by R. G. Belsky
I looked out at the people in the park. There was a young guy near us now in a tank-top T-shirt and cutoff jeans throwing a Frisbee to his dog. Each time he threw it, the dog happily chased it—then brought it back and started all over again. I felt a little bit like the dog. Constantly chasing something for no reason. I’d uncovered a lot of facts in this case. But I wasn’t sure what any of them meant.
“Look, I’m sorry,” I said to Bonnie.
“I guess I should be flattered, huh?” She smiled. “Being a suspect right along with Lisa Montero. That puts me in pretty good company.”
“I’ve been under a lot of pressure,” I told her.
“Yeah, I’ve noticed. Accusing me of being a murderer seems to be the act of a pretty desperate man. I once heard you’d do anything to get a story, but this is ridiculous. Look, I’m going to say here something very personal to you, Joe. OK?”
I shrugged. “Sure, go ahead.”
“I know you like to think that life dealt you a bad hand,” she said. “But it seems to me that the cards you’ve gotten were pretty good. You just played them badly. By my count, you’ve had at least two good women who loved you—your wife Susan and Carolyn. But you treated both of them like shit. Then you fall head over heels in love with someone like Lisa Montero, who’s guaranteed to break your heart. Now you wonder why you’re unhappy. Well, no one’s doing these things to you, Joe. You’re doing them to yourself. You self-destructed your marriage. You self-destructed your engagement to Carolyn. You self-destructed your newspaper career. And now it looks to me like you’re doing it all over again.”
She was right, of course.
Especially about me and Susan.
I remembered again how much Susan used to love Christmas. The excitement in her voice when she talked about it. The sparkle in her eyes when she put up decorations. The joy in her on Christmas morning when she opened her presents.
Then I thought about the one Christmas she and Joey and I spent together before they were taken away from me. Or almost spent together.
It was right after I’d lost my job at the Banner, and I was gambling pretty heavily. I’d gone through most of our savings and the money Susan had put away to pay bills. But I’d opened a special Christmas account at the bank the year before, and there was still enough money in that to buy presents for her and Joey. Which was what I intended to do when I withdrew it on the day before Christmas.
I never wanted to lose the money.
I really thought I could parlay it in a poker game into enough to buy them something really special.
By the time I left the game, I was broke. I called up every friend I knew—some of whom I hadn’t seen in years—and begged them for money to buy my family gifts for Christmas. It was already Christmas Eve, so many people weren’t home. The ones that were took pity on me and gave me money. But when I finally made it to the stores, it was too late. They were all closed. Everyone had gone home to be with their families. So did I.
I’ll never forget the look of sadness on Susan’s face the next morning when there were no presents under the tree. Joey was too young to understand what was going on, but I knew I had let him down too. On the day after Christmas—when the stores were open again—I used the money I’d borrowed to buy them some wonderful gifts. But it wasn’t the same. It was never the same between Susan and me after that.
Until the very end.
That last night—the night before she and Joey died—I thought I’d gotten through to her again. That we’d rekindled the love we once had. That we were going to be okay.
But then they were gone.
And now I’ll never know for sure . . .
“I can still do this story,” I told Bonnie.
“And you think that’s going to make everything better?”
“Yes.”
I really did think that. I figured that if I could just figure out the riddle of David Galvin and the Great Pretenders, then everything else would fall into place. The William Franze murders. The deaths of my wife and son. My job at the Banner. Maybe even my life.
Looking back on it all now, I was really naive. I was like a poker player betting big on a pair of twos—while everyone else in the game was holding full houses and flushes and four-of-a-kinds. Only I didn’t know that until it was too late.
“Do you have any real leads?” Bonnie asked.
“Just one,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“Someone who still seems to be at the center of everything that’s happened.”
“Who?”
“John Montero.”
Chapter 58
John Montero was a creature of habit.
Every morning he got up at the same time, 6 a.m. Then he jogged for thirty minutes on a treadmill, while he watched the morning news on TV. After that, he always ate the same breakfast—a glass of grapefruit juice, a bowl of oat bran, and decaffeinated coffee—as he read the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and overseas market listings from Europe and Japan. Then he got into his car and drove to his office on Wall Street, arriving exactly at 10 a.m. every day.
The point is that he was really easy to catch up with if you really wanted to do it.
I did.
But someone beat me to it.
John Montero had been shot to death.
They found him in his parked car in the garage of his office building. He was slumped over the steering wheel with two bullets in the head. Both shots were fired from very close range. Police theorized that he must have known his killer—or at least not been frightened by the assailant. There was no sign of forced entry into his car or a violent encounter beforehand. Whoever did it had apparently been sitting in the passenger seat next to him.
By the time I got to the murder scene, the place was a real circus. The police were there, of course. So was a lot of press.
Dennis Righetti was one of the cops standing near Montero’s bloodied car. I walked over to him.
“Is there any possibility at all that this could have just been a random killing?” I asked. “A carjacking? Or a robbery? I mean maybe it had nothing at all to do with all the other murders.”
“The car is a sixty-thousand-dollar Mercedes, and no one even tried to take it,” Righetti said. “Montero’s got a couple of thousand dollars in cash in his wallet—not to mention credit cards and the like. Also untouched. Now what do you think the motive was?”
“Somebody wanted to get rid of him.”
“That’s pretty obvious.”
But I still didn’t understand why.
I’d pretty much convinced myself that Montero was somehow behind everything. He was the bad guy. The bogeyman. The man I had to put behind bars. But now he was dead too. So none of it made any sense to me anymore.
“You’re gonna love this,” Righetti said. He gestured toward Montero’s car. “You know what we found in there? A scrapbook with newspaper clips of the new murders on Galvin’s list. Dodson. Linda Hiller. Like he was keeping track of the killings. Oh, there was something else too. A gun. A Smith and Wesson semiautomatic .40-caliber gun. We have to wait until the ballistics tests come back, but I’m betting it’s the same gun that was used on Dodson and Hiller.”
“You think he killed both of them?”
“Maybe.”
“But what was the motive?”
“One scenario goes like this. His daughter gets herself into a real jam with the Franze murders. Maybe she really was innocent, like you say. But Montero didn’t want to take that chance—he figures there’s too many enemies out there who want to make a member of his family pay for his past crimes. He needs a way to get her off the hook. And he’s willing to do anything to beat a criminal rap. We’ve seen that in the past with him. Suddenly this list of Galvin’s appears with Franze’s name on it—and you start writing stories about some wacko ex-college students out there still killing people. It’s like a gift from heaven for Montero and his daughter. All they have to do is convince everybody that your story
is true—and she gets off free. Only, to make it convincing, there has to be more murders. Otherwise people might think Galvin is just making it up. But, after Dodson and Hiller die, everyone believes it.”
“Then who killed Montero?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Righetti said.
Greg Ackerman was there too. I figured he’d be happy the man he wanted to nail so badly was now dead. But he didn’t look very happy.
We talked about the scrapbook and gun that had been found in Montero’s car.
“It still seems thin to me,” I said when he was finished.
“You think so, huh?”
“Yeah. Why would a busy guy like Montero care enough to keep a scrapbook of the killings? And why carry it around in the car with him? For that matter, why would he keep the gun in the car with him? What if he got stopped by a cop or something? I don’t buy any of it.”
“You think maybe someone set him up to take the fall?”
“That’s right. The same person who really did the killings.”
“Well, that’s scenario number two that we’re working on,” Ackerman said.
“You got any idea who it could be?”
“How about your ex-girlfriend?”
I stared at him. “You mean Lisa?”
“Sure. First she does the brother. Then the mother. And now the father. She’s the only one left. All the money now belongs to her.”
He was right, of course. I didn’t want to admit it. But I’d thought of the same scenario.
Maybe Lisa hadn’t killed William Franze and Whitney Martin that night in the East Side townhouse.
But that didn’t mean she couldn’t be responsible for any of the other killings.
“Are you going to arrest her?” I asked Ackerman.
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
“Because of you. You made sure that I looked stupid the last time I arrested her for murder. I can’t do it again. No one would take it seriously—they’d think I was just harassing her. I could never get a conviction. Because of you, Lisa Montero may just get away with murder.”
Chapter 59
Christine Whalen was wearing her hair long this time when I went to see her at her office. The half glasses were gone too. Probably using contacts. She had on a pale blue silk blouse with the top two buttons open, a gray blazer, and a pair of blue jeans. She sat on the edge of her desk and crossed her legs. The jeans were tight against her thighs.
“I need your help again,” I said.
“Professionally?”
I looked at the open buttons on the blouse. I wondered if she greeted all her patients like that.
“Is there an option?” I asked.
“My fee is one hundred dollars an hour,” she told me. “I didn’t charge you the first time. But people do pay me for my advice. That’s how I make a living. And my time is money. So . . .”
“How about I buy you dinner, charm you with my witty repartee, dazzle you with my unerring ability to always choose just the right little bottle of wine—and we call it even?”
She laughed. “You’re very charming, Mr. Dougherty,” she smiled. “I’m sure that many women would jump at the chance to go out with you. It’s just that I’m not one of them.”
“Not your type?” I asked.
“Not my sex.”
It took me a while to understand what she was saying. I guess I’m just not a ’90s kind of politically correct guy. Finally, it dawned on me.
“You’re gay?”
“Yes, I’m a lesbian.”
“Are you fanatical about it?”
She laughed again. “Let’s just say I’m involved in a very serious relationship right now.”
“Maybe you haven’t met the right guy,” I said brightly.
“Gee, that’s an original line.”
“You’ve heard it before?”
“Every man in the world thinks he’s the one who can turn a gay woman straight. They never do.”
“Maybe we can break some new ground here.”
“Doubtful,” she said.
In the end, she agreed to talk with me more about David Galvin. No charge.
Maybe she did have a secret crush on me.
I told her everything that had happened so far. About Galvin. The Great Pretenders. Arthur Dodson and Linda Hiller. Me and Lisa Montero. Carolyn. Bonnie. My gambling. The way I got fired at the Banner eight years ago. Once I started talking, I couldn’t stop. I’d held a lot inside me for a long time. She was the only shrink I knew, and I felt a need to unburden myself.
“Let me get this straight,” she said when I was finished. “You broke up with your fiancée, got dumped by the woman you left her for—and now you come here and make a pass at me?”
“Well, it wasn’t technically a pass . . .”
“It was a pass.”
“So what do you think, Doc?”
“You are totally fucked up.”
I smiled. “Stop talking in that technical medical jargon—and give it to me straight.”
She said it would be easier if we just concentrated on the story.
“The key to this is still David Galvin,” she said.
“But he’s dead.”
“Whatever,” she shrugged. “Let me tell you something about serial killers. They always want to leave something behind for us to remember them by. They say the Boston Strangler always left the head of his victims tilted at a certain angle as his own personal signature. Another man in Florida, who killed thirty-two women, wrote short stories about all his murders. Son of Sam wrote letters boasting of his bloody deeds. Charles Manson left messages in blood. These are very vain, egotistical people we’re talking about here. They always leave clues for us to follow. Not because they’re sloppy, but because they want us to know everything they’ve done. They think they’re smarter than us. They think we’ll never be able to catch them. So we have to prove they’re wrong.”
“But how do I chase after a dead man?”
“If you really want to understand everything David Galvin has done, then you have to think like him,” she said.
“I thought I was.”
She shook her head no.
“I checked out everything he said in his last letter,” I said stubbornly. “He said there were three Great Pretenders besides him. I’m pretty sure that Arthur Dodson and Linda Hiller were two of them. So that leaves one person unaccounted for. That’s the person who’s doing the killing now. Probably to cover up their own involvement. So all I have to do is find the Last Great Pretender. The one he didn’t put in the note.”
“Why do you think he wrote that note and gave you that last interview?”
“He felt remorse for everything he’d done,” I said. “He talked about God and how religion was helping him as he battled the cancer that was killing him. He said he wanted to make peace with God before the end. Get his life in order, settle all this unfinished business—before his own judgement day. That’s why he told me all these things. He wanted a clear conscience when he died.”
Dr. Whalen laughed. “You really don’t have a clue,” she said. “Why didn’t Galvin tell you in the note who the Great Pretenders were? Why is the name of the third Great Pretender not in the note? How do you know there were only three of them?”
“Galvin said . . .”
“This is a fantasy game,” she said impatiently. “Everything is make-believe. It’s all pretend. Nothing is as it seems. You always have to remember that.”
“But why would Galvin lie to me?” I asked. “He had nothing to gain from it. He was dying.”
“Like I told you before—I think Galvin was still playing a game with you.”
“What game?” I asked impatiently. “The game he was playing ended a long time ago. For chrissakes, the man’s been in prison for the past eleven years.”
“You just haven’t been listening, Dougherty. You’re still playing by the rules. But there are no rules in this game. Galvin made the rules. He can c
hange them without telling anybody. He can do anything he wants. He is God. Remember?”
“But he’s dead. I checked.”
“I never said he was alive. But anything is possible in a fantasy player’s world. Even death isn’t permanent. Do you understand?”
I nodded.
“All the bizarre events that happened since the day you met with him,” she said. “The murders, the intrigue, the unanswered questions—it’s almost as if he’s out there choreographing the whole thing, isn’t it? Now I’m not sure exactly how. But I think Galvin figured out a way to accomplish that. Do I really think he’s still alive? No, I don’t. But I also don’t believe he was being totally truthful with you.”
“He said he’d found peace with God,” I said again.
“Galvin thought he was God. When he talked about God, he was talking about himself.”
I suddenly realized the full magnitude—and the horror—of what it was she was telling me.
“Here’s a man who killed nine people—horribly and without a trace of human compassion,” she continued. “Why would he change so much in prison? It doesn’t make sense. From what you say, he was truly evil and totally brilliant and operated for most of his life without the slightest hint of remorse. Maybe he was dying of cancer, but I don’t believe he suddenly developed a conscience overnight.”
“So what do you think happened?” I asked her.
“I think David Galvin decided to play God, right to the very end. That’s what he’s doing now.”
“But Galvin’s dead,” I repeated.
It seemed important to keep saying that.
“Okay, he’s dead.”
“Then what are you trying to say . . . ?”
“Somehow,” Dr. Christine Whalen told me, “David Galvin is still playing the game. A deadly game. A game with no rules. And someone out there is playing it with him. So are you. That’s what he was trying to tell you that last day you saw him.”
“But who . . . ?”
“David Galvin is still the Great Pretender,” she said. “You just never understood.”
