by R. G. Belsky
The conclusion was inescapable.
Atwood had been telling the truth.
Yes—Grace Mancuso was blackmailing him, he was sleeping with her, and he did go to her apartment on the night she was murdered.
But he didn’t kill her.
Which left us with many unanswered questions.
We still didn’t know who murdered Grace Mancuso.
Or why Dora Gayle’s name turned up on that list found at the Mancuso crime scene.
Or why any of the other names were there either.
And—even though this didn’t seem as relevant now—we never found out what damaging information Grace Mancuso had on Atwood that she was using to blackmail him. “I killed someone … it was an accident, but someone else went to jail for it,” he said during the police interrogation. But there hadn’t been time to get more details then, and now Atwood had taken that secret to the grave with him.
The bottom line of it though was that Dora Gayle’s death had nothing to do with the Grace Mancuso murder. Three people were now dead since this had started—Grace Mancuso, Bill Atwood, and Dora Gayle. It was pretty certain at this point that none of them were killed by the same person. Sometimes a crime mushrooms like that, setting off a chain reaction of dominos falling that no one could have ever predicted. No one else had any other reasonable explanation for the strange confluence of events, including me.
Someone had to take the blame for Atwood’s death, of course.
The finger pointing had already started. The Mayor fired his special assistant, the one who’d been working with police on the investigation. The Mayor went on TV to make a public apology for the tragic mistake and subsequent death of Bill Atwood. He said he had received faulty information from the people he had put in charge of the case, and he vowed reforms in the criminal justice system.
Heads were rolling in the police department, too. The police commissioner was critical of everyone, except himself. One deputy commissioner was suspended, another was put on modified duty. They had pushed for prosecution of Atwood too, claiming at the time the case against him seemed ironclad. Both of them blamed homicide detectives on the case for the screwup, saying they’d conducted a sloppy investigation. The detectives claimed it was the police commissioner and the mayor’s office that had put pressure on them to arrest Atwood, even though they didn’t think there was enough evidence and that the case against Atwood wasn’t strong enough.
The media was heavily criticized too for rushing to judgement on Atwood. Everyone from Inside Scoop to the New York City tabloids to all of the local TV stations and cable news networks were accused of reckless and irresponsible journalism. Channel 10 had been at the forefront of the Mancuso/Atwood story—so naturally we took the most heat for the tragic outcome.
But you know what?
They were all right in being critical of our actions, especially my own. We had screwed up big-time, and we deserved all the heat we got from that. No one felt worse about it—or more guilty about Atwood’s death—than me.
I thought I might even get fired over it. Instead, Faron—and Kaiser too—both supported me and said I’d done nothing more than any of the other journalists covering the case had done. They told me it wasn’t my fault that Atwood was now dead. I was grateful for that, even though I wasn’t completely sure I agreed with them.
I still have nightmares about Bill Atwood’s senseless death—and I fear they will never go away.
Meanwhile, this was all being played out against the backdrop of the funeral for Atwood, which elicited tangled emotions from many people.
At first, there was outrage over his actions. The affair with the dead woman. The other affairs with his assistant and the coed and countless others who had come forward. It seemed like the bill for the web of lies he’d manufactured to the voters and others over the years was finally coming due.
But, amazing enough, this was quickly followed by an outpouring of sympathy as the case against him for the murders of Grace Mancuso and Dora Gayle collapsed like a house of cards. Sure, he’d played around with a lot of women and he’d lied about it. But that’s what a politician does. He’d served his country well in Washington and later as a respected college administrator. Most people felt that was the way he should be remembered, not for the blemishes on his record.
In the end, Atwood got an impressive funeral. Political leaders, celebrities, and just plain everyday people packed the church on Fifth Avenue where the service was held. There were lines extending for blocks to view his casket.
The most emotional moment of the service came from Atwood’s daughter, Miranda, the senior at Yale he’d talked so proudly about to me during that first day in his office. Miranda—with her father’s good looks and apparently his gift for oratory too—delivered a moving eulogy, referring to him at one point as “a great man, a great American, and a great father.”
Looking at the young woman standing at the podium, I thought again about how much devastation had been caused to the Atwood family and so many others.
Then, at some point while she was talking, Miranda Atwood completely lost her composure. She began crying and couldn’t finish the eulogy. They had to lead her back to her seat, and the young woman’s sobbing could be heard throughout the rest of the service. At the end, she would break down and throw herself onto her father’s coffin.
“A DAUGHTER’S ANGUISH!” the headlines read the next day.
Meanwhile, Lisa Kalikow had no real explanation for shooting Atwood. She just kept saying over and over again how much she loved Grace Mancuso. She said she hadn’t gone there with the express intent of shooting him. She heard he was there, she wanted to see the man that had killed Grace—and she just brought the gun along, maybe to scare him or something.
The gun had been given to her by her father a year earlier after she’d been mugged on the subway after leaving work. She’d never fired it before. Even now, she couldn’t remember the details of the shooting. When she was told Atwood was innocent, she broke down and cried.
Later that night, she would be hospitalized after a suicide attempt in her jail cell. It was all too much for her to bear. The woman she loved was dead, she’d killed the wrong man, and was going to prison—and the real killer was still out there walking free.
At some point, I scored an interview with Nancy Atwood about her husband. It was heartbreaking to watch. But it was also pretty amazing TV.
She talked about the good times with Bill Atwood. Meeting him for the first time, falling in love with him, their wedding day, the happy moments they shared and how proud they both always were about their Miranda, who would graduate from Yale.
“I suppose that’s why I hung in there so long with Bill, through all the embarrassment and his affairs and the rest. Despite his failings, my husband had a lot of things going for him. He was smart, he was good-looking, he was charming, and he was successful. Most of all, people liked him. I guess I liked the idea of being Mrs. Bill Atwood, and enjoying all the benefits that came with that. And, of course, I always wanted us to stay together for Miranda’s sake. Miranda idolized her father. A divorce would have been devastating for her.”
She told the story again of deciding to reveal what she knew that led to her husband’s arrest and subsequent death.
“I knew he was lying about Grace Mancuso, and I finally decided I had to tell the truth. I was prepared to suffer the consequences of that in terms of losing my marriage. But I didn’t realize how much of an impact it would have on my daughter. Miranda won’t even speak to me anymore. She hates me for what she said I did to Bill. So I lost my husband and my daughter. I wish sometimes I could go back and change things. Change everything to make it the way it was again. But it’s too late for that now.”
Mostly, though, I was back to being a full-time news director again.
The big new project at Channel 10 was to launch a morning newscast, along with our 6 and 11 p.m. shows. That meant hiring a whole new team of perky newscasters for ea
rly morning duty. It also meant I probably would start having to get up earlier to oversee our perky new morning team, which I wasn’t exactly thrilled about doing. Being perky early in the morning is not one of my strong points.
At the same time, there was a massive new emphasis on trying to create a bigger online presence via social media platforms for our newscasts through an updated Channel 10 app. I understood some of this digital/app stuff, but you had to be like a twenty-five-year-old kid to really grasp it all. So I hired a few twenty-five-year-old kids to run the digital end for me. That’s one of the first rules I ever learned about being a TV executive—delegate what you don’t know how to do to people who do know how to do it. Careers have been built on this simple premise.
The one constant thing in my life was the news. The news always keeps coming—day after day, week after week, month after month—whatever else changes around it. And filling up a TV newscast over and over was an all-consuming job that never seemed to end.
“Feeding the beast,” an editor I worked for once called it. “No matter how much you give it, the beast is always hungry for more.”
For a while, the follow-ups on everything that had happened surrounding the Grace Mancuso murder kept the beast at bay. We milked it for everything it was worth. But eventually we just ran out of things to say. And so we began chasing after new stories. There were always new stories out there. New crimes. New scandals. New tragedies and human-interest stories. New celebrity stuff.
That’s the other thing about feeding the beast.
The beast always wants something new to eat.
And so eventually everyone forgot—or almost forgot—about Grace Mancuso.
I went out on another date with Scott Manning. Well, sort of.
A few days after our dinner, he asked if he could meet me for coffee. Coffee? That should have been my first sign this was not going to end well. Coffee is a real step down from having dinner together.
When I got there, he announced to me that he was moving back in with his wife.
“Wow, our date was that bad?” I said, trying my best to mask my shock and disappointment.
“The date was great.”
“So how exactly did it chase you back to your wife then?”
“Look,” he said, “I’ve made a lot of mistakes with my marriage and my family. I have a son who won’t even talk to me. I need to make it all right again. Or I need to at least try to make it right. Do you understand? If it wasn’t for Tim, if it wasn’t …”
I did understand. Nancy Atwood had a daughter she was trying to reestablish a broken relationship with. Scott Manning had a son he wanted back in his life again. Everyone seemed to be reaching out to their children to make up for past mistakes. Everyone except me. I wanted to do that too. But I still had to find my child.
I didn’t want to lay anything that heavy on Manning though.
I decided to go the humor route instead.
“Does this have anything to do with being disappointed over me not having sex with you the other night?” I asked.
“Well, it would have been nice. But no.”
“How about if I change my mind and say I’ll have sex with you now?”
“Tempting, but that doesn’t change anything.”
“Damn,” I said. “Offering up easy sex to you was the best offer I could come up with.”
He smiled. But it was a sad sort of smile.
I decided to suspend my comedy routine and just take the high road.
“Good luck,” I said. “I really mean that. I hope everything works out for you with your wife and with your son. You deserve that kind of happiness. You’re a good guy, I can tell.”
“You’re a good one too, Clare.”
Yeah sure, I thought to myself, but not good enough to keep you from going back to your wife.
I saw the other cop in my life too. My ex-husband Sam. We ran into each other at a media event I had to go to at Police Headquarters. It was a social reception with a banquet table of food and even a bartender.
“I’ll buy you a drink for that first tip you gave me about the list,” I said.
“The drinks are free, Clare.”
“Uh, I know, that was kind of a joke.”
“Oh, right.”
He smiled weakly.
“You look good,” he said to me.
“So do you, Sam.”
Except he didn’t. He looked tired and not as attractive as I remembered him in the past. Sam was always good-looking and charming, even if he wasn’t quite Scott Manning in the looks and charm department. But I didn’t see any of that now, and I wondered idly what I’d seen in him in the past. Maybe it was the comparison with Manning that left him coming up short in the sexual attraction department for me.
I asked him about his wife and baby, just to make some kind of conversation.
“It’s exhausting, to be honest with you,” he said. “She’s busy with the baby all day and night; I hardly get any sleep. Between that and my job, I’m tired and burned out all the time.”
“What did you think having a baby was going to be like? You just hand the kid a can opener and a change of clothes every once in a while—and that’s it?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure what I expected, or what I want. I’m not sure about anything.”
“Are you talking about the marriage?”
“I miss you, Clare,” he blurted out. “I miss talking to you like this. Having fun with you. I miss a lot of things about you. Maybe it’s not too late. Maybe we could still see each other again sometime and … well, you know what I mean.”
My God, I thought to myself, he’s coming on to me. He’s got a new wife and a little kid at home, and he’s trying to proposition me. Sam finished off his drink and ordered another. I realized at that point he’d probably had quite a bit to drink even before I got there.
“The thing is I sometimes still wonder if I made the right decision,” he said. “You and me were so great in the beginning. Maybe I should have stayed with you and tried harder to make it work. Maybe I picked the wrong woman. I guess what I’m saying is I’m not sure I made the right choice; I’m not sure I did the right thing.”
“You did the right thing, Sam,” I told him.
“So the guy you wanted to have sex with doesn’t want to have sex with you anymore,” Janet said to me. “And the guy you don’t want to have sex with now suddenly wants to have it again with you. Is that right?”
“Welcome to my life.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Evidently not have sex with anyone for a while.”
“I’m talking about you and Scott Manning.”
“Nothing. He’s gone.”
“And your ex-husband?”
I shook my head no.
“He’s just having buyer’s remorse. He’s better off with his new wife. He’s remembering all the good things about me. If we ever got back together again, he’d remember all the pain-in-the-ass qualities I have too. Believe me, I can be a real pain in the ass to live with.”
“No question about it. I can only imagine …”
I shot her a glare.
“Besides, I don’t want to be a house wrecker.”
“Home wrecker.”
“Whatever. I’ve got plenty of other things to feel guilty about without having that on my conscience too.”
“You mean you still feel guilty over all the stuff with Bill Atwood and the way he died?”
I hesitated for a second, thinking maybe about telling Janet everything that was bothering me. All about me and Lucy, the daughter I lost a long time ago and somehow needed to find. But I didn’t.
“Right,” I said. “The Atwood business. That’s it.”
I was at a dead end on Lucy. I simply didn’t know what else to do.
I had even confronted Elliott Grayson about it face-to-face recently. I checked and found out when he was scheduled to visit his office here in New York City. I didn’t figure I’d have much
luck trying to see him there. But I still remembered where he lived in New York. He’d brought me up there on that long-ago night we went out together. I went back there and staked the place out. It took a while, but I finally found him coming out of the building lobby at around seven a.m.
“We had a deal,” I shouted at him.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, looking around anxiously and trying to figure out the best way to get away from me.
“I didn’t go with my story that might have ruined your Senate bid, and in return you promised to tell me where Lucy was. I never told anyone about what you did. I held up my end of the bargain. Now you need to give me that information.”
“I lied to you about Lucy. I don’t know anything at all about her.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Believe whatever you want. Say whatever you want. No one will believe you. And, even if someone did, you’d just be destroying your own career by admitting you buried a story like that for your own personal reasons. You’d be committing professional suicide. It’s a gamble on my part, I know. But I’m a gambler, Carlson. I’m betting that you won’t destroy yourself just to take me down. Especially because you know that if you do that, you’ll lose any chance whatsoever of me telling you at some point in the future whatever I might know—assuming I know anything—about your daughter. So you just have to wait until I decide what to tell you—and when. That’s our deal now.”
“Don’t be too sure about me,” I said. But even as I said it, I could hear the lack of conviction in my voice.
“Like I said, I’m a betting man, Carlson. I’m betting that you won’t do anything. I think the odds on that are pretty good.”
Elliott Grayson walked away from me now. I let me him go. There wasn’t much more to say because he was right. I’d lost out on the big story I could have broken about him. And I’d lost out on my chance to finally track down my daughter after all these years.
