by R. G. Belsky
“My God, whatever happened to the simple courtesy of saying good morning to the people you work with? What is wrong with us as a society, Jack? Have we lost all civility in this day and age? Why can’t you greet me one time with a cheerful: ‘Good morning, Clare. How are you today?’”
“Good morning, Clare,” Faron said. “How are you today?”
“Actually, I have a problem.”
I showed him the short newspaper article about the death of Marty Barlow and told him about my relationship with Barlow.
“What do you think about us doing something on the news tonight about his murder?” I asked. “I feel like I owe him at least that much.”
Faron made a face. “Not our kind of story, Clare. There’s no celebrity or sensational angle, no pizzazz, no ratings of any kind there for us. I’m sorry your friend got killed. I understand he meant a lot to you. But that doesn’t meet the criteria for getting a story about him on our newscast. You already knew that before you even came in here, didn’t you?”
I did. I was feeling guilty because I’d let Marty down at the end. And I didn’t need another thing to feel guilty about right now. Marty was like family to me. And I had no other family. Well, I did, but that was the other thing I was feeling so guilty about. I’ve screwed up a lot of things in my life.
“Kind of ironic, isn’t it?” I said. “A guy like Marty devotes his life to the news business. And now, when he dies, he doesn’t even rate a meaningful goodbye in what the news business has become today. It makes me sad. And yes, guilty, too, that I couldn’t do more for him, after everything he did for me.”
“He was an old man,” Faron said. “He died. There’s no story there.”
CHAPTER 2
MARTY BARLOW HAD been found dead on the street by a dog walker on East 68th, between Park and Lexington—outside the address where he had been living with his daughter, Connie, and her family.
Earlier that day, he’d attended a local community board meeting. People at the meeting said he’d infuriated a lot of the attendees by making inflammatory accusations of malfeasance and corruption against several board officials. He’d also delivered a powerful diatribe about greedy landlords being protected by powerful political figures, some of the same things he’d been talking to me about in my office that day when he brought up the name of District Attorney Terri Hartwell. And he’d had several angry confrontations with people at the meeting. Cops questioned everyone there that day to see if one of those things might have led to the later violence against him. But that fizzled out along with other possible leads they pursued.
“This appears to be a mugging gone bad,” a homicide investigator wrote in the police report I managed to get on the case. “There’s been a number of muggings recently in that area. Barlow probably resisted so the mugger killed him. Then the mugger panicked—or maybe saw the dog walker approaching down the street—and fled without taking time to grab Barlow’s wallet or any other possessions.”
There were a few more details, but nothing that helped me understand what had happened. Of course, not all details of a murder are always included in a police report. To get every bit of information about a case like this, I needed to talk to the homicide investigator who wrote the report. Which was a problem for me.
The police report on Marty Barlow was written by my ex-husband—well, one of my ex-husbands—Sam Markham. We’d had a bad encounter the last time I ran into him at a party. He’d drunkenly suggested we have sex together again. I pointed out to him that was not a good idea because 1) he was married to someone else now, 2) he had a new baby at home, and 3) I wasn’t interested in having sex with him anymore. These seemed like compelling arguments to me, but he took the rejection badly and hadn’t spoken to me since. This all happened quite a while ago. I wondered if he was still mad at me.
I looked out the window of my office. This was early June, and summer was only a few weeks away. But there was no sun out there today. It was raining. Raining hard, turning the intersections into big puddles. My umbrella was home in my closet. If I went out now, I’d get drenched. It would be easier to call Sam to ask for more information. But I knew I had a better chance of getting what I needed if I did it in person. I sighed and made my way over to the precinct where he worked.
By the time I got there, my hair was matted down from the rain, and I was dripping all over his desk.
“My God, just what I don’t need in my life today,” Sam said. “My batshit-crazy ex-wife showing up to make my life a complete nightmare again. What the hell do you want, Clare? And by the way, you look terrible. Like a wet rat or something.”
Yep, he was still mad at me.
“It’s raining out,” I said, “and I forget my umbrella. Listen, I came over here to help you on a crime.”
Sam leaned back in his chair and looked over at a detective sitting at the next desk.
“Jeez, isn’t that lucky for us? I was saying to Larry here how I wished some hotshot TV journalist would come by and help us out today. Someone really smart. Someone like my ex-wife. Wasn’t I saying that, Larry?”
The other detective smiled.
“She doesn’t look so smart to me,” he said. “She’s not even smart enough to come in out of the rain.”
They both laughed loudly.
I ignored that and asked him about the police report he’d filed on Marty’s murder.
“Like I said in the report, I figure it was a robbery that went wrong.”
“What about the murder weapon—whatever the killer used to hit him with—the blow to the head?”
“Never been found.”
“I wonder why not?”
“The weapon could have been something small the mugger kept in his pocket for attacking people. Or even a rock or a tree branch. Maybe he took it with him when he fled, maybe he dumped it somewhere along the way. But we can’t find it.”
“What else?”
“Nothing else. Hopefully, we catch this guy mugging someone else and we’re able to link him with Barlow’s murder.”
“So that’s all there is to the investigation?”
“It’s a pretty simple random murder case, Clare. Not a lot of options to pursue.”
I told him how Marty had said he was pursuing a big story about city corruption and possibly even murder before he died. Sam rolled his eyes. Not a surprise—I had no real details.
“And you figure maybe someone killed him to shut him up?”
“It’s a possibility.”
Sam shook his head no. “We get a lot of people—especially crazy old people like Barlow—who come in here with some secret lead or conspiracy information about something they’ve solved. A few months ago, a guy claimed he knew who killed Jimmy Hoffa and that he could lead us to where the body was buried in New Jersey. We trekked out there with some Jersey troopers to dig up the area. Needless to say, the Jimmy Hoffa case remains unsolved and the whereabouts of the body unknown. Oh, the guy later insisted the New Jersey authorities must have been in on the cover-up and moved the body. These people see secrets and conspiracies everywhere. From what I can tell, Martin Barlow was a lot like that. Sad to see, but people like Barlow get confused and irrational and disoriented when they get old.”
“He was still in his sixties,” I pointed out. “Not that old.”
“I don’t mean just his age.”
“What then?”
“The dementia.”
“Marty Barlow suffered from dementia?”
“From what I understand. That explains a lot about his behavior. Maybe that even played some role in putting him into the circumstances where he wound up getting murdered. I had a grandfather with dementia. It’s a nasty business to watch somebody falling apart mentally like that.”
“Who told you he had dementia?”
“His family. Have you talked to them?”
“I’m going there next.”
“Dad came to live with us here after my mom passed away,” Marty’s daughter, Connie, told m
e. “He couldn’t live alone in that house in New Jersey anymore. And he refused to go into any kind of assisted living facility. We—well, I—didn’t know what else to do.”
She sat next to her husband on a couch in the living room of the brownstone they owned on East 68th Street. Their daughter—who looked to be in her early twenties—was there, too. Connie thanked me—without much apparent emotion, almost mechanically—for stopping by and talked about the last few years of her father’s life.
“I’d warned him about the dangers of a man his age being out alone on the street at night. But you know my dad … he was stubborn.”
“Bull-headed was more like it,” her husband said. “He shouldn’t have been living here. I told him he belonged down in Florida in one of those retirement places. I even told him I’d pay whatever it took to get him a place there. But he said he wasn’t going to sit around playing shuffleboard and checkers. So he wound up getting himself killed.”
The husband’s name was Thomas Wincott, and he said he was the CEO of some big company based in Manhattan. He must have been pretty successful at it. They owned the entire townhouse where we were sitting in a historic Upper East Side neighborhood.
Wincott acted more annoyed by the inconvenience of Marty’s death than upset about it. His wife seemed almost as stoic. She never cried or showed any emotion about losing her father. The young woman—the daughter, whose name was Michelle—fidgeted as they talked, looking down at her watch several times. I had a feeling she wasn’t comfortable in the house and was only here now because of her grandfather’s murder.
“I understand Marty had been diagnosed with dementia,” I said.
“Yeah, yeah,” Thomas Wincott muttered, “he had dementia.”
“When did the doctor tell him—or you—about his dementia?”
“He was never actually diagnosed with it,” Connie said. “Dad hated to go to doctors. You probably knew that, Ms. Carlson. We tried to convince him to see someone, but he refused. He said he was okay. That there was nothing wrong with his mind.”
“You don’t know for certain that he had dementia?”
“Well, he was acting crazy all the time,” her husband said. “So he must have had dementia or something like it.”
I thought about my last meeting with Marty. I didn’t see any signs of dementia or other mental deterioration. Oh, he was acting crazy—maybe crazier than normal for him—but he’d always acted crazy. Even back in the days when we were working together at the New Jersey paper. Crazy was part of the package you got with Marty. But it was always a good kind of crazy. Of course, I hadn’t seen him in a long time except for that one meeting—and these people lived with him every day. So maybe they knew more than I did about his mental state at the end.
“I’m sorry the old man died,” Thomas Wincott was saying now. “But, like I told my wife, you have losses and profits in life, the same as in business. You absorb the losses and move on to make more profits. You don’t waste time crying about the things you lost. I mean the man was almost seventy …”
Michelle Wincott stood up at this point and excused herself, saying she needed to get a glass of water. I said that I was thirsty, too, and followed her into the kitchen.
“I’m sorry about your grandfather,” I told her when we were alone.
“He was a good man,” she said. “I’m going to miss him. But, to hear my father talk, it’s like a damn spreadsheet problem instead of losing a member of the family.”
I nodded. “What do you do?” I asked.
“I’m an actress.”
“No kidding? Anything I might know?”
“Probably not. I’m making some headway though. A few off-off-off Broadway plays. I’m auditioning for a lot of movie roles and TV commercials, too.”
“Sounds like interesting work.”
“Try telling that to my father.”
“He doesn’t approve?”
“He wants me to get an MBA and go into the business world. So I can make a lot of money. Like him. He says I’m wasting my life away trying to be something so impractical as an actress. Me and my father, we haven’t gotten along well since I told him I wasn’t going to follow in his tradition of chasing the almighty dollar.”
“What about Marty?” I asked. “How did he feel about you trying to make it in show business?”
She smiled.
“He encouraged me. He was the only one here who did. He told me I should follow my dream. He said that’s what he’d done his whole life—and was still doing. Being a newspaperman. Because that’s what he loved.”
“That sounds like Marty. He always talked about being a journalist like it was a noble profession. He instilled that in me, too. He taught me so much. He meant an awful lot to me and my career.”
“You know, he talked to me about you,” she said. “He told me about giving you your first job at a newspaper. He was proud of you.”
That made me feel good, but sad, too. Sad that I was never able to find the time for him later.
“My father doesn’t understand me,” Michelle Wincott said. “And my mother listens to everything my father says. To hell with both of them. I don’t care what they think. They’re waiting for me to fail. Everyone’s waiting for me to fail. No one has ever supported me in this dream.”
“Except your grandfather.”
“Yes, he was okay.” Her eyes glistened with tears. “Christ, I’ll miss him.”
It was the first real emotion I’d seen from anyone in that house.
Before I left, I asked Marty’s daughter, Connie, if I could see the room there where he lived. She led me to one of the upstairs bedrooms. I wasn’t sure why I went there or what I hoped to find. But I looked around anyway.
Marty always took a lot of notes for his stories. When I knew him back in New Jersey, he kept them all—pages after pages—in a voluminous notebook. I saw some notebooks in a drawer. There was also a big filing cabinet with a lot of papers and newspaper clippings he’d collected. But Marty had apparently kept up with the journalistic times. His daughter told me that he typed a lot of his things into a laptop computer. I asked her if I could take Marty’s computer with me back to the Channel 10 office to look through his files. I was curious. I figured whatever Marty was working on those last few days would most likely be on his computer. She shrugged and said sure. I don’t think she cared one way or another.
When we got back to the living room, Thomas Wincott was on the phone. He was talking animatedly about making a campaign finance donation. He was clearly in full business mode. I guess Wincott’s mourning process for his dead father-in-law was now officially over.
“Goddammit!” he muttered when he finally hung up the phone. “I hate politics!”
“Politics?” I asked.
“Yes, I’m involved in this big political negotiation right now. It’s been so stressful and time-consuming and aggravating.”
“I guess Marty’s death happened at an awfully inconvenient time for you, huh?”
“It sure did.”
If Wincott had any idea at all how insensitive that sounded, he didn’t show it.
“I don’t quite understand though,” I said, simply trying to make conversation before I said my goodbyes to Marty ‘s family. “Why are you involved in politics? I thought you said you were the CEO of a company. What does that have to do with politics anyway?”
A lot of times a journalist gets a break on a big story because he or she cleverly figures out a brilliant question to ask.
But other times, it’s dumb luck to ask the right question.
That’s what happened to me this time.
“Everything. I own and manage a lot of buildings around town. The best way to get anything done in New York City real estate is to have politicians on your side. The higher the better. They grease the wheels of the bureaucracy for you. The only thing is—to get them to do that—you have to grease them, too.” He laughed. “Which means contributing to their campaign fund. But what the hel
l, if things work out right, this will all be worth it.”
“Who’s the politician?”
“Terri Hartwell,” he said. “She’s going to run for mayor, you know. And I’m jumping on her bandwagon big-time.”
CHAPTER 3
I WAS STILL trying to sort everything out when I met my friend Janet Wood for drinks that night. About Marty. But about something else going on in my life right now, too. I had a lot on my mind at the moment.
“Let me ask you a hypothetical question,” I said to Janet.
“Sure.”
“What kind of a mother do you think I’d make?”
She stared at me.
“Are you pregnant, Clare?”
“God, no.”
“Thinking about adopting?”
“Not really.”
“Then why ask me a question like that?”
“It’s a perfectly reasonable question. You’re a mother. You’re raising two beautiful daughters. You have a successful career as a lawyer. And, as far as I can tell, you have a happy marriage, too. I’m asking if you think I could ever balance my career and motherhood the way you do. Would I be a good or rotten mother, Janet?”
“But you don’t have a child and, from what you say, no plans to do so.”
“Hence, my use of the word hypothetical to describe the question.”
Janet and I were sitting at the outside bar of a restaurant on East 29th Street, above the East River Drive and the East River running alongside that. It was a beautiful summer night, and we could see all the cars on the highway along with boats making their way up and down the river. Across the water on the other side were the lights of Brooklyn and Queens; north and south was the splendor of Manhattan.
Janet was drinking a daiquiri, which she always did when we went out. She was drinking it very slowly the way she always did. Janet always drank two daiquiris. Never more, never less. She was a very precise person. I couldn’t imagine her ever being drunk or out of control in any way.
Me, I was starting on my third Corona of the night. I did think about ordering something a bit more exotic or special to go with the terrific view. I’d even asked our waiter for the special drink menu to peruse. But, in the end, I went for the beer. I like beer. I took a slice of lime off the top of the bottle, squeezed it into the beer, and took a big gulp.
