Beyond the Headlines
Page 21
1973 to 1975.
The two years after the U.S. pulled out of Vietnam—leading up to the final collapse of the South Vietnamese government.
And the same time as Laurie Bateman—then Pham Van Kieu—was born in Vietnam.
CHAPTER 46
AS SOON AS I got back to New York, I began calling everyone I could think of who might know about those missing two years in Charles Hollister’s life after Vietnam. First, Susan Daily again in Sacramento. Then Bert Stovall, the CEO in Hollister’s company and his lifelong friend. But neither of them did.
Daily said Hollister never talked about that period of his life while they were together. Stovall said he’d lost touch for a while with Hollister after they got back from Vietnam, and they didn’t hook up again until the mid-’70s when Hollister contacted Stovall about starting his first computer company.
I tried Laurie Bateman again, but she didn’t return my calls. Neither did Charles Jr., which didn’t surprise me. I was pretty much persona non grata with the Hollister family these days, I decided.
Except maybe not.
Not with all of them.
Elaine Hollister had seemed different than the rest of them that day we talked after the funeral. Friendly and forthcoming. She’d even told that story about her and her brother and about the long-ago falling-out with her father.
I did some checking and found out she was still in New York. She had an apartment in Tribeca where she stayed when she was in town. She agreed to meet me there.
It turned out to be a fancy apartment with a lot of fancy furniture in a fancy neighborhood. I wondered if she lived this well when she was in Europe helping battered women. I guess it’s easier to be a noble do-gooder when you have a lot of money to spend on it. I didn’t say that to her, but she must have heard the same thing before.
“Yeah, I know, I’m a hypocrite, right?” she said when I did compliment her about how nice the apartment looked. “I live like this, while I’m out there trying to save the rest of the world, huh? I’m not apologizing for being wealthy, Ms. Carlson. And I have tried to use my money to do good in this world. That’s what matters to me.”
“What’s the situation with your father’s will and all his money now that he’s gone?” I asked.
“It appears that his most recent will remains in effect. There’s nothing anyone can do about that. Yes, he was planning to write a new will, which would cut Laurie Bateman out of a lot of things. But he died before that happened. I’m not that concerned—there’s still plenty of money for me and Charles. Charles is furious though because she gets control of the company. He hates her, and she hates him. So now that she’s in charge, he’ll be out very soon. That’s pretty difficult for him to handle, I’m sure.”
“What do you think of Laurie Bateman?”
She shrugged. “My father loved her. Then he didn’t love her. That’s about all I know. My mother was the only Mrs. Hollister I could relate to. Once she died, I didn’t care who my father was with—Laurie Bateman or his mistress or anyone else.”
“Did your mother ever tell you anything about your father’s past life? Especially the period right around when he left Vietnam in 1973?”
“That was before my mother knew him. He was with his first wife then, wasn’t he?”
“No, she came after that.”
“What exactly are you trying to find out?”
I told her about the missing time gap in Charles Hollister’s life between 1973 and 1975. “Long before your time, of course,” I said. “I was just hoping you might know something.”
But she didn’t. I kept asking her questions. Because you never know for sure where the answers you get are going to take you.
“Tell me again about that last phone conversation you had with your father,” I asked at one point. “When he called you up out of the blue in Paris. What did he talk about?”
“A lot of things. About him and my mother. About him and me and how much he loved me. More than anything, he talked about his regrets over his life. He talked about being in his seventies and facing his own mortality. And not liking what he saw when he looked back at his life in the mirror. He assured me he wasn’t dying or anything like that. He had a few health problems, but they weren’t serious at the moment. He said something had happened recently though—something he’d found out—that gave him a real wake-up call about his own life. He said he was trying to deal with that—to make things right, if he could—now with the people he had hurt over the years.”
Of course. Hollister seemed to be following a pattern during those last weeks of his life. Going back to see a lot of people from his past. People he had hurt in some way and he seemed to want to make amends. Why not his own daughter, too?
“I had so many emotions and mixed feelings about everything that had happened between us, I wasn’t sure exactly what to say to him right then. I wanted to think about it all and then talk to him again, when I came back to the U.S. Before I could do anything though, I heard about his death. I’m not sure what I would have said to him. But I would have liked the chance to try and make things right between us again before he was gone.”
I had one more question for Elaine Hollister before I left. Something else that had occurred to me.
“How did your mother die?”
“Oh, she drowned.”
“An accident?”
“Yes, she fell overboard during a cruise on Charles’ boat.”
CHAPTER 47
“CHARLES HOLLISTER’S LAST wife drowned—she fell overboard during a cruise on her son’s boat,” I said to Jack Faron.
“Okay.”
“Laura Bateman’s father was killed by a hit-and-run driver in Los Angeles not long after she came to the U.S. from Vietnam as a baby in 1975.”
“So you told me.”
“The maid for Hollister and Bateman died when she was hit by a subway train.”
“I already know that.”
“And Laurie Bateman’s stepfather died from a gunshot wound. It was ruled a suicide, but she was alone with him in the house that day.”
Faron stared at me.
“Don’t you see where I’m going with this?” I asked him.
“Not a clue.”
“All of them suspicious deaths. All connected in some way to Charles Hollister or Laurie Bateman. Individually, they might not seem that significant. But put them together and you begin to see a pattern. A pattern of murder.”
“No, it’s not. First off, not all of those deaths are suspicious, Clare. Authorities ruled the Hollister wife’s death accidental; she’d had too much to drink, fell off the boat during a storm with heavy waves. And the police said the death of the maid could have been an accident—there’s no proof she was pushed deliberately by anyone. The first death, Bateman’s father, happened when she was a little baby, for God’s sakes. Her stepfather was a suicide. And she was in jail and Hollister was dead when their maid went in front of that subway. What’s the point? Exactly where are you going with all this?”
“I’m not sure yet,” I said.
It was my first day back in the office working as news director, and I had a news meeting coming up next. But I’d wanted to meet with Faron first to tell him what I’d found out on my trip and about the story I planned to do on air about it all. So far, the meeting was not going well.
Faron was eating while we talked. Either a late breakfast or an early lunch, I couldn’t be sure. It consisted of a container of cottage cheese and a kind of health bread toast. Whatever it was, Faron didn’t look happy about eating it. I also didn’t notice any weight loss on him since I left for LA. I wondered if there’d been more of those late-night visits to McDonald’s or the Baskin-Robbins store. Maybe that’s why he was in such a bad mood. Maybe it wasn’t just about me and this story. I decided to say something about his dieting to cheer him up.
“Glad to see you’re sticking to your diet,” I said. “How’s it going?”
“I want to throw up every time I
see cottage cheese.”
“Well, that bread looks like it might be good though. What is it?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t care. All I know is it tastes like friggin’ cardboard.”
“Have you seen any results on the scale from all this yet?”
“I only lost one pound—one pound!—after eating all this damn horrible stuff.”
“As they say, a journey of 1000 miles—or 1000 pounds—begins with a single step,” I said brightly.
Faron glared at me. I didn’t think I’d cheered him up much.
I talked to him then about all the stuff I’d done and found out. The interviews with Hollister’s ex-wives. The one with Laurie Bateman’s mother about the trauma and tragedy of their journey from Vietnam to the U.S. And Hollister reaching out to his estranged daughter to question many of the things he’d done and decisions he’d made in his life. I told him it would make a terrific profile of the background on Hollister and Bateman leading right up to his murder.
“The tragic story of a fairy tale gone wrong,” I said. “A Channel 10 Exclusive Report. We could call it ‘Behind the Headlines—the real Laurie Bateman Story.’ What do you think? It could be really good.”
Faron agreed. “But what about the deaths? The father, the ex-wife, and the maid? Like we said, there’s no real connection to any of them. How are you going to handle that on the air?”
“I’ll say there are all these unanswered questions. And I’ll go through each of the deaths we talked about. No links, no obvious answers to them. But it will add to the drama and color of our story. Just ask the question of what happened to all these people. Who knows what might come of it?”
Faron finally agreed to let me do it that way. I’m not sure if he did so because he thought it was a good idea or because he wanted to keep me happy so I wouldn’t leave for the new job.
Before I left, he asked me about that. “Did you meet with the West Coast Media people while you out there in LA?”
“I did. No change. Everything is still up in the air.”
“Let me know when there’s a decision because I’m going to have go looking for a new news director if you’re leaving.”
“I’ll let you know more details as soon as I hear,” I answered.
When I got to the news meeting, I found out that everyone else had heard about my possible new job. Like I said, this is a newsroom. Gossip travels fast.
I wanted to talk about the stories. Particularly my story. But everyone wanted to discuss my future first. They acted upset about me leaving. I told them, like I did with Faron, that no decision had been made. I like to think their concern was a genuine respect and affection for me as their boss, but a lot of it was really about themselves and their future too. I understood that.
“I’m not sure Dani and I can deal with a new news director right now,” Brett said. “We have so much going on between my divorce and our marriage and the baby on the way. Damn, we don’t need anything else to be worried about now. You couldn’t have picked a worse time to do this, Clare.”
“I’ll try to coordinate my career with your lives better in the future,” I said.
A lot of them wanted to know if I planned to take anybody with me from Channel 10 to the new job. One of them was Maggie. She said she’d be willing to come along as my producer or whatever if I was interested. I was uncomfortable talking about this in a public meeting with the staff, but I didn’t have a choice. The elephant was in the room, and no way I was going to get rid of the damn thing now.
The most surprising response came from Cassie O’Neal. She said she wanted to come with me.
“I could help you there, Clare. I could be your sidekick so you don’t have to do all the work. I could do a lot of the soft feature celebrity stuff, while you concentrate on all that hard news you like. And I’d be a big help to you for your on-screen appearance. You know I look good on TV; everyone says so. I could give you fashion and makeup tips. Because you … well, sometimes you could use work on your style if you know what I mean. No offense.”
I nodded.
“Thank you, Cassie. You’ll be the first person I call if I get the job.”
CHAPTER 48
BEFORE I WENT on the air with this Laurie Bateman story, I wanted to do one more thing. Talk to Laurie Bateman again. Ask her about all these new questions I’d uncovered about her past. Maybe she’d have some answers. The only problem was she wouldn’t talk to me.
I’d tried repeatedly to reach her again. Before, during, and after my trip to the West Coast and Georgia. At first, I got polite responses about her being busy and promising to get back to me. But after a while, even those stopped. There were no responses at all to my phone messages, emails, or texts.
How did I go from her best girlfriend to this so quickly? I assumed it had to do with the fact that I was still covering—and putting stories on the air—about her and her husband’s murder. She clearly didn’t like that; she wanted the story to go away. But why? What was she hiding?
I needed to confront her and force her to talk to me. I thought about stalking her at her offices in the Hollister building as I did with Charles. But I didn’t think that would work with her. She was smart, a lot smarter than Charles. She’d have security throw me out of the building before I asked my first question.
No, I had to do this in a public setting where she couldn’t afford to make a scene like that with me. Not Laurie Bateman, America’s sweetheart. I found the perfect spot when I read about an upcoming appearance by her at a charity event.
It was a dinner at the National Arts Club in Gramercy Park to benefit young Asian women who had come to this country as refugees just like she had a long time ago. There was money being raised for housing, education, and job opportunities for them. All the guests would pay big bucks for tables there. And why not? It was for a good cause, and there was star power in Laurie Bateman as the speaker.
I didn’t pay big bucks to get in; I waved my press credentials and did some fast talking instead. And so I was sitting there in the back of the ballroom when Laurie Bateman delivered an emotional speech about the importance of what they were doing for the young Asian women present.
“When I look at the faces of these women on this stage, I see myself in them,” she said. “Like them, I came to this country with hopes and inspirations and dreams that came true far beyond anything I could have imagined. That is why it is so important to me to help other women like myself to lead the American Dream that I have been so fortunate to achieve. Thank you for your support to enrich the lives of these women, and for your support to me. I thank you all from the bottom of my heart.”
They were nice-sounding words. She came across as caring and sincere. But I wondered how much of it was true. I wasn’t sure about anything involving Laurie Bateman anymore. It was like there were two of her. The one the public knew and the real one without all the celebrity hype. That was the Laurie Bateman I needed to find out about to get the answers I needed.
At one point during her speech, Bateman saw me in the audience. If that rattled her at all, she didn’t show it. She simply kept talking about the young women there and herself—and then she even included something about me.
“Many of you know I went through a horrible experience involving my husband, who was killed in a violent crime. Amazingly enough, the authorities at first even believed I had something to do with it. Fortunately, the truth about my innocence came out—thanks in large part to a woman here in the audience tonight. Clare Carlson, the news director of Channel 10 television. I want you all to join me in thanking Clare for getting my story out and my name cleared. Let’s have a hand for Clare Carlson …”
Everyone turned to look at me. Then they all started to clap. I wasn’t sure what to do. Should I stand up from where I was sitting? Should I wave to acknowledge their applause? I wound up standing up partially from my chair and giving a half of a wave. Bateman had surprised me with that. But now it was my turn to surprise her.
“I have some questions for you,” I yelled. “I’ve been trying to reach you.”
“Clare, I’m sorry I haven’t had a chance to talk with you again. I’ve just been so busy. I’m sure you understand. But I’ll catch up with you soon. We’ll have a nice long conversation then.”
She turned and began walking away from me.
“That’s not good enough,” I said.
“What?” she said over her shoulder.”
“I have a lot of questions for you.”
“Well, I don’t have time to answer them all now.”
“Okay, let’s try one then. What was your husband doing in those last days before his murder when he started looking into his own past? Why was he doing that? And how did it involve you?”
“I don’t know anything about it.”
“Was there a connection between him and your mother and your family in Vietnam?”
That one stopped her. She turned around and faced me now. She moved close to me. Close enough that no one else but me could hear what she began saying to me in a low whisper.
“Clare, I really am grateful to you for what you did for me. But now it’s over. Your story is over. And your part in my life is over. It’s time for you to stop all this, including the stories you’re putting on the air. I’m asking you nice just this one time to stop what you’re doing, Clare. Because if you don’t stop, I’ll make you stop. I have the power to do that now. I have the power to do anything I want. I can even talk to Brendan Kaiser, who owns your station, and tell him to make you stop. Do you want me to do that? Do you want me to ruin your career for you? Or do you just want to go away quietly and we’ll both move on with our lives?”