by R. G. Belsky
She smiled.
“I guess I have two major goals,” I told her. “First, I want to try to win Susan back and make our marriage work this time. I know what I have to do to be with her again. I need to change. I need to become a better person. I keep thinking back on all the things I did—and all the things I didn’t too—that doomed our relationship the first time. Do you remember when I told you about sleeping with Nikki Reynolds once when she was trying to get me to do a book deal? Somehow, when I remember that story, I always forget about a big part of it. I like to think that Houston and all the things that happened afterward drove me away from Susan and into Nikki’s bed. But that’s not the way it happened. I was still on top then. It was before Houston. I had everything, and yet I still wound up in bed with someone like Nikki. Houston didn’t break up my marriage to Susan, like I always say. I broke up my marriage. That’s the kind of guy I was back then, Dr. Landis. I don’t want to be that guy again.”
Landis had been writing this all down in her notebook. But when I looked now she had put the pen down and the notebook sat unused on her lap.
“What’s the second goal?” she asked.
“I want to solve the Kennedy assassination.”
I thought that would startle her. But it didn’t seem to. Almost as if she was waiting for me to say it. I guess she had me down pretty well by that point.
“I went to see Lee Mathis before I came here,” I said. “He doesn’t have much time left. You can see him slipping away quickly now. I think what he uncovered in that book might be the most significant thing we’ve found out about the assassination in the half century since it happened. Think about it. Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t shoot Kennedy. He wasn’t even there that day. That means everything we know—or everything we thought we knew—about one of the most important and history-changing events of our time is wrong. And we have to start all over again to try to figure out what really happened. Someone has to keep doing this. It won’t be Lee Mathis. But I don’t want everything he did—everything he found out about his father Lee Harvey Oswald and the events in Dallas—to die with him. There’s something else too. Those threats against me—the phone call in New Orleans—I still don’t know for sure who did that.”
“Brad Lawton, presumably.”
“That’s the most logical person. I know he sent me the first letter with the Kennedy half-dollar to get me started on the whole thing. So it makes sense that he did all the rest of it. But maybe it was someone else. Someone besides Lawton who just didn’t want the Kennedy case reopened again after all this time for reasons we’re not aware of yet. On the other hand, maybe it all means nothing. There are so many questions I still have—”
“And you really think that after all this time you can answer all the questions and finally solve the Kennedy assassination?”
“It would be the greatest story of my life. Maybe the greatest story ever. If I’m really as great a reporter as I like to think I am, maybe I can pull it off. So whatever I do going forward—whether I’m a reporter or a teacher or anything else—that’s what I want to do. I want to find out who killed John F. Kennedy.”
“And do you plan to do all this by going back to being a newspaper reporter again?” Landis asked.
“You told me once, when we started this, that you thought being a reporter was part of my problem. That I based everything in my life on my worth as a reporter. And that this prevented me from confronting, and dealing with, some of the real issues in my life. I didn’t buy that then, but now I think there’s something to what you said.”
She tapped her pen on her notebook, like she was thinking carefully about what she wanted to say before the words came out of her mouth.
“I believe—and this isn’t necessarily me as a psychiatrist talking—that most of us are put on this earth for a purpose. I believe that my purpose is to do what I do in this room. And I believe that you were meant to be a reporter. It’s the one thing you do well, the one thing you’re passionate about, the one thing that seems to be a part of your inner being as a person. It’s almost as if being a reporter is part of your DNA, Malloy. I don’t want to see you just throw this all away.”
“Weren’t you on the other side of this debate before?” I smiled.
“For the record, I think you can find answers to your life at the same time as being a reporter. I didn’t think that when you first came to see me. But then you were defensive and unwilling to talk about or confront any of the issues in your life. You’ve made a lot of progress. We’ve made a lot of progress together. Because you’re willing to open up now and talk to me about everything—even your innermost secrets. That’s very important. I’m proud of you.”
Except that wasn’t really true.
I hadn’t told her everything.
There was one secret I was still keeping inside of me.
Chapter 54
WHEN I THINK about my life now, I divide it into two parts.
Before Houston.
And after Houston.
No matter what happened with the Kennedy and Reyes stories, no matter what I ever do in the future, that story I wrote about a legendary New York City girl named Houston was clearly the defining moment of my career. The story, and the repercussions from it, changed me irrevocably. And so now, if I truly wanted to confront the mistakes of my past and find some sort of closure so that I didn’t make them again, I had to confront the truth about Houston too.
Which is why I found myself standing outside a town house on Sutton Place in a ritzy neighborhood on the East Side of Manhattan.
A pleasant-looking blond woman in her thirties answered the door when I rang the bell.
“Mrs. Walter Issacs?”
“Yes.”
“Hello, Houston,” I said. “I’m glad to finally meet you.”
Her face flashed with what I first thought was anger but then realized was sadness. Her shoulders sagged. She dipped her head briefly, and I wondered if she might cry. But then she lifted her head and looked me directly in the eye. She was a tough lady. The street made you tough.
“How did you find me?” she asked.
It wasn’t easy. I’d spent much of my free time after leaving the Daily News going back on her trail, trying to finally find out what happened to her after all this time and, even more important, if she really existed. I eventually tracked down someone who told me she’d confided to a couple of people that she was getting married. She said she’d fallen in love with a man who was going to take her away from the life of prostitution. She told them he was a lawyer.
I determined the last time she’d been seen on the street or was actually known to be active in the call girl business, then went back through all marriage licenses issued for that year. Then I cross-referenced them against the listings in the American Bar Assocation for lawyers in the New York area.
I started knocking on doors of the addresses of every one of them. I did the same thing each time: said “Hello, Houston” whenever a woman answered the door. None of them knew what I was talking about. Until I knocked on the door of Mrs. Walter Issacs.
Houston.
Her real name, she said, had been Vicki Ellison. We sat in her living room filled with designer furniture and plush carpeting and expensive-looking paintings, and she told me the story of how she had gotten there. About growing up in Minnesota and being shunted around from foster home to foster home after her parents died in a car crash. About the foster father who repeatedly raped her until she finally ran away. About hitchhiking to New York City where she dreamed of becoming an actress or a model. And about how she’d instead wound up turning tricks under the name of Houston.
She was good at what she did. So good that Houston became a legend. But she didn’t want to be a legend. She just wanted a life.
And so when she got the opportunity to live a real life, she jumped at it and never looked back.
It was a perfect life—or at least as close to a perfect life as anyone could live—until I showed up at her door.
“I’m the reporter who wrote a series about you in the Daily News,” I said.
“I know who you are.”
“I looked for you then, but I couldn’t find you. If I had, my career—my life—would have been different. People didn’t believe you existed. But here you are. It makes all the difference for me.”
“And now you’re going to walk out of here and tell the whole world the story.”
I didn’t say anything.
“My husband doesn’t know anything about my past. It would destroy him. Destroy our life together. My children, my friends, the people at our country club—they only know me as Victoria Issacs. I walked away from being Houston a long time ago. I left her behind when I married Walter. But now you’re going to open all of that up for me again, digging up my past, by writing a story about finding me.”
She sighed.
“I guess I always knew that one day someone like you would show up at my door. I used to think about it all the time. Every day I wondered when this would all come to an end. But I just kept taking things one day at a time. Trying to be a good wife. A good mother. The best person I could be.
“I’m an artist now. Did you know that?” She pointed to some of the pictures on the walls I’d noticed when I came in. “I painted those. I’ve sold a lot of my work at art houses and galleries and shows over the past year or so. I’ve always liked to draw and paint, and now I’ve discovered I have the real talent for it. Funny how things work out in life. I guess I’m not exactly what you were expecting, huh?”
She looked at me, waiting to see what I would say. Looked at me with piercing blue eyes. Looked at me like she must have looked at men as Houston to sell herself to them. But she wasn’t trying to sell me anything. She was pleading with me. Pleading not to take away her life.
“I’m not going to write a story about you,” I said.
“Why not?”
“I don’t have any reason to do that.”
“Of course you do. You write the story about finding me and it vindicates you. Makes you a big star reporter again. The man who tracked down Houston, the legend of the New York City hookers. I’m your winning lottery ticket.”
“I’m not going to write a story about you, Mrs. Issacs. I’m not going to tell anyone. Your secret is safe with me. You have my word on that.”
She looked confused.
“But you spent all this time, all this effort to track me down. Why do all that if you weren’t going to tell the world that you were right back then when you claimed I existed? If you’re not going to do that, why did you look for me now?”
“I needed to find you for myself,” I said.
It was a beautiful September day with the sun shining brightly on the East River when I left the town house of the woman who was called Houston in another lifetime. She had made mistakes in her life—bad mistakes—but somehow she persevered and battled back and built an entirely new life, a better life, for herself.
“I guess I always knew that one day someone like you would show up at my door. Every day I wondered when all this would all come to an end. But I just keep taking things a day at a time. Trying to be a good wife. A good mother. The best person I could be.”
Maybe one day that will happen to her. Someone else will track her down and reveal her secrets and take away this life she has built.
But not me.
And not today.
On this day, Vicki Ellison, who went on to be Houston and now was Victoria Issacs, continued to hold on to the belief that she could somehow make up for all the bad choices she had made, put the past behind her, and become the kind of person she once hoped she could be.
Maybe we do get second chances in life.
Houston did.
So why not me?
Acknowledgments
This is a work of fiction. There is no Lee Harvey Oswald Jr. No secret grandson. And no history-changing trip to New Orleans on the eve of the assassination. But the questions that remain about the death of President John F. Kennedy more than a half-century later are very real. It is the greatest murder mystery—the biggest crime whodunit—of our time. So I decided to write this book about what might have happened if a newspaper reporter somehow uncovered a link between a series of present-day murders in New York City and the events in Dallas on November 22, 1963. This was more than just an intriguing story line for me. It also gave me a unique opportunity to use my own fascination with the JFK assassination story as a basis for my fictional character’s obsession with the same topic.
Thanks to the following for their help:
Nalini Akolekar of Spencerhill Associates, who is the kind of agent every writer dreams of having and did such an amazing job of turning The Kennedy Connection from what I thought might be a pretty cool concept for a suspense novel into a reality.
Todd Hunter at Atria Books, whose enthusiasm for Gil Malloy’s relentless pursuit of Page One exclusives has made it possible for Gil to come alive in this book, as well as more Gil Malloy books to follow.
Greg Gittrich of NBC News; Michael Goodwin and Ed Kosner who ran the New York Daily News when I was there; plus Rupert Murdoch and everyone else at the New York Post for giving me the opportunity to spend my career working at the best job anyone could ever have—being a journalist in New York City. The Kennedy Connection may be fiction, but a lot of the newspaper zaniness in the book is pretty damn authentic. I met a lot of Gil Malloys along the way.
And thank you, most of all, to Laura Morgan. For everything.
About the Author
Photograph by John Makely
R.G. Belsky, a journalist and author based in New York City, is currently the managing editor of news for NBCNews.com. Prior to joining NBC in 2008, he was the managing editor for the New York Daily News, the news editor for Star Magazine, and the metropolitan editor of the New York Post.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by R. G. Belsky
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Cover design and photo illustration by Tony Mauro
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Belsky, Richard.
The Kennedy connection : a Gil Malloy novel / R. G. Belsky.
pages cm
1. Journalists—Fiction. 2. Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917–1963—Assassination—Fiction. 3. Oswald, Lee Harvey—Family—Fiction. 4. Assassins—Fiction. 5. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. I. Title. PS3552.E53385K36 2014
813'.54—dc23
2013047387
ISBN 978-1-4767-6233-3