by R. G. Belsky
“Do you mean his drinking?”
“Yes.”
“Well, we met in a bar. It wasn’t even noon. He was already getting pretty drunk. And he seemed to be on a first-name basis with the bartender.”
Lawton smiled sadly.
“I’ve run into Jimmy a few times over the years. It’s always been uncomfortable. We were very close when we were on the street together. Hell, you have to be close to your partner. But then . . . then we went our separate ways. I’ve offered to help Jimmy with his drinking problem a few times, but he just got angry and defensive. I guess there’s only so much you can do to help people who’ve lost their way like that. No one else can help them until they’re willing and ready to help themselves.”
He was right, of course.
I knew this from experience.
Hell, there were probably lots of people who said the same thing about me.
“Why is this story so important to you?” Dr. Landis asked me after I had told her about it that day in her office.
I shrugged. “Roberto Santiago was a friend of mine.”
“All right.”
“I don’t have that many friends anymore. And even though most of my old friends avoid me these days and want nothing to do with me, Santiago . . . well, he came to me when he needed something. Something important. He still trusted me. He believed in me. That meant a lot to me.”
“And you feel that you let him down?”
“I suppose that’s right.”
“So maybe you’re trying to make it right by finishing this story—doing what he asked you to do—in his memory now that he’s dead?”
I nodded.
“I think you’re looking for some kind of a magic bullet,” Landis said to me.
“A magic bullet?”
“Yes.”
“You mean like the bullet that killed Victor Reyes fifteen years later?”
She smiled. “In a sense. In medicine, ‘magic bullet’ refers to a miracle cure—a panacea for everything that ails you—that will make everything all right for you again. I think you believe this story about the bullet that killed this young man after all this time could be a sort of magic bullet for you too. That’s why you care so much about the story. But the problem, Mr. Malloy, is that the magic bullet doesn’t exist. It’s pretty much a myth. In medicine. And in life too.”
It was the first thing she had said, during all of our sessions together, that I completely agreed with. Because I knew she was dead on the money about this one. There could be no “magic bullet” for me.
Nikki Reynolds had been right when I told her about Reyes in the restaurant, of course. No one cared about a story like Victor Reyes. Hell, I wouldn’t have cared about Reyes myself when I was Gil Malloy, star reporter. But now he was the most important thing in the world to me. Because I needed to do a real story again.
If I could just do this one thing right.
It wouldn’t make any difference to the rest of the world or change my career in any meaningful way or undo any of the wrong that I had done.
It was too late for that.
But it would mean something to me.
And so I decided I would put every bit of my journalistic abilities and all of my energy and all of my heart into doing this one story right.
The rock was at the bottom of the hill . . .
Chapter 10
CARRIE BRATTEN WALKED over to my desk in the newsroom and stood there in front of me, looking a bit uncomfortable.
“You might be right,” she said.
“About what?”
“The Kennedy half-dollar.”
“It does mean something?”
“I checked with a police source of mine in the department. I asked him if a Kennedy half-dollar had ever been found at any other crime scenes. He just got back to me. Said they’d found the body of a homeless guy a few days ago down on the Bowery. The guy had been stabbed to death. He had a Kennedy half-dollar in his hand.”
I sat there stunned. Despite all my bravado with Carrie earlier, I sure wasn’t expecting this.
“No one thought much about it at the time until it happened with the Kennedy woman too,” she said.
“But now the cops think it might be the same killer?”
She nodded. “And, if so, the Kennedy half-dollar could be his trademark.”
“Jesus, a serial killer?”
“Maybe.”
“Any indications of any more murder victims with Kennedy half-dollars?”
“I asked my source. He said no, not at the moment. The police are going through records of recent homicides now.”
“Do you have enough to write a story?”
“Not yet. It’s just speculation at the moment. The source said he’d get back to me as soon as they found anything concrete between the two murders.”
“It doesn’t make much sense, does it?” I said. “If it turns out to be true, the victims don’t fit the traditional serial killer pattern. A successful fashion and celebrity photographer in an upscale neighborhood and a homeless guy on the Bowery. One’s a man, the other’s a woman. One was shot to death, one was stabbed. The only possible connection between the two is the Kennedy half-dollar.”
“Serial killers—if that’s what this is—generally go after the same kind of victims. Young women, children, or whatever. This doesn’t seem to fit any kind of serial killer pattern.”
“Unless the victims aren’t the motives in this case.”
“What do you mean?”
“A serial killer who targets attractive young women does it for sexual needs. Schoolteachers or nurses . . . well, the killer is maybe acting out some kind of unresolved trauma from the past. Whoever killed Shawn Kennedy and this homeless guy had a motive too. But it could be a completely different motive from the victim itself, some other reason for murdering them and leaving the Kennedy half-dollar clue that the cops aren’t seeing.”
“Any idea what that could be? Or what the Kennedy half-dollar connection is about?”
“No,” I said. “Of course not. No idea at all.”
I took out the address and phone number Nikki Reynolds had given me for Lee Harvey Oswald Jr., who was writing a book about the injustice he believed had been done to his father after the assassination of John F. Kennedy a half century earlier.
I was grasping at straws here. I knew that. But I also knew I needed to check it out. The connection between the Kennedy half-dollars at the two crime scenes was too intriguing to pass up. I had no idea what one thing might have to do with the other, of course. But I learned a long time ago that the best way for a reporter to get answers for things he didn’t know was to ask questions.
Maybe Lee Harvey Oswald Jr.—if that really was his name—would have some answers for me.
The address was in Washington Heights, at the northern tip of Manhattan, a long trip from the Daily News. I decided to call instead of going all the way up there. I dialed his telephone number, listened as it rang a few times and then went to an answering machine. “Hi, this is Lee,” a male voice said. “I’m not home right now. Leave a message at the beep, and I’ll get back to you.”
“Hey, Lee,” I said, “my name is Gil Malloy, and I’m a reporter with the New York Daily News. Nikki Reynolds, your agent, gave me this number. I’d like to talk to you about your book. It sounds fascinating, and I want to do a story about it for the Sunday Daily News. Call me back as soon as you can.”
I left my direct extension at the paper, my cell phone number, and my email address in the newsroom.
I thought about what to do next. I had a couple of choices. I could sit there and wait for Oswald to call back. I could go back to work on the Reyes case. Or I could head up to Washington Heights and knock on Oswald’s door.
I walked to the subway station and caught an uptown train t
o Washington Heights. Just because he didn’t answer the phone didn’t mean he wasn’t home. Or around the neighborhood somewhere. Besides, I always preferred the face-to-face interview to the phone interview anyway.
He lived in a six-story walk-up a few blocks from the George Washington Bridge. I found his name on one of the mailboxes in the lobby: Lee Harvey Oswald Jr. Just like that, for all the world to see. I pressed the buzzer. No one answered.
There was a deli across the street with a bench in front. It was hot out. The temperature was climbing into the nineties. I walked into the deli, bought a cold soda, and sat down on the bench to watch the apartment building. Every once in a while someone went in or out. Each time I approached men and asked if they were Lee Harvey Oswald. If they weren’t, or if it was a woman, I asked if they knew Oswald.
No one did. That might mean he hadn’t lived in the building very long. Or that he was quiet and kept to himself. Or that it just wasn’t a very friendly or neighborly building. One man said he’d seen the name on the mailbox and wondered who would call himself Lee Harvey Oswald Jr. But most of the tenants didn’t seem very interested in the tenant’s infamous name. Hell, why should they be? The JFK assassination had been a half century ago. Now it was just a part of history.
After I waited for an hour or so, I walked back to the subway and took the train back to the News. Sitting on that bench in the hot sun had been uncomfortable. By the time I got onto the subway train, I was drenched in sweat. It was nearly noon and I’d wasted half the day. And I had nothing to show for it. Worse yet, I had absolutely no idea what I was looking for in the first place. Yep, it was a complete waste of time. No question about it.
But what the hell, I had plenty of time on my hands these days. It wasn’t like I had anything else important to do in my life. The subway was air-conditioned. When I first got on, it felt like a relief from the heat outside. But now, as we rolled underneath the streets of Manhattan, I felt trapped, like the walls of the car were closing in around me. I wanted to get out of there. For just a second, I started to gasp for breath. I felt dizzy. I was afraid I might have a full-blown panic attack and pass out or something right there on the train. But then the moment passed and I made it back to the Daily News okay.
Chapter 11
MARILYN STALEY HAD told me I’d need a miracle to ever get on a big story again.
The miracle came in a plain brown paper envelope.
It was addressed simply to me. Gil Malloy. Reporter. New York Daily News.
You get lots of mail like that when you’re a reporter. People who think they’ve got a great story to tell you. Most of the time they don’t. But you never know, you can never be sure. So you open them all.
This one had a single piece of paper inside along with a sealed envelope. I unfolded the paper and read the words on it.
Everyone made such a big deal out of the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. JFK’s words from a half century ago were repeated over and over on the air and in print.
“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” blah, blah, blah.
Well, for my country, to commemorate John F. Kennedy’s death, I am going to blow the living shit out of Kennedy International Airport.
But first some preliminaries . . .
I opened the envelope. There were two newspaper clippings inside. One was Carrie Bratten’s story about Shawn Kennedy. The other was a short metro brief about the homeless man found stabbed to death on the Bowery.
There was something else in the envelope too.
It fell out after I read the note and the two newspaper clips.
A Kennedy half-dollar.
It had been awhile since I sat in on a top-level editors’ meeting at the News. But I was in one now. In fact, I was the main topic of conversation. Staley was there. And Bratten. Plus assorted other assistant city editors and managing editors. Most of them I knew but hadn’t had much to do with in a long time. A couple of them were new faces to me, editors who had been hired since I crashed and burned on the Houston story. All they probably knew about me was what they’d heard from other people in the newsroom, which couldn’t be good.
Staley had the letter I’d gotten on the desk in front of her. She stared down at it, read the words one more time, and then looked up at me.
“Have you notified the police about this yet?” she asked.
“I thought I should show you guys first.”
“We need to let the police know about this immediately.”
“Absolutely,” I told her.
No one said anything for a few seconds.
“And then I’ll write the story,” I said.
More silence from around the room.
“I am going to write a story about this, right?”
“Well, let’s talk about that,” Staley said.
I sighed. “You’re not going to tell me you’re letting Carrie Bratten write this, are you? This is my story. Not hers. The letter came to me.”
“No one’s suggesting that Carrie write the story,” Staley said.
“So what’s to talk about, then?”
“Whether or not there will be a story.”
“How can we not write a story about this? It’s blockbuster stuff. We’ve got a crazy guy—apparently set off for some reason by all the JFK fiftieth anniversary stuff that happened—threatening to kill more people and blow up Kennedy Airport. This is a huge story. It will get picked up everywhere, all the other papers in town, TV newscasts, the national cable networks . . .”
“If it’s true,” someone said.
The lightbulb suddenly went off in my head. I knew what this meeting was all about now. I understood what was going on here. I knew what they were concerned about and why they wanted to talk about it with me.
“Given your track record and journalistic reputation in the light of everything that happened, I’m sure you understand why we have to be absolutely certain that the letter is legitimate and that you are telling us the complete truth about how you managed to get it,” Staley said.
“You think I made up the letter?” I asked.
“We never said that.”
“That I sent it to myself just to get back onto a big story and onto the front page again? Do you really think I’d do something like that? That I’d stoop that low?”
Staley looked at me sadly. So did everyone else in the room. That’s when I realized how far I’d really fallen.
“Are you telling us the truth—the entire truth—about everything?” Staley asked me now.
There were a lot of things I could have said at that moment. But I didn’t. Because I knew there was only one right answer for me.
“Yes, I am telling you the truth.”
“The entire truth?”
“The entire truth.”
“How can we be sure of that?”
“You’re just going to have to trust me, Marilyn,” I said. “All of you are just going to have to trust me again.”
Sitting at my desk after the meeting in Staley’s office, I looked through the file containing all the notes I’d made about the Reyes story. The Reyes case had been my salvation—a pure story, a real story where I could find the truth and see justice done and make things right somehow for Victor Reyes and Roberto Santiago in death. If I could do that, I told myself, I could somehow crawl back over that line I had crossed, undo the damage I had done, and restore my integrity.
I thought about Roberto Santiago. About Camille Reyes. About Miranda Santiago and the three children she now had to raise without a father. “Roberto said you were a good man,” Miranda Santiago had told me. “A man he trusted to do the right thing.”
I had a choice to make.
I could walk away from the story about the Kennedy killings right now and go back to the Victor Reyes story,
a story that sadly no one really cared about but would bring me the pure satisfaction of doing the right thing.
Or I could pursue the Kennedy trail to wherever it might lead and maybe—just maybe—get a piece of a great story that could get me back onto the front page again.
Which meant, of course, that there was really no choice for me at all.
I closed the file on Victor Reyes and put it away in a drawer in my desk.
Even though I knew that by doing that I might be closing off something else—a chance, possibly my last chance—to become the person I once wanted to be.
PART TWO
Ghosts
of
Dallas
Chapter 12
THE Daily News broke the story on the front page the next day. My stuff from the letter claiming responsibility for the two murders and threatening more violence, including bombing Kennedy Airport. Plus all of Carrie Bratten’s information about the two seemingly unrelated murders being linked by the discovery of the Kennedy half-dollars at each scene.
I sat in the same coffee shop reading the story, just like I had the other morning. Except this time the story had my byline on it as well as Bratten’s.
‘KENNEDY KILLER’ LOOSE IN CITY
BY GIL MALLOY and CARRIE BRATTEN
THE DAILY NEWS has received a shocking letter from someone who claims to have already killed two people—and threatened more violence—in remembrance of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
The letter, left in an unmarked envelope at the newspaper’s office, talks about plans to bomb Kennedy Airport as some sort of bizarre and unexplained effort to seek justice for what happened in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, when President Kennedy was cut down by bullets as he rode in a motorcade through the city.
The writer of the letter also claims responsibility for two recent murders in New York City: 28-year-old fashion photographer Shawn Kennedy, who was shot to death in Union Square; and a homeless man named Harold Daniels, found stabbed to death on the Bowery.
