Free The Fraud by Brad Parks Page B

they get jumped by all the TV people. I’m talking tigers on raw meat. It’s totally Animal Planet.”
    “Did any of them give us any insight into Mr. Tiemeyer before they got devoured?”
    “Nah, brah. But I got a little bit of color for you.”
    “Lay it on me.”
    “I’m not going to say he was a fat slob who needed to lose weight,” Chillax said, parroting my earlier description of what color was. “I’m going to say he recently stopped using a lawn service and had started mowing his own lawn to get more exercise. And he and his wife had stopped going out for dinner three or four nights a week and cut it back to one.”
    “Okay. That’s good. What else?” I asked.
    “Not much. You asked for color. This dude’s color was, like, neutral off-white. I mean, he played golf. Woo-hoo. What rich white guy doesn’t? I got a bunch of the ‘Oh, he was such a nice person,’ and ‘Oh, everyone liked him.’ But I don’t think anyone in this neighborhood really hangs out, you know? It’s like McMansion heaven out here. I think the only reason the neighbors mentioned the lawn-mowing thing is that they didn’t realize white people knew how to mow lawns. They act like that’s why Mexicans were invented.”
    “Yeah, I hear you,” I said, somewhat surprised to hear Chillax voice such a social conscience.
    “Really, the only thing the neighbors knew was that he grinded out a lot of hours at work. It wasn’t unusual for him to come home late. That’s all I got.”
    Young Chillax’s energies needed to be better directed. He was clearly wasting his time where he was. I knew I was going to eventually get good stuff on Joseph Okeke. If he didn’t come through with an equal measure of Kevin Tiemeyer, our story would be unbalanced.
    Then my eyes fell on Buster Hays, still doing violence to his keyboard. Buster was the master of using a little bit of information to get more information. That’s what we had to do here.
    “Okay,” I said. “So you said he played golf. Was he a member of a country club or something?”
    “Yeah, Fanwood.”
    Fanwood Country Club, named after the town next to Scotch Plains, was no Baltusrol or Pine Valley—two of New Jersey’s most famous courses. But it was a nice place. And it was a place where people would know Kevin Tiemeyer and might be a little more forthcoming with us than his neighbors, who were being blinded by klieg lights as they spoke.
    Back in the days when we had four or five reporters available to work any big story, we could simply dispatch one of them to Fanwood while Chillax continued to babysit the house. These days, we had to be more creative.
    “Okay, here’s what we’re doing to do,” I said. “If and when the family spokesman comes out, the TV stations will be all over it for us. I’ll make sure someone on the desk grabs the quotes. Meanwhile, you head over to Fanwood and get some of his buddies to fill your notebook. Get a good anecdote or two about him on the golf course but then also talk to them about what they’re thinking and feeling. Are they avoiding Newark now? Are they planning on making their next car purchase a Ford so they won’t be such juicy targets? I want to know how this crime is impacting them.”
    It would be perfect: the golf-playing masters of the universe suddenly feeling their own vulnerability, shaken over the loss of one of their own.
    “You got it, brah.”
    I cringed again. “Oh, and Chillax? You might want to refrain from calling any of them ‘brah.’ They might think you’re talking about something their wives buy at Victoria’s Secret.”
    “Huh?” he said.
    “Never mind. I’ll talk to you later.”
    I hung up, stood up and strolled over to Tommy’s desk. Tommy had movie star good looks, with thick dark hair; big, puppy dog brown eyes; the perfect amount of facial scruff (just long enough to be noticed, not so long that he looked homeless); and olive skin that was the recipient of an exfoliating-and-moisturizing