by R. G. Belsky
“What if Sandy Marston wasn’t the one who really killed Lucy Devlin?” I blurted out.
“He confessed.”
“Allegedly.”
“He even told the authorities where to find the body.”
“What if they already knew?”
“Why would they already know that?”
“Elliott Grayson was the chief law enforcement official in the shootout where Marston died. He also was the lead investigator in the excavation of the six bodies of those children in New Hampshire. And Louise Carbone claimed he was there with a little girl who looked like Lucy Devlin.”
“So what does that all mean?”
“I’m not sure, Jack. Not yet. But there’s something wrong with this guy. I’ve felt it all along. We’ve got to stop him before it’s too late.”
Faron let out a huge sigh. “Every expert, every politician, every poll is convinced that Grayson will be the next Senator. The voters love him. Our viewers love him. Hell, my own wife and kids love him. Not only that, the owner of this station had a dinner party the other night where Grayson was the guest of honor. He’s one of the most powerful men in this city. And now we’re looking to accuse him of all sorts of potential wrongdoing and crimes, even though we’re not sure yet exactly what they are?”
There’s a scene I always remember in a movie version of Farewell, My Lovely, the Raymond Chandler book. It’s set in 1941, and at the end, Robert Mitchum as Philip Marlowe muses about how Yankee superstar Joe DiMaggio’s fifty-six-game hitting streak finally ended.
“Bagley and Smith, a couple of run-of-the-mill pitchers, stopped DiMaggio,” Marlowe says. “I guess maybe they had something extra that night.”
I like to think that’s true of a lot of us. Most of us aren’t superstars. We’re not heroes every day. We don’t do great deeds all of the time. But there are moments—every once in a while there are special moments—where we can reach deep down inside and summon up just a little bit of greatness.
As I said before, Jack Faron was one of the pretty good guys in the TV news business.
And maybe this day, just like Bagley and Smith against the great DiMaggio, he had something extra.
“Okay,” Faron said to me. “What do you want to do next?”
“Check out everything Grayson has ever said and done. In the Senate campaign, as US Attorney, as a prosecutor before that—whatever it takes. We need to find out whatever there is to know about him. Not the Elliott Grayson we see in the press and in the public eye, the real Elliott Grayson. If nothing is what it seems, then we must assume that everything Grayson has said is a lie. We have to find out exactly what is true and what isn’t.”
“Starting where?”
“There’s one obvious place.”
“Joey Manielli.”
“That’s right,” I said. “I’m going to go to California and talk to Joey Manielli. I want to find out what he has to say about his miraculous return from the dead.”
CHAPTER 38
JOEY MANIELLI MET me in the prison visiting area.
“Who are you again?” he asked.
“Clare Carlson. I’m a TV reporter from New York City.”
“What the hell does a TV reporter from New York want to talk to me about?”
“They didn’t tell you?”
“Someone just said I had a visitor.”
“And you didn’t bother to ask what it was about?”
“I’ve got plenty of time to kill.” He smiled.
I’d flown to northern California that morning after calling ahead to the prison to make arrangements to see Manielli.
His name now was Joseph Wilkinson, and he’d been arrested for stealing a BMW a few weeks earlier. It got worse after that. The cops discovered the stolen car had been used in a series of gas stations holdups by Manielli and another guy. The last one had gone bad. The gas station owner pulled a gun, and the guy with Manielli shot him. For a while, it looked as if he might die. He recovered, which is the only thing that saved Manielli and his pal from a murder charge. But he was looking at a lot of years in prison.
As I sat across from him now, I thought about how much he reminded me of his father. There was a big tattoo on his arm, just like Ralph Manielli had had when I saw him at the trailer park in Allentown. Same look, too, right down to the sneer on his face. He was wearing a pink prison jumpsuit. But put him in a t-shirt and cutoff shorts like Ralph Manielli was wearing that day, and you’d have a younger version of his father. It’s amazing how we turn into our parents as we get older, whether we want to or not.
“Your name is Joseph Wilkinson?”
“That’s right.”
“What happened to Joey Manielli?”
“He died.”
“Except he didn’t.”
“Yeah, well …”
“You’re really Joey Manielli.”
“Who would have figured they still had those fingerprints on file, huh?”
“Tell me what happened.”
The thing about talking to prisoners, I’ve found out over the years, is that it can go one of two ways. Either they clam up and say nothing at all, or you can’t shut them up. Fortunately, Joey was the second kind. I think he liked the fact that he was suddenly important and a TV newswoman wanted to talk to him. I think he also liked the fact that I was a woman, since he kept checking me out with an interested eye throughout the whole interview. Or maybe he just was glad to “kill some time,” as he put it. Whatever the reason, he told me his story.
“My mother back in Allentown was a drunk. Not just any drunk, but the queen of the drunks. The first sound I used to hear when I woke up in the morning was the popping open of a beer can. She kept a six-pack by her bed so that she didn’t have to walk into the kitchen. By the time I left for school, she already had a nice buzz going. When I got home at the end of the day, she was either asleep or passed out.
“My father, he was the real asshole. He drank, too, but he didn’t pass out. He just got mean. The more he drank, the meaner he got. Sometimes my mother or someone else was his target, but mostly it was me. I guess I was more of a challenge because I fought back. Of course, that just made him beat me harder. Sometimes he used his fists, sometimes he used a belt, and sometimes it was a wrench from his toolbox. Sometimes he did all of these things, plus other stuff I can’t even remember.
“I tried to run away a lot of times, but where was I going to go? I was a little kid. I had no money, no way of getting away. That’s why I stole that car back then, even though I didn’t get very far. Most of the time, though, I’d just go down to the highway near where I lived. I’d sit there for hours, thinking about how great it would be to ride away on one of the trucks that passed by. Then, when it got dark, I’d go home. Most of the time they didn’t even know I was gone.
“Those are the things I remember about being a kid. No father-son talks, no discussions around the dinner table. Hell, we hardly ever had dinner. My mother was usually too drunk to cook, and my father was hardly ever around. Once in a while, one of them would stop at a McDonald’s or a Kentucky Fried Chicken and I’d get some of that. But most of the time I just had to fend for myself when it came to eating. Just like everything else.”
“Did you ever go to anyone for help?” I asked him.
“Like who?”
“A teacher or a guidance counselor at your school?”
“What could they do? Just contact my parents and tell them I was complaining about them. Then I would have gotten beaten up again when I got home. I knew how things worked. No one at that school or anyone else in that town was ever going to help me.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“One day I was sitting by the highway, watching the trucks like I always did, and this guy came up to me. He sat down next to me and started talking. He came back the next day, and the day after that. He told me he wanted to be my friend. My special friend was the way he put it. Well, one thing led to another, and he asked me if I wanted to go away with
him. I couldn’t imagine anything worse than where I was living. So I said yes.”
“Did this man …” I wasn’t sure exactly how to ask the question … “have sexual relations with you?”
“Nah, nothing like that.”
“Are you sure?”
“Believe me, I’m sure. I knew all about that even when I was that young. To be honest, I figured that was what he was after. I was even prepared to let him do some stuff to me if it got me out of there. That’s how desperate I was. But it never happened like that. We just traveled around the country together.”
“Where?”
“Lots of places. I didn’t care, I just was glad it wasn’t Allentown. We stopped at little motels, camped out in the woods sometimes—it was fun. Then one day we wound up at this big house. There was a man and a woman there. The guy said these two were going to be my parents now. That was all. Then he left. I never saw him again.”
The bastard had sold the kid, I thought to myself.
“I lived with them,” he continued.
“They were real pushovers, real goody-two-shoes. At first, they were real easy with me, let me do whatever I wanted. Then they tried to impose all these rules—curfews, making me do homework, telling me who I could hang out with. But I ignored them. I mean, they were nice and all, but they were really kind of pathetic. Even when they tried to punish me, that didn’t mean anything. Not after what I’d been through. As I grew older, I got bigger and tougher and I think that scared them. One time I pushed the old lady down a flight of stairs when she started giving me lip. Another time I grabbed the guy by the throat and threatened to beat the crap out of him if he didn’t leave me alone. That night I heard them talking, complaining about how they’d made a big mistake in taking me in. Hell, I was ready to move on, too. And by then I was old enough to be on my own. So, one day I just left.”
“Did you know about the body back in New Hampshire with your name?” I asked.
“Not until they told me here.”
“Did you ever use the name again after you left Allentown?”
“Nope.”
“Why would someone want to make it seem as if you were dead?”
“I have absolutely no idea.”
I’d thought this was about sex and perversion, but it wasn’t. Whatever happened to Joey Manielli was about something else. These people didn’t take him out of some kind of sick lust for children, they were running an adoption scam. Taking kids like him who wouldn’t be terribly missed and selling them to desperate would-be parents. So, a kid from a dead-end, go-nowhere existence like Joey Manielli somehow wound up in a house with rich people who could afford to pay for a black-market child.
“Tell me about the man you ran away with,” I said.
“What do you want to know?”
“His name.”
“He never told me.”
“How did you get around the country? Car? Truck? Bus or train?”
“None of those things.”
“But you said you traveled everywhere.”
“Sure, by motorcycle.”
Motorcycle.
“The funny thing is, I never did know who he was all these years. Then one day, not long ago, I’m watching TV, and the news comes on. There’s his picture right there on the screen. He was older, but that was him.”
I took out a picture of Elliott Grayson and showed it to him.
“Is this the man who took you away?”
Joey glanced at the picture briefly, then shook his head no.
“Nah, he didn’t look anything like that.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure, I’m sure. This guy had long hair and these kind of real piercing, intense eyes. I recognized him right away when I saw him on TV. I couldn’t figure out at first why he was on the news. It turns out he was killed during some big shootout with the law out in Idaho a few months back. Do you know who I’m talking about?”
Yeah, I did.
I knew exactly who he was talking about.
Sandy Marston.
CHAPTER 39
I HIRED A freelance film crew from the area to shoot some video of Joey Manielli at the prison for us.
I thought I might have a hard time getting official approval, but the warden was fine with it. All he asked was that he appeared on camera. He was an ambitious guy, and he figured being part of a TV news story kept him in the public eye.
Manielli was fine with it, too. He preened and mugged for the camera, clearly enjoying his moment in the spotlight.
Watching him, I thought about how funny life can be sometimes. I mean, Joey Manielli got dealt a bad hand in life as a kid—having a couple of loser parents like Ralph and Janis Manielli. Then he lived with a different family, a better family, a family who apparently tried to raise him the right way. But he still wound up here in jail. Had he always been doomed—from the moment of his birth—to this kind of life? Or were there moments along the way that could have changed the course of events for Joey Manielli, but never worked out right?
I suppose it all went back to the age-old question of heredity versus environment. Which one was the most important in determining the direction of a person’s life? Heredity or environment? And can one’s destiny or future truly be altered in the big scheme of things?
My piece that ran on Channel 10 showed Manielli telling pretty much the same story he’d told me. About growing up in that trailer park in Pennsylvania. About going away with Sandy Marston. About being handed over to the new family in California. About finding out recently that he was supposed to be dead.
Afterward, I came back on camera and wrapped it up by saying:
And so long after he was declared dead, and even longer since he disappeared, the questions about Joey Manielli’s abduction are finally answered.
But this raises many other questions.
Who was the dead child found in that grave?
How did Elliott Grayson and law enforcement officials make such a mistake by identifying the person?
And, of course, does this mean there are any questions about the identities of those other five children found dead in Mountainboro, New Hampshire?
Those are questions that Channel 10 will continue to look into …
* * *
But that turned out to be easier said than done.
They couldn’t exhume the body that was supposed to have been Joey Manielli because it had been cremated. The Manielli family had found some bargain-basement funeral director who offered them the cheapest way to get rid of the body. No funeral, no casket—just a quick cremation and scattering of the ashes. “Why should I spend a lot of money on some damn pine box?” Ralph Manielli said in explaining his reasoning for the cremation and lack of a funeral service. “I mean if the kid was already dead, what difference did it make?”
I assumed Ralph and Janis Manielli would be underwhelmed, too, at the news that their son was still alive. But I was wrong about that. They were ecstatic. That’s because they’d hooked up with a lawyer who told them they could probably get a lot of money from the government for the screwup. They were planning on suing for the “pain and suffering and emotional distress” they suffered from wrongly believing their son was dead. Beautiful.
Elliott Grayson held a press conference where he apologized profusely for the mistake and expressed his regrets for the pain it caused to the Manielli family. He gave a detailed account of a mix-up in records by a technician that they had determined must have led to the misidentification. The technician, he said, no longer worked for the government and could not be found to provide any further explanation.
He also said that the records of all the other five cases had been rechecked, and there was absolutely no doubt they were the same children that had been identified. He looked into the camera and said solemnly that he had personally conveyed this information to all five of the families. He talked about how sorry he was that they had to suffer through this additional anguish.
It was another impressi
ve performance, and most people seemed to accept his explanation. The parents of the five other children. The rest of the press. And, most importantly of all, the voting public.
“Am I going to vote for Elliott Grayson for Senator?” said one woman we put on the air. “Of course I am. Okay, he made a mistake. We all make mistakes. I liked the way he stood up like a man and admitted it. He’s done so many great things, I think it’s a shame anyone makes a big deal out of something like this. He’s still the man I want to send to Washington.”
Teddy Weller, of course, tried to turn it into the biggest political scandal he could. He talked at his campaign appearances about how this showed Elliott Grayson was incompetent; that he was irresponsible; that you couldn’t believe anything he said; and this showed a longtime trusted civic leader like Weller was the right man to represent New York in the Senate.
He dramatically demanded at one press conference that the five other bodies be exhumed now to determine for certain that they were the five missing dead children that Grayson had said they were several years earlier.
But that didn’t go anywhere, because none of the families of the other five wanted their children dug up. They accepted Grayson’s explanation of what happened and didn’t want to go through the trauma and public spectacle of having their children’s bodies exhumed again. “My little boy Donald suffered enough in life at the hands of the inhuman monster who killed him for no reason,” the father of Donald Chang said. “Please just let him rest in peace now.” Emily Neiman’s parents called the idea of digging up their daughter’s remains after all this time “ghoulish.”
In the end, political experts agreed that the Manielli misidentification was just a minor glitch—not a fatal one—for Elliott Grayson’s Senate prospects.
And they said he’d handled his damage control press conference so well that there wasn’t likely to be any lingering questions about this.
People believed his explanation.