Below the Fold

by R. G. Belsky

  I stared at her. Like I’ve said, Maggie can really be annoying sometimes. Especially when she’s right

  “The story’s over, Maggie.”

  “I think we should still keep digging for more answers.”

  “Okay, let’s just say hypothetically that you’re right. Who else could have killed her then? There’s a lot of suspects out there, especially with the Revson scandal. Hundreds of people involved in that who could have wanted her dead for revenge. But it would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack at this point.”

  “Maybe the Revson stuff is just a sideshow in Grace Mancuso’s murder. There’s passion about money, and then there’s real passion. I think this all comes back to Bill Atwood. We know she was blackmailing him about that girl’s death a long time ago in the park. He tries to bed her, she threatens him with exposure until he pays her big bucks.”

  “Except Atwood didn’t do it. He couldn’t have. He was at college meetings across town when the Mancuso woman died. We’ve been through all of this before. It’s like this story just keeps going around in circles.”

  “No, Atwood wasn’t the killer.”

  “Huh?”

  “He was the reason for the killing.”

  And, just like that, it all came together for us.

  “This was a crime of passion,” Maggie said. “A crime of sexual motivation. A crime of anger. And if Atwood was having an affair with the Mancuso woman, who would be angry and jealous and capable of that kind of passion?”

  “His wife,” I said.

  CHAPTER 60

  NANCY ATWOOD BROKE down and confessed very quickly.

  The police brought her to the same interrogation room where her husband had been questioned and laid it all out for her. As soon as they did, she began to cry. Her body trembled, her shoulders sagged, and she sobbed uncontrollably. She looked like a broken woman, a woman who had held on to her secret too long and now needed to bare her soul.

  Nancy Atwood then waived her rights and agreed to make a statement.

  “I killed her,” she said. “There had been so many women over the years, but this time it was too much. Bill had promised me after the last time that there’d be no more affairs. I don’t know if I believed him or not, but I wanted to. I let myself believe that we could finally have a real marriage.

  “I’d put up with it for a long time, but I guess this time something just snapped. I waited for him outside the college and followed him to that woman’s apartment. I didn’t know what to do, I was so upset. I thought about it for days. Finally, I went back to her apartment that night and knocked on her door. I figured she probably wouldn’t let me in. But she did. She didn’t even seem surprised when I told her what I wanted. Like she’d had visits like this from wives before. I begged her to leave my husband alone. But she refused. She said she could get him to do anything she wanted—and she would. Then she laughed at me. That’s when I lost it. I killed her.”

  Under questioning, she gave a lot more details about what happened in Mancuso’s apartment. She talked about how she had overpowered Grace Mancuso, and then beat her to death. How, in a jealous rage, she battered her face beyond recognition. How she then fled the apartment, leaving the dead Mancuso woman’s body behind.

  It was a helluva story.

  The only problem was—none of it was true.

  Nancy Atwood couldn’t accurately describe the inside of Grace Mancuso’s apartment. She stood barely five foot tall and weighed only about 110 pounds and was twenty years older than Mancuso. Making it unlikely—even more so than with Zachary—that she could have overpowered the victim the way she said she did. And, most importantly of all, there had been other people’s fingerprints found in Mancuso’s apartment. One of the sets of prints belonged to Dave Zachary. Another to Bill Atwood. A third set of prints was still unidentified. They did not match Nancy Atwood’s fingerprints. It was clear she had never been there.

  So why would she confess to a crime she didn’t commit?

  There was an obvious answer to that, of course.

  She was protecting someone else.

  There was only one person a mother would be willing to go to jail for.

  Her daughter.

  Miranda Atwood was a lot tougher than her mother to crack. She denied vehemently at first that she had anything to do with Grace Mancuso’s murder. She refused to answer questions without a lawyer present. And she even argued—without success—that police had no right to take her fingerprints.

  But the case against her was building in other ways now that she had been identified as a suspect.

  A tenant at the Mancuso building picked her out of a lineup and said she’d seen her on an elevator there on the night of the murder.

  A coed from her college remembered Miranda drinking heavily on campus after that. When a newscast came on TV about the Mancuso killing at a bar they were at, a drunk Miranda declared in a loud voice: “I guess I showed her, huh? That ought to shut her up!” No one knew what she was talking about at the time. But now it certainly seemed to be one more nail in the case against her.

  It also turned out that, in addition to being a star athlete on the lacrosse and soccer teams at Yale, she had taken a number of self-defense and boxing courses—where she had excelled. She clearly had the physical strength and ability to overpower Grace Mancuso the way the killer had done.

  And, when Miranda Atwood’s fingerprint results came back as a match for the set found in Mancuso’s apartment, she finally broke down and the whole tragic story finally spilled out of her.

  Later, I watched—and, of course, eventually put on the air—the police video of her interrogation. Just like I’d watched and put on the air the interrogation video with her father before he died.

  “Why did you do it, Miranda?” one of the detectives in the interrogation room asked her.

  “Because she tried to take him away from me.”

  “Who?”

  “My father.”

  “You mean she wanted to take your father away from your mother?”

  “No, not her. Me.”

  “But you’re his daughter.”

  “He loved me more than any of the rest of them.”

  The secrets came tumbling out then, secrets about a young woman’s bizarre father fixation that were in some ways more sad and more tragic than anything else that had come before in this story.

  She told how she’d called her father one night and said she wanted to meet him in the city. He said he was going to be tied up in meetings. She knew what that meant. He was seeing another woman again. She was so angry at him over this that she showed up anyway and waited outside his office until he left. There was an argument, then he walked away from her. He’d never done that before. Afterward, she followed him to the apartment on the Upper East Side. She found out he’d visited Grace Mancuso.

  She became obsessed with the thought of her father being with this woman. Sure, there had been other women in her father’s life before. Lots of them, she knew that. But this one seemed different. He seemed more preoccupied, more serious about her. She didn’t know why Grace Mancuso was so important to him, of course. About dealing with the blackmail threat. She was just afraid she was going to lose him to Grace Mancuso.

  And so she’d gone back to the apartment where she’d followed him that night. She knocked on Grace Mancuso’s door, told her who she was, and tried to reason with her. But Mancuso just laughed at her. Bragged about how she had Miranda’s father wrapped around her little finger. About how she was going to use that to destroy him.

  That’s when Miranda picked up the statue in front of her and hit her. She hit her again and again and again.

  At that moment, it wasn’t just Grace Mancuso she was hitting. She represented a lot of women. Every other woman Miranda’s father had ever been with. She didn’t stop until this woman—the woman that had once been Grace Mancuso—was an anonymous mass of flesh, something so horrible that her father would never look at her again.
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  Later, Nancy Atwood—in an exclusive on-air interview with me—tried to explain the motivation behind what her daughter did. She actually had requested the interview because she wanted to set the record straight about Miranda and Bill Atwood and everything else.

  “When Miranda was growing up, it was very difficult for her. Her father was always on television and in the newspapers and everyone knew him. But Miranda never did. She hardly ever saw him. He was always out on the campaign trail or meeting with people or making speeches. For most of the time when she was a young teenager, in her formative years, he was in Washington—while we continued to live up here. I didn’t realize the repercussions of that absence from her father would be so severe.

  “The stuff with the women made it worse. All her friends and classmates knew about Bill and his scandals, of course. They were always throwing it up in her face. For a young girl growing up, just having her own first sexual feelings, it got very confusing. So confusing that at some point she retreated into a fantasy world.

  “She became obsessive over Bill. He was the most important man in her life. She would do anything for his attention. She blamed me for driving him away to other women. I think she blamed herself sometimes too. And—this is very difficult to put into logical words—it was almost like she was competing with me for Bill’s love. She wanted him all to herself. She wanted him to love her more than any other woman, even me.”

  I tried to phrase my next question as delicately as I could, but there was no way to avoid the obvious.

  “Are you sure your husband didn’t do anything sexually with her?” I asked her.

  “Yes, I’m sure. There was never anything sexual. It was all in her head. I knew Bill. He was a bad husband, but he wasn’t a bad father. We sent Miranda to a psychiatrist after we found out about this fixation on her father. She’s been going for sessions ever since. There’s been a lot more we tried—the group counseling sessions, the hospitalizations, the therapy. You always hear about the damage a cheating husband does to his wife. But you never really think about what it does to a child. I could handle what Bill was, but Miranda couldn’t. So she created a fictional father she could live with. The father of her dreams.”

  I believed her. Miranda Atwood, in a sense, was just as much a victim as all of the rest of them. There were no really bad people here, except for maybe the murder victim herself—Grace Mancuso.

  “It’s not fair,” Nancy Atwood said, then began crying.

  That clip would be played over and over again hundreds of times on stations all across the country, on websites and on Twitter and YouTube. It was trending and viral and everything else hot in this era of social media for days afterward.

  “It’s not Miranda’s fault. I know she did a terrible thing, but you can’t take away her whole life for that. It’s my life too. She’s all I have left. Someone has to understand that …”

  CHAPTER 61

  MURDER IS A numbers game for us in the media. Sure, every human life is supposed to be important, every murder victim should matter—but that’s not true in the world of TV news where I work. Sex sells. Sex, money, and power. Those are the only murder stories really worth covering.

  I’ve heard that from bosses and editors my entire career, and I’ve taught it to the reporters who worked for me.

  I’ve pretty much always followed that rule myself too.

  Until Dora Gayle.

  We’d set everything in motion at Channel 10—Maggie and me and the rest of us—by just following our instincts this one time. Ignoring the murder-by-the-numbers stuff and covering the seemingly meaningless death of a woman we had no reason to care about.

  The results had been staggering. Three more people dead—Bill Atwood, Dave Zachary, and, of course, Grace Mancuso. Other lives—Lisa Kalikow, Miranda Atwood, Nancy Atwood—ruined or dramatically altered. So many stories intertwined, so many repercussions. It was like throwing a stone in a silent pond, then watching the ripples spread relentlessly through the water. We made a lot of ripples with Dora Gayle.

  All because of one homeless woman.

  Someone who wasn’t even supposed to matter had changed everything.

  I’m back “feeding the beast” every day at Channel 10 News, chasing after more stories to put on our newscast.

  I did get a big raise and a promotion and even a new job title because of my work on the Grace Mancuso story. It came from Kaiser himself, so I guess I’m sitting pretty in terms of my future at the station.

  The new title part was very cool. He offered me the choice of two options: Senior News Director or Vice President of News. I liked the sound of both “senior” and “Vice President,” so I asked him if I could be Senior Vice President of News. He said no. So I took Vice President of News. I always wanted to be a Vice President of something, even though I’m not exactly sure what the title means and I basically do the same job I did when I was a plain old news director.

  Jack Faron got a raise and a promotion too because of the story. And I made sure Maggie got more money for her invaluable contributions. So everyone at the station was happy.

  Miranda Atwood got a plea deal for manslaughter—not murder—in the death of Grace Mancuso. Which seemed kind of ludicrous given the brutality of the killing. But the DA’s office took into consideration her mental state at the time and her lack of any previous criminal record and a lot of the other mitigating factors to cut her a break. She was sentenced to fifteen to twenty-five years in prison, with a chance to get out on parole in ten years. Maybe she’ll still have enough time left then for a chance at a life.

  Her mother, Nancy Atwood, was a sad figure at the sentencing, sobbing uncontrollably in the courtroom as her daughter was being sent to prison. A few days later, Nancy Atwood took an overdose of sleeping pills and was saved by ER personnel just in time. She was later taken to a hospital to be treated for severe depression.

  Emily Lehrman was still practicing law, but she no longer represented mob bosses and drug kingpins. It wasn’t like she had suddenly gone back to working for the homeless or anything; she was still making money. But it sounded as if she’d taken another look at herself in the light of everything that had happened, didn’t like what she saw, and decided to make some changes in her life.

  Meanwhile, Scott Manning did go back to his wife.

  He was very honest with me about it. He said he had a responsibility to his wife to try to make their marriage work. He had a responsibility to his son to try and repair their broken relationship. He also changed his testimony about the Manny Nazario murder; admitted he now suspected that his partner, Tommy Bratton, had indeed pushed the suspect to his death. Manning said he cared very much about me, but these were all things he needed to do in order to make things right.

  They were noble things to do on his part, and a big person—a compassionate, understanding person—would have praised him, respected him, and supported him for the decisions he had chosen.

  Unfortunately, I was not that person.

  I was stunned, disappointed, and angry at him, and the final meeting between us ended badly.

  But I suppose I always knew that it was going to wind up for me like this in the end.

  Because I—unlike Dora Gayle—never believed that a Prince Charming was going to come along and the two of us would live happily ever after.

  That only happens in fairy tales.

  And fairy tales don’t come true.

  I still think about Dora Gayle a lot.

  I look at that college picture of her—the beautiful, brilliant, poetry- and literature-loving Dora Gayle with her whole life still ahead—and can’t reconcile that with the sad, homeless woman who died in that lonely bank vestibule.

  How could that have ever happened?

  I recently reread Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Dora’s favorite book when she was in college. I’d read it a long time ago myself, but now I thought maybe it could help me better understand Dora Gayle. My overwhelming reaction when I finished the bo
ok was one of sadness. Not just about the words on the page, but for the author too. Sylvia Plath killed herself at the age of thirty, before much of the acclaim for The Bell Jar and her other works turned Plath into a literary icon. Dora Gayle hadn’t been recognized by anyone until after she died too, just like Sylvia Plath. I wondered how Dora would feel about that.

  All I know for sure is that I feel worse about Dora Gayle than any of the rest of it.

  And angry at her, too.

  Yes, she’d had some bad breaks in her life. Her alcoholic parents. Her breakup with Bill Atwood, the man of her dreams. The loss of her unborn baby. And all the other things that had happened to her which started Dora on her downward spiral to a life on the streets. No question about it, she was a victim of a lot of events she couldn’t control, just like the other four people on that Grace Mancuso list.

  But they had persevered—and built meaningful, even if flawed, lives for themselves.

  I believed there must have been moments when Dora Gayle could have made different decisions—as difficult as they might have seemed to her at the time—and turned her own life around.