by R. G. Belsky
A man from the store saw us looking at the photos and came over.
“Are these for sale?” I asked.
“Everything in the store is for sale,” he said. “These, plus many others we don’t have room to show out here.”
“Did you take these?” Manning asked, pointing to some eighties shots of places in the East Village then.
“No, my father did. He was quite obsessed about keeping a visual record of the New York City he knew and loved.” He gestured toward all the pictures displayed around the store. “This is a result of that obsession.”
“Was your father Marcus Dupree?” I asked
“That’s right. I’m his son, Jonathan. Did you two know my father?”
“He and I might have met once,” Manning said. “That’s what we’re trying to find out. It would have been a long time ago.”
“Where?”
“The Domino Club.”
Manning looked over at the pictures from the eighties in the East Village years ago.
“You told us there were more pictures besides these,” Manning said to Dupree. “More from this era here—the eighties? In the East Village?”
“Sure, lots of them. My father kept everything he did. He was fanatical about it. I’ve never had the strength to throw any of them away either. They seemed to mean so much to him. Besides, you never know when they might be worth something. Do you want to buy one?”
“Where are the rest of the pictures?” I asked. “In the back of the store?”
“No, there’s not enough room. My father had a loft on Allen Street. We used to live there, and he eventually turned it into a storeroom for his work. Everything’s there.”
We told him what we were looking for. Pictures from the Domino Club on the night of October 25, 1986. The night of Game 6 of the World Series when the Mets came back to beat the Red Sox and go on to later win the Series. We said we wanted to go through all of his father’s files looking for it.
“I don’t have time to do something like that,” Dupree told us, realizing now we probably weren’t regular customers who were actually going to buy anything from his store.
“I’m afraid we must insist,” Manning said.
“Look, if you want to buy something, go ahead and do it. Otherwise, you’ll have to leave.”
“We’re not leaving until we see all those pictures,” Manning said.
“I’m going to have to call the police then.”
“Don’t bother.”
Manning took out his NYPD detective’s shield and showed it to Dupree.
“Now take us to the rest of the pictures.”
Working with a cop—even one like Manning who probably didn’t even have the right to be flashing his NYPD credentials to anyone at the moment—sure made things a lot easier.
Dupree kept protesting about how long a search was going to take him until we got to the storage place on Allen Street, but Manning ignored him. Dupree was right about one thing though. There was a huge amount of pictures stored there inside the Allen Street location. There were boxes and boxes of stuff piled up all over. Some had specific dates on them. Others seemed alphabetized by names or locations—or sometimes both. But a lot of it didn’t seem organized in any way at all.
“My father had a very … well, unusual filing system,” Dupree said. “I’ve come to understand some of it over the years, but it’s still difficult. What’s the date you’re looking for again?”
“October 25, 1986.”
Dupree shook his head. “I hope you’re getting paid overtime, Lieutenant. We could be here for a while.”
He climbed up a ladder and began taking stuff off the shelves. There were thousands of pictures in all sorts of different boxes. Manning and I split them up, each of us going through every picture to eliminate it from consideration.
It took an hour and a half. We finally found what we were looking for. A folder labeled: “Domino Club.” We opened it and pictures came tumbling out.
There were lots of shots that showed people dancing and drinking and having fun at the club. The pictures all had dates stamped on them. We found several from the night of October 25, 1986. Manning and I looked through them excitedly. One of them was a picture of Manning’s band playing that night, which showed him onstage. Another picture was of the scene around a big television set with the crowds gathered to watch the end of the classic World Series game that night.
Then I found another picture of Manning. A young Scott Manning standing with his arm around a girl at the bar, apparently during a break in the band’s performance and maybe after the music had ended. She had shortly cut cropped hair—almost a crew cut—and was dressed in leather and adorned with tattoos on all arms and other visible body parts.
“Wow, that’s me and Jennifer!” he yelled out when he saw the photo.
“Not your wife, I guess.”
“Nah, that was before I married Susan. Jennifer—Jennifer Hartley was her name—she was just a punk rocker groupie that hung out at a lot of our band gigs. I guess she was there that night too. I honestly don’t remember that picture being taken. But I’d probably had a lot to drink by then.”
He did look a bit wasted in the photo. But what really mattered is that we now knew that Dupree had taken pictures there that night. Of course, this picture didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know about any of the others from the list being there.
But, if Manning had now showed up in two pictures from that night, maybe there were more.
We were almost through everything else in the file when we found it. Another picture of Manning. But the woman named Jennifer Hartley wasn’t in this picture. It was Manning and four other people. On the back of the photo, someone had written an address: “207 Avenue C, Apt. 2G.”
I stared at the five people in the picture. Bill Atwood. Emily Lehrman. Brendan Kaiser. Dora Gayle. Scott Manning.
They’d all been at the Domino Club that long-ago night.
Marcus Dupree had taken their pictures.
And now this was somebody’s blueprint for murder.
CHAPTER 45
“WHAT DOES ANY of this have to do with the killing of Grace Mancuso?” Manning asked.
“I was hoping you might know.”
He and I were sitting outside at a rooftop bar in Gramercy Park, with the lights of Manhattan below us. We had decided we needed a drink to help sort things out after the shock of seeing the picture in Dupree’s file. Both of us were drinking beer—he had a Michelob and I had a bottle of Corona. The beer was ice cold, and it felt like the perfect thing to be drinking on a hot summer night like this.
The setting was perfect for a beautiful date.
Except this wasn’t a date.
It was just a business meeting.
That’s what I kept telling myself anyway, while my mind was racing to try to put together the pieces of what we’d found out into some logical scenario.
Manning looked down now at the photo of him and the four others that we’d brought with us.
“My God, I was so young then,” he said. “Did I really look like that once?”
They all looked different. Manning, Emily Lehrman, Bill Atwood, Brendan Kaiser, and, of course, most of all, Dora Gayle.
Bill Atwood and Dora were obviously together. He had his arm around her in the picture, and she was looking at him adoringly. Dora looked so beautiful in the photo, and I still had trouble accepting the fact this was the same woman who’d become a sad, tragic homeless person on the streets of New York. “I’m Cinderella,” she had told people. “I’m waiting for my prince to take me away so we can live happily ever after.” She had found her prince, but he turned out not to be a prince at all. Atwood had run off to chase other women and build a great life for himself, leaving Dora behind reeling into a downward spiral that she never recovered from until she finally died. Damn. So much for believing in fairy tales.
Kaiser was just a kid, all decked out in trendy, hip-at-the-time clothes and sporting
an eighties-style haircut. Emily Lehrman looked pretty and was dressed very sexily; completely different than the conservative business suits she wore to court. She had on a denim miniskirt, a T-shirt that said “Impeach Reagan,” and what looked like go-go boots. Manning was a good-looking kid in the picture too, and he had changed the least—despite his amazement at the way he looked back then. As far as I was concerned, he still looked really good. But then I was a bit prejudiced because I was eager to jump his bones.
“Somehow this picture got to whoever killed Grace Mancuso and wrote that note,” I said. “Marcus Dupree, the photographer, is long dead. His son said it was never distributed in any way, as far as he knew. So how did the killer get it?”
“The photographer gave it to one of the five of us. That person kept it all these years. That’s the only logical explanation.”
“Did you get a copy of the picture?”
“No.”
“Neither did Lehrman and Kaiser. At least, that’s what they say. I checked before I came here. They don’t remember anything at all about getting a picture from that night. Of course, I don’t know about Atwood and Gayle.”
I turned over the picture and read the writing on the back again. An address: “207 Avenue C, Apt. 2G.”
“That address is our only lead,” I said.
“Except it wasn’t the address of any of Dupree’s places or the club.”
“And we checked this address after we left the photo shop and discovered it was now just another big new apartment building. Whatever it was in 1986 is long gone.”
“So we have a lead that really isn’t a lead.”
I looked down again at the lights of New York City below us. New York City always looked beautiful from way above—like sitting in this place or coming in on a plane at LaGuardia or Kennedy Airport. You saw all the beauty of New York, but none of the ugliness that went with the place.
“What are you going to do next with all this?” Manning asked me.
“Go on the air with it. Tell everyone about the picture with all five names on the list that we found. We may not be sure exactly what it means, but it’s the link we’ve been looking for. That’s a big story. And a big break in the investigation for you and the police too.”
“Yeah, well …”
“You’re going to pass on to the department everything we found out, right?”
“I’m not sure. They’re going to jump all over me if I do that for getting involved in an active murder investigation when I’m supposed to be on limited duty, or whatever the hell it is I’m on.”
“What if I just broke it on air then so the police could pick it up from there. I’d leave you out of it.”
“Except they’d go back and interview Dupree. Who’d tell them about the cop who showed him the detective’s shield to convince him to go look for the picture.”
“Oh, right.”
“I’m probably going to be in big trouble no matter what I do.”
“I’m sorry.”
He shrugged. “I was in big trouble before. A bit more won’t make a whole lot of difference to me at this point.”
I got the feeling he was talking about more than just his police career when he talked about the trouble in his life. I was on my third beer and had a bit of a buzz going. So I asked him about the state of his marriage right now. Hey. I’m an investigative journalist—I always want to know the facts.
“We’re together,” he said.
“How’s that going?”
“Day-to-day.”
“What about your relationship with your son?”
“That’s day-to-day too.”
“But you’re going to keep trying to make it work?”
“I think I owe it to them.”
I was debating whether or not to ask more questions on the topic, but it turned out I didn’t have to. He knew where I was headed with this.
“Look, Clare, I like you. I like you a lot. And I’m very attracted to you. If the situation were different, I’d really want something to happen between us. But I can’t do that. I can’t cheat on my wife and family when I’m trying to make things right again for the things I’ve done wrong in the past. That’s just the kind of person I am. I hope you understand.”
“Of course I do.”
But I was disappointed. I tried my best not to let that show as we talked some more. About his wife and son. About his situation with the NYPD. And, most of all, about the Grace Mancuso story and everything that went with it. Going through everything over and over in hopes of stumbling across something—anything—that we’d missed.
It was just before we were getting ready to leave when Manning suddenly picked up the picture again. I thought maybe he remembered something about one of the five people in it. But he didn’t even look at that, just turned it over and stared at the address on the back again.
“I think I know what this is,” he said. “Or was.”
“You recognize the address?”
“It seemed familiar to me when we checked it out before, but I couldn’t place it then. Figured it was just some place I’d been before on a case I’d worked on. But it wasn’t a case that brought me there. I went there before I joined the force. I think that same night. It was Jennifer, that woman you saw in the other picture at the club with me.”
“What about her?”
“This is where she lived.”
CHAPTER 46
I WENT WITH the story the next night on our newscast.
Sure, I didn’t have the whole story yet. And, in a perfect world, it’s always best to have the whole story before you go with it. But journalism, especially TV journalism, is rarely a perfect world. I now knew there was a picture from more than thirty years ago of the five people whose names were found on that mysterious list next to Grace Mancuso’s body. That was news. Good enough for me.
And so there I was back on the air again, talking to the Channel 10 audience:
ME: There are shocking new developments in the baffling Grace Mancuso murder case. Channel 10 News has exclusively obtained a picture taken at an East Village club more than thirty years ago which clearly shows five people together that night—the same five people whose names were left on a list next to the Mancuso woman’s body.
The picture went up on the screen of Bill Atwood, Dora Gayle, Emily Lehrman, Scott Manning, and Brendan Kaiser. I’d told the production people to freeze it there while I talked:
ME: This picture was taken on October 25, 1986—the night the New York Mets made a miraculous comeback from two runs down, two out in the 10th inning of World Series Game 6 with the Red Sox—and the Mets then went on to win the World Series.
All five of these people were together at this spot in the East Village when that happened.
What does this have to do with the murder of Grace Mancuso, who would have been a baby when this picture was taken?
Was there any further connection between all five of them beyond this seemingly random encounter?
Why did someone leave all five names at the Mancuso crime scene?
All of these are questions that still have to be answered.
But Channel 10 has turned the picture over to NYPD homicide investigators who say it’s the first real break in the case since Grace Mancuso’s body was discovered in her East Side apartment several weeks ago.
And, of course, two of the people in the picture, Bill Atwood and Dora Gayle, have died in tragic crimes not directly related to the Mancuso murder—but which could still be a part of the overall puzzle.
Channel 10 News will continue to stay on top of developments in this fast-moving story …
I did not say anything about Jennifer Hartley or the address on the back of the picture or the fact that Manning had recognized that as the place where Jennifer Hartley lived in the East Village back then.
I’d considered it.
Thought about making a public appeal for her to come forward.
That would have been the easiest way to track her
down after all this time.
But it also meant everyone else in the media would have the same information—and the same story—that we did. I preferred to keep the Jennifer Hartley information secret until we could find her ourselves and get her to tell us her story exclusively.
Now all we had to do was find her.
I explained the dilemma to everyone at the first news meeting we did after my broadcast.
“My God, that was a long time ago,” Brett Wolff said.
“She could be dead,” Dani said.
“Probably married and living under a different name,” Brett added.
“It’s going to be awfully hard to find her,” Dani agreed.
“She also is the one person—our only real lead here—who might have some answers for all this,” I pointed out.
I turned to Maggie, who hadn’t said anything yet. Which was unusual for Maggie. I figured she was still mad at me for working with Manning on the story without telling her. I was right.
“What do you think, Maggie?” I asked.
“Can you tell me again exactly how you got the information about the Jennifer Hartley woman being the person who lived at the East Village address on the back of the picture?”
“Someone told me.”
“Someone who?”
“Someone who had knowledge of her back then.”
“Someone in the picture?”
“Well, yes.”
“Scott Manning?”
“That’s right.”
Maggie sighed.
“Problem?” I asked, knowing full well there was one.
“I really don’t like the idea of this Manning guy being involved in the story with you like this.”
“He’s a trained investigator, an NYPD homicide detective.”
“He’s also a potential murder suspect.”
“I really don’t think—”
“Clare, those five names on that list are the best potential murder suspects we have for the Grace Mancuso killing. You know that as well as I do. And two of them are dead. That leaves three—Emily Lehrman, Brendan Kaiser, and Scott Manning.”
