Beyond the Headlines

by R. G. Belsky

  All around us, everything in the offices of Victor Endicott was in disarray—papers strewn everywhere, drawers open, filing cabinets turned over.

  It sure looked like someone had made a hasty exit from this place.

  Not everything was gone though.

  One of the cops came over with a package in his hand.

  “I think I’ve got something,” he said to Sam.

  The package had a label on it, which said: “CHARLES HOLLISTER—SURVEILLANCE.”

  Inside it were hours and hours of tapes and transcripts from Endicott’s surveillance of Charles Hollister for Laurie Bateman.

  We skimmed through the transcripts of what was on the tapes. Lots of it was tedious and boring, of course. Chronicling endless conversations between Hollister and Melissa Hunt. A little bit of it in bed that was titillating, but most of it was pretty routine stuff—the kind of conversations everyone has day to day and night to night, even if you are with a sexy young mistress as Charles Hollister was.

  I explained to Sam and Pollock my theory about how Endicott had used the tapes.

  “You’re saying Charles Hollister never made the phone call to his office that morning?” Sam asked.

  “It was his voice. But I think you’ll find some of these surveillance tapes of him with his girlfriend—containing all these hours of conversation—were spliced together to make it seem like he was actually talking on the message.”

  “How can you be sure of that?”

  “Hollister complained on the call that he didn’t like the front-page headline. But newspaper people at a place like the Chronicle don’t call it the front-page headline. They call it either the splash or the wood. Hollister prided himself on using newspaper jargon. Whoever put the tape together—presumably that was Endicott—didn’t know that about newspaper jargon.”

  Sam looked over at Pollock now. “Can you explain to me why you’re here? Why does the Treasury Department care about Endicott?”

  “Because of the millions of dollars we’ve found missing from the Hollister business money funds.”

  “I thought you were looking at Hollister for that.”

  “We were.”

  “Then what does Endicott have to do with it.”

  “He might have been involved too—he knew a lot of secrets about Hollister and his business. Professionally and personally. He could have been playing both sides of the fence. Using this information for his own personal gain. We’ve been gathering more information about him ever since Hollister’s murder. It looks like he found out about that. And that’s why he’s gone.”

  “Where do you think this guy Endicott is now?”

  “Probably in Rio de Janeiro or Europe,” Pollock said. “Living off money taken from the Hollister funds.”

  “So this is about stolen money?”

  “And maybe murder, too … the murder of Charles Hollister.”

  “You think Endicott murdered Hollister because of the money—and then fled the country with a fortune in stolen funds?”

  “That’s certainly a possibility.”

  Sam shook his head.

  “I should have listened to my horoscope this morning.”

  “What did it say?” Pollock asked.

  “That I should have stayed in bed.”

  I hadn’t said anything yet. It didn’t seem like anyone particularly wanted me to say anything. I mean, I wasn’t a hotshot homicide detective or Treasury agent or anything. I was just a nosy TV reporter. But I was the one who had led the law to Endicott’s office and alerted them to everything he had probably done.

  So I figured my opinion counted for something.

  “I don’t think it was Victor Endicott who killed Hollister,” I told everyone. “I think he just got scared and ran. I think he was working for someone else.”

  “Well, we know he was working for both Charles Hollister and Laurie Bateman at different times.”

  “But who else besides them?”

  “Huh?”

  “Maybe there’s another player here. Someone we’re missing. Someone who hired Victor Endicott to do his dirty work for him. Someone with a better motive for murdering Hollister than Endicott had. We need to figure out who that is. And the answer could be right here in whatever he left behind.”

  And, in the end, the answer we were looking for was there.

  It was a video. A security video. It turned out to be the missing security video from Charles Hollister’s house on the night before his body was found. And why not? Endicott was all about security. He probably even installed the video security system there. So he’d have had no trouble removing a security video he—or, more specifically, whoever he was working for—didn’t want found.

  We plugged it into a machine in Endicott’s office and played it.

  Sure enough, it showed the front of Hollister’s building. The time stamp on the video put the date as the night before his death and the time as 9:30 p.m., between the time he’d come home from the charity event he’d attended with Laurie Bateman and the 10:30 date he’d set with Pham Van Quong at the hotel.

  The video itself wasn’t long. Someone had deleted the beginning and the end. The rest was all blank.

  All that was left was several seconds of footage from outside the Hollister townhouse that night.

  But it was enough.

  Enough to see who had been there.

  I looked at the figure on the screen in front of me.

  The last person to probably see Charles Hollister alive.

  It was Hollister’s son.

  Charles Blaine Hollister Jr.

  CHAPTER 55

  BETWEEN COVERING THE Laurie Bateman story and running the newsroom, the last thing I needed was another thing on my plate to deal with right now. But I got just that when I went back to Channel 10 after leaving Endicott’s office.

  There was a message for me to call a Dr. Polis. He was the doctor I’d gone to for the test on the breast cancer gene. He must have gotten the results. I thought maybe his office would want me to make an appointment to come back to see him again. But when I called the number, I wound up talking to Dr. Polis himself.

  “I have good news,” he said to me. “Your test came back negative.”

  “Meaning I don’t have the gene?”

  “No sign whatsoever of the BRCA1 gene in your tests, Ms. Carlson, I’m happy to say.”

  I sure was happy about it, too. But good news like that is rarely perfect. And this wasn’t. There was more. And I should have seen it coming.

  “The BRCA1 gene—if it was detected in your daughter—must have been transmitted to her by your husband.”

  I hadn’t given him any details about my daughter or the circumstances of her birth.

  “I wasn’t married when I had her,” I told him now.

  “Okay, the father—the man you were with when you conceived her—must have the gene. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  Oh, I understood.

  “Can you contact this man?”

  “That would be pretty difficult without a séance.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “I see. Can you contact his relatives? Are you still in touch with them?”

  “Look, Dr. Polis, he was a one-night stand. We had sex together when I was nineteen years old, and I never saw him again. That’s all that happened between us. Except for me getting pregnant and having his baby.”

  Dr. Polis didn’t respond right away. I wasn’t sure if it was because he was shocked or because he was trying to figure out what to say.

  “Do you know if this person went on to have other children?” he asked me finally.

  I thought about what I’d read on Cowell’s death and background the time I’d looked up the information.

  “Yes, I believe he did.”

  “You need to try and contact the family. If your daughter carries the gene and it didn’t come from you, but from him—then his children are at risk for carrying the gene j
ust like your daughter. You should reach out to them, if you can.”

  I wanted to tell him I didn’t know how to do that. And whatever happened between Doug Crowell and me a quarter century ago during a brief one-night encounter had nothing to do with me now. Let his family deal with their own medical problems, like I was doing now. I didn’t have time to worry about all this. But I knew none of this was true. I was a reporter; I could track down Crowell’s family if I tried. And I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t do the right thing for his children, whoever they were.

  “I’ll do that,” I told Dr. Polis. “I’ll reach out to them, transmit this information to them, and even put them in contact with you.”

  After I hung up, I thought again about that night I had with Doug Crowell. There I was, just nineteen, a sophomore in college, who had too much to drink at a campus fraternity party. Crowell was the president of the fraternity, a good-looking guy who was a big man on campus. So I was flattered when he started paying attention to me. Flattered enough that I slept with him that night.

  It’s always a temptation to look back on your life and do the “what if?” thing. I try to avoid doing that most of the time because it never accomplishes anything. But I did it now. I played the “what if” game to myself. What if I hadn’t gone to that fraternity party? What if I hadn’t gotten so drunk that night? What if I had never met Doug Crowell there? And, most importantly of all, what if I had never slept with Crowell that night and gotten pregnant with his baby?

  My life sure would have turned out a lot differently.

  But instead, those brief moments of passion when I was so young have defined my life ever since.

  And continued to do so, because I was still dealing with the aftereffects.

  Doug Crowell’s wife was named Sheryl. She lived in Dallas, Texas. She had been a flight attendant at the same airline where Crowell flew as a pilot, and they’d been married for more than twenty years before he died. They had three children—two daughters and a son—all in their late teens or early twenties. I was able to find out all this information pretty easily online. I had no idea if she might have remarried or if the children still lived with her or anything else about Sheryl Crowell. But I did track down a phone number for her.

  That was the easy part—finding all this about Sheryl Crowell.

  The hard part was what I had to do next.

  I tried to play out in my mind how a conversation between me and this woman might go:

  “Hello, Mrs. Crowell. You don’t know me, but I used to have sex with your husband. Well, we only had sex once. And, in our defense, he was drunk—and so was I. But there were significant repercussions from that. A lot of them. For me and now for your family. Apparently, your husband carried a potentially deadly cancer gene called BRCA1 that can get passed down to his children. I know that because we had a child. Yeah, I know, that’s a shocker, and he never knew about it—but I got pregnant from that night we had together. I recently discovered that my child from that, who’s now a twenty-nine-year-old woman, has tested positive for the gene. I’ve tested negative. Which means it must have come from him. The bottom line here is you need to see if your children are carrying the gene, too, which could put them at great risk for potential cancer. Uh, I think that about covers it all. Nice talking to you, Mrs. Crowell. Oh, and have a nice day.”

  Okay, I know it wasn’t going to go exactly like that.

  But no matter what I said to this woman, that was the basic message I was going to have to deliver.

  Damn.

  On the positive side, once I made the call, I could go back to concentrating on something easier—like figuring out who killed Charles Hollister and why.

  I picked up the phone in my office and punched in the number for Sheryl Crowell …

  CHAPTER 56

  THINGS BEGAN TO happen very quickly after the discovery of the security video that showed Charles Blaine Hollister at his father’s apartment that night.

  The cops talked to Charles for hours—first informally in his office at the Hollister building, then later in an interrogation room at police headquarters with the battery of lawyers representing him.

  Initially, Charles denied everything. He stuck to his story that he’d argued with his father earlier in the day at the office, but he’d gone straight home afterward and never saw him again before his death.

  That’s when they showed him the security video—the one we’d found in Endicott’s office—which showed him outside the Fifth Avenue townhouse later that night, shortly before his father was supposed to leave for a meeting with Pham. Enough time for him to have killed his father and then left his body for Laurie Bateman and the maid to find the next morning. Especially if he paid Endicott to send the doctored phone call at 6:38 a.m. to make it seem like Hollister was still alive then and also got Endicott to remove the security video showing him there the night before. It all made sense. Endicott had worked for both Hollister and Laurie Bateman. Why not hire out to Charles Blaine Hollister, too?

  Things began to fall apart in a hurry for Charles after that.

  The police talked to people in a bar where Charles had been seen drinking for much of the night before showing up at his father’s place, and they all said he was drunk, angry, and making threats against his father and Laurie Bateman and everyone else he believed was plotting against him.

  They talked to his ex-wife who said he’d nearly beaten her to death one night in a drunken rage. While he was doing it, she said, he bragged about how he’d done the same thing to other people. One of them was his own sister. Charles said he’d beaten up his sister, Elaine, so badly that he’d scared her all the way out of the country, leaving the path open for him to claim all his father’s wealth and power for himself. At least until Laurie Bateman came along.

  When the police went to see Elaine, she confirmed it. She told them the same story she’d told me that day in the coffee shop.

  All of it looked bad for Charles—it was clear that he had a violent temper, especially when drinking, that could well have led to an explosion with his father that night.

  But the real damage came when police searched his office and then his home for evidence.

  They found a bloodied handkerchief in his office with his father’s blood on it—which he must have used to wipe himself off after the killing.

  They also found his father’s cell phone in there, which had been missing since the murder. There was a voice mail on it of Charles Jr. yelling at his father, and even threatening him at one point. Which must have been why he took it with him when he left his father’s house that night.

  Worst of all for Charles, though, police found a document. A damning document. A real motive for murder that pointed directly at him.

  It was a copy of Charles Hollister’s will. A new will that he’d just drawn up. He must have planned to give it to his lawyers, but never got the chance before he was killed.

  The new will definitely removed Laurie Bateman from power and kept her inheritance at the original prenup levels they’d had when they were married. But it was even worse for Charles. Charles was written out completely. His father had left him with nothing—no income, no position within the company. His only hope to inherit now was if the new will never got filed, his father died—and Laurie Bateman got convicted of the murder. The authorities believed that was what Charles Jr. did and then framed Bateman as the prime suspect.

  Hollister had written in the draft that his son had been “the greatest disappointment in my life”—and that he was through protecting him. Charles would be on his own. Instead, all his money and control of the company went to his daughter, Elaine. “Elaine is a good person,” Hollister had written in the draft for the new will. “I’ve never done right by her. But I want to do that now. She’s the person I want to carry on for me when I’m gone.”

  Charles insisted he had no idea how the bloodied handkerchief or the cell phone had gotten into his office. He admitted that he and his father ha
d argued earlier in the day after his father told him about the new will he was preparing. And he admitted getting drunk and angry and going back to his father’s house later that night to confront him about what he was going to do. But he said his father never answered the door—and that he left without even seeing him.

  That was a hard story to believe.

  Meanwhile, the Medical Examiner’s Office now said that although it had originally estimated the time of death as shortly before Hollister’s body was found, it could have been longer than that. They even speculated that Hollister could have been attacked with the lamp and shot the night before, but then lay mortally injured on the floor before finally dying several hours later. The ME declared it was possible he had been murdered around the time Charles was at the building, rather than the next morning when the maid and Laurie Bateman arrived.

  The evidence was all pretty overwhelming against Charles Hollister Jr.

  Just as it had once been with Laurie Bateman.

  But the police were convinced that this time they had the right person.

  And so, Charles Hollister was arrested for the murder of his father.

  A video of Charles being led through a perp walk in handcuffs by police was at the top of the newscast for Channel 10 and every other station; it went viral on social media; and the picture was on the front page of every newspaper in town.

  The appearance by Charles in court afterward was a media circus. TV cameras everywhere, hundreds of reporters. We broke into our daytime programming to cover it live. They brought Charles into the courtroom wearing a red prison jumpsuit, refusing to even allow him the dignity of putting on a suit and tie. He looked scared but still arrogant at the same time—if that’s possible. He kept looking around the courtroom, like he was hoping someone would help him.