Below the Fold

by R. G. Belsky

  Maybe that’s why Dora never drank herself back then. She’d seen enough of that as a child. She hated the sight of liquor. She hated the smell of it. And, most of all, she hated what it did to people like her parents.

  Which made it even seem more tragic when Dora developed her own drinking problem—but that would all come later.

  By the time she went to college, Dora had left the depressing surroundings of her parents’ home and moved to a place on East 3rd Street. She walked each day to her classes at NYU, where she majored in English literature and became a very serious, introspective student. She read dark poetry by Sylvia Plath; listened to sad songs about death and despair; and worried about the poor and the desperate and the lonely—believing that their suffering was her own too.

  Not exactly a fun date for the guys in college. Except for one thing. We found an old picture of her at NYU, and the young Dora Gayle was gorgeous. Drop dead gorgeous. She had long straight black hair that hung down to her waist. Big brown eyes. A beautiful face. Even though she hardly ever wore makeup, men were said to be captivated by her unadulterated beauty.

  She told people her goal was to write serious poetry and teach literature herself one day.

  No one knew much about exactly what happened to her after she left college.

  But she popped up in a city Social Services report years later when she’d apparently tried to apply for government assistance. By that point, according to the report, she seemed like a totally different person from the pretty, poetry-loving student at NYU.

  She’d worked in a variety of jobs—waitress, cleaning lady, department store clerk. None of them lasted very long. She’d started drinking somewhere along the line, and alcohol had completely taken over her life. She couldn’t hold a job anymore.

  After that, she just disappeared from the system again.

  Until she turned up on the street as a homeless person.

  Everyone who encountered Dora on the streets seemed to like her—and many tried their best to help her. A woman behind the counter at the coffee shop where she could often be seen holding the door for customers gave her free sandwiches and coffee from time to time. So did the owner of a nearby deli. A bartender named Jimmy Landon at a place called the Landmark Tavern said he sometimes slipped her a bottle or two.

  “She was going to drink anyway,” Landon explained, “and this way at least maybe she’ll have a little more left over for something else. She was a very polite lady. She always said thank you to me. I wish all my customers were as pleasant as she was. There’s a lot of people who wander in here looking for free drinks. But she was different. There was almost an aura of … well, class or dignity about her. She was smart too. She’d quote from Thoreau or Shakespeare or some other guys I never heard. I always figured she was somebody once, but then things went bad for her.”

  The woman from the coffee shop, Janice Aiello, was the one who first said Dora Gayle always told people her name was Cinderella.

  “I never knew her real name,” the woman said. “Just Cinderella. I asked her once why she called herself Cinderella. I was curious. She told me that one day a handsome prince would come and rescue her and they would live happily ever after. Just like the fairy tale.”

  She talked about how Dora had been a regular sight at the coffee shop each day panhandling at the front door. Holding it open and hoping for a handout from the busy people who pushed past her to get their coffee and pastry before rushing to their offices. People like me. Like Maggie had said at the news meeting that first day, the coffee shop was close to our office and I had stopped in there many mornings.

  I tried to remember if I had ever seen Dora Gayle there myself and, if I had, whether I’d given her any money. I sometimes did give money to homeless panhandlers, but not a lot. There was just too many of them to worry about. It was easier for all of us to look away, pretend they didn’t exist, and go on with our own lives. I understood that. But I still wished I’d given Dora Gayle some money one of those days that might have made her own sad life a little better, even if only for a brief few minutes.

  Janice Aiello explained how she frequently gave Dora Gayle coffee to drink, especially when it was cold outside. Sometime she gave the homeless woman sandwiches and pastries too. The owner of the store wouldn’t let her give away free coffee and food, she said. So she paid for it herself.

  Janice Aiello seemed like a nice person.

  Nicer than me.

  “Did she talk about anything else besides her name being Cinderella when she was there?” the reporter asked.

  “A bit. A lot of the time she didn’t make much sense. She drank a lot. And, even when she didn’t … well, I’m not sure she was right in the head.”

  “Any idea what she was doing before she started living on the street?”

  “Not really.”

  “Did she ever talk about having any family?”

  “She did tell me once she had a daughter.”

  “Was there a name or any information about the daughter?”

  Aiello shook her head no.

  “I think it was a long time ago.”

  We got a big break when Maggie found a documentary online from a student filmmaker that included Dora Gayle. It was called “Forgotten and Alone”, and the person who did it had interviewed various homeless people on the streets of New York City. One of them was Dora Gayle.

  “I like living here in the park,” she said in the film, sitting on a park bench with a liquor bottle in her hand. “I don’t have to deal with anyone here. I can just be left alone. Oh, sure, sometimes people look at me funny, sitting here with all these shopping bags filled with my possessions. But I don’t care. People have been doing that for my entire life—or at least as long as I can remember. Mostly though, people are nice to me. I try to be nice to them too. I don’t want to cause any trouble.”

  She took a long drink from the bottle she was holding in the video.

  She said she didn’t remember a lot about her life but did recall being happy once a long time ago—particularly when she was in college. It was almost like she was talking about another person and another life.

  “That was such a beautiful time,” she recalled to the filmmaker. “I wrote poetry back in those days, you know. It was beautiful poetry. I was in love then too. Him and me, we were so happy together.”

  But she didn’t know what she’d done yesterday, or for much of her life since then.

  “I forget things. I used to remember more, but the memories were always bad. So now I don’t mind forgetting. I live here and down by the coffee shop and in the park and a few other places. I just try to get through each day with something to eat and something to drink. It seems simpler that way.”

  Watching the picture of the haggard-looking, disoriented woman in the documentary, it was hard to imagine this was the same person who had been such a beautiful girl in that long-ago NYU picture.

  But that was the downward spiral Dora Gayle’s life had taken before her death.

  The details of her murder itself were sketchy. A customer had discovered her body that morning when he let himself in the bank area to use one of the ATM machines. She had been stabbed numerous times, according to the Medical Examiner’s report. The time of death was estimated to be several hours earlier, sometime during the middle of the night. The assumption was she’d gone into the bank vestibule to sleep. Someone had accosted her inside for whatever reason—and then killed her. The police said it appeared to be just a random case of street violence. Which meant it was not very likely her murder would ever be solved or the killer caught.

  The story was delivered on the air by Cassie O’Neal, one of Channel 10’s top rated personalities. Cassie was blond and beautiful, like so many other people on TV these days. Her strength was her looks, not her reporting skills. And she’d stumbled a bit in the past when doing live breaking news. But a story like this was one she couldn’t mess up too badly. I had other staffers do the reporting, and then Maggie and I w
rote the whole script for the report on Dora Gayle.

  Cassie ended it by saying:

  “Her name was Dora Gayle. But she called herself Cinderella. She believed that one day there would be a happy ending to her story. And, in a city where people are supposed to be hard-hearted and unfeeling, Dora Gayle—aka Cinderella—touched a lot of us. She was a New York City fixture in that park and the neighborhood around it. A true New York character. Someone who got many to open up their hearts and emotions to another human being. Sadly though, there would be no happy ending for her. Instead, she died alone and violently while seeking a brief respite from her hard life on the street. Goodbye, Cinderella … we will miss you.”

  The segment ended with a picture of Dora Gayle on the screen—not the one from the documentary, but the picture of the beautiful young woman at NYU who loved poetry and still had all her dreams in front of her.

  That’s the way I wanted our viewers to remember Dora Gayle.

  Me, too.

  CHAPTER 3

  I WAS HAVING dinner with my best friend, Janet Wood. We were eating at a place that was supposed to have the best stuffed lamb chops in town. The chef there had recently boasted about how proud he was of them during an interview with New York magazine. Janet just ordered some kind of a big salad dish though. Me, I went for the lamb chops. I didn’t want to offend the chef.

  I told her about the Dora Gayle story and the latest on Brett and Dani’s abortive affair and a lot of other things going on at Channel 10. Janet was a lawyer and talked about a messy divorce case she was working on at the moment.

  “Don’t you get tired of eating that green stuff?” I asked her at one point between bites of my lamp chops.

  “It’s called salad.”

  “Whatever.”

  “I want to look good. Eating healthy helps me to look good and feel better too. Don’t you ever think about that, Clare?”

  “Nah, I just want to keep eating so I’ll pack on thirty pounds and no man will ever be interested in me again. That way I can just entirely eliminate men from my life. It sure would make things a lot simpler that way.”

  Janet cut off a small slice of tomato, picked it up with her fork along with some lettuce and put it in her mouth. She ate like she did everything else. Precise. Impeccably neat. Always in control. She always seemed so perfect in everything she did. She had a great husband, great kids, a great career. Oh, I knew she had to have troubles somewhere in her life. But, if she did, she sure put on a great act.

  “Problem?” she asked me now.

  “No problem.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Whose name?”

  “The guy you just broke up with.”

  “C’mon, Janet, why do you always assume that I’m upset because of something that’s gone wrong in my love life? That my personal life is always somehow a mess or in crisis? I have a lot of things going on in my life besides worrying about whether or not I’m having a healthy relationship with a man at the moment.”

  “What’s his name?” Janet repeated.

  His name was Alan Paulus. And it hadn’t exactly been a relationship. It was really just a date. Well, actually not even a full date. We’d met at a party, then gone back to his place.

  “What happened then?” Janet asked me when I told her the story.

  “I asked him what he thought about our Channel 10 news show. He said he never watched any TV news. In fact, he didn’t even own a TV. Didn’t go on the Internet for it either. He said he got all his news from listening to public radio. I hate pretentious people like that. I decided there was no way this was going anywhere long term between us.”

  She took another bite of her salad. I finished off my first lamb chop, then began to devour the second one. They were good. Very good. Maybe not the best lamb chops I’d ever eaten, but damn close.

  “Well, at least you found out how you felt before you had sex or anything with this guy,” Janet said.

  “Oh, we had sex.”

  “You had sex.”

  “Of course.”

  “I don’t understand … why did you have sex with him after what you just told me?”

  “You kinda had to be there,” I said.

  “So how was it?”

  “The sex?”

  “Yes, the sex.”

  “Very good.”

  “So the sex was good, but you still don’t want to see him again because he gets all his news from public radio—not from TV?”

  “I can’t be with someone who doesn’t watch TV,” I said. “That’s one of the hard and fast Clare Carlson rules for any kind of a relationship. It’s a real priority for me.”

  “You have a strange set of priorities.”

  “Well, they work for me.”

  “How do they work? You’re a forty-something-year-old woman who’s been divorced three times and has no man in her life right now.”

  “Okay, I didn’t say they worked well.”

  The truth was, though, that Alan Paulus wasn’t even the man I was really upset about. I told Janet about that now too.

  “Do you remember Sam?”

  “The cop who was your second ex-husband?”

  “My third. But who’s counting? Anyway, I was talking to someone at his precinct the other day, and he said Sam and his new wife just had a baby. I knew she was pregnant. He’d told me that the last time I talked with him. But I didn’t realize she’d already had the baby. I guess the baby news kind of depressed me.”

  “Did you want to have a baby with Sam?”

  “Not really.”

  “Do you want to have a baby with anyone?”

  “At my age? No way.”

  “So why did the baby stuff impact you so much? It doesn’t really make a lot of sense, Clare.”

  I knew the answer to that question. But it was a secret I couldn’t tell to anyone. Not even Janet.

  No, I didn’t want to have a baby now.

  You see, I already had a baby.

  A long time ago.

  But then I lost her.

  CHAPTER 4

  THERE WERE NO more answers about the Dora Gayle murder. No one was arrested for it. No potential suspects were found, questioned, or even identified. No one figured out exactly why she was in the bank vestibule in the middle of the night. Or why someone had stabbed her to death there.

  Which was not really surprising.

  People like Dora Gayle died in New York City all the time and then were quickly forgotten. We see them on the streets, in the subway stations, or in our parks and walk right past them as if they didn’t exist. And then one day, they are gone and no one ever thinks much more about them.

  But there was something about Dora Gayle—unlike other New York City crime stories—that had really gotten to me.

  And I knew what it was.

  The picture.

  I was still haunted by that picture from NYU of the young, beautiful Dora Gayle. This wasn’t actually a crime story anymore, at least not a crime story like the ones we usually covered on Channel 10. No one really cared about who killed Dora Gayle. It would wind up being a drug addict or another homeless person or someone else like that who murdered her for no real reason. That wasn’t the story here. The real story I still wanted to tell was how she went from the young girl who liked to read poetry and write love sonnets to become the homeless woman who died alone in that bank vestibule.

  But everywhere we went turned out to be a dead end.

  Dora Gayle was just another obscure person who died an obscure death for some obscure reason.

  Sure, we’d given her a few minutes of fame in death by doing her story on the air. A couple of newspapers and news websites in town picked it up—and a few of the national cable news channels did too. The Associated Press even put out a story that went out to media around the country about the sad, tragic woman who called herself Cinderella that died on the streets of New York City.

  Still, most people didn’t really care. We have a pretty sophist
icated rating tracking system for our newscast that shows how many people are watching at any given moment. The ratings were very high for the segment before Dora Gayle, a feature about a new celebrity diet that everyone was trying. And then again for the segment afterward, an interview with a woman who’d won $20 million in the lottery by picking the numbers from her dog’s birthday. But not so much for Dora Gayle.

  Which meant I wasn’t really doing my job. My job was to keep viewers watching the Channel 10 News every night. To get them to buy products from our advertisers. If I didn’t do that … well, sooner or later I’d be out of a job. I understood that was the bottom line in the TV news business.

  And so even I had to finally admit now that the Dora Gayle story was over. When I worked for newspapers, we called murders like this “below the fold” news. That meant they didn’t get top play on the front page. It’s the same with TV news. Dora Gayle just wasn’t important enough for us to care about very much on the evening news.

  I had plenty of other news to cover in the days and weeks after that. Something was always happening in New York City—most of it bad. There were more delays and more commuter outrage at Penn Station. A fire had wiped out a landmark building in Soho. The mayor and the governor were feuding—and both of them were mad at the City Council president.

  Plenty of new murders too, and one day we got one right in the Channel 10 wheelhouse as a classic Blonde White Female Syndrome story.

  “A woman stockbroker named Grace Mancuso was found beaten to death in her Upper East Side apartment,” Maggie told me. “She was very pretty, very successful. The crime scene was really bad. There was blood everywhere in the apartment-bedroom, living room, and kitchen. The Medical Examiner’s office says the killer kept beating her even after she must have been long dead. Nothing was taken, as far as investigators can see. It sure looks like a crime of passion.”