“YOU AND WENDY NEED TO BE CAREFUL,” A COP SOURCE WARNED BARBARA DURING A CONVERSATION FROM HIS PERSONAL CELL. “THE STUFF YOU GUYS are reporting is serious. A lot’s at stake. Cops could go down ’cause of this.”
On top of the hate e-mails, Barbara and I had started to get nasty voice-mail messages and hang-up calls. The paper’s top editor, Michael Days, was concerned enough to ask the company’s telecommunications staff to trace the calls. Denise Gallo, the scarily efficient Daily News den mom who served as Michael’s right arm, came over to us with a printout of incoming calls to the newsroom. She highlighted calls to our extensions in yellow. “Girls, do you recognize any of these numbers?” At fifty-seven, Denise always referred to us as the Girls, though Barbara was fifty-one and I was thirty-nine. No number looked familiar, except for one—a hang-up from my home phone. Karl had a habit of calling and hanging up when I didn’t answer. The three of us erupted in giggles.
We tried to brush off the anger directed at us, but our imaginations sometimes led to our brains’ dark crannies. I was afraid to get my morning newspaper. I’d open the front door and scan up and down my street before dashing to the lawn to snatch the paper. I’d quickly dead-bolt the door behind me.
“Why do you keep locking the door?” Karl asked after dropping Brody at school.
“I don’t know,” I said dumbly.
I wasn’t a door-locker by nature, and Karl knew that I rarely bothered to lock the door when we left to go grocery shopping or out to dinner.
During a morning run, on a winding road without sidewalks, Barbara jumped into the bushes when a speeding pickup truck veered toward her. This is it, she thought. The pickup rocketed by, disappearing around a curve, and she breathed puffs of relief, uncertain whether to laugh at herself or hurry home.
Barbara’s neighbor, Hutch, walked across the street to her house every night before she came home from work to flip on every overhead light and lamp. The past three years, Barbara and Hutch had had an on-again, off-again relationship. She’d met him three months after moving here with her teenage children, her divorce still raw. She gardened obsessively, thinking a manicured lawn, prettied up with flowers, could mask the chaos of an uprooted life. On a Saturday afternoon in May, Barbara kneeled in the dirt and planted yellow and purple pansies. She thought of her ex-husband, all the weekend afternoons, twenty-five years together, spent working on the lawn. She looked a mess in her mud-splotched running clothes, her eyes pink and puffy from crying, when Hutch yelled from across the street, “How about coming over for a get-to-know-your-neighbor drink?”
It took her three weeks to fall for him.
Hutch, a rugged, broad-shouldered, six-foot-tall man with a strong jaw, was like a teenager with a bad-boy edge. He had a bald spot and a nose that sported a bump and curved slightly to the right—the result of three bloody breaks sustained in ice hockey and wrestling dustups. He didn’t walk; he swaggered, exuding self-confidence.
After the divorce, Barbara probably needed someone like Hutch. They spent evenings in his basement, dancing to Led Zeppelin and the Cure like high-schoolers. He wasn’t guarded with his emotions and spoke without a filter. But over time, some of his raunchy, off-color remarks made Barbara cringe. They often had spats about race, politics, priorities, lifestyles, children. A gun lover, he kept a 9mm Glock in his bedroom dresser and stashed shotguns and hunting rifles in a locked safe. Barbara hated guns. The highs of the relationship were euphoric; the lows chipped away at her.
Barbara hadn’t dated in over twenty-five years, and Hutch was the opposite of her ex-husband, Matt. Matt was reserved, reliable, predictable, and so steady that his emotional pendulum rarely budged. Those were some reasons she fell in love with him. He grounded her. Matt was the “Whoooa, Nellie” to her exuberant “Giddy up! Woo-hoo!”
The problem was, Hutch was a little too “Woo-hoo” and that scared Barbara. She pictured herself with a man whose personality was a blend of Matt and Hutch’s. But dating was hell.
On one date, a guy pulled up his pant leg to show Barbara his tattoos. On his calf, he had tattooed the name of his then-wife inside a heart. When he started dating after his divorce, his new girlfriend hated the tattoo, so he covered up his ex-wife’s name with a rose and added the girlfriend’s name in bigger print underneath. Barbara imagined her name, in even larger letters, scrawled underneath the ex-girlfriend’s name, camouflaged with a giant pink chrysanthemum.
Another guy described himself as “athletic and toned” on his Match.com profile and looked about 180 pounds in his photo. Barbara didn’t recognize him when they met. Somewhere along the way, he’d packed on an extra hundred pounds. He confessed that he first called Barbara from the family station wagon because he was still living with his ex-wife. He assured Barbara that he wasn’t intimate with his ex and slept in the den on a broken La-Z-Boy chair.
Still another guy, who Barbara had really liked, turned out to be a pathological liar. He even spun a tale about making pot roast for his grown daughters, when he’d really ordered pizza.
“It was the pot roast,” Barbara told me incredulously. “Why would he lie about pot roast? I mean, pot roast, Wendy. As if I care that he didn’t cook.”
Barbara shared her dating horror stories with Hutch. He had a few of his own.
“I keep telling you. I’m the one for you,” said Hutch, who then smiled, threw his shoulders back, and swept his hands up and down his body, stopping at his crotch. “Look. I’m the full package.”
Hutch liked to parody the line from Jerry Maguire, in which Tom Cruise tells Renée Zellweger, “You complete me.”
“I,” Hutch said with a theatrical pause, “complete myself.”
Even when Barbara and Hutch weren’t dating, they stayed friends, and Hutch loved being her protector. After he lit up her house like the Griswold family’s Christmas, he would poke his head into every closet and under all three beds. During the nightly patrol, he had a Glock holstered on his hip, just in case. Years ago, he’d been a cop and had a license to carry.
“Hutch can be soooo sweet sometimes,” Barbara told me.
Around this time, George Bochetto, the hawkish attorney hired by Jeff, was readying a Laker-Ruderman smackdown. He assured Jeff that we were easy prey. He’d clobber us. On Jeff’s dime, Bochetto hired a private investigator to blast holes in Benny’s story and discredit our work.
The PI spent days interviewing Benny’s relatives and former bosses, who characterized Benny as an unredeemable liar, con artist, drug addict, and thief, disowned by his own father. He pulled Benny’s criminal record and interviewed cops who vouched for Jeff, casting him as the kind of cop they’d want beside them in a foxhole. Jeff’s former partner, Richard Eberhart, denied knowing that Jeff rented a house to Benny. He claimed Barbara had twisted his words. The PI pulled Jeff’s awards, commendations, and letters of praise from community leaders. He compiled the interviews and documents into a textbook-thick binder, which included exhibits A through K.
With the PI’s report in hand, Bochetto set about organizing a news conference with the Fraternal Order of Police. In Philly, politicians tiptoed around the FOP. Lawmakers and judges who dared to poke the 14,600-member beehive with a stick felt their collective sting. The FOP relentlessly bashed municipal court judge Craig Washington when he refused to allow a memorial photo of slain officer John Pawlowski to rest on the bench during court proceedings. The police union hung a huge banner reading “DUMP Judge Craig Washington” outside its headquarters.
Barbara and I had whacked the beehive with a baseball bat. We’d taken on one of their own, and the cops were about to unite in a swarm.