The Kennedy Connection

by R. G. Belsky

  They were excited when I told them about it.

  It was the perfect story.

  Except for one thing.

  I didn’t get to work it.

  Carrie Bratten did.

  “Carrie’s the star reporter here now, not you,” Marilyn Staley explained to me that day. “You should know better than anyone how that works. This is a big story. She’s our top reporter. Ergo, she gets the story, not you.”

  I got very agitated. I complained about how unfair it was. I screamed at her. I threatened to quit if I didn’t get to do the story. Which, in retrospect, was probably the worst thing I could have done. Staley did not yell back at me. She just looked at me sadly until I was finished with my tirade.

  “Look, Gil,” she said, “I think everyone here has been fair and kind and compassionate to you to allow you to stay here after what happened. You know that as well as I do. And if you do your job and keep your head down, maybe, just maybe, you will survive here. You can have a life here, a career here as a reporter. Just not the reporter you once were. If that’s not enough for you, if you cause any more scenes like this, well then . . . we’ll just part ways right now. I don’t think any other major newspaper or media outlet would touch you after what you did on the Houston story. It’s your choice. Think about it.”

  I went back to my desk and did just that.

  It was shortly after that that I suffered the first full-blown panic attack that had landed me in Dr. Landis’s office.

  Sitting there now, watching her take notes on everything I was saying and writing it all down in her notebook, I knew what I had to do.

  Say anything, do anything so this woman will give a good report on me to the Daily News people who’d sent me here. I had to play the game. No matter how much I wanted to grab that notebook out of her hands, rip it up into little pieces, and storm out of her office. I needed her to tell the Daily News that I was making progress. I needed her to tell them there was hope for me. I needed her to save my job.

  Because I realized what was at stake here.

  I had no wife. I had no real friends to rely on anymore. I had no family—my mother and father were dead, and I was an only child. I had no real interest in anything else these days. The job was all I had. Without that, I had nothing.

  Which is why, I suppose, I cared so much about Victor Reyes.

  “I’m actually working on a story right now,” I said to Landis.

  “So they did give you an assignment?”

  “Nah, this is a story I’ve been working on my own.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “The unsolved murder of a man named Victor Reyes.”

  “Will the paper publish this story when you’re finished writing it?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “Why wouldn’t they?”

  “Actually, it’s not really that good a story.”

  “So why are you doing it?”

  “Because I’m a reporter. No matter what anybody else thinks of me, I’m still a reporter.”

  She wrote that down too.

  “Tell me about this Victor Reyes story,” Landis said.

  Chapter 4

  I’D FIRST HEARD about Victor Reyes from a homicide detective named Roberto Santiago.

  Santiago worked on the Priority Murders Squad, an elite division of the NYPD that focused on major, high-profile homicides in the city. I met Santiago long before that, though. Down at Ground Zero. He’d been one of the cops who toiled there day and night in those horrible weeks and months after 9/11. Just like me. And, like a lot of us did down there in the fall of 2001, we formed a strong bond, Santiago and I. Later, he helped me out on police stories as I rose to prominence at the News and he rose in the ranks of the police department. I even sought his help when I was trying to track down the infamous Houston. I never heard from him after the story fell apart, and I assumed he’d given up on me just like so many other people had.

  So I was surprised to get a phone call from him in the middle of the night.

  “I’ve got a story for you, Malloy,” he said, without apologizing for the late hour.

  “I don’t really do stories anymore,” I said, yawning into the phone.

  “I’m at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx,” Santiago told me.

  I looked at the clock on the table next to my bed. The dial said it was 3 a.m.

  “Can this wait until morning?”

  “If you grab a cab, you can be here in less than thirty minutes. Not much traffic out there at this hour. I’ll be waiting for you in the emergency room.”

  I groaned. I thought about just hanging up the phone and going back to sleep. But I didn’t. Maybe it was because I was curious about why he wanted to see me after all this time. Maybe I felt I owed him something. Or maybe, just maybe, I still had that old reporter’s instinct and wanted to find out what the story was that was so damn important to Santiago.

  A half hour later, I was in the Lincoln Hospital emergency room with Roberto Santiago. He was standing over the body of a man on a stretcher.

  “Who is he?” I asked.

  “Victor Reyes.”

  “Is that supposed to mean something?”

  “I grew up with him.”

  I nodded sympathetically, even though I still had no idea what I was doing here.

  “We used to run in a gang together,” Santiago said. “I got out of the gang life. He didn’t. Then he got shot. The bullet hit his spinal cord and paralyzed him. He’s been in a wheelchair ever since.”

  I looked down at the body of Victor Reyes on the stretcher.

  “How old was he?” I asked.

  “Thirty-four.”

  “And how did he die?”

  “A heart attack.”

  “A heart attack,” I repeated, still confused about why I was there.

  “His mother found him struggling to breathe. She called 911. But he was already dead by the time they got him here to the hospital. The doctors say it was a massive coronary.”

  “Detective Santiago,” I said, “I am very sorry for the loss of your friend. And I’m sure that the late Mr. Reyes was a very fine person who will be greatly missed. But why the hell exactly am I here?”

  “I want you to write the story.”

  “What story?”

  “I’m going to catch the person that killed him.”

  “Wait a minute, you work on the Priority Murders Squad.”

  “You don’t think the death of Victor Reyes is a priority murder?”

  “It’s not even a murder,” I pointed out.

  “Actually it is,” Santiago said.

  “When Victor Reyes was just nineteen years old, he was shot from a passing car as he came out of his apartment house,” Santiago told me. “No specific motive, although it appears to have been gang related.”

  I took notes as he talked.

  “The bullet first shattered two of his ribs.”

  “That’s not good,” I said.

  “It ruptured his spleen.”

  “Worse.”

  “And the bullet lodged in Reyes’s spinal cord, leaving him unable to walk or feel any sensation whatever below his waist.”

  “The worst.”

  “The assailant inside the car was described as—”

  “Let me guess . . . a young male Hispanic.”

  Santiago gave me a dirty look.

  “What?” I said. “You think he’s going to be Irish in that neighborhood?”

  “The doctors I talked to tonight said it was the gunshot that killed him. The bullet did it. The same bullet. That damn bullet.”

  “Wait a minute—I thought he died of a heart attack.”

  “He did. But contributing factors to the heart attack, doctors say, were bronchial pneumonia, paraplegia, and coronary atheros
clerosis. All of these things were brought on by his being in a wheelchair for so many years.”

  I nodded.

  “At some point, probably within the last few hours of his life, the remains of the bullet that had been in his spine all this time—there was no way to take it out without causing more damage—became dislodged and traveled through the bloodstream to his heart. In his weakened condition, that proved fatal.”

  “Are you saying that if he hadn’t been shot fifteen years ago, he wouldn’t have had the heart attack now?”

  “That’s what the doctors told me.”

  “Interesting.”

  “So technically, whoever shot him back then is guilty of murder.”

  “And you’re going to try to solve a murder that happened fifteen years ago, except no one even knew it was a murder until now.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s the story you want me to write?”

  “Not a bad story, huh?”

  I needed some coffee. We found a vending machine that still had some coffee available. It wasn’t great, but at that hour of the morning, the bar for acceptable coffee is set pretty low for me. We found seats in the empty cafeteria and sat there drinking our coffee and talking about Victor Reyes.

  “When I was growing up, my mother died,” Santiago told me. “My father was never around much. Camille Reyes, Victor’s mother, sort of became a surrogate parent for me.”

  “And that’s how you and her son Victor became so close?”

  Santiago nodded. “I was older than him, but we ran together through most of our teenage years.”

  “Define ran.”

  “We belonged to the same gang.”

  “I find it hard to picture you as a gang member.”

  “Everyone ran in a gang in my neighborhood. You either were a part of a gang or you became the victim of a gang. It was a matter of survival.”

  “How did you manage to get out of that life?”

  “I got lucky,” Santiago said. “I met a cop who was a good guy. He saw something in me that no one else ever had. Including myself. He told me I was wasting my life and got me to finish school. When I did, he encouraged me to join the police. Helped me get into the Police Academy. If I hadn’t been lucky enough to meet that police officer, I probably wouldn’t be here today.”

  “And Victor Reyes?”

  “He wasn’t so lucky.”

  Santiago took a sip of his coffee.

  “Victor’s mother has taken care of him for fifteen years. She’s fed him, taken him to the park in his wheelchair—hell, she even had to help him go the bathroom. Now that he’s dead, the most important thing in the world to her is that we find whoever did this to her son. She wants justice for Victor. So do I.”

  “You can’t make this personal,” I told him.

  “It is personal.”

  “The first rule for a police officer—for a journalist too—is to never let any case or any story to become personal.”

  “The job never gets personal for you?”

  I sighed. “It’s not a hard-and-fast rule . . . okay, it’s not even a rule at all . . . actually, no one ever really follows it.”

  There was something else I wanted to ask Santiago.

  “Why me? Why did you ask me to come here tonight?”

  “I want people to know about Victor Reyes. I don’t want him to have died for no reason. To have his life forgotten about by everyone except me and his mother. That’s why I called you. I want someone to tell people his story, to make his life, and his death, matter. I decided someone in the press could help make that happen. And you’re the best press I know.”

  “Not if you talk to a lot of people these days.”

  “I heard about all that. I don’t know exactly what you did or didn’t do. What I do know is the guy I met at Ground Zero. We shared a lot down there, we talked about a lot of things. Life and death was a big topic. I remember we talked about how the victims—from the rich investment bankers to the busboys from Windows on the World on top of the tower—all died together that day. How death doesn’t differentiate between rich and poor, famous and not so famous. How, in death, no loss is greater or less than the other.”

  “Death is the great equalizer,” I said.

  “That’s why I want you to write this story. You’re the one person I hoped would understand. Who could help me make sure that Victor Reyes’s life—and his death—mattered.”

  “You’ve got no witnesses?”

  “No.”

  “No real motive?”

  “Not yet.”

  “No clues?”

  “Right.”

  “Probably no forensic evidence worth anything after all this time?”

  “Nope.”

  “What exactly do you have to help you solve this case?”

  Santiago shrugged.

  “You don’t have a damn thing.”

  He smiled sadly. “Malloy, that is an excellent summation of this case at the moment.”

  I’d like to say that I was so moved by Detective Roberto Santiago’s emotional plea and his compassion for Victor Reyes and his quest for justice for his dead boyhood friend from the Bronx that I threw myself into the story right after our meeting that night at the hospital.

  But that wasn’t what I did.

  Instead, I did nothing.

  I’d gotten pretty good at doing nothing.

  I just slipped back into my normal routine of feeling sorry for myself and the mess I’d made of my own career and my own life.

  The truth was I pretty much forgot about that conversation at the hospital with Santiago. Almost. Oh, it was there in the back of my mind, and every once in a while I would think about doing something about the Victor Reyes story. I figured I owed it to Santiago for everything we had shared during those days after 9/11. But I never did anything about it. Nothing at all.

  Until it was too late. After I found out Santiago was dead.

  It wasn’t a big story in the Daily News or anywhere else. He didn’t die in the line of duty or as a hero or anything like that. He was killed by a drunk driver. It was one of those senseless things—just being in the wrong place at the wrong time—that make you wonder if fate is laughing at us somewhere as we earnestly go about our lives.

  Santiago had finished up his shift at about eleven one evening, and he was crossing the street to his parked car. Another car ran a red light and plowed right into him in the middle of the intersection. He died instantly.

  The driver of the car was a drunk who fled the scene when he realized what he had done. But a witness got his license plate number. The cops picked him up at a bar an hour later. His blood alcohol level was nearly 0.20, drunk enough so that he could barely stand up. But not drunk enough to stop him from getting behind the wheel of a car. After hitting and killing Santiago, he’d driven to the bar and kept on drinking.

  The pointlessness of it was what bothered me the most, I suppose.

  Roberto Santiago was a cop who put his life on the line every day when he went to work. He’d been in shootouts, hostage situations, run into burning buildings, and done all sorts of other heroic—and dangerous—things in the line of duty. He’d survived that all. And then, on his way home from work at the end of his shift, Santiago gets run down by a damn drunk driver in the street.

  The wrong place at the wrong time.

  It seemed so unfair.

  But life, as I had found out, was often that way.

  Chapter 5

  JUST BECAUSE I could no longer work on big stories didn’t mean I couldn’t read them.

  A few days after my lunch with Nikki Reynolds, I sat in a coffee shop on Water Street at eight o’clock, sipping my second cup of coffee and reading the front-page story in that morning’s Daily News.

  The first thing I saw, of course, was
the byline. By Carrie Bratten. My personal nemesis at the paper. The front-page headline said BEAUTY SLAIN IN UNION SQUARE PARK. There was a huge picture of an attractive blond woman.

  The story itself got a two-page spread on pages four and five inside, including pictures from the scene and a map of the Union Square area where the woman’s body had been found.

  The victim’s name was Shawn Kennedy, and she had been shot to death. Her body had been found by a dog walker in the park early the previous morning. She was dressed in designer jeans, a pink tank top, and sandals. There was a gold chain around her neck and what looked like a very expensive bracelet and ring on her right hand. An expensive-looking watch was on her left wrist. Whatever the motive for her murder, it sure hadn’t been robbery. This one had a personal feel to it. Her purse was still with her. The ID and money and credit cards inside all seemed untouched.

  Shawn Kennedy was a photographer who did a lot of fashion and celebrity shoots in Manhattan. She’d worked for People, Us Weekly, InStyle, many of the big publications. She lived in a converted loft on St. Mark’s Place, a few blocks south of the park.

  Police found a witness who saw her in a bar in the Union Square neighborhood the evening before. The witness was the bartender. He said she’d been alone, had a couple of drinks at the bar, and then left. He said he’d chatted with her in between customers and that she’d told him she was waiting for someone. When he looked back at the bar and she was gone, he assumed her date had shown up. Or she’d given up on him and just gone home.

  The bartender was considered a potential suspect at first. Especially after cops discovered he had an arrest record for drug possession and robbery. His name was Kevin Gallagher, and cops brought him to the East 21st Street station house for formal questioning. But it went nowhere. Even the cops who took him in seemed to know he wasn’t the guy who did it. Gallagher stuck to his story about having a casual conversation in the bar with the woman, and they couldn’t budge him from it. Probably because he was telling the truth. His criminal record for robbery didn’t fit in. Nothing had been taken from the Kennedy woman, even though she was carrying money and wearing expensive jewelry. Besides, Gallagher wound up having an alibi. He’d been working at the bar until closing time at two in the morning. The owner said he never took a break all night. The ME’s report estimated that Kennedy had died sometime before midnight.