Below the Fold

by R. G. Belsky

  The manager at a small residential hotel in the area remembered him. He didn’t want to talk to us until Manning flashed his NYPD shield. Like I said before, working with a cop sure did have its advantages.

  “Yeah, he was here,” the manager said. “Came in about ten days ago. Stayed maybe a week.”

  “What happened then?”

  “He didn’t pay his bill.”

  “You evicted him?”

  “That’s what we’re in business for. People don’t pay their bill, we don’t let them stay here.” The hotel manager looked down at the picture again. “What’d he do?”

  “Why do you think he did something?”

  “Cops don’t go looking for people who are innocent.”

  When we were finished at the hotel, we walked over to Washington Square Park. It was late afternoon, and the sun was blazing down. There were people sitting on benches, sunbathing on the grass, throwing Frisbees in the park. There were mothers with their babies, students, businessmen on a break, homeless people, and a few drug dealers.

  It had been a long day. I suggested we get something to eat. So we bought hot dogs and sodas from a street vendor near the entrance to the park, then took them in and sat down on a bench.

  While we were eating, a man sat down on the bench next to us. He was wearing a tattered pair of jeans, a T-shirt that said “Welcome to New York,” and carrying a newspaper. He looked tired and weak, like it took all of his strength just to make it to the park bench.

  “Hello, Scott,” Dave Zachary said. “It’s been a long time.”

  “A long time, Joey.”

  “I guess you’ve been looking for me, huh?”

  “You’ve been watching?”

  “For a while.”

  “We need to talk.”

  “So let’s talk, old buddy.”

  CHAPTER 56

  “I DIDN’T EXPECT you’d bring someone else with you,” Zachary said, looking over at me.

  “She’s—”

  “I know who she is. I watched the TV newscast the two of you did. That’s how I knew you’d come looking for me here eventually. I knew if anyone would figure it all out, it would be you, Scott. You always were smart.”

  “So are you. And the smart thing to do now is to let me take you in.”

  “Just like that?”

  “We can help you. You’re not well, I understand that. The illness has caused you to do things you wouldn’t normally do—that’s not your fault. It’s not really Dave Zachary who committed murder, it’s the illness that’s doing it. I really believe that. I can get you to a hospital, get you whatever treatment you need right now.”

  “I can help too,” I said. “We’ll talk about your condition on the newscast, we’ll get public compassion on your side. Whatever you have done, it’s not your fault—just like he said. Let us both help you. This has gone far enough already. Please don’t make things any worse, Mr. Zachary.”

  Zachary had the newspaper folded over his right arm. He lifted it slightly now so that we could both see what was underneath. He was holding something silver and metallic in his hand. A gun. He kept it pointed at us. Hidden by the newspaper, no one else could see the drama that was being played out here.

  “I used to always love this neighborhood back in the old days,” Zachary said, looking around at the village streets around the park. “It was so exciting in the Village back then. We all had this energy, this commitment, this feeling that everything mattered so much. That’s why I wanted to come back here and see it again before … before it was too late. Except it isn’t the way I remembered. It’s different. Everything has changed.”

  “Maybe we’re different too,” Manning said.

  I kept my eye on the newspaper with the gun underneath it in Dave Zachary’s hand. He held it like a prop, as if he’d almost forgotten it was there. I was hoping Zachary wouldn’t use it, hoping he was still the kind of person Manning remembered, hoping he’d come here to listen to his old friend and let this all end peacefully.

  But that was the Dave Zachary that Manning had described to me back then, a long time ago.

  Not necessarily the Dave Zachary who was sitting next to us with a gun in his hand on a park bench right now.

  “We were really something back then, weren’t we?” Zachary said. “Playing our music, dreaming of making it big, being around all the incredible energy of New York City during the eighties. We were so young and so optimistic about the future back then, Scott. Sometimes I close my eyes and I can still see you and me and the rest of the band going onstage to play.”

  “Hey, ho, let’s go,” Manning said.

  Zachary smiled sadly. “Yeah, like that night at the Domino Club, huh? Jeez, it just felt like everything came together that night—us as a band, the Mets with their miracle comeback, the people in the crowd all going wild. That was like a perfect night to be young and living in New York City with all these great hopes and expectations we had for the future.

  “But it was never the same after that. Once you quit to join the police force, the band fell apart. I went back to Chicago and married Rebecca, the one great love of my life. She was the only thing I ever felt as much passion for as my music. But, as I guess you found out, that didn’t work out. I never became Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen either. The two things I loved the most—Rebecca and my music—both broke my heart.

  “And so I did the best I could with my life—and the hand I’d been dealt. I married Maureen, the woman you met. She’s a good woman. But I just never felt the same passion for her as I used to for Rebecca. The same thing with my work. I became a schoolteacher. I taught kids about music. I thought at the time I was helping and making some kind of a meaningful contribution. But, once I found out I didn’t have much time left, I realized that’s not much of a legacy for five decades on this planet. Before I died, I wanted something more. I wanted to tell myself that I left something good behind. Something that showed I’d been here and that I’d made a difference. The way I wanted to do with my own music back here in the old days.

  “They always say your life flashes before your eyes when you die. Amazing concept, isn’t it? I mean there you are falling off a tall building to your death, and fifty years of stuff are fast-forwarding and replaying in your mind. I’ve never been sure I really believed that. I mean at best you’d only have time for a few images. Marriage, kids, job, or whatever. Come to think of it, how would anyone even know if it were true? Because even if it does happen to you, you can’t tell anybody about it. You’d be dead. That, I believe, is the biggest flaw in the whole your-life-flashes-before-your-eyes-when-you-die theory. You’d have to talk to a dead man to prove it.

  “Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about this—life, death, and all that stuff—since I found out I don’t have a lot of time left. Let’s just say it would be a lot easier to go off a tall building or die in a car accident or drop dead of a sudden heart attack. Because what happens to you then—whether you get one last look at your life or not—only takes a matter of seconds. Me, I have weeks, months to think about dying. And that’s the tough part, old friend. That’s tougher than dying.

  “I guess that’s what I was doing—trying to watch my life pass before my eyes. And it took a long time. Plenty of time to realize I didn’t like who I was and what I had become. So I tried to remember who I used to be. I wanted to be that person again, just a little while, before I died.

  “Then I was watching television one night and I saw the piece about the homeless woman who died destitute and alone on the streets of New York City. About how she’d once had all these big hopes and dreams, just like I had then. The woman who called herself Cinderella and believed that fairy tales really did become true. And I recognized her from the picture. The one you used from college, when she was so young and pretty,” he said, looking over at me.

  My God, I thought to myself.

  The Cinderella story.

  It had gotten picked up by cable news networks and shown in
a lot of places around the country, including Chicago.

  And now Dora Gayle, whose murder had seemed so insignificant to nearly everyone at the time, had somehow become the catalyst for all this.

  “I remembered her from the picture taken that night at the Domino Club,” Zachary said. “The one that got sent to our old apartment after you moved out. I’ve kept it all these years for some reason. I guess because that was such a special night and I wanted to have something to remember that good feeling. And there Dora Gayle was in the picture again, looking just as beautiful as she did in the one you ran from her college years. That really got to me.”

  “But you didn’t know her or any of the other people in the picture, except Scott,” I pointed out.

  “Actually, I did.” He turned to Manning. “I wound up talking to Atwood at the Domino Club that night and then—after you moved out—I hung out with him a few times afterward. He had a lot of money, he liked to party, and he was a real ladies’ man, even back then. He told me he was with the Gayle woman for now, but he wasn’t going to let himself be tied down to one woman. How he was headed for England on the Rhodes scholarship and was going to make it with all these British chicks while he was there.

  “Then one night we were drinking at some place on the Upper West Side, across from Central Park, and he picked up this girl who said she had some mind-blowing pot. So we walked into the park to smoke it. At some point, things started getting heavy sexually between Atwood and the girl. They went off into a nearby woods together while I just sat there and smoked my joint. Dreaming about Rebecca. Hell, you remember me back then—she was the only girl I wanted to be with.

  “Suddenly, Atwood came running out of the woods in a panic. He said things got out of hand, the sex got rough, and now she wasn’t moving. Sure enough, when I followed him into the woods and saw the body, I realized she was dead. I don’t think Atwood meant to kill her. It was an accident, something had gone wrong—maybe because of all the dope we’d been smoking.

  “I wanted to call the police, but he said we couldn’t do that. That his career would be ruined. He told me we needed to just leave the body there, since no one could ever connect us to her. Maybe I wasn’t thinking clearly because of the pot—and I guess I was worried about being implicated in a murder too—so that’s what we did.

  “When I woke up the next morning, I thought it all might have just been a bad dream. Until Atwood and his father showed up at my door. They said how important it was that he not be implicated in this in any way. All about the big future he had ahead of him. They offered me money—a large amount of money, enough money to go back and marry Rebecca—for my silence. I took the money.”

  This was the money Rebecca had talked about with us. The reason why she decided to marry Zachary. And then the reason why she left him when the money was gone.

  “Your ex-wife said you gave away the money,” I said.

  “I did.”

  “Why?”

  “To save my life. Or least to try to salvage whatever was still left of it.”

  “Because of guilt over letting Atwood get away with murder.”

  He nodded.

  “But you took the money. You went back to Chicago with it and started a new life there with Rebecca. Why the sudden change of heart?”

  Zachary looked down at the gun in his hand. For a second, he seemed to drop it a bit, and I thought maybe he was going to put it down. But he didn’t. The gun was still pointing at us. This was his story, and all Manning and I could do was let him keep talking and see how this all played out.

  “One day after I was back in Chicago with Rebecca,” he said, “I decided to see if I could find out what had happened with the dead girl in the park. It turned out that some kid they found in the park got arrested for the murder. I’m not sure what evidence they had against him, but it didn’t really matter. He wound up getting stabbed to death in a prison fight before the trial.

  “I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t come forward and tell the truth without implicating myself—both of being at the murder scene and taking the money to keep quiet. But I had to do something; the guilt I felt over what happened was overwhelming. So I did the only thing I could think of. I gave the money away to charity. To some big music schools and for scholarships to music students. All anonymous. I didn’t want anyone to know what I did with that money, I just wanted to know that I did the right thing in the end. Even if it was too little, too late.

  “I stopped dreaming about being a big music star after that and settled for a life as a high school music teacher. And, as the years went by, I almost forgot about that long-ago night. Until I saw the story on TV about Dora Gayle and went back to look at that picture of the five of you at the Domino Club.”

  He talked about writing the original comments on the picture when he’d first gotten it in 1986. He said he’d been so inspired by everything that happened that he wanted to preserve the memory of that special night.

  “You all seemed to have such dreams and optimism back then. Atwood talked about one day becoming a politician who would make the profession seem noble again, like the Kennedys had once done; Kaiser wanted to travel the world and experience life, not be all about money like his father; Lehrman was dedicated to using the law to help the homeless and other needy people; Gayle wanted to write poetry and great literature; and you, Scott—well, you and I were going to turn the music world upside down.

  “But, after I saw that newscast about the Gayle woman, I thought about what had happened to everyone else in the picture since then. Atwood and all his scandals. The Lehrman woman defending drug dealers and mob bosses. Kaiser becoming a money-grubbing billionaire who stepped all over people to get what he wanted. And, of course, you, Scott. I felt the saddest about you. I always had such high hopes for you.”

  “And I let you down?” Manning asked.

  “I read about you and that kid who got pushed out a window. You lied, man. Why did you lie? You used to have such high ideals and hopes and aspirations. What happened to you? What happened to us all? I couldn’t stop thinking about that. About how we had all thrown everything away. My life—all of our lives—seemed to have no point whatsoever. I only had one hope left for some sort of salvation. A long time ago, I had a daughter. I’d never seen her, and I wanted to find out about her before I died. So, after I talked to Rebecca, I came to New York to try and find her.”

  CHAPTER 57

  I WAS PRETTY sure I knew where this was going.

  Grace Mancuso had been blackmailing Bill Atwood in the days leading up to her murder. Until now, we never knew what she was blackmailing him over. Just that it had to be something really bad—something even worse than the sex scandals that had dogged Atwood over the years.

  Now it turned out that he had killed a woman a long time ago as a young man and that someone else died in jail for the crime.

  And Dave Zachary—Grace’s long-lost biological father—was there when Atwood killed the girl.

  It wasn’t hard to figure out what happened next.

  “I had one big thing I wanted to do before I died. A long time ago, I had a daughter. I’d never seen her, and I wanted to find out about her before I died. So, after I talked to Rebecca, I came to New York to try and find her. This was my daughter, my legacy from the eighties, my one remaining hope for the future.

  “When we first met, I tried to explain that to her. About my music, my love for her mother then, and about the mistakes I had made. I told her everything, including about that night in the park when I had helped to cover up a murder. About how no matter how much money Atwood and his family paid me to keep quiet, it wasn’t worth it. About how that decision had haunted me ever since then.

  “My daughter was the only thing left that mattered for me. I wanted her to understand, so she never made the same mistake herself. I wanted a better life for her. That was all I cared about now. If I knew she was all right, I could die happy.

  “But when I came back to see her aga
in, she laughed about it all in my face. She said I was just a silly old man. She bragged about how she’d first come up with a scheme to defraud investors at the company where she worked. Now she said I was going to help her make even more money because I had told her the secret about Atwood. How she was blackmailing him for enough money to get a big score to set herself up big in a new place.

  “I was devastated. I told her I loved her. I told her how important she was to me. I told her I needed to know I did one thing right before I died. But she just kept laughing. Then she told me if I really loved her, I could do one more thing for her. She said she’d invited Atwood to come over there at ten that night. He thought it was for sex, but she was going to drop the hammer on him for the money—either pay up immediately or go to jail for the long-ago murder. And, just to make it even more convincing that she had the goods on him, she wanted me to be there. The only witness to that murder. The man he’d paid to cover it up and allowed police to put the wrong man in jail for the crime. She said she wanted to see the look on Atwood’s face when he saw me there and realized who I was. Then all that money—the blackmail money from Atwood—would be hers, she gloated.

  “‘C’mon, Daddy, do me this one last favor,’ she said in this mocking tone. ‘Help your little daughter get fuckin’ rich tonight!’

  “When I told her I wouldn’t do it, she called me a loser. She said she was a winner and all the rest of us were losers. She said she was ashamed to have someone like me as her father. Then she told me to get out. She said she didn’t need me anymore. I’d given her enough damaging information about the murder Atwood committed to get the money from him.

  “I was devastated. On that first day I’d come to see her, I’d brought her a present. The wooden statue of the Empire State Building. I knew it wasn’t much, but it somehow symbolized New York City and my new hope for my daughter once I found her. I wanted her to have it. I wanted her to have a piece of me after I was gone.