Below the Fold

by R. G. Belsky

  “Any suspects?” I asked.

  “Grace Mancuso had a very active love life—including a new boyfriend and an ex-lover she’d just dumped. They’re all being questioned now. “

  “Well, that sounds like our top story,” I said.

  “It gets even better, Clare. Turns out she was involved in some big financial scandal at the Wall Street firm where she worked. A whole bunch of people there are being indicted. And the Mancuso woman had recently negotiated a plea deal for her to turn state’s evidence and testify against them.”

  Money, sex, a beautiful victim—this murder had everything we were looking for in a big story. And yes, she was even blond too.

  “Let’s work the hell out of it,” I told Maggie. “Pictures of Grace Mancuso; video from the scene; interviews with her neighbors; co-workers at the Wall Street business that can tell us about the scandal stuff; details about her love life; and anything else you can think of. I want all hands on deck for this one.”

  “You got it, boss,” she said.

  I spent the next few hours doing other news director stuff.

  We were starting a series of commercials for a new advertising campaign to promote the Channel 10 newscast—and we’d hired a big Madison Avenue firm to produce the promo spots for us.

  The idea was to show all the members of the Channel 10 news team out there doing their jobs just like regular New Yorkers.

  There were shots of our sports guy, Steve Stratton, playing stickball with a group of kids on a street in the Bronx; then interviewing players in the locker room at Yankee Stadium; and finally eating a hot dog and cheering during a game along with other diehard baseball fans in the bleachers. For Wendy Jeffers, the woman who did the weather, we put her on the boardwalk at Coney Island talking about looking forward to the hot summer months ahead. Our traffic reporter was in a helicopter looking down from the sky at a massive traffic jam at the George Washington Bridge; the movie critic standing in the lobby of a theater munching on a tub of popcorn; and the consumer reporter waiting in line at a local store to return a broken appliance.

  Those were easy, but some of the other on-air reporters were a bit more challenging. Especially Cassie O’Neal. And Janelle Wright. The two of them were our top-rated on-air reporters. Not coincidentally, both of them were very sexy and glamorous. But beauty—not brains—was their strong suit. I wanted to make sure they came across in the ad as serious journalists, not like the Barbi Twins.

  The decision was to put Cassie on a crowded subway car and Janelle in a public-school cafeteria to show how dedicated they were to the important issues of transit and education. The only problem was Cassie had hardly ever been in a subway station before and couldn’t figure out how to get through the turnstile, while Janelle refused to eat anything they served in the cafeteria—“I’ve never eaten a Sloppy Joe in my life—and I’m not about to start now,” she proclaimed.

  As for Brett and Dani, our two anchors, the ads showed them sitting in a comfortable living room setting—just like the viewers who would be inviting them into their living rooms for the Channel 10 News each night, Of course, I thought it might be more appropriate to shoot the spots with Brett and Dani in the bedroom, but I didn’t tell that to the Madison Avenue people.

  Somehow though we made it all work.

  My phone rang just before the six p.m. newscast was about to start.

  “Clare, I have to talk to you,” a familiar voice at the other end said.

  It was Sam, my ex-husband who was a cop.

  “I’m a little busy right now.”

  “This is important.”

  “Okay. And listen, belated congratulations on your baby. I heard the news.”

  “Huh? Oh yeah, thanks. But this is concerning a story. Do you know about the Grace Mancuso murder on the East Side?”

  “Sure. We’re leading our newscast with it in a few minutes.”

  I told him all we’d found out at the scene, at the company where Mancuso worked, and from our police sources.

  “There’s more,” he said.

  “More how?”

  “They found a note at the scene, Clare. They haven’t gone public with it yet. But I wanted to give you a heads-up. It’s about your boss.”

  I was confused.

  “What boss?”

  “Your big boss. Brendan Kaiser.”

  Brendan Kaiser was a media mogul who owned a lot of properties in movies, publishing, the Internet, and, of course, TV—including Channel 10, which he had bought about a year earlier.

  “There was a list left behind in the Mancuso woman’s apartment, apparently by the killer. We’re not sure what it means. Kaiser’s name is on it. And four more names. There’s a politician, Bill Atwood–the guy who used to be in Congress. A well-known lawyer, Emily Lehrman. Even a police detective, a homicide lieutenant named Scott Manning. And I have no idea why the fourth name is there. You’ll see what I’m talking about in a few seconds. I’m sending it to you now on email.”

  “Thanks, Sam. But why are you doing this for me?”

  “Old times, Clare. I owe you at least that much.”

  “I didn’t figure you thought the old times were that great.”

  “I gotta run. You didn’t get this from me. Remember that.”

  He hung up. A few seconds later, I heard the ping of a new email from my computer. I opened up the message. It said:

  TO THE NEW YORK CITY POLICE DEPARTMENT

  Someone says there’s something left to pay, for sins committed yesterday.

  Grace Mancuso paid the price today for sins committed a long time ago.

  I did this with a little help from my friends…

  There was a list of names below. Like Sam had said, Brendan Kaiser, the owner of my station, Channel 10, was on that list. So were several other prominent New Yorkers I recognized. None of it made any sense. But it was the last name on the list that made the least sense of all. The list read:

  Brendan Kaiser

  Bill Atwood

  Emily Lehrman

  Scott Manning

  Dora Gayle

  CHAPTER 5

  JACK FARON WAS the executive producer of the Channel 10 News. Faron was a pretty good guy, as far as executive producers go. Which is a bit like saying Charles Manson used to be a pretty good guy, as far as crazed, psychotic cult killers go. Still, Faron was the one who promoted me to news director from TV reporter. I was never sure if that was because he thought I’d be good as a behind-the-scenes news executive or because I was so bad on the air. But, one way or another, I owed Faron.

  He walked by my office now after I finished reading the note.

  “Hey, Jack, I need to show you something I just got from a source of mine,” I yelled out.

  He came into my office and sat down.

  “You still have sources?”

  “Yes, I have sources.”

  “Who’s the source?”

  “You want a name?”

  “Anything.”

  “He’s my ex-husband.”

  “The lawyer?”

  “The cop.”

  “Kinda hard to keep track of your ex-husbands without a score-card, Clare.”

  He smiled broadly. My turbulent marital history was a source of constant amusement for him and a lot of other people at the station. Most of the time I played along with the jokes. But I wasn’t in a joking mood right now.

  “This is information about Brendan Kaiser,” I said.

  “What does a cop know about Brendan Kaiser?”

  “Kaiser’s name just turned up in a murder investigation.”

  Faron wasn’t smiling anymore.

  “Turned up why?”

  “I’m not sure yet.”

  “Are you saying he’s a suspect in a murder?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  “Well, then what …”

  “Maybe as a potential future victim. Although I have no idea why. His name was on a note found at the crime scene of the Grace Mancuso murder
that we’re leading the newscast with in a few minutes. Along with several other well-known names.”

  I handed him a printout of the email from Sam with the note and told him about our conversation.

  “None of this makes any sense,” he said after he finished reading it.

  “Nope.”

  “Why would Kaiser’s name be on a list like this?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “And what in the world could Dora Gayle—that old homeless woman murdered a few weeks ago—have to do with Kaiser or any of the other people on this list?”

  I shrugged. I had no answers for him. Like he said, none of it made any sense.

  “No one else knows about this?” he asked now.

  “Not yet.”

  “But they will, right?”

  “I can’t imagine it won’t get leaked by someone even if there’s no official release of the information.”

  “Damn, damn, damn,” Faron muttered.

  Faron looked over at me then and asked the question I knew he wanted to know the answer to next.

  “Are you planning on going with this on the air tonight? Telling everyone about this list with Kaiser’s name on it?”

  “I think you have to make that decision, Jack.”

  “This one’s above my pay grade.”

  He took out his cell phone, punched in a number, and then said he urgently needed to talk to Brendan Kaiser.

  Kaiser’s office said he’d get back to Faron as soon as possible.

  While we waited for Kaiser to call back, Faron and I watched our newscast leading off with the Grace Mancuso murder story.

  Brett and Dani went through the basic details of the crime and then switched to a live feed of a press conference at police headquarters.

  An NYPD spokesman said Grace Mancuso had been bludgeoned to death by as many as fifty to sixty blows. The murder instrument was a large wooden statue found at the scene—a cheap replica of the Empire State Building that looked like it was something sold at a store in Times Square or some similar place that catered to New York City tourists. A chunk of the wooden statue had broken off and couldn’t be found. The larger piece, covered in blood, was lying next to Mancuso’s body.

  The spokesman said there was no sign of forced entry or break-in at the scene, which indicated Mancuso had let the killer in voluntarily. Her body was found when police broke into the apartment after receiving an anonymous 911 call about screams and sounds of violence coming from inside, but the time of death was actually now estimated to be twelve to eighteen hours before that call was received.

  He also reported several sets of fingerprints had been found in the apartment besides Grace Mancuso’s, and law enforcement authorities were running them through all possible computer data banks to see if they could be identified.

  “We are operating on the premise that the motive for the murder is most likely either something in Ms. Mancuso’s personal life or else related to her job on Wall Street where she had recently been involved in a financial scandal investigation. Accordingly, we are conducting interviews right now with as many of her friends and co-workers as possible.”

  The police spokesman did not say anything about a note with the name of Brendan Kaiser or anyone else being found at the scene.

  After the live feed from the press conference was over, the Channel 10 broadcast cut back to Brett and Dani in the studio and the rest of the Channel 10 news team with our blanket coverage of the murder of Grace Mancuso.

  The most interesting part came when Cassie O’Neal interviewed a neighbor at the Mancuso address who said she’d had several bizarre conversations with the dead woman in recent weeks.

  “She asked me for money,” the woman said. “Wanted to know if she could borrow a few thousand dollars from me. But she promised to pay it back very soon. It all seemed very strange to me. I mean, I knew she had this big job on Wall Street that paid her a lot of money. And I’d seen the inside of her apartment—it was filled with expensive furniture, closets full of designer clothes, and fancy paintings on the walls. Why did she suddenly need money in such a hurry from me?”

  “Did you loan her money or find out what she needed it for?” Cassie asked.

  “Of course not. I felt badly for her, but not badly enough to lend money to a neighbor I barely knew. I was a little uncomfortable about it afterward though. I kept hoping I wouldn’t run into her and have to make some sort of excuse about the money all over again. But that never happened.”

  “You never saw her again before her death?”

  “Oh, I saw her. Just a few days ago. I wasn’t sure what to say, so I just apologized again for not being able to help with the loan of any money. But she didn’t even want to talk about it anymore. She didn’t seem to care about the loan anymore. She said she’d figured out some other way to get the money she needed.”

  A few minutes after the segment was over, Faron’s phone rang. It was Brendan Kaiser. Faron told him about the note police had obtained and ran through whatever other facts about the murder he knew at the moment.

  He tried to put the part about Kaiser’s potential involvement in the case as delicately as possible.

  But there was no delicate way to tell your boss—and one of the most powerful people in the country—that their name has been linked to a murder.

  Me, I hated dealing with the top-level executives at the station on any story.

  Even worse, I never wanted to be dealing with the top boss.

  And, most of all, I didn’t want to be involved in any way in giving him this kind of bad news.

  The phrase “kill the messenger” kept running through my mind.

  But it turned out I didn’t really have much choice this time.

  “He wants to see us right away,” Faron said when he got off the phone.

  “Us?”

  “You and me both. I need you with me on this one, Clare.”

  CHAPTER 6

  I HAD NEVER met Brendan Kaiser, even though he owned the TV station I worked for. I’d seen him once, when he bought the station eighteen months earlier and showed up briefly at Channel 10 for the official announcement to everyone here.

  I thought about trying to introduce myself that day but decided not to. This was Brendan Kaiser, the legendary media giant who owned TV stations, movie studios, book and magazine publishing companies, newspapers around the world, and also a series of popular and prosperous websites. Head of the billion-dollar Kaiser Communications Corp. I wasn’t intimidated very easily, but Kaiser intimidated me.

  Most of his time was spent at the main Kaiser headquarters office located in a new high-rise building in Lower Manhattan.

  Faron and I went through a succession of security checks there now and then rode a private elevator up to see Kaiser on the top floor of the building. During the cab ride downtown, I had decided on a plan of action for how to handle this whole thing. I would let Faron do all the talking, and I would keep my mouth shut. That way I couldn’t get into any trouble.

  It was an excellent plan, I decided.

  And I congratulated myself for thinking of it.

  What could go wrong?

  Kaiser greeted us warmly when we were ushered into his office. He was around fifty, decent-looking with thick gray hair, but he also had a bit of a paunch I could see when he stood to greet us. There was an exercise bicycle sitting in a corner of his office, but I had the feeling Brendan Kaiser didn’t spend much time on it.

  “Tell me everything you know, so we can decide the best course of action here,” Kaiser said as he sat down behind his desk after the introductions.

  Direct. To the point. No nonsense. I liked that.

  Faron ran through it all for him. The call I got from a police source about the note found with Kaiser’s name on it at the crime scene; the other names on the list; and the fact that the authorities hadn’t made the names—or even the existence of the list and the note—public at this time.

  “Do you know any of the other peop
le on the list, Mr. Kaiser?” Faron asked when he was done with that.

  “Just one of them. Bill Atwood, the ex-congressman. He and I have met at several political functions. I can’t say I know him very well. I meet a lot of politicians like Atwood in my position. There was no special relationship of any kind. I might have run into the Lehrman woman—the attorney—at some event over the years. I’m not sure. But her name seems familiar. I don’t know the police officer and I certainly didn’t know the homeless woman. And I never heard of Grace Mancuso until she was murdered.”

  “In other words, you have no idea why your name was on that list,” Faron said.

  “None whatsoever.”

  Faron nodded sympathetically.

  “Who else at the station knows about this at the moment?” Kaiser asked.

  “No one except the two of us, Mr. Kaiser. Clare found out from her source and came directly to me with the information. Then I notified you. I know this all must come as quite a shock to you.”

  “It certainly does,” Kaiser said. “But the question now is what we do next. That’s why I called you both here. As you said, this is all very sudden and troubling news for me to hear from you. But now I’d like to hear your ideas about what we should be doing to deal with this going forward.”

  My plan to remain quiet had been working perfectly so far. It sure was a good plan. A damn fine plan. But, as Mike Tyson once said, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.

  “How long have you known?” I asked Kaiser.

  “Excuse me?”

  “How long have you known about your name being found at the Mancuso crime scene? I figure the police would have contacted you right away, probably at least a few hours ago. They had to find out what you might or might not know about the note. I assume you told them the same thing you told us. Then Jack here called you and told you we knew about the note at the crime scene too. You acted like this was the first you’d heard about it, because you wanted to see what our reaction would be. You wanted to know if we were planning to put it on the air. You wanted to know if you were going to have to bigfoot us as the big boss to put a lid on all this—or whether we were going to do that on our own. That’s why you just played out this little ‘golly, gee—this is the first I heard about this’ charade here. Is that pretty much right, Mr. Kaiser?”