Beyond the Headlines

by R. G. Belsky

  “Almost too perfect, huh?”

  Faron stared at me across the desk.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Something is bothering you. What?”

  “I’m not sure, Jack. Something seems wrong about it all to me. Laurie Bateman lives this fairy-tale life, always seems happy, and now she suddenly wants to tell the world this tale of woe. It seems off, like there’s a missing piece to the story that we don’t know about yet.”

  “So go interview Laurie Bateman and find out what it is.”

  “Sounds like a plan to me.”

  Faron and I talked for a while about the logistics for the interview. I told him Janet was going to get back to me later with a time and place for a preliminary meeting with Laurie Bateman. Then I’d go back with a video crew to actually shoot what we were going to put on the air. We discussed what video people I should use. The kinds of questions I should ask her. And the best place to conduct the interview.

  I told him I’d prefer to do it outside—in a park maybe—rather than inside her fancy apartment. I said that would add more of an authentic New York feel to it. Make it seem more like a real-life conversation for our viewers rather than sitting in an expensive townhouse. I’d done outside interviews like this before, and they had been very effective.

  “What if it rains?” Faron asked.

  “It won’t rain.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “It’s always sunny for us at Channel 10.”

  He smiled.

  “You’re taking that positive thinking lecture I gave you pretty seriously, huh?”

  “I’m just a glass-half-filled kind of gal.”

  That night turned out to be a slow one on my social calendar. Bradley Cooper didn’t call. Leonardo DiCaprio kept playing hard to get. And Tom Brady was still trying to make me jealous with Gisele Bündchen. So I had dinner with an old friend. Fellow named Stouffers. He makes a damn tasty macaroni and cheese, that Stouffers. Efficient too. All you do is pop it into the microwave and presto—instant gourmet delight.

  Afterward, I watched TV, switching around between the various news channels. All the TV people on them seemed to be happy, seemed to be having fun. None of them ever sat home eating Stouffers TV dinners by themselves, I bet. I wondered if I should get a roommate. Or a dog.

  My phone rang a little after eight. It was Janet.

  “I figured you might be out,” she said when I picked up on the first ring. “You’re home?”

  “Hard to believe, huh?”

  “No date tonight?”

  “I’ve quit dating.”

  “Again?”

  I ignored that.

  “Clare, you need to find someone. A man who is good and decent that you like. A man that you might want to spend the rest of your life with. There are men out there like that.”

  “I know, Janet. In fact, I had a date with a guy not long ago who told me he thought marriage was a wonderful institution. He said he wants to stay with one woman for the rest of his life.”

  “That sounds promising.”

  “Yeah, except that woman is his wife. He’s already married.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. Feel sorry for her.”

  Janet sighed. “You still need to think about settling down. Getting your life in order. How old are you now?”

  “I’m forty-seven.”

  “Well, move fast. You’re not getting any younger.”

  “Thanks,” I told her. “I really needed to hear that.”

  She told me that Laurie Bateman wanted to meet me the next day at her apartment here in the city. She said we could figure out then the best time and place to do the on-air interview. Laurie Bateman’s apartment. I assumed that was the one she lived in with Charles Hollister. I wondered if he’d be there. That could be uncomfortable. But I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to complicate things in any way that might delay my sit-down with Laurie Bateman.

  “Where’s the apartment?” I asked.

  “Right off of Central Park. On Fifth Avenue.”

  “Where else?” I said.

  It was the middle of rush hour when I headed up there the next morning, and not a cab to be found. There’d also been a subway derailment near my apartment in Union Square so I knew the trains were all delayed. I trudged to a bus stop. That wasn’t much better. It took twenty minutes before the first bus came, and then there were three others right behind it—bunched together in a pack.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked the driver as I got on. “You afraid to travel around the city by yourself?”

  He looked me over from head to toe and scowled. “That’s what I like about this job,” he grunted. “You meet such interesting people. You got any other complaints, lady?”

  I used my Metro card to pay the fare.

  “How about the air-conditioning on this bus?” I asked.

  “How about it? It’s working, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “The problem is it’s December.”

  The driver shook his head and chuckled. “Yeah, that’s something, isn’t it? All summer long we sweltered because it was broken, and now the damn thing won’t shut off. New York—ain’t it grand?”

  By the time we got near Laurie Bateman’s Fifth Avenue townhouse, I was freezing and shivery and contemplating a lawsuit against the Transit Authority.

  What I needed was a cup of coffee. I hadn’t had time to get any before I left my place. I figured I’d find a Starbucks or other coffee place before I went upstairs to talk to Laurie Bateman.

  But that all changed when I got off the bus, walked to her address, and saw what was there outside.

  The police.

  Squad cars with flashing red lights lined up in front of Laurie Bateman’s building.

  Other cars carrying detectives.

  And an EMS vehicle parked by the door.

  I raced toward the building. When I got closer, I recognized one of the detectives standing outside. It was Sam Markham, who also happened to be one of my ex-husbands. Sam was a homicide cop. He only showed up if someone was dead.

  “What are you doing here, Clare?” Sam said with surprise when he saw me. “No one else from the press knows about this homicide yet.”

  “I was supposed to talk to Laurie Bateman this morning.”

  “Well, you can’t talk to her now.”

  Oh, my God, I thought to myself. Had the behind-the-scenes marriage battles between her and Hollister turned violent? Deadly violent. She’d wanted to tell the world her story with me, Janet had said—but maybe she didn’t go public in time.

  “Is Laurie Bateman dead?” I asked him.

  “No, she’s very much alive.”

  “Who’s dead then?”

  “Charles Hollister.”

  “What about Laurie Bateman?”

  “She’s under arrest for her husband’s murder.”

  CHAPTER 6

  BREAKING INTO OUR regular daytime TV programming for a news story is not something we do a lot at Channel 10. The station makes big advertising money from the daytime talk shows; courtroom and other reality stuff; plus, reruns of popular sitcoms from the past. Hey, there’s a reason you see Friends and The Big Bang Theory on TV dozens of times a day. It takes a really big news story to interrupt that juggernaut of a viewing lineup.

  The murder of Charles Hollister was that big of a news story.

  I called it into the office as soon as I found out from Sam. I was still in a state of shock, but that didn’t stop me from doing what I had to do. I was a reporter at heart. Always have been, always will be. And, no matter what the circumstances were, my adrenaline always kicked in on a big story.

  I got Maggie first and then Faron on the line. Faron decided to put my voice on the air immediately over my cell phone. He said I should just tell the viewers whatever I knew. Which wasn’t much, I’ll admit. But enough for us to get the
story out first before anyone in the news media even knew anything about it.

  And so Channel 10 viewers suddenly saw a black screen with the letters: “Alert: Breaking News.” Then a crawl along the bottom of the screen said: “On the phone is Channel 10’s Clare Carlson.”

  I then said on air:

  Charles Hollister, the billionaire businessman, has been found murdered at his home in Manhattan. And, even more shocking, his wife, Laurie Bateman, is in custody as the chief suspect. Police and medical personnel arrived this morning to find Hollister dead inside his spacious townhouse on Fifth Avenue.

  I stretched it out as long as I could with any more details from the scene I could see at the moment.

  By the time I’d run out of things to say, our Channel 10 anchors, Brett Wolff and Dani Blaine, were in place and reporting more on the story from the studio. They showed B-footage of Hollister and Laurie Bateman in happier days. They also reprised the story of the marriage—beset with controversy about the age difference—as well as a capsule history of Hollister’s incredible success in the business world.

  Meanwhile, Faron had dispatched a video team. Once they arrived, we were ready to do a live report from the scene.

  When an on-air story is hurriedly put together without time for the reporter to go over the script beforehand, we call it a “rip and read.” There’s no preparation, the reporter just reads what’s on a teleprompter in front of him. But this time, Brett and Dani couldn’t even do that. They had to report it all live, as it was happening. Just like I was doing right now at the scene. I was winging this whole thing off the top of my head.

  But this was where my experience as a reporter on the streets in the past saved time. I knew how to do a breaking news story like this, something a lot of young TV reporters couldn’t handle. I just did what I used to do as a reporter at a fire or a police shooting or other big breaking news story. Told the story I had with whatever details were available.

  This is the building near Central Park where Charles Hollister was found murdered today. Details remain sketchy, but Hollister’s wife, Laurie Bateman, is still upstairs being questioned by police. A police source told me that she is the leading suspect in this murder.

  I managed to get a few people to talk on camera with me. Several cops. Medical personnel. Curious onlookers and neighbors. None of them knew anything significant, but that didn’t matter. This was a big news event, and every bit of color from the street outside the crime scene helped me to tell our viewers the story.

  Other media were starting to show up now, alerted by my own broadcast. Local TV stations. Newspaper reporters and photographers. And even big trucks belonging to the networks and cable news channels. This was going to be a big story. It had everything. Money. Celebrity. Just like Jodi Arias or Casey Anthony and all the rest of the big crime stories that have dominated the news in the past. And I was the one who broke this one.

  The biggest moment, the most dramatic scene that would lead every newscast in New York and around the country later, was about to happen next.

  The police brought Laurie Bateman down from where she and Hollister lived to the street, then to a waiting patrol car where she’d be taken to the station house for further questioning—and likely formally charged later with the murder.

  It was a media circus.

  Laurie Bateman wasn’t handcuffed, but there was a cop holding each of her arms as they walked her through the gauntlets of press and cameras and onlookers desperately trying to see it all. She looked straight ahead, a grim look on her face. Like this was a bad dream she would suddenly wake up from. She sure didn’t look like the glamorous celebrity I’d seen on the screen so many times in the past.

  It all seemed under control until she was almost at the police car that was supposed to take her away. At that moment, she broke free from the two officers holding her, whirled to the TV cameras and the rest of the media, and began to say in a pleading, sobbing voice:

  I didn’t do it! I didn’t kill him! Oh, my God, I can’t believe they think I murdered him! I’m innocent … you have to believe me … you all have to believe me that I didn’t kill my husband!

  The two cops grabbed her at that point, dragged her away from us in the media, and put her into the police car, which drove away.

  But wow!

  That was awesome!

  And very convincing. I mean, I knew she used to be an actress, so maybe she was just playing the part of an innocent wife wrongfully accused of her husband’s murder. But she played it damn well.

  I looked at my watch. I’d been there two hours already, but there was a lot more to come. Waiting outside at the precinct while they finished questioning her. Then most likely a formal charge, followed by an arraignment and—no doubt—a high-priced lawyer arguing for her to be freed on bail.

  “C’mon, let’s go, Clare,” one of the Channel 10 video people yelled at me from our van. “Get in. We’ve got to get down there in a hurry to get a good spot for the perp walk and at the courthouse.”

  “Do I have time—?”

  “No time for anything. Let’s go.”

  Damn.

  It was going to be a long day.

  I sure wished now I’d had time to stop off and get that coffee.

  CHAPTER 7

  IT TOOK MOST of the rest of the day to put together the details about the Charles Hollister murder.

  They turned out to be pretty sensational.

  When the Hollisters’ maid—a woman named Carmen Ortega—arrived for work at nine a.m. that morning, she found Hollister dead on the living room floor, his head bashed in with a lamp. She said Laurie Bateman was attempting to flee the apartment leaving the body behind her—but that Bateman stopped running once she saw the maid.

  Ortega was the one who called police.

  When they got to the scene, the cops discovered that Hollister had also been shot. Three times—two in the chest and once in the head. It wasn’t clear what came first: the blows from the lamp or the gunshots. But the assumption was the killer first attacked him with the lamp and then fired three shots into his body to make sure he was dead.

  There were pieces of the broken lamp scattered around the living room. The base of the lamp was on the floor a few feet away from the body. Police found a gun in another part of the house. It had been stuffed into a drawer underneath a stack of clothes. The gun was registered to Laurie Bateman. The gun had been fired three times—there were three spent shells in the cylinder. It would take a while longer to make a ballistics check comparing the bullets from the gun with the bullets in Hollister’s body. But police had little doubt that this was the murder weapon.

  In another part of the sprawling apartment, they found more explosive evidence. A series of pictures spread out on a desktop. The pictures showed Charles Hollister having sex with a woman. The woman in the pictures was not Laurie Bateman. She was a stunningly beautiful blond, based on what could be seen of her in the passionate sex shots of her in bed with Hollister. This must be the Hollister mistress Janet had told me about. According to caption information on the back of the pictures, they had been taken—with a hidden camera in the bedroom, no doubt—by a private investigator named Victor Endicott.

  Detectives tracked Hollister’s movements from the night before. He’d attended a series of business meetings at his office in Midtown Manhattan until about five p.m. His corporate CEO, a man named Bert Stovall, said Hollister seemed fine at that point, and he had no hint of any kind of danger or concerns on Hollister’s part.

  Later, Hollister took his wife, Laurie Bateman, to a big charity event at an art gallery on Central Park West. The event had been scheduled for some time, and they had committed to it back then. But it appeared they didn’t want to be there together that night. Witnesses said they had an argument in front of people, which was surprising because they normally put on such a “happily married and in love” front for the public. No one was sure what the argument was about, but they appeared to be extremely ag
itated with each other.

  Maybe it was about the pictures of Charles Hollister in the sack with another woman, I thought to myself. Yep, that will generally spark a martial fight pretty quickly.

  The last time Charles Hollister was heard from was early the next morning. He called his office to leave a message for his secretary that he wouldn’t be in at his usual time because he was going to stop first at the New York Chronicle, a newspaper he had recently bought, to deal with a problem there.

  The secretary wasn’t in the office yet, but police listened to the message from Hollister on her phone. It said: “I’m heading directly over to the Chronicle this morning to meet with that goddamned editor there as soon as he gets in. He screwed up the front-page story today. I had to order them to rewrite the front-page headline. I want to deal with him right away this morning. I’ll see you after that.”

  The time of the message was 6:38 a.m., a little more than two hours before the maid arrived at the Fifth Avenue townhouse and found Laurie Bateman trying to leave with Hollister’s body in the living room.

  Detectives talked later to Victor Endicott, the private investigator who had secretly taken the sexy pictures of Hollister in bed with the other woman. Endicott told them he’d been hired by Laurie Bateman to find out if her husband was cheating on her. He said he’d given the documented proof—the pictures in the bedroom—to Laurie Bateman earlier that day. Asked what her reaction was, Endicott said she was “very angry.” Hence, the argument at the charity event between the two of them later in the evening.

  Laurie Bateman admitted hiring the private investigator to spy on her husband, admitted to fighting with him the night before, and admitted to owning the gun that was found at the crime scene. But she said she had not spent the night there. She told police she had instead gone to another apartment after the argument they had.

  She and Hollister had numerous homes around the country and the world—but she also still had her own place. A condo in Greenwich Village where she had lived before marrying Hollister. She said she sometimes went there for quiet space from the public turbulence that constantly surrounded them and because of the growing tensions in their marriage.