The Kudzu Kid Read online

  Tucker Daniel was a lawyer as well as a publisher, and he had cultivated a shrewdness of his own. He studied Fogarty even as Fogarty studied him, noting the wrinkled clothes and the areas under the eyes that looked like tiny deflated balloons, and realized that the young man’s confident patter was nothing but shellac camouflaging rotten wood. This kid, Daniel thought, is desperate.

  “Another thing is, I’ve got an aunt in Virginia Beach,” Fogarty was saying, “so it’s not like I won’t know anybody down here.”

  The publisher peered over his glasses again, as if Fogarty were an interesting specimen discovered on a field trip.

  “Yes, well, this process usually takes a while,” Daniel said in his clipped University of Virginia business school voice. “I’d have to say I was surprised when you asked to come down here just two days after we’d talked. That didn’t give me much time.”

  A pause.

  “I did get in contact with your old boss up in New Jersey, though. A Mr. Donnelly?”

  A taut fist formed instantly in Fogarty’s stomach. Oh, shit, he thought.

  “He was very complimentary. He said you were a hard worker, had broken some big stories, and that he’d miss having you around.”

  Well, damn. The editor had told Fogarty that he wouldn’t be an obstacle to his getting another job, as long as it wasn’t with anybody Donnelly knew, but Fogarty wasn’t sure he believed him. Fogarty kept the relief from showing on his face. He never played poker—it was a social game and Fogarty had no social life—but he would have been good at it.

  “Why leave a job like that, Mr. Fogarty?” Daniel asked. “And what’s your hurry? More to the point, why would a city boy like yourself think he could find happiness down here in the tobacco, peanut and Baptist belt?”

  “Like I said,” Fogarty reminded him, “I just woke up one morning and decided I wanted to be an editor. I’m kind of impulsive like that. I picked up that copy of E & P, turned to the classifieds, and there you were. It sounded interesting. It sounded different.”

  Daniel couldn’t help but notice the edginess invading the young man’s voice. Fogarty was beginning to feel sleep-deprived, and his civility was unraveling.

  At least he looked normal—slender, but not to the point of skinny, no visible tattoos. His hair was longish, but Daniel took that as a sign of neglect rather than a statement. Besides, this was 1985, and nobody cared about haircuts, or the lack of them, anymore.

  “I was hoping to flush out a journalism student or two through that ad,” Daniel said, giving Fogarty a half-smile of uncertain meaning. “Maybe someone with strong weekly experience. I hardly expected to find myself sitting across the desk from someone with your qualifications. You’re a regular Bob Woodward, Mr. Fogarty.”

  “Thanks,” Fogarty said with all the humility he could summon.

  For one crazy instant, he thought of telling Daniel the truth—that he had not only been fired, but essentially blackballed from every other paper in the Northeast. The magazine ad seeking an editor for the Southside Echo in Jefferson Springs had seemed to offer more of a penance than an opportunity, a place of anonymous exile where he might begin to repair the damage he had done to his reputation.

  But Tucker Daniel wouldn’t want to hear that truth. This was a matter-of-fact businessman who wanted a reliable underling, someone to run his paper while he flew off to Hilton Head with his wife or sipped Jim Beam at the steeplechase races. The last thing he needed was a loose cannon who would periodically send him scrambling for his libel lawyer.

  “Calvin Hamer edited this paper for more than forty years. He knew everyone in Randolph County, and everyone in Randolph County knew him. He took some stands over the years, and he took some heat. He was a tough old bird, but he knew the landscape. You, Mr. Fogarty, do not know the landscape.”

  “I can learn,” Fogarty said.

  Daniel tipped slowly back in his venerable chair, which emitted a protesting chirp from deep in its joints. He was dressed in a white shirt and Duck Head slacks, a skinny red tie suspended from his neck like a hangman’s noose. His hair was graying at the temples, his face ruddy—lots of golf, Fogarty thought.

  “Why are you here, Mr. Fogarty?” Daniel asked. “Really, why are you here?”

  The negotiations had arrived at a pivotal point. It was time for another story, and Fogarty was a storyteller by profession. He leaned forward, as if to share a secret.

  “Well, there is something else,” he said. “There were some people up there who didn’t like one of the last stories I wrote. I mean, they really didn’t like it. My girlfriend up there was threatened. Somebody stuck a screwdriver in my tires and put a concrete block through my windshield. I was always looking over my shoulder, and it got to the point where I couldn’t do my job. I wanted out.”

  Daniel stared at him for a long moment, waiting to see if Fogarty burst out laughing. Was this a put-on? But Fogarty’s expression never changed as they locked eyes.

  “You’re serious, aren’t you?” the publisher said finally.

  “As John Gotti is my witness.”

  “So, what? You want to come here and hide out for a while? This is a newspaper, Mr. Fogarty, not the Witness Protection Program.”

  “No, I want to come here and start a new career. Let somebody else go out on the front lines.”

  Daniel sighed deeply.

  “We don’t have gangsters in Randolph County, Mr. Fogarty,” he said. “If you’re murdered here, it will probably be by someone who loves you. Our supervisors will argue for days over the price of a new road sign, and you’ll be covering things like high school graduations and church reunions. This is a very long way from the Jersey Progress, and you’re going to feel like you’re in a foreign country. The pay is not good and the hours will be brutal.”

  “No problem,” Fogarty said. “I’ll take it.”

  “Just a minute,” Daniel said sharply. “Frankly, I’m over a barrel. Since Calvin died six months ago, I’ve been doing a lot of what he used to do on top of all my other duties. Needless to say, my wife is not thrilled. Every time she makes plans for us in Richmond, I’m heading out the door to a planning commission meeting or town council. For a place where nothing ever changes, Randolph County sure has a lot of government.”

  It was the first time Daniel had dropped his cool shield of detachment. Fogarty knew he had him.

  “There’s still something about you that bothers me,” Daniel continued, “but you’ve got a good resume—better than good—great references, and you wanted this job badly enough to drive all the way down here.”

  Daniel’s chair squeaked again as he stared at the cracked ceiling. Fogarty felt the faint vibration of traffic on Main Street and heard a cricket somewhere in the building. The Jersey Progress newsroom of nearly one hundred was always a soup of sound, a babble of ringing telephones and raised voices and clicking computer keys. This place, with a total of four working in news, was like a funeral home.

  “To tell you the truth, Mr. Fogarty, I can’t think of any reason not to hire you,” Daniel said finally. “The job pays five hundred dollars a week, which I realize is a lot less than you were making before. You’ll be on salary, which means working as many hours as it takes to get the job done. I can promise you that I’ll stay out of your way and let you run the paper the way you see fit, just as long as you don’t get me run out of town. All I ask is that you give me a year, in writing. I don’t want to go through all this in another three or four months.”

  “You got yourself a deal,” Fogarty said, conjuring up a broad smile from the depths of his fatigue and uncertainty. “And call me Eddie.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE MAYTAG MAN

  I hate that freakin’ bell,” Denny DeBrocco always said.

  It was attached to the inside front door of his TV store, and it jangled giddily whenever the door was opened.

  Like sleigh bells, Denny thought sometimes. Or the summer song of the ice cream truck driver.

&nb
sp; “You’ve got a customer!” it sang out joyously.

  And the bell was always right, because people who knew Denny came to the back door. The problem was Denny didn’t want customers.

  He could never figure out how they found DeBrocco’s TV Sales & Repair in the first place. It was tucked away on a side street off a side street in a beaten-down industrial section of South Orange, New Jersey—not exactly the garden spot of the Garden State. The place wasn’t listed in the Yellow Pages, never advertised, and the outside sign was almost too small to be seen by passersby.

  Yet somehow, maybe a dozen times a month, some stranger would come jangling into Denny’s world, usually when he was deep in the rear of his cavernous store. It was a mystery beyond his comprehension.

  He had actually thought of removing the bell and propping a permanent Closed sign in the window, but Leo Castelli, his boss, had forbade it.

  “Jesus Christ, Denny,” Leo said. “You gotta keep up appearances.”

  So he would trudge out to meet the customer, generally someone carrying a TV or VCR and wanting it fixed.

  “Yeah, sure,” DeBrocco would say. “We’ll take care of it.”

  “You don’t even know what’s wrong with it,” the customer always replied.

  “I told you, we’ll take care of it.”

  In such emergencies, DeBrocco would call one of his neighbors, a guy who could fix anything. And DeBrocco invariably paid him more for fixing the equipment than the customer would pay when he came back to pick it up.

  The prices on the TV’s and VCR’s in what passed for DeBrocco’s showroom were always fixed higher than the going rate. The last thing Denny wanted was for word to get around that he offered any bargains.

  “Hey, we’re not freakin’ Kmart,” he would say with a shrug.

  The flow of merchandise was unpredictable. There was the time, for instance, when a home entertainment hauler from North Carolina made the mistake of dozing off in his cab out in the auxiliary parking lot at JFK, leaving one of his doors unlocked. He awoke just before three that morning with a .357 Magnum taking up space in front of his face. The next day DeBrocco’s had an infusion of inventory.

  And a week later, most of those TV sets had disappeared.

  “Hey, I need a—what do you call it?—identity,” Denny would tell his friends. “They got this blank on the tax form for ‘occupation.’ What am I gonna put there? Gangster? DeBrocco’s friends would all laugh, because they, like him, were gangsters.

  Whatever that meant. Certainly, there was nothing scary about Denny DeBrocco. He couldn’t even maintain the gruffness needed to bluff the walk-in customers away—if they weren’t intimidated by his initial brush off, he often wound up bullshitting with them for hours about the Giants, Devils, Nets, or the weather.

  That was really DeBrocco’s job, bullshitting, and he was good at it. As for the store, it existed for what Leo called “bookkeeping adjustment.” Money flowed through DeBrocco’s like oil through an automobile filter and very little of it stuck.

  In 1983, for example, DeBrocco had sold a total of twenty three television sets and six VCRs to people he didn’t know. The other sales, accounting for over nine hundred thousand dollars, were either freebies to friends or existed only on paper.

  “So who does your taxes, Denny?” his friends would ask.

  “I dunno,” he’d say, “Leo, or somebody.”

  They called Denny The Maytag Man, after the famously idle washing machine repairman in the TV ads. And because DeBrocco’s had off-street parking behind and a huge back room—a vestige of when the place had been a shoe warehouse—his establishment became a popular meeting place for some of Castelli’s associates. Leo loved that word, rolling it around in his mouth when he said it and for Dom Davila, who was Latino rather than Sicilian but still someone who could be trusted—”a friend of ours,” as the saying went. The all-Sicilian thing was falling apart now, anyway.

  “It’s like hockey,” Castelli would say. “Used to be all Canucks. Now, you got all these foreign guys. But it’s still hockey.”

  DeBrocco was afraid of Davila, and Davila knew it. Maybe it was his Colombian and Mexican connections or the wolfish grin that would slide across Davila’s swarthy face like a zipper.

  Once DeBrocco had made the mistake of telling Davila that he had seen the movie Scarface and was creeped out by the scene in which an unfortunate drug dealer was dismembered with a chainsaw by other drug dealers.

  After that, Davila would sometimes catch DeBrocco’s eye, make a yanking motion with his right hand, and emit a guttural “R-r-r-r-rumm!” sound from deep in his throat, followed by the zipper grin. Sometimes when Davila came to DeBrocco’s store, the grin would be a little wilder and there would be a faint crust of white powder around his nostrils.

  DeBrocco’s drug of choice was Bud Light, a vain attempt to keep his girth from expanding, and maybe a bottle of wine or a shot or two of Jack Black on holidays. He had grown an extra chin, and he found himself increasingly short of breath when he lugged one of those heavy old-model TV’s to the rear of the store. Unlike most of the macho types who hung out at his place playing cards and telling raunchy jokes, he never cheated on his wife.

  “Who’s gonna go out with a guy like me, anyway?” he would say. “I’m just a TV salesman. And if Rose ever found out? Whew! Remember that guy Bobbitt?”

  The DeBrocco’s and their two kids went to Mass every Sunday at St. Vincent’s, where he often took up the collection in his ill-fitting suit, shoving the long-handled basket across the aisles with a beatific smile, winking amiably at people from the neighborhood. His older son, Denny Jr., was an altar boy.

  And yet DeBrocco was a made member of Castelli’s organization, which meant that he had once killed a man. The difference between him and Dom Davila was that he didn’t enjoy it.

  “This is a favor for Georgie Martin,” Castelli had told DeBrocco one afternoon as they sat in Castelli’s kitchen in East Orange and sipped sweet-bitter absinthe from shot glasses decorated with scenes of Atlantic City. “Georgie is doing a favor for the people out in Vegas, and you’re doing a favor for me.”

  It was time. DeBrocco was always introduced by Castelli as “one of us” rather than “a friend of ours,” because he was of the third generation. His father had also been one of them, until he died in prison, and DeBrocco was swept into the life as quickly as water escaping down a bathtub drain.

  No matter that his personality made him ill-suited for this destiny. He was an aberration in his alternative world, devoid of aggressiveness. All that saved him from an unpleasant few years in the tough public school he attended was the fact that everyone knew who his father was. No one dared laugh at DeBrocco, and he mistook that for universal acceptance.

  Castelli had plenty of hard-eyed associates who would be all too happy to escape their routine for a few days, fly out to some other city and pump a few bullets into a man they didn’t know. But it became Denny’s turn, because once a family member had killed, it bonded him to the group through blood.

  It was like a sacrament, Leo explained. Like Confirmation. He knew DeBrocco was devout.

  Soon after that, DeBrocco got his TV store. And one night in late June, just after Eddie Fogarty had headed south, he threw open his back room for a meeting that was better attended than most.

  “You should have this many customers all the time,” Leo said.

  “You shittin’ me?” DeBrocco shot back. “Then I’d have to really work.”

  As with any meeting of any club in town, there was some initial boredom—“prior business,” Castelli called it. Then the delivery boy showed up with takeout food from Guglielmo’s, and somebody had to make a phone call, and a couple of guys excused themselves to use the bathroom. It was close to eleven before Leo came to the point.

  “We got real problems with this garbage thing, the hazardous waste,” he said, his old voice cracked and hoarse when he tried to speak loudly.

  “Marty Ventura?” someo
ne asked.

  “Yeah, Marty Ventura. That Northwest Extension deal went sour. We got burned, big-time, on it. Somebody went to the goddamn DA and the FBI, if you can believe that. Then the newspaper got hold of it, then TV. It was just a big freaking mess.”

  “Now, they got to zone the area commercial, so kiss it goodbye. They’ll be so many people crawling around there that we won’t be able to drop a gum wrapper on the property without the feds being all over our ass.”

  A latecomer from Secaucus stood up.

  “I’m sorry, Leo, but I’m coming in the middle of this thing. Tommy’s out of town, and I’m filling in for him. Can you catch me up?”

  Castelli nodded.

  “The deal was, Noudi Construction—who we own, more or less—submitted a bid to lay that road down, the Northwest Extension, a bid so low nobody could undercut it. Anyway, Marty was making sure nobody would undercut it.”

  “Problem is, Carmine has got to do that road now, just like any other solid citizen, and he’s gonna lose money doing it. So we gotta bail him out, big-time, and that’s part of what this meeting is all about. We was all gonna benefit from this, so we should all have to kick in. I don’t think Carmine could put in a sidewalk for what the bid was once Marty got through with it. Marty don’t like to take chances.”

  Noudi Construction never intended to make money from the road-building project, Correlli explained.

  “The real money was gonna come from hauling all this toxic shit from Elizabeth and Bayonne and some places in Upstate New York out to this construction site after dark. Noudi was gonna babysit. We were gonna dig some big holes and say they were for fill dirt and the shit was going in there. After dark, under the dirt. If you try to do this in some out-of-the-way place, somebody will get suspicious. Better to do it under their noses.”

  “There are some real big bucks in this, gentlemen, in case you haven’t heard. In a lot of ways, it beats moving coke.”

  For that, Castelli knew, they could thank the Environmental Protection Agency. After a federal investigation in the late ‘70s revealed that certain landfills and storage depots in North Jersey had been contaminated, and after a big dump site right across the river from Manhattan had gone up like the Fourth of July, all but a handful of toxic waste sites around the state were closed down. Same with New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Delaware.