by R. G. Belsky
It really shouldn’t have been important, but I asked the question anyway. I was curious. Reporters are like that.
“How did you know Andy?” I asked.
“We went to college together.”
A warning bell went off in my head.
“You went to Columbia,” I said, looking over at the diploma on his wall. “Andy didn’t go to Columbia, did he?”
“I only went to graduate school at Columbia,” Richmond said. “Got a masters in journalism. Figured it might come in handy someday, what with my father owning a newspaper like the Banner. But I did my undergraduate work in political science. That’s where I met Andy.”
He didn’t say what school he’d done his undergraduate work at, but then he didn’t have to. I already knew. David Galvin went there. So did Lisa Montero. Andy Kramer. And Greg Ackerman. Now I could add Jimmy Richmond to that list too. Everything and everyone in this story always led back to the same place.
NYU.
I told Bonnie all about the missing witness when I got back to my desk.
She said she had a lead too.
“Do you remember that picture we ran of Arthur Dodson on the front page the day after his car was found on the Tappan Zee Bridge?” she said. “Well, it got picked up by TV and the wires and sent around the country. We got a call from some woman in a little town called Hillsdale, Pennsylvania. She says she thinks she saw him shopping at a store there. She followed him to a local motel. She says she’ll show me where it is. I checked the map. I can drive over there in about three hours.”
I made a face. “It’s sounds to me like it’s probably going to be a wild goose chase, Bonnie,” I said.
“Me too,” she said. “If this turns out to be nothing and I miss out on my big date with Brad Pitt tonight, I’m going to be really pissed.”
There were lots of messages waiting for me at my desk and on my voice mail. Mostly from one person. Carolyn. It had been days since I’d called her. At first, it had just slipped my mind because I was so busy. Now, after what happened between Lisa and me, I realized I was consciously avoiding Carolyn. I knew I had to talk to her sooner or later. But I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.
The first messages on the voice mail sounded curious, rather than angry. Where was I? Why hadn’t I called? Later, she must have thought about it and realized I was avoiding her. On the last few calls she sounded as angry as I had ever heard her. I’d never seen that side of Carolyn before. And I really wasn’t prepared to deal with it now.
Anyway, there was no way I had time to call her now.
I had a big story to do.
And the truth is that by the time Granville and I were on our way to meet Connie Reyes, I’d already pretty much forgotten all about Carolyn again.
Chapter 37
Up close, Connie Reyes didn’t look as good as I thought she did when I first saw her.
She was young and attractive, but she looked aged beyond her years. The kind of woman who’d packed a lot of living into her twenty-five years or so. Twenty-five going on fifty is the way one cop I used to know described women like her. Or sometimes even twenty-five with one foot in the grave.
The three of us—her, me, and Granville—were back at the same spot on Orchard Beach, sitting on a bench overlooking the ocean.
“You got my money?” she asked.
“There is no money.”
She gave a puzzled look to Granville. So did I. Obviously he had not told me everything about what he had to promise Connie Reyes to get her to meet with me.
“I can’t pay you anything,” I said, turning back to the woman. “If I pay you money, it would corrupt the validity of your story. People would say that you only told me what I wanted to hear so that you could get paid. Everything you said would then become worthless. I’m sure you understand.”
She didn’t.
“If I don’t get paid, why should I talk to you?”
“Because it’s the right thing to do.”
Connie Reyes didn’t say anything.
“Look, Ms. Reyes, an innocent woman’s life is at stake here. She’s charged with murder. Two murders that you know that she didn’t commit. All you have to do is tell me the truth. Please. I need your help. So does Lisa Montero.”
I wasn’t sure what was going to happen next. It could have gone either way.
“I won’t testify in court,” she said.
“I know that.”
“And you can’t use my name.”
“I’ll write a story quoting you as a secret source. Nothing more. That’s a promise.”
“How do I know I can believe you?”
“I’m a newspaperman. We always protect our sources. It’s a sacred oath.”
“You mean like a doctor?” she asked.
“Something like that.”
She thought about it for a little while.
“I’ve got immigration problems,” she said finally.
“I understand.”
“Problems with the law too. I can’t get involved.”
“I won’t involve you by name,” I said again. “I don’t have to. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects me. If a reporter writes a story like this using a confidential source, no one can ever force him to give up that source to any court or law enforcement authorities. So you don’t have to worry. You’re totally covered by the Constitution.”
That wasn’t totally true, of course. The right of a reporter to withhold the identity of confidential sources in a court of law is still a matter of great debate. Sometimes a reporter will go to jail for refusing to divulge who his source is. Most of the time though reporters wind up turning over the name of a source before it ever gets to that point. Not everybody’s a hero. And not every source stays as secret as Deep Throat. But I didn’t tell Connie Reyes any of that. The bottom line was I had no intention of telling anyone who she was.
She took a deep breath. “Okay, let’s go,” she said.
The story was pretty much the same one Granville had told me. It totally cleared Lisa Montero. She said the killer was a man. She said she’d never seen him before, but might recognize him again now.
I went over all the details with her several times.
Then it was time for the final question.
The one about the bathroom.
“I’m thirsty,” she said suddenly, just as I was about to ask her. She looked over at a guy selling soft drinks not far from where we were sitting. “Do you guys want something?”
We both said yes. I gave her some money, and she walked over to the vendor’s cart.
“You believe her story, right?” I said, turning to Granville after she was out of earshot.
“Sure. Why would she lie?”
“Well, I’ve got to make sure she’s telling the truth.”
“How are you going to do that?”
“I’m going to ask her something. Something she could only know if she was in William Franze’s townhouse on the night of the murders. If she gives me the right answer, then we’ll be sure.”
I looked over toward the soft drink vendor to see if she was headed back yet.
She wasn’t there.
I looked all around the beach.
Connie Reyes was nowhere to be found.
She was gone.
Andy was holding Page One for my story.
“Did you get it?” he asked eagerly when I called him.
“Something happened, Andy,” I said.
“Did you meet the girl?”
“Yes.”
“And she told you all about seeing someone else—not Lisa Montero—kill Franze and the other prostitute, right?”
“That’s right. She said it was a man who did it. Not Lisa.”
“All right!” he shouted. “You got it, Joe. The story of a lifetime. I told Rollins about all of it and I told Spencer Blackwood too. We’re holding Page One. Now you did confirm it, right? You asked the Reyes woman the question about the broken bathroom? And she gave
you the proof we needed to know that she’s totally on the level?”
I thought about what to do now.
I knew what I was supposed to do. I was supposed to tell Andy everything. I was supposed to tell him that my exclusive source had taken a powder before I could ask her the crucial question. I was supposed to tell him I didn’t have enough yet to go with the story. That’s what I was supposed to do.
But I wasn’t sure if it was what I should do.
I thought about the Walter Billings case too.
I hadn’t told Lisa everything about that story.
I’d never told anyone.
You see, at some point after Billings killed himself and I got fired from the paper, I decided I needed to find out for myself what really happened between him and that young blond girl. Sure, Jack Rollins went with the story too soon, he should have held it until I checked it out more. But I always believed the story. Even after everything that happened. I never bought the line about Billings trying to convert the girl and help her find religion. I still thought he brought her to that hotel to have sex with her.
Of course, I never knew that for sure.
Until I found the girl.
Her name was Judy Pearson. I tracked her down about six months later at a restaurant on the Jersey Shore where she was working as a cocktail waitress. I bought her some drinks when she got off of work and—after she got kind of drunk—she admitted to me that Billings tried to have sex with her. She said his people had paid her afterwards to back up his version of the events that night. She’d gone through most of the money. But there was no way, she said, that she would ever go public now with the real story. She was going out with a rich lawyer from a prominent local family, and a scandal might ruin everything before she could marry him. Besides, she was worried about getting in trouble with the law for perjury. No, she decided, there was no percentage for her in telling the truth just to help me. It didn’t matter anyway. I wasn’t sure that anyone would believe her now anyway if she changed her story after all this time.
But I believed her.
I was convinced my story was right.
That was important to me.
There’s a line in All the President’s Men where a journalist talks about being criticized for messing up a story. “Everybody says to me, ‘You fucked up, you got it wrong,’” he says. “Well, I fucked up all right, but I didn’t get it wrong.”
That’s the way I felt too.
My instincts on the Billings story were right. They were right about Nancy Kelleher too. And now my instincts were crying out to me that Lisa Montero was innocent—that she was being set up by someone.
Only if I played this one by the rules I couldn’t help her.
There’s all sorts of people in this world. The ones who always play it safe. The conservative risk-takers. The middle-of-the-roaders, who’ll sometimes take a chance and see how it turns out. And then there’s the gamblers. The people who just can’t say no to any chance for a big score. No matter what the risk.
Me, I always was a gambler.
So at that moment I decided to take the biggest gamble of my life.
“Joe, you do have the story, don’t you?” Andy Kramer was saying impatiently over the phone.
“Yes,” I told him. “I’ve got it all.”
He put me on with a rewriteman and I began to dictate my story into the phone.
A secret witness has been found who backs up Lisa Montero’s claim that she is innocent of the murders of William Franze and Whitney Martin.
The witness—whose identity is being withheld by the Banner—told this reporter in an exclusive interview . . .
Another defining moment.
Chapter 38
The judge presiding over Lisa’s pretrial hearing was Robert Maddox.
He sat behind a desk in his chambers now, reading the front page of the New York Banner. My story. There was a big headline that said: “EXCLUSIVE: SECRET WITNESS SAYS LISA MONTERO DIDN’T DO IT!” Judge Maddox did not look happy.
“Everybody read the paper this morning?” he asked.
I was there. So was Greg Ackerman. He did not look happy either. But Lisa’s lawyer did. He was smiling broadly. His name was Michael Conroy—and he was about forty, with blond hair and good looks that made him look a little like a younger Robert Redford. Conroy was from one of the prestigious Park Avenue law firms in the city. John Montero had spared no expense to defend his daughter. But then you didn’t have to be Perry Mason to figure out that I had blasted a rather large hole in the prosecution’s case.
“Yes,” said Conroy, answering Maddox’s question.
“I read it,” Ackerman told the judge.
“Helluva story, isn’t it?” Maddox asked.
He turned toward Ackerman. “You realize, of course, that if what Mr. Dougherty here has written is true, then it raises serious questions about the validity of your prosecution.”
“I’m going to move for a dismissal of all charges against my client,” Conroy said quickly.
“This is all lies,” Ackerman said, gesturing toward my story. “The whole thing is based on the account of a single source. An unnamed source. I demand to know—and this court has a right to know—who that source is.”
Everyone looked at me.
“Who is your source, Mr. Dougherty?” Judge Maddox asked.
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Why not?”
“Because, as a reporter, I claim a First Amendment right to protect the identity of my confidential sources.”
That was my out in this whole business. My safety net. My “get out of jail free card.”
All I had to do was scream “freedom of the press” and I could keep my big secret about Connie Reyes. No one would ever find out what really happened when I talked to her. Not the judge. Not Greg Ackerman. Not the police. None of them would ever even know Connie Reyes’s name, unless I gave it to them. And I wasn’t going to do that. So the police could never go back and check out the details of my story. She was my confidential source. Just like Deep Throat. It was beautiful.
Of course, I believed I was doing the right thing.
I mean I knew that Connie Reyes’s story was true.
I knew that because I knew Lisa Montero was innocent.
Judge Maddox looked wearily now over at Greg Ackerman.
“Well, Counselor, it seems to be that we’re at an impasse here. Does the district attorney’s office have any ideas on how it wishes to proceed on this matter?”
“Yes,” Ackerman said. “We request that you order this reporter to reveal the identity of his confidential source in open court—or else face contempt of court charges.”
“I refuse,” I told him.
Lisa and I walked through Central Park, then sat by the lake holding hands.
“What’s going to happen now?” she asked as she watched the people out on the lake on boats.
“The judge will have to make a ruling on whether or not I have to give up my source.”
“What if he says you do?”
“I won’t.”
“You mean you’ll go to jail for me?”
“If I have to.”
She squeezed my hand. “How romantic.”
“But if Judge Maddox rules in my favor, Ackerman’s whole case against you falls apart. And then you and I can be together and get married and live happily ever after.”
I leaned over and kissed her.
“I love you, Lisa.”
“Wow!” she laughed. “Like I said that first night we met, you get right to the point, don’t you?”
“I still like to put the lead in the first paragraph,” I said.
The next day Judge Maddox issued his ruling from the bench.
“A very delicate balance exists between the workings of the government and the press’s right to keep the public informed,” he said. “It’s not always an easy decision to determine which is most important in any particular case. That’s the situation here.
“Therefore, I’m not going to take any contempt action against Joseph Dougherty for refusing to reveal his source.”
Maddox also said that—based on the new evidence that had emerged in the case—he was granting the defense motion for a dismissal of both of the murder charges against Lisa Montero.
She was a free woman.
I’ll never forget making love to Lisa that night.
It was like something had been released from deep inside her. She was wild, she was passionate, she practically devoured me with her heat. As I held her tight, as we moved together as one, as I buried my face in her long, black hair, I realized this was what I had been waiting for ever since Susan had died.
It had been an incredible day.
My story, of course, was Page One of the Banner.
MONTERO MURDER CHARGES DROPPED!
CRUSADING BANNER REPORTER’S STORY BREAKS CASE WIDE OPEN DISTRICT ATTORNEY’S OFFICE NOW UNDER HEAVY FIRE IN WAKE OF DISMISSAL
I’d been interviewed by everybody. People magazine. USA Today. The Associated Press. The local TV shows. Some of the networks too. Larry King wanted me, so did Geraldo—even Jane Pauley had called. Everybody was talking about me.
There was a picture that went out over the wires that showed me kissing Lisa moments after the charges against her were dropped. It had happened spontaneously. I was standing there, she ran over to me—and all the emotions I’d been holding in for so long suddenly came spilling out. So I kissed her. Right in front of all the other reporters and photographers and TV cameras. I didn’t even care anymore if anyone knew about us. I didn’t care about anything except Lisa.
“I can’t believe it’s finally over,” she said to me now as we lay in bed together.
“It’s not,” I told her.
“What do you mean?”
“The real killer is still out there,” I reminded her. “Now that everyone knows you didn’t kill Franze, I still have to find out who did. Whoever that is probably is responsible for the deaths of all those other people on David Galvin’s hit list. That story hasn’t been told yet. I want to be the one who breaks it.”