by R. G. Belsky
“And let Ferraro get all the glory?”
“Is that what you care about?”
“I don’t want to see that prick Tommy Ferraro standing up in front of the TV cameras taking credit for all the hard work we did. He’d just love that.”
“I’m sure he’d give us part of the credit.”
“Like hell he would. He’d see this as his ticket for a big promotion, his road to the top. Fuck him. I’m doing this my way. Are you in or not?”
“Let’s talk about it in the morning.”
“I’m not waiting until morning.”
“The killer will still be there. We’ll have breakfast together and then—”
“I’m going in right now.”
“Don’t do this, Jack.”
“Are you in or not?”
I thought about it for a few seconds. But, of course, there was really no decision to make.
“Not,” I said finally.
Jack slammed the phone down in my ear.
He called back a few minutes later. I knew he would. But I didn’t pick up the receiver that time. My phone rang maybe twenty times. Then he hung up, and tried again. After that, he stopped.
My life changed a lot after that.
I didn’t stop drinking. Far from it. Within a couple of days I was hitting the bottle as hard as ever. But now I knew what I was doing to myself. I wasn’t kidding myself anymore. I was a drunk. Just like Jack Reagan.
And that was really the end of my relationship with Jack.
I saw him a few times after that. But it was never the same. I guess we just drifted apart, the way two people in a relationship do when they don’t have anything in common anymore.
I never slept with him again.
So I guess you’d have to call that phone call with Jack Reagan a real turning point for me.
The first day of the rest of my life.
Chapter 26
“So what happened then?” Mitch Caruso asked me.
“Nothing.”
“What do you mean?”
“Loverboy just went away. He stopped killing. And after a while the story died too.”
“What about the suspect that Reagan thought he’d found?”
“There never was any suspect.”
“But—”
“Jack just had too much to drink.”
“So he never went back to that house he told you was filled with evidence?”
“No. He stayed in the bar most of the night. When he woke up the next morning, he’d forgotten all about it. He was pretty far gone at that point.”
“And that was the end of the two of you?”
“Yeah. You know, I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had gone to the bar to meet him that night. Would I have stayed with him—would I have gone down the same path of self-destruction he did? But I got out in time. Hey, I’ve had my problems. But I’m dealing with them.”
We were getting close to the crime scene now.
There was still one question Caruso hadn’t asked me.
I knew he would.
“How did Reagan die?” he asked.
“He committed suicide.”
“How long ago was that?”
“About a year after we broke up.”
I looked out the window. It was still early evening, and people were out on the streets shopping or going to the movies or out for a meal. Living nice, normal, sane lives. How did mine get so screwed up?
“I’d pretty much lost touch with him by then—we hadn’t talked in a couple of months. I was dating an organized-crime cop working out of the Seventy-First Precinct in Brooklyn. I thought it was pretty serious, and I guess it was. He wound up being my first husband. Anyway, one night Reagan called me up out of the blue.”
“What did he say?”
“That he was going to kill himself.”
“Jesus!”
“He asked me if I remembered the game he played that night at Finnegan’s. Russian roulette. I told him I did. Well, he said the trick to winning at it was still the same. You just didn’t have to care about dying.”
“What did you say?”
“I thought he was bluffing.”
“But he wasn’t.”
I shook my head no.
“He put a bullet in the gun and spun it around. Then he pulled the trigger. I could hear the click of an empty chamber over the line. He did it a second time too. Another miss.
“That’s when he told me he loved me. He said he didn’t want to live anymore without me.
“The third time was the one that did it. I could hear the gun go off over the phone, and then the line went dead. I dialed 911. But when they got to Jack’s place, he was already dead. He’d blown his head off, just like he’d said. There was a picture of me next to him.”
Caruso let his breath out slowly. He looked like he was in shock.
“Is that why you kept on drinking so much?” he asked.
“God, I don’t know. I’m not sure it’s that simple. They say you can’t blame other people for your drinking, you have to look at yourself. Mostly the reasons are inside you. But it hasn’t been easy. I’ve had three failed marriages. I’ve been on and off the wagon for twelve years. My career hasn’t exactly worked out the way I thought it was going to.”
“There must have been some good moments along the way.”
“You want to hear something really weird?” I said. “That summer covering Loverboy was the high point of my life. The only time I’ve ever had everything going for me. I was twenty-four years old. Maybe I just had too much too soon.”
We pulled up in front of the stewardess’s apartment house. There were police cars blocking the street and cops all over.
“That’s some story,” Caruso said as we got out of the car.
“Yeah, it is, isn’t it?”
“And that’s all of it?”
“The whole thing,” I told him.
Then we walked inside to see Loverboy’s latest victim.
I was lying, of course.
That wasn’t the whole story at all.
Not even close.
But it was all I was going to tell Mitch Caruso.
Part 4
Read All About It!
Chapter 27
LOVERBOY STRIKES AGAIN!
Cops probe fourth new slaying—note warns of more victims
Exclusive
by Lucy Shannon
A 25-year-old stewardess was found shot to death outside her Queens apartment last night—apparently the latest victim in the infamous Loverboy slayings.
The killer left behind a taunting note addressed to this reporter which said: “There’ll be a lot more—just like in ’84!”
It also included his trademark phrase: “I love you to death.”
Thirteen people were murdered in New York City from 1978 to 1984 by a person who called himself “Loverboy” and left similar notes during the summer of 1984.
If this is the work of the real Loverboy, he is now responsible for killing 17 people and wounding eight more over a period of nearly two decades.
Last night’s victim was identified as Deborah Kaffee, a stewardess for American Airlines who was returning home from Kennedy Airport after a cross-country flight from Los Angeles.
Her body was found by a neighbor who heard gunshots shortly before 7 p.m.
“I saw someone running away,” the neighbor told cops. “Just a shadowy figure out of the corner of my eye. Then I saw poor Deborah. She was covered in blood.
“Who would want to do that? She was such a lovely girl.”
Police say the pretty blond stewardess died instantly after being shot three times in the head at close range with a .44-caliber gun.
All the other victims also were shot with the same type of weapon.
Kaffee had arrived back in New York on a cross-country flight that landed at 4:40 p.m., and then went to a nearby bar called The Hangar, which police say is a favorite spot for stewardesses and pilots.
“I know we think of someone jumping out of the bushes with a gun,” said Detective Mitch Caruso.
“But there’s also the possibility that the woman went with him willingly. Loverboy doesn’t have to be a bogeyman—he could be a very charming fellow, just like Ted Bundy was.”
The note found at the scene—the latest in a series addressed to this reporter—talked about “a summer of blood.”
Like the earlier letters, it alternated between horrifying threats and dark humor.
“I will not rest until my job is done,” the writer says. “I am on a mission. A mission from God.”
At another point, he talks about sometimes having difficulty choosing his victims.
“So many pretty girls, so little time (ha ha!).”
Police say they are still trying to determine if the killer is the same one who terrorized the city 12 years ago—and then disappeared.
“He says he’s Loverboy,” Deputy Police Commissioner Victor Pataglia told reporters at a hastily called press conference. “And everything seems the same—the victims, the gun, the notes. But it could be a very clever copycat.”
Pataglia said Police Commissioner Thomas Ferraro—the head of the original Loverboy task force—had no immediate comment on the latest round of killings.
But City Council President Peter Garwood—who most political experts predict will be running against Ferraro in next year’s mayoral election—questioned the copycat theory as well as Ferraro’s handling of the case.
“All signs indicate that one person has done all of the murders,” Garwood said at a separate press conference.
“This city, and Police Commissioner Ferraro, have to finish what we started 12 years ago. But this time let’s do it right. We have to find Loverboy.”
There’s nothing like a big story to energize a newsroom.
Most of the things a paper covers are pretty dull. City Council votes. School board crises. Stuff from Washington or places like Bosnia or the Mideast that nobody actually understands. People have to know about all of it, I guess. But they don’t really care.
This was different.
This was a story.
An in-fucking-credible story.
A once-in-a-lifetime story.
Except that it seemed to be happening twice in mine.
I realized that everybody was looking at me differently now when I walked into the Blade city room. I wasn’t poor Lucy the office drunk anymore. I was Lucy Shannon the ace reporter. I’d used up my fifteen minutes of fame a long time ago. But now I was getting a second helping.
Suddenly everybody was my friend again.
Editors wanted to tell me about their stories. Copykids offered to bring me my coffee. Other reporters who had ignored me for years stopped by my desk to talk. Even Victoria Crawford smiled and said hello to me.
Maybe that had something to do with the fact that the Blade’s circulation was running dramatically higher than normal since our coverage of the new killings started.
Every morning now when I came to work, there was a growing stack of messages from other media people requesting interviews about my own role in the case. Newspapers. Magazines. TV news programs. Shows like Inside Edition and A Current Affair and Geraldo.
I tried to ignore most of them.
But one of the most persistent was Michael Anson, the woman who wanted me in her movie about Loverboy.
“It would be a natural, Lucy,” she said. “Dogged woman reporter devotes her career to chasing the city’s worst killer. How can you say no?”
“No.”
“I could really beef up your part. Make you a hero. Maybe even get into some stuff about your personal life and . . .”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said.
“Why not?”
“I’m a reporter. A reporter should report. Not act in movies or appear on talk shows or be the subject of other people’s stories.”
“Okay, we’ll get an actress to play your role. But you can still make a cameo appearance—and then we’ll do a big publicity campaign about the real-life reporter who’s still trying to crack the case—”
“Good-bye, Ms. Anson,” I said.
I hung up just as Janet Wood sat down next to me.
“Who was that?” she asked. “Oprah or Dave?”
“Hollywood calling,” I said.
Janet shook her head in amazement.
“Now all you need is a sex life.”
“I’m working on that too.”
I told her all about Mitch Caruso.
“Another cop?” she said incredulously.
“Yeah, I know. . . .”
“Didn’t you tell me you were finished with cops?”
“I think this one’s different.”
“They always are.”
Barlow walked over. He was eating a corned beef sandwich. It looked good. It would look even better with a beer.
“News meeting this afternoon,” he told me. “Victoria Crawford’s office.”
“You want me to go?”
“Yeah, Vicki wants to talk more about Loverboy.”
“Is there a problem?”
“Hell, no. She thinks you’re doing a great job. She loves you.”
“Victoria Crawford hates me.”
“Not anymore. You’re selling a lot of newspapers. That makes you number one on her hit parade these days.”
I looked over at Janet.
She just rolled her eyes.
“When you’re hot, you’re hot,” I said.
Chapter 28
“Do the police have any suspects yet?” Victoria Crawford asked me at the meeting.
“Not that I know of.”
“How are your sources with the investigating cops?”
I thought about me and Mitch Caruso.
“Pretty good,” I said.
“But not as good as last time?”
“I’m not sleeping with any of them, if that’s what you mean.”
“That never was part of the job description, Lucy.”
“You know me—I always like to go that extra mile.”
Everyone laughed—even Vicki.
We were really hitting it off these days, me and the Vickster. I remembered what Janet had told me about the divorce rumors. If they were true, Vicki was playing for big stakes here. She needed this story, and the big circulation boost it gave the Blade, to try to hold onto her job.
Suddenly Loverboy was as important to her life as it was to mine.
Fate sure works in strange ways sometimes.
Vicki’s next question was the obvious one. I knew it was coming, but I still wasn’t ready for it.
“Did the police have any suspects last time?” she asked.
“Yes,” Barlow said.
“No,” I said.
Vicki smiled at both of us.
“Well, that seems to cover most of the possibilities,” she said.
Barlow cleared his throat and gave me a funny look.
“Maybe you forgot, Lucy. But I’ve spent the morning going through a lot of your old clips. There were three suspects back in 1984. The cops looked at all three of them pretty carefully, but they never came up with anything substantial.”
“Who were they?” Vicki asked.
“Their names were David Gruber, Albert Slocum and Joey Russo.”
“So where are they now?”
“Gruber’s in jail. He got busted about ten years ago for molesting some little girl in a school playground. Slocum’s dead. He overdosed on heroin in some flophouse down on the Bowery. No one’s heard from Russo in years.”
“He’s probably dead too,” I said.
“What makes you think that?” Vicki wanted to know.
“Just a guess.”
“Well, he seems like the hottest prospect we’ve got.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Anybody
got any ideas on where to look for him?” she asked.
“The last known address we have is his mother’s on the West Side,” Barlow said. “It’s way over near Tenth Avenue—in Hell’s Kitchen.”
“You might as well start there, Lucy,” Vicki told me.
“It’s not him,” I said.
“What?”
“He’s not Loverboy.”
“Why not?”
“The real Loverboy is dead.”
Everybody stared at me.
“You still don’t believe this is the same guy doing all these new killings?” Vicki asked.
“No, this is a copycat.”
“The City Council president seems to think it’s the same person. Did you hear Garwood’s press conference?”
“I think he’s wrong.”
“So what happened to the real Loverboy?”
“How the hell do I know? Maybe he blew his brains out. Maybe he got hit by a bus. Maybe he died of a brain tumor. But something happened. He’s not alive anymore. He didn’t do these new murders.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Look, I’ve worked with homicide cops for years—I’ve learned a lot about how a killer’s mind works. It’s real hard to kill someone for the first time. It goes against everything we’ve all been taught since we were kids. But then, once the killer’s done it, well, it’s not such a big deal anymore. The second time is easier. And the third time even easier than that. I think Loverboy found that out. He liked to kill. So he never would have stopped for twelve years. Ergo, he’s dead. And we should be looking for a different person.”
Vicki tapped a pencil nervously on the desk as she listened. I noticed she wasn’t wearing a wedding band on her left ring finger. Maybe that was some sort of statement. I’m my own woman. I’m still the editor here—with or without my powerful husband.
On the other hand, maybe she just forgot to put the ring on this morning.
Or maybe she never wore one—I really didn’t remember.
Sometimes I think about stuff like that too much.
“Well, let’s check out this Russo character anyway,” she said to me. “If it turns out he really is dead, then we can eliminate him from the equation. Anything else, Lucy?”
