The Kennedy Connection

by R. G. Belsky

  “Do you think your son could have done these killings?” I asked him.

  He didn’t answer me.

  “Do you think he sent me this note threatening to blow up Kennedy Airport?”

  Still nothing.

  “I believe he did,” I said. “I think you believe that too. Because it’s the only possible answer that can explain why this is happening now at the same time as your book. You know that’s right, don’t you, Mr. Oswald?”

  He nodded sadly, almost imperceptibly.

  “This book,” he said, “this damn book. I wish I’d never written it. I wish I’d never changed my name. I wish I’d never found out who my real father was. I meddled with the past. With the ghosts from the past. I woke up those sleeping ghosts from the past . . . and now I don’t know how to undo it.”

  I raced back to the Daily News, excited about my big scoop that I thought would be all over the front page of the paper the next day.

  Except it didn’t work out exactly that way.

  That’s the thing about a big story. A big story is like a living, breathing organism. A big story keeps moving. No matter how good a job you think you did on it, no matter how much time you spent on it, it sometimes doesn’t matter in the end. If something new or shocking or unexpected happens . . . well, breaking news always trumps everything in this business.

  Which is what happened here.

  “I’ve got the page-one story!” Carrie Bratten suddenly screamed across the newsroom, standing up from her desk and starting to run toward Marilyn Staley’s office.

  I started to say that I had the page-one story.

  That it was all mine too, and she couldn’t be a part of it.

  But even before Carrie said her next words, I knew exactly what they were going to be.

  “There’s been another Kennedy murder,” she shouted to me over her shoulder as she headed for Staley’s office.

  PART THREE

  Camelot

  and

  Other

  Myths

  Chapter 26

  THE NAME OF the new victim was Marjorie Balzano.

  She was a seventy-nine-year-old widow and grandmother who had lived in the city for her entire life. Her apartment was on West 83rd Street, just off Riverside Drive. At some point, shortly after ten the night before, she had gone out to a bodega on Columbus Avenue to buy milk, bread, and assorted other groceries. She was killed on the way home, apparently by a blow to the head.

  A neighbor found her body sprawled on West 83rd Street just a few doors away from her apartment house at approximately ten forty-five. There was a large gash on her head and blood flowing from it. The groceries she’d just bought were scattered on the sidewalk near her. Her purse was there too. The money and credit cards inside it had been taken.

  On the face of it, this looked to be a pretty clear-cut mugging that somehow turned fatal. Someone assaulted the elderly woman walking home along on the dark street, she resisted, there was an altercation—and she died.

  Except for one thing.

  They found something in her purse.

  A Kennedy half-dollar.

  Inside an envelope.

  The outside of the envelope said simply: “No. 3.”

  The cops didn’t make that angle public right away. We did. Well, Carrie actually. She got a tip about it from her source in the police department, and the Daily News broke the story.

  The page-one headline said simply KENNEDY KILLER STRIKES AGAIN!

  There was a press conference in the afternoon at police headquarters. The police commissioner was there, flanked by some of his top lieutenants. Commissioner Ray Piersall went through the details of what they knew about Balzano’s death and the Kennedy killings in general, then asked if there were any questions.

  There were a lot of questions.

  “Why do you think the killer robbed this victim?” someone asked.

  “Maybe the killer needed money.”

  “But the killer didn’t take any money or jewelry from Shawn Kennedy,” another reporter said. “And he certainly didn’t take anything from Harold Daniels on the Bowery because Daniels didn’t have anything.”

  “Those are the facts as we know them,” the commissioner said.

  “Why rob now and not rob the Kennedy woman who had more valuable items to be taken?”

  “We don’t have the answer to that at this point.”

  Someone else brought up the one thing that was consistent in all the killings. “Do you think there is any significance to the fact that all the killings have happened in Manhattan? Not in the same area, but still all in the same borough. Do you think that means the killer lives in Manhattan?”

  “That is a likely scenario,” Piersall said. “Either that the killer lives in Manhattan or he is more familiar with Manhattan. Manhattan is fairly easy to navigate, even for someone who doesn’t know the city very well. Brooklyn, Queens, and the other boroughs are not. So yes, there is a good chance the killer either lives in Manhattan or is at least comfortable there—compared to other parts of the city. That’s the profile of the killer we project at this point.”

  Or someone from out of town who didn’t know the city very well, I thought to myself.

  Someone like Eric Mathis.

  If Mathis had come to New York to start killing people, he very likely would do that in Manhattan instead of a borough where he might get lost or confused by directions.

  Carrie asked a question then. I knew she would. I figured she’d want the opportunity to get some face time in front of the cameras and all the press there.

  “I notice you said ‘he’ when you were referring to the killer,” she said to the commissioner. “That suggests you have information that the killer is a man. Do you know that for a fact and, if so, how did you obtain that information?”

  “Uh, no . . . we have no such information.”

  “So it would be correct to say that you have no idea if the killer is a woman or a man at this point?”

  “We don’t have the answer to that question right now.”

  Carrie smiled. She had made her point. Now she went for the kill.

  “So, to recap here, Commissioner, you don’t know if the killer is a man or a woman. You don’t know what the connection might be between any of the victims. You don’t why the killer—he or she—used a different method to kill each time. You don’t know why he or she has struck in completely different parts of Manhattan, against completely different kinds of victims and for what seems to be different motives. And you don’t know why he or she has only killed in Manhattan. Ergo, you seem to be saying that you have no idea who the killer is or how to catch him. Or her.”

  There was laughter all around the room. Piersall looked flustered. He looked at his aides, like he was hoping to get some kind of help from them. But no one said anything. This was not going well for Commissioner Piersall or the New York City Police Department.

  “We are pursuing the investigation vigorously at all levels,” Commissioner Piersall said defensively. “All the resources of the NYPD are being thrown into this investigation. I personally can assure the people of New York City that we are doing everything we can to capture the person committing these crimes.”

  “But you have absolutely no idea who that is right now or why he or she is doing it,” Carrie repeated.

  “Not at this point,” the commissioner said.

  Maybe he didn’t.

  But I did.

  Chapter 27

  WE BROKE THE Eric Mathis story the next day. The headline practically jumped out at you off the newsstands that morning.

  OSWALD GRANDSON HUNTED IN KENNEDY KILLINGS, the front-page banner head screamed.

  Below that, a smaller headline: KIN OF JFK ASSASSIN IS NOW SOUGHT FOR QUESTIONING ABOUT 3 NEW NYC MURDERS.

  And then the bylin
e:

  EXCLUSIVE BY GIL MALLOY and CARRIE BRATTEN.

  The story itself ran on all of pages two and three of the paper. With a picture of Eric Mathis I’d been able to grab from the file at the Book Depository in Dallas, which was positioned for maximum effect next to the mug shot taken of Lee Harvey Oswald following his arrest after the JFK murder. There were also pictures of Lee Mathis from my interview with him; pictures of the three murder victims; old file shots of the JFK assassination, including the famous one of Jackie in the backseat of the car holding her dying husband in her arms.

  Everything in the forty inches of my story was pretty much the way I had written it. Marilyn Staley and the copy desk had barely changed a word. And why should they? This was a friggin’ perfect story.

  A MAN BELIEVED to be the grandson of JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald is being sought for questioning by police in connection with three recent New York City murders linked to President Kennedy’s death in Dallas a half century ago, the Daily News has learned.

  The suspect was identified as Eric Mathis, 27, who recently disappeared from his job at the Texas School Book Depository museum in Dallas—taking with him materials about Oswald and the JFK assassination.

  “He’s definitely a person of interest,” Police Commissioner Ray Piersall told the News exclusively last night. “Based on new evidence and information provided by the Daily News, we are searching for Eric Mathis here and across the country.”

  The TV cameras descended on us later that day. The local New York stations, the cable outfits, the national news, and network magazine shows—all of them were there. They wanted to interview me. They wanted to interview Carrie. Some of them interviewed Marilyn or anyone else they could find. Or they just stood in front of the News building and quoted from my story. That’s the thing about TV news. Everyone always says newspapers are dying, and all that matters are TV and the Internet. But when a big story breaks, it’s still usually a newspaper reporter who breaks it, and TV and all the rest of the so-called new media just follow along.

  I wondered if somebody would ask me about my past. My checkered newspaper history with the Houston incident and my disappearance from the front page for so long. I wasn’t sure how I’d answer that question. I’d played around with several responses—making a joke of it, expressing remorse, refusing to answer anything that wasn’t about the current story. But no one asked. It was as if Houston had never happened. Everything was the way it used to be for me again. The media attention. The journalistic acclaim. The thrill—that incomparable high I hadn’t felt in so long—of being the star reporter on the biggest story around. Just as quickly as all that had disappeared from my life, it was all back.

  For Carrie, this was a whole new experience. She’d had a few big stories, but she’d never been in the media spotlight like this before. I could tell she liked it, of course, but she was also a bit taken aback—maybe even intimidated—by the glare of the cameras and all the attention she was getting.

  That surprised me a little.

  I figured she was so full of herself and so arrogant that she didn’t have any of those kinds of insecurities.

  But what the hell, she was only twenty-five years old, and it was all happening very quickly for her.

  The other thing that surprised me was the way she talked about me in the interviews. I heard her saying “we” or “Gil and I” about the story. When I talked about the story on air, I just said “I.” Hardly ever mentioned Carrie. I felt a little guilty about that after I heard her. So I started making a few references to her too. Why not? There was enough fame to go around with this story.

  In the middle of all this, we still had to write a story for the next day’s paper. Carrie and I worked the phones, then put our heads together for a follow-up angle on the police search for Eric Mathis and wrote it all up in time for the early copy deadline at seven thirty. Marilyn read it, made only a few edits, and sent it to the copy desk.

  “You know what I think we should do next?” she said.

  “Think about a story for the next day,” Carrie said. “I have an idea—”

  “No, not now.” Staley smiled. “There’s something much more important we have to do now. Go to Headlines to celebrate.”

  Headlines was a newspaper bar where a lot of Daily News reporters hung out. It was a tradition that had been honored for as long as I’d been at the paper. Whenever you broke a big story—whenever the paper pulled off some sort of journalistic coup—the reporter who broke the story got feted with drinks at Headlines.

  We drank there for a few hours. Me, Carrie, Marilyn. And a lot of other editors and reporters at the paper.

  “Let me make a toast,” Marilyn said at one point, standing at the bar and holding up a glass a bit unsteadily after a few drinks. “To the most unlikely journalistic duo of all time. Gil Malloy and Carrie Bratten.”

  “Beauty and the beast,” someone said.

  “Malloy, isn’t he dead?” another person yelled out.

  “Joke if you will, but they make one helluva reporting team,” Marilyn shouted to the crowd.

  Behind her, the TV over the bar was playing an interview with us. I couldn’t hear my words over the din in the bar, but I could see my face on the screen and the words written underneath: “Daily News Reporter Gil Malloy, who broke the exclusive story about the Kennedy killings.”

  It was a great night.

  At some point, I wandered outside to get a breath of fresh air. Carrie was there, standing on the sidewalk and smoking a cigarette. Looking a little dazed by it all, I thought at first. But as I got closer to her, I realized it was more than that. She was pretty drunk.

  “Gil Malloy,” she said to me with glassy eyes. “Gil Malloy and Carrie Bratten. Like Marilyn said in there, we make a helluva team, don’t we?”

  She took a step toward me, then slipped and almost fell onto the sidewalk. I caught her before she went down. She leaned against me closely for support.

  “Let’s go back in for another drink,” she said.

  I shook my head.

  “I’ve gotta go. I don’t want to get home too late; it’s going to be another big day tomorrow.”

  “You don’t have to, you know.”

  “I don’t have to what?”

  “Go home for the night.”

  She looked up at me. Her face was only a few inches away from mine now. She was clearly drunk. But it was also pretty clear what she was proposing to me.

  “My place is not far from here,” she said. “We could just head over there for a nightcap . . .”

  “I’m going home,” I said.

  “Oh, don’t be like that.”

  “I think you should go home too.”

  “It’s a real nice apartment. Great views. Especially from the bedroom . . .”

  “I’m going home,” I said again.

  I got her a cab, then somehow managed to put her in the backseat and gave the driver her address.

  Then I went back into the bar and had another drink.

  By myself.

  And thought about how I’d dodged a very big bullet.

  Chapter 28

  A GUY WALKS INTO a psychiatrist’s office with a chicken on his head,” I said to Dr. Landis. “The psychiatrist says, ‘I can see you’ve got a real problem.’ The guy doesn’t say anything. But the chicken tells the psychiatrist, ‘You’re telling me. How do I get this jerk from under my ass?’”

  She didn’t even smile. Just sat there with a pen in her hand and notebook on her lap. My God, did this woman ever loosen up at all?

  “You didn’t laugh.”

  “I’ve heard the joke before.”

  “Still could have laughed.”

  “I’ve heard it many times.”

  Landis looked down at the notebook. She paged through it for a second or two.

  “What did y
ou think of my big page-one story? I’ve been on TV too. Everyone is talking about me and this story. I’m a star again.”

  “To be honest, I have conflicting emotions about it.”

  “Hey, what I’ve done over the past few days is damn impressive. Why can’t you just be happy for me? Why do you have to analyze and dissect everything about me? I was about as down as I could be when I first started coming to see you. Now I’m up again, everything is going right in my life. So what the hell is your problem?”

  “My problem, as you put it, Mr. Malloy, is that you came to me with some serious psychological issues that I believe led to the panic attacks you were having and had greatly impacted you and your life. I thought you—I thought we—were making significant headway on these issues. I told you in some of our previous sessions that I thought one of your biggest problems was that you tend to evaluate your life based on your worth as a reporter. So when you were a big star, you felt good about yourself. When you weren’t, you fell apart and found yourself experiencing the panic attacks. Now you’re on top as a reporter again, which is good. But you can’t allow that to camouflage the serious underlying issues about you as a person that caused you to have the panic attacks in the first place.”

  “I haven’t had any more of the panic attacks,” I said.

  “For now. But what happens when the story goes away? And you’re not the star reporter anymore? That’s why you need to deal with the realities of yourself as a person. Not as a reporter. I need you to evaluate your life as a complete entity, not just based on how many front-page bylines you get.”

  My comment about having no more panic attacks hadn’t been completely true. I’d felt the beginnings of one when I was in Dallas and thought the story was getting away from me. But I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell her about that.

  “You make it sound like doing well at my job is a bad thing,” I said.