by R. G. Belsky
And now here she was again.
There must be some kind of message or lesson somewhere in all this.
But damned if I could figure out what it was.
* * *
Stacy wanted me to get Houston to appear on camera with me. I pointed out that the woman was the grieving widow of a murder victim. That her entire life would unravel once her past was revealed. That she had two young daughters she would have to protect from all the scandal about to swirl around her. Stacy said to ask her anyway. I did. She said no.
The show itself and all the rest of it went pretty smoothly. There were lots of questions about what I did or didn’t do all those years ago. How I felt about it now, did I have regrets, etc.? I answered the questions as candidly as I could. People also asked about my current connection to Houston. I answered these more carefully, sticking to the story that I didn’t know who she was until she came to my office that day recently looking for her missing husband.
The only uncomfortable moment—for me anyway—came when someone pointed out that my proving Houston really did exist didn’t excuse my journalistic sin in claiming quotes from her.
This person asked me how I could justify that.
It was a good question.
I said that I couldn’t justify it in any way.
“As a journalist, I have an obligation to always tell the truth and be entirely forthcoming with the reader,” I said. “In this case, I did not. I could give you all sorts of excuses about how I believed the sources who gave me the quotes or I was practicing some new kind of journalism or whatever. But the fact is I failed in my duties as a journalist then. I’m sorry about that. I never did anything like that before in my life, and I’ll never do it again. Yet I know this will always be a blot on my record as a journalist that I can never erase.”
And that really was the truth.
No matter what I did, no matter how many stories I broke, no matter that Houston really did exist—I’d constantly have to prove myself all over again. It always reminded me of the story of Sisyphus, which I really related to. Sisyphus was a character in mythology sentenced by the gods to forever push a heavy rock up a hill, only to see it roll back down to the bottom each time. He was destined never to change his fate. Maybe that was the same fate Houston and I would have to endure for our entire lives. The rock was at the bottom of the hill for both of us, and all we could do was try to keep pushing it back to the top.
* * *
When the show was over and the story had posted online, I called Victoria Issacs to ask her how she was coping with all of this.
“There’s an army of reporters and TV cameras and all sorts of other media camped outside my front door right now,” she said. “My husband is dead, my reputation is ruined, and my life will never be the same again. Other than that though, I’m doing just peachy.”
I wanted to tell her I was sorry, but I knew that was pointless.
She knew as well as I did that the story of Houston had to eventually come out, and we’d worked together to break the news to the people in her life with as much preparation as possible.
But, in the end, she was caught in the same Houston paradox that I was.
Houston had been the best thing in her life at the beginning. Houston made her rich and famous and successful. And then Houston had taken all that success away. Just like it did with me once—and might do again before this was all over.
I thought about a line from Raymond Chandler in The Long Goodbye that I always remembered—and it somehow seemed to fit both of us.
“There is no trap so deadly as the one you set for yourself.”
CHAPTER 18
WATCHING the videos police had found on Melissa Ross’s computer made me feel kind of dirty.
I’d been pestering Wohlers for another exclusive, so he agreed to let me see them. A consolation of sorts for all the help I’d been to him on the case.
There was some steamy stuff that the cops found in those files. But not all of them were sex videos, per se. There were pictures and videos of cheating husbands and boyfriends out to dinner with other women, walking with them down the street, kissing or making out with them on park benches or cars, and lots of other surveillance material she’d collected.
Some of it was definitely hardcore.
Ross had apparently been able to get inside houses and hotel rooms to plant video devices. I wasn’t exactly sure how legal that was. There was a good chance the video evidence of infidelity would never stand up in a divorce proceeding. But then it probably didn’t matter to her clients. The revelations to the wife would be damaging enough.
It wasn’t hard to figure out her next move once the video or pictures were captured. Her clients—the aggrieved parties, the women being cheated on, the wives and girlfriends who had hired Melissa Ross to do the spying—were shown the escapades of their husbands’ or boyfriends’ unfaithfulness.
Then they could confront the man with this evidence. Or not confront him, as in Karen Faris’s case. But at least they knew the truth.
I wondered what these wives were thinking once they’d been convinced of their husbands’ infidelities. Was it better to know or not to know? Was it better to continue on in a loveless marriage with your head buried in the sand and believing your husband’s lies that he wasn’t seeing any other woman? Or did the truth somehow either make it more bearable to go on in the relationship or easier to summon up the courage to end it once and for all?
I supposed that each case was different. For every Karen Faris who was willing to look the other way after seeing proof of her cheating husband, there were other wives on the phone with a divorce lawyer vowing to take their husbands for everything they owned.
* * *
On the screen now, a balding, slightly potbellied man was getting a blow job in what appeared to be a hotel room, from a brunette woman who looked like she knew exactly what she was doing. He sat on the bed in the room while she kneeled down in front of him. Several times she looked up, and her face was visible on the video we watched.
“That’s not Melissa Ross,” I said to Wohlers.
“Nope.”
“A hooker, you think?”
“Probably,” he said.
“She sure looks like she has a lot of expertise.”
We watched for a few more minutes, until the man exploded onto the woman’s face in the video.
Across the bottom of the screen a time stamp gave the location where the video had been shot, a hotel called the Trafalgar that was in Times Square, and the exact date and time of the incident—which had been a few months earlier. There was a name too, Robert Johnson.
“Robert Johnson is the cheating guy,” I said to Wohlers as I wrote down the name off of the screen.
“Yep, so we’ve got to find this Robert Johnson—and go talk to him.”
“You think he knows anything?”
“That’s what we need to find out. We need to talk to as many of these people on her videos and in her files as we can. Maybe we can get a lead that will help us find her that way. But there’s no other information about this guy Johnson on the video. So we have to cross-check everything against the material in her files. Plus, there’s plenty of other men in those files and pictures and videos that we took out of Melissa Ross’s office. We need to go through all of that too.”
“Sounds like a big job,” I said.
“Tell me about it.”
I wrote down as many names as I could from the other videos he played for me—hoping that I could track down and talk to some of these men myself.
* * *
Meanwhile, I did track down Melissa Ross’s ex-husband, Joe Delvecchio. The former NYPD cop was working as a security guard/bouncer at a club in midtown.
But he made it clear to me he did not want to talk about his former wife—or the circumstances of what she did to him.
“I had to quit the force because of her,” Delvecchio told me. “After what happened . . . well, you can imagine what it was like fo
r me. All the jokes, all the derogatory remarks about my manhood, all the questions about how I could let a woman do something like that to me. I was the victim. But I wound up suffering the most. Not just the job, I lost my reputation.”
Delvecchio was a big man, well over six feet. He was good-looking, muscular, a real macho guy. He glanced around now at the club-goers on the dance floor, looking for any signs of violence or trouble.
He talked about why he had never brought charges against his ex-wife and why he refused to ever discuss it with anyone.
“The people here, they don’t know anything about me. I’m just the guy that keeps everyone in line. They need to be a little bit scared of me. What do you think would happen if they read in your paper that I was the guy who got handcuffed to a bed and beaten up by some crazy woman?”
“Maybe they’d understand. Like you said, you were the victim.”
“So was the guy who got his dick cut off by Lorena Bobbitt. How did that work out for him? They made jokes about him on late night TV even though he was the victim too. Me, I don’t like being a joke.”
I pointed out to him that my paper—even without his cooperation—could still shoot pictures and video of him as he left the club, on the street, or outside his home. We could still tell the whole story of what happened to him at the hands of Melissa Ross. Then all the people at the club where he worked would know exactly who he was and know the humiliation he’d suffered. He would still be a laughingstock, whether he cooperated or not. Or, I suggested, we could work out a compromise. I’d interview him—but I wouldn’t use his name; I wouldn’t use his picture; and I wouldn’t specify where he was living or working now. Delvecchio wasn’t wild about the idea. But, in the end, he agreed to go along with the compromise.
“How long were you and Melissa married?” I asked Delvecchio once we sat down to begin the interview.
“Six months. Actually, a year technically. But the last six months of that were in divorce court. We both wanted it done. But, even when a divorce is mutual, it’s not that simple. I found that out.”
“How was the first six months of the marriage? Was it passionate? Scary? Weird?”
“All of the above. Melissa was always volatile. She’d fly off the handle at me over every little thing. Screaming. Yelling. Sometimes she got really violent. Hitting me, punching me, and even worse. That scene at the end . . . that wasn’t the first time she’d threatened to kill me.”
“If she was so volatile, why’d you marry her?”
“C’mon, Melissa is hot! I mean hot in looks, hot in bed. I knew that she was high-maintenance, but I figured all that craziness was worth it to be with a hot chick like Melissa. I was wrong about that.”
“What did she get so mad at you about?”
“Jealousy about other women mostly. She accused me of flirting with them, fooling around with them behind her back. Not coming straight home after work. She claimed I was cheating on her.”
“Were you?”
Delvecchio shrugged. “A couple of times.”
“Even though you had this hot chick at home?”
“She wasn’t always so hot when it came to me. There were nights she refused to have sex because she was mad about something. Other times she was all over me, mostly when she wanted something from me. It was almost like Melissa used sex as a . . .”
“Weapon?”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“Did she ever tell you why she was so angry at men?”
“Men always hurt her, she used to say, men always broke her heart. That’s why she got the tattoo on her arm, the one with the two pieces of a heart split apart. I hated that tattoo. She already had it when I met her. I tried to get her to have it removed. But she said she was keeping it. Whenever I brought it up, she just told me that someday I’d break her heart too.”
Eventually we got around to talking about that final scene between him and Melissa Ross. I asked him what had set it off.
“There was this waitress who worked at a bar near my precinct,” Delvecchio sighed. “I’d been flirting with her for a while, and she kept flirting back. Well, this one night I went there and drank a lot. One thing led to another, and the waitress and I made it in my car. I was so drunk I didn’t realize I still had a pair of her damn panties in my jacket pocket when I got home. Melissa found them. We had this big fight and then I finally collapsed dead drunk on the bed. When I woke up, I was handcuffed to the bed. I started screaming stuff at her to let me go and that’s when she first threatened me with the gun. Put the barrel in my mouth and talked about blowing my head off. Then she moved the gun down and did the same thing on my crotch. Said she’d blow my balls off first.”
Delvecchio shook his head.
“She kept me like that for days, I guess. Gagged me so no one could hear me. And kept talking about castrating and killing me. I think she might have eventually if I hadn’t managed to get the gag out of my mouth and scream loud enough for help that someone in the building finally heard it and called police. That’s the way they found me. Cops from my own precinct saw me like that and what that woman had done to me. I was glad to see them at that point, of course, and I told them what she had done. But later . . . later was when all the embarrassment and humiliation set in. So I changed my story, said it was some kind of consensual sex game and didn’t press any charges. But everyone knew the truth. So eventually I had to leave the force. I just couldn’t face anyone there anymore.”
He looked onto the dance floor, where couples moved effortlessly to the music. The incident with Melissa Ross had happened years earlier. But I could see that telling the story again had made it seem very real for Delvecchio.
“What did you think when you heard about her and the murder at the Hotel Madison and the apartment of the other guy?”
“It scared me,” Delvecchio said. “It made me realize all over again how crazy she really was. And how . . . how I could have wound up dead too back then just like those two poor bastards.”
* * *
After I left Delvecchio, I went back to the office and read over all the notes I’d made that day.
One thing was obviously clear. Melissa Ross had a lot of anger in her toward men. She felt she’d been used and abused by men all of her life. Then she married a husband who cheated on her and confirmed everything she’d always experienced in the past from the men in her life. She hated men. So she took out her anger in a series of escalating incidents—kicking her commanding officer in the crotch; handcuffing and torturing her husband; even starting up her own private investigator’s business that specialized in catching cheating men for other women.
But then one day she suddenly crossed the line between these man-hating actions and the actual killing of men.
Why?
What had turned Melissa Ross into a cold-blooded murderer?
Then I remembered something she had written in the email she sent: “We all go through our lives with blinders on. Getting up every morning, going to work—each day the same as the next. Pretending that what we do really matters somehow or actually makes a difference in this big cosmic universe of ours. And then one day everything changes.”
So what changed for Melissa Ross?
Why now?
If I could figure that out, then maybe it could help me and the police stop her before she killed again.
CHAPTER 19
I’M getting a divorce,” Susan told me.
“That’s great!” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“Uh, I mean that’s terrible.”
“No, I think you meant what you said the first time.”
“Okay, I did.”
“You could at least make a token effort to hide your jubilation over my life falling apart.”
“I just never thought Dave was the right person for you.”
“Dale.”
“Him either.”
She shook her head.
“You’re really loving this, aren’t you?”
We were eating lunch outside on a bench near her office in Foley Square. My choice of venue. There was a street cart vendor who was one of my favorites. He sold incredible chili hot dogs. Topped with cheese, onions, and sauerkraut. I ordered two for myself. My upper limit for consuming these chili hot dogs was three, which I had done on a few memorable occasions.
“So what happened?” I asked her between bites after we sat down.
“He came home from work, and I told him we needed to talk. I said some of the same things I told you the other night. That he was a great guy, but the marriage wasn’t working. There was no magic in it, and I wanted more. He understood completely. He’s a smart guy and I think he must have realized the same thing as me. Maybe even before I did. We agreed on a timetable for the divorce, the logistical decisions on who would live where and how to tell our friends and family. It was all very civilized.”
“Wow, that’s a lot different than when you told me you wanted a divorce.”
“The circumstances were different then.”
“As I recall, you dumped a pile of dishes, silverware, pots and pans on my head while I was asleep—and then threw a whole bunch of my clothes out of the window.”
“After you came home dead drunk during one of your ‘lost weekends’ of feeling sorry for yourself about the Houston scandal.”
“Oh, I definitely had it coming.”
I took another bite of my chili dog and contemplated how to proceed next. This was a very crucial moment in my relationship with Susan, after what happened between us last time at the bar. A delicate moment. I didn’t want to move too quickly. I needed to be cool and rational and measured about my next move. Yep, slow and easy was the way to go. Subtlety was the key.
“So do you want to have sex again with me?” I blurted out.
She was eating a salad she’d gotten from another food cart. She took a mouthful now, chewed it slowly, and looked out at the street as if she was contemplating what to say next. A young couple walked past us pushing a baby carriage and with a small girl alongside them. They looked like a happy family. I sometimes wondered if Susan and I might have wound up like that if I hadn’t made a mess of our marriage. Now all I could do was try to put the pieces of that marriage back together again.
