Below the Fold

by R. G. Belsky

  The point is that an interrogation can go either way. It doesn’t always matter if the defendant is rich or poor, famous or a nobody.

  One thing was for sure though. You get a defendant who wants to talk and he doesn’t bring a lawyer with him—well, that’s the best. You just pull up a chair and listen because you’re going to be there awhile. That’s what happened with Bill Atwood.

  “You’re in a lot of trouble here, Atwood,” said the homicide detective in the room, whose name was Marc Briggs.

  He didn’t call him Congressman or Mr. Atwood or even Bill. He was simply Atwood in here. It was a little thing, but I knew it was intentional on Briggs’ part. It helped establish the power dynamic of the interrogation process.

  “I understand that,” Atwood said nervously. “I’ve never been arrested before.”

  “You’re not technically arrested yet. You haven’t been officially charged with anything at this moment.”

  “Am I going to be?” he asked, his voice cracking again.

  “It doesn’t look good. We found your fingerprints at the murder scene, the apartment of a woman you claimed to us you’d never met. We’ve got your jacket with blood all over it, the same blood type as the victim. We think you threw the bloody jacket into the river the night she was killed. We found a piece of the statue that was used in the murder there too. We’ve got your assistant telling us the Mancuso woman had called you. And we know that Grace Mancuso had told people she was trying to get money out of somebody who was very important. That she thought she could make this person pay to avoid a scandal. We think that person was you.”

  “Oh God,” Atwood said.

  “In addition, we now know that you had a relationship in college with Dora Gayle, one of the other people on the list. You lied about that at first. Dora Gayle is dead too. We have to assume that her death was somehow connected to the Mancuso woman’s. You’re our leading suspect in that killing too.”

  Atwood sat slumped in a chair in the stark interrogation room, with the cinder block walls and the one-way glass so people could watch him being questioned without him seeing them. He took a sip from the coffee someone had gotten for him. He didn’t look anything like the calm, in-control man that he’d been with me in his office at the college just a few days ago. He looked scared.

  “I’d like to cooperate,” Atwood said. “I want to clear this up.”

  “You haven’t acted like that. You’ve lied to us. It’s time now to tell the truth.”

  Atwood took another sip of the coffee. This was the moment you figured he’d ask about a lawyer. “Shouldn’t I have some kind of legal representation here?” most of them said about now. Except Atwood never asked for a lawyer. He didn’t when they’d come for him at the college. He didn’t when they read him his rights. And he didn’t now.

  “You’re right about her trying to get money out of me, Detective. She called me up one day out of the blue. Told me she’d found out about something that happened when I was younger. I have no idea how she knew about it after all this time, but she did. Every detail of what happened. She wanted money to keep quiet. Lots of money.”

  “And you were willing to pay her?”

  “I had no choice. The scandal would have ruined me.”

  “You’re no stranger to scandal, Atwood.”

  “This was a different kind of scandal,” Atwood said simply.

  Briggs didn’t ask him what he’d done that was so scandalous. Not yet. I understood why. He wanted Atwood to keep talking, keep telling the story his own way.

  “Anyway, she wanted a huge amount of money to stay quiet. An outlandish amount of money. Even if I came up with that much money, I was going to have to liquidate it from my accounts. That would take time. I needed to figure out some way to get Grace Mancuso to back off. I set up a meeting with her. I thought maybe I could convince her to change her mind—or at least lower her demands and give me more time. I’d only talked to her on the telephone before. When I saw her, I realized Grace was a real looker. That changed everything. I hoped maybe I could have some fun with her and solve my problem at the same time.”

  “You started sleeping with her?” Briggs asked.

  “Yes.”

  It wasn’t hard to imagine the way he’d figured it. The great Bill Atwood, the man with the magic touch when it came to women. Grace Mancuso falls apart like a starstruck schoolgirl when he hops into bed with her. She forgets all about this extortion plan and loses her heart to him. Another scandal averted. But it hadn’t happened that way. I remembered Lisa Kalikow saying how the Mancuso woman was playing the man she was blackmailing. “She was going to throw it in his face when she took the money,” Kalikow had said. “She wanted to see the look on his face when she told him.”

  Was that what had happened on the night Grace Mancuso died?

  Is that why Atwood killed her?

  “She asked me to come to her place about ten p.m.,” Atwood said. “She said she had a big surprise for me. I thought I was going to be able to finally convince her to stop what she was doing to me with the blackmail threat. I wanted to make a deal with her. Reason with her. She was smart, and I was smart. I hoped we could work as a team together and both come out ahead. It wasn’t the first time I was able to turn a situation around like that. Besides, she really liked me. She didn’t know me when it started, but after she started sleeping with me … well, I figured things between us were different now.

  “When I got to her apartment, the door was open. I went in. That’s when I found her. She was lying on her stomach. I tried to turn her over. I just couldn’t believe she was dead. Then I saw how badly she’d been beaten. I really freaked out, I guess, and that’s when I got her blood on my jacket. And that statue thing … Christ, it was imbedded in her head. I must have taken it out or it fell when I moved her. I’m not sure. I mean I was in such a panic at that moment.

  “I realized how much trouble I was in. I couldn’t let anyone know I was there. I couldn’t handle the scandal that would explode around me if I were connected to a murder investigation. So I got out of the apartment as fast as I could. I found a cab and had the driver take me all the way up to the Tarrytown train station, where I’d left my car that morning. I realized I had blood on my sports jacket. So, after I went home, I took it off. That’s when I found that piece of statue. It had somehow wound up in the pocket of the jacket. I suppose I must have put it there without thinking while I was trying to figure out what to do in the apartment.

  “I tried to go to sleep, but I couldn’t. Not really. All I kept thinking about was that battered body. I knew I had to get rid of all of it—the sports jacket, the statue, and all the blood. That’s why finally I got up in the middle of the night, put it in a bag, drove over to the river, and threw everything into the water. I’m sorry I lied. But I didn’t kill that woman. She was already dead when I went into the apartment.”

  It was a pretty unbelievable story.

  But the fact that it was so unbelievable made it almost seem believable.

  At least to me.

  And there was something else in his timeline of events that didn’t fit into the nice, neat package of evidence we’d built up that Atwood was guilty of murder.

  He said Mancuso had approached him first with the threat of blackmail for something in his past, then he had slept with her after that in the belief he could win her over in bed. Our theory had been that Mancuso seduced him first to blackmail him later with the shocking information that he’d had sex with his own daughter. These two completely different scenarios of how events unfolded between him and Grace Mancuso simply didn’t gibe now.

  We’d gone with the theory that Mancuso was his secret love child and that was the explosive secret he had to hide—he’d slept with his own daughter—on the Channel 10 newscast. It had exploded all over the media and social media too with Twitter outrage and overwhelming condemnation of Atwood for committing such a heinous act.

  Briggs confronted him with this now.<
br />
  “Was Grace Mancuso your daughter?” he asked.

  “No!”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “I only have one daughter.”

  “There’s evidence that Grace Mancuso was the love child of you and Dora Gayle when you were both in college.”

  “I never had a child with Dora Gayle.”

  “And Grace Mancuso never told you after the sex you had that she was really your daughter? That she was going to tell people that you’d committed such a taboo act and ruin your political career unless you gave her all the money she wanted?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Which left one big question, of course.

  “Then what was Grace Mancuso blackmailing you over?” Briggs asked.

  Atwood didn’t answer for a long time. It was the first time he had stopped talking since the interrogation had begun. But this was one question he clearly did not want to answer, even now.

  “You said you wanted to tell the truth.”

  He nodded glumly.

  “I killed someone,” he said finally.

  “Who?”

  “No one you know. It was a long time ago.”

  “You murdered this person?”

  “No, it was an accident.”

  “Then why would it be so damaging to you?”

  “Because someone else went to jail for it.”

  Bill Atwood broke down completely now and began sobbing uncontrollably.

  “It’s a guilt I’ve had to live with all my life. I’ve done some bad things in my life, but this was the worst. This was the one I could never forget. I’ve always felt there was somebody—or something—out there waiting for me because of this. Some unfinished business. The ghosts of my past haunting me. I guess I always knew that one day I was going to have to pay for what I did. I’ve always believed that. No matter how long it took, those ghosts were always out there waiting for me. Do you understand?”

  CHAPTER 32

  ATWOOD REFUSED TO talk any more about the long-ago murder or accident or whatever it was that Grace Mancuso was using to blackmail him. In fact, every time Briggs brought it up again, Atwood kept sobbing. Eventually, Briggs just focused on Grace Mancuso. That was the main thing they wanted to make sure they had evidence from Atwood on now. The rest they would worry about later

  They talked for another several minutes on the video. Atwood continued to insist he had nothing to do with Grace Mancuso’s murder and that she was dead when he got to the apartment.

  He also seemed genuinely baffled about Dora Gayle. He said he’d dumped her after that romance when he went to England, then hardly ever thought about her again over the years. He said he didn’t even remember her name on the list until several days afterward. He said he never knew anything about a child with Dora Gayle, and he had nothing to do with Gayle’s murder.

  But the case against him was overwhelming.

  Atwood was officially charged later that day with the murder of Grace Mancuso. Authorities announced the evidence against him—the fingerprints found in her apartment; the bloodied clothes and part of the statue that had been the murder weapon he’d thrown into the water; and his lies about knowing her—was more than enough to get a conviction.

  There was no direct evidence linking him to the Dora Gayle murder yet. But police listed him as the prime suspect and predicted he soon would be charged with that too.

  When they brought him out of the station house in handcuffs for the perp walk on the way to being arraigned downtown in Manhattan Criminal Court, it turned into one of the biggest media events ever.

  Reporters lined up outside. Microphones were thrust out in the air. TV cameras everywhere. I’d covered a lot of these kinds of things in the past, but I’d never seen a spectacle quite like this one.

  “Congressman, did you kill Grace Mancuso?” someone yelled.

  “Was she really your daughter?” another reporter asked. “What about Dora Gayle?”

  “Do you have anything to say to the people of New York?” a woman with a microphone wanted to know.

  Atwood kept looking straight ahead, a stony look on his face—like a man experiencing a nightmare he hoped he would wake up from very soon.

  His wife was there in the crowd. So was his daughter, Miranda. She looked sad and confused and stood in a spot far away from her mother. I could only imagine how that relationship was going to play out going forward. Also in the crowd was Diane Rodgers, the Atwood assistant who once thought he might marry her. And Sandy Underhill, the student who’d sold her story of a sex romp with Atwood to the TV show—she was there too, milking in every bit of her fifteen minutes of media fame.

  In the end, it was the women that brought him down. There was a kind of irony to that. That’s what I was thinking about when it happened.

  It was all so quick, and yet I will never forget those horrible few moments—like a modern-day Jack Ruby–Lee Harvey Oswald that played out in public right before all of our very eyes.

  She screamed out the words even before the first shots.

  “You bastard,” she yelled, “I hate you.”

  There was a gunshot, then another, and after that everything was a blur. Atwood crumbling to the ground. The woman being wrestled to the ground. The gun finally being taken away from her. The cries of horror from the crowd.

  “I loved you.” The woman with the gun was sobbing. “I loved you so much.”

  But she wasn’t talking to Atwood. She was talking to the dead Grace Mancuso.

  “You killed her,” Lisa Kalikow cried out at Atwood as he lay on the ground. “You killed the only woman I ever loved. Now you’re going to die just like she did.”

  From somewhere far off, I heard Atwood’s last prophetic words from the police interview.

  “I’ve always felt there was somebody—or something—out there waiting for me because of this,” he’d said. “Some unfinished business. The ghosts of my past haunting me. I guess I always knew that one day I was going to have to pay for what I did. I’ve always believed that. No matter how long it took, those ghosts were always out there waiting for me. Do you understand?”

  The thing was, I did understand. I knew all about the ghosts. Because I had my own ghosts, too. The ghosts of my own secrets from the past. The ghosts of things from back then that I still had to pay for doing. And now the ghosts that would haunt me forever about Bill Atwood and the role I played in all the events leading up to this tragic ending of his life.

  The ghosts were out in full force now, and I was afraid at that instant—even as I watched paramedics working fruitlessly on a dying Bill Atwood as he lay on the street—that the ghosts would be coming after me next.

  PART II

  FEEDING THE BEAST

  CHAPTER 33

  THE CASE AGAINST Bill Atwood began falling apart within hours of his death.

  The first sign that something was wrong came when Sandy Underhill, the Benson College coed who slept with him and told the story on TV about him calling Grace Mancuso a “little bitch who deserved to die,” popped up again in an interview in the National Enquirer. In this one, she gave a completely different account of things Atwood supposedly said about Mancuso in the hotel room that day. Under questioning by police, Underhill admitted he’d never mentioned Grace Mancuso. In fact, their hotel room encounter had taken place before Mancuso was even murdered. She said she’d made up the rest of it to make her story seem more sensational. She wanted to be a celebrity.

  Then came even more disturbing news. Grace Mancuso was not Bill Atwood’s secret daughter. Dora Gayle never had a baby. She was pregnant—apparently with Atwood’s child—but she suffered a miscarriage. That, along with being dumped by Atwood—who was partying up a storm with girls in London back then—was apparently too much for her. She dropped out of school and began the long downward spiral that eventually turned her into an alcoholic and a homeless person living on the street. One doctor who’d treated her said she sometimes t
alked when she was drinking about being married to a husband named Billy and how they had this beautiful daughter together and lived in this pretty little house—but it was all a delusion. A sad dream that came out of the bottle.

  As for Dora’s murder, cops picked up a derelict near the park who confessed to the slaying. It turned out she had been talking during one of her delusions about the bank account she still thought she had. This time the delusion cost Dora her life. The guy forced her to the bank ATM that night and then stabbed her to death in a rage when she couldn’t produce any money. He said he was sorry he killed her, because she was a nice lady. He also said that he was a secret agent for the CIA, and he asked the arresting officers to notify the President and Joint Chiefs of Staff of his situation.

  It got worse after that.

  The DNA samples of the blood found on Atwood’s clothes matched Grace Mancuso’s blood. But that didn’t really mean anything anymore. Before he died, Atwood admitted he was in the apartment and gotten her blood on him the night she was murdered. That negated the importance of that evidence, which seemed so crucial just a short time earlier when they found it at the bottom of the Hudson River.

  The real jolt though came from the final Medical Examiner’s report. It found that the time of death for Grace Mancuso was even earlier than they had first thought, some eighteen hours before police discovered her body—definitely no later than five or six p.m. Atwood had been in meetings at Benson College all that day until six, then attended a fund-raising dinner until after nine. As many as two dozen people had seen him during that time period and could vouch for his whereabouts. He had an alibi. It also bolstered his story that he arrived at the Mancuso woman’s apartment sometime after ten p.m.

  In addition, the cops found a custodian in the building who remembered seeing Atwood come into the building about that time. Also, they tracked down a cab driver who took him home to Tarrytown. He still had the record of the trip in his cab—pickup at 71st and Madison at 10:35 p.m. for the trip to Tarrytown, NY, which took forty-six minutes. The fare came to $78, plus a $22 tip. The cab driver absolutely identified Bill Atwood as the man who was his fare.