Playing Dead

by R. G. Belsky

  Lisa looked worried.

  “Maybe you should just walk away from it right now,” she said thoughtfully.

  “Why would I do that?”

  “It could be dangerous for you.”

  “I’m not worried.”

  “Well, maybe you should be.”

  “Lisa, this is my job.”

  “So get another job,” she said.

  I wanted to tell Lisa about all the reasons I couldn’t walk away from it. About how this was more than just another story for me. About Susan and Joe Jr. About how they died. And about how I needed to find the answer to what happened to them before I could ever hope to get on with living the rest of my own life. But I didn’t say any of those things to her that night. It just didn’t seem like the right time.

  “So let’s just forget about Felix the Cat or whatever his stupid name was,” Lisa was saying.

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Bet I can make you forget,” she said.

  And she was right too.

  She kissed me on the lips. And I suddenly realized I was ready to make love again. Then I was lost in her perfume and her hair and the softness of her body. Everything else—David Galvin, my career at the Banner, even Susan and Joe Jr.—they all seemed very far away when I was in her arms.

  Later, as I was drifting off to sleep, I heard Lisa get up and go into the next room. I lay there for a while and waited for her to come back. When she didn’t right away, I got up to see where she’d gone. I saw her sitting in her nightgown and a robe at a table. She was talking on the telephone.

  “I don’t want to do that,” she said into the phone.

  I wondered who in the world she could be talking to at this hour of the morning.

  “But, Dad . . .”

  Her father?

  “No, he’s asleep in the other room,” she said.

  I realized Lisa didn’t know I was there. I moved back against the wall to make sure she didn’t see me. I wasn’t sure why I did—or even why I was listening to her conversation. It probably had nothing to do with me. I guess I was just curious.

  “Yeah, I know,” Lisa was saying. “I’ll take care of it.”

  Her face looked very grim.

  “I said I’d take care of it,” she said impatiently.

  Then she slammed the phone down.

  I hurried back under the covers before she came into the bedroom. She started taking off her nightgown and robe next to the bed. I pretended that she had just woken me up.

  “Where’d you go?” I asked sleepily.

  “I had to make a phone call,” she said.

  “To who?”

  “It’s not important.”

  Lisa crawled into bed again. She was wearing only a skimpy pair of bikini panties now. God, she was so beautiful. She snuggled up close next to me, put her arms around me, and rested her head gently on my chest. She looked up at me and smiled.

  “Is everything all right?” I asked her.

  “Everything’s great,” she said.

  That was the last really good time I remember with her.

  Before everything started to go wrong. . . .

  Chapter 39

  I’ve always had a lot of trouble saying goodbye.

  “You seem to have this need to hang onto something long after it’s finished,” a psychiatrist once told me during the dark days of depression after my firing, Susan and my son Joe’s death, and my gambling problems. “You’re never willing to let go. You know, there comes a time when you have to just move on, turn the page, and jump start your life. But you don’t want to do this. You prefer to live in the past. You fantasize that somehow things will go back to being the way they used to be. Or at least the way you remember them. That’s your problem, Joe. Are you going to do something about it?”

  I guess my parents had a lot to do with that.

  Like I said earlier, when I was growing up, my father and mother fell out of love very quickly. My memories of childhood mostly consist of the two of them arguing and yelling and slamming doors all over our house. But they never got divorced. They stayed together because of me, my father told me once a long time later. The family is the most important thing, a boy needs two parents—blah, blah, blah. But I don’t think that was the reason at all.

  I think my father was just one of those people who could never admit he’d made a mistake.

  He didn’t know how to say goodbye either.

  To just get up and walk away from the table when life dealt you a bad hand.

  I guess I inherited that from him.

  For a long time after my wife and son were gone, I couldn’t say goodbye to them. I went to the funeral. I accepted people’s condolences. I grieved for them. I cried for them. But I still didn’t accept the fact that Susan and Joe were really dead.

  On the night before they died, we’d gone out to dinner together at a seafood place near the ocean. All three of us. It was the first time we’d ever taken Joey anywhere like a restaurant. Susan drank Bombays and tonics, I had beer, and Joey some milk. Over dinner, Susan and I talked about us and about our future. Of course, I had no idea at the time that it would be the last night we would ever spend together.

  It was six months later that I finally got myself together enough to say goodbye to them—in my own way.

  I went back to the same restaurant where we’d eaten that last night. I reserved a table for three—and sat in the same place, ordered the same drinks, and the same meal we’d eaten together. Three drinks, three places. But just me, sitting there alone at the table. Of course, it was a very painful experience. The waiters and some of the other people in the restaurant thought I was crazy. But I didn’t care. What really hurt was sitting there staring at those empty places across the table.

  That’s when finally I realized they were never coming back. They were gone forever. It was time for me to get on with my own life—and put the two of them behind me.

  That’s what I did too.

  Until David Galvin.

  Now I had to call Carolyn to tell her it was over.

  I had no choice.

  On the day after the charges against Lisa were dropped, the picture of me kissing her appeared on the front pages of newspapers around the country. Carolyn didn’t try to call me again. She simply packed up all my stuff and had it delivered to my hotel. I found it piled up in the lobby when I got back from work.

  “Do you want this all delivered up to your room?” the guy behind the front desk asked me.

  “I don’t think I’m going to be here much longer,” I said. “Can you keep it in storage for me?”

  “No problem. Are you moving back to New Jersey?”

  “No, I’m staying in New York.”

  I figured I’d get my own apartment in Manhattan for the time being. Until Lisa and I moved in together. I had it all figured out. Except for what to do about Carolyn. I knew I had to talk to her one more time, but I was really dreading doing it. It turned out to be worse than I expected.

  “I’m sorry,” I said when she came on the line. “I know you deserve better. But things happen.”

  There was a long silence on the other end.

  “That’s it?” she said finally.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m sorry? Things happen? That’s the best you can do? I mean you can shovel the bullshit with the best of them, Joe. I really expected something more eloquent than that. Go ahead, try again. Say anything. It doesn’t have to be true. Make it up. Like you did with that story the time you got fired. You’re good at making stuff up, Joe.”

  “Look, I know you’re very hurt . . .”

  “Don’t flatter yourself. You’re the one who’s hurt, Joe. You’ve fucked up big time. Again. I gave you a life, a life you’d thrown away a long time ago. And now you’re doing the same thing you did before. Do you really believe your rich girlfriend is going to think you’re so great once she doesn’t need you anymore? I don’t think so.”

  “Lisa and I
are in love,” I told her.

  “You don’t know what love is,” she said.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Let me ask you one question, hotshot. This story you did—the one that got Lisa Montero off the hook? Is it true?”

  Carolyn was just flailing away in anger at me, of course. She didn’t know anything. But it did make me uncomfortable.

  “Of course it’s true.”

  “Really? Because you know what I think, Joe? I think the bitch really did do those murders.”

  “Lisa Montero is innocent,” I said.

  “And how do you know that? Did she tell you? While you were in bed together?”

  “I knew, Carolyn. I always knew. I had a gut feeling about her right from the very start.”

  “Yeah, well you once told me you had a gut feeling about us,” she said. “You were wrong about that too.”

  Chapter 40

  Another big story was breaking.

  “Arthur Dodson is dead,” Andy said. “Shot to death in a hotel in Pennsylvania. The killer dressed the body up in a clown suit, then painted a smile on his face with makeup. It was a really weird scene. We’re breaking the exclusive today on Page One.”

  I remembered Bonnie going to a little town in Pennsylvania to check out the tip on him.

  “Bonnie found Dodson’s body?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Is she okay?”

  “She’s fine. She’s the one who called the police. It was a big scoop for her.”

  Good for Bonnie.

  She told me the whole story herself later.

  “It was friggin’ unbelievable,” she said. “Christ, I almost peed in my pants.”

  “I’m mean I’m standing there knocking on this motel room door, figuring the whole trip to Hillsdale is going to be one big waste of time. The damned door will open up—and I’ll be face to face with an appliance salesman or a guy from Nebraska on his vacation or maybe just some local yahoo who’s bedding down his secretary at the town’s hot-sheets palace. He’ll ask me what I want. I’ll say I’m looking for a missing person on a serial killer’s hit list. He’ll tell me to fuck off, slam the door shut in my face, and I’ll have to make the long trip back to New York City feeling really stupid.”

  She took a deep breath. “Only it didn’t happen that way.”

  “There was no answer when I knocked. But somebody’s car was parked in front of the door. Of course, it could have been anybody’s car. The manager of the motel’s. Another guest. But I had a really bad feeling about it. So I decided to let myself in.”

  “How did you do that?”

  “I used a credit card in my purse to pop open the lock on the door.”

  I must have looked surprised.

  “I learned how to do that once when I interviewed a professional burglar for a series I was doing on home security,” she explained. “It’s actually kinda easy. Although some credit cards do work better than others. They tell me it has something to do with the size of the plastic.”

  “Which one did you use?”

  I was just curious.

  “American Express,” she smiled. “Never leave home without it.”

  I shook my head. “The killer could have still been inside the room, Bonnie. You could have been the next victim.”

  “Yeah, and the depleted ozone layer is killing me a little bit every day too. So what?”

  “Anyway, I see Dodson the minute I get inside. He looks like fuckin’ Bozo the Clown. All done up in clown makeup and a clown suit. And he’s tied down to the bed—his hands and feet are bound with really heavy rope and there’s a gag in his mouth. It looked like he’d been like that for a while. There was a bag from McDonald’s next to him and a lot of empty hamburger wrappers. I don’t know if Dodson’s captor was feeding him to keep him alive or feeding himself while he did the dirty deed.

  “And then there was the blood. Lots of blood. Blood all over the place. Christ, I’d hate to have to be the maid who cleaned up that room. The place would be a real challenge for Martha Stewart.”

  The Dodson murder bothered me. That’s why I had started pumping Bonnie for information on it as soon as I was back in the Banner office. How did the killer ever manage to track Arthur Dodson down to a little motel in Hillsdale, Pennsylvania?

  “I found him,” Bonnie pointed out.

  “You got a tip.”

  “Maybe the killer did too.”

  “That seems like an awfully big coincidence.”

  I suddenly had another thought.

  “What if the killer was the one who called you?” I said.

  “Why do that?”

  “Why not? Felix the Cat liked publicity. This one seems to too. Look at the two new victims—the Hiller woman dressed up in a bridal gown store’s window and Dodson made up to look like a clown. I don’t know what the significance is. But the killer’s crying for our attention. What better way to get it than to call up a reporter and lead her to the crime scene?”

  “Jesus, I never thought of that.”

  “You took the call from the anonymous tipster yourself, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you remember what his voice sounded like?”

  “Hers.”

  “Hers?”

  “Yeah. It was a woman.”

  “Okay, do you remember anything about her voice?”

  “It was a twenty-second call, Joe. I didn’t tape it or use a lie detector or do a stress analysis test on it. I get a million calls a day. I didn’t know there was going to be anything special about this one.”

  “Would you remember the voice if you heard it again?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I’m not sure.”

  There was one other big question we didn’t have the answer for either, of course. Why? Why did someone want the two of them—Linda Hiller and Arthur Dodson—dead?

  “Look, I know you’ve probably thought about this a lot, but here’s my theory,” Bonnie said.

  “There were four Great Pretenders, according to Galvin. Him and three others. Arthur Dodson and Linda Hiller went to NYU at the same time as Galvin. What if they were in the Great Pretenders? That leaves one. One Great Pretender who’s trying to cover his—or her—trail. Cleaning up all the loose ends.”

  “Yeah, I thought of that too,” I said.

  “The question is who?”

  “Someone who has a lot to lose,” I said.

  Chapter 41

  It took me a long time to realize that Lisa Montero seemed to be avoiding me.

  At first, I thought I just kept missing her. I’d leave a message on her machine and not get any answer. So I’d call back a little later. Still nothing. I tried her place in the city, her office on Wall Street, and her father’s house. Sometimes I checked in with the operator at the Banner maybe a dozen times an hour to see if there had been any calls from Lisa that I’d missed. There never was. It was as if she had disappeared off the face of the earth.

  Except she hadn’t.

  She was a real celebrity now, and a lot of people saw her around town. At Elaine’s. Le Cirque. Madison Square Garden. The hot clubs in town. Lisa was back in the fast life again, traveling in the same circles, running with the same crowd.

  But where was I?

  I was on the outside looking in.

  I finally admitted that to myself about a week after the murder charges against Lisa were dropped—and there was still no sign of her.

  “Any messages for me?” I asked one of the secretaries as I sat down at my desk in the Banner office.

  She nodded toward a stack of memos in front of me. A lot of people wanted me for interviews or TV shows or to have lunch with me. “You’re a very popular guy,” she said.

  I skimmed through them quickly.

  “Nothing from Lisa Montero?” I asked her.

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I know how to answer the telephone, Joe.”

  Bonnie gave me a funny look from
the next desk after the secretary walked away.

  “What’s going on with you and the Montero woman anyway?” she asked. “I thought you two were really tight.”

  “We are.”

  “Then why the long face?”

  “I haven’t heard from her in a day or two.”

  “Maybe she’s busy.”

  “Yeah,” I said sarcastically.

  “Exactly how many days are we talking about here, Joe?”

  “Well, actually it’s been a week.”

  “Uh-oh,” Bonnie said.

  Bonnie was right. Uh-oh. Something was definitely wrong. I needed to find out why.

  So I went looking for Lisa. I tried everywhere. Her place. Her father’s house. Both of their offices. All of her usual hangouts. I finally found her at the same place I did the first time. Elaine’s. She was sitting at the same corner table in the front of the restaurant. There was a tall, good-looking, blond-haired guy with her. I didn’t recognize him at first. Then I realized it was Michael Conroy, her lawyer. He had his arm around her and her head was resting on his shoulder. They didn’t look like they were having a legal discussion.

  I walked over to their table.

  “Joe, what are you doing here?” Lisa asked.

  “I’ve been looking for you.”

  “Yeah, I know,” she said casually.

  Conroy shook my hand. “Listen, I want to thank you for that article,” he said. “You saved her. It’s all because of you she’s not in jail.”

  “I’m a newspaperman,” I said. “I was just doing my job.”

  Lisa rolled her eyes.

  “For chrissakes, give it a rest, Joe,” she said. “This whole Clark Kent routine of yours is really getting boring.”

  I pulled Lisa away from Conroy and walked her over toward the bar. She was holding a drink in her hand. She swayed a bit as she stood there next to me—and she had a glazed sort of look in her eyes. I realized she was probably drunk. I didn’t want to talk to her when she was like this. But I had to. I didn’t know when I might get another chance.