Loverboy

by R. G. Belsky

  “It was the late sixties,” Mitch said. “The Vietnam War was still on, and there was a big push for recruits. I suppose the standards weren’t as high as they are now. And don’t forget—it wasn’t Martin Chambers’s record they were looking at. It was Jack Reagan’s. A straight-A student. Model citizen. Nothing for anybody to question there.”

  “Martin Chambers knew his résumé would never work,” I added. “So he decided to become Jack Reagan. Only he had to make sure Reagan wasn’t alive to mess anything up.”

  “And you think he was connected to the real Jack Reagan’s death?” Ferraro asked.

  “I think he murdered him to assume his identity,” I said.

  “That’s unbelievable.”

  I told Ferraro about the string of other unsolved murders in Missouri that ended when Martin Chambers left town.

  “The man we knew as Jack Reagan probably killed a lot more people than we even know,” I said.

  Ferraro shook his head. He gazed across the desk at me.

  Then he asked the big one.

  The $64,000 question.

  “What are you going to do now?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “If you print this story, it could destroy my political career,” he said.

  I nodded. “That’s a possibility.”

  “I’ll become a laughingstock. A nationwide joke. The bumbling policeman who didn’t even know that the worst serial killer of all time was right there beside him.”

  “It’s not going to do much for my reputation either,” I said. “I can see the headlines now: ‘Bimbo Reporter Slept with Modern-Day Jack the Ripper.’ This is going to set women in journalism back about a million years.”

  “They’ll probably make a TV-movie about you guys,” Mitch said.

  “Yeah,” I told him. “They can call it Dumb and Dumber.”

  “Who else knows about this?” Ferraro asked me.

  “No one.”

  “So we could bury it here right now, then, couldn’t we?”

  “That thought did occur to me.”

  “And no one would ever find out.”

  It was a nice dream.

  I’d thought about it all night before I came to see him, tossing and turning as I wondered if I could live out the rest of my life carrying this deep, dark secret around inside me.

  I knew my answer.

  So did Ferraro.

  We’d both held onto too many secrets for too long.

  “I think it’s time we finally told the truth,” I said.

  Chapter 61

  LOVERBOY WAS A COP!

  Authorities Probe Dead Detective’s Mysterious Past

  Exclusive

  by Lucy Shannon

  New evidence has revealed that the infamous Loverboy may really have been a homicide detective investigating the murders.

  The shocking new twist to the most sensational crime case in New York City history came just days after copycat Loverboy killer Robert Fowler shot himself to death in the New York Blade offices.

  Now the original Loverboy—who killed 13 people and wounded 8 others between 1978 and 1984—is believed to have been Police Detective Jack Reagan, a 15-year veteran and a key member of the Loverboy task force.

  Reagan committed suicide in 1985.

  A joint investigation by the commissioner’s office and the Blade has also discovered:

  Reagan’s real name was Martin Chambers.

  He is believed to have carried out a series of other unsolved murders in his hometown of Clayton, Mo.

  One of his victims was named Jack Reagan, the man whose identity he assumed.

  “It appears that this individual we knew as Jack Reagan did indeed commit the so-called Loverboy murders,” Police Commissioner Ferraro said in an interview with the Blade.

  “He also was my partner on the Loverboy task force and even coined the name Loverboy.

  “These facts are as astonishing to me as they must be to everyone else out there. As to why no one ever suspected anything before, I have no answer to that.

  “The only good thing I can tell you is that these revelations mean the Loverboy case—after nearly two decades of questions and uncertainty—appears finally to be over.”

  The article told everything—I didn’t hold any of it back. It went on for nearly one hundred inches of copy. There were sidebars on my personal involvement with Reagan, on the impact of these disclosures on Ferraro’s political future, and on an in-depth look at Reagan’s mysterious past as Martin Chambers.

  And so I was front-page news once again.

  But if I was worried about being ostracized by my media counterparts for what I’d done, I needn’t have been.

  They didn’t seem to care if I’d broken the rules. I’d covered a mass killer, I’d slept with a mass killer and now I’d broken the true story about the mass killer. They loved me. I was like Michael Jackson or Madonna or Amy Fisher.

  Everyone wanted to talk to me about it. Inside Edition and Hard Copy. Geraldo. Larry King Live. Michael Anson was back on the phone, pleading with me to be part of her movie. Book publishers said my story would be a best-seller.

  I didn’t accept any of the offers, though.

  I told the story only once, in the pages of the New York Blade, where it belonged. It was all I had the energy for right now. I wasn’t looking to cash in on this or become famous or win a Pulitzer. I just wanted to get on with my life.

  That night I went to Headlines.

  There was a huge cheer when I walked in. Everyone was there, sitting at one of the big tables. Janet. Barlow. Brian Tully. Karen Wolfe. Norm Malloy. Even Victoria Crawford this time. They were celebrating the Blade’s big scoop on the story.

  “Here she is—Lucy Shannon, reporter extraordinaire,” Janet said, holding her glass up to toast my entrance.

  “Speech, speech,” Tully shouted.

  “Drinks, drinks,” someone else yelled.

  “I don’t drink anymore, remember?” I told them.

  “No, we just want you to buy drinks for us,” Karen said.

  “That I can still do.”

  I smiled, ordered a round for everyone and a bottled water for myself, then sat down at the table with them.

  “I haven’t seen you here in a long time, Vicki,” I said to her.

  “Yeah, I think the last time was the Christmas party.”

  “Right.”

  I’d rather she hadn’t brought that up.

  “That was when you compared me to the Mayflower Madam and Heidi Fleiss, as I recall.”

  A waiter brought our drinks. I took a sip of the water.

  “I’m sorry about that,” I told her. “I was . . . I was drunk.”

  She shrugged. “No big deal.”

  “I did a lot of dumb things when I was drunk, Vicki.”

  “Hell, you were probably right,” she said.

  Damn.

  I hated it when I was wrong about people I loved to hate, like Ferraro and Vicki Crawford. Maybe people can change for the better. Or maybe I never really gave them a chance in the first place.

  “Have you seen the Wall of Fame?” Malloy asked.

  “Only about a million times.”

  “No, I mean tonight.”

  I looked up at the pictures on the wall. They were all there. Fullerton. Slotnick. Morrison. The legends of the history of the New York Blade. But this time there was another picture. Mine.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said.

  “We voted to include you earlier today, after the edition came out,” Malloy told me.

  “Who did?” I asked.

  “It was unanimous.”

  Everyone around the table nodded.

  “Why me?”

  “For actions above and beyond the call of duty.” Janet smiled at me.

  “You mean Loverboy?”

  “It was an extraordinary story,” Vicki said.

  We stayed there into the early-morning hours, laughing and telling newspaper stories. It was a great nig
ht. I didn’t even miss drinking. I was on too much of a natural high.

  At some point I asked Vicki about her impending divorce from Ronald Mackell.

  “I think I’ll be able to keep control of the Blade,” she said. “I’ll have to give up a lot of other things in the settlement, but that’s okay. Circulation and profits are really up from the Loverboy stuff—that helps my case. Shows that I’m not just a rich man’s bimbo.”

  “That’s really important to you, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, it is. So is the Blade. I really care about this newspaper. I like being the editor.”

  “And if . . .”

  “If I don’t keep control of the paper? Then Ron takes over again, and I’m out on my ass.”

  “What would you do then?”

  “Probably get a job as a reporter somewhere.”

  She saw the look on my face.

  “Don’t look so surprised. I used to be a pretty good reporter.”

  “I remember.”

  “Hell, there are worse things a person can do with their life.”

  “But not too many better,” I said.

  She finished off her drink and called for a check. It was getting time for her to leave. Me too.

  “I’ve got no regrets about any of it, Lucy,” she said. “Ron was a real son of a bitch. But he gave me a nice life and bought me expensive things and handed me this opportunity of a lifetime at the Blade. Okay, he cheated on me. But a lot of husbands do.”

  “Did you love him?”

  “I thought I did. At first. But once I got to know him . . . well, let’s just say he was a very cruel man.”

  I stared at her. “You mean he hit you?”

  Vicki shook her head. “He was cruel in other ways.”

  I suddenly thought about Jack Reagan. I remembered the time he had thrown me against the wall of my apartment.

  What about his wife? Had he been cruel to her when they were married? Had he ever hit her? Had he gone back to his hometown of Clayton, Missouri—years after he’d changed himself from Martin Chambers to Jack Reagan—and murdered her in one final fit of anger?

  Why?

  Why, after all that time?

  And what kind of torment and pain had Rita Vlosek endured at his hands before she died a horrible death that Halloween night in 1985?

  That was when it suddenly hit me.

  The answer.

  The answer to what I’d been missing all along in the Loverboy story.

  And it scared the hell out of me.

  Chapter 62

  Mitch Caruso wanted to make love.

  We were in bed at my place. He was kissing me very tenderly, but I was having trouble concentrating on the moment. I kept thinking about something else. Something even more important than sex.

  “Rita Vlosek died on Halloween night in 1985,” I told him.

  “Okay.”

  “We figure Reagan went back to Missouri fifteen years later or whatever and for some reason murdered his ex-wife.”

  “That’s right.”

  He nuzzled his lips gently against my neck.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Why what?”

  “Why kill her after all that time?”

  “Do we really have to talk about this now?”

  “Yes.”

  Mitch sighed and sat up straight in bed.

  “Okay, maybe the Vlosek woman had something on him. She knew the secret of his past as Martin Chambers. Maybe she somehow stumbled onto his new identity and threatened to expose him, and he decided to shut her up for good.”

  “That makes sense.”

  “Good.” Mitch smiled. “Let’s have sex.”

  “Except for one thing.”

  “What?”

  “Rita Vlosek died on Halloween night, 1985.”

  “Yeah, you just said that.”

  “Jack Reagan committed suicide in early October of 1985.”

  Mitch suddenly realized what I was telling him.

  “Then Reagan didn’t murder her. He couldn’t have—he was already dead. Someone else did it. We were wrong.”

  “That’s one possibility.”

  I sat up in bed and pulled the sheet around me. It was still summer and it was hot outside, but I was shivering. Maybe it was the air-conditioning in my apartment. Or maybe I wasn’t cold at all. Maybe I was just scared.

  “Why did you get a search warrant to go through my apartment?” I asked him.

  “Jeez, you’re not going to bring that up again!”

  “There must have been a reason.”

  “Lucy, I told you I was sorry.”

  “I want to know why.”

  Mitch shrugged. “We got a tip,” he said.

  “A phone call?”

  “Yes.”

  “Anonymous?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What did it say?”

  “That you had crucial evidence connected to the case hidden in your apartment.”

  “And you didn’t think this was just a little bit suspicious?”

  “Well, it panned out. It was true. I mean, we did find Russo’s gun.”

  “I never told anyone about the gun,” I said. “Not my shrink, nobody at the paper, not even any of my ex-husbands knew I had it. There was only one other person who knew.”

  “Who?”

  “Jack Reagan.”

  He stared at me in disbelief.

  “I think Jack Reagan’s still alive,” I said.

  Chapter 63

  No one had ever questioned Jack Reagan’s suicide.

  No reason to.

  Depressed, alcoholic cop leaves the police force, broods about his life, loses his girlfriend, drinks a lot—and then finally kills himself.

  It happened all the time.

  But was that really what had happened here?

  The records showed that police had arrived at Jack Reagan’s apartment on the Lower East Side at 8:16 p.m. They’d gotten the call from me at 8:02, but it took them fourteen minutes because there was a robbery in the area at the same time which occupied the closest patrol cars. I got there at 8:22.

  The first cops on the scene found Reagan lying on the living room floor. The phone was still off the hook. The gun was next to him. They called for an ambulance, but it wasn’t really necessary. The blast had blown off most of his head and face. There was blood all over. The place was a mess.

  His death was quickly ruled a suicide—based in large part on my account of the telephone call from him—and he was buried a few days later at a big policeman’s funeral filled with teary-eyed cops and flowery speeches about his years of service to the city.

  Beautiful, I thought.

  A nice touch, Jack.

  “There was never any medical confirmation of the victim’s identity,” Mitch said as he went through the file. “No fingerprints. No hair samples. No dental charts checked.”

  “Is that unusual?”

  “Not really. I mean, they see a suicide in a guy’s apartment, they assume it’s the guy who lived in the apartment. Anyway, they got a visual ID that it was Reagan from someone on the scene.”

  “Who?”

  “It just says, ‘Identification of victim confirmed by individual who viewed body.’”

  Mitch paged through the file again. “Maybe the person’s name is somewhere else.”

  I suddenly realized something.

  “Don’t bother looking,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “I know who identified Reagan to the cops.”

  “Who?”

  “Me.”

  Mitch put down the file.

  “When I got there, I told them about his phone call to me and the gun blast going off. Then they asked me who he was. And, of course, I told them and said he was an ex-cop. I was obviously very distraught. They asked me a few questions about our relationship, and that was that.”

  “It was all cut-and-dried,” Mitch said.

  “Exactly.”

  “Lucky for Reaga
n—if he was trying to fake his own death—that you showed up.”

  “It wasn’t luck at all,” I said. “He phoned me and did the whole suicide scene over the line, remember? He knew I’d come running over. And he knew I’d be the perfect person to make people think it was Jack Reagan lying on that floor.”

  “Which brings up a big question. Who died that night?”

  “Probably another Joey Russo.”

  “A patsy?”

  “Yeah, some guy Reagan picked up off the street. He’d have to be the same age, build and complexion, of course. He takes him to the apartment, blows his face off with a powerful enough weapon so nobody will recognize the switch, and then calls me to set the whole thing in motion. I’ll bet some derelict dropped out of sight on the Bowery or wherever and was never heard from again.”

  Mitch shook his head. “I’m still not sure I buy all this.”

  “Isn’t there some way to find out?”

  “You mean, dig up the body out of Reagan’s grave?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jesus, it’s been more than ten years.”

  “Does that mean it can’t be done?”

  He thought about it. “They could do DNA tests on the remains, I guess.”

  “And that’ll tell us whether or not it was Reagan who’s in there?”

  “Maybe. But I’d have to get a court order. I’d have to go through miles of bureaucratic red tape. I’d have to answer a lot of questions. It would be a huge amount of work. And the DNA testing itself is a lengthy process. After all this time, it might take weeks or months to get an answer.”

  “We need to know,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “If you’re right, and this guy is still out there, he might come after you, Lucy.”

  “That thought had crossed my mind.”

  “Of course, he’s probably a million miles away from New York City by now.”

  “Probably.”

  Mitch said he’d come over after his shift ended and spend the night at my apartment.

  “To protect me?” I asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Or to ravish me.”

  “Both.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “Well, I didn’t get to do a whole lot of ravishing last night.”

  “Tonight will be different.”