Loverboy

by R. G. Belsky

  Kate was about forty, with long dark hair and piercing brown eyes. A strand of hair fell into her eyes now. She pushed it back. I imagine she didn’t have much time to comb it and get dressed this morning. She lived on Long Island with her husband and two young children. Probably had to wake up the husband, make sure someone looked after the kids and then grab a train or cab into the city before she could even deal with my problems. Kate Robbins lived a normal life. Like most people. I wondered what that was like.

  “I talked to the arresting officers before I came in here,” she said. “This is what they’ve got:

  “One, a scrapbook filled with clips from the case. Which doesn’t mean anything, because you’re a reporter and you keep clips of a lot of stories.

  “Two, three Loverboy letters which were never found at the scene of any of the crimes. They say that’s proof you were leaving the letters yourself. But we claim you were just trying to get into the killer’s mind, or writing a book about the case, or some shit like that.”

  “Three, there’s the gun. A Bulldog forty-four revolver. That’s not a real problem if it doesn’t match up with any of the murders, but big trouble if it does.”

  I felt light-headed. It was getting difficult to breathe. For a second, I thought I might faint. I couldn’t believe that any of this was happening to me.

  I was scared—really scared—for the first time in a long while.

  “So where does that leave us?” I finally managed to ask her.

  “Best-case scenario—they get you for tampering with evidence or maybe even planting evidence because of the letters. They also nail you for possession of an unregistered gun. That works out to a prison term of anywhere from between four and seven years.

  “Worst-case scenario—the gun matches the Loverboy killings and they’ve got you dead bang for murder. That’s an automatic life sentence, with no possibility of parole for at least thirty years. You could even go to death row. There’s a death penalty now in New York State.”

  I let my breath out slowly.

  “I’m not wild about either option.”

  “Me either.”

  “Any other alternatives?”

  “Yeah, we get all their evidence ruled inadmissible.”

  “How?”

  “Well, they had a warrant to search your apartment. That seems legal enough. But why did they get the warrant? Did they have probable cause? That’s the big question.”

  I told her about learning Mitch Caruso had been nosing around my bedroom.

  “He probably found the stuff, told Masters, and they came back for it with a warrant,” I said.

  “Did you invite Caruso into your apartment?”

  I thought about our conversation on the sidewalk in front of my building.

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “But not to search it?”

  “No, for a cup of coffee. We were on a date. Or so I thought anyway.”

  “Okay, that’s good. We can argue that he obtained entry to the premises by misrepresenting himself. As far as you were concerned, he was not acting in his capacity as a police officer. He was a private citizen when he went through that door. It might work.”

  I nodded.

  “Kate, can I ask you another question?”

  “That’s what they’re paying me for.”

  “Aren’t you going to ask me if I did it?”

  She shrugged. “That’s none of my business.”

  “Don’t you want to know?”

  “Look, if you want to discuss your guilt or innocence, that’s up to you. But I cannot do anything about it. And I can’t let it affect the way I defend your case. That’s my obligation as a lawyer. Do you understand?”

  “So even if I tell you I’m guilty, you can’t tell anyone?”

  “That’s right.”

  “It’s lawyer-client privilege?”

  “Yes.”

  I thought about it for a long time before I decided. But I really had no choice. I never did.

  “I want to talk about it,” I said.

  I told her everything. It was the first time I’d ever done that with anybody, and once I started, it just came pouring out. Kate didn’t speak, she didn’t move, she didn’t take any notes. When I was finished, Kate reached over and put her hand on top of mine. She squeezed it softly.

  “Is that all of it?” she asked.

  “Everything.”

  “Jesus Christ!” she said.

  That was when I began to cry. I hadn’t cried since I was a little girl. I’m not a weeper. I didn’t cry when Jack Reagan died. I didn’t cry when my marriages broke up. I didn’t cry when I was in rehab. But now it all came out like a tidal wave, years of it bottled up inside me so much that I thought I would never stop.

  “Lucy, I think you should see somebody about this,” Kate said.

  “You mean a psychiatrist?”

  “Yes.”

  “I already am.”

  “For how long?”

  “Twelve years,” I said.

  Chapter 40

  “I need help,” I remember telling Dr. Collett. “I’m a mess.”

  “You mean your drinking?” he said.

  “My drinking. My relationships. My life.”

  “Do you like drinking?”

  “Like it? Yes, I like it. Actually, I love it. When I’m drinking, I’m on top of the world. I’m funny. I’m perceptive. I’m sexy. I’m not worried about missing a big story or the state of my love life or any of the things that eat me up inside a lot of the time. When I’m drinking, I’ve got it all. I’m Superwoman. My favorite place in the world, except maybe a newsroom, is a bar. Any time is good. But the best times are the quiet times. Late afternoon, before the evening crowd arrives. Or the early-morning hours, after most of them have gone home for the night. Sitting there with a vodka in my hand—well, that’s just heaven for me. It’s the answer to all my problems.”

  “I thought drinking was your problem,” Dr. Collett said.

  “Sometimes it’s the answer too.”

  “Do you want to talk about your other problems?”

  I went silent. How could I answer a question like that?

  “Not right now,” I finally replied. “Maybe another time.”

  That was my first session with Dr. Collett.

  It happened right after I broke off my relationship with Jack Reagan, and I tried to deal with my drinking for the first time. I’d been going to see him ever since. Once a week, fifty-two times a year, for the past twelve years. I’m not sure it’s done me much good. But I keep going because I don’t know what else to do. People who are drowning don’t complain about the lifeline someone has thrown to them. They just hold onto it for dear life and hope to be rescued.

  Dr. Collett was my lifeline.

  We talked about a great deal of things.

  My marriages, for one. He was fascinated that I always seemed to be attracted to police officers.

  “They call us cop-fuckers,” I said. “Women who get turned on by men in blue.”

  “Is that what you are?”

  “People say so.”

  “What do you think?”

  I pondered that.

  “I cover cops for a living. I’m around them all day and night. They’re pretty much the only men I spend time with. So I hang out with them. I drink with them. Sometimes I date them. And sooner or later, I usually wind up marrying one of them.”

  Husband Number One was a real by-the-book, “I bleed police blue” detective. He came from a family of hero cops, and he was the exact opposite of Jack Reagan. Which I guess was why I married him. Husband Number Two was almost a carbon copy of Reagan, so that was doomed to failure. Husband Number Three was somewhere in between and lasted the longest—three years.

  There were lots of things wrong in all of the marriages, but the one constant was my drinking. In the end, that was what made it impossible for anybody to live with me. I generally had the drinking under control at the beginning of the relatio
nship, but then it got progressively worse.

  Was it my drinking that made the marriages go bad?

  Or was I drinking because the marriages were bad?

  Which comes first—the chicken or the egg?

  Dr. Collett and I also talked about my career.

  I told him how I agonized over every story. How I fretted that whatever I did wasn’t good enough. How I tossed and turned at night, replaying every assignment. How I would wait by the newsstand for the delivery of the other papers—terrified they would have something I didn’t. Dr. Collett said I was very driven and compulsive when it came to my newspaper career. He seemed to think that was significant.

  He wanted to know about my childhood. So I told him about my parents, Joseph and Rose Shannon; growing up in Garfield Heights, Ohio; feeling alienated because I was still gawky in those formative teenage years and never seemed to fit in with the popular kids’ crowd; and how I was compulsive about success even back then—always determined to get the best grades and join the most extracurricular activities to prove that I was better than anyone else.

  “Did you have boyfriends?” Dr. Collett asked me.

  “Not until my senior year.”

  “What happened in your senior year?”

  I smiled. “I got pretty.”

  “Pretty?”

  “One morning I looked in the mirror and I wasn’t gawky anymore. I’d grown up. Guys that never even looked at me before suddenly were pestering me for dates.”

  “So things got better for you after that?”

  “No.”

  “But you just said . . .”

  “Not better. Different.”

  But despite all our hours together—all the conversations over the entire twelve years I’d been seeing him—Dr. Collett and I never talked about my real problem.

  The reason I’d finally decided I needed to start seeing him.

  The closest we came was on the day I brought up the blackouts.

  They were getting worse. I’d started waking up in strange places without any memory of what had happened the night before. Once I drove twenty miles in my car and didn’t remember a bit of the trip. Another time, I woke up alone in a hotel room without any idea how I’d gotten there. And then there was the morning I found a used condom in my bed. I’d had sex with someone the night before, but I didn’t know who. For days afterward, I was afraid to meet the gaze of men in the office or on my police beat, wondering if it might be one of them.

  I sometimes wondered what else I did during these blackouts.

  Did I sit in my apartment and write letters from Loverboy to myself?

  Did I leave them at murder scenes and then pretend to find them?

  Or did I do things even worse than that?

  I talked about it this one time with Dr. Collett.

  “The thing I want to know,” I told him, “is whether it’s possible I might do something bad during one of these blackouts.”

  “Define ‘bad.’”

  “Unpleasant. Harmful.” I paused. “Violent.”

  “You mean, hit someone with your car and then flee? Or have sex with your father or somebody with AIDS, or be a mass killer? Something like that?”

  I nodded.

  “The rule of thumb for behavior during blackouts is pretty simple,” he said. “You don’t do anything during them that you wouldn’t do while you are conscious. If you’re the type of person who likes to take their clothes off and dance naked on top of barroom tables, you might do the same thing during a blackout. Otherwise, your moral inhibitions will stop you. It’s like hypnosis. A hypnotist can’t make you do something you feel is morally wrong. Our moral compasses keep working even when the rest of the brain shuts down.”

  “So you’re saying I would never do anything bad during a blackout?”

  “‘Bad’ is a relative term.”

  “Okay, really bad.”

  “Give me an example.”

  I pretended I was thinking about it.

  “Let’s take a totally extreme example,” I said. “I couldn’t murder anybody during a blackout. Right?”

  “Not unless you ever murdered anybody while you were conscious.” He smiled at me. “You haven’t, have you?”

  I smiled back. Then I changed the topic in a hurry.

  That wasn’t what I wanted to hear.

  You see, I knew the answer to his question.

  And that was my real problem.

  Chapter 41

  A hearing was set for later that morning.

  I wasn’t sure what to expect. That’s pretty funny, actually. I mean, I was a goddamned criminal-justice reporter. I’d covered a million court appearances like this. I could recite the routine from memory.

  But this wasn’t just another case or another story. This was me. This was real life. So I sat there in the courtroom with Kate holding onto my arm for support as I waited nervously for my fate to be decided, the way thousands of others before me had sat and waited.

  “How are you doing?” Kate asked.

  “I’ve been better.”

  “Just remember, you don’t say anything except for two words. What are they?”

  “‘Not guilty.’”

  “Say them again.”

  “‘Not guilty.’”

  She leaned closer to me and spoke right into my ear.

  “Now, if the judge asks you any other question, you let me handle it. If the prosecution says anything, you let me handle it. If you’ve got to go to the bathroom, you tell me and I’ll handle it. If you see a fire break out in the courtroom, don’t say anything. Just tell me and . . .”

  “You’ll handle it.”

  “I’ll yell ‘Friggin’ fire,’” she said.

  I smiled.

  “Now, do you have it all straight?”

  “I think so.”

  The courtroom was packed, mostly with reporters and TV crews. Barlow and Janet were there in the Blade section. So was Victoria Crawford, which was a surprise. And Norm Malloy. I was a real piece of Blade history for him now—the first reporter ever to be arrested as a serial-killer suspect.

  No question about it, I was definitely a media event. I thought about how strange it was to be sitting at the defense table instead of back in the press section. One thing was for sure—if I ever covered another court hearing, I’d never see it the same way again. If.

  My arraignment was before Judge Russell Fuchs. I knew Judge Fuchs. I’d been to a few political dinners with him, and I think we even danced together at one of them. Of course, he was pretty drunk, and so was I.

  Not that any of that mattered, though. He’d had acquaintances and even celebrities pass through his courtroom before. A few years ago, he sentenced a former chief judge to prison for extortion. There was also a city councilman brought up on corruption charges, I believe. So he wasn’t likely to get too rattled by a reporter whom he maybe danced with once a long time ago.

  “What happens when this is over?” I asked Kate.

  “We ask for bail,” she said.

  “Will I get it?”

  “Not if they charge you with murder.”

  “Do you think they will?”

  “I don’t know. This whole case is screwy. I’m not sure they know exactly what they have, or why they’ve got it. Maybe we can use that to our advantage.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just wait.” She grabbed my arm again. “Okay, here we go.”

  The bailiff stood up.

  “Criminal Case Eighteen-Nine-Oh-Six,” he called out. “The people of New York versus Lucy Shannon.”

  I got up and walked toward the judge. Kate was right behind me.

  The prosecuting attorney was named Garrity. He was about thirty-five, with an expensive pinstriped suit and a great haircut. He looked like a young hot-shot on the way up. This was his lucky day. A high-profile event to cut his teeth on. He must be really happy, I thought.

  Only he didn’t look happy. He looked confused. He seemed to be havi
ng an argument at the prosecution table with somebody from his office. I could hear raised voices, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying.

  “Anytime you’re ready, Mr. Garrity,” Judge Fuchs said.

  He didn’t answer right away.

  “Mr. Garrity?”

  “Sorry, your Honor.”

  I glanced behind him. Masters and Caruso were there. Masters was reading something out of a notebook. I wondered if he’d be called to testify against me today. Caruso caught my glance and smiled. A sad smile. I looked away.

  Judge Fuchs gazed down at me. If he recognized me, he didn’t show it.

  “Miss Shannon, you have been charged with possession of an unregistered weapon, filing a false police complaint and obstruction of a criminal investigation. There are also potentially more serious charges pending against you, depending on the outcome of ballistics tests involving the weapon. How do you plead?”

  I looked over at Kate. She nodded.

  “Not guilty,” I said in a loud voice.

  Fuchs nodded. This was all pro forma stuff.

  “Is there a bail request?”

  “We make a motion that the defendant be freed immediately on her own recognizance,” Kate said. “Failing that, we request that bail be set at a reasonable amount—taking into account Miss Shannon’s reputation as a respected journalist and responsible citizen with no previous criminal record.”

  Fuchs turned to Garrity. “Counselor?”

  But Kate wasn’t finished.

  “But before we even talk about bail, I move that all the charges against my client be dropped,” she said.

  Fuchs rolled his eyes. “C’mon, Miss Robbins. You know the purpose of this hearing is to accept a plea and decide on bail. You’ll have a chance to argue your client’s case at a later date.”

  “There are unusual circumstances in this case,” she said, “that I feel need to be addressed right now.”

  “What unusual circumstances?”

  “The police had no reason to go into my client’s apartment. They did so only because Miss Shannon was out on a date with the arresting officer. He later took out his personal animosity toward her by—”