by R. G. Belsky
I was confused about pretty much everything.
“Okay, so Gallagher killed the Kennedy woman,” Carrie was saying. “The Kennedy half-dollar just happens to be there. Or Gallagher puts it there for some reason. But then how do Kennedy half-dollars show up at the other two crime scenes? And where does Eric Mathis fit into all this? I gotta tell you, Gil, this Kennedy half-dollar thing doesn’t make sense now.”
“Nothing makes sense,” I said.
Chapter 35
NOT LONG AFTER Gallagher confessed to the Shawn Kennedy murder, someone used Marjorie Balzano’s ATM card. Her ATM card—along with her wallet, ID, credit cards, and money—had been missing when cops arrived at the scene after getting the 911 call from the neighbor.
The ATM hit happened at a bodega in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn. Someone had withdrawn $800, the maximum allowed to be taken out at any one time. There was a security camera in the bodega, which showed the person who used the ATM. The owner of the bodega identified him from the video as Anthony Davis, a high school dropout who came into the bodega from time to time.
Police arrested Davis later that day at his mother’s house a few blocks away. He said he didn’t know anything about the Marjorie Balzano murder. He said he hadn’t even been in Manhattan in months. When he was confronted with the threat of a murder charge, he copped to using Balzano’s card at the ATM but said he bought it from a guy in the neighborhood named Tyrone Greene.
Greene made a bit more sense as Marjorie Balzano’s killer than Anthony Davis did. He ran with a gang known for violent crimes and had a rap sheet of drug ripoffs, assaults, muggings, and possession of a weapon. The cops found him at his girlfriend’s house. They were both in bed, high on drugs at two in the afternoon. A search of the place turned up the rest of the stolen contents of Marjorie Balzano’s purse, including credit cards and cash. The cops took them both in for questioning about the murders.
At first, Greene insisted he’d found the contents of the purse. He was going through a garbage can and just stumbled across it, so he simply took advantage of the situation. He admitted selling the ATM card to Davis but said that was all he did.
The girlfriend, however, was more helpful. She was a junkie who had the habit bad—and was willing to do about anything to get her next fix. She said that Greene had not killed Marjorie Balzano. She said someone else had done the killing. His name was Franklin Jackson. Jackson had told them he mugged the old lady, took her ATM and credit cards and wanted to sell them. He and Greene argued about the price, and Greene wound up killing Jackson. The girlfriend even led them to a vacant lot where Franklin Jackson’s body was found. Greene then confessed to everything, claiming Jackson had attacked him and he killed Jackson in self-defense. For the record, none of them—Greene, his girlfriend, or Davis—knew anything about a Kennedy half-dollar.
It was a tragic crime story, the kind I’d seen so many times in New York. They always bothered me. But this one bothered me even more than usual. Because—as with Shawn Kennedy’s murder—I didn’t understand what was happening or why it was happening.
Marjorie Balzano had been killed during a mugging. The mugger took the contents of her purse, then tried to sell them. He got killed. And the person who killed him got caught along with the person who tried to access the dead woman’s bank account. But what did any of this have to do with the “Kennedy killings”? Where did the Kennedy half-dollar come from that connected the dead Balzano woman to the other cases? And, most important, where was Eric Mathis and how did he figure into all of this?
By the time I got to the Daily News, the city room was in an uproar.
“Marilyn wants to know what’s going on with our story,” Carrie said to me. “I don’t know what to tell her. I’ve been up all night thinking about this. I can’t sleep. I can’t eat. This is not good.”
I could hear the tension in her voice, see it on her face. I realized this had probably never happened to her before. Every story she’d ever done, every assignment she’d worked on, was a big success. She never had to deal with a story blowing up in her face like this. I was like that for a long time too.
I remember when the first questions began to be asked, the first doubts about the Houston story. This was suddenly starting to feel the same way. A big story falling apart. It hadn’t reached Houston proportions yet, but I kept thinking about Houston. How could a story that had been going so good go bad so quickly? I desperately wanted to do something to put it back on course—to fix whatever was wrong—but I didn’t know how. I didn’t even understand what was going wrong. So there was no way to fix it.
For just a brief period, I started to feel short of breath again. Oh, God, not another panic attack, I thought to myself. Not here in the newsroom in front of everyone. Not in front of Carrie. I excused myself and raced into the bathroom. I locked myself in a stall, took deep breaths, and tried to calm myself down. After a little while, I felt better. I came out of the stall, splashed water on my face, and tried to pull myself together before walking back out to my desk. Carrie looked quizzically at me when I came back, like she wondered what I’d been doing for the past twenty minutes. But she didn’t say anything.
The meeting in Marilyn’s office later didn’t go well. It was only a few days earlier that she was telling me how great I was and how proud she was of my rehabilitation as an ace reporter. It was a beautiful moment. But that was in the past. Staley was all business this time. Asking questions, demanding answers we couldn’t give her. Staley looked tense too.
We agreed to do a story for the next day’s paper summing up all the new developments and doing our best to put them in some sort of perspective to the overall “Kennedy killings” story. She wanted us to quote the police extensively. The police were as confused as we were. So if we put the confusion on them, it took some of the heat directly off of us and our front-page exclusives about the case that now seemed a long time ago.
“Where is Eric Mathis in all this?” Staley asked.
“The police are still looking for him.”
“No leads whatsoever?”
“Nope. He’s just gone.”
“Well, someone better find him soon.”
“What happens then?” Carrie asked.
“We get some answers from him,” I said.
“Hopefully, they’re the answers we want to hear.”
“So where the hell is Eric Mathis?” Staley asked.
Chapter 36
THEY FOUND Eric Mathis two days later.
New York City police had a massive manhunt on for him. The search concentrated on Manhattan but also fanned out into the adjoining boroughs and suburbs of the tristate area. They had a watch on airports, train stations, bus depots, hotels, subways, rental car places, and everywhere else for him. Posters of him were plastered throughout the city.
“New York is a big city, but he can’t hide from us forever,” Police Commissioner Piersall had proclaimed at one of his press conferences. “If he’s still here, we’ll find him. Wherever he is, we’ll find him.”
But when someone did finally find him, it wasn’t in New York City at all.
Not even close.
It was one thousand miles away.
A fishing boat found a body floating in the Mississippi River outside New Orleans while trolling for its morning catch. The body got scooped up along with the fish in the net, and when they emptied the contents of the net on the deck of the boat they discovered the body of a young man. When the local authorities arrived, they reported that the body looked as if it had been in the water for a while. They said there was no sign of physical trauma or injury beyond what might have been expected from being in the water for some time.
The police did a search of the area, and at a spot overlooking the water, not terribly far from where the body had been found, discovered a man’s wallet with a room key that had been left there. The
wallet identified him as Eric Mathis. The key was for a motel room on the outskirts of New Orleans. When police questioned the motel owner, he said that a man who fit Mathis’s description had stayed there several weeks earlier but then disappeared without paying his bill. He left his belongings behind. Because he wasn’t sure if the man might come back to claim them—and hopefully pay his bill—the motel owner had packed up the belongings in a closet.
Police went through the stuff and found the rest of the materials Mathis had taken from the Kennedy museum. Pictures of Lee Harvey Oswald. Videos of the assassinations. Eyewitness accounts. Stuff that he had apparently taken with him to New Orleans, just like the stuff I’d found at his home in Dallas. The material looked as if it had been neatly organized at one point—in different-colored file folders with labels—but it was now a disorganized mess. Maybe that had happened when the motel owner packed them in the closet. Or maybe, at some point, Mathis simply stopped caring about keeping it all organized.
The police found something else too.
A suicide note.
Eric Mathis explained in the note why he had made the decision to kill himself.
You go through your entire life thinking you’re one person. That you know yourself. You know your father and mother. You know where you came from. And then one day, out of the blue, you find out that’s all wrong. You know nothing about who you are and, more important, about the genes you carry inside you and what you might someday be capable of.
I know now that my father is the son of Lee Harvey Oswald, which makes me the grandson of Lee Harvey Oswald. And I can no longer live with that fact. Because whatever Oswald did or didn’t do that day in Dallas, the people of America will never forgive him. I can never forgive him either.
And I can never forgive my father for opening up this Pandora’s box of trouble for me. Why couldn’t he have just left well enough alone? I tried to deal with it. Tried for a long time. I thought by learning as much as I could about my grandfather and what happened in Dallas, I could somehow better handle the reality of who I was and where I came from.
But then my father wrote the book. And once I read it, I knew there was no hope for me, no future and no reason to live. The entire world would know me only as Lee Harvey Oswald’s grandson. I don’t want to be that man. I can’t bear the shame that it will bring. This is the only way out for me.
He talked about plans to jump off of a bridge near where his body was found, pointing out he would die the same way as his grandmother Emily Springer had. He seemed to take some solace in that, saying he hoped it would provide him with “final closure” from the nightmare he had found himself caught up in. The note was signed simply, “Goodbye, Eric Mathis.”
The writing was authenticated to be Mathis’s after comparisons with other documents he had signed at the Texas School Book Depository. The body in the water was also officially identified as him. The ME’s office determined that Mathis died of drowning—his lungs were filled with water while he was still alive—and that there was no other apparent cause of death. Which meant he had, as he said in the suicide note, simply jumped off the bridge in a deliberate effort to die.
Even more important, though, the ME delivered an approximate time of death: about three weeks before his body was found.
Which was right after he had disappeared from the motel.
And before any of the New York City murders.
The story had broken overnight and the night rewrite crew handled it.
They put the story of Mathis’s death on the front page, but it was a pretty straightforward, factual story. It had all the basic information in it. But it didn’t deal with the implications, especially the part about how long ago he had died.
I’d been up for hours, ever since one of the night editors called me with the news. I tried to help out with the story as best I could, feeding some background material to the rewrite man handling it in the office. No way I could go back to sleep after that. I went online to read some of the other reports, watched the cable news on TV too. Eventually, I just got dressed and went into the office at the crack of dawn, when hardly anyone else was there.
I sat there in the empty newsroom for a long time, reading the article in the News and thinking about everything that had happened. After an hour or two, people began streaming into work. No Carrie, though. That was unusual. She was usually one of the first reporters in the office. I tried her cell phone a bunch of times, but it kept going right to voice mail.
“Hey, kid, we’ve got a problem,” I said as I left her a message. “Call me right away.”
But she never did.
She could have still been asleep, of course. Or shut her phone off for some reason. Or been too busy trying to work on the new developments herself to get back to me right away. But I realized now that she had seemed to be distancing herself from me ever since the questions about the story had started with the bartender’s confession of killing Shawn Kennedy. Sure, we’d slept together a few times after that first night at her place. We still never talked about it, just pretended the next day that none of it had happened as she went back to being Carrie Bratten, star girl reporter. But once cracks in the Kennedy story began to clearly emerge, there had been no more bedroom invitations. Even on the work front, she was going more her own way. I had a flashback to the way so many people distanced themselves from me after the Houston debacle. I kept trying to convince myself that it couldn’t be happening all over again. But it was pretty hard to ignore the signs that my life was falling apart.
I’d had another panic attack in my apartment as I was getting ready to come to work. A bad one. So bad I thought I might have to dial 911 for help. But, like most of the previous attacks, it passed and I was able to make it into the Daily News office without any more incidents. I just hoped that nothing happened in the office again. I couldn’t handle that. Whenever the panic attacks happened, in the middle of them, I always had the fear that I was going to die. If I did die from a panic attack, I wanted to be alone in my apartment or somewhere else far away from the Daily News so that no one could ever see me like that. I didn’t want to die in the newsroom. That somehow seemed a very important thing for me at that point.
I went over it all again in my head, just as I’d been doing ever since I got that phone call in the middle of the night telling me the news of Eric Mathis’s death. No matter how many times I did it, no matter how many different scenarios I tried to imagine, the answers were always the same.
Kevin Gallagher had confessed to Shawn Kennedy’s murder when she rejected his advances. Why would he confess if he didn’t do it? Besides, the gun that killed her was found hidden in his apartment. So this was clearly now a crime of passion and anger and panic that had nothing to do with the other two killings.
Similarly, Franklin Jackson had robbed Marjorie Balzano, then died when he attempted to sell her ATM and credit cards to Tyrone Greene—which meant that killing too could no longer be listed as part of the “Kennedy killings” equation.
The Harold Daniels killing was still unsolved. But now, with everything that had happened in the other two cases, that was looking more and more like what was initially believed. A senseless murder of a bum on the Bowery, probably committed by someone else living on the Bowery.
And in any case, Eric Mathis—whom I had pinpointed as the most likely suspect to have killed all three of them as part of some Kennedy assassination anniversary vendetta—couldn’t have committed any of the murders.
Because he was already dead at the time they happened.
Which left the question of the Kennedy half-dollars. That completely baffled me. If the crimes weren’t connected, if none of them had anything to do with Eric Mathis’s Kennedy obsession—or anyone else’s Kennedy obsession—then why were the coins at all the crime scenes?
And how did they get there?
Who the hell could have put them there bes
ides the killer?
I tried Carrie again on her cell phone. Still no answer. I didn’t leave a message this time. I wondered where she was and why she wasn’t checking her phone. She must have known by now about Mathis’s death. Marilyn Staley wasn’t in yet either. I wasn’t looking forward to talking to Staley that morning, but I knew I needed to have that conversation and wanted to get it over with as soon as possible.
At about nine o’clock they both walked in.
Staley and Carrie.
Together.
That’s when I realized what had happened. Carrie wasn’t answering my calls because she wanted to talk to Staley herself. She was cutting her losses. She wanted to distance herself from the damage that was being done here. Maybe she met Staley for breakfast somewhere. Or maybe she just waited outside the building to grab her before she came into the office. But they had already discussed what had happened overnight; I knew that now. And I was on the outside looking in.
Neither of them looked at me.
They just walked into Staley’s office and shut the door behind them.
After a while, Staley came out, looked over at me, and shouted across the newsroom, “Malloy, in here now.”
There was no warmth in her voice like there had been a few days earlier.
This was not going to be a friendly chat like that.
Someone had to take the fall for what was going on.
And I knew at that moment who it was going to be.
Like Lee Harvey Oswald had said a half century ago, “I’m just the patsy.”
Chapter 37
THE HOUSTON NIGHTMARE had begun slowly, with a few questions at the beginning about the story and then a few more until the entire thing imploded in my face. No one comes right out and asks you if you made a story up the first day. Or demands answers about your fact checking. Or questions you about your thoroughness or—most important—your integrity as a reporter. No, that all comes later when a story goes bad.
