by R. G. Belsky
“Why me?” I asked. “How the hell could I be Loverboy? I was eighteen goddamned years old and in high school back in Ohio when the first killings happened.”
“We don’t think it’s the same guy,” he said.
“A copycat?”
He nodded.
“That’s what I’ve been saying all along. But no one agreed with me.”
“They do now.”
“Why?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Why don’t you tell people that?”
“They want to keep it a secret. They think it will help us catch the real killer if he thinks we’re still looking for the first guy.”
“Who they are now convinced is dead.”
“Yes.”
Interesting.
“Why were the charges against me dropped?” I asked.
“I’m not sure. I was surprised, too, when it happened.”
“I’ll bet your uncle—our esteemed Police Commissioner Ferraro—was pretty unhappy when he heard the news.”
“Not exactly.”
“What do you mean?”
“He was the one who told the prosecutor to back off on you.”
Tommy Ferraro!
It was goddamned Tommy Ferraro who got me released from jail.
But why?
And what the hell was his involvement in all of this?
“Anything else?” I asked.
“Yes. The ballistics tests came back negative.”
“On the gun you found in my apartment?”
He nodded. “It didn’t match the bullets in any of the four bodies.”
“Four.”
“Right. Barry Tischler, Theresa Anne Vinas, Julie Blaumstein and Deborah Kaffee.”
“You didn’t check them with the original Loverboy killings.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Like I said, they told me they were convinced the original Loverboy was dead.”
Which explained a lot.
“Look,” I said, “I want to make a few things clear to you. I really was attacked in that alley. I have not had a drink in six months. I was not the original Loverboy. I did not commit these new murders in an alcoholic haze, or because I was obsessed with the case, or in a desperate effort to rescue my failing newspaper career. Do you believe me?”
“I want to.”
“But you’re still not a hundred percent sure, are you?”
He shrugged.
“What will it take to convince you?”
He thought about it for a second.
“How about we put you on the box?”
“A lie detector?”
“Yeah. It’s not admissible as evidence, either way it comes out. But a bad test result isn’t going to do you any good. I don’t think your lawyer would want you to take it.”
“If I pass, will you help me find this new Loverboy?”
“We’ll both find him.”
“Okay, let’s do it,” I said.
Chapter 45
“Is your name Lucy Shannon?”
“Yes.”
“Do you reside at One-Fifty-Five East Eighteenth Street in Manhattan?”
“Yes.”
“Are you thirty-six years old?”
“Yes.”
“Are you a newspaper reporter in New York City?”
“Yes.”
“Are you employed by the New York Blade?”
“Yes.”
“As a reporter at the Blade, have you ever been involved with the news coverage of a series of murders known as the Loverboy killings?”
“Yes.”
“Have you written stories about them?”
“Yes.”
“Did you ever knowingly fabricate any of the facts in those stories?”
“No.”
I was hooked up to a lie detector at police headquarters. The guy asking the questions said them all in the same monotone voice. I guess this was part of the procedure.
I couldn’t see the lie detector apparatus from where I was sitting. But I remember the way it always looked in the movies. There was a roll of graph paper and a metal needle drawing a line of ink across it. Most of the time it was level. That meant the person on the machine was telling the truth. But every time there was a lie, the needle jumped violently across the graph.
I wondered if many of my answers would make the needle jump.
“Did you ever write a note purporting to be from Loverboy in order to advance your newspaper career?” he asked.
“No.”
“Did you ever plant such a note at a murder scene?”
“No.”
“Have you ever planted any evidence at a murder scene?”
“No.”
“Are you Loverboy, Miss Shannon?”
I smiled. “No.”
“Did you have any involvement with Loverboy in any of the killings?”
“No.”
“Have you ever killed anyone?”
“No.”
The test took about twenty minutes.
When it was over, I took an elevator downstairs and walked outside to wait. Caruso said he’d meet me there as soon as he got the test results.
It was a beautiful summer day, with the temperature in the seventies and a breeze blowing in off the water. There were lots of people out enjoying it—eating their lunches, sitting on park benches, or laughing and joking with friends. I sat down on one of the benches, outside police headquarters. Sometimes I wished I had a job like other people. Nine to five every day, a leisurely lunch, then straight home after work. I wouldn’t have to worry about police searches or mass murderers or newspaper deadlines. I wouldn’t have to tell any more lies. Maybe then I could be really happy. Maybe.
I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Mitch Caruso.
“How’d I do?” I asked.
“Pretty good.”
“I passed with flying colors?”
“You only missed one question.”
A warning bell went off in my head. Uh-oh, I thought.
“Which one?”
“‘Have you ever killed anyone?’”
“My answer was no.”
“That’s right.”
“And the machine says I lied?”
“The needle went right off the chart.”
I looked at Caruso’s face.
He was staring at me as if he suddenly realized he had no idea who I was or what I was really about. But that was all right. Sometimes I felt the same way about myself.
“Look on the bright side, Mitch,” I said. “At least you know from the other questions that I’m not Loverboy, right?”
He didn’t say anything.
“Lucky for you too. I mean, that probably would have put a real damper on our relationship. How could we ever date or sleep together or maybe get married someday? You’d never know when I might pull out my trusty forty-four and blow your brains out. That’s no way to live—”
“Cut the crap, Lucy.”
“Yep, you sure are one lucky guy.”
“Who did you kill?”
I thought about the secret I’d been holding onto for so long. It was time to let it go.
“Joey Russo,” I said softly.
“The Loverboy suspect from twelve years ago?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
I made an imaginary pistol with my thumb and forefinger, and pretended to pull the trigger. “Boom-boom, right in the head.”
“You did this?”
“Me and Jack Reagan.”
“When?”
“On our final adventure together.”
“Do you mean that night he called and told you to meet him at the bar?”
“Yeah. It was one hell of a last date.”
“But you told me you didn’t go.”
“I lied.”
It’s funny about keeping a secret that big. I’d held onto it for twelve years, never breathing a word to friends, husbands or even the psychiatrist
who was paid to pull stuff like that out of me. But now that I’d finally told one person, Kate Robbins, it didn’t seem like that big a deal anymore. The second time around is easier, I guess. Just like they say about murder.
“Tell me everything,” Caruso said.
“Okay.”
And so I did.
Chapter 46
Jack Reagan said he was going to play Russian roulette again.
Unless I agreed to meet him, he would put a gun to his head and pull the trigger. If it didn’t go off, he would hang up and call back. Then—if I still said no—he would spin the chamber and try it again. He said he would keep doing it until I changed my mind or he was dead.
I thought he was bluffing.
The first time anyway. I told him to play his stupid games by himself and hung up. But by the second phone call, I decided he was serious. I heard the click of the gun on an empty chamber over the line. And I remembered the look on his face that night at Finnegan’s.
So I went to him. I knew it was a terrible mistake. But I didn’t know what else to do.
Maybe that’s why I drank so much that night.
Once I got to the bar where Jack was, there was no stopping me. I really put it away. I still remember most of it only in bits and pieces. But I know that by the time we went to see Joey Russo, I was royally blitzed.
We drove to Russo’s mother’s apartment house in the West Forties, the same place I’d gone back to a few days ago.
I didn’t go inside that first time, though.
I waited in the car while Jack went upstairs. He was gone for a long time. I was so drunk I fell asleep at some point. The next thing I remembered was Jack opening the door and shoving Joey Russo into the backseat.
Russo looked terrible. There was blood on his face and he didn’t say anything. I guess he’d passed out.
“He resisted arrest,” Jack explained.
“Jesus, Jack . . .”
“We got the right guy, though.”
He took out a .44 and some Loverboy letters and showed them to me.
“I found these with him.”
I read the letters. They were addressed to me. The prose, the jokes, everything about them was the same as the ones I’d been getting. They were from Loverboy, all right.
“Some of them are new ones,” I said. “Not just copies of any we’ve seen before.”
“He was probably saving these for his next victims.”
“What about the gun?” I asked.
“A Bulldog forty-four. Loverboy’s choice of weapon.”
I looked at the unconscious figure lying in the backseat.
“What did Russo tell you?”
“He admitted it.”
“He said he was Loverboy?”
“Damn right. He laughed about it too. Boasted that I’d never be able to stop him. Said I’d seized all this evidence illegally. That I’d violated his constitutional rights. He told me a lawyer would get him off, then sue me and the city for millions in damages. After that, he’d go back to killing again. And I couldn’t do a damn thing about it.”
Reagan shook his head. “What a sick fucking world.”
He took out his gun and pointed it at Russo.
“I should blow this motherfucker away right now. Save the taxpayers a lot of money. Maybe save some innocent lives too.”
I was really getting scared now. Even drunk, I knew this was bad.
“Stop it, Jack!”
“Why?”
“You’ve already screwed up the bust. Don’t make it any worse.”
“Shit. Are you worried about this slimeball’s rights? Hell, I’ll read him his rights.”
He took the barrel of the gun and pressed it into Russo’s mouth.
“You have the right to consult your attorney, asshole. You have the right to remain silent.” Reagan laughed. “And you sure as hell seem to be doing that. You have—”
I got out of the car.
“Where are you going?” Reagan asked through the open window.
“To call the police.”
“I am the police.”
“I don’t want to be involved in this, Jack.”
There was a pay telephone on the corner. I started walking toward it.
I was halfway down the block when I heard a shot from inside the car. Then there were two more. I ran back and looked inside.
Jack Reagan was still holding the gun in Russo’s mouth. What was left of it, anyway. Most of Russo’s face had been blown away and there was blood all over the backseat.
“The kid was right, you know,” Reagan said softly. “He would have walked. The evidence was dirty. And he would have killed more people. This was the only way, Lucy.”
I don’t remember a whole lot of what happened after that. I know we drove around for what seemed like hours with Russo’s body in the car. A couple of times we stopped because I was sick. I hung my head out the window and vomited, while Jack looked around for a place to hide Russo’s body. Finally we wound up at an abandoned pier along the Hudson River. Jack weighted the body down with stones and then rolled it into the water.
By this time it was nearly dawn, so we went back to my place and crashed.
That was the last time I ever slept in the same bed with Jack. We sure as hell didn’t do anything, though.
At one point Jack reached over and touched my shoulder. I pulled away. I didn’t have any more illusions about us. I hated him now. I hated what he’d done. Worst of all, I hated me for being a part of it.
When I woke up in the morning, he was gone.
At first, I thought the whole thing was all just a bad dream. But then I found Russo’s .44 and the letters he’d written.
Reagan had left them in my apartment.
“And that’s what we found?” Caruso asked.
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you ever throw it all away?”
“The thing is,” I said slowly, “there were times when I thought that Reagan really had done the right thing.”
I tried to put it into words as best I could.
“I mean, the Loverboy killings did stop after that night. We got the right guy. Joey Russo had done horrible things to other people, so this was truly justice. An eye for an eye. But then, whenever I started feeling that way, I took out Russo’s stuff again. The gun and the letters. And they made me remember the night he died. And the way I’d felt when I saw his bloody head inside that car. And I realized that what Jack and I had done—well, it made us no better than the Joey Russos of the world. In the end, neither of us could live with that. Jack killed himself. I never had the guts to do that. Not with a gun, anyway.”
I started to cry again. Just like I did when I told the story to Kate Robbins.
“Something in me died, too, that night we killed Joey Russo,” I said. “I know I didn’t pull the trigger, but I was there. I could have stopped it. I should have stopped it. Maybe if I’d said something different to Jack. Maybe if I’d tried to take the gun away from him. Maybe if I hadn’t left him alone in the car with Russo . . .”
I replayed in my head the events of the night that had changed my life so irrevocably—just like I had done so many times for the past twelve years.
“Jack was out of control. He was an explosion waiting to happen. I knew that for sure when he played Russian roulette at Finnegan’s. I should have demanded he get help. I should have gone to Ferraro and told him about it. I should have done something. But I didn’t. I did nothing.”
I shook my head.
“Except doing nothing is an act in itself, isn’t it? Inaction is a decision that has its own consequences. In this case, it resulted in a man being murdered. A terrible man. But it was still murder. No matter how hard I tried to rationalize everything over the years, I could never change that.
“But do you know what the worst thing was? It’s what I did after Joey Russo was dead. I didn’t tell the cops. I didn’t tell my editors at the Blade. I didn’t tell anybody. Again, I did nothing.
I kept it all bottled up inside me, my own horrible secret from the world that ate away at me bit by bit like a cancer.
“I thought I was saving my own life. That if people knew the truth, I’d lose everything that was important to me—my job, my reputation, maybe even my freedom. But I didn’t really save my life at all. I lost it. All I did was create my own private prison.
“You see, I didn’t like myself much anymore. Before Joey Russo, I always figured—deep down, no matter what happened—I was a pretty good person. But after that night I wasn’t sure. And I didn’t know how to live with that.
“And the thing I loved to do best—be a newspaper reporter—well, I couldn’t do that the same way anymore either. A newspaper reporter is supposed to uncover the truth and tell the public about it. That’s what I used to do. But now it was all a big lie. I mean, there I was uncovering other people’s truths, while at the same time I was hiding the biggest secret of all for so many years.
“Everything I’d done in my whole life, everything I’d worked so hard to achieve—first back in high school in Ohio, then at the newspapers in New Jersey and finally during those heady, exuberant early days at the Blade—everything was meaningless because of the one thing I didn’t do.”
“Lucy,” Mitch said softly, “I think the fact that you agonized with the guilt all these years means you really are a good person. A truly bad person wouldn’t have cared so much about another person’s death. Especially someone like Joey Russo. You do care. Passionately. It’s too late to change the past, but you can still do something about the future. In the end, you’re doing the right thing. You’re telling the truth. You’ve punished yourself over Joey Russo for twelve years. That’s enough. It’s time now to forgive yourself and move on.”
“Yeah, I’ve tried telling myself that, too, over the years,” I said.
“Maybe it’s the truth.”
“It’s a nice theory, but I’m still not sure it works.”
“Why not?”
“Because, in the end, Joey Russo is still dead.”
I tried to explain what it was like to Mitch.
“Sometimes, even now, I still think that I see Joey Russo,” I said. “I’ll be walking down the street and catch a glimpse of somebody that looks a bit like him. And for one fleeting instant, I imagine he’s still alive. Or at least some sort of evil spirit of him is. Taunting me, torturing me, making sure that I’ll never have a moment of peace because of what I did to him. But, of course, it’s never really Joey Russo. The real Joey Russo is somewhere at the bottom of the Hudson River.
