Eyes of the Innocent Read online

  “I’m going to go get a beer now,” I said. “And if you don’t cut this out by the time I get back, I’m going to get some of the rougher guys in this bar to reprise Brokeback Mountain on you. And I’m not talking about the scene in the tent.”

  I went to the taps, casting a fleeting look around to see if Sweet Thang was elsewhere in the bar. She wasn’t. I ordered a Yuengling and scanned to the left. No Sweet Thang. I got my beer, tossed down a fiver—more than enough for a drink and a tip at a place like McGovern’s—and looked to the right. Still no Sweet Thang.

  I’m not sure why I cared. Shacking up with Sweet Thang qualified as a genuinely bad idea. On the Personal Destruction Scale, it ranked somewhere between riding a broken motorcycle in the rain and piloting one of those superlight airplanes that have to be assembled from a mail-order kit. I should have been thrilled that she wasn’t there, because it meant at least one of us came to our senses. And yet, being a typical guy, I still wanted to be wanted. An evening of having a lovely young creature like Sweet Thang extolling my many great features was just what the ol’ ego needed. I scanned the place one more time on my way back to the table, but no.

  “You can stop looking for her,” Tommy said when I returned. “She isn’t here.”

  Mi-Ryong had already shoved off, so I dropped the I-don’t-care act. There was clearly no fooling Tommy

  “Where’d she go?” I asked.

  “She got a phone call and all of a sudden she was in a hurry to leave,” Tommy said. “I’m guessing it was someone hotter than you. Jealous?”

  “Hardly,” I said, taking a long sip on my beer.

  “You should stay away from her,” Tommy said. “She’s bad news.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Gay intuition,” Tommy replied. “She just seems like she’d get a little stalkerish.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Besides, Tina would cut your dick off,” he added.

  “Yes, there’s that, too,” I conceded.

  Tommy and I settled into a typical after-hours reporter conversation—basically talking about the various ways the business was dying and how the people running it were hastening the demise—for another beer and a half. Then Tommy, who had clubs to get to and boys to see, announced it was time to go, and I figured it was time for me to do the same.

  Except, unlike Tommy, the only boy I was going to see was my cat, Deadline. He and I shared a small house with a tiny lawn in Bloomfield, one of those great northern New Jersey towns that lacks in neither population density nor attitude.

  Deadline and I previously lived in Nutley, another well-lived-in New Jersey bedroom community known for its concentration of Italians and, not surprisingly, its phenomenal pizza. We enjoyed it and planned on staying for a while. Then a source of mine blew up our house—he and I had some artistic differences over my work—and Deadline and I decided we needed a change of scenery.

  My Amherst friends urged me to join them in paying way too much to live in way too little space on that small island just on the other side of the Lincoln Tunnel. But I liked having a dandelion or two to pull and, besides, Deadline was scared of those big New York City rats. I had first looked for a place in Montclair, a town made trendy about fifteen or twenty years ago when a small enclave of artists and writers discovered it. Unfortunately, the stockbrokers heard it was trendy and mounted a hostile takeover, meaning a guy on a reporter’s salary could no longer dream of affording the real estate. So Bloomfield it was.

  Deadline was asleep in my bed by the time I got home, so I tiptoed in, careful not to wake him. If he doesn’t get his twenty-two hours of shut-eye a day, he gets ornery. I read the new Michael Connelly on my nightstand until the other side of midnight, when I finally wrenched it out of my hands. I was just drifting off, or at least it felt that way, when suddenly my cell phone was ringing.

  I looked at my clock. Six-fourteen A.M. What kind of sick, depraved, thoughtless person calls a reporter at 6:14 A.M.?

  I looked at my cell phone. “Thang, Sweet,” it said.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s gone,” Sweet Thang sobbed. “My necklaces, my bracelet, my earrings, my jewelry box, it’s all gone.”

  At first, Primo paid little attention to the ancillary service industries that coexisted alongside his. He fixed up houses. That was enough.

  But after a few years, as he began doing the development side of the business by rote, he became increasingly aware of—and annoyed by—the people making money off his hard work: the real estate agents taking their six percent, straight off the top; the lawyers with their exorbitant hourly rates; the title searchers, appraisers, and home inspectors, each charging their ridiculous fees; the mortgage brokers with their commissions, which became even richer with the more exotic subprime loans.

  Parasites, all of them. Primo did the work. Primo took the risk. Primo made the sacrifices. All so they could get fat?

  No more, Primo decided. He was not going to let those untold thousands of dollars slip away with every house he built. So, much like the robber barons of the nineteenth century, who expanded their businesses vertically until they controlled every aspect of production, Primo began spreading his reach.

  He opened a real estate agency and gave it all his listings. He lured some young lawyers away from their firms and paid the start-up costs for them to hang out their own shingle—in exchange, of course, for a healthy kickback on all the business he sent them. He founded a title search company, a home inspection agency, an appraisal business, a mortgage brokerage. He even opened his own pest control business, because state rules required a house be certified termite-free before a certificate of occupancy was issued.

  Primo did it all. He was a complete, one-stop shop for home purchasing. His customers, who were eager to jump into the late 1990s/early 2000s real estate market and start making easy money, were thrilled he streamlined it for them. They happily shuffled from one link in Primo’s chain to the next, and Primo profited at every stop.

  It made the whole system so simple to manipulate. After Primo fixed up some dilapidated dump, he’d recruit some greedy-yet-naïve investor and put him through the system. Primo’s real estate agents would make the house seem like a steal—the myth of the old lady who lived there forty years and meticulously maintained it was a favorite. His appraisers would inflate the price using bogus comparables and a generous tape measure. His mortgage brokers were trained in the art of fudging a loan application, overstating the buyer’s wages and rental income, and then selling the buyer on some dreadful subprime loan with a sweetheart introductory rate that made it all seem affordable.

  And then the lawyers would tie a neat bow around the whole package. Each house was rehabbed and sold by a different limited liability company, or LLC. Each service enterprise was fronted by a different LLC as well. Primo had so many different LLCs—all with different postal addresses, all with fictitious names as their corporate agent—it was sometimes hard just to come up with new names for them.

  Each believed it was independent, thus avoiding any conflict-of-interest laws. Each was encouraged to find as much outside work as it could, adding to the air of their legitimacy. But each answered to only one man, and that man was Primo.

  CHAPTER 3

  Between the melodrama in Sweet Thang’s voice and the unsightly number on my clock, it took me a few moments to parse her first utterance. And, in true Sweet Thang fashion, she was frantically piling more words on top of the initial ones, creating a verbal traffic jam that was causing extensive delays in the non-E-Z Pass toll lane that was my early-morning brain.

  Somewhere in the midst of a detailed description of all the items on her charm bracelet—just after the “oh-so-cute sombrero” she got on a trip to Puerto Vallarta and during the “darling little gondola” her father brought her back from Venice—my overloaded ears got the message to my slumbering vocal cords that it was time to wake up.

  I shoved aside Deadline, who had taken his hal
f of the bed out of the middle, and willed myself to sit up.

  “Slow down, slow down, slow down,” I begged. “Your jewelry is gone?”

  “I already said that!”

  “I know, but I just now understood it,” I said. “Don’t you know what time it is?”

  “What does that matter?”

  “It’s”—I looked at the clock again—“six-nineteen A.M. This is not an hour of the day when I function.”

  “But I’m in crisis!” she whined. “And Akilah is gone.”

  “Wait, Akilah? As in Akilah Harris?” I asked. “What does this have to do with Akilah Harris?”

  “Weren’t you listening?”

  “I thought we already established this: no.”

  “I just told you, Akilah spent the night…” she said.

  I said a word that would need to be bleeped on network television, then added several more. But Sweet Thang, unheeding of my profanity, had already set her mouth back to the races.

  “… I was at the bar last night, waiting for you—I don’t want you to think I just stood you up for no reason—and I got a call from her. She said she didn’t have anywhere else to go and I couldn’t just turn her out on the streets. So I picked her up in Newark and drove her back to my place in Jersey City…”

  “You did not. Oh, my God, you did not.”

  “… and I just felt like after her hard day, she shouldn’t have to sleep on my pull-out couch, because it’s kind of lumpy in spots and the mattress is kind of thin because it has to still be able to tuck in when it’s in couch mode…”

  “I can’t believe this,” I was mumbling, entirely to myself. “I can’t effing believe this.”

  “… so I told her she could sleep in my room. Because I have this Select Comfort bed. You know, that’s the kind with the sleep number on it? And I told her if she wanted more firm she could dial a higher number, and less firm she could dial a lower number. My Gram Gram got it for me for graduation; it’s totally the best present ever, because it’s like having your own personalized, individualized bed…”

  “This just is not happening,” I continued. “Even you’re not this dumb.”

  “… so I let her borrow some pj’s—and I heard that, it’s not dumb to be generous, it’s Christian—and she seemed to be settled in just fine. I went into the living room and pulled out the couch and was watching reruns of The Hills and she was dead asleep. I mean, I heard her snoring and everything…”

  “Just let me know when I get to say ‘I told you so,’ ” I interjected.

  “… and then I went to sleep—not yet, by the way, let me finish—and in the morning I got up and she was gone. And so was all my jewelry. I have one of those jewelry boxes that’s sort of like a little armoire, with little cabinet doors you can swing open and the little knobs on it, you know? It’s really cute. Anyway, I leave it out on my dresser, which is where I like to keep it, so I can see my jewelry when I get ready in the morning and envision how it’s going to look with my outfit…”

  “Of course you do.”

  “… also, I hate tangled jewelry, it drives me IN-sane. So the way I lay it out, with the earrings on their trees and the necklaces on their stands and the bracelets arranged in chronological order of when they were given to me and the rings laid out alphabetically by color? Well, that and the jewelry box, it kind of takes up most of the dresser. But when I came in just now, the dresser was bare. And the jewelry box was gone. And Akilah was gone. And I don’t care about most of the stuff—it’s just stuff, after all—but I really, really have a sentimental attachment to that charm bracelet. It just reminds me of all the places I’ve been and all the things I’ve done and I’ve had it since I was a little girl and it’s pretty much my most treasured possession.”

  She hesitated, and not knowing how long it would be before she actually came to a full pause, I interrupted.

  “So, to sum up, your stuff is missing…”

  “Primarily my charm bracelet, yes.”

  “… and you called … me?” I said, laying on the incredulity as thickly as possible. “Shouldn’t you call the police? Or your insurance company? Or, hell, Zales or something?”

  “I can’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I told you already. It wouldn’t be Christian. I can’t do that to Akilah.”

  “I’m sure Jesus would have reported the crime,” I said.

  “I’m sure He would have turned the other cheek.”

  “No, Jesus Christ would have thrown His weight around with the Jersey City Police Department to make sure they were looking into it, maybe even used His influence with the Hudson County Prosecutor’s Office,” I said. “You need to read the Old Testament more. Sometimes God gets good and pissed off and it only makes sense His only begotten son would be a chip off the old block.”

  “Don’t blaspheme,” she said curtly. “And I am absolutely not, under any circumstances, going to tattle on Akilah.”

  “Tattle?” I spat. “What’s next? She didn’t commit larceny, she’s just a bad sharer?”

  “That poor girl has enough troubles in this world. I am not going to add to them simply because I have been deprived of a few material possessions.”

  “So, again, why are you calling me?” I asked.

  “Because I didn’t”—I could practically hear her lower lip begin quivering—“I didn’t have anyone”—cue the sniffles—“anyone else to call,” she finished, and began bawling.

  But, of course, she was still talking.

  “I’m”—gasping inhale—“scared and I”—shuddering exhale—“don’t want to be”—tiny stifled sob—“alone.”

  Over the next six tearful minutes, we agreed that I should drop everything else I was planning on doing, not pause for breakfast, take the briefest of showers (I won that battle despite a fierce onslaught of whimpering), and come over to her apartment.

  It wasn’t exactly what I planned for my morning, but there’s something about the weeping, frightened, vulnerable female that this particular Heroic Male simply cannot ignore. Saddle the gallant steed, shine the armor, locate the damsel, and Mrs. Ross’s boy will always ride to the rescue.

  Mrs. Ross’s boy is a sucker that way.

  * * *

  I was shaved, showered, and dressed in fifteen minutes—no real man needs more time than that—and out the door in sixteen, pausing only to make sure Deadline had enough food to maintain his inactive lifestyle.

  As I backed down the driveway, I briefly glanced at the newspaper loyally waiting for me on the front porch and felt a pang at leaving it there. Long before I started writing for one, starting the day with a daily newspaper was a cherished habit. I was raised to believe it’s just one of those things a decent, educated citizen does. Then it became my profession, and it became a kind of necessity: the reporter who doesn’t know what’s in the paper is not a very good reporter. I once had an editor who was known to quiz people as they came in the door to make sure they had read that day’s edition before they arrived at work. For me, reading the paper in the morning is like religion.

  But then I reminded myself religion is all about being comfortable with hypocrisy and I kept driving. I’m sure there wasn’t anything so dire in there that couldn’t hold until after my white knight routine was done.

  I made good time to Sweet Thang’s place, which was in the increasingly fashionable Newport section of increasingly fashionable Jersey City. She had given me the apartment number (12J) and her door pass code (90210—she assured me she wasn’t too young to have watched the show by the same name in reruns), and I soon found myself riding up a mirrored elevator to the top floor of a rather swank apartment building.

  When Sweet Thang answered her door, she was still in her bedtime attire, which consisted of boxers, a ribbed tank top, and lots of creamy, perfect, youthful skin. She had a fresh, soapy smell and greeted me with a hug that made me a little light-headed.

  “Oh, my goodness, thank you so much for coming ov
er,” she murmured as she gave me one last squeeze, then released me. “It makes me feel like a thousand times better just to have you here. I can’t tell you how totally gross and violated I feel right now. I mean, I’m still not going to tattle on her to the police but, ewwww! How gross is it to have someone just come into your house and take stuff! Like, I would have totally given her some money if she asked for it, didn’t she know that? It’s just soooo uncool and—”

  I put a finger to my lips and made a shushing noise.

  “Sorry,” she said quickly. “I know. Babbling. Stop now.”

  Her place was spacious, nicely furnished, and, I immediately surmised, not possibly affordable on her $500 weekly intern’s salary. If the ample square footage didn’t tip me off, the commanding view of Manhattan did.

  “Nice place,” I said as I trailed her from the small foyer into the living room, where the foldout couch was still unfurled.

  “I just painted in here,” she said. “Do you like the color? It’s from the Ralph Lauren Urban Loft collection. It’s called ‘Sullivan.’ ”

  “Do you call it ‘Sulli’ for short?” I asked.

  “No, but I think I’ll start,” she said, smiling.

  “You’re lucky they let you paint it yourself. I’ve heard of places like this where they make you use whatever contractor the landlord prefers because they’re afraid the tenants will be too sloppy.”

  “Well, my dad owns the building,” she said.

  “Oh,” I said. I’d figured Daddy was loaded. I didn’t realize he was that loaded.

  She added quickly: “I pay him rent, though.”

  Market rate, I’m sure. She flopped down on the bed, propping herself on one elbow and stretching out her gorgeous, bare legs underneath her. She left room for me to sit on the bed.

  I chose a nearby chair.

  “Does your dad own other buildings?” I asked, not sure if I wanted to know the answer.

  “A few. Real estate is just a hobby.”

  “And his day job is…”