Loverboy

by R. G. Belsky

  I walked out and went back to the city room. Barlow came over. He was working on one of the cream-filled doughnuts now.

  “How’d it go?” he asked.

  “Not as badly as I expected,” I said.

  Chapter 3

  Emily Tischler lived in an elegant new high-rise on the Upper East Side, near Gracie Mansion.

  There was a huge circular driveway in front, with some red and white hyacinths planted in the center, where two limousines and a taxi sat parked under the blazing sun. The lobby had a running-water fountain, marble floors, a crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling and sliding glass doors with the words “Summit House” written on them in big red letters.

  A doorman stood stiffly at attention next to the water fountain. He was wearing a black uniform with white-piping trim and white braids hanging from the shoulder, a white cap with a black peak, highly polished black shoes and white gloves. I wasn’t sure whether to say hello or salute.

  I told him who I was and rode the penthouse elevator up to the top floor, where Emily Tischler answered the door.

  She was petite, fair-haired and pretty, in a plain, nonthreatening sort of way. I figured her to be no more than twenty-three, with a clean, fresh look to her. No jewelry except for a simple pair of earrings. Almost no makeup. She was wearing a sleeveless white linen blouse, neatly pressed caramel slacks and brown-leather penny loafers.

  “Thank you for coming, Miss Shannon,” she said. “Come in, please.”

  The apartment was all glass and chrome and metal. Modern and clean, but stark and devoid of any character. There was a yellow velvet couch in the center of the living room, along with two pieces of metal that I think were what modern furniture passes off as chairs. I opted for the couch.

  “Do you want something to drink?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I said. “It’s pretty hot outside.”

  She disappeared for a few minutes and came back carrying a bottle of beer and a tall glass on a silver tray.

  “Is this okay?” she asked.

  The bottle was icy cold, with beads of melting water dripping down the sides. She lifted it and the glass off the silver tray and held them out in front of me.

  I summoned up all my willpower. “Uh—I’ll just take some diet soda, if you have it.”

  She came back a minute later with a Diet Pepsi and handed it to me. Then she sat down in one of the metal monstrosities.

  “My husband left home two nights ago, and he hasn’t been back since,” she said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  I took a sip of my soda.

  “I’m heartsick with worry.”

  “Do you have any idea where he went?”

  “Barry and I don’t keep track of each other. Each of us is free to come and go as we please. This is an open marriage.”

  “Right.”

  I thought she had said that with a little too much intensity. I was going to say something about it, but I decided not to. I drank some more soda.

  “Did he tell you anything at all the night he left?”

  “Well, he said he was going to a bar near here. He does that sometimes. But when I called the bar about two a.m., they said he’d already left.”

  “Has he ever done anything like this before?” I asked.

  “You mean disappeared?”

  “Well . . . not come home at night.”

  She bit down on her lower lip. “There have been a few times. I mean, we do have an open marriage.”

  “Right.”

  “But never for as long as this. And without leaving me any message.”

  “Your husband works for Tischler’s Department Store?”

  “He’s a vice president of the company.”

  “And the store’s owned by his father.”

  “Yes.”

  “I assume you’ve tried his office.”

  “They said they haven’t seen him either. But that’s not too unusual. You see, Barry’s work schedule is very loose and . . .”

  “Open?”

  “That’s right.”

  I looked down at my glass. It was empty. I could ask Emily Tischler for another soda. But I was afraid if she managed to get up from that chair she was sitting in, she might not get back down again. Besides, I didn’t want to spend any more time in this apartment than I had to.

  “Look, Mrs. Tischler,” I said slowly, “what exactly is it you want me to do?”

  “Why, find my husband, of course.”

  “What if he doesn’t want to be found?”

  “Meaning you think he could have run off somewhere?”

  “There is that possibility. Have you gone to the police?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “They sort of said the same thing you just did.”

  “Suggested it was a domestic problem?”

  She nodded. “I need to do something. So I thought of the newspapers. I figured if I got a story written about it, maybe it could spur some action.”

  Maybe it would. But what if it turned out that Barry Tischler was just shacked up with some babe? How would he feel about all that embarrassing publicity? More important, how would his father—who did a million dollars’ worth of business a year with the Blade—feel about it?

  Well, that really wasn’t my problem. Vicki Crawford had told me to come here and be nice to the woman, so I’d be nice. I took out my notebook.

  “Tell me a little about your husband,” I said.

  She talked for maybe twenty minutes, going over background about Barry Tischler. When she was finished, I asked if I could see some of his personal things—clothes and stuff.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’ll help me get a better idea of him. You know, atmosphere and all that.”

  She shrugged and led me down a long corridor to a bedroom with a window overlooking a park.

  I spent a little time rummaging around in there. Emily got bored after a while and excused herself. After she was gone, I looked at a picture of Barry Tischler that was on top of a dresser. He was standing next to a sailboat, wearing a crew captain’s T-shirt, white pants and little, round horn-rimmed glasses. Good-looking in a conservative, old-money sort of way.

  The dresser itself was filled with the kind of stuff you’d expect to find. Expensive sweaters. Lots of khakis. Even a nice collection of Calvin Klein underwear. Then, underneath a pile of shirts in the bottom of a drawer, I hit paydirt. A small brown leather phone book was carefully hidden away in a corner.

  I picked it up, paged through it quickly and found a lot of names and numbers. They were names like Kathy and Debbie and Ruth—all of them women. I checked the corner of the drawer one more time and came up with something else—a package of Trojan condoms.

  Of course, he might keep the condoms to have sex with his wife, but somehow I doubted it. Kathy and Debbie and Ruth seemed a better possibility. All in all, it didn’t look like ol’ Barry was going to win a lot of points for marital fidelity.

  I put the phone book and the condoms back where I’d found them, shut the drawer and looked around the room once more.

  As far as I could tell, Barry Tischler wasn’t hiding under the bed. He hadn’t left behind a trail of bird-seed or crumbs to mark his path. There were no messages written in invisible ink on the wall. I walked back to the living room, where Mrs. Tischler was waiting for me.

  “Did you find anything that might help?”

  I thought about the phone book and the condoms.

  “Maybe.”

  “Oh, Miss Shannon,” she said, stifling a sob, “I’m so worried. I just hope Barry’s all right.”

  “I’m sure everything’s going to work out fine,” I said.

  But I didn’t really.

  Her marriage was in trouble.

  And that trouble, before it was over, would touch a lot more people than just Emily and Barry Tischler.

  Chapter 4

  Leo Tischler, the head of Tischler’s Department Store, was in h
is late fifties. He had silver hair, steel-blue eyes and a no-nonsense manner that made it clear he didn’t like to waste time.

  He also seemed to have come to the conclusion that maybe going public with this wasn’t such a hot idea.

  “I should have never let Emily talk to you,” he said as I sat in his office overlooking Fifty-Ninth Street. “It was a mistake.”

  “Your son has been gone for a couple of days. She’s worried. Aren’t you?”

  “Hey, husbands leave sometimes. He’s probably just out sowing a little wild oats.”

  “You mean another woman?”

  “Look, Barry likes girls. He always has. Nothing wrong with that. I like ’em too.”

  He smiled across the desk at me.

  “I don’t know why he got married anyway. Why did he need it? I told him that. Of course, most of the time no one’s the wiser, no one’s hurt.”

  “Most of the time?”

  He hesitated. “Are we off the record here?”

  I shrugged. “Whatever.”

  “A few months ago”—Tischler sighed—“Barry disappeared like this. When we found him . . . well, he was holed up in a motel in New Jersey with some girl he’d picked up. I made up a cover story about a sudden business trip to tell Emily. Only . . .”

  “Only what?”

  “The girl in the motel turned out to be just seventeen. And then she got pregnant. He paid for her abortion, but something went wrong and . . . well, the girl died. It was a really messy business.”

  “A messy business,” I said.

  Jesus, Leo Tischler was really something. No wonder Barry had turned out the way he did.

  “Anyway, Barry gave me his word he wouldn’t do anything like that again.”

  “But now you think he could be doing a repeat performance.”

  Tischler nodded.

  “What was the name of the motel?” I asked.

  “The Route 4 Motor Lodge. It’s just across the George Washington Bridge.”

  I wrote that down.

  “You think he might have gone back there?” Tischler asked.

  “People sometimes follow the same patterns. I’ll check it out.”

  He rubbed his hands together nervously.

  “Look, I really don’t want to see anything about this in the newspaper, after all. I’ve decided against it.”

  I wanted to tell him that wasn’t up to him. But I was supposed to be nice.

  “It’s not my decision to make,” I said.

  “Who decides?”

  “Vicki Crawford.”

  “Oh, yeah, that broad who’s the editor now. Okay, I’ll call Vicki and set her straight on how I want all this handled.”

  “That’s a good idea.” I smiled.

  Nice.

  I stood up to leave. He walked me to the door.

  “Now, if you find out anything about Barry, you call me,” he said. He wrote something down on a slip of paper and handed it to me. “That’s my private number. Call me any time. Any time at all, even after this is over.”

  He winked.

  Like father, like son.

  “One more thing,” he said. “That little incident about Barry and the abortion—that’s our little secret, okay? I’m a respected businessman in this town. It might reflect badly on the Tischler family name.”

  “I suppose it might,” I said.

  You never know about a story.

  Barry Tischler could have been at the Route 4 Motor Lodge. Screwing his brains out. Just lost track of the time and forgot about the wife and the job and all that stuff. Sorry.

  But he wasn’t there.

  The motel manager said he had no one registered by that name. Of course, not everyone registers with his right name at a motel. I showed the manager a picture of Tischler I’d gotten from his wife. He recognized him. But he said he hadn’t seen him for a few months.

  My next stop was the Manhattan bar where Barry had last been seen.

  It was called Partners, and it turned out to be your basic East Side singles place. A big long wooden bar. Lots of little tables with checkered tablecloths. A sign in the window which said: happy hour, every day 4–6.

  The guy behind the bar was named Gary Savoy. He didn’t seem very impressed when I showed him my press card.

  “A reporter,” he sniffed. “Another damn reporter. There’s too many reporters around here.”

  I took out the picture of Barry Tischler and showed it to him.

  “Recognize him?”

  He studied the picture.

  “What’d he do?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s why you’re doing a story on him—because he did nothing?”

  “His wife’s looking for him. Do you know him or not?”

  Savoy handed the picture back.

  “Yeah, I’ve seen him around here.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Making conversation with people.”

  “Women?”

  “Hey, he likes to meet women. Women come here to meet guys. It works out nice.”

  “When’s the last time you saw him?”

  He thought for a second.

  “A couple of nights ago. I remember his wife or somebody called here asking about him, but he’d left by then.”

  That would have been the phone call Emily Tischler said she made at 2 a.m.

  “Did you happen to see who he left with?”

  “C’mon, there’s maybe two hundred people in here at night. I’m not a chaperon.”

  The place was already starting to fill up with the afternoon crowd. Girls in pleated skirts and silk blouses. Guys in summer sport jackets and jeans. Everybody looked hip and successful. I felt out of place.

  “People really come to places like this looking for love, huh?” I asked Savoy.

  “You got something against love?”

  “It’s highly overrated.”

  “Maybe you’ve just been with the wrong man.”

  “I’ve been with several of them,” I said.

  I gave him a card with my name and the Blade’s telephone number. I told him to call me if he saw Barry Tischler again. He ripped the card into several little pieces and dropped them into an ashtray on the bar. Then he lit the pieces with a match and smiled as they burned.

  The power of the press.

  “We’re not getting along too well, are we?” I said.

  “Reporters, fucking reporters,” he muttered. “Always busting my balls. Been busting my balls all week.”

  Chapter 5

  “Warren Beatty,” Janet said. “In bed. After sex. And with a woman who’s not his wife.”

  “How about Cher?” I countered. “From an infected needle while getting a tattoo.”

  Janet thought about that for a second.

  “Okay, I’ve got a better one. Oprah Winfrey. She chokes on a ham sandwich. Just like Mama Cass did!”

  “That’s good,” I said. “That’s real good.”

  We were in the Blade city room the next morning. I guess we were getting kind of loud, even for a newspaper office. Barlow came over to us. He had a candy bar in his hand.

  “Are you two playing the Someone Famous Died game again?”

  “Absolutely,” I told him.

  He shook his head.

  “You’re crazy.”

  “What’s crazy about playing a game where you fantasize about celebrities dying and which one would make the biggest front-page story?”

  “It’s sick, Lucy.”

  I nodded. “So what’s your point?”

  He sat down on the edge of my desk and took a bite out of the candy.

  “The Breakfast of Champions, huh?” I said.

  “What’s your problem, Lucy?”

  “I thought you were going on a diet,” I said.

  “I’m thinking about it.”

  “Does the term ‘compulsive eater’ mean anything to you?”

  “Hey, you’re a great one to lecture me about being compulsive.

 
; “Okay, I’m compulsive—but I’m a recovering compulsive.”

  Barlow finished off the candy bar. “Any luck on Barry Tischler?” he asked.

  I told him everything I’d done.

  “I also made a few other checks,” I said. “Barry Tischler has not been admitted to any local hospitals. He hasn’t been arrested. He’s not lying dead in the morgue. Pretty thorough, huh? Of course, I still don’t have any idea where Tischler is. But then again, I’m not sure I really care.”

  “You don’t.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Just drop it. There’s no story.”

  I stared at him.

  “His father called, right?” I said.

  “As a matter of fact, he did.”

  “And Vicki wimped out.”

  “C’mon, you yourself said it sounded domestic—the guy just took a powder.”

  “I know.”

  “So?”

  “So now I’m not so sure.”

  “You just want to be mad at Vicki.”

  “Well, there is that too.”

  After he left, I sat there wondering what had really happened to Barry Tischler. Maybe I should call his wife again. Maybe I should check some more hotels around town. The telephone rang. I picked it up.

  “Is this Lucy Shannon?” a man’s voice said.

  “You got her.”

  “Miss Shannon, we’re shooting a movie here in town. It’s about the Loverboy murders. The serial killer who terrorized the city a number of years ago.”

  I squeezed the receiver tightly and took a deep breath. “Yeah, I know who he is,” I said.

  “Michael Anson would like to meet you.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “The director of the movie.”

  “Why?”

  “We’d like you to be in it. You played such a big role in the real Loverboy case that we’d like you to play yourself in the film—a reporter covering the story. Of course, it would only be a cameo role, but the publicity could be beneficial for both of us.”

  I sighed.

  “Tell Mr. Anson—”

  “Ms. Anson,” the guy said.

  “Huh?”

  “It’s Ms. Anson. Michael Anson is a woman.”

  “Ah,” I said, “cool name. Like Michael Learned of The Waltons.”