Playing Dead

by R. G. Belsky

  She said he had also believed he was being followed.

  But she could provide no concrete examples of any connection to Montero, one of the richest and most powerful men on Wall Street and in the New York City political world.

  Police said they had no evidence to connect the business dealings with Montero to Findlay’s disappearance. . . .

  There was a picture of Edward Findlay with the article. One of him with his wife and little daughter too. Two days later, there was another story about Findlay’s body turning up in the East River. There was no sign of foul play, and his death was ruled accidental. I looked, but couldn’t find any more articles about him.

  I shut off the computer.

  At least I knew one thing I didn’t know before. One of the people whose lives John Montero had screwed up a long time ago was Greg Ackerman’s father.

  I decided to go to talk to Ackerman again.

  I had a feeling I was still missing something else really important.

  But I was getting used to that feeling.

  Chapter 48

  Greg Ackerman lived in a brownstone on East Eighty-eighth Street. I got the address from Bonnie, who had a contact in the DA’s office. It was late, after 11 p.m., when I pulled my car up in front of the building. I wondered if I should wait until morning. But I knew I wouldn’t sleep. I’d been thinking about this all day, ever since I’d read about his father in Montero’s newspaper file.

  Okay, maybe Ackerman did have a personal grudge against the Montero family.

  But there was something else bothering me.

  What if Ackerman was right?

  What if Lisa Montero really did murder Franze and the hooker?

  And what if I was right about their deaths being connected to all the other killings?

  That meant Lisa Montero was the last of the Great Pretenders—the person I was looking for.

  I got out of the car, walked through the front door into the lobby, and buzzed Ackerman’s apartment.

  To say he was surprised to see me when he opened the door would be an understatement.

  “Hi,” I said. “I was just in the neighborhood so . . .”

  “What the hell do you want?” he snapped.

  He was wearing a terrycloth bathrobe and looked very tired. Maybe I’d woken him up. Or else he was just about to go to bed.

  “I need to talk to somebody,” I told him.

  “Why me?”

  “You’re the only person I could think of.”

  “We’ve got nothing to talk about.”

  “Yes, we do.”

  “What?”

  “What if Lisa Montero really did it?” I said.

  Ackerman stared at me in amazement. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

  “Jesus, Dougherty, it’s a little late for that . . .”

  “Do you still think she killed Franze and the hooker?” I asked.

  “Hey, you’re the one who found the goddamned witness who said she didn’t do it.”

  “Yeah, I did,” I said slowly. “That’s what we have to talk about.”

  We sat at his dining room table, drinking coffee and going over it all for a long time. The apartment was small, but comfortable—a one-bedroom with a view of York Avenue. Assistant district attorneys don’t make a fortune. There were a number of awards that Ackerman had won on the walls. There was also a framed diploma from NYU Law School.

  “I’ve found out some new information,” I told him. “I think it could change things.”

  “Change things how?”

  “I’m not so sure anymore that Lisa Montero is innocent.”

  “Tell me what you’ve got.”

  “I can’t.”

  Ackerman shook his head in frustration. “Just like you couldn’t tell me the identity of your source, huh.”

  “Look,” I said, “you’ve got your rules, I’ve got mine. We both have to live by them.”

  “So what do you want me to do?”

  “Tell me everything you know about Lisa Montero and the Franze murders.”

  “Why? What’s in it for me?”

  “When I find something out, I’ll come to you. I’ll work with you. I’ll tell you everything I know.”

  “Before you print it in the Banner?”

  I took a deep breath. I was violating every rule of being a newspaper reporter here. But desperate times require desperate measures. And I was a desperate man.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “How do I know I can believe you?”

  “You have my word on it,” I told him.

  In the end, Ackerman agreed. We stayed up late into the night going over it again and again.

  Lisa and William Franze had met for dinner at about 8 p.m. at a restaurant on Madison Avenue. People at the restaurant told police afterward that they both were drinking heavily. Franze even more than Lisa. The two of them also did not seem to be getting along very well—they exchanged angry words in loud voices on several occasions during the meal. But Franze was a regular at the restaurant, and this apparently was not terribly unusual. He brought lots of different women there, and he was often loud and obnoxious. Sometimes other customers complained, but the restaurant never said anything to him about his behavior. When you’re rich, you can get away with a lot.

  Sometime around ten-thirty or so, they showed up at Elaine’s, where the drinking and fighting continued. No one at either place knew what the argument was about. “I don’t think it mattered,” said one waiter at Elaine’s. “They always seemed to be fighting whenever I saw them together. They sure had lots of practice at it.”

  They arrived at Franze’s townhouse on Sixty-first Street between 11:40 p.m. and midnight. According to Lisa, it was very soon after that that he called the escort service and proposed a three-way sex session to her. She says she refused, they argued some more, and she stormed out. Lisa claims that before she left she heard him talking to someone on the phone about getting a second girl. She drove around aimlessly for a half hour or so, then went back to his house where she saw a woman going in. She insists it was not the same woman who was murdered. She says she was so embarrassed that she left, went home, and fell right asleep.

  There were a number of witnesses. Several neighbors had heard Lisa and Franze arguing in loud voices shortly before the murders. They had also seen Lisa storm out of the house. And—perhaps most damaging for her—one eyewitness, an old man walking his dog, saw everything that night. He saw the argument between Franze and Lisa. He saw the Martin girl going in—he says he even talked to her when she stopped to pet his dachshund. Then he saw Lisa coming back to the house later. He said he was sure of the times too because he always walked the dachshund at the same time.

  The phone records were very specific too. Franze had made only one call, to the Elite Escort Agency at 11:54. He said he wanted a girl right away, so they sent Whitney Martin out to his house. Franze was, the agency pointed out, a regular customer. The agency said there was no second call from him—and that only the one girl was assigned to the job. In fact, there were no other calls at all from Franze’s phone that night. He’d made a total of fifteen calls from his home phone on the day he died—nine to business associates, one to the escort agency, and five to the plumber he was trying to get over to fix the toilet in his bathroom. The plumber didn’t arrive until the following morning.

  “Everything points to Lisa Montero as the only person who could have pulled the trigger,” Ackerman said.

  Most of this, of course, had already been in official police reports and media accounts of the murder.

  What he told me next was not.

  “Do you really think she could be a killer?” I asked him.

  “Let me tell you about Lisa Montero,” he said. “Her mother died six months ago. Did you know that?”

  “Yeah, she told me. So what?”

  “Did she tell you the death was listed as suspicious? Carbon monoxide poisoning. They found her in the garage.”

  “What
are you saying . . . ?”

  “Lisa’s brother died a year ago. He drowned. Or at least that’s the official verdict.”

  “You’re saying it was murder?”

  “Two accidental deaths like that? Hard to believe that it’s just a coincidence.”

  “And you think Lisa was responsible?”

  “I think the lady’s a psychopathic killer.”

  “Why? What was her motive?”

  “Ambition. Greed. The brother was supposed to take over the business after the father died. I hear Lisa didn’t like that. She figured she should be next in line. All of a sudden, no more brother. The mother—who knows? Maybe she figured out what Lisa had done and was set to blow the whistle on her own daughter.”

  “But what about her father, John Montero?” I said. “Does he suspect that any of this is true?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I mean if he did, why would he still be trying to protect her?”

  “She’s all he has left,” Ackerman said.

  I thought about everything he’d just told me. I still couldn’t believe it.

  “Why didn’t any of this come out before?” I asked him.

  “It probably would have. At Lisa Montero’s murder trial.”

  “But now there won’t be any trial.”

  “That’s right,” Ackerman said. “You made sure of that.”

  Chapter 49

  The forgotten woman in all this was Whitney Martin. The girl from the escort service found dead in bed with Franze. She’d been mentioned in every account of the murder, but no one ever really talked about her. She was just there. One more detail at the crime scene. Like a piece of furniture or the broken toilet or the blood on the walls.

  Except Whitney Martin was once a living, breathing human being.

  I decided to find out more about her.

  The Elite Escort Agency, where she worked, was located in an expensive high-rise building on Lexington Avenue. There was a suite of offices, with an attractive red-haired woman sitting behind a desk at the front door. It looked like the office of any big business or corporation. Except what they were selling was sex.

  I’d read about places like this. They walked a fine line with the law. They were really just fronts for prostitution. But they dressed themselves up in all this glamour; advertised on TV and in glossy, high-brow publications; and talked about providing “a sophisticated companion for an evening at the theater, ballet, or dinner.” The theory was that whatever happened after that was a business transaction between the girl and her client. But the reality of it was no different than the girl in hot pants standing in the middle of Times Square and shouting, “Hey, sailor!”

  Me, I had no personal experience with this kind of operation. On the few times I’d been to prostitutes in my life, they’d turned out to be more of the Times Square variety. A couple of times in Atlantic City. Once at a bachelor party for a sports writer at the Banner. And another time when I was doing a piece on street prostitution in the city, and I decided to do some real investigative reporting. I was always willing to go that extra mile for a story.

  But none of them looked anything like the red-haired woman sitting behind the desk at the Elite Escort Agency.

  “Hi, I’m Stacy,” she smiled. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “We cater to all tastes. Some of them very commonplace, some quite bizarre.”

  Stacy stood up now. She was in her twenties, tall, with a nice figure and dressed very fashionably. Yep, no question about it. This was a class operation, and she was a classy woman.

  “The woman I’m interested in is dead,” I said.

  “That is bizarre.”

  I smiled. “I’m a reporter,” I said. “I work for the New York Banner. Tell me about Whitney Martin.”

  She did. Not there though. Stacy said she was due for a break anyway. She switched on the voice mail, and we went downstairs to an outdoor cafe next to her building. As we sat down at the table, I realized that if I saw her on the street I never would have guessed what she did for a living. She looked like a model or an actress.

  “So why do you work for an escort service?” I asked.

  “You mean how did a nice girl like me wind up at a place like this?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I go to City College. I’m majoring in economics. I need the money for tuition.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “Nope. Whitney went to City College too. That’s where I met her.”

  “So the two of you are sitting around the dorm room and just decide one day to become hookers?”

  Stacy shook her head no. “I’m not a hooker,” she said. “I don’t go out on calls. I just work in the office. It’s really very legit.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No problem. I just want to make that clear to you.”

  “Whitney went out on calls through, didn’t she?” I asked.

  “Oh yeah, she loved it. She thought it was a real kick. She used to come back and tell me about all the guys she met. Stockbrokers. Oil barons. CEOs. They had all this money and power and big houses and cars and boats. But when they were with her, she said, she was the one in control. They’d do anything to have sex with her. She was calling all the shots. I think Whitney really liked that.”

  I suddenly thought of something. “Was she blackmailing any of them?” I asked.

  “Of course not. Why would you say that?”

  “You said the men she went out with had all this money and power and property. Maybe they’d lose it if she exposed them. Maybe she figured this out—and figured it was an easy way to make some serious college money.” I saw the disbelieving look on Stacy’s face. “Look, it would make a good motive for murder.”

  “I thought the motive was supposed to be William Franze, the guy she was with. A jealous girlfriend or something.”

  “That’s one theory.”

  “You think it might have been somebody who was really after Whitney?” she asked.

  “No one knows for sure what happened that night.”

  “Whitney wasn’t a blackmailer,” she said emphatically.

  I nodded. I had no idea if she was or not. I was just fishing anyway. “Where did Whitney come from?” I asked.

  “Wayne, New Jersey. Her family had some decent money. They were sending her to college here and a younger sister to Boston University, which is a pretty hefty fee. But Whitney had a falling out with them, so she was living off the money she made at the agency. She made a lot of money.”

  “And the two of you were friends?”

  “Whitney was neat. She was fun. We were almost even roommates.”

  “What happened?”

  “She couldn’t get along with Oscar.”

  “Who’s Oscar? Your boyfriend?”

  “Oscar’s my dog.”

  She took a picture out of her purse and showed it to me. A little white fluffy dog on a beach somewhere with her. She was dressed in a bikini, and throwing a rubber ball to the dog. Cute. Definitely cute. The dog wasn’t too bad either.

  “Whitney didn’t like dogs?” I asked.

  “She was scared of them. I think a dog bit her once when she was a kid or something, and she never got over that. She wouldn’t even come into the house if Oscar was around.”

  I handed her back the picture.

  “So what’s the deal with you?” she asked. “Are you married? Engaged? In love with somebody? Gay?”

  I laughed. “What makes you think I’m one of those?”

  “All the good ones are.”

  “You think I’m a good one?”

  “You’ve got possibilities,” she said.

  “Well, I used to be married,” I said. “I was engaged up to a few days ago. I also was in love. Unfortunately, the woman I was in love with was not the same woman that I was engaged to. As you might guess, that created a few complications in my love life. The bottom line is I no longer have a fiancée or a girlf
riend. I haven’t gone the gay route yet, but maybe I should try that next. My luck with women hasn’t been very good.”

  “Maybe you’ve just been with the wrong woman.”

  “I’ve been with a few of them,” I told her.

  Wayne was about a forty-five minute drive from Manhattan. Stacy gave me the address of Whitney Martin’s parents, and told me how to get there.

  I didn’t want to go see them. I always hated to talk to the family of a murder victim. Besides, I didn’t really know what it would accomplish. But I didn’t know what else to do.

  I’d tried everything else on this story without any luck.

  So I decided to follow the trail of Whitney Martin—and take it wherever it led.

  Chapter 50

  I could figure out right away where Whitney Martin got her good looks from. Her mother, Janet Martin, was a drop-dead beauty. A lot older, of course, somewhere around fifty, but the years had been kind to her. I remembered reading one of the accounts of the murder that described her as a former fashion model. She had high cheekbones and striking features—she still looked as if she could have just stepped out of the pages of Vogue magazine.

  She was digging up a flower bed in the front lawn. She had on a crisp white blouse, a pair of freshly ironed jeans, and expensive-looking leather boots. There wasn’t a speck of dirt on any of them.

  “What do you think of my azaleas?” she asked.

  She pointed to a long row of bright pink flowers in front of us.

  “They’re beautiful,” I said.

  “I’ll bet you’ve never seen azaleas like that before, have you?”

  The truth was I hadn’t thought that much about azaleas in my life, but I didn’t tell her that.

  “They’re one of a kind,” I agreed.

  “My azaleas have won first prize at the Wayne Garden and Flower Club for four years running,” she said proudly. “A lot of people try to grow them. But most people can’t do it well. No one’s ever won the award five years in a row. I hope to be the first.”