by R. G. Belsky
“How?”
“Like I told you before, my uncle is as much of a by-the-book cop as you’ll ever find. Once you confessed something like Joey Russo to him, he should have acted on it through the normal channels. But he didn’t tell anybody. And he was the one who made sure all the charges against you got dropped. He just wanted it all buried. There had to be a reason. He was trying to protect himself too.”
“Very clever.”
He shrugged. “It wasn’t that hard. I’m a trained investigator, remember?”
“So what happens next? Do you arrest me as an accomplice for murder? Maybe your uncle, too, for withholding evidence. Is that your plan, Mitch?”
“That’s not what I want.”
“What do you want?”
“Some answers.”
I stood up. I realized I was shaking now. I wasn’t sure if it was because I was angry or afraid. Maybe a bit of both.
“Let it be, Mitch,” I said. “It’s finished. That’s the way your uncle wants it. That’s the way I want it too. It’s not going to do anybody any good to start digging this stuff up again.”
“A man was murdered, Lucy. And you’ve been carrying the guilt of that night around with you for twelve years. I thought you said you wanted to finally break free of that.”
“Joey Russo killed thirteen people. If Russo didn’t die when he did, there would probably have been a lot more innocent victims. Everything worked out for the best in the end.”
“Is that you talking—or Jack Reagan?”
“Maybe Reagan was right.”
“Reagan was a lunatic.”
“He got rid of the real Loverboy, didn’t he?”
Caruso shook his head sadly.
“So that’s it, huh? Everything’s tied up in a nice, neat package. We just forget about what happened to Russo that night and move on. My uncle gets elected mayor. You become a famous reporter again. Everybody’s a winner—except Joey Russo. He’s not famous. He’s just dead.”
“I can live with that,” I said.
“Well, I can’t.”
He took out a file of papers from his pocket and laid them on the table.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“The ballistics report,” he said. “I got the results today.”
“You mean on the gun Fowler used to kill himself?”
“That’s part of it.”
“Is it the same gun that was used on all four of the new victims—Tischler, Vinas, Blaumstein and Kaffee?”
“Yes.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“There’s also a report on Russo’s gun.”
“The one you took out of my apartment?”
“Yeah. Everyone forgot about that in all the excitement. I mean, you and my uncle both had this secret little deal going, so he never pushed it. And those ballistics tests took a lot longer anyway, because some of the original case files were so old. But I finally got them. I guess I was simply curious. Policemen are that way sometimes. Just like reporters.”
I still didn’t get what it was he was telling me.
“Okay, so they matched too. The gun you found in my apartment was the same gun used to kill the first thirteen victims. I told you why it was there. Reagan took it from Russo, then gave it to me. I’ve just held onto it all these years. You knew that before. So what’s the big deal?”
“They don’t match.”
“What?”
“The ballistics tests say it’s not Loverboy’s gun.”
I guess I always knew deep down that I wasn’t going to be able to walk away from it like that.
I’d spent twelve years of my life carrying around the guilt of what I’d done that night in the car with Jack Reagan and Joey Russo. Nothing was ever the same for me after that. It had consumed me. It had nearly destroyed me.
Now I was finally going to have to face it.
Oh, I knew there were all sorts of other possible explanations why the gun didn’t match: Russo had two .44s; the ballistics report was wrong; the original-murder case files were old and confused.
But that wasn’t it.
I knew what had really happened even before Mitch Caruso uttered the words:
“Joey Russo wasn’t Loverboy,” he said. “You killed the wrong guy, Lucy.”
Part 7
I Love You to Death
Chapter 56
I thought it was over, but it wasn’t.
I’d been concentrating all along on the present, figuring that once I found the copycat Loverboy who killed Barry Tischler, Theresa Anne Vinas, Julie Blaumstein and Deborah Kaffee that would exorcise all my own demons from the past.
But I was wrong.
I still had to find the real Loverboy, the one who had murdered thirteen people more than a decade ago and changed my life in the process.
I didn’t know how I was going to do that.
So I did the only thing I could think of—I went back to the beginning.
I talked to them all. The surviving victims like Danny Girabaldi and Kathleen DiLeonardo. The still grieving family members like Jack Corrigan. Some of them were nice. Most were polite. A few got impatient because of all my questions.
I didn’t care.
I just kept going over everything with them, hoping to pull out a sliver of information that somehow might lead me to Loverboy.
By the time I was finished, I’d filled up several notebooks with information from the interviews. I spent hours poring over the stuff.
The most tantalizing of them all was Kathleen DiLeonardo, the Long Island woman shot in the shoulder. She’d been wounded the least seriously by Loverboy. She remembered the most about what had happened. And she’d even managed to catch a glimpse of him before he struck.
That last fact jumped out at me now from my notes as I talked to her again at her house on Long Island.
“You actually saw Loverboy?” I asked.
“Only for a second or two.”
“What do you remember?”
“Nothing really.”
She seemed uncomfortable talking about it.
“You know he was a man, right?”
“Yes.”
“Big? Small? Medium?”
“Pretty big.”
“Did he have light hair? Dark?”
“Kind of blond, I guess.”
This was the first time I’d heard about any of this.
“Did you tell that to the police?”
“Of course.”
“What did they say?”
“They were excited, just like you are now.”
“Did they try to get you to identify a suspect?”
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
“I never did.”
Okay, but somewhere inside her head she had a description of Loverboy. Maybe she could even identify him. I wondered why the police had never put this in any of the reports on the case.
It seemed too good to be true.
And, as it turned out, it was.
I showed her a picture of Joey Russo first.
“Do you recognize the face?” I asked.
“Yes.”
My heart skipped a beat.
“The police showed me the same picture a long time ago.”
“But he wasn’t Loverboy?”
“No.”
Next I took out pictures of the two other prime suspects in the case back in the early eighties. David Gruber and Albert Slocum. Neither of them had blond hair or were very big. But you never know.
“Same thing,” she said.
“The police showed their pictures to you twelve years ago, and you said neither one was the guy?”
“That’s right.”
I put the pictures away. I wasn’t ready to give up yet, though.
“The police have got some pretty sophisticated methods of identification these days,” I told her. “If you feed that to some of the crime-lab people, they could do a computer enhancement. Maybe we could come pretty clo
se to the face you saw.”
Kathleen DiLeonardo shook her head.
“Look, there’s some stuff you probably ought to know about me. I didn’t really get over the shooting as easily as I tell people. The truth is, it messed me up very badly.”
She shivered slightly. Not because it was cold. The sun was shining brightly, and it was eighty degrees outside.
We were sitting on the porch of her house, which overlooked Long Island Sound. On the horizon you could see lots of beautiful homes and green rolling lawns and sailboats bobbing on the water.
It was a nice life.
But Kathleen DiLeonardo was a long way away right now. She was back at Queens College on the night Loverboy had tried to kill her.
“I went to therapy for a long time,” she said. “I was afraid. I was so afraid.
“Every time I went out, I was convinced Loverboy was going to come back and finish the job. I couldn’t go to school. I couldn’t go out at night. I couldn’t even go to the store without practically having a goddamned nervous breakdown.
“I didn’t trust anybody. I thought my teacher at school wanted to kill me. My landlord. Even my therapists.
“One time—right after the shooting—I became convinced that one of the cops talking to me was really Loverboy. I got so hysterical I tried to jump out a window of the station house. That’s why the police never took my description seriously. Christ, I thought everybody was Loverboy.”
She started to cry softly now.
“I still have nightmares about that night. Not as often. They’re down to every few months or so now. I’m still scared. But I’m mad too. Mad at what he’s taken from me.
“When I read your story about Robert Fowler . . . well, I understand how Fowler felt. I don’t condone what he did. But, God help me, I understand. He tried to do something about his pain. He tried to make somebody pay for it.
“I wish I could make somebody pay for my pain too. I sometimes feel that I’d even kill somebody to do that. Just like Bobby Fowler. Do you understand what I’m saying, Miss Shannon?”
I understood, all right.
More than she realized.
Loverboy had changed all our lives—everyone he came in contact with along his bloody path. None of us had ever been able to go back to being the people we used to be before we met him.
Not Robert Fowler.
Not Kathleen DiLeonardo.
Not me either.
“Do you really think you can find out what happened to him?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“The police never did.”
“I will.”
“Why?”
“I have to.”
Chapter 57
That night I went to see Mitch Caruso again.
He’d been busy too investigating the case. And he seemed to have made much more progress than I did.
“I’ve got good news and bad news,” he said when I asked him about it in the squad room.
“That’s the oldest joke in the world, Mitch.”
“Which do you want first?”
“The bad.”
“Okay, but you’re gonna love the good stuff.”
He told me first how he’d gone back and checked out every one of the early murders, then cross-indexed them against whatever he could find out about Joey Russo’s movements during the same time period.
We could have done that ourselves twelve years ago, Jack Reagan and I. But we didn’t. Jack decided to be Dirty Harry instead. So we stopped being cop and reporter that night and became a lynch mob.
Now it was too late for the answers about Joey Russo to do much good.
But I still wanted to know.
“Russo definitely didn’t do three of the murders, and probably couldn’t have committed at least two of the others,” Mitch said. “The three definite noes have witnesses or documented proof that puts him somewhere else at the time of the crime.
“On the first one, the night Bobby Fowler and his girlfriend got it in upper Manhattan, Russo had just started a job as a busboy in a restaurant on West Fifty-Seventh Street. He didn’t last very long—he got fired a few days later. But he was there when the shooting happened, according to the manager’s old records.
“The second one he’s got an alibi for is a beaut. Russo picked up a street hooker near the Lincoln Tunnel, only it turned out to be a he instead of a she. Russo tried to get his money back, they got into a big fight and both got hauled in by a passing patrol car as part of a prostitution sweep. He spent the night in jail. It’s all in our own records.
“The third one is good too. Russo was in the Army. He enlisted at one point and got sent to Fort Knox, Kentucky, for basic training. That didn’t last much longer than any of his jobs. In fact, he got a dishonorable discharge a short time later. But he was at Fort Knox for morning roll call a few hours after one of the murders went down here. Fort Knox is six hundred and forty-two miles from New York City. I looked it up.
“On two of the others, we’re pretty sure Russo had an alibi. But the evidence is a little more vague. Witnesses’ memories fade over the years, records get lost, people die—that sort of thing.
“The bottom line is your guy Russo is innocent of at least three of the killings—and probably two more also.”
I nodded. “Which means he probably didn’t do any of them,” I said.
“We always figured that it was the same person who did all thirteen.”
“Me too.”
Okay, so I’d helped kill an innocent man. I’d been pretty sure of that ever since Caruso told me about the gun. But now there was no doubt.
What happened now?
Was I going to go to jail as an accomplice to murder?
And what about Commissioner Ferraro? He was guilty of withholding evidence in an outright murder case now, wasn’t he?
Jesus, what a mess.
“What’s the good news?” I asked finally.
“You didn’t kill Joey Russo.”
My head jerked up in surprise.
“What are you talking about?”
“You had nothing to do with it, Lucy.”
“Hey, I know I didn’t shoot him. But I was there. I could maybe have stopped Jack before he did it. Taken away his gun or—”
“Russo was already dead.”
I stared at Mitch. I still didn’t get it.
“I went to see Russo’s mother again,” he said. “I went through everything one more time with her. The man who came to the door to get her son. What he looked like. But I also asked something else—what time he came.”
“I already know what time it was,” I said impatiently. “Late. Between twelve and one.”
“Do you know what Mrs. Russo said?”
“I really don’t see the point of all this.”
“She said it was seven-thirty.”
“Well, she’s wrong. She’s an old lady.”
“She’s sure it was seven-thirty because Wheel of Fortune was starting. She always watches Wheel of Fortune. And it was just starting when Reagan knocked on the door.”
“Is she sure it was Reagan?”
“She described him to me the same way you did.”
He told me what Mrs. Russo had said about the way Reagan looked.
“Yeah, that was Jack,” I said.
“Don’t you see what this means, Lucy?”
“There’s a missing five hours between when Reagan met me and said we were going to pick up Russo—and when he really did it.”
“What does that tell you?”
“I—I’m not sure. . . .”
“Joey Russo was already dead.”
I suddenly realized what he was saying.
“Reagan picked him up at seven-thirty. I figure he tried to make him talk, then shot him out of frustration. When he called you from the bar, he was trying to figure out what to do with the body. You said yourself Russo seemed in pretty bad shape when Reagan threw him into the car. The truth was, he was already dead. That’s th
e only logical explanation. Your ex-lover—the fuckin’ great Jack Reagan—set you up.”
“Russo—Russo was dead?”
“There was nothing you could have done to save him.”
“All these years . . .”
I started to cry.
“I’ve been living with this for so long. I thought I killed a man, Mitch. I thought I took another man’s life. Do you have any idea what it feels like to carry around a guilty secret like that?”
“I—I can only imagine.”
Mitch put his arms around me.
“You’re free and clear now, Lucy. For the first time, you can just walk away from all this.”
“Free and clear,” I whispered.
“That’s right. You can start over again. You’ve got the whole world in front of you. We’ve got the whole world in front of us.”
I still couldn’t quite believe what he was telling me.
“But I’ve wasted so much time,” I said. “My whole life these past twelve years. The failed marriages. My problems at the Blade. The way I’ve managed to self-destruct everything good that’s ever happened to me by the age of thirty-six. All because of Loverboy. And now you’re telling me I never killed anybody after all.”
“I thought you’d be relieved to find that out.”
“I am.”
“But you’re mad too.”
“Yeah, I’m mad. I’m mad at Reagan, Russo—all of them. But mostly I’m mad at myself. How could I have been so stupid?”
“Your biggest mistake was keeping this bottled up inside you for so long,” he said. “Pitting yourself against the world. Sometimes there are people in this world who are on your side. You need to remember that.”
He hugged me tightly.
“Let it go,” he whispered in my ear. “Just walk away.”
Then he kissed me.
I kissed him back.
“It’s time to get on with your life, Lucy.”
Chapter 58
I’ve always been a lot better at the professional stuff in my life than the personal.
I mean, even when I was drinking I could jump out of bed at five in the morning, run to the scene of a plane crash and file twenty-five inches of copy before any other reporter in town.
I was never intimidated by big stories, big names, big assignments or big interviews; they were what I lived for.
