The Kennedy Connection

by R. G. Belsky

  Bratten’s story went on for nearly forty inches. It was filled with all sorts of details—the same kind of details I would have used—about the crime. The color of the victim’s purse. A description of the jewelry. The exact position of the body when it was found. A vivid picture of the scene in Union Square Park around her: The grassy expanse in the middle of the park. The trees that had hidden her body until daylight when the dog walker discovered her. The type of dog he was walking (a black-and-tan miniature dachshund). Even the fact that a coin had fallen out of the victim’s purse—possibly in a struggle with the assailant—and been found lying next to the body. The coin was a Kennedy half-dollar. Bratten noted the tragic juxtaposition of the Kennedy coin next to the dead woman of the same name.

  All in all, it was a helluva job of reporting by Carrie Bratten.

  Which pissed me off even more than the fact that she was doing the story instead of me. I wanted to find something wrong with it. I wanted to believe that I could have done a better job on the story if someone had just given me the chance. But I couldn’t find any real flaws in her work. She was as good as I was. Or at least as good as I used to be. That pissed me off even more.

  I took another refill on my coffee and reread the article from beginning to end. That’s when it hit me.

  A Kennedy half-dollar had fallen out of the victim’s purse and been found near the body. The victim’s last name was Kennedy. That was just a bizarre coincidence, of course. A tragic twist of fate, as Bratten described it in her story. Except for one thing. A few days before, Nikki Reynolds had talked to me about a book she was trying to promote about the John F. Kennedy assassination.

  Another coincidence?

  Probably.

  But I’d always been taught as a reporter never to trust in coincidence.

  “There are no coincidences,” an old newspaperman had taught me when I was starting out as a cub reporter. “There’s always a reason for everything. Coincidence should be your last option for an explanation—after you’ve tried everything else and still can’t explain an event or a series of them. You go to the facts, the facts never lie. That’s what being a reporter is all about. If the facts fail you and all you’re left with is the coincidence explanation, then maybe it really is a coincidence. But let me tell you something, son, that hasn’t happened to me very often. Coincidences are the easy answer, the simple way to wrap up a story. But they often lead you into the wrong direction, away from the truth. Go after the facts if you want to find out the truth.”

  I finished my coffee, put the paper under my arm, and walked to the Daily News building a block away.

  Chapter 6

  HOW MANY KENNEDY half-dollars are there in circulation at the moment?” I asked Carrie Bratten.

  “What?”

  “A ballpark figure is fine.”

  “I have no idea.” Bratten shrugged.

  She looked annoyed that I’d even come over to her desk in the Daily News city room to talk to her. That was okay with me. Lots of people got annoyed when I talked to them these days. I wasn’t very popular in the city room anymore. That bothered me at first. But I was getting used to it.

  Bratten was blond and cute and kind of sexy, I suppose, but in a pretty obvious way. She wore short skirts, high heels, and low-cut blouses and sweaters, which attracted a lot of attention in the newsroom and out on the streets as she chased down stories.

  Some female reporters play down their looks and their sexuality because they want to be taken seriously. Not Carrie Bratten. It was pretty clear she would do anything for a story. And I mean anything. Of course, I didn’t have any direct evidence that she’d actually slept with some of her sources to break exclusives, but that was the kind of ambitious, hard-driving, do-whatever-it-takes journalist she was.

  I’d heard her father was some kind of big-shot plastic surgeon or something from Boston, and she had that spoiled, rich-girl aura about her. Maybe if we’d met under different circumstances I might have been at least a little bit attracted to her. But not here. Not now. Now Carrie Bratten just pissed me off every time I saw her or her damn byline.

  “When the Kennedy half-dollar first came out after JFK’s assassination, it was incredibly popular,” I said. “They made nearly three hundred million of them in 1964. But, as the years went by, they didn’t turn them out nearly as much. At some point, people pretty much stopped using half-dollars altogether. Did you know that most cash register drawers in stores don’t even have a spot to put half-dollars these days? Slot machines in Vegas and Atlantic City used to take them, but now they’re pretty much all computer driven with tickets instead of coins. The number of Kennedy half-dollars has declined dramatically over the years since JFK’s assassination. Last year, there were only a million or so of them. They’re not easy to find.”

  “When did you become such an expert on Kennedy half-dollars?” she asked.

  “I’m not. I looked up all this information. Just like you could have done.”

  “Why bother?”

  “I was curious. Maybe you should have been more curious about it too.”

  Her eyes narrowed. She tried to keep the bored/annoyed look on her face. But I could tell I’d struck a nerve. She suddenly could see where I was headed with this.

  “What’s your point?” she asked with more bravado than I knew she was feeling at that moment.

  “Your murder victim’s name was Shawn Kennedy.”

  “So?”

  “There was a Kennedy half-dollar found next to her body.”

  “A coincidence.”

  “Probably.”

  “You said there were still a million Kennedy half-dollars out there . . .”

  “Right.”

  “No reason one of them couldn’t have wound up in the victim’s purse, then fell out in the struggle with the killer.”

  “No reason at all.”

  “Like I said, just a coincidence with the name.”

  “Except there were three hundred million Kennedy half-dollars in circulation in 1964, and there are only a million now.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning it would have been a lot less of a coincidence back in 1964 than it is now.”

  She nodded. Grudgingly. I’d made my point.

  “What am I supposed to do with this information?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Then why make such a big deal out of telling me?”

  “I always figure that it’s better to know stuff about a story than not know about it. That’s the way I always work as a reporter. That’s the way good reporters work. They ask questions. They check out details. They try to make sure they get the whole story. Of course, I’m not sure if that matters to you, Carrie.”

  I walked back to my desk, feeling satisfied—and, truth be told, a bit ebullient—over what I had just done.

  The truth is the Kennedy half-dollar found next to the Kennedy woman’s body probably did mean nothing. But I’d planted a seed of doubt in her mind. I’d seen something that she missed. Plus, I’d pissed her off.

  All in all, it was a win for Gil Malloy.

  I sure as hell didn’t have many of them these days.

  So I tried to savor the good feeling of this one for as long as I could.

  Which turned out to be about five minutes.

  Marilyn Staley sent me an email saying she wanted to see me in her office right away. That could mean a lot of things. None of them good.

  “How are you doing, Marilyn?” I asked when I sat down in a chair in front of her desk.

  “Fuck you, Malloy.”

  “Interesting response. Not exactly an answer to my question, but . . .”

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “Topic?”

  “Carrie Bratten.”

  “Oh.”

  “Ca
rrie says you tried to steal her story. You told her you could do it better than her. She said you were confrontational, condescending, and downright rude to her.”

  “I’m not sure you can be confrontational and condescending at the same time,” I pointed out.

  “Let me tell you something, Malloy. Carrie Bratten is a very bright, very talented, very highly thought of reporter on this paper.”

  “She’s also a snitch. She really came to you and whined all this crap about me? Well, that settles it, I’m not giving her any more reporting tips.”

  I stood up to leave. There wasn’t much more to say. Just before I got to the door, though, I turned around and looked at Staley.

  “I can still be a good reporter, Marilyn,” I said.

  “That ship sailed a long time ago.”

  “If I just got a good story to work on . . .”

  “Like I said, those days are over for you.”

  “I’m not giving up. I’m still a reporter. No matter what you think about me now. Look, I know I deserve a lot of what happened to me. But I can’t dig myself out of this hole I’m in by writing about lottery contest winners or bridal showers or new animals at the Bronx Zoo. I’m just looking for another chance. Another chance to prove myself. Another chance to be a real journalist again.”

  “It would take a miracle for that to happen,” Staley said.

  Chapter 7

  WHEN I BEGAN working on the Victor Reyes case a few weeks earlier, I needed a starting point. So I went to see Reyes’s mother. It seemed like as good a place as any.

  She lived in a really bad section of the Bronx, a neighborhood of abandoned buildings, boarded-up stores, and street corners owned by drug dealers, pimps, and gangs.

  Her apartment was small and inexpensively furnished, but neat and taken care of—almost as if it were a sanctuary from the nightmarish streets outside. Camille Reyes was about sixty. She had gray hair and a face that looked as if she’d once been pretty but was now worn out after years of struggle.

  I sat in her living room and talked to her about her son.

  “Why do you want to write about Victor?” she asked me right off.

  “He’s a good story,” I said.

  “And you really think that the readers of your newspaper will care about some poor kid from the Bronx who died?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “The police didn’t care,” she said. “On the night Victor was shot, the police were here for a very short time. They asked a couple of questions and then I barely heard from them again. My son wasn’t an important case to them. He was just a kid from a bad neighborhood who nobody really cared about very much. Not the police. Not you people in the press. No one.”

  “Well, we’re going to try to do better by your son this time,” I said.

  “The only one who ever cared was Roberto.”

  “Roberto was a close friend of mine,” I said, exaggerating our relationship a bit to try to get her on my side.

  “And now he and Victor are both dead.”

  She picked up a picture of her son from a table next to her and looked at it. It was a picture of Victor as a young man before the shooting. He was standing, not in a wheelchair. I wondered if that’s how she wanted to remember him.

  “Victor was trying to turn his life around just before he was shot,” she said. “He was taking night courses to get a high school diploma; he got a job; he promised me he was going to quit the gang life. He was very excited about all of this.”

  I wrote down everything she was saying in my notebook.

  “The job was especially important to him. It was the first real job he ever had. He was working as a busboy at Fernando’s, a restaurant in a much nicer Bronx neighborhood than this. Victor liked it there. He talked about how maybe he’d even like to own his own restaurant one day. I thought it was a crazy dream, but Victor had a lot of dreams back then. He seemed so happy. And I was so proud of him.”

  “And the dream died after he was shot?”

  She nodded. “His life was over at nineteen. He couldn’t work; he couldn’t have a relationship with a woman; he couldn’t have a normal life anymore. That heart attack he had wasn’t what killed him. It was that bullet fifteen years ago. It just took him a long time to die.”

  She looked down at the picture in her hand again and started to cry. I waited until she stopped and pulled herself together before continuing.

  “What do you remember about the night Victor was shot?” I finally asked softly.

  “It was about eight p.m.,” she said, her eyes still glistening with tears. “Victor told me he was going out. A few minutes later, I heard a gunshot. I ran outside and Victor was lying there on the street. I held him in my arms until the ambulance came.”

  “Did he say anything to you?”

  “He asked me why he couldn’t feel his legs.”

  She began to cry some more. I waited again.

  “Did he see anyone inside the vehicle who shot him?”

  She shook her head.

  “I heard there was a description put out for a young Hispanic man in a car as the shooter.”

  “Victor said he never saw anybody,” she said.

  Fernando’s restaurant went out of business a couple of years ago. But I was able to track down an old staff employee roster and found the names of some of the people who worked there. One of them, a guy named Miguel Pascal, owned another restaurant in the Bronx now.

  “Do you remember Victor Reyes?” I asked Pascal.

  “Sure, we worked together at Fernando’s when I was just starting out. He was a busboy, I was a waiter. Then he got shot.”

  Pascal was going about his business in the kitchen of his restaurant as we talked—checking out orders, tasting menu dishes being prepared, and supervising the kitchen help.

  “Reyes just died,” I told him. “He had a heart attack. Apparently brought on by being in a wheelchair all these years.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “I’m trying to find out who shot him.”

  Pascal shook his head. “It sure took someone long enough to give a damn about that.”

  “Better late than never.” I shrugged.

  Pascal took a sip now from a pot of soup cooking on the stove in front of him. He made a face and told the cook it needed more seasoning. Then he turned back toward me.

  “The police suspected at the time it was a gang shooting,” I said. “Maybe Reyes was shot because he was a member of a rival gang.”

  “Not anymore he wasn’t.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Victor quit the gang life. He told me so.”

  “When did he tell you that?”

  “A day or two before the shooting.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “As a matter of fact, he did. He wanted to join the police force. He had a friend or a brother or somebody who had gone to the Police Academy and changed his life around. Victor wanted to do the same thing.”

  “Did he say who this person on the police force was?”

  “No, he never gave a name to me.”

  That was okay.

  I knew who it was.

  Roberto Santiago.

  Victor Reyes had wanted to turn his life around just like his friend Roberto Santiago had by becoming a police officer and leaving the gang life behind.

  But someone had shot him first.

  Chapter 8

  THE NEXT THING I did was go talk to Roberto Santiago’s widow. There had been no official record of any follow-up police investigation with the Reyes shooting. Just the long-ago original one from fifteen years ago. That wasn’t altogether surprising. Santiago had admitted this was personal to him. So he might not have wanted to do it officially or even tell his superiors what he was doing. Still, even if he was doing it off duty, he must have
talked to someone about it. He talked about it with me. Maybe he talked about it with someone else too.

  His wife seemed like the most likely person he would have confided in about anything he discovered.

  Miranda Santiago was an attractive dark-haired, olive-skinned woman in her thirties. We sat in the living room of her house on Staten Island, which was filled with pictures of her husband. Dressed in his official blues for a formal event. Wearing casual stuff around the house and the neighborhood. The worst pictures of all—the hardest to look at—were the ones of him and his children. A boy twelve years old, a girl who was eight, and another boy just a year old.

  “It’s still so difficult for me to accept,” Mrs. Santiago said to me. “When you’re a policeman’s wife, you know what comes with the territory. Every day, when you say goodbye to your husband before he goes to work, it could be the last time you’ll ever see him. Roberto’s life was on the line every day with that job. He knew that, and I did too. And maybe if he’d been killed chasing down a murderer or stopping a bank robbery or trying to rescue someone from a fire . . . well, maybe that would have been easier to accept. But this . . . this is too senseless. A drunk driver. A damn drunk driver. And Roberto wasn’t even on the job when it happened. He was crossing the street on his way home to me and his children, and then . . . he was just gone.”

  I let her talk like that for a while. Because I’d seen it before. The anger over the randomness of it all. The sadness and the grief over the loss of someone you loved so much. And, most of all, the realization that the person was now gone forever from your life. Finally, I brought up Victor Reyes.

  “The person Roberto grew up with in the Bronx,” she said sadly.

  “Yes.”

  “He died a few months ago.”

  “Roberto told me he was going to try and find the person who shot him fifteen years ago. Did he ever talk to you about this, Mrs. Santiago?”