Playing Dead

by R. G. Belsky

  “I gave a speech at Columbia Journalism School,” he said.

  Beautiful.

  “Well, you know what they say,” I told him. “Those who can—do. Those who can’t—talk about it to journalism students.”

  Rollins glared at me.

  “This is a big story you’re working on, Dougherty,” he said. “Don’t screw it up.”

  “I’ve worked on big stories before,” I told him.

  “Yeah, that’s right. You have. And the last time you did, somebody wound up dead.”

  Chapter 8

  It was nearly 2:30 a.m. by the time I got home to New Jersey. Carolyn was asleep, of course. But she stirred slowly as I crawled into bed. Then she rolled over and pressed her body close to mine. She opened her eyes.

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  “It’s the middle of the night.”

  “I waited up for you for a long time.”

  “The story suddenly got a lot bigger.”

  I told her about David Galvin’s confession. The excitement back at the Banner when I told them. My byline on Page One in today’s editions. The way everyone wanted to talk to me and buy me drinks at Lanigan’s afterwards. Carolyn was quiet for a long time after I’d finished.

  “So it’s not over, is it?” she said.

  “I have to go back to see Galvin again tomorrow.”

  “Why?”

  “To get the rest of the story. Who were his accomplices? Where are they now? What about the victims we don’t know? And why did he pick me to tell all this to?”

  “You said it would only take one day.”

  “I didn’t know the guy was going to pick this moment to bare his soul. But he’s dying. He wants to clear his conscience. I’m the guy that’s helping him do it.”

  I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. She was very beautiful. Some women don’t look pretty until they get up and put on their makeup. But Carolyn had a kind of natural, clean-scrubbed beauty that was always there. I nestled my head against the side of her neck and buried my face in her blond hair. I hugged her tightly.

  I’d met Carolyn eighteen months ago. I was sitting in a coffee shop of a Holiday Inn in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where I worked for a small local paper. I was supposed to interview the motel’s manager for a chamber of commerce feature on leading area businessmen. For me, it was the last stop in a journalistic (and life) freefall that had taken me from New York City to Newark to Westchester County to Trenton and then finally to Pennsylvania.

  Along the way, I’d taken time to grieve for my dead wife and infant son, indulge in a serious gambling habit that left me deep in debt and dodging loansharks everytime I left the house, and come as close to hitting rock bottom in my life as a man can.

  I was a mess.

  So you can see that on that day in the Harrisburg Holiday Inn when I met Carolyn Nash . . . well, it was like a desperate horse player who suddenly hits the supertrifecta at the track with the last twenty dollars in his pocket.

  Carolyn saved my life.

  She was my salvation.

  I owe her everything.

  I just started up a conversation with her in the coffee shop. I always had a good line of patter. I could charm people with superficial talk from the minute I first met them. It was one of my tricks as a reporter. I never lost it. Even in those days—in the depths of my despair—it wasn’t until people got to know me better that they realized how empty I was inside.

  But Carolyn was different.

  She told me that she lived in Princeton, New Jersey She said she was a lawyer for a big drug firm in New Jersey. She said she was in Harrisburg to attend an executive seminar—and had a long day of meetings with corporate types ahead of her. I told her about my life. All of it. Even the deepest, darkest secrets. She never made it to her executive seminar, and I never did the chamber of commerce interview. We spent the rest of the day, that night, and the following day together.

  After she got home, she called and asked me to visit her in Princeton the next weekend. Pretty soon, I was there every weekend—and during all my other free time too. Finally, she convinced me to quit my job at the Harrisburg paper and move to Princeton to live with her. I tried doing some magazine feature freelance writing for awhile, and then Carolyn’s father offered me the job with his public relations firm. Everyone says I’m a natural in the public relations business. That I have a real knack for it. A few months ago, I proposed to Carolyn, and she accepted. Now we’re going to be married in September.

  Looking back on it now, I realize how much I needed someone like Carolyn in my life. Someone who could put me back on course. She’s everything a man could want. She’s pretty. She’s smart. She’s loyal. She’s truly a good person.

  Joe Dougherty finally wins one in life.

  I hugged her again now. Then we made love. After it was over, she fell asleep in my arms.

  I didn’t fall asleep for a long time though. I had too much to think about. I couldn’t get David Galvin out of my mind. All his talk about other victims and accomplices and his desperate quest for forgiveness for all his sins. He scared me. I wasn’t scared in a physical sense. I was scared because he had somehow touched me emotionally. On some weird level, I had connected with him in that hospital room.

  “It’s an incredible experience,” Galvin had said. “The fear in their eyes, the kiss, the sex, the violence—everything coming together in one glorious burst. At that moment, I used to feel such passion. An all-consuming passion. A passion like I never felt for anything else in life. And I knew this was something I had to do—because God, in his infinite wisdom, made me like that. I could fight it, I could resist it, but I could never stop it. Have you ever felt passion like that, Joe?”

  Yeah, David, I have. Tonight. When I was back in the Banner city room again—and writing your story.

  We all want passion in our lives. Some of us just look for it in different places.

  What about me, David? If I’d been on the NYU campus with you and those three other students eleven years ago, would I have joined in your sick, deadly game? Would I have been one of the Great Pretenders?

  No, of course not. But I understand what you were looking for. I think I might even understand why you did what you did.

  That’s why I’m so frightened.

  I looked over at Carolyn. She had rolled over to the other side of the bed. She was sleeping peacefully, with strands of her blond hair falling over her face. I could reach out and touch her if I wanted. She was still only a few feet across the bed from me.

  But—at that moment—she seemed a million miles away.

  Chapter 9

  “David Galvin is dead,” they told me at the prison the next day.

  At first I didn’t believe it.

  “That can’t be,” I said.

  “He was very sick.”

  “But I just talked to him yesterday. I was here for several hours. Only I didn’t have time to finish my interview. They said if I came back this morning . . .”

  “He died during the night, Mr. Dougherty.”

  Did I want to talk to any of the other prison officials about this?

  I started to ask for the warden. But then I had a sudden inspiration. All the warden was going to do was read me the official press statement about the death. He wasn’t going to know the answers to any of my questions. I needed to find somebody that David Galvin might have confided in before his death. Okay, he probably wouldn’t have confided in the warden. But then who?

  I want to get into heaven, he told me, that’s the most important thing to me now.

  Galvin had turned to religion in his dying days.

  “Do you have a prison chaplain?” I asked.

  “Yes. The Reverend Harold Campanella.”

  “I want to talk to him.”

  The Reverend Harold Campanella was a pudgy man in his sixties, with thin, gray hair and a rumpled suit that looked as if he’d slept in it for several nights. I wondered how being a chaplain a
t a prison like this ranked in the hierarchy of minister success stories. Was it at the top of the ladder or the bottom? Looking at Reverend Campanella, I opted for the bottom.

  “Tell me about David Galvin,” I said.

  Campanella seemed uncomfortable at the mention of Galvin’s name. He looked over at a Bible on the corner of his desk, as if maybe it could give him inspiration.

  “He murdered many people.”

  “I know that.”

  “But, at the end, he sought forgiveness for his sins in the eyes of the Lord.”

  “I know that too.”

  “And you would be . . . ?”

  “My name is Joe Dougherty.”

  “Oh, the newspaper reporter.”

  “Galvin mentioned me to you?”

  “Several times.”

  “Do you have any idea why he specifically asked to see me?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Did he tell you about our conversation yesterday?”

  “Unfortunately, I never got a chance to talk with him at the end. He slipped into a coma. My last meeting with him was yesterday morning. I knew he didn’t have much time left.”

  He shook his head sadly.

  “I must tell you, Mr. Dougherty, David Galvin presented me with perhaps the most vexing moral dilemma I have ever faced in my long years of service to the church. On the one hand, the man epitomized true evil—he did horrible, Satan-like deeds during his short lifetime.”

  “But yet, during my conversations with him, Galvin truly tried to embrace Jesus Christ. Maybe he finally saw the light, or maybe he was just afraid of dying. I’m not sure. But if we accept the concept of God as all forgiving, then we must offer the hand of forgiveness to the David Galvins of the world too.

  “Anyway, that’s what I decided to do. I’m afraid it wasn’t a very popular decision in some circles around here. But I work for God—not the New York State prison system.”

  “That sounds very noble, Reverend,” I said.

  “Are you a church-going man, Mr. Dougherty?”

  “No.”

  “But you do believe in God?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “So did David Galvin.”

  He reached into his desk and took out a white envelope. He handed it to me. My name was on the front. That’s when I knew my old reporting instincts were still there.

  The reverend, not the warden.

  Of course.

  “David wrote three letters in the days before he died,” Campanella was saying. “He left them with me to distribute after he was gone. One was to his parents, who I’m afraid weren’t very pleased to receive it. I think they wanted to just forget their son ever existed. The second one was to me. And the third one, the third letter, was supposed to go to you. There it is, Mr. Dougherty.”

  I tore open the envelope and read Felix the Cat’s last words . . .

  “It’s a list,” I told Andy Kramer on the phone after I left Campanella. “A fucking list of victims.”

  “How many names are there on the list?”

  “Twenty-one,” I said.

  “Galvin was responsible for eleven, right? Nine dead and two hospital jobs. That leaves ten other killings.”

  “I already checked them with the Banner library before I called you. Eight of the names are from unsolved murders or deaths. Most of them awhile ago, a few very recent. Cases where no one was ever caught, no motive was ever found. They’re not all women, but Galvin said they wouldn’t be. Otherwise, it fits the Felix the Cat pattern, Andy.”

  “And the other two names on the list?”

  “They’re still alive.”

  It took a second for the impact of that to sink in on him.

  “These are murders that haven’t happened yet,” I told him.

  “Jesus Christ!” Kramer said.

  “There’s one more thing here that I think’s going to blow your mind. I heard you talking about a big murder story when I was in your office. The one that’s been all over the front pages. About the Wall Street bigshot who got blown away a few weeks ago in his East Side townhouse.”

  “William Franze,” Andy said.

  “William Franze is on the list too,” I told him.

  Chapter 10

  There was more.

  But I needed a little time to think it all through before I talked about it with anyone else. After I left the prison, I walked around the town of Ossining aimlessly for awhile. Eventually, I found myself where you could look out over the Hudson River. The Hudson this far north was truly a majestic sight, stretching across more than two miles at some points as it winded its way from New York City all the way up to the St. Lawrence Seaway.

  As I stood there watching the water lap up along the shore in the soft spring breeze, I thought about what a strange business death can be.

  I mean we hear about people dying all the time. Murders. Accidents. Disease. If you’re a newspaperman, death is as much a part of your daily life as breathing. And yet none of it means very much. Just names in an obituary or a news story.

  Unless it’s someone who matters to you.

  I remembered how I felt when I found out that Susan and Joe Jr. had died. I used to think there was nothing more important to me in the world than a big newspaper story. But, without my wife and son, newspaper stories didn’t matter to me anymore. Nothing mattered. I didn’t matter.

  If he had lived, my son would be nine years old now. He’d be in the third grade; probably starting to play little league baseball or soccer; and—with a little boy’s astonishment and wonder—discovering the world the same way I did when I was his age.

  I never got to read bedtime stories to him, never got to teach him how to throw a baseball or shoot a basket or fly a kite. You want to hear something really sad? I even had a crazy dream—I remember first thinking about it at the hospital on the night Joe Jr. was born—that he would someday grow up to be a great newspaperman just like his dad.

  And Susan . . . well, Susan was the love of my life. I’d never admit that to anyone now, certainly not to Carolyn, but it was true. Susan and me were more than just husband and wife. We were lovers for life. Best friends. Soulmates. I’d never met anyone like her before, and I’ve never met anyone since who could take her place. I just never imagined growing old without her.

  Someone once asked me when I knew that she was the one for me.

  I just did.

  Right from the very start.

  I asked her to marry me on our first date. We were sitting at this trendy East Side restaurant that had been written up in New York magazine. I’d taken her there to try and impress her. The magazine said it had terrific food, terrific service, and terrific ambiance. But I hated the restaurant. I hated the food. I hated our waiter. And most of all I hated the ambiance.

  “So what do you think of this place?” I asked Susan, after we’d finished our salads and were starting on the main course.

  “It’s fine.”

  “No, really. I want you to be honest.”

  “Okay,” she said slowly, “it’s not fine. The truth is I think it’s overrated, overpriced, and I have this overwhelming desire to slap that arrogant smirk off the face of our asshole waiter.” She smiled at me across the table. “You know, Joe, you didn’t have to spend all this money on me. I wanted to go out with you. We could have gone to a McDonald’s, and I’d have been happy.”

  “Will you marry me?” I blurted out.

  She stared at me in amazement. “You don’t waste any time, do you?”

  “Well, I was going to wait until we got to the dessert, but then I figured what the hell . . . I’ll just go ahead and ask the question now. So what do you think?”

  Susan laughed. “I haven’t even decided whether I’m going to let you kiss me goodnight yet.”

  “Actually that was my second question.”

  “Well, I think if I say yes to the first question, that pretty much answers the second one too.”

  “Will you?” I asked.r />
  “Kiss you or marry you?”

  “Either one.”

  “I’ll think about it,” she said.

  She did kiss me when I took her home that night. Then we made love. Passionate love. When it was over, she held onto me for a long time. Finally we fell asleep in each other’s arms. Sometime during the night, she woke me up with a kiss.

  “Yes,” she told me.

  “The marriage question?” I asked sleepily.

  “Absolutely,” she said.

  I loved her so much. The kind of all-encompassing, no-questions asked love you think will never die or grow old or go bad. I’ve only felt that way about two other things in my life besides Susan—newspapers and New York City. The first time that I walked into a newspaper city room I knew that was where I belonged. And I felt the same way when I got off a bus at the Port Authority on a hot summer night a long time ago and began walking around New York. It was love at first sight.

  Of course, none of the three worked out the way I hoped. I don’t work at a newspaper anymore, I live in New Jersey, and Susan has been dead for a long time. But I don’t regret any of it. As the old saying goes, it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. That’s the way I felt. And I’d finally come to peace with the way everything turned out. Or so I thought anyway—until the letter from Felix the Cat.

  I looked down now at the letter I was holding in my hand.

  I had wondered why Felix the Cat wanted to tell his story to me—a burned out, disgraced reporter who hadn’t worked at the Banner for years—instead of picking some young hotshot journalist who was getting bylines on the front page today.

  Now I knew.

  I didn’t have a lot of other answers I needed yet, but at least I had that one.

  I read through the names on Galvin’s list one more time.

  Twenty-one names. Twenty-one victims of a group of thrill seekers—four rich, spoiled kids on a college campus, all from wholesome American upstanding families—who just thought it would be a real kick to go out and murder a lot of people.