Loverboy

by R. G. Belsky

“Not particularly,” I said.

  “So let’s go to New York.”

  “When?”

  “Right now.”

  I told my parents first. They took the news very well. I think both of them had pretty much given up hope that I was going to settle down with a nice local boy and raise children and join the PTA. They probably came to that conclusion somewhere around the time a police car brought me home at 5 a.m., after a particularly wild night of partying. Or when the high school guidance counselor in my senior year wrote “rebellious, overly opinionated and a real pain in the ass” on my report card. I still graduated with honors, though. I was always a maze of contradictions.

  I grew up in Garfield Heights, which is a suburb of Cleveland. But it was really like living in a small town. Everybody knew everybody, and everyone knew everyone else’s business. There’re people I went to high school with who married other people from the same high school, and now they have kids of their own who go to that high school.

  A lot of young people don’t know what they want to do when they grow up. Not me. I wanted to get out of Garfield Heights. I wanted to go to some place big and exciting where people didn’t look at me and judge me and where I didn’t have to follow anybody else’s rules on how to live my life.

  “Maybe the problem is you, not this town or this school,” the guidance counselor once told me. “Maybe running away to a big city won’t help you run away from your problems.”

  But I didn’t listen to her.

  I knew where I was headed.

  I was going to go to New York City to become a famous newspaper reporter.

  And I did too, even though things didn’t work out exactly the way I had hoped.

  But I’ve never looked back. I’ve never for a second wondered what my life would have been like if I’d stayed in Ohio and gotten a job there or settled down and raised a family. Even now when I go back for a visit—which is very rarely—I feel trapped and uncomfortable and out of place, just the way I did when I was in high school. Suddenly I’m the girl who didn’t make the cheerleading squad all over again. The one who didn’t get invited to any of the cool parties. The one who was afraid no one would ask her to the prom. My throat gets tight and I have trouble breathing and I desperately feel like a drink. So I make up some excuse about an urgent assignment and hurry back to New York City.

  I suppose my parents know I’m lying, but they never talk to me about it.

  Anyway, that’s why I wasn’t surprised when there were no emotional farewells at my house when Carrie and I left fourteen years ago. My mother and father seemed to have been preparing for my departure for a long time.

  It was different at Carrie’s house. Carrie’s mother cried. A long time ago, she had dreamed of being an actress too. It hadn’t worked out. She’d gotten pregnant by an actor who hit the road when he heard the news, so she went to work on a factory assembly line and raised Carrie as a single mother. Now her daughter was going to make the dream come alive again. It was a very touching moment.

  They hugged each other for a long time. Then Carrie’s mother gave her five hundred dollars, which she’d saved from her job on the assembly line. She told Carrie to keep it for an emergency so she would always have a nest egg if things didn’t work out. Carrie promised she would. Carrie also said that when she made her first appearance on Broadway, she would fly her mother to New York City and thank her publicly from the stage during the curtain call. There were tears on their faces as we left.

  A few hours later, we were driving across Pennsylvania in my 1975 Fiat. We spent some of the five hundred dollars on new clothes at a mall near Pittsburgh and the rest on beer. We played Go-Go’s songs and drank beer the whole way, throwing our empty cans out the window and going eighty miles an hour along the Pennsylvania Turnpike. We both had that wonderful excitement and confidence about the future you still have when you’re young and hopeful.

  On our first night in New York, Carrie and I stayed at a motel near the Lincoln Tunnel where the rooms were very cheap. The clerk on duty leered at us when we checked in. Later, as we lay in bed, there was a noise outside the door that woke us both up. Visions of Norman Bates danced in our heads. We checked the lock, put on the safety chain and moved a large dresser in front of the door so that no one could open it from the outside. Nothing happened, and eventually we fell back to sleep.

  The next morning I took a bus to the New York Blade offices. I told the receptionist I wanted to work for the newspaper. I had no appointment. I had no job application. Nobody would even talk to me. Finally one of the editors felt sorry for me and told me he knew someone who ran a small daily in New Jersey. He gave me the man’s name and said to come back to the Blade when I had more experience.

  The newspaper was in Wayne, New Jersey, about thirty miles from New York. It had a circulation of only ten thousand and an editorial staff of ten people, but I learned a lot. I covered City Council meetings and police stories, wrote headlines and laid out pages, and even learned how the presses worked. On my days off, I would go into the city and buy all the New York papers. Then I’d sit in a cafe and devour them, watching the people go by outside and dreaming about working there someday.

  After nine months at the Wayne paper, I got a job with The Bergen Record. That was still in New Jersey—but it was much bigger and closer to the city. There was a school controversy going on, and I did a series of exclusive articles on a whistle-blowing teacher who revealed all sorts of shocking abuses in the educational system. It won an award and got me some attention and—best of all—caught the attention of the people at the Blade. They offered me a job. I’d finally made it to the Big Apple.

  I was a cub reporter. I did anything the editors asked me to do. Obits. Boring press conferences. The police shack. I didn’t care—I loved it all. I would have mopped floors if they’d wanted me to. I was just so glad to be a part of a New York City newspaper.

  Carrie? Well, she lasted in New York for only a few months. Never made it as an actress on Broadway. Never even made it in Shaker Square. She moved back to Ohio, married some guy who went to high school with us, had a couple of kids, and now works part-time in the same factory as her mother. I haven’t talked to her in years. Life goes on.

  Anyway, that was me back then. Lucy Shannon. Ambitious young reporter. Budding alcoholic. And definitely a woman ready for love if the right guy ever came along.

  Not a bad person, but not exactly Mother Teresa either.

  Until Loverboy.

  Chapter 20

  “Do you remember a murder case about six years ago?” Reagan asked me. “This young couple were at a lovers’ lane in upper Manhattan. A gunman opened fire on them.”

  We were sitting at a corner table at Pete’s, matching each other drink for drink.

  All the small talk was gone. I’d told him about me. He’d gone through some of his police stories. Now we were getting down to it.

  “Before my time,” I said.

  “The girl’s name was Linda Malandro. She died. The guy was a kid named Bobby Fowler. He was pretty shot up, but he lived. They never caught the guy who did it.”

  “Sounds like it was a big story.”

  “Yeah, it was on page one for a while.”

  He took a gulp of his drink.

  “A year later, a woman was shot on a street in Queens for no apparent reason. The gunman just jumped out of the bushes and started firing. She died too.”

  “You think it’s the same guy?”

  “There’ve been five more unsolved cases like that since 1978. Six people died, four were wounded. We have no leads. No suspects. No nothing. Except the ballistics reports. They all match. The same forty-four-caliber gun was used in all the shootings.”

  I stared at him. I couldn’t believe what he was saying.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said. “There’s a fucking serial killer out there. . . .”

  He nodded.

  “How come nobody knows about this?”

  “Hell, we didn
’t even realize it ourselves for a long time. No reason to think there was any connection between any of the killings. I mean, they were in different boroughs and a few years apart. But then somebody at the crime lab stumbled across the fact that the bullets in two of the shootings seemed to match. They both came from a Bulldog forty-four revolver. That’s a powerful gun, but a pretty rare one. So we started checking all the unsolved murders in our files. That’s when we saw the pattern. Finally they set up this special task force to catch the guy. Ferraro’s in charge. I’m assigned to it too. So far, we’ve found diddly-squat.”

  “And no one’s ever told the public about any of this?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “The idea was it would be easier to catch the killer without the glare of publicity.”

  “People have a right to know if there’s a murderer out there.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  “Then why . . . ?”

  “It wasn’t my decision. It was the brass downtown at headquarters. I’m just a working cop.”

  I nodded. It finally dawned on me why we were here. He wasn’t doing this for me. He was doing it for himself.

  “You want this story published, don’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “I think maybe it’ll help flush the killer out. Hell, we aren’t getting anywhere the way we’re doing it now. Anyway, I’ve got a feeling this guy wants publicity. I think he’s frustrated he hasn’t become a national celebrity like Son of Sam or Zodiac or one of those other nut jobs. So let’s give him some—and see what happens.”

  “Won’t you get in trouble doing this?” I asked.

  “Not if you don’t tell anyone where you got the information.”

  “I won’t. I always protect my sources. It’s a reporter’s sacred duty to do that. It’s guaranteed by the Constitution. I mean, I’d go to jail before I’d give you up to anyone.”

  I really believed in all that crap back then.

  “That’s what I’m counting on,” Reagan said.

  He stuck his hand out.

  “So we got a deal?”

  “Deal,” I said.

  We shook on it.

  “I think we’re gonna make a great team together, Lucy Shannon,” Reagan said.

  Then he smiled that killer smile again.

  Looking back on it all now, I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Jack Reagan had been sixty and fat, with bad teeth. Would I still have jumped on the story the same way? Sure, I would have. But the rest of it would have been a lot different.

  “So aren’t you glad you decided to take me up on my invitation for a drink?” he asked.

  “Absolutely.”

  Was he kidding? This was a huge story. And he’d dropped it right in my lap.

  I finished off my drink. I’d switched from beer to vodka a while earlier, and I was starting to feel a buzz. Nothing I couldn’t handle, though. I was still sober. Or at least not drunk enough for anyone to know, when I called in the story.

  I was very good at hiding my drinking in those days. For a long time no one at the paper even realized I had a problem. I had a good act.

  I called the Blade and told the night city editor everything Reagan had told me. It took a while. I could hear his astonishment at the other end of the line as I went through it all. He told the managing editor—who woke up the editor in chief at home to tell him.

  Then they tore apart page 1—and made up a whole new one with my story for the late editions.

  After I got off the phone, Reagan and I kept drinking. In fact, we wound up closing the place down. The bartender tried to stop serving us at about 1 a.m. But Reagan flashed his police shield and told him to keep them coming. It was after two by the time we finally stumbled out the front door into the warm summer air.

  I suddenly remembered that the Blade had a printing plant in Queens, where I could get one of the first copies of my story off the presses.

  “Let’s go!” he said.

  “Right now?”

  “The night is young.”

  Reagan was driving a big, black Lincoln, and he had a bottle of tequila in the glove compartment. We passed it between us on the front seat as we made our way through the streets of Manhattan, along the Midtown Tunnel and then onto the Long Island Expressway.

  The expressway was almost deserted at that hour. He floored the accelerator until we were hitting speeds of close to one hundred. Whenever a car did get in our way, Reagan turned on the police siren and flashing light as we roared past—probably frightening the hell out of the driver.

  We didn’t care. We were laughing and screaming at people out the windows and having a blast.

  “This is a bitchin’ car,” I said.

  “I love a Lincoln.”

  He started singing an old song from the ’50s called “Hot Rod Lincoln” at the top of his lungs. It’s about a drag-racing teenager and his car. I took a big swig of the tequila and joined along with him on the chorus.

  It was a great night.

  We got to the printing plant just as the first papers were coming off the press.

  I showed my press card to one of the workers, who gave me a copy. I sat down on a crate in the parking lot—with the stars from a clear June night sky above me and the lights of the Manhattan skyline off in the distance and the roar of the presses behind me—and looked at page 1.

  The headline said:

  SERIAL KILLER TERRORIZES CITY

  Exclusive

  by Lucy Shannon

  Reagan slipped onto the crate next to me and put his arm around me. He looked down at the paper.

  “Are you happy?”

  “Delirious. It’s my first page-one story.”

  “Stick with me, kid.” He smiled. “I’ll make you a star.”

  Then he kissed me.

  No one had ever kissed me like that back in Ohio.

  No one in New York either.

  That night I made love with Jack Reagan for the first time.

  Chapter 21

  There was plenty of other news going on in New York during that summer of 1984.

  Ronald Reagan was running for reelection against Walter Mondale. The Yankees and the Mets were both fighting for a pennant. And the city was going through a torrid heat wave.

  But the news of the murders quickly became the only thing in town people were talking about.

  The next day—on a Sunday afternoon—the Mayor and the police commissioner held a press conference to discuss it. The Mayor had to cut short his vacation to be there. The police commissioner helicoptered in from his weekend house in the Hamptons. Ferraro and Reagan were there too.

  The Mayor vowed to spare no expense or manpower to catch the killer. He assured people that the city was safe. And he said he was assigning an army of cops to work with Ferraro and Reagan on the case.

  “Do you have a prime suspect?” a reporter asked the police commissioner.

  “No,” he said.

  “Any substantial leads?” someone else wanted to know.

  “Not at this moment.”

  The story led every newspaper and news show in town.

  When I got to work on Monday morning, I was a celebrity too. There were TV cameras waiting for me. Reporters from other papers. A call-in radio show asked me to answer questions from their listeners.

  Me, I didn’t want to go on radio or TV or give interviews. I just wanted to get back to work on the story. But the paper thought it would be great publicity; they said it would help sell newspapers.

  So I did it. And that was how I became an overnight star. A media sensation. My fifteen minutes of fame. Of course, I told myself I never had any choice in the matter. I was just doing what I’d been told. It was all part of the job.

  But somewhere along the line, a funny thing happened.

  I started to like it.

  I knew I needed a big follow-up story. And I got one.

  First, I found the wi
dow of the dead Wall Street executive. Diane Borelli knew who I was; she’d already seen me on one of the TV interviews. That seemed to make me all right in her book. So she told me about their four years of marriage, their new baby and their house on three acres of prime Westchester land. She said Joseph Borelli was a great husband, a wonderful provider and a terrific father. She made him sound like something out of an old situation comedy. Almost too good to be true. He was Ward Cleaver, Steve Douglas and Mike Brady, all rolled into one.

  I didn’t ask her what Ward Cleaver was doing out on a Saturday night in New York with a pretty young waitress.

  Then I tracked down the mother of the slain girl, Susan Lansdale. She came from the Midwest—a little town outside Indianapolis. Mrs. Lansdale told me her daughter had gone to New York with the dream of becoming a ballet dancer. She’d been taking classes at Juilliard and making money by working nights at the Gotham City bar. “Susan was so beautiful and so talented,” the woman sobbed. “Why would anyone want to kill her?”

  I didn’t have any answer for that one.

  The Blade ran the story under my byline, with pictures of both Joseph Borelli and Susan Lansdale. Alongside it was a sidebar about the earlier victims, as well as pictures of them.

  The headline said: “Victims of the Killer.” Below that was another headline: “Who Will Be Next?”

  When I was finished, Reagan and I decided to celebrate by going out for dinner and drinks. I don’t remember how much we ate, but we sure drank a lot.

  We started out at a place called Jim McMullen’s on the Upper East Side. After that, we went to the bar at Elaine’s. Elaine’s is a big celebrity hangout on Second Avenue where they fawn all over you if you’re famous and make you feel uncomfortable if you’re not. I’d gone in there once when I first came to New York and got treated as if I had a case of leprosy. But now it was like my own private Cheers—everybody knew my name.

  By 3 a.m. we were at Dorrian’s on Second Avenue. Dorrian’s would become famous a few years later in connection with another notorious killing. A young couple named Robert Chambers and Jennifer Levin met there, then went into Central Park to have sex. Afterward, Chambers strangled her to death. The newspapers called it “the Preppie Murder Case.”