Faces of the Gone: A Mystery (23 page)

Of course. The gun. Rosa Bricker—the funeral director with the unexpectedly keen eye for forensics—had offered the professional opinion that the shooter had used a .40-caliber pistol. It had struck me as odd at the time, because .40 caliber is generally used by law enforcement. But I had dismissed it by assuming the perp had gotten his mitts on some pensioner’s gun—never thinking the perp
was
a pensioner.

What else? I began replaying each of my interactions with Irving Wallace. The first time he wasn’t even going to talk to me until I said the words “Ludlow Street,” and suddenly he was interested. He had seemed pretty paranoid, which I had chalked up to him being a fed. Really, it’s because he was a criminal.

Our next talk was after he did the testing for me. He freely told me the samples were more than 99 percent pure. Why tell me that? Wouldn’t that just lead me closer to the truth?

Then it dawned on me: free advertising. He told me I could write it was the purest heroin ever sold on the streets in America. He knew I would write it—newspaper reporters are suckers for superlatives like that. And once New Jersey’s largest newspaper reported The Stuff was 99- plus percent pure, junkies from Newark all the way out to the Delaware Water Gap would be trying to get their hands on it. If I had the dexterity to kick my own ass, I would have.

Then I thought about how he ended that conversation:
Is what you gave me the only samples you have?
I have one more bag of each—The Stuff and the generic. And you’re keeping them in a safe place?
I’m going to tuck them away in my piggy bank at home. Good. Wouldn’t want them getting out.
In my piggy bank at home. Lord. That one little throwaway

Then I thought about our latest conversation, when he tried to put me off the theory that La Cabra was responsible for Ludlow Street. What had he said? That someone like La Cabra wouldn’t reach down to the street level in Newark? That someone was “snowing” me?

I chortled. It might have been the only factual thing he told me—it just conveniently left out that he was the person doing the snowing. Of course he would steer me away from La Cabra: he wanted to protect his boss.

I wondered how Irving Wallace, high school basketball hero and proud graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, could have fallen so far as to get in with a scumbag like José de Jesús Encarcerón. What a sad, fascinating tale—one I would no doubt flesh out in the coming days.

My legs had switched into autopilot and taken me to my desk, where I sat down and immediately went to our handy voter registration database. I typed in “Irving Wallace” and found three of them living in New Jersey.

One was in South Jersey, beyond commuting distance. One was in East Orange, which would have made him one of about three white people in the whole city. But one was in Summit, on New England Avenue. The one-time pride of Summit High School had stuck around his hometown.

I typed the address from voter registration into our property- ownership database and found out that, indeed, Irving and Sharon Wallace owned a home on New England Avenue. And it was valued at $1.4 million. Not a bad little shack for a humble government scientist.

I turned next to Lexis-Nexis, which told me, among other things, that Irving Wallace did not have a mortgage on his shack. He owned it free and clear, no liens, no nothing.

“Must be very frugal,” I said to myself.
“What’s that?” a familiar voice said.
I looked up and Tina Thompson was sitting across from me. “Oh, hi,” I said, a little startled.
“I’ve been sitting here for ten minutes,” she said. “You’ve

had your head buried in that screen the whole time. Another five minutes and I was going to start peeling off clothing and see if you would notice.”

“Well, in that case . . .” I said, sticking my face three inches away from the screen and banging on the keys.
Tina giggled, then added an adorable smile/hair flip/eye bat combination. A little more than an hour ago, she had been breathing fire at me through the phone. And now she was . . . flirting with me?
“I know it’s not unusual for me to be slow on something like this,” I said. “But I’m trying to keep up: weren’t you pissed at me?”
“Oh, very.”
“And now you’re . . .”
“Sorry.”
“Sorry?”
The female of the species is, indeed, a most confounding creature.
“Yeah,” she said. “Look, I’m sorry I’ve been so hard on you. That’s why I came over here. You’ve had an awful day, the kind of day I wouldn’t wish on anyone. And as I was thinking about it, I realized I was probably only making matters worse being such a bitch. And I feel just terrible about that. So I want to apologize.”
“Oh, well, okay,” I said. As far as I could track, Tina had gone from nurturing consoler (last night), to worried friend (this morning), to overprotective bodyguard (this afternoon), to ranting quasi-girlfriend (earlier this evening), to remorseful supplicant (right now), to . . . whatever she would be in five minutes.
“This is usually the point in the conversation when you should say something like, ‘apology accepted,’ ” Tina prompted.
“Oh, yeah, yeah. Definitely. Apology accepted. It’s been a long day.”
“So we’re okay now?”
“We’re great.”
She sat down in an empty seat at the desk across from mine. My reward—the superspecial toe-curl smile—was followed by a more serious countenance.
“Are we good enough that I can give you a lecture?” she asked.
“I suppose I have one coming.”
“It’s real simple. Just be careful, okay? I care about you.”
“I thought you only cared about my reproductive capacity,” I said, fixing her with what I hoped was an endearing grin.
“Well, that, too. But I don’t want to have to tell my future child that his father got killed three days after conception.”
“Conception? Who says I’m going to sleep with you? Since when am I that easy?”
“Since puberty, I’m guessing.”
Couldn’t exactly counter that point, so I decided to lecture back for a moment.
“Okay, I know you’re just looking out for me. And it’s sweet, it really is. It shows your maternal side.”
She blushed a bit.
“But,” I continued, “this thing is, I don’t know, it’s like my responsibility now. I mean, there are four people in the morgue whose chances for justice are slipping away by the hour and it doesn’t look like anyone in an official capacity cares much whether they get it. Then there’s the matter of the woman in the hospital struggling for her life because of something I wrote.”
Tina reached out across the desk and grabbed my hand.
“That’s not true. You didn’t send that woman to the hospital. Some monster with a gasoline can and a lighter did that.”
“And the monster never would have known about Brenda Bass if it weren’t for me. It’s not like we have a Hippocratic oath in this business. But if we did, I think it’s pretty clear I violated it.”
“You’re being way too hard on yourself,” she said firmly.
“Look, I don’t kid myself into thinking I can fix this mess— it’s already too broken for that. But maybe I can make it a little better.
“Besides,” I said, with the requisite dramatic pause, “I think I may know who the bastard is.”
“Yeah?” she said, releasing my hand and sitting back, like she wanted to get a wide- angle look at me.
“Yeah. I was just about to visit him. Want to go for a ride?”
She drew back even farther.
“I’m not talking about a guns- blazing visit,” I continued. “Just an arm’s-length visit.”
She looked around at the copy desk, where the most pressing business seemed to be parceling out a group dinner order that had just come in.
“I don’t know if I can leave,” she said. “After I decided I wasn’t sleeping with you to night I agreed to fill in as night assignment editor. Technically the paper is under my command right now.”
“Well, then I guess I just won’t tell you—”
“Oh, dammit, you’re impossible. Fine. First edition is pretty much done, anyway. It’s just a drive- by, right?”

ithin five minutes, having bundled up against the cold, we were in my car, speeding toward the suburbs. I told Tina about the latest, ending with my brilliant deduction that Irving Wallace was “the Director” from the memo. Tina mostly just listened.

“So, basically, it’s that he’s tall, his title has ‘director’ in it, and he heard you make an offhand comment about your piggy bank,” she said when I finished.

“Yeah,” I said. “
And
the murder weapon was a forty-caliber gun like a fed would use.
And
he seems to have an overdeveloped curiosity for our coverage of the Ludlow Street murders.
And
he just seems like the kind of uptight guy who would write memos about things.”
“Uh-huh,” Tina said, but I could hear her uncertainty. “
And
he’s got a fully paid-off house in Summit worth $1.4

“He could have inherited it,” she pointed out. “You said he grew up in town. Maybe that was the family manse?”
“He’s not old enough to have lost both his parents.”
“Mmm-hmm. And how did Irving Wallace find Hector Alvarez?”
“I haven’t figured that out yet,” I said. “But it stands to reason someone who does drug testing would have connections in the drug treatment community. The world isn’t that big.”
I turned off the interstate at the Summit exit, and not fifteen minutes after we departed Newark’s gritty streets we were driving along the tree-lined avenues of one of New Jersey’s nicest suburbs. This state could give you socioeconomic whiplash that way.
“But you think Irving Wallace works for this La Cabra fellow?” Tina said.
“Well, I’m not a hundred percent sure about that one,” I admitted. “Call that a maybe. I mean, he did seem to go out of his way to try to throw me off that trail, like he was protecting someone. Why would he do that?”
“But, turn it around for a second, why would La Cabra want to work with Irving Wallace?” Tina asked as we climbed a hill, past rows of houses that got nicer as the elevation rose.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m saying, just imagine you’re a Colombian drug lord. You can probably convince just about any bad guy in America to work with you. Why would you want to collaborate with someone who works for the government?”
“Well, because . . . because that way the government wouldn’t come after you,” I said. “Irving Wallace would be able to mislead them from the inside, push them in other directions.”
“No good,” Tina said. “I love conspiracy theories as much as the next girl. But there is just no way some bureaucrat with a chemistry set is going to convince the entire U.S. Department of Justice to call off the dogs on one of the world’s most notorious drug kingpins.”
“Good point,” I said. I should have thought of that myself. The La Cabra thing may have just been the National Drug Bureau’s ill-conceived way to explain four dead bodies, with no more credibility than the Newark police’s ill-considered barstickup theory. “I suppose it’s possible Irving Wallace is acting alone,” I conceded.
“Okay, so without the Colombian drug lord, how did Irving Wallace get the product he needed for his operation?” Tina asked.
“His lab tests thousands of kilos a year,” I said as we passed a sign for a hospital, then neared a train station. “He told me that himself.”
“And you think he got his drugs by skimming off a portion of whatever his lab got sent for testing.”
“Yeah, that’s it.”
“What about chain of custody?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well,” she said, “any drugs seized by a law enforcement agency is eventually going to be used as evidence in a trial, right?”
“If all goes well, yeah.”
“So part of being used in evidence is having a clean chain of custody. Every person who handles it along the way has to sign something attesting that they didn’t tamper with it.”
“Uh-huh. And?” I asked, as we rolled past a YMCA, a library, a quaint little park, all the trappings of a well-tended, well-to-do town.
“I’m just saying that it’s not like John Q. Detective is going to fork over ten kilos of heroin to the lab and then not notice when only five kilos come back,” Tina said. “How did he get around that?”
“I don’t know. He’s a bright guy. He could have figured out something, I’m sure.”
“Oh, of course,” Tina said. “But then there’s the issue of purity.”
“What issue?” I asked, feeling increasingly worn down by Tina’s cross-examination. It was like being a rookie reporter again, and the editor was asking me all the questions I had been too feebleminded to think of myself.
“Well, Wallace told you—what was it you put in the paper? That it was the purest heroin ever sold?”
“Right.” I said, Making a turn at a convenience store and passing several majestic Gothic churches.
“Okay, even assuming he was lying, everyone else has told you The Stuff was the best, that junkies adored it,” she said. “So we can assume it was pretty high purity.”
“Yeah, so?”
“So all Wallace has access to is heroin that has been seized off the street and comes into his lab. How is he possibly going to take that—a lot of which is garbage—and turn it into this product that drove all the junkies wild?”
“Christ, Tina,” I finally exploded. “He’s a chemist. Don’t you think he knows how to do something like that?”
“Okay, okay. Don’t get defensive. I’m just saying we have a few blanks to fill in, that’s all.”
“Editors,” I huffed. And she let me leave it at that.
Our destination, New England Avenue, was just on the other side of the downtown area, opposite the Grand Summit Hotel. We passed some apartments, then some town houses, then some smaller houses, then some larger ones. Then we came to the Irving Wallace residence. The place was completely dark, but I didn’t so much as tap the brakes as we rolled by.
“Hey, you passed it,” Tina said.
“I know,” I said, and drove two blocks farther down before turning around. On the way back, I turned off the headlights and we coasted to a stop. I didn’t know if the subterfuge was necessary, but it couldn’t hurt. Besides, with the lights off, it was less likely for a neighbor to notice a strange car and decide to call the cops. In Newark, my four-year-old Chevy Malibu was well camouflaged. In Summit, amid all the fancy imports and high-end domestics, it might as well have come with a neon sign that said
JUST VISITING
.
We took some time to stare at the house, looking for, I don’t know, signs of evil aura or something. But it was just your basic Tudor, slightly on the large side but not a mansion by any stretch. I was guessing five bedrooms, three baths, no more. Don’t get me wrong, it looked like it could keep the rain off your head. But it didn’t entirely fit what I was envisioning.
“I guess $1.4 million doesn’t buy that much anymore,” I said.
“Not in Summit, New Jersey, it doesn’t. Not even after a real estate slump.”
“Where do you think he buries his money?”
“Isn’t it always beneath the trapdoor that Scooby and Shaggy accidentally fall into?” Tina asked.
“Yeah, and he would have gotten away with it if not for us meddling kids,” I said.
I turned my attention back toward the house. There was a basketball hoop in the driveway. The hedges were neatly trimmed. There were two large trees in the front lawn, each of which looked to be a minimum of a hundred years old. There were no cars in the driveway, no sign of white vans anywhere— though I’m sure he would have been smart enough to stash his dirty-work vehicle elsewhere.
“I think I’ll go ring the doorbell,” I said.
Tina whirled to face me and voice her objections.
“Kidding,” I said, before she could get them out.
I shifted the Malibu out of park, turning the headlights back on when we had gotten under way. There was nothing to be gained by confronting Irving Wallace at this point. Fact was, as Tina had so effectively pointed out, I hadn’t even begun to figure out how his operation worked. And until I had a better idea, it was best that he not know I was closing in on him.