by R. G. Belsky
If I was trying to scare him, it didn’t work.
“Oh, the place is surrounded, huh?” Lawton laughed. “You’ve been watching too many crime shows. It doesn’t work that way in real life. And, like I told you, I didn’t shoot Reyes. Jesus, that kid turned out to be a pain in the ass, though, huh? Took him fifteen years to die and he causes me all this trouble. All over some lousy spic kid in the Bronx. But it all ends here. Now.”
“It won’t work, Lawton.”
“Why not?”
“Because this time I am wearing a wire.”
For the first time, I saw a look of fear on Lawton’s face.
“You’re bluffing.”
I pulled up my shirt and showed him the wire that Susan had outfitted me with after I left her office that day.
I’ve thought a lot since then about everything that happened. About how things could have worked out differently if Lawton hadn’t done what he did in those next few seconds.
Of course, Lawton probably figured he didn’t have lot of options left at that point. But maybe he did. He’d pretty much confessed to everything on the tape. Except he’d never come right out and flat-out said or admitted that he did any of it. And he specifically said he didn’t shoot Reyes, which I thought was weird.
A good defense lawyer might have been able to raise doubts with a jury about what Lawton had actually done or not done, and likely would have gotten some of the evidence thrown out as inadmissible in court. There’d be charges for falsifying evidence with the Kennedy half-dollars, the drug theft in the Bronx, and a lot of other stuff that would in all likelihood send him to jail. But the main charges—the killings of Reyes and Santiago—might never stand.
I could have even envisioned some sort of second act for Brad Lawton after prison. With him making a big deal, like he did to me in my apartment, about how he did all those things with Reyes and the drugs and the rest of it to save the city. How the legal system was broken and didn’t work anymore, so he created his own system to keep the streets safe. How he would have been the best, the most effective police commissioner the city ever had if he’d gotten the chance. Hell, people go for all that “second act” crap these days. I could have even seen Brad Lawton on the The View or Dr. Phil charming people all over again.
But none of that happened, of course.
Instead, the police, who had been waiting outside listening to it all from the wire device they’d planted on me, suddenly smashed through the door of my apartment with guns drawn. Lawton stood frozen for a second, gun in hand. That was all the time he had to make a decision. A second or two. Like I said, if he’d just dropped the gun and surrendered to them at that point . . .
But I guess he knew that he could never do that.
Because he was Brad Lawton.
And Brad Lawton never lost.
Brad Lawton always got what he wanted.
And so Lawton decided to fight. In his mind at that instant, he probably thought he had no other choice. So he backed up to the window and fired on the onrushing cops. I don’t think they would have shot him if he hadn’t done that. It’s hard for a cop to make the decision to use his weapon to shoot at a deputy commissioner, and I’m sure they were briefed to do everything possible to bring Lawton in intact. But when cops are fired on, they fire back. Which is what happened here, even though I don’t think they were shooting to kill. One of the bullets ripped into his shoulder. It shouldn’t have been fatal, except the force of the blast knocked him backward toward—and then out—the open window behind him. For a second or two, which seemed like an eternity, he hung there precariously, clinging to a final sliver of hope between life and death. But then he plunged downward and was gone. He landed on top of a taxicab first, then hit the street. That picture of Brad Lawton lying sprawled dead on the street became a classic Daily News page one the next day.
Lawton had told me he’d make it onto the front page of the Daily News.
And he did.
Just not the way he wanted to be.
Chapter 51
I STILL CAN’T BELIEVE Brad Lawton could have done all of those things,” Susan said.
“People aren’t always what they seem,” I said.
We were sitting on a bench in Madison Square Park off of Fifth Avenue at 23rd Street. There’s a Shake Shack at the south end of the park. It’s supposed to have the best hamburgers in town. The funny thing is that Susan and I had lived a few blocks away from there during our marriage and never once got to the Shake Shack. The problem was it was too popular and the lines were endless, especially in nice weather. But this time we decided to give it a shot.
After we finally made it through the line, she went for a regular hamburger with a Diet Coke and I had a cheeseburger with everything along with a chocolate shake. I always figured that when you went to a place where something on the menu is in the name of the place, you should give that item a shot. So there we were eating our burgers and drinking our drinks. My cheeseburger was good. Maybe not the best cheeseburger I’ve ever had, but pretty damn close. I wished I’d brought Susan here earlier. I wished I’d done a lot of things with Susan earlier.
“So what are you going to do next?” Susan asked.
I had accomplished quite a lot with all my work in the past several weeks, when you looked back on it.
I’d exposed Brad Lawton—the deputy police commissioner who would have otherwise moved on to the NYPD top spot—as a murderer, a drug dealer, and a thief who ruined countless lives before he lost his own.
I’d saved at least a couple of lives—Nikki Reynolds and Carrie Bratten. The cops had gotten to Nikki’s apartment in time to rush her to the hospital to save her from the pill overdose. Carrie wrote a first-person story for the Daily News about her brush with death at the hands of Lawton in which she mentioned my name somewhere around the twelfth paragraph. Which was her way of saying thank you to me for saving her life. I guess.
George Sledzec was freed on bail while prosecutors investigated his case, and then fairly quickly afterward the charges were dropped. After he was released from prison, he checked into an alcohol rehabilitation program where, from what I heard, he was making good progress. Of course, he still had a long way to go. He could drop out of the program, fall off the wagon, and plow his car into a school bus one day. But all you can do is the right thing and then hope it turns out okay in the end.
Meanwhile, several investigative agencies were looking into the JFK assassination all over again in the light of Lee Mathis’s (aka Lee Harvey Oswald Jr.) book claiming he was Oswald’s son and laying out a seemingly authentic alibi for Oswald on the day of the murder. No one could be sure anything new would ever come of it all, of course, but it was getting a lot of publicity and attention. One of the networks even ran a special: Dallas Revisited—Was Lee Harvey Oswald Innocent? Mathis was quoted extensively in the program. All the publicity made his book a hot commodity too. I talked to Mathis about it. He was happy people were finally listening to his story, even though he was still traumatized by all the tragedy it had brought. I just hoped he lived long enough to enjoy a bit of the fame and fortune and satisfaction from the book. He deserved at least that small happiness after everything he’d been through.
My involvement in the Lawton story had put me in demand too. With newspapers. TV stations. Magazines. Several TV stations reached out to me to offer jobs, and a whole bunch of newspapers were interested in hiring me as a reporter or columnist too. Even Marilyn Staley wanted to meet me for lunch to discuss my future. Now that she cared about my future again.
Funny thing about that. I always thought that once a reporter lost his integrity, once he screwed up like I did, there was no future in the business for him. But we live in a different time. Disgraced politicians get gigs on TV these days. Authors accused of making up facts in their books or plagiarizing get even bigger contracts for the next book. The world is a very for
giving place now. That’s what happened to me. I got famous. For the wrong reasons maybe, but I had become a hot property all over again because of what happened.
There was one thing I hadn’t accomplished, though. I hadn’t found out who killed Victor Reyes. Which is what had set out to do in the first place.
“We still have no evidence Lawton was the one who shot Reyes,” Susan said between bites of her hamburger.
“You checked his gun?”
“All his guns. The one at your apartment, plus the guns we found in his home, his office, and his damn trophy case. Yes, we found a lot of guns there. One of them was even a pearl-handled revolver like the kind General George Patton used to carry. I think Lawton thought of himself as some kind of heroic Patton-like figure. But no matches for the guns or bullet that shot Reyes fifteen years ago. Of course, he might have gotten rid of it afterward . . .”
“He never admitted the Reyes shooting to me either,” I said. “He talked about the rest of the stuff he did but insisted he didn’t shoot Reyes.”
She sighed.
“There’s something else,” I told her. “I’ve been thinking about this. Ortiz said Lawton picked him up and took him to the station house that night to get information. At the same time Reyes was being shot. That means Lawton had to be there too. I hadn’t thought that through before, but now it seems pretty clear. Ortiz couldn’t have shot Reyes because he was at the precinct with Lawton. So that means Lawton has an alibi too. Ortiz’s alibi is Lawton’s alibi.”
“I think maybe he really was just afraid that if anyone—like Santiago or you—started digging too deeply they’d discover all the drug stuff he was doing back then. He knew that would torpedo his career, and his career was everything to him. He’d do anything to protect that, even murder. That’s what this was all about.”
“So who shot Reyes?”
“Maybe Reyes was just a gang shooting after all,” Susan said. “He messed with the wrong people. He pissed someone off—either in his own gang or a rival gang—and so they popped him on the street.”
“Which means we’ll probably never know who did it.”
“If it’s a gang shooting, the gang member who did it is probably dead or in jail by now. And probably has even forgotten that he shot Reyes or why he did it. Fifteen years is a long time. I know you’ve tried really hard to find some answers, but I think it’s time to just let this one go.”
I nodded. She was right. Even I knew there was a time to give up on a story, and this seemed to be as good a time as any on Reyes.
Susan finished her hamburger. She wiped some relish off of her chin with a napkin, then finished her diet soda.
“What are you going to do now, Gil?” Susan asked me again.
“Well, I was thinking about maybe getting in line for another one of those cheeseburgers.” I smiled.
She looked at me sadly. I suddenly remembered how Dr. Landis said I always made a joke when I didn’t want to answer a question.
“You’re going to have to make some decisions,” she said. “Sometimes you have to realize that the way you’ve lived in the past won’t work anymore and you need to move on and go in a different direction with your life.”
“Just like you did, huh?” I said.
We both realized we weren’t talking just about my career anymore.
“Why don’t you take one of those big media jobs you’ve been offered?” Susan asked.
“I’m damaged goods as a journalist,” I said.
“They don’t seem to care about what you did or didn’t do in the past.”
“It’s not about them. It’s about me. Because I know what I did. I used to talk all the big talk about integrity and how it was the most important thing a newspaperman had, blah, blah, blah. I really believed it too. But then, when I had the chance to step up and prove what kind of integrity I had, I screwed up badly. Twice. That’s what I’ve got to live with. Myself. All those other people—the editors, the TV producers, the talk show hosts—they might have forgiven me for what I did. But I haven’t forgiven myself.”
“What will you do, then?”
“I was thinking about becoming a teacher,” I said. “Not journalism. English maybe. Or history. I was thinking that if I could figure out a way to handle the financial end of it, I could go back to school and get a teacher’s certificate. Then I’d try to get a job at a junior high or high school somewhere in the city.”
“And you’d be happy doing that instead of being a reporter? Do you think it could fulfill you in the same way?”
I thought about Gary Nowak in that school cafeteria in Florida. Nowak had wanted to be a police officer all his life. He dreamed about it, he believed in it, he worked hard and did everything right to reach his goal. And then, through no fault of his own, that opportunity was taken away from him. And now he had chosen to contribute his skills—to live his life—in a different way. “You do what you have to do,” Nowak had said to me.
“I’m not sure about that yet,” I told Susan.
“What happened to you on the Kennedy story . . . that really wasn’t your fault, you know,” she said. “This time it wasn’t your fault. It’s not like with the hooker.”
“You mean I didn’t make this one up intentionally?”
“The hooker was different,” she said again.
“Her name was Houston, by the way.”
“I know. I was with you when you went through all of that, remember? I lived the whole Houston nightmare along with you.”
“The thing about the Kennedy scoop,” I said slowly, “is that I believe there was a story there. I’m pretty sure that Lee Mathis really is the secret son of Lee Harvey Oswald Jr. And that he did uncover evidence that showed his father was in New Orleans the day of the assassination. That pretty much blows the lid off the Warren Commission Report and any other scenario for what happened that day in Dallas that puts Oswald anywhere near the Book Depository with a gun in his hand. This could have been the biggest story of my career. The biggest ever.”
“You really thought you could solve the Kennedy assassination after all these years?”
“I don’t know. It has been a long, long time. The trail is very, very cold. But I did have the starting piece: the elimination of Oswald as the prime suspect. All I had to do was start building the case from there, just like I build the pieces—the facts—of any other police case. Because that’s what the Kennedy assassination was in the end. A crime story. I’m not sure if I could have come up with all the answers. But I might have. And wouldn’t that have been something? It would have been the ultimate triumph for my career. I really believe that could have all happened if things had sorted out differently.”
“And now?”
“Even if I did find the answer to who killed Kennedy, no one would probably believe me. People would just call me another conspiracy nut. After everything that’s happened, my integrity is gone. I can never get that back. And there’s nothing I can do about it.”
I got up and dumped our trash in a container. When I came back to the bench, Susan was still sitting there. There was a subway station across the street. She could catch a train there that would take her downtown to Foley Square. To her job at the DA’s office and then back to her fiancé. But she didn’t seem to be in any hurry to get back there. Me, I had no job to go to these days. So I just waited. We sat in silence for a while.
“As long as I’ve known you, Gil,” she said finally, “all you’ve ever wanted to be was a newspaper reporter. Do you really think you can just walk away from it that easily? I’m not so sure. And I think you’re wrong about something else too. You’re not finished as a reporter. You proved that on the Kennedy story at the end with everything you uncovered. Personally, I would like to see you keep going after the true story about the assassination. If anybody could come up with some real answers about what happened in Dallas that
day, it would be you. I believe that. I guess I still believe in you.”
She stood up now from the bench. “I’ve got to get back to the office.”
She started walking toward the subway station. I walked with her.
“Thanks,” I said.
“For the advice?”
“For everything.”
She leaned over, softly kissed me on the cheek, and began walking down the steps toward the subway.
“You too,” I said. “And best of luck with the marriage to Dale. I really mean that.”
She turned around and looked at me with surprise.
“You got his name right.”
“Yep, I figured I owed you at least that much.”
She started heading back down the steps. Then, turning her head around again, she told me casually, “Oh, by the way, he’s not my fiancé anymore.”
“You’re not engaged?” I practically shouted out, as passersby turned to look at me.
“That’s right.” She shrugged. “I guess I buried the lead for you, huh?”
“What happened?”
“It’s complicated.”
“But the bottom line is you and Dale aren’t getting married?”
“Not at the moment, no.”
“So does that mean that you and I . . . well, that is, you and I could get together from time to time?”
“You never can tell,” she laughed and then disappeared down the steps into the subway station.
Chapter 52
THE TOUGHEST PART was telling Camille Reyes that I couldn’t find out who shot her son—and that we probably never would have the answer to that question.
I went back to that small apartment in the Bronx, the place where she had taken care of Victor for fifteen years, and explained it all to her. As I sat with her again in the living room, I kept looking over at the picture she kept on the table of Victor as a young, healthy man before the bullet shattered his spine and his life. I thought about how different that life might have been if he hadn’t walked outside this house and been shot on that hot summer night. Maybe he would have become a successful businessman like Pascal. Or a police officer like his boyhood friend Santiago. But that gunshot ended his hopes, ended his dreams for a normal, happy life.
