Eyes of the Innocent Page 25

My hands were shaking, but I managed to force my fingers to call Sweet Thang back, on the off chance it was nothing—like a big spider scared her and made her drop her phone.

  But my call went straight to voice mail and, besides, I knew this wasn’t arachnid related. Sweet Thang had made that kind of noise when Akilah jumped her and put a knife to her throat. It was an I’m-in-trouble-come-help-me-now-don’t-dawdle-please kind of scream.

  I pulled a screeching U-turn, the kind that involved jumping a curb because the road just wasn’t wide enough, and sped toward Akilah’s house. As I blew through a series of red lights—I thought they were orange, Officer—I called my favorite detective sergeant, in hopes of getting some reinforcement.

  “Raines here.”

  “I think Akilah Harris knows who killed Windy,” I said. “And I think the killer is after her.”

  “Whoah, whoah, whoah, slow down. What happened?”

  I relayed what Sweet Thang told me about Akilah knowing more than she let on, then told him about the scream.

  Raines was unimpressed.

  “All you really know for sure is that your colleague’s cell phone doesn’t work,” he said.

  “Come on, you’ve got two young women in trouble, probably kidnapped or worse,” I said, feeling a little frantic that I couldn’t impress on him the gravity of that scream. “Can’t you put out an amber alert or something?”

  “I can’t put out an amber alert because someone yelled just before her cell phone battery conked out,” Raines replied. “We would need confirmation an abduction had occurred. And besides, amber alerts are for kids, not adults.”

  I knew that, of course. I also knew, thinking as a levelheaded cop—and not an easily addled newspaper reporter—he was right: I had a strong hunch something was wrong, but little more than that.

  “If you can get a witness to say they saw a forcible abduction, we’ve got a different scenario on our hands,” Raines continued. “Otherwise, you got nothing.”

  “Can you at least ask a squad car to meet me at the house? Something?” I begged. “For all I know, it’s a hostage situation and they’re still holed up inside.”

  “Fine,” Raines said. “I’ll ask patrol to send a car over. But I’m a little busy, you know? I got a pretty major investigation here, and I’m going to have to ask you to lose this number if you keep bothering me with half-baked hunches.”

  He hung up before I could reply.

  Continuing to drive as if traffic signals were mere suggestions, I contemplated my next move, concluding quickly I didn’t have one. I couldn’t exactly charge into Akilah’s house, guns blazing. Not when the the most dangerous weapon I had in my car was nail clippers.

  Thankfully, I arrived at Akilah’s simultaneously with a white and black Newark patrol car. Two cops, a tall black man and a short Hispanic woman, got out. I waved to them.

  “We were told we got a possible DV,” the guy said. “You the one who called it in?”

  DV. What’s DV? Oh, right: domestic violence. Why would Raines tell them it’s a domestic violence?

  “Yeah, that’s me,” I said. “I was talking to a colleague of mine on the phone and I heard her scream like she was in real trouble.”

  I could tell the guy thought I was wasting his time and was doing his best to suppress an eye roll.

  “And she’s in there!” the female cop said, pointing to Akilah’s burned-out shell of a house which, admittedly, didn’t look very domestic at the moment.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Her name is Lauren. There’s a woman with her named Akilah.”

  “What’s the guy’s name?” the male cop asked.

  “I, uh, I don’t know.”

  More barely restrained eye-rolling.

  “All right,” he said, then turned to his partner. “We’ll check it out. You stay here.”

  The cops walked up to the front door—or, rather, the hole where it used to be—and entered. I braced myself for the sound of gunshots, or another scream, or something. But the cops came out two minutes later. The guy looked perturbed.

  “There’s no one there,” he hollered from the top of the porch. “You sure they were in that place?”

  I was about to answer when I was interrupted by a lady standing on the stoop of a three-family house two doors down.

  “They left,” she said, in an African accent. She had a brightly colored shawl wrapped around her shoulders, and I could guess from the slippers on her feet she didn’t want to leave her spot. The male cop took the lead and walked toward her.

  “Who left, ma’am?”

  “Two women, three guys,” she said. “They got in a black car and drove away.”

  I felt the adrenaline rush renew itself.

  “See? They were kidnapped,” I said in a voice that sounded more like yelling than I wanted.

  The male cop shot me an annoyed look that said, Shut it.

  “Could you please describe the women?” he asked.

  “One was a pretty white girl, blond hair. The other was small, dark. She was pretty, too, but she looked like a mess. I had seen her before. She lives in that house, but I don’t know her.”

  “Now what about the men?” he asked.

  “I didn’t look that hard.”

  “Did it look like they were being forced into the car?” the cop asked.

  She thought for a moment

  “Maybe. Maybe not. The little dark one was crying. But they walked to the car and got inside.”

  Something unintelligible squawked on the cop’s radio, which he had attached to his belt. Whatever it was, he was suddenly in a hurry to leave.

  “All right. Thank you, ma’am. You can go back inside.”

  The cop started walking toward his patrol car.

  “What!” I said. “That’s it? You’re not going to do anything?”

  “You heard her. She said they weren’t abducted.”

  “She said she wasn’t sure. There’s a difference.”

  I panned my eyes toward the female cop, just to see if there was a chance I’d be able to prevail on her softer, female side … except, apparently, she wasn’t into that stereotype. She seemed more concerned her hat wasn’t sitting straight as she walked toward the squad car and paid little heed to my discussion with her partner.

  “She said one of the women was crying,” I pleaded. “Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  “My wife cries all the time,” he replied as he got back into his car. “I’m sorry, sir, we have to go.”

  As he pulled away, the shriek of the tires on the pavement made it all the more emphatic: the police were not going to help me on this one.

  Better sharpen those nail clippers.

  * * *

  Not to denigrate Officer Friendly’s interrogation techniques, but I felt there was a little more to be learned from our eyewitness, so I jogged up to the African woman’s house, climbing the steps to her sagging front porch. There were three doorbells. I rang all three.

  A window to my left cracked open.

  “Yes?” a voice asked. It was the African woman.

  “I’m Carter Ross. I’m a reporter with the Eagle-Examiner. Do you mind if I ask you a few more questions about what you just saw?”

  “Hold on,” she said. Soon, she was standing with the front door slightly ajar. She didn’t ask me in, which was fine. I didn’t have time for hospitality.

  “Yes?” she said again.

  “I’m worried those two women may be in trouble,” I said. “Can you tell me a bit more about the men you saw them with?”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t get a good look.”

  “Please try.”

  She closed her eyes and concentrated for a moment.

  “Well, two of them were large. They were young,” she said. “The other was old. He wasn’t very tall, but he looked like he had muscles, like a weight lifter.”

  She paused.

  “He had a beard, a, what do you call it,” she said, opening her eyes and drawing a circle ar
ound her mouth with her finger. “A goatee.”

  Short. Built. Goatee. It seemed like a description I had heard before.

  “Racially, was he white, black?”

  “I would say … Hispanic.”

  “And how would you describe his hair?” I asked.

  “He didn’t have any. His head was shaved.”

  That cinched it for me. Akilah and Sweet Thang had been kidnapped by the so-called Puerto Rican man, the one Akilah said sold the mortgage on her house. I had dismissed him as being a product of her imagination, just another piece of her intricate fabrication. But really he was like everything else in Akilah’s world: twisted slightly, for storytelling purposes, but basically real.

  It also fit the rough description of the man who had returned Windy’s corpse at Enterprise—Donato Semedo, or whatever his name was—whom Raines had described as short and broad.

  “How long ago did they leave?” I asked.

  “About ten minutes ago,” she said.

  In other words, right after I heard Sweet Thang’s scream. He probably marched them right out of the house. It was a bold move—a kidnapping in broad daylight—but I supposed if Akilah knew something about the murder of Windy Byers, the killer would take some big risks to be rid of her.

  And anyone who happened to be with her.

  “And you said the car was black?”

  “Yes, long and black. Like the cars the men drive to pick people up at the airport.”

  “A livery cab?”

  “Yes, a livery cab.”

  “Thank you, ma’am, you’ve been very helpful,” I said, slipping my card through the door opening. “Please call me if you think of anything else.”

  I trotted back to my Malibu, wondering how I could track down a single black livery cab in a city where ten thousand of them came to pick people up at the airport every day.

  I had no shot.

  At this point, my only connection to the Puerto Rican man was Hector Gomes of Van Buren Street. I had to get to him, fast, with what resources I had.

  I made two phone calls. The first was to Denardo Webster. My picture was helpful, but he was the only one who really knew what Gomes looked like. I told Webster about the abduction and instructed him to meet me at Gomes’s house just as soon as he could get his feet off his desk.

  My second call was to Tommy, who would be helpful if there was, in fact, a language barrier to surmount.

  “Hey, can I pick you up outside the office in five minutes?” I said. “I think Sweet Thang is in real trouble, and I may need your Spanish or maybe even some fake Portuguese.”

  “Okay,” Tommy said. “I’ve been figuring out some real interesting stuff with these dead donors, by the way.”

  “Great. You can tell me on the way.”

  Once again, I made the Malibu do things the good people at Chevrolet never intended, which might have bought me an extra minute or two. I jammed the brakes to noisy effect directly outside the building, where Tommy was waiting.

  “What’s going on?” he asked as he climbed in.

  As I tore off toward the Ironbound, I told him about Sweet Thang’s bone-chilling scream, my inability to convince the authorities to take it seriously, and the existence of the so-called Puerto Rican man.

  “I think I know who he is,” Tommy said. “But he’s not Puerto Rican. I think he’s Brazilian.”

  “Tell me more.”

  “Remember how you asked me to check out all the dead donors and see if maybe there was something they had in common?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I was looking at the names for a while, and I wasn’t getting anywhere. They were just a bunch of dead guys who lived in the Ironbound and they … Red light, red light, red light.”

  I looked up and saw, sure enough, a traffic light. And it was red.

  “Sorry,” I said, wearing off a layer of brakepad but managing to get the car stopped just a foot or so over the line.

  “No problem. Anyhow, after a while I stopped looking at the names and honed in on the addresses instead. You know, like maybe there was a pattern there?”

  “Okay,” I said, gunning the car as soon as the light turned.

  “And it turned out there was,” Tommy continued. “All of the houses had been flipped.”

  “Flipped?”

  “Yeah, you know, bought for a low price, rehabbed, then sold…”

  “I know what flipping is,” I said.

  “Sorry. Anyhow, once I caught onto the pattern, it was pretty easy to see. Basically, after all these old people died, their houses had been bought by an LLC—that stands for ‘limited liability company,’ by the way.”

  “I know what—”

  “I know, I know, sorry. I just didn’t know what any of this stuff was before I started covering it. Anyway, it’s all these different LLCs, never the same one twice, buying these houses and flipping them for, like, twice the original price or more six months later.”

  “Okay,” I said as we passed under the railroad tracks by Newark Penn Station. “So, to play devil’s advocate, who’s to say these LLCs have anything to do with one another?”

  “Well, they don’t appear to, except I recognized one of the names: Bahia Partners LLC,” Tommy said. “I remembered from a council meeting I covered not long ago where they were voting on selling some city land to Bahia Group LLC. Then I started looking through the council minutes from the last few years—our library has them on file—and I started seeing a few other land-buying LLCs that turned out to have very similar names to LLCs that had flipped properties. There was, like, Amazonas Associates LLC and Amazonas Company LLC, Esperito Santo Investments LLC and Esperito Santo Financial LLC…”

  “I get it, I get it,” I said. “Someone got tired of thinking up new names so they just started recycling the old ones with a small twist on them.”

  “Yeah, and it turns out they’re all names of states in Brazil,” Tommy said. “And you’ll never guess who was always proposing the land sales to those particular LLCs.”

  “Oh, but let me try,” I said. “Councilman Wendell A. Byers.”

  “Very good,” Tommy said. “You’re pretty smart for a guy who thinks khaki is the new black.”

  * * *

  I had to slow down once we crossed into the Ironbound and onto Ferry Street, the only road in Newark that is reliably crowded at just about any hour of the day.

  As we crept along, I assembled the narrative in my head. A house flipper who wanted to get into new home construction knew it would be handy to have a city councilman in his pocket. So he started using the names of dead people to make campaign donations well above and beyond the legal limit. In return, the councilman supports the developer in making city land purchases, likely at generous rates.

  It sounded like your garden variety Garden State corruption. So where did that cozy little relationship go wrong?

  I couldn’t figure it out. Or, more accurately, I didn’t have the time to give it proper thought. Having passed Monroe, Madison, and several other dead presidents, I finally made it to Van Buren Street. It was one way, the wrong way, so I had to hook around on Polk. He was a better president anyway.

  Finally I reached the address, which belonged to a small, wooden-framed, single-family house with no apparent sign of activity.

  “Okay,” Tommy said. “What now?”

  “Well,” I said. “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “Not to me.”

  “Damn. Me, either.”

  I looked around for an aging white Datsun and saw it parked down the street, which wasn’t especially surprising. If this guy really was a contractor of some sort, he probably shouldn’t be real busy late in the afternoon on a raw day in February.

  Another car pulled onto the block and I recognized it as a city-owned SUV.

  “Let’s go,” I said. “That’s Denardo Webster, Windy’s chief of staff.”

  “And down low lover?” Tommy asked.

  “One and the same.”


  I got out of my car and hailed Denardo, who pulled alongside with his window down.

  “Okay, here’s the deal: this is the Spanish dude’s house,” I said, pointing across the street. “We need to figure out who his boss is. Then we need to figure out where the the boss is. And we need to figure it out fast.”

  “And you’re thinking the Spanish dude’s boss is the guy that killed Windy?” Denardo said.

  “I am.”

  “All right,” Denardo said. “Just do me a favor: when we find this bastard, I want a few minutes alone with him to explain my grief over losing my friend.”

  He could have all year, as far as I was concerned.

  “No problem,” I said.

  Denardo parked in front of us. He grabbed a city council badge off the dashboard—what was he going to do with that? Table some resolutions? Recommend further study?—and joined Tommy and me.

  As we crossed the street to confront an unwitting Hector Gomes, I wondered what we must have looked like to an outsider. There was me, the whitest man in Newark; Denardo, the black man-mountain; and Tommy, a scrawny, nattily dressed Cuban kid.

  What an odd trio. Yet here we were, the best and perhaps last hope Sweet Thang and Akilah had at making it to tomorrow.

  We reached the front door, and as I considered the etiquette of knocking versus ringing, Denardo lowered his shoulder and barreled into it, grunting as his three hundred-plus pounds connected and splintered the wood around the lock.

  “Cheap door,” Denardo said as it gave way. “That’s the problem with these house flippers. They don’t build stuff to last.”

  Tommy and I followed Denardo as he stormed into the living room, where we found a slightly built Hispanic man dressed in a thin white T-shirt, frantically pulling up his boxer shorts.

  “Police,” Denardo shouted, waving his city council badge. “Let’s see those hands.”

  The hands shot into the air, and as we all took in the scene before us—the open porno magazine, the box of tissues, the small tent he was pitching in his shorts—we all quickly reached the same conclusion: Hector Gomes had been fondling his love monkey.

  “Oh, that’s just unfortunate,” Tommy said.

  “Would you look at this little pervert?” Denardo said. “I mean, what’s this?”

  Denardo picked up the magazine, which had been bestowed with the very subtle title ¡Gigante Tetas! As advertised, it featured some women whose breasts appeared to have been significantly aided by science. Denardo waved the magazine above his head as if it was evidence of the most heinous turpitude.