by R. G. Belsky
His father had always been there to help him out of jams like this in the past. But now his father was gone. And he was facing murder charges for being the one who killed him.
I saw Laurie Bateman in the court, viewing the proceedings from the other side of the defendant’s bench this time. Elaine Hollister was there, too, staring silently at her brother. And Bert Stovall, who had lost his lifelong friend and now had to watch his friend’s son being accused of the murder. He looked ashen and shaken by what had happened. This had clearly been a traumatic experience for him.
The lawyer for Charles Hollister pleaded with the judge to grant him bail.
“This is a leading citizen,” the lawyer said. “He is an officer in one of the most prestigious businesses in the world. A man who has just suffered the trauma of losing his father to a violent act …”
That wasn’t much of an argument. He lost his father because he murdered him, the prosecutor pointed out. Sort of like the son who kills his parents and then asks for sympathy because he’s an orphan.
“Your client is charged with murder,” the judge said, cutting off the lawyer in mid-sentence. “Bail is denied. The defendant is remanded back into custody.”
They put handcuffs on Charles again and began leading him out of the courtroom. As he walked past Laurie Bateman, his sister, and Bert Stovall, he looked over at them and said something that seemed to be some sort of a plea. For help, I presume. I couldn’t make out what it was. But it didn’t matter. They all just sat there stone-faced until Charles Hollister was led back to jail.
For us at Channel 10, it was another ratings bonanza.
The arrest of Charles Blaine Hollister for his father’s murder was the biggest story in town.
And I was the one who broke it.
Damn, it sure felt good to be Clare Carlson right at this moment.
CHAPTER 57
MITCHELL LANSBURG CALLED me. I figured it was because he’d been impressed by all my latest exclusives on the Charles Hollister/Laurie Bateman story. Maybe he wanted to give me more money. Or a bigger car. Or something else that would make me an even bigger star than I was at the moment.
Lansburg asked if I was free for dinner that night. I remembered our conversation when I was in LA and wondered if this was another business meeting or a date. Either way, I was interested. I said yes.
The last time we’d met here, he’d taken me to the 21 Club, one of the most expensive restaurants in the city.
I wondered what fancy place we’d be going to this time.
He suggested we meet at Pete’s Tavern. Pete’s Tavern is a neighborhood place in Gramercy Park, where you get cheap drinks and decent affordable food. There was nothing wrong with it, but it didn’t come close to matching the glamor of a place like 21. I guess that’s when I should have realized this evening wasn’t going to go the way I expected.
Lansburg looked as good as the last time I’d seen him. Wearing jeans, an open-collared sports shirt, and a corduroy sports jacket.
“There’ve been some developments,” he said when we sat down in a booth.
“There sure have! Did you see all the great stuff I’ve been putting on the air?”
“Not those kind of developments. Developments at West Coast Media.”
“What kind of developments?”
“It doesn’t look like we’re going to be able to go ahead with you on this show.”
I sat there stunned. The last time we’d talked, I was going to be the biggest TV star in Hollywood. Now I was out?
“Are you telling me I got fired from this job before I even started it?”
“You’re not fired.”
“But I’m not going to be working for you, right?”
“It’s not about you. It’s about the show and the money we can raise for it and the advertising support we can count on and a lot of other things like that. That’s the bottom line here. We thought we could make it work, but we can’t. These things happen in the business. I’m sorry. I thought you would have been really good at it.”
I tried to make sense out of all this. But it was impossible to do. I mean it didn’t matter at all that I’d broken another big story. This was about business. About the business of TV. Things didn’t always make sense in the TV business.
“What about another show? You said the money and advertising didn’t work out for this one. Is it possible you could come up with another program idea for me?”
“Possible,” he said.
“But not likely?”
“These things move quickly, Clare. You were the flavor of the month when we first talked about doing this. But once that idea fell through, even though that had nothing to do with you, you’re kind of damaged goods in the eyes of many of the people I deal with.”
“But I’m still breaking big stories on Laurie Bateman and all the rest.”
“I understand that.”
“Then why am I not a hot commodity in Hollywood for a talk show anymore?”
“That’s the way it works, I’m afraid. There’s a moment for everything, and sometimes that moment just passes—and then the ship has sailed.”
I stood up. Our dinner hadn’t come yet, but I didn’t care. There didn’t seem to be much reason to stay around and keep talking to this guy. I told him that.
“There is another thing I wanted to discuss with you,” Lansburg said.
“About the job?”
“About you and me.”
I sat back down.
“I’m sorry the way this worked out,” he told me. “I like you, Clare. I like you a lot. Professionally. And personally, too. I couldn’t do anything about my personal feelings while I was negotiating with you about the job. That would have been inappropriate, as I’m sure you understand. But now, since it looks like we won’t be working together, I’m hoping we can still … well, spend time together.”
Okay, I’d figured he might be coming on to me in LA when he’d talked about having dinner when he came back to New York. Now I was sure. But what I wasn’t sure about was how I was going to react.
“There’s no real reason we couldn’t see each other on a personal basis going forward now,” he said.
“Oh, I can think of a pretty good reason.”
“What’s that?”
“You’re married.”
“I used to be married.”
“Used to be?”
“I’m divorced.”
I looked down at his hand. The wedding ring was still there. He saw me staring at it.
“Well, I’m not divorced yet.”
I didn’t say anything.
“But I’m in the process of getting divorced.”
“And you keep on wearing the wedding ring to remind you of all the swell times you had in your marriage?”
I thought about conversations I’d had with Dani Blaine about this, when she was waiting for Brett to leave his wife for her. Oh, he eventually did. And maybe Mitchell Lansburg would too. But I didn’t feel like being the “other woman” in his life while this all played out.
“She understands that I’m going to be seeing other women,” he said to me now. “We have an understanding. She’s fine with it so you don’t have to worry that we’re doing anything behind her back. She wants me to be happy with someone else.”
“Good for her.”
“So what do you think?”
“I think we should call her.”
“Who?”
“Your wife. Tell her about you and me. See how happy she’ll be for you.”
“Uh, that’s not a good idea.”
“You’re not really getting divorced, are you? You just want to have an affair with me.”
“Is there anything wrong with that? I like you. I know that you like me. I can sense it from the way you look at me. Is there anything that wrong about getting involved in an affair—simply having fun—with a married man?”
No, there wasn’t. I’d done it before. More than once, including my affair with the marri
ed Scott Manning a year earlier. But I didn’t want to do it again. Maybe it was because of something my daughter had said to me: “Mom, you need to stop sleeping around with every man you meet. You need to establish a relationship with a man, a good man, and make that work. Like I have.” My friend Janet had said that to me many times in the past. But it was a lot more meaningful coming from my own daughter. Out of the mouths of babes, and all that. Whatever the reason, I knew what I had to do.
“Goodbye,” I said to Lansburg. “Call me if anything ever changes on the job front.”
Then I walked out of the restaurant.
Except I didn’t want to go home. For one thing, I hadn’t eaten anything yet. But more importantly I didn’t want to be alone right now. I wanted to be with someone. I wanted to be with a man.
Mitchell Lansburg wasn’t going to be that man. Neither was Scott Manning. Or Sam Markham, the homicide cop who was my ex-husband. They were all married. Billy Carstairs wasn’t married, but I didn’t want to talk with him again. That left only one person—one man I knew—that I could think of.
And so, a short time later, I was sitting back in Pete’s Tavern again—this time with a different man than Lansburg.
It was Nick Pollock.
“I was surprised to get your call,” he said.
“I was lonely and wanted a man to talk to.”
“How did you pick me?”
“I wanted to make sure it was someone I wouldn’t have sex with. Someone who wouldn’t be attracted to me in that way. A man who I liked and thought I’d enjoy talking to without any possibility he was going to try to get me to go to bed with him—like the guy I was with here earlier tonight.”
“And you decided on me,” he said with a smile.
“You checked all the right boxes.”
It turned out to be a nice meal. We talked about a lot of things. The Laurie Batman story, of course. His tax investigation into the Hollister businesses. But personal stuff too. At one point, after a few drinks, I told him how I’d slept with a lot of men over the years, but never could seem to find the right one.
“It’s funny,” he said, “but I had the same problem for a long time. I was with a lot of men. But until I met Joe, I never had a relationship that worked. I guess it doesn’t matter whether you’re heterosexual or not. This business of finding good relationships is still difficult for all of us.”
“I guess that means experimenting with being a lesbian wouldn’t make much difference for me, huh?”
He smiled.
“You’re an interesting woman, Clare. You’ll find the right man. Give it more time.”
“I’m kinda running out of time at this point in my life.”
I asked him more about the investigation into Hollister Enterprises. I wondered if the ascent of Laurie Bateman into the top role there had changed anything. He said they were still trying to figure that out. How much Hollister had been directly involved in the fraud and what, if anything, had changed since his murder.
“There was something weird with Hollister about that,” he said. “When we talked to him and confronted him about the funneling of funds to secret accounts, he didn’t react the way we thought he would. He didn’t deny it or get belligerent or any of the other things you’d expect him to do once he found out we knew. He was more … well, he seemed shocked. He almost promised to help us in getting answers. And then he got murdered.”
“And that was just about the same time Hollister started delving into his own past,” I said as I sipped my beer and thought about it. “Reaching out to his ex-wives, his estranged daughter, and lots of other things. He even went back to the man who may have come up with the original idea for the computer microchip that made Hollister a fortune.”
I told him the story about Pham Van Quong, aka James Dawson, which I hadn’t put on the air yet. I still had no hard proof for everything Pham had told me. I also wasn’t exactly sure how it fit into everything at this point.
“That is strange,” Pollock said when I was finished.
“I keep wondering why Hollister did all those things at the end,” I said. “Did he suddenly get a conscience? Or was there something else going on here that we don’t know about? Something that led to his murder?”
“But we know who murdered him—it was his son, Charles Jr. And he did it because he was angry about being cut out of the will.”
“Right.”
“So all this other stuff about Hollister’s past you uncovered doesn’t mean much now, does it?”
“I suppose.”
CHAPTER 58
JACK FARON WAS examining a box full of Dunkin’ Donuts when I walked into his office the next morning.
It was a twelve-donut-sized box. From what I could see, there was a variety of sugar, glazed, chocolate-covered, and assorted other varieties inside.
“So many choices, so little time,” I said.
Faron glared at me, picked up one of the chocolate-covered ones, and bit into it.
“What happened to the cottage cheese?” I asked.
“I got sick of eating it.”
“But you’re still on your diet?”
“Yes, of course.”
“And how exactly do the donuts fit into it?”
“I’m moderating the dieting. I read where you can over-diet. Eat too much of the same thing. It’s not healthy.”
I glanced over at the waste can behind his desk. There was a pizza box in there.
“Pizza and donuts for breakfast sure sounds like a healthy combination to me.”
“The pizza was from last night.”
“Dinner?”
“I had to work late here.”
“Hey, those extra pounds should start rolling right off you, Jack.”
“I’m hungry,” he said, finishing off his donut and reaching for another. “I’m hungry all the time since I started this stupid diet. And I’m sick of eating cottage cheese and fruit. Okay? You satisfied? Now did you just come in here to bust my balls or do you have something to tell me?”
“I have something to tell you. Actually, two things to tell you.”
“So tell me.”
“First, I’m not going to be leaving here to do the TV talk show in Los Angeles.”
“You turned them down?”
“Uh, they turned me down.”
I told him about my meeting with Lansburg. I figured I might as well just give him the truth. He’d probably find out anyway about what happened. He seemed happy to hear that I was staying at Channel 10. At least, I hoped he was happy. Sometimes with Faron it’s hard to tell. But yeah, I’m pretty sure he was happy.
“What’s the second thing you wanted to tell me?” he asked.
“I’m not sure the Laurie Bateman story is over.”
I ran through all the questions I had about it, including the biggest question I’d been thinking about since my conversation with Nick Pollock the night before.
“Was Charles Blaine Hollister Jr. responsible for it all?” I asked Faron. “The murder. The stolen money. The cover-up. Everything. Was that all Charles Jr.? It’s kind of hard to believe. Especially if you’ve met Charles Jr. He’s not that smart … not smart enough to pull off all that.”
“Let me make sure I’ve got this all straight,” he said, clearly sounding exasperated with me now. “First, you go on this journalistic crusade to convince everyone that Laurie Bateman is innocent of murder. Then you decide she is guilty, and you spend all your time and effort trying to prove that. Finally, it turns out that Charles Jr. is the one who did it, and you make sure he gets arrested and charged with his father’s murder. Only now, you’re not sure about that either. You think maybe—just maybe—someone else is the killer. Did I get that all right, Clare?”
“Yep, but thanks for the recap.”
Faron put down the donut he was holding in his hand and pushed the box away. I’d apparently accomplished the impossible. I’d gotten him so upset with me that I killed his appetite.
“Y
ou know, Clare, there are times I think I would have been happier if you had gotten that other job. You do a lot of great things, but you’re always causing me big problems like this along the way. There are days when I think you’re more trouble than you’re worth. And this is one of those days. Can’t we just move on to another story?”
“Not until this one is finished,” I said.
“What will it take to convince you that the story is finished?”
“Once I find out what Charles Hollister was thinking those last few weeks of his life. Why he was digging through his past. I think the answer to that will give us the answers to a lot of other questions. And I think that may have been what got Charles Hollister killed. There was something going on in Hollister’s life in those weeks before he died. It started when the feds first approached him about the investigation into his company’s finances. He suddenly went back and reached out to all of these people from his past. Apologizing to people. It was like Hollister was reexamining his whole life. I sure wish I could figure out what he was thinking about at the end.”
“How do you find out what a man who’s now dead was thinking?”
“I have an idea about that …”
CHAPTER 59
IF YOU WANT to find out what a man is really thinking, the best way is to talk to the woman he’s been sleeping with. Laurie Bateman wasn’t talking to me anymore. But it didn’t appear as if Charles Hollister had been sleeping with her much before he died. He was sleeping with Melissa Hunt though. So I went to visit her again.
She seemed happy to see me. The story I’d aired about her had made her a star. Well, sort of a star. She told me how the interview had gotten her a bunch of offers to appear in movies, TV, and commercials. None of them seemed to me to be particularly desirable roles, more to take advantage of her sudden celebrity instead of her acting. I thought about how Laurie Bateman had made a career out of the same sort of celebrity status. It was kind of ironic that Hollister had been attracted to both of them. But then I suppose it wasn’t their acting ability that attracted him.
“I imagine you must think I’m a terrible person to be so happy about all this while poor Charles is dead,” she said to me when she was finished running through all those offers. “But, like I told you before, I don’t get anything from Charles’ will. Not a cent. It goes to his wife. Most of it does anyway, and the rest to his kids. I’ve got to take care of myself. So don’t judge me.”