The Lacey Confession

by Richard Greener

  No matter how he felt about his flight, landing at Schiphol, Amsterdam’s airport, was always a pleasant event. There were some airports—they were everywhere it seemed—where the landing pattern required a corkscrew approach to a runway devilishly nestled between jagged mountain peaks. He still hated that. Schiphol, on the other hand, was in a country that didn’t appear to have a hill more than ten or fifteen feet high anywhere. The airport had once been a lake. The Dutch drained it, at the beginning of the twentieth century, constructing a complicated pattern of small canals, irrigation ditches and pumping stations that spread for miles. Land reclamation was a high art in the Netherlands and Schiphol provided a canvas the whole world could admire. The lakebed, dry as it could be, at first became a military base. It was turned into a wartime airport during World War One. Because, in truth, it was little more than a mud field, French pilots who never liked it at all called it Schiphol-les-bains. The name stuck for many years until state-of-the-art renovation made it suitable for the modern fleets of passenger jets and prepared Schiphol Airport to become the busiest in Europe.

  What with the change in time zones from America to Europe, turning one day into another just by, arbitrarily it seemed, skipping the night, plus Dutch Customs being very touchy in the midst of continued terrorist threats, and then a change of trains in Rotterdam, it wasn’t until late afternoon, technically the next day in Holland, that Walter arrived in Bergen op Zoom. Door-to-door, the trip had taken more than 30 hours. Despite sleeping across the Atlantic, he was tired, but he had work to do and no time for rest. There weren’t many hotels to stay in. Aat had told Walter he found him at the first place he looked. Walter was not surprised. Harry Levine was no different from the rich kids who ran away from Houston or Kansas City or wherever their parents lived, to New York City. They always took a room at The Plaza. Maybe figuring that Harry Levine would go to Bergen op Zoom wasn’t easy, but once done, finding him there was child’s play.

  At the Mercure de Draak, just as Aat had reported, Walter found Harry Levine registered under his own name. Harry was an innocent, a babe in the woods. He carried a passport saying he was Harry Levine. So, what other possibility was there? It probably never occurred to him to try to register under another name. Walter had seen people who were pretty good at running and hiding make the same mistake many times. He called Harry’s room from a house phone in the lobby. “Mr. Levine’s room, please,” he asked the operator. “Yes sir,” she said, and an instant later the phone rang.

  “Hello,” said Harry, tentatively. He had considered not answering at all.

  “I’m Walter Sherman. I’m coming up.” Harry started to say something. Walter cut him off. “Not on the phone. I’ll be right up.”

  “Nice to meet you too,” said Walter incredulously, shaking Harry’s hand. Christ! he thought. This guy greeted me with a “glad to meet you.” Nobody’s glad to meet anyone under circumstances like these. A worried Walter wondered what he had gotten himself into.

  “Call down to the desk and tell them you’re checking out. Throw your stuff together. Let’s get out of here.” He stood there and looked at him—Harry Levine, target. He looked pretty much like his photos, every bit the average American male in his thirties. A little taller, a little darker and a little better looking perhaps, but easy to spot, for sure. If those looking for him had any sense of what they were doing, they would find him in no time.

  Not everyone Walter had searched for looked like their photographs. Often, the pictures he was given were too old to be of much use. This was especially so with teenagers. A family photo of a fourteen-year-old girl—one taken at home with the whole family gathered around a Thanksgiving meal or a Christmas tree—bears little resemblance to the same girl, three years later, sexed-up, high as a kite, with a couple of new piercings, a tattoo and colored hair. Over many years, many cases, Walter had developed quite a skill identifying live people from photographs that would be useless to others. The fact that the others always seemed to include the authorities had guaranteed a brisk marketplace, a deep vein in Walter’s gold mine of a profession. He really could do what others couldn’t. Some pictures of some targets never went far away. Walter had never really gotten over being fooled so badly by the photos of a man he looked for, and eventually found, four years ago. Leonard Martin was his name and every cop in America was trying to catch him. Martin fooled them all and Walter had allowed himself to be buffaloed just like they were. That wasn’t supposed to happen. The pictures of Leonard Martin and the real Leonard Martin were so dissimilar . . . Just thinking about it bothered him all over again—Leonard Martin, Michael DelGrazo, the cowboy with the floppy hat . . . Sonofabitch, he thought. Here I am standing in the doorway of Harry Levine’s room in one of the oldest hotels in the world, and all I’m thinking about is—Leonard Martin.

  “I just arrived,” said Harry. “I’ve only been here a few . . .”

  “Registered under your own name.”

  “Not a good idea?”

  “No, Harry. Definitely not a good idea. Check out and move into my room until I figure out where to go next.”

  “What room are you in?” asked Harry.

  “Not here. Not this hotel. Come on, get your things.” Walter saw that Harry was a very neat person. His bathroom had been set up as if he’d moved in. The toothpaste, toothbrush and a small bottle of mouthwash were stacked next to a drinking glass. His razor, shaving cream, aftershave lotion and extra blades had been carefully lined up on the side of the sink opposite the toothbrush. On a marble shelf next to the shower, Harry had arranged his deodorant, hairbrush and comb. The towels at first appeared undisturbed, still hanging, nicely folded. Walter’s experienced eye saw one of them had been used. It was refolded and had been put back in its original location, but he noticed the small change in the crease on one side. Very neat, he thought. He expected what came next. Harry’s clothes were hung in the closet and arranged in drawers—underwear and socks in the top drawer, a few shirts in the second and a sweater, sitting alone in the bottom drawer. “Look, Harry,” he said. “Just toss everything in your bag and let’s get out of here. Before they get here.”

  “They can’t be that close—whoever they are—can they?”

  “They could be getting off the elevator at the end of the hall, right now.”

  “What? Come on now . . .”

  “You’d be better off assuming that than assuming they’re not. I’m here, aren’t I?” Walter reached into the closet, grabbed the hanging pants, a jacket and the shirts and threw them into Harry’s open bag sitting on the bed. Harry looked upset, but he did the same with the rest of his belongings. Then he reached under the bed and retrieved a bulky attaché case.

  “That it?” asked Walter.

  “Yes,” said Harry, “I hid it in London. I got it before I came here, to Holland.”

  “That’s what I figured,” Walter said. “Call the desk. Check out.”

  Harry called down and told the front desk to prepare his bill. Doing just as Walter instructed him, he said, “Put the charges on my credit card and mail the receipt to me.”

  In a minute they were down the stairs, past the kitchen, out of there through a back door.

  PART TWO

  It may be the devil or it may be the Lord

  but you’re gonna have to serve somebody.

  –Bob Dylan–

  The day Anna Rothstein ran away from Memphis and married a kid named Eddie O’Malley, her father, Saul, worried about his wife’s sanity. Doris Rothstein was crying in the kitchen. Her sister Irene was on her way over but hadn’t arrived yet. They were always there for each other at a time of crisis. That’s certainly what this was, Saul said to himself. The word helpless ran through his mind. It was a very uncomfortable word. Saul Rothstein was not the kind of man who was used to feeling helpless. Despite his wife’s emotional meltdown, he saw this . . . thing, this set of fucking outrageous circumstances . . . as a challenge to the central rule guiding the Rothstein family’
s life—I, Saul Rothstein, make the rules! The phone call from Anna pissed him off. Saul couldn’t believe she actually put this Eddie guy on the line. What can you say to a nineteen-year-old auto mechanic who’s just run off with your daughter?

  That morning, Anna left for school before seven, saying she needed to be there early. A friend was picking her up, she told her parents. Saul Rothstein now realized the friend had been the little Irish shithead now calling himself Anna’s husband. Saul hung up the phone and muttered, “Fuck me? I don’t think so, you little Mick sonofabitch!”

  The newlyweds returned home, to Memphis, by car from the small town in Mississippi where they had been married, a place called Langston, so small Saul had never heard of it, somewhere in the southwest part of the state not far from Louisiana. This Eddie O’Malley apparently lived in an apartment somewhere near the Memphis airport. Anna mentioned something about two other roommates who had gone off to let them have some privacy. Mr. and Mrs. O’Malley were holed up inside. This bullshit needed fixing.

  What kind of assholes live in Mississippi? Rothstein pondered that question as he waited in the outside office of his old friend, the Honorable Milton Fryer, Memphis’s only Jewish judge. “How is it they allow children to get married over there?” he asked the judge. Anna was only sixteen. He thought she said the O’Malley guy was nineteen. Saul wasn’t sure, but he was certain he’d had enough of this already. He beseeched Judge Fryer to help and, in less time than it took cement to harden, the judge annulled whatever nonsense Mississippi had been stupid enough to sanction. Anna Rothstein—now never legally O’Malley—went home, to her parents’ house. Her mother, Doris, didn’t stop crying for weeks. Even Irene was no help. Saul wanted no part of that either.

  Anna Rothstein was a nice looking girl, tall, five-eight, maybe more, hazel eyes and light brown hair—almost blonde. At fourteen she was full breasted and by sixteen, with a little makeup and a nice dress, she was able to look twenty if she wanted. She was a bright girl, clearly the favorite of her dad, also smarter than her older brother. She took after her father. Everyone always said that and it pleased Saul tremendously. But not now. Although she had gone home, Anna reacted harshly to the annulment. She said she was going to retain counsel and challenge the Judge’s ruling. She already knew the law much better than her father did. Saul’s friend Milton Fryer wasn’t there to help. He capitulated.

  “Do you love this . . . Eddie O’Malley?” her father asked.

  “That is not what we are talking about,” said Anna. “What’s at issue here is the legality of your bogus annulment. You and Milton Fryer have a relationship, the sort of which any judge, other than ‘Uncle Milty,’ would easily see as a conflict of interest for him. You know, Dad, the legal system of the state of Tennessee was not created for your personal use. I wasn’t even married in this state—they wouldn’t let me. My Mississippi marriage cannot be tossed out by some Tennessee judge, sitting in the company of my father, absent either myself or my husband or any representation either of us might wish to have. Do you see what I mean?” Saul couldn’t help himself. He was proud of his daughter.

  “What is it you want, Anna? And remember, you’re driving your mother nuts here.”

  So it was that a sixteen-year-old Jewish girl from Memphis, Tennessee, in the year 1953, granted her parents’ wish to annul her Mississippi nuptials in return for being allowed to keep the name O’ Malley. She didn’t think that was asking too much, and she was right. Her grandmother would get used to it, she said.

  Two years later, when she left Memphis to attend the University of Tennessee, Anna O’Malley dropped the Anna for Abby. She liked the sound of it. She spent four highly entertaining, successful years in Knoxville, studying Political Science—and did it—“Thank you God!” her father had prayed—without getting married again. Eddie O’Malley was long gone, not missed and hardly remembered. In the autumn of 1959, Abby O’Malley enrolled at the University of Chicago Law School. She was the first woman to be Editor-in-Chief of the Law Review and graduated first in the class of 1962. She loved living in Chicago and, after graduation, accepted a position there with Farmers Mutual Insurance Company. She specifically asked to work in major fraud investigation. She liked the challenge and rose to meet it. She had a talent for taking disparate events and scattered pieces of evidence and putting them together, gleaning a method, a motive, a conspiracy. In 1963 she left the private sector for government work. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy hired her to work on his organized crime unit, The Jimmy Hoffa Squad, as it was called. Abby had a nose for fraud, and fraud was the way the mob ran its whole national operation. Bobby Kennedy was pleased to have her. She moved to Washington, D.C. where she was a perfect fit. She was young, attractive, ambitious and smart. Then the President was murdered and everything at the Justice Department changed.

  Bobby Kennedy had only one thing on his mind—who killed his brother? He recruited a small team of talented Justice Department lawyers to work only on that. Abby O’Malley was among them. Less than a year later, while only twenty-seven years old, Robert Kennedy handpicked her to take his investigation private. At first he put her in the Justice Department’s Boston office. This gave her easy access to his family’s resources and kept anyone in Washington from learning what the Special Assistant to the Attorney General really did. Shortly thereafter, Abby resigned from her government job and was hired by the legal department of a private investment firm, controlled by the Kennedys. Her position there served as cover for her real job—for which the family had allocated an unlimited budget—finding the person or persons responsible for the death of President John F. Kennedy. That mystery was finally solved and the investigation concluded in 1968. Less than a month later Bobby Kennedy was murdered.

  Following his death, Abby O’Malley’s duties changed. Once Bobby Kennedy was confronted with the existence of Lacey’s confession, and its contents, once he was assured it was real, and that it was hidden away to protect Lacey, Abby’s job was to get it. Get it and destroy it. No cost was too much. That Bobby too was soon gone made no difference. From then on, while she appeared to be a high-level lawyer for an investment-banking firm, she devoted her efforts to a single mission—preserving the Kennedy mystique.

  Rose had become depressed after Bobby’s death. In her melancholy, she said things to Abby, cried to her as only a mother could. To Abby O’Malley she said that which she could never have uttered in the earshot of her priest, her bishop or Cardinal Cushing. She was a good Catholic, but she was human. To keep the flame of Camelot burning brightly was to keep her boys alive and close. A woman of boundless energy and infectious enthusiasm had become despondent.

  “Isn’t it enough he took my boys?” she wept in private to Abby. Was it God she spoke of, or Frederick Lacey? “Must he now destroy all they stood for?”

  “No one can ever do that, Rose,” comforted Abby, still unsure. Could the wrath of God be directed through Lacey? Was Rose Kennedy in fear of each? Of both together?

  “Oh, yes they can. They’ll ruin Jack now. With Bobby gone . . .” Rose paused for a moment and Abby could hear the upheaval in the old woman’s chest. The pain this woman felt at the death of the son who had always been her favorite stood exposed like fresh-butchered meat—raw, red and dripping blood. Abby expected her to cry out, Bobby! Bobby! Bobby! But she didn’t. Rose Kennedy wiped her eyes and nose with a nearby tissue, cleared her throat and said, “Without Bobby, there’s nobody to protect Jack. They’ll savage him.”

  “No,” said Abby. “We will not allow that.”

  “The women, Abby! The women alone will do it for them. I told Jack, but he didn’t listen. I told him ‘You’re the President of the United States, act like it!’ He never listened to me, and his father—he was no help. You watch, Abby. The business with the Monroe girl. The others too. Jackie will be of no help either. She’s done with us and if it weren’t for her children, I would . . .” She stopped herself just in time.

  Abby O’Malley said, “R
ose, I never believed all that would stay hidden, not forever. The President’s health also. People will find out and there will be those who will publicize it. It doesn’t matter. There might even be more. There may be things we don’t know, especially about his friends—deals they made, favors they called in—who knows what. Still, it won’t matter. I promise you. The American people love President Kennedy without reservation, for one reason and one reason only.” She looked at Rose, wanting to make sure the senior Kennedy was focused and completely lucid. “They love him because he was assassinated. And the same for Bobby. They love them both for the tragedy that took their lives, took them from us before their time. Nothing that is revealed will ever change that, unless the circumstances of their deaths, at the hands of Frederick Lacey, become known.”