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Playing Dead

Page 21

by R. G. Belsky


  Another hard-core bettor said that even winning was never enough. He told of winning thirty thousand dollars in Las Vegas early one Sunday morning, and then heading back to his hotel with his winnings. But, sitting there in his car at an intersection near the Las Vegas strip, he turned right instead of left. He headed for the blackjack tables, where he lost the entire thirty thousand before the sun was up. “It wasn’t about money,” he said. “It was about action. I always had to have the action.”

  And there were so many more. The people who thought they’d come up with systems to beat the odds at the track or the roulette table or for basketball games. A guy who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on lottery tickets—dreaming that if he hit the numbers just once, he could repay all his debts. A compulsive sports bettor who kept it under control all year—and then bet the house, car, and life savings on Super Bowl Sunday. The ones who would bet on anything—the weather, numbers on car license plates, or even whether one person would cross the street before another.

  I wasn’t like that.

  I had a little bit of a problem, but I basically had it under control.

  That’s what I kept telling myself for a long time.

  And then one day I was watching this movie called Lost in America. It’s the one where Albert Brooks decides to quit his job as an advertising executive, sell his house, and use his life savings to travel around the country with his wife in a mobile home. Their first stop is Las Vegas, where his wife turns out to be a secret compulsive gambler who loses all the money in one night at the roulette table trying to play the same number. The number is twenty-two. Even after she’s broke, she just keeps chanting “Twenty-two . . . Twenty-two . . . Twenty-two.” She’s convinced that if she can play it just one more time, she’ll win big. Everybody who saw the movie thought that was really funny. Except for me. I got it. I understood exactly what she was talking about. I realized I was doing the same thing in my own life, I was always looking to play my own “Twenty-two.” The big score. The one that would turn everything around for me.

  A movie.

  A goddamned movie.

  That’s what finally made me realize I’d hit rock bottom.

  Now I was back at rock bottom again.

  Just like the day I was so broke I had to take a cross-country bus home from Las Vegas.

  This time I’d gambled everything I had on one more big story.

  And I’d lost it all.

  John Montero wasn’t so nice to me this time. There was no talk about how much his daughter liked me. No cold beers. No questions about betting or baseball or the world of gambling. No fatherly advice. The man was all business. My standing in the Montero family had definitely fallen in the last couple of days.

  “I don’t have very much time,” Montero said impatiently, when I finally managed to track him down at his office in downtown Manhattan. “What can I do for you?”

  “You said I should come see you if I ever had a problem,” I reminded him. “Well, I have a problem.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “You.”

  I told him everything. About Connie Reyes. Joseph Corman and Karen Raphael. How I’d found out that they both listed a company called Bay Ridge Sand and Gravel as their place of occupation the last time they were arrested. I’d done a bit of checking and found out that Bay Ridge Sand and Gravel was owned by—surprise, surprise—the Montero Corp. I finished up by explaining to him the way his daughter, who I thought was in love with me, now was doing her best to discard me like I was yesterday’s newspaper.

  “What is it that you’re trying to tell me?” he asked.

  “I think you set me up,” I said.

  “How did I do that?”

  “The notes someone sent me. The girl I met in the Bronx. Your daughter whispering sweet nothings into my ear. Going to bed with me the night before her hearing started. The whole thing was a game. A very well-thought-out plan. A setup. You were betting that I’d fall for it—and go after the story she was innocent. You were right. I did. You probably checked me out first. Found out I had a reputation as the kind of reporter who’d play a bit loose with the facts when I needed to. Bend the rules. Cut some corners to break a big story. I was just what you needed, huh?”

  Looking back on it now, I’m not sure what I thought Montero’s reaction was going to be. Would he deny it? Throw me out of his office? Or maybe I’d even wind up in the trunk of a car like Joseph Corman and Karen Raphael.

  But Montero didn’t do anything of those things. He didn’t have to. He had me in a trap that I couldn’t get out of—and we both knew it. I was caught just like a big fish at the end of one of his hooks. And he could play with me for a very long time before he decided whether to let me go or not.

  “Of course, I knew about all you, Dougherty,” he said.

  “So that’s why you picked me?” I said.

  “Sure, you were perfect.”

  The perfect patsy.

  “Why go to all that trouble?”

  He shrugged. “I love my daughter very much.”

  “I want to know one thing,” I said. “Did she really kill William Franze and the girl in bed with him?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure of that.”

  “I’ve never been surer of anything in my life.”

  “Then why not let a jury decide that?”

  “Like I told you the other day,” he said, “I always like to have an ace in the hole. An advantage on my opponent. You were my ace. I needed you. I just didn’t like the odds. I figured they were stacked against Lisa.”

  I thought about the two stories Greg Ackerman had told me that first day in his office. About how John Montero had beaten those criminal raps before. Ackerman had said that Montero was a very bad man. A liar. A cheat. And probably a killer too. Only I didn’t listen to him. I thought I knew better.

  Now Montero had done the same thing again.

  Only this time he’d used me to wriggle out from under the law.

  I told him that. He smiled at me. A scary smile.

  “I’ve made too many enemies over the years,” he said. “Let’s just say that I didn’t want my daughter to have to pay the bill on some debts I ran up a long time ago.”

  I stood up to leave.

  “So what are you going to do now, Joe?”

  “I can’t do anything,” I said. “The story was a phony. If I admit that, then I’m dead in the newspaper business.”

  “Dead is a very permanent thing to be,” Montero said.

  “Like the couple I met in the Bronx?”

  Montero shrugged. “I’ve lost my wife and my son in the past year,” he said. “Lisa’s all I got left. I’ll do anything to protect her. Remember that—just in case you think about doing anything stupid.”

  “I think I’ve already used up my allotment of stupid,” I told him.

  Chapter 44

  That night I went to Lanigan’s. Bonnie was there. Andy. Even Spencer Blackwood. Everyone bought me drinks. Everyone patted me on the back. Everyone wanted to be my friend again.

  There was a drunken discussion going on at one of the tables about what was the most important part of the Banner.

  “Okay, here’s my hypothetical question,” Spencer Blackwood said. “You have to get rid of one section of the newspaper. Which one do you pick—the comics, the horoscope, or the editorial page?”

  “Editorial page,” someone said without hesitation.

  “Editorial page,” another one chimed in quickly.

  “We have an editorial page?” Bonnie asked.

  I finally managed to pull Blackwood away from the table and into a corner, so I could talk to him in private.

  “What’s so important?” he asked me when we were finally alone.

  “I think I set some things in motion with my story, Spence,” I told him. “Things I didn’t know about . . .”

  “Such as?”

  I stared down at my drink.

  “I’m not sur
e.”

  “Then don’t worry about it. You’re not God, Joe. You’re a reporter. All you do is report the facts.”

  “Yeah . . . well, sometimes I wish I’d never heard of this story.”

  “I felt that way about a story one time when I used to be a reporter,” he said.

  “You?” I asked.

  “Yeah, me. That’s right, Dougherty, I used to be a reporter. For chrissakes, I wasn’t born at the age of seventy and immediately named editor-in-chief.”

  I smiled.

  “Anyway, I set some things in motion a long time ago with a story too,” Blackwood said. “It happened back in the fifties, during the McCarthy era. Everyone was looking for Communists in those days. People were being blacklisted, lives were being ruined.

  “One of the biggest witch hunters was a guy named Joe Flaherty. Flaherty was a congressman and a bully and a pretty all-around despicable person. The paper I worked for assigned me to do an in-depth profile on him. Well, I was young and ambitious and I figured this could be a big story for me.

  “And it was. I discovered that Joe Flaherty was really Joseph Finkelstein. He’d changed his name and lied about his history because his parents were Communist agitators during the thirties. Finkelstein himself had belonged to a Communist cell when he was a teenager.

  “I confronted him with everything I knew. He begged me not to use it. He said his life would be ruined.”

  “Did you run the story?” I asked.

  Blackwood nodded. “The day after it appeared Joe Flaherty walked out onto the streets of New York City with a rifle, shot five people to death, and then blew off his own head.”

  “My God!”

  “Yeah, I’ve had to live with that one for more than forty years. Sometimes I can still see the faces of those five innocent victims who died. One of them was a little baby in a stroller.

  “Now I’m not sure what you’re talking about when you say you set some things in motion with the Lisa Montero story. But I know that I set things in motion with my story too. I realized that if I hadn’t done that story, those people would still be alive. And that bothered me. Hell, I even thought about quitting at the time.

  “But, in the end, I realized I’d done the right thing. And you want to know why? Because I told the truth. That’s what a reporter does. He tells the truth.”

  He picked up the copy of the Banner that was lying on the bar in front of us. It was an old one. The one with my story about the secret witness on the front page.

  “You told the truth on the Montero case, Joe,” Blackwood told me. “As long as you’ve done that, you’ve done your job. No problem. Right?”

  “No problem,” I said.

  I eventually drifted away from the rest of the crowd and found a spot at end of the bar where I could be alone. I ordered a double bourbon on the rocks. As I drank it, I remembered doing the exact same thing the day I lost the last of my severance money in Las Vegas eight years ago.

  Yep, here I was—basically in the same situation again. Which was totally fucked. I’d screwed up really badly. I’d lost everything that I worked so hard to get back over the last few years. Carolyn. My new life. My job too, if this ever got out. But even if it didn’t, I wasn’t sure I could live with the truth of what I had done.

  There was another problem too.

  I still didn’t have the slightest idea what happened to William Franze or the rest of the people on Galvin’s list. Montero had admitted a lot of things to me. But when I asked him if his daughter really killed Franze and the call girl, he said she didn’t. Maybe she really didn’t. Maybe Montero was just playing it safe by using me as her insurance policy against a conviction.

  But I still believed that the Franze murders were connected to the others on Galvin’s list—no way it was there just by accident.

  If Lisa Montero did do it, then that meant she was responsible for all the other unsolved crimes too—including my wife and son.

  If not, then the real killer was still out there.

  John Montero had said there was nothing I could do. But he was wrong. I still had one more move in me.

  There’s a theory in gambling called the Martingale Maneuver. It first gained fame around the turn of the century when a gambler used it to win a hundred thousand dollars in three days of play in Monte Carlo. The idea behind the Martingale Maneuver was a simple one—the more you lost, the more you upped the ante. In other words, every time the bet went against you—you just increased the size of the next one. No matter how down and out you were, you played for the big score.

  That’s what I was going to do.

  I just needed one more big score.

  I needed to do this story.

  Only the right way this time.

  It was nearly 1 a.m. by the time I left the bar. I’d had a lot to drink by then, so I don’t remember everything that happened next too clearly.

  What I do remember is hearing a car engine start up just as I stepped off the curb to cross the street. Then, when I got to the middle of the crosswalk, there was a loud roar. I looked up just in time to see the car hurtling toward me at full speed. I leaped frantically out of the way, landing on the hood of a parked car. The other car sped past me without stopping. Another few seconds and I would have been dead.

  I wasn’t hurt, but I was pretty shaken up. And I was suddenly very sober.

  I remembered something Bonnie had told me the other day in the newsroom: “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—someone who’s made a whole new life and has a lot to lose if the truth ever comes out—who’s trying to cover his—or her—trail. Cleaning up all the loose ends.”

  Was that what was happening now?

  Was someone out there trying to clean up the last of the loose ends in this story?

  Joseph Corman.

  Karen Raphael.

  And me.

  Part 5

  Catch Me if You Can

  Chapter 45

  I needed to understand David Galvin better. I needed to understand his followers too, since at least one of them was still out there playing his deadly game. The bottom line was I had to understand what made all of the Great Pretenders tick if I wanted to stop them. So I decided to find someone who could help me.

  Her name was Dr. Christine Whalen, and she was a psychologist who had an office on Fifth Avenue, not far from the Empire State Building. Dr. Whalen had written a book about the phenomenon of fantasy and role-playing games called Game or Obsession? That’s how I found her. I’d picked up the book on the shelves at the NYU Bookstore, where I’d gone looking for some help. Not that I expected her to know David Galvin. The book had been written only a year or so earlier, long after Galvin went to jail. But I figured she was the closest thing I could find to an expert on the subject.

  “The world likes to put people in categories,” Dr. Whalen said, as I sat in her office. “We usually take the most extreme example—or the worst-case scenario—and assume that is the norm.

  “Look at people who ride motorcycles, for instance. Most of them are decent, law-abiding citizens. But when we think about motorcycle riders, the popular image that comes to mind is Hell’s Angels—scary people with tattoos and chains and knives who run in vicious gangs. Do you see what I’m saying, Mr. Dougherty?”

  I nodded.

  “Anyway, it’s the same thing with these fantasy types of games you’re talking about. We all hear stories about the horrors they sometimes lead to. Obsession, suicide, violence, sometimes even murder. But there are many people who play the game for what it really is—a game—without ever losing touch with reality.”

  “Is that what you found out when you were writing your book?” I asked.

  “No, that’s what I thought before I started it.”

  “What about now?”

  “I discovered it really
was a worst-case scenario,” she smiled.

  I stared at her. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “I’m afraid not. In this case, the worst is the norm. The horror stories aren’t myths, after all. These really are very dangerous games for people to play. They are addictive, they’re obsessive, and they sometimes separate you from reality. Put ideas like this into the minds of the wrong people—especially young people, the very bright and impressionable—and it can turn into a disaster. That’s what I discovered in the process of doing my book.”

  Christine Whalen was probably about forty or so. Her hair was short, she had on a pinstriped women’s business suit and she wore a pair of half glasses that made her look a little like Glenn Close as a lawyer in the movie Jagged Edge. No nonsense was probably the best way to describe her.

  “The lure of these fantasy games is tremendous,” she said. “They are incredibly addictive. You become whoever you want, assume any role, do anything you choose—kill, maim, injure people for no reason. There are rules, but many times no one bothers to follow them. That’s one of the things people who play these games always say—the only real rule to remember is that there are no rules. You can cheat, lie, double-cross other players—anything you want. It’s all part of the game.

  “Violence is a big part of it too. Everything in the game—the kills, the bloodshed, the victories—is predicated on violence. Of course, none of it is supposed to be real.

  “Except that sometimes it does become real. The line between fantasy and reality gets very blurred. That happens more than anyone realizes. It happened with your David Galvin and his friends—only in this case to a degree so unthinkable that it dwarfs any of the incidents I talk about in my book.”

  Dr. Whalen took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes wearily. She looked better without the glasses. She’d look even better if she let her hair fall down a bit around her shoulders and got out of that business suit into something sexier.

 

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