Beyond the Headlines

by R. G. Belsky

  “I couldn’t fight back because he was so much stronger than me. Afterward, he would always apologize, tell me he loved me, and promise it would never happen again. But it did, over and over. Yes, I hated my husband and I hated everything he’d done to me. But I didn’t kill him. I had plenty of reasons to want him dead. But so did a lot of other people. I’m innocent. I’m not a murderer! You have to believe me!”

  I was stunned at what I was seeing and hearing.

  I went back and watched it again.

  And again a few more times after that.

  It was almost word for word what she’d said in the courtroom during her real-life hearing that day. I found a few other instances where she had said something similar to what she’d said in the courtroom that day. Not exactly the same. But close enough so that it seemed extremely unlikely that it could be simply chance or coincidence.

  I stared at the now frozen image of Laurie Bateman on my computer screen for a long time.

  What the hell did this mean?

  Did Laurie Bateman go back and take lines from one of her old, obscure movies in order to help make her case for freedom?

  Or was she just playing a part that day too?

  “What if she really did it?” I said to Jack Faron.

  “Who?”

  “Laurie Bateman. What if she did murder her husband to get her hands on his money?”

  Faron was eating lunch in his office as we talked. He’d heated himself a Lean Cuisine spaghetti dish in the office microwave. Which would have been fine for his diet, except he had three of them on his desk in front of him. I wasn’t exactly a rocket scientist when it came to calorie counting, but I figured that eating three portions kind of defeated the purpose of the diet meal.

  “Wait a minute,” Faron asked between bites of his lunch. “Weren’t you on the other side of this before?”

  “I was.”

  “You were the one who helped convince everyone Laurie Bateman was innocent.”

  “I’m not so sure I was right about that anymore.”

  “What changed your mind?”

  I told him about the old movie I’d just seen. About how the dialogue from the courtroom scene in it was eerily similar to what Laurie Bateman had said in the real-life courtroom. About how it had made me wonder if she was really telling her own story that day or just playing another part.

  “And no one else ever noticed this connection with the movie before?”

  “Not that I can see. It’s a very old, very obscure movie. Barely anyone saw it at the time and very few since then. I only came across it because I started looking into her past stuff.”

  Faron thought about it for a minute. He ate a few more mouthfuls of his meal, then pushed it aside. He didn’t look happy with it. Or with me. I was bringing him a problem again, and he didn’t like problems any more than the food he was eating these days.

  “It doesn’t prove anything,” he said. “Maybe she was nervous about the upcoming courtroom appearance and wanted to prepare something. She remembered the part she played of an abused wife and it helped her to tell her own story. It could be as innocent as that.”

  “Except one of the biggest reasons she got out of jail and the charges were dropped were those emotional words she spoke about the domestic abuse in her marriage—first in the interview with me, then again in the courtroom. Everyone was overwhelmed by her sincerity. Including me. Now it doesn’t seem so sincere if she was basically reading lines from an old movie.”

  Faron nodded.

  “Do you want to go on the air with this then? Just raise the question. Show clips from the movie and then segments of her interview and the court appearance. It could be compelling.”

  I shook my head no.

  “I don’t want to tip my hand yet to let her know we found out about this. I’d like to do more digging first. See what else I can go back and find out about Laurie Bateman and the murder of Charles Hollister. There’s one other thing—one other loose end—that’s always bothered me. Why did the Hollister maid, Carmen Ortega, die? Of course, if it was just an accident—a coincidence—that a woman set to take part in a big murder trial fell in front of a subway train, then it’s not relevant to anything else. But if it was murder, the murderer’s motive must have been to prevent her from testifying at the trial. That meant the murderer was someone who didn’t want Laurie Bateman to be convicted. Who could that be? Well, Laurie Bateman, of course, was the obvious possibility. Sure, she was in jail. But she had money, lots of money. She could have hired someone on the outside to get rid of Carmen Ortega for her and to make it look like an accident.”

  Faron shook his head in frustration. “I’m confused. Why are you asking this question now? Why are you asking any of these questions about Laurie Bateman now? Why not before? I mean the woman went free because of you, Clare.”

  “I know. That’s what makes me so mad.”

  “Who exactly are you mad at? Laurie Bateman?”

  “I’m mad at everybody, including myself. If Bateman killed her husband, then she subverted an important issue—the women’s movement, which has accomplished so much for women, has righted so many wrongs for us, in recent years—to possibly gain false sympathy in order to beat the murder rap against her. If she lied about killing her husband, then maybe she lied about the domestic abuse against her too. That’s an egregious affront to me as a woman. And it should be an egregious affront to any woman.

  “But, even more than that, if she is lying—then I’m mad because I fell for it. I believed her. I trusted her. I fought for her. But now, if it turns out she really did it, that means she outsmarted me. I guess that’s what bothers me the most.

  “I did the same thing I accused the police and the DA’s office of doing, Jack. They started off with the premise that Bateman was guilty and then looked only for evidence that could support that conclusion. They didn’t pay any attention to evidence that might exonerate her. Well, I did the same thing—only I did it in reverse. I went looking for evidence that Laurie Bateman didn’t murder her husband. And I found it. A lot of it. But, along the way, I ignored other leads I should have pursued.

  “I hope Carmen Ortega’s death turns out to be an accident after all. I hope the similarity in Bateman’s words with the movie lines were a coincidence too—or, at worst, a misguided attempt by her to prove her innocence in court because she was so desperate to get out of jail for a crime she didn’t commit.

  “But I have to know the truth. I liked Laurie Bateman when this story started—and yes, I believed she was innocent right from the beginning. I still think she is innocent, at least until I find out more. But what if I’m wrong? What if Laurie Bateman is guilty—and she was responsible for the deaths of both her husband and Carmen Ortega?”

  Faron realized the enormity of what I was telling him.

  “Then that means …” he started to say.

  “That means I helped her get away with murder.”

  PART III

  THE FOG OF WAR

  CHAPTER 32

  BY THE TIME I got to work the next morning, Maggie had prepared a massive file on Laurie Bateman. I said I wanted to find out everything I could. Not only about the Laurie Bateman of today, as I had earlier. But everything about her past, too, all the way back to Vietnam when she came to the U.S. as a baby.

  “Why do you care so much about the details of Bateman’s background?” she asked. “I mean the Vietnam stuff was a long time ago.”

  “The past never dies, Maggie. It’s not even past.”

  “Huh?”

  “William Faulkner said that.”

  “Jeez …”

  “You’re not a fan of Faulkner?”

  “Oh, I’m fine with Faulkner. I took English literature. I just never thought I’d hear you quoting him.”

  I told Maggie about the comparison I’d discovered with the old movie and my new questions about the story. If Maggie was surprised, she didn’t show it. She went with the news flow pretty easily,
understood that a story didn’t always follow a straight line—there were often a lot of detours along the way. And I knew she trusted my news instincts, which was good to know when you worked with someone in a newsroom.

  “I simply want to find out as much as I can about Laurie Bateman—or, more precisely, I want to find out what I don’t know about her. I’m going to have to talk to her again about everything and this time it might not be as friendly as my previous meetings with her. I need to arm myself with as many facts as I can about her and her life before I take that step.”

  On the way into the office, I’d brought a large cup of black coffee at the deli downstairs and a poppyseed bagel smeared with scallion cream cheese. I figured it would be a long morning, so I wanted to fuel up. I took a bite of the bagel, a sip of the coffee, and then plunged into the Laurie Bateman file.

  Even though I was too young to remember it, I knew enough about the last days of the South Vietnamese war to understand what a nightmare it must have been for the people there.

  I’d seen those horrific images and video from April 1975, out of Saigon and elsewhere, of them desperately trying to flee the country before the Communists arrived: hanging from departing U.S. helicopters, swimming out into the ocean to try to get to any boat that might help them escape, storming the gates of the U.S. Embassy, and pleading for help as U.S. Marines pushed them back before abandoning the embassy themselves a short time later.

  Most of the U.S. combat troops had pulled out of the country after a cease-fire agreement with North Vietnam in 1973, and two years later the entire South Vietnamese government was collapsing—with North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops about to capture Saigon and the country.

  Now it was total chaos as agonizing decisions had to be made about who got to leave—and who were forced to stay.

  I thought about Laurie Bateman—who was then Pham Van Kieu—and her family and what they must have endured in order to escape. Did they manage to get on one of the helicopters? Did they get picked up by a ship? How did they get out when so many others didn’t? Well, it was probably like everything else that happens in a war—the luck of the draw. Some people survived and some didn’t.

  There were only a few details available about them fleeing the war. Despite being asked about it in several interviews over the years, Laurie Bateman had never revealed what she’d been told about it.

  All we knew was this: Only a few months old at the time, Laurie had come to America with her Vietnamese family. The family seemed to consist of her mother, father, an uncle, and a grandmother. Laurie and her mother had managed to get out of the country during those last days before the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong arrived in Saigon. They eventually made their way to California, where they were reunited with her father—who had been sent to college in Los Angeles earlier by the South Vietnamese government.

  “Wait a minute,” I said to Maggie. “If the father was alive, how did Marvin Bateman get into the picture?”

  “That was a few years later. Her father died not long after the family arrived in America. A car accident. That’s when the mother and Laurie met Bateman.”

  “What about the rest of the family? The grandmother is presumably long dead. But what happened to the uncle?”

  “No one is sure. He was the brother of Laurie’s mother. He just kind of disappeared after they came to the U.S.”

  “And the mother?”

  “She’s still alive. Marvin Bateman died a number of years ago. But she still lives in the same house. It’s in La Jolla, a couple of hours south of LA near San Diego.”

  I wrote all this down as Maggie was talking. I wasn’t sure why. Like I said, I didn’t know what I was looking for in all this. But the same as I do with any story, I wanted to accumulate as much information as I could and hope it led me somewhere.

  I already had questions that were bothering me though. About exactly how the family made it out of Vietnam. About the death of her father. And about the disappearance of her uncle earlier. None of it probably meant anything; it all happened so long ago. But I was still curious.

  I was curious about something else, too.

  “Bert Stovall, Hollister’s CEO, told me they’d met when they were both in Vietnam during the war. Is there any possible connection between Hollister when he was there and Laurie’s family? I have no idea how or why, but it does seem like an interesting fact that they were both there then. Maybe you could look into that …”

  “I already did.”

  Of course. Maggie was always one step ahead of everyone.

  “And?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Here’s what I found out about Charles Hollister and Vietnam: He was drafted into the Army in 1971. One of the last group of men that got drafted for the war. He wound up in Saigon working in an intelligence office at MACV headquarters. That was the major U.S. military center there. Not long before he rotated out of Vietnam and came back to the U.S., he encountered a Viet Cong soldier attempting to plant an explosive at the MACV building. The enemy soldier reached for his AK-47, but Hollister shot and killed him first—and before the explosive could be ignited. He probably saved a lot of lives that day. They gave him a medal for his heroic action.”

  That was the story Stovall had told me earlier.

  Interesting, but didn’t seem to have anything to do with what I was looking for.

  “Is there any possibility at all that Hollister had any contact with the Pham family and his future wife while he was in Vietnam?”

  “No way. He left Vietnam in 1973 when the U.S. pulled out its last combat troops. She wasn’t born until 1975, two years later.”

  “Damn.”

  Maggie laughed. “What were you hoping for, Clare? That maybe Laurie Bateman was Hollister’s secret daughter from the war? And he didn’t know? Or she didn’t know? And, one or both of them found out, which set off everything that happened later? Did you think this story was going to be that easy?”

  I sighed. “One can only hope.”

  CHAPTER 33

  THE LAST PERSON I ever wanted to see or talk to again was William—Wild Bill—Carstairs. I did not like Carstairs. I did not trust him. And, worst of all, every time I was around him reminded me of my moment of weakness when I’d slept with him. Nope, if I never saw Carstairs again in my entire life, it would be too soon.

  I met Billy Carstairs that afternoon following my meeting with Maggie.

  I had my reasons. The last few times I’d talked with Carstairs, we’d been on opposite sides. He was arrogantly predicting a conviction for Laurie Bateman, and I believed she was innocent. Now that I wasn’t so sure anymore, I was more interested in finding out about what evidence he—and the DA’s office and police—had accumulated against her before the charges were dropped. Which meant meeting with Carstairs. I’ve always said I’d do almost anything for a story. Well, this was going to be a real test of that.

  When I called Carstairs, he said we should meet somewhere outside the DA’s offices. He said he didn’t want to be seen there with me.

  “You’re not very popular with the people there right now,” he said.

  “I can only imagine.”

  “Actually, I’m not very popular with them these days either.”

  “A lot of fallout from the collapse of the Bateman case?”

  “That and other things.”

  He suggested we meet in the Foley Square area.

  “Some place outside,” I said, not wanting to find myself trapped in a restaurant or a bar with Carstairs.

  “Isn’t it a bit cold to be meeting outside?”

  “I don’t plan to stay that long.”

  He sighed. If he was insulted, he didn’t say anything about it though. That was one of the good things about Billy Carstairs: it was pretty hard to insult him or hurt his feelings. He’d had it all said to him before.

  “Remember that park near the courthouse, Clare?”

  “The one where you tried
to molest me?”

  “Yeah, that’s the one.”

  Even in December, there was still a guy selling hot dogs there. I wondered if these people ever went south for the winter. Carstairs and I both bought hot dogs and sodas—we went Dutch-treat by the way—and sat down on one of the park benches. It was a relatively nice day for the first month of winter. Temperature only down to the mid-forties. But I was still hoping this wouldn’t take long.

  “How bad are things for you at the DA’s office?” I asked once we sat down and began munching on our hot dogs.

  “I still have a job. But only barely. They’re not giving me any work to do. And I’ve got a big meeting coming up with my bosses there that I don’t think will go well. I’m going to have to start looking for a new job. Let’s just say my star is falling. Or crashed and burned, I guess you could say. And it’s all because of you.”

  “Uh, sorry about that,” I said. I kind of meant it. I didn’t really want to destroy the guy’s career and his life.

  “It wasn’t just Laurie Bateman and the Hollister murder case. It was everything that came along with it. Once she opened it up to all the ‘I’m a woman victim of an abusive man’ stuff, people started zeroing in on me as the prosecutor and looking at my own sexual background. As you might expect, there was a lot of damaging stuff they came up with. Both in the office and out.”

  “In the office?”

  “My assistant, Annette, you met her. She’s now filed sexual harassment charges against me. Piling on, I guess, once all this stuff about me and other women came out. She claims I made her sleep with me to keep her job.”

  “Did you make her sleep with you to keep her job?”

  “Hey, I had sex with her. But I never made it a quid pro quo. I’ve slept with a lot of women in the office, and that was never a problem before.”

  “Times have changed,” I pointed out.

  “Yeah, I guess I found that out.”

  He definitely seemed more subdued than I’d ever seen him before. I could tell how much all this had taken a toll on him, professionally and personally. I mean, I’d already been sitting with him for ten minutes so far and he hadn’t made a pass at me yet. A tiger doesn’t change his stripes though, and I figured the same old Billy Carstairs would return.