The Girl Next Door cr-3 Read online

  For a second or two, I just stood there as he lumbered toward me with a pigeon-toed gait, making a guttural noise that was somewhere between a woof and a bark. I seemed to recall the wilderness safety pamphlet counseled that you should never turn and run, that you should hold your ground. Running doesn’t work, the pamphlet advised, because bears are faster than people. Plus, bears were big into what it called the “bluff charge,” meaning he would pull up before he reached his target.

  So this was a bluff. Just a big, nasty, snarling, drooling, growling, menacing, intimidating, teeth-baring … bluff.

  As he narrowed the gap between us from a hundred to perhaps seventy feet, I told myself he would stop short any second, just put on his bear brakes and come to a skittering halt. This was all about the sound and nothing about the fury.

  I just wished the sound-which was throaty and primal and utterly believable-wasn’t making my sphincter tighten.

  I couldn’t really just stand there, could I? I began to question the wisdom of the pamphlet. What if it was misinformation put out by the bears themselves? Some kind of slick, bear propaganda? Shouldn’t I, as a trained journalist, weigh the veracity of my source a little more carefully-and, more to the point, weigh the possibility the source might be hungry?

  The rational part of my brain kept repeating those simple safety tips. Don’t run. Stay calm. Running only makes matters worse. This is a bluff.

  Then a different part of my brain, a more instinctive part, took over. Hey, stupid, it said. This bear is about to bluff your head off. Run, stupid. Run!

  So I ran.

  With my imaginary tail tucked between my legs and a frightened yell escaping my throat, I began desperately scrambling up the street, back in the direction of South Orange Avenue, hoping perhaps that when the bear saw I had dropped all claim to his garbage bag, he would return to his rotting vegetables in peace.

  But no, as I allowed myself a quick peek back, I saw he was still after me. And he was getting closer. Apparently, that damn pamphlet was right about only one thing: bears are faster than humans.

  I dashed through the first intersection without bothering to look for cars, gaining new appreciation for the wisdom of my young gangbanger friend. Fast-moving Chevys are a lot less scary, after all.

  As I continued up the next block, I passed the old woman on the porch, still clutching her broom. She started yelling encouragement.

  But not at me. At the bear.

  “That’s right! Get ’im!” she hollered. “He crazy. We got enough crazy ’round here already!”

  “Aw, come on!” I protested, through ragged breath. “Can’t you at least root for your own species?”

  I looked back again and saw I was at least not losing any more ground. As long as I kept sprinting, I’d be fine. Too bad I’m not a world-class half-miler. As I got closer to South Orange Avenue, I was starting to feel the burn in my legs and lungs, and I didn’t know how much longer I could keep it up. I rounded the corner, with the bear in hot pursuit, and saw my gangbanger buddy, still high up in the air.

  “Run, white boy, run!” he crooned. “I’m the appetizer, but it looks like you the main course!”

  I glanced up at him covetously and began calculating whether there was room for two up in that light stanchion. Then I spied a much better, much larger safe haven.

  Lunky.

  My hulking intern was just completing his interview, and I don’t want to say I hid behind him, but, well, I hid behind him. Lunky seemed confused by what I was doing. I just grasped his back and positioned him so the full breadth of his body was between me and the bear.

  This turned out to be the smartest thing I did all day. The bear took one look at Lunky and dug his paws into the asphalt, coming to a stop so quickly I thought he was going to roll over on himself. Even in Newark, the call of the wild has a pecking order. And Lunky was definitely the biggest bear on this block.

  “Mister Ross,” he said, “are you okay?”

  I was. But only because the bear was now dashing toward the nearest tree, a stout-looking sycamore. He clambered up with surprising agility, flaking off large chunks of exfoliating bark as he went, only stopping when he got to a branch about fifteen feet in the air. Then he turned and warily eyed Lunky.

  “I’m fine,” I said, still panting.

  I bent at the waist, put my hands on my knees, and spent a minute or so sucking whatever oxygen I could ply from the humid July air. Finally I straightened and said, “Well, that was a nice jog. I’m going to take my leave of you now. You got this situation under control?”

  Lunky cocked his head to the side and considered me with the same kind of empty-headed curiosity as the bear. I filled in the blanks for him.

  “You talk to some of the people who have seen the bear and get their reactions,” I said. “Get some old people, some young people, some people in the middle. Then come back later this afternoon with a nice full notebook and we’ll make a story out of it.”

  “But what about the bear?” he pleaded.

  I glanced up at the tree and said, “Put him down as a no comment.”

  * * *

  As I walked back to my car, I whipped out my phone and placed two calls. The first was to the photo desk, which would love a picture of a treed bear in Newark for A1. The second was to animal control, which would have the unenviable task of figuring out how to get the thing down.

  Then, feeling reasonably confident in Lunky’s ability to shag a few usable quotes, I set about my own work. That began with a call to Detective Owen Smiley of the Bloomfield Police Department. I’m always a bit leery about working on stories in the town where I live-what I write doesn’t always win me popularity contests, especially with the authorities-but there are certain advantages, like when the third baseman on your rec league softball team is a cop.

  As I merged with the northbound traffic on the Garden State Parkway, I called his cell phone and immediately heard, “Smiley here.”

  “Hey, Owen, it’s your left fielder.”

  “Wuzzup, lady-killer!” he greeted me. Owen is married with either two or three or four small children-I’m not sure how many, as it seems like his wife is perpetually pregnant. He thinks that because I’m single, I must be hooking up all the time. I don’t disabuse him of the notion, if only because he enjoys living vicariously through my bachelorhood.

  “Not much,” I said. “You playing this Thursday?”

  “You bet.”

  “Good stuff,” I said, then went for the subtle shift in topic. “Say, did you catch that hit and run by any chance?”

  “Which one?”

  “The one with Nancy Marino, the papergirl.”

  “Marino … Marino … You mean the one last Friday?” he said, like I was asking him to recall a cold case file from 1978.

  “That’s the one,” I said.

  “Yeah, I caught it. Why, you interested?”

  “Maybe. Call it a case of morbid curiosity. Her family thinks there might be something more to it.”

  “Oh well…” he said, like he was struggling with how to say something. “We’re off the record, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, off the record, you got to find a way to tell this family to move on,” Owen said. “Hit and runs like this, if we don’t get something right away-an eyewitness who snags a plate, a surveillance camera, a suspicious repair shop visit, something like that-we aren’t going to get anything. Unless the guy who did it gets some kind of attack of conscience and turns himself in. Forget it. If the family wants us to, we’ll put out a reward for information. I can get that approved pretty quickly.”

  “Reward, huh? Does that work?”

  “People are motivated by all sorts of things.”

  “So you don’t have any other leads?” I pressed him. “Our story mentioned an anonymous caller. Were you able to track that down?”

  “I tried. Prepaid cell phone. Could be anyone.”

  “What about the tips line? Anything come
in on that?”

  “Nada.”

  “Huh,” I said. “Well, thanks anyway.”

  “Sure. If you hear anything, let us know.”

  “Will do. See you Thursday,” I said.

  “Thursday,” he confirmed, then ended the call.

  I drove in silence the rest of the way to Ridge Avenue, just me and my Malibu. There are some reporters who don’t feel compelled to visit the scene of a crime they’re writing about, but I’m not one of those. Even if days have passed since the event in question-and the ambulances are gone, the blood is cleaned up, and the police tape has blown away-I still want to walk the ground where it happened and give my senses a chance to work for me.

  Sometimes I jot down some notes. Sometimes not. Sometimes I want to just feel the place.

  In this instance, the feeling I got from Ridge Avenue was one of utter ordinariness. It was an archetypal Bloomfield neighborhood, with that not-quite-city, not-quite-suburb feel. The single-family houses were small, neat, and cozily packed together. They were all at least fifty years old, built for the waves of workers who were fleeing the city two generations ago. I could hear the rush of the Parkway from a few streets away-the Jersey equivalent of a white noise machine-but it was otherwise quiet.

  The street, while called an avenue, was really more like a lane. Cars parked on either side further constricted traffic flow. So while it was technically two-way, there was really only room for one car to pass.

  I pulled my Malibu to the curb midway down the block, where Nancy had been hit, and looked for some small piece of evidence a life had ended there. But, of course, there was none. The residents of Ridge Avenue had been temporarily disrupted by the accident Friday morning, probably talked about it for the next day or two, but had otherwise gone on with their lives. The victim was no one they really knew.

  Cutting the engine, I sat there for a moment, imagining I was a paperboy, quickly rolling out of my car to deliver that morning’s edition. I opened the door like I was in a hurry, without really bothering to see if anyone was coming, as Nancy Marino had likely done. That’s when I realized how little chance she had: the street was so narrow, I was in the middle of it by the time I stepped out of my car. Had some drunkard been barreling down the street behind her, he couldn’t miss.

  I was standing in the middle of the street, notepad in hand, scribbling down these and other thoughts when something caught my eye. It was just a brief fluttering in my peripheral vision, but there it was again: a curtain in the house to my right, being drawn slightly.

  Someone was watching me.

  This, of course, happens all the time to newspaper reporters. Stand out in the middle of the road with a notepad, writing furiously, and folks tend to want to know what you’re up to. Are you an insurance adjuster? A tax assessor? Are you casing the neighborhood?

  Sometimes people get edgy and call the cops, which always turns out to be a hassle. I try to defuse the situation before it gets to that point by simply introducing myself. Most people are actually relieved when they learn you’re a newspaper reporter, because it means you’re not there to jack up their taxes or steal their flat screen.

  I walked up the short driveway of the house, which had dark red clapboard siding and a down-on-its-luck vibe about it. There were weeds where there had once been flower beds, unkempt shrubbery and high grass in the yard. Whoever lived there wasn’t all that concerned about competing in the neighborhood garden competition. I bounded up a small set of concrete steps, then knocked on the door. I could hear movement inside that sounded like small children, but no one answered. I knocked again. More movement. Still no answer.

  “Hello?” I said. “I don’t want you to be concerned. I’m just a reporter with the Eagle-Examiner. I’m writing about the accident that happened here last week.”

  The house went quiet. The children had finally been shushed, and the adults were hoping I’d take the hint and go away. But there are times when common courtesy is something a newspaper reporter has to leave at home, so I knocked again.

  “The woman who was killed delivered newspapers,” I said. “I was wondering if you or anyone else on the street might have seen anything.”

  Finally, a reply: “No habla.”

  * * *

  I retreated from the front stoop, wondering if I had just found my anonymous caller. On that hunch-and because I like bothering him-I pulled out my phone and dialed my on-staff Spanish interpreter. Tommy Hernandez is second-generation Cuban-American, the son of immigrant parents who insisted the family speak Spanish at home. He’s also our Newark City Hall beat writer and one of our finest young reporters. He has been with the Eagle-Examiner two years now, and while he was still technically an intern-our paper had long ago stopped granting full-time status to new employees on the fear that they might actually expect to be paid a living wage-his internship has been rather indefinitely extended.

  Tommy has a keen eye for detail, a well-developed sense of story, and an easy way of chatting with people that made them want to talk back. If I felt like kidding myself, I could say I had been a role model for him and helped him develop these skills. But it’s more accurate to say Tommy came out of the box with these talents and I had, on occasion, exploited them for my own purposes.

  Sort of like I was doing right now. He picked up on the third ring.

  “Are you at a clothing store?” he demanded. “If so, I want you to drop the plain blue shirt, put down the penny loafers, and step away from the cash register.”

  Tommy is as gay as taffeta and chintz, and he’s got some rather pointed opinions on matters sartorial. He finds my WASPy fashion sensibilities a bit on the starchy side.

  “But what am I supposed to wear to the lawn party in the Hamptons I’m going to this weekend?” I asked, playing along. “Veronica and Muffy are expecting me.”

  “Come out and salsa with me instead. It wouldn’t hurt you to discover that people’s hips can actually move while dancing.”

  “That’s just a rumor being spread by you Puerto Ricans in an attempt to bring my people down,” I said.

  Tommy said something in Spanish that I assumed was an insult.

  “Yeah, right back at you,” I replied. “Anyway, as charming as it is to swap pleasantries, I was hoping you could help me out with a quick interview en espanol, por favor.”

  “I’ll do it, on one condition.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Please don’t ever try to speak Spanish around me again. It hurts my ears.”

  “Deal,” I said, giving him the red house’s address and extracting a promise that he’d hurry.

  I spent the next twenty minutes pacing up and down Ridge Avenue, knocking on doors, getting the same load of nothing the police had gotten. The neighborhood busybody, a nice white-haired lady, assured me that she had talked to everyone on the block-just because she felt so bad about what happened to “that poor girl”-and neither she nor anyone else had seen anything.

  “What about the people over there?” I asked, pointing to the red house.

  “Oh well, they’re Mexican,” the woman said, as if being Mexican rendered them sightless.

  “Yes, I know, but they still might have seen something. Maybe they’re the ones who called it in.”

  The woman glanced furtively to the left and right.

  “They’re illegal aliens,” she said, pronouncing each syllable very deliberately so it came out as “eee-lee-gal ale-eee-ans.”

  Which likely explained why they didn’t want to open the door for a nicely dressed, officious-looking white man or give their names to the police. I thanked the woman and resumed my wait for Tommy, who eventually pulled up behind my car, parked, and got out.

  Tommy is small, dark, and wiry. He works out, but only for tone, not for bulk. So I’m not sure he would have cracked 140 pounds on the scale. His clothes-which today consisted of black chinos, a snug-fitting gray shirt, and shoes that were undoubtedly the height of queer couture-are always quite dapper.
r />   “Make it quick,” he said. “I’ve got my own stories to work on, you know.”

  I gave him a rundown of what I knew, ending with my suspicion that someone in the “Mexican” family was the anonymous caller.

  “That’s the place,” I said, pointing to the house. “You want me to come with you, or would I get in the way?”

  “You might as well come. They probably just pretend not to speak English so they don’t have to talk to dumb americanos like you.”

  “Can’t blame them,” I said, as I repeated my walk up the driveway and concrete steps toward the house, this time with Tommy at my side.

  Our approach had been watched from the front window, from behind the slightly drawn shade.

  Tommy knocked, coupling it with two sentences in Spanish. Whatever he said must have disarmed the inhabitants somewhat because they stopped their we’re-not-home act. The door opened slightly, and a short, barrel-chested, dark-skinned man with wide eyes and distinct meso-American features appeared behind it. He was wearing a clean white T-shirt and khaki pants splattered with a dozen different paint colors.

  Tommy immediately unleashed a burst of rapid-fire Spanish. The only words I understood were “Newark Eagle-Examiner.” The man listened, then returned the volley with one of his own. They went back and forth a few more times, and I got the sense the exchange was becoming friendlier. Then suddenly Tommy was smiling and nodding, while gesturing at me and saying something through grinning teeth. I was the butt of some joke, which was fine by me. I was here as the straight man, after all.

  “Do you have a press pass?” Tommy asked me.

  “Yeah.”

  “Show it to him.”

  I dug my press pass out of my wallet and passed it through the crack. The man studied it for a moment, handed it back to me, and said, “Un momento, por favor.”

  The door closed.

  “So what’s the deal?” I asked in a not-quite-whisper.

  “I think you’ve found your caller.”

  “Yeah, what’d he see?”

  “Not sure yet. That’s why we’re doing the interview, remember?”

  “Oh, right,” I said, looking down to the street, at an elevation drop of perhaps five to ten feet. All of Ridge Avenue was on a gentle slant, and we were on the high side, which would have provided a good view of whatever happened below.