by R. G. Belsky
* * *
“I want to go to Ohio,” I said to Marilyn Staley.
“What’s in Ohio?”
“The follow-up on the Melissa Ross story.”
“They’ve already brought her body back to New York.”
“I want to find out what she was doing there. Now it looks like someone set her up. Made it look like she was the killer. Got everyone—the police, the media, the whole country—looking for Melissa Ross as a cold-blooded serial killer. And then, for some reason we don’t know yet, this person killed her and dumped her body in this lake in the middle of Ohio. There are a lot of things we don’t know here.”
“You figure the answers are in Ohio?”
“It’s a place to start.”
“How long will it take you to get there?”
“The flight to Cleveland is an hour and a half. Then maybe an hour’s drive tops from the airport to the area around Munson Lake.”
“Okay, book a flight to Cleveland as soon as you can.”
“I already have. I told Zeena to do it for me.”
“When?”
“Before I came in here to ask you.”
She groaned.
“C’mon, Marilyn, I knew the idea would make sense to you too. Flights to Cleveland are cheap, it won’t cost too much from your travel budget. And a Daily News dateline—with my byline—from the lake where Melissa Ross’s body was found is good for the paper. Good for all of us.”
“I’m just curious, Gil,” she said to me as I was leaving her office. “Do you have some kind of information, some evidence, some lead that you’re not telling me about? Something that makes you want to go to Ohio so badly that you set up the trip even before you asked me about it?”
I thought about the potential Wylie connection. Even in my own mind, it sounded crazy.
“No, Marilyn, I’m just playing a wild hunch that this might lead to a good follow-up story,” I said.
When I got back to the newsroom, I asked Zeena if she’d made arrangements for the trip to Ohio like I’d asked.
“Almost.”
“You did make hotel reservations?”
“You want a hotel?”
“Yes, I want a hotel,” I said, with exasperation.
“Okeydokey.”
“How about a car?”
“A car.”
“You didn’t rent a car . . .”
“Why do you want a car?”
“Because I have to drive from the Cleveland airport to this town called Munson Lake.”
“Is that a long ways?”
“At least an hour drive. That assumes, of course, that I have a car to drive in. Which I apparently don’t. Zeena, why didn’t you take care of any of this stuff I talked to you about?”
“Jonathan had surgery for a brain tumor,” she said.
“Huh?”
“General Hospital.”
Now I understood. Zeena was a daytime soap fan. She had this arrangement with the office that she was allowed to watch her favorite soaps during her lunch hour and breaks. In return . . . well, I wasn’t sure what we got in return. I told her to make my travel arrangements as soon as Jonathan was out of medical danger.
* * *
By the time I got to Cleveland, Stacy had gotten involved with the story. She thought it was a great idea for me to do a live stand-up from the lake—the spot where Melissa Ross’s car went into the water—for Live from New York.
So there I was standing by Munson Lake doing a remote TV broadcast even before I wrote up my own damn story.
Ah, the exciting new world of journalism.
I ran through the basic facts, pointing to where Melissa Ross’s car went into the water. I talked on air with some residents who lived near the lake, including the teenaged girl who had spotted Melissa Ross’s car and body on the bottom while she was swimming. Then I did an interview with Munson Lake Police Chief Dan Conigulara.
ME: Chief, how do you think the woman and her car got into the lake?
CONIGULARA: At first, we thought it was an accident. That she lost control of her car on the road and plunged into the water. But that would have been hard to do.
ME: Why?
Conigulara pointed to a fence that was around the lake.
CONIGULARA: There was another fatal accident once here at this lake. A long time ago. After that, they put up the fence so that a car would have a safety barrier to stop it before it got to the water.
ME: So what you’re saying is that a driver would have had to deliberately avoid that fence to make it all the way down to the lake.
CONIGULARA: Yes, that’s right.
I turned to the camera.
ME: For weeks, police have been hunting for Melissa Ross, believing that she could provide all the answers to this baffling series of murders known as the “Blonde Ice” killings. Now they have found her. But there are no answers. Instead, Melissa Ross’s death just raises more disturbing questions about a killer who is still out there, still on the loose, and still apparently looking for more victims.
CHAPTER 31
MASSILLON—the town where Wylie had grown up and went to high school—was about a thirty-minute drive south from Munson Lake. I didn’t tell Marilyn or Stacy or anyone else back at the paper where I was going or why. Hell, this didn’t even make sense to me, so how could I explain it to someone else? I had no idea what I was looking for, why I was looking for it—or how to go about finding it.
The high school was a lot different now, of course. Most of the teachers and staff who’d been there when Wylie was a student were long gone. Most of them, but not all. I found that out when I introduced myself to the principal, Richard Hanson. Hanson had been a civics teacher—just starting out his teaching career—when Wylie was at the school, and remembered having him in one of his classes.
“Bob certainly has done well for himself, hasn’t he?” Hanson said as we sat in his office. “I’ve heard and read so much about him over the years. He’s the most famous person ever to come out of this school. Imagine, one of my students could possibly wind up being mayor of New York City. Isn’t that something?”
“I suppose it doesn’t come as much of a surprise to you he was so successful, huh?” I said. “You probably saw those qualities in him when he was here.”
“Not exactly,” Hanson said. “Don’t get me wrong, Bob was a nice kid—but he just wasn’t that exceptional in high school. He wasn’t a bad student, but no whiz kid. More of a ‘B’ student than an ‘A’ one. And, on the football field, he did start some games for the team in his senior year, but . . .”
“Everything I’ve read about him said he was a standout student and athletic star. Got a scholarship to Cornell and everything.”
Hanson smiled. “Bob always sold himself pretty well. Made himself seem a little more important than he really was when he was here. That’s one of the reasons he’s gotten so far, I suppose. To be honest, many of us were surprised when he got into Cornell on that scholarship. He certainly didn’t have the grades you’d expect for it. And it wasn’t like he was good enough to get an athletic scholarship. But that’s Bob. He’s always been in the right place at the right time. Good things just happen to people like that. Like they say, better to be lucky than good, huh? And Bob Wylie . . . well, he’s always been lucky.”
I talked to a few more people who’d been there when Wylie was a student. They all told me pretty much the same story. Bob Wylie was a charming guy, a popular guy, a nice guy who everyone liked. But he was nothing special as either a student or as an athlete.
I managed to dig up an old yearbook from the year Wylie graduated. There were several pictures of Bob Wylie in it. His graduation photo. One of him on the football field throwing a pass and looking as cool as a young Tom Brady. So how did he do it? How did an average student and not so great athlete wind up getting a scholarship to a top Ivy League school like Cornell? How did he rise to the position of power and influence that he held today in New York City?
&n
bsp; Maybe he’d learned a lot—maybe he’d improved himself dramatically—since he was in high school.
Or maybe it was just like Hanson had said: It’s better to be lucky than good. And Bob Wylie had always been lucky.
At the back of the yearbook, I found a section called “Favorite Senior Awards.” There was a picture of Wylie with a girl. Holding hands with each other. The headline over the picture said: STEADY SENIOR COUPLE. Underneath, a caption read: “Bob Wylie and Valerie Cartwright. Do we hear wedding bells in their future?”
I looked at the picture of the two of them for a long time. The young, handsome Wylie and the young woman with him. She was actually very average-looking, which seemed a bit out of place next to Wylie. She wasn’t bad-looking, but no beauty either. She was gazing at Wylie lovingly in the photo. Wylie? Well, he was looking at the camera.
I remembered from the clips I’d gone through back in the office that Wylie had been married only once.
His wife’s name was not Valerie Cartwright.
No real surprise there, of course. Most high school romances fell apart after graduation, when the kids grew up and began to go out into the real world. So Bob Wylie and Valerie Cartwright—the “Steady Senior Couple” back then—broke up and went their separate ways in life. It didn’t mean anything at all. In fact, it was no doubt completely unconnected to what I was looking for.
Except I didn’t know what it was I was actually looking for.
Maybe Valerie Cartwright could help me figure that out.
* * *
Valerie Cartwright still lived in Ohio. I tracked her down in a place called Bainbridge Township, less than an hour away from where Wylie had grown up, in Massillon. She’d gotten married to a man named Bill Sidowsky.
It looked like she’d done well for herself. When I pulled my rented car up to her address, the house turned out to be a sprawling, spectacular-looking home on several acres of land. There was a long winding driveway, a swimming pool, a pond out front, and even a guesthouse adjoining the main structure.
A few minutes later, I sat in Valerie Sidowski’s living room talking with her.
“Why is a reporter from New York City coming all the way out here to ask me questions about Bob Wylie?” she asked.
“He’s being touted as possibly the next mayor of New York. We thought it would be a good idea to do a color piece on him. His life, his background, where he grew up—that sort of thing.”
This was the same story I had given to the principal and the others at the high school earlier. It made sense too. Wylie was a big personality in New York now, so it was very logical that a New York newspaper reporter would want to do a profile on his past.
Valerie didn’t look that much different from her picture in the high school yearbook. Older, of course. But she was one of those women who never really looked their age. In high school, she’d seemed older than a teenager, and now she looked younger than a woman who was near fifty.
She proudly showed me pictures of her husband and three children on the walls of their living room.
“Bill is chairman of the board of Cartwright International. My father started the company. They’re based near here in Cleveland—always have been—but with branch offices now in New York, Los Angeles, D.C, London, Paris, and around the world. That’s where Bill is now, on a business trip to Paris. Bill Jr., our oldest son, works for his father. My other son, John, is a financial analyst for a bank in Chicago. And my daughter recently graduated from Cornell. She’s on a round-the-world tour right now, figuring out what she wants to do with her life.”
I nodded, trying desperately to act like I was interested in all of this. This was how interviews sometimes went. You got the person talking, feeling comfortable. Telling you a lot of information you couldn’t care less about. Waiting for the moment to ask the questions you really wanted answers for.
“So how did you and Wylie get picked as ‘Steady Senior Couple’ in high school?” I finally asked when I thought the time was right, showing her the picture from the yearbook.
“Oh, that was because of Bob, much more than me. Bob was always popular. Everyone liked him. I guess they still do, huh? Me, I was just along for the ride with him when it came to high school popularity. It was really quite exciting being Bob’s girlfriend, I have to say. Even after all these years I remember the excitement of being with him.”
“How long were you together?”
“We started dating the summer before our senior year. He was so handsome, charismatic, so . . . well, so Bob. We went steady all during our senior year and then he left for college. We stayed together as a couple while he was in college too. Saw each other when he came back to Ohio, and I took trips to New York to be with him at Cornell.”
“Who eventually ended the relationship—you or him?”
“Oh, it was him. He sent me a Dear John letter—or whatever you want to call it to a woman—after he graduated from Cornell. I always thought he’d come back to Ohio once he graduated and we’d get married. But Bob had other plans.”
“Did it bother you that he went to a college as far away as Cornell?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “In fact, the reason Bob went to Cornell was because of me. And my father. You see, my father was on the board of directors at Cornell. He’d graduated magna cum laude there and was a big alumni contributor. He pulled some strings to help Bob get admitted and get his scholarship. The admissions process was very competitive. Bob probably wouldn’t have made it there without my father’s help.”
It started to make sense now. Bob Wylie was a good student, not a great one, Richard Hanson, the principal had said. A good athlete, not a superstar. Hanson was surprised by how he got into a top school like Cornell. Except he met—and started going steady with—the daughter of a prominent alumnus and contributor who could get him into Cornell. Coincidence? Or was Wylie playing politics even back when he was in high school?
“So you and Bob went steady during your entire senior year?”
“Pretty much so. Of course, there are always a few ups and downs in a relationship.”
“Tell me about the downs.”
“We broke up once. For about two weeks. I found out Bob had been cheating on me. The girl was really pretty, really sexy—much prettier than me, I have to admit. But she was known for sleeping around. To be honest, she kind of had a reputation as the school tramp. I told Bob he had a choice—stop seeing her or stop seeing me. If he didn’t make a choice, we were finished.”
“And he stopped seeing this other girl?”
“Yes.”
She changed the subject quickly. Like she didn’t want to remember that side of him. The cheating side. She talked again about how much she’d been in love with him back then.
“Are you married, Mr. Malloy?” she asked at one point.
“I used to be.”
“What happened?”
“We got divorced.”
“That’s too bad.
“I’m seeing her again now though. We’re even talking about getting remarried. Doing it right this time.”
“It sounds like you really love this woman.”
“Yes, I do.”
“More than any other woman you ever met?”
“Susan is definitely the love of my life,” I said.
She nodded. “If this person is the one you really love, hold on to her no matter what. Don’t ever settle for second best. I believe we all have one special love in our life, one person that we’re meant to be with. It’s a shame if that turns out not to be the person that you marry. And you lose the one that you really love. A shame, Mr. Malloy.” She looked down again at the long ago yearbook picture of her and Wylie. “A terrible shame.”
I was pretty sure she wasn’t talking about me and Susan anymore.
* * *
“That girl Bob cheated on you with in high school,” I said before I left, “do you by any chance remember her name?”
“Of course, it was Patty Tagliarini.” S
he spelled out the last name. “Like I said, she was pretty in a cheap kind of way. Slit skirts, tight sweaters. That kind of girl can be awfully tempting for a teenage boy. But, with Bob, it was just a temporary thing. He promised me he would never see her again.”
“I’d like to talk to her,” I said. “Do you have any idea how I might contact her?”
“Oh, you can’t. She’s dead.”
“When did she die?”
“Gosh, that was a long time ago. At the end of our senior year actually.”
“How did it happen?”
“She died in a car accident. She got drunk, drove her car off the road, and drowned in a place called Munson Lake.”
* * *
I found some old newspaper clips about it at the Massillon library. The death of Patty Tagliarini had been a pretty big story at the time. There was an article about it on the front page of the Massillon paper: TEEN DIES IN WATERY CAR CRASH. Several follow-ups talked about grief counselors being brought into the school for students and stepped-up efforts to warn young people about the dangers of drunk driving.
There was a picture of Patty Tagliarini. She was pretty, all right. The picture wasn’t your standard studio shot. It was from a party. Patty Tagliarini was drinking a beer and posing in a sexy, flirting kind of way for the camera. The story talked about how she’d been known as a “party girl” at school. Another reference said she was “very popular with the boys.” Like Valerie Cartwright had said, it was clear that this was a girl who liked to have fun.
According to the article, the accident had occurred at 12:30 a.m.
Tagliarini was driving at a high speed—estimated to have been as much as 85 mph—on the narrow road overlooking the lake. She lost control of the car and plunged down a hill into the water. Her body was found outside the car on the bottom of the lake. An autopsy showed that her lungs were filled with water, and drowning was the official—although it seemed pretty obvious—cause of her death. The autopsy also showed she had a blood alcohol level of nearly 2.0—more than double the legal limit for driving. There was evidence of marijuana in her system too. The conclusion was inescapable. She’d gotten drunk, probably gotten high too, and driven the car off the road in an alcohol- and drug-fueled haze.
