by R. G. Belsky
“But at the end, when she was telling me to get out, she made fun of the statue. Said it was just like me … cheap and useless and an embarrassment to her. I guess something snapped in me, it was too much to take. She’s taken my innermost secrets and left me with nothing. The statue was right in front of me, the statue she made fun of. I’d like to say that I didn’t know I was capable of that kind of violence. But I discovered that I was.”
“What happened then?” I asked.
“I’m not sure. This brain tumor … well, it plays tricks on my mind. Big chunks of my memory these days are sometime just gone. The next thing I remember was waking up in a hotel room. I went back to Grace’s apartment. When I saw her lying there dead, that’s when I realized just how much rage I was capable of.”
“Were you the one who called the police afterward to lead them to the body?” Manning asked.
He nodded.
“She was just lying there. All covered in blood. Beaten so badly. I was so ashamed of what I’d done. I didn’t want to just leave her there like that. I couldn’t just walk away. She was my daughter.”
“And then you left the note next to her body for police to find with the names of me and the other four people?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you do that?” Manning asked.
“I don’t know. I guess I just wanted to send you all some kind of a message. The five of you in that picture. I blamed you for all the lost hopes and lost dreams we had on that night when the picture was taken. I was mad at all of you for what you have become, and I was disappointed by you. I know that probably doesn’t make a lot of sense, but I felt you had all played some role in what happened inside my daughter’s apartment. That’s why I did it.
“I wrote down all five of your names as being complicit in what I had done. And used the verses of two of my favorite songs from the past too, because they seemed appropriate. ‘… for sins committed yesterday’ is from the Rolling Stones song on their Between the Buttons album. And ‘a little help from my friends’, of course, is from Sergeant Pepper and the Beatles. I used to play those songs a lot in our apartment, Scott. Just like I did with the Ramones. They were all my favorites.”
Manning nodded. “I should have recognized that sooner, I guess. Except I had no idea you were involved.”
“But you did find me in the end. Which is what I wanted to happen. One way or another, I wanted it to be you that found me. It just felt right that way.”
I looked around the park. There was no sign that anyone else was aware of what was going on. People continued to lounge on the grass, play games, read on park benches, and do all the other things that people do on a hot summer day in New York City.
“So what happens now?” I asked.
“I can’t just walk away. I need to take you both out of here with me so you don’t try to stop me somehow. I’m not going to shoot you, unless I have to. I just wanted to talk to you, Scott. I’ve done that. I didn’t know you were going to bring the TV woman. But now I need to go ahead with the rest of what I have to do here. Give me your gun.”
Manning hesitated for a second or two, looked down at the gun in Zachary’s hand, and then over at me. He shrugged, took out his gun, and handed it to him. Now, I was really scared. But it turned out he knew what he was doing.
“There’s backup officers watching us,” Manning said.
“What?”
“There’s been police officers watching us the whole time.”
I thought at first he was bluffing.
But then he pointed toward a clump of trees and made a signal. There were two police officers who stepped out from behind them now. They had their weapons out. Manning hadn’t been bluffing at all. He really did make preparations, like he’d told me, before coming here to find Dave Zachary.
“You get up and try to walk us out of here, they’ll stop you. Someone might get hurt. So just give my gun back and give me your gun. I can help you. I’ll do everything I can to help you. I’ll get you a lawyer …”
“To do what? Get me a shorter sentence? I’m afraid it’s a bit too late for that.”
“You need a doctor.”
“A doctor can’t help me. A lawyer can’t help me. No one can help me anymore. This is something I’m going to have to do on my own.”
“If you try to take us out of the park with that gun, they’re going to give you one warning to drop it. If you don’t, they’ll have to shoot you. That’s the police procedure for a case like this. Don’t do this. You don’t have a chance. If you don’t give yourself up, it’s just like committing suicide.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.” He smiled sadly.
At that moment, I suddenly understood. I understood what Dave Zachary’s plan was. His grand finale. Zachary wasn’t trying to get out of here alive at all. He wanted to die.
Suicide by cop, they call it.
When a person is too afraid to kill themselves but puts themselves deliberately into a situation where the police have to kill them.
The officers began moving toward us.
“Don’t do this,” Manning said softly to Zachary.
“Police,” one of the officers shouted. “Drop your weapon!”
It was like a slow-motion film, everything happening in a relentless sequence with us powerless to stop it. Zachary throwing away the newspaper now and turning toward the two approaching officers, with the gun in his hand. The cops yelling out a final warning. Zachary pointing the gun in his hand at them.
“He’s not going to shoot!” I wanted to scream out, but I didn’t.
“Drop the gun!” one of the cops was yelling at Zachary.
Don’t shoot … I thought to myself.
But I knew it was hopeless.
These were cops.
And they would do what a cop was supposed to do.
Protect a fellow officer—as well as an innocent civilian—they felt was in danger.
Zachary continued to move forward toward them now waving the gun his hand, ignoring their repeated demands that he drop the weapon.
In the end, they had no choice.
There was a single gunshot, and Dave Zachary fell forward, blood spurting out of a hole in his chest.
He was dead before he hit the ground.
CHAPTER 58
I’D NEVER SEEN a person shot and killed before. Not right in front of me like this.
Oh, I’d covered a lot of bloody murders and police killings over the years. Written about them for newspapers, talked about them on the air, seen graphic video and pictures of crime scenes. I was certainly no stranger to death and tragedy and bloodshed and gore. But this was different. This was the real thing.
I also realized at that moment how traumatic it had all been for me. I’d been scared the whole time. I admitted that to myself now. From the moment Dave Zachary sat down on the park bench and showed us the gun he was carrying. Scared that he’d shoot me or Manning. Scared that one of the police officers might hit us too with one of their shots. Scared that something else terrible could happen in the volatile situation we were in. Well, something terrible did happen. But at least Manning and I were okay.
All this was running through my head as I looked at Dave Zachary lying on the ground in a pool of blood next to me, almost feeling paralyzed and in a state of shock. But I also knew what I had to do now. I was a professional. A professional journalist. I needed to do my job.
And so I did all the things a journalist should do in that situation. I called the story into the Channel 10 newsroom. I got a video crew and reporters to the scene. We broke into the daytime programming with urgent bulletins. We shot interviews with the people there, including me, for the 6 p.m. newscast and on our website.
Manning was acting like a professional too. Working with the two police officers to control the crime scene. Bringing in an ambulance and the ME’s office for Zachary’s body. Briefing detectives, CSI, and the other authorities who showed up on what had just happened. I realiz
ed that he’d gone through the same emotional ordeal as I had. Maybe even worse, because he’d lost a person who was once his best friend. But he was still all business. I respected that.
It turned out that the gun Zachary had been holding wasn’t a real one at all. Just a toy that looked authentic. He’d probably bought it at some novelty store, just like he did with the Empire State statue he’d given to his daughter. Not that police would have had any way of knowing the gun was fake in the split second they had to make a decision. All the investigators at the scene seemed to feel that the shooting of Dave Zachary by police had been justified.
Later, back in the newsroom, I worked furiously to pull everything together for the 6 p.m. newscast.
“How come you didn’t bring a video crew with you?” Faron asked me at one point.
“I didn’t know I was going to be almost killed.”
“You could have pulled out your iPhone and recorded it all.”
“Someone—Zachary or one of the cops—might have thought I was going for a weapon and shot me too.”
“Well, at least it would have been good video.”
That was the kind of gallows humor I’m used to in a newsroom.
I was glad for the jokes.
They helped me stop thinking about the reality of it all.
At 6 p.m., I was ready for showtime. The introductions played for the Channel 10 newscast. Brett and Dani did their opening. And then the red light went on for me to be on the air.
ME: A suspect in the murder of Wall Street financier Grace Mancuso was shot and killed by police today in Washington Square Park. Channel 10 was there and has this exclusive story …
Afterward, a whole group of people took me out to a nearby bar where there was a lot of drinking, a lot more bad jokes about me being in the middle of a fatal police shooting, and—most importantly—a lot of compliments and acclaim for me. Even Brendan Kaiser showed up. No one had ever seen him at a Channel 10 function before. But he toasted me, told everyone how I’d proved again I was a Pulitzer Prize journalist, and how I’d exceeded every expectation of his over the course of the past few weeks.
It was heady stuff, I gotta admit that.
I had a great time. It was just what I needed.
I also drank quite a bit.
Actually, too much.
Which is probably why I was in a pretty emotional state by the time I got back to my apartment.
Sitting there alone after all the euphoria and acclaim I’d been getting from everyone, I began thinking again about the fear and the shock and all the rest of the emotions I’d been suppressing all day.
The fear I’d felt in the park.
The shock of seeing a dead David Zachary in front of me.
And I started to cry.
I knew I didn’t want to be alone tonight.
I could call Janet, I thought to myself.
Or even Maggie.
But in the end, when I picked up my phone, I knew the number I was going to punch in.
“Scott, I need you to come here!” I said.
A short time later, Manning was at my door.
He let me talk about all the things that were racing through my mind at what seemed like 100 mph now. We did that for a long time, sitting on the couch in my living room. He put his arm around me and hugged me when I got especially emotional. And then, as I guess I knew we would when I made the phone call to him, we wound up in the bedroom.
I’ve had sex with a number of men in my life. Okay, a lot of men. I’ve found that my sexual experiences generally broke down into two categories: The passionate, but ultimately meaningless, sex-for-sex’s sake type like I had with Alan Paulus and many other men in the past. Or the more meaningful sex I’ve experienced with men who truly mattered to me—my ex-husbands, at least in the beginning, and a handful of others along the way. The first type of sex is easy. No worries, no risks, no emotional investment of any kind. The second type of sex is trickier and—at least for me—rarer. But every once in a while, these two different types of sex—the passionate physical and the deep emotional bonding—come together in one glorious package. Well, without going into all the X-rated details, that’s what happened with Scott Manning and me that night.
The next morning, when I woke up, I looked over and saw he was still there.
“You didn’t get up afterward and go home to your wife,” I said.
“I’ll go home later.”
“Won’t she ask you where you were all night?”
“I just lost a good friend,” he said. “I think that gives me a special dispensation for one night of sex.”
More gallows humor.
Just like a newsroom.
I liked that.
“We talked a lot about me last night, but what about you?” I said now. “How do you feel about the way things wound up with Zachary? It’s got to have been quite a shock the way it all played out like that.”
“I keep going over the whole thing in my head. Wondering if there was anything I could have done differently.”
“There wasn’t.”
“Sure there was. I didn’t have to ask my friends on the force to be there for backup. I knew in my heart that Zachary wasn’t even going to be of any serious danger. He didn’t even really have a gun. We weren’t in any immediate danger at all.”
“But you didn’t know that at the time.”
“I should have sensed it. I feel terrible.”
“If you didn’t bring those cops as backup and Zachary’s gun had been real and he would have killed me—or both of us—”
I shook my head. “You did the right thing. You’re a cop. You did your job.”
I asked him some more questions, like how he’d convinced the two officers to follow him there. If he was on restricted duty, why would they even agree to help him on a case? He said they were friends of his—and, more importantly—fellow police officers. Cops always backed up other cops on the street, he told me.
Just like he’d backed up his partner, Tommy Bratton.
The question I really wanted to ask him was still out there though. I knew I shouldn’t bring it up again, but I couldn’t help myself. I’m an investigative journalist. I ask questions for a living. So I asked him the big one.
“What’s going to happen now between you and your wife?”
“I don’t know, Clare.”
“How about us?”
“I don’t know that either.”
To be honest, that was the only answer I’d expected from him. If it had been anything else, I probably wouldn’t have believed him anyway. I reached over and hugged him. Then I gave him a big kiss. He might not be here with me tomorrow night or the night after that. But he was here now. That was enough for me at the moment.
CHAPTER 59
THE BOTTOM LINE was, the Grace Mancuso story was finally over.
Dave Zachary had killed his biological daughter in a rage fueled by his brain disease when he saw what she had become. Then he left behind the list of names from that long-ago picture, including Dora Gayle—whose senseless murder had ignited Zachary’s quest for answers in the first place. That bizarre confluence of events had led to all that happened afterward, including the tragic death of Bill Atwood.
There were still some unanswered questions, of course, but there always were on every story.
I spent my first day back in the office after Dave Zachary’s death working at being a news editor again. I sat in a lot of meetings, worked on budget numbers, read the latest ratings and marketing demo reports, and dealt with a few personnel problems.
The biggest one was Dani Blaine wanted to know if she could file a sexual harassment complaint against Brett Wolff for sleeping with her. I asked her if she’d agreed to have sex with him. She said she had at the time, but since then changed her mind and decided it hadn’t been a good decision. And besides, she said, he’d been a real jerk afterwards. I told her I didn’t think that quite met the bar for sexual harassment in the workplace.
/> I figured it was only a matter of time until Brett wanted to file a sexual harassment complaint against Dani.
Welcome to my world. I was back in my old job.
Even when I was a reporter on newspapers, I’d always felt a letdown after the end of a big story. All the adrenalin and energy and excitement over breaking a front-page exclusive was gone—and I had to go back to covering routine news again. It was even worse now. I’d gotten a taste of being a reporter again and I’d broken one of the biggest stories of my career. I sure missed that feeling.
But I wasn’t really a reporter anymore.
I was a TV executive, and I had a job to do.
It was time for me to move on from Grace Mancuso and all the rest.
Or so I thought, at least until Maggie came into my office.
“You’re always preaching to us about not jumping to conclusions on a story, right, Clare?”
“Glad you’ve been listening, Maggie,” I said distractedly as I pored over some of the ratings numbers.
“Well, I think that’s what you’re doing now.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You—and everyone else—is taking it at face value that Zachary killed Grace Mancuso.”
“He admitted it to us in the park.”
“No, he didn’t. He admitted he was in her apartment. He admitted he was furious at her. He admitted he saw the body. But he also said he didn’t remember actually killing her. That he remembered leaving the apartment, blacking out, coming back again to see her dead and realized then ‘I must have killed her.’ Those were his words, according to your account. But what if he didn’t really remember killing her because he didn’t really do it? What if someone else did? Someone who showed up there in between those last two visits of his?”
“That’s a pretty far-fetched scenario.”
“Is it? Dave Zachary never committed a violent deed in his life, from everything we’ve been able to find out. And the one violent act he witnessed—the killing of the girl by a young Bill Atwood—traumatized him so badly that he carried the guilt with him all of his life. And even at the end, when he supposedly murdered his daughter, what was his first reaction? To call the police so her body didn’t just lie there alone in the apartment. Does that sound like the act of a man who could have brutally beaten a woman to death? And I’m not sure Zachary could have had the strength to beat her like that. He was very sick and weak, people said. You said that too when you saw him in the park. Mancuso was a young, reasonably fit woman. Does it not seem hard to believe that he could overpower her like that? No, everything we know about Zachary tells us he was a good, kind, caring, compassionate man. No indication ever that he was a killer. And certainly not someone who could be capable—psychologically or physically—of such a bloody, brutal beating as the way Grace Mancuso died.”
