Playing Dead

by R. G. Belsky

  “Maybe some other time,” I said.

  She nodded and finished off her drink.

  “You and me—we really live in different worlds, don’t we, Joe?” she said.

  “I guess so.”

  “But we’re a lot alike too.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “So what do you think?” she asked. “You figure that two people like us could ever get involved with each other?”

  I stared at her. I’m hardly ever at a loss for words, but I sure was this time. I stood there—struggling to think of something witty, something clever, something appropriate to say back. But I couldn’t come up with a damn thing.

  “Probably not,” I finally stammered.

  “I guess it’s lucky then we’re not getting involved, huh?” she laughed.

  Chapter 29

  I was lying in bed with Carolyn back in Princeton, trying to make up for all the time I’d been away. It was the middle of the afternoon. I’d taken the day off from work, and so had Carolyn. We didn’t waste a lot of time on idle chitchat. We just jumped right into bed as soon as I got there.

  Only something was wrong.

  Not with Carolyn. She seemed fine. In fact, she was the one who suggested we skip all the polite preliminaries and get right into the sack. No, the problem was mine.

  At first, I couldn’t figure it out. It was like I was making love to a stranger, not my fiancée. No, that wasn’t right either. Making love to a stranger is usually exciting. This seemed . . . well, it seemed routine. Like we were an old married couple just going through the motions of a tired ritual. Even though we weren’t even married yet. There was no excitement. No thrills. No passion.

  Then something happened.

  I thought about Lisa.

  And suddenly everything changed.

  I started making wild love to Carolyn. I kissed her passionately, I explored every part of her body, I made animal sounds and groans of pleasure. She moaned too—softly at first, then louder and louder until she was screaming at the top of her lungs. She wrapped her legs around my body, she clawed desperately at my back. But, of course, it wasn’t Carolyn that was in bed with me anymore. It was Lisa. I could see her face in front of me, taste her lips, smell her perfume, run my hands through her long dark hair. “I love you, I love you, I love you,” I repeated over and over again as we came together in an explosion of lust like I hadn’t experienced for a long, long time.

  The two of us lay there spent and exhausted afterward.

  “Whew!” Carolyn finally said. “That was something else.”

  “Yeah, it was.”

  “I guess absence really does make the heart grow fonder,” she laughed.

  That night, Carolyn said she didn’t want to go out to dinner. Instead, she cooked a big meal for the two of us. Roast beef with gravy, potatoes, biscuits, and salad—the works. She was a terrific cook.

  While we ate, I told her about the David Galvin story. I talked a lot about the Great Pretenders part of it, and not very much about Lisa Montero. She listened intently as if it was the most important thing in the world to her. And then she told me stories about her job, while I pretended like I was interested.

  “When are you coming home for good, Joe?” Carolyn asked.

  It was the question I’d been dreading.

  “As soon as the story’s over,” I said.

  “When will that be?”

  “I’m not sure,” I told her. “Maybe a few more days, maybe a few weeks.”

  “And that’s the end of it?” she asked. “I mean you’ll be finished with the job at the Banner then. You can come back to Princeton, work for my father’s company again—and we’ll be married in the fall. That’s still what you want, isn’t it, Joe?”

  “Absolutely,” I lied.

  I cut off a piece of the roast beef and chewed on it slowly.

  “Do you like the roast beef?” Carolyn asked. “I bought it from that new butcher on Nassau Street.”

  “The one that opened last month,” I said.

  “Yes, that one.”

  I thought about Lisa again.

  “Joe, is everything all right?” Carolyn asked me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I realized I’d drifted off. “I was just thinking about my story.”

  “So what’s the verdict?”

  “The verdict about what?”

  “My roast beef,” she laughed. “Do you like it or not?”

  I wanted to tell her right then about everything.

  All the passion, the excitement, the thrills that I’d felt since I’d gone back to the Banner.

  David Galvin.

  The Great Pretenders.

  Lisa Montero.

  How they’d made me feel alive again.

  How I didn’t want to go through the rest of my life without feeling that way again.

  But, of course, I didn’t say that.

  “The roast beef really is good,” is what I said.

  Chapter 30

  John Montero wasn’t what I expected.

  I was figuring on meeting a combination of Joseph P. Kennedy and Howard Hughes and Donald Trump. Some larger-than-life figure who puffed on a big cigar and had a stock market ticker going next to him and kept getting calls from around the world telling him about the price of the dollar in Japan and Europe. The kind of guy who never went a day without making or losing a million dollars or so. Who was ruthless and merciless—and would do anything to make money.

  But John Montero didn’t look like that at all.

  He seemed like a nice guy.

  Lisa Montero had called to tell me that her father agreed to talk to me at his house on Long Island. The phone call came in through the city desk at the Banner. When someone called out her name for me to pick up on my extension, everyone in the office looked up. I liked that. I was hot. I was happening. I was a star again. She said there was a big pretrial hearing scheduled in her case for later in the week. She would have to be in court for it. She was very nervous. I told her not to worry, that everything was going to turn out all right.

  Her father lived in a huge house on Shelter Island, which is off the north shore of Long Island—facing Long Island Sound and Connecticut in the distance.

  A butler wearing a red jacket led me into the living room where Montero was watching a baseball game on TV. It was a huge projection TV with a screen that took up much of the wall. The New York Mets were playing the Atlanta Braves. All of the players looked like giants.

  He was a big man, with striking features. You could see where Lisa got her good looks from. I figured he was maybe in his early sixties—and still in pretty good shape, even though his black hair was now specked with patches of gray. I remembered Lisa telling me that both his wife and only other child, her brother, had died. Since Lisa had an apartment in the city, I wondered if Montero lived here by himself. It seemed like a very big house for just one person. But then when you had his money and power, you could do whatever the hell you wanted, I guess.

  “You want a beer?” Montero asked me after we’d shaken hands.

  “Yeah, I’d love one,” I said. “It was a long, hot ride out here from the city.”

  “Good. I never trust a man who doesn’t say yes to a cold beer on a hot day.”

  He dispatched the red-coated butler to get beers for both of us.

  I looked down at a table next to where Montero had been sitting. There were Xerox copies of newspaper clippings on it. They were stories by me. Murders I’d covered. Trials I’d written about. There were maybe a dozen of my biggest stories. The Nancy Kelleher story was one of them.

  A loud cheer came from the television. One of the Mets had just gotten a base hit.

  “Do you like baseball?” Montero asked me.

  “I used to watch a lot of games. Not so much anymore.”

  “Who do you root for?”

  “Either the Mets or the Yankees, depending on how they’re doing at the moment.”

  “Sort of a fair-wea
ther fan, huh?”

  “Actually, I never used to root in the traditional sense. I guess I wasn’t really a fan either. I used to like to bet a lot on baseball. That was the fun part of it for me. Baseball’s a tough game to bet on, but you can do it. Hell, you can bet on anything.”

  He seemed fascinated by that.

  The butler brought out drinks.

  “I made a bet of a hundred dollars on this game,” he told me. “Just a friendly wager with a business associate. Well, not that friendly actually. It’s not a lot of money, but I want to win. Me and this business associate are very . . . well, competitive. I don’t like to lose to him. I don’t like to lose to anybody. Anyway, he’s got the Braves, I have the Mets. The Braves have won six games in a row, and the Mets have lost four straight. I figured they were due. I’ve got five-three odds. What do you think?”

  I looked at the screen. The game was 0–0 in the third inning. The Braves had their best pitcher on the mound, while the Mets were going with a guy they’d just called up from the minors a few days before.

  “That’s a sucker bet,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You never bet on a team to end a streak,” I said. “You bet on them to continue it. If they’re winning, you just keep betting on them until they lose. If they’re on a losing streak, you go against them until they win. You’ve got a better chance of coming out ahead that way.”

  Montero nodded. “Anything else?”

  “Yeah, the game is seventy percent pitching. The pitcher is the most important part of your bet. The guy on the mound for Atlanta is a twenty-game winner with a lopsided career winning percentage against the Mets. The other guy pitching for the Mets is horse manure. Never bet on horse manure.”

  “But the odds . . .”

  “Forget the odds. The bookmakers set the odds. They know exactly what they’re doing. The odds are not meant to be fair—they’re meant to get money from suckers.”

  “Like me?” Montero smiled.

  I shrugged.

  “It sounds a little like Wall Street,” he smiled. “So let me get this straight—if I figure out the odds and go along with your streak theory and work on the theory that pitching is seventy percent of the game, does that give me a pretty good chance of winning my bets?”

  “Not really.”

  “But you just said . . .”

  “Baseball is a tough game to bet on, Mr. Montero. It’s just too unpredictable. Football’s better, but the odds are stacked against you there too. The best sport to put your money on is basketball—either college or pros. Me, I give a bit of an edge to the college game—but even there it’s tough to come out ahead on a long-term basis.”

  “So how do I win?”

  “If you really want to make serious money gambling, forget about sports betting all together. You’re better off going to one of the casinos. Down in Atlantic City or Las Vegas. You can beat the house in either place—if you really know what you’re doing. Of course, you can also lose your shirt. The roulette wheel is for suckers. So is the craps table—unless you’re an expert. The place you’ve got your best chance is at the blackjack table, where the odds aren’t stacked so much against you. Even there though, you’re generally lucky to break even. The only way to win consistently at blackjack is to use a technique called card counting. But the hotels will bar you from their casinos if they find out you’re doing it.”

  “You mean it’s cheating?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “Well, maybe. I’d call it borderline cheating.”

  “And that’s the only way to make real money at the game?”

  “Pretty much so.”

  Montero smiled. “Actually it is a lot like Wall Street.”

  On the TV screen one of the Atlanta players had just hit a grand-slam home run off the Mets pitcher. The score was now 4–0 Atlanta. Just like I predicted. Of course, the odds had been in my favor.

  “So tell me some more,” he said.

  “Well, there’s two classic stories that pretty much sum all you need to know about gambling, Mr. Montero,” I said.

  “The first is about a guy who likes betting on baseball games. He’s spectacularly unsuccessful. In fact, at one point he loses twenty-two bets in a row. But he’s convinced he’s due for a hot streak. So he calls his bookie—desperate for some action. The bookie tells him there’s no baseball games being played that night. The only action going down is on a hockey game. Does he want to make a bet? ‘Hockey?’ the guy snorts with disdain. ‘What the hell do I know about hockey?’”

  Montero laughed.

  “The second story is the classic gambling anecdote of all time. One bettor asks another bettor how he did. ‘I had a great day,’ the guy replies. ‘I broke even.’”

  He laughed again. On the TV screen, one of the Braves had just hit another home run. The score was now 6–0. The Mets were changing pitchers.

  I looked down again at the newspaper clippings of my stories on the table next to him.

  “You’ve been reading up on me?” I asked.

  “I always believe in being prepared when I meet someone.”

  “So what did you find out?”

  “You appear to be quite a paradox, Mr. Dougherty. A dedicated reporter. A man of integrity. A man who will go to any lengths to find the truth when he believes in a cause. On the other hand, you once got fired from your job for making up a story. Fascinating. So which one is the real Joe Dougherty?”

  “Sometimes things aren’t as black and white as they seem,” I said.

  I picked up the story about Nancy Kelleher. There was a picture of her hugging me on the courthouse steps after her murder conviction was overturned. It was on Page One of the Banner under the headline: “FREED AT LAST—THANKS TO OUR REPORTER!”

  “You think maybe I can do the same thing for your daughter, don’t you?” I said to Montero. “Figure out a way to get her off.”

  “The thought did cross my mind,” he smiled.

  “The circumstances might be different,” I said. “I knew that Nancy Kelleher was innocent.”

  “And you don’t think my daughter is?”

  “I’m not sure yet. If she is innocent, I’ll do everything in my power to make sure that a miscarriage of justice doesn’t take place. But if I find out evidence that she did kill Franze and the girl in bed with him, I’ll write the truth about that too. That’s what I do. I write the truth. I want you to understand that, Mr. Montero.”

  Montero looked back at the baseball game on the giant TV. He stared at the screen for a long time. I had the feeling that he was trying to decide something.

  “Are you interested in some lunch, Joe?” he asked finally.

  “Sure.”

  “Is seafood okay?”

  “Absolutely.”

  He drank the last of his beer and put the glass down on a table in front of him. Then he stood up.

  “Okay, let’s go then.”

  “What are we having?”

  “I don’t know. We have to catch it first.”

  It had been a long time since I’d gone fishing. Of course, even then I just used to sit with a rod and reel in a rowboat or on a pier on a lazy afternoon and hope to get lucky. The way John Montero went fishing was a lot different. The boat we went out in looked as big as a yacht to me. It had a captain and crew, complete equipment for deep sea fishing, and even a sophisticated radar system to help track down schools of fish.

  It hardly seemed fair to the fish.

  “Do you like my daughter?” Montero asked once we were out on the water.

  “Sure.”

  “Because she likes you very much.”

  She does, huh? How about that? I wanted to ask him exactly what she had told him about me. But I didn’t.

  “Lisa seems really nice,” is what I said instead.

  “She’s a good kid. A little wild, but she’s been through a lot. She lost her mother—and then her brother last year. I’m all she’s got left, and she has to deal with
all the bad stuff people say about me. Now I think somebody’s trying to set her up for this murder. I’m afraid it’s somebody who’s really out to hurt me. That’s why they’re going after my daughter.”

  I chose my next words very carefully.

  “Off the record, Mr. Montero,” I said, “just between you and me—is there any possibility at all that Lisa really could have killed Franze and the call girl?”

  He first gave me a look of astonishment, then shook his head and laughed.

  “Boy, you’ve got balls, kid.”

  “Thank you. I think.”

  “Of course not,” he said to me, answering my question. “There’s no way that Lisa could have ever done something like that.”

  “So why did Greg Ackerman arrest her?”

  “He’s out to get me.”

  “He doesn’t like you very much,” I agreed. “He says you’re a criminal. He says you should be in jail, except you always figure out some way to beat the rap.”

  “I’ve never been convicted by a jury for anything I ever did in my career,” Montero said evenly. “So I’m not guilty of anything. That’s still the American system, the last time I looked. Don’t you agree?”

  “Absolutely.”

  We sat there and fished for an hour or so together. Sitting side by side there on his big boat—our shirts off, with the late spring sun beating down on us. Talking. And bonding. Me and Big John Montero. Like I said, I didn’t think he was a bad guy at all. In fact, I liked him. And he liked me. Even more importantly, so did his daughter.

  I never caught any fish, but that was all right. He did, and we ate them back at the house. We talked about Wall Street, the newspaper business, and all the murders that had happened. And, of course, most of all we talked about his daughter Lisa and the charges against her.

  “Let me ask you the same question you asked me before, Joe,” he said at one point. “Do you think Lisa could have done it?”

  “Off the record?”

  “Sure.”

  “No,” I told him. “I think somebody’s trying to set her up too, Mr. Montero.”

  Chapter 31