The Good Cop

CHAPTER 2

It felt a little intrusive, sitting in Mimi Kipps’s kitchen while she was upstairs showering, and I was contemplating whether I should take my leave when I heard the water shut off. Then, from the living room, baby Jaquille began making a noise that may or may not have been crying. It mostly sounded like a wind-up toy on the fritz.

“Would someone mind holding the baby for a second?” Mimi hollered from upstairs. “He’s just hungry. I’ll be down in a second to feed him.”

In a house that had seemed so filled with relatives, I was sure someone more appropriate than the friendly local newspaper reporter would materialize and take care of this duty. My maternal instincts rank slightly ahead of wolf spiders-inasmuch as I know better than to eat my own young-though I’m not sure I had much to offer beyond that. So I sat still and waited for the noise coming from the Pack ’N Play to quiet. It was my version of the “not it” finger to the nose.

But I soon realized I was the only one in the house. And Jaquille’s frustration was mounting. I went into the living room and looked down at him as he squalled.

“Uh … what … what exactly do I do?” I hollered upstairs.

“Just pick him up,” I heard Mimi say.

And how do I do that? I wanted to say. Did the kid come with a handle on him or something? Among the many skills I had managed to pick up in the newsroom over the years, this was not one of them. We often talked about babysitting the interns, but our interns usually knew enough to keep their weeping more private.

Still, Jaquille’s distress was only increasing, so I did what any good reporter does in an uncertain situation: I summoned all the confidence I had and faked it. Like a seasoned wet nurse, I reached down and grabbed him with two hands, then cradled him to my body. He was small enough that I’m sure I could have one-handed him. But since I cared enough to catch a softball with two hands, it seemed the least I could do for this little guy.

“Okay, pal, it’s okay,” I said in what I hoped was a reassuring voice.

Jaquille was unconvinced. My faking hadn’t fooled him. He screamed even louder, and even though his eyes were closed, he was thrashing his head around, his mouth searching for … something. But what?

Oh. Right. A nipple.

“Sorry, friend,” I said. “I got two of those, but neither is going to do you much good.”

Jaquille screamed some more and I became aware of my desire to do something, anything to make him stop. So I stuck my finger in his mouth. He immediately clamped down on it. Hard. Like he intended to suck the nail clean off my finger.

But at least he was quiet, contentedly taking these long pulls on my finger like it was going to get him somewhere. I kept worrying he would figure out nothing worthwhile was going to come of it, but he seemed unbothered. He was just looking up at me with those big, glassy, grateful eyes, like I was the only important thing in his tiny little universe. I was starting to understand how it is parents first fall in love with their kids. Another human being-even a shriveled, alien-looking one-gazes at you like that, and it makes you feel like you’ll do anything for them.

“Don’t worry, little guy,” I cooed. “I got your back.”

Jaquille sucked a few more times, his eyes never leaving my face.

“Oh, look at you, you’re a natural,” Mimi said as she descended the stairs.

“Yeah, don’t let that get out.”

“Here you go,” she said, taking the baby from me. “How’s my little man?”

As soon as I pried my finger from his mouth, Jaquille renewed his protest. I was going to take that as a perfectly good excuse to announce my departure, then the doorbell rang.

“I’m sorry, can you answer that?” she asked. “If this baby doesn’t eat, no one around here is going to be able to think.”

Since when had I become the nanny and the butler? As Mimi disappeared with the baby into the kitchen, I opened the door.

The man standing there was huge, dark-skinned, and cologne-doused. He had on a gray pinstripe suit that, at a quick glance, looked like it was silk and custom-tailored. He wore a hangdog look on his drooping face, gold-wire-framed glasses, and a fedora, which he doffed as he entered. He looked familiar, though I couldn’t say why.

“Good day to you, sir,” he said in a deep, bass voice, walking in like I had already invited him. “Is Noemi here?”

He took care to pronounce Mimi’s full name, doing it so deliberately it sounded more like “No Emmy”-like it was something with which Susan Lucci would have once been familiar. As soon as he was done, I heard her call from the kitchen, “Pastor Al! Come in, come in!”

The man shuffled in and I backed up to give him room. He was at least five inches taller than me, and if I could guess from the size of the body filling his suit, he needed one of those scales that went beyond three hundred pounds. He was dabbing sweat with a handkerchief, even though it wasn’t that hot.

“Have a seat, Pastor Al. I’m just heating a bottle for the baby,” Mimi said.

Finally, my brain clicked in and I realized who Pastor Al was and why he looked familiar. He was one of Newark’s celebrity ministers, a man well represented in the three Bs of local outdoor advertising-billboards, buses, and benches. His church, Redeemer Love Christian, was a nondenominational house of God that used the slogan “Let Jesus Redeem You” and always featured “The Reverend Doctor Alvin LeRioux, an Anointed Man of God” in its advertisements.

We had written a story about the church not long ago. It had something like eight thousand members, many of whom had been talked into tithing by the anointed man of God. The story raised the question of where that money all went-other than the three Bs and the chauffeured SUV that the good Reverend Doctor was known to ride around the city in-but never fully answered it. Unlike other nonprofits, churches are exempt from laws requiring them to expose their finances to public inspection.

Suffice it to say, the piece probably wasn’t Pastor Al’s favorite reading material. I had heard talk that after our story ran, he gave a sermon calling our newspaper an agent of Satan-or something similarly unflattering. I can’t say that kind of talk made me want to like him any more than he liked me. Still, he was a man of some standing in the community, and I was going to treat him with all due respect.

“Reverend LeRioux, I’m Carter Ross with the Eagle-Examiner,” I said, extending a hand. He shook it, though I could tell he didn’t want to. I could also tell I was going to smell like his cologne for the rest of the day, no matter how many times I washed myself.

“I’ll be out in a second,” Mimi called.

Pastor Al hobbled in arthritic fashion over to one of the couches, where he landed heavily. He stared straight ahead, dabbed his forehead, and seemed to be making a point of not talking to me. The baby was still caterwauling, then abruptly quieted-the bottle, at long last, had been delivered.

Mimi came into the room a moment later with a happily suckling Jaquille cradled in one arm.

“Pastor Al!” she said.

“Noemi, my child,” he said, without getting up.

“It’s so good of you to come.”

“I came as soon as I heard.”

I thought, at that point, he would offer a prayer, read some Scripture, or do something appropriately nonsecular. Instead, he gestured at me.

“Noemi, I was hoping we could share some words in confidence,” he said. “I am troubled by the presence of a reporter here.”

And I am troubled by ministers who wear two-thousand-dollar silk suits. But at least I’m polite enough to keep it to myself.

He continued: “I know the media enjoys publicizing tragedy for its own purposes. But these are private moments to be shared by family and loved ones.”

Mimi looked over at me, obviously torn. I had earned her trust, and I could tell she liked me. But, at the same time, Pastor Al trumped Reporter Carter in her world.

I saved her the trouble of having to kick me out.

“Actually, I was just leaving,” I said. “I’ll call you later.”

Pastor Al was still mopping his forehead as I left.

* * *

Relieved to be no longer serving as a human pacifier, I returned to my car, having already decided on my next course of action. With apologies to Mike Fusco, I had to figure out if Darius Kipps had been a straight-up cop.

If he wasn’t, it meant he probably did kill himself, in which case I was just wasting my time. It’s not that crooked cops don’t make for great copy-they do-it was Brodie’s suicide policy. There would just be no getting around it. Besides, I’d never get anything on-the-record. No one was going to piss on a dead cop’s grave, even if he was bent.

Then again, if Darius Kipps wasn’t dirty, it opened the possibility the suicide wasn’t what it seemed, in which case I had a load of dynamite on my hands. Either way, I wasn’t going to find my answer in the phone book or on the Internet. I was going to find it on the streets.

I started driving through the heart of the hood, down a series of avenues I have come to know as well as any place I’ve ever lived. During my years at the Eagle-Examiner, the milieu had become familiar, even comfortable: the vacant lots and abandoned buildings, the aging Victorians and ancient storefronts, the new construction and glistening chain stores. It’s the hodgepodge that is present-day Newark, a city forever striving to renew itself, with mixed results.

I love it when some visiting journalist parachutes into town for three days to write the Definitive Newark Story. Because the fact is, if they’re looking to write “Newark: City on the Rise,” they’ll find that. And if they’re looking to write “Newark: Still the Same Hellhole Despite What the Mayor Keeps Telling People,” they’ll find that, too. To me, the city is like its own kind of Rorschach test. What you choose to see-whether you want to be optimistic or pessimistic in your view-says as much about you as it does about the place.

My destination was the Clinton Hill section of Newark and my man, Reginald “Tee” Jamison. The nickname came from the thriving T-shirt shop he ran-no one, other than perhaps his wife, called him by his real name. I had written a story about him a few years back, and we had since become unlikely friends. I say “unlikely” only in a statistical sense, inasmuch as there are roughly two hundred million white people living in America, and Tee is friends with only two of them.

Still, I was glad to be one of the two. Despite the superficial differences between us-he has more hair in two of his dreadlocks than I have on my entire head, not to mention more muscle in one of his pectorals than I have in my entire body-we were kindred spirits in more ways than not, and we enjoyed deciphering our respective worlds for each other.

Plus, he grew up in Newark, shuffling between a variety of foster care placements in all parts of the city, so he has a network of contacts that would make any reporter envious. If Darius Kipps was dirty, Tee might or might not know it. But he sure would know someone who knew.

I arrived at his store to find a half-dozen knuckleheads hanging around his front door. They were generally good kids-if you could ignore the pot smell that clings to their clothing-though their presence on Tee’s sidewalk led people to make certain assumptions about what was going on inside. Tee, who was a legitimate businessman, finally got fed up one day and posted a sign in his front window, NO, WE DO NOT SELL WEED HERE.

As I got out of my car, six heads immediately swung my way-well-dressed Caucasian men tend to have this effect on Clinton Avenue in Newark-but then they saw it was me. I’m a frequent enough visitor to Tee’s store that they know I’m not there to arrest them, harass them, or otherwise disrupt their mojo. With their alarm level back down, they returned to what appeared to be a dice game. And not Dungeons amp; Dragons.

I hit the buzzer by Tee’s front door and waited for the lock to release. When I walked in, Tee was designing a T-shirt for a pair of customers, who were seated in front of his desk.

“Uh-oh, it’s the IRS!” he hollered from behind his desk.

“Sir, this is a random audit,” I said, playing along. “I’m going to have to ask for your last five years of returns, including all associated receipts.”

“Receipts? What’s that? You know a brother like me can’t read. My massa won’t let me.”

“Well then, I’m afraid we’re going to have to throw you in jail with all the other darkies. Now excuse me for a second, I have to plant some drugs on you.”

“C’mon now, don’t make me go all Rodney King on your pasty ass.”

I think the customers knew we were kidding because we were both smiling broadly. But they looked like nice folks, and I could tell we were making them feel uncomfortable. So I pulled out of the act and said, “You want me to come back later?”

“No, no, I’m just finishing. Gimme a second.”

Tee took another five minutes wrapping up with his customers, while I perused some of his inventory, including the ever-popular shirt that showed a stick figure lying on the ground under the words, WHY DON’T YOU GO PRACTICE FALLING DOWN?

I was admiring another one-a top-ten list of “Yo Mama’s So Ugly” jokes-when Tee came over and shook my hand.

“So what’s going on?” Tee asked. “You working on something?”

I told him what I knew about Darius Kipps, finishing with, “So, basically, I need to figure out if he’s crooked.”

“Oh, that’s easy,” Tee said. “They all crooked.”

I had repeatedly tried to convince Tee of my belief that, in fact, the vast majority of policemen are not corrupt-in the same way the vast majority of newspaper reporters don’t make up stories. But it only takes a few reprobates to skew the reputation of the rest of them. Newark, for example, had roughly 1,200 police officers last time I checked. If even 99 percent of them were law-abiding, that still meant there were a dozen cops rampaging around the city, wreaking havoc.

Alas, it seems like Tee had experience with all twelve of them.

“C’mon, I’m serious,” I said. “I’ve got a picture of him. You think your friends outside are hard-core enough to know if Kipps was involved in something he shouldn’t be?”

“Them? Nah. They just playin’, you know what I mean?”

I did. In Newark, there were pretend gangs and then there were serious gangs, and it was important to know the difference. Kids like Tee’s knuckleheads might call themselves a gang. They might adopt some of the gestures, mannerisms, and clothing of a gang. They might even say they were Bloods or Crips. But, in reality, they were a gang in roughly the same sense as the Little Rascals. They hung together for camaraderie and mutual protection. They were basically harmless.

“Besides,” Tee pointed out, “you said this guy is Fourth Precinct, right? Those kids never get out of the South Ward. The Fourth is up in Central.”

“Oh, yeah, good point. You know anyone up that way who might be able to help me?”

Tee got a far-off look.

“What?” I asked.

“Well, I know these dudes up there. Trust me, if your cop was dirty, they’d know. They got that neighborhood wired. Hell, I think they got the whole city wired.”

“Okay. I’m not going to have to get stoned again, am I?”

Tee had once set me up with sources who felt the only way to ensure I was not a member of a law enforcement agency was for me to smoke pot with them. It was an experience that proved two things to them: one, I’m not a cop; and two, my tolerance for marijuana is not especially impressive.

“No, no, nothing like that this time,” he assured me. “But let me ask you something: You need a new pair of boots by any chance?”

“Huh?”

“Just say yes.”

“Yes?”

“Okay, let me make a call.”

* * *

Fifteen minutes later, I was out the door with an address scribbled on a piece of paper and instructions to stop at an ATM machine to pick up a hundred dollars in cash. I was also instructed not to get too attached to said money.

The address was on Irvine Turner Boulevard, which was one of Newark’s most notorious drug corridors for one reason: it offered a straight shot to Route 78, an east-west interstate that led rather quickly to some of the state’s nicest bedroom communities. All the suburbanites who came to Newark to get their drugs-and make no mistake, that was a big part of the clientele-knew they couldn’t get lost if they just stayed on Irvine Turner.

I relied on my GPS to guide me to the address Tee had written for me, which turned out to be around the corner from the Fourth Precinct headquarters. It was a cream-colored, two-story, warehouselike building that encompassed a good chunk of the block. The only apparent tenant, and it occupied perhaps one-tenth of the building, was a bodega that had a door onto the street. It had dark windows-behind bars, of course-made of one-way glass, the kind that would allow someone inside to see out, but not the other way around.

Where was Tee taking me, anyhow? I pushed through the bodega’s door to the sound of little bells chiming-a few had been tied to the door. The store was empty except for a turban-wearing cashier sitting in a bulletproof box.

I approached the man, who I guessed was Sikh, and said, “Tee sent me.”

He tilted his head and peered at me like I was speaking a soon-to-be-extinct Javanese dialect.

“I’m the guy Tee sent,” I said.

More peering.

“Is this one-sixty Irvine Turner Boulevard?” I asked.

“One-sixty A,” the guy said in a thick Indian accent. “You want one-sixty, you go around the corner.”

“Around … which corner?”

The guy pointed out the door and vaguely to the left, so that’s the direction I took. I reached the end of the building without seeing anything obvious, just a narrow alleyway. It was far cleaner than most Newark alleys-spotless, actually-which really got me suspicious. I hoped Tee remembered that I had a cat who depended on me as his sole means of support.

I turned and, midway down the alley, found a meshed steel door, the kind that served as a superstrength screen for another door inside it. I pulled on the screen, but it was bolted solid. A security camera, attached to the side of the building about fifteen feet up, looked down on me.

There was no knocking on a door like this. But I also couldn’t see any other way in. I studied the door frame, the door itself, and saw nothing obvious. Was I supposed to stand there until someone saw me on the camera?

Then I found it, just to the left of the frame: a small, recessed doorbell button, practically camouflaged because it had been painted the same cream color as the concrete around it.

I pressed the button and waited. Nothing happened. I pressed again. Still nothing. I was beginning to think it was broken-and there was no way into this hulk of a building-when I pressed the button a third time.

Then I heard a metallic voice: “Keep your shirt on, keep your shirt on. What are you, dying or something?”

The voice sounded … Jewish? Were there still Jews left in Newark? I thought they all left a half-century ago. I couldn’t even tell where the sound was coming from. My head swiveled in every direction.

“Over here, over here,” the voice said.

This time I was able to place it as coming from the camera, which had a small speaker.

“Oh, hi,” I said, feeling weird because, to anyone who walked by, it looked like I was talking to a wall.

“You just gonna stand there all day, looking like a putz? What do you want?”

“I’m … I’m the guy Tee sent.”

More faintly, like he didn’t know I could still hear him, the voice asked, “What did he say?” Then another guy-who also sounded like an older Jewish man-replied, “He said he was the guy Tee sent. The boots. The boots.”

“Oh, yeah,” the voice said, returning to its previous volume. “You here about the boots?”

“That’s right.”

“Why didn’t you say so? You think I’m a mind reader or something? Hang on, hang on.”

I waited another moment, until the door was opened by a granite block of a black man who, I assumed, was not the owner of the voice I heard on the speaker. I followed him down an unadorned, windowless hallway until we reached another door, where he punched in a numeric code.

The door opened, and suddenly I felt like I was in a chaotic, mismatched Macy’s. It was a large, open space filled with merchandise, loosely organized by category: luggage to the immediate left, cookery and housewares straight on, hardware beyond that, clothing and footwear to the right, electronics in the back left. The only thing missing was the perfume section.

“What … what is all this?” I asked, but my granite-block guide was not a talker.

I heard a pleasant dinging sound and turned to see two men appearing out of a freight elevator. The first had on yellow-tinted glasses, a dark yellow shirt with the top three buttons undone, light yellow slacks, and white slip-on shoes that reminded me of something a nurse would have worn forty years ago. His saggy skin was deeply tanned, even though it was March. His jewelry-a necklace, multiple bracelets, and rings on several digits, including both pinkies-was all yellow gold. His hair, what little of it there was, had been dyed blond and was gelled back. He looked like a wrinkled human banana and walked like the only rooster in a hen house.

The second man was slump-shouldered and appropriately pale for the season. He wore light gray pants and a blue cardigan sweater over a white oxford shirt, which was buttoned all the way to the top. He had no jewelry. His hair was its natural gray. He walked like a man who had lost every bet he ever placed.

The man in yellow said, “I’m Bernie. Everyone calls me Uncle Bernie. This is my brother Gene. Which one of us do you think is older?”

Both guys were at least seventy, though it was hard to tell beyond that. Either one of them could have been 138 for all I knew. If he had asked me who was older, him or Methuselah, I still wouldn’t have been able to answer.

“I have … I have no idea,” I said.

“Come on, guess.”

“He’s older,” I said, pointing at Gene, if only because I could tell that was what Uncle Bernie wanted to hear.

“See? That’s what everyone thinks, Gene! You look like a shlamazel. You’re not gonna get any tail at the bar dressing like that.”

I suspected both of these guys were a bit beyond their bar-cruising years-unless you were talking about the salad bar at an assisted living facility-but I at least appreciated his spirit.

“Anyhow, I know you didn’t come here to admire my good looks,” he said. “C’mon. Let’s go.”

* * *

Uncle Bernie led me through some racks of clothing toward a footwear section that would challenge a Nine West.

“You sure you don’t need some pots and pans?” Uncle Bernie asked me on the way back. “I just got some new All-Clad. That’s top of the line, All-Clad. The best. The best.”

“No thanks.”

“What about a TV? Samsung. Sony. Those Japs make a good TV now. Fella like you, I bet you like sports, right? Me? I like the ponies. I go to the track. I place a bet. I take a little nap in the sun. It’s very relaxing. But you young guys? You all like the football and the basketball. Need a good TV for that, am I right? How about a new high-def?”

“That’s okay.”

“Boots,” Gene reminded Bernie. “He came for the boots, remember?”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m just talking here. What, you think I’m some kind of goyishe kop?”

“That’s Yiddish for ‘stupid,’” Gene translated.

“Okay, here we are,” Bernie said as we arrived at a series of wire racks, filled from top to bottom with shoe boxes. “What size are you? Ten? Eleven? You’re so tall, I bet you’re eleven.”

“Yeah, eleven works,” I said.

“Okay, okay, where are we … boots, boots,” Bernie said, pawing through some boxes. “Here we go. Timberlands. Excellent company, Timberland. They make a fine product and they stand behind it a hundred percent, a thousand percent. Now these? These are the top of the line.”

He pulled out a pair of work boots and continued: “These are from their premium collection. Steel toe. Waterproof. Eight-inch upper-that’s two inches more than their usual. You wear these boots, people say, ‘Hey, look at that feinshmecker!’”

“That’s Yiddish for someone who has good taste,” Gene interjected.

“Now, you get these boots retail for one fifty, one sixty, even on sale. You? You’re a friend of Tee’s-as far as I’m concerned, you’re mishpokhe. I give ’em to you for a hundred even. We good?”

I was so stunned by everything I was seeing-much less by what a mishpokhe was-I had to slow down and make sense out of it. “I’m sorry, Uncle Bernie, I just have to know, what is all this? Where did this come from?”

“What do you mean, where did this come from? You think I’m back here tanning leather all day? It came from the manufacturer.”

“No, I’m just asking … I’m sorry, are you guys some kind of fence or something?”

Bernie recoiled, looking genuinely offended. “Fence? Fence! A broch! My mother would rise from the grave and cuff me behind the ear if I stole so much as a lump of sugar! A fence! Shame on you.”

“So how did you guys … get all this stuff?”

“Warranties,” Bernie said. “It’s all about the warranties.”

“Huh?”

“We’re a warrantied product reseller,” Gene explained.

“What’s … what’s that?”

“Well, take those boots you got there. Timberland,” Uncle Bernie said. “Now, Timberland is a popular boot around here. And these young black guys, they all want their boots to be crisp and new, all the time. The moment a boot gets a speck of dirt on it? Feh! They’re done with it.”

“But these look brand-new…”

“I’m not finished. Am I finished? Geez, this guy. It’s like he’s sitting on shpilkes.”

“That means that you’re impatient,” Gene said.

“Anyhow,” Bernie plowed forward, “Timberland, they guarantee their product for life. For life, you hear me! So we have people all over, people who know us, people who know what we’re looking for. And they recover these kind of things for us-for a small fee, naturally. So say we get a pair of slightly used boots. We send them back to Timberland and, whammo, new boots.”

“They just … send you boots?”

“Well, there’s work involved. You have to write a letter-the letter is important, make ’em know you’re serious. And then sometimes we might have to, what’s the best way to put it, massage ’em a little. This is an art we’re talking about here.”

“Timberland guarantees its product against material or manufacturing defect,” Gene said. “So we-”

“Tut, tut,” Bernie interrupted. “What are you, making a megillah? He gets the point. Geez, Gene, someone asks you what time it is, you build ’em a clock.”

“So all this stuff,” I said, making a sweeping gesture with my arm. “The pots, the pans, the power tools. All of it is-”

“Straight from the manufacturer, never been used, good as new,” Bernie said. “Same as you get in the store. But for the right customer, Uncle Bernie gives you a discount.”

“But can you … do that?” I asked. “Is it legal?”

“Legal?” Bernie spat. “Was it legal what the Pharaoh did to my people? Was Auschwitz legal? Don’t talk to me about legal!”

“But don’t these companies, I don’t know, protect against this somehow? You must have twenty pairs of Timberlands there. Doesn’t Timberland eventually figure out it’s shipping all these new boots to the same place?”

Bernie just smiled and said, “We in the tribe have a saying for that: ‘Mensch tracht, Gott lacht.’”

“Man plans, God laughs,” Gene said.

I felt like laughing, too. Newark: there are a million scams in the naked city.

“So, I’m not here to dance with you, I’m here to sell stuff,” Bernie said. “You want the boots or not?”

“Yeah, I’ll take the boots. But I need a quick favor,” I said, extracting the picture of Darius Kipps from my pocket. “My guy Tee tells me you know all the cops around here.”

“The cops, the pawnbrokers, the shopkeepers, the machers, the kurves, the bubbas,” Bernie assured me. “We know everyone. In this line of work, someone farts, you gotta be able to smell it, kid.”

“Okay. Well, I’m trying to figure out if this one detective is dirty or not.”

“Dirty? What, you mean is he on the take?”

“Yeah, something like that. I just want to know if he’s involved in anything he shouldn’t be involved in.”

“Time was, they were all on the take,” Bernie said, chuckling. “You remember that, Gene? They paid those poor shmendricks a hundred fifty bucks a week and then they wondered why they were all in the mob’s pocket.”

“Tell him about Addonizio,” Gene said.

“Addonizio! Remember him? He was a real Moyshe Kapoyer. He was the mayor. He used to be a congressman, but you know what he said? He said ‘You can’t make any money as a congressman, but as mayor of Newark you can make a million bucks.’”

“Said it right into a wire,” Gene added. “To the FBI.”

“Ah, but that was the old days,” Bernie continued. “Now? Not so much. The pay. The benefits. It’s all too good. These guys don’t want to risk their pensions. A few of them get involved in some funny business here and there, but nothing like it used to be. Let me have a look at this fella.”

I handed Bernie the photo, which he held out at arm’s length for perhaps a half a second.

“Him? Oh, he’s all right. He’s fine.”

“Are you sure? You want to look-”

“Sure? Yeah I’m sure! Listen to this guy, thinking I don’t know what I’m talking about. I got stains in my shorts older than you, kid. You gonna tell me my business? I say this guy’s okay, he’s okay.”

“Gotcha. Thanks for taking a look.”

“No problem. Now, hey, you need a briefcase by any chance?”

* * *

Somehow, I made it out of Gene and Bernie’s Warranty Emporium without acquiring any more merchandise, though not for lack of effort on Bernie’s part.

I tossed the Timberlands in my backseat, wondering when I’d ever have a chance to use them-I’m not exactly a steel-toe kind of guy-then turned my gaze to the Fourth Precinct headquarters, a hulking, fortresslike edifice whose windows had all been bricked over. The building had a famous-or, rather, notorious-history as the place where the Newark riots began in 1967.

Most folks thought the riots began when some cops beat up a cab driver (named John Smith, of all things) and then dragged his broken body back to the Fourth Precinct, resulting in the rumor the cabbie had been killed-and prompting a spasm of violence and looting from the outraged citizenry. That’s true, but it’s only part of the story. The city actually calmed down the night of Smith’s arrest, to the point where the local National Guard Armory, which had been put on alert, was told to stand down. Violence didn’t flare up again until the next night, when a protest outside the Fourth Precinct got out of hand, leading to four days of sustained unrest.

Either way, the Fourth played a central role in a cataclysm that left twenty-six people dead and caused ten million dollars in physical damage, to say nothing of what it did to Newark’s reputation. On the fortieth anniversary of the riots, a group of citizens and community leaders led an effort to have a small plaque mounted on the front of the building to commemorate what happened there. Otherwise, the Fourth Precinct was more or less the same place it had been in 1967. There had been talk about tearing it down, but no one had quite gotten around to it.

Now here it was, harboring secrets once again, playing an oblique role in another tragedy-even if I couldn’t quite measure the angle.

Lacking any kind of real plan, I locked my car and wandered in the direction of the precinct. I wanted to get a read on the place, imprint an image of it in my brain. I kept my eyes fixed on it as I walked up the sidewalk, then stood there for a while, like if I stared at it long enough its walls would start spilling what they knew.

I was still rooted there when a voice interrupted me.

“Can I help you?”

It was a patrol cop in uniform, taking a smoke break by the side of the building. I’m not sure how I missed him-he had to be at least six foot eight, with the arms of a seven footer-but somehow he startled me a little.

“I was just … I heard a cop killed himself in there last night, and I guess I wanted to have a look. Is that a problem?”

“No law against looking,” he said, taking a drag on his cigarette.

I did my best to study the guy out of the corner of my eye while I pretended to examine the building some more. Maybe I had watched a few too many bad eighties movies, but he was tall, black, and wearing a policeman’s hat that made him appear even taller, and I couldn’t help but be reminded of Hightower from Police Academy.

So. How to handle him? If I told him I was a reporter, the guy’s mouth would cinch up tighter than Uncle Scrooge’s change purse. But there’s a rule about identifying yourself to sources: you only have to do it if you planned to quote them. And since there’s no way a beat cop would ever be cleared by his superiors to be quoted on something like this, I wasn’t exactly risking anything by posing as a nosy bystander.

“Did you know him?” I asked.

“We all did.”

“What happened?”

“Seems like you already know,” Hightower said, stubbing out his cigarette on the wall of the building, then dropping the butt.

“Was he a good guy?”

“You must be a reporter.”

Busted. Another rule: you don’t necessarily have to identify yourself, but if you’re asked whether you are in fact a reporter, you can’t go lying about it.

“Yeah, how’d you know?”

“White guy in this neighborhood? If it’s nighttime, you’re here to buy drugs. If it’s daytime, you’re either a reporter or a social worker. Social workers don’t wear ties.”

I nodded my head. “You got me,” I said.

I figured those would be among the last words Hightower and I ever exchanged. But, to my surprise, he pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and lit another one. He was going to get as much nicotine in as he could while he was still on break. And that suited my purposes fine.

“So I’m hearing a bunch of patrol guys found him drunk on bourbon, covered in puke,” I said. “They tossed him in the shower to sober him up. And then he did himself in in the shower.”

“You hearing all that, huh?”

“We got sources.”

“What else you hear?”

I paused, not sure how much further to push things. Mike Fusco damn near strangled me when I asked him about Kipps being corrupt. But at least I had a little bit of a size advantage on Fusco. Hightower? If he wanted to, he could fold me in quarters and stuff me in his pocket.

Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained. So I took a deep breath and said: “There’s talk that Detective Kipps might have gotten himself tangled up in something inappropriate, that he might have gotten caught, and that maybe that’s why he pulled the trigger. But then I’ve had other people telling me he was legit. So I guess I’m trying to figure out which it was.”

I braced myself, and Hightower’s face twitched a little. But all he did was take a drag on his cigarette. “What do you care?” he asked.

“Well, the way my bosses think, a crooked cop who shoots himself is probably getting what he deserves, and therefore we don’t have much of a story,” I ventured. “Then again, maybe the cop is straight. Maybe he didn’t even kill himself in the first place, in which case there’s a lot more going on than we might realize. You follow me?”

I had set him up to tell me all kinds of wonderful things about Darius Kipps. And mindful of what Pritch said about black officers in the Fourth being tight with each other, I figured that’s what I was going to hear.

But he flicked his cigarette on the ground and exhaled a long line of smoke. Without any expression, he said, “Sounds to me like you don’t got a story.”

“What makes you say that?”

But he didn’t reply, just brushed past me and up the front steps, disappearing into that long-infamous building.

* * *

It was starting to feel like I needed a scorecard just to keep track of who was in the “Darius Dirty” column and who belonged in “Darius Clean.” Pritch and Officer Hightower seemed to be in the former, while Mike Fusco and Uncle Bernie were in the latter. Me? I was right in the middle, in a third column that might as well have been labeled “Carter Clueless.”

I was trudging back to my car when my phone chirped with a text message. It was from Tommy Hernandez, our city hall beat writer and a coconspirator in what had turned out to be some of my finer capers. Tommy and I did our best to look out for each other in the newsroom. So I took it seriously when his text read: “TT on warpath. Watch ur back.”

TT was, of course, Tina Thompson. And I didn’t know what he was talking about until moments later, when my phone rang. It was coming from a number with a 315 area code, which I knew was Syracuse, N.Y. Over the years, we had enough interns from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications to know those three digits cold.

“Carter Ross.”

“Hey, Carter, it’s Geoff Ginsburg.”

Geoff was another Syracuse intern. In the modern newsroom-which has more demand for work than money to pay for it-interns have two of the things editors prize most: enthusiasm and affordability. Like some invasive species, interns started in relatively small numbers, but with no natural prey-beyond their own inability to survive on the near-poverty-level wages we pay them-they have been allowed to proliferate to the point where I think the interns now outnumber the full-time staff members.

Talent-wise, they were a mixed lot, though Geoff was better than most. He was a smart kid, an excellent writer, and a keen reporter. Because of his surname, some wiseacre on the copy desk had taken to calling him Ruth Bader. That turned rather quickly into Ruthie, the name that stuck. Mind you, unlike the Supreme Court justice, our Ruthie looked like he was about thirteen years old. He had an enthusiastic demeanor that made you wonder if he was getting his Journalism Merit Badge and a round, boyish face that I’m fairly certain didn’t require regular shaving.

That youthful appearance made his obvious crush on Tina Thompson all the more funny. It was unclear whether the crush was professional or personal. Ruthie struck me as the kind of kid who might go for an older chick, especially a hot one like Tina; but he also struck me as a total suck-up, so it could go either way. All I knew is he spent an awful lot of time hanging around her office, following her on trips across the newsroom, yapping around her heels like the lap dog he wanted to be.

“Hey, uh, Geoff,” I said, barely resisting the urge to call him Ruthie. You never knew whether the interns were aware of the clever nicknames we had awarded them. “What’s up?”

I started my engine, just to get the heat going. It had been a mild day for March, but it was starting to get chillier now that the sun was going down.

“Well, I remembered you were working on that project about public housing,” he said. “I happen to be really interested in public housing, so I was seeing if you wouldn’t mind me tagging along.”

I felt my eyebrow arching. It was highly unlikely he “remembered” anything. The only people who would know about that project were the editors who had access to the master work-in-progress spreadsheet that tracked all reporters’ activities. Plus, no one is really interested in public housing. Not even the people who live there.

Tina had obviously dispatched her little puppy dog to spy on me. The only question was whether he knew he was a spy or if he was just an unwitting pawn. One way to find out.

“Geoff, did Tina tell you to call me?”

“N-no,” he said, faltering slightly. “I’m just … really interest … interested in public housing and … the issues that go along with them.”

Okay. I could play that game. I felt a wicked smile spread across my face. Ruthie, I thought, meet my wild goose. Have fun chasing it.

“Well, in that case, you have great timing,” I said. “I could really use your help with something.”

“Awesome!”

“You got a notepad out? You should be writing this down.”

“Absolutely.”

“Good. Okay, first I need you to get some food coloring.”

“Food coloring. Will do.”

“Wait, it’s not that easy. It has to be organic food coloring. Gluten-free, of course. Vegan, if possible. If you get the regular stuff, the hydrocarbons just mess up everything. You might have to go to one of those all-natural food stores, and they don’t have any of those in Newark. Millburn or Montclair might have one. Be persistent. It’s important.”

“O-okay,” he said.

“Then you need to get some pregnancy tests.”

“Pregnancy tests?”

“I’ll explain it in a second. Just write it down. Get some pregnancy tests. At least a dozen of them-we’ll need more, but that should get us started. Get First Response or EPT. Don’t mess with the store brands. We need reliability here. Pretend your girlfriend missed her period and you really have to know.”

“All right. What next?”

“Well, there’s a group of Newark Housing Authority town houses on Eighteenth Avenue that are brand-new, just occupied,” I said, giving him a range of addresses. “We’re hearing reports that the contractor in charge of the project never connected the toilets to the main sewer line. You know what it looks like when you try to flush a toilet that doesn’t drain to the sewer?”

“I would imagine it’s pretty gross.”

“Yeah, but not at first. There’s a lot of pipe to go through before you get to the sewer, so it doesn’t back up right away. It might take a month before that happens. There’s only one way to test.”

“Okay, how’s that?”

“That’s where the food coloring comes in. I want you to knock on every door on the block and tell the residents you need to test their toilet. Put a few drops of food coloring in the toilet. Then ask them to flush it for you. It’s important the residents flush it. It makes them feel involved in the process, you know?”

“Right. Sure.”

“Then you have to dip into the toilet and take a water sample. That’s where the pregnancy test comes in. Not many people know this, but if you use regular toilet water on a pregnancy test, it will come back positive every time. Every time. I’ll explain the science to you someday. It has to do with amino acids and naturally occurring lipids and, well, it gets pretty involved.”

“Okay,” he said. I could tell the kid’s head was spinning. It should have been: I was talking total gibberish. But there was no way this twenty-two-year-old Boy Scout was going to know enough to call me on it.

“Anyhow, there’s only one way that a pregnancy test will come back negative, and that’s if there are traces of organic, gluten-free food coloring in the water. You follow me? And if there’s organic, gluten-free food coloring, what does that mean?”

“Uh…” he said. Yep, I had definitely lost him.

“It means the pipes are backing up. So, again: if the pregnancy test on the toilet water comes back negative, some of the food coloring has bounced back at you. That means the pipe hasn’t been connected to the sewer and we have a scandal on our hands, because you can bet the contractor charged the Newark Housing Authority for pipes that connected to the sewer.”

“Oh, yeah. Yeah, you’re right.”

I grinned. Having spun him around on a verbal baseball bat, it was now time to push him in a random direction and watch him fall down.

“Now, if the toilet is backed up, I’m going to need a full social history on each of the family members,” I said. “I want to know everything about them-where they came from, how they got here, what brand of toothpaste their grandfather used. I want everything. It should take a minimum of two hours, possibly four hours to get all the information you need. I want to be able to really tell these people’s stories. Then, once you’re done with the first house, you have to move onto the second. We need to get the whole street.”

“Okay, got it,” he said. “Are you going to meet me out there?”

“No. I’ve got other stuff to do. I figured this is simple enough for an intern to handle.”

“Umm … uhh…” he said, because I knew his instructions from Tina were probably to follow me and report back to her. I also knew that the block in question had twenty-six new units on it. If he was diligent-and worked nights and weekends-he ought to be done in about three weeks.

Then I went in for the kill: “Now, whatever you do, don’t tell Tina. She’ll get really, really excited that you’re doing this and she might not be able to contain herself. She might force us to rush this into the newspaper, and we don’t want to rush it. We want all our ducks in a row on this one.”

“R-right,” he said.

“Okay. I want a progress update tomorrow afternoon,” I said before I hung up. “I expect to hear from you in twenty-four hours.”

Maybe then I’d let the kid off the hook. Maybe.

* * *

With Ruthie out of my way, I turned my attention back to the Kipps conundrum-and my knotted scorecard. I needed some kind of tiebreaker, some unimpeachable source that could give me a definitive thumbs-up, thumbs-down.

The answer, I suspected, lay with the Newark Police Internal Affairs. But that was a safe I wouldn’t be able to crack by myself. The kind of officers who gravitated to Internal Affairs are not your normal cops. To want to join the police takes a certain adherence to order and structure. To want to police the police requires an altogether different level of regimentation. It’s not the kind of makeup that makes one prone to blabbing with reporters.

Still, I knew there was one person who might have the keys to that particular kingdom. And, unfortunately, that man was our veteran cops reporter, Buster Hays.

I say “unfortunately” because Buster-in addition to being cantankerous, curmudgeonly, and condescending-delighted in lording this sort of thing over me. He came to the Eagle-Examiner by way of da Bronx, and he fancied himself the last common man in a newsroom overrun with elites who are overeducated and out of touch. And, in that respect, he believed I was the personification of everything that had gone wrong with the newspaper

And yet? Though I’m sure we would never admit it, we shared a certain commonality of purpose and values, inasmuch as we both believed in getting the story right. So he seldom could resist helping me. Buster had a network of moles, informants, and gadflies-contained in four bulging Rolodexes that he steadfastly refused to computerize-that could shame the director of the CIA. He had developed them carefully, and through a reporting career that spanned parts of five decades, he had never burned a source. And you better believe his sources knew that.

His Rolodex was a kind of treasure that he had shared with me, albeit judiciously, throughout the years. And in the hopes he would again show his grudging generosity, I sat in my still-running car and dialed his desk.

“Hays.”

“Buster, it’s Carter.”

“Whaddayuwant, Ivy?” I heard in response.

In Buster’s world, Amherst was an Ivy League school. I had stopped trying to convince him otherwise.

“I’m working on a story about Darius Kipps-”

“The cop who swallowed a bullet? They finally put out a press release about that. I already shoveled something into the Slop. You’re wasting your time. I don’t think the dead tree is going to want more than six inches.”

The dead tree is what even dinosaurs like Buster had taken to calling the physical newspaper.

“Yeah, I know, I’m just indulging my curiosity a little bit. I spent some time with the family this morning and learned some stuff that made Kipps seem like he wasn’t the type to go killing himself. But then I also got a guy who says Kipps might have been tangled up with IA.”

“I got a guy who said the same thing,” Buster said, because, of course, I could never be allowed to have sources who knew stuff his sources hadn’t already told him. “What about it?”

“Well, you got anyone in IA who might tell us what the deal was?”

“What’s it matter at this point?”

“I don’t know. I just feel like we’re not getting anything close to the full story.”

“Well, Ivy, maybe they never taught you this at your fancy college, but you know the I in IA stands for ‘internal,’ right? That means it’s stuff they don’t want to get out.”

“So, what, you saying you don’t have anyone?” I asked, because there was no better way to goad Buster into action than to challenge the depth or breadth of his law enforcement contacts.

“I’m not saying that. I’m saying it’s going to take a little finesse, is all. I might have to call in a favor or two.”

“Well, I’d appreciate it if-”

“So that means you have to do me a favor.”

“Uh, okay, shoot,” I said, fairly certain this was somehow going to involve picking up dry cleaning or mowing a lawn.

Instead, Buster said: “You’re doing my Good Neighbors.”

Good Neighbors was the name of a feature that ran six days a week in our community news section. As its name suggested, it was a puff piece about someone who had done a kindly deed, whether it was volunteering, rescuing a cat from a tree, or selling hair to Locks of Love. It was a lovely thing for the readers and for the person featured, I’m sure. But from a journalistic standpoint, it was about as useful as bunions.

Back before the economic tsunami that washed away all trace of newspapering as we once knew it, we had enough resources-okay, it’s a handy word sometimes-that we could farm out Good Neighbors to our network of stringers, mostly housewives who delighted in doing stories that made everyone feel warm and fuzzy. Then the stringer budget was unceremoniously eliminated. As a result, every reporter at the paper had been put on a rotation that required them to produce one Good Neighbors piece every six months or so. In terms of things I liked to do with my time, it ranked ahead of oral surgery but behind trips to the DMV.

“Oh, what the…” I moaned. “Are you serious?”

“As a heart attack.”

“Jesus, Buster, I’m busy. I got this Kipps thing and a big thing about public housing that Tina wants by the end of the week. I don’t have time to-”

“You want IA? You give me Good Neighbors.”

“You … you wouldn’t.”

“Oh, I would. I am.”

“Couldn’t I just pick up your dry cleaning?”

“My clothes are wash-and-wear.”

“Mow your lawn?”

“I live in a condo.”

I thought about making some kind of argument about how, as colleagues working for the same noble cause, we ought to help each other without expectation of reward. But I didn’t need to be treated to the sound of Buster cackling in my ear.

“Couldn’t you just … I don’t know, do me a solid?”

“I’m gonna teach the Ivy boy a foreign language. Quid pro quo. It’s Latin for ‘quit your whining.’ We got a deal or not?”

Not seeing any other way out, I just sighed and said, “Deal.”

“It’s due Wednesday morning,” Buster said. “Don’t make me wait.”

* * *

The sun was getting low in the sky by this point, which meant it was high time to get off the streets. Like Officer Hightower said, the only white people who came into this part of Newark after dark were there to buy drugs. For someone of my pallor, sitting alone in a car on Irvine Turner Boulevard was an invitation to dealers to approach the window with that innocent-but-loaded question, “You looking?”

And I wasn’t. So I went back to the newsroom, which was nearing that familiar peak in its daily intensity level. For as much as things had changed in the world of newspapering-with the de-emphasis of the dead tree product and the movement to put more online faster than ever before-some things were the same as they had been a generation ago. Six o’clock is still a busy time. Nonbreaking stories are due, and reporters who have otherwise been procrastinating all day finally get serious about their tasks.

I knew, with a Good Neighbors now on my plate, I should probably join them. But having mentally tabled that until the morning, I sauntered back to the library-or the “Info Palace” as the librarians liked to call it-where I knew I could find Kira O’Brien, my newly discovered romantic interest.

Kira was twenty-eight, a fairly recent graduate of Rutgers’ Master of Library Studies program. In some ways, she’s textbook librarian, at least at work. She dresses like a Young Republican, keeps mostly to herself, and has a bookish air about her-all of which belies the fact that the moment she leaves the office, she’s basically insane.

Our relationship began at a house party being hosted by a mutual friend from the newspaper. It was late and we were somewhere between a little and a lot drunk. She was dressed like she had come from either a comic book convention or a sci-fi/fantasy convention. (I get them all confused, I just know each seems to involve women in skimpy clothing being leered at by nerds.) I went over to her to make some kind of clever comment about her hair, which had been dyed blue and purple.

We ended up having a lovely chat. And I noticed, to my surprise, she had a tongue piercing, which she never wore at the office. So-and this was, clearly, the booze talking-I asked her if she had anything else pierced. She hauled me into a bedroom and showed me. Before very long, the demonstration became rather aerobic in nature.

And that, more or less, was the basis of our relationship so far. We went places (often with her in costume). We got drunk with her friends (because hers were more interesting than mine). And then we did our aerobics (oftentimes in unconventional and/or public places). It was an arrangement that had allowed me to cross a number of items off my bucket list, some of which-like getting intimate with Princess Leia in an elevator-I didn’t even know were on there in the first place.

It was unclear if she was going to be a girl I could take home to Mother, or if we would even last that long. But she was feisty and fun, and we had dynamite chemistry. I have come to recognize that, between my sensible car, bland wardrobe, boring hairstyle, and the other totally uninteresting aspects of my life, I need a little crazy to balance things out. And that’s what Kira has been for me lately. My quota of crazy.

“Hey, what’s going on?” I said.

She looked up at me and smiled. Kira is small, dark-haired, and dangerously cute-dangerous because she knows just how cute she is. She has blue eyes that manage to be sweet and mischievous at the same time. Plus, what man can resist the naughty librarian?

“Hey,” she said, “want to go to a party in a bit?”

“A party … tonight? It’s a Monday.”

“What, you not allowed to go out on school nights?” she taunted.

“No, I just … okay. A party. On a Monday.”

She cast her eyes left and right, tilted toward me, and whispered, “It’s an absinthe party.”

“What’s an absinthe party?” I whispered back.

“I don’t know, actually,” she said, still hushed. “And I don’t know why we’re whispering about it.” She returned to regular volume: “I guess it’s just a party where we all sit around and drink absinthe.”

“Hasn’t absinthe been shown to cause mental illness?”

“I don’t know. Hopefully, yes.”

“Uh, okay, sounds like a blast.”

“I’m done here at nine,” she said. “We can go over together. Now go away. I have work to do.”

Following orders, I walked back to my corner of the newsroom, passing the All-Slop News Desk along the way. It was actually a collection of desks, of course, with a half-dozen small televisions coming down from the ceiling in the middle. The monitors are equipped to show both Internet and television, allowing us to monitor our competition across a variety of media simultaneously.

This time I was surprised to see one of the televisions contained an image of the Reverend Doctor Alvin LeRioux, all three-hundred-plus sweat-mopping pounds of him.

But it wasn’t one of his commercials. It looked like he was just beginning … a press conference? He was standing on the steps of Redeemer Love Christian Church in front of a bank of microphones. All the local television channels had obviously been invited. The agent-of-Satan local newspaper had not been.

“Oh, what the hell is he doing?” I asked no one in particular.

A few of the reporters chained to the All-Slop looked up at me, then reburied their heads in their laptops. We were getting the feed from the local twenty-four-hour news station, which always cut into press conferences on the early side, so it hadn’t quite started yet. But it was clearly about to. The camera was tight on Pastor Al, who was gesturing for someone to join him at the podium. Then the camera panned out slightly to capture Mimi Kipps, dressed in her finest suit, with her chin held defiantly high, coming to her minister’s side.

“Now what the hell is she doing?” I asked, but again no one paid attention to me.

I grabbed the appropriate remote control and turned up the volume just as the festivities began.

“Thank you for coming,” Pastor Al boomed in his best basso profundo. “I have gathered you here to discuss the death of one of our community heroes, Detective Darius Kipps of the Newark Police Department.”

Wait, what happened to “private moments” and sharing words in confidence and not publicizing tragedy? I guess all that went out the window when the good Reverend Doctor realized he could get himself some face time out of this. He had timed the press conference perfectly to be able to get sound bites on all the six o’clock news programs-and I’m sure they would be recycling it at ten and eleven as well.

“The Newark Police Department has put out a press release, indicating the death of Detective Darius Kipps was due to a self-inflicted gunshot wound,” the pastor said, then he brought down the hammer:

“The proud family of Detective Kipps disputes this finding. We are calling on the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office and the Essex County Medical Examiner’s Office to recognize its conflict of interest and step aside in this matter. We would like the attorney general of the State of New Jersey to perform an independent investigation into the cause of death.”

In the State of New Jersey, buying a gun can be a tedious process. Buying a whole lot of guns is not legally possible.

It was this basic fact that helped Red Dot Enterprises to thrive.

New Jersey is one of just six states that does not have a version of the Second Amendment-guaranteeing the right to bear arms-in its state constitution. It has outright bans on any weapon that chambers more than fifteen bullets, and either restrictions or bans on a variety of other weapons, including semiautomatic guns.

Then there’s the paperwork. Would-be gun buyers must first acquire a Firearms Purchaser Identification Card from their local police department. The application fee is only five dollars, but it requires fingerprinting, which costs an additional sixty. Processing of the form takes a minimum of thirty days, though it can sometimes take longer, depending on how rushed the municipality feels. And not many of them feel rushed.

Felons are, of course, denied, as per federal law. But New Jersey codicils restrict gun ownership further. Anyone who has committed a crime that could have required them to spend six months or more in jail-whether or not they actually served the time-are banned from buying a gun. So are people convicted of crimes involving domestic violence. Other grounds for denial include treatment for mental illness, juvenile delinquency, alcoholism, narcotics addiction, or physical defects. Police chiefs or their surrogates are expected to conduct an interview and check references, and are given broad authority to reject applications.

But that’s only the first step. Holders of a valid Firearms Purchaser Identification Card must then obtain a separate Permit to Purchase a Handgun for each individual gun they wish to buy. That requires filling out another form with the local police-with another minimum thirty-day wait and another thorough background check-and can again require fingerprinting, though the police chief has the discretion to waive that requirement if fingerprints already exist on file and valid identification is presented.

Once a person has obtained both permits, the latter of which is only good for ninety days, they may then purchase a single handgun from a licensed dealer. If they can find one. The onerous nature of the state’s gun laws pushed many dealers out of business decades ago. In most of the state’s cities-including Newark and Camden, its most violent municipalities-there are no retail outlets that sell guns.

The result of all this regulation means that, each year, at least three out of every four guns used to commit a crime in New Jersey come from outside the state. And those are just the guns that are traceable. According to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the origin of roughly half the guns recovered by law enforcement in New Jersey cannot be determined. The record-keeping is either incomplete or nonexistent; or the guns’ serial numbers have been obliterated. It is widely assumed these guns come from states whose laws allow guns to be acquired more easily.

Indeed, New Jersey’s laws-enacted in response to the epidemic of gun violence that has plagued its cities for decades-have had the unintended consequence of proving that old NRA bumper sticker: when you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns.

If anything, Red Dot Enterprises hoped New Jersey’s gun control laws would get tougher.

It would mean even less competition.