The Kennedy Connection

by R. G. Belsky

  Of course, anyone could have sent this one. It didn’t have to be from the same person doing the killing. But along with the threatening phone call I’d received in New Orleans, it sure looked like someone was damn intent on getting me off this story. Which just made me more certain than ever that I was on the right path.

  At the height of all the media frenzy over our JFK story, Carrie and I found ourselves being interviewed for the NBC Nightly News. We rode up the elevator at 30 Rock, which I’d seen on television so many times. The TV show with Tina Fey. Saturday Night Live. Conan and then later Fallon. I’m pretty sure I saw one of the Saturday Night Live people as I got on the elevator. No question about it, I got a kick out of being there. And I could see Carrie was completely captivated by the glamour and history of the place. I had a feeling that she could imagine herself as a TV star here one day.

  “Who do you think killed JFK?” the on-air person asked us at one point during the interview.

  “We don’t know,” Carrie said. “Which is why the Daily News is calling for the new investigation. It’s finally time to find some answers. We demand the answers. Not just for us, but for all Americans. We deserve those answers.”

  “But you don’t think Lee Harvey Oswald pulled the trigger in Dallas?”

  “The new evidence indicates that he wasn’t even in Dallas until after the assassination happened,” I said. “Which means he couldn’t have shot Kennedy. But the evidence also shows that someone wanted to make Oswald look like the shooter. The lone shooter.”

  “And you believe that this is all connected somehow to the murders of three people in New York City in recent weeks?”

  “Yes. We don’t know how. And we don’t know why. But maybe when we get the answers from one of these crimes—either from the JFK assassination or the so-called Kennedy killings that are happening now—well, it will help us find the answers to all the rest of it too.”

  They interspersed the interview with clips of the assassination, JFK’s funeral, and shots of Carrie and me at work in the Daily News city room—typing on computers, talking on the phone, and conversing with other reporters and editors.

  There’s an outdoor bar in the center of Rockefeller Plaza that’s open in the summer, in the same place as the ice rink during the Christmas season and winter months. Carrie suggested that we stop for a drink there after the interview. Sitting in the center of 30 Rock, with all the Manhattan traffic and the glamour and the New York feeling around me, I savored my moment in the sun. I was back on top of the media world. Me and Carrie.

  “We’re really a lot alike, Gil,” Carrie said.

  “How’s that?”

  “Well, we’re both very smart people.”

  “Can’t argue with you there.”

  “We’re both very ambitious.”

  “Okay. Maybe you more than me. But I’m still with you.”

  “And we’re both great reporters who will do anything it takes to get the story—to get it first, to get it best. The story is all that matters to people like you and me. It’s our lives, it defines us, it’s what we’re all about. There’re not a lot of people who have that kind of dedication to being a reporter the way we do. That’s the special bond you and I have. You know that as well as I do.”

  I wasn’t sure I agreed with all that. I didn’t want to say I was just like her. There were a lot of things about Carrie I didn’t like. She was a great reporter, but the jury was still out on her as a person as far as I was concerned. I had to admit one thing, though. She was damn hot. Sitting there with her on the hot summer night, I couldn’t help but be very aware she was wearing a low-cut blouse, very tight blue jeans, and big open-toed sandals that she kept ­dangling from her perfectly shaped and manicured feet as we talked. I’d resisted the urge to take her home after she got drunk in the bar. But I sure as hell remembered the way she came on to me that night. Sexy. Flirtatious. Needy. Not at all like she acted in the office when she was all business and ice-cold professionalism. Now she was drinking again, and slipping a bit more into that mode. Maybe if I just hung out with Carrie when she was drinking, I’d like her better.

  “So maybe we should just roll the dice,” Carrie said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You and me.”

  “What about us?”

  “Together.”

  “We are together. Just like Woodward and Bernstein, remember.”

  “No, silly.” She giggled, and I realized she was definitely getting drunk again. “I mean you and I together as . . . well, you know.” She drained the rest of her drink, then signaled the bartender for another. “I mean that offer to come over to my apartment is still open.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “How come?”

  “We could ruin our professional working relationship.”

  “Or we could expand it into a different kind of a relationship.” She giggled again. “A fun relationship.”

  “But what if it doesn’t work out?”

  “What if it does? What if you and I turned out to be great together? Even greater than we are as a reporting duo. It’s possible, you know. We might light up the bedroom the same way we light up the front page. Wouldn’t you like to find out if we can do that? I would.”

  “It’s a nice offer, and I’m very flattered, Carrie. But I don’t think so . . .”

  “Take me to my place for one more drink. Just a nightcap in my apartment. That’s all. Then you go home. And tomorrow morning we go back to work on the story.”

  “A nightcap? That’s all you want from me? Honestly?”

  “Cross my heart and hope to die,” she said, putting her hand over her chest. Then she reached over, took my hand, and put it there too.

  She had a spacious two-bedroom apartment overlooking the East River. You could see the UN, the East Side of Manhattan and across the river to Queens from different parts of the place. It was expensively furnished too, or at least it looked that way to me. There was a huge velvet couch, a fancy easy chair, lots of artwork on the walls, and a thick shag carpet on the floor. Nicer than my place. A lot nicer. So how did she afford all this on a starting reporter’s salary? Probably her plastic surgeon father, making sure his little girl was well taken care of in the big city. Damn, he must have to do a lot of Botox and face-lifts to pay the rent on a place like this.

  She went into the kitchen, made me a drink and one for herself, then brought them out and sat on the velvet couch beside me. Without any warning, she suddenly leaned over and kissed me. I kissed her back. Our hands quickly and passionately began exploring each other’s bodies. I buried my face in her hair, smelling expensive shampoo. I could smell her perfume too as well as getting a whiff of the booze on her breath as she kissed me. It was all good. I realized I’d been fantasizing about doing this with her for a long time, even as we sat in news meetings in Staley’s office. I wanted her. I needed her. And for whatever reason, she wanted and needed me too.

  We tore each other’s clothing off as we moved into the bedroom. I caressed her breasts and explored the rest of her body. She did the same to me. It had been a long time since I’d been with a woman, and I thought I’d feel uncomfortable and awkward in this situation after all this time. But the passion I felt at that moment superseded all that. Even as I did this with her, I couldn’t believe it was happening. I was making love to Carrie Bratten. But it was also as if I was releasing all my demons and uncertainty and self-doubt at the same time. Like I was being reborn completely at that moment. All of that stuff was going through my mind while I was in bed with Carrie. Of course, the alcohol may have played a role in it all too.

  When it was over, neither of us said much. She asked me if I wanted to spend the night there. I said yes. We discussed the logistics a bit: I’d have to get up early in the morning, go back to my place, and grab a change of clothes for the office. She even trie
d to get me to talk a bit about what we were going to do next on the Kennedy story, but I was in no mood for that. I just laughed, said we’d pick up the conversation at the office in the morning, and then rolled over and went to sleep.

  A few hours later, I woke up and saw the bed next to me was empty. No sign of Carrie. I got up, walked out into the hallway, and heard her in the second bedroom, which she had turned into a study. She was sitting at a desk, typing into a computer. Some of the articles we’d done on the Kennedy killings were spread out in front of her. Jesus, she was working on the story. This kid was a helluva dedicated reporter. I watched her for a few minutes as she typed. She didn’t see me. She was too focused on what she was doing. I went back into the bedroom.

  I sat on the bed, wide-awake now, looking out at the expanse of New York City from the window.

  And I had a flashback to another time I sat in a woman’s fancy apartment like this, looking out at the city and realizing that it was all out there for me—New York City, the whole damn world.

  That had been with Nikki Reynolds. Right before everything went bad with Houston. And now I was doing the same thing all over again.

  Maybe it was just my own insecurity and paranoia.

  Or maybe it was some kind of karma or omen or supernatural warning or something for me.

  But later, when the Kevin Gallagher thing happened, I remembered it came right after that night I spent at Carrie’s apartment.

  That’s when it all started to go wrong.

  Chapter 34

  KEVIN GALLAGHER HAD been a part of this story briefly at the beginning. He was the bartender at the Union Square bar where Shawn Kennedy had been drinking the night she was murdered, and—as far as anyone knew—Gallagher was the last person to talk to her that night before the murder.

  At first, the cops considered him to be a potential suspect. But he had an alibi. He’d been working at the bar until two o’clock, a few hours after Shawn Kennedy was murdered, according to the time of death determined by the medical examiner.

  So the police moved on to other theories of what happened to her. An ex-boyfriend. A mugging in the park that went bad. Even a drug deal gone awry.

  That was at first, of course.

  Then, once the Kennedy half-dollar she had was connected to other murders with the same coin left with the victims, the investigation moved in a new direction: serial killer. Shawn Kennedy was not killed for any reason other than to make a statement by an obsessed killer—presumably now Eric Mathis—about the Kennedy assassination anniversary. Maybe the fact that her name was Kennedy played a part in it. Or maybe that was just a coincidence.

  But for Kevin Gallagher, his brief moment in the spotlight was over. He gave a few interviews about his encounter with the Kennedy woman that night, talked about how shocking it was that a beautiful girl like her got murdered after leaving the bar where he worked, and then pretty much faded from public view and wasn’t heard from again.

  Until he was arrested.

  This happened in the East Village, outside a small apartment building near Avenue C. A young woman said she’d been followed home from a nearby bar by a man whose advances she’d rejected repeatedly earlier that night. The man had trailed her after she left, then accosted her outside her front door, saying he wanted to come up to her apartment. Then he tried to kiss her. When she resisted, he punched her and then smashed her facedown onto the sidewalk so hard it required thirty stitches to stop the bleeding afterward and she had fractured orbital bones around one eye. As she lay there bleeding and moaning in pain on the street, she said he told her, “Stop whining, bitch. It could be worse. You’re lucky you’re not winding up dead like that other bitch who didn’t want to kiss me in Union Square Park.” She later identified her assailant as Gallagher.

  When the police picked him up, he denied everything. At first.

  But then his story began to fall apart piece by piece.

  The first story he told was that nothing had happened. He hadn’t followed the woman home, he had never left the bar until much later, and she had mistaken him for someone else.

  Under intense interrogation, he changed his story a bit. He said he had followed her from the bar, but only because he was concerned about her safety and wanted to make sure she got home all right. He had never approached her, certainly had not hit her, and he had no idea who did.

  A bruise on his hand matched up with one of the wounds on the woman’s face. The cops also found blood on his shirt. They suspected it was the woman’s blood that splashed on him after he hit her and threw her down to the sidewalk. They pointed out to him that once they got the tests back from the lab showing it was her blood on his shirt, then they’d know for sure he was lying.

  That’s when he changed his story again. This time he admitted he did hit her but claimed it was self-defense because she attacked him when he tried to kiss her. He continued to deny that he bragged to her—or mentioned anything—about killing the Kennedy woman in Union Square Park. The questioning went on for several hours. Eventually, he admitted he might have mentioned something about his involvement in the Union Square case. But only because he was trying to impress the woman on the street with how important he was and how he had his name in the newspapers. Not because he really knew anything about it other than that.

  It all fell apart, though, when police found the gun. While they were interviewing him, the cops got a search warrant for his apartment. That’s when they found the gun. A Glock. The same kind of gun that had killed Shawn Kennedy. I’m still surprised by how stupid people are. I’ve never killed anyone. But if I ever did, I sure as hell wouldn’t leave the evidence in my apartment for someone to find. I’d drop it off a bridge somewhere or bury it or whatever. But not Gallagher. He took the gun home with him, stuck it in a drawer, and seemingly forgot all about it.

  The cops didn’t even have to wait for the ballistics report to come back to clear the case.

  Gallagher gave it all up as soon as he saw the gun.

  Signed a full confession right then and there.

  The details went like this: He had tried to hit on the Kennedy woman at the bar. Especially when she got a call from her date saying he couldn’t make it. When she left the bar, he followed her into Union Square Park as she headed for the subway station. She confronted him, told him to get away, and then—when he didn’t—began to scream. He took out the gun, which he claimed he just wanted to use to scare her enough to shut up, but she screamed even more.

  He said the first shot hit her in the back as she turned away to run. He claimed it was an accident. The gun just went off in his hand. Then, when he realized what had happened, he was afraid if she lived and identified him he’d go to jail. So he stood over her and fired another shot into her as a coup de grâce to make sure she could never tell anyone about him. Then he went back to the bar and finished his shift.

  The owner of the bar had backed up his alibi for a couple of reasons. One, Gallagher was selling him drugs and he didn’t want to cut off that supply. Second, Gallagher knew about violations at the bar that could have gotten it shut down if he went to authorities. The owner insisted, however, that he never lied with any idea that Gallagher might have actually committed the crime. He said he just went along with Gallagher’s story because he didn’t want to see him get in any trouble, which was probably true. In the end, the owner was arrested too and charged with lying to law enforcement officers. The Union Square bar was padlocked and shut down.

  So this was no longer an unsolved Kennedy Killer case.

  Shawn Kennedy’s murderer had been caught, and the case was closed.

  That just left Harold Daniels and Marjorie Balzano.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Carrie said to me as she read the account.

  “I know.”

  “If Gallagher killed the girl because she spurned him that night, why was the Kennedy half-dollar
there with her? Could it really just have been a coincidence she had the coin? Like the cops thought at first. What about the half-dollars found with Harold Daniels and Marjorie Balzano? If the first one was an accident, how did they get there?”

  “I don’t understand any of it, Carrie.”

  We were both stunned by these developments. The arrest of Gallagher had been announced by the police so everyone in the media found out at the same time. That didn’t make us happy either. It was the first time we hadn’t broken the news with an exclusive on this story. I didn’t like not being first. Neither did Carrie.

  It didn’t help any either that I was still trying to figure out what was going on between Carrie and me outside the office. That’s what happens when you sleep with someone you work with. Things get confused.

  Carrie and I hadn’t spoken about the night at her apartment. Just like the incident with the cab the other time, she was all business the next day in the newsroom and acted as if nothing had happened between us.

  Except it did happen. Again. Two nights later. As we were leaving the office, she invited me back to her apartment. I went, of course. We made love in the big bed with the view of the East River again. I stayed the night again. I figured this time maybe we could at least talk about it in the morning. But I was wrong. When I woke up, the other side of the bed was empty again. The apartment too. She’d left me a note saying she had to get to work early to make some calls and do some research. By the time I got to work, she was already writing a story for the next day. She showed it to me, I made some suggestions, she put the revisions into the story, and then went back to her desk. There was no mention of our roll in the sack the night before.

  And so that’s where we stood right now, me and Carrie.

  I was confused about the status of our relationship.

  I was confused about what was happening with the Kennedy story.