Eyes of the Innocent Page 3

  “You’re going to do the interview, right?” she asked with big, imploring blue eyes.

  “No. You are. You’re the one she obviously trusts. At this point, I’m just the guy driving the car.”

  “But what do I doooo?” she whined.

  “You’ll be fine,” I said, trying not to look at her. “When we sit down, just ask her what happened and then let the conversation flow. Be understanding. Make sure she realizes you’re not judging her. Cry all you want to. It’ll be perfect.”

  “Oh, my goodness, thank you so much,” Sweet Thang gushed, and touched me again, this time on the shoulder. “I knew working with you was going to be the best thing ever.”

  “Well,” I said, gradually trying to inch away but finding the Malibu had restricted my westward movement. “I’m sure we’ll have fun.”

  “I know we’ll have fun,” she said, fixing me with a serious look, placing her hand back on my forearm and giving my arm a pat.

  Thankfully I saw Akilah coming out of the front door, which I used as an excuse to get out of the Malibu and wave for her. The air was cool on my face and I realized I was flushed. Carter Ross, star investigative reporter for the mighty Newark Eagle-Examiner, reduced to a blushing teenager by the wiles of one blond coed.

  Akilah climbed into the backseat and soon we were pulling up alongside African Flavah. Granted, I’m probably not real typical of the clientele at African Flavah—and I have a hard time saying the name without sounding ridiculously Caucasian—but the restaurant’s owner, a guy named Khalid, was a buddy of mine and a real inspiration. Back in the mid-1990s, Khalid and his wife, Patty, had opened their diner in a row of burned-out, empty storefronts on a part of Springfield Avenue that still hadn’t recovered from Newark’s 1967 riots.

  But their diner flourished. And soon, so did the neighborhood around it. A clothing store moved in a few doors up. A bodega and a barbershop opened a few doors down. Then came a small electronics store and a furniture store. It was a regular renaissance.

  Along the way, Khalid and Patty’s diner became a local institution, one so revered that in all the years they had been in business, Khalid proudly told me, they had never been robbed once. It helped that Khalid treated all his customers with respect and dignity, which wasn’t always the case with business owners in the hood. The matching bulletproof security cameras—one inside, one outside—might also have something to do with it.

  As we entered, Khalid and I exchanged greetings and before long we were seated in a booth along the wall with a pot full of coffee. Akilah attacked it like it was planning to run off.

  In this different light—when she wasn’t threatening my colleague with a very large knife—she looked younger than I originally thought. Younger and prettier. Her body was slim but not without curves in the right places. Her hair was straight and pulled back into a no-nonsense ponytail, showing nicely formed cheek and jaw bones and a slender, graceful neck. There was definitely potential there. Throw on some makeup and a dress, and I bet she’d be a gal any guy would like to have on his arm.

  Still, she had that ghetto hardness to her face. It’s a look that comes from learning at a too young age that only the strong survive and only suckers trust someone else to help them do it. You can see it in the way the eyes flit about, in the way the body seems constantly tense, in the way the brain always seems to be manipulating a set of odds.

  Yet somehow Sweet Thang had slid underneath that tough, cynical exterior. Maybe it was because Akilah’s math told her that a white girl with a ridiculous nickname and nice clothes couldn’t possibly be out to hurt her. Maybe it was because she was too damn tired to keeping doing all the calculations.

  Either way, Akilah’s reactions to Sweet Thang were different. She was allowed in, even when most others were not.

  After we placed our order and handed back our menus, Sweet Thang looked at me imploringly one last time. I shook my head. She rolled her eyes. I nudged her under the table with my foot. She batted her eyelashes. I crossed my arms. She got the hint.

  “So,” Sweet Thang said as gently as she could, “what happened?”

  * * *

  Akilah looked down at the table.

  “I don’t even know. I mean, I know I shouldn’t have left them at home alone,” she began. “It’s my fault. It’s all my fault.”

  Her eyes filled with water again. I grabbed a napkin for blotting. Sweet Thang took her hand.

  Over the next hour or so, it all came out—sometimes in a torrent, other times in a tumble. It was one of those interviews that could have doubled as a therapy session. Sweet Thang nodded at all the right times, shushed when she needed to, supported Akilah’s every emotional need.

  I was just the guy with the pen, furiously taking notes.

  As I suspected, Akilah Harris’s twenty-four years on this planet had seldom been easy. Her father was never really in the picture. She said she was four when her mother died of a drug overdose. Akilah didn’t know what drug and didn’t provide many details. But I suppose, to a four-year-old, none of that would have been especially significant.

  She had been taken in by an aunt who lived in the Baxter Terrace Public Housing Project, a grim collection of low-rise brick buildings not far from Interstate 280. It was not exactly what you would call a kid-friendly environment.

  Akilah explained how she had gotten pregnant for the first time when she was sixteen, and the aunt—who was very religious and therefore very ashamed—basically disowned her. She dropped out of school to support herself and the child. With no other relatives in the area, she stayed with a succession of friends in Baxter Terrace. Then the baby died of a heart defect when it was less than six months old.

  Akilah got pregnant again when she was eighteen, which is how she got Alonzo; then again when she was twenty, which is how Antoine came to be. Akilah didn’t say anything about the father, which was hardly unusual. Dads didn’t always stick around in that part of town.

  Really, it seemed like Akilah had only caught one break in her young life. She managed to find a decent job. She said it was at University Hospital, and it “paid good”—which probably meant she was pulling down $30,000 a year, including overtime. That didn’t go very far in most parts of Northern New Jersey, one of the most expensive areas of the country to live in. But to a kid from Baxter Terrace, it could still feel like a lot of money.

  And, naturally, the first thing she wanted to do was get the hell out of Baxter Terrace.

  But that’s where things got complicated. About four years ago, not long after Antoine was born, she got connected with a guy—she was kind of vague about the details—who, in turn, connected her with another guy—she described him as “a Puerto Rican guy”—who, in turn, ushered poor, orphaned Akilah Harris into her very own home.

  “It was a chance to raise my children somewhere else besides Baxter Terrace,” she said. “I had to do it.”

  For a while, it worked out fine. Then, suddenly, she couldn’t afford it anymore. Sweet Thang—a guileless creature with the kind of naïveté that only the young possess—asked a few follow-up questions about how such a thing could even be possible and seemed genuinely confused. I would have to explain it to her later. Akilah Harris had gotten slammed with a pernicious form of subprime mortgage.

  People hear the term “subprime” and get confused, because the “sub” makes it sound like it’s some kind of good deal. It’s not. The “prime” refers not to the rate but to your status as a borrower. If you’ve got five years of perfect credit and a steady job, you qualify for a prime mortgage at a reasonable rate. Being subprime meant that something about you was less than perfect and you were going to get charged a rate that only barely failed to qualify as loan-sharking.

  Except, of course, they didn’t start out that way. Many of the subprime loans that floated around the ghetto a few years back had had introductory rates far below what the permanent rate would be. It made an otherwise unaffordable house suddenly fall into just about anyone�
�s price range. For a while. Then—surprise!—the real rate kicked in. Just like that, you went from 4 percent interest to 12 percent interest and your monthly payment doubled overnight.

  The Puerto Rican man probably told Akilah—and countless other dupes—not to worry about the interest rate reset. After all, it would only take a year or two before they had enough equity in the house to refinance to a regular loan.

  And that was true—as long as credit remained easy and the housing market stayed supernova hot. For a while, it did. I had written about Newark neighborhoods where the average home price, driven primarily by real estate speculators, was doubling every two years.

  The only problem is, nothing like that lasts forever. When the global credit crunch hit and the easy money stopped flowing, the bubble that was Newark’s real estate market experienced a big, messy burst. And people like Akilah Harris, who were led to believe the good times would never end, were finished. The foreclosures came in huge waves.

  Some people figured out pretty quickly their days among the landed gentry were over and accepted it graciously, slinking back to the apartments from which they came with their credit scores in shambles. Others tried to do short sales or loan workouts, hoping to emerge with the shirts on their backs—and often nothing more.

  And then, every once in a while, there’s a real hardhead, like Akilah. She was so determined to hang on to her house—in the face of a financial reality that dictated otherwise—she got herself another job. It was a second-shift job cleaning floors at a pallet-making company.

  She just couldn’t find any second-shift child care—not for anything she could afford, anyway. And with her mother dead and her aunt refusing to be part of her life, she had no family to leave her sons with. So each day, she worked at the hospital from 7 A.M. to 3 P.M., picked up the boys from daycare, brought them home, and put them in her bedroom with the TV on.

  She left them snacks. And then she locked the door “so they couldn’t get in no trouble.”

  Which is why, when that fire started at 9 P.M., they had no hope of escape.

  * * *

  Akilah finished up the details of how the previous evening unfolded for her. None of her neighbors knew she worked a second job or where it was, so no one from the fire department—or the police department or child protective services—had been able to notify her about what had happened. She was just walking back from work a little after 1 A.M. when she saw all the fire trucks and cop cars still jamming her street.

  A neighbor collared her before she could get to her house, explained what happened, and convinced her she would be arrested for child endangerment if the cops found her. Akilah spent the night weeping on the neighbor’s floor. When she awoke in the morning, the authorities had finally left. She went back to her house to collect some of the things that hadn’t been destroyed in the fire and get some items for her boys’ funeral.

  That’s when we found her.

  “I know I should have just let the police take me, but I just wanted to spend a little bit of time in the house,” she said. “I just felt like, I don’t know, like it was the only place I could be close to my boys. I knew I hadn’t been there for them in life so I wanted to be there for them in death. Maybe that sounds stupid, but that’s what I was thinking.”

  Akilah sighed.

  “So that’s my sad story,” she said.

  It was, I had to admit, an extraordinary interview. I couldn’t believe she had shared so much with such brutal candor. Most people couldn’t be that honest with themselves, much less with two strangers.

  At the same time, she was an orphaned only child who worked sixteen-hour days and didn’t seem to have a soul in the world she could count on. She was probably just desperate for someone to listen.

  And in two newspaper reporters, she had found a more than receptive audience. Sweet Thang had been mopping tears off her own face for most of the last hour. My eyes were dry, though I felt like my insides had been cleaned out by a canal dredger.

  “What do you think the police are going to do to me?” Akilah asked.

  The question had clearly been addressed to me, the white guy with the tie.

  “It depends on how hard-assed the prosecutor’s office feels like being,” I said. “If you had other children still in your care, there might be pressure to get the kids removed from you and put in foster care. And to make sure you never got them back, the prosecutor might throw the book at you—child endangerment, negligent homicide. But as it is, they might not feel the need to go after you as much. Do you have a record?”

  She shook her head.

  “Well, that’ll help,” I continued. “There’s a possibility if you cooperate with them, they’ll let you plead to something that’ll give you probation and nothing more.”

  “I deserve to go to jail,” she said, without hesitation. “For what I did? I hope they send me away for a long time.”

  I hoped they didn’t. I’m not saying I wanted to nominate Akilah for Mother of the Year. But throwing this young woman in jail wasn’t going to solve much of anything. I seriously doubted the state of New Jersey could mete out a punishment more severe than the life sentence of pain and regret she had already received for losing those two boys.

  And ultimately, what was she really guilty of? Of making a tragically poor decision about child care, sure. But beyond that? She was a single mother who wanted to raise her children someplace other than the projects and had been too unsophisticated to avoid the usurious scumbags who preyed on that desperation.

  The real villain here was that industry of scumbags. It started with that “older man,” whoever he was, whose job it had been to hustle fresh meat for the Puerto Rican man, whose job it was to sign them up. But it didn’t stop there. Next were the lending executives, who were underwriting the borrowing with impossibly reckless loan products, approving mortgages for people who obviously did not have the means to pay them back. Then came the investment bankers who were bundling and packaging those bad loans into securities that were somehow rated AAA, which proved to be the lipstick on the proverbial pig.

  Some of those Wall Street crooks—the ones that didn’t get bailed out—got a little bit of comeuppance when those securities were suddenly worth pennies on the dollar. The crooks on the street? The Older Man and the Puerto Rican man? They were still out there, finding new ways to enrich themselves on the misery of others.

  And while I couldn’t stop them from doing it, I could at least hit them with the only weapon a newspaper reporter had: public embarrassment. The Older Man’s role in the whole thing was probably a little too tangential to go at him, presses blazing. But the Puerto Rican man, if I could find him, was a nice target. A story with the headline “Sleazy Bastard” above it would do just fine.

  “Tell me a little more about the Puerto Rican man,” I said. “You keep a phone number for him? A business card maybe?”

  She shook her head.

  “Do you remember his name?” I asked.

  “It was like…” She groped around her memory for a second or two, then gave up. “I don’t know.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “He wasn’t tall or nothing, but he was built,” Akilah said. “He had a goatee he pet all the time, like it was his cat or something. He was dark skinned, for a Puerto Rican. He was bald…”

  She paused to try and think of more, but nothing was forthcoming.

  “About how old?”

  “I don’t know. Forty? Fifty?”

  Or more. Or less. To twenty-four-year-olds, I think any age over thirty-five becomes a blur.

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Not in a long time.”

  “Can you think of anyone who might know more about the guy?”

  “I mean, you can go into the projects and ask around. People there will probably remember him.”

  I nodded. They probably did remember. Whether they would tell a cracker like me was another issue.

  “Did you
keep any of the paperwork?”

  “I never got no paperwork,” she said.

  That was probably not true. But it didn’t matter. That’s why the Founding Fathers, in their infinite and righteous wisdom, created the blessing that is public records: so reporters like me could snoop around.

  The county kept copies of mortgages down at the courthouse. And while that would only provide me the name of the lender, not the mortgage broker, I could work backward from there. Because while I had no legal rights to Akilah’s closing documents—which are not public record—Akilah did. I could gently assist her in getting the necessary papers from her lender. Problem solved.

  I’d have my sleazy bastard in no time.

  * * *

  Our breakfast long since demolished, I threw a tip on the table, then paid our bill at the register up front. As we walked back to my car, tears started rolling down Akilah’s cheeks. Naturally, that set Sweet Thang’s waterworks going, too. They both hopped in the Malibu’s backseat, leaving me to chauffeur us to Akilah’s place. I felt sort of like a white Morgan Freeman driving a black Miss Daisy. Except in this case, Miss Daisy kept wiping her runny nose on her shirtsleeve.

  When we arrived, Sweet Thang hopped out with Akilah. They swapped cell phone numbers, then hugged. Sweet Thang watched Akilah disappear inside the front door, then climbed back in the front seat.

  “I told her she could stay at my place tonight if she wanted,” Sweet Thang said.

  “That is such a bad idea,” I said as I got us under way.

  “That girl has nothing and I have a foldout couch in my apartment,” Sweet Thang countered. “It’s the Christian thing to do. Don’t you ever ask yourself what Jesus would do?”

  I was tempted to tell her it was a moot point: Jesus came along about 1,950 years before foldout couches. But I didn’t want to turn this into an argument about religion—or convertible furniture—so I tried to put a halt to it.

  “I’m going to pretend you didn’t just invite a source to spend the night,” I said. “And you’re going to conveniently forget to mention this to anyone back at work. Fair?”