by R. G. Belsky
“Then there are the nightmares. I have a lot of them—they’ve gotten worse since I started covering the story again—but the dream I remember the most is the one with the electric chair. It’s like a scene from an old prison movie. The prisoner is strapped into an electric chair with a black hood over his face, and the warden is standing nearby, ready to turn on the current. I’m watching it all like a spectator. But then suddenly I’m a part of it. I walk up to the prisoner in the electric chair—the one condemned to die—and pull off the hood. The ending is always the same. It’s me I’m looking at in the chair.”
I shook my head sadly.
“Every day of my life for the past twelve years, I’ve been expecting someone to find out about me. Waiting for the knock on the door when the police come for me. When they take me off in handcuffs and charge me with Joey Russo’s murder and my nightmare comes true. Sometimes I even thought it would be a relief. But even that wasn’t my biggest fear. Do you know what my biggest fear was, Mitch?”
“What?”
“That it would never end.”
He nodded in understanding.
“I didn’t want to live with all the guilt anymore,” I told him. “But I didn’t know how to live without it.”
Mitch leaned over and took my hand. He squeezed it gently.
“And you never told anyone else about this during all that time?”
“No.”
“Not any of your ex-husbands, not your parents, not even a close friend?”
I shook my head. “Nobody.”
“Why not?”
“I guess I never knew anybody I trusted enough.”
“Until now,” he said.
I looked into his eyes. They were kind, gentle eyes. Just like him.
“Until now,” I repeated.
He helped me to stand up.
“Let’s go,” he said.
“Where?”
He looked over at the police building. “Back inside.”
“Am I under arrest again?”
“Someone wants to talk to you.”
Chapter 47
It had been a long time since I’d been face-to-face with Thomas Ferraro.
I’d seen him at press conferences and on TV and even during a political dinner or two. But we never spoke. I sure as hell didn’t want to talk to him, and he seemed to feel the same way. It was as if we both wanted to forget about the people we used to be back in the old days.
We’d both come a long way since then. Only we were moving in different directions.
Ferraro was an up-and-coming police lieutenant during the original Loverboy investigation, and I was a hotshot young reporter. Now he was the police commissioner. And me? Well, let’s just say I wasn’t a hotshot young reporter anymore.
Ferraro was sitting behind a big desk in his office, talking on the phone to a deputy commissioner about a future parade on Fifth Avenue. There were pictures of his wife and children in gold frames in front of him. Hanging on the wall were awards and plaques he’d won during his time on the force.
He hung up and looked across the desk at me.
“Long time no see, huh, Shannon?” he said.
“You’ve done really well for yourself,” I told him, glancing at the awards.
“Thanks.”
“Jack always said you were going to make commissioner someday.”
“How about you?” Ferraro asked. “How’s your life?”
“My life’s shit.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“That’s okay, Tommy. You have enough ambition for both of us.”
Ferraro shook his head sadly.
“Don’t you ever get tired of it, Lucy?”
“Tired of what?”
“Being such a know-it-all.”
“Hey, I don’t know everything.”
“You don’t know anything,” he said.
He and Caruso had talked before I came in. So he was already aware of everything I’d told Mitch about Joey Russo. I figured he must have been really surprised. Now I was waiting for the other shoe to drop.
But when it finally did, it turned out I was the one who was surprised.
“Can we talk off the record?” he said. “Just you and me.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t ever want to read any of what I’m about to tell you in the newspaper.”
“What’s in it for me?”
“We’ve both got a lot to lose here, Shannon.”
I wasn’t sure what he was talking about, but I had a feeling he was right.
“Okay. Off the record.”
“I don’t even want you talking to Mitch about what I’m going to tell you. Is that clear?”
“Okay.”
“I’ve got your word on that?”
“Yes.”
Ferraro took a deep breath.
“I knew about it,” he said.
“You knew about Joey Russo?”
“Yeah.”
“How long?”
“I figured it out about six months later. When they started to disband the task force.”
I couldn’t believe this. “How?”
“I kept wondering why Loverboy had stopped killing. The only explanation was, he was dead. But how? I started going back over everything again and that led me to Russo’s mother. She told me about the man who came to the door that last night. ‘I’ve got to go with the man,’ Russo had told her. I thought about that for a long time, and then it dawned on me. ‘The man’ is street lingo for someone in authority. Like a cop.”
“Jack Reagan.”
“I went back with a picture of Reagan and showed it to her. She definitely ID’d him as the one her son had left with. So I confronted Reagan with what I knew. I even said we’d found Russo’s body with bullet wounds from his gun. It wasn’t true, but he didn’t know that. I told him we were going to bring him up on a whole slew of charges, so he better come clean. He confessed everything. Not long after that, he killed himself.”
I swallowed hard. “I always thought Jack killed himself over me.”
“Maybe that was part of it too.”
“How come none of this ever came out before?”
There was a pained expression on Ferraro’s face.
And all of a sudden I realized I was wrong about him.
He wasn’t out to get me at all. He didn’t want me to go to jail. He just wanted the Loverboy case to go away.
Ferraro hated dragging up the past as much as I did. We both had plenty of secrets to hide. The difference was, he was running for mayor. The stakes for him were much higher.
And now here I was again, sitting in his office, telling him about a murder he didn’t want to hear about.
“That’s why you pushed to get the charges against me dropped so quickly, isn’t it?” I said.
He nodded.
“Because if my story came out, then yours might too.”
“Jack Reagan was my partner on the Loverboy task force. We were supposed to be working hand in hand. If people find out he murdered Loverboy—and that I knew about it, but did nothing—I will not be elected mayor. I won’t be police commissioner anymore. I don’t want that to happen.”
“You could have gone to Internal Affairs twelve years ago with what you had,” I said. “Why didn’t you?”
“I would have been committing career suicide. You know all about the police code of silence. Cops don’t like cops who squeal on other cops.”
“Yeah, the Serpicos of the world don’t become commissioner, do they?”
“There are lots of other people out there besides cops who probably would say Jack Reagan did the right thing. Reagan meted out old-fashioned justice. An eye for an eye. No lawyers. No appeals. No mercy. And the killings stopped as soon as Russo was dead. Hard to argue with that kind of logic, isn’t it? The thing we all have to decide is how far we’re willing to go to maintain law and order in our society. Are we ever justified in breaking the law to maintain the law? If we f
ight monsters like a monster, do we not become monsters ourselves?”
“That’s pretty philosophical stuff for a cop,” I said.
“I’ve had a lot of time to think about it.”
“And worry about it messing up your political future.”
He didn’t say anything.
“So what do we do now?” I asked.
“Well, we never had Russo’s gun. Now we do, so we’ll run a ballistics check on it with the earlier murders. But I know how it’s going to come out. They’ll be a match. Which means Russo was Loverboy. Loverboy is dead. And someone else is doing all these latest killings.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
Damn.
I didn’t have many suspects left.
Ferraro was out of the picture now—he had plenty of secrets, but they were mostly like mine.
Russo was long dead.
There was still Micki, of course. Sooner or later, the cops would track her down. But I didn’t really think she’d turn out to be the murderer. Or Michael Anson either.
“We’ve got to forget about the old Loverboy,” Ferraro said. “This is somebody new. This is happening now.”
“There still has to be some sort of connection,” I insisted.
“Like what?”
“I’m not sure.”
He shook his head. “I don’t even know where to start looking.”
I did.
Back at the beginning.
Part 6
The Long Good-Bye
Chapter 48
The same doorman was on duty at Emily Tischler’s apartment house.
He was wearing the same get-up as before too. Black doorman jacket and pants. White braids hanging from the shoulders. White gloves. And a white hat with a black peak.
The doorman said Mrs. Tischler wasn’t seeing anybody. He said she was still in mourning for her husband. He said he didn’t think it was right to intrude on her grief by telling her I was there. He said he was sure I understood.
I didn’t understand.
I wanted some answers.
“Does that help you pick up girls?” I asked him.
“What are you talking about?”
“Women just love a guy in uniform,” I told him.
“Fuck you,” he said.
I smiled. Now we were getting down to it.
It was childish to pick a fight with him. I knew that. But it made me feel better.
“Tell Mrs. Tischler I’m going up to see her,” I said. “Tell her I have some questions to ask about her husband’s murder. Tell her if she doesn’t feel like answering them for me, I’ll bring the police with me next time. Tell her that, will you?”
A few minutes later, Emily Tischler opened the door for me.
She had on a simple black dress and her eyes were red, as if she’d been crying a lot. The perfect widow. I wondered if the grief was for real or if it was just a look she’d gotten out of a catalog, like the Town & Country outfit she’d worn last time, or the modern furniture in the apartment.
“I know you mean well, Miss Shannon,” she said, “but I’m really not ready for visitors right now.”
“I’m not a visitor.”
“Why are you here?”
“I want to find your husband’s killer.”
We went inside and sat in the same seats as last time.
“It wasn’t Loverboy who murdered your husband, Mrs. Tischler,” I said.
“But the police told me they thought it was.”
“The police were wrong.”
“Who else would want to kill him?”
“Maybe you.”
She was shocked.
“I loved Barry. He was a wonderful man.”
“Barry was a shit.”
It was like I had slapped her across the face. Her lip began to tremble and her eyes teared up.
“Your husband liked young girls,” I said. “You knew that. So maybe you followed Barry to the bar, tracked him and the Vinas girl to their parking spot and then—pow, pow, pow!”
It could have happened that way.
Then, because she realized she would be an obvious suspect, Emily Tischler went out and committed two unrelated murders to throw us all off the track by making it look like Loverboy did it. A sly one, that Emily Tischler. I had her now, though. She was going to confess to me, and then . . .
But even as I thought this, I realized how ludicrous it was.
“Do you really think I could do something like that?” she asked.
“No.” I sighed. “Probably not.”
She relaxed a bit.
“Look, do you have ideas about anyone else who might have wanted your husband dead, Mrs. Tischler?” I asked.
She thought about it for a second.
“Maybe a business associate?” she suggested.
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“This was too emotional a killing.”
“What about about one of the other . . . ?”
She hesitated. It was difficult for her to say.
“The other women in Barry’s life,” she finally managed.
“Possibly.”
I could go through Barry’s little black book. Talk to all the women listed in there. Maybe one of them knew something. Maybe one of them did it. Maybe that was where the answers were.
Maybe.
But I still had a feeling I was missing something important.
“How about Barry’s family?” I asked.
“What about them?”
“Any skeletons there?”
“Barry’s father is head of Tischler’s Department Store. He’s very wealthy. Barry always got everything he wanted. He was certainly born with a silver spoon in his mouth.”
“And your family?”
“My parents run a small drugstore in the Bronx—Carpenter’s Pharmacy.”
“So you weren’t born with a silver spoon in your mouth?”
She smiled.
“Actually, I’m adopted.”
“Really.”
I found that interesting. Not because of anything to do with the case, but because I’d done a series about adoptions for the Blade a while back. One thing I learned was how many adopted children become obsessed in later years with finding their birth parents. When they did, it often worked out badly. I told that to Emily Tischler.
“Did you ever try to contact your real parents?” I asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“My mother died when I was very young. That made my father put me up for adoption. I don’t remember very much about them.”
“But aren’t you curious?”
“The Carpenters are really the only parents I ever had,” she said.
She shook her head sadly.
“I just realized something. I started out life as Emily Malandro, became Emily Carpenter and then Emily Tischler. Three name changes already. Not bad, huh? Of course, now that I’m a widow, I’ll have to decide which name to use again.”
I wasn’t sure what else to say, so I thanked her for her time, wished her well and said I’d get back to her if I found out anything about her husband’s death.
Maybe I’d have better luck with the families of the other three victims.
Chapter 49
I tracked down Julie Blaumstein’s parents by using a nationwide phone directory we have at the Blade.
You just stick a CD-ROM disc into a computer, punch in the name and area you’re looking for, and the program gives you a list of possible matches. Then you can narrow it down even further with more specifics. Victor and Helen Blaumstein lived in Silver Lake, Wisconsin. No problem at all.
After that, though, came the hard part.
“Mrs. Blaumstein, my name is Lucy Shannon and I’m a reporter with the New York Blade,” I said. “I’d like to talk to you about your daughter—”
She hung up.
I called right back. This is a point of professional prid
e with me. How many broken connections I can handle and still come away with a story. I once knew a reporter who made it up to fourteen. My personal high is nine. Of course, sometimes the person on the other end takes the receiver off the hook. And eventually you reach the point of diminishing returns, where they get so mad at you they wouldn’t give you the story if you were the last reporter on earth.
Helen Blaumstein talked to me after the fourth time I called.
“Please stop calling,” she begged. She was crying. “My daughter is dead. Someone did horrible, unspeakable things to her. My little baby. And now you want to sensationalize it so you can sell newspapers.”
“I’m not sensationalizing anything,” I said.
“Then what do you want?”
“I’m trying to catch the person who did it.”
That was the right thing to say.
“What’s your name again?” she asked.
“Lucy Shannon.”
“I read about you in People. You’re the one who’s been covering the case for so long.”
“It looks now like your daughter’s death is not directly related to the earlier murders. So I’m trying to find something about Julie’s life that might help me. A reason the killer did what he did to her and the other victims.”
“Are you making much progress so far?”
“Absolutely.”
Actually, I didn’t have a clue.
“Well, I’ll do anything I can to help, Miss Shannon.”
She told me all about her daughter. How Julie got the job at the public relations firm. Her move into the new apartment. Even her trying to meet someone through the dating service because she said she was lonely in the big city.
“Julie was always very popular,” Mrs. Blaumstein told me. “She never had any trouble meeting boys here. I warned her not to do this dating service. I said it sounded dangerous. But she told me I was just old-fashioned. She said she’d be fine—and that I was wrong to worry.”
Mrs. Blaumstein started to cry again. “It’s terrible to be right about something like that.”
