Eyes of the Innocent Read online

  I sat down to remove myself from temptation. Had I not resolved to maintain a perfectly professional demeanor around her, I might have enjoyed that vista. There was no denying the young lady was rather fetching—I mean, if you like shapely twenty-two-year-old blondes, that is—and she had a wholesomeness about her that put certain unwholesome thoughts in my head. As a tall, nearly broad-shouldered, thirty-two-year-old single guy with a reasonable body mass index and no facial disfigurement, I could entertain the thought she wasn’t repulsed by me.

  But while there’s no official policy at the Eagle-Examiner against fraternizing with the interns, there were at least three factors to consider. One, Uncle Hal might decide his paper needed one less investigative reporter if I made a play for his buddy’s little girl. Two, I had some unresolved romantic issues with Tina Thompson, our city editor, and I suspected she would not be impressed if I summited Mount Intern. Three, I was getting exhausted just trying to listen to her for five minutes; an entire evening’s worth of conversation and flirtation might make me slip into a coma.

  All in all, it seemed like enough reason to leave Sweet Thang to the Sigma Alpha Epsilons.

  “Do you want me to call the fire department?” she asked. “Or find a national expert on space heaters? Maybe there’s a space heater awareness group out there? Or a space heater safety nonprofit or something? I want to do this story exactly how you would do it. How would you start?”

  I was tempted to tell her I planned to start like any self-respecting reporter approached a story in which he has absolutely no interest: waste time chatting with colleagues, return several lengthy personal e-mails, take an extended lunch, check in with old sources on completely unrelated matters, then start making phone calls around three o’clock when there was absolutely nothing better to do.

  But that didn’t seem like the kind of example I should be setting for an impressionable young person.

  “Well,” I said. “I like to get a feel for what I’m writing about first. Visit the scene. Take in the sights. Talk to some neighbors. So what do you say we make a little trip out to Littleton Avenue?”

  The question was barely even formed and she was already grabbing a notebook and her car keys.

  “Can I drive?” she asked.

  “That depends. What kind of car do you have?”

  “It’s the cutest little BMW. My dad got it for me for graduation. It’s red. I call him Walter. He’s got an iPod dock and everything. I just love him.”

  I immediately got this image of Sweet Thang bopping through the hood in her shiny red BMW, blasting Taylor Swift on Walter’s speakers. The carjackers would play rock-paper-scissors to determine who got dibs.

  “No,” I said. “Better let me drive.”

  * * *

  My car is a five-year-old Chevy Malibu. It has traveled some undetermined distance beyond a hundred thousand miles: dead speedometers tell no tales. I bought it for a suspiciously low price from a used car dealer in Newark. I’m not saying the guy was unscrupulous, but the title work looked like it had eraser marks on it.

  It wasn’t exactly a chick magnet. But the Malibu had certain benefits that were practical—no, essential—when operating in a rugged city like Newark. You didn’t have to worry about it getting beaten up by the potholes because it was already beaten up. You could leave it unlocked with the motor running outside a chop shop and not have to worry about it being there when you got back. And when it comes to blending into the hood, it does just fine.

  Which is good, because in most Newark neighborhoods, I don’t exactly blend. It’s not just that I’m white. It’s that I’m a peculiar subset of the white race, one that disappeared from Newark long ago: a purebred, stiff-upper-lipped, can’t-dance-a-lick WASP. I’ve got carefully parted brown hair, blue eyes, and a way of walking and talking most inner-city black people just find funny. I wear well-pressed shirts—usually white or blue—with pleated slacks and a tie with a half-Windsor knot. Even white people tease me about how white I am.

  So I’m perfectly aware, when I enter many parts of Newark, that I create a little bit of a scene. Some people, assuming I’m lost, will approach and ask if I need directions. Most merely stare like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man just went past.

  People have suggested to me that if I acted like I have some street in me—wear hip-hop clothes, drop certain colloquialisms into my vocabulary, get a haircut that didn’t look so Leave It to Beaver—black folks might open up to me more easily.

  But I don’t believe that. You can only hide who you are for so long. The simple truth is, I grew up in Millburn, a proper New Jersey suburb that is only a few miles away from Newark geographically but a full country away demographically. From the time I grew out of onesies, my mother dressed me in collared shirts. My upbringing featured things like tennis camp, Broadway musicals, and trips to Europe. I went to Amherst, a small, expensive, exclusive liberal arts college that doesn’t exactly do much for one’s street cred. I’m pretty much what black folks refer to as The Man. If I pretended otherwise, I’d come off as a fraud. And no one—of any race, gender, or creed—wants to talk to a fraud.

  Besides, I like half-Windsor knots.

  And, funny as it may sound to my fellow WASPs, I like Newark, too. And not just because of the gentrification that is slowly (very slowly) taking root or because of the new, shiny stuff being built downtown. I like the old parts of the city, too—the old neighborhoods, the old churches, the old stories that seem to be lurking around every corner. Say what you will about Newark, but it’s got character. And heart. Two things we could all use more of.

  So I didn’t mind that as Sweet Thang and I pulled up to the scene of the fire on Littleton Avenue, two old guys on a nearby porch openly gawked at us. The Man—now with a bubbly blonde anchor in tow—tends to have that effect.

  The air was still acrid from the fire, with that wonderful aroma of burned plastic and toasted toxin wafting about. Even if I didn’t have the address, my nose could have led me there.

  The house wasn’t at all what I expected. Usually, when fatal fires broke out in Newark, they were in nasty, tottering, ninety-year-old tenements, the kind of places that had been fire traps for so long you wondered how they hadn’t burned down sooner.

  But this one was a relatively new construction, one of those architecturally challenged boxes that started popping up around Newark at the turn of the new century. It had been quite a moment for a long-depressed city. Real estate developers had finally discovered that, for all its ills, Newark is still just a twenty-minute train ride from Manhattan. Soon, builders were falling over themselves to snatch up the abundance of empty lots and toss up one- and two-family houses.

  At the peak of the boom, new two-family houses were going for more than $400,000, an astounding number to Newark residents who remembered the not-so-distant time when they couldn’t even give away their houses. Then the bubble popped, the foreclosures began hitting in waves, and it was back to reality.

  Still, the city’s housing stock had been at least partially transformed. And most folks figured it would take a few years before the new construction started looking—and burning—like the old tenements.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” I said out loud.

  “What?” Sweet Thang asked. She had been yammering nonstop on the way out—can’t for the life of me remember about what—but had been quiet since we left the car.

  “Check this place out,” I said. “It’s nice.”

  Sweet Thang looked at me, looked at the house—with its soot-streaked siding, blackened window frames, and scorched roof—then looked back at me like she couldn’t believe she had placed me next to Judy Blume in the writing pantheon.

  “Well, okay, maybe nice is no longer the right adjective,” I said. “But it used to be nice. It couldn’t be more than a few years old. It’s got its own driveway, a garage, this nice sturdy gate here.”

  I shook the gate for emphasis. She whipped out a pad and started taking notes. I could get
used to having my own stenographer.

  “Look at the landscaping,” I said, gesturing to some well-manicured shrubs. “At one point, someone cared about the way this place looked. I bet there used to be border flowers planted in front, maybe some impatiens. No, no, make that marigolds. Too much sun for impatiens.”

  Sweet Thang wrote down every word, like I was dictating the next coming of Ulysses. I unlatched the gate and walked closer, with Sweet Thang trailing behind, still scribbling madly. The front door was … well, there was no front door. The firemen must have busted it off its hinges.

  “Come on, let’s go in,” I said, walking up the front steps.

  She halted.

  “Are we allowed?”

  “You’re not in homeroom. We don’t have to raise our hands and ask for a hall pass to use the bathroom,” I said. “Besides, I don’t see anyone here telling us not to. As far as I’m concerned, an open door is an invitation.”

  Sweet Thang bit her lower lip and let out a whiny “But couldn’t we get in trouble?”

  “In trouble?” I asked. “For all we know, there’s a melted space heater in one of those kid’s rooms. That space heater is our smoking gun, literally and figuratively. Can’t you just see it? With the charred teddy bear leaning up against it? Isn’t that the perfect start to our story? It could be. But I guess we’ll just have to go back to the office and tell Uncle Hal we’re not sure if a space heater had anything to do with this fire because we were afraid we could get in trouble.”

  “Fine,” she huffed and charged past me up the steps.

  Interns, I chuckled to myself. So easily goaded.

  I pulled a pad out of my pocket and began jotting down a few notes when, from inside the house, I heard a loud thud.

  Then Sweet Thang screamed.

  * * *

  I took the porch steps in two leaps and barreled inside the house to find Sweet Thang with a long kitchen knife at her throat.

  The person holding said knife—a wiry, dark-skinned black woman—looked like she knew what she was doing with it. And when she saw me, her eyes opened wide and she pressed the blade even tighter against Sweet Thang’s neck.

  “Step back,” she yelled, then took a fistful of bouncy blond curls and tilted back Sweet Thang’s head. “I’ll cut your little girlfriend here.”

  Sweet Thang had gone stiff and silent. I suppose she didn’t feel like she was in a position to negotiate, so I did the talking.

  “Take it easy,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “We’re reporters with the Eagle-Examiner. We’re just here working on a story.”

  You could see the woman’s mind whirring, trying to decide whether to believe me. Sweet Thang was holding up remarkably well under the circumstances.

  “My name is Carter Ross,” I continued. “This is my partner Lauren.”

  “It’s Lauren McMillan, but people call me ‘Sweet Thang,’ ” she squeaked.

  Now the woman looked downright perplexed.

  “Sweet Thang?” she said derisively.

  Her brow furrowed deeper.

  “Y’all messing with me?”

  “Here’s my card,” I said, digging it out and inching toward her, holding it at arm’s length. When I got just close enough, she released Sweet Thang’s hair and snatched my card. She barely bothered to look at it.

  “That don’t mean nothing. Anyone could fake that.”

  “How about I give you my phone and you call information and get a number for the Eagle-Examiner. Ask whoever answers if a guy named Carter Ross works there.”

  She removed the knife from Sweet Thang’s throat and pushed her at me, which brought us together in an awkward half hug.

  “Don’t matter,” she said. “Ain’t no scrawny white boy and his shorty gonna give me no trouble anyway.”

  Sweet Thang rubbed her neck, which didn’t appear to have blood on it. I was guessing this was the first time anyone had held a knife to daddy’s little girl’s throat. I was just grateful I didn’t have to explain to Uncle Hal how his buddy’s kid had been decapitated while in my care.

  “You must be Akilah Harris,” Sweet Thang asked.

  The woman eyed her.

  “I’m very sorry for your loss,” Sweet Thang continued. “Those little boys were just so precious. I’m very, very sorry. I want you to know I said a prayer this morning for Alonzo and Antoine.”

  What happened next has to go down in journalism history as the fastest anyone has gone from homicidal to hysterical. The mention of those boys’ names instantly caused this woman, who was evidently Akilah Harris, to crumble. She dropped the knife, brought her hands to her face, and started sobbing. And not just little sobs, either—big, gulping-for-breath, snot-everywhere sobs.

  “They was … they was my little angels,” Akilah said between gasps.

  Sweet Thang rushed to Akilah’s side, enveloping her in an embrace. Soon, Akilah was hugging her back and they were both crying. It was hard to make out who was saying what amid all the blubbering, but it was something along the lines of Akilah repeatedly saying “my babies” and “my angels” and Sweet Thang saying “I know” and “I’m so sorry.”

  I suppose somewhere there was some tweedy journalism professor who would have said that what Sweet Thang was doing—dropping that wall between reporter and source, allowing herself to connect emotionally with Akilah’s pain—was a Very Bad Thing. But then there’s also a reason why those tweedy journalism professors fled to academia in the first place: they were sucky reporters.

  You’ve got to get your sources treating you like a fellow member of the species, not an alien with a notepad. Legions of kids come out of J-school each year having been drilled endlessly about objectivity, balance, and other semiuseful subjects—much to their detriment. Some of them unlearn it quickly enough. But for others, the inability to get real with sources becomes a crippling affliction they carry throughout their journalism careers.

  Should we teach kids about balance? Of course. Getting both sides of a story is one of the foundations of what we do. There are many areas—politics, court trials, business disputes, and so on—where we’re absolutely obligated to play it down the middle.

  But there are also stories where, frankly, there is no middle. A mother’s pain over losing her children in a fire would be one of those stories. There’s no “other side” to tell. There’s just one woman and her profound tragedy. I believe telling that story in a sensitive, compassionate way makes the news—and all those who read it—a little more human.

  They finally released their embrace.

  “I’m sorry I almost cut you,” Akilah said, sniffling.

  “It’s okay,” Sweet Thang cooed. “You thought someone was breaking into your house. I would have done the same thing if I were you.”

  Now there’s an image: Sweet Thang threatening someone with a knife. I’m sure they taught all the Vanderbilt debutantes proper throat-slashing technique just in time for their cotillions.

  “I wish I could invite you in for some coffee or something,” Akilah said. “But they cut off the electricity.”

  “That’s okay,” Sweet Thang said.

  “And I’m sorry the place is such a mess,” Akilah added.

  It was such a perfectly absurd thing to say under the circumstances, we all laughed. From knife-wielding to crying to laughing, all in about ten minutes. At least this job isn’t boring.

  * * *

  My keen reporter’s instincts told me Akilah was in the mood to unburden herself of her story. And as the good little scribes we were, Sweet Thang and I were not opposed to letting her do so.

  But while this was the time, it was not the place. Too much debris. Too much smell. Too much death.

  I made the suggestion we head to African Flavah, a hole-in-the-wall diner on Springfield Avenue that just happened to serve the best breakfast in the city. Akilah was unsure for a moment until I sealed the deal by making it clear the Eagle-Examiner would be more than happy to pick up the check.


  Akilah asked for a few moments alone in the house to collect herself. I told her we’d be waiting for her out in the car.

  The fresh air felt good and smelled better. As I fired up the Malibu to get the heat going, Sweet Thang flopped down heavily in the passenger seat.

  “I’m so sorry,” Sweet Thang said.

  “What for?”

  “For crying.”

  “Yeah, so…?”

  Obviously, there had been at least one tweedy journalism professor in her past.

  “Isn’t that … unprofessional?” she asked, biting her lower lip in a way that still managed to be coquettish.

  “No, I’d say it was great. You made a connection and now a grieving mother wants to talk to us—to you, I should say. That’s pretty much the definition of a good human interest story right there. How did you know she was the boys’ mother anyway?”

  “I spent all morning looking at their pictures in the paper. They both look like her. The younger one could be her little clone.”

  “Good catch.”

  “Thanks,” she said. She leaned back in her seat and, because she apparently abhorred silence, asked, “So when do we ask her about the space heater?”

  “Space heater?” I said.

  “I thought we were doing a story about a space heater.”

  “No. Oh, hell no. Lump the space heater story.”

  “But what about—”

  “Lump it.”

  “But we’re supposed to—”

  “Lump it.”

  “But Uncle Hal—”

  “Even Uncle Hal will realize this is much better than a space heater story. If we do this right, this could go on page one tomorrow,” I said. “Hang on, I’m just going to run inside and check on Akilah.”

  Sweet Thang grabbed my wrist.

  “Wait a second,” she said.

  Her hand felt soft and warm and lovely. And for the briefest moment, I started imagining what it might feel like to have that hand situated elsewhere on my person.

  “What is it?” I asked, reminding myself I was old enough to be her … well, her older brother, for sure. Perhaps even her youthful uncle.