by R. G. Belsky
“You haven’t returned any of my calls,” I told her.
“Gee, you’re a bright boy.”
“Why?”
“Didn’t feel like it,” she giggled.
She took a big gulp of her drink.
I grabbed Lisa by the shoulders and pulled her close to me, looking right into her eyes. For just a second, I thought I connected with her. I saw something there. A spark, a hint, a sign of the old Lisa. But then I saw something else too. Sadness.
“What did you think was going to happen between us, Joe?” she asked softly.
“I-I don’t know . . . I thought we’d be together.”
She shook her head. “Go back to your girlfriend in New Jersey, Joe. Marry her. Start a family. Live happily ever after—or whatever the fuck people do in New Jersey. You and me, we had a good time. We had some laughs. Now it’s over.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“I love you, Lisa,” I said impulsively.
She didn’t answer me.
“The appropriate response is, ‘I love you too,’” I told her.
“Sorry.”
“But you said . . .”
“I’m fickle,” she shrugged.
Conroy came over now to bring her back to their table. I stood there helplessly, trying my best to think of something to do. Something to say. Something to make things go back to the way they were a week ago. So I decided to tell her the truth.
About what really happened that day in the Bronx with Connie Reyes.
About how I had stopped being a reporter and became a part of the story.
About what I had sacrificed for her.
“Lisa, there’s something you don’t know about that witness I found,” I called out to her. “I didn’t tell you everything about her. There were some problems . . .”
“Who cares?”
“It’s important.”
“Not anymore.”
She turned around and came back to me at the bar.
“You know, Joe, you really do need to lighten up about all this,” she said. “You take all this newspaper crap too seriously.”
Then she leaned over and gave me a kiss. It was a tiny peck on the cheek, which only lasted for a second or two. A perfunctory kiss. A decidedly unpassionate kiss. A good-bye kiss.
“The story’s over, Joe,” she said.
Chapter 42
“She dumped you?” Bonnie said.
“I wouldn’t say dumped . . .”
“Let’s recap here. Lisa Montero won’t go out with you. She won’t answer your phone calls. And the last time you saw her she was hanging onto another man’s arm and told you—I believe this is a fairly accurate quote—’I’m sorry. I’m just fickle.’ Right?”
“Well, yeah. But . . .”
“That, my friend, is dumped.”
We were sitting on the floor of Bonnie’s apartment, which was on West Twelfth Street in Greenwich Village near Sheridan Square. There was very little furniture in the place. Just a lot of books, stacks of newspapers, and posters of New York City and famous movies on the walls. There were also some sort of psychedelic lights that kept flashing off and on, which gave everything an eerie look. Bonnie’s place was a lot like Bonnie. Funky, unpredictable, a little weird—but always interesting. It reminded me of the way I used to live when I was in college.
I’d told her what happened while she was driving me back to the hotel the next day after work. I needed to talk to somebody. Bonnie didn’t seem very surprised when I told her about the encounter at Elaine’s. But she decided I shouldn’t be alone right now.
So there I was, sitting on her floor and smoking some marijuana with her, while we discussed my love life.
“Sorry about the way the apartment looks, but my decorator didn’t show up today,” Bonnie said. “As you can probably tell, I’m not exactly cut out to be a homemaker. I never seem to have time to worry about buying furniture and wallpaper and stuff like that. It might be some sort of serious character flaw on my part.”
She took a toke on her joint. “This is one of my other vices,” she said, looking down at it. “I know Nancy Reagan probably wouldn’t approve. But I find it really helps me relax after a hard day at the office. Otherwise, I get sort of hyper and stressed out and start doing stuff at a hundred miles per hour. I mean I’m still hyper and stressed out. But I think it slows me down a bit.”
“Bonnie, you are a remarkable individual,” I told her.
“Yeah,” she shrugged, “everybody tells me that.”
“Where are you from anyway?”
“The Midwest.”
“Ohio? Where you went to school?”
“Yeah.”
“You still got family back there?”
“No. My father died when I was young. My mother a few years after that. There were no brothers and sisters. I got raised by my grandmother. But she’s dead now too. I’ve been on my own for a while. How about you?”
“My mother and father are gone too. They got divorced, but not soon enough. I don’t think they were ever very happy together.”
“Jeez, maybe that’s why we’re both so screwed up,” she said.
“Who said I was screwed up?” I asked her.
“You? C’mon!”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve got a real act going for you there, Dougherty. That sincere face, those puppy-dog eyes—a real sensitive, nineties kind of guy look. Except you dumped that woman in Jersey the minute Lisa Montero battled an eyelash at you. And I don’t think that’s the first time it’s happened either.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Bonnie.”
“Sure you do. You know, I’ve been thinking about that whole story you told me one day in the car about gambling away all your severance money after you got fired. The way I figure it that was eight years ago. Your wife died sometime after that. So what in the hell were you doing in Atlantic City and Las Vegas with some bimbo blackjack dealer when you had this loving wife and this baby son back home? It kinda blows a hole in the whole grieving widower rap you like to use sometimes. You know what I mean?”
I nodded. She was right, of course.
“Anyway, I was curious. So I looked up the story of your wife and son’s deaths in the clips. There was an article that said they died in a boating accident off the coast of Long Island, near Sag Harbor. You were in the boat too. You said you swam for shore to try to get help. But when the coast guard got to the scene, it was too late. They were already gone.
“That’s what you told the cops anyway. But they had some questions about your story. It turns out that people at the house in Sag Harbor where you were staying had heard you and your wife having a big argument the night before. Some other people said she’d told them she was planning on taking the kid and leaving you. That made the cops suspicious. They began to wonder if it was really an accident, after all.
“They questioned you all night. For twelve hours or so, you were a suspect in a possible murder. Only no one could break your story. In the end, they just declared it an accident. Since then, you like to tell everybody about this wonderful marriage and wonderful family you tragically lost. Only it wasn’t so wonderful. Am I right or am I right?”
I shook my head. “Like you always say, Bonnie, you’re a helluva reporter.”
I took a long toke on the joint in my hand. It was all coming back to me now. All the pain. The anger. The terror. And the questions too. The questions that I still didn’t have the answers for. Not even after all this time.
No, it wasn’t always so wonderful for Susan and me. I remembered the time I came home from work early one day. I never came home early. A lot of the time I didn’t even come home. But I didn’t have any big story to work on—and I guess I was feeling guilty about the lack of time I spent with her. She was pretty much raising Joey on her own, with me as more of a drop-in visitor than a dutiful husband and father. So I decided to make this night special. I’d surprise her. We’d get a sit
ter for Joey, then we’d go out on the town and have a good time like the old days. She’d drink her Bombay and tonics, smoke her Marlboros, and then we’d come home and make mad, passionate love just the way we used to.
But Susan wasn’t home when I got there.
By the time she finally did come home, I’d worked myself up into a real state of anxiety. And I got another surprise when she walked in the door. She was all dressed up. She had on a short dress with a slit up the side, a sexy blouse—and her hair and makeup were done up like I hadn’t seen her do for me for a long time. That made me mad.
“Where have you been?” I asked her.
“Out.”
“That covers a lot of territory.”
“Well, you should know,” she said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I just think it’s pretty funny that you’re asking me where I’ve been. You’re the one that’s never home, Joe. That’s the problem.”
Then she told me that she’d been to see Jack Whittaker. Jack Whittaker was a lawyer that we knew. He was very successful and wealthy, owned a posh condo on Park Avenue, drove a flashy sports car, and was a real womanizer. One of the women I always felt he had the hots for was Susan. I looked at the sexy outfit she was wearing again. Now it all started to make sense.
“Did you screw him?” I blurted out.
“No, I didn’t screw him,” she replied calmly. “It was a business appointment.”
“Oh, sure,” I said sarcastically. “I can just guess what kind of business you were doing. Hell, Jack Whittaker’s been dying to get into your pants for a long time.”
“Unlike you, I don’t sleep with every person on the planet that’s willing to sleep with me. But if I was interested, he’d be a good candidate for a new man in my life. He’s charming, he’s got plenty of money to take care of me and Joey because he doesn’t lose it all in Atlantic City or Las Vegas, and he’s there. He’s there, Joe. That’s a big thing for me. Someone who’s there. But then you wouldn’t know anything about that.”
“What in the hell were you doing with Jack Whittaker this afternoon?” I demanded to know.
“I was seeing him about getting a divorce from you,” Susan said.
She looked at me sadly.
“It’s time we put this marriage out of its misery, Joe. You killed it a long time ago.”
I was shocked. But I was angry too. Maybe I had cheated on her. Maybe I had betrayed her. Maybe I had given her and Joey a raw deal. But, in the end, I wasn’t the one saying goodbye. She was. That still seemed very important to me.
“I’m not divorcing you,” I reminded her. “You’re the one who’s divorcing me.”
“Yeah,” she said, “and it took a slow news day before you finally noticed.”
“So what really happened that day out on the water, Joe?” Bonnie wanted to know.
“Sure, Susan and I were having a lot of trouble,” I said, remembering those last troubled days of my marriage.
“And no, I wasn’t the best husband in the world. I was going through a really rough time. I’d lost my job in New York. I was bouncing around from small paper to small paper, and getting more fucked up at every stop along the way. I was gambling heavily too. We had bills mounting up, loansharks at the door—it wasn’t a pretty picture.
“Obviously something like that has a pretty detrimental effect on a marriage. Susan and I were going through a lot of troubles. She seemed unhappy, distant—that’s why we took the trip to Long Island. It was supposed to be a chance to rekindle the romance, a second honeymoon. Only it didn’t work out like that. We fought most of the time. Except for the last dinner we had together. We went to this restaurant with little Joey, and it was like nothing had ever been wrong. I really thought we were going to make it.
“Then the next day we rented this boat. I probably shouldn’t have; I didn’t know anything about boats. But I thought I could handle it. I always thought I could handle anything in those days. Well, the motor gives out on us somewhere a mile or so offshore—and we just start drifting out to sea. At first, I figured someone would see us and pick us up. But there were no other boats around. We were alone. That’s when we got really scared.
“I knew if we drifted out into the open ocean, we had no chance. So, before we got too far away from shore, I decided to try to swim for it. I’ve always been a pretty good swimmer. I didn’t know what else to do. Susan begged me not to go, not to leave her and Joe Jr. But I thought I could save them. I really did.
“Instead I almost died too. The tides were really strong, and I had a lot of trouble keeping in the right direction toward shore. I don’t know how long I was in the water, it felt like hours. But then, just when I felt like I couldn’t go on anymore, I saw the shore. Finally, a big wave hit me, almost knocked me unconscious—and the next thing I knew I was lying on the beach.
“There was no sign of Susan and Joey. The coast guard searched for days before giving up the search. A couple of weeks later, some debris washed up on shore nearby that looked like it was from the boat we’d rented. One of those big waves that gave me so much trouble while I was trying to swim for help must have broken it apart. So my wife and my son died out there that day. Alone. Without me. I couldn’t save them.
“The cops? Yeah, I think they suspected at first there might be some kind of foul play. They could never figure out how I could have pulled it off without almost drowning myself though. And besides, my grief was very real. I think they realized that after questioning me for so long. In the end, it was declared a case of accidental drowning. No one blamed me for what happened. Except for one person. Me.”
“And that’s what you’ve been living with for the past eight years?” Bonnie asked.
“Yeah.”
“Jeez, you’ve had a real run of bad luck, haven’t you?”
“I guess you could say that.”
“Well, they always say there’s one good thing about bad luck,” Bonnie said softly. “It can only get better.”
Chapter 43
I almost missed it in the morning papers.
The story about two new murders was hidden away in a back section of the Banner, a very small item at the bottom of a page. No reason it shouldn’t have been there. It seemed like a routine low-life double shooting. There was no way for anyone to connect it to Lisa Montero or David Galvin’s hit list. Except for me.
I read it several times.
MAN AND WOMAN FOUND SLAIN IN MIDTOWN GARAGE; MOB HIT SUSPECTED
A man with a long criminal record and his girlfriend were found shot to death yesterday in their car.
The victims were identified as Joseph Corman, 45, and Karen Raphael, 28.
Police said their bodies were found inside a bloodsplattered 1993 Pontiac that was parked in a garage at Eighth Avenue and 47th Street.
Both had extensive arrest records, and cops suspect underworld connections to the bloody crime . . .
There were pictures of Joseph Corman and Karen Raphael along with the article. Two grainy mug shots dug out of the files from some of their previous busts. I recognized them right away. Not as Joseph Corman and Karen Raphael, of course. I only knew the two of them by the names they’d used the time I’d met them.
Victor Granville.
And Connie Reyes.
I drove downtown to police headquarters to talk to my friend Captain Righetti in his office.
“Joe Dougherty!” he boomed from behind his desk when I walked in. “The man of the hour.”
“Right.”
“Hey, I saw you on CNN the other night. A couple of the local newscasts too. My kids were really impressed when I told them I knew you. How about giving me your autograph?”
“I need some help, Dennis,” I said.
I sat down in a chair across from him.
“Do you remember when I asked you a few days ago about a woman named Connie Reyes?”
“Yeah, I guess so. Why?”
“I want to see a picture of h
er.”
Righetti and I walked down the hall to another office, where a woman police officer sat behind a computer. We stood and watched while the woman punched Connie Reyes’s name into the system. A few seconds later a file appeared on the screen. The woman at the keyboard pushed another button and then we saw Connie Reyes’s face.
It was not the same woman I met in the Bronx.
“Dammit!” I muttered.
Righetti and the woman police officer both gave me a funny look.
“You got any idea how I’d find this Connie Reyes?” I asked her.
“Oh, she’s easy to find. She’s not going anywhere for a while.”
“What do you mean?”
“Connie Reyes,” the woman said, pointing to one of the entries on the screen, “has been an inmate at the State Prison for Women at Albion for the past six months.”
“You didn’t tell me she was in jail,” I said to Righetti.
“You didn’t ask,” he said, looking very confused. “Why? Was it important?”
He was right.
I could have checked it easily, but I never did.
Because I was in too much of a hurry.
At one point, during the depths of my pre-Carolyn lost years, I started going to Gamblers Anonymous.
The people there were really screwed up.
There was one woman, a housewife and mother of two, who said she used to tell her family she was going shopping. Instead, she would drive to a gambling parlor to play poker. She’d stay there all day, and sometimes all night. She made up bizarre stories to tell her husband and kids when she got home. Once she said she had suffered a blackout. Another time she beat her hands on a wall until they bled, then claimed she’d been accidentally locked in a restroom in the store at closing time and banged on the door until morning. She was in charge of the family finances, but she gambled away all the money that was supposed to pay their bills. When medical insurance payments came in the mail, she cashed them and used the money to gamble instead of paying the doctor. Then she’d tell her father that she needed money to pay the doctor—and use that to gamble too. “I was sick,” she said. “I didn’t care about anything but gambling.”
