by R. G. Belsky
Police told the News that the letter appeared to be authentic because of previously undisclosed information that it contained about the two seemingly unconnected crime victims, Kennedy and Daniels. In both cases, a Kennedy half-dollar was found on or near the bodies—a fact that was not known by the public at the time of the crimes. The letter received by the News included a Kennedy half-dollar along with newspaper clippings about the two murders.
“The fact that the writer knows about the Kennedy half-dollars is confirmation that he or she must have been involved in the murders,” Police Commissioner Ray Piersall said in a statement after authorities were notified of the letter received by the Daily News. “There is no other way this person could have been aware of this information. It appears we are dealing with a serial killer—perhaps set off by the coverage of the 50th anniversary of JFK’s death. We don’t know the motive, but for some unfathomable reason, the JFK assassination seems to be the catalyst.”
I read the piece all the way through to the end. Then I went back to the beginning and read it again. It felt good to be back on the front page with a big story. It had been a long time since that had happened for me. But now . . . well, hell, it was as if I had never left. I still had the magic touch. No problem at all. Just like riding a bicycle, some things you just never forget.
Working with Carrie Bratten turned out to be my biggest problem.
First, she didn’t want to share a byline with me. She wanted to write her own story about the Kennedy half-dollars being found on the two bodies. And then let me write my own story about the letter I received. Marilyn Staley, quite correctly, pointed out that they were both part of one big story. Ergo, we needed to write it as a single story, combining both of our stuff into one lead article for the paper.
Then there was the actual writing of the story itself. Just like she didn’t want a double byline on the story, Carrie didn’t want me to write it with her either. That was pretty hard to avoid, though. Normally, when a story has a double byline, one person does a lot of the reporting and the other actually writes the story. The question with Carrie and me was which one of us would write it. As it turned out, we managed to work out a compromise on this. Sort of. I wrote the part about receiving the letter. She did the stuff about the two murders she’d connected together with the Kennedy half-dollar. Then Staley edited the whole thing, putting together a coherent article.
I read through it all one more time in the coffee shop. Maybe a million people would read the Daily News today with my name on the page-one story. Maybe some of them would be other newspaper editors who might decide to give me another chance and offer me a real reporting job. Maybe my ex-wife would read it too, then realize what a mistake she made in giving up on me and would come crawling back pleading for my forgiveness. Maybe some of my ex-friends would start returning my phone messages or reach out to see how I was doing.
A waitress came over and asked if I wanted more coffee. She was young. Reddish hair, nice figure, cute face. I figured her for an aspiring actress. I flashed her a smile. The smile that used to open doors for me and convince people to tell me their innermost secrets and give up everything they had when I was a big star reporter. I hadn’t used it very much in recent times. Not really much for me to smile about these days.
“That’s me,” I said, pointing to my byline in the paper. “I wrote the page-one story today.”
“Really?” she said, clearly impressed by the customer she was serving.
I smiled again.
“Well, you deserve a free cup of coffee today,” she said, filling my cup.
She smiled back at me. Then she walked off to wait on another customer. I picked up my coffee, sipped it slowly, and then headed for work.
What the hell, it was a start . . .
When I got to the office, Staley called Carrie and me to her office. She told us our story had become the big media news of the day; every other newspaper and TV station in town was chasing after our exclusive; the circulation department said copies of the News were flying off the newsstands this morning. Then she talked about some ideas we could work on for a follow-up story the next day. Finally, she asked Carrie and me if we had any questions.
“Why is his name first in the byline?” Carrie asked.
“That’s your question?” Staley said.
“This really was my story. It was through my police contact that we first found out about the connections between the murders. All he did was get a letter.”
“Which is why both of your names are in the byline.”
“But his is first.”
“There’s really no significance to whoever’s name is first.”
“I think they just put them alphabetically,” I said.
“My name is Bratten,” she pointed out. “B comes before M in the alphabet, last time I looked.”
“Oh, maybe they went by who’s smarter, then.”
“Malloy . . .” Staley said, glaring at me.
“Cuter?”
“Look,” Staley said, “whether you two like it or not, you’re going to be teamed up on this story. You’re just going to have to learn to work together. Just like other teams have done in the past.”
“Like Woodward and Bernstein,” I suggested.
“Exactly.”
“Huntley and Brinkley.”
“Right.”
“Leopold and Loeb.”
Staley threw up her hands and stood up from her desk. “Okay, this meeting is over. You two figure it out. Handle the byline—handle all of it—any way you want. I don’t care. Just don’t screw it up.”
Spoken like a true city editor.
“Leopold and Loeb?” Carrie said to me when we were back out in the city room.
“They were a pair of thrill killers back in the 1920s who murdered people and—”
“I know who Leopold and Loeb were,” she said.
“Bad analogy, you think?
“Marilyn didn’t seem to care for it too much.”
“She wasn’t that keen on your byline question either, was she, Carrie?”
She almost smiled at that, I thought.
“Look,” I said, “Marilyn is right about this. We’re going to have to work together, whether we like it or not. You know that, and I know that. We don’t have to like each other. We don’t even have to respect each other. But we do need to figure out some way to function together as an effective team.”
She nodded.
“Like Woodward and Bernstein,” I said.
“Or Leopold and Loeb,” she said.
This time she did smile. No question about it. Ah, Malloy, they just melt when you turn on the charm. Even the ice-cold bitches like Carrie Bratten.
“Going forward,” I told her, “maybe we should split up the two parts of this story. You keep working on the murders, looking for any connections on how the Kennedy half-dollars fit in. Me, I’ll try to find out more about the letter. Not just the letter itself. The whole Kennedy assassination angle and how it could have set something like this off. There are still a lot of unanswered questions—always have been—about what happened that day in Dallas. Maybe one of them is the thing that set our killer off now. I want to go back and find the answers to those questions. That could be the answer to the questions we have today about these killings.”
“What unanswered questions are you talking about?” she asked.
“Did Oswald kill Kennedy? Or was there a conspiracy and the real killers have gone free over all these years?”
She looked at me in amazement. “You’re actually going to try to solve the Kennedy assassination?”
“I want to give it a shot.”
“God, you really are crazy.”
“It’s the greatest murder mystery in history,” I said. “I’m a reporter. I cover murders and look for answers. You do too, Carrie. So wh
y not try to get to the bottom of the biggest murder ever?”
“And you think that somehow whatever you find out about the JFK assassination can help us figure out what’s happening here now—who sent you this letter and who’s killing people on the streets of New York City today?”
“Yes.”
She shook her head.
“So what the hell are you going to do, Malloy?” Carrie asked. “Go back and read the whole goddamned Warren Commission Report looking for clues?”
“I don’t have to read the Warren Commission Report.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve already read it.”
Chapter 13
MY FATHER USED to tell me that the Kennedy assassination was the most traumatic—and history-changing—event in his lifetime.
Like the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor was for his father’s generation.
Or 9/11 would turn out to be for my generation.
A moment in time that changes you and the world you live in forever.
My father was in college when JFK was killed. This was before Vietnam, protests in the streets, the drug culture, and everything else we remember about the ’60s. Students still believed in the government. John F. Kennedy had inspired them about politics and public service with his Peace Corps, his New Frontier, and his Camelot White House with youth and vigor and stirring speeches about changing the world.
But that unimaginable weekend in November 1963 changed everything for his generation, my father would say. The stunning and horrifying news of the assassination. The tears and grief of the young president’s funeral in Washington. And, of course, the shooting that forever silenced the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, in the basement of a Dallas police station by nightclub owner Jack Ruby.
Like many young men of his generation, my father became intrigued—maybe even obsessed—by the ongoing conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination as the years went on. He read books, watched documentaries, and talked about how there were so many unanswered questions about what happened that day in Dallas.
I don’t think my father ever had a clear-cut opinion on who might have been involved in a conspiracy. He would rattle through the usual suspects: the mob, the CIA, the anti-Castro Cubans, right-wing fanatics, the FBI—or a combination of all of them. The only thing he was certain about was that the man the Warren Commission named as the lone assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, could not have—and did not—carry out the assassination of John F. Kennedy on his own.
“Nothing about Oswald as the assassin makes sense,” he would tell me. “It was the right wing that hated Kennedy, not the left. But Oswald proclaimed to be a Marxist and, in fact, had even lived in the Soviet Union. He wasn’t a particularly good marksman in the Marines, but we’re supposed to believe he hit Kennedy with shots from a window high above a moving motorcade—all in a span of a few seconds. With a cheap mail-order rifle known for misfiring and poor accuracy. And Oswald just happens to work in a building along the route the presidential motorcade decides to take that day. No, Oswald may have been involved in the conspiracy in some way, or maybe he was just a patsy the way he claimed to cops once he was in custody. But someone else was behind the plot that killed my president. And someday the truth will finally come out.”
For me, none of this really mattered very much until after my father’s death.
We had been very close, my father and me. You see, my mother died when I was only ten and my father raised me on his own. He was the circulation manager of a newspaper in Ohio where I grew up. He had once wanted to be a reporter, just like me, but he wound up on the business end of things instead. Maybe that’s why he was always so proud of me and encouraged me to pursue journalism.
He died of a heart attack one night. No warning. He just went to bed and never woke up. This happened before I made it to New York. It was a difficult thing for me to deal with, and probably because of that I became curious and eventually obsessed for a while myself with some of the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories. He had accumulated lots of books and records and documents on the subject, including the complete Warren Commission Report from 1964 that assured the American public a crazy lone assassin named Lee Harvey Oswald had killed Kennedy. After my father died, I read everything he had left and did some of the same kind of research into the assassination he had done. Somehow it felt like it brought him back to life for me while I was lost in the details. Of course, I—just like my father and all the others who have done the same thing—never came up with any persuasive answers. And, as time went on, it began to occupy a smaller and smaller part of my consciousness. By the time of 9/11, I had relegated the Kennedy assassination and all the unanswered questions about it to old history, just like most people had done.
But now here it was again.
The crime—maybe the greatest unsolved crime in history—that wouldn’t go away even a half century later.
And now it might have something to do with new crimes and new murders that were happening today.
This wasn’t just an exercise in history anymore.
More lives were at stake here.
All I had to do was find out why . . .
The Lee Harvey Oswald book coincidence still intrigued me. I wasn’t sure why. Or what it might have to do with anything. But it was there. I needed to find out why both the book and the new violence were happening now. The best place to start was with Lee Harvey Oswald Jr. and his mysterious book.
I started by Googling Lee Harvey Oswald Jr. for some information or leads on the man. That turned out to be hopeless, of course. I was inundated with thousands of pieces about Lee Harvey Oswald. But none of them were about my Lee Harvey Oswald. No mention of a Lee Harvey Oswald Jr. Nothing on Facebook either. Or Myspace. Or Twitter or any other place I looked.
I called Nikki Reynolds’s office. She wasn’t there so I asked them to put me through to her voice mail. I left a message asking her to help me get in touch with her author. I didn’t say why, of course, just that I was interested in doing a story about the book. I knew she’d figure it out—once she read my Kennedy story in the Daily News. But I was banking on the theory that Reynolds believed any kind of publicity for a client was good, even if it was controversial or potentially suspicious or criminal. I also thanked her on the message for our lunch and suggested we might have dinner some night soon. I told her how good it was to see her and, yes, how good she looked. I didn’t actually offer to sleep with her, but I probably would have if I thought it would help me get to Lee Harvey Oswald Jr.
I dialed Oswald’s number again. Still got the answering machine. I left another message, asking him to call me as soon as he could and saying again how anxious I was to do a story that could help publicize his book.
At that point, I was out of ideas. When that happens, my fallback plan is generally to get something to eat and then wait to see what develops. When the going gets tough, the tough get hungry.
On my way out of the newsroom, I passed by Carrie’s desk.
“I just spoke to the medical examiner’s office,” she said. “They’re doing an autopsy now on Daniels, the homeless guy, to see if there’s any DNA or any other evidence that might connect his death directly to the Kennedy woman. I’m headed over there to get the results as soon as they come back. One way or another, this could be an angle for our story tomorrow.”
“Absolutely.”
“How about you?”
“Still scrambling.”
“No leads at all?”
“Not yet.”
That wasn’t entirely true, of course, because I still hadn’t told her about the Oswald book—but it wasn’t a big lie either.
Just a little white lie.
When I got back to my desk later, my telephone was ringing. I picked it up.
“I’m looking for Gil Malloy, the newspaper reporter,” a voice said.
“You got him.”
“This is Lee Harvey Oswald Jr.,” the voice on the other end said.
Damn! How about that?
“Thank you for calling back, Mr. Oswald,” I said.
“Call me Lee.”
“Sure, Lee.”
“You asked me if you could do an interview about my book. Well, I would like that very much. I have a lot of things to say. Things that have gone unsaid for too long. I want the world to hear these things now. I want them to know the true story about Dallas and John F. Kennedy and my father.”
Chapter 14
I SAW YOUR NAME on the front page of the newspaper,” Dr. Landis said. “The paper said it was an exclusive.”
“Malloy’s the name, exclusives are my game,” I smiled.
Landis didn’t smile back. The damn woman never smiled. She was wearing a blue pin-striped suit today that made her look even more prim and old-fashioned than she did the other times I was there. She sat erect in her chair, holding the ever-present notebook and pen in her lap. She had a concerned look on her face.
“Hey, how many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb?” I asked her.
She didn’t answer.
“Just one,” I said. “But it takes a dozen office visits and the lightbulb really has to want to change.”
No laugh, not even a smile.
“Wow, this is a tough room to work,” I told her. “What’s a guy gotta do to get a laugh around here.”
Still nothing.
“Mr. Malloy,” she said finally, “you and I have spoken before about your apparent tendency to make jokes to cover up your true feelings and emotions when you’re talking in here.”
She sighed and put the notebook down on a table next to her. I took that as a sign that she was through listening to me for the moment and wanted me to listen to her. I was right.
“Let’s talk about you and your defense mechanisms,” Landis said. “You have other defense mechanisms that I think you rely on in the same way as this. One of them is the way you embrace and constantly refer to your job as a newspaper reporter. By doing that, it protects you from having to deal with the questions, the issues, the uncertainties of the world around you. It allows you to blank everything out except the story you’re working on at that moment. You wrap yourself in journalism like it was a religion.”
