Authors: Brad Parks
The Fraud (9 page)
“What does that mean?”
He rolled his eyes. “Prince of Denmark, as in
Hamlet
—one of the great tragedies of all time.”
I should have known better than to try and get into a fashion war with Tommy.
I went back to Southern. “Boy, we should have banned your kind from the NFL while we still had the chance.”
“A sport where everyone wears tight pants and every play begins with a man putting his hands under the butt of another man who is bent over? Oh, honey, it’s too late to ban us. We’ve been there since day one.”
We enjoyed a snicker at the expense of homophobes everywhere.
“Anyhow, I know you’ve got Nigerians and skeletal remains on your hands, but are you hungry? I just looked at the time and it’s a quarter past pizza.”
“I’d join you if I felt more confident I was going to get this story,” he said. “But at this point, I’d put the odds of that about equal with the chance of you winning
Dancing with the Stars
.”
I ended up dining alone.
Midway through my second slice of pizza—and three-quarters of the way through a life-giving Coke Zero, always my beverage of choice—I got a call from Chillax.
“They kicked me out, brah,” he said.
I wiped my chin with my napkin. “What do you mean, ‘they’ kicked you out? Who kicked you out?”
“I went to Fanwood Country Club and was hanging out in the parking lot talking to some dudes and then this dude from the club came charging out and was like, ‘You can’t be here. This is private property. Blah, blah, frickin’ blah.’”
“And who, exactly, was this dude?”
“I don’t know. He said he was the general manager.”
“All right,” I said. “Just hang there for a little bit. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
On my way out, I grabbed a copy of that day’s paper, which would make for useful leverage in what I anticipated would be my negotiations with Fanwood Country Club’s general manager. It has been said the pen is mightier than the sword. In my experience, the product of hundreds of pens—when printed in a form that is disseminated to hundreds of thousands—is mightier still.
As I drove out of Newark to points west, I plotted the rest of my afternoon.
First, I would get Chillax on track. Then I would return to Newark, where I would find Maryam Okeke in some place not near her fuming mother. My hope was that the daughter would have had a better relationship with her father than the mother had with her ex-husband, and that she would be able to tell me enough about her dad to allow me to assemble a decent biography on the man.
My best chance was probably to snare Maryam as she left school. Arts High School was just up the hill from the
Eagle-Examiner
offices. I could get her after the final bell rang. Maybe she would divulge what transgression her father had committed that made him “deserve” his fate.
I also had to work the Rotary angle. Not that I expected resistance there. As community minded businesspeople who liked attention for their good deeds, Rotarians welcomed having their names in the newspaper. They were easy marks.
It was no more than three minutes after I had this all worked out when my plan started to unravel. I was on Route 22, just past a well-known strip club—motto: “All we wear is a smile”—about to enter the roadway’s less-seedy, big-box-retail-choked stretch, when traffic came to a halt.
I wish I could report I handled this with the sanguinity of a Buddhist monk in a coma. Alas, I reacted in a way perhaps more typical of my Jersey heritage: by silently wishing death on everyone in line ahead of me.
When that didn’t work, I gripped my steering wheel until my knuckles turned white.
Strangely, this also failed to have any impact on what had now coalesced into an unyielding column of brake lights. So I waited until I had inched up to the next chance to depart the roadway, which I availed myself of.
Any real Jersey Guy knows at least five ways to get where he needs to go, because chances are the first four are clogged with people who have forgotten where their gas pedals are. Yes, some of those routes could be a little circuitous. But for those of us who are infrequent bedfellows with patience, the liberty of movement more than compensated for the extra mileage we put on our automobiles.
Especially in my case. My Malibu’s odometer has not budged past 111,431 for at least eighty thousand miles now.
I was so relieved to be free, I’m not sure I registered that a white Ford Fusion had pulled off behind me. Or if I had noticed it, I thought it was just another not-quite-Buddhist joining me on the path to a more meaningful enlightenment.
It was when I turned off Route 28, a popular Route 22 alternate, that I really noticed him.
He had also turned off. He was laying back a bit, trying not to be obvious about it. But we were now the only traffic on roads less traveled, cutting through the greener parts of Union County.
At first, I thought maybe I was just being paranoid. So I tested him by picking a random street and making a left.
When I turned, he turned.
I eased off the throttle a little bit. He did the same. Any Jersey driver restless enough to bail on a traffic jam typically maintains a following distance of approximately three gnat eyelashes. Yet this guy was suddenly in no hurry.
With the sun glare on his windshield and with the distance he maintained I wasn’t really able to see the driver. The license plate was also hard to make out. I thought I caught the letters SME. The numbers all seemed to be 8s, 0s or 6s, which made them difficult to differentiate.
I was starting to get at least curious, if not concerned. Who went around following newspaper reporters other than the mentally ill or the terminally bored? Don’t get me wrong, I had been harassed from time to time, threatened more than once. But that was usually either right before a story’s publication or shortly after it came out, not when I was still trying to figure out which end was up.
Plus, it’s not like I was sitting on some powder keg of information here. At least not that I knew of. Kevin Tiemeyer and Joseph Okeke seemed to be little more than decent guys from different neighborhoods who liked fancy cars and paid for it with their lives.
Maybe I was just spooking myself. Time to find out for sure. I had reached a subdivision I had been to before. Its primary road was a large loop that emptied back out onto the road I was currently on.
So I made the turn. The driver in the Fusion with the SME license plate, who I had already started calling Sammy in my head, kept going straight. As he passed directly behind me, I caught a glimpse of him. Sammy appeared to be a dark-skinned black man who was either bald or had very short hair. But he was not driving close enough or slow enough for me to see his face.
I took the wandering road through the subdivision, already chiding myself for having indulged my overly active imagination. Then I reached the exit and rejoined the road I had been on.
And there he was again. He must have pulled over and waited for me. Either he knew the subdivision, like I did, or he had a GPS that showed him I would soon be coming out the other side.
He was being even more cautious now, having let another car come in between us. I thought about jamming on the gas, knowing I could now lose him without any trouble. But that would do little to sate my curiosity as to who Sammy was in the first place. So I sped up—but only a little—and, when I reached the next light, turned right. As soon as I was out of sight of the intersection, I pulled over to the side. Unless Sammy was willing to become Captain Obvious, he would have to pass me.
Sure enough, he cruised past me about thirty seconds later. He hadn’t accelerated to more than about twenty miles per hour, so I got a good long look at him as he past.
What struck me, immediately, were his cheeks. They bore deep, vivid scars. I couldn’t pretend to know what the scars signified. But I did know that all of the main ethnic groups in Nigeria still practiced scarification to some degree. Which meant I could make a reasonable guess as to where Scarface Sammy was from.
I could have followed him—turnabout being fair play—except I didn’t know what I hoped to accomplish in doing so. All I could do was keep an eye out for him in the future. It’s not like he would be hard to spot, now that I knew what I was looking for. Even if he changed cars, he couldn’t change his face.
Unless, of course, he was wearing a blue ski mask.
Scarface Sammy knew he had been made.
And he was furious. He felt like pulling the Beretta out of his glove box, taking aim at something—a stop sign, a building,
anything
—and firing off a few rounds.
Mostly, he was just in disbelief. In his line of work, one that frequently involved what might be called predatory behaviors, following people was part of the job. And he had learned there were certain facts about it—and certain fictions.
The fictions are supplied by Hollywood and by the dozens of detective shows that populate screens large and small. They depict people successfully following their targets, always four cars back, never losing them despite highway on-ramps and railroad crossings and alternating merges and all the obstacles the road can throw at you. If the targets realize they’re being trailed, a thrilling car chase ensues. But those are portrayed to be the only possible outcomes.
The facts? Well …
Real Life Fact Number One: following people is actually a lot harder than the movies make it out to be. Especially in moderate to heavy traffic, and especially if you’re doing it by yourself. Forget lagging back by however many car lengths. Most of the time, even if you are doing your damndest to glue yourself to the target’s bumper, it’s all you can do just to keep up with him. You’re constantly getting cut off by other cars, or by lights that turn red at the wrong time, or by other circumstances far beyond your control.
For that reason, you sacrifice subtlety in exchange for a better chance at success. But that’s not really a problem, because …
Real Life Fact Number Two: almost no one realizes they’re being followed. Most people go about their days in well-practiced oblivion. They drive to their jobs, to their friends’ houses, to their kid’s school—or wherever—in a state of consciousness that, from the standpoint of the person following them, can be difficult to distinguish from a coma. You practically have to walk up to them, knock on their windows, and announce, “Hey, you notice I’m following you, right?”
Sammy thought back to where he had gone wrong. He had been watching Tujuka Okeke’s house, no different than he had been doing for weeks now. And then the man in the Malibu showed up.
A white man in a tie, driving a lousy old car, a Malibu, yet walking like he owned the whole neighborhood. Sammy’s curiosity had been piqued immediately.
The man spent a few seconds talking with Tujuka Okeke, but only a very few. Like he was delivering a message of some sort? Or perhaps receiving one? And then he departed just as quickly as he came.
To Sammy, who had been sitting on the Okeke house for more than a week now, this was the most interesting thing he had yet seen. It very well might have been exactly what he was looking for. So he decided to follow the man.
First, they went to the offices of the newspaper—what was Malibu man doing
there?
—and then to a pizzeria. And then suddenly he was heading west to … where exactly?
Sammy never got the chance to find out. Somehow, the man in the Malibu—who was, apparently, not as catatonic as most of the people Sammy followed—had figured out Sammy was there.
He had even gotten a good look at Sammy’s face. It was humiliating to Sammy. He fancied himself as better than that.
Sammy had to drop his tail before he could figure out who Malibu man was or what he wanted. But Sammy knew he would eventually figure it out.
To be sure, his employer would be interested. And if his employer was interested, that meant Sammy was interested.
And have no doubt …
Real Life Fact Number Three: Scarface Sammy always got his man.
Being a good little intern—to say nothing of an unhurried one—Chillax had stayed just outside Fanwood Country Club. He had pulled out his lacrosse stick and was using one of the brick pillars that marked the entrance to the club as a backboard, whipping a ball off its brick facing and catching it in one quick motion.
I rolled the window down as I came to a stop.
“Sorry I’m a little late. Traffic,” I said, opting not to mention Scarface Sammy. There was too great a chance Chillax would tell someone else—because it was, like, totally epic, brah—who would end up telling Tina, who would promptly reassign me to the copy desk until she determined the threat level was lower or until C-3PO graduated from medical school.
“It’s okay, brah,” he said. “It gave me a chance to practice. Alumni game coming up. Gotta keep my skills sharp.”
I’m sure the club manager would love that. “All right. Why don’t you follow me inside. I’ll do the talking.”
As I put the car in gear and entered the playground of the 1 percent, I immediately felt conspicuous. A dented Chevy Malibu is great camouflage for driving through Newark. At Fanwood Country Club, it is like a lanced boil on the face of Miss America.
Especially in a parking lot like the one I soon pulled into. Lexus, Range Rover, Mercedes, Lincoln—the place was a carjacker’s paradise.
Not more than thirty seconds after I arrived, a nattily dressed young man in a golf cart pulled to a stop just behind my trunk. He had a haughty air about him and I could tell he was sneering at my Malibu. I immediately disliked the guy. Only
I
can sneer at my Malibu.
“I’m sorry, sir. Are you a member here?” he asked as I got out.
“No, I’m a guest of the Underwoods,” I replied.
The subtle
Fletch
reference sailed so far over his head I thought I saw it land on the eighteenth fairway behind him.
“Uh-huh,” he said, his lip still set in a disparaging curl. “Can I help you with your clubs?”