by R. G. Belsky
Then, after the last phone call from Susan, the beer finally took its toll on his bladder. He had to use the men’s room. Galvin followed him in. The two of them were alone.
At first—when he saw the knife—Macklin thought it was a homosexual rape attempt.
He pleaded for his life.
He offered Galvin money.
He even said he’d have sex with him.
She never knew how long the scene went on for. But, when it was over, Macklin was dead. The police found him stabbed to death—with his pants left around his ankles—in the bathroom of a rough homosexual hangout. It looked like an open-and-shut case. As far as they were concerned, the victim had just gone looking for a different kind of sexual adventure, and gotten more than he bargained for.
Susan never found any of this out until later.
When Galvin told her the story the next day, he left out the part about the murder. She thought Macklin had just had an extremely embarrassing night. The story didn’t get much publicity in the papers. Both Macklin’s family and his law firm had done everything they could to keep the circumstances of his death private. And Susan had no reason to ever see him again.
The same thing happened with the next two. Marilyn Dupree and Judith Curran. Marilyn Dupree was an exotic dancer and Judith Curran a young black woman trying to work her way through Fordham University to become a teacher. In a city like New York where a dozen murders happen every day, neither of them drew a great deal of attention. If there was much coverage of their deaths, Susan never knew about it.
But the fourth time was different.
That was the one that changed everything.
Her name was Toni Aiello, and she was a popular, pretty eighteen-year-old high school student from Long Island. She was murdered the morning after her senior prom. Toni Aiello and her friends had come into the city to party after the dance—still wearing their formal attire—and Susan had waited on them at the restaurant. Galvin was there too, and was fascinated by the idea of having some fun with a prom queen. Susan lured her into the park late at night with the promise of meeting someone who could sell her drugs. She left her there standing alone in her prom dress. She never knew what happened next.
But later they found Toni Aiello’s murdered body behind some bushes near the archway at the entrance to the park.
This murder did not go unnoticed.
A high school girl killed in her prom dress in the middle of Washington Square Park was big news, and the story was splashed over the front page of every newspaper in town.
When Susan read about it, she thought at first the whole thing was just some sort of horrible coincidence. She found Galvin and told him what had happened. She thought he’d be shocked too. But he just laughed. Then he told her. He told her everything. About Aiello. About Macklin. And about all the rest of them too.
“He said they were my murders,” she remembered. “He’d done the actual killing, but he said he’d give me credit for these four. He said it was just the beginning. He said there’d be a lot more too. He said I was the only one that had lived up to his expectations. He said he was proud of me.”
Susan never went back to NYU. She changed her name, her address, even the way she looked. She never talked to David Galvin again. She was afraid of him. Eventually she got a job tending bar at a place on East Thirty-fourth Street, which is where I met her.
She agonized over what to do. If she went to the police, she’d have to confess her part in the murders and she’d go to jail too. But if she did nothing, Galvin would carry on with his murder spree. And no one would know the horrible truth except her.
Finally she sent an anonymous letter to the authorities telling them about Galvin.
She never knew for sure whether they had taken it seriously or not.
But soon after that Galvin was captured. So maybe his arrest wasn’t just a lucky break after all. After he was in jail, there was no reason for her to ever admit what she had done. Galvin could never hurt anyone again. So she tried to put it out of her mind. To get on with her life.
She married me.
She had Joey.
Then she married Charles Matheson and became a wealthy Connecticut socialite.
And—until this had all exploded around her again—most of the time she’d managed to forget all about David Galvin and the games they’d played at college eleven years ago.
Most of the time.
“Sometimes at night,” she said, “I wake up and I can still see their faces. All four of them. Macklin. Dupree. Curran. Aiello. It’s like I could almost reach out and touch them. I want to say I’m sorry. I want to say I didn’t mean it. I want to say a lot of things to those people. But it’s too late. So instead I get up, send my son off to school, kiss my husband goodbye as he goes off to work—and try to pretend like it never happened.”
Then she talked about the night that we met.
“When you told me your name, I knew who you were,” she said. “I remembered it from the story about Galvin being arrested. I’d kept a copy of that article—and looked at it every once in a while just to tell myself that he really was in jail and couldn’t come looking for me anymore. I couldn’t believe the man who wrote that newspaper article was asking me out. I took it as a sign. A sign of hope. A sign that I could somehow turn my life around by being with you.
“That was why it was so important to me to have Joey too. I wanted to bring something good and wonderful and hopeful into this world. I knew I could never make up for the four lives that were gone. But I could do this. I could have a son and I could raise him to be a good person. It became the most important thing in my life. When I look at Joey, when I think about him—well, that’s the one thing that makes the nightmares go away.”
I wasn’t sure what to say.
We all go through life thinking we’re making our own choices about which direction to go.
Then sometimes—like now—we find that the choices were made a long time ago.
“If Joey was so damn important to you, then why did you leave me?” I asked angrily.
“That’s why I left you, Joe.”
“I—I don’t understand . . .”
“You weren’t the one for me,” she said. “I thought you were, but you weren’t. Your life was falling apart just like mine had been back then before I met you. I had to move on. For myself. And for Joey. That’s when I met Charles. And I knew he was a good man and a kind man and the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. I’m sorry.”
I nodded. There wasn’t much else to do. I had a million things I wanted to say to her, but I didn’t.
“And you’ve never told anybody else about all this?” I asked.
“No.”
“Not even your new husband.”
“That’s right.”
“So why are you telling me now?”
“I figured it was time,” she said.
I looked down at the gun that was lying next to her down on an end table. “And you’re afraid.”
“Yes. He’s coming after me. Just like he came after the others. I know that’s what’s happening here.”
“David Galvin is dead,” I reminded her.
“You don’t know him,” she said. “He’s evil. He’s the devil. Somehow he’s found a way.”
A few minutes later, Susan walked me to the front door. I put out my hand to say goodbye. She hugged me instead. I hugged her back. I thought I’d feel nothing for her. This woman who had once been my wife and the mother of my child. Who I now knew had been alive for the past eight years while I grieved for her. Who had married another man. And who once played deadly games with a cold-blooded murderer. But I was wrong. I felt her touch, I smelled the scent in her hair, and I was under her spell again. I missed her. I’d always miss her. I loved her. God, help me.
“What are you going to do now, Joe?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Chapter 67
I needed to talk to someone.
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Someone I could trust.
For the first time in my life, I wasn’t sure what to do about a story. If I printed it, I’d have the scoop of a lifetime. But I’d also be sending Susan—the mother of my son—to prison.
There was something else bothering me too. I wasn’t convinced I had the whole story yet. Susan had given me the answers to a lot of my questions. But not all of them.
I went through the possibilities of people I could go to for advice. Jack Rollins was obviously out. Andy too—he was too ambitious to think about anything but what an exclusive like this would do for his own career. Spencer Blackwood? Maybe, maybe not. He was a nice enough old guy and he seemed to like me, but he was a newspaper editor too. I didn’t know which way he would go. I remembered Christine Whalen and tried to get her on the phone, but there was no answer. Maybe she’d be back soon, but I didn’t want to wait. I needed someone now. There was only one other person I could think of.
“Bonnie, you do want to get some coffee?” I said.
“I’ve already had about eleven cups of coffee this morning,” she answered. “Do you really want to be responsible for pouring more caffeine into me? It could get ugly.”
“I’ll take the gamble,” I told her.
We sat at a small table in the corner of the Banner cafeteria.
Bonnie—as usual—was doing most of the talking.
“I really shouldn’t be drinking coffee. Coffee is supposed to get you up. Well, I’m so up I feel I should have a parachute on my back. I mean I am flying. Maybe I should try decaf instead, huh? Hey, what is decaf anyway? Did you ever see that bit on ‘Seinfeld?’ What’s the deal with decaf—do they cut open the coffee beans and pour out the caffeine or something? I think about stuff like that all the time . . .”
“My wife and son are alive,” I told her.
I didn’t think there was anything that could stop Bonnie from talking when she was on a roll, but that did it.
“And she told me she was a murderer.”
Bonnie took a deep breath. “Well, there’s a real conversation stopper if I ever heard one,” she said slowly.
I told her about everything that had happened in Greenwich.
“So what do you think I should do?” I asked her when I was finished.
“Run the story,” she said without any hesitation.
“But if I do that, I’ll ruin Susan’s life. And my son’s too. She could go to jail, and he’ll be without a mother. She did a terrible thing eleven years ago. And she did a terrible thing to me when she faked her death and ran off with Joey. But now she seems to have pulled her life together. She’s an upstanding citizen. She’s happy. Joey’s happy. What the point of changing all that?”
“Then don’t do the story,” Bonnie said.
“She’s the key. The missing person I’ve been looking for. The whole story hinges on her. I’ve been working on this for weeks. My whole newspaper career depends on it. I can’t just walk away from it.”
“Jesus Christ, Joe, I don’t know what to tell you. You’ve got to make the decision. Not me.”
“You could do the story yourself,” I pointed out to her.
“No, I couldn’t. I have no proof.”
“I just gave it to you.”
She shook her head. “It doesn’t work like that,” she said. “We’re a team. We started out on this story as a team, we’re going to finish it as a team. Whatever we decide, we decide together. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
There was something else we hadn’t talked about yet.
Bonnie brought it up before I did.
“What about the new murders? Dodson, Hiller, Franze, and Montero? She confessed to helping Galvin kill four people eleven years ago. Maybe she murdered these people . . .”
“She told me she didn’t know anything about them,” I said.
“You believed her?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I just think she was telling the truth.”
“She’s a liar, Joe. She told you that. A very good liar. Her whole life has been built on lies . . .”
“I believe her,” I said.
Bonnie started to say something, then just shrugged. “Okay, so where does that leave us, partner?”
“Still looking for a killer.”
“You got any ideas?”
“John Montero.”
“What about him?”
“He doesn’t fit the pattern,” I said.
Chapter 68
The Montero killing had been bothering me ever since it happened.
It was different than the rest.
Dodson, Hiller, and Lisa had been members of Galvin’s secret group—there was a reason for a surviving member to want to kill them to keep the story quiet.
But why Lisa’s father?
The circumstances of his killing were different too.
Dodson and Hiller had been murdered with all the trappings of one of Galvin’s fantasy games. The wedding dress. The clown suit. But there was nothing like that with Montero. It was a hit. Plain and simple. Whoever killed him wasn’t there to play games. They just wanted him dead.
So what did that mean?
Well, maybe there were two killers at work here. One for Dodson, Hiller, Franze, and Whitney Martin—thinking Martin was Lisa. Another who simply wanted to get rid of John Montero.
Or maybe the killer was really after Montero all along—and just killed the rest of them to cover up his real motive.
Someone who had a motive for wanting Montero dead.
Someone who hated him.
Who hated John Montero?
Well, Greg Ackerman did.
I went over the stories about Ackerman’s father and Montero in the library again. Looking for something I might have missed the first time around.
Greg Ackerman’s father died five years after the case fell apart, a broken man. Then Ackerman went to NYU, where one of his classmates turned out to be Lisa Montero. The daughter of the man who ruined his father’s life.
Did Greg Ackerman know she was there? He said he didn’t, but I had to consider the possibility. I also had to consider the possibility that maybe something else had happened between him and Lisa. She was very attractive. Even he had admitted that to me. (“On a scale of one to ten, I’d make her a fifteen,” he said to me.)
What if he asked her out and she turned him down? Or they had a relationship that went bad? Would that be enough to push him over the edge to murder? First, her father destroys his father’s life, then she breaks his heart. So he carries a grudge around with him all these years—until he finally gets a chance for revenge. And when I mess up his murder case against Lisa, he goes right after the father.
I shook my head. This was all speculation. I needed some facts.
The man who had changed his testimony in the case against Montero all those years ago—Louis Archer—moved to Arizona afterward, according to one clipping I found. Maybe that was a lead. If I tracked him down, maybe he’d tell me the truth about what really happened. Maybe that would lead me to the evidence I needed on Greg Ackerman.
I managed to follow Archer’s trail to a retirement home in Tucson, where he had died several years ago. Natural causes. Nothing suspicious about it, they said. He was an old man.
Another dead end.
Just for the hell of it, I looked up the other story Ackerman had told me. The man who had died mysteriously after refusing to sell his company to Montero. Edward Findlay. I read about his disappearance, the discovery of his body in the East River, the police refusing to bring any charges against Montero—and the sad story of Findlay’s wife and little daughter. There was a picture of the two of them taken at his funeral. I found a later clip that said his wife had committed suicide. They said she had never recovered from the pain of losing her husband.
I knew that same pain.
I’d felt it when I lost Susan and Joe Jr.
Now I felt it again knowing they were alive all thi
s time—but realizing they could never be a part of my life anymore.
I read the Edward Findlay file again. The first time I’d looked at the clipping a few weeks ago I’d been bothered by a nagging feeling that I was missing something.
I still had that feeling.
One of the later stories said that his little girl had been sent to a foster home after the mother died. It said she was having a lot of adjustment problems. I looked at the picture of her again at the funeral. A little girl who’d just lost her father.
The vague uneasy feeling I had suddenly got a lot stronger.
I walked over to the head of the library and asked if she had a magnifying glass. She gave me one from her desk. I took it back to where I was sitting and looked at the picture again. The little girl’s face jumped out at me now.
People change a lot over the years.
A little girl doesn’t always look the way she’s going to when she grows up.
But some things are the same.
I must have sensed some of it the first time I looked at the picture, but it didn’t click until now.
Now I knew.
I knew who the little girl was.
And I suddenly knew who had a reason for killing John Montero.
Chapter 69
It took me only about half an hour to get back up to Greenwich.
The afternoon commuter jam-ups hadn’t started yet, and I drove very fast. I did seventy mph on the East River Drive, weaving in and out of traffic like a crazed race car driver. Then, once I was over the Triborough Bridge and headed north on the New England Thruway, I pretty much floored the accelerator on the open stretch of road until I got to Connecticut.
I was furious with myself.
I’ve always been a sucker for a woman’s sob story. All my life, a woman bats her eyes at me and I believe everything she says. I keep looking for the truth, and expecting I will find it. But I never do. They’d all lied to me. Susan. Lisa. All of them.
The big house loomed in front of me now.