by R. G. Belsky
“No.”
“Maybe you should.”
“I can’t involve the police.”
She’d stopped crying now. She took a tissue out of her purse and dabbed at her eyes with it.
“I think Walter has been cheating on me,” she said.
“Okay.”
“I’ve suspected it for a while.”
“With one woman or more than one?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Did your husband admit to you that he was seeing someone else?”
“No.”
“Do you have anything beyond your own suspicions to indicate that he is cheating on you?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know for sure?”
“A woman senses something like that. Especially a woman like me. Husbands would cheat on their wives with me all the time. I know the signs from being on the other side of that equation. I don’t know if it’s one woman or more than one or even prostitutes that he’s paying. But he’s more interested in them than in me.”
Looking at her again, I couldn’t imagine why Walter Issacs would want to cheat on this woman. No matter how beautiful some new girlfriend was.
“Listen,” I said, “you’re not the first woman whose husband has cheated on her. A majority of marriages in America wind up with some kind of infidelity. The rest of them . . . hell, they’re thinking about fooling around too, but they haven’t gotten up the courage to actually live out the fantasy. The whole idea of the happy marriage is pretty much a mirage these days, as far as I can tell.”
“You sound very cynical about marriage.”
“I guess I am.”
“Have you ever been married?”
“Once.”
“It didn’t work out?”
“She’s married to someone else now. So no, we did not live happily ever after. The only difference here is I can’t understand why your husband would want to cheat on you. You’re the kind of woman men sneak out on their wives to cheat with. Like you said, you know how that works better than anyone from all the men who paid you all that money back in the day to be with you. So why would your husband need to go to anyone else when he had you waiting at home for him?”
She smiled slightly now. “I learned a lot about men as Houston,” she said. “Men are always attracted to what they don’t have. Even if what they have is pretty darn good. I was far more appealing to men as a flirty and promiscuous call girl than I am as a wife and a mother, I guess. The grass is always greener, or something like that. Anyway, that’s how most men screw up their marriages. By not realizing how good a woman they’ve already got and going looking for more excitement.”
I nodded. She could have been talking about me and how I messed up my marriage to Susan, but I didn’t tell her that.
“So you think that your husband’s disappearance is somehow related to his playing around with other women?” I asked.
“I think so. I’m not sure, but . . . yes.”
“Okay, your husband is shacked up with someone else. I’m sorry, but it happens.”
“I just hope that’s all it is.”
“What else could it be?”
She reached into her purse. At first, I thought she was going to take out more tissues for her eyes. But instead she had a piece of paper in her hand.
“Did you ever tell anyone that I used to be Houston after that day you found me?” she asked.
“No.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Of course, I’m sure.”
“Not even your editor? Maybe to make sure you got your job back? Or a close friend? Or some woman you were sleeping with, in a moment of passionate outburst? Have you ever told anyone, anywhere, anything about how I really was the Houston in your story? I have to know the truth.”
“I’ve never told anyone,” I said. “Why would I? I have as much to lose as you by doing that at this point. Hell, knowing the truth about Houston and keeping it from my editors—it would have been a great follow-up story—that’s as almost as bad a journalistic sin as pretending I found and talked to you in the first place.”
“I have to know that I can trust you.”
“We share a secret, Vicki,” I said. “You and I both. We need to be able to trust each other.”
She hesitated for a moment, looking down at the piece of paper in her hand that she’d taken from her purse.
“I found this note under my front door,” she said. “While I was worrying about why my husband hadn’t come back. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to tell the police. Or any of my friends. All I could think of was you. You were the only person I could talk to about this. I kept hoping you’d have some answers. I almost wished you had told someone about Houston. At least it would make some sense then.”
“I’ve never told anyone,” I repeated.
“Then how do you explain this?”
She handed me the piece of paper.
I read the note.
It consisted only of a few words. Someone had written them on the paper in large letters with a red Magic Marker. The note said:
“I know where your husband is, Houston.”
CHAPTER 3
I WAS living on East 36th Street, just off Lexington, in the Murray Hill section. I’d moved there from Chelsea after breaking up with the last woman I’d been seeing. Before that, I’d been on the Upper East Side, where I’d moved from Gramercy Park after my marriage broke up. I had a problem staying in an apartment by myself where I’d spent a lot of time with a woman I loved. Too many memories, I guess. It was easier just to move on. At the moment, I was considering the possibility of moving to Brooklyn or Staten Island to get away from Peggy Kerwin.
I let myself into the empty apartment, grabbed a beer from the refrigerator, plopped down on my couch, and turned on the TV set. TV was the perfect solution for loneliness. TV was my true friend.
I clicked around through the channels—watching snatches of news, sports, cable reruns—and thought about Houston and her missing husband.
Before I left work, I’d talked to a police detective I knew named Frank Wohlers. I trusted him and I figured he could check into it quietly for me. I told him how Walter Issacs was a prominent attorney, and that his wife—who was a friend of mine—had become concerned because he had not come home. I did not tell him about his wife’s suspicions that he was cheating on her with other women. Or how I knew the wife. Or about the note she’d gotten, addressed to Houston. Those details might have to come out later, but I was hoping Wohlers would find out some answers without them. He said he’d make some discreet inquiries and get back to me as soon as he came up with anything.
There were still several problems I had with all this.
First, what would make Walter Issacs disappear? He’d never done that before, so why now? Even if he was running off with another woman, there were more logical ways to leave your wife. There was also the possibility of foul play, of course. But then wouldn’t he have shown up in a hospital or—worst case scenario—the morgue by now? I suppose he could have been kidnapped, but why target him? He was a successful lawyer, but he wasn’t famous or particularly high-profile or controversial. Kidnapping didn’t make any more sense than any of the other possibilities.
My second concern was over my own involvement in this. If whoever wrote that note knew about Victoria Issacs’s past life as Houston, then maybe they knew about my knowledge of it too. How I’d tracked her down and never told anyone—most notably my editors at the paper—that she really did exist. I didn’t like the idea of anyone else knowing that secret besides her and me.
Finally, and perhaps most troubling of all, Houston, I had thought, was finally in the past. The most traumatic thing I’d ever gone through, it dramatically affected my career, my marriage, my whole psyche, for years. I wound up having anxiety attacks from it. Attacks so bad that I needed to see a doctor and a psychiatrist and take medicine to battle the stress. It left me a different perso
n. But now I had thought it was finally over. That illusion was shattered when Victoria Issacs—aka Houston—walked into my newsroom that morning.
I finished off my beer, grabbed another one from the refrigerator, and switched around the channels looking for something to take my mind off all of this and my empty apartment and the many other problems in my life.
One of the cable channels was showing reruns of Mister Ed. Perfect. Wilbur was in trouble with his neighbors because Mister Ed had been making annoying phone calls to them. Everyone thought it was Wilbur making the calls, and he wasn’t able to convince them it wasn’t because he couldn’t tell them that . . . uh, his horse talked. With TV fare like this, who needed a woman around?
It had been more than six months now since Sherry DeConde left. We’d met while I was working on a big story that involved her and wound up in a pretty passionate romance for a while. She was a theatrical agent in Greenwich Village, and we split our time between her townhouse there and my apartment in Chelsea. In the end, it didn’t last though. She was much older than me, twenty-five years or so, although she still looked damn good and damn sexy. We might have survived the age difference, but we both also carried a lot of messy baggage from our pasts that in the end couldn’t be forgotten. Sherry had been married four times. She wanted to marry me too. She thought that would solve everything. I kept holding her off on the marriage stuff, and then one day she was just gone. The next time I heard from her she was in Europe. She traveled around there, finally settling down in Italy, where she met a count or something and married him. When I asked her why, she said: “I get married, Gil. It’s what I do.”
My ex-wife, Susan, had married again too. To an estate lawyer, or something like that. Susan was a prominent assistant district attorney in Manhattan, and the two of them together were a definite power couple. For a long time after our divorce I’d held out hope that she’d come back to me. Endured the other men in her life, even an engagement to another guy. But there wasn’t much I could do after she got married. That was pretty much the end of it for me.
And then there was the other woman in my life. Houston. I gotta say again that I couldn’t stop thinking about how good she looked when she came to see me at the News. The first time I saw her she looked more like a housewife and a mother. This time I could see the “Houston” sexiness that drove so many men mad for her. Maybe she’d glammed herself up to try to win her husband back. Whatever, it was all academic. She came to me because she was worried that her husband might be badly injured or dead or something. I decided it would be extremely tacky for me to ask her out on a date while she was waiting to find out.
I needed someone else.
There had to be another woman out there for me.
I mean what I was looking for in a woman really shouldn’t be all that difficult to find.
All I wanted was someone who was attractive, intelligent, interesting to talk with, a nice person and . . . well, not married.
* * *
I’d DVR’d a previous appearance I’d done recently on Live from New York with Bob Wylie, who was the deputy mayor for New York. I figured it might be useful to re-watch now since Stacy wanted me to interview him again. It used to make me uncomfortable to watch myself on TV. But now I sort of liked it.
At the moment, Wylie was the leading contender to be the next mayor. He had quite an impressive résumé—in politics, law enforcement, and private business. He’d been police commissioner in a few cities, most notably St. Louis, and then moved to New York, where he set up a lucrative private security business. After the current mayor of New York was elected, he recruited Wylie to be his top deputy mayor—creating a new role for Wylie in which he oversaw all aspects of law enforcement. This included the police, city anti-terror agencies, school safety, and coordinating with transit, fire, and federal agencies as well as community officials. The mayor and Wylie hailed this establishment of an overall law enforcement czar as an innovative approach for fighting crime in the twenty-first century.
It was a good idea. Maybe too good, at least for the mayor. Wylie racked up an impressive record in the job, dramatically cutting back crime and strengthening police ties with the community at the same time. But it was Wylie, not the mayor, who got most of the credit for it. He was a good-looking, charismatic guy who exuded energy and self-confidence. He’d become a media darling and his popularity soared. Now he was expected to run against the mayor in the upcoming election and—from what I’d found out at the News this morning—it appeared he wanted to drop a big hint about that to me.
The appearance I’d DVR’d was of Wylie at the Police Academy. He was there to talk to the graduating recruits about the rewards and responsibilities of a life on the force. One of the graduates was Vincent D’Nolfo—who I’d met when he worked as a bodyguard for a TV star named Abbie Kincaid. D’Nolfo and I hadn’t gotten along very well at first, but—after Abbie was murdered—we kind of bonded and kept in touch. He’d been an Army Ranger in Iraq and Afghanistan when he was younger, but then bounced around between private security jobs. I suggested—and even put him in touch with someone in the department I knew—he take the NYPD entrance exam. He did it just before reaching the maximum age of thirty-five, and now was one of the oldest police recruits on record. I set up an on-air meeting between him and Wylie which turned out to be pure media gold. D’Nolfo told Wylie a moving story of how his best buddy in Iraq had died saving his and other soldiers’ lives during an ambush. He said he always carried a picture of his dead friend with him in his pocket now and knew that the friend would somehow watch out for him on the streets of New York too. Wylie spoke eloquently as he praised D’Nolfo’s service to both his country and his city.
Afterward, Wylie took me aside and talked to me privately for a while.
“That was great,” he said. “Hell, you just did more to make me look good than my goddamned PR director has done since he started.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” I told him.
“What do you mean?”
“Most PR people are useless,” I said. “Like that old joke about them: How many PR people does it take to change a lightbulb? I don’t know, I’ll have to get back to you on that one.”
Wylie smiled at me.
“Can you and I speak frankly, Malloy?”
“Sure. Speak frankly.”
“I’ve asked around about you. People say you’re a helluva reporter. Smart, talented, relentless, fair . . .”
“All qualities of mine. And don’t forget modest.”
“They also say you’re a total pain in the ass to work with.”
“That might be a little too frank,” I told him.
He said he had a lot of people working for him. Some good, some not so good. His top aide was a guy named Tim Hammacher who was tough, not afraid to upset people—a real ball-buster, as Wylie put it. He wanted someone else like that to join his team. Someone like me, he said.
“Do you mean in the deputy mayor’s office?” I asked.
“I’m talking about in the mayor’s office when I get to city hall.”
I figured the whole thing was a win-win situation for me. If I did wind up taking a job with him, it would mean a lot of money and power and prestige. I doubted that I would make the move because my only real ambition is to be the best reporter in the world. But it didn’t hurt to have an ally in the potential future mayor. I’d told him that day at the Police Academy I’d think about the job offer. I figured I could string him along that way for a while. In the meantime, I could get some inside stuff from him and this guy Hammacher on his campaign.
* * *
My part of the Live from New York telecast was over now. I clicked off the DVR and went back to channel surfing. Just in time too. The Mister Ed episode was wrapping up. Wilbur was in the barn with Mister Ed when his wife, Carol, brought him his lunch there. Then she kissed him and left. God, I envied Wilbur. A pretty wife. She brings you your lunch and kisses you. Plus you have a talking horse too.
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Now that was a perfect marriage.
Not like my marriage.
Or Walter and Victoria Issacs’s.
I wondered what had happened to Walter. I could call Wohlers and ask him if he’d found out anything yet. But Wohlers worked the day shift, and he probably had gone home by now. Besides, he had promised to get back to me with any information.
One way or another, I’d soon find out something.
The best-case scenario was that Issacs had indeed run off with some other woman and not told his wife.
The worst-case scenario . . . well, I wasn’t sure about that.
But I had a bad feeling—a reporter’s instinct, I guess—that there wasn’t going to be a happy ending to this story.
“So where the hell is Walter Issacs?” I said out loud to myself.
CHAPTER 4
THEY found him the next day. Stabbed to death in a posh midtown hotel room.
“It’s bad,” Wohlers said when he called me at the office with the news.
“What happened?”
“Maid found the body when she went in to clean the room this morning. He’d been stabbed multiple times. I mean we’re talking about a lot of stab wounds. There’s blood all over the place. It looks like he’s been dead for a couple of days. I’m here now. Hotel Madison, just off of 47th Street.”
“Any idea what Issacs was doing at the Hotel Madison?”
“I think he was having some kind of sexual assignation.”
“What makes you think that?”
“There was semen found on the sheets of the bed.”
“Always a clue.”
“So you want to tell me again how you’re involved in this, Malloy. And exactly what you know or don’t know about Walter Issacs. And his wife. This is a murder case now. No more bullshit.”
“I’m on my way to the hotel now,” I said. “I’ll tell you what I can when I get there.”
I grabbed a cab outside the Daily News building. On the way uptown, I dialed Victoria Issacs’s number. I was sort of hoping she wouldn’t pick up. I really didn’t want to be the one to break this news to her. But it turned out I didn’t have to worry about that. She already knew her husband was dead, and the gory details of how it happened. The cops had managed to notify her before I made the call.