Playing Dead

by R. G. Belsky

  She stood up now and surveyed them proudly. There was a small blade of grass sticking to the knee of her jeans, where she’d been bending down on the lawn. She saw it now and frowned. She reached down and flicked it off. Impeccable.

  “I’m here to talk about your daughter, Mrs. Martin,” I said.

  “You mean Whitney?”

  “Yes.”

  There was a pained expression on her face. She looked back at her flowers. Like she could find some sort of comfort there.

  “What Whitney did,” she said slowly, “it was just unbelievable. She brought shame onto our family.”

  “She died, Mrs. Martin.”

  “It was the way she died.”

  “You mean because she was a prostitute?”

  “Yes.”

  “Things happen,” I said. “It doesn’t mean she was a bad person.”

  “She brought shame onto this family,” Mrs. Martin repeated, staring at her azaleas.

  We went inside after a while. The house was a lot like her. Beautiful, impeccably clean, everything in its proper place—so perfect that it almost seemed unreal. There was an old-fashioned quilted sign on the wall in the living room that said “God Bless Our Happy Home.” I hadn’t seen one of those in a long time. Next to it was an award from the Wayne Garden and Flower Club. There were also family pictures. Janet Martin and a man I assumed was her husband, with two beautiful girls. One of the girls was Whitney.

  “Did you know your daughter was working for an escort agency?” I asked her.

  “No.”

  “She never told you?”

  “I said I didn’t know.”

  Of course, she did.

  “What did you fight about with her?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You had a big falling out. You cut off her money for college and she hadn’t spoken to you in a while before she died.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “One of her friends.”

  She sighed. “Do you have any children, Mr. Dougherty?”

  “I did. A son.”

  “Did?”

  “He died.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  “It was quite a while ago. He was very young.”

  Maybe that created some kind of bond between us. Maybe it helped her trust me. Or maybe she just wanted to talk to somebody about it.

  “Sometimes we try too hard for our kids,” she said. “We want so much to protect them from being hurt that we hurt them even more. And we don’t know we’re doing it until it’s too late.”

  “Is that what happened with you and Whitney?”

  She nodded. “A long time ago, when I was young and about Whitney’s age, I wanted to be an actress. I came here to New York, went for auditions, and kept looking for my big break. But I had to pay the rent, buy food, find nice clothes—and there was no money. So I found a way to make money. Just until I became a big star. That’s what I told myself anyway.”

  I suddenly realized what she was going to tell me.

  “I became a prostitute. Oh, they didn’t call it that. I worked for this big fancy spa—leisure consultants was the term they used for us. But we all knew what it was about. Men would pay us money, we’d do stuff for them—and well, as they say, it’s the world’s oldest profession. Then one day I met a man I liked. Whitney’s father. He took me away from all that. We moved here, we created this beautiful home, we raised our two daughters. I did everything I could to protect them—to make sure they would never have to suffer some of the pain that I had.”

  Wow! I wondered what the Wayne Garden and Flower Club would say if they found out about this.

  “Did Whitney know all about your background?”

  “Yes, I told her one day.”

  “Why?”

  “I wanted to make sure she never did anything like that.”

  “But it didn’t work.”

  “No. In fact, the exact opposite happened. She became fascinated by it. The whole thing really intrigued her. She wanted to see what it was like. Maybe if I hadn’t told her the story, none of this would have happened. And Whitney would be alive today.”

  I looked at a picture in the living room of a happy, smiling Whitney Martin. She had her arm around another girl. The second girl was very pretty too. The two of them looked a lot alike.

  “Is that your other daughter?” I asked Mrs. Martin, pointing at the picture.

  She nodded. “Elizabeth.”

  “And she’s in college too?”

  “Yes. This was her freshman year at Boston University. She did really well too. Made the dean’s list. Her major is political science. She wants to work with the peace corps.”

  She seemed very proud of Elizabeth.

  “Where is Elizabeth now?” I asked.

  “She’s not here.”

  “Is she at Boston University?”

  “No.”

  “Then she’s living here for the summer?”

  Mrs. Martin didn’t directly answer my question. “Elizabeth was very close to her sister, Mr. Dougherty. She’s having a great deal of difficulty dealing with all this. They were only a year apart in age, and Elizabeth always looked up to Whitney as a role model. She just can’t believe that she’s now gone. None of us can.”

  “Can I talk to her?” I said.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t want Elizabeth to get involved in this,” she said firmly. “It’s been too hard.”

  I could have pushed it, but I didn’t. I guess I didn’t really think Elizabeth would have much to add anyway. So instead I just stood up, thanked Mrs. Martin for her time, and said goodbye.

  I felt sorry for her.

  She had worked for a long time to make this the perfect American house. Perfect parents. Perfect daughters. Perfect furniture. Perfect flowers in the yard. But then one day tragedy came calling. And now this house would never be the same.

  It was a long way between what happened to Whitney Martin and the strange games that David Galvin and the Great Pretenders started playing at New York University more than a decade ago.

  But there was a connection.

  There had to be.

  Chapter 51

  You never know about a story. Sometimes you dig and dig—and come up with nothing. Other times the answers jump up and practically hit you over the head. That’s what happened when I went back to William Franze’s neighborhood to talk to the witnesses from the night of the murders.

  Sure, the cops had already done that during the early days of the investigation. But cops—no matter how good they are—can sometimes miss an important clue. Or see it and not realize what it means. Or maybe I had some information or perspective or viewpoint on the case that the police didn’t, which could help me find something that they had overlooked. I figured it was worth a try.

  The first witness I saw was Blanche LaMotta. She lived in the building next door to Franze’s. She said she remembered hearing a loud argument coming from the Franze building around midnight on the night of the murders. She remembered the time because she had just started watching a rerun of “Murphy Brown,” she said, which came on at twelve o’clock.

  “What did you do then?” I asked.

  “I went to the window to find out what was happening.”

  “What did you see?”

  “Nothing at first. But I could still hear the yelling.”

  “What happened then?”

  “I saw a woman come running out of the building. She seemed very agitated. She was still shouting as she ran away from the place. I wasn’t sure who she was talking to. But then I saw Mr. Franze. He was standing at the door of his place. He was yelling at her too.”

  “William Franze was still alive at this point?”

  “Yes. He even came partway down the walkway and tried to grab her. But she pulled away from him. They screamed some more—and then she ran down the street. He went back inside. I figured
it was all over so I went back to my TV program.”

  “This is very important,” I said to her. “Did you see the woman well enough to identify her?”

  “No,” she said. “I told the police that. It was too dark for me to see her face.”

  “Well, can you remember what they were arguing about?”

  “I never could make out most of it,” she said. “Just the one name Mr. Franze kept using.”

  “What was that?”

  “Lisa. He called the woman Lisa. I’m sure of that.”

  Jack Graham lived across the street. He’d heard the argument too, he said.

  “It was loud, definitely loud. Both of them were shouting at the top of their lungs. I had my windows closed and the air conditioner running. So it had to be really loud for me to hear it. I mean they were really going at each other bigtime. You know what I mean?”

  “Did you see anything?”

  “No, but I didn’t really look. Hey, this is New York City. Stuff like this happens all the time out on the street, even in nice neighborhoods like this. I’ll tell you the truth, I didn’t want to get involved. I wasn’t looking to be any peacemaker or Good Samaritan. Good Samaritans can get themselves killed in this town.”

  “What did you hear then?”

  “Just words. Snatches of conversation. Lots of profanity. Most of it didn’t really mean anything to me. . . .”

  “Most of it?”

  “Yeah, there was one thing. At the end. Something the guy said. I heard it really clearly too. Of course, he was probably standing out on the street now, yelling at her—which is why I could hear him so well. He said, ‘Go ahead, run back to daddy. Who needs you anyway? I’d rather fuck a whore than an ice-cold bitch like you anyway, Lisa.’”

  I canvassed the rest of the neighbors after that, ringing doorbells all the way up and down the block. It took a lot of time, but didn’t produce any results. No one else heard anything. No one saw anything. No one remembered anything special about that night. There was always a lot of noise on a New York City street at night. Most New Yorkers just shut everything out. Even a murder.

  There was one other person I needed to talk to. But he lived on the next block. The old man who was walking his dog in front of Franze’s house on the night of the murders. His name was Albert Edelman. He said he’d seen Lisa coming back after the argument. And he saw Whitney Martin, the dead woman, go in too—in fact, he said she’d even talked to him.

  I had an address for Edelman, but I decided to do it a different way. One of the clips quoted him as saying he always walked his dachshund dog at the same time—a little after midnight—and followed the same route which took him past Franze’s townhouse. I figured it might be a good idea to try to recreate the exact events of that night. Maybe I’d see something that everyone else had missed.

  So I went back to East Sixty-first Street at midnight, parked my car in front of Franze’s place, and waited for Edelman and his dog.

  Sure enough, at a little after twelve, he came down the street with the dog on a leash. The dog was a brown dachshund. If Edelman remembered that this was the spot where everything had happened the night of the murders, he didn’t seem bothered by it. He stood waiting patiently as the dog sniffed along a patch of sidewalk right in front of the Franze townhouse.

  I got out of my car, walked over to Edelman, and told him why I was there. He shook my hand and said he’d be happy to help. He told me his dachshund’s name was Gretchen. Gretchen wagged her tail at me. I kneeled down to pet her, and she licked my face. Then she rolled over on her back to let me scratch her stomach.

  “She’s very friendly,” Edelman smiled.

  “I can see that.”

  “Yeah, everyone likes Gretchen,” he said.

  I asked him what he remembered about the night that William Franze and Whitney Martin had been murdered.

  “I saw the girl. The one that got murdered.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “I was here walking Gretchen, just like I am here with you now, and a taxi pulled up at the curb. This young woman got out. She had to walk right past me. She saw Gretchen and smiled at her. Then Gretchen wagged her tail, so the woman stopped to pet her. Gretchen licked her face too. Like she did with you. Gretchen’s shameless when she finds anyone who’ll give her attention.”

  “So if this woman stopped to pet your dog, you got a really good look at her, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re sure it was the woman who was killed—Whitney Martin?”

  “Absolutely. I saw her picture in the paper the next day. That was the same girl. She was very beautiful. She seemed very nice too. I mean she didn’t look like a call girl or anything. She looked more like a college coed. What a shame that she had to die so young.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “I started walking Gretchen down the street. I saw the woman go toward the front door of that house.” He pointed to William Franze’s place. “Then as I was coming back down the street again later another woman walked right past me and turned into the same place. I saw this one face to face—we were only a few feet away. It was Lisa Montero. The one the police arrested.”

  “Did she say anything to you?”

  “No, I don’t think she even noticed me. She seemed very agitated, very upset.”

  “And you saw her go into Franze’s house?”

  “No. I said she was heading toward it. I remember thinking it was unusual—two such beautiful women showing up like that at the same place at the same time. But I didn’t really think much more about it. Until I saw it on the TV news the next day. I mean it didn’t have anything to do with me. I just finished giving Gretchen her walk and went home.”

  “So you can’t be sure that Lisa Montero ever actually went back inside Franze’s house.”

  “No, I never saw that.”

  I took out a newspaper clip about the murder and showed it to him. There was a picture of Whitney Martin on the frontpage.

  “That’s the first woman you saw, right?” I said.

  “Yes,” he said, squinting at the picture.

  “And you’re sure?”

  “Oh yeah, she’s got the same features. The same eyes. The same facial structure. Everything’s the same . . .”

  He looked at the picture again.

  “Except . . .”

  “Except what?”

  “I don’t know,” Edelman said. “She just looked a little younger that night.”

  There was something wrong here.

  I knew that, but I just couldn’t put my finger on what it was.

  I’d gone over the same ground as the police did in the days right after the murders. I’d talked to the same eyewitnesses. I’d gotten all the same answers the police did. Nothing was different. So why did I have the nagging feeling there was a clue out there I was missing?

  I thought about it all the way back to my hotel. I pulled up in front, got out, and headed for the front door. There was a woman coming out of the hotel walking a large dog. She was tall, wearing tight designer jeans and high-heeled boots and looked like she was a model. But it wasn’t her I was looking at. It was the dog.

  That’s when it hit me.

  “The woman stopped to pet my dog,” Albert Edelman had said. “Gretchen licked her face too.”

  He’d told that to the police, of course. Only they didn’t make anything of it. No reason to. Only now I knew something the cops didn’t know. That story didn’t make any sense.

  Whitney Martin was terrified of dogs.

  Her friend Stacy had told me so.

  “I wanted Whitney to move in with me,” Stacy had said. “But she couldn’t—she didn’t get along with Oscar. Oscar’s my dog. Whitney was afraid of dogs.”

  Why would Whitney Martin—who was afraid of dogs—stop to pet Albert Edelman’s dachshund and even let it lick her face? There was only one possible answer. It was so easy I wondered why someone hadn’t stumbled over it before.
r />   The woman he saw was not Whitney Martin.

  Of course, Edelman insisted that she looked just like the pictures of Whitney Martin that he saw. And he had no reason to lie. But he admitted to me that there was one thing that was different. The woman he had seen looked younger in person, he said.

  Who looked just like Whitney Martin—only a little younger?

  Her sister.

  Chapter 52

  I was back on a stakeout again.

  They really are a miserable part of the newspaper business. You’re always too hot, too cold, too wet, or too dry. You get hungry, you get thirsty, you have to go to the bathroom. Worst of all, you get bored. Bored out of your mind. And, in the end, most of the time you don’t even find out anything new anyway.

  I once knew a reporter who spent a week staking out the apartment of a woman who was the key witness in a big New York City murder case. Morning, noon, and night, he was parked right in front of the woman’s door. Of course, nothing happened. On the eighth day, the reporter desperately had to go to the bathroom, so he decided to slip off to a gas station around the corner to take care of it. He was gone maybe ten minutes—at the most. He came back to find out that the witness had walked out the front door, and another reporter from the Daily News had spotted her and gotten an exclusive interview. It ran on Page One of the News the next day. This guy wanted to kill himself. So did the editors at his paper. I didn’t blame any of them.

  Another reporter I knew solved the bathroom dilemma one time by simply refusing to leave. As the call of nature became too great to ignore, he simply dealt with it there. Literally. In his pants as he sat in the car. So now his pants were soaking wet and smelled horribly of urine. So when it came time to approach the person he’d been following, they fled in terror from this foul-smelling stranger in wet pants.

  Then there was the reporter on a stakeout who figured out how to deal with his boredom by listening to the radio. He really got into it too. News. Sports. Music. Those long hours of waiting in the car for something to happen just flew by. The only problem came when he tried to start the car again to follow the subject of the stakeout. He couldn’t. His battery had gone dead from all his radio playing.