Free The Nightgown by Brad Parks Page B

touch a hair on his head. We ended up running this 3,000-word puff piece on him. He’s got it hanging in his office like a trophy, from what I’m told.”
    I was speeding down Broad Street in Newark by this point, slaloming between lanes. Yeah, I had spent my last two years in Pennsylvania, but it hadn’t taken the Jersey out of my driving.
    “So the fact that he’s hit a building means…?”
    “Maybe nothing, maybe everything,” Tina said. “I mean, was he drunk? Was he high? Was he speeding? You just have to keep in mind this guy is a major player in this state. Anything he does is news.”
    “What if it was just an ordinary accident?”
    “Then it’s not very interesting news, but it’s still news,” Tina said. She furnished me with directions to the location of the crash, finishing with, “If you get anything good, call me immediately.”
    I drove south on the Turnpike, through the more aromatic sections of Elizabeth and Linden, until I reached exit 12. I wound around on Roosevelt Avenue, through commercial and residential areas and into an industrial stretch. Just past a trucking depot, I found what I was looking for: a brick building with a noticeable chunk taken out of its corner and a variety of lesser car parts still strewn around it.
    It took me a moment to take it in, but when I did, I nearly hopped out of my Nova and did a victory jig – which is saying a lot, given that my pasty Northern European lineage is not known for its dancing skills. I pulled out my phone and dialed the last number that called me.
    “ Examiner , this is Tina,” I heard.
    “Tina, it’s Carter Ross. I know this may sound presumptuous, because I don’t even work for you, but you may want to reserve a spot for me on the front page.”
    “Why?”
    “Because, the building at the corner of Roosevelt and Jefferson is not just a building,” I said, giving a quick pause before I delivered the punch-line:
    “It’s a go-go bar.”

    Tina quickly concurred that a powerful State Senator careening into an establishment that offered exotic entertainment – it was called Roxy’s Go-Go, if that wasn’t perfect enough – had significant news potential.
    I terminated the call and began trying to figure out what happened. This, however, did not prove as simple as I hoped. The manager of Roxy’s Go-Go was inexplicably publicity shy, a member of the “we don’t want no trouble” school of media relations. He wouldn’t even give me his name, perhaps sensing that if he was seen as too forthcoming about the Senator’s mishap he would suddenly be visited by a very dogged health department inspector.
    All I could cajole out of him was that around 5 o’clock he heard a loud noise and felt the building shake. He went outside, saw the car – a black Lexus – crumpled against the building. And he called the cops.
    Since that was his first call, I figured it should be mine as well. I got bounced around until I ended up talking with the Police Director, who was about as forthcoming as the manager had been. Yes, he could confirm there had been a single car accident at 5 p.m. at the corner of Roosevelt and Jefferson. Yes, the car in question was registered to Leonard R. Ryan of Clark. No, he wasn’t saying anything else.
    His official excuse for reticence was that it was a “pending investigation” but I knew the unofficial reason was that he wasn’t born stupid. He knew the score: The Carteret Police Director served at the pleasure of the mayor, who owed his position to the support of the Carteret Democratic Party. The Carteret Democrats, meanwhile, leaned heavily on the Union County Democratic Party, which was essentially a cult of Lenny Ryan’s personality. So while Lenny may not have been very good at controlling the steering wheel of his Lexus, he was quite adept at controlling everything else in a town like Carteret.
    Hence, I was being stymied by Lenny Ryan’s perceived power. And I was starting to run out of time. It was