by R. G. Belsky
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Wohlers grunted.
* * *
There was a big press conference later outside the crime scene. Wylie showed up for this one. It would have been hard for him not to be there for something so big. He went through the details of what happened inside Delvecchio’s apartment. I listened with everyone else and filed new updates to the office with Wylie quotes. He mentioned me as the one who got the phone call from the killer alerting police to the new victims.
Some of the reporters and media outlets wanted to interview me afterward.
Like it or not, I wasn’t just covering this story.
I was a part of it.
Of course, the cops wanted to interrogate me too about everything I could tell them from the phone call. I did the best I could. But I was pretty sure it wasn’t going to help much. Even the phone number that had shown up on my cell turned out to be a dead end. It was Delvecchio’s phone. She’d used it to make the call after she killed him. They were still hoping to find some fingerprints or other forensic evidence off of it, but that seemed to be wishful thinking too. When it was all over, I managed to intercept Wylie on the way to his car.
“I need to talk to you about something,” I said. “In private.”
There were a number of Wylie aides and police officers standing around us. He paused as the driver held the car door open.
“You can make an appointment with my office and—”
“We need to talk now.”
“What’s the urgency?”
“What I have to tell you is very important.”
Wylie nodded and motioned for me to get into the backseat of the car with him. Then he closed the door so we were alone while the others waited outside. I think at first he thought I wanted to talk about the job offer. He started saying how everything was in flux with the loss of Hammacher, so all staff appointments were on hold for the moment. He seemed rattled again—even more than he had at the press conference after Hammacher’s body was found. I told him I wasn’t here to talk about a job in his office.
“I’ve uncovered things that are somewhat . . . well, somewhat sensitive,” I said.
“Sensitive to who?”
“You.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Did you ever know a girl named Patty Tagliarini?” I asked him.
He looked at me blankly.
“This would have been a very long time ago. Back when you were in high school.”
“Yes, I believe so,” Wylie said slowly. “I remember a girl by that name when I was in high school.”
“Did you have a relationship with this Tagliarini girl?”
“What kind of a question is that?”
“I think it might be relevant to the case. I know it sounds improbable and way out of left field. But I need to have the answer to that question.”
Wylie sighed. “Yes, I had a relationship—as you call it—with Patty Tagliarini when I was in high school. I had relationships with several girls while I was in high school. The one with this girl was very brief. I only saw her a couple of times. She died in a car accident not long after I stopped seeing her. It was very tragic. But why are you asking me all of this?”
“Patty Tagliarini was Melissa Ross’s biological mother,” I said. “And she died in the exact same lake where Melissa Ross’s body was found thirty years later. Put there by the real Blonde Ice killer. What do you make of all that?”
I’m not sure what I expected to happen next. Wylie gasping in shock? Breaking down and telling me something that would blow the lid off this story? Awarding me an official Dick Tracy Crimestopper ring for my exemplary investigative work? But he didn’t do any of these things. He just listened intently as if I was talking about some other story that didn’t involve him.
I told him how I’d found out from Melissa Ross’s mother about the adoption, that I’d learned the name of the biological mother from the adoption agency, and the details I had come up with from Ohio about the accident and the Tagliarini girl.
I did not bring up anything about Houston. I’d discussed that with Marilyn. We figured that the Tagliarini stuff was based on facts that couldn’t be denied. Whether or not he patronized Houston when she was a prostitute would simply be her word against his. So, for now, I was keeping that juicy tidbit a secret. For now.
“I really don’t understand,” Wylie said when I finished talking about Munson Lake. “I mean I recognized the name Munson Lake when I heard where Melissa Ross’s body was found. But I assumed it was just a coincidence that it happened close to where I grew up.”
“And now that you know Ross was the daughter of the woman you were dating for a while back then—and died in the same place?”
“But what could any of that have to do with this case?”
“I’m not sure either. But I think the killer murdered Melissa Ross here in New York, then drove the body out to Ohio and dumped her into that lake—just the way her mother died in 1986—to send some kind of message. I have no specific theories beyond this. But there’s too much here for it all to just be a coincidence. It’s part of her game. And somehow that game now involves you.”
CHAPTER 37
WYLIE wants us to print the story about him and Melissa Ross’s biological mother,” I said at the morning news meeting.
“What did he say to you?” Marilyn wanted to know.
“His exact words were”—I looked down at my notes from the interview with Wylie and began reading from them—“ ‘I want to find out the answers to these troubling questions as much as you and your paper do. Please publish this story as soon as possible in the hope that someone may read it and come forward with more information. I am totally committed to doing whatever is needed to bring this Blonde Ice case to a successful conclusion.’ ”
“Jeez, that doesn’t make much political sense for him,” one of the editors muttered.
“Actually, it does,” I said.
I’d thought about this a lot since the Wylie interview. Before I came in and laid it all out for everyone at the news meeting. I didn’t mention that I’d told Marilyn all the Tagliarini stuff earlier and she’d given me the go-ahead to confront Wylie. She didn’t let on that she knew about it beforehand either. Which was kind of a shame because that would have driven Stacy crazy. But I wanted them both on my side, and that was a delicate balancing act.
“Wylie’s smart,” I said. “And cool under pressure. He never batted an eye when I brought up the Patty Tagliarini connection, even though he had to have been shocked to find out I knew about it. He must have weighed all his options very quickly and decided this was the best one. If he denied it, he’d just look foolish when the facts came out. If he tried to get me not to print the story, that would look like he had something to hide. He knew I was going to publish the story—one way or another—so he went with this approach. Full disclosure. Let the truth come out no matter what it is, he says to us. He’s on the same side as us, he just wants answers. Pretty smart, it seems to me.”
“It’s still going to be politically embarrassing to him,” Stacy said.
“Embarrassing yes, at first. But only by association. He didn’t do anything wrong here, he just got dragged into the case personally. He’s kind of a victim too, you might say. At least as far as we know.”
“Is there any possibility at all he could have had anything to do with the Tagliarini woman’s death?” an editor asked.
“Or that he’s the father of the baby who turned out to be Melissa Ross?” another one said, bringing up the same obvious points Marilyn had earlier. “That would explain a lot.”
I shook my head no.
“Wylie didn’t even know the Tagliarini girl until a year after she had the baby. Plus, she was alone in the car and there was no evidence of foul play. She just got drunk and drove off the road into that lake. The police ruled definitively at the time that her death was accidental.”
There was some more discussion about the
political fallout for Wylie and speculation about what the Blonde Ice case might have to do with all this, but in the end there wasn’t much more to say.
“Okay,” Marilyn said finally, “this is the easiest decision I’ve had all month. Let’s do what Wylie wants us to do. Print the story.”
* * *
This story—more than the others—really made a big media splash when we ran it. Maybe it was because the story had so many questions with no answers. Maybe because it was so wacky and unexpected how a high school romance was somehow linked to these serial killer murders. Or maybe it was just because there was so much interest in the Blonde Ice case that any new exclusive was going to get huge play. Everyone—the other newspapers, the TV stations, the cable news networks, and the whole damn Internet—blanketed it with coverage, commentary, and speculation.
There’s a tradition at the paper that when a reporter breaks a big story like this, he gets taken out for drinks at a place called Headliners to celebrate his scoop.
Which is what happened to me that night.
Hey, who am I to buck tradition?
Headliners is a newspaper bar that has been around for years—long before I was a reporter at the News. The walls are lined with pictures of great reporters, great editors, and great front page stories. Sitting in the middle of the place there’s even an old-fashioned linotype machine from the composing room of a New York City newspaper in the fifties. Walking into Headliners is sort of like going back in time. I loved it.
Once we were all there, Marilyn stood up and made a speech about how my story had beaten everyone else in town again. She also, of course, tried to grab a bit of the glory—making a big point of emphasizing that she was my editor for this wonderful piece of journalistic work. Then Stacy stood up and did pretty much the same thing. It was uncomfortable watching the two of them competing for attention like this, but also compelling in a way. Sort of like rubbernecking at a car accident. You just couldn’t look away.
At some point, Stacy came over and dragged me into a corner for a personal conversation.
“Have you thought much about your future, Gil?” she asked.
“You mean like retirement? Social Security? Medicare? Shuffleboard and checkers in Florida?”
She laughed—a little too loudly—at that. I wondered how much she’d had to drink.
“No, I’m talking about your future at the paper. There are big changes coming, Gil, and you can be a part of them. There’s the TV thing, of course, I can really make you a star. And there’s so many exciting opportunities ahead on the website. The print edition of the paper will continue to shrink in importance, maybe even disappear altogether. But that’s going to just open up even more possibilities for you. For you and me together.”
“You figure you’re going to be in charge of all this?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Not Marilyn?”
She looked over at Marilyn Staley on the other side of the room, then back at me.
“Marilyn is yesterday’s journalist,” she said to me. “I’m the journalist of today—and tomorrow. You’re going to have to make a choice between me and Marilyn very soon. Whose team do you want to be on? I hope that you’re going to be on my side. The winning side. What do you think about all of that?”
“I think I want another beer,” I said.
As I made my way to the bar, Marilyn intercepted me.
“What were you and Stacy talking about over there?” she asked.
“Oh, she was just asking my advice on some social media questions. She wanted to know if I preferred Instagram, Google plus, or Twitter. I said I generally went with AOL dial-up service, it seemed to me to be the way of the future. I also said I thought the Internet was a passing fad like hula hoops or the pet rock. She thanked me for my keen insights and that was pretty much it.”
“Who do you like better, Stacy or me?” Marilyn suddenly asked.
“What are we—in high school?”
“Answer the question.”
“Well, you did fire me once,” I pointed out.
I was afraid that Marilyn was really going to push for my support in her war with Stacy, just like Stacy had done a few minutes earlier. And I didn’t want to be a part of that discusson with her. I liked Marilyn. I really did. But Stacy was right about one thing. There was going to be a winner and a loser in all this, and I needed to stay on the side of the winner—whoever that might be. The longer I could put off picking sides in this battle the better it was for me.
But it turned out that at the moment Marilyn had something else in mind to talk with me about.
She was an old-time editor, and old-time editors are always the same when it comes to big stories. They’ll praise you for a big front page exclusive, take you out for drinks to celebrate, but—in the end—they always come back to you with that age-old editors’ question.
Which is what Marilyn did with me now.
“So what have you got for tomorrow?” she asked.
CHAPTER 38
I DID have an idea for where to go next on the story. Sort of.
I had been thinking about that college class.
The one on women’s empowerment.
Karen Faris attended it. So did Janet Creighton, one of the other women in Melissa Ross’s files. And both of them said that’s how they found out about Melissa Ross and her investigative agency specializing in wayward spouses. Somehow there was a connection between that class and Melissa Ross. And that connection could be the key to how the victims, or at least some of them, were selected. And to how Ross herself was involved. Someone in that class must have had a connection to her.
Except it wasn’t that easy.
Faris didn’t know the answer, and she said they didn’t even know one another’s names in the class. Neither did Creighton. And Dr. Kate Lyon, the instructor, refused to cooperate because of the doctor-patient confidentiality thing.
So where did that leave me? Where else could I try to find out the information I needed?
The college itself.
That’s where the classes were held.
Maybe they could help.
* * *
I never particularly liked going back to college campuses as a reporter.
For one thing, it brought back some bad memories. College wasn’t a particularly happy experience for me. My father died while I was in college, and I’d already lost my mother several years earlier. I thought too many of the journalism professors were idiots living in ivory towers who couldn’t cover a simple fire story if their lives depended on it. And all I wanted to do was get out of school and work at a newspaper, which I did for much of my time there, as an intern at the News.
Also, being around college students always made me feel old. It really didn’t seem like that long ago that I’d been a student just like them. But seeing all the young faces on a campus now made me remember that I wasn’t a kid anymore, I was pushing forty.
Finally—and I know this probably comes across as a bit vain—I’d never really had much luck with college coeds. I do okay with most women. But every female college student I ever tried to hook up with always seemed more interested in saving the environment or something than being impressed by Gil Malloy and his reporting credentials.
The student sitting at the reception desk outside the office of the university president was no exception.
She had been openly unfriendly to me ever since I told her I wanted to talk to Jackie Dowling, the head of the college.
“Who are you again?” she asked.
I told her and showed her my Daily News press credentials.
“A reporter, huh?”
“Do you read the News?”
“I hate newspapers.”
“A free press is the cornerstone of democracy,” I said.
“Is that why you people spend most of your time ignoring serious issues and writing about the size of Kim Kardashian’s butt?”
“The size of Kim’s butt is a pretty serious i
ssue.”
“I’m afraid President Dowling has no time in her schedule today for unannounced appointments,” she said haughtily.
“How about if I do my Ben Bradlee impression from All the President’s Men for the two of you?”
“There’s no way President Dowling can see you today,” she repeated.
“Perry White from Superman?”
She didn’t even crack a smile.
“Do me a favor and just ask President Dowling if she’ll see me,” I said. “If you do that, I promise not to write any more Kim Kardashian stories this week.”
She still didn’t smile back, but stood up, walked into the office behind her, and closed the door.
She came out a few minutes later, walking stiffly over to her desk.
“President Dowling says she will see you,” she said.
Terrific, I thought. Dowling would probably turn out to be another goddamned snooty academic who’d do anything to avoid helping me catch a killer.
* * *
Except it wasn’t like that.
Jackie Dowling was an attractive woman, in her fifties, with a warm smile and a friendly manner. When I came into the office, she strode quickly over to me from behind her desk and put her hand out to shake mine. I remembered reading somewhere that she had been in politics—working for the previous administration—before being appointed president of the college. So this cordiality could be political grandstanding. But, grandstanding or not, I was still glad to have it after the frosty reception I’d gotten outside.
“I’m so sorry you had to wait out there that long,” she said after I introduced myself and told her what I was looking for. “The minute Nicole told me, I said to bring you in here. I’ll do anything that I can to help you.”
I relaxed a bit. I liked Jackie Dowling. I told her what I was looking for.
“Have you talked to our adult education office?” Dowling asked after I finished.
“They say they don’t have records of the people in the classes. That it was handled completely by Dr. Kate Lyon, the instructor.”