Below the Fold

by R. G. Belsky

  “Oh, right. I saw something about that on one of the cable news channels. You think this could be your guy?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Did he lose a lot of money to her in that scam?”

  “None that we know of.”

  “So what’s this Zachary guy’s motive?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out. Tell me whatever you know about him.”

  Kowalski put the phone down for a few minutes and went looking for David Zachary’s missing person file.

  “There’s no sign of any violent behavior in his past,” the Chicago cop said when he came back on the line. “He seems pretty clean. A teacher for more than thirty years. Taught high school music classes and was a faculty advisor for the school’s marching band at football games and stuff like that. Been married to the same woman the whole time. No kids, a house, a couple of cars—all very average.”

  I asked if he could tell us again about what he had learned about the events leading up to his disappearance.

  “That’s the damnedest thing about it,” Kowalski said. “There doesn’t seem to have been any one thing that was the catalyst for him leaving. Nothing that makes sense anyway. His wife said Zachary was simply watching TV one night and he got very agitated. He kept mumbling to himself, pacing around furiously, and saying some things that didn’t make any sense to her.”

  “Did she tell you what he was watching?”

  “It was a news show about some murder in New York.”

  Christ, it was all coming together now. This was the link we’d been looking for. Zachary was the key. Except it didn’t quite make sense. If Zachary was watching a news show about Grace Mancuso’s murder before he disappeared, then maybe he wasn’t the one who had killed her.

  “Was the news show he was watching about the Grace Mancuso murder?” Manning asked.

  “Nah, I would have remembered that when you mentioned her name to me earlier. This was no big high-profile case. Just the death of some homeless woman in New York.”

  “Dora Gayle?” I asked

  “Yes, that was her name. He’s watching this news show about the Dora Gayle woman’s death, and that’s when he got very worked up. Told his wife ‘Cinderella is dead’ at one point, even though she had no idea what he was talking about. She figured it was just the brain tumor that was doing it. Weird, huh?”

  Dora Gayle.

  She’d been there from the start of this story, hovering around the edges even though neither I nor anyone else could figure out what she might possibly have to do with all the events that happened.

  And now she was back in a big way.

  Dora Gayle was the key to it all.

  But how?

  And why?

  CHAPTER 52

  MANNING AND I flew to Chicago the next day.

  Manning was still having a lot of trouble dealing with the developments about his old friend Dave Zachary. And not just because of his possible involvement in the Grace Mancuso murder, he told me on the flight there.

  “The thing is the Dave Zachary I knew was a dreamer, a visionary, a man who always wanted to strive for great things,” he said. “He wanted to make a real mark in the music industry, even more than I ever did. I was happy just playing gigs and working in the clubs. He liked that, too. That’s why he idolized the Ramones, because he wanted to emulate their whole punk rock act persona. He called himself Joey, after Joey Ramone—the Ramones’ lead singer.

  “But he wanted even more than that. Dave—or Joey, as he wanted to be called back then—aspired to be like Dylan or Springsteen. He began talking about us getting a record contract and becoming music superstars—and, most of all, about writing great music and meaningful lyrics that could change the world. He really believed that, too. I remember once we were listening to one of Springsteen’s big songs, “Born to Run,” and he told me that someday he would write something even better.

  “He always aimed for the top; he wanted the best in everything. Same with women. The rest of us would run around with whatever women we could find. But he had his girlfriend Rebecca back in Chicago. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. He had a picture of her above his bed in our apartment and talked about bringing her to New York as soon as he made enough money to support them both.

  “Rebecca was just drop-dead gorgeous. She looked a lot like Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders back then. I told that to him once, and he said: ‘In Chrissie’s dreams; Rebecca is better looking.’ I heard later he eventually did go back to Chicago and marry Rebecca after I moved out of the apartment. I always wanted to meet Rebecca. I guess I’ll finally get my chance now when we get to their house.

  “He and I lost touch after I joined the NYPD. I tried reaching out to him a few times, but he never got back to me. I figured he was mad at me because I quit the band. I was never exactly sure what happened to him after that, but I always figured it would be something great. I sure as hell didn’t expect to find out he was a high school music teacher all his life. I guess I just find it all a bit confusing.”

  That confusion wasn’t eased when we got to Zachary’s address. It was a nondescript one in a suburban community about fifteen miles from O’Hare Airport.

  “My God, the Joey I knew would have laughed about a house like this,” Manning muttered. “‘Matchbox houses’, he called them, like from the Pete Seeger song. ‘All those ordinary people living in their ordinary matchbox houses living their ordinary lives,’ he’d say contemptuously.”

  His wife was a lot different than the gorgeous portrait of the Chrissie Hynde look-alike Manning had remembered too. That beautiful Rebecca had morphed over the years into a matronly looking woman with gray hair and wearing a shapeless house dress. She led us into the living room.

  We told her everything now about the murder of Grace Mancuso. About Dave Zachary’s confrontation with the security people at Revson when he showed up and demanded to see her. We asked Mrs. Zachary again if she could think of any connection between her husband and the Mancuso woman. She said she couldn’t. She seemed confused and scared.

  I tried to calm her down by asking her some innocuous questions about her and her husband.

  She talked about their life together since. She worked as a receptionist in a doctor’s office, sang in the church choir, and she and Dave enjoyed gardening together on weekends. She said it had been a good marriage, a good life. There had been no children. They’d tried, but she was unable to conceive so they’d just accepted that as God’s will.

  “Dave was a fine teacher. He worked with a lot of young people over the years. Turning them on to the pleasures of playing and composing and listening to good music. Many times, we’d get letters or emails from former students, thanking him for everything he’d done to help them become better people. Many of them went on to become successful musicians and music teachers themselves. Dave always felt he played at least a part in that. I think that gave him real satisfaction.”

  “When did he get sick?” I asked.

  “He found out about the cancer several months ago. He hadn’t been feeling well for a while. Run down, headaches, trouble sleeping. I finally convinced him to go to the doctor. I figured they’d just give him some antibiotics or vitamins to get him back to normal. But instead the doctors said Dave had a brain tumor. It was malignant, and there was nothing they could do. There were times after that when he was his old self. Then he’d just lose it so much he couldn’t remember what year it was, who was president, or even the school where he used to teach.

  “The doctor told us this was natural with the progression of the disease. Of course, we knew it was only going to get worse. I thought he’d be depressed. But it was never like that. The illness—the death sentence from the doctor—almost seemed to give him new life, a heightened sense of urgency. He said he wanted to make use of the little time he had left. He said he needed to take care of a lot of things before he was gone.

  “Anyway, that’s kind of what Dave seemed to be doing n
ow. He was going back in his life, making amends. Like he was settling up the final bill. He started spending a lot of time going over old stuff in the house—pictures, reports cards, letters—that sort of thing. He began reaching out to people he hadn’t talked to in a long time—friends, coworkers, former students. Like I said, I guess he was putting his affairs in order.”

  “Could we see some of the stuff you’re talking about?” I asked.

  “Sure, if you think it will help.”

  She led us down to the basement. There was a trunk in the corner. She opened it up. It was filled with scrapbooks, school papers, honors, and awards—the memories of a lifetime.

  “He spent hours down here after he got sick,” Mrs. Zachary said. “I asked him once what he was doing. He said he was looking for answers. Answers about his life. He kept talking about the things he needed to make right before he died. I was his wife. I thought I understood him, I thought I understood what was going through his mind. But I realize now that I didn’t understand. I still don’t.”

  She went back upstairs, while Manning and I went through the stuff in the box. A few minutes later, we found what we were looking for.

  It was the picture.

  The same picture.

  The one of the five people from that long-ago night at a club in the East Village.

  It wasn’t hard to figure out what must have happened. Jennifer Hartley had sent it to Manning at the last address she had for him. Except he wasn’t living there anymore. Zachary was the only one at the apartment now. Zachary got the picture and for some reason held onto it all this time.

  Except this picture looked different than the one we’d found in the East Village photographer’s studio.

  Dave Zachary had put a black X in magic marker over the faces of all five of them—Bill Atwood, Dora Gayle, Brendan Kaiser, Emily Lehrman, and Manning, too.

  On the back of the photo, written in faded ink, it said:

  “FIVE FACES OF OUR YOUNG GENERATION ON A MEMORABLE NIGHT IN NEW YORK CITY; 1) My best friend and my roommate—who’s going to help me to make meaningful social statements with my music; 2) a law student who’s dedicated to donating her skills to help the poor gain affordable housing and decent lives; 3) a Rhodes Scholar who wants to be the kind of politician that one day we’ll be proud of like we used to be back with John F. Kennedy; 4) the son of a ruthless newspaper baron who has decided to be a different kind of man than his father; and 5) a lovely, brilliant young woman who understands the beauty of words and poetry.

  It was dated 1986, presumably when he’d gotten the picture mailed to him from Jennifer Hartley that was meant for Manning.

  Underneath, there were more words in fresher ink that obviously had been written by Zachary much more recently.

  “We all had such high hopes for the future back then. And look how we all turned out. A dirty politician, a dirty lawyer, a dirty cop, a corporate moneygrubber, and a waste of a woman’s life. And, of course, me. What was the point of it all? Where did we lose our way? There’s only one thing I can still do to make it right …”

  Manning stared at the picture and the words. “Jeez, Dave Zachary never stopped being a dreamer,” he said. “He remembered Dora Gayle from the picture that night and realized what had happened to her since then. So he went back and looked at the lives of the rest of us from that picture too. Then, in his confused and rapidly declining state of mind, it was all too much to take for him. Something snapped. He then went on some crazy mission before he dies that involves all of us in whatever delusion he’s under.”

  That all made some weird kind of sense to me too.

  Except, I couldn’t get the thought out of my head that we were still missing something.

  What did Grace Mancuso have to do with any of this?

  If Zachary had no investment money he’d lost in the Revson fraud scandal, then why would he murder her?

  And the Mancuso woman wasn’t just murdered. She was brutally beaten and killed. The fury, the anger, the excess of it all. This was a crime of passion the medical examiner had said. Did that sound like Dave Zachary? Not the Dave Zachary Manning and his wife knew. Besides, Zachary had no history of violence. For most of his life, he was a mild-mannered schoolteacher. This was completely out of character for him.

  I looked down again at the black Xs drawn over the faces of Manning and the four others.

  Was Dave Zachary out to kill the people in that picture because they had disappointed him? Disappointed him by the way they’d lived their lives?

  Maybe.

  But he hadn’t come after any of them.

  Instead he murdered Grace Mancuso.

  Why?

  And what was he planning next?

  Upstairs, there was an uncomfortable moment before we left. Both Manning and I wanted to offer some words of assurance to Mrs. Zachary, but what could we say? That we’d find her husband somewhere. When that happened, he’d be arrested for murder. Then it would be a race to see if he died of a brain tumor before they convicted him. No, there was going to be no happy ending to the Dave Zachary story.

  “Dave used to talk about you a lot,” Manning said to her now, still trying to make some kind of innocuous conversation before we left.

  “When did he talk to you about me?”

  “When we lived together in New York back in 1986.”

  She looked confused. “I didn’t meet Dave until after he came back from New York.”

  “Aren’t you Rebecca?”

  “No, my name is Maureen.”

  “Dave always talked about somebody named Rebecca. And he went back to Chicago and he married Rebecca.”

  “Oh, she was his first wife. She left him. It was a very messy business. It hurt Dave very badly. I always thought he never really got over losing Rebecca. Oh, he loved me. But I always thought he still carried a torch for that Rebecca. God knows why.”

  Damn.

  This wasn’t Rebecca.

  Rebecca was still out there somewhere.

  And Dave Zachary was trying to tie up all the loose ends from his past before he died.

  “Do you have any idea how we might find Rebecca?” I asked.

  CHAPTER 53

  HER NAME WAS Rebecca Steffani and she lived in a fancy two-story Tudor house in a posh Chicago neighborhood. It was only about twenty minutes away from Dave Zachary’s house, but it might as well have been in another world.

  I Googled her before we went there and also had Maggie do some checking back at the office for any information about Rebecca Steffani. To my surprise, there was a lot about her.

  She had been married for many years to a man named Anthony Steffani. He was ostensibly a building and plumbing contractor. But, for much of the past two decades, he had also been at the top of the Chicago police department’s list of crime bosses. Tony the Tongue Steffani they called him. That’s because legend has it that he once cut out the tongue of a stoolie in his organization. A story like that, whether true or not, tends to cement your reputation as a tough guy. He ran a massive prostitution, drugs, and gambling operation on the south side of Chicago.

  Then, a few years ago, he’d been shot to death while having lunch at his favorite Italian restaurant. Since then, Rebecca had been living the good life as a mob widow. She was part of the city’s night club crowd, she dated a rich lawyer who’d defended her husband before he was shot, and, in general, didn’t seem that heartbroken ol’ Tony was gone.

  There was even some speculation she might have had something to do with setting him up that fateful day he had his last lunch, supposedly because she had heard he might try to divorce her. She was still an attractive woman. Big, bouffant hairdo. Tight Capri pants. Low-cut sweater. Think the Mob Wives reality TV show, and you had Rebecca Steffani.

  “Yeah, Dave came here a few weeks ago,” she told Manning and me as we sat in her house. “I hadn’t even thought about him in years. The putz began talking about all the good times we had. Good times? I don’t remember why I was even
with him in the first place, but I sure remembered why I dumped him.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “He was a loser.”

  “How was he a loser?”

  “He wound up spending his whole life as a schoolteacher, for crissakes. Who the hell wants to be a schoolteacher? Or be married to one?”

  “His wife said he got a great deal of satisfaction out of working with young people.”

  “Oh, right,” she snorted. “Well, satisfaction doesn’t pay the mortgage.”

  Sitting there now and talking to Rebecca Steffani, I suddenly suspected that she really might have had something to do with her husband’s death. Maybe she used him for years to get what she wanted—this house, nice clothes, fancy cars. And then, when it looked like he wasn’t going to be of any use to her anymore, she got rid of him. No way the cops would probably ever prove that. But my instincts told me that this woman would probably do anything—even murder—to get what she wanted.

  The question was whether she was always like this. Did she get hard and mean and greedy as she got older? Or had she always been this way, and the young Dave Zachary was just too blinded by love to notice?

  “Dave’s missing,” Manning said.

  “So I heard.”

  “He’s also sick. That’s one of the reasons we’re trying to find him. It could be a life or death situation.”

  Rebecca Steffani shrugged. “Nothing to do with me,” she said.

  I thought again about how much in love Manning had said Zachary was once with this woman. How he used to describe her as a goddess, the love of his life. Maybe he was just deluding himself the whole time. Maybe we all are. Maybe there’s no such thing as love. Maybe it’s all just an illusion, a moment in time that we make up in our head—and that’s then gone as fast as it came.

  “What did Dave Zachary say to you?” I asked.

  “Most of it didn’t make a lot of sense. He kept talking about looking back on his life, trying to make sense out of a lot of things, right the wrongs he’d done to people over the years. He said he wanted to see something that told him he’d left the world a better place after he was gone. Crap like that. It was like listening to a bad Dr. Phil show. To be honest, I was bored silly. I just wanted to get him out of here.”