Loverboy

by R. G. Belsky

  My trouble came whenever I tried to do the little things that everyone else in the world seemed to do so effortlessly.

  Like find the right guy.

  Or get married.

  Or stay married to the same person for more than twelve seconds.

  I didn’t want to mess it up this time.

  “I haven’t done this in a long time,” I told Mitch as we lay in bed, exploring each other’s bodies in that awkward but exciting way two people do when they’re together for the first time.

  “Me either.”

  “Really? I figured you for a real ladies’ man.”

  “I’m very picky.”

  He leaned over and kissed me.

  “Are we going to make love now?” I asked.

  “I certainly hope so.”

  And then we did.

  Afterward, we lay in bed for a long time, talking about our lives. He wanted to know about my three ex-husbands.

  “Were any of them like me?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “How were they different?”

  “Wow, this is like a police interrogation.”

  “Just the facts, ma’am.”

  “Okay, none of them did Jack Webb imitations.” I smiled, snuggling closer to him.

  “Did you love them?”

  I shrugged. “Sort of.”

  “Sort of? That doesn’t seem like the recipe for a happy marriage.”

  “I was lonely. I needed someone. They were there.”

  “You should have waited for the right guy.”

  “I did,” I said, kissing him. “I just got married a few times along the way.”

  “How did they handle your drinking?” he asked.

  “Badly. Most of the time they’d start out acting as if it didn’t bother them. But after a while they’d try to use tough love on me. You know—‘Either you deal with your problem or I’m outta here’—that sort of stuff. It didn’t matter.”

  “Is that what’s going to happen with us?” Mitch asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “This is different.”

  “You mean I’m different from all those other guys?”

  “I’m different,” I told him.

  I smiled.

  “Don’t you see?” I said. “I’m finally free of Joey Russo and Jack Reagan and everything bad that happened back then. I proved to myself I can be a real reporter again—the kind I used to be. And now I know that I can fall in love too.” I kissed him gently on the lips. “I’ve got my life back, Mitch.”

  Later, while he slept, I thought about how different Mitch Caruso was from Jack Reagan and all the other men I’d ever been with.

  For the first time, I could see being content and happy with someone—whether or not I kept working at the Blade or stayed on the police beat or ever touched another drop of alcohol.

  I was ready to say good-bye to the old Lucy.

  Lying there in the dark, listening to Mitch breathing softly next to me, I suddenly realized I didn’t even care anymore about finding Loverboy.

  Whatever had happened to the real Loverboy was a long time ago.

  Like Mitch said, it was time to get on with my life.

  I was thirty-six years old. Plenty of time yet to have a successful marriage, have kids, buy a house in the country and live happily ever after.

  I reached over and hugged Mitch, burying my head in his chest as I thought again about how incredibly different it was being with him instead of with someone like Jack Reagan.

  There was just no comparison.

  Mitch was gentle, Reagan was violent.

  Mitch was funny, Reagan was angry.

  They didn’t even look alike—Mitch had a medium-sized build with shaggy brown hair and a mustache, while Reagan was big with blond hair.

  Yep, Mitch and Jack were as different as two people could be. Thank God for that.

  I was just drifting off to sleep when the thought hit me. At first, I believed I was dreaming. That when I woke up, I’d realize how silly it seemed. But I didn’t. I couldn’t get it out of my mind.

  I kept thinking about something Kathleen DiLeonardo had said to me earlier that day.

  “One time—right after the shooting—I became convinced that one of the cops talking to me was really Loverboy,” she had told me. “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.”

  Jack Reagan was big.

  And he had blond hair.

  Just like Loverboy.

  Chapter 59

  Okay, it was a crazy idea.

  In fact, it was so crazy I didn’t tell anybody what I was doing at first. Not Barlow. Not Janet. Not even Mitch.

  Maybe I’d been covering the Loverboy case for so long that I’d totally lost my mind.

  Maybe.

  But the more I dug into Jack Reagan’s past, the more I began to think that I really might be onto something big.

  The fact is Jack fit the pattern of a certain kind of serial killer perfectly. I remembered something Mitch had said about it earlier in one of the stories I did: “Loverboy doesn’t have to be a bogeyman—he could be a very charming fellow.”

  It was true too.

  We all think of serial killers as lonely misfits who look crazy or live at home with their mother, like Joey Russo. But some of them turn out to be upstanding citizens with regular jobs who give no indication to the people around them of anything wrong. They say Jack the Ripper was probably a prominent London doctor or even a member of the royal family. Ted Bundy was a smooth-talking Romeo. Even Son of Sam had a regular job—he worked for the post office.

  Another characteristic of serial killers is that they’re like arsonists—they like to see the results of their work. People who set fires are frequently found in the crowd outside watching a building burn. Serial killers show up at crime scenes and funerals, and sometimes even make friends with cops because it increases the thrill. What better way to do that than being a cop yourself and assigned to the task force investigating the case? Jack Reagan would have been in on every break, every lead, every detail about what the cops were thinking and doing. If he was the killer, he must have loved it.

  Lots of other stuff about him fit the pattern too. He was volatile, violent, angry and dangerous—especially when he was drinking.

  I also realized I didn’t know much about Jack’s past. He had never talked about it.

  In fact, the remark he’d let slip one day about having a wife was the only indication I ever had that he’d had any life at all before he met me.

  According to the police records, he joined the police force in 1969, after being discharged from the Army. He’d served two tours in Vietnam, winning the Bronze Star for bravery. Before that, he’d graduated with honors from high school in Clayton, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis.

  There were a number of Reagans in the St. Louis phone book, but I kept calling, asking everyone if he was related to the Jack Reagan who graduated from high school back then and went on to serve in Vietnam. I finally hit one of the right ones. His name was James Reagan and he was a certified public accountant. He said he was Jack’s brother.

  I asked him a whole bunch of questions about Jack, his childhood and his family in Clayton. I wasn’t really sure what I was looking for. I was just curious.

  “Jack could have gone to college and avoided the draft,” James Reagan said. “He had good grades and a couple of schools offered him scholarships. But he wanted to do the right thing. He thought he should do his part for his country first. That’s the kind of person Jack was. A real stand-up guy. You know what I mean?”

  That didn’t sound much like the Jack Reagan I knew, but I guess people change over the years.

  “How did you know Jack, Miss Shannon?” he asked.

  “I was a friend of his.”

  “A friend?”

  “Well, more than
a friend. I went out with him for a while.”

  “You mean in high school?”

  “No.” I laughed. “We were both a long way past high school when we met.”

  He seemed confused.

  There was something very wrong here, but I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what it was.

  “Are you from Missouri?”

  “No. I live in New York City.”

  “So how did you meet Jack?”

  “Here in New York.”

  “Jack never was in New York.”

  I didn’t understand what he was talking about.

  “Of course he was.”

  “No, he talked about visiting there someday, but that was before—”

  “Mr. Reagan, your brother was a police officer in New York City for fifteen years. I worked with him. I dated him. I talked to him just before he killed himself here twelve years ago.”

  There was a long pause at the other end.

  “Miss Shannon, my brother died more than twenty-five years ago in Missouri.”

  “Twenty-five years?”

  “Yes. He was killed in a mugging in 1969.”

  Nineteen sixty-nine. The same year my Jack Reagan joined the police force in New York City.

  “Did they ever catch the person who did it?” I heard myself ask.

  “No. It’s still unsolved.”

  James Reagan had a fax machine for his accounting business. I told him I was going to send him a picture of someone. I asked him to tell me if it was his brother. He asked me what was going on. I told him what I could. He said he’d call me back.

  Twenty minutes later, the phone rang.

  “His name is Martin Chambers,” he told me.

  “Who’s that?”

  “He knew my brother.”

  “They were friends?”

  “I wouldn’t call them friends. Chambers was kind of a troublemaker, as I recall—a big drinker who got in some scrapes with the law. He was in the same high school as me but a year or two younger. He and Jack might have been in the same class. It’s been a long time and he looks much older in that picture—I had to check an old yearbook to make sure. But that’s him, all right.”

  “Have you seen Martin Chambers since high school?”

  “No.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He left town, I guess.”

  And moved to New York City, where he started calling himself Jack Reagan.

  The Clayton Police Department’s records from twenty-five-plus years ago were filed in a basement, and it took quite a while to find them. A young cop named Morelli finally came up with what I wanted. Jack Reagan’s file. It was pretty much like James Reagan had told me. An unsolved murder case.

  A thought suddenly popped into my head.

  “Did you have any other unsolved murders back then?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, a series of killings that might have been related to each other—say against young women or something like that.”

  Morelli sighed. “You know, I should charge you for my time. You’re really busting my balls.”

  “It could be important,” I said.

  Morelli said he’d check. He came back on the line a short time later. He’d obviously talked to someone who remembered what had been happening in Clayton in the late ’60s. He was much more interested in me now.

  “There were five unsolved killings of young women, aged eighteen to twenty-four, which began in the summer of 1968 and continued through 1969,” he said. “The homicide detectives suspected at the time that they could be related. But they didn’t have any real proof. And they were afraid of starting a panic.”

  “What happened after that?”

  “The killings stopped.”

  “In 1969?”

  “Yes.”

  “And no one was ever caught?”

  “That’s right.”

  The local records on file at the Clayton City Hall showed that Martin Chambers had married a woman named Rita Vlosek in 1968. There was only one Vlosek in the phone book. It turned out to be her mother.

  “I’m calling about your daughter,” I said.

  “Rita?”

  “Yes. I need to find her. Can you tell me where she lives now?”

  I guess I knew what the answer was going to be even before Mrs. Vlosek said it.

  “Rita’s dead. She’s been dead for a long time.”

  “How did she die?” I asked.

  “She was murdered.”

  I asked her for the details.

  “It happened on Halloween. There was a lot of violence and property damage that night, with gangs running around the city causing trouble. Rita . . . Rita’s clothes were ripped half off.” Her voice broke. This wasn’t easy for her, reliving her daughter’s death again. I felt bad about that, but there was no other way. “The police think Rita maybe encountered one of the gangs. She fought back when they tried to attack her and . . . and they killed her.”

  “Did the police ever catch anybody, Mrs. Vlosek?”

  “No.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “Nineteen eighty-five.”

  Jesus, the same year that Jack Reagan died.

  What the hell was going on here?

  A few hours later, I was sitting with Kathleen DiLeonardo again on Long Island. I showed her a picture of Jack Reagan. Her eyes opened wide with astonishment—and a bit of fear too—when she saw it.

  “That’s him,” she said.

  “The man who shot you?”

  “Well, at the time I thought he was, but . . .”

  “You decided you were wrong.”

  “He was one of the police officers handling the case. I must have gotten confused. I was going through so much turmoil then.”

  “You were right.”

  “You mean he . . .”

  “I think he was Loverboy.”

  She looked at the picture of Martin Chambers/Jack Reagan again.

  “Where is he now?”

  “He’s dead.”

  Kathleen DiLeonardo shook her head in confusion.

  “They told me I was crazy.”

  “Maybe we all were,” I said.

  Chapter 60

  “Jack Reagan—or to be more accurate, Martin Chambers—was Loverboy,” I told Police Commissioner Thomas Ferraro.

  “Do you realize what you’re saying?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I think so. This despicable mass killer was actually one of the lead homicide detectives in charge of the case. Your partner. My lover. Which makes us both look like real horses’ asses.”

  We were sitting in Ferraro’s office. The pictures of his family were still in front of him on the desk. His awards and plaques were still hanging on the wall. But all the trappings of power had a hollow ring to them now. Sure, he had a big office, a loving family, a good life—a lot of stuff I didn’t.

  But he still had to face the demons of his past just like I did.

  “You don’t have definite proof, do you?” Ferraro asked.

  “No.”

  “Everything you’ve told me is pretty much circumstantial.”

  “Circumstantial,” I agreed.

  “And since Reagan’s dead, we’ll probably never know for sure.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But you’re sure, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. Mitch is sure now too.”

  Ferraro looked at his nephew, who was sitting next to me.

  “I went back and checked Jack Reagan’s personnel file,” Mitch said. “I wondered how a cop with a record like his—he’d been cited a lot of times for drinking on duty and other infractions—wound up with such a prestigious job on the Loverboy task force. Do you know why?”

  “He was assigned to me,” Ferraro said. “I figured it was the luck of the draw.”

  Mitch shook his head.

  “It was more than luck. Reagan showed up at the scene of one of the early murders. He said he was drinking at a b
ar nearby, heard about it on a police radio and came over to see if he could help. Same thing happened on the next murder.

  “No one thought much about it. They were just routine murder cases. And he was a cop. Everyone was glad to get his help.

  “Later on, it was Reagan who put it all together and came up with the idea that a serial killer might be doing the murders. The brass thought it was great police work. They even put a letter of commendation in his file.

  “Then he volunteered to be on the task force that was being assembled to catch the madman. Why not? He was already investigating the murders. He knew more about the case than anyone. So they assigned him as your partner.

  “Think about it. He’d murder someone, then show up afterward with the cops at the scene. He knew everything the department was doing. Every lead we were following. Even what we were thinking. Then he starts dating the reporter covering the case. He helps her come up with the name Loverboy. He starts sending her notes from the killer. Christ, he must have been laughing at us the whole time.

  “It was the perfect cover. The entire police force was looking everywhere in the city for Loverboy. And he was right there beside us.

  “Even when something went wrong—like the time he missed killing the DiLeonardo woman and she caught a glimpse of him—it didn’t matter. Everyone thought she was confused. Who was going to believe that the shooter just hung around the police station afterward to question the victim? Hell, Kathleen DiLeonardo herself thought she was crazy.”

  Ferraro sat there in shock.

  “Why would he do it?” he asked. “Why kill all those innocent people?”

  “Who knows?”

  “There has to be a reason.”

  Mitch shrugged. “Martin Chambers’s father was a drunk who disappeared when he was about six. His mother was an alcoholic too. People who knew them back in Missouri say she alternated between smothering the kid with love and physically abusing him because he reminded her of her husband. There may have been some sexual abuse too. We can speculate on that being the reason for Chambers/Reagan turning out the way he did. But I don’t think it’s that easy. There are plenty of other child-abuse victims and children of alcoholics who don’t become serial killers.”

  “But how could someone like that ever get on the police force?” Ferraro asked.