Eyes of the Innocent Page 4

  “Whatever,” Sweet Thang spat.

  I realize I may encourage a slight blurring of the line between reporter and source, but there still is a line. I find a good rule of thumb for journalism ethics is to think of what the headline would be if another newspaper decided to write about how you covered a particular story. JOURNALIST SHOWS SYMPATHY TO MOURNING MOTHER is something I could live with. JOURNALIST HARBORS FUGITIVE FROM JUSTICE didn’t have as nice a ring. I hefted a large sigh.

  “What?” Sweet Thang said.

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on, what is it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Don’t ‘nothing’ me,” Sweet Thang scolded. “If you’re going to be my mentor, we need to have open lines of dialogue. Communication is the most important part of any relationship. We have to be able to share our thoughts and feelings.”

  I was suddenly having a flashback to my last serious relationship. She had moved into my cozy little bungalow in Nutley and had taken to redecorating it room by room. Then she decided to redecorate me. She wanted me to put product in my hair. And wear flatfront pants. And pay more attention to men’s fashion magazines than I did to my fantasy football team. And, above all else, she wanted me to share my feelings, and share my problems, and share my fears.

  I’m not saying I’m one of those emotionally constipated men who doesn’t have a clue what’s going on between his ears. At the same time, there are certain areas where a man has to be able to set his own agenda. Hair product is one of them. So, finally, I shared with her. I shared that no matter how many times she asked, I wasn’t going to join her for a manicure. She left me soon after for some guy at her advertising firm. You can probably find them at a nail salon right now.

  “Hel-LO?” Sweet Thang said. “Feelings?”

  “I feel,” I said, measuring my words, “that it’s a bad idea for you to have this woman sleeping at your apartment. I know this is hard to hear, but for all we know, Akilah is a nutbag who decided she didn’t want to be a mom anymore and burned down her own house with her kids locked inside.”

  “Do you really think that’s what happened?”

  I didn’t. But I still planned to have Sweet Thang call the hospital and the pallet company to verify her employment, just in case.

  “That’s not the point,” I said. “The point is, we just don’t know. So not only is it a bad idea professionally to have a source living with you, it could be unsafe personally, as well.”

  She turned to face me, smiling wide.

  “That’s sooo sweet of you,” she said. “I knew you were the best mentor ever. I can’t wait to tell Uncle Hal what a sweetheart you are and that you’re looking out for me. I know he’ll totally appreciate it.”

  I clenched the steering wheel with both hands and drove. Sweet Thang was playing me like a Stradivarius, which is probably what she had done to every Y chromosome she had come across since puberty. All I could do was remind myself once again that she was the female equivalent of the Strait of Magellan: thin, beautiful, and treacherous.

  During the final few blocks to the office, she kept babbling about how wonderful I was. It wasn’t until we pulled into the Eagle-Examiner parking garage I was finally able to get a sentence in.

  “Okay, here’s the plan,” I said, mindful of Szanto’s admonition to keep Sweet Thang away from the computer keyboard while any meaningful writing was going on. “First of all, give me your cell number.”

  “I have two,” she said. “Which one do you want?”

  “You have two cell phones,” I said, mostly out of disbelief.

  “Yeah, I talk a lot”—I noticed, believe me—“so sometimes I run out of battery before I have the chance to recharge.”

  “Two cell phones,” I said again. “First, allow me to scoff at you.”

  I made my best scoffing noise.

  “Okay,” I said, “now I’ll take those numbers.”

  I file all work-related numbers last name, first name. So I saved these in my phone as “Thang, Sweet” and “Thang, Sweet 2.”

  I gave her my number and she programmed it in her phone. Uh, phones.

  “You program all your numbers in both phones?” I asked.

  “Hell-OOO, what if the other one is out of batteries?” she asked.

  Good point. Absurd but good.

  “Okay, I’m going to start transcribing notes”—and write the beginning, middle, and end of the story—“and I was hoping you could take a trip up to the county courthouse and get a copy of Akilah Harris’s mortgage for us.”

  “No problem,” she said, smiling sweetly. “I’ll do anything you ask.”

  She held my gaze a beat longer than was necessary. Somewhere in my lower body, I felt a twitch.

  * * *

  I bid Sweet Thang farewell, wiped my suddenly sweaty brow, then went back up to the newsroom to search for a cold shower.

  Instead, I found the one thing that worked faster:

  “Crrrtrrr!” Szanto bellowed as soon as I was within radar range.

  I walked into his office and sat down to find him munching a mouthful of antacid tablets—berry flavored, by the scent of things.

  “Whtdgt?” he asked.

  I took that for “what do you got?” and plunged forward, telling him how the intern almost got her neck slit, then about Akilah Harris and her remarkable story. It was a narrative so moving I felt my throat constricting at several points during the retelling. I touched on every tragedy that had shaped her young life, emphasizing that while her tale was unique, it was also achingly typical of the struggle faced by many working poor. I concluded that sharing her story in a thoughtful manner would offer a real insight into our local community and do our readers a tremendous service.

  Szanto sat quietly as I spoke. He even stopped chewing his antacid. I felt like I was really reaching him. I was drilling through that hardened, old-time newsman’s shell and reaching that fundamentally decent inner core that remembered a good newspaper was ultimately about real people and their stories. And when I was done, there was only one thing he could ask:

  “Can we strip the story across the top of tomorrow’s front page?”

  No, wait. That wasn’t it.

  “Come again?” I said.

  “I said, ‘What about the effing space heater?’ ”

  “Sal!” I exploded. “Haven’t you just been listening to me? This is human tragedy. Who cares about a damn space heater?”

  Szanto clenched his fists.

  “I sent you out there to get a simple story about a space heater,” he said.

  “And I came back with something ten times better. Even Brodie is going to see that. We’ll have another chance to write space heaters next week. Come on. This is good stuff and you know it.”

  Szanto released his fists and instead channeled his stress into grinding his teeth.

  “Well,” he said at last, “could you at least mention the possibility of a space heater? I’m not saying you have to put it in your lede. Just sneak it into the nut graf somewhere.”

  “Oh, for the love of … are you serious?”

  Of course he was. Szanto and serious were like fruit flies and ripe bananas.

  “Fine,” I huffed.

  “Good. Now, I think we can make a run at A1”—that’s what we called the front page of the newspaper—“but I want you to write it hard.”

  “What do you mean, ‘Write it hard’?”

  “I mean, spare me the slant about the poor woman from the ghetto victimized by the larger forces of social injustice.”

  That, of course, is exactly what I planned to do. And Szanto had been my editor long enough to know it.

  “Are you really that hard-hearted?” I asked.

  “Oh, I’ve got a heart of fluffy dryer lint,” Szanto said. “I’m just saying, let’s not let her completely off the hook here. The fact is, nobody forced that woman to sign a mortgage she couldn’t afford. And nobody forced her to compound the error by getting a second job instead
of just getting rid of the place. And you want to tell me she couldn’t have tried a little harder to find somewhere to put those kids? Let’s remember, the victims here are those two little boys.”

  Valid points, all. And in absence of a good counterargument, I pouted.

  “Come on now, you can still make it read pretty,” Szanto said, and suddenly was rooting for something on his crowded desk. “Just remember the story is about this.”

  He slid that day’s paper across the desk and patted two fingers on the pictures of Alonzo and Antoine.

  They were two happy little faces, each with sharp features—like their mother—and a set of eyes that captivated me the way they had Sweet Thang earlier in the day. They were eyes that glowed with hope, love, and happiness. They were the eyes of two little boys who’d never hurt anyone or done anything to deserve this. They were the eyes of the innocent.

  “It’s about those dead little boys and all the people who failed them,” Szanto finished.

  I nodded. He was right, of course—just as I had been right about the space heater story being bunk. But that was a good editor-reporter relationship. You had to keep each other honest.

  “Fine,” I said, then summoned my best parting shot: “But if you screw with my lede I’m going to have Sweet Thang complain to Uncle Hal. And then you’ll really be sorry.”

  Szanto grinned, then shoveled in a fresh mouthful of antacid tablets. I retreated to my desk and started pounding on the keyboard. It was two-thirty in the afternoon, which meant I had enough time to craft a lovely story—but not enough time to dawdle. Our deadline for first edition isn’t until 8. But Szanto would start hovering over my shoulder by 6, if not sooner.

  I was just starting to settle into the story when “Thang, Sweet” popped up on my cell.

  “It’s not here,” she said breathlessly. “The mortgage. It’s not here.”

  “What do you mean it’s not there? It has to be there,” I said, annoyed she couldn’t complete such a simple reporting errand.

  “I know, but it’s not.”

  “What address did you use?”

  She repeated the number on Littleton Avenue that she and I had both seen earlier that day.

  “You went to the Register of Deeds and Mortgages, right?” I asked.

  “Yeah, and I typed ‘Akilah Harris’ into the computer, and nothing came up. Then I searched by address, and nothing came up. Then I looked up the block and lot number and searched under that, but nothing came up.”

  I sighed and peeked up at the clock. It told me I didn’t have time to run up to the courthouse.

  “So I flirted with one of the male title searchers and got him to help me,” Sweet Thang continued. “He was this total stoner, and stoners don’t usually go for me, because I’ve got more of that wholesome look, you know? Anyway, he couldn’t find it on the computer so he looked up the deed and got the recording date. Then he went into the books with the hard copies. He didn’t know where the book was and he was going to give up, so I flirted with him some more. Finally, he found it. The book had been misfiled. And then when he got to where the mortgage was supposed to be, he said it had been ripped out.”

  “Ripped out?”

  “That’s what he said. Then I had him show it to me. There was a space where it should have been. But it jumped from page 177 to page 195. He said it was totally weird and he had never seen anything like it before.”

  “Yeah, me neither,” I said.

  “Then I asked one of the office clerks, and he was this nice guy at first, really helpful. Then he went away for a little while, and when he came back he was all weird with me. He said it wasn’t there and I had to leave.”

  I frowned.

  “Did the clerk know you were a reporter?” I asked.

  “Yeah. He was really nervous about that. He practically kicked me out. He was just like, ‘You have to leave. I’m sorry, you have to leave.’ ”

  I frowned some more. Perhaps if I thought about it, I could produce a perfectly reasonable, perfectly innocent explanation for why documents pertaining to a scandalously predatory loan were missing. But nothing was coming immediately to mind.

  Something wasn’t right.

  Primo had been one of the first Brazilians to arrive in Newark during the late 1980s, never realizing he was in the vanguard of what eventually became a substantial migration.

  His father, a well-respected civil engineer, begged Primo not to go, trying to reason with him. Primo was also an engineer. With his father’s connections, and with Brasília in the midst of a building boom, there would be plenty of work for many years to come. Why leave for a country where he knew no one and lacked the proper credentials to continue in his chosen field?

  Primo was adamant. The father threatened to disown the son. Primo told him to go ahead. He was twenty-seven years old. He wanted a fresh start in America. He was leaving behind everything—his job, his wife, even a small child. He told his wife he would send for her just as soon as he got settled.

  But that was a lie. Upon arriving in America, he severed all contact. He changed his name. Then he changed it again. He learned how to manipulate the American system to give himself multiple identities, none of which were truly his own.

  He settled in the section of Newark known as the Ironbound, so named because it was surrounded by railroad tracks on all sides. It was almost entirely Portuguese back then, but that was not a problem for Primo. They spoke the same language. And even though the Portuguese knew he wasn’t one of them—his accent was different, his skin darker—they tolerated him.

  Primo took whatever job he could find at first. He parked cars at a garage in downtown Newark during the day. He bussed tables at a Portuguese restaurant on weekends. He lived in a cold-water flat above a jewelry store, making a deal with the store’s owner living where he lived rent-free in exchange for sleeping in the store at night with a pistol.

  With virtually no expenses beyond food, Primo saved every penny he could. After a few years, he had enough to purchase an old row house, free and clear. He quit his restaurant job, spending every night and weekend for three months turning the dilapidated house into a tidy-looking home. He took some shortcuts, but only the kind a building inspector would notice. Then he bribed the building inspector. Before long, he sold the house for a handsome profit.

  It was a start.

  Primo bought another house, then another. He bought shrewdly, being careful not to overextend himself, always working harder and, most of all, smarter. He bid on houses that appeared to be worthless—the ones that looked like they were about to fall over—then used his engineering knowledge to prop them back up. It was amazing what you could do with a few two-by-tens, nailed in just the right spots.

  And in a town like Newark, with its aging wooden housing stock, there were plenty of falling-over houses for him to buy. He continually reinvested the profits from his successes, taking only a bare minimum out for his living expenses. Most of the time, he just threw down a sleeping bag in whatever house he happened to be fixing up at the moment, dozing with a loaded gun next to him just in case any neighborhood vagrants got ideas.

  Soon, he had more houses than he had time for. So he hired a team to work for him. They were all fresh-off-the-boat Brazilian immigrants who, under Primo’s tutelage, could prop up a house and primp it for sale in just weeks. As Brazilians continued arriving throughout the 1990s, Primo’s workforce grew. Two teams became four teams. Four became six.

  He was slowly building an empire.

  CHAPTER 2

  People sometimes ask me how I write, whether I favor a particular method or technique. I try to tell them writing is an individual process and that one person’s system probably won’t work for someone else. But if they persist, I usually tell them the truth. For me, the essence of writing comes down to one simple thing:

  Frequent urination.

  The first thing I do upon sitting down is hit the caffeine. Usually it’s Coke Zero, but sometimes, in the earl
y morning or later at night, I go for tea. I’ll drink Diet Pepsi if I have to, but only under desperate circumstances. I never drink coffee. I may be the only journalist in the world who despises coffee.

  After consuming my caffeinated beverage of choice, I switch to noncaffeinated—usually water, to avoid dehydration. Then I jump back to the caffeine. I continue this alternating pattern until the writing is done.

  The end result is that I pee like I’m about to run the Kentucky Derby. Once I get going, I can’t last more than about twenty minutes without a trip to the loo.

  Maybe that sounds like an annoyance, but I’ve found it to be an essential part of the writing process. It’s during these many trips to the bathroom that the magic happens. Turns of phrase leap into my head, transitional sentences mysteriously appear, narrative structure makes itself apparent. The pee flows out, the words flow in. I’m not sure if this is some kind of cosmic balancing act—I try not to think about the physics behind it—I just know it’s happened too many times to be mere coincidence.

  Clearly, I wouldn’t recommend this method for anyone with urinary incontinence. And it does come with some limitations: instead of worrying about writer’s block, I fret over sewer capacity; I could never consider a job as a foreign correspondent in Europe because the pay toilets would bankrupt me; and with longer articles, I end up getting so overcaffeinated I shake like an eighties hair-band drummer.

  But I have come to accept over the years that this is how I do things. Some writers hunt and peck. I piss and peck.

  Akilah Harris’s story was a twelve-flush job—more than I thought it would be, but by no means a record. When I was through, I decided to give Sweet Thang the lead byline. I figured it would help get her noticed in the office for something other than her breasts. Byline politics—who got them, whose name came first, who was appearing on A1, and who was getting buried on C5—were a constant source of chatter in the office. That, of course, was the only place people talked about bylines. I’m quite confident that the vast majority of our readers skipped right over them.

  But for the small percentage who actually paid attention, the next day’s story would start “BY LAUREN MCMILLAN AND CARTER ROSS.” A lot of veteran staff members would have put their own names first, under the thinking that she was an intern—thus deserving of secondary status—and hadn’t actually written the thing herself. But I just felt even though I had been the one putting the words on the page, Sweet Thang had made the greater contribution to the story by getting Akilah to open up the way she did.