The Girl Next Door

CHAPTER 5

They didn’t call security on me. I guess I wasn’t considered that much of a threat. I was allowed to stop at my desk and collect my things, albeit under Tina’s supervision.

Somehow the newsroom gossips already knew what had happened-I swear, one of them has Brodie’s office wired-and by the time I had collected my briefcase and was ready to depart, half of them were giving me looks generally saved for death row inmates in Texas. Tommy shot me a mournful glance, surreptitiously formed his fingers into the shape of a phone and mouthed the words “call me.” Buster Hays was shaking his head sadly. The rest of the faces were a blur of pity, concern, and confusion. I’m sure in repeated retelling on the office rumor mill, I would emerge as an idiot for having lied about my identity, as a hero for having affronted Jackass, but as a cautionary tale that no one is safe in this day and age.

If they knew the truth-that I was being railroaded-they would undoubtedly view this spectacle differently. I would be seen as a martyr, a noble sufferer who was willing to lay his career on the line in his quest for the truth, a reporter’s reporter.

Instead, as I made my condemned man’s walk out of the newsroom, I merely hoped I looked brave rather than pathetic.

Tina and I rode the elevator down in silence at first, mostly because I wasn’t sure what to say to her. I never knew where, exactly, our relationship was supposed to head, but whatever the optimal direction, this was clearly a wrong turn. Her eyes stayed fixed on the numbers above the door as they ticked from two to one.

“I tried, but I couldn’t save you,” she said quietly. “His mind was made up.”

“How long am I gone for?”

“He wanted six months, but I talked him down to three,” Tina said.

“Three months!” I blurted. I had been thinking I’d be out for a week or two.

“You’re actually lucky,” Tina said. “Jackman wanted you fired outright.”

Of course he did. I was that pesky reporter who kept asking him questions about Nancy Marino.

“Carter, when you come back, you can’t give them anything to use against you,” Tina said. “Jackass would use any excuse to jettison another newsroom salary.”

“Tina,” I said, wanting to tell her some of the things I had learned about Jackman.

Then I pulled myself back. Before she became my editor, Tina had always been my confidante. I could tell her when I was going behind another editor’s back and why I was doing it, and she supported me every time, often running interference for me. But that dynamic had changed. She kept trying to tell me, but now I finally got it: she wasn’t my friend anymore; she was my editor.

So I just said, “Sorry about the bear thing.”

“Oh God, that doesn’t even matter.”

She was inching back toward the elevator, and I knew she had work to do. We would, as usual, leave a lot unspoken.

“I’ll see you around,” I said.

She gave me a quick kiss on the cheek and scampered back on the elevator. She had a newspaper to put out. And it was a strange feeling to know I wasn’t part of that anymore, at least for the time being. I had been working for one newspaper or another since high school. Being a reporter was the only thing I’d ever done, the only thing I ever wanted to do. It was much more than an avocation for me, even more than a career. It was my identity. My friends, my family, my neighbors, every person in my life knew me as a reporter, first and foremost. I couldn’t imagine being without it for three months.

I also couldn’t imagine being out of a paycheck for that long. With all the pay cuts and furloughs having whittled away my income, I was barely keeping up with my mortgage as it was. I could maybe afford to be out of work for three weeks but not three months.

I was beginning to have visions of being forced out onto the street or, worse, moving back in with my parents at the age of thirty-two. It would be an indignity for me, but it would be even harder on Deadline. Mom’s allergic to cats.

So, as a responsible pet owner, I had little choice. I had to prove to Brodie and everyone else that I was, in fact, merely being an intrepid reporter; that Jackman was a nefarious killer; and that Ted from accounting-sorry, Carter Ross-deserved to be reinstated.

Which meant there was no time to mope. I had to make like Fred and Ginger: pick myself up, dust myself off, and start all over again.

And heck, I wasn’t starting all over. Were this a cop drama, I would have been asked to lay my gun and my badge on the desk before I left. But you can’t very well take away the tools of a modern reporter’s trade-Internet, cell phone, devious brain-and in this case, they didn’t even bother collecting my company laptop. So I retrieved the Malibu from the parking garage, pulled it up on the street alongside the Eagle-Examiner building, and tapped into the newsroom’s wireless network.

I soon learned Gary A. Jackman, formerly of Michigan, was now a resident of Mendham, a bucolic bedroom community tucked in the hills of Morris County. He was a registered Republican-big shock there-and lived in a home assessed at $2.27 million, which set him back $35,000 a year in property taxes alone. Not a bad little shack.

I got the address and plugged it into my GPS, which told me it was forty-four minutes away. If I got started now, I would be at the Jackman manse just after dark, which would suit my purposes quite nicely.

Any lawyer, detective, or courtroom junkie knows that to prove a murder, you need to establish means, motive, and opportunity. In this case, I felt good about motive-Jackman wanted to erase an impediment to a business deal. Opportunity was clearly there as well-he would have been able to look up her route and lie there in wait for her.

Now I just needed to see if he had the means-a black SUV with a large grille plate, perhaps one with a suspicious dent in it. Finding a vehicle fitting that description parked in Jackman’s driveway would be as good as finding the murder weapon.

* * *

With the setting sun disappearing behind the Watchung Mountains-we call them mountains because it sounds better than the Watchung Inclines, which is what they really are-I drove west toward Mendham, arriving just as the world was switching from daytime running lights to real headlights.

I made the turn on Jackman’s road, then found the number for his house in stainless steel digits, bolted to a brick pillar on one side of the driveway. There was a matching brick pillar on the other side, and in the middle was a gate made to look like wrought iron, the kind with tops just pointy enough to reinforce the idea that the inhabitants would prefer you not just pop in for a visit. There was also a call box on the left side of the driveway for deliverymen, plumbers, and other members of the servant class.

The entire front of the property was shrouded by a line of tall shrubs. Beyond them was a front yard filled with trees. So it was a little tough to make out much of Jackman’s house from the road. But it appeared to be your basic McMansion, a boxy monstrosity erected sometime during the go-go nineties and meant to look like some postmodern mash-up of Victorian and contemporary. I could already imagine what the interior looked like, with rooms that were a little too spacious to ever be cozy and at least one bathtub that could seat six adults comfortably.

I drove past twice at cruising speed but couldn’t make out much. Privacy had obviously been a selling point for the Jackman family. There was only going to be one way I could get a full look at Jackman’s fleet of cars, and that was to creep up to his house and peek into his garage. Under New Jersey Code of Criminal Justice 2C:18-3-a statute that deals with trespassing, and therefore a part of the law not unknown to an enterprising reporter such as myself-the act of peering into a dwelling place for the purpose of invading the occupant’s privacy is explicitly defined as a fourth-degree crime, which can land you in county jail for up to eighteen months.

But only if you get caught.

So I killed a little more time driving around, gawking at the big houses owned by the wealthy capitalists, the inventive entrepreneurs, and, of course, the members of the lucky sperm club. Not that I have a problem with any of them. Some reporters hold a grudge against the well-to-do-primarily because we are not and will never be one of them-but the fact is the good ol’ You Ess of A needs rich people, too. The more the better, frankly.

When it was sufficiently dark, I parked perhaps a quarter of a mile away and took off toward Jackman’s place on foot. As I reached the driveway, I spied something I hadn’t noticed while rolling along at twenty-five miles per hour: a small security camera bolted to the top of one of the brick pillars. It had a wire coming out the back that appeared to feed down into the ground.

I have a general theory about security cameras. The ones that you can see-that are made obvious for the whole world-are most likely fakes. Those wires led to nothing more threatening than a few hungry earthworms. It’s the ones you can’t see that are real. So I spent a minute or two scanning the trees and other possible hiding places, but there were no lenses looking back at me.

So I proceeded, albeit with caution. The shrubbery along the edge of the property was basically impenetrable to a person of my size, leaving me no choice but to vault over the faux wrought-iron fence, which I did with all the agility of a sake-stoked sumo wrestler. I landed heavily and felt a jolt in my knees-dress shoes not being known for their shock absorption-but determined that I was otherwise unscathed.

Before heading toward the house, I took one last look at the surveillance camera, inspecting the back side for telltale signs of authenticity, like blinking LED lights or the soft whirring of a motor. But there was none of that. It was a fake for sure.

So I moved ahead, quickly walking along the side of the Jackman driveway, trying to stay in the shadow of the trees. I wasn’t exactly dressed in commando clothes-unless there’s some unknown elite military unit that prefers khakis and white button-down shirts-so I felt a little exposed as I neared the house. Anyone who happened to be glancing down at the driveway would easily make me. But, really, how often do people look outside of their suburban McMansions? That’s the whole point of them. They’re fortresses of solitude, insulating the owner from the intrusions of the world at large.

The end of the driveway had a decent-sized area of asphalt-all the better for maneuvering large black SUVs-and I skirted the edge of it, staying somewhat concealed in a fringe of trees. The Jackman garage was of the three-car variety, though unfortunately there were none of those little windows that garages used to have. There was also a regular door, painted beige to match the siding on the house, but that was also windowless. They certainly weren’t making it easy on the would-be criminal trespasser.

Above the garage was what appeared to be a living room. The lights were on and I could glimpse the top of a wall-mounted flat-screen television, also powered up. If there were any people in the room, I couldn’t see them-which hopefully meant they couldn’t see me, either.

Each of the three garage bays had a set of floodlights, now dark. But they had little boxes above them that told me they were motion sensitive. So I gave them a wide berth as I continued edging around the driveway, slowly getting closer to the house.

That’s when I finally saw my in: the beige door had a small white rectangle at the bottom, so Fifi the cat could get out for her nightly exercise. If I could find a way to reach the cat door without setting off the lights, I’d get my needed glimpse inside the garage.

Completing my circumnavigation of the driveway, I stayed outside the range of the motion detectors, then dashed quickly to the side of the house, so I was flush up against it-and, I hoped, out of the line of sight of anyone inside. I tiptoed along until I got to the corner of the garage, went down on my hands and knees, and made like Fifi.

I nudged the kitty door open with my hand and peered through it, but that didn’t allow me to see much more than a patch of concrete floor a few feet in front of me. No, I soon realized, my only way to see inside would be to stick my head through and look around.

So in I went. It was a tight squeeze: I had to get my head perfectly parallel to the ground and then push to squeeze it through. To make matters more difficult, the door was at an awkward height. It was too low for me to stay on my hands and knees but too high for me to lie flat on the ground. So I had to support myself on bent arms, with my legs splayed out behind me. I’m quite sure I looked ridiculous, but, then again, the whole point of this is that no one would ever notice.

With my head fully inside, I craned my neck to the right. At first, I saw nothing. It had been brighter outside than it was in the garage, and my eyes weren’t adjusted to the darkness. But I was a patient trespasser, so I gave my pupils time to fully dilate.

Sometime during the next minute, as I waited for more distinct shapes to emerge from the darkness, I thought I heard a noise. I told myself it was nothing, maybe just the hum of a storage freezer that had been stuck out in the garage. But it got louder and, with a sudden sense of doom, I realized what it was: a car engine, coming up the driveway. The Jackmans were home. Time to disappear.

But as I went to pull my head out of the door and make my escape, I lost that perfectly parallel angle I had upon entry. I kept yanking, but either the back of my head or my chin was getting caught every time. The geometry just wasn’t working anymore. I twisted. I tugged. I pulled. But the more I struggled, the more it felt like the door itself was getting in the way.

Short of decapitation, there was no way out.

I was stuck. And screwed. The floodlights had already come on. The car was at the top of the driveway and was now idling in the turnaround. The occupants were probably trying to figure out why a headless human shape was sprawled by the side of their house. Then I heard a car door slam and a very official-sounding voice say:

“Sir, I’m with the Mendham Borough police. I’m going to have to ask you to take your head out of the garage so I can place you under arrest.”

* * *

Getting myself unstuck turned out to be something of a trick. When it became apparent I had reached an impasse on my own, the cop started offering some helpful tips, going about the thing with a calm, professional demeanor I found impressive, given that I doubted he had ever come across a suspect with his head jammed in a cat door. Finally, after some exertion, I worked myself free and, relieved, faced my arrester for the first time.

He was a veteran whose buzz cut was going white, and he looked at me with a certain amount of resignation. After all, here I was, a nearly middle-aged man-not some stupid kid-and on top of that, I was well dressed, apparently sober, perhaps even educated. Shouldn’t I have known better?

“We’re going to do this the easy way, right?” he said, taking his cuffs out of his belt.

“Yeah, I’ve had enough,” I assured him, sticking my hands out in front of me.

“Nope, got to do it behind,” he said apologetically, and I turned around.

“Sorry about this,” I said, because he seemed like a genuinely nice guy and I felt bad for putting him through the trouble of arresting me.

“I’m sure you are,” he replied as he secured the cuffs.

“I assume someone inside the house called you?”

He didn’t answer, and I began going over all the things I probably did wrong before arriving at the obvious conclusion:

“I guess that camera out front wasn’t a fake,” I said.

“Nope,” he said, allowing himself a small guffaw as he opened the back door to his patrol car and helped me inside. I never knew this before-this being my first arrest-but it’s not easy to get into a car without the use of your hands.

“Aren’t you supposed to read me my rights or something?” I asked as I settled in.

“Don’t have to,” he said. “You need two elements for Miranda: custody and interrogation. I’m not planning on asking you any questions. Frankly, I don’t even want to know what you were doing in there.”

He shut the door and I thought we’d soon be on our way to the station. Instead, he went up a walkway that led to the front entrance of the house. It left me alone in the idling car, giving me some time to gain perspective on this entire episode.

On the one hand, it was a bit embarrassing. Okay, a lot embarrassing. I suppose technically, now that I had been suspended, I was an amateur. But did that really mean I had to go acting like an amateur?

Mostly, though, I just found it funny. I realize this is not, perhaps, the prevailing attitude among men who have just been unfairly suspended from their jobs and then gotten their heads stuck in cat doors. But one of my core beliefs, while not necessarily found in any major world religion, goes like this: one sign of a well-led life is that you have great stories to tell when it’s over.

And there was no doubt that, someday, this would make for a hysterical story-assuming that I didn’t end up having to tell it to fellow inmates during my daily hour of yard time.

After ten minutes, the cop came back out, followed by Jackman, who ventured as far as the end of the walkway, close enough to take a look at me. Next came his wife. She was a brittle-haired blonde who actually looked a lot like Jackman, except her manicured nails had colored polish on them. She stared at me with this look of horror on her face, like I was a dangerous animal that had been captured and caged. If I had just a bit more sense of theater, I would have started slobbering and thrashing around like the Tasmanian devil. Instead, I just grinned and waved.

Once the Jackmans were done gawking at the deranged criminal, they turned away and spoke briefly to the cop, who nodded and followed them back inside. Clearly, there was some irony to this: the perhaps-murderer was free to return to his home while the trespasser was in handcuffs. I thought about saying as much to the cop when he returned to the car. But really, what would that accomplish? You know, other than get me evaluated by a prison psychologist.

So I just asked, “Is he going to press charges?”

“Looks that way,” the cop replied. “He doesn’t seem to like you very much.”

The feeling is mutual, I thought but did not say. Even if I hadn’t been Mirandized, I didn’t want some loose, wiseass comment like that coming back at me if there was a trial.

We made the drive to the Mendham Borough Police Department, a brick building with a peaked roof and glass doors that looked more like a gynecologist’s office than a police station. Once inside, I was led through the booking process, which included fingerprinting and photographing. I gave the photographer my best smile, if only because I knew-if I ever got myself reinstated-some wiseacre like Buster Hays would get his hands on my mug shot and plaster it around the newsroom as a gag. Or at least that’s what I would do to Buster if he ever got arrested.

I could only hope my mother’s golfing group never heard about this.

Eventually, I was tossed into one of the two small holding cells they had in back. In the cell next to me there was a guy who looked dead and smelled worse. My belongings had been taken from me when I came in, so I had no idea what time it was. But I would guess an hour or more passed by the time my cop came back to me.

“This is your summons,” he said, handing it to me on a clipboard with a pen. “Your court date is on there. You sign at the bottom to say you received it. It’s not an admission of guilt.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I charged you with trespassing rather than breaking and entering. You got the ‘breaking’ part, but I’m not sure you ever quite got to ‘entering.’”

Great. I was such an inept criminal even the cop was making fun of me.

“Now the good news,” he continued. “I was able to get the judge on the phone to set bail for you. I suppose you know whose house that was and so did the judge. So, given the circumstances, he couldn’t R and R you”-release me on my own recognizance-“but he set it pretty low, five thousand.”

“That’s the good news?”

“The alternative is I couldn’t get the judge on the phone and you would have spent the night in the county jail.”

“Good point,” I said. “So what do I do now?”

“Well, a five-thousand-dollar bail means you have to post ten percent. You got five hundred dollars on you?”

“That depends: Will you let me run to an ATM machine?”

He shook his head.

“Then I think I need to make a phone call.”

Before long, he set me up at a phone. I ran through my options-Mom and Dad definitely not being among them-and realized there was really only one person I could call without needing to do a whole lot of explaining. And fortunately, I had Tommy’s cell phone number memorized.

“Mmph?” he said sleepily. I didn’t know what time it was, but guessed it was now after midnight.

“Hey, Tommy, sorry to wake you up but I need a Venti-sized favor.”

“Wha … you woke me up because you need coffee?”

“No, no. I’m at the Mendham Borough police station and I need someone to post bail for me.”

This instantly brought Tommy to life. Of course, rather than express heartrending concern for my well-being, he just laughed at me.

“Oh! My! God! The clean-cut prep-school boy gets locked up with all the rough-and-tumble outlaws,” he cackled. “It’s like gay porn come true!”

“Nice. Very nice.”

“Are the fellas being gentle? Remind them you’re thin-boned and that you’ve never done this before. Maybe they’ll give it to you tender instead of rough.”

“Sorry to inform you and your dirty imagination, but this is Mendham. They have zoning ordinances that ban rough-and-tumble outlaws. Besides, I’m in a cell by myself.”

“Oh, too bad,” Tommy said, sounding genuinely disappointed. “Well, what can I do for you?”

“Think you can scrape together five hundred bucks and come post bail for me?”

He thought for a moment. “If I max out my ATM and get a cash advance on my credit card, I think I can get to five hundred. Oh, and I’m going to need to stop at an all-night drugstore, too.”

“Why?”

“So I can get you some soap on a rope.”

* * *

Sometime during the next hour or two, they rousted my comatose neighbor and sent him off to the county jail. And not a moment too soon: his body odor was starting to seep into my clothes. Still, even after he departed, his scent lingered, which was among the things thwarting my efforts to grab a nap-along with the thin mattress, the dank air, and the constant squawking coming from the dispatch. In the end, I just engaged in a staring contest with the wall. The wall kept winning, but I felt like I was gaining on it.

By the time Tommy arrived and completed the necessary paperwork to secure my freedom, it was after two A.M. I had been a guest of the Mendham Borough police for roughly four hours. And while that should have been long enough for me to reconsider my life of crime, all it really did was redouble my resolve to ensure that Jackman spent a lot more time-like, the rest of his life-staring at prison walls.

After receiving my belongings, I entered the lobby to find Tommy slumped in a chair. He was wearing the same clothes as he had been earlier in the day-black shirt, gray pants-but they were far more rumpled.

“I suppose a mere ‘thank you’ probably doesn’t cover this one, does it?” I said.

He stirred and gave me an up and down.

“You look almost as bad as I feel,” he said, then wrinkled his nose. “And you smell worse.”

“Yeah, I’m planning to lodge a complaint with management about the pillow mints, too,” I said. “And, you know, they don’t even give reward points here?”

“You sure? From what it sounds like, they’re looking to give you a free extended stay sometime soon.”

“We’ll see, I guess. It’s a fourth-degree crime and I don’t have a prior record.”

“Yeah, and you might get off when they decide you’re too nuts to stand trial. When I announced I was there to post your bail, the desk sergeant goes, ‘Oh, you mean the Peeping Tomcat?’ I’m sorry, what the hell were you doing with your head stuck in a pet door?”

As we walked out to his car and started driving back toward mine, still parked down the street from Jackass’s place, I gave Tommy a full recap on what I had learned about Jackman, finishing with how finding a large black SUV would be a potentially crowning piece of evidence.

“Why didn’t you just do a little stakeout in front of his house and see what he drives to work in the morning?” Tommy asked when I was done.

“Everyone knows you don’t commute in the same vehicle you use to commit vehicular homicide,” I replied. “Besides, I’m impatient.”

Neither Tommy nor I knew Mendham very well, so it took us a few wrong turns before we got on course. He had to drop me off at my Malibu, which meant we ended up cruising past Jackman’s black-gated driveway.

“That’s his house,” I said.

“Looks dark.”

“Yeah, I’m sure everyone is fast asleep after the excitement of the evening.”

Tommy said nothing, but a small kernel of an idea had suddenly plopped itself down in my head. It quickly germinated, dug in its roots, and started reaching out its stalks, and before I knew it, I was opening my mouth to give voice to it.

“You know, you could sneak in there right now and have a little look,” I said.

Tommy’s head whipped in my direction.

“What?”

“It’ll be easy. I’ve already scoped it out and made every possible mistake. We know about the camera, and besides, there’s no one awake now to be looking at it. It was just bad luck I got caught in the first place. It’s not like you’d be breaking into the Louvre.”

“Forget it.”

“C’mon, if you get caught, I’ll have them wrangle up some of those rough-and-tumble outlaws you were fantasizing about.”

Tommy made a face like someone replaced his entire shoe collection with white Reeboks-the kind with Velcro.

“Haven’t you broken the law enough for one evening without being an accomplice to another crime?” he asked.

“I’ve got a flashlight in my car. You can shine it in there, take a quick look at the bumpers, and be out before anyone knows you were ever there. You’re much sleeker and stealthier than I.”

“That’s true,” he said, letting the thought drift along for a second before swatting it down. “No. No! Are you crazy? Absolutely not. I’m not getting my head stuck in some stupid cat door.”

“No way you get stuck. Your head is much smaller. Look at this big coconut of mine. It’s practically Jupiter. Yours is more like, I don’t know, Mercury or something.”

“That doesn’t mean I’m going to go along with an idea you’re pulling out of Uranus.”

We both stopped to snicker. Hard to resist a Uranus joke.

He pulled up alongside my car. Decision time was here.

“I’m going to get my flashlight. When I get back, I want you to be in the passenger seat.”

I climbed out, expecting that as soon as I was clear, Tommy would gun the engine and put down a fresh layer of rubber in his haste to get away. But no, as I retrieved the small flashlight from my glove compartment, I heard the driver’s side door open and close. And when I returned, he was riding shotgun.

“Hurry up before I change my mind,” Tommy said. “I’m only doing this because of those pocket squares Jackman wears. He gives pocket squares a bad name, and I’ll not have anyone besmirching an otherwise wonderful accessory.”

“Thanks ag-”

He held up a hand. “Just drive. Go by slowly so I can get a good look at it, then drop me off down the street.”

I did as instructed. Before he departed, I reminded him about the security camera and the motion-sensing lights over the garage.

“Don’t worry,” he replied. “I don’t plan to screw this up like you did. Just stay here.”

“Leave your cell on. I’ll keep a lookout for cops.”

He didn’t answer, taking off at a brisk jog before I even killed the engine. I waited in the dark, staying alert for Mendham’s finest. But there was no traffic of any sort. New York may be the city that never sleeps, but Mendham likes to get its shut-eye.

Ten minutes later, Tommy jogged back and jumped in the passenger seat.

“Nothing,” he said, panting a little.

“What do you mean nothing?”

“No SUV.”

“Are you sure? Could you see that well?”

“Sure I could see. I walked right inside and turned the lights on.”

“You what?”

“While you were busy playing cat burglar, you missed the most obvious fake rock in the world just to the left of the door. It had a key inside with the security code written on it-8331, in case you care. So I used the key, shut off the security system, and walked inside. There’s a silver Lexus and a tan Ford. Neither one is an SUV, neither one is black. Would you like their license plates and VIN numbers? I got those, too.”

I started the car, rolling past Jackman’s still-dark house.

“So, what, I guess he must have had someone do it for him? A hired hit?”

“Or a rented car,” Tommy said. “Either way, it’s not in his garage. Can I go home now? If I miss too much REM sleep, my skin breaks out.”

* * *

I have scant memory of driving to Bloomfield, showering, or getting under the covers. But I must have done all those things, because I was at home, in bed, and smelling unlike rot when my cell phone rang at precisely nine the next morning.

I was in the midst of one of my usual anxiety dreams, the one where I’ve shown up for the final exam in a college French class, and I suddenly realize I don’t speak a word of French. So, at first, the phone was ringing in the middle of the dream, just as the professor was passing out the exam.

When I finally figured out who I was, where I was, and that I shouldn’t answer with “bonjour,” my phone had rung three times. I tapped the answer button and tried to say my name, but with my vocal cords still asleep, it came out as, “Carr Rahh.”

“Carter, it’s Jim McNabb.” His voice boomed through my earpiece. He had me on speakerphone, and like most people of a certain age, he felt he needed to yell at it to be heard. It was loud enough that Deadline, who had been pressed up against my thigh and doing his best impression of a stuffed animal, actually lifted his head to investigate. Usually, it would take the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse having a hoedown at the foot of the bed to stir such curiosity.

“Hi, Jim,” I said, propping myself up and stifling a yawn.

“Are you busy?” McNabb yelled.

“Not for a while. I got indefinitely suspended from my job yesterday.”

“Oh yeah?” he said, with his usual interest in anything that sounded like scuttlebutt-enough that I could hear the sound of him picking up the handpiece and taking me off speakerphone. “What happened?”

I debated whether I should confide in McNabb, who tended to use information as leverage. But, in this case, desperation outweighed caution. Besides, he was a friendly guy. And sometimes you just need friends.

“Jackman is on to me,” I said. “He trumped up some stuff against me and tried talking Brodie into firing me. The old man wouldn’t go quite that far, but he did suspend me.”

“Really? Wow. Well, I guess it’s no surprise that prick plays for keeps. You better watch your back around him. We’ve already seen what he’s capable of doing to an employee who pisses him off.”

“Yeah, thanks,” I said, making a mental note to look both ways when I crossed the street.

“So how long are you on the bench? A week? Two?”

“Try three months.”

“Whoa, that’s a big number!” McNabb said, like we were discussing how much I lost on the ponies over the weekend. “See, that’s why you need a union behind you. We’d file an immediate appeal, probably throw in a grievance, too, just to complicate matters. If they still didn’t want you coming to work while it all got settled, no problem-we’d make sure you were getting a paycheck the whole time. Eventually we’d throw enough stuff at them they’d be begging us to settle. You’d get a free vacation and never be out a dime.”

“Well, I don’t have a union. So until I can prove to Brodie what Jackman’s real motivation is, I’m on a one-way street to the poorhouse. I’m hoping you’re calling with some information that will help me get off it.”

“Yeah, yeah, actually, I am,” he said. “I got something to show you.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t want to ruin the surprise. Just come into the office. You got to see it in person. It’ll be worth the trip. It’s something you can actually use-no off-the-record this time.”

“Okay. I’ll see you in about forty-five minutes.”

“I’ll be here.”

Deadline had slipped back into repose, and with the Four Horsemen elsewhere-probably behind the counter at a Starbucks, screwing up people’s orders-my departure from bed did not disturb him. I had a brief debate about what I ought to wear, inasmuch as I was technically off duty. But I settled on my usual reporter’s garb, which included my notepad in my right pocket and two pens in my left. That was my armor, after all. And even if this particular knight had lost his liege, it was still what I wanted to wear as I went into battle.

I waved to my neighbor, Constance, as I left my house-she was watering her lawn, as usual-and made the trip to downtown Newark. I found parking outside a dry cleaner on a cramped side street, about eight blocks from my destination. Now that I was no longer on the Eagle-Examiner’s dime, I needed to keep my expenses down. No parking garages for Citizen Ross.

I got out of the car to find the sun was already starting to beat down on the pavement. The temperature and humidity were doing that mid-July tag team where one slams you to the canvas and the other jumps off the ropes and lands on you. I was already wiping sweat off my brow by the time I finished my eight-block walk and made it to the revolving front door of the National Newark Building.

I went through the routine of announcing myself at security, riding up to the twentieth floor, and pushing through the doors etched with the IFIW logo. At the reception desk, I was greeted by a smiling Jim McNabb, who was again dressed like he was on his way to play in a member-guest golf tournament. Every day must have been business casual for Big Jimmy.

We took what appeared to be the same circuitous route back to his office, winding our way through cubicles and workstations, past the low-rent bleached blonde with the overdone eye makeup. She was standing next to her desk, wearing a tight blouse that, if it could talk, would say, Hi, I’m trying too hard.

“Hey, Big Jimmy!” she called out playfully.

“Hey, candypants,” he said.

We rounded the next corner and I couldn’t help myself.

“Candypants?” I asked.

“I don’t do that with most of the girls,” Big Jimmy said. “But that one actually likes it, you know? Makes her feel good, like she must be doing an okay job because why else would the boss pay attention to her?”

Either that or it made her feel like her ass had just been caramelized.

* * *

We rounded one last corner and went into McNabb’s office, with its commanding view from Newark to Manhattan and all the Superfund sites that lay in between.

“I’m glad you were able to come in,” he said, settling himself into his ergonomically correct chair and sliding a keyboard out of a drawer under his desk. “I got something I want to show you on the computer.”

He typed in some kind of password and waited as the machine came out of dormancy.

“I just love the computer,” he said. “I’m not real natural with it, but I’m trying. Some guys my age, they need to be dragged kicking and screaming into this stuff. Not me. To me, this is the future and you got to get with the program. So give me the BlackBerry, the blueberry, the iPhone, the mePhone, the youPhone. I’m actually thinking about getting a new one right now. I want to stay current with all of it.”

He started working the mouse with the skill of someone who, for all his good intentions, never quite got comfortable with the thing.

“Okay,” he said. “I was going to forward you this e-mail, but I wanted you to be able to see it with your own eyes, exactly as I got it, so you didn’t think I was monkeying around with it or making it say something it didn’t really say.”

He turned the flat-screen monitor on his desk toward me. He had highlighted a message from Jackman that had been sent July 1-exactly a week before Nancy was killed-at 10:34 A.M.

“This, as you can see, is an e-mail from Gary Jackman. You can look at the full header later if you want to so you can see it’s legit.”

“That’s okay, I trust you, Jim.”

“I know you do. I just know how you reporters are. You guys have to be suspicious of everything and I don’t blame you. I want you to know this is for real.”

“Got it.”

He double clicked on the e-mail and I started reading:

Jackman, Gary [gjackman@eagleexaminer.com]

To: ‘McNabb, James’

Cc: ‘Porterhouse, Gregory’; ‘Koncz, Sophie’; ‘DeLillo, Alec’; ‘Blake, Michael’

Subject: IFIW Local 117 Renegotiations

Jim,

As you are aware, these continue to be extraordinarily difficult times for newspapers, and the Newark Eagle-Examiner has not been immune to the forces that are ravaging the industry as a whole. In short, revenues continue to fall, despite sustained efforts to stop the slide.

As I have told you previously, this newspaper has been operating at a loss for far longer than any business ought to. And while our owners have taken a long-term view and shown remarkable patience, that patience has come to an end. They have informed me that if I cannot return the paper to at least some small level of profitability by the end of the year, they will cease operations and sell all remaining assets.

The only way for us to avoid this dire scenario is to drastically change our business model. To date, our Mailers’ union, Drivers’ union, and Printers’ union have recognized the extraordinary nature of our distress and agreed to substantial givebacks on their contracts. Our nonrepresented employees have also withstood a series of pay cuts and furloughs. Other arrangements with vendors and suppliers have been modified. Your union, our Deliverers, remains the lone holdout. Yet without a new agreement with our Deliverers, we will have no choice but to cease operation. All employees-from your members to this paper’s publisher-would be terminated.

This is not an idle threat or posturing for the purpose of negotiation. This is a necessity, and I will be happy to have our COO open our books to prove it to you. Unless we can reach an accord, your union will be responsible for bringing the Newark Eagle-Examiner, one of the great remaining American newspapers, to its knees. It is my hope we can work together in good faith to avoid this dire outcome.

Sincerely,

Gary

When I finished, I turned the screen back in his direction. I knew things were real bad at my paper. I didn’t know they were that bad. It occurred to me for the first time that when my suspension ended, I might not have a job to return to.

“Now, you tell me: Does that sound like a man desperate enough to commit murder?” McNabb asked. “He’s not only going to lose his job, he’d go down as the guy who couldn’t save a ‘great American newspaper.’ He’d never get another job near that pay grade. That’s a pretty powerful motive, to me.”

I thought about the $2.27 million McMansion, the $35,000 property tax bill, the his-and-hers matching manicures, the pocket squares, all the elitist trappings of a well-financed life that would instantly evaporate if Jackman found himself on the unemployment line next to the rest of his former employees.

“Can I have a printout of that?” I asked.

“I figured you were gonna ask that,” he said, sliding a piece of paper across the desk at me. I grabbed what I could tell was a photocopy of the e-mail, albeit with a few identifying characteristics strategically blacked out. “I figured it was cc’d to enough people that any one of us could have leaked it to you.”

“Great,” I said. “Just curious: Is your e-mail backed up somewhere?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I just want to make sure that e-mail exists somewhere on a server, so if I got a prosecutor to subpoena you, they would definitely find it somewhere.”

“Oh. Oh yeah. Well, we do backups, for sure. But I’m not planning on erasing this. And if I got a subpoena, yeah, that’d be great. That would let me off the hook with my board and everyone else, because I could just say, ‘Hey, I had no choice.’ Why, you thinking about taking this to the cops?”

“Not yet,” I said. “At this point, I’d just be a disgruntled employee with a wild theory. I’m still a few facts short.”

“Yeah, I guess this could still all be one big coincidence, right?”

He looked at me with a frank, open face. And I once again found myself wondering whether I could trust McNabb with more information. He was a born blabbermouth, the last guy who could be relied on to keep a secret. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I didn’t actually want him to keep it secret. Having McNabb working back channels for me might just flush out more Jackman adversaries with heretofore unknown evidence.

Besides, there was that whole thing about no longer having the luxury of caution.

“Actually,” I said, “it’s no coincidence.”

* * *

Over the next ten minutes, I recounted for McNabb a distilled version of the story Mrs. Alfaro told me. Naturally, I was careful not to disclose her name, say where she lived, or give identifying characteristics-I wanted to respect the pledge of confidentiality I had given her-but I didn’t spare the details. As I spoke, McNabb’s mouth set into an ugly pout. I got the sense it was hard for him to hear. He had obviously been fond of Nancy Marino.

When I finished, he stood up and walked over toward the window. He put his hands on his hips and made a loud shushing sound as he emptied his lungs. His eyes appeared to be focused on something far beyond Manhattan. He shook his head a few times, like he still didn’t want to believe it, then went back to staring.

“That son of a bitch,” he said at last, without turning away from the window. “I know I told you I thought it was Jackman, but I was always thinking maybe I had it wrong. You assume people are basically good, you know? Nancy, she … that kid was … she didn’t deserve anything like this. He killed her because of, what, a few bucks an hour in a stinking contract?”

Except-and I had already done this math-it was more than just a few bucks. Say we had one thousand carriers, as Buster Hays suggested. Say they each worked three hours a day delivering the newspaper and did it seven days a week, 365 days a year. If Nancy was any guide, they were getting paid $18 an hour to do it. But a fifty percent pay cut meant a $9-an-hour savings for the paper. That rounded to about $7 million a year. In a budget where years of ritualized fasting had created negligible fat, $7 million could certainly make the difference between red and black-which would make the difference between Jackman getting to remain as the publisher of a fully operating major metropolitan newspaper and being put out of work.

“It’s like you said, Jackman was getting desperate,” I said.

“A powerful man facing the loss of his power will do just about anything to protect it,” McNabb said thoughtfully.

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess he will.”

“So do the cops know about this yet?”

“My source doesn’t trust the cops. I think I’ll eventually be able to talk her into working with them, when it comes to that, but for right now that’s not a priority.”

McNabb walked back from the window and sat down, flopping his weight heavily on the chair.

“What is a priority is that last conversation you had with Jackman,” I continued.

“Huh?”

“The talk you had with him in the bar the night before Nancy was killed.”

“Oh yeah. Oh geez, I wasn’t even thinking about that. But you don’t even need that anymore, right? Your source saw him do it.”

“My source saw a large black SUV do it,” I reminded him. “She never laid eyes on the driver, and even if she had, it would be a stretch to say she could make a positive ID that would hold up. Jackman had to be going fifty, sixty miles an hour at a minimum by the time he hit Nancy. My source was way too far away, and being on the second floor, the angle was all wrong for her to be able to see the driver’s face anyway.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“I’m beginning to think Jackman wasn’t actually the driver. He strikes me as the kind of guy who might hire someone to do his dirty work. I’m fairly certain he doesn’t own a black SUV himself. I think he either rented himself a killer or rented himself a car.”

“Oh yeah? What makes you think that?”

“I, uh, had his garage investigated late last night,” I said, throwing in a wink.

“What do you mean?”

“I broke into Jackman’s garage and had a look around,” I said, leaving out the small detail that Tommy had been the one doing the breaking and looking. “There’s a Lexus and a Ford in there, but neither are SUVs.”

“You got to be careful doing something like that. You could get yourself in trouble, someone sees you sneaking into garages.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t say I got away with it. I spent last night as a guest of the Mendham Borough Police Department.”

“No kiddin’! You going to be okay? I know some good lawyers…”

“Thanks, I’ll figure that out later,” I said. “In any event, it’s going to make proving his guilt a little more difficult. The case might be more circumstantial than I or anyone else likes. But it also makes that bar conversation absolutely pivotal. Think about it from a jury’s perspective. You hear the suspect was drunk and tossing out threats, and then hours later the person they were threatening got killed? Even if we never did find that black SUV, your testimony might be enough to get a conviction.”

“I told you, I can’t get involved like that,” McNabb said quickly, defensively. “What I was doing with Jackman could get me in real trouble with my board. When I told you about that conversation, you promised me off the record. Off. The. Record. Don’t you go back on your word.”

His big belly had shoved the keyboard back under the desk, and he was leaning toward me, pointing a finger at me with his face flushed.

“I’m not. I’m not,” I assured him. “But, at this point, you’ve got to agree that a murder is bigger than you getting a little jammed up with your board. Be reasonable here.”

“So nothing with you is really off the record, huh? You’re going to run to the cops and rat me out?”

“Just relax. I’m not running anywhere or ratting anyone, Jim. All I’m saying is, I need your help. There’s got to be something you can do for me or give me that will help establish Jackman was drunk and raving that night. Surely some bartender or patron overheard you guys? Then if the cops approach you and ask you, you can just say it was a friendly get-to-know-you drink that went bad, and you can leave out the part about contract negotiations-”

“Yeah, but eventually I’ll have to testify.”

“That’s a long, long way down the road,” I said. “Let’s worry about getting Jackman arrested first. The fact is, Jackman will eventually realize we got him, but he’ll have just enough leverage-because there will inevitably be holes in the case-that he’ll get a decent plea deal. You’ll never have to testify about anything.”

McNabb leaned back and exhaled, closing his eyes and rubbing his temples in a circular motion with two fat middle fingers. Finally he opened his eyes.

“Let me think about it for a day or two,” he said.

For now, it was the best I was going to get. I just had to give him that space. He led me out of his office, past candypants, past the reception desk, and out the etched-glass doors.

I was back down in the lobby when my phone rang. It was Tina.

“Hey, how’s my favorite ex-editor?” I asked.

“Carter, you need to come in immediately,” she said, her voice terse and low.

“What, you can’t live one day without me? I’m flattered.”

“Stop joking around. Brodie just heard about the incident at Jackman’s house last night, and he’s absolutely fuming. I’ve never seen him this mad. If you’ve got anything to say for yourself before he makes your suspension permanent, I suggest you come here damn fast and say it.”

At first, he was both astonished and impressed by his opponent’s temerity. He had been around reporters plenty of times. Most of them thought daring was to plunge into an especially large box of documents.

This one obviously had different ideas. Snooping around a house in the dark of night? Breaking into a garage? Being willing to do the dirty work with no thought of the danger involved? It was the rare reporter who pushed that far to get a story.

But his surprise at-and grudging respect for-those tactics quickly gave way to other feelings. Like irritation. And anger. And hatred.

The threat was more serious than ever. A few threads of this supposedly perfect crime had already started to unravel. And even if Carter Ross was still far off in certain areas, he was getting close-way too close-in others. He was starting to know about things no one ought to have been able to discover. And if he had learned that much already, while showing no signs of wanting to pull back, he might just discover even more. Depending on how determined he was, he might figure out the whole thing. And Ross seemed pretty determined.

Under most circumstances, it didn’t take much to break a man, especially those soft, white-collar types. A little push here. A little shove there. Men who had worked to achieve a certain standing didn’t want to lose it. Threaten them with the loss of something that mattered to them and they backed off. You just had to figure out what was important to them and make sure it became imperiled.

Ross didn’t seem to work that way. He was far less risk averse. He wasn’t put off by the potential loss of his job, by hits to his reputation, or even the threat of jail. Who knows what else he might put on the line?

Ross had already been through things that would put most men off the case, but it wasn’t enough. Not yet. Clearly, a more active approach would be required.