Beyond the Headlines

by R. G. Belsky

  Wow! She was threatening me. I must have really gotten to her. And she was even threatening me that she would be able to get Brendan Kaiser to keep a lid on this story. I wondered if she could pull that off. Not that it mattered. I wasn’t going to stop doing this story. Not until I got all of the answers that I was looking for.

  “I was watching an old movie of yours the other night, Laurie,” I said. “One of those movies that hardly anyone remembers. But I recognized some of the lines you used in it. Because they were the same lines you used when you talked about living in fear of your husband and playing your brilliant act to get you out of jail. That’s what it was, right? An act. Was any of it true? Were you telling the truth about anything up there onstage tonight? Or is it all just part of the public act of being Laurie Bateman?”

  She smiled now. Like she knew exactly what I was talking about. Even though she’d never admit it.

  “Let me tell you something I learned about being an actress, Clare,” she said. “A director taught me this a long time ago. Don’t stay on the stage, don’t stay on the screen too long. Know when to make your grand exit. Deliver your big line—and then get off. Know when it’s time to go. That’s what I’m telling you now. It’s time to go. It’s time to make your grand exit. The story is over.”

  Not for me it wasn’t, I thought.

  Not by a long shot.

  At 6:00 p.m., the red light went on and the intro for the evening newscast began to roll:

  ANNOUNCER: This is Channel 10 News.

  With Brett Wolff and Dani Blaine on the anchor desk, Steve Stratton with Sports and Wendy Jeffers at the Accu 10 Weather Center.

  If you want to stay up-to-date in this fast-paced city, you need to keep on the go with Channel 10 News.

  And now, here’s Brett and Dani …

  BRETT: Good evening. Here’s what’s happening: A shooting at a Times Square restaurant has left two people dead and five injured; the mayor has a new plan to try and help the homeless on the street during the holiday season; the Yankees just signed another big name free agent; and we’ll hear the latest from Wendy Jeffers at the Channel 10 AccuWeather Center.

  DANI: But first, we start with an update on a story that’s been in the headlines recently—about slain billionaire Charles Hollister and his celebrity wife, Laurie Bateman. Our Clare Carlson, the award-winning news director of this station, has an exclusive report:

  I was on camera now:

  ME: More than a half century ago, in the spring of 1975, Laurie Bateman came to the U.S. as a months-old baby fleeing with her family from war-torn Vietnam as it fell to the Communists.

  Earlier this month, her husband, Charles Hollister, was found murdered in their posh Fifth Avenue townhouse—and Bateman was first arrested, and then released on murder charges.

  The slaying of Charles Hollister remains a mystery, but then so is much else about the whole story of both Hollister and Bateman.

  Channel 10 News went looking for answers in the past of both of them and came up with some surprising information—and a lot more questions.

  Here is what we found …

  CHAPTER 49

  THE DAY AFTER my broadcast aired, we got a call in the newsroom from the security desk downstairs. They said a man there wanted to talk to me about the story. Did I want to see him?

  “He says he has information about the Laurie Bateman story,” Maggie told me.

  “I’m busy catching up on all the paperwork I missed when I was out of town. How about you or one of the reporters out in the newsroom talk to him for me and find out whatever it is?”

  “He said he’ll only talk to you.”

  I sighed. But I learned a long time ago in this business to never turn down a tip on a story. Sure, you get a lot of crazy news tips from a lot of crazy people. But, every once in a while, one of them pays off. You don’t want to be the kind of journalist who missed out on a good one.

  I told Maggie to have someone bring him to my office.

  A few minutes later, a man walked in accompanied by two security guards. I could tell he was older, even though he didn’t look as old as he probably was. He was slightly built, he had gray hair, and he walked with a limp. The most noticeable thing to me though was his nationality. He was Asian. In fact, I was pretty sure he was Vietnamese.

  I was pretty sure I’d seen him before.

  Not in person.

  But on a video.

  The video of the subway station where Carmen Ortega, the Hollisters’ maid, had died after being pushed or else fallen in front of a subway train.

  He was the Vietnamese man I’d seen in the video trying to save Carmen Ortega after she was hit by the train.

  “I’m Clare Carlson,” I said, glancing over at the two security guards and glad they were there in my office with me and this man at the moment. “You said you had something important to tell me?”

  “My name is Pham Van Quong,” he said now.

  The name sounded familiar. At first, I didn’t realize why. Then it hit me. The name Pham. That was Laurie Bateman’s birth name. The name of her family in Vietnam before they came to the U.S. and the mother changed it to Laurie Bateman.

  I realized, too, now that I’d seen a picture of him once before.

  Besides on that subway video.

  It was the picture I’d seen at Gloria Bateman’s house in La Jolla.

  “Are you …” I started to say.

  “I’m the man you were talking about on the air as Laurie Bateman’s father,” he told me.

  PART IV

  BEYOND THE HEADLINES

  CHAPTER 50

  “YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO be dead,” I said.

  It was a stupid thing to say, but it was the only thing I could think of at the moment. I had played through a lot of scenarios in my mind about Laurie Bateman’s life and past all the way back to her birth in Vietnam. But this never was one of them.

  “Obviously I’m not dead. I watched your broadcast last night, Ms. Carlson. I’ve seen some of the other things you’d said and done. You’ve clearly talked to a lot of people and gathered a great deal of information about my family and many other things I care about. That’s why I decided to come see you. I want to tell you the truth. The truth about everything that I know.”

  Pham Van Quong sat down in front of my desk. Looking at him up close now, I could see some of the age in his face. But he still looked remarkably good for a person who had to be in his seventies, just as his wife had when I met her in La Jolla. Good-looking genes sure ran in Laurie’s family, which I guess helped explain why she was so attractive.

  He was a short man, no more than five-foot-seven or five-foot-eight, thin but seemed to be in good athletic shape. He was dressed in what appeared to be an expensive suit, with a dress white shirt and a red tie. He looked like a man who had done well in America, the same as his wife and daughter did. He spoke perfect English, so I assumed he’d lived in this country for a long time.

  “I imagine you must have a lot of questions for me,” he said.

  “I sure do.”

  “Okay, I’ll try to give you as many answers as I can.”

  “Let’s start with this question: How come you didn’t die in that traffic accident?”

  “It wasn’t a traffic ‘accident,’ Ms. Carlson. What happened that night was deliberate. The driver of the car meant to hit me. Hit me and kill me.”

  “Why did someone want to kill you?”

  “Because I knew too much.”

  “About what?”

  “We’ll get to that later.”

  I was confused. None of his answers were helping me much so far. There was also another real concern I had right now. If this man was Laurie Bateman’s father, if his story about surviving that long-ago traffic incident was true—then he could logically be a suspect in the murder of the man who married his daughter.

  I had no idea what his motive might be, but for some reason, he was coming out of the shadows now so maybe he wanted a share of th
e fortune his daughter was inheriting after Hollister’s death. And I was sitting face-to-face with a potential murderer in my office.

  Except he didn’t act like a murderer. He acted like a man with a story to tell. I had to find out what that story was.

  “Tell me about the car that didn’t kill you outside the UCLA campus,” I said. “If you didn’t die that night, then who did?”

  “A classmate of mine. His name was Nguyen Hau. He was Vietnamese too. We’d met when I started attending classes at UCLA. And we bonded there—and became friends—because we were both from Vietnam. It was nice to have someone I felt comfortable with in a strange country.

  “We’d both had a class in the same building that night. We left together, but he was walking a bit ahead of me. When he stepped off the curb as the light changed to green for him, the car barreled through the red light and aimed directly at him. I watched it all happen from a few feet behind.

  “It was deliberate, there was no accident that night. The driver of the car meant to hit him. But I was convinced I was supposed to be the target, not him. I think the driver found out I would be leaving class, waited for me, and then tried to run me over. Except he mistook Nguyen Hau for me. He looked a lot like me, he was Vietnamese, and it was dark outside. So Hau died that night, instead of me.”

  I still had no idea why anyone would want a Vietnamese refugee—either Pham Van Quong or Nguyen Hau—dead, but I asked him the next most obvious question first.

  “Why did the police think the dead man was you?”

  “That’s how he was identified. And I never corrected anyone. I decided it was best if whoever wanted me dead thought I was already dead.”

  “But how did the authorities mistakenly identify you? Wasn’t there ID on him?”

  “I switched our IDs before the police arrived.”

  “What about fingerprints? Dental records?”

  “They didn’t need any of that. They had a confirmation from a family member. A family member who identified the body as me.”

  “Who?”

  “My wife.”

  I tried to take that information in now. It didn’t make sense to me. This was all getting really crazy.

  “Your wife knew you were alive?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you never went back to live with her and your baby daughter.”

  “No, I left Southern California right after that and relocated in another part of the country. I changed my name. My name is James Dawson now. It has been for a long time. I became a completely different person. Pham Van Quong was dead as far as anyone knew, and I decided to keep him dead.”

  “Didn’t you want to be with your family? Your wife and your little daughter? Why didn’t you take your wife with you?”

  “That was her decision. Not mine. She did not want to be a part of my new life—or a part of my life at all anymore. When I told her what I had to do after the attempt on my life, she saw it as an opportunity for her. She made that clear to me. That was her price for identifying me to authorities so that I could be officially dead. I had to disappear from her life. She had other plans, other aspirations she wanted to pursue—and she said she couldn’t do that with me as her husband.”

  “She wasn’t in love with you?”

  “My wife was—and still is, from what I saw during her TV appearance with you—a very beautiful woman. She’s always attracted men in her life. Many men. I was only one of them.”

  “She was seeing other men while you were married?”

  “Yes, there were always other men in her life.”

  I thought about Gloria Bateman telling me how she’d slept with men to get out of Saigon.

  I thought about how she’d gone after Marvin Bateman here in the U.S. who made her rich and her daughter famous.

  I thought, too, about her marriage to Bateman—and realized it had probably been illegal because she was still married to her husband, whom she knew was alive.

  “Does your wife know you’re still alive today?” I asked him.

  “I’m not sure. I haven’t been in contact with her in years.”

  “What about your daughter?”

  He sighed.

  “I told you I wanted to tell the truth. So let me tell the truth now about that. I came to this country after the U.S. troops pulled out of South Vietnam in 1973 and the peace accords were signed in Paris that ended the American war involvement. I began taking courses at UCLA in 1973. I never returned to Vietnam after that. Laurie was born in September of 1974. You do the math …”

  “Do you mean … ?”

  “She’s not my daughter. Someone else is her father.”

  CHAPTER 51

  IT WAS THE question that had been hovering around this story right from the beginning.

  Had there been a previous connection between Charles Hollister and Laurie Bateman and her family that dated back to the days when Hollister was a soldier in Vietnam?

  And, if there was a connection, what was it?

  Now that Pham had revealed he could not be the father of the little girl who grew up to be Laurie Bateman, could the father have been Hollister? Did Hollister father a baby in Vietnam a half century ago, then marry her years later when she became a famous celebrity? If so, did he know who she was when he married her or did he find out later? Did Laurie Bateman know that the man she married might have been her biological father?

  “Who was the father if it wasn’t you?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Your wife never told you?”

  “All she ever said was that he was an American GI. She told me she did what she had to do to survive in Vietnam without me. She brought the baby with her to America when she arrived, and she told me that she was going to find a different husband to raise her. I still remember her telling me: ‘I can do better than you—and I will.’ And that’s what she did. She married Marvin Bateman after my ‘death’ that night on the UCLA campus. I was already dead to my wife.”

  Damn. Gloria Bateman was a real piece of work. I remembered her telling me how she had sex at the end of the war with U.S. soldiers to get on one of the helicopters leaving from the U.S. Embassy. But this sexual encounter with a military man would have taken place more than a year before that. With an American who must have helped her in some way then. She was a woman who would do and say whatever it took with a man to get her way. Just like her daughter seemed to be.

  Could that man in Vietnam she had sex with that produced a daughter been Charles Hollister? Except he left Vietnam when the U.S. combat troops pulled out in early 1973—months before the baby would have been conceived.

  Or did he?

  I wanted to ask Pham a lot more about this. But he kept going on about everything else that had happened to him in Vietnam before he left and came here to the U.S.

  So I let him talk …

  “I grew up in Saigon,” he said. “My father was a professor of physics at the college there, and we were pretty well-to-do. Which was important in those years of the war. If you had money and influence, you got benefits other people in Vietnam didn’t. Vietnam was extremely class conscious back then.

  “The biggest thing was the war, of course. A lot of people don’t realize this, but not all young men then got drafted into the South Vietnamese Army. There were college deferments, just like in the U.S., that could keep you out of the military. The key was a test that high school students had to take if you wanted to continue your education. If you scored high on that, you got to go to college and receive a deferment from Army service. There was a lot of pressure in taking that test. Fortunately, I did extremely well and got into a college in Saigon.

  “For a time, I wasn’t even that aware of the war because I was so involved in what I was doing at school. That all changed when the war started going badly. And, toward the end, when it became clear the war was coming closer to Saigon, it affected us all. We had to make decisions then. Did we switch allegiance to the Communists once it appeared that it
was only a matter of time before they took over the country? Or did we depend on the U.S. to keep us safe? I did the latter.

  “At college, I loved courses with math and science and technology. I was always good at that kind of stuff. Gifted, the instructors called me. While I was there, I became friendly with another student who was even smarter than I was in these courses. He was what I guess you would call a genius when it came to technology.

  “Anyway, we spent a lot of time together, not just in the class but also working on our own ideas. I mean, at one point. we even came up with our video game—sort of like a version of Pong, the first one back then in the seventies.

  “But the biggest idea we had, the big thing we developed, was an idea for a computer. A different kind of computer. Back then, the only computers were the big ones that were used at places like NASA. But we came up with a device—a microchip—that we believed might make the computer accessible to everyone.”

  Which is what Charles Hollister did a few years later. I was pretty sure I could see where this was going.

  “By this point, we’d told other people about our idea for the computer microchip. We had to do that. Because we needed help, we needed support—financially and otherwise—to keep working beyond what we were doing at the school.

  “We got that from the government. First the South Vietnamese government, but then—when that began falling apart—from the U.S. people still there. Because even after the U.S. troops pulled out in 1973, there were still members of the U.S. intelligence community based secretly in Saigon who wanted us to keep working on the idea.

  “That’s why I went to the U.S. They wanted me there, in an American college, and I agreed to do that. I didn’t think I had much of a choice. And so, I said goodbye to my wife and went to America. She would meet me there soon, or so they promised me. My friend refused to go along with them though. He told them it was his idea, and he would keep working on it there without their help if necessary. He told me he feared the Americans would steal the microchip from us. He said he would give it to the Communists before the Americans, if necessary, to prevent that.”