The Girl Next Door Page 2

  “Well, it’s a story. Maybe not a big story. But it’s one I’d really like to do,” I said, then slid the obit page at her. “Read Marino comma Nancy.”

  Tina moved her attention to the newspaper, frowning as she scanned it.

  “You want to write a story about a dead waitress?” she asked.

  “A waitress and a newspaper delivery person, yeah.”

  I grabbed the obit from her desk as she narrowed her eyes at my mouth.

  “Were you sleeping with her?”

  “Tina! Have some respect for the dead!”

  “Well, were you?”

  “Oh, yeah, I was shagging her rotten,” I said. “I’d throw a quick one in her every morning. Her customers complained their papers were late if I took more than five minutes, so it was always wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am.”

  Tina often claimed I had certain tells when I was lying, though she would never say what they were. For a while I tried sticking to the truth, but it just made me feel even more self-conscious. Since she became my editor, I had changed course and lied to her whenever possible. She knew this, of course. But I had to keep her off balance somehow.

  She scrutinized me for a moment, then said, “Okay, so you didn’t know her. Why do you want to write about her again?”

  “I don’t know. It would just be a nice story about the kind of everyday person you don’t miss until she’s gone—call it a Fanfare for the Common Woman.”

  “All right there, Aaron Copland, knock yourself out,” Tina said. “What killed her, anyway? Anything good?”

  Only a newspaper editor would describe a cause of death as potentially being “good.” Only a newspaper reporter would know exactly what she meant by it.

  “Don’t know yet. I’m sort of curious about that, actually.”

  “Well, unless she died of some exotic and heretofore undiscovered strain of swine flu, you’re not going to get more than sixteen on this. So don’t go crazy and file forty or anything.”

  We measure stories in column inches, and the Incredible Shrinking Newspaper had a lot less of them than it once had—especially in the middle of July, the absolute doldrums of the news calendar. It was a bit of a problem for me, as I was notorious for writing as if we still published a paper as thick as a phone book every day.

  “I won’t go so much as a word over budget,” I promised.

  “How many times do I have to tell you,” she said, as I departed her office. “I know when you’re lying.”

  * * *

  There’s no easier way to report a story about the newly dead than to attend a service in their honor. You have to be somewhat discreet—since leaning on the casket, flipping open your notebook, and asking for comment as people pass by is considered a tad gauche. But if you show the proper respect and make it clear you’re just there to write a few kind words about the deceased, you generally get a line of people waiting to chat with you. It’s cathartic for the aggrieved, and it gives you everything you need to write a glowing tribute.

  My trip to Bloomfield for Nancy’s visitation included a change-of-clothing pit stop at my house, which was not far from the Johnson-Eberle Funeral Home. Then again, since Bloomfield is only about five miles square, more or less everything in town is not far.

  On a map, Bloomfield looks like a bowling alley—a long, narrow chunk of land with the Garden State Parkway running through the middle of it. The town was carved away from Newark sometime in the early 1800s and now serves as the unofficial dividing line between the parts of New Jersey that scare white people and the parts that don’t. To the north and west are well-to-do towns like Montclair and Glen Ridge, where people are mostly concerned about sending their children on to their first choice four-year college. To the south and east are rough-edged cities like Newark and East Orange, where people are mostly concerned about their children getting shot.

  In the middle is Bloomfield, which doesn’t always know what to make of itself. Case in point: when you get off at the Bloomfield exit, you see a BMW dealership on one side of the street and a check-cashing place on the other.

  It’s not quite urban, inasmuch as there are no high-rise buildings; yet it’s not quite suburban, either, inasmuch as the houses are packed together so closely you tend to know if your neighbor has a cold because you can hear the sneezing.

  The citizenry consists of some young professionals like me, some blue-collar folks, some senior citizens, and a lot of guys named either Tony or Vinnie who like to pretend The Sopranos was really about them.

  The Realtors trumpet the town’s diversity because otherwise they’d have to talk about the property taxes, which are levied by the local chapter of the Barbary Pirates. I pay $11,000 a year in tribute, in exchange for which I am spared from having to walk the plank and I enjoy curbside leaf pickup.

  Oh, and just to get the New-Jersey-What-Exit thing out of the way: 148 off the parkway.

  I pulled into my driveway and waved to my neighbor, Constance, who was watering her lawn. Constance lives alone, having divorced Mr. Constance long ago. She spends a lot of time watering her lawn. She also prunes her roses, weeds and reweeds her flower beds—not that they have any in them—and generally makes my yard look like it is tended by wild rabbits.

  Constance is, at most, sixty-five. But she has one of those old-lady perms that ages her appearance a bit. She has two grown children who live in Colorado (I think) and Florida (perhaps), but have not seen fit to give her any grandchildren. I think she plans to move in with whichever one spawns first, which is perhaps part of what dampens their urge to procreate. But, in the meantime, she likes to keep an eye on the neighborhood and inform people about things they already know, starting conversations with, “You came back late last night” or “You were visited by a lady friend.” (Though, sadly, I haven’t had many of those lately).

  My house is a tidy, two-bedroom ranch that is perfect for an on-the-go bachelor like myself: one bedroom for me and one bedroom for my extraneous stuff, so the rest of the place can stay relatively uncluttered in the event I do get to entertain a member of the fairer sex. Or at least that’s the theory. Most of the time, I share my home with just one other living creature, a black-and-white domestic short-haired cat named Deadline.

  Granted, it’s not always readily apparent that Deadline actually is living. The act of sleeping all night exhausts him so much he can only compensate for it by sleeping all day. He has some brief periods of activity in the late morning and early evening, during which time he mostly eats and uses the litter box. Then it’s straight back to dreamland. Some people describe their cats as curious or playful or affectionate. Mine is best described as dormant.

  “Don’t let me wake you,” I said, as I slipped into my bedroom, where Deadline was snoozing on the radiator cover by the window, bathed in sunlight.

  I opened the door to my closet and selected a charcoal gray suit. Not that it was much of a choice. I only own one suit, which is still one more than a lot of newspaper reporters. I bought it my senior year at Amherst College for job interviews. Now that there are no jobs left in print journalism, I use it exclusively for weddings and funerals. I couldn’t begin to count how many people that suit has married or buried.

  I dressed quickly. It helped I had already been wearing my usual reporter uniform, which included a white shirt and half-Windsor knotted tie. It’s a bit formal by the standards of my profession, which went business casual sometime around the invention of printed type and slowly degraded from there. I get teased by my colleagues for my stodgy attire, but I don’t think that’s fair. I mean, hey, sometimes I wear a blue shirt. Sometimes it even has stripes.

  So, yeah, my wardrobe isn’t especially hip. But neither am I. Over the years, I have resisted the flat-front pant revolution, the slip-on shoe insurrection, the hair product revolt, and a host of other rebellious fashion movements I felt would take me further away from what I really am: an upstanding, prep-school-educated, clean-shaven WASP with freshly cut side-parted hair and absolute
ly no interest in changing styles.

  “Try to keep it down,” I told Deadline as I departed. “I don’t want the neighbors calling in a noise complaint on you.”

  Deadline signaled his acknowledgment by keeping his eyes screwed shut and his body unmoving. “Good boy,” I said.

  I went back outside to my car, a five-year-old Chevy Malibu that often turns women’s heads—but sadly, only because it keeps getting holes in the exhaust line. I’ve been told that driving an aging Malibu isn’t good for my “image,” to which I usually have two responses: one, it doesn’t make sense to spend money on a car in a place like New Jersey because even if the tailgaters don’t get you, the potholes will; and, two, people who judge others based on what car they drive are idiots.

  It took four minutes to get to the Johnson-Eberle Funeral Home, a pristine white Victorian with immaculate landscaping. I parked on the street because the lot behind the building was already full of cars driven by people who had come to pay their last respects to Nancy B. Marino.

  * * *

  If you want good attendance at your funeral, die young. Almost everyone you ever knew is still alive and mobile enough to make it out. It’s only the people who hang on to ninety or one hundred—and outlive their would-be funeral audience—who get the lousy crowds.

  As such, the Johnson-Eberle Funeral Home had put Nancy in the largest of their three viewing rooms, and it still wasn’t big enough. Some of the mourners sat in the rows of white folding chairs set up in the middle of the room. Others stood around the edges. Still more spilled outside into the lobby and down the main hallway that split the center of the building.

  I’m sure some of them were fellow employees of the Eagle-Examiner, but I’d have little chance of knowing them—the distribution arm of our operation is so separate from the newsroom, they might as well be different companies. The Belleville High School Class of 1987 also appeared to be well represented, as was the staff of the State Street Grill. It was, all in all, a nice cross section of regular folks from Essex County, New Jersey.

  Really, there was only one person in the crowd who didn’t fit. He was a tall, patrician-looking man standing self-consciously against the far wall, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else. From his perfectly coiffed ash-blond hair to his waxy pale skin to his insincere blue eyes, I’d know him anywhere: Gary A. Jackman, the not-so-esteemed publisher of the Newark Eagle-Examiner.

  It was a nice gesture for him to show up, and I might have even given him credit for it if I didn’t otherwise detest the man. He had come to us from a chain of smaller papers in Ohio or Michigan or something similarly Midwestern. His lone qualification for the job appeared to be that he knew how to cut a budget better than anyone else. He did not have a background in newspapers before that—I think he operated a national chain of sweatshops, or something like that—and I held it against him every chance I got.

  In the newsroom, where he was universally despised, he was known by a variety of nicknames. The features desk, with its appreciation of alliteration and poetry, called him “Greedy Gary” or “Scary Gary.” In sports, where the locker room influence tends to make them a little crude, he was “Jackoff.” In my corner of the newsroom, where we’re more direct about things, he was “Jackass.”

  In the two years he had been at the paper, he had made it clear to us that he cared deeply about how much money we spent but very little about anything else we did—those forgettable things like telling great stories, uncovering grave injustices, or holding powerful people accountable for their actions. He actually admitted he did not read the newspaper each day, an unforgivable sin in the minds of the people who toiled so assiduously to produce it. Yet his most despicable act may have been that, at a time when he was sacking editors and reporters with lunatic glee, he kept three secretaries. What he did to occupy them was a source of constant speculation.

  His personal appearance only made him easier to dislike. He was perhaps best described as foppish, with his expensively tailored clothes, monogrammed cuff links, and—his personal calling card—a predilection for pocket squares. It was also rumored, though never confirmed, that he had a manicurist come into the office once a week to keep his nails trim, as if he couldn’t just buy nail clippers like everyone else.

  As I approached him from the other side of the room, he had those well-manicured hands crossed in front of him. He was talking with a man who had stubbornly refused to give in to his male-pattern baldness, with one of the worst comb-overs I had ever witnessed: the piece of hair stretched across his shiny head had come loose and was sticking up and to the left, sort of like a single horn on a lopsided unicorn.

  Jackman and the unicorn were having a rather animated conversation—correction: the unicorn was animated, while Jackman just seemed to be tolerating him—and I observed from a distance. The unicorn kept gesturing broadly, occasionally pointing a finger at Jackman, like he was accusing him of something dastardly. Maybe he didn’t like pocket squares? Tough to tell.

  I finally got curious as to what had the guy overstimulated, so I closed to within eavesdropping range. But I was too late. All I heard was Jackman end the conversation with, “… I’m sorry, this just isn’t the time or place. We’ll have to talk later. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

  Jackman rather pointedly turned his body away from the unicorn, who forced out an exasperated sigh and then walked in the opposite direction. A small part of me wondered, Not the time or place for … what exactly? Was the unicorn asking Jackass to dance the polka? But a much larger part of me had a story to write and a deadline to respect. I gave Jackman a moment or two to clear his head, then sidled up to him.

  “Mr. Jackman, Carter Ross, we’ve met before,” I said in a low voice, extending my right hand.

  He looked at me disdainfully and did not uncross his arms, leaving my hand hanging in the air. We had met before, on several occasions. He had even presented me an award for outstanding reporting once. Yet he was examining me like I was something that fell out the back end of one of his foxhunting dogs.

  “I’m doing a feature obit about Nancy Marino for tomorrow’s paper and was hoping I could get a quick quote from you,” I continued, undeterred by his aloofness. “Could you just say a quick word or two about her?”

  Having tossed him the mushiest of all softballs, I slid my notepad out of my pocket to capture whatever dribbled out of his mouth next.

  “If you want to talk to me, you’ll have to call my secretary and set up an appointment,” he said in a cool, clipped tone.

  During my long career in journalism, which began when I was a freshman in high school and was now nearing twenty years, I had been blown off for interviews plenty of times, and by people far more important than Jackass. But I had never been blown off by someone who, at least in theory, was supposed to be on the same team as me. I did my very best to keep my voice down and remind myself that the man had the authority to fire me on a whim.

  “Sir, with all due respect, this will just take a minute or two,” I said. “I’m sure it would mean a lot to the family to have the publisher saying something nice about someone who worked very hard for our newspaper.”

  I stressed the “our newspaper” part, but it did not seem to move him.

  “Call my secretary,” he said, then turned his back on me and started walking to another part of the room for no other reason than to get away from me.

  “Which one of the three?” I shot back, a little louder than was perhaps needed.

  “Just call my secretary,” he said again.

  I frowned. I’m a big boy. I’ve been spurned before and will be spurned again. It was just annoying that it would have taken this man absolutely no effort to say something that would comfort a grieving family, but he still wouldn’t do it. He had taken perhaps three more steps when I momentarily lost my filter.

  “What a douche bag,” I said, in a voice I hoped was loud enough so he could hear it. But he kept walking. My childish insult was lost in the din.
/>
  * * *

  It’s a peculiar thing, being a reporter at a wake. Because you have absolutely no reason to be sad—after all, you’re the only one in the room who never knew the guest of honor—and yet, hanging around a bunch of people in mourning, you’re something less than human if you don’t start feeling a little melancholy, too. Empathy is a burden that way. You start to feel like you actually did know the deceased. And it wasn’t long until Nancy—if you’ll pardon the phrase—started coming alive to me.

  The family had assembled some photos of Nancy, who was petite and, while not a knockout by any means, pretty in a girl-next-door kind of way—or at least she was the girl next door if you happened to live in an Italian neighborhood. She had olive skin, brown eyes, dark hair, a nice smile full of white teeth.

  The pictures, which had been mounted on poster board and displayed on easels, basically told Nancy’s life story. There was Nancy as a carefree kid at the Jersey Shore, with skinned knees and a summertime tan; Nancy at her first communion, looking like the starch in her white dress was chafing her very soul; Nancy with a face full of braces, wearing a softball uniform that bore the name of a local podiatrist; Nancy as a teenager with a head full of eighties Jersey hair, teased up to elevations that could only be described as alpine; Nancy at her graduation, trying to act like a woman in a cap and gown but still looking like a kid.

  After high school, there were fewer photos. It was never Nancy alone after that, just Nancy with family at holiday time, the obligatory Thanksgiving-and-Christmas shots. There wasn’t a single picture of her waitressing or delivering newspapers, the things she spent the majority of her time doing. No one had deemed those activities important or noteworthy enough to permanently record. Such was the life of the common woman.

  I pulled my eyes away from the photos and focused on the rest of the room. Nancy’s family was up front, accepting a stream of visitors by the casket, a highly polished—and conspicuously closed—oak-colored box adorned with large sprays of flowers on either side. A closed casket meant one of two things: a long, slow wasting disease that left the deceased withered beyond repair; or a quick, violent end that left the deceased shattered beyond recognition.