those malevolent types too much notice about what you’re up to.

But in this case my gut-and maybe those aforementioned pheromones-told me Nikki was safe. At a certain point, a reporter has to decide to trust someone. It might as well be the pretty Greek girl.

“So, Nikki, this is going to be hard for you to hear, but I think Nancy was murdered.”

The look on Nikki’s face confirmed her guilelessness. She was registering the kind of authentic surprise-slack jaw, stunned mouth, astonished eyes-no one would have been able to fake.

“That hit and run was no accident,” I continued. “I talked to a reliable eyewitness who told me a black SUV appeared to have been following Nancy for several days. It was that same black SUV that ran her over.”

Nikki was shaking her head.

“But I don’t … Nancy was like … She was like the nicest person in the world. Who would do that to her?”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Did she mention being worried about anything? Fearful of anyone? Was she having any problems that she told you about?”

“No,” Nikki said, thought about it for a moment, then added more definitively, “I mean no.”

“What about boyfriends? Was she having trouble with any guys?”

“No. Definitely not. She didn’t … I’m not saying she was a dyke or anything. But I’ve known Nancy-sorry, I knew Nancy-for, like, twenty years, and she never had a serious boyfriend. She never even talked about guys like that. And that’s kind of different, you know? I mean, say a good-looking guy like you walks into the restaurant.”

I tried desperately not to blush as Nikki continued:

“All the other waitresses would be like, ‘Oh, check out Mr. Handsome at Table 17 … I got myself a stud,’ stuff like that. It’s just what we do to pass time, you know?”

“Sure,” I said, as if I had long experience in waitress small talk.

“Well, Nancy wasn’t like that. It’s like she didn’t notice or didn’t care. I mean, she was nice to good-looking guys, but she was nice to ugly old ladies, too, you know?”

“Got it. Okay, not boyfriends. So what about after work? What did she do after work?”

“Nancy? My God, I think all she did was work. She got up to deliver papers at, like … I don’t know, but it was early. Then she was here doing the seven-to-three shift. She did the busy part of breakfast and lunch. Then she did, I don’t know, church stuff. Family stuff. Sometimes she would go to meetings at night for her other job.”

“What kind of meetings?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I guess they were like union meetings or something. It was all about the newspaper.”

It made sense a union shop steward would have some nighttime obligations, probably ones that stretched close to midnight. Nancy must have been an expert in sleep deprivation.

“Did you guys ever hang out after work or anything?” I asked.

“No. I mean, we were close, but Nancy kind of-”

Nikki was interrupted by the office door swinging open with enough force that the resulting wind scattered some of the papers on the desk. A round-faced, balding Greek man stormed in behind it, his fists clenching tightly enough that I could see his forearm muscles tensing where his rolled-up shirtsleeves cut off.

And he looked angry enough to shoot fire out his nose.

* * *

In my (albeit limited) experience with Greek women, they are masters at manipulating the tempers of their menfolk, stoking them or soothing them as the situation warrants. And that is what Nikki immediately, and perhaps instinctively, began doing with her father: turning on the charm in an effort to pacify him.

“Babba!” she said brightly, putting the accent on the second “ba.” She gave him the kind of heart-melting smile that Daddy’s Little Girls have been using to wrap their fathers around their fingers for eons.

But Babba wasn’t buying it this time.

“What’s going on here?” he asked angrily, in a thick Greek accent slanted with the sound of accusation. He shot glances back and forth between us. I knew I had seen the man before, though I was having a tough time placing where.

Then a small piece of his comb-over broke loose from his bald head and started dancing in the air, and it hit me: he was the lopsided unicorn I had seen chatting up Jackman at Nancy’s wake, the one Jackman had told to get lost. And now he was looking like he wanted to gore me with his hair horn.

“Babba, this is Carter Ross from the-”

I was standing up to introduce myself, but Nikki’s father was having none of it.

“I don’t want you talking to no newspaper reporter,” he interrupted. Nikki had never gotten the chance to say I was a reporter. Somehow, Babba already knew.

“But, Babba, we were-”

“It’s time for you to go,” he said, turning toward me, his fists still balled. I could tell he was considering whether to grab me by the arm and physically throw me out of his restaurant. I’m not the most menacing-looking guy in the world, but I’m just broad-chested enough that most guys think twice about trying to manhandle me. Besides, I was a head taller and at least twenty years younger than Babba. It wouldn’t have been a fair fight.

“Leave, now,” he said. “Or I call the police and tell them you trespass.”

“Sir, I’m not trespassing. I’m conducting an-”

“It’s time for you to go,” he said again, finding new inspiration for his anger.

As best I could tell, my options were as follows: confront the fuming Greek man and attempt to calm him down, an act that would likely only enrage him further; or make like Alexander the Great and get the heck out of Macedonia, which is the course I chose.

“Nikki, it sounds like I’m not welcome here,” I said, deliberately addressing her rather than Babba. “I think I’ll leave now.”

“I’ll see you out,” Nikki said.

Her father started to protest, but Nikki fixed him with a glare every bit as effective as if she had dropped a piano on his head.

“He is a customer,” she spat. “We are not rude to our customers.”

The old man could hardly object to that logic. And it was clear an unspoken deal had been struck. She would acquiesce to his demand that the newspaper reporter depart, but he would allow her to coordinate my retreat in a way that preserved her dignity. As if to underscore the fact that she had resumed control of the situation, she slipped her arm in mine-clearly an unpopular move with Babba-and escorted me out of the office and back through the kitchen without so much as another glance at her father.

As we entered the dining area, my mind was already churning. Whenever a reporter gets asked to leave someone’s home, business, school, or place of worship-and I’ve been bounced out of all four on many occasions-it inevitably raises the question: What do they have to hide?

“What was that about?” I asked, when we were finally out of range.

“Oh, that’s just my dad being my dad,” she said, shaking her head like she’d seen it a thousand times before. “He’s old-school.”

“But why wouldn’t he want you talking to a reporter? We’re not discussing state secrets here.”

“When he doesn’t understand a situation, that’s how he reacts. I’ll explain it to him once he calms down, and he’ll be fine.”

I thought back to the debate I had earlier with myself, the one involving how much to tell Nikki. I had decided she was harmless, and I hoped I was still correct in that judgment. As for her father? There was no telling about him. Jeanne Nygard had said Nancy was having “problems at work.” It was dawning on me she never specified which workplace.

Was it possible this man had something to do with Nancy’s death? Was that why he didn’t want me snooping around? It wouldn’t immediately make sense that a diner owner would want to get rid of one of his most popular waitresses, but there was no telling what might have been happening beneath the metal awnings at the State Street Grill.

As we reached the front of the restaurant, where Nikki’s pal Jen was still faithfully staffing the hostesses’ station, I attempted to do some quick damage control.

“Do me a favor and don’t tell him what I told you about Nancy,” I said, then added quickly, “I don’t want to upset him further.”

“Oh, no problem,” she said, holding the front door open for me. “Believe me, I stopped telling my dad everything about my life a long time ago. I mean, I’m twenty-eight years old and he still thinks I’m a virgin.”

I brushed past her just as she said the word “virgin,” and felt a charge rush through me. I walked out into a small anteroom, then to another door, which I held open for her.

“Anyway, sorry he freaked out,” she continued as we reached the front porch.

“No problem.”

I suddenly felt like I was being watched. And, sure enough, Babba was monitoring our interaction from inside the restaurant, his arms crossed, his unicorn horn at the ready. Nikki either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

“And thanks for writing that nice article about Nancy. That was really sweet.”

“I was happy to do it.”

Uncrossing his arms, Babba started making for the door. He had apparently lost his patience for our little farewell scene. This time Nikki noticed.

“You’re a nice guy,” she said quickly, and before I knew what was happening, she stood on her tiptoes, gripped my shoulders to propel herself upward, and kissed me on the cheek. It was one of those innocent-but-not-so-innocent kisses, the kind that involved a little too much body contact to be considered sisterly.

Without another word, she disappeared back into the diner, leaving me standing on the patio, just slightly dazed.

* * *

By the time I came to my senses, my empty brain had stopped calling the shots and my empty stomach had taken over. It guided me a block and a half down Bloomfield Avenue and into a hole-in-the-wall pizzeria, where I found myself ordering two slices and a Coke Zero.

This, of course, is one of the great pleasures of living in New Jersey, as compared to other parts of this vast, pizza-starved nation of ours. Walk into nearly any pizza place in my part of the state, and you will find better pie than you will in, say, the whole of the American South. People offer all kinds of theories for why this is so, citing the quality of the water (something in the aquifer that supposedly makes for good dough), the pollution (something in the air makes the sauce taste better), or the density of Italian-Americans (something about having a last name ending in a vowel just brings it all together).

I think it’s a kind of natural selection. A pizzeria in, say, rural Virginia merely has to outperform Pizza Hut, which is about as tough as besting a week-old baby at arm wrestling. A pizzeria in New Jersey has to take on some of the toughest competitors in the pizza world. Offering anything less than outstanding pie puts them out of business within six months. Only the strong survive.

I was into my second slice when my phone rang. I recognized both the number and the inflectionless voice on the other end:

“Mr. Ross, this is Jeanne Nygard, Nancy Marino’s sister. We met yesterday at the funeral home,” she said, as if she feared I suffered advanced amnesia.

“Of course, Jeanne, I remember.”

She wasted little time getting to the point: “Have you decided whether you’re going to investigate my sister’s murder?”

The word choice-“murder”-was an obvious attempt to be provocative. And even though I agreed with it, I didn’t let on. I wanted to see if she could convince me.

“What makes you think it’s a murder?” I asked.

I watched a bead of sweat drip down the side of my soda cup as I waited for her answer.

“Mr. Ross, I need to know if I can trust you.”

“You’ve mentioned that before. And I have to be honest, if you’re of the mind not to trust me, it’s going to be difficult for us to get past it. It will probably work better if you decide to give me a little trust and see how it works.”

“But I need to know whose side you’re on.”

People are always asking me variations of this question. Sad to say, but in a world overstuffed with pundits, bloggers, and first-person essayists, the true reporter-objective, open-minded, and willing to let go of his ideological slant-is getting pushed closer to extinction every day.

“Ms. Nygard, I don’t even know what the sides are yet,” I said. “All I can tell you is that I have no agenda other than to find the truth. And if it turns out there are two sides to that truth-or three sides, or more-I will treat them equally.”

My soda cup had created a small circle of moisture on the pizzeria’s Formica tabletop. This time, as I waited for her reply, I lifted the cup and started making patterns with the rings.

“What if the truth … doesn’t reflect well on your newspaper?” she said at last.

“Then my newspaper ought to be the first to report it. I don’t know what experiences you’ve had with other newspapers or other newspaper reporters. But at my place, we insist on transparency from the people we cover, so we hold ourselves to an even higher standard of self-disclosure.”

“So you’re not … with management?”

“I’m neither with nor against it. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on and we’ll worry about who looks bad later.”

This seemed to satisfy her.

“I don’t like having long conversations on the phone,” she said. “Can we meet in person?”

“Sure. Where can I find you?”

“I’m staying at the La Quinta,” she said, as if there were only one La Quinta and it turned its nose up at shoddier establishments like the Ritz-Carlton.

“Which La Quinta?”

“Hang on,” she said, lowering the phone for a moment, then returning to rattle off an address on Route 3 in Clifton.

“I can be there in fifteen minutes,” I said. “I’ll meet you in the lobby?”

“That would be fine,” she said, and we hung up.

I finished my pizza in two large bites, then drank what remained of the Coke Zero on my way out, tossing it in the trash by the door. Before long, the Malibu was pointed north on the Garden State Parkway, then east on Route 3, a thoroughly obsolete divided highway with short exit ramps and nonexistent merge lanes. To drive it is to invite early death to do the merengue with you. Yet, judging from the traffic that was always on it, roughly four billion people somehow survive the dance every day.

The La Quinta was just beyond a Shell station and a merging panel truck that nearly relieved my Malibu of its bumper. The hotel, which shared a parking lot with an egregious theme restaurant, looked like it had gotten a much-needed face-lift sometime in its recent past, and I’m sure somewhere there was a manager using the phrase “newly refurbished” whenever he got the chance.

Jeanne was waiting for me in the glass-enclosed lobby when I arrived, bobbing and weaving involuntarily as she sat in an armchair just inside the entrance. She was wearing a slightly different floral-print dress than the day before, but she still had on the same photochromic glasses. Her brown-and-gray hair, now out of the braid, fell halfway down her back. Any hairdresser would have told her it was far too brittle to be worn so long, but I could guess Jeanne Nygard probably wasn’t one to solicit opinions from the local salon.

“My husband doesn’t want me talking to you,” she began as I sat down, not bothering with preamble. “He thinks the stress is bad for my disease. I have Parkinson’s.”

She stopped dramatically, like I ought to have some kind of reaction-pity, dread, horror-or like I should be shocked and appalled by her condition.

“My sister doesn’t want me talking to you, either,” she resumed. “She thinks I’m just imagining everything. She … she doesn’t believe in negative feelings, so she thinks no one should be allowed to have them.”

Jeanne threw another pause into the conversation, so I filled it with an “uh-huh” because it felt polite.

“But I feel it’s important for me to talk to you, for Nancy’s sake,” she said.

Jeanne had obviously rehearsed this little speech and needed me to believe she was speaking to me at great personal peril and only out of considerable devotion to her late sister. The amateur psychologist in me recognized she was most likely a narcissist who was creating a self-serving fantasy in which she, Jeanne Nygard, was the heroine. The reality was that she was probably just using me to get back at her older sister, the disapproving lawyer.

But hey, if it got me the story, I was happy to play along.

“Yes,” I said. “For Nancy’s sake.”

* * *

With that matter settled, Jeanne paused-there were a lot of those in a conversation with Jeanne-and drew strength for what she needed to say next.

“I believe my sister was murdered because of her views,” she said.

Murdered for her views. Jeanne was turning her sister into the classic hippie martyr. She was making the fascists in the military-industrial complex nervous, man, they hadda get rid of her! And I might have dismissed it as ridiculous paranoia-too much peyote on the commune back in the day-except, of course, I knew someone did want to get rid of her, based on what Mrs. Alfaro had seen.

“What views?” I pressed.

“They were … unpopular … with certain people,” Jeanne said, and I didn’t know if she was being evasive on purpose or if this was just how she talked.

“Yes, but what views? Are we talking political views? I’m confused.”

“I suppose you could say they were political.”

“So … Nancy was killed by … Republicans?” I asked. Didn’t hippies blame Republicans for everything?

“No, no, not like that,” Jeanne said. “I mentioned to you she called me the night before she was killed.”

“Right. You said she was having problems at work?”

“Well, not at work, exactly.”

“Then where, exactly?” I asked, feeling my patience easing away. Talking with Jeanne was like being trapped in a car that only made left turns.

“You know my sister was very involved with her union, yes? She was a shop steward.”

“With the IFIW. Right.”

“You know it was in the midst of negotiations with … your newspaper.”

“I’m aware, yes,” I said, even though I hadn’t known about any of that until Tina had brought it up the night before. She never mentioned the IFIW specifically, but it stood to reason that if all the paper’s other unions were being asked to renegotiate their deals, the IFIW would as well.

“So my sister called me that night. Thursday night.”

“Right. The night before she was killed.”

“I think maybe there had been a meeting that night, a union meeting.”

“You think there was a meeting, or there was a meeting?”

She stopped to consider that question. I watched as a vacationing family-ugly dad, pretty mom, two elementary-school-aged kids who looked like they could end up going either way-checked in for a night of thrills and excitement at the Clifton La Quinta.

“My sister didn’t say, specifically,” Jeanne said, eventually. “But I … It stands to reason that she got home late from the meeting and then had trouble getting to sleep.”

“Okay,” I said, feeling like I was in another one of those left turns. “So what was keeping her awake?”

“She was very worried about the negotiations with the paper. She made it sound like they were going poorly. Nancy was … quite steadfast in her position.”

“And what position was that?”

“That they shouldn’t settle.”

“Settle what?”

“I’m not sure,” Jeanne said. “But she said the union couldn’t afford to give in, because if they did, management would assume it could do anything it wanted to them. She felt if the union wavered at all, it would lose any leverage it had in the future.”

“Okay. So who would have disagreed with her?”

“Maybe people in the union. Or maybe management. She could be very strident, in her own way. And as a shop steward, she would have been seen as … a leader. People were drawn to my sister. She was very smart.”

There was another pause, so I filled it with: “I know she was.”

“So if my sister felt one way, a lot of other people would have felt the same way. She would have convinced them of it. And if the way she felt was … counter to what other people felt…”

She let that statement linger for a second.

“She might have been seen as … getting in the way of what they wanted,” Jeanne finished.

“So,” I said, trying to straighten out all the left turns. “What you’re suggesting is that perhaps Nancy was seen as an impediment in the negotiations, so someone wanted to get rid of her?”

“It seems very stark when you put it that way…”

“So how would you put it?”

She ducked and swayed, the unheard music-her constant soundtrack-quickening by a beat or two. Then she made the effort to hold herself very still.

“My husband was out here on business not long before Nancy was killed,” Jeanne said. “He saw her at my mother’s house. And you know what she told him? She said, ‘If these talks get any rougher, we’re going to have to start bringing guns to the table.’”

As if summoned, we were soon being approached by a man who was apparently Jeanne’s husband, a large, pale doughy guy I recognized as one of the men who helped break up the funeral home fight between Jeanne and Anne. He wore square glasses that reminded me a bit of safety goggles, a bushy mustache, and a checkered button-down short-sleeve shirt that stretched tightly over a belly that had gone paunchy years ago. I had him pegged as an engineer before he even opened his mouth.

“Hon, dontchya thinkya had enough now?” he said with an accent that came from either Wisconsin or Minnesota.

“Mr. Ross, this is my husband, Jerry Nygard,” Jeanne said.

“Nice to meet you,” I said, but didn’t stand up or acknowledge him further, because he wasn’t even looking at me.

“Hon, why dontchya come up to the room and have a Coke with me.”

“I don’t want a Coke,” she said testily.

“Jeannie…” he said, raising his voice as much as a guy from Minnesota ever would in front of a stranger like me. She ignored him.

“So, Mr. Ross, do you intend to investigate my sister’s death?”

She was a little too eager. And in keeping with my hard-to-get strategy, I wanted her to stay that way. Besides, she didn’t seem like the type who needed to be told there really were monsters under the bed. She imagined enough of them on her own. So I summoned my best nonchalant air.

“I’ll look into it a little,” I said. “I don’t want to make any promises. I can’t charge around tossing out allegations on a hunch.”

“Yes, of course. I can understand your need to be … prudent.”

“Yes, prudent,” I said, even though I was the kind of reporter who usually stayed at least ten highway exits away from prudent.

“Thank you,” she said, and started to rise slowly from her seat.

“I’ll see you at the funeral on Thursday,” I said.

She nodded slightly. She really did look quite spent. Maybe Jerry was right. Maybe she did need a Coke.

Still, she sloughed off any aid from her husband as she made her way toward the elevator. Jerry waited until she had rounded the corner, then suddenly the dorky, mild-mannered husband was standing over me, in an apparent attempt to be intimidating.

“Back off,” he said sharply. “This family has been through enough.”

“Mr. Nygard, I-”

“Just back off,” he hissed again. “This doesn’t concern you.”

I was so surprised by the sudden show of aggression from the mild-mannered engineer, I just sat there as he stalked off. There was suddenly yet another man who didn’t like the newspaper reporter.

* * *

As much as I might have enjoyed spending more time in the La Quinta’s lobby-it was newly refurbished, after all-I returned to my car and nudged it back onto Route 3, putting myself on a course to visit IFIW-Local 117 Executive Director Jim McNabb in his downtown Newark office.

Once I had gotten myself up to the speed of the surrounding traffic-only slightly slower than the Daytona 500 and just as likely to use a turn signal-I put in a call to Buster Hays, the one reporter at the paper who would likely know about the Eagle-Examiner’s ongoing labor negotiations with Local 117.

Buster was the kind of reporter who knew stuff about things like that, in the way that he knew stuff about more or less everything. He had been at our paper so long, I’m pretty sure he started when Johannes Gutenberg was the press foreman. Through his many, many, many years of employment, Buster had developed the kind of institutional knowledge that made him a go-to guy on all happenings at the nest.

I certainly don’t like him, inasmuch as I consider him an archaic, cantankerous, condescending pain in the ass. He also doesn’t like me, inasmuch as he considers me a snot-nosed, spoiled, overeducated pretty boy. Other than that, we get along great.

Still, I think if you strapped us down, dosed us with all the surplus truth serum left over from every Cold War-era spy movie ever made, and asked us what we thought about the other, we might-after several hours of interrogation, water-boarding, and forced viewings of America’s Next Top Model-actually admit to having respect for each other.

He answered the phone by saying “Hays.”

“Buster, it’s Carter.”

“What do you want?” he said. Buster grew up in da Bronx-and had the accent and attitude to prove it-so it came out sounding like “whaddauwant?”

“How much do you know about our negotiations with the International Federation of Information Workers?”

“Why do you care, Ivy?”

I had repeatedly tried to convince Hays that my alma mater, Amherst, was not part of the Ivy League. Those efforts had been a failure.

“Let’s just call it idle curiosity for right now,” I said.

“Fine. How much does an Ivy boy like you know about labor law?”

“Umm…”

“Right, okay, here goes,” he said, inhaling. Hays pretended otherwise, but nothing gave him more pleasure than lecturing me on one of the (many) areas where his knowledge outstripped my own. “There’s a key distinction in labor law between independent contractors and employees. If you’re an independent contractor, an employer doesn’t have to do squat for you, because you don’t technically work for them. So there’s no benefits, no worker’s comp, no paid holidays, no stuff like that. And independent contractors can’t unionize. That’s why a lot of newspapers use independent contractors to deliver their papers. It saves a lot of headaches.”

“Okay,” I said, merging onto Route 21 and following the highway as it snaked alongside the Passaic River.

“Now, a long time ago, there were two papers in this town, and the Eagle-Examiner was locked in a battle for survival with the Newark Express,” Hays continued. “We were using independent contractors to deliver our paper, which meant the contractors could actually deliver both papers-the Eagle-Examiner and the Express. Well, the Eagle-Examiner had gained a small advantage in market share and was really trying to turn the screws on the Express, so it told its carriers, ‘We don’t want you doing both, you’ve got to pick,’ thinking that most carriers would pick the Eagle-Examiner. And they did. Hang on, I got another call.”

Hays put me on hold. I had accelerated to sixty-five miles an hour, which meant I was puttering in the right lane, being passed as if I were motionless by traffic doing eighty.

“Where was I?” Hays asked.

“The independent contractors were only delivering the Eagle-Examiner,” I prompted him.

“Oh, right. Well, it all seemed to be working out pretty well for the Eagle-Examiner, but then the IRS stepped in and said, ‘Wait a second, if you’ve told them what they can and can’t deliver, they aren’t independent contractors anymore. They’re employees and you’ve got to start treating them that way.’ Well, once they became employees, they were no dummies. They organized lickety-split. You still with me?”

“Got it. So they formed a union,” I said, having hit the Newark border and the first of a series of traffic lights.

“Yep, and the Eagle-Examiner hasn’t been happy about it since, because once a union gets formed in this state, good luck getting rid of it,” Hays said. “It’s become a real problem for Mother Eagle, a huge problem. When you look at some of our other unions, we’ve got maybe fifty guys running the presses that print this paper, and maybe a hundred guys driving the trucks that distribute this paper. I’m making these numbers up, but you get the point-if push really came to shove and they went on strike, we could replace them.

“But the carriers? Fuhgeddaboutit. You’re talking about more than a thousand people-men and women, boys and girls-all over the state delivering this paper. Each of them knows their route and their neighborhood like the back of their hand. And if they decided to go on strike, it would literally shut the paper down because there’s no way we could find enough people and be able to train them to do those routes. The subscribers would be getting their morning papers at five in the afternoon.”

“So they got us by the short hairs,” I said.

“Yeah, and they know it. In the early days, they threatened to strike pretty much every time their contract came up. So sometime in the late nineties, the publisher got tired of dealing with it. He signed them to a twenty-year contract.”

“Twenty years? I’ve never heard of that. I thought most collective bargaining agreements were three or, at most, five years.”

“Yeah, no one else had heard of anything like that, either. But, remember, this was the late nineties. Owning a big paper like the Eagle-Examiner was still a license to print money. So the publisher figured it was no big thing giving a few paperboys a sweetheart deal. But as the years went on and those guaranteed raises kept kicking in, suddenly we were grossly overpaying our carriers. At other places, carriers are independent contractors, driving their own cars, paying for their own gas, not making much more than minimum wage. Here they’re employees making I-don’t-know-how-much, plus we reimburse them for miles. It’s killing us, and every publisher since has wanted to strangle the publisher who signed that deal. It’s gotten to be a real albatross.”

“So what’s going on with the negotiations right now?”

“Well, they don’t exactly give me a seat at the table, Ivy,” Buster said. “But from what I’m told, they’re stuck.”

“Stuck?”

“Yeah, stuck. Normally management coerces concessions by promising not to furlough people or lay them off. But you can’t furlough people you need 365 days a year, and you can’t lay them off, either. So management has been going with their hat in their hand, saying they won’t survive unless they get givebacks on their contract-basically, pay cuts instead of pay raises. And the union has been telling ’em where to shove it.”

“You heard anything about a shop steward at Local 117 being particularly difficult?” I asked. “Maybe she was getting in the way of progress at the table?”

“Oh, I don’t get that deep with it. But if you really want to know, call Jim McNabb. He’s always looking to get cuddly with another Eagle-Examiner reporter.”

“That’s actually where I’m heading right now,” I said.

“Good,” Hays said. “He’ll try to spin you a little. But his information is reliable. Once you take off the spin, what you’re left with is usually pretty good.”

* * *

The headquarters of the International Federation of Information Workers-Local 117 were housed at 744 Broad Street, also known as the National Newark Building. Of the two skyscrapers that dominate the Newark skyline-744 Broad and the Prudential Building-744 is the one that doesn’t look like an architecturally bereft marshmallow.

I found parking in a garage and made my way inside. Having seen on the directory that the IFIW’s offices were located on the twentieth floor, I announced myself at security in the lobby. By the time I made the elevator ride up and walked through a pair of smoked-glass doors with the IFIW logo stenciled on them, Jim McNabb was waiting to greet me at the front desk. He was wearing tan slacks, a golf shirt, and a wide smile.

“Carter Ross!” He practically shouted, like I was there to shower him with winning lottery tickets.

“Hiya, Jim,” I said, knowing his overly chummy welcome was merely the first part of his act. I actually have no problem with sources who try to spin me. For a guy like McNabb, it’s part of the job-just like it’s my job to have done enough homework to see through it.

“Let’s go back to my office,” he said, then turned to the receptionist and added, “Janet, hold my calls. Mr. Ross is a very important reporter for the Eagle-Examiner and I don’t want any interruptions.”

He led Mr. Ross the Very Important Reporter through a maze of cubicles and hallways. I could only imagine that the IFIW’s hundred thousand members generated no small amount of paperwork, all of which funneled to these desks. McNabb was overweight, but he was more thick than fat. So he was still able to walk fast, and at times all I could see was his bushy silver head peeking above one of the partition walls.

“We call this the nerve center,” Jim said. “We’re protecting the rights of hardworking New Jerseyans all across the state, right here in this office.”

I said nothing. Replying would only encourage him, and I’d end up wasting a half hour listening to an IFIW infomercial.

“Like this beautiful young lady right here,” he said, stopping suddenly at one of the cubicles. It was occupied by a mousy, low-rent, bleached blonde whose eye makeup might charitably be described as whorish. She was in her early forties, desperately trying to cling to her youth, and looked up at Jim like she was grateful to be in his presence.

“Do you know what this beautiful young lady does for a living?” Jim continued. “She makes sure the dirtbag insurance companies aren’t denying coverage to our workers. Isn’t that a wonderful thing? You should write a story about her someday.”

“Hi, Big Jimmy,” she said in a singsongy voice.

“Around here they call me ‘Big Jimmy,’” he said, in case I had missed the point that he was a man of great status. “Keep up the good work, honey.”

With that, we were moving again. “Love that kid. We got her, what, six months ago?” he said, like she was a pound puppy who had eagerly taken to paper training. “She works her sweet little ass off.”

Not wanting to engage in a discussion about the flavor or size of her ass, I kept my mouth shut until we entered Big Jimmy’s lair, a corner office with ten-cent furnishings but a million-dollar view of Manhattan.

“Nice,” I said.

“Not bad, huh?” he said, following my line of sight across the Hudson River, and we both got lost in the view for a second.

“Anyhow, take a seat,” he said, and I did, selecting a wire-framed plastic chair, the only kind he had. Jim settled into his one piece of nice furniture, a high-backed, ergonomically correct, cushy executive chair. “What can I do for the Eagle-Examiner today?” he asked.

“This is going to sound a little strange, but I’m hoping you could tell me a little more about your negotiations with my newspaper.”

I thought this might trip him up a bit, but he rolled with it, the friendly smile still in place.

“And why would I do that? You some kind of spy for Gary Jackman or something?”

“Gary Jackman,” I said, not bothering to hide the grinding of my teeth, “has, in the last two years, been responsible for both cutting my salary and giving me involuntary furlough, which is the same thing as a pay cut. Plus, he’s making me pony up a lot more for my health care, which eats further into my take-home pay. I’m not exactly in the mood to do him any favors.”

“Yeah, but he still signs your paycheck. I’ve been doing this union thing for a long time. People have all sorts of strange loyalty to the guy that signs their paycheck.”

“Okay, so let’s do it like this: don’t tell me anything that Gary Jackman doesn’t already know. Does that work for you?”

He rubbed one meat-hook hand over his face for a second, then said, “Yeah, okay. I can play that game. What do you want to know?”

“Well, I’m told the negotiations are stuck. Where, specifically, are they stuck?”

“It’s pretty simple. They’re telling us we’re way overpaid and that they need an across-the-board fifty percent pay cut and a freeze on future wage increases. And we’re telling them to go pound sand.”

“Fifty percent? Wow. That’s a lot.”

“Tell me about it. They keep saying our pay scale needs to be put back in line with the rest of the industry. But that’s ridiculous. These people rely on that money to pay their bills. They shouldn’t be punished just because deliverers at other papers don’t have as good a deal.”

“Has there been any give-and-take at the table?”

“Not really,” Jim said, grinning sardonically. “They’re making threats, and they think it gives them leverage on us, but they got nothing. And even if you are a spy from Jackman, you can tell him I said that. Find your savings somewhere else. Don’t balance your books on the backs of the paperboys. They’re not exactly making six figures here.”

“You think your membership knows my paper is just rattling the saber?”

Jim leaned back in his throne, his eyes scanning south to the Verrazano Narrows. “Some of ’em do,” he said.

“But some of them need convincing?”

“They always need convincing.”

“Was Nancy Marino one of the chief convincers?”

The breezy smile Big Jimmy had been wearing since I first came through those smoked-glass doors vanished off his face.

“What’s she got to do with it?” he asked, like hearing the name brought up the hurt of her death all over.

“Well, she was your shop steward there.”

“Yeah, so?”

“So what was her role in the negotiations?”

“What does it matter now?”

I shrugged, like I didn’t know, like I was trying to play it off as no big deal either way. “Not sure. I’m just asking.”

“I thought you said there was no smoke with the whole Nancy thing,” he said, turning his head to the side but keeping two leery eyes locked on me. In typical McNabb fashion, he was on the lookout for a handle on this situation so he could turn it for his own use.

“Well, there might be a bit of smoke,” I admitted. “Or maybe it’s not really smoke, just steam. Definitely not convinced there’s fire. It’s still sort of hard to tell.”

“Well, what are we talking about here? You’re beating around the bush.”

“I am, I know, and I apologize for that,” I said, feeling myself shift on the hard plastic chair. Time to lay at least a few of my cards on the table: “I’m told Nancy had taken a very hard line that the union shouldn’t give in. I’m wondering if someone-maybe within management-might have taken exception to her line and decided to…”

I let that thought linger out there. Jim knew what I was saying without me filling in the blank.

“I thought it was an accident,” he said.

“It was. But maybe it was more the intentional kind of hit and run than the accidental kind?”

“Who’s saying that? The police saying that?” Jim asked, his dirt-groping antennae clearly extended as far as they went. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to give Big Jimmy too much information to work with just yet.

“Not the police. The police are done with the whole thing. Let’s just call it a reporter’s hunch at this point.”

“So you got a hunch maybe someone killed Nancy because of something to do with the negotiations?” he said, not bothering to hide his disbelief. “Boy, I don’t know.”

“I don’t know, either. At this point, I’m really just indulging my curiosity,” I said, deliberately soft-selling it. “For all I know, it could have been something at her other job, at the diner. Or, heck, it could be some boyfriend no one knows about. I’m really not sure, to be honest.”

He stopped himself like something had just occurred to him. I shrugged again, trying to stay as noncommittal as possible.

“Let me think about it,” he said. “Make some calls.”

* * *

We small-talked a bit more but were clearly done with the meaningful part of our exchange. I was soon being escorted out of the IFIW nerve center. And really, it was just as well. It was nearing five o’clock. I retrieved my car from the garage and made the short drive across town, cognizant of the need to get back to the nest and babysit Lunky. I hoped he had managed to get a few decent quotes from bear-scared Newarkers over the last few hours.

My main challenge upon entering the newsroom was to elude Tina until after I had found Lunky. Otherwise, she’d inevitably start asking me questions about my afternoon with Smokey the Bear, and I couldn’t just make up my reply. She’d get suspicious when my answers didn’t end up remotely matching the story I handed in.

So I crept along the outer wall of the newsroom, a long distance from the glass office where Tina would be lurking, and worked my way toward the intern pod by way of the men’s bathroom. I needed the pit stop anyway, with the Coke Zero I drank several hours earlier now pressing quite urgently against my bladder. I was just taking aim at a particular piece of white porcelain when, from the next urinal over, I heard Tommy’s voice.

“Doing some of your best work?” he said, having sidled up next to me to take care of his own business.

“Excuse me, haven’t you ever heard of the Men’s Bathroom Code?” I said, keeping my gaze straight ahead-another part of the code. “Don’t you know there’s a prohibition against talking to a guy when his Richard is out?”

“Is that true? In that case, I’ve had whole relationships where neither one of us should ever have said a word.”

I sighed and shook my head.

“For that matter, what about the entire institution of anonymous gay sex?” Tommy continued. “That’s not my scene or anything, but those poor guys would be out of business if they couldn’t talk to each other in men’s rooms.”

“Yes, but think of how much better off Larry Craig would be right now if he had just stuck to the code,” I said as I stowed my equipment.

“Oh, that old queen? Someone would have outed him eventually.”

We flushed simultaneously-sort of like synchronized swimming, only in reverse-then I went to the other side of the bathroom to wash my hands.

“So how are things coming?” I asked. “Learn anything new, interesting, or heretofore unknown about Nancy Marino?”

“That depends. Did you know she was perhaps the most boring human being on the planet?”

“I was unaware of that.”

“It’s true,” said Tommy, who had started an elaborate hand-washing routine that began with turning on the water and leaving it running while he rolled himself a length of paper towel. “She doesn’t have a car loan. She pays her mortgage on time. She pays her tax bill on time. She pays everything on time-her credit score was a 740.”

“You got her credit score?” I asked, impressed.

“I have ways,” he said, lathering his hands for what seemed like an inordinate amount of time while I was drying mine.

“So what else?”

“No bankruptcy. No divorce. No lawsuits. No criminal charges. I couldn’t even find a speeding ticket.”

Tommy left the water running as he went over to his prerolled towel.

“I’m sorry,” I said, gesturing at the sink, “but what the hell are you doing?”

“Do you know how many germs there are on that thing?” he said. “Everyone takes their dirty hands and turns on the faucet. Then they wash their hands and what’s the first thing they do? Turn off the faucet with their clean hands-except they’re not clean anymore because they’ve just touched the dirty faucet.”

He used his wet paper towel to turn off the water.

“It’s much more sanitary this way,” he assured me.

“I’m so glad I have other things to worry about.”

“Suit yourself. The next plague is coming. Only the clean will survive.”

“I’ll take my chances,” I said. “So nothing at all stood out about Nancy Marino?”

Tommy threw his sodden towel in the trash. “Well, I don’t know if it means anything, but she just took out a $50,000 loan against her house.”

“Huh,” I said, trying to make it fit with the rest of her financial profile. And it didn’t. This woman had worked her sneaker treads off to buy that house. When it came to money, she seemed about as daring as an elderly shut-in on a fixed income. People like that generally don’t take out home equity loans. They’re too busy pressing leftover shards of soap together to make a new bar.

“She’s probably just redoing her kitchen,” Tommy said.

“Yeah, maybe. Well, it’s something to file away, at any rate. Thanks for doing all the scut work for me.”

“Don’t I always? Give me a jingle if I can do anything else. City Hall is dead right now.”

We parted ways and I continued to slink across the newsroom toward Lunky’s desk. I had made it most of the way-still undetected-when I was interrupted by having to answer my phone.

“Carter, it’s Jim McNabb,” I heard.

“Hey, Jim.”

“Look, I didn’t want to say anything about this while you were still in the office because I just had to think about it for a little bit. But now … Well, I still don’t know, but I guess I’m going to tell you anyway.”

“Okay.”

“We’re off the record, right? Way, way off record. I’ll help you get it on the record later if I can. But for right now, this just has to be you and me talking, okay?”

“Okay.”

“So, I was … I can’t believe I’m about to say this … are you sure you want to hear this? It’s kind of a bombshell.”

“I’m a big boy, Jim, I can handle it,” I assured him.

Then he dropped it:

“I think Gary Jackman killed Nancy Marino.”

He considered himself a good judge of people, the kind of man who could size up other men at a glance. That was the whole issue with Nancy Marino. She wasn’t a man.

So he never really saw it coming with Nancy, never thought she’d be trouble, never thought things would be different with her than they were with everyone else. Maybe he had grown a little too used to having his way prevail, sure. But that happens to most men of import. He didn’t feel he needed to treat Nancy with any special deference.

He actually liked her for a while. She was cute, like the proverbial girl next door, with that brown ponytail and quick smile. She had a lot of spunk and a nice little body. He liked watching her move. He was married, sure. But they could have something on the side. Just some casual fun. It wouldn’t have been the first time for him.

Then Nancy Marino started to become a problem. Then she started to become an even bigger problem. She kept getting … emotional about things.

And that really gored him. It was just like a woman to make it emotional, to make a big deal out of something that should have easily been sloughed off. Deep down, although he dared not say it, he thought all women should be like his mother and stay home. The workplace really was a man’s world. His father’s generation had been better off in that respect.

Eventually, he knew he’d get her under control the same way he got everything else in his life under control-by being smart, patient, and, more important, tougher than everyone else around.

But he was surprised to learn he wasn’t tougher than Nancy Marino. She kept coming back at him, kept pushing her claims. Didn’t she know ultimately he would win-correction, that he had to win?

It got so she was in his head, distracting him from his other work. And that simply wouldn’t stand. He had more important matters to deal with than her petty concerns.

He was respected in the community, a man who pushed the buttons of the machine. He didn’t have time for this little cog jamming things up.

It was the visit from the regional director of the National Labor Relations Board that really threw him over the top. The NLRB wanted a sworn affidavit. It was taking Nancy Marino-Nancy Marino! — as seriously as it was taking him, treating the two parties as if they were on the same level. He could stall the NLRB, but only for so long. It could subpoena him. And, ultimately, there was no arguing with a subpoena.

Yes, once the NLRB was involved, it changed everything. It meant he wasn’t really in control of the game and he certainly couldn’t make up the rules anymore. With the NLRB, things would be by the book. It would put everything out in public, because any document generated by the NLRB became part of the public record. There would be some kind of settlement negotiated or some kind of mediation. There was no way he could tolerate all that.

Something had to be done. He wasn’t going to risk losing everything he worked for because of the girl next door.