by R. G. Belsky
Then I asked her a lot of questions about her father. His friends. His enemies. His business dealings. His reputation for ruthlessness. I was looking for a reason that someone might want to get back at John Montero by setting his daughter up for murder.
“He’s a businessman, who’s made a lot of money in his lifetime,” she sighed. “People who make money make enemies too. It happens. On Wall Street, in government . . . everywhere. Look, my father’s done a lot of things I’m not proud of. OK? He comes from a different world and a different generation and a different set of rules. But a lot of what they say about him isn’t true. It’s just myth and exaggeration.”
I nodded. “What about you?” I asked.
“Me, I’m from today’s world,” she said. “I went to college—my father is a high school dropout, you know, so that was really important to him—and I got a master’s degree in business administration. I work with my father now. Some day I even hope to take over for him. Or at least I did, until all this happened to me.”
“What does he think about that?”
“Not much. The truth is he really doesn’t let me do very much. I’m listed as a vice president in the company, but I’m just a figurehead. Like I say, he’s old-fashioned. And, of course, I’m a woman. He thinks I should get married and have babies.”
“Do you have any brothers?”
“I had one. He died. My mother’s gone too. I’m all my father’s got. I figure that sooner or later he’ll change his mind about me and the business. Someday.”
“So what do you do with your life until then?”
She looked across the table at me and smiled. A sort of a sad smile. It was one of those moments I’ll always remember. Frozen in time forever. Because, right then, I saw the real Lisa Montero. All her defenses, all her protection, all her New York City cool disappeared for just an instant. And, during those few seconds, I knew her for what she really was. A lost soul, trying to make sense out of her life. Just like me.
Or so I thought then anyway.
“Mostly I wind up with people like Billy Franze,” she said.
Chapter 25
Bonnie had made some real progress.
Even though it didn’t seem like it at first.
“I checked out all the new names of victims on David Galvin’s list,” she told me. “First the cases that took place eleven years ago, but no one ever connected to him until now. I went through all the old police reports about these deaths, I talked to some relatives of the victims, I even tracked down a few of the cops who handled the investigations at the time. I’m telling you, Joe—I didn’t leave one stone unturned.”
“And?”
“Nothing.”
“What do you mean nothing?”
“Nothing. There’s absolutely no connection—no common denominator—between any of the new victims. Different kinds of victims, different ways they died, absolutely nothing that ties them together. And nothing that links them to any of the other people that we’re sure Felix the Cat killed during the same time period. Not that I can see anyway.”
We were sitting at Bonnie’s desk in the Banner newsroom. I was drinking a cup of coffee. She was eating a big piece of lemon custard pie from the cafeteria downstairs and washing it down with a Coca-Cola. Everytime I saw Bonnie, she seemed to be eating something—but she still probably only weighed about a hundred pounds dripping wet. I figured she burned off most of the calories with her nonstop energy.
“So then I decided to look at the two other new names—the ones that were both still alive when Galvin talked to you. Linda Hiller and Arthur Dodson. I did the Hiller woman first. That’s when I hit paydirt.”
She took a bite of her pie.
“The category is U.S. colleges,” she said, doing a pretty good imitation of Alex Trebeck on Jeopardy. “And the clue is ‘New York University.’ Please make sure to give me your answer in the form of a question.”
I stared at her. “Where did Linda Hiller go to school?” I said.
“That is correct.”
Damn.
“Now guess when she went to NYU,” Bonnie said.
I tried to remember the story about the Hiller woman’s murder. She was thirty-two at the time of her death, I think it said. I did some quick math, subtracting eleven years from that—which put her at somewhere around twenty-one in 1987 when Felix the Cat was on his rampage. Just the right age for a college coed.
“Linda Hiller was at NYU at the same time David Galvin was there!”
Bonnie drank some of the Coke and gave me a big smile. She was very pleased with herself.
“Yeah. Of course, she wasn’t Linda Hiller then. She was Linda Kolchak. She got divorced a few years ago, but kept her married name.”
“And you checked out Arthur Dodson too, right?” I asked.
“Gee, no, Joe,” she said sarcastically, “I never thought of that.”
“Dodson went to NYU too in 1987?”
“That’s right. I talked to his wife and family. They’re really upset—say they have no idea where he’s gone. But they were really cooperative—they want us all to help look for him. So the wife gave me the whole life story. She even showed me his college yearbook. He started at NYU in 1984, graduated in the class of 1988. Majored in business administration. Kind of interesting, huh?”
Business administration.
The same thing Lisa Montero majored in.
Yeah, it was interesting. I was mad at myself though. I wouldn’t have recognized Linda Hiller’s maiden name when I was going through all the alumni records. But I should have caught Dodson’s name. Except there were so many names in the files. Thousands of them. It was hard to check all of them out. Now I made a note to go back and do it again. Maybe there was somebody else I was missing too.
The bottom line was that an awful lot of people connected with this case had gone to NYU at the same time. Galvin. Lisa. Ackerman. Andy. And now Linda Hiller and Arthur Dodson too.
“Okay, so let’s assume Dodson is still alive,” Bonnie was saying. “I figure maybe he knows something we don’t know. And that’s why he’s running. Like he once got David Galvin or one of Galvin’s friends mad at him in school or something. Some reason why he’d be on a hit list after all this time. Of course, we have to find him to find out what it is. And my police sources say they have zilch on his whereabouts at the moment. But I’m still working on it.”
I told Bonnie about my interview at the jail with Lisa Montero.
“Listen, I’m sorry about that crack I made in the car about you and the Montero woman,” she said. “I was out of line.”
“No, it was an astute observation.”
“What’s the deal with you and her anyway.”
“She reminds me of someone.”
“Who?”
“My dead wife.”
“You mean she looks like her?”
“Not really. Oh, Susan had dark black hair too. And she was very pretty, just like Lisa. But it’s more than that. There’s just something about her that takes my breath away. I felt the same way when I met Susan too. I guess I just haven’t felt that way in a long time.”
Bonnie nodded.
“Do you still think about Susan a lot?” Bonnie asked.
“Yeah, all the time.”
“What do you remember?”
“Little stuff mostly. The way she held a cigaret. The things she liked to drink and eat. Snatches of conversations we had together.” The memories were all coming back now. “Susan smoked Marlboros. One right after another, she was a real chain-smoker. She’d take the cigaret out, then tap it three times on the side of the Marlboro pack. Never twice, not four or five. Always three times. She was precise like that about everything she did. When she drank, it was always Bombay and tonic. Not just gin and tonic, it had to be Bombay and tonic. She never got drunk though. She’d take two drinks—three at the most—and then stop. She had amazing willpower. When she got pregnant, I thought she’d have a lot of trouble giving up the Marlbo
ros and the Bombay and tonics. But she didn’t. She never touched either for all those months until Joey was born, then went right back to them again afterward. One day I asked her how she could do that so easily. She just smiled and told me, ‘I’m full of surprises.’”
I shook my head sadly.
“Susan and me, I just always felt we were destined to be together,” I said. “I met her in this little place where she was tending bar. I’d never been in there before in my life. I just went on a whim. And it wasn’t even her regular night to work. She switched shifts with someone at the last minute.
“Did you ever see that movie Sleepless in Seattle?” I asked Bonnie. “It’s all about a couple who have never met—but are destined to be in love with each other. I always felt that was like me and Susan. I remember one scene where a woman talks about the first time she touched the hand of her future husband. She said she could feel the magic. And she knew right then they would be together forever. That’s the way I felt about Susan. I always felt the magic.”
Bonnie nodded in understanding. “How about with Carolyn?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Do you feel the magic with Carolyn?”
“It’s different with Carolyn . . .”
“Uh-oh,” Bonnie said.
“C’mon, I’m a lot older now. So is Carolyn. We’re not kids. I love her very much. She’s been great for me. She’s turned my whole life around again. We’re going to be very happy together. Sure, there’s magic. There’s plenty of magic. It’s just a different kind of magic.”
“Whatever you say, Joe,” Bonnie smiled.
I said I’d write up a story about the interview with Lisa Montero, and she could do her own piece on the mysterious NYU connections she’d uncovered. I figured the Banner could run the two stories side by side.
“Which editor do we talk to about all this—Kramer or Rollins?” she asked.
“Kramer, I guess.”
Bonnie grunted.
“You don’t like that.”
“It really doesn’t make much difference either way.”
“Rollins is an asshole.”
“They’re both assholes. Rollins is just a lot more obvious about it than Kramer is.”
There was one piece of pie left on the plate in front of her. Bonnie started to pick it up on her fork, then looked across the desk at me. I guess maybe she felt guilty.
“Hey, do you want a bite?” she asked.
I shook my head no. She quickly popped it into her mouth.
“Let me tell you something about the politics that are going on in this office,” Bonnie said. “You got a little taste of it in that meeting we were all at with Spencer Blackwood. Blackwood is nearly seventy. The word is he’s going to retire in probably six months—maybe a year tops. Rollins and Kramer both desperately want his job. Do you see the picture?”
“Who decides on a new editor? Blackwood?”
She shook her head no. “The guy that’s going to make the call is Jimmy Richmond.”
“Jimmy?”
Walter Richmond was the owner and publisher of the Banner. He’d been there during my first tour of duty too. His family had owned the paper for generations.
“Do you remember Jimmy?” Bonnie asked.
“Yeah, I do. I think he was a copyboy the last summer I was here. Everyone was afraid to ask him even to get a cup of coffee. He knew it too—he was kind of arrogant, as I remember. And the kid’s running the whole show at the Banner now?”
“Pretty much so. The old man spends most of his time on his yacht. No one knows for sure who Jimmy likes for the editor’s job—Kramer or Rollins. He and Rollins rub elbows with a lot of the same people at social events. But he and Andy are friends too. They’re about the same age. They both worked together here as copyboys while they were still in college.”
The same age.
“What college did he go to?” I asked.
“Who?”
“Richmond.”
She saw the look on my face. “Joe, I know what you’re thinking,” she laughed. “NYU. The Great Pretenders. Galvin said they’d all gone on to be successful in their chosen fields. Maybe one of them is right under your nose, huh?”
“It’s possible.”
“Well, you can forget about Jimmy Richmond. He went to Columbia, not NYU. Graduated from the School of Journalism there. I’ve seen the diploma on the wall of his office. And about six months ago, he got honored at a fancy dinner up at Columbia for being an outstanding alumni contributor to his alma mater.”
“Hey, you never know.”
I stood up and looked at my watch. Only a few hours until deadline. It was time to go back to my own desk and write up my jailhouse interview with Lisa Montero.
“Oh, by the way, Joe,” Bonnie said as I started to leave, “it was Clarion State.”
I turned around.
“What?”
“That’s where I went to college. Clarion State. Not NYU. It’s a little school in Ohio.”
“Jesus, I don’t care, Bonnie.”
“Sure, you do. You’re obsessed by the fact that so many people involved in this story were students at NYU at the same time during the eighties. You think there’s got to be some sort of connection. Me, I’m basically the same age group as Galvin and Lisa Montero and all the rest—in my early thirties. You were going to check me out sooner or later. I just figured I’d save you the trouble.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I told her.
She was right though.
I would have checked.
Chapter 26
Sometimes late at night—when I still had the dreams about Susan—I’d wake up and be surprised to see Carolyn lying in the bed next to me.
And I’d think: “What in the hell am I doing here?”
Actually, the question wasn’t so much why I was with Carolyn.
It was really why she was with me.
She was this classy, ice-cool blond beauty with a great-looking face and a terrific body. When she walked down the street or came into a room, people turned their heads to look at her. Lots of guys wanted to go out with her. She could have anyone she wanted. So why did she pick me? A guy with “burned-out loser” written all over him on that first day we met.
I asked her that once.
“You were funny,” she said. “You made me laugh.”
Okay.
“And you’re cute.”
Cute.
“Plus, and this a really big plus, you and I are great in bed together.”
Maybe.
But the truth was I wasn’t all that great in bed when we met. I hadn’t had a real relationship with a woman in a very long time, and I was out of practice. I didn’t even care that much about sex during those dark days. I was too busy feeling sorry for myself. It took a lot of time and considerable patience on Carolyn’s part before we were up to speed in the bedroom department.
There was another possible explanation about why she was attracted to me. Carolyn was a do-gooder. A patron of lost causes. The kind of person who gave money to the homeless on the street and took in stray animals and cheered up patients in nursing homes and hospitals. I don’t mean to make fun of this, because she’s truly a good-hearted person. She’s always there for somebody in need. Only sometimes I wondered if I was just another one of Carolyn’s charity cases.
Or maybe the clue to our relationship was in a story she once told me about her high school senior prom.
Her date for the prom was the son of a close friend of her father’s. He was president of the senior class, head of the debating team, and had a scholarship to Harvard. But Carolyn didn’t want to go to the prom with him. She wanted to go with someone else—a boy from the wrong part of town who rode around on a Harley motorcycle, wore a black leather jacket, and had a small-time police record. She thought it would be really cool to drive up to the dance—wearing her prom dress—on the back of the Harley. But her father made her go with the other guy.
; “Did you have a good time?” I asked.
“It was okay.”
“What went wrong?”
“I really wanted to ride on that motorcycle.”
When she met me, Carolyn was practically engaged to an executive vice president at the drug firm where she worked. She dumped him right away. Again, her father was not pleased with her choice in men. He told her I sounded like trouble. I wasn’t good enough for her. But this time she was too old for him to do anything about it. In the end, once we knew each other better, her father and I got along fine. He’s my boss at the public relations company now. But I still can’t help thinking that I’m the guy from the wrong part of town with the black leather jacket and the Harley that Carolyn was never allowed to go to her prom with.
But the bottom line here is that she’s a helluva woman for a guy like me. A helluva woman for anyone. So why did I have this feeling that something was missing in my life? Why was I still dreaming about Susan? Why did I think about Susan every time I saw Lisa Montero?
Maybe I was just having a minor case of cold feet—the usual prewedding jitters every prospective groom went through.
Maybe I expected too much out of a relationship.
Or maybe it was like the old Groucho Marx joke—the one that Woody Allen told at the beginning of Annie Hall—about not wanting to join any club that would admit someone like him as a member.
Yeah, maybe that was me.
How could I ever marry a woman who’d fall in love with a guy like Joe Dougherty?
Chapter 27
They found Arthur Dodson’s car at 5 a.m. sitting empty on the Tappan Zee Bridge, about thirty miles north of New York City.
The motor was running, Dodson’s wallet was left on the front seat, and someone had called the police to say that they had seen a person go off the bridge into the waters of the Hudson River below.
“So what do you think happened?” I asked Captain Righetti as I stood on the bridge, watching police go over the car for clues and search the water for any sign of a body.
“Well, the way I see it,” he said, “there’s three possibilities. First, someone caught up with him here, forced him out of his car and threw him off the bridge—leaving his wallet behind to make sure we know what happened.
