Loverboy

by R. G. Belsky

  Fuchs slammed his gavel down. “Miss Robbins, that’s enough!”

  “He couldn’t screw her in bed, your Honor,” Kate finished, “so he decided to screw her any way he could.”

  Fuchs shook his head and looked over at the prosecutor. “Mr. Garrity?”

  Garrity didn’t respond right away. Instead he walked over to the prosecution table for another discussion. This one didn’t seem to go any better than the first. When he came back, he had a peculiar expression on his face.

  There was something really strange going on here. I had no idea what it was.

  “Your Honor,” Garrity said, “we agree to withdraw the charges against Miss Shannon.”

  There was an audible gasp from the crowd in the courtroom.

  The judge was as surprised as anyone.

  “You’re dropping the case?” Fuchs asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Let me get this straight. The State of New York spent a good deal of time and taxpayers’ money to get a warrant—which may or may not have been legal—to search this woman’s apartment. In it you found a collection of evidence allegedly linked to a mass-murder case. Then, after arresting Miss Shannon and holding her overnight and getting us all in this courtroom to deal with whatever it is you think you’ve got, you say: ‘Whoops—never mind!’”

  Garrity’s face turned bright red. This case wasn’t going to give his career a boost after all.

  “That’s right, your Honor.”

  “Why?”

  “I can’t say at this time.”

  Judge Fuchs impatiently slammed his gavel down again.

  “All right, case dismissed,” he said. “All charges against the defendant are dropped.”

  He looked at me. “Miss Shannon, the court officers will return any of your belongings, and you are free to go.” Then he turned to the bailiff. “Next case.”

  There was bedlam in the courtroom.

  The reporters were shouting out questions and trying to get to talk to Garrity or to me and Kate. She pulled me through a side entrance, then out into the hall and toward a service elevator. We just made it out of there. A pack of reporters descended on us as the elevator doors were closing.

  I thought maybe Kate had some answers, but she didn’t. She was as confused as everybody else.

  “What the hell just happened in there?” she said.

  Chapter 42

  Everybody cheered when I walked into the Blade newsroom.

  I hadn’t been exactly sure how the people there would react. It made me feel good. I didn’t have anybody waiting for me at home. I really didn’t have a family back in Ohio anymore. The newsroom was my only family.

  For the first time in a long while, I remembered how good I used to feel when I walked into the place. I remembered the magic. The electricity. All the reasons that I wanted to be a newspaperwoman in the first place.

  Maybe you can go home again.

  Barlow came over to my desk.

  “Congratulations,” he said. “I think.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’ve got a lot of questions, Lucy.”

  “I don’t have many answers.”

  “Let’s try.”

  We went through it all. I assured him that I hadn’t been drinking the night of the attack in the alley—and hadn’t made it up or imagined it.

  “What about the vodka bottle in your apartment?” he asked.

  “I keep it there as a reminder,” I told him.

  “A reminder of what?”

  “How shitty I felt after the last time I drank.”

  I said the clippings were from my scrapbook. I said I’d written the letters—and even tried to make them sound like Loverboy—because I was thinking of writing a book about the case. That was what Kate had suggested as a possibility in court. It seemed as good an answer as any.

  “And the gun?” he asked.

  “I bought it a few years ago.”

  “Why?”

  “For protection.”

  “Against who?”

  I shrugged. “Burglars. Sex maniacs. Escaped mental patients. It seemed like a reasonable idea at the time.”

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “From some cop.”

  “Do you remember his name?”

  “No.” I smiled sheepishly. “It was a long time ago.”

  “And the fact it happens to be the same kind of gun that Loverboy uses—that’s just a coincidence?”

  “Yeah.”

  There was a flaw to the story, of course.

  A big flaw.

  But no one—not the cops, Garrity the prosecutor or even Walter Barlow—had figured that out yet.

  At least I didn’t think so.

  Because if they had, I’d have never walked out of that courtroom a free woman.

  “We need to write a story on this,” Barlow was saying. “And it has to be objective. We can’t look like we’re slanting anything just because you work here. Janet will do the piece. She’ll talk to you first. Then she’ll get the police side of it too. All right?”

  “No problem,” I said.

  Janet.

  Janet was doing my story.

  Hey, don’t get me wrong. I like Janet. Janet was probably my best friend at the paper. We sat next to each other, we swapped newspaper stories, we talked about each other’s love lives. No doubt about it, Janet was one fine human being.

  But this was supposed to be my story.

  I went through it all again for her, just like I did with Barlow. She seemed embarrassed at having to interview me. I guess she was worried about offending me. Or maybe she was worried that I really was a murderer.

  “What do you think happened in court this morning?” she asked when we were done.

  “Some sort of technicality, I guess,” I said. “Even my lawyer can’t figure it out.”

  “That looked like a lot more than a technicality going on at the prosecution table. Those guys were seriously stressed out. Something blew up in their faces.”

  “Yeah, I need to find out what it was.”

  “You?”

  “It’s my story,” I said defiantly.

  “There are other stories, Lucy.”

  “Not for me there aren’t.”

  A commotion broke out in the newsroom. Everyone was suddenly gathering around a television set in the center of the office. Barlow gestured for me to come over too. I looked at the screen. Ronald Mackell’s face was on it. The owner of the Blade.

  “You better listen to this.” Barlow grunted.

  Mackell was talking to reporters in the lobby of the Mackell Building on Park Avenue. That was the headquarters for the Mackell Corporation, a far-flung conglomerate of properties and businesses that stretched around the globe. The Blade was one of them.

  “. . . and so I was appalled and shocked,” Mackell was saying, “to learn that one of my own employees was implicated in connection with this horrifying series of murders.”

  “The charges against Miss Shannon were dropped,” one of the reporters told Mackell.

  “Only because of some fast talking by a high-powered lawyer.”

  “But that was your lawyer,” the reporter pointed out. “She worked for the Blade.”

  “I never authorized anyone to represent Shannon. I believe that the police department of New York City does not arrest people for no good reason. They obviously had clear and convincing evidence of wrongdoing. I fully support their actions. And I believe this was a travesty of justice that took place in court today.”

  Barlow shook his head. “Jeez, his buddy could have written that for him.”

  “Who’s his buddy?”

  “Ferraro.”

  I stared at him. “The police commissioner?”

  “Sure.”

  “Ferraro and Mackell are friends?”

  “They have lunch together, they play handball together, they belong to the same country club. I think Ferraro even vacationed this year at Mackell’s house in the Hamptons
. Hell, Mackell’s one of the main people pushing Ferraro for mayor.”

  “Jesus Christ!” I said.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Thomas Ferraro just keeps turning up in the strangest places in this case.”

  Mackell was still talking:

  “And so I have notified the editor of the Blade that Ms. Shannon’s employment should be terminated immediately. There is no place for her in my organization. She is a disgrace to fine journalists everywhere.”

  I heard a gasp of surprise from behind me. It belonged to Vicki Crawford. She was standing there watching her husband’s performance with the rest of us.

  “You son of a bitch,” she said out loud to the screen.

  Then she looked at me.

  “Get back to work,” she said.

  “I’ve just been fired.”

  “Not by me you haven’t.”

  “But your husband—”

  “My husband is a very important man. My husband is worth eight hundred million dollars.”

  She’d raised her voice now and was almost shouting.

  “My husband also has a very young blond-bimbo mistress that he’s screwing twice a week in a suite at the St. Regis Hotel. We’ll be discussing all this in divorce court soon, and those are going to be the most expensive fucks in history for him. In the meantime, I’m still the editor of this newspaper. Now get busy. You’ve been working on this goddamned murder case for twelve years, and you still haven’t gotten it right. Don’t screw it up this time.”

  She strode off toward her office.

  “Does that mean I’m still on the story?” I called out after her.

  “You’re still on the story.”

  Way to go, Vicki!

  Chapter 43

  I needed some answers.

  A lot of weird stuff had been happening to me over the past twenty-four hours.

  I wanted to find out why.

  I wasn’t exactly sure how to do that, but I figured there was only one place to start.

  Back at the alley in Sheridan Square where I’d been attacked.

  My reasoning was pretty simple. I didn’t know how to find the killer. I didn’t know what was going on between the police and me. So I’d start in the alley. If I could prove that someone really had attacked me—and track down whoever did it—then maybe the rest of the pieces of the puzzle would fall into place.

  Sheridan Square looked much different in the daylight than how it had looked at night.

  The alley was still there, of course. But a construction crew was working on the sidewalk in front of it and a street peddler was selling his wares and lots of people were walking by. Looking at the place now, I thought it seemed unbelievable that someone had dragged me in there and tried to strangle me.

  But it had happened.

  I knew it had.

  I entered the alley and started searching for clues.

  Of course, the police had already been over it and found nothing. They certainly would have seen anything obvious. On the other hand, they probably hadn’t done that thorough a job, especially if they didn’t believe me. Besides, it had been dark, and Masters and Caruso hadn’t had that much time before our confrontation at the station house. So all I had to do was look for something that wasn’t so obvious.

  I walked slowly up and down the alleyway, going over every square foot of it the best I could. It was maybe sixty feet long, with some trash heaped up along one wall and a pile of construction debris toward the front.

  I didn’t find anything.

  When I was finished, I started from the beginning and did it again. I must have retraced my steps a total of ten times in all. The effort took me a couple of hours.

  That’s the only way I know how to do things. I cover stories the same way. I may not be the best reporter in the entire world, but no one is more diligent than I am. I don’t give up. I just keep going until I find an answer.

  The answer to the riddle of my attack turned out to be buried underneath some of the garbage. It was almost completely covered, probably because somebody had piled more garbage on top since I’d been there. That was why I had missed it at first.

  It was tiny and white, maybe only an inch or so in length. And it probably wouldn’t have meant anything to the police, even if they had found it. They’d never seen it before.

  But I had.

  And I knew where.

  Michael Anson didn’t look so pretty this time. Her face was bruised, she had a bandage on her forehead and one of her lips looked swollen.

  “What do you want, Shannon?” she said when she saw me.

  “Is that any way to talk to the woman you want to make the star of your movie?”

  “Fuck you.”

  I guess the bloom had gone off our relationship.

  “Problems in paradise?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but my problems are none of your business.”

  “Au contraire,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’ve got another problem for you.”

  I took out the white object I’d found and placed it down in front of her.

  “Ever seen that before?”

  She had, but she didn’t want to tell me.

  “It’s an animal’s tooth.”

  “So?”

  “You and I both know someone who wears animal teeth around their neck, don’t we, bunky?”

  “Micki,” she said grimly.

  “Bingo.”

  Anson sighed. “Look, Micki came and told me how she’d attacked you. I couldn’t believe it. I tell you—I was completely flabbergasted. No way I knew anything about it.”

  “Why did she do it?”

  “She heard us talking the last time you were here. I said something about all the publicity for the Loverboy case helping the movie, and she jumped to conclusions. She did it for me. She thought she was helping by making it look like Loverboy came after you. Micki’s not too bright, but she means well.”

  “How’d you get the bruises?” I asked.

  She grimaced.

  “Gionfriddo?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “Like I said, Micki heard us talking. She was upset about what I said to you—well, about wanting to get together. We had an argument. It got out of hand.”

  “I thought you said you could handle her.”

  “I was wrong.”

  I picked up the tooth and dropped it back inside my purse. I was going to need it. It was evidence.

  “Where are you going with that?” Anson asked.

  “To the police.”

  “Do you really think that’s necessary?”

  “Miss Anson, your pal Micki attacked me because she thought it would be good publicity for the movie. I know that doesn’t make a lot of sense, but that’s what she did. Okay, so maybe she thought murdering a few people—and making it look like Loverboy did it—would help the publicity for the movie too. Did you ever think about that?”

  “Micki would never kill anybody.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “I know her. . . .”

  “You were wrong about the beating,” I said.

  Then I went to find Mitch Caruso.

  I had a lot to talk about with him.

  Chapter 44

  Mitch Caruso was surprised to see me. But happy. I think.

  “I was going to call you,” he said.

  “Why?” I asked. “Did you want to come over and search my bedroom again?”

  “I’m really sorry about that. I was just doing my job.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m just glad I found out you were looking for evidence. Otherwise, I would have figured you for some pervert sniffing through my underwear drawer.”

  I smiled at him.

  “You seem to be taking this surprisingly well,” he said.

  “I’m trying to put the most cheerful spin on it that I can.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I need your help.”

  “To do
what?”

  “Prove you guys were wrong about me.”

  I took the tooth out of my purse and laid it down in front of him.

  “This fell off a necklace,” I said.

  “So?”

  “The person wearing the necklace was the one who attacked me in the alley.”

  I told him about Micki and Michael Anson and the movie. How Anson was in big trouble with the mob if her movie wasn’t a hit. How Micki decided she could help her lover if she created a lot of publicity for the movie. Maybe by attacking the reporter covering the story—and making it seem like Loverboy did it. Or maybe even by doing something worse.

  “You actually think she might have committed these murders to help the Anson movie?” Caruso asked.

  “It’s possible,” I said.

  “Is she that crazy?”

  “You thought I was that crazy, didn’t you? That I was going around shooting people to help my fading newspaper career. Whose idea was that anyway? Yours? Masters’s? Wait, don’t tell me—it was your uncle’s, wasn’t it? My old friend Police Commissioner Tommy Ferraro.”

  Caruso grimaced.

  “Look, you fit the profile,” he said. “Then, when we found that stuff in your bedroom . . .”

  “What profile?”

  “Loverboy’s. We had a group of top psychologists come up with a whole list of characteristics for the killer. Someone obsessed with the case. Someone mentally unstable. Potentially a substance or alcohol abuser . . .”

  “And that reminded you of me.”

  “There have been similar cases. Remember you were telling me about another serial-killer case you’d read about, where the murders just stopped too; then years later, the newspapers started getting notes from the guy again. And it turned out they were written by one of the cops in the original investigation who became so caught up in it that he started to think he was the killer. Well, we figured maybe the same thing had happened to you.”

  “So that’s why you asked me out?”

  “I asked you out the day we found Barry Tischler and Theresa Anne Vinas. That was before any of the new notes. I really wanted to date you.”

  “Gee, that worked out conveniently, then, didn’t it? You got a potential girlfriend and a prime suspect, all wrapped into one package. Neat.”

  Caruso shook his head. “It wasn’t like that, Lucy.”