Eyes of the Innocent Page 21

  “Crap,” I said to my empty garage.

  I briefly took stock of my situation, which was admittedly dire. I could call a cab, but that could take half an hour or more—Bloomfield was just suburban enough that you couldn’t run out to the street and hail one. I could call a friend, but that wasn’t guaranteed to be any faster. I could steal a car, but … oh, right, I wouldn’t know how to steal a car if my collection of pleated pants depended on it.

  Suddenly, the solution came to me in the form of that ancient-but-still-running commercial that ends, “Enterprise, we’ll pick you up.” In my head, I could summon the ridiculous image of a rental car gift-wrapped in brown paper, motoring toward someone’s house. It always made me wonder: with brown paper covering everything but the windshield, how did the driver get into the car in the first place? And wouldn’t it be a little dangerous to drive?

  But I didn’t have time to ponder such weighty issues. I dashed inside and quickly entered into negotiations with my local Enterprise franchise. I stressed to the lady on the phone that transaction speed—not make, model, or the presence of an onboard navigation system—was my primary concern. She nicely dispatched a driver who arrived in a car that, much to my relief, came without packaging. Within fifteen minutes, I was on my way to Avenue P.

  Despite my ambivalence on the subject, I had been provided with a nav system anyway. So while I was reasonably certain I knew the way to Avenue P—I had done a piece about illegal drag racing there a few years back—I tapped in the address just to see if the computer knew a quicker way.

  Soon, an alluring female voice was telling me my destination was, of all things, an Enterprise rental car location. It must have been an off-site facility of some sort, spillover from Newark Airport.

  As Nancy—I decided to call my nav system Nancy—guided me ever closer to my destination, I began to suspect our hot tip had not, as Szanto might have hoped, bought us time over the competition. Not when I could hear news helicopters hovering overhead.

  On the ground was more bedlam. Avenue P was a long, straight stretch of road with only two outside access points, at the top and bottom—which is why the drag racers loved it. From atop a highway ramp, I could already see an armada of news vans had created a small media city at the south end, where the police had erected a barricade that could stop a tank brigade. Certainly, I could join them … if I felt like spending my entire day in the cold to learn nothing more than what I could have gotten staying in bed and watching local news.

  Ignoring Nancy’s advice, which would have led me straight into the gaping maw of that information oblivion, I took an end run around to the north side, snaking through the marshland past an abandoned movie theater and a variety of small warehouses and scrap yards. I was pretty confident the boys from the networks wouldn’t know about this way. Homefield at least had some advantage.

  At the top of Avenue P there was a much smaller police presence—just a single patrol car and two officers who looked like they didn’t particularly want to be standing outside on a raw February morning.

  “Hey,” I said, rolling down my window as one of them motioned me to halt. “What’s going on?”

  “Police investigation,” the officer said.

  “Oh,” I said. “I’m just returning my rental car.”

  “How’d you end up over here? You get lost or something?”

  “Nancy told me to go this way.”

  “Who’s Nancy?”

  “My nav system,” I said. “From the sound of her voice, she’s pretty hot.”

  The guy stared at me like I had been given an extra helping of idiot at birth, which is pretty much the effect I was going for. He stepped away from my car for a moment, turned his back, and got on his radio. As an ethical reporter for a legitimate news-gathering agency, I cannot misrepresent myself in order to gain information or access to something. If the cop asks me whether I’m a reporter, it’s pretty much game over.

  But if he doesn’t ask, I don’t exactly have to go volunteering the information.

  He turned around and leaned on my window.

  “Can I see your rental agreement?” he asked.

  “Sure!” I said brightly, and reached for the packet that was still sitting on the passenger seat next to me. He took a cursory glance at the paperwork, handed it back to me, and waved me through without a word.

  Primo didn’t wrestle much with the decision to kill Councilman Wendell A. Byers. It was just something that, when a certain set of facts presented themselves, became the only course of action.

  It began with an argument about a silly house. Primo knew he never should have sold Byers that house, knew it would complicate a business relationship that was already tricky enough. Byers probably should have known better, too. But, ultimately, each man had his weakness. For Primo, it was greed—one more customer to buy one more house. For Byers, it was lust—he liked the idea of having a house for his latest piece of ass. Primo never understood it, but it somehow made Byers feel important.

  So the deal was struck. Then it went bad. And, naturally, Byers couldn’t see it was his own fault. He blamed Primo, who pointed out Byers should have known what he was getting into. That’s when Byers started getting belligerent. And once he started uttering those threats—“I’ll cut you off … I’ll tell everyone on the council you’re a bad actor … no more land for you … you’re finished in this town”—Primo knew he had to act. He had worked too hard to get where he was to have this bozo councilman wreck everything.

  It would mean finding a new councilman to bribe, yes. But there were nine of them. Surely one of them would be amenable—perhaps even Byers’s replacement.

  So, no, the decision wasn’t hard. Killing Byers and getting away with it? That was the difficult part. Primo knew the police would investigate a dead councilman with great vigor. He had to make sure none of the suspicion would land on his doorstep.

  At least officially, there was no relationship between the two men. Primo had always been careful to ensure there was no paper trail that could tie them together. Any investigator looking for one would only bump into Primo’s seemingly unconnected archipelago of LLCs, none of which led directly to the man himself, and to campaign contributions that would have appeared to come from all over. Primo used aliases for everything. Even Byers didn’t know Primo’s legal name.

  The real danger, Primo knew, was Byers’s penchant for blabbery. The man was a human leak, incapable of keeping his mouth shut. What if he told someone about his arrangement with Primo? What if there was something in Byers’s personal files? What if he’d told his little whore everything during their pillow talk? It could get messy.

  Primo had to make sure there were no loose ends.

  CHAPTER 7

  After turning onto Avenue P, I drove slowly past a sprawling auto body shop, an impound lot, a small fabricating plant—the industrial underbelly of America. About midway down, Nancy told me, “Turn right.”

  “Anything you say, sweetheart,” I said.

  I half expected Nancy to reply “Don’t patronize me, dear,” but she stayed quiet as a gate swung upward and I entered the green and white wonderland that was Enterprise’s off-airport facility.

  Inside was a jumbled chaos of official vehicles, marked and unmarked, from Newark police to New Jersey State Police to FBI—a circus of men in dark-colored windbreakers. It was tough to tell if there was a ringmaster for all the madness. From an outsider’s perspective, it just looked like a lot of people with short haircuts running around trying to look important.

  I couldn’t imagine what they were all doing there. Properly deployed, it was enough law enforcement manpower to tackle at least two dozen unsolved murders. Instead, they were all focused on one lousy councilman.

  Following the lines that told me where to return my car, I pulled to a stop under an awning at the direction of a very distracted man in a puffy jacket that had CHECK-IN in block letters on the back. He kept looking at the vast parking lot to his left where,
about two football fields away, all the short haircuts were focusing their attention. With his handheld computer, he scanned a bar code on the back driver’s side window. If it seemed odd to him someone would return a car a mere half hour into the rental, he didn’t say anything about it. Of course, that might be because he never actually looked at me.

  “Shuttle to the airport is that way,” he said, tearing off a receipt and waving vaguely toward the main building.

  “Thanks,” I said, taking the receipt and making a show of walking in the proper direction until I was out of his line of sight, when I began making my way back toward the parking lot.

  Dressed in my black peacoat, dark pants, and rubber-soled dress shoes—and with my own short haircut—I looked coplike enough that no one was stopping me. That was the nice thing about so many different agencies being out here: everyone would just assume I belonged to someone else.

  Plus, there was something about the news helicopters overhead—there were now three of them—that added to the general sense of mayhem. I could have been leading around a tiger tied to a piece of dental floss and I’m not sure anyone would have given me a second glance.

  As I got closer, I saw most of the action was buzzing around a red Ford Taurus. The parking spots around it had been cleared out and an ambulance, lights still flashing, was parked nearby. That meant the councilman’s corpse was still on the premises, perhaps still in the car.

  I kept walking toward it and got to within about twenty yards, where a perimeter of yellow crime scene tape had been erected. I thought about ducking under it—inasmuch as no one had stopped me so far—but didn’t want to risk it just yet. So I went over to a huddle of guys, all of them black or Latino, dressed in jackets that said either CHECK-IN or CLEANING on the back. There seemed to be one guy in the middle who was commanding the floor, so I went over to eavesdrop.

  Except as soon as they became aware of my presence, they all turned and looked at me.

  “Hey, fellas,” I said.

  Several of them nodded, then one of the cleaning guys eyed me and asked, “You a cop or something?”

  I could guess the typical car cleaner at the Newark Airport Enterprise facility was probably making about $8.85 an hour and might have had a run-in or two with the law that left him unfond of those sworn to protect it. So I smiled and said, “Not exactly. I’m a reporter with the Eagle-Examiner. I’m probably not supposed to be here. So keep it quiet, okay?”

  The cleaners grinned, happy to keep my secret and eager to help.

  “He’s in the red car over there, the senator or whatever,” one of the check-in guys said. “He’s still in there. They haven’t moved him yet.”

  “Really,” I said.

  “Eddie is the one here who found him,” another said, pointing to the guy who had been in the middle of the scrum when I came up—a short, weathered-looking Latino.

  “No kidding,” I said. Eddie smiled proudly at me, showing off a mouth at least three teeth short of a full deck. I stuck out my hand: “Carter Ross.”

  “Hey,” he said, not bothering to take his glove off as we shook.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Oh, Eddie … I mean Edgar … Perez … but they call me Eddie,” he said.

  Eddie Perez grinned again. There hadn’t been a lot of visits to the dentist in his past, but he sure seemed friendly.

  “So what time did you find him?” I asked.

  “Man, I don’t know, it was like six … six-thirty … My shift start at six, you know? And it was at least an hour in, so like … seven … seven-thirty. I don’t know. Yeah, seven-thirty … eight.”

  Well. That was precise.

  “And what, he was just sitting in one of the cars?”

  “Yeah, man, I was doing Row Q, you know, going through, making sure there wasn’t no trash, making sure they got the gas in them, you know? And I get to this one car and I can tell someone left something in the trunk because it’s riding low back there.”

  “Tell him about the roast beef sandwich,” one of them prompted.

  “Yeah, yeah, man,” Eddie said. “I went around to the trunk and it smelled a little bit, you know? Like you leave a roast beef sandwich in the car for a couple days and it starts to smell, you know? And people, they do this all the time. The check-in guys are supposed to inspect the trunks, but sometimes they get busy, you know?”

  “Right, sure,” I said, like I had ample experience cleaning gamy roast beef sandwiches out of rental cars.

  “And, man, I open up the trunk thinking I’m going to find someone’s suitcase and a sandwich or something. And there’s this guy all curled up in there, where the, uhh … you know, the thing…”

  “The spare tire?” I asked.

  “Yeah, man, where the spare tire is supposed to be. Except it wasn’t no spare tire in there, it was this guy.”

  “Tell him about the nails,” another one said.

  “Yeah, man, he had these nails sticking out his whole body, you know?” Eddie said.

  “Nails?”

  “Yeah, it was like someone took a nail gun or something and went bam, bam, bam, bam. There had to be like twenty, thirty, fifty nails in him, you know?”

  I immediately got the image of Windy Byers, his corpse riddled with metal spikes, curled up in the wheel well.

  What a way to go.

  * * *

  Eddie recounted the end of his story, calling me “man” at least seven more times and saying “you know” at least a dozen. But the gist of it was that he went to report the presence of an existentially deprived passenger to his boss, who called the authorities, who came streaming in ever more massive numbers. They interviewed Eddie at some length until they finally realized he was just the guy who cleaned the car and, man, he didn’t really know nothin’, you know?

  In truth, Eddie had probably reached the end of his usefulness to me, as well. He had given me some great bits of what we in the business call “color”—those little details that make a story jump off the page. There was a big difference between a lede that read “Newark Councilman Wendell A. Byers was found dead yesterday at a car rental facility near Newark Airport” and “A cleaning man at a car rental facility near Newark Airport made a gruesome discovery in Row Q yesterday morning, when he found the nail-riddled corpse of Newark Councilman Wendell A. Byers rolled up in the trunk of a red Ford Taurus.”

  I thanked Eddie for his help, but as the group broke apart, I sidled up to one of the check-in guys, a black guy with short-cropped hair.

  “Hey, you mind helping me with something real quick?” I asked.

  “Sure, boss, what’s up?” he said, in a perhaps Jamaican, perhaps Haitian, definitely Carribean accent.

  “You got one of those little handheld computers?”

  “Yeah, boss,” he said, pulling it out of the pocket of his puffy jacket.

  “What can you tell me about this car,” I said, rattling off the license plate number to the red Ford that had become Windy Byers’s impromptu hearse.

  He did some typing, working quickly on the small keyboard with his thumbs, the only flesh exposed on his otherwise gloved hands.

  “It was rented from location oh-one-five—that’s here—Sunday at 7:42 P.M. by…” He stopped at the name. “Don … Donaa…”

  “Spell it for me,” I said.

  “First name D-O-N-A-T-O,” he said.

  Donato. Got it.

  “Last name S-E-M-E-D-O.”

  Semedo. Donato Semedo. What kind of name was that? Italian? Spanish? I didn’t dare pull out my pad to write it down, so I did my best to burn it into my memory. Donato Semedo. Donato Semedo.

  “Does that thing give you the renter’s address?”

  “Yeah, boss,” he said, tilting the computer so I could see it.

  It was on Hanover Street in Newark. I didn’t know the street but could guess it was in the Ironbound, which was a German enclave back when all the streets were being named.

  “Thanks,” I said, thankful
to have found such a helpful check-in guy. “That thing tell you anything else?”

  “Rental insurance declined,” he said. “It doesn’t say nothing about the return. He must have just dumped it here.”

  That explained why the cleaner was the first to find the body.

  I might have pushed for more, but I sensed an attack was coming from lower middle management. A man with straight, mousy brown hair, too-big-for-his-face glasses, and a very unfortunate mustache was approaching fast from the direction of the main building. His jacket was embroidered with JEFF on it.

  And Jeff looked very excited.

  “Excuse me, sir, are you with the police?” he asked.

  “No,” I said, and was not inclined to volunteer more than that.

  “Well, this is not a public area,” Jeff said. “And I can’t have you walking around talking with employees. I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

  “What’s wrong with talking? It’s a free country.”

  Good comeback. For a fourth grader.

  “I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” he said, unmoved by my patriotism.

  I briefly considered whether there were any legitimate grounds by which I could protest. But ultimately I was better off bringing as little attention to myself as possible. If the authorities became aware a reporter had been traipsing around their crime scene, they might get persnickety and hit me with trespassing or disturbing the peace or loitering or one of the other charges they typically reserve for young black men hanging out on street corners.

  Better to escape relatively unnoticed.

  “So you’re saying I have to leave?” I asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Okay, no big deal,” I said. “Which way to the airport?”

  Jeff not only showed me the way to the shuttle but escorted me there, stood next to me with his arms crossed until it came, then made sure I was onboard with the door closed and the shuttle moving.

  There were only two other passengers with me, a pair of airport-bound business travelers who had seen my prisoner of war treatment and were nervously clutching their luggage, like I was about to steal it. We passed the police barricade, and as we inched along through the narrow channel between the TV trucks, I decided it was time to join my people. I walked up to the driver and said, “You can drop me off here.”