Loverboy

by R. G. Belsky

  “Which brings up another, much more disturbing possibility.”

  “What?” She laughed. “That I went out and killed some people all to get publicity for my movie?”

  “You didn’t have to do it yourself. You could have hired someone to do it.” I looked over at the woman wearing the animal-teeth necklace. “Like Micki with an i by the door.”

  “Even you don’t believe that, Shannon.”

  “Probably not.”

  “Actually, I could do the same thing with you. Your newspaper’s circulation soared during the first wave of killings. So did your career. Maybe you thought that would happen again. So you . . .”

  I held up my hand. “I get your point. Truce?”

  Anson glanced toward Micki and smiled.

  “Just out of curiosity,” I said, “what’s the Mickster’s job around here?”

  “She’s my bodyguard.”

  “You need a bodyguard?”

  “There’ve been threats against my life. People who say I’ll die if I go ahead with this movie.”

  “From who—movie critics?”

  “The threats are real. Just yesterday the police arrested some demonstrators outside who feel we’re glorifying a mad killer.”

  “Well, Micki looks like she’s capable of protecting you.”

  “That’s why I keep her around me twenty-four hours a day.”

  I pondered that for a second. “That must be tough on your love life,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Having Ms. Smiley-Face there standing guard next to the bed could really cut down on the ol’ bedroom ardor with your lover.”

  Anson turned toward Micki now and laughed. Micki laughed too. I decided I’d said something funny. I just didn’t know what it was.

  “I don’t get the joke,” I said.

  “Miss Shannon, Micki is my lover.”

  “Oh.”

  I stood up. It was time to leave.

  “So will you be in the movie?”

  “I’ll think about it,” I said.

  Micki was still glaring at me when I left.

  Micki and Michael.

  Cute.

  If they ever get married, they won’t even have to change the monograms on their towels.

  Jesus, how come I never saw that one coming?

  Chapter 15

  One of the worst things about being a reporter is talking to victims and their families.

  It’s one thing to see a murder or accident victim’s bloody body. That’s something you can deal with. But it’s a lot tougher actually meeting the families and seeing the grief they’re going to have to live with for the rest of their lives.

  Once, when I was just starting out, I had to ask a sobbing husband how he felt after his wife had chopped his baby son’s head off and then begun reciting biblical quotations over it. Another time, I broke the news to a teenage girl that her father, mother, brother and sister had all been killed in a car accident. Both times I remember getting drunk afterward.

  Now I was doing something different. I was going back to some crime victims years later to see what had become of them. What were they like now? How had they been changed by their ordeals?

  The first person I met was Danny Girabaldi. He had been nineteen when he was shot; he was thirty-one now. He’d been with his date, an eighteen-year-old girl named Clare Cappadonna, in a parking lot outside a Bay Ridge dance club when the killer had struck. Clare had died instantly from a bullet to the head. Danny had suffered bullet wounds to the head, chest and back, and glass fragments in his eyes. He somehow had survived. But now he was legally blind.

  “Yeah, I remember it,” Girabaldi told me as we sat in his living room. “I go over it every day. I mean, what the hell else do I have to do?”

  He wore a pair of dark glasses. In the pictures of him from before the shooting, he’d been a handsome teenager. Now he looked much older than his years. His parents sat on either side of him in front of a picture window looking out on a quiet Brooklyn neighborhood.

  There seemed to be a sadness throughout the whole house.

  “How are you getting along?” I asked.

  “Oh, as well as can be expected. I don’t get around much, but I’m not totally blind.”

  “Well, that’s something.”

  “Yeah. I mean, I can pick up shapes and shadows and stuff. I can even see you sitting there, for instance. I can’t tell what you’re wearing or much about you or even if you’re a man or a woman without hearing your voice. But I’m not totally blind.”

  He said this very firmly, as if it was an important distinction to make.

  “Danny worked for a while a few months ago, you know,” his father piped up. “Isn’t that right?”

  Danny nodded.

  “I got him a job at the post office,” he said. “I work there myself, been there for thirty-eight years. Anyway, we needed some help around Christmastime.”

  “How’d it go?” I asked.

  “Not so well,” Danny said.

  “We probably pushed him a little,” his mother said. “Asked him to do something he wasn’t ready for yet.”

  “Maybe next year,” his father said.

  She nodded. Danny didn’t say anything.

  We went over the events of the night he’d been shot. The more we talked, the more subdued Danny seemed to get. This conversation was not doing him any good. I felt bad about that.

  “There’s been some more killings,” I said. “I don’t think it’s the same person. I think it’s probably just a copycat. But I’m trying to pick up anything—no matter how small—from what happened to you that might help me track him down.”

  “Why bother?” he asked. “It’s too late for that now.”

  “It’s never too late, Danny.”

  “It is for me.”

  Kathleen DiLeonardo was a different story altogether.

  She’d been walking home after a night course at Queens College when the killer opened fire. She had been hit in the shoulder, but fortunately, the bullet had passed through without causing any major damage.

  “I hardly think about it anymore,” she told me.

  She was married now and living in a split-level in Glen Cove, Long Island. She had three daughters and her husband was a stockbroker who worked for a big firm on Wall Street. They’d just put a down payment on a vacation house near Orient Point in Suffolk County, she said. Life had been good for Kathleen DiLeonardo since that night in Queens a long time ago.

  “The only thing is, I still get this ache in my shoulder when it rains,” she said. “Or sometimes when I reach up to get something with that arm. But I guess, all things considered, I was pretty lucky.”

  I thought about Danny Girabaldi and agreed that she was.

  “Did you see the person who shot you at all?”

  “Just for a second. A shadowy figure jumped out of some bushes. I mean, it was really dark. And it all happened so quickly . . .”

  “What did he look like?”

  She shrugged.

  “Any possibility you might recognize him if you saw him again?”

  She seemed uncomfortable with that thought. “Like I told you, it was a long time ago. I’m not sure anymore about any of it.”

  Jack Corrigan was bitter.

  “My life ended when Katy died,” Corrigan said. He nodded toward a picture next to him of a smiling teenager. “She was the apple of my eye. My wife died a year and a half later—from a broken heart, I’ll always believe that. Me, I had to stop working soon after it happened because of my heart going bad. All the stress, the doctors said.”

  Corrigan lived in a dingy one-room efficiency in a hotel on West Forty-Fifth Street in Manhattan.

  “We had a little house in Jackson Heights,” he said wistfully. “Had to give it up after I stopped working and the doctor bills ran up.

  “Christ,” he said, shaking his head, “I can still see Katy on that last night. She said she was going out dancing. I told her to
be careful, because the papers were already writing about this nut with a gun who was killing young girls. She kissed me on the side of the cheek and said, ‘I will, Daddykins.’ She called me ‘Daddykins’ whenever she wanted something—like money to go out. So I gave her twenty dollars, in case she wanted to stop and get something to eat afterward.”

  Corrigan paused and looked down at the picture again.

  “The twenty-dollar bill was still on her when they found the body,” he said bitterly. “He didn’t even rob her. The creep just killed her for no reason at all.”

  I nodded. I really didn’t know what to say.

  “But you’ve kept going. That’s important.”

  “I have to. I have my work to do.”

  “Your work?”

  He handed me a pile of newspaper clippings. They were about committees being formed to fight for victims of crime. Petitions signed. Protests made to judges and prosecutors who were lenient with violent criminals.

  “Do you know that Son of Sam tried to get money for the book-and-TV rights to his story? We stopped that. Got a law passed preventing a criminal from profiting from his crime. It’s called the Son of Sam Law.”

  I nodded. “Yes, I’m aware of that.”

  “Do you know what will happen if the cops ever catch this guy you’re looking for?”

  “They’ll send him to jail.”

  Corrigan shook his head violently from side to side.

  “No, he’ll get himself some fancy lawyer who’ll say he’s insane. And he probably is. So he’ll be pampered in some hospital somewhere at taxpayer expense. And all the time they’ll be writing books about him and TV-movies and he’ll be trying to get his hands on that money. Do you know they’re already trying to shoot a movie here about this case?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, it’ll never get done. Not if I have anything to say about it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve been going down there every day, where they’re shooting it, to try to talk some sense into that director. And I’ll protest outside, every step of the way if I have to. It’s not right for them to make money on my daughter’s death. It’s just not right.”

  I remembered what Michael Anson had said about threats against her life.

  “This is a free country, Mr. Corrigan,” I said. “If people want to pay money to see a movie—”

  “It’s blood money! Blood money off my dead daughter. And I won’t stand for it.”

  At least one of the victims had turned to religion.

  Bobby Fowler and his girlfriend, Linda Malandro, had been the first people shot by Loverboy. Sitting in a car overlooking the Hudson River, after leaving a disco one hot summer night in 1978. She’d died, but he survived.

  Now he was the Reverend Robert Fowler. I found him at a little Baptist church on Queens Boulevard in Kew Gardens. He was helping to fill baskets with food for the elderly people in the area.

  “I took the shooting as a sign from God,” he said. “So I decided to devote myself to Him. As thanks for sparing me.”

  “Well, that sounds very constructive,” I told him.

  “It wasn’t easy,” Fowler said. He put some bread, eggs and milk into a basket and handed it to a volunteer. “I mean, I had some pretty rough times after Linda was shot.

  “You know, we weren’t just a couple of kids fooling around with each other. We’d lived together for a year, and had a daughter. But then we’d broken up. We were just getting back together when it happened. If we hadn’t gone to that secluded spot that night, we probably would have gotten married. But . . .”

  “What happened to your daughter?”

  Fowler shrugged. “You see, I was really screwed up for a while. Started drinking. Did drugs. And since I wasn’t married to Linda, I had no clear-cut right to her. She wound up with adoptive parents.”

  “Do you ever see her?”

  He sighed. “Not really. It’s too difficult. And anyway, she never remembered much about me.”

  “But you remember. . . .”

  “She was all that Linda left behind,” he said. “And I lost that too.”

  “Tell me about the shooting.”

  He went through it all. The lovers’ lane. The shadowy figure by the car. The gunshots. Linda’s body lying next to his as he struggled for consciousness.

  “You know,” Robert Fowler said, “the Lord saith we must not wish ill on our enemies. He asks us to turn the other cheek. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.”

  Fowler looked at me and said:

  “But I hope they catch the bastard and he rots in jail.”

  On the way back to Manhattan, I thought about what I’d learned.

  Mostly that Loverboy had affected his victims in different ways. Some, like the Girabaldi family and Jack Corrigan, had their lives ruined. For Kathleen DiLeonardo, the incident had been only a small aberration and her life had gone on normally. Bobby Fowler had experienced the depths of despair and now seemed to have picked up the pieces and made something constructive for himself.

  Different lives, different outcomes.

  I suddenly had an overpowering urge for a drink. A vodka on the rocks would taste great. Or maybe just an ice-cold beer. Hell, in the old days I used to be able to put away a six-pack of beer in no time at all. Not that I wanted to do that now. All I wanted was a single drink to quench my . . .

  No, that wasn’t right either. I wanted to get drunk. Disgustingly drunk. So drunk I didn’t have to think about Danny Girabaldi or Katy Corrigan or Theresa Anne Vinas.

  I pulled my car over to the side of the road. There was a tavern there. joe’s place, the sign said. Underneath that, it read: good drinks, good company. That sounded awfully nice to me. I could go inside, have a couple, and no one would ever know . . .

  I looked down at my hands on the steering wheel. They were shaking.

  My God, what was I doing?

  Right after I had first stopped drinking, I went to AA meetings every day. I hadn’t liked it much—the sobriety speeches and the crusading people and the little slogans—but it had helped me achieve a bit of discipline.

  I’d gotten a sponsor while I was there, a woman I was supposed to call if I ever needed help. I’d never called her. But I’d kept the card with the number on it in my purse, just in case. I reached into my purse for it now—and found another card instead. Detective Mitch Caruso’s.

  I stared at his number for a long time. Then I looked at the tavern. Then back at the number.

  Finally I put the card back in my purse, started the engine and got back on the road again.

  By the time I reached the Midtown Tunnel, the worst of it was over.

  Chapter 16

  I woke up with a start.

  My heart was pounding. I was gasping for breath. I was having a terrible nightmare.

  Normally I don’t remember my dreams, but this time was different. As I got up and padded into the kitchen, it was still very fresh in my mind. I took a diet soda out of the refrigerator, pulled back the tab and gulped some liquid down. I looked at the time. Two-thirty a.m.

  Damn!

  All the talk about Loverboy had brought the memories back.

  In my dream, the cops had finally caught Loverboy. Not only that, but the creep was tried, convicted and sentenced to death. I watched—horrified, but fascinated too—as they strapped him into the electric chair. The warden stood nearby, ready to turn on the current.

  But there was one problem.

  I couldn’t see the killer’s face. It was covered by a black hood. The kind of hood hangmen used to put on their victims in the days of the Old West.

  But I had to know who it was.

  So I stepped forward, stood in front of the frightened figure in the chair for a few seconds and then suddenly yanked the black hood away.

  Now I was staring face-to-face with the evil menace.

  And that was when the real nightmare began.

  The face of the person sitting in th
e electric chair—the face of the killer—was my face.

  Sitting there in the living room now, I thought it still seemed too real. I drank some more soda and clicked on the TV. Maybe I could Nick at Nite myself back to sleep. Mary Tyler Moore was on. Lou Grant was kidding her about what a lousy drinker she was—how she hardly ever touched the stuff, but got very funny after a few sips of a martini. Sometimes I wished I were like Mary; she lived such a great life. But then I remembered this was just fantasy. In real life, Mary Tyler Moore was an alcoholic just like me.

  And I thought about Jack Reagan, the cop from the Loverboy task force who’d been quoted in one of the old clips I found in the Blade library.

  That brought back memories too.

  Jack and I had had a lot of fun together. When we were drinking—which was pretty much all of the time—we had probably closed up every Irish pub in the city at one time or another during the early-morning hours. Shannon and Reagan. The cop and the hotshot young reporter. What a pair they were.

  Would things be very different if Jack were alive now? Probably not.

  I mean, what did I think would’ve happened—Jack would’ve married me and we’d have lived happily ever after? No way. Jesus, what a rotten combination. A couple of drunks. We probably would have wound up killing each other.

  Except ol’ Jack had killed himself first.

  It was a little after 4 a.m. before I finally fell asleep again.

  I didn’t dream any more that night.

  Chapter 17

  “I’m glad you called,” Mitch Caruso said.

  “I found your card in my purse. That was a good move.”

  “You still had to make the call.”

  “I needed to hear the sound of a friendly voice.”

  “What happened to your ‘I can’t be friends with a man’ rule? The credo you live your life by?”

  “Sometimes I change the rules as I go along.”

  He smiled. We were sitting in a restaurant on Third Avenue. I still wasn’t exactly sure what I was doing there. Why Mitch Caruso? I could have called Janet or someone else at the paper if I wanted someone to talk to. But he just seemed like the right person. Sometimes you have to go with your instincts.