The Girl Next Door Read online

  “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.

  “And by the way, they’re from El Salvador, not Mexico,” Tommy added.

  “They here legally?”

  “Don’t know, don’t care. So don’t ask.”

  “Yeah, but … it seems like the cops interviewed everyone on the block except them. And I’m sure the Bloomfield police have some Spanish-speaking officers. So they must have hid from the cops. And if they hid from the cops…”

  Tommy fixed me with a flat stare.

  “You figure that out all by yourself, did you?” he asked.

  I cracked my best winning smile. “Young man, I’m a trained newspaper reporter. I’m capable of making logical deductions beyond the reach of most ordinary citizens.”

  “Yeah, well, in case I haven’t made it clear: don’t ask. Don’t even ask anything that might sound like a roundabout way of getting at their status. We don’t want them getting spooked.”

  “Got it.”

  “Oh,” Tommy added. “And stick with ‘mister’ and ‘missus.’ El Salvadorans are very formal.”

  Before I could reply, the door opened wide.

  “Please,” the man said. “Come inside.”

  * * *

  We entered to find a plump, round-faced woman sitting on a folding chair with a roughly three-year-old boy on her lap. An older sister who was perhaps five stood obediently beside her mother. The furnishings were sparse, just a couch, a folding table, and a few plastic chairs. Children’s toys were scattered across the floor. The Virgin Mary smiled down at us beatifically from one of the walls. Next to Mary was a cross, with Jesus still hanging there—which, of course, meant this family was Catholic. We Protestants let poor ol’ J.C. come down from there several hundred years ago.

  “This is Mr. Felix Alfaro,” Tommy said.

  “Hi, there,” I said, sticking out my hand toward the man. “Carter Ross.”

  “Hello, Señor Ross,” Mr. Alfaro said, smiling widely as we shook. “I sorry, I no speak the English so good. But I learning.”

  “Your English is already better than my Spanish,” I assured him. I nodded in the direction of the woman, who I assumed was Mrs. Alfaro. “Good afternoon, ma’am,” I said.

  “You like drink? Some coffee?” Mr. Alfaro asked.

  I was drawing the breath to say “no, thank you,” but as my tongue reached toward the top of my palate to form the n, Tommy saved me from that faux pas.

  “Sí,” he said. “Yes, please.”

  Tommy shot me a glance that might as well have been a jab in the ribs. Mrs. Alfaro had already risen, deposited her son in front of some trains, and headed toward the kitchen to get the coffee. I don’t drink coffee—can’t stand it, actually. But this was clearly an instance when I would pretend otherwise.

  As the honored guests, we were invited to sit on the couch, which had a horrific plaid pattern that dated back to a more disco-intensive era. Mr. Alfaro sat in a folding chair across from us, and soon words I could not understand began pouring out of his mouth. Tommy listened, grinning at first, then getting serious. He added a word here or there, asked a question or two, then laughed twice at the end.

  “He says he hopes we like the coffee,” Tommy said. “Mr. Alfaro’s family grew coffee for generations. He was raised on a small coffee plantation. Then his family got chased off in the civil war. But he says coffee beans are still in his blood. He hopes to be able to save enough money to someday return his family to its land.”

  Mr. Alfaro listened to Tommy’s translation, pleased with what he heard.

  “And he says most American coffees are blends that ought to be lining garbage cans,” Tommy said.

  Mr. Alfaro nodded enthusiastically at this sentiment.

  “Maxwell House,” he said, making a face like he had just swallowed a heaping mouthful of sidewalk grit. “Baaah.”

  We all laughed heartily at this—everything is funnier when you’re trying to be polite—and Mrs. Alfaro returned with four mugs, serving me first. I took a small sip, feeling like I was being watched the entire time. I acted like I was considering the brew for a moment, as if my taste buds were searching for the gentle hint of peach, the almond subtext, the caramel finish.

  “Excellent,” I said,

  Mr. Alfaro smiled proudly. I had just complimented ten generations of Alfaros in one word. Mrs. Alfaro seemed pleased. Tommy looked relieved. The Virgin Mary smiled some more. And I tried not to grimace when the bitter, acidic taste flooded into my mouth.

  As everyone else helped themselves to their mugs—milk, no sugar, for all—Tommy began chattering, and I could tell we were getting down to business. Mr. Alfaro listened gravely, his eyebrows moving closer together as he concentrated. Still, I surmised he liked what he was hearing. When they completed their negotiations, I looked at Tommy expectantly.

  “He said he feels a … a”—Tommy groped for the right word—“a duty to do the right thing and tell the truth about what they saw. But he said he doesn’t trust the police. It sounds like no one really trusts the police down in El Salvador. So I assured him we would not go to the police.”

  “Right,” I said to Mr. Alfaro. “No police.”

  He nodded. Tommy continued:

  “He said we can quote them, because I explained they wouldn’t be helping at all if we can’t quote them. But we can’t use their name. We can identify them as ‘a resident who asked not to be named.’”

  “That sounds fair,” I said to Tommy, then gave Mr. Alfaro some good eye contact as I said, “No names.”

  Mr. Alfaro immediately turned to Mrs. Alfaro, speaking in a low and rapid voice. It became obvious Mrs. Alfaro was the witness to the accident. She just wasn’t going to say anything without her husband’s permission. He finished by barking a quick order at the children who, led by the older girl, scampered upstairs.

  Mrs. Alfaro waited for the children to clear out, then began telling her story. I removed my notepad from my pocket and Tommy—speaking in the first person, as if he were Mrs. Alfaro—provided the t
ranslation in short bursts:

  “I’m an early riser … I often wake up before the children … I like to look out the window and watch the sun rise … It reminds me of home … One morning, I saw a black … a black, sorry…”

  Tommy interrupted Mrs. Alfaro with a question, which generated a response, then another question, then another response. There were some hand gestures, and I heard automobile brands being discussed.

  “It was a black SUV, but she doesn’t know what kind,” Tommy said. “She said she first saw it on Tuesday morning. It was large and black and had a big, shiny grille plate, which sounds like just about every SUV out there to me. But I think that’s going to be as good as she can do.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Tommy returned to being the voice of Mrs. Alfaro: “I had never seen the truck before Tuesday, and then it appeared several mornings in a row last week … It would park and wait, park and wait … Always following the girl who delivers the papers … Then it would drive away when she drove away … I kept thinking, ‘What is he doing here? What does he want?’…”

  I could imagine that a black SUV casing the neighborhood in the early morning would be of some concern to her—whether she was here legally or not.

  “Then Friday morning last week, I saw the SUV parked up the street again … And the woman who delivers the papers was there, in front of our house … Then the car was driving … It was driving … no, it was speeding actually, very fast down the road, very fast…”

  Mrs. Alfaro’s voice was accelerating as well, her face flushing from the excitement. Tommy was concentrating on her mouth, almost like he was lip-reading rather than translating.

  “I saw the woman getting out of her car … The black SUV was going very fast … I could hear the roar of the engine, but the woman didn’t seem to be paying attention … The driver, it was like he was pointing, no, aiming toward the woman … I could see the SUV was going to hit her and I wanted to scream, but I knew she couldn’t hear me … And then the car hit her…”

  Mrs. Alfaro was shaking her head, then she finished:

  “It hit her very hard, without stopping … Her body flew into the air, almost like it weighed nothing … And then the car ran over her … I screamed to Felix, ‘She got hit by the car! She got hit by the car!’ … And then Felix called the police … We were hoping that if an ambulance got there fast enough, they could save her … But she was dead … She was dead … It was terrible … May God rest her soul.”

  Everyone thought they knew him, or at least thought they could guess his story. They looked at him, looked at what he had achieved, saw how important he was, and they assumed he had been born to it.

  He never bothered to correct them. Some men who grow up poor are proud of where they came from, constantly bragging about their lowly beginnings and how bad they had it, because they feel it makes their glorious climb to the top all the more impressive. He wasn’t one of those. To him, that was the whole point of outgrowing humble beginnings—it meant you never had to revisit them.

  But the truth, which few people knew, was that he started at a low station. His family was filled with totally unremarkable types, the kind of people who were born, lived, and died without the wider world ever being aware of them. They were cogs in the machine, nothing more.

  His father was an off-the-docks immigrant who worked for a grocery distributor, loading and unloading produce trucks—tomatoes, oranges, whatever was in season. The man never complained about it, until one day he just wore out. He was a few months short of retirement when he suffered a massive heart attack, right there on the loading dock. The forklift he was driving at the time slammed into a wall, spilling a couple skids of lettuce. One of his coworkers said it looked like he was dead before the lettuce even hit the ground. Within a half hour, the mess was cleaned up and someone else was driving the forklift.

  His mother, who had come with his father from the old country, was a homemaker, living in the same fifth-floor walk-up apartment from the day she got married until the day she died. Her husband wouldn’t let her take a job, and in some ways it didn’t matter: she never wanted one anyway. She was content to raise her children, spend time with the other women in the neighborhood, play her bingo, and smoke her Pall Malls. After her husband passed, she got by on their meager savings and a small Social Security check. Then lung cancer got her. She didn’t so much wear out as she wasted away.

  He never talked about his parents. He loved his mother right to the end but, in truth, was always ashamed of his father, with his lack of ambition. His father had never pushed him, never demanded he do anything in school besides show up, never insisted he better himself in any way.

  No, all his motivation was strictly internal. He pushed himself, mostly so he didn’t end up like his old man. He worked and schemed and angled. He took shortcuts now and then, cheated when he had to. He did anything he could to move up life’s ladder. And he’d do anything he could to stay there.

  He wasn’t going to be another cog.

  CHAPTER 3

  Having finished with her story, Mrs. Alfaro brought the back of her hand to both sides of her face, wiping away the small tear tracks that had formed. Tommy gave her a moment to compose herself, partly out of kindness and partly because he needed to catch his breath. Mr. Alfaro stood rigidly by his wife, a hand on her shoulder in a small-but-important gesture of consolation. I paged back in my notebook, filling in key words while they were still fresh in my mind. My self-invented shorthand hadn’t quite been able to keep up, and I wanted to get as much of it as I could.

  Of course, the details only mattered so much. The main point was that it was now undeniable: Nancy Marino’s death was no accident.

  Unwitting hit-and-run drivers don’t stalk their prey for days on end, wait patiently down the block and then accelerate when someone gets out of her car. This was a homicide, as cold and simple as if someone had brought a gun to her ear and pulled the trigger. This weapon just happened to take unleaded gasoline.

  Eventually, Tommy started asking Mrs. Alfaro some follow-up questions, providing me the short version of the answers. No, she never got much of a look at the driver. No, she didn’t catch the license plate. No, she couldn’t say for sure the make and model of the SUV. No, she had nothing else to add to her story. She had told us everything she remembered.

  When we were done, I thanked the Alfaros for their hospitality and for their willingness to talk, reiterating my promise not to go to the police or print their names in the newspaper. Soon I was following Tommy back down the front steps to our cars. It was getting toward the middle part of a hot summer afternoon, but it felt like Antarctica in my guts.

  “So what now?” Tommy asked as we reached the sidewalk.

  “I don’t know exactly. At risk of stating the obvious, someone killed this woman and the Bloomfield police sure won’t be able to figure out who or why.”

  “And you can?”

  “Well, I certainly have to try. This may sound strange, but I feel like I owe it to Nancy. She was one of the good guys. And who am I as a newspaper reporter if I don’t look out for the good guys? Besides, I’ve gotten to like her. And whether I knew her or not, she was a colleague.”

  “It would be a hell of a good story, too,” Tommy added.

  “Well, yeah, and there’s that,” I conceded.

  “Can I do anything?”

  “No, no. I got this,” I said, knowing it would only make Tommy more eager to help. “You have your own reporting to do.”

  “Yeah, but it’s just some stupid city council stuff. I can make time for something like this.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, setting the hook a little more. “If Tina found out…”

  “Tina doesn’t need to know anything about this,” he assured me. “Come on. You know you can’t do this all by yourself.”

  “Well, okay,” I said, smiling inwardly as I thought about what task my newly recruited assistant should tackle.

  Nancy’s si
ster obviously knew something. But after a quick glance at my phone—no missed calls from the 510 area code—I decided I could continue playing it cool and let her come to me.

  In the meantime, I had to learn more about Nancy Marino. Because while I could fake my way through her obituary, that didn’t mean I really knew her. Sure, she seemed like a reliable newspaper deliverer and could apparently keep a lunch order straight. But it was also entirely possible Nancy Marino was a hopelessly addicted gambler, a hundred grand in debt to a bookie who finally lost his patience.

  Was it likely? No. But put in enough years as a journalist, exploring life on the margins of society, and you start to realize how cunning humankind can be. The gentle Little League coach turns out to be a vicious mobster. The humble parish priest is an embezzler. The prim kindergarten teacher has a raunchy Internet site. It happens.

  I’m not saying I assume the worst about people. But it also doesn’t make sense to assume the best. That’s what being a reporter teaches you: don’t assume.

  “Hello?” Tommy said, pantomiming like he was knocking on a door. “Anyone home?”

  “Sorry. How about you head back to the office and see what kind of paper you can find on Nancy Marino,” I said. “Pull her mortgage, search the court filings, look for liens against her house—the usual.”

  “Okay.”

  “Oh, and if you bump into Tina, remember: you didn’t see me, you aren’t working on this, you don’t even know me. I’m supposed to be off chasing a bear in Newark.”

  “Oh,” he said, as if this made perfect sense. “So what’s your plan while I’m doing all the boring work?”

  “I’m heading to the restaurant where Nancy worked and asking some questions. Call me if you learn anything interesting.”

  “You, too,” he replied and we parted ways.

  I climbed into the Malibu, the interior of which was only slightly cooler than the surface of the sun. The Malibu’s air-conditioning may once have worked well, but that was many years and several owners ago. So it was still sputtering lukewarm air when I reached the end of my two-mile-long journey to the State Street Grill.