by R. G. Belsky
“God, I hope it’s not Kaiser,” someone muttered.
“Did she just call our owner a murder suspect?” someone else asked.
“I think she said ‘potential’ murder suspect,” I said.
“Still not good.”
I glared at Maggie. I was kinda mad at her now. Mad for being so critical of me using Manning on the story. Mad for bringing it up in a public meeting this way. And, most of all, mad because I knew she was right. Manning did still have to be considered a potential suspect. All of them on the list did.
But I needed Maggie more than ever now.
“Can you find Jennifer Hartley?” I asked her.
“Sure.”
“Just like that?”
“We have that address in the East Village. If she lived there, there will be a trail of all her forwarding and subsequent addresses. Even if she changed her name or the way she looked or anything else. All we have to do is follow that trail, and we’ll find Jennifer Hartley—whoever she is and wherever she is today.”
“How can you be so certain?”
“I might not be a hotshot like Scott Manning, but I’m a pretty good trained investigator too.”
CHAPTER 47
JENNIFER HARTLEY HAD come a long way from the short-haired, tattooed punk rocker she was in the 1980s.
We tracked her through a series of addresses until we got to the one she lived at now—a big house, a mansion really, in Greenwich, Connecticut. She’d married a man named Zach Monroe, who developed some kind of computer super-chip that made him rich and gave her a life of leisure.
Jennifer Hartley—now Jennifer Monroe—met us in front of the house as we drove up the long driveway. She had long, perfectly coiffured hair now. Wearing an expensive-looking, fashionable sundress and sandals. She had garden tools in her hand, and it looked like she’d been working on a lavish bed of flowers near the front door. She put them down now and walked over to us.
Manning had called ahead to tell her that we were coming but wasn’t specific about the reason—just saying the visit was about “police business.” There were some awkward introductions and then an equally awkward hug between her and Manning. The kind of hug you see when two people used to know each other really well in another life but were complete strangers now.
“It’s been a long time,” Jennifer said to him.
“More than thirty years.”
“You look good, Scott.”
“You, too, Jennifer. But different. A lot different …”
She smiled.
“Let’s go inside and talk,” she said.
“I’m still not sure exactly what this is about,” she said as we sat in her living room. “You told me on the phone that it all had something to do with a night we spent at a club in the East Village.”
“That night seems to be the link to a murder case.”
She shook her head. She was confused.
“How? Who was murdered?”
“A woman named Grace Mancuso,” I said. “A stockbroker who lived on the Upper East Side of New York. Does that name mean anything to you?”
“I read about it in the papers and saw it on TV. But she was in her thirties, right? What does this have to do with a night we spent out at a club when she was barely born?”
Manning and I went through everything we knew about the picture from that long-ago night at the Domino Club and finding her address on the back.
“Do you have the picture?” Manning asked.
“If I do, does that mean I’m some kind of suspect?”
“Of course not.”
“Maybe I should call my lawyer before I talk to you anymore.”
She said it casually, and I wasn’t sure at first if it was a joke or not. But then she laughed.
“I had the picture,” she said. “I had both shots. The one of just you and me, then you with the other people that night. I don’t have them anymore. I threw them away.”
“When?”
“Several months later, I guess. I found them one day. I was moving out of the East Village place, and they brought back too many memories. I had a bit of a crush on you back then, Scott. Don’t know if you were aware of that or not. I guess I was into my rock groupie phase, and you were so cute when you played onstage with your band. Anyway, then I found out from someone that you’d quit the band, enrolled at the police academy, and were engaged to be married. I didn’t like that Scott Manning. I was mad at him for taking away the cool guy onstage I used to know. It felt good at the time, although now it seems kind of silly what I did. It was just a couple of pictures, you know. Pictures of you and me and some other people out for a night in the city. Of course, I had no idea this might one day wind up as possible evidence in a murder case. Do you think that one of the people in the other picture with you is the killer?”
“Not necessarily. Two of them are already dead. And one of the deaths was by someone for a completely different reason.”
“So why is it so important?”
“I think there’s something about that night that could tell us who killed Grace Mancuso … and why.”
A short time later, she walked us to the door and then out to our car. She gave Manning another awkward hug, and they said their goodbyes.
“I sure wish I’d kept that picture of you and the other four from that night you’re looking for,” Jennifer said.
“Me too.”
“I guess you wish you’d kept yours, too.”
“Huh?”
“Your copy of the picture. You threw it away too, right?”
“I never had the picture.”
She stared at him.
“I ordered two copies of both pictures from that night,” she said. “I asked the photographer to send them to me afterward. He sent one copy for me, and another one for you. He said I should send them on to wherever you lived. It took me a while, but that’s what I did. I mailed it to you.”
“When?”
“Quite a while later, I’m not sure how long. I found them in a drawer one day. The picture of you and the picture with the four other people. I realized I’d never told you I had the pictures and figured you might want them. But I hadn’t talked to you in a while at that point. Your band had broken up. So I just mailed both pictures to you. I was always surprised I never heard anything back from you.”
“I never got any pictures.”
“Well, they didn’t come back, so …”
“Where did you send them?”
“To your apartment then. The place on Sullivan Street. I was there once and had written down the address.”
“I moved out of there after I quit the band and enrolled in the Police Academy.”
“Then the pictures should have been forwarded to you,” I pointed out to him. “Or else sent back to you, Jennifer.”
“Unless …”
“Unless it wound up in someone else’s hands.”
“Who?” Jennifer asked.
I didn’t have an answer for that. Neither did Manning. I had been hoping this would all end somehow once we tracked down Jennifer Hartley. That she would have some answers. But it didn’t work out that way. Jennifer Hartley wasn’t the answer to all this, just another piece of the puzzle. The killer was still out there somewhere, and I didn’t have the slightest idea who that was.
CHAPTER 48
“THE GOOD NEWS is we found Jennifer Hartley,” I told Jack Faron. “Tracked her down to her house now in Connecticut. She did get that picture sent to her, just like we thought. And I got an exclusive interview.”
“Okay, what’s the bad news?”
“She doesn’t know anything.”
I sat in Faron’s office and ran through all the highlights of the conversation with Hartley, including the part about the copy of the picture with the five people she’d sent to Scott Manning—but that somehow disappeared.
“But there was another copy of that picture,” Faron said, his voice getting more excited now. “That means it could still be out
there. And there’s a possibility—a good chance—that this picture is in the hands of the person who killed Grace Mancuso and left that list of the names of the people in the picture. For whatever reason. So we just go with that. Play it up big. Get the Hartley woman interview on air too, talking about the mystery of the picture and the events of that night and all the rest. Clare, that sounds like a terrific story to me.”
“Wait a minute—aren’t you the guy who didn’t even think this even was a story anymore?”
“That was before.”
“Before what?”
“Before this.”
He picked up some papers and slid them across the desk to me.
“It’s our latest overnight rating report.”
“Yippee!”
“I know how much you love reading ratings book numbers.”
“More than life itself.”
“These include the overnights for our last show. You got a monster rating number for this story. Some of that probably came from all the promo we did during the day for it, but the numbers kept going up even during your segment. Nobody was turning it off. You struck ratings gold on this one, Clare.”
I looked through the numbers quickly. It didn’t take long to see what Faron was saying. Big numbers everywhere, including all the key demographics. There are some stories that just seem to strike a chord with the viewing audience. The emergence of the long-ago picture and its connection to the Grace Mancuso murder seemed to have done it. But there was something else in the numbers too. Everyone suddenly cared about Dora Gayle now. The connection between all the money from the Revson scandal and all the other powerful and important people on that list with her seemed so incongruous that people desperately wanted to learn more and find out the reason a homeless woman was a part of this story.
I remembered now how crazy it seemed to everyone to do a big on-air piece in the beginning about Dora Gayle and her seemingly meaningless death. That was a murder that could never draw big numbers, people said. You covered murders by the numbers on TV news. The all-important rating numbers. And there was a formula that you followed in deciding what murders to put on the newscast. Dora Gayle had proved just how flawed that method was. A good story is a good story.
“Tell me about Scott Manning,” Faron said now.
“What about him?”
“Why he seems to be working with you on this story.”
Damn. Did Maggie go to Faron with a complaint? I doubted that. Not her style. She was the “in-your-face” confrontational type, not the “behind your back” type. But everyone in that news meeting had heard what she said about Manning. And it had no doubt become a hot topic in office gossip. A newsroom is a small place, so it wouldn’t have taken long for the news to get to Faron.
“Are you sleeping with him?” Faron asked.
“How could you even ask me a question like that?”
Faron just stared at me.
“I’m not sleeping with him, Jack.”
“Are you planning on sleeping with him in the future?”
“I don’t really plan these things out.”
“Probably not a good idea to do anything like that. At least until we get some more answers on this story. And make sure this Manning isn’t involved in any way we’re not aware of yet. That would be bad news if we were employing him in some capacity and he turned out to be guilty of something here, maybe even murder. Bad for you. Bad for me. And bad for the station.”
“I’ll do my best to control my sexual urges,” I said.
“Just let me know if anything changes in your personal relationship with Manning.”
“You’ll be the first person I tell, Jack.”
We talked about the next story we were doing. I’d go on the air with the Jennifer Hartley picture stuff. That was easy. The trickier element was how to keep the story going after that.
It was Faron who came up with the plan we finally decided on. I probably would have thought of it eventually too. But I was a little rattled by all the Manning talk. So maybe I was not exactly at the top of my game right at the moment.
“Everyone wants to hear more about Dora Gayle,” he said, pointing again to the ratings numbers.
“But we’ve already told her story.”
“Let’s tell it again.”
“We already did that too. Not much left about Dora Gayle’s life to say in this story.”
“Then let’s tell a different Dora Gayle story. Go back and compare her life to all the money and power and influence of the others—the victim, Grace Mancuso, and the other people on that list. Keep asking the question over and over again. What does a sad, tragic homeless woman have to do with any of this? Show the picture again and again of her as a young, beautiful woman at the club in the East Village in that picture—and then the way she looked and lived now. It would be powerful stuff.”
He was right. Dora Gayle. And I suddenly came up with the perfect way to show how Dora Gayle just didn’t fit into the facts we knew about this story.
“Revson,” I said.
“What about it?”
“Of all the things that seem strange about Dora Gayle—the facts of the story that just don’t make sense with her involvement—the strangest is the Revson financial scandal.”
“You still think there’s some kind of bizarre connection between Dora Gayle and Revson?”
“There has to be a connection between all of it. Dora Gayle. The other people on the list. Mancuso. The mess at Revson. It’s the only way any of this makes any kind of sense.”
“But what could possibly be the connection between a thirtysomething-years-old picture and a homeless woman in it to a financial scandal and murder happening now?”
“Let’s go back to Revson and ask them,” I said.
CHAPTER 49
TODD SCHACTER WAS standing in front of my apartment building when I got home that night.
That was a surprise. I hadn’t heard from him since our last encounter in the coffee shop. I sort of assumed that he’d forgotten about me or decided not to do what I asked him or he’d failed at it and was afraid to admit that.
But here he was waiting for me.
“Let’s talk,” Schacter said when I approached him.
No hello, no pleasantries of any kind.
“Sure, want to come upstairs to my place?”
“No.”
“I’m pretty tired, it’s been a long day. I’d be a lot more comfortable there. I could make you a drink—I know I sure could use one.”
“No,” he repeated.
“Why not?”
He pointed toward the lobby of my building. There was a doorman letting people in and out.
“There might be a security camera in there.”
“There’s no security camera in my building.”
“How do you know that?”
“Well, I’ve never seen one.”
“The best security cameras are the ones that no one is aware of.”
“Do you spend your whole life worrying that any place you go might somehow catch you on a hidden security camera?”
“Yes.”
Damn, this guy was a weird dude.
He asked me to start walking with him. So that’s what we did. We began walking down the street away from my building. He said that was the best way to make sure that no one was watching or listening to us from any recording devices. I remembered how John Gotti, the old New York City crime boss, always held his meetings like that. Walking down the street of New York with his lieutenants to make sure the FBI wasn’t listening in on them. I told that to Schacter now.
“It’s a very effective method to avoid detection,” Schacter said.
“Yeah, well, they finally did catch Gotti on tape, and he went away to prison for the rest of his life.”
“I’m smarter than he was.”
He reached into his pocket, pulled out a large manila envelope, and handed it to me.
“The information you’re looking for is in there.�
��
“About the email?”
“Yes.”
“You know who sent the original email about Lucy Devlin that I told you about?”
He nodded.
“It’s all in there. Her name. Address. Date of the email. Where she sent it from.”
“She?”
“It was sent by a woman.”
“Any idea how old this woman is?”
“Of course.”
“Mid-twenties?”
“That’s right.”
The same age Lucy would be. I tried to let the enormity of what he was saying sink into me for a few seconds.
“How can you be sure this is the right person?” I finally asked. “I mean, I didn’t give you a whole lot to work with, I realize that. Are you absolutely sure this woman is the one who sent the original email?”
“I’m sure.”
“How sure?”
“I double-checked it with another source of information.”
“What do you mean?”
“Her email appeared in another computer file I was able to breach at the same time.”
“Who?”
“Senator Elliott Grayson.”
“Holy crap!” I said.
“That was kinda my reaction too,” Schacter said, and he gave me the closest thing to a smile that I’d ever seen from him.
“But you said you were afraid to go into Grayson’s computer files.”
“I changed my mind.”
“Why?”
“Like I said, I still like a good challenge.”
And then he was gone.
Walking away from me down the street like he’d never been here at all.
I went upstairs to my apartment, poured myself a big drink, and opened the envelope Schacter had given me.
It was all there, just like he’d said.
The email had been sent from a Hotmail address in Winchester, Virginia. Schacter had tracked the owner of the account to a house there that belonged to a man named Gregory Nesbitt. He lived there with his wife, Linda, and his daughter, Audrey. Linda Nesbitt was twenty-seven years old, which is the exact age Lucy would be if she were alive. For whatever it was worth, I noted that Linda’s first name also began with an “L”—just like Lucy—which might make sense for someone to do if they were choosing a new name for themselves. Their daughter, Audrey, was eight years old and a third-grader.
