Below the Fold

by R. G. Belsky

  “I still like the Revson angle,” Maggie said. “The Mancuso woman hurt a lot of people there. First the clients she swindled, then the people at Revson she was prepared to testify against. That makes a pretty good motive for murder.”

  I thought about the way Grace Mancuso’s body had been beaten and pummeled so badly.

  “This just seems like it’s about more than money,” I said. “It feels personal.”

  “Losing a lot of money can make it very personal,” Maggie said. “So can going to jail because she ratted on you.”

  “My guess is there’s something more.”

  “Like what?”

  I thought about it for a second. “‘Follow the money’ is one saying. But another is ‘follow the heart.’ That’s something an old newspaper editor always preached to me. He said most murders were either about love or money. That’s where the answers were, he used to say.”

  “Money and love?”

  “Right. If this isn’t about money, maybe it’s about love.”

  “But the cops have already checked out all the men Grace Mancuso was seeing. And so, did we. We looked really hard at the new boyfriend, the old boyfriend, and a few in-between. But they all have alibis or have been cleared by the police. It doesn’t look like any of the boyfriends did it.”

  “We might be looking for the wrong thing.”

  “What should we be looking for?”

  I’d been thinking about this after going through my old notes from the interviews I’d done. I’d come up with an idea. Or at least a new theory. Something that hit me after I re-read my conversations with the various people I’d talked to since I’d started working on the Mancuso story. One interview in particular jumped out at me.

  “A girlfriend,” I said.

  “You think Grace Mancuso liked women too?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “But what does that mean?”

  “It means we’ve doubled the number of potential romantic suspects.”

  Maggie smiled.

  “Okay, then how do we find this girlfriend?”

  “Maybe we already have,” I said.

  CHAPTER 19

  LISA KALIKOW LIVED in a studio apartment in the Inwood section of Manhattan, about as far north as you can go near the Bronx border. There was a Korean bodega on the first floor of her building. Different neighborhood from Grace Mancuso’s apartment. Different worlds.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked when she opened the door.

  “I have some more questions.”

  “I’m kind of busy now. Maybe we could do this later somewhere else.”

  “It won’t take long.”

  I hadn’t called her ahead of time for a reason. Sometimes it was good to interview people when they weren’t ready for it. That put them off guard, didn’t let them prepare their story beforehand. You found out things that way, things they were holding back. I was pretty sure Lisa Kalikow was holding back something.

  “Is there any news about who killed Grace?” she asked as we sat in her tiny living room.

  “Some.”

  “Do you think it had to do with the problems at Revson?”

  “That’s one of the possibilities.”

  I watched her eyes. She was looking around the room, while at the same time trying to pretend she wasn’t. I looked over in the direction where she kept glancing. There was a picture on the wall. A picture of two women on a boat in the water.

  I walked over and looked at the picture more closely.

  “Is that you?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Vacation?”

  “That’s right.”

  “The other woman in the picture looks like Grace Mancuso.”

  She nodded. “We went white water rafting out West a few months ago.”

  “Some kind of a group thing from work?”

  “No, just the two of us.”

  “That sounds like fun.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You must have had a good time. I mean you keep the picture up here on your wall and all …”

  There were other pictures of the two of them. One at some kind of club, where they both looked a bit smashed. Another at the beach. Grace Mancuso had on a thin two-piece bikini and looked really hot. Not exactly the staid corporate Wall Street look. If Lisa Kalikow knew I was coming, she probably would have taken them down. But they were important to her. They were all she had left of Grace Mancuso. Probably looked at those pictures all the time.

  “I’m still trying to find out who Grace Mancuso was seeing romantically at the time she died,” I said.

  “I don’t know much about Grace’s personal life,” she said.

  I looked again at the picture on the wall. “Really? You went on vacation with her. You spent time with her. She must have opened up a little bit about her love life. I mean she was a good-looking woman, right? There had to be lots of boyfriends in her life.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” she replied stiffly.

  “You have no idea about her boyfriends?”

  “Not really.”

  “Do you have a boyfriend?”

  “I don’t see what that has to do with anything …”

  “Were you and Grace Mancuso lovers?” I asked.

  Kalikow stared at me, uncertain what to say. Trying to make up her mind whether or not to deny it. I decided to make it easier for her.

  “I’m not looking to cause you any problems here,” I said softly. “I understand that at a company like Revson, this is probably the kind of thing you’d like to keep quiet. Finance is a very conservative business. Of course, lots of people are out of the closet these days—it’s no longer that big a thing. But at Revson, maybe it still is, right? Especially for two women. If people there knew about you, there’d be lesbian remarks behind your back—and you didn’t want that. Neither you nor Grace. So you pretended you were friends, but you were really a whole lot more, weren’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “And no one else knew?”

  “Grace said we had to keep it a secret.”

  “How long were you involved with her?”

  “Six months or so.”

  “Was it serious?”

  “I loved Grace.”

  “Did she love you?”

  “Grace didn’t love anybody.”

  There it was again. That description of Grace Mancuso as a person with no emotions, no feelings. Even the people who cared about her said that. Did that characteristic play a role in her death? I had to assume that it did.

  “Tell me about it.”

  They had met maybe a year ago, she told me. When Kalikow first started working at Revson. She would see Grace around the office, looking so attractive and so much like a woman on the fast track to success. For a long time, she fantasized about having sex with her. She never thought it would become a reality. But then—about six months ago—Grace asked her to have lunch. Pretty soon they were sleeping together.

  “Six months,” I said. “That’s about the same time as the scandal at Revson erupted, isn’t it? Do you think there’s a connection?”

  “I’m the executive secretary to one of the top legal counsels at Revson. Grace was concerned about what he knew; she needed information. I had information. She used to ask me questions all the time about the investigation, who was cooperating and who wasn’t—that sort of thing. I knew what she was doing. She was using me.”

  “Didn’t that bother you?”

  “Have you ever been in love?”

  “Frequently.” I smiled.

  “Okay, but were you ever really in love? Mad, passionate love where you can’t think about anything else, you just have to be with them—nothing in the world matters except that person. Well, that’s the way I felt about Grace. I knew why she was with me, but all I cared about was that she was there. I couldn’t live without her. Just the thought of losing her made me crazy. That’s why what happened at the end was so difficult.”
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  “You mean her murder?”

  “Even before that,” she said. “I found out there was someone else Grace was seeing.”

  “Another woman?”

  She shook her head no. “A man.”

  “She was in love with a man?”

  “No. Grace had boyfriends, but she was never in love with anyone. She was using him. Just like she’d used me. This wasn’t a real romance, she was stringing this guy along to get something from him. That’s what she said when I confronted her about him, and I believed her. She said she was sleeping with him because he was the answer to all of her problems. She was going to make a lot of money off of him. That’s what I told you before. I just didn’t want to tell you about the rest, about her and me. She told me not to worry, that she didn’t feel anything for this guy. It was all business. She said she couldn’t wait to see the look on his face when she dropped the bomb on him. She was going to tell him everything and laugh at him. Then she’d make him pay up big to her.”

  “She was planning to blackmail this person?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did she get the money?”

  “I don’t know. That was the last time I talked to her.”

  “When was that?”

  “When we were in bed together, not long before she died.”

  It all made sense. Grace Mancuso needed money. She had some information she could use to blackmail somebody. Along the way, she decided to sleep with him. Not for love. But she had a reason. Maybe to blackmail him even more. Or to find out more information while they were under the sheets. Or maybe she just got off on humiliating him. It was too much for him to take, so he killed her in a rage.

  “Do you know who the man was that she was blackmailing?” I asked.

  “No, she never said.”

  “Any idea at all?”

  “She said he was very important. That it would blow my mind if I ever found out who he was. That’s why she was going to get so much money out of him. He couldn’t stand another scandal, she said. Especially one like this.”

  “Anything else?”

  “She said that the guy prided himself on being a real ladies man. Thought he was God’s gift to women. That’s why she was really looking forward to taking all his money from him and ruining his life.”

  A ladies’ man?

  Thought he was God’s gift to women?

  Couldn’t afford another scandal?

  That sure sounded a lot like Bill Atwood.

  The same Bill Atwood who insisted he never knew Grace Mancuso.

  CHAPTER 20

  “BRENDAN KAISER LIKES you,” Jack Faron said.

  “What’s not to like?”

  “I’m serious. He thinks you’re a hard-nosed, bulldog, tenacious, in-your-face journalist who won’t stop digging until you get the story. What the hell did you say to Kaiser anyway?”

  “We had a very frank and open discussion about the Grace Mancuso story.”

  “What is the story?”

  “I don’t know yet, but I think I’m getting closer to finding out.”

  I went through everything I’d found out about the blackmail angle from Lisa Kalikow.

  “I went back to Atwood and asked him again if he had any kind of a relationship with Mancuso.”

  “And?”

  “He said he still didn’t know her.”

  “What did you expect him to say?”

  “I had to try.” I shrugged.

  “It doesn’t have to be Atwood she was sleeping with and blackmailing.”

  “No, it could be anyone,” I agreed. “Maybe someone at Revson. That would make a lot of sense too. She had information about the scandal she hadn’t turned over to authorities yet—and was going to use it to get big money out of someone there for her silence. Whoever she was getting it from, she expected a big payoff. That’s why she told her family and others she’d asked for money that she didn’t need it from them anymore.”

  “And we have no way to determine who that person might be? Atwood or someone else?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  “Or even if the blackmail attempt was the motive for her murder?”

  “We don’t know anything for certain, Jack.”

  Faron sighed. “Most of the time in a murder case, there’s a shortage of likely suspects or motives. But not here. In the Grace Mancuso murder, we have plenty of possible suspects and motives. Too many.”

  “But it all boils down to that everything Grace Mancuso did seemed to revolve around sex or money—two of the oldest motives in the world for murder,” I pointed out. “We don’t know for sure which one got her killed or if—and this is a real possibility too—it was a combination of both that got someone so angry that they beat her to death. All we can do is keep putting these developments on the air each night. Even if we don’t know exactly what they mean. Just like we do with any other story.”

  “Except this isn’t like any other story,” Faron said.

  “Uh, no.”

  “Kaiser wants to know why his name is on that list and he wants all the answers and he wants this case solved as quickly as possible so he can move on.”

  “I’m doing the best I can, Jack. I’ve covered every base I could think of.”

  “What about the other names on that list?”

  “I’ve talked to them all, even the Lehrman woman—although she wouldn’t say much.”

  “But you’re ignoring one name. One person you haven’t thought about that much since the Mancuso story started. And still have no possible idea of why she’s involved in this. Dora Gayle.”

  I told you at the beginning that Jack Faron ranked pretty high on my list of TV executives I’d known. Which admittedly wasn’t a tough upper tier to crack. But one of the reasons I liked him was that he sometimes actually thought like a journalist, not like an executive producer. I think maybe Faron started out as a journalist before he changed to the business and producing part of the job—and still thought of himself a bit in that role. He always understood everything I did as a journalist. He always supported me as a journalist. And, every once in a while, like now, he even came up with a good idea for me as a journalist.

  “This whole thing really started with the Dora Gayle murder,” Faron said to me now. “A seemingly meaningless death to us at the time on the streets of New York. Then she turns up on that list with Kaiser and the rest. But you forgot about her. Assumed you knew all about Dora Gayle because you’d already covered that. Except now Dora Gayle doesn’t make sense. Her name shouldn’t be on that list. She doesn’t belong with the others. She’s the only one who isn’t accomplished or prominent in their field in some way. So why is Dora Gayle’s name on that list?”

  “Holy crap!” I said in an astonished voice after he was finished.

  “You don’t think that makes sense?”

  “No, it makes a lot of sense.”

  “Why so surprised then?”

  “I didn’t think executive producers ever had good ideas.”

  Faron sighed. “If anything comes of it, just be sure to tell your new best friend Brendan Kaiser where you got the idea.”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “And I’ll get right on it, Jack. Go back to the beginning on Dora Gayle. Find out anything more I can about her and try to figure out how she wound up on that list of people at the Grace Mancuso murder apartment. There has to be a connection there that we’re missing.”

  Dora Gayle.

  Damn.

  The woman who called herself Cinderella might still be the key for me to this story.

  CHAPTER 21

  I NORMALLY KEEP thinking about a story I’m working on even after I leave the newsroom—going over angles, leads, possible follows, and the like in my mind over dinner, watching TV, or even lying in bed trying to go to sleep.

  But tonight, I was thinking about another story—a story I’d covered a long time ago.

  The disappearance of eleven-year-old Lucy Devlin.

  After tossing and t
urning for a while, I got out of bed, walked over to the desk area in my apartment, and pulled a scrapbook off the shelf where I kept clippings of all the big stories I’d done as a reporter.

  Lucy Devlin was the biggest one, of course. It won me a Pulitzer and lots of journalistic acclaim and helped me have the career that I have today in TV news. I wouldn’t be where I am today if it weren’t for Lucy Devlin and the way she mysteriously disappeared as an eleven-year-old girl from the streets of Manhattan.

  I paged through some of the headlines in the scrapbook: “MISSING: 11-year-old Girl Disappears on Way to School”; “Massive Search for Little Lucy”; “A Mother’s Grief: Please Give Me My Daughter Back”; then, “Hope Dims in Search for Lucy Devlin”; and finally, of course, the most recent headline from last year: “Body in Grave ID’d as Missing Lucy Devlin.”

  And I read through the articles all over again even though I remembered every fact in them like it was yesterday.

  The details of the Lucy Devlin disappearance were heartbreaking. Anne Devlin, Lucy’s mother, had put the eleven-year-old girl on a school bus in their posh Gramercy Park neighborhood of Manhattan—but Lucy never showed up in the classroom.

  As the city prayed for Lucy’s safe return, I filed story after story about the search and the Devlin family’s anguish and all the details of the missing little girl’s life.

  There was a big article in the scrapbook from several months later about me winning the Pulitzer Prize for my Lucy Devlin stories. It quoted the Pulitzer judges as saying: “Clare Carlson’s comprehensive—and yet compassionate—coverage of this heartbreaking story sets new standards for extraordinary reporting and dedication to uncovering the truth.”

  Except I hadn’t really told the truth.

  Not by a long shot.

  I’d kept a lot of secrets about Lucy Devlin to myself.

  The biggest secret, of course, was that Lucy Devlin was my own daughter. The one I’d given up at birth as a nineteen-year-old college freshman. Fifteen years later—motivated by some kind of maternal instincts, I guess—I had tracked her down to the family in Manhattan that adopted her. Except I never told them or Lucy who I was.