by R. G. Belsky
I asked him about the Laurie Bateman case.
“I want to know more about the evidence you had accumulated against her,” I said.
“Why do you care now?”
I didn’t want to tell him the truth. I didn’t trust Billy Carstairs—even the new Billy Carstairs—that much. I said I was working on a follow-up story that we were doing on air soon about how she’d gone free.
“We thought we had a good, solid case against her at the beginning,” Carstairs said. “But, as you well know, a lot of it began to fall apart. Once that interview with you aired, all this sentiment began building for her—and no one was interested in the actual evidence. The other big damaging blow though, even before that happened, was the death of the maid. I mean, the maid would have testified about finding Bateman trying to flee the crime scene with her husband’s dead body behind her. But, once the maid was gone, all we could do is enter her testimony in the court record—and Bateman insisted that wasn’t accurate. That she wasn’t running away, she was simply in a state of shock after finding the body. We lost a lot when we lost that maid as a live witness against Bateman.”
“Are there any new leads about what happened to the maid on the subway?”
“The police have a video from a transit security camera showing the scene on the platform. Begins while the maid is standing there waiting for the train and ends with her down on the tracks after being hit by the incoming train. I’ve watched it. It looks like someone might have shoved her as the train was approaching the station. But it’s hard to tell if it was deliberate or accidental. And, even if it was deliberate, that doesn’t mean it had anything to do with the Bateman case. There’s a lot of crazy people on subway platforms. There’ve been other cases where people are shoved into the path of trains by a psycho or whatever for no reason at all. It happens.”
Except this time it happened to a key witness in a sensational murder trial, I thought to myself.
“Anything else?” I asked.
“There is one other thing. I don’t know what it means. But it always bothered me about this case. The detectives who arrived at the crime scene said Bateman was crying and very emotional and kept insisting she was innocent of the murder. The same way she was during the interview she did with you and then later in court.”
“Isn’t that what you’d expect?”
“Exactly.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“She wasn’t that way before the police arrived. That’s what the maid, Carmen Ortega, told us in her statement. She said Bateman was composed, completely in control, and seemed—well, almost happy about her husband lying dead on the floor. It wasn’t until a short time after, when the police arrived, that she became emotionally distraught the way you’d expect from a wife who just found her husband murdered.”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. The way she changed once the police were there, it’s almost as if …”
“She was acting?”
“Yes, like she was acting,” Carstairs said.
CHAPTER 34
MY NEXT STOP was to see another one of my exes. This time it was Sam Markham, the homicide cop on the Hollister case, who also had been my third husband. I wanted to ask him about the video that Carstairs had told me about, the one of the subway platform when Carmen Ortega died.
On my way uptown to the precinct, I thought about how strange it was that both of the men I needed information from happened to be ex-lovers of mine. But then again, maybe it wasn’t so strange. I’ve been with a lot of men over the years.
My daughter had brought this up to me the last time we talked. “You’re almost fifty now, Mom,” she said. “You need to settle down. Stop sleeping with every man you find attractive, find one man—the right man—and start a life with him. It’s time.”
Yes, that came from my own damn daughter.
Sam and I got along though. At least as well as two divorced people can expect to get along with each other. I liked Sam. Hell, I liked all my ex-husbands. All three of them. I’m the first person to admit that the dissolution of my marriages was more my fault than theirs. Sam and I had gone through a rough period a year or two ago after the divorce when he came onto me while he was drunk, and I rebuffed him. He was angry at me about that for a while. But now he seemed happily married to a new woman and with a young child—and I was pretty sure I was just history to him. Like I was with a lot of men.
I found him in the squad room and asked about the video from Carmen Ortega’s death on the subway track.
“Why do you want to see that?”
“I’m an investigative journalist. I’m investigating the Laurie Bateman case. The maid’s death is part of that story.”
“But you already made sure Bateman got off on the charges.”
“I’m working on a follow-up story now.”
“What kind of a follow-up?”
“To see if she was really innocent.”
Unlike Carstairs, I trusted Sam enough to tell him the truth about what I was there for.
“You have doubts?” he asked.
“I have questions.”
“Such as?”
“Well, here’s one question for you, Sam: Do you think she did it?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know for sure one way or another. But it doesn’t matter anymore what I think, does it? She’s never going to be charged with anything again now. Because of you. You played a big part in getting the charges dropped. Once you did that interview with Bateman and she played the woman card—claiming she was the victim of continual domestic abuse from her husband—it didn’t matter whether she did it or not in the arena of public opinion. Laurie Bateman never paid any attention to women’s groups or feminist causes until it helped her to paint herself as a battered woman. And it worked. To be honest, I find the whole idea of her claiming to be a victim because he might have slapped her around a bit pretty despicable.”
“That’s because you’re not a woman,” I said.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning a man can’t relate to what Laurie Bateman might have endured the same way as a woman.”
“Well, before you label me as a sexist male curmudgeon, I know one thing for a fact: I never hit you when we were married.”
“No, you didn’t.”
He smiled. “But I did think about it a few times.”
“I’ll bet you did,” I said.
We watched the video together on a computer screen at Sam’s desk. It had been taken with a routine surveillance camera on the subway platform. There were cameras everywhere in the city now—Big Brother was always watching. But that didn’t mean it would tell you much about a crime. Sometimes, like with the video Sam showed me, it just left you with more questions.
The screen was black at first, then I suddenly was watching a view of the subway platform that day. It was filled with people for the evening rush hour. Everyone was bustling around, and there was a lot of pushing and shoving by people trying to get in position for the trains.
Sam paused the video at one point, then pointed out the Ortega woman to me. She was standing near the edge of the platform. A middle-aged woman, dark hair, carrying a handbag—she looked just like anyone else waiting for a subway ride. Watching her like that was kind of eerie. Because I knew—and she didn’t—that she only had seconds to live.
But I sat there transfixed at her on the screen—trying to find anything that could give me a clue about what happened to her.
Sam started playing the video again, but paused a few times more to show me some specific people. One was a homeless man panhandling from riders as they waited. Another was an apparently mentally disturbed woman gesturing wildly and yelling at people. Not an uncommon sight in the streets and subway stations these days.
“We thought it might have been someone like that who shoved her onto the tracks, either deliberately or accidentally,” Sam said. “But there’s no evidence of that. We talked to them both. At least as well as we could,
because neither was very coherent. But neither one seemed to know anything about the woman or how she wound up on those tracks in front of the subway train. And there’s nothing here that shows they were involved in any way. Or anyone else on that platform. It all looks pretty normal for an evening rush hour until the Ortega woman died.”
He played the rest of the video now.
Sure enough, you could see the crowd pushing and shoving on the platform. Carmen Ortega was standing in the center of it, close to the edge of the platform. The train pulled into the station. After that, it was pure chaos as everyone realized that a woman, Carmen Ortega, was on the tracks in front of the oncoming train.
“I was hoping for more,” I said. “What’s the Ortega woman’s death being called?”
“Accidental, for now.”
“Even though she was scheduled to testify in a big murder trial?”
“We can’t prove anything else at the moment. And Laurie Bateman was in jail when Ortega died so she sure couldn’t have done it. Besides, it doesn’t mean much now that Bateman has been cleared of the charges.”
I nodded. That all made sense. I didn’t like it, but I didn’t have any other answers. I stood up to leave.
“Do you want to see the end?” Sam asked.
“There’s more?”
“Just a guy who tried to save her.”
I looked back at the video of the scene. There was a man down on the tracks now, attempting to get Carmen Ortega back up onto the platform. He finally did, and she was lying there when the first EMTs arrived. But it was too late. She’d apparently been killed instantly by the impact of the train.
“That was a pretty heroic thing to do,” I said, looking at the man on the screen.
“Yep. Of course, she was already dead. But he didn’t know that when he went down on the tracks to try to save her. Everyone else on the platform just watched. But this guy tried to help. Except he couldn’t get her out of there in time.”
“What did he say about it afterward?”
“Nothing. We never talked to him. He left before anyone could get to him. No one else knew who he was. Just a Good Samaritan. We put out the picture of him in hopes of finding him. But nothing. Of course, it’s not a very good picture. All you can tell is he looks Chinese.”
I looked at the picture of the man on the screen now. Sam was right. You never got a good look at his face. Just a glimpse from the side. Nothing else. He could be anybody out there.
“Asian American,” I said.
“Huh?”
“The term is Asian American, not Chinese.”
“Even if he’s from China?”
“We don’t know that. There’s a lot of different types of Asian Americans living in New York City.”
I looked at the paused picture of the man on the screen again.
“Do you think he could be Vietnamese?” I asked.
“I suppose so. Why?”
“Laurie Bateman is from Vietnam.”
“I know, but …”
“I think he looks Vietnamese,” I said.
CHAPTER 35
THERE WERE NOW three possible links to Vietnam in this story: 1) Laurie Bateman was born in Vietnam as Pham Van Kieu and came to the U.S. as a baby after the war there ended; 2) Charles Hollister served in Vietnam as a soldier during that war; and 3) The man who had jumped onto the subway tracks in a heroic if unsuccessful effort to save Carmen Ortega, the Hollister’s maid and a key witness in the murder case, was—or at least appeared to be—Vietnamese.
I did not have the slightest idea what any of this all meant.
Probably nothing.
But I wanted to find out for sure.
I started back with Laurie Bateman again. I’d been trying to reach her ever since I left the precinct where Sam worked. I’d left a lot of messages, but gotten no response. So much for the personal stuff from her at her party about how she and I would be inseparable now as “girlfriends.”
Of course, maybe she was just busy or hadn’t gotten my messages yet. But I had a feeling she didn’t want to talk to me again. Maybe I was being cynical, but I couldn’t help feeling that she’d gotten what she wanted from me—and now she didn’t need me in her life anymore. My job was over, as far as Laurie Bateman was concerned.
I was going to have to talk to someone else about the Vietnam angle. Who? Well, Bert Stovall was the person who first told me how Hollister had served there—they’d been in the same unit and become lifelong friends after meeting in Vietnam. So he seemed like my best choice.
I wondered if he might avoid my call like Laurie Bateman seemed to be doing.
But Stovall got on the phone right away. He thanked me for all I’d done for Laurie, talked about how Laurie had taken over now as the head of the Hollister business empire—and about all the changes that had happened in just a few days since then. But he said she’d assured him he would continue to be the CEO and she would rely on him in the same way that Charles Hollister had for so many years.
I let Stovall go on like that for quite a while, as if I’d only called him for a personal update rather than for any professional reason.
“Tell me about Vietnam,” I said finally during a break in the conversation.
“What do you mean?”
“You talked last time in your office about how you and Hollister met there. Served together—and then you went to work for him when you got back to the U.S. and left the Army. I thought that might be interesting for a follow-up story. You know how we operate in the media: we’re always trying to keep a big story like this alive for a bit longer, if we can.”
It seemed like as good an excuse as any to explain my sudden interest about Vietnam.
“Charlie and I got drafted just before the U.S. was getting ready to pull out of the country altogether at the end of the war. Bad luck for both of us. They ended the draft after that. But not in time for us. Charlie and I were both assigned to MACV headquarters in Saigon. We just kind of hit it off, I guess. We became inseparable for the rest of our time there. And we stayed friends for more than a half century afterward.”
“What exactly was MACV?” I asked Stovall.
“MACV stood for Military Assistance Command, Vietnam. It was the headquarters for special operations and intelligence operations through the entire country. Not that there was much intelligence going on there, we used to laugh. Both of us were just counting the days until we could go home.
“I still remember how great it was when that finally happened. We were on this jet that took us back to the States at Fort Lewis, Oregon. When the plane touched down on U.S. soil, this huge cheer erupted from all of us. God, it was good to be out of Vietnam. Of course, neither of us ever had to go out into the field for real combat, thank God.”
“Except there was that time Hollister shot the enemy soldier.”
“Yeah, the Viet Cong sapper outside our MACV headquarters. Let me tell you, that was damn shocking—and why the Vietnam war was so scary. It turned out this kid with the explosive had been working for us at the base for a while. Pretending he was on our side, while he was working with the Viet Cong too. That was what happened a lot over there with that damn war. You never knew exactly whose side anyone was on. Damn, it was confusing to have to fight a war that way.”
“The ‘fog of war,’” I said.
“Huh?”
“That’s what Robert McNamara called it years later. In a documentary movie about how both sides stumbled into a war they didn’t want. He said neither side really understood it. There were no rules, no boundaries, no hard and fast allegiances like in previous wars we’d fought. No one could be sure who were the good guys and the bad guys. Everyone was always confused about Vietnam. And, in many ways, he said, they still are today. The documentary was called The Fog of War.”
“Yeah, that sums it up pretty well.” Stovall sighed. “It was such a mess, the whole year we were over there.”
“What happened after you and Hollister got back from the war
?”
“I had gone to work as an accountant—I went back to school to get my MBA—and then one day I got a call from Charlie. He said he was starting this new business, with computers. He kept talking about the future of computers and how everyone would be using them one day soon. He asked me to join him in his business. I was young and it seemed like fun, so I said yes. And the rest is history. That’s how we started the Hollister company.”
“Did it take long for you and him to become successful?”
“Not at all. We hit it big right out of the gate. Charlie, he was really into computers, even back then when no one paid much attention to them. Anyway, he came up with this idea for a new super chip, which totally revolutionized the computer industry. Just like Steve Jobs and the iPhone would do later. Everything broke just right for us. And, after that, came the oil wells and the real estate and the media properties and the pharmaceutical companies and everything else.”
I waited until the end to bring up Laurie Bateman again. I asked him if he was surprised, after their time together in Vietnam, that Hollister had wound up marrying a woman born in that country.
“Nah, like I told you, Charlie always liked the Asian American look.”
“And there was no connection from the time you and he were in Vietnam?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, her family was there, you were there …”
“She wasn’t even alive when we were in Vietnam.”
“Right,” I said.
I finally managed to reach Laurie Bateman. Maybe she got tired of dodging my calls and figured it was easier to talk with me. Anyway, she called back after the latest message that I left for her.
“Sorry, Clare, but it’s been pretty hectic around here. I’m in charge now, you know.”
