The Good Cop

CHAPTER 5

With little more to be learned from Pastor Al-or at least little that didn’t involve a sermon-I soon excused myself, thanking him for the interview. I went back out on the street and, having departed God’s house, decided I could risk powering up my cell phone without incurring any unnecessary wrath.

My phone told me I had two missed calls and two messages waiting. From looking at the numbers, I knew it was my two spokesmen. Flaks love it when they get a reporter’s voice mail. It allows them to dump their canned, one- or two-sentence statement and get away before you can ask difficult follow-up questions that require them to do more work. But at the same time, it allows them to ignore your return phone call because, hey, they called you back already! You got the statement! What are you griping about? Come on!

In this case, the flaks were doing a neat little do-si-do. Hakeem Rogers was in full duck-and-cover mode, saying he had no comment because the matter had been referred to the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office.

The Essex County Prosecutor’s Office spokesman, meanwhile, called to say that for the time being, he had nothing to add beyond what the Newark Police Department had already said; and that I couldn’t interview the medical examiner, on the grounds that it was an ongoing case.

So, in other words, Newark was deferring to Essex County, which was deferring to Newark. It was overlapping governmental bureaucracy at its absolute finest. Each part could claim it was in the right, even while the whole was still very wrong. Meanwhile, someone was getting away with murder. And he was a cop, no less.

It was enough to make me, at the very least, hungry. And since I still wasn’t keen for fried chicken, I went back to the office, parked, and sought some Pizza Therapy.

On my way toward the pizzeria, I saw Tommy Hernandez on the opposite side of the street and heading in the same direction. Tommy is twenty-four, second-generation Cuban American, and gay as the day is long. I’m not sure his family knows about the last part-Tommy still lives with his parents, and his bedroom at home might as well be a closet, because he’s still in it-but the rest of the world doesn’t have a very tough time figuring it out. Tommy is trim, neat, slightly below average height, well above average in looks, and, at all times, perfectly accessorized.

At least technically, Tommy is still an intern. His one-year assignment with us began well over a year ago and has developed into an interesting stalemate: the paper cannot afford to bump him up to full-time status, inasmuch as then he might actually start expecting raises, 401(k) matching, and other wild extravagances; at the same time, the paper couldn’t let him go because he was one of our best natural reporters and he covered Newark City Hall, one of our most important beats.

So he had earned permanent, temporary status and, barring unforeseen changes-or Tommy coming to his senses and enrolling in business school-he might become the newspaper industry’s first fifty-year-old intern someday. Selfishly, I hoped he stuck around. He’s become one of my closest friends, not to mention a semiregular pizza partner.

Such being the care, I crossed the street and said, “Hey, what’s a handsome young man like you doing for lunch?”

“You know, if you really are going to convert to my side, you’re going to have to do something about those pants.”

“What’s wrong with my pants?”

“If I had to describe it in one word? Pleats. Pleats are what’s wrong with your pants. Pleats are what’s wrong with your entire world.”

I grinned, just because that’s Tommy: my own, personal episode of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.

“So what have you been up to?” I asked.

“Nothing half as interesting as what you’ve been up to, apparently. You got any kind of follow-up working?”

As we continued to the pizzeria and ordered our slices, I told Tommy about my trip to the morgue, my time as a Peeping Tom, and all the various denials and contradictions I had heard along the way.

Tommy listened thoughtfully and, at the end, said, “So why do you think the cops don’t want to take this thing on? Usually when it’s one of their own getting killed, they go all out.”

“Yeah, except when it’s one of their own doing the killing,” I cracked. “But I don’t think that’s it. My guess is they really think it’s suicide, and they just want it to go away. You know how a lot of cop shops are when it comes to mental health issues. They deal with it like five-year-olds deal with cooties. I don’t think the thing with Fusco and Mimi is in their sights because they’re trying to keep the blinders on.”

“Are you going to tell them about it?”

“I hadn’t really thought about it yet. But … yeah, I guess I have to.”

And I did. I’m a reporter, yes. But I’m also a citizen, which means I have the same civic duty to report information about a crime as anyone else. Depending on how things worked out, it could also result in my being taken off the story, for at least a half dozen reasons-not the least of which is I couldn’t very well cover a trial in which I was also testifying. But I suppose that might be unavoidable. Such is the price of virtue.

“So is there anything a bored city hall reporter can do to get in on this?” Tommy asked.

I pondered it for a second, then said, “That depends. Are you still friendly with that secretary in the council clerk’s office?”

The secretary was a middle-aged Latina who was sweet on Tommy and, apparently, didn’t have much of a Gaydar. Tommy winked in her direction a lot and cooed at her in Spanish so the other secretaries couldn’t understand what they were saying.

“Yeah, what do you need?”

“Keep an eye out for any new city contracts involving Redeemer Love Christian Church or Alvin LeRioux,” I said. “It would sort of help complete a certain picture for me.”

“Redeemer Love Christian. That’s one of those churches that reads a lot of Leviticus-the whole man shall not lie with man thing, right?”

“I believe so, yes.”

“Okay,” Tommy said. “I’ll get right on it.”

* * *

Having revived myself through the miraculous combination of thin crust, tomato sauce, and mozzarella, I returned to the office, put my head down, and started doing some serious typing. It was two thirty, and since this story wasn’t going to be winning any awards-news like this required an unadorned, just-the-facts-ma’am approach-I vowed to be done no later than four thirty, so that the story could be posted online by five.

Once upon a time, sitting on a scoop like this, I would have continued cautiously reporting for another few hours, maybe hectoring some more sources or trying to round it out by having an independent forensics expert comment on the pictures. That was back in the hoary days of the late nineties and early millennium, when a scoop was something you guarded jealously until it could be revealed, in its full glory, in the next day’s paper.

At most, you would send a version of the story to the Associated Press around midnight-too late for the other papers to catch up but early enough so you could get credit for the scoop on the morning radio and television shows, which would be using that wonderful phrase “according to a story in the Newark Eagle-Examiner.”

The Internet has changed all that, of course, scrunching down the time of the news cycles to the point where it has obliterated the concept. When you have news, you post it. No one waits for the dead tree anymore.

I actually finished by four. I looked around for Tina, to tell her I was about to file, but she was nowhere to be seen. So I shipped the story over to the All-Slop and treated myself to a Coke Zero from the office vending machine.

Then I took the long way home, swinging by the Info Palace for a quick visit to see how Kira was recovering from any absinthe-related maladies she may have been suffering. I found her fully engaged by something on her computer screen. She was looking properly prim, dressed in a starched white blouse, with her dark hair up in a bun.

The room was empty except for her, so I said, “Tell me, are you going to do that randy librarian thing, where any second you’re going to let her hair down and start roaring like a lioness and demanding I be your lion?”

“Huh?” she said, looking up from her screen.

“Never mind. You just … you have your hair up, and I was … entertaining certain librarian-related fantasies.”

“Oh, that. That’s just so I know where I’ve put my pen. Otherwise I lose it fifty times a day,” she said, pulling a Bic ballpoint from the back of her head and letting her hair cascade around her shoulders. Sadly, there were no feline sounds involved.

“How’s it going?” I asked. “Feeling okay?”

“Oh, I’m fine. I don’t get hangovers.”

“I thought hangovers were God’s way of making sure the Irish didn’t take over the world.”

“No, that’s whiskey,” she said. “Hey, why does your editor keep coming in here and shooting me dirty looks?”

“Who, Tina?”

“Yeah, she’s probably sneered at me three or four times today.”

“I’m sure she’s not sneering.”

“Oh, she’s sneering. You think I don’t know what a sneer looks like? She keeps going like this,” Kira said, then twisted her face into a countenance I thought could only be achieved by eating jalapenos.

“Oh, she does that to me all the time. That’s just how she looks when she’s thinking hard.”

“No, these were definitely intentional, directed looks. Seriously, what’s up her butt?”

“I’m sure it’s nothing.”

“I barely even know her.”

“All the more reason why it’s not about you.”

“Well I…” and then she stopped, tilted her head and shot me a sly grin. “Wait, you guys didn’t used to…”

“To what?”

“Shag?”

“Uh … not quite.”

“But she wanted you to shag her.”

“I suppose so, yes. Periodically. Or, rather, nonperiodically. It’s a long story.”

“Did you guys have a fling or something?”

To most in the newsroom, Tina Thompson’s love life was an open book, and our former … whatever … was common knowledge among those who cared. But I guess that book somehow hadn’t made it back to the library.

So Kira didn’t know about me and Tina, and clearly it was in my best interests to tell her now rather than later. After enough years of singledom, one accumulates a certain number of former relationships-some might call it baggage-and I’ve always felt it best to deal with it in a forthright manner. It’s not like I’ve got some big heavy, nine-piece luggage set. Mine is just your basic, middle-of-the-line Samsonite: a few high school girlfriends, a few from college, a few post-college, one live-in who didn’t work out, and a smattering of random dates along the way. It’s so unremarkable I always have to check the tags when it comes through at the airport to make sure it’s even mine.

Still, this was the first potentially complicated moment of our young relationship. We had yet to define what we were-exclusive/not exclusive, going somewhere/just playing around, et cetera-and I had to treat this with due care.

“Well, I guess Tina and I had some adult situations, but we never-”

“What, you never made the move?”

“No, I made the move-”

“But you never sealed the deal? What’s up with that?”

I explained, as best I could, how the combination of a ferociously ticking biological clock and an irrational fear of committed relationships had led to Tina’s desire for my seed and my seed alone.

When I was done, Kira said, “Oh. That’s kind of weird. But you said no?”

“I guess it’s not my idea of how fatherhood should work.”

“So, what, now she has voodoo dolls of you somewhere? You’re not suddenly going to start grasping your side when she puts a pin in you?”

“No, but it sounds like you might want to watch out. She’s practiced in witchcraft, you know.”

“I’ll be careful,” she said, then, thankfully, changed subjects. “By the way, Powell called me a little while ago. He wants to talk to you.”

“Why didn’t he just call me directly? He’s got my number-he sent me those text messages last night.”

Kira gave her eyes a quick roll. “I don’t know. He’s a little flighty sometimes. He spends so much time thinking about the dead he has a little trouble focusing on the living.”

“Yeah, I suppose I figured that.”

“Anyway, he seemed really excited to tell you about something. So you might want to call him.”

“Okay, I’ll go do that,” I said. “You want to grab dinner tonight or something?”

“Can’t. My steampunk book group meets tonight.”

“Oh. Can I come?”

“Well, we always do it in costume. I’m dressing as a proper Victorian widow who’s really a zombie. My character lures men into marrying her and then eats their brains. You want to come dressed as one of my soon-to-be-dead husbands?”

“That’s tempting, really, but maybe I’ll pass. I haven’t read the book, after all.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

“Well, have fun,” I said, giving her a quick kiss on the cheek, because I knew no one was looking, then departed.

Kira hollered after me, “Watch out for the aging voodoo sperm witch!”

* * *

I was perhaps two strides back out into the newsroom, and still chuckling about what Kira had just said, when I saw something that made me immediately remove the smirk from my face.

It was the aging voodoo sperm witch herself. She had her arms crossed and was demanding to know, “What did she just call me?”

“Huhwhawho?” I said, hoping perhaps she had been too far away to really hear it.

“Oh she did not just say that.”

“Say, uh … say what?”

“Aging voodoo sperm witch?”

Ah, so apparently Tina was doing that pissed-off-chick thing, where they ask a question to which they already know the answer. There was only one response, of course, and that’s to do that conflict-avoiding-guy thing, where we try to say anything to stem a total cataclysm.

“Oh, she wasn’t … that’s a … a movie we saw. Kira’s into all that fantasy stuff, you know. Some of the titles are a little bizarre.”

“For the hundred millionth time, Carter Ross, I know when you’re lying,” she said and began stalking away before I could have much say in the matter.

About three steps into her stalking, Tina turned like she was going to say something. Then she changed her mind and continued on her way. There was no sense in going after her-in the same way there’s no sense in running your fingers under a working power saw-so I retreated to my desk.

I was at least semicurious as to what had Paul/Powell riled up, so I made him my first call. His phone cut straight to some indistinct-yet-ominous-sounding symphony music, which droned on for a good twenty seconds. There are few things more annoying than people who turn voice mail into an opportunity to foist their music on a defenseless listener.

Finally, his wannabe Vincent Price voice said, “You have reached Powell. Please leave a message in which you recognize that life is fleeting and death is forever.”

I wasn’t prepared to give up on reincarnation just yet, so I hung up.

This led to a few minutes of thumb-twiddling-more in the figurative sense, since literal thumb-twiddling gets exhausting if you try to do it for more than about thirty seconds-during which time I pondered my next step.

This was one of the other ways in which the Internet had changed the dynamics of the modern scoop. As soon as you posted something, it set the clock going: the competition would start scrambling to catch up with you, meaning you had to scoop your own scoop if you were going to stay in the lead.

In this case, I decided fairly quickly what my new scoop would be. A story that said the Eagle-Examiner had obtained autopsy photos contradicting police findings was good. But a story that said the police had recognized their egregious fault and renewed an investigation because of photos uncovered by the Eagle-Examiner? That was even better.

They just had to be given a reason to do it. And, of course, I happened to have witnessed that reason earlier in the day, when I saw the first few minutes of what could have been Mimi and Fusco’s amateur porn video. As Tommy had made me recognize, I would need to tell the police about that sooner or later. Might as well make it sooner.

I briefly considered telling Tina what I was about to do. But I knew how that would go. I would inform Tina I felt ethically obligated to tell the police about something. Tina would ask Brodie, who would ask the lawyers, who would dither about it for three days-at $400 per dithering hour-and then eventually decide I was, in fact, ethically obligated to do it. It would then go back down the food chain, making everyone feel justified they had done their job. And all the while, I wouldn’t be doing mine.

Not being in the mood for any of that, I dialed the number for my good friend Hakeem Rogers.

After a minute on hold and two minutes of insisting I really did need to speak directly with the Newark Police Department’s esteemed public information officer-and, no, I couldn’t just send him an e-mail-I was finally connected.

“Check your voice mail,” he said as soon as he picked up the line. “Everything I have to say is already on there.”

“I know, I know. And we’re about to post your very informative words online. I’m calling about something else. I’d like to report information about a crime that may have been committed. I’d like to speak with the investigating officer on the Darius Kipps case.”

Rogers took a second to swallow this before saying, “Really? You serious?”

“Yeah, I’m serious.”

“You’re not trying to backdoor yourself into an interview, are you? Because if I hear you were just-”

“No,” I cut him off. “I have real, actual, credible information.”

“What is it?”

“Ha, no way. I’m not doing this through intermediaries. I talk to the detective in charge of the investigation or I don’t talk.”

There was another pause on his end before he said, “What are you up to, Ross?”

“Just doing the right thing. Isn’t this what you guys are encouraging responsible citizens to do in all those tips posters you plaster all over the place?”

“Yeah, but…” He let his voice trail off. “Okay. Let me make a call.”

I went back to twiddling my thumbs (again, not really) and watched as my story went live on our Web site. This is horribly old-fashioned of me, I know, but a scoop online never feels quite the same as a scoop in the newspaper. The online scoop seems to disappear into the Internet ether-or, worse, into some message forum where five trolls who still live in their parents’ basements make comments on it like “yeh hahaha that remind’s me ov the time my cuzin got tyed up by his girl frend n the beeeyatch didnt let him go 4 like 3 dayz hahahahaha lol.”

The newspaper scoop, meanwhile, has a certain immortality to it. Mashed pulp and indelible ink are used to note it, and it is entered into the permanent record, such that if anyone in future generations feels like checking in on this day in history, it will be there waiting for them. You just don’t get that online.

Or maybe you do. I know they call them “PermaLinks.” But still. I just don’t see it. One of these days, our paper is going to make the inevitable switch to being online only, and I swear, that’s the day I quit and go work for the Amish Times.

I was somewhere in the midst of that reverie-thinking of how I’d handle a story about one of those gruesome three horse-and-buggy tie-ups-when my phone rang.

“Carter Ross.”

“Hey, it’s Rogers. I called out to the Fourth. Captain Boswell out there wants to talk with you.”

“The captain? Why is he dealing with it?”

“The better question is why is she dealing with it. It’s Captain Denise Boswell.”

“Really? How enlightened of you guys.”

“Yeah, she’s been out there about six months now. She’s the first female officer we’ve had in charge of a precinct. I sent you a press release, but of course you guys didn’t run squat about it, because that’s positive news, and you guys aren’t interested in positive news about the NPD.”

I let him take his shot, then said, “Okay, now just to make it clear: I am not going out there to conduct an interview. I am going out there to offer information. But if she feels like making a statement after I’m done, I’m not exactly going to stop her.”

“I already told her you’d probably try to weasel your way into an interview and that she shouldn’t let you. But she’s a captain. That’s above my pay grade. If she feels like running her mouth, I can’t stop her.”

It was exactly what I wanted to hear. “I can live with that. When does she want to talk?”

“Right about now, from what it sounds like.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’m on my way.”

* * *

Twilight was coming fast, what with the cloud cover, and it was a lights-on drive out to the Fourth. I thought about stopping by Uncle Bernie on my way-because, you know, I really could use some new All-Clad cookware-but decided I didn’t have time for the bartering or the bantering. I let the Malibu roll to a stop across the street from the Fourth Precinct, in front of a group of relatively new town houses that had been erected in the footprint of what had once been a blighted public housing high-rise.

It hadn’t been raining for several hours, but the front steps to the Fourth still had that wet, gritty feel and sounded like sandpaper as I trudged up them. I went inside and announced myself. Then I sat on a small bench that was designed for maximum discomfort and read the wanted posters. Some bad men stared back at me.

I was soon greeted by an old friend of mine: Officer Hightower. All six foot eight of him.

“You again?” he said. “Thought you didn’t have no story.”

“Yeah, I’m here to talk to-”

“I know. Come on.”

I followed him up some stairs and through the precinct, which had the kind of cramped feeling that obsolete buildings often did. It was dimly lit, which accentuated the fact that everything in it was either yellowish beige or bluish gray, and there seemed to be stuff-just stuff-stacked everywhere. It was basically clean, on a superficial level, but there hadn’t been cleaning products invented that could cut through all the grime accumulated from too many people toiling for too many hours across too many decades.

The door to the captain’s office was open, and Hightower preceded me in. Captain Boswell was a stocky African American woman in her late thirties with a mop of curly black hair that appeared to be extensions. She was dressed in a blue uniform with a neatly knotted black tie and sat behind a large, cluttered desk. When she stood to greet me, she didn’t get much taller. Her butt protruded in a manner that suggested it could accommodate a small shelf.

“Mr. Ross, thank you so much for coming,” she said, smiling and extending a small hand, which soon gave me a firm handshake. I had expected the first female precinct captain in Newark Police Department history would be a real ballbuster-you’d have to be tough to make it in that environment, right? — but Captain Boswell had a warm, friendly, almost motherly manner about her.

“Thank you, Captain. Thanks for seeing me.”

“Please have a seat.”

I settled into a wooden chair in front of her desk. Hightower had assumed a position in the back corner of the room, almost like a bodyguard. I didn’t realize I looked threatening enough to require such protection. The captain made no move to introduce him, or even acknowledge him, and seemed to pay about as much attention to him as she did to the furniture. She leaned back in her seat, quite comfortable in her little domain, and folded her hands across her round stomach.

“I just read your story about the photos,” she said. “It was very interesting. You reporters do have your ways of getting things, don’t you?”

“I guess we do, yes.”

She waved it away, like it was of little consequence to her, and started looking around the room with a crinkle in her brow. “I have to apologize for the state of my office. I generally try to keep it a lot tidier than this. Things have just been a little crazy the last few days, as you might imagine. Detective Kipps is … was … a popular officer. This has been very hard on everyone here.”

“Yes, I can imagine.”

“I know this runs counter to what you might think, because police work these days has become so data-driven and numbers-oriented, but we also do old-fashioned community policing here. It gives you the best of both worlds. And to me, part of that is creating an atmosphere in the precinct that’s like a family. I encourage my officers to support each other like brothers and sisters. So this has been like losing a family member for a lot of us.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. I was aware Hightower was nodding in agreement, in the back corner of the room.

“Well, enough about our troubles. I understand you have some information for us.”

“That’s right,” I said. “And like Sergeant Rogers told you, I’m coming to you not as a newspaper reporter but as a citizen.”

“Yes, I’m aware.”

“It concerns Detective Fusco and Mrs. Kipps,” I said.

“Detective Fusco? Mike Fusco?” she said, like it surprised her.

“Yes, as I’m sure you know, Detective Fusco was close with Detective Kipps and … his family. And … he was also close with Detective Kipps’s wife, Mimi…”

I let my voice trail off for a second. I’m not sure why this was difficult for me to say. Maybe it was because Captain Boswell was so motherly. I felt like I was telling her one of her children was a naughty, naughty boy. At the same time, a mother needs to know certain things, so I continued:

“Yesterday, I was going to interview Mrs. Kipps when I saw her and Detective Fusco through a window. Mrs. Kipps was wearing only a towel, which I thought … a little odd. And then Detective Fusco began rubbing her shoulders, which I thought even odder. Then they started kissing, quite passionately. I didn’t see any more than that, but it looked to me like they were having an affair.”

“I see,” she said. She was listening intently, but her face gave no indication as to her thoughts on what I had just shared.

“Anyhow, that-along with the photos and everything else I’ve been able to learn about Detective Kipps-made me wonder if there was more than a simple suicide here.”

The captain was still silent, so I completed the thought: “It made me think this was some kind of love triangle gone wrong, and that Detective Kipps may have been killed because of it.”

The more I talked, the deeper the crease in her forehead became. “Mmmm…” she said, like she was considering this.

“So … I thought perhaps the investigating officer would like to know about what I saw,” I said, then I shut up because it was feeling like time for Captain Boswell to start contributing to the conversation.

“Well, at this point, we don’t have an investigating officer,” she said. “I had been of the understanding that there was nothing to investigate.”

“Nothing?” I said. “But what about the marks on Kipps’s arms and legs?”

She took a long moment, then said, “To be honest-and this is off-the-record-I was unaware of those until your story broke. They would have been included in the autopsy report, of course. But even under the best circumstances, it takes the medical examiner several days, if not several weeks, to get us an autopsy report. So that hasn’t become part of our investigation yet.”

“But now that you know about them, you’ll reopen your investigation, yes?” I asked.

A simple “yes” was all I needed to give me the follow-up I had been looking for, but she only allowed, “At this point, I can’t say.”

This, I must say, perplexed me. I had thought this conversation, while guarded, would be fairly cut and dry: I’d say what I know, and she’d act. I hadn’t expected more uncertainty, unless …

“Does this … does this have something to do with an Internal Affairs investigation?” I asked. “We had heard something about that early on…”

She shook her head. “I can’t talk about that. Anything involving IA is strictly confidential. That’s department policy.”

“So you guys are sticking with ‘self-inflicted gunshot wound’?”

“For now, yes.”

“But … how do you explain those marks on his arms and wrists? Someone tied the man to a-”

She was again shaking her head. “I don’t mean to be dodging your questions, Mr. Ross, and they’re good questions. But I really can’t say anything more.”

“Are you saying he tied himself to a chair?”

From behind me, Hightower coughed. Captain Boswell didn’t look at him or even seem to notice it, but the noise broke what little rhythm I had going.

“Is there anything else you have to tell me?” she asked.

“No, I guess not. You know my paper is still going to run with the story about the autopsy photos.”

“And that’s your right to do that,” she said.

She smiled again. I got the feeling that while she took Kipps’s death personally, none of the rest of the maneuvering associated with it was personal to her. It was the job.

I guess that’s one way you get to be the first female precinct captain in Newark history: you learn to separate the two.

* * *

We finished up with some polite but entirely uninformative small talk, and soon my long-limbed escort was leading me back through the dimly lit hallway and down the stairs. I figured he’d stop once we reached the main door, but he kept going as we went down the front steps.

“Might as well go the whole way,” he said, seemingly reading my thoughts. “You get mugged and it messes up our CompStat numbers, and then the captain would get all pissed at me.”

“Very thoughtful of you,” I said.

When we got to the sidewalk, he pulled out a pack of cigarettes-likely his real motivation for going outside.

“That your ride?” he asked, nodding at my Malibu.

“Yeah, it’s bitchin’, ain’t it? The ladies can’t get enough of it.”

He let out a deep laugh, lit his cigarette, and took a draw.

“Drive carefully,” he said.

Smoke carefully, I thought. But instead I just said, “Thanks, Officer. Have a nice night.”

On my short drive back to Eagle-Examiner headquarters, I pondered what very little new information I had gleaned from Captain Boswell. Really, the only semiuseful thing she said was when I asked her about Kipps and Internal Affairs. This is me reading into things, sure. But when someone says, “I can’t talk about that,” it suggests there is something to be discussed.

I returned to the office determined to lean on Buster Hays until he gave up what he had, especially now that I had the necessary inducement: while I was gone, Ruthie Ginsburg-God bless industrious interns everywhere-had e-mailed me a completed Good Neighbors. It was about Stephen Rosenberg of Livingston, who had planned, fund-raised, and created a picnic area in Riker Hill Art Park as his Eagle Scout project. It more than met the high standards we expected of our Good Neighbors pieces, which is to say it appeared to have letters, spaces, and punctuation in approximately the correct distribution.

At the end of the e-mail, Ruthie wrote, “When can we talk about the Eighteenth Avenue town houses? I got some great stuff for you about that and the neighborhood.”

I actually felt a little badly all that “great stuff” was going to die in his notebook. But he would hardly be the first reporter to have that happen to him. Anyone who has been around this business for more than a minute has had to eat a story they thought was dynamite.

Looking over to the small armada of unassigned desks where we corralled the interns, I didn’t see Ruthie. Perhaps, having tested enough toilet water and uncovered enough good deeds for one day, he had gone home. I rattled off a hasty thank-you e-mail, then printed out a copy of the story and took it over to the wrinkled dean of the newsroom himself.

“Okay, Buster, give it up,” I said. “I got your Good Neighbors right here. I want IA.”

Buster had been concentrating on his computer, looking at it with his usual contempt, like he wished it would turn back into a typewriter, his preferred drafting instrument. He turned and peered at me from over a pair of reading glasses.

“I’m on deadline, Ivy,” he said. “You’re going to have to wait until I’m filed. Contrary to what your parents have probably been telling you your whole life, the sun doesn’t rise and set out of your ass.”

“A deal is a deal.”

“Yeah, yeah. Give me five minutes.”

I rolled my eyes-not that he saw it-and retreated to my desk. I tried calling Paul/Powell and was again requested to consider my eternal and everlasting death. This time I left a quick message: “Powell, it’s Carter Ross at the Eagle-Examiner. Kira said you were looking for me. Give me a call.”

Returning to my desk, I saw I had a fresh e-mail. It was from “Thompson, Tina” and had the subject line, “???” which made me cringe as I clicked on it. What had I done wrong this time?

But it was just one line: “Want to have dinner with an aging voodoo sperm witch tonight?”

I considered this for a moment. Did I? Tina had been such a pill lately, I was actually looking forward to spending less time around her, not more. Then again, it’s not like I had any pressing plans-watching college basketball with Deadline curled up against my leg didn’t count-and maybe Chief Tina was finally making a peace offering. We could use a burying of the hatchet.

I looked over to Tina’s office, which was dark. She hadn’t been in there for at least ten minutes-we had those motion-sensing lights that shut off after so long. I fired back a quick, “Sure. Details?”

As I awaited a reply, I heard Buster bellow from a few desks over, “Okay, Ivy, I’m filed. Let’s do this.”

I grabbed the printout of Ginsburg’s story and returned to Buster’s desk.

“Let’s see that Good Neighbors,” he said.

I slid the story in his direction. He adjusted his granny glasses and took a quick gander at the top.

“You farming out your dirty work to interns now?”

I summoned my best impersonation of Buster’s Bronx accent and repeated the words he had said to me earlier in the day: “I do what I need to do in order to survive in this cruel world.”

The right corner of his mouth lifted-for Buster, that counted as a smile-and he said, “Good. You’re learning.”

He spent another five seconds scanning the copy, then proclaimed, “This’ll do.”

“Okay, so let’s have it.”

Buster removed the glasses, rubbed his face, then said, “At the time of his death, there was no IA investigation into Darius Kipps. Nothing. Zip. Zilch.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. My source is gold. IA is bound by an attorney general’s directive to investigate all complaints, no matter where they come from. If there was a complaint about him, there’d be a file. And my source said there’s no file. He did some checking with the other IA guys just to make sure. Kipps is clean, as far as they’re concerned.”

“Huh.”

“Now,” he said, grinning as much as Buster ever allowed, “ask me what else my guy told me.”

“What else did your guy tell you?”

“It’s going to cost you another Good Nei-”

I stopped him immediately: “Forget it, Buster. There’s quid pro quo and then there’s extortion. Don’t cross the line.”

“Okay, okay. Hang on,” he said, opening up a notebook and flipping to a page filled with random pen marks that may have been an attempt to represent actual letters. “Okay, according to my source, Kipps called an IA guy. My source wouldn’t say which IA guy, just that it was someone Kipps knew and trusted. The call came in late Saturday night so the guy wasn’t around. Kipps left a message.”

“What did the message say?”

“My guy said it was pretty vague. It didn’t make any sense to him. Something about…” Buster was looking at his notes like he was struggling with them. “It was something about … seeing blotches on something … or … I don’t know. Point is, Kipps wanted the guy to call him back.”

“And did he?”

“Nope. By the time the IA guy got to the message, it was Monday morning. Kipps was already dead.”

* * *

If nothing else, Buster’s source helped illuminate the rumors floating around the NPD about Kipps and Internal Affairs. I’m sure as the news about Kipps was getting out, the IA officer-whoever he was-had been telling people something along the lines of, “Wow, Kipps just left a message for me over the weekend.”

Once that got out into the wind, it could have blown in any direction-cops love gossiping as much as reporters, and gossip can always get twisted, advertently or otherwise. That’s why my guy Pritch would have heard that Kipps had contact with IA, which could turn easily into “Kipps was dirty.”

The more intriguing question was what he was calling to say. If it had to do with “blotches”-whatever that was-maybe Kipps had a health problem. Weren’t blotches on the skin a symptom of HIV/AIDS? That would certainly be something Kipps wouldn’t want to get out. And maybe he would rather kill himself than let the world know he had contracted AIDS.

That would still leave the matter of those marks on his arms and wrists, but perhaps there was something I hadn’t thought of or didn’t know that explained those.

Or maybe Kipps was calling IA about misconduct by a fellow officer: Mike Fusco. There’s probably nothing in the Newark Police Department handbook that expressly prohibits sleeping with another officer’s wife. But it was possible Kipps had some kind of other dirt on Fusco he was suddenly willing to spill. If that was the case, and Fusco found out about it, it gave him yet another reason to put Kipps on the dead side.

Or maybe, I realized as I returned to my desk, I could just face facts that I was still speculating. A larger truth was out there, waiting for me. I just had to keep plugging away until I found it.

In the time I had been gone, Tina had sent me another e-mail. “My place. Eight,” it said. “Bring a bottle of wine and your appetite.”

That sounded promising-for a skinny girl, Tina knew how to cook-and it certainly beat the repast I had waiting for me in Bloomfield, which would have involved a hasty phone call to Panda Palace. I wrote back, “Sounds great. See you then.”

I was clicking the Send button as my phone rang.

“Carter Ross.”

“Carter, it’s Powell,” he said. I could hear street noises in the background.

“Hey, what’s going on?”

“I saw you posted a story about those photos I took. Pretty awesome. But why didn’t you run the pictures? Did they not come out well or something?”

“No, they came out fine. We just … they might be a little graphic for some of our readers.”

“Would you have run them if that dude was still alive?”

“I don’t know. Does it matter?”

“Well, yeah it matters. See, this goes to one of the central points of the Death Studies movement, and that is challenging the irrational fear of death in our culture. Until we change some of the basic assumptions about what it means to make the change from lucidity to morbidity, we will never-”

“Right, Powell,” I said, because I didn’t need to hear the lecture he was going to give when he became Professor Death. “Kira said you were hot to talk to me about something?”

“Yeah, I, uh … I was at the M.E.’s office today-because my internship is Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, you know? And I overheard him talking to someone.”

“Him? Who’s him?”

“The medical examiner. And he was pissed. I couldn’t tell about what at first. But I had never heard him that mad before. He was fired up. You could hear him going off. I thought he was going to have a conniption.”

I realized I needed to indulge Paul/Powell’s penchant for verbal meandering. So I said, “Okay. What was he mad about?”

“You couldn’t even really tell, at first. And I couldn’t, you know, just be seen hanging outside his office, eavesdropping. Technically, I’m supposed to be in the examining room, observing the autopsies, taking notes, you know? I have to be able to justify this internship to my adviser at the end of the term, and I can’t-”

I lost my patience: “Right, got it. Let’s get back to the mad medical examiner.”

“Oh, right. Well, it was tough to tell what he was pissed about, but I heard him say ‘Kipps.’ That’s the name of your dude, right?”

“Right.”

“Yeah, well, I guess somehow they had found out about the photos. I don’t know how they knew you had them-”

“I called them and told them.”

“You did?”

“It’s sort of what reporters do, Powell.”

“Oh,” he said, as if he couldn’t quite figure out why I would tip my hand like that. “Well, anyway, someone-like his boss or something-must have been asking him about the photos. And he kept saying stuff like, ‘I have no idea’ and ‘Well, they didn’t come from me,’ and ‘If I find out, I’ll fire the bastard,’ and all that.”

I smiled. I love it when government agencies go on witch hunts to figure out where a leak is coming from. It expends a tremendous amount of energy and almost never catches the real witch. Half the time the person who ordered the investigation into the leak is actually the person behind it-but knows he has covered his tracks well enough to never be caught. The other half of the time the source is someone they’d never suspect, like the intern who got the key from the janitor. They’d be better off trying to find Santa Claus’s workshop.

“So I had to walk away at that point because, you know, I’m supposed to be-”

“In the examining room, right.” I cut him off.

“Yeah, but anyway, everyone in the office was totally buzzing about it. It wasn’t hard to hear him. I was talking to one of the secretaries about it, and you know what she said she heard him say?”

“What’s that?”

“She said that he said, and I quote, ‘What you’re asking me to do is unethical.’”

“What was he being asked to do? Did she know?”

“No. That’s just what she said he said.”

“Hmm…”

“Anyhow, I thought you’d want to know,” he said. “I gotta run. I volunteer at a funeral home on Tuesday nights. I’m doing it for credit, so I have to be on time.”

“Have fun with that. Thanks for the call.”

“Later.”

So the medical examiner was being asked to do unethical things. And he was understandably upset about it.

I just hoped he was upset enough to unburden his worries to the Eagle-Examiner.

* * *

From a reporter’s standpoint, public employees are wonderful creatures because they have no way of hiding from us. Within a few mere keystrokes, I can learn their full name, date of birth, and annual salary-time was, in the days before identity theft became so rampant, I could even get their Social Security number. Maybe that all sounds a little invasive of their privacy, but the framers of the Constitution didn’t want public officials to have privacy. They were deeply suspicious of anyone with authority and wanted citizens to have lots of tools with which to resist tyranny.

As such, I was able to learn in fairly short order that Essex County Medical Examiner Raul Ibanez was born on August 9, 1964, and was paid $177,716 a year to slice and dice dead folks and make pronouncements about them. A few keystrokes later and I was looking at a Google Maps overview of his home on Lenox Avenue in Westfield. It looked like a nice crib, though his trees needed some trimming.

I looked at the clock, which told me I had just enough time to ambush the medical examiner and still make it back to Tina’s by eight-but only if I hustled. So I grabbed my peacoat and made like a man in a hurry.

The best way to explain Westfield, New Jersey, is that someone cracked open an upscale shopping mall above it, then sprinkled all the stores onto the streets below. As such, I could have given directions to Ibanez’s place as I would give directions to a food court: take a left at the Victoria’s Secret, pass the Williams-Sonoma, take another left after the Banana Republic.

After making the turn on a suitably genteel suburban street, I found Ibanez’s nicely appointed home on the left side. It had a basketball hoop mounted on the garage, healthy shrubs lining a slate walkway, and a handsome red door with a brass knocker that I was soon putting to use.

A smallish man with a neat goatee and a thin semicircle of hair around his otherwise bald head soon answered. He was wearing suit pants and a button-down shirt-no scrubs for this doctor-but had ditched the jacket and tie. He had a wireless device clipped onto his belt.

“Dr. Ibanez, I’m sorry to trouble you at home, but I thought it would be better to see you here than at your office. My name is Carter Ross and I’m a reporter for the Eagle-Examiner. I’m the guy who posted that story with the autopsy photos today.”

He exerted an effort at keeping himself impassive, though I got the sense hearing my name was like a small kick in the nuts. I was, after all, the guy who had ruined his day.

“What … what are you … I have no comment,” he said quickly, with a slight accent, and I expected the statement would soon be followed by a whole lot of red door being slammed in my face.

But he kept the door open. This was encouraging. Maybe he didn’t want to comment, but he did want to talk. I might be able to leverage what little information I had into a whole lot more-with help from a little semieducated bluffing.

“Dr. Ibanez, I can totally respect that. But I gotta tell you, you seem like a nice guy, and I don’t want to have to end up writing a story about you needing to answer charges from the state ethics board, you know what I’m saying?”

I didn’t know if the state even had an ethics board for medical examiners-much less what this guy was being asked to do that was unethical-but the words “ethics board” were like another shot to his bits. Since pretending to know more than I actually did seemed to be working, I continued:

“I just see how this is all coming together-I’m sure you’ve heard the AG’s office has looked at this thing-and I hate to see you being railroaded on this.”

That got him.

“Railroaded?” he said. “Oh, for the love of…”

“It’s happened before. If this thing spills out all big and ugly, they might be looking for a scapegoat. Look at all the players here”-right, whoever they were-“you think any of them are really going to fall on their swords? Really, who’s going to fall on his sword? You’d be an easy target.”

I was really winging it now, but Ibanez was too wrapped in his own drama to recognize it.

“Oh, damnit. Damnit! Are you … Who’s saying that? Where are you getting that?”

“You know I can’t tell you. Let’s just put it this way: it’s the same place I got the photos from. And it’s someone who’s in a position to know you’re being asked to do something unethical.”

That, of course, was true, in a manner of speaking. That Paul/Powell was in that “position” because he happened to be skulking outside Ibanez’s office was immaterial. The doctor brought his hands to his forehead and massaged his temples. His cheeks were getting flushed. I went in for the kill.

“We’re off the record here. So why don’t you just tell me this thing from your perspective, beginning, middle, and end. And when I put this all in the newspaper, I’ll try to make it look as good for you as I possibly can.”

I thought I had him right where I wanted him: cornered, scared, a little off balance. Total capitulation was just moments away.

But I guess I had cornered him a little too much because he came out fighting. What I heard next was, I imagined, the same version of Raul Ibanez that Paul/Powell had heard earlier in the day.

“You know what? You know what? You want to write something in your paper? You write the facts. I’m not … I … I give them the mechanism. I give them the cause. But the manner, that’s … I’m not … I’m not a detective. I give them the science. That’s my job.”

He started jabbing his index finger at me: “That’s my job. And I did my job. They’re the ones not doing their job. You tell that to the damn state ethics board! You tell that to your damn sources! You tell them I’m going to get this all documented. They want to railroad me? Let ’em try. Let ’em try!”

There appeared to be a Mrs. Ibanez coming down the stairs to learn what all the yelling was about. But I never got a glimpse of more than her feet because the next thing I saw was what I suspected I might get all along: an up-close view of his red front door being slammed in my face.

My last official act of the evening was to slip my business card through Ibanez’s mail slot, just in case he decided he needed to yell at someone in the middle of the night. Then, having done enough damage for the evening, I flipped the “off duty” light in my mind and started driving toward Tina’s.

Except, of course, my brain kept trying to pick up passengers the whole way. Even as I did my requested wine shopping-a connoisseur, I always insist on a silly name or a pretty label-I thought of what I could read into Ibanez’s performance.

The doctor was absolutely correct, of course: a medical examiner makes objective determinations as to the mechanism of death (in this case, a bullet traveling at high velocity) and the cause of death (that Darius Kipps didn’t have much of a head left by the time the bullet departed his person). When it comes to mechanism and cause, a homicide and a suicide can be virtually identical. From a purely medical standpoint, those ligature marks on Darius Kipps’s arms and legs were about as involved in his demise as a shaving nick.

No, those go more to the manner of death, which is what really counts, legally. The manner of death is a more subjective call on the medical examiner’s part, and it relies on what he can learn from the body and what he’s been told by investigators.

I didn’t know what the investigators had told Ibanez, of course. But in the face of what appeared to be foul play, someone had informed Ibanez no more investigation would be done, giving him little choice but to rule the manner of death a suicide. And he considered going along with that unethical.

Or at least that was my best guess. By the time I reached Hoboken, I hadn’t come up with anything better.

* * *

The last available street parking spot in Hoboken was snatched up in late 1995. So rather than join the legion of people circling patiently for the next one, I parked in a garage. I was just getting out of the car when I got a text from Tina. “Hopping in shower. Let yourself in.”

Tina’s door code, 2229, was easy to remember, thanks to the handy, if slightly disturbing, pneumonic she had given me: it spelled the word “baby.”

Tina’s condo was a one-bedroom on the fourth floor with a view of Manhattan that made you feel like you owned the world. I took in the panorama for a second, then went over by the bathroom door, which was slightly ajar.

“Hey, it’s me,” I announced.

“Hey. Sorry. I’ll be out in a second. My jog lasted a little longer than I thought,” she called over the hissing of the shower.

“No problem.”

“Did you pick the wine based on the name?”

“No, I went with a cute label instead. It’s got this little black dress on it and it’s called, get this, ‘Little Black Dress.’ It’s a pinot noir.”

“Oh, that stuff is actually pretty good. Pour me a glass and I’ll be out in a second.”

After pouring us both glasses of wine-I drink wine when beer is unavailable-I went and spied what my dinner was going to be. I saw broiled salmon with dill sauce, snap peas with some kind of fancy onions on them, and asparagus sauteed in what smelled like lemon butter. A fish, two vegetables, and no starch. Such was the peril of accepting a dinner invitation from Tina, who mostly eschews red meat and treats carbohydrates like they’re an aggravating relative she visits only on holidays.

I was sitting on the couch, taking in the view when Tina emerged and gave me a better one. She had pulled back her still-damp hair and was wearing a pair of men’s boxers and a black camisole that nicely showed off her shoulders. She wasn’t wearing a bra underneath, but I could hardly blame her. I wasn’t wearing one either.

“Thanks for being patient,” she said as she took a sip from her glass of wine, then moved into the kitchen to begin plating our meal. “I just needed that run so badly. I skipped yesterday, thanks to Darius Kipps, and if I had to skip today I would have felt like a giant slug.”

My need for exercise goes into hibernation a little more easily, but I said, “Well, we wouldn’t want that.”

“I left the office early tonight, too. I had to sell my soul to do it-I’ll be closing the paper Wednesday and Thursday thanks to this-but it was worth it. I just needed a break.”

“Yeah, I bet,” I said. The rationalization was as much for her sake as mine. Knowing Tina as I do-take a prototypical Type A, then add three parts of ambition and four parts of ceaseless drive-she was still feeling guilty about leaving early.

She inquired as to the state of my story, and I filled her in on the latest while she continued puttering around the kitchen. She was asking more as a friend than a boss-you can tell the difference because her questions don’t have as fine a point on them when she’s being my friend-and soon we were seated before the dinner she had prepared.

“This ought to be a switch for you,” she said. “Everything you’re about to eat is nonprocessed and a hundred percent organic.”

“Yeah, but I’d like to remind you cavemen ate organic, unprocessed food, too. And they’re dead.”

She shook her head but smiled. “Sometimes I think you’re the caveman.”

“Cheers,” I said. “To evolution or the lack thereof.”

We clinked glasses and set to eating. When we’re not fighting like crazed badgers, Tina and I really do get along quite well. And it was pleasant to finally have a cessation of hostilities. The salmon was dynamite. The wine wasn’t bad, considering who picked it. And we fell into easy chatter.

We were finishing up our meal-and had made the rather easy decision that, yeah, it wouldn’t kill us to open up another bottle of wine-when Tina finally got around to what was, as I figured, her agenda all along.

“You know, I’ve been a real bitch to you lately, and I want to apologize,” she said as I refilled her glass.

“No, no, it’s okay. We’ve all been stressed.”

“It’s more than that. I’ve been…”

“It’s okay.”

“No, let me just say this. I feel like I’ve been, I don’t know, not myself. Like today, with Kira, she called me a voodoo sex witch, or whatever it was, and I was already scheming of ways to make her life hell-really, how dare she? I never did anything to her, right? And then I realized I had been inventing reasons to go back into the Info Palace all day just to give her dirty looks. I know she noticed. She must have thought I was a nut.”

“She didn’t mention anything about it,” I said, and for once Tina failed to intercept the blatant lie I had just tossed up.

“And the thing is, I don’t really even care that you two are seeing each other, or dating, or whatever it is you’re doing-”

“It’s sort of still undefined,” I interjected.

“That’s fine. It’s none of my business and, besides, it’s not-I mean, no offense-it’s not something I’m even interested in doing, you know? I don’t want a relationship with you. I don’t want a relationship with anyone. And yet there I was, getting jealous and acting crazy because you guys are … whatever. I think sometimes my competitiveness gets the best of me. I need to win for the sake of winning, never mind that I don’t even particularly want what I’m trying to get.”

“It happens to all of us sometimes,” I reassured her.

“Me more than most. Anyhow, please accept my apology. I’ll try to be on my best behavior from here on out.”

“No problem. Thanks for apologizing.”

“You’re an easy person to apologize to,” she said.

We clinked glasses again. It soon turned out I was easy in other ways, too.

* * *

For the record, it really wasn’t my fault. I try to own my mistakes in this life and know when I am to blame for things. I accept full responsibility when I am. But it wasn’t me. Not this time.

First, it was the kitchen. Tina has this narrow, galley-style kitchen, as is often the case in crowded Hoboken, and there isn’t room in it for two people. So as we did the dishes-with me manning the sink and her puttering around me-she kept brushing into me with that lithe body of hers or having to put a hand on my hip for balance as she scooted past. It was just slight, incidental contact, yes, but sometimes that sets a tone for the less incidental kind.

Next, it was the couch. Tina only has one that faces her television at the right angle. So when she suggested we watch a movie-and, really, I needed at least a movie’s worth of time before I was remotely in shape to drive home-there was no choice but for us to both sit on it lest one of us have a ruined viewing experience.

Finally, it was her calf. The movie was perhaps ten minutes old when she announced that it had been giving her troubles lately and was starting to stiffen up after her jog. She asked if I wouldn’t mind rubbing it, and being the amiable sort of chap that I am, I acquiesced. Isn’t that what good friends do?

The next thing I knew, I had both of Tina Thompson’s long, lovely, bare legs stretched across my lap. I began rubbing her left calf, finding the kink in the muscle and slowly kneading it out. She let out a series of delighted sighs.

Then, because I was already in the neighborhood, I rubbed her right calf. After all, as any jogger knows, it feels good to have your legs rubbed after a run, whether you’ve strained a muscle or not. So she kept right on making those pleasant little noises.

Next thing I knew, Tina had scooched down closer to me so I could rub her quads. And I figured that was reasonable because they are, after all, the largest muscles in the legs, and they get sore from running, too. I worked around the knee, then moved up to the thick part of the thigh. Tina was really getting into the massage, having closed her eyes and flung her arms up over her head, such that her camisole was riding up a little, exposing part of her lean midriff.

At a certain point, she asked if I could rub her hip flexor as well because, she reported, that was also a little tender. And because apparently I wasn’t quite hitting the sore spot with her boxers “getting in the way,” she removed them, leaving her in a pair of rather insubstantial black panties.

I kept up the pretense of the massage for a little while longer as I worked on one hip, then the next. Then somehow I was rubbing her arms, then her shoulders. Then, well, of course she had to remove the camisole so I could really work on her back a bit without that “getting in the way.”

So somehow, in this purely innocent fashion-through no fault of my own-I ended up with Tina more or less naked and writhing on the couch, moaning in pleasure. And it would hardly seem sporting of me to let her do all that writhing and moaning by herself, so I joined in.

Tina and I had gotten to this spot-or variations of it-a number of other times during our dalliances through the past few years. And usually one of us pulled back, knowing that taking the final step could change everything. Especially at the right time of the month.

And so I kept expecting she would announce a halt to this little romp. Only she was way too into it, perhaps because my hands were straying into areas where the massage therapist at the health club wouldn’t go.

Then I kept expecting I would finally come to my senses. Except I was way into it, too, perhaps because she had tugged off all my clothes and started playing with some of my happier places.

Soon what started on the couch went to the floor, then to the bedroom, where very, very bedroom-type things started happening. This was, technically, our first time at this, but it didn’t feel like a first-time thing. There was none of the awkwardness or the haltingness. No one was checking in to make sure anyone was okay-the answer was already obvious.

I let her cross the finish line first because I’m just that kind of guy, then followed her soon thereafter. We held each other for a while without discussing any of what had just transpired. And frankly, I didn’t have the energy left to ponder what we had just done, how it would impact Kira and me-that relationship was still so undefined-or whether the Ross family tree had just added another branch. I just lay there and let my senses enjoy the smell, touch, and sight of Tina in her postcoital glory.

The next thing I knew there was a dim, morning light coming through the window and a phone was ringing somewhere. It sounded like a home phone, but it wasn’t my home phone. Then I remembered that’s because I wasn’t in my home. Tina grabbed it and offered a “hello” that managed not to sound like she had just been ripped from sleep.

“Oh, hi, Katie,” she said. There was only one Katie I knew of that would be calling at this hour, and it was Katie Mossman from the All-Slop.

“No, no, perfect timing. I’m just getting back from a run. What’s up?” Tina continued. She was perched on the side of her bed, still naked, and had grabbed a pen and small pad. There was another one of those unsightly numbers-a six, of all horrible things-leading her digital clock.

She began scribbling as I listened to her half of the conversation, which consisted of a lot of “Uh-huh, uh-huh” and “No, I’ll do that.”

It ended with: “Okay, I’ll be there in forty-five minutes or so. Thanks, Katie, bye.”

Tina turned to me and said, “Well, so much for lying in bed this morning.”

“What’s going on?”

“Pretend like I’m calling you on the phone to tell you we got another dead Newark cop-another suicide, from what it looks like. He was found dead in his home. Apparently it’s already all over the incident pagers this morning, so we better get moving.”

“They know who it is?”

“Yeah,” Tina said. “It’s Mike Fusco.”

Red Dot Enterprises didn’t get into business to kill anyone.

It might supply would-be killers with guns. But it left the act to the customers. As the old saw goes: guns don’t kill people, people kill people.

Really, for the associates of Red Dot Enterprises, it was more of a practical decision than a moral one. Most police departments didn’t focus their efforts strictly on guns. They had gang units, drug units, or homicide units, but never gun units. When they bothered with weapons charges, it was always in connection with (or sometimes even in lieu of) other charges. The classic is the drug dealer who is wily enough to hide his stash but goes to jail for being caught with a gun. It was like getting Al Capone on tax evasion. Even though the cops are happy to get a dirtbag off the street, the gun isn’t seen as the real crime. The police cared about guns, yes. But they didn’t care that much.

Murder was an entirely different story. Murder was a messy business, one that attracted undue attention. Newspapers wrote stories about it. Voters paid attention to it. Most of all, police commanders in cities large and small cared about it. Deeply. Many of the same police commanders who would have to scramble to the Uniform Crime Report to find their gun arrests could tell you their homicide clearance rate off the top of their heads.

Especially when it involved a police officer. It was something the associates of Red Dot Enterprises couldn’t believe they were even talking about when the subject first came up. They just wanted to keep their low profile, sell their guns, and make their money quietly. Not kill cops.

So there was more than a little debate about Detective Michael Fusco. There were those in the group who thought they didn’t need to bother with Fusco. Sure, he had some investigative skills and could bring certain law enforcement resources to bear on them. But it’s not like he was the world’s greatest detective. He was a meathead who drove around in a big pickup truck and wore tight sweaters. He wasn’t that much of a threat.

And yet, before long, even the doves in the group were going along with the hawks when it came to Fusco. The clinching factor was when it was learned, through reliable sources, that he had started a relationship with the Widow Kipps shortly after her husband’s death. It was a sign Fusco was too close, and that he probably wouldn’t give up. He had to go, plain and simple.

So they quickly set about planning it. Had Fusco been a civilian, they could have hired some help. Red Dot Enterprises certainly had enough contacts with dangerous men, thugs without conscience who would kill for next to nothing-a little free merchandise would have been all the payment required.

But a cop was a different matter entirely. This was a job they were going to have to do themselves.