“That’s where I went,” Mrs. Bondo said. “Rutgers-Dempsy.”
“Oh yeah?” Ray said brightly, his cheeks burning.
But then she added, “That has got to be one of the saddest stories I’ve heard all week.”
“So was the class OK?” Ray asked again, and again she was a long time in answering.
“Well, I’ll tell you,” she began, then looked directly at him. “It might be helpful for you to understand that the kids are actually more afraid of you than you are of them.”
Chapter 5
In the Field—February 11
Ever the gent, short and stocky Bobby Sugar emerged from the bathroom still knotting the drawstring of his sweatpants, a rolled Newark
Star-Ledger
between elbow and ribs.
“Let’s get down to it,” addressing Nerese waiting for him at the dining room table in his cheaply but newly built townhouse apartment. “Let’s do it.”
Although Nerese still thought that the fastest way to make some headway on finding out what had happened to Ray was to work on his daughter, before she committed herself on this one she just needed to make sure that his noncooperation wasn’t masking something best left in the dark, that she wasn’t about to go to bat for a drug dealer or a pedophile or someone with any number of other disqualifying occupations or enthusiasms.
And although she and Sugar had had their share of beefs in the past, in the three years since his retirement from the Dempsy PD he had become a first-rate gagger, one of a rarefied breed of PIs who, by creating dozens of false identities for themselves over the phone, could assemble a portfolio as thick as the Bible on anyone living or dead, without ever having to leave their apartment.
To various police departments around the country, to the IRS, to credit retrievers and to innumerable banks, he was an FBI agent doing a workup on a suspect. To the Central Insurance Bureau, he was a fraud investigator from Blue Cross needing a history of claims. Referencing the staff rosters of every public and private hospital from New York to California, he was an affiliated doctor compiling the medical history of a new patient; and to former employers he was either an executive headhunter needing off-the-record feedback on a potential recruit, or a political campaign manager doing a background check on a new volunteer.
The secret of his success, especially with the evening at-home calls to former employers and sometimes even neighbors and relatives, was that Sugar, like any halfway decent detective or journalist, knew that once you got people talking, the problem was to shut them up.
“So how’s the kid,” he asked, sliding into the chair across the table from her, an open box of Dunkin’ Donuts and a plastic punch bowl filled with off-season candy canes between them.
“Darren?” Nerese shrugged, tore off half a doughnut. “Darren’s Darren.”
Looking out the window over Bobby’s shoulder, she saw a Chinese restaurant cheek by jowl with a funeral home, four lanes of two-way traffic tearing up the blacktop down there like time was money.
“Neesy.” Bobby leaned over the dinette table, chest hair sprouting from the V neck of his T-shirt. “The thing to remember with kids? Is that they tend to outgrow themselves.”
She nodded as if in deep acceptance, although she had a hard time envisioning her son outgrowing anything save for his clothes. Nonetheless, in the last few years whenever Bobby Sugar had something to say about children Nerese always made a point of opening herself up to it.
This had not always been the case; in fact, when they had first worked out of the same detectives squad in the mid-nineties, whenever Sugar had occasion to open his mouth on anything, Nerese more often than not had been inclined to put her fist in it.
In October of ’95, when the O.J. verdict came in, Sugar had gone apoplectic at Nerese’s lack of outrage; Nerese dismissing his smokescreen tirade at the sorry state of American justice as what a friend of hers called soft bigotry. But when O.J. was finally nailed in civil court, they had actually wound up throwing punches in the squad room after she came in to work and found that he had plastered her desk and locker door with torn-out “Guilty” headlines from every newspaper in the New York–New Jersey area.
In response to her calling him a Ginny-assed redneck motherfucker that day as she was being dragged away by two other detectives in the squad, Sugar had pulled himself together, smoothed back his hair, readjusted the knot of his noose-yanked tie and said, “I’m not a racist. I’m an empiricist.”
Because she was embarrassed that she had no idea what that word meant, his declaration went a long way in momentarily cooling her off; but after consulting the dictionary that night, she came in the next day saying, “Empiricist, my ass. Some people just see what they want to see.”
After that, the two of them had barely made eye contact until the day, a year and a half later, when her then twelve-year-old son was rushed to the hospital with a ruptured appendix while she was stuck on an extradition assignment, picking up a fugitive rapist in California.
By the time she finally made it to the Dempsy Medical Center a full day and night after the surgery, she found Bobby Sugar at his bedside, the two of them watching a game show on the ceiling-mounted TV. Later, she’d found out that, knowing Nerese’s mother was in the hospital herself at the time and that her brothers were not exactly go-to guys, Sugar had taken it upon himself to be her very frightened boy’s stand-in parent, and had spent the better part of the last thirty-six hours pretty much holding Darren’s hand.
And for that, he could have waltzed in from the john wearing a Klan hood and cracking a bullwhip and Nerese would have done nothing more than call him an asshole before going back to work on the assorted doughnuts.
“Ready?” Sugar asked, reaching for a manila folder on the windowsill. Nerese opened a reporter’s pad.
“OK. Raymond Randolph Mitchell, born ’60 married ’91 divorced ’95, one kid Ruby Draw-Mitchell born in ’90. Last six addresses: 644 Broadway in New York, from ’88 to ’94—his ex and kid are still living there—10 Jones Street in Greenwich Village, from ’95 to ’98, then big move, 1330 La Cienega in West Hollywood, ’98 to the fall of ’01, then back to New York, the Gramercy Park Hotel mid-September to mid-October of the same year, then from there to current, residing in Little Venice at 44 Othello Way, right here in Dempsy. Questions? Comments?”
“Go ahead,” Nerese said, her pen motionless, suspended above the pad.
“OK, criminal—nothing on the NCIC computer, but you know that. And, checking in with One Police Plaza, with Hudson, Essex, Bergen, Dempsy County prosecutors offices and with the LAPD, there’s nothing, no open complaints, nothing charged then dismissed. Also, there’s no litigation, no torts, nothing in civil court and no tax liens.
“On medicals . . . No hospital admissions except for, you know, the present situation: no rehab clinics, no methadone maintenance, no psychiatric admissions, no HIV therapy and no lab work—blood tests, X rays, EEGs, EKGs, MRIs, CAT scans, nada.
“He doesn’t see a shrink and it looks like the guy doesn’t even have a regular doctor, which is none too bright once you hit forty. Questions?”
“Go ahead.” Nerese broke off a section of doughnut, put it down, picked it up, put it down.
“OK. Employment. And this is somewhat interesting. From ’87 to ’90 he was a public school teacher, English, Fannie Lou Hamer High School in the Bronx. Then from ’90 to ’93 he was driving a cab for an outfit called Orion, then from ’93 to ’95, get this, he was a polygrapher for an outfit, also New York, called Truth and Justice, did mostly employment screens, then from ’95 to ’97 he was back driving a cab for two garages, first DMG then Scorpio.”
“He went from teaching high school to driving a cab?” Nerese started doodling, a whirling stroke like a tornado.
“OK,” Sugar flipped a page. “According to the Special Investigations office over at the New York Board of Ed? He was facing some kind of disciplinary hearing, so it could have been one of those you-can’t-fire-me-I-quit deals.”
“A hearing for what?”
“Apparently, back in ’90 he took thirty kids and went AWOL on a class trip.”
“How’d you . . . They never release that shit.”
“Yeah, well, I was calling from the chancellor’s office, so it was strictly in-house.” Sugar patted himself on the head.
“Then drove a cab again after the polygraph gig?”
“Yeah, but then get this. From ’98 to 2001 he worked out in LA for a company called Satchmo Productions, was a staff writer on that TV show
Brokedown High
? The guy starts pulling down four, count ’em, four grand a week. Left
that
gig, God knows why, and other than the volunteer teaching thing over at the Hook? Basically, he’s been unemployed ever since. Or, given his financials, maybe a better word is ‘retired.’”
Nerese kept doodling.
“You want the financials?”
“Sure.”
“OK.” He turned a page. “AmEx and MasterCard combined averages from seven to fifteen hundred a month, no distinct purchasing patterns to speak of, mostly restaurants, bookstores, music stores, the odd TV or microwave at P. C. Richard, Moviefone tickets here and there, a few clothing stores, no favorite bars, no masked charges, you know, dummy corporations for whores, lap dances, massages, any kind of sex or sex-related products.
“Has, at present, three hundred and four thousand dollars in a Prudential-Bache money market account, down from an opening balance of three hundred seventy-seven, six months ago, no further deposits, so it’s most likely what he could save from that high-priced writing job out in LA, living off it like his own trust-fund baby. No stocks, bonds, any kind of investments, shares or partnerships . . . OK. The mortgage on Othello Way runs him fourteen hundred and eighty bucks a month, lays out another thirteen hundred per in child support, has never missed a payment on either one. OK,” turning the page. “Withdraws, roughly another five thousand a month, deposits it into a checking account at First Dempsy for, I’m guessing cash machine access, you know, general out of pocket and to pay the smaller bills, cable, gas and whatnot, however, last month he transferred sixteen thousand, not five, could be to cover holiday expenses, could be something else, but that’s the one thing I don’t have yet, the canceled checks from the First Dempsy account. My guy in the proof department over there’s on vacation, but I should have it for you in a few days.”
Sugar nudged the Plexiglas bowl toward Nerese. “Candy cane?”
“So what do you think?” Nerese had filled the page with tornadoes, dollar signs and “Satchmo.”
“Well, if it was me, what I’d like to know”—Sugar pulled his elbows back, a hollow pop emanating from his sternum—“is how you go from driving a cab to raking in four Gs a week writing a television show. And
then
I’d like to know, who in their right fucking mind walks out on that kind of cheddar, comes back to Dempsy fucking New Jersey with their hands in their pockets whistling Dixie.”
“Anybody out there have anything to say about it?”
“Hard to get a straight answer.” Sugar flipped some pages. “I talked to three people—two said he just quit, happens all the time, high burnout rate, guy’s a good guy, everybody wishes him well. The third said, well, he wouldn’t say straight out, but there might have been an incident, maybe not, of a, get this, a racial nature. Something said at a party, some kind of, of misunderstanding or misinterpretation or . . . I couldn’t . . . Usually I got people talking till my ears bleed, but I don’t know. I got all the names and numbers for you if you want to take a crack at it, but frankly I don’t think anything out there followed him back to New Jersey just to go upside his head. If I were you? I’d stay local, canvass the neighbors, talk to the kids at the Hook, other teachers or, even more to the point, I’d just ask him what the hell happened and keep asking until he’ll tell you just to fuckin’ get rid of you. That’s what I’d do.”
Nerese looked down at her open pad, “racial” having joined “Satchmo,” the doodles and the dollar signs.
“So,” Sugar said, sliding the folder across the table, Nerese lost in thought until the silence caught her attention. Snapping to, she fished the check out of her purse: three hundred dollars, a third of Sugar’s usual fee.
“So how’s Darren doing?” he asked, palming the check.
“You asked me that already,” Nerese responded with a little bit of an edge—despite the massive discount, three hundred dollars for anything not life and death was a painful amount of money. “How’s your guy?”
“Taylor?” Sugar’s face came alive. “Come here.”
Rising from the dinette, Nerese followed him into the living room, a six-piece chocolate-brown velour sectional-and-easy-chair ensemble camouflaged atop a chocolate-brown wall-to-wall rug so new she could still smell the nap.
“Check it out.” Sugar gestured to a large trophy nesting between Blockbuster video boxes on a shelf over his television: first place in an under-eighteen kick-boxing tournament at the Jersey City Boys Club.
“The kid’s a monster.” Sugar beamed.
Nerese’s gaze strayed to a framed yearbook photo of Taylor Sugar; Nerese as always doing a double-take at rediscovering that Sugar, never married, and still more or less an urban redneck, had an adopted son who was either Asian or Hispanic, he’d never tell which.
“That’s great, Bobby.”
“Wait. Check it out . . .” And before she could stop him, Sugar turned sideways and pulled down his sweatpants to mid-thigh, revealing a brown-and-amber bruise which, despite a few days’ worth of fading, still resembled a fully articulated human foot.
“Taylor was practicing in the kitchen, and me as usual with my head up my ass? I just come around the corner and walked right into it. Look . . . ,” touching himself right below the hip. “You can still make out all five toes.”
A luxury development built on reclaimed marshland abutting the Hudson River, Little Venice was politically part of Dempsy proper but geographically a long, lonesome mile from the nearest residential or commercial district of the city.
There was a security shack and a remote-controlled gate at the entrance to the development, the guard obliged to phone the tenants before allowing their visitors on the grounds. But given the vast and porous wasteland that enveloped this checkpoint it was too much to hope for that there should be a record of Ray receiving any guests the day of the assault, especially if they had come to do him dirt.
As Nerese came through the gates, manned today by a retired cop she knew by face but not by name, the air became redolent of a heady mix of river tang and churned earth, and she found herself on a fragile ribbon of asphalt hemmed in by hillocks of backhoed dirt, each mound posted as the future site of a pool, tennis court, health club or recreation center—each one a rest stop for the gulls, overrun with cracked clam shells, construction debris and its own random greenery—weeds, moss, Arms to Heaven and whatever else took root via neglect.