Loverboy
Page 26
And then we began living happily ever after.
One day at a time.
Epilogue
Things have finally begun to settle down.
I’m back working at the Blade again. I spent a couple of days in the hospital, then a few weeks resting up at home. Finally, when I was about to go stir-crazy, Victoria Crawford offered me a new job as a kind of criminal-justice columnist for the paper. I do in-depth investigations, write opinion pieces and sometimes still go out on the street with cops to cover a breaking murder case.
Michael Anson did make her movie about Loverboy. She loved the new ending with the confrontation between me and Reagan at the lovers’ lane, even though it wound up a bit differently in the movie. In her version, Mitch Caruso gets there in time to shoot it out with Reagan. I explained to Anson what Mitch had told me afterward: He’d known something was wrong on the phone, so he sent a cop over who watched my house and followed me up to the lovers’ lane. But the cop wasn’t sure what was going on, and it was a few minutes too late when Mitch got there and they finally moved in. Anson said her way played better at the box office. That’s Hollywood.
Thomas Ferraro is still the police commissioner and probably will be the next mayor. All the polls say he’s more popular than ever after the Loverboy business. He’s become real star material. He’s even writing a book about the case. I guess that’s the way it works today—if you do something bad, you write a book about it or make a TV-movie deal and become rich and famous. There’s no such thing as bad publicity.
Things at the Blade are pretty much back to normal too. Barlow keeps talking about going on a diet, Janet is still looking for Mr. Right, and Victoria Crawford got her divorce from Ronald Mackell. The case was handled by a woman judge, who gave Victoria the paper, their Fifth Avenue apartment and a whopping $80 million in alimony—even more than she’d asked for. Meanwhile, Mackell’s new girlfriend sued him for palimony. Beautiful. Sometimes what goes around does truly come around.
As for Mitch and me, we’re still very much together. We’re not married yet; we don’t even officially live together. But that’s my choice. I’ve been married before, and I know a ring on my finger is not the most important thing in a relationship. I want to take it slow and easy. I want to do it right this time.
So, all in all, I guess I’m as happy as I’ve ever been.
I still wonder about some stuff, though.
Like why Jack Reagan did what he did. I mean, what drove him to kill all those people? Outwardly, Jack seemed just like everyone else. He had a good job, he liked to drink, he made love to women. Okay, he was a bit crazy sometimes, but he didn’t seem like some sort of sadistic monster. Joey Russo as Loverboy made sense. Jack Reagan didn’t. I had a lot of trouble making sense out of all that.
And why did Jack make that anonymous call to the police and tell them about the gun and other stuff in my apartment? Did he really want to set me up for murder? If so, he must have known that he hadn’t given me the real gun. He’d kept that all along. Or was he just trying to stir things up, to have some fun, to put Loverboy on the front page? Just like he had that night at Pete’s Tavern when it all began.
I wonder about myself too. I mean, how could I have spent all that time with Jack Reagan and never suspected the truth? What does that say about me? I like to think I’m bright and perceptive and have good instincts about people. But I was wrong about Jack. Horribly wrong. So how can I ever completely trust my instincts again about anyone else in my life? Even someone like Mitch Caruso.
I’ll never know the answers to those questions.
But that’s okay, I guess.
I can live with that.
And the truth is, most of the time my life is pretty good these days.
Most of the time.
They never found Jack Reagan’s body.
The scuba boys searched several days for it, but came up empty. My car was down there, all right. But no one was inside. Probably his body was thrown clear of the wreckage and landed somewhere else in the water, they say. Then the current got hold of it and pushed it downriver to a totally different area, maybe even out into the ocean.
It’s almost impossible to find a man’s body when that happens, I’m told. It could wash up on shore months later. Or maybe it’ll never be found.
Nothing to worry about, of course.
I mean, I know he’s dead. They found blood all over the car where he’d been wounded. And they say no one could survive an injury and a fall like that.
But I still have the nightmares.
There are several of them, but the one I remember the most—the worst one—has me back at the spot of the shooting, just before I looked up into Mitch Caruso’s face and he told me he loved me. I’m standing there watching the car with Reagan in it go off the cliff. It crashes through the fence, tumbles over several times and then pitches straight down to the water below. Just like it did that night. Only this time I see something I didn’t see before. As the car goes through the fence, something comes out of the door and lands on the grassy edge of the cliff. It’s Reagan. He’s managed to jump free before the car went over. He’s standing there grinning at me.
Then he starts coming toward me.
That’s the point where I wake up—screaming, covered with sweat, gasping for breath.
Crazy, huh?
That’s what Dr. Collett says. Mitch too. And everyone else I’ve told about the dreams.
I knew they were right too.
Until what happened a few days ago.
It was a bright, sunny April morning—with the promise of another summer in the air—when I crossed Eighteenth Street, in front of my apartment house, to try to hail a taxicab. At that moment I saw the car. It was a black Lincoln—just like Jack Reagan used to drive—going about sixty miles an hour and headed straight at me. I screamed and leaped backward onto the hood of a parked car to get out of the way. The Lincoln roared past, missing me by inches. Then it disappeared around the corner of Third Avenue.
The incident made me think again about Reagan. And that empty car they’d found at the bottom of the Hudson.
A few nights later, while Mitch was still working the late shift and I was home alone, I thought I heard a car gunning its engine in front of my apartment building. When I looked out the window, I caught a glimpse of it driving away. It looked like it might be a black Lincoln. But I couldn’t be sure.
That night, before I went to sleep, I loaded an extra police revolver Mitch had left there and put it in the drawer of the end table next to my side of the bed.
Even though I knew it was probably nothing.
Just my imagination running wild.
Acknowledgments
They say writing a novel is lonely work, but it helps when you have good people on your side.
I’d especially like to thank the following:
Philip Spitzer, my agent, whose enthusiasm and encouragement from the very beginning never gave me a chance to doubt.
Kristin Cortright at Avon Books, who got inside Lucy’s head so well she told me things about her even I didn’t know.
All the terrific women I’ve worked with at the New York Post and Star Magazine, who were the inspiration for so much of the material, one-liners, and New York attitude in this book. Like Lucy Shannon, they’re great reporters—even if they don’t bend the rules quite as much. I can’t name you all, but you know who you are.
And, most of all, thanks to Laura Morgan—who has a lot of Lucy Shannon in her, and vice versa.
—R.G. Belsky
About the Author
R.G. BELSKY is a newspaper editor who lives in New York City.
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Endorsements
“Belsky perfectly nails the tone and the atmosphere . . . [of] the newsroom of a New York tabloid . . . Lucy Shannon is a gem with her mordant humor, cynicism and love of a good story . . . LOVERBOY is one of those sparkling, quick tales that one
encounters far too seldom.”
Erie Times-News
“Lucy will keep you reading. Isn’t that what good reporters do?”
Chicago Tribune
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
LOVERBOY. Copyright © 1998 by R.G. Belsky. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers. For information, address HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007.
Digital Edition ISBN: 978-0-06-285263-2
Print Edition ISBN: 978-0-380-79068-8
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