by R. G. Belsky
Another night, we came out of a place in Queens and found a double-parked car blocking ours. Jack took out his gun and shot out the guy’s side and front windows. Someone called the cops that time, but they just told us to go home and sleep it off, after they found out who Jack was. Cops always look out for other cops.
There were lots of other times—when he’d been drinking—that Jack would drive too fast or play music deliberately loud or just go out of his way to get into an argument with people over some trivial point.
You never knew when one of his rages would happen.
Like the night we were at my house, and he was watching a Yankees baseball game. He’d made a big bet on them winning. When a guy from the other team hit a home run, Jack went ballistic. He kicked in the screen of my television, sending glass flying all over. When I tried to calm him down, he hurled me against a wall. The next morning he sent me flowers at work, and a long note of apology. That night he took me dancing at the Rainbow Room and told me how much he loved me.
So there were definitely problems in the relationship.
But nothing I couldn’t handle. No big deal. Just a few little blips marring the otherwise happy romance of Lucy Shannon and Jack Reagan.
Until the night at Finnegan’s.
That was when it all started to go wrong. . . .
Chapter 24
By the end of August, Jack Reagan had become obsessed with catching Loverboy.
That was understandable, I guess. He’d been chasing him for a long time—from the time the police first figured out the killings were related. There’d been nothing but dead ends over the years. Witnesses who knew nothing. Leads that didn’t pan out. Suspects who had airtight alibis. Meanwhile, the killer was still out there, taunting us all as he carried out his deadly business. No wonder Jack was frustrated.
Jack had another goal too. He not only wanted to catch Loverboy, he wanted to do it before Ferraro did. The two of them were partners in name only now. They hardly even spoke to each other. Jack did his work on the street with me, while Ferraro hung out at the task-force headquarters downtown—rubbing shoulders with the brass.
I guess it worked for him too, since he wound up being police commissioner. But Jack didn’t care about that stuff. Jack was a cop, pure and simple. He just wanted to make the biggest arrest of his career.
Funny about him and Ferraro. You couldn’t ask for two more opposite types. Ferraro was a by-the-book, spit-and-polish, “yes sir and no sir” guy. Jack was a rebel. A guy who never followed the rules. Maybe that was why I identified with him. I’d been like that all my life too. Now I had a partner.
Sometimes we’d sit around and dream about what would happen if he caught Loverboy.
Jack said there’d never be anything he could do to top that. He talked about getting off the street afterward and taking a desk job. Or maybe retiring and buying a place upstate so he could go fishing. Or even going into business for himself as a security consultant or private investigator.
But I didn’t think any of that was really going to happen. I couldn’t see Jack Reagan ever being happy doing anything except being a cop—and drinking his nights away in bars.
Anyway, like I said, he was definitely getting more and more intense about Loverboy. Every lead, every tip that came along—he was convinced that was the one that was going to finally crack the case wide open.
There were a lot of tips and leads.
All the publicity surrounding the case had everybody looking at a friend or lover or neighbor as a potential Loverboy. A lot of these people meant well; others just wanted to cause trouble. But thousands of names poured in to the task force, and each name had to be checked out.
Some of the names came from women who wanted to get even with ex-boyfriends who’d jilted them. Or from mothers convinced that their sons were perverts because they’d never married. Other names in the task force’s bulging files belonged to genuine nutcases. They just didn’t happen to be our nutcase.
Whenever one of Jack’s suspects didn’t pan out, he got very depressed. Sometimes he didn’t believe it. He’d say he should be the head of the task force—that Ferraro was bungling the whole investigation. Jack was convinced Ferraro would do anything to screw him. That Ferraro wanted to keep all the glory from the Loverboy arrest—whenever it finally happened—for himself.
I suppose I should have been worried about Jack a long time before I was.
The turning point came on the Friday night before Labor Day.
I was finishing up a story on deadline when Jack called. It had been a long day—I’d covered a press conference, done some interviews and spent a few hours at the task-force headquarters—and an even longer night the night before. We’d closed some bar in Washington Heights at about 4 a.m. All I wanted to do now was go home to my bed and sleep.
“We’re going to Finnegan’s Bar,” Jack announced.
“Where’s that?”
“Queens.”
I sighed. “Not tonight, Jack.”
“I think he’s there.”
“Who?”
“Who? Loverboy, that’s who.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’ve got a snitch who put me onto this guy. His name is Raymond Lyons. He perfectly fits the profile of Loverboy that we got from one of the shrinks—an angry loner, lives at home with his mother, uncomfortable with women. And he’s been hanging around this bar, talking about the case. Saying all the dead girls had it coming.”
“It’s probably just another false lead.”
“What if it isn’t? Do you want to miss out on the arrest of the century?”
That was what did it.
Finnegan’s turned out to be a place filled with a blue-collar crowd, a few construction workers and even some college kids. It was just another bar. It seemed like I’d seen a thousand of them with Jack in the past few months. He was already drinking when I got there.
“Where’s Raymond Lyons?” I asked him.
“Not here yet.”
“So what do we do now?”
“We wait.”
Jack was drinking bourbon. He finished it off and ordered another, along with a vodka martini for me. I didn’t like the look in his eye. He seemed out of it, almost a little crazed. I realized he’d probably started drinking a lot earlier that evening. Maybe he’d been drinking all day.
It was three hours later before Raymond Lyons showed up. Jack was pretty well out of it by then. I was drinking a lot too, but I wasn’t in nearly as bad a shape as he.
Jack walked over to Lyons, flashed his detective’s shield and told him he was on the Loverboy task force.
“I understand you’ve been talking about the murders a lot in here,” Jack said.
“Yeah,” Lyons told him. “So what?”
He was a short, almost frighteningly thin guy with glasses, maybe in his early twenties. He didn’t seem worried about why a cop wanted to talk to him. That was strange. It’s not the right guy, I thought to myself. He’s just another nut looking for attention. I wanted to drag Jack out of there, but it was too late for that now.
“You know anything about the killings?” he asked Lyons.
“I might.”
“Like what?”
“That’s for me to know and you to find out.”
He laughed loudly at his remark.
“You think it’s funny?” Jack asked.
“I think it’s hilarious.”
“Why?”
“They were all bitches. They deserved to die.”
Jack stared at him. It was a scary look.
“Raymond, are you Loverboy?” he asked.
The kid just smiled. “What do you think?” he said.
Jack asked the question again.
Lyons gave the same answer.
You could tell Jack was about ready to explode. But Lyons didn’t seem scared. He didn’t seem worried. He still had this strange smile on his face, like it was all a big joke.
I wal
ked over and stood next to the two of them. I was sipping on a vodka martini and watching nervously as this drama unfolded in front of me. I didn’t know what else to do.
“Are you Loverboy?” Jack asked him again.
“What do you think?” Lyons repeated.
Then he looked over and saw me for the first time. I guess he realized Jack and I were together.
“Do you know what I’d do if I was Loverboy, Mr. Policeman?” he said.
Lyons nodded toward me.
“I’d take out my forty-four and use it on this bitch.”
He was leering at Jack now. Taunting him.
“First I’d mess up her pretty face. Then I’d stick the gun between her legs and blow her twat from here to kingdom come. I guess that’d make fucking her a little difficult for you, huh?”
Everything turned into a blur after that.
Jack punched him in the face—and he went down. Then Jack hit him again. After that, he started kicking him. Jack was like a madman. Everybody else in the bar—including me—just watched in horror, afraid to try to stop him. Lyons’s face was a mess and he was coughing up blood. Every time he hit him, Jack asked the question over and over again: “Are you the killer?”
Lyons wasn’t answering anymore with “What do you think?” He wasn’t answering at all. I’m not sure he could.
Finally Jack picked him up and sat him down on one of the bar stools.
“Let’s you and me play a game, Raymond.”
He took out a revolver.
“Did you ever play Russian roulette?”
Raymond Lyons looked scared now. He must have realized at last that he was dealing with someone even crazier than he was.
Jack emptied all the bullets out of the gun. He held up one of them for Lyons to see. Then he put it back into the gun—and whirled the chamber.
“I’m going to ask you the question again. This time you’re going to give me the right answer.”
He put the gun up to the side of Raymond Lyons’s head.
“Are you Loverboy, Raymond?” Jack asked.
The guy was crying now. He tried to shake his head no.
“Wrong answer,” Jack laughed.
Then suddenly he pulled the trigger. There was a click as the hammer came down on an empty chamber. Lyons screamed. I looked down and saw a puddle of liquid forming underneath the bar stool. Raymond Lyons had wet himself from fear.
“Hey, you won that time, Raymond,” Jack said.
He held up the gun again and whirled the chamber another time.
“Let’s play again.”
I have no doubt Jack would have killed him. He would have kept spinning that chamber and pulling the trigger until Raymond Lyons confessed he was Loverboy. But it didn’t work out that way. Someone had managed to call the cops. A couple of them came through the door now with guns drawn.
They knew Jack. Cops never want to give another cop trouble. They tried to play it cool.
“What are you doing, Jack?” one of them said.
“Questioning a suspect.”
“A bit unorthodox, isn’t it?”
It was a tense moment. This could go either way. The cop was trying to diffuse the situation by treating it lightly. But if that didn’t work, he was going to have to shoot Jack.
“You don’t like Russian roulette?” Jack asked.
“Put the gun down,” the cop told him.
“It’s a fun game.”
“Not for the victim.”
Jack looked at the trembling man on the bar stool.
“Sure it is.” He laughed. “Just ask him.”
“C’mon, Jack . . .”
“Hell, I’ll prove it to you. I’ll play the damn game myself.”
Jack took the gun, spun the chamber again and suddenly put it up to the side of his own head.
“Jesus, Jack!” the cop yelled.
“See, I’m not afraid at all.”
He pulled the trigger. There was another click. The chamber was empty.
“Hey, I guess it’s my lucky day too.” He smiled.
They got the gun away from him after that. Everyone wanted to keep the whole thing quiet, so the cops eventually put me and Jack into a police car and took him home. Lyons was hospitalized for a week. I don’t know if he ever told anybody what happened. As for the other people in the bar, I guess they didn’t want to get involved, because Jack was never brought up on any charges.
That night I undressed Jack and put him to bed. I lay there next to him in the dark, worried about him and even more worried about me. At one point he woke up and reached over to hug me.
“What the hell were you thinking about back there in the bar?” I asked.
Jack smiled. “It was no big deal, Lucy.”
“Russian roulette? No big deal? You could have killed yourself.”
“There’s a trick to playing that game.”
I stared at him.
“What trick?”
“G. Gordon Liddy said it best. The Watergate guy. He used to do this gimmick in bars where he’d hold his hand over a lighted flame. Someone asked him what the trick was. He said the trick was, you had to not mind the pain.”
I still didn’t understand.
“That’s the trick to playing Russian roulette,” Jack said. “You just have to not mind dying.”
Chapter 25
Jack Reagan was out of control.
I knew that now.
But what about me?
I was with him day and night. We worked together, ate together, drank together and—last but certainly not least—slept together. Was I the only voice of sanity and reason in his otherwise troubled life? Or was I part of the problem too?
The day after Finnegan’s is when I made my first try at dealing with my drinking. I had nothing stronger than diet soda at lunch. That night after work I didn’t do my usual barhopping. Instead I went home, made myself a quiet dinner and read a book.
I know it doesn’t sound like much, but it was a start. A start at a normal life. There’d be a lot more of those kind of starts—mostly false ones—over the years until I finally faced up to my demons.
Of course, the first step in battling demons is figuring out who they are.
I desperately needed to sort out what was good and what was bad about my life.
I’d just witnessed firsthand what the pressures of the Loverboy case had done to Jack. Was the same thing happening to me?
I wanted to talk to somebody about it, but I wasn’t sure where to turn to.
I was afraid to ask any of my editors at the Blade because I thought they might decide to take me off the Loverboy story.
I didn’t have any real close friends to confide in—I’d been too busy working ever since I came to New York to make any.
So, in the end, I tried my parents. I didn’t really think they’d have any answers for me. They’d never had in the past. But old habits die hard.
“I need help,” I told my mother when she got on the phone from Ohio.
“How much do you need?” she asked.
“It’s not about money, Mom. I make plenty of money. The Blade pays me well.”
“What’s wrong, then?”
I told her about all the pressures of the story I was working on, about my not-so-perfect relationship with Jack Reagan, about all my fears and insecurities that had come bubbling to the surface; most of all, I talked to her for the first time about my drinking.
I said that somehow all my problems always seemed to revolve around the drinking.
“So why don’t you stop drinking?” she said.
“I—I can’t. . . .”
“Then you should try harder.”
Beautiful.
So instead, I decided to try to fight it on my own.
I tried to help Jack too. I really did. I asked him to go to a counselor with me or an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, or to ask the police department for help. He wasn’t interested. In fact, he got very angry when I suggested it and stormed o
ut of my apartment.
I didn’t hear from him for three days. When I did, it was pretty ugly. He woke me up with a phone call in the middle of the night. I could hear the sounds of a bar in the background. He sounded very drunk.
“Get your ass over here, Shannon!” he said.
“Where are you?”
“Duran’s. It’s in the fucking West Forties somewhere, way over by the river.”
“I’m not drinking with you tonight, Jack.”
“Are you still on that crazy kick?”
“It’s not crazy. I’m just trying to take it easy for a little while. You should think about it too.”
“When the hell did you become such a goddamned do-gooder? You used to be fun. Now you’re as much a pain in the ass as my wife used to be.”
He’d never mentioned a wife before. I wondered where she was.
“I found him,” he whispered into the phone.
“Who?” I asked.
Even though I already knew what he was going to say.
“Loverboy.”
“C’mon, Jack, you’re not going to start that again. . . .”
“No, it’s really him this time. I swear.”
“How do you know?”
“I was in his house.”
“You broke in?”
“Yeah, I know it’s illegal. But so is killing people. Let me tell you, his place is a gold mine of evidence. Loverboy clippings pasted on all the walls, bloodstained clothes and even a forty-four. I’ll bet we can match the gun up with the bullets found in the victims. This is the real deal, babe.”
I wasn’t so sure.
“How drunk are you, Jack?”
“Would you get off that kick and just meet me here at Duran’s? I’m going to go arrest him—and I want you with me. You should be a part of it. We’re a team. Shannon and Reagan. Together forever, right?”
“I think you should call this in to the task force downtown,” I said. “Let them handle it.”