Below the Fold

by R. G. Belsky

  Now he was worth an incredibly obscene amount of money and was recognized as one of the most powerful media figures in the world—rivaling the Hearsts, the Murdochs, the Newhouses, and all the other names from the past.

  “I never wanted to be my father.” Brendan Kaiser smiled sadly. “And look at me now …”

  CHAPTER 39

  WHEN I GOT back to the newsroom, I told Jack Faron my plan for revisiting the Grace Mancuso story in a big way.

  “We run interviews on air with Brendan Kaiser, Scott Manning, and hopefully even Emily Lehrman—if she’ll ever talk to me. Otherwise, we tell the viewers all about her and her background. All the stuff about how she used to represent little people, but now all her clients are big money cases—many of them mobsters and drug lords. About her hermit-like personal life. Everything we can find out about Emily Lehrman. We take a new look at her and all the other names on that list to try to figure out the connection that got them there. Talk about their lives, their past—everything about them. We even dig more into the backgrounds of both dead people too—Bill Atwood and Dora Gayle—for possible answers.”

  I told him highlights I’d found out so far about all of them.

  I told him the details about my confrontation with Emily Lehrman and my conversation with Manning.

  I did not tell him that I had already discussed all this with Brendan Kaiser, which was kind of sneaky—I suppose—on my part.

  “No way,” Faron said when I was finished talking. “Bad, bad idea. No one wants to go back and hear about an old story—there’s too many good stories that are better for us to do, ratings-wise. More importantly, you don’t know what you’re looking for or what you might find out about these people. Especially with Kaiser. For Christ’s sakes, Clare, the idea of you looking into his past more on the air is filled with potential booby traps and big dangers for us. I’m not going to let you do it. I know you’re stubborn, I know you’re dogged about a story, and I know you like to argue whenever decisions of mine don’t go your way. But there is simply no way I’m going to let you do this. You’re my news editor. Act like a news editor. Go back out there and spend your time putting out the best newscast we can every night. Forget about the Grace Mancuso story unless there’s an arrest or some other big development. Is that all clear? And nothing you can say will get me to change my mind about this.”

  “I’ve already discussed it with Kaiser and he thinks we should do it,” I said.

  Faron sighed.

  “Okay, Jack,” I said, “I know I shouldn’t have gone over your head to Kaiser without talking to you first. And I know I should have told you he was on board with the idea before I asked you about it. But, if I’d done it that way, we never could have gotten to that great little speech you just gave me. About acting like a real news editor and all the rest. It was quite stirring. One of your best.”

  Sometimes I go too far with people. I wondered if I’d done that with Faron. He was one of my supporters at the station, but right now he was just staring at me with a blank expression on his face. I couldn’t tell if he was mad at me or not. Actually, I was pretty sure he was mad at me. The question was how mad?

  “Don’t ever do that to me again,” he said.

  “I won’t.”

  “I’m serious, Clare.”

  “Understood.”

  “Imagine how you’d feel if Maggie or one of your people who worked for you came to me for a decision instead of going through you. Your damn head would explode. That’s the way I feel right now about what you did.”

  “I’m sorry, Jack. I really am.”

  He nodded. It seemed like the worst was over. Or at least I hoped it was.

  “Have you thought about the possible negative consequences of what you’re doing?” he asked.

  “You mean the drop in ratings if we don’t break something big and just rehash a lot of old news to the viewers?”

  “Worse than low ratings.”

  “What’s worse than low ratings?”

  “Losing all of our jobs. Have you considered the possibility that there might be a reason Brendan Kaiser’s name was on that list? And if we reveal that reason—no matter all the highfalutin things you say about journalistic integrity or whatever—it could turn into a nightmare for us. Think about it, Clare: What do you do if you find out something really bad about Brendan Kaiser?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “But you’re still willing to jeopardize your career as a TV executive here to find out?”

  “I’m a journalist at heart, Jack—not a TV executive. I have to find out the truth.”

  Just before I left his office, Faron asked me one more question.

  “If Kaiser hadn’t agreed to do this—if he’d said no, just the way I did at first—you would have just kept working on this story anyway, wouldn’t you?”

  “Have we met?” I asked.

  I talked to Maggie next, taking her through what was going on and all the new information I’d found out.

  I also told her Manning would be working with us now on the story.

  “The cop on the list?” she asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “The one you went out with?”

  “Not really relevant here, but yes.”

  “What exactly is he going to do?”

  “Help us investigate.”

  “I already have our own investigative people working hard on this.”

  “Now you have one more.”

  “You just went ahead and did this without talking to me first?”

  “I didn’t think you’d mind, Maggie.”

  “You could have asked me and found out.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Are you still seeing this guy?”

  “No.”

  “You have no personal feelings about him whatsoever?”

  “He’s married, Maggie.”

  “That’s not answering my question.”

  “Maggie, just try to do the best you can with him on our team.”

  “Whatever you say,” she snapped and stalked out of my office.

  Jeez, now she was mad at me too—just like Faron.

  My two favorite people in the office.

  I was just making friends all over the place today.

  The idea was to tape the interviews with Kaiser and Manning over the next day or so. At the same time, we’d begin digging deeper into the backgrounds of Atwood and Dora Gayle for more stuff to put on the air about the two dead names on that list. And try to pinpoint how their long-ago romance might have played a role in including them in this murder story all these years later. That left Lehrman. I was trying to decide on the best way to approach her again when my phone rang. It was Janet.

  “What the hell did you say to Lehrman anyway, Clare?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “No one’s seen her around the courthouse since then. Same with her apartment, no sign of her there either. I just found out why. She’s in Connecticut. Admitted to Silver Oaks.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a drug rehab. Apparently, Emily Lehrman almost died from an overdose.”

  CHAPTER 40

  I FOUND LEHRMAN sitting in a sunroom for patients on the second floor, looking out a window at the beautiful view of the lush Connecticut landscape. Flowers, trees, grass, and even a small stream running through the back. Of course, she didn’t have to let me in, didn’t even have to confirm for me that she was there. All the patient records were confidential. But she had told the people at the front desk to send me up once she found out I was there.

  “Why did you agree to see me?” I asked her now.

  “I don’t have that many friends that come here to visit me.”

  “I’m a reporter, I’m not exactly a friend of yours.”

  “But you’re here. No one else is. I guess you’re the closest thing to a friend I’ve got at the moment.”

  She looked tired. The ice-cold professional exterior was gone now, r
eplaced by something more real, more open, and more humane.

  “What happened?” I asked her.

  “I took too many drugs.”

  “Intentionally?”

  She shook her head.

  “No, I didn’t try to kill myself, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Then why?”

  “All that stuff you asked me about my life and career choices … I told you I didn’t have to answer any of your questions about it, and I didn’t. But I do have to answer to myself. And so, after that day you confronted me in the courthouse, I began thinking about what I had become. I guess I didn’t like those answers.”

  “Drugs aren’t the answer either.”

  “Oh, they have been for me in the past. They’ve helped me get through a lot of personal crises like this. But not this time. This time I just took too many or the wrong kind or something. And that’s how I wound up here.”

  I stayed there for a long time with Emily Lehrman that day, comforting her and talking with her about the near-death experience she’d gone through. At some point, I told her about my interviews with Kaiser and Manning that I was going to put on the air, and I asked if she’d do the same kind of interview. I told her I needed to hear everything about her past and her entire life, just like what I’d done with the others from the list. And I said that included talking about the sudden career shift years earlier that changed her from a dedicated attorney fighting for the poor and defenseless, to a high-powered mouthpiece for drug lords and mob bosses. Of course, she asked me how any of this about her past could possibly have anything to do with the Grace Mancuso murder or why she was on that list in Mancuso’s apartment. I told her the same thing I’d told the others. I didn’t know either, but the Dora Gayle/Bill Atwood connection had been more than thirty years ago—so maybe that was true for her and the rest of them too. I said I just wanted to accumulate all the information I could and see where it led me.

  To my surprise, she agreed to do the interview.

  Whatever had happened, her brush with death from the overdose had turned her into a different person.

  A real person.

  I was finally talking to the real Emily Lehrman.

  And finding out a whole lot about her and the person she used to be.

  “When I was younger, I was a romantic at heart,” she told me at one point when I asked her about those long-ago days. “I believed in love. And I thought I found my love. His name was Terry Antum. God, Terry was drop-dead gorgeous. He had long blond hair that he pulled into a ponytail in the back, big blue eyes. He was a dropout from Columbia University where he’d helped lead a strike against military recruiters on campus that had shut down the school. After that, he’d gone on to organize protests at another college over demolishing low-income housing to make room for more university construction. I was representing the threatened tenants, and that’s when I met—and fell in love with—Terry.

  “We lived together in a loft downtown. We never got married. We told each other we didn’t need a marriage license or a ring to verify our love. That our love was stronger than any marriage vows. What we shared was a bond that was so deep and so full of integrity and significance that nothing could ever tear us apart. It was all so glorious and fulfilling and exciting.”

  “Sounds perfect,” I said.

  “Yeah, doesn’t it? It was also all bullshit.”

  She shook her head sadly.

  “I should have known from the arguments we began having. Mostly, they were about money. For Terry, money was a necessary part of the social activist movement. He would organize protests or actions just to raise money to support their causes. It seemed to me at some point that money had become more important to him than even the social causes we were working for. Terry was always talking about money, plotting ways to get it and spending freely whatever he obtained. For me, this presented a moral dilemma. If the money took precedence over the social causes we were trying to improve, were we still idealists or were we becoming part of the problem?”

  The answer to that when it came, she told me, was very clear. Lehrman said she turned on the television one day to see a news report about a bank robbery in New Canaan, Connecticut. A group of robbers, dressed in ski masks and carrying automatic weapons, had burst into the bank, stolen several hundred thousand dollars, and fled in a panel truck. A guard tried to stop them. One of the robbers shot him dead. There was another shootout on the Connecticut Turnpike a short time later, and police killed three of them.

  A few hours later, Terry stumbled in—dazed, disoriented, and panicky. He said the police were after him, and he needed to get out of the country right away. He said the bank robbery was supposed to be a political statement for social justice, but it all went wrong. They hadn’t even gotten the money. It was lost in the shootout. Now he had to get away or he’d go to jail for the rest of his life.

  “He told me he needed money to run. I went to the bank and drew out everything I had. My savings, money we’d collected for political causes. I gave it all to Terry. He promised he’d call me later when he got settled somewhere else, and we’d meet up again. I kissed him goodbye at the door. The next day I found out there’d been a wild police chase in Massachusetts. State troopers had tried to pull over a car, then followed it at ninety miles per hour until the driver lost control. It crashed through a guardrail, rolled down a cliff alongside the road, and burst into flames below. When the cops got there, they discovered the charred bodies of two people in the car. One of them was later identified as Terry Antum.

  “I wasn’t sure how I felt about Terry in the months afterward. I mourned his death, of course. But I couldn’t come to grips with some of the things he had done, such as taking part in the bank robbery where that guard died. Whatever his motivation, that was murder—pure and simple. So what did that say about me? If I was wrong about Terry, how could I be sure I was right about anything else I once believed in so fervently? I tried throwing myself into my work, but it wasn’t the same. I was no longer sure I was on high moral ground, and I didn’t know how to deal with that.

  “Then, a few years later, I went to Montreal for a conference on affordable housing for the poor. While I was walking through the lobby of the hotel, I saw him. Terry Antum. My Terry. He had dark hair now, the ponytail was gone, and he had a beard. But the eyes were the same. I’d recognize him anywhere, even if he was supposed to be dead. I followed him to a mansion on the outskirts of town. I found out it belonged to a man named Lawrence Redmon who had come to Montreal a few years earlier, saying he was retired after making a lot of money in the computer industry. But that was a lie, of course. Lawrence Redmon was really Terry Antum. And the money had come from that bank heist. Somehow, he’d faked his own death and gotten away with all the loot. With my life savings, too, as an added bonus. I never knew exactly how he did it. The only way to find out would have been to talk to him. And I couldn’t do that. Couldn’t face the reality of what had happened. I just went back to New York, told no one what I’d found out, and tried to get on with my life.”

  She walked over to the window in the room and looked down at the trees and flowers in the beautiful green landscape below.

  “Terry took something more valuable than money from me. I’d lost my idealism. I’d lost my moral bearings. I’d lost my trust in people’s inherent good. Anyway, that’s when I decided to start representing different kinds of clients. People who wouldn’t disappoint me. I had no false illusions about them, nothing to lose in an emotional sense. Does that make sense to you?”

  “Was it that he broke your heart or that he stole the money that bothered you the most?”

  “It was the betrayal,” she said. “The overall betrayal of my trust. I didn’t think I could ever trust anyone again. From then on, I devoted myself completely to my career, no matter what it took or who I had to work for or what I had to do. I made the money my priority. Life was so much simpler for me that way. Or so I thought until this happened.”

&n
bsp; I felt sorry for Emily Lehrman. I really did. And I felt badly that my conversation with her had played such a role in pushing her to this point. I wanted to say something to make up for doing that. I wanted to say something to make her feel better.

  But there was one big question I still had to ask her.

  “Did you know Grace Mancuso at all or do you know any reason why your name is on that list?”

  Lehrman shook her head no. “I never heard of her until then. That’s the truth. You have to believe me about that.”

  “I believe you,” I said.

  CHAPTER 41

  WHEN I’M WORKING on a big story like this, a lot of other stuff in my life seems to fall into place too. My personal and professional lives have always been intertwined that way. A big story always makes everything better for me.

  So, even as I continued to pursue the Mancuso story, I decided to keep pushing on the other big issue in my life that I simply couldn’t drop: the search for information about my daughter, Lucy.

  Which was how I found myself walking into an Internet cafe on the Upper West Side to look for someone.

  I spotted him sitting in the back, drinking coffee and staring at the screen of a laptop in front of him—his fingers pressing keys rapidly as he worked on something.

  “Hello, Todd,” I said, slipping into the seat next to him.

  Todd Schacter looked up, startled.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I want to talk to you again.”

  “How—how did you find me?”

  “That computer of yours leaves fingerprints, Todd. Just like you told me. All I had to do was download your IPO, access your Internet provider for all your personal and security information, then it was easy to open up a LocateMe app in your name to search for myself—which really was you, of course—and obtain your exact location in the Cloud.”

  “That’s all gibberish,” Schacter said. “What you said doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Yeah, I know.”