The Girl Next Door Read online

  The restaurant just in from the corner of Bloomfield Avenue and State Street used to be one of those prototypically scuzzy/wonderful Jersey diners, named after its original proprietor—Willy? Henry? Something ending in a y—until the current owners decided the best way to renovate was with a wrecking ball. They tore down the old diner and in its place raised the State Street Grill, an attractive stucco-faced building with Art Deco metal awnings and a hip, retro look.

  I had been to the new place a couple of times since moving to Bloomfield two years earlier. So I knew that while it looked the part of the modern eatery—and had gone somewhat upscale as compared to its greasy spoon days—it was still a Jersey diner in its soul, with a twenty-four-page menu, neon signage, and a keepin’-it-real vibe. Visit during a busy lunchtime, and you’ll see an America the Founding Fathers could only have barely imagined, with people of every different hue and ancestry dining next to each other. Old Italian men. Young Hispanic families. Blacks and whites and ambiguously browns.

  I entered and was immediately greeted by the hostess, whom I recognized from my previous visits. I’m also pretty sure I had seen her at Nancy’s wake the day before. She was in her late twenties and attractive in that way that hostesses tend to be, with dark hair, green eyes, and nice curves, all put together in a neat, medium-sized package. Her nose announced her Greek heritage, but her accent was all Jersey. So when she asked me if I wanted to sit at the “bar,” it came out sounding like “baw.”

  “Actually, I’m not here to eat today,” I said. “My name is Carter Ross. I’m a reporter with the Eagle-Examiner, and I’m working on a story about Nancy Marino.”

  As soon as I said the name, the hostess went stiff, as if she was reliving the shock of Nancy’s death. She took a moment to collect herself, then motioned to one of her colleagues.

  “Jen, could you cover for me? I need to talk to this reporter,” she said, then turned in my direction. “Come with me, please.”

  * * *

  I hurried to keep up as the hostess walked briskly toward the side of the restaurant, through the kitchen and toward a wooden door, which she held open for me. We walked into a small office decorated with sports memorabilia, pictures of the Parthenon, and posters of women eating gyros.

  “I’m sorry, this is still so weird, you know?” she said, closing the door behind me. “My family owns this diner, and Nancy had been working here since I was a kid. She was like my older sister. I can’t believe what happened.”

  We made eye contact and I found myself momentarily swept into a sea of green iris. In that instant, something clicked between us. And I’m pretty sure it wasn’t merely my overly active male imagination, because she was gazing back at me with unusual intensity. Call it pheromones or whatever, but sometimes you just know you like someone, and it comes with more than an inkling that the sentiment is returned. There were future possibilities between us, even if the current circumstances would not allow it.

  After a pause—more pleasant than awkward—she recovered and walked over to the desk, where she began picking through a pile of invoices, order forms, and time schedules.

  “Did you see the story about her in the paper today? We got it here somewhere,” she said.

  “Yeah, I saw it.” Then added with perhaps false modesty: “I wrote it.”

  “You did?”

  I had long since reconciled myself to the extent to which readers ignored bylines. Even people who knew me—and knew where I worked—would come up to me and start telling me about my own stories. No one ever bothered to read the first three words: “By Carter Ross.”

  She found my story, which had been tucked in the upper-right-hand corner of that day’s obituary page. I walked toward her and pointed to my name at the top of it.

  “That’s me,” I said.

  She studied it, seemingly in some kind of trance.

  “So that’s my name. What’s yours?” I prompted.

  “I’m so sorry, I’m just out of it today. I’m Nicola Papadopolous. But call me Nikki.”

  “Hi, Nikki, nice to meet you. Do you mind if we sit down and talk?”

  “Yeah, sorry, yeah, have a seat,” she said, sitting behind the desk while pointing to the chair on the other side. “This whole thing is just, like, wow. It’s thrown me for a loop, you know?”

  “I understand,” I assured her.

  She nodded, and I had a brief debate with myself about how much to tell my new friend, Nikki. Past mistakes had taught me to be cautious with information when you don’t know quite who you’re dealing with. Even people who seem benign—or at least neutral—could turn out to be malevolent. And you never want to give those malevolent types too much notice about what you’re up to.

  But in this case my gut—and maybe those aforementioned pheromones—told me Nikki was safe. At a certain point, a reporter has to decide to trust someone. It might as well be the pretty Greek girl.

  “So, Nikki, this is going to be hard for you to hear, but I think Nancy was murdered.”

  The look on Nikki’s face confirmed her guilelessness. She was registering the kind of authentic surprise—slack jaw, stunned mouth, astonished eyes—no one would have been able to fake.

  “That hit and run was no accident,” I continued. “I talked to a reliable eyewitness who told me a black SUV appeared to have been following Nancy for several days. It was that same black SUV that ran her over.”

  Nikki was shaking her head.

  “But I don’t … Nancy was like … She was like the nicest person in the world. Who would do that to her?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Did she mention being worried about anything? Fearful of anyone? Was she having any problems that she told you about?”

  “No,” Nikki said, thought about it for a moment, then added more definitively, “I mean no.”

  “What about boyfriends? Was she having trouble with any guys?”

  “No. Definitely not. She didn’t … I’m not saying she was a dyke or anything. But I’ve known Nancy—sorry, I knew Nancy—for, like, twenty years, and she never had a serious boyfriend. She never even talked about guys like that. And that’s kind of different, you know? I mean, say a good-looking guy like you walks into the restaurant.”

  I tried desperately not to blush as Nikki continued:

  “All the other waitresses would be like, ‘Oh, check out Mr. Handsome at Table 17 … I got myself a stud,’ stuff like that. It’s just what we do to pass time, you know?”

  “Sure,” I said, as if I had long experience in waitress small talk.

  “Well, Nancy wasn’t like that. It’s like she didn’t notice or didn’t care. I mean, she was nice to good-looking guys, but she was nice to ugly old ladies, too, you know?”

  “Got it. Okay, not boyfriends. So what about after work? What did she do after work?”

  “Nancy? My God, I think all she did was work. She got up to deliver papers at, like … I don’t know, but it was early. Then she was here doing the seven-to-three shift. She did the busy part of breakfast and lunch. Then she did, I don’t know, church stuff. Family stuff. Sometimes she would go to meetings at night for her other job.”

  “What kind of meetings?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I guess they were like union meetings or something. It was all about the newspaper.”

  It made sense a union shop steward would have some nighttime obligations, probably ones that stretched close to midnight. Nancy must have been an expert in sleep deprivation.

  “Did you guys ever hang out after work or anything?” I asked.

  “No. I mean, we were close, but Nancy kind of—”

  Nikki was interrupted by the office door swinging open with enough force that the resulting wind scattered some of the papers on the desk. A round-faced, balding Greek man stormed in behind it, his fists clenching tightly enough that I could see his forearm muscles tensing where his rolled-up shirtsleeves cut off.

  And he looked angry enough to shoot fire out his nose.<
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  * * *

  In my (albeit limited) experience with Greek women, they are masters at manipulating the tempers of their menfolk, stoking them or soothing them as the situation warrants. And that is what Nikki immediately, and perhaps instinctively, began doing with her father: turning on the charm in an effort to pacify him.

  “Babba!” she said brightly, putting the accent on the second “ba.” She gave him the kind of heart-melting smile that Daddy’s Little Girls have been using to wrap their fathers around their fingers for eons.

  But Babba wasn’t buying it this time.

  “What’s going on here?” he asked angrily, in a thick Greek accent slanted with the sound of accusation. He shot glances back and forth between us. I knew I had seen the man before, though I was having a tough time placing where.

  Then a small piece of his comb-over broke loose from his bald head and started dancing in the air, and it hit me: he was the lopsided unicorn I had seen chatting up Jackman at Nancy’s wake, the one Jackman had told to get lost. And now he was looking like he wanted to gore me with his hair horn.

  “Babba, this is Carter Ross from the—”

  I was standing up to introduce myself, but Nikki’s father was having none of it.

  “I don’t want you talking to no newspaper reporter,” he interrupted. Nikki had never gotten the chance to say I was a reporter. Somehow, Babba already knew.

  “But, Babba, we were—”

  “It’s time for you to go,” he said, turning toward me, his fists still balled. I could tell he was considering whether to grab me by the arm and physically throw me out of his restaurant. I’m not the most menacing-looking guy in the world, but I’m just broad-chested enough that most guys think twice about trying to manhandle me. Besides, I was a head taller and at least twenty years younger than Babba. It wouldn’t have been a fair fight.

  “Leave, now,” he said. “Or I call the police and tell them you trespass.”

  “Sir, I’m not trespassing. I’m conducting an—”

  “It’s time for you to go,” he said again, finding new inspiration for his anger.

  As best I could tell, my options were as follows: confront the fuming Greek man and attempt to calm him down, an act that would likely only enrage him further; or make like Alexander the Great and get the heck out of Macedonia, which is the course I chose.

  “Nikki, it sounds like I’m not welcome here,” I said, deliberately addressing her rather than Babba. “I think I’ll leave now.”

  “I’ll see you out,” Nikki said.

  Her father started to protest, but Nikki fixed him with a glare every bit as effective as if she had dropped a piano on his head.

  “He is a customer,” she spat. “We are not rude to our customers.”

  The old man could hardly object to that logic. And it was clear an unspoken deal had been struck. She would acquiesce to his demand that the newspaper reporter depart, but he would allow her to coordinate my retreat in a way that preserved her dignity. As if to underscore the fact that she had resumed control of the situation, she slipped her arm in mine—clearly an unpopular move with Babba—and escorted me out of the office and back through the kitchen without so much as another glance at her father.

  As we entered the dining area, my mind was already churning. Whenever a reporter gets asked to leave someone’s home, business, school, or place of worship—and I’ve been bounced out of all four on many occasions—it inevitably raises the question: What do they have to hide?

  “What was that about?” I asked, when we were finally out of range.

  “Oh, that’s just my dad being my dad,” she said, shaking her head like she’d seen it a thousand times before. “He’s old-school.”

  “But why wouldn’t he want you talking to a reporter? We’re not discussing state secrets here.”

  “When he doesn’t understand a situation, that’s how he reacts. I’ll explain it to him once he calms down, and he’ll be fine.”

  I thought back to the debate I had earlier with myself, the one involving how much to tell Nikki. I had decided she was harmless, and I hoped I was still correct in that judgment. As for her father? There was no telling about him. Jeanne Nygard had said Nancy was having “problems at work.” It was dawning on me she never specified which workplace.

  Was it possible this man had something to do with Nancy’s death? Was that why he didn’t want me snooping around? It wouldn’t immediately make sense that a diner owner would want to get rid of one of his most popular waitresses, but there was no telling what might have been happening beneath the metal awnings at the State Street Grill.

  As we reached the front of the restaurant, where Nikki’s pal Jen was still faithfully staffing the hostesses’ station, I attempted to do some quick damage control.

  “Do me a favor and don’t tell him what I told you about Nancy,” I said, then added quickly, “I don’t want to upset him further.”

  “Oh, no problem,” she said, holding the front door open for me. “Believe me, I stopped telling my dad everything about my life a long time ago. I mean, I’m twenty-eight years old and he still thinks I’m a virgin.”

  I brushed past her just as she said the word “virgin,” and felt a charge rush through me. I walked out into a small anteroom, then to another door, which I held open for her.

  “Anyway, sorry he freaked out,” she continued as we reached the front porch.

  “No problem.”

  I suddenly felt like I was being watched. And, sure enough, Babba was monitoring our interaction from inside the restaurant, his arms crossed, his unicorn horn at the ready. Nikki either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

  “And thanks for writing that nice article about Nancy. That was really sweet.”

  “I was happy to do it.”

  Uncrossing his arms, Babba started making for the door. He had apparently lost his patience for our little farewell scene. This time Nikki noticed.

  “You’re a nice guy,” she said quickly, and before I knew what was happening, she stood on her tiptoes, gripped my shoulders to propel herself upward, and kissed me on the cheek. It was one of those innocent-but-not-so-innocent kisses, the kind that involved a little too much body contact to be considered sisterly.

  Without another word, she disappeared back into the diner, leaving me standing on the patio, just slightly dazed.

  * * *

  By the time I came to my senses, my empty brain had stopped calling the shots and my empty stomach had taken over. It guided me a block and a half down Bloomfield Avenue and into a hole-in-the-wall pizzeria, where I found myself ordering two slices and a Coke Zero.

  This, of course, is one of the great pleasures of living in New Jersey, as compared to other parts of this vast, pizza-starved nation of ours. Walk into nearly any pizza place in my part of the state, and you will find better pie than you will in, say, the whole of the American South. People offer all kinds of theories for why this is so, citing the quality of the water (something in the aquifer that supposedly makes for good dough), the pollution (something in the air makes the sauce taste better), or the density of Italian-Americans (something about having a last name ending in a vowel just brings it all together).

  I think it’s a kind of natural selection. A pizzeria in, say, rural Virginia merely has to outperform Pizza Hut, which is about as tough as besting a week-old baby at arm wrestling. A pizzeria in New Jersey has to take on some of the toughest competitors in the pizza world. Offering anything less than outstanding pie puts them out of business within six months. Only the strong survive.

  I was into my second slice when my phone rang. I recognized both the number and the inflectionless voice on the other end:

  “Mr. Ross, this is Jeanne Nygard, Nancy Marino’s sister. We met yesterday at the funeral home,” she said, as if she feared I suffered advanced amnesia.

  “Of course, Jeanne, I remember.”

  She wasted little time getting to the point: “Have you decided whether you’re
going to investigate my sister’s murder?”

  The word choice—“murder”—was an obvious attempt to be provocative. And even though I agreed with it, I didn’t let on. I wanted to see if she could convince me.

  “What makes you think it’s a murder?” I asked.

  I watched a bead of sweat drip down the side of my soda cup as I waited for her answer.

  “Mr. Ross, I need to know if I can trust you.”

  “You’ve mentioned that before. And I have to be honest, if you’re of the mind not to trust me, it’s going to be difficult for us to get past it. It will probably work better if you decide to give me a little trust and see how it works.”

  “But I need to know whose side you’re on.”

  People are always asking me variations of this question. Sad to say, but in a world overstuffed with pundits, bloggers, and first-person essayists, the true reporter—objective, open-minded, and willing to let go of his ideological slant—is getting pushed closer to extinction every day.

  “Ms. Nygard, I don’t even know what the sides are yet,” I said. “All I can tell you is that I have no agenda other than to find the truth. And if it turns out there are two sides to that truth—or three sides, or more—I will treat them equally.”

  My soda cup had created a small circle of moisture on the pizzeria’s Formica tabletop. This time, as I waited for her reply, I lifted the cup and started making patterns with the rings.

  “What if the truth … doesn’t reflect well on your newspaper?” she said at last.

  “Then my newspaper ought to be the first to report it. I don’t know what experiences you’ve had with other newspapers or other newspaper reporters. But at my place, we insist on transparency from the people we cover, so we hold ourselves to an even higher standard of self-disclosure.”

  “So you’re not … with management?”

  “I’m neither with nor against it. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on and we’ll worry about who looks bad later.”

  This seemed to satisfy her.

  “I don’t like having long conversations on the phone,” she said. “Can we meet in person?”