Playing Dead

by R. G. Belsky

  “This isn’t personal,” he told her.

  “Yes, it is. You’re questioning my abilities. I checked all those names out, I investigated everything, I didn’t miss a thing . . .”

  “Nobody’s perfect, Bonnie.”

  She sat there glumly. I was a little surprised by her reaction. I’m generally protective about my stories too. And I sure didn’t much like the idea of somebody else—even Bonnie—digging too deeply into everything I’d done on the Franze case. But Andy was right. It made sense to switch assignments. One of us might just stumble across something the other one had missed.

  “Anyone got any other thoughts?” Andy asked.

  “What about the list?” I said.

  “Galvin’s list?”

  “Yeah, there’s something wrong with it.”

  “Like what?”

  “Franze and Whitney Martin, for one thing. It’s like they don’t belong on the list. What’s the connection to Galvin or NYU or any of his Great Pretender friends? And what happens now? All the names on Galvin’s list are answered for. Everyone’s dead. So it should be over. But I don’t think it is. I think there’s going to be more murders. Unless we can stop them. But I don’t know who or how or why.”

  I looked over at Bonnie for a second. She was staring down at the floor. Still sulking.

  “You sure do have a lot of questions,” Rollins said.

  “It’s called being a reporter, Jack.”

  “Maybe you should get off your ass and go find some answers, huh?”

  A few minutes later, as we were walking out of the office and back into the city room, Rollins caught up with me. He wasn’t finished yet.

  “I just want you to know, Dougherty,” he said, “that if I ever become editor of this paper, you’re finished. My first order of business will be to get you fired. Again.”

  “Well, then we should all hope that day never comes,” I told him.

  He shook his head. “You fucked up a big story eight years ago. Since then, you’ve fucked up your career, you fucked up your marriage, you fucked up your new engagement to this woman in New Jersey—let’s face it, you fucked up your whole life. And now you’re fucking up this story too. The bottom line here is you’re just a total fuckup.”

  I realized as he was walking away that what I’d told Lisa about him that first night in bed together was probably the truth. Jack Rollins had forgotten the real Walter Billings story. His role in it had been buried away deep in his subconscious a long time ago. It was easier to blame me for the whole thing. Maybe that’s why it made him so uncomfortable to have me around again.

  Bonnie came up behind me.

  “Nice conversation?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, “Jack said he was thinking of nominating me for employee of the month.”

  “Watch out for him, Joe,” she said. “He’s out to get you.”

  He’ll have to wait in line, I thought.

  “How about you?” I asked her. “Are you okay with everything that happened in there?”

  “No, I’m not,” she said. “I did a good job checking out Dodson and Linda Hiller and all the other victims. I don’t know why they want you to go back again now.”

  “Sometimes a fresh perspective can . . .”

  But Bonnie wasn’t listening. “I’m a good reporter, Joe. I’m just as good a reporter as you are. Maybe better. You’re not going to find anything I didn’t find out from those people. Believe me.”

  “I’m sure I won’t,” I said.

  Chapter 56

  Except I did.

  I went into it figuring that I wouldn’t uncover a single thing that Bonnie hadn’t. That she really was as great a reporter as she said she was. That she’d left no stone unturned. That I’d know no more at the end than I did when I started out.

  But, by the time I was finished, I had a lot more information.

  I also decided I had a problem.

  Margaret Dodson was not in good shape. That wasn’t surprising. A few weeks ago, she’d been living a happy life with her husband and their two children. Then he suddenly disappeared. After that, he was found brutally murdered in a motel room hundreds of miles away. And now there were a lot of questions about what he might have done sometime in his life to wind up on David Galvin’s death list.

  “Did your husband seem worried or anxious at all before he disappeared?” I asked her.

  “No, he was the same as always,” she said. “We didn’t always see a lot of each other, what with Arthur’s job and the kids. He worked long hours, and he also coached our son’s soccer team. But he seemed fine.”

  “Tell me about the last time you saw him.”

  “Gosh, I don’t know what to say. It was all so normal. We had breakfast, he said goodbye, and then he caught the eight-eleven train to New York City. He worked for an accounting firm on Park Avenue—Kelly, Strachnan, and Dodson. He’d been named a full partner last year.”

  I nodded.

  “Then, somewhere in the middle of the day, I got a phone call from the people at work. They wondered where he was. He’d never shown up at all.”

  “Do you remember what day that was?”

  She gave me the date.

  It was the same day my article about David Galvin had appeared in the Banner—along with Arthur Dodson’s name included on Galvin’s list of targeted victims.

  “After that, the police came to my door. And people kept calling me up and telling me about Arthur’s name being in the paper. On some serial killer’s list. They asked me what was going on. I didn’t know what to make of any of it. I still don’t.”

  It seemed pretty obvious what had happened. Arthur Dodson had read the newspaper sometime that morning, probably on the train on his way to work. The Banner with my article about Felix the Cat. When he saw his name, he panicked and decided to run. He didn’t tell anyone where he was going. His wife. His kids. The people he worked with. He just ran. What would scare somebody so badly that they would do that? David Galvin, I guess.

  I talked to Margaret Dodson about her husband’s days at NYU. That was before she knew him, she said, but she told me proudly that he’d graduated magna cum laude and been president of his fraternity. She said he still kept in touch with some of the fraternity members. Had she ever heard him mention David Galvin’s name? No, she said, he never did.

  Then I asked her some more questions about his job.

  Their neighbors.

  Friends.

  I wasn’t sure where I was going, but I felt like I had to ask her as many questions as I could. Maybe I’d get lucky. Maybe I’d stumble across something that was important.

  And that’s exactly what happened.

  “Why Hillsdale?” I asked her at one point. “Do you have any idea why your husband wound up dying in this little town in the middle of Pennsylvania? Any connections he had there? Friends, family—business trips?”

  “It’s funny you mention that,” Mrs. Dodson said. “We did go to Hillsdale once. Spent a night there on our way to visit my family in Chicago. Anyway, Arthur just fell in love with Hillsdale. He thought it was a quaint little town. He said he’d love to retire there someday. In fact, whenever things got really crazy or hectic around here, he would joke about how we should move to Hillsdale and get away from all our troubles. Trouble could never find us there, he said.”

  I stared at her. “Did you tell this to anyone else?”

  “I didn’t remember until it was too late.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, the police asked me if I had any ideas where Arthur might have gone. I said I didn’t. I just didn’t think about Hillsdale then. I guess I was too upset. It wasn’t until later, when someone else asked the same question, that I told them about how he sometimes talked about going there.”

  “Who was that?”

  “The other reporter from the Banner that was here.”

  “Bonnie Kerns?”

  “Yes, the red-headed one.”

  “
When did you tell her about Hillsdale?”

  “The day before my husband was found dead.” Mrs. Dodson shook her head sadly. “I guess she never had time to do anything about it either until it was too late.”

  There was something wrong here.

  Bonnie had said that she got the tip about Dodson from an anonymous phone call. But Margaret Dodson said she’d told her about his love for the town a day before he died. So why hadn’t Bonnie mentioned that to anyone? If it was a phone call and a tip from Dodson’s wife, that was more than just the wild goose chase Bonnie claimed she’d gone to Hillsdale on.

  There couldn’t be that many motels in Hillsdale. A half dozen or so at most. What if Bonnie had gone there looking for Dodson on her own after the conversation with his wife? What if there never was any phone tip about him being there? She could have canvassed all the motels in the area in a few hours. An out-of-town visitor like Arthur Dodson wouldn’t be hard to find—even if he had changed his name.

  But why would Bonnie do that and not tell anyone?

  Well, there was one answer.

  An unthinkable one.

  But I thought about it anyway.

  Chapter 57

  “We need to talk,” I said to Bonnie.

  “About what?”

  “Clarion State College.”

  Bonnie and I were sitting in Bryant Park, which is in the middle of Times Square and a few blocks away from the Banner building. Bryant Park used to be a home for drug dealers and derelicts. But, a few years ago, they cleaned the place up and turned it into a real garden spot of New York City. Now it was filled with mothers pushing baby strollers, yuppies on their bikes and roller skates, and midtown office workers taking a long lunch hour.

  But I wasn’t there for lunch. I was working.

  “You checked?” Bonnie asked.

  “Yeah. Clarion State said you never went there.”

  “They must be mistaken. Maybe you talked to the wrong person. Maybe . . .”

  “What town is Clarion State in?” I asked her.

  “What?”

  “You went there for four years, Bonnie. A little place in southern Ohio called Clarion State College. That’s what you told me. So you must know what town you were in. That’s pretty basic. What town in Ohio is Clarion State located in?”

  “Clarion is the name of the town too,” she said, but not with a lot of conviction.

  I made a loud buzzing sound like the host of a TV game show.

  “Wrong answer,” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” she stammered. “I meant Clarion was the name of the county. The town is . . . Oh, Christ, what was it called again? Look, Joe, I’m just drawing a blank here. It’s more than ten years ago and . . .”

  “There is no town of Clarion in Ohio,” I said. “No county either, for that matter. There is a Clarion State College, though. It was named after James Clarion, who led a Union Army regiment that defeated the Confederates in a key battle at Gettysburg during the Civil War. The school is located in the town of Loganville, which is in Hocking County. That’s in southeastern Ohio, about twenty miles from the Ohio River and the borders with Pennsylvania and West Virginia. I checked. You should have too. If you’re going to make up a story like that, it’s important to get your facts straight.”

  Bonnie sighed deeply. “What made you check?”

  “I didn’t, not for a long time. There was really no reason to. Which, I guess, is why you volunteered the information. A preemptive strike. Tell me what I want to know before I ask it. That way I won’t dig too deeply into your past. It worked too—caught me off-guard and bought you time. But then I began to wonder about you.

  “Like the way you found Arthur Dodson, for instance. I always had a problem with the fact that the killer tracked him down to that little out of the way motel in Pennsylvania just about the same time you did. It just seemed to be too much of a coincidence. Sure, he could have gotten the information from the same tipster you did, but that didn’t make much sense. I began to think maybe there wasn’t a tipster. Maybe you found him on your own—and then paid him a visit. I wasn’t sure how you found him though. Until I talked to Margaret Dodson.”

  I went through everything the dead man’s wife had told me.

  “So I decided to do some more checking. Linda Hiller, for instance. I found out that you were at the bridal shop where her body was found a week before the murder. One of the clerks there remembers you asking questions about wedding gowns and stuff. I figure you were doing some research on the place.

  “Then I discovered that you went to see David Galvin too—about a year before I did. Your name’s in the records at the prison. But you never did a story about it. So what were you and Galvin talking about? Old times? When the two of you went to NYU together?”

  “My God, you think I’m the killer, don’t you?” Bonnie said.

  “Did you go to NYU?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Well, you didn’t go to Clarion either.”

  “That’s right. I went to Penn State.”

  “Oh, so now it’s Penn State?”

  “Yes.”

  “Bonnie, if you really went to Penn State, why wouldn’t you just tell me that in the first place?”

  “Because I didn’t want you digging into my past.”

  “Why? What was I going to find?”

  She looked at me sadly.

  “When I was in high school, I wasn’t very popular,” she said. “I know you probably think I’m kinda weird now, but I was really weird in high school. I never had one date, never had a boyfriend, and spent the night of my senior prom watching Lawrence Welk on TV by myself.

  “I thought it would all change when I went to college. Different place, different people. But it was just the same. No, that’s not true. It was worse. All the other kids at Penn State seemed to have more money than I did and be better looking and have more friends. I was still the weirdo on the outside looking in.

  “But I was smart. I was always smart. So I figured out a way to get guys to like me. I’d be easy. You wonder why I don’t like sex now? Well, I guess that’s the reason. Back then, I was the easiest girl in the freshman class. You went out on a date with Bonnie Kerns, you got laid—no problem. Because I was so fuckin’ desperate to be liked. And it worked too. Suddenly guys were interested in me. Of course, most of them were dorks, perverts, and creeps. And they all wanted to be with me for the wrong reason. But I didn’t care. At least I didn’t think I did.

  “Until the night of this big fraternity pledge party. I got invited by a really good-looking freshman guy—this jock who was at school on a football scholarship. I was surprised he wanted to go with me. But excited too. Really excited. I bought a new dress, I spent hours trying to fix myself up in front of the mirror. I wanted so much to make him proud he’d invited me. Only when I got to the party, I found out I wasn’t his date at all.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “I was supposed to be the date for the fraternity’s entire freshman pledge class.”

  “You mean . . . ?”

  “I was the party entertainment.”

  “They had sex with you?” I asked.

  “They raped me.”

  “How many . . .”

  “All of them.”

  “Did you go to the police?”

  Bonnie shook her head no. “I never pressed any charges. I never even told anyone else what happened. I was too embarrassed. Instead, I just went back to my dorm room and cried all night. The next morning, I realized I could never face seeing any of them again. I could never face seeing anyone on campus. I figured everyone would know about me. So I got on a bus, left college, and never looked back. I came here to New York City, got a job for a while as a waitress, then did temporary office work—and finally wound up at the Banner. Anyway, that’s why there’s no record of me at Clarion State College or whatever the hell the name of that place is.”

  “Why didn’t you just tell me that in the firs
t place?”

  “Like I said, I’ve never told anyone. You’re the only one who knows.”

  “But that was such a long time ago . . .”

  “When I filled out my application to work at the Banner, I said I’d graduated from Clarion State with a degree in journalism. That’s how I got this job. I lied. I figured that no one would ever bother to check it. And they didn’t. Until now.”

  “So you never went to college at all after Penn State?”

  “No.”

  “And if Andy or Rollins found out . . . ?”

  “Who knows? They might just laugh about it. But I lied on my application. I was hired under false pretenses. They could fire me if they wanted to. I love this job, Joe. It’s my whole life. That’s why I didn’t want you poking around into my background. I couldn’t take the chance.”

  “What about the rest of it?” I asked. “Arthur Dodson. Linda Hiller. Your visit to David Galvin.”

  “The reason I went to the bridal shop where they found Linda Hiller was that I’m going to be in a wedding. One of the women in personnel, Kathy Neeland, is getting married next month. I’m supposed to be a bridesmaid. I’ve never done anything like that before so I guess that’s why they remember me asking a lot of questions. You can check with Kathy, if you want.

  “As for the phone tip on Dodson, they log all incoming calls at the Banner switchboard. Check that out too. The stuff about Hillsdale from his wife I didn’t connect to the phone call until after I went to the motel. After that, it didn’t seem worth mentioning since I’d already found him.

  “The interview with Galvin was assigned by Andy Kramer. He thought it would make a good ‘Whatever Happened to?’ feature for a slow news day. Only Galvin wouldn’t talk to me, so it never came off. Maybe he remembered though. Maybe that’s why he came to the Banner when he decided to tell his story at the end.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say. I’d convinced myself on the way over to meet Bonnie that all these things somehow added up to a smoking gun—a pattern of devious deception on her part that she’d never be able to explain. Now I realized I’d just been jumping to conclusions. I felt bad.