by R. G. Belsky
“It was terrible at first after David was arrested,” Norman Galvin told me. “People called us names, threw things at our house, threatened us. My business suffered too. But the worst part were the people we thought were our friends. It was as if . . . well, as if Barbara and I had done those terrible things. But we hadn’t. We didn’t kill those people. David did.”
“But you never moved.”
“No.”
“How come?”
“I didn’t think that running away was the answer.”
He looked around the house. The house where David Galvin—who would become Felix the Cat, one of the country’s most notorious serial killers—once grew up a million years ago. He looked at the pictures of his other children on the wall—the ones who grew up to live decent lives. This house was filled with memories for him. Some were good, but many of them were very, very bad.
“Did you ever have any idea . . . any suspicions?” I asked.
“About David?” He shook his head. “No, he was our first born, our pride and joy, the genius in the family. David was a brilliant boy—the psychiatrists all said that after he was arrested. They told us his IQ was off the charts. He was good looking too. Popular. Charming. He was going to go on to medical school after NYU. David could have done anything he wanted with his life—he had so many things going for him. So why did he do what he did? I’m afraid I don’t know the answer to that. And I gave up trying to figure that one out a long time ago.”
I nodded. I felt sorry for them. I could feel their pain. It was a pain they had lived with for a long time, but they had survived—and it had gotten better in recent years. Now the pain was back with a vengeance. And I was one of the reasons. I felt bad about that.
I asked about the letter David had sent them before he died. My letter had contained the list of new victims. There weren’t any secrets in the one he’d left for Reverend Campanella at the prison—just thanks for his kindness during the last days of the illness, according to the minister. Maybe he’d told something to his parents. Something else he’d kept hidden all these years.
Norman Galvin shook his head no.
“There was nothing,” he said. “Just telling us he was sorry for all the problems he had caused—and a lot of religion talk about finding God and being at peace with himself and hoping he still had a chance to get into heaven.”
“Can I see the letter?” I asked.
“No,” Mrs. Galvin said.
I was surprised. The Galvins had been totally cooperative with me up until this point.
“Why not?”
“Because I threw the damn thing away after I read it,” she said. “It was just too painful to hold on to.”
Like everything else about their son, I thought.
“Mr. and Mrs. Galvin, when David was a student at NYU, do you ever remember him mentioning a group called the Great Pretenders?” I asked.
“No. I read your article,” the father said. “I know what he told you. But that’s the first time I ever heard of anything like that. He was very specific when he was arrested—he said he’d done it all alone. Now . . . now I just don’t know what to believe anymore.”
“David talked in that last interview with me about his obsession with role-playing fantasy games. He said that’s what the Great Pretenders was all about. Did he ever talk with either of you about this?”
They both said no.
“Did he play any games like that when he was in high school?”
Mrs. Galvin shrugged. “Oh, he played some video games, I guess. They weren’t nearly as sophisticated as they are now. But he loved them. He’d lock himself up in his room for hours on end in front of the screen. It was like he was in his own little world. He was always very compulsive about anything he did. If he liked something, he never knew when it was time to stop.
“But he was that way about everything. One summer he fell in love with basketball. He’d be out there shooting a ball,” she said, looking through a window at the basketball hoop hanging from the garage, “until it was too dark for him to even see it. I used to tell him moderation was the key to everything in life. He never listened.”
“So you never thought anything was really wrong with him?”
“No. I just figured it was the normal stuff a teenage boy goes through when he’s growing up.”
I nodded.
“How about his friends? Did either of you know the people he hung around with at NYU?”
“Not really,” Norman Galvin said. “In high school, we did. But they never lasted too long—you see, he never had much use for any of his high school friends. He got bored with them very quickly. David was kind of a loner, I guess. But he said at NYU he’d finally found some people smart enough to understand him—that he could relate to on the same level. He seemed happier in college than he did in high school. That’s why I was so surprised when the horrible truth came out about what he was doing.”
“Was there anyone specific at NYU that you can remember?”
“There was one girl. We met her a couple of times. She and David hung out together, he said, but I don’t know if there was anything going on between them. He didn’t seem interested in her that way. I think they were just friends.”
“But you don’t know her name?”
“Well, I didn’t until today.”
“What do you mean?”
“Her picture’s in your newspaper.”
I stared at him. I didn’t know what he was talking about. “You mean with my article?”
“No,” he said, “it’s on a different page. I just read it before you came. That’s when I remembered who she was.”
He picked up the newspaper and showed me another article. It was written by Bonnie Kerns. The latest story about the murders of William Franze and the call girl. There were pictures of the two victims. And also a picture of Lisa Montero. Underneath it was a quote from an assistant district attorney named Greg Ackerman calling her the prime suspect in the case.
“That’s her,” he said, pointing to the picture of Montero.
“Lisa Montero and your son were friends?”
“Weird, huh?” Norman Galvin said.
Lisa Montero had been there all along—drifting through this case right from the very beginning.
I’d heard about her and the Franze murder case that first day in Andy Kramer’s office. Then Franze and the call girl wound up on David Galvin’s hit list. Bonnie wrote that the authorities thought the Montero woman did it. After that, I discovered she had gone to NYU at the same time as Galvin and the Great Pretenders. And now this from his parents.
Lisa Montero knew David Galvin.
She was somehow a part of this story.
All I had to do was find out how.
Chapter 15
“I’m looking for information,” I told Bonnie Kerns.
“So what do I look like—a four-one-one operator?”
“You seem to know an awful lot of stuff about an awful lot of things,” I said. “Everybody at the paper says you’re a terrific reporter. And for the past few weeks you’ve been covering the William Franze murder, which now appears to be connected to my story. I thought you might have some ideas.”
“So that’s why I’m getting the five-star-restaurant treatment for lunch, huh?”
We were eating at a very trendy place on Park Avenue South, not far from the hotel where I was staying. It had beautiful waitresses, beautiful customers, and not so beautiful prices.
“Is this your standard procedure for getting information out of a woman?” Bonnie asked, looking around the place. “You take her out to a fancy restaurant, bat your big brown eyes at her—and the woman just falls to pieces right in front of you?”
“It has been known to happen,” I said.
A waitress came over to take our orders. She smiled at us. She was tall and athletic looking and pretty, probably an aspiring dancer or a model. She was wearing a pair of skin-tight designer jeans and a low-cut sweater with a tag o
n the front that said her name was Amanda. She continued to smile while she wrote down what we wanted—pasta for me, a fish dish for Bonnie. She was still smiling when she left.
Bonnie rolled her eyes, put her finger down her mouth, and made a gagging sound after she was gone.
“Let me tell you something, Joe,” she said. “You’re wasting your time with this whole seduction bit on me. I’m not a seductive kind of girl. Now Amanda there, she is. You could probably seduce Amanda right out of her Calvin Kleins. Me, I’m more the functional type. I mean I know you think you’re cute and charming and all that—but I’m immune to it. I really am. You want to know a secret? I’m really not even interested in men.”
“Are you . . . ?”
“Into women? Am I a lesbian? Is that your question?”
“Well, yes . . .”
“I thought I was. I tried it for a while. Now I don’t have much to do with either sex, romantically speaking. I just don’t date. My choice. Well, no one’s exactly beating down the door to change my mind. That’s probably because I don’t look like Amanda back there. But it works out nice. I’m totally committed to my work right now. I don’t need a personal life. Does that sound weird to you? Probably, huh? Hey, what am I telling you all this stuff for anyway? It’s just that when I start talking, sometimes I can’t stop. I’m kind of intense. I don’t know if you noticed.”
I smiled.
“Tell me what you know about the William Franze murder,” I said.
“William Franze was a high roller in the world of big finance. Wild Bill, they called him on Wall Street because he was so volatile and unpredictable. Franze was the kind of guy who could make a fortune on Monday and then be broke by Friday. Do you know what I mean?”
Yeah, I knew what she meant. When that happens on Wall Street, they put you on the cover of Fortune magazine. Try it in Atlantic City or Vegas like I used to, and they call it a disease.
“Franze lived in a lavish townhouse on East Sixty-first Street,” Bonnie said. “He was married, but no one ever saw him with his wife. He went out with lots of women. One of them was Lisa Montero, the daughter of business mogul John Montero—one of the richest men in the country and a very big force on Wall Street and in New York City politics for years.
“On the night he was killed, Franze and the Montero woman had gone out to dinner and then back to his place. After that they began arguing and she stormed out. Neighbors heard them fighting and saw her leave in a rage. Another witness saw her return a while later.
“Montero admitted to cops afterward that they’d fought. She said it was because Franze wanted her to have sex with him—and another woman. A ménage à trois. He called up an escort agency and ordered a girl to be sent over to join them. She says that when she said no, Franze ordered two hookers then instead of one. That’s when she stormed out.
“When cops got to the scene, they found Franze dead in bed. The body of a girl named Whitney Martin, who worked for the Elite Escort Agency, was also in the bed. They’d both been shot several times. Both Franze and the Martin woman were naked, and it appeared as if they had been in the throes of lovemaking just prior to their deaths.”
“He ordered two hookers?” I asked Bonnie when she was finished telling me the story.
“That’s why they called him Wild Bill, I guess.”
“So what happened to the other hooker?”
“No one knows.”
The waitress brought our food. She smiled again as she put it down. I looked over at Bonnie. She crossed her eyes and made a face at me across the table. I tried hard not to laugh. I liked Bonnie. I loved her energy, her drive, her absolute conviction that she knew more about anything in the world than everybody else. I remember when I used to feel that way too.
“And Lisa Montero claims she didn’t do it?” I said.
“Right. But the cops and the DA’s office don’t believe her. Especially this young hotshot named Greg Ackerman in the DA’s office. I think he sees a career-making case here. Of course, they all have to tread kind of carefully because of her father’s money and political influence. But the word I hear is that they’re going to arrest the lady for murder very soon.”
“What’s Lisa Montero like?” I asked.
“Very successful. She’s a vice president in the Montero Corporation, which is run by her father John and who—the last time I looked—was right up there in the Fortune 500 listings along with Ron Perelman and Rupert Murdoch and some of those Japanese computer guys. She’s smart. She’s pretty. She’s also a bit of a nut case. She dates all types of playboy types. The lady likes to party. They say she uses men, flirts with them, charms them—until she gets what she wants. I assume you’ve already tried to reach her at her office?”
“They told me she was on a leave of absence.”
“You’ve left her messages?”
“Lots of them.”
“Home?”
“Unlisted number.”
“I know a guy at the phone company who can . . .”
“So do I. No good. The DA’s office has red-flagged her number and pulled her whole information file—no one can get at it.”
“Just a thought.”
“I have been a reporter before, Bonnie.”
“Oh yeah? Well, if you’re such hot shit, Dougherty, how come you’re sitting here begging me to help you?”
I laughed.
“If you want to talk to Lisa Montero, it seems to me the best place to catch her is in a social setting,” Bonnie said as she ate. “At a business office or official function, she’s going to have people around her running interference. But when she goes out, she’s more vulnerable. She also likes to drink a lot, which shouldn’t hurt either.”
“Where does she go socially?” I asked.
“Broadway plays. The movies. Madison Square Garden sometimes for Knicks or Rangers games. Her favorite restaurants are Le Cirque and Lutèce and the Union Square Cafe. Later at night, she hangs out sometimes at Elaine’s on the Upper East Side. Hey, try them all. I did. It didn’t get me anywhere. But maybe you’ll get lucky.”
“Thanks, Bonnie. I appreciate this.”
“It’s the least I can do,” she laughed, “since you bought me this expensive meal—and I won’t have sex with you.”
Bonnie looked down at her plate. She picked up a piece of fish with her fork and chewed on it thoughtfully. There was something else on her mind.
“Are you ever going to talk about it?” she asked.
“What?”
“You. The Banner. The big scandal eight years ago. What exactly happened anyway?”
“Don’t you know?”
“Just some of the basic details. You did a story about some big shot city official, linking him to a sex scandal. There was a big lawsuit, the newspaper printed a retraction, and the city official committed suicide. The upshot was that you got fired. After that you had some personal problems, and no one heard from you in years—until you suddenly showed up in the Banner newsroom the other day. That’s really all I know.”
“That’s a pretty good highlights package,” I said.
“You want to talk about it?”
“Not now.”
“Some other time then?”
“Maybe.”
“Okay, let’s talk about Nancy Kelleher then.”
“Where did you hear about that?”
“I asked around about you with some of the Banner old-timers at Lanigan’s the other night,” Bonnie said. “They told me how you were a legend around here. That you were the most tenacious reporter they’d ever seen. That you never gave up on a story. One guy said I should ask you about the Kelleher story.”
“Nancy Kelleher,” I said slowly. “She was a hooker who worked on Park Avenue. Came here on a bus from Wisconsin, thought she was going to break into show business and wound up on the street. Her pimp was a creep named Johnny Sanchez. According to the cops, she goes home one night, gets into a fight with Sanchez, and shoots him dead in her bed. T
he story gets a lot of press coverage—everybody in town is writing about the innocent girl who came here from the Midwest and turned into a murderer. The DA’s office figures it has a slamdunk case—Sanchez was murdered in her bed, she’s got no alibi, the murder gun was found in her apartment—and they’re right. The jury took about thirty seconds to come back with a guilty verdict.”
“So what’s the story?” Bonnie asked.
“There was just something about it that didn’t feel right to me. A few loose strands. So I decided to do some more checking. Once I began to pull on a few of the loose ends, the whole thing began to unravel. I finally tracked down a woman who worked as a prostitute for a rival pimp. She said he bragged to her he killed Sanchez as part of a turf war, then tried to make it look like one of Sanchez’s own girls did it. I wrote the story, the pimp eventually confessed to cops, and Nancy Kelleher was freed.”
“Awesome.”
“There’s more. It turns out that the woman who broke the story to me had tried to contact the DA’s office during the trial to tell them what she knew. But the ADA handling the case—a young ambitious guy who was looking to make a name for himself—never followed up on it. He liked Nancy Kelleher for the murder better, because she was front-page news. One pimp killing the other would hardly make the paper. I wrote about that too. Got him fired from the DA’s office and brought up on charges. He finally copped a plea for obstruction of justice.”
“Wow!” Bonnie shook her head in amazement. “So what happened to Nancy Kelleher?”
“She runs a school for runaway girls in the Bronx now. I knew a guy in social services, I put her in touch with him and he helped her get started. Now she’s a big success. She’s married too—got two kids of her own. I still talk to her sometimes. We kept in touch.”
“God, I’d love to do a story like that,” Bonnie said.
“She was more than just a story,” I said. “It was one time when I felt like I was really able to accomplish something as a newspaper reporter. To make a difference. When that happens, it’s a really good feeling.”