by R. G. Belsky
Maybe working here gave the people at Revson a different view of the world. They had all this money, all this power—they probably thought they were gods. That they could do anything they wanted with these people’s money. They forgot those were real people down there that they were robbing.
Of course, it probably didn’t seem like robbery when they did it. This theft was all on computers and electronic files and banking statements. Clean and neat, no violence. But it was robbery, all right. Just the same as the bad guy who walked into a bank or a bodega and announced a stickup. The only difference was the bad guys at Revson couldn’t see the people they were robbing.
“I’d like to speak with some of your other employees, Mr. Albright,” I said.
“Of course.”
“Any suggestions on who could be helpful?”
“I’ll give you some names.”
He wrote them down on a piece of memo paper. I looked at the names. None of them meant anything to me, but then I didn’t expect they would.
Vernon Albright was good. Very good. He’d gotten his whole response to the Revson scandal down perfectly. Maybe even rehearsed it. “We were all shocked, we had no idea, there’s always a few bad apples …” Albright had used that speech on a lot of people before, and he had it down pat.
There’s an old saying in journalism that it isn’t always what people tell you, sometimes it’s what they don’t tell you that matters. Albright had given me a lot of information, but most of it was probably useless. Just like the names on the memo pad that he’d written down. The question was what Albright didn’t tell me. And who he didn’t want me to talk to in the company.
If I could figure that out, maybe I’d have a lead to what really happened to Grace Mancuso.
CHAPTER 11
AFTER I LEFT Albright’s office, I told the video team to go back to the office without me.
“What are you going to do?” one of them asked.
“Walk around the place a bit. See what I can find out.”
“What are you looking for?”
“I don’t know.”
That was the truth. Sometimes you have to let your instincts as a reporter take over. No, I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, or even if I was going to find it here at Revson Investments. But I wanted to try. Just stumble around in the dark a bit and open up a few doors at random and see what was there.
I wandered around the Revson offices, questioning various employees and making myself pretty obvious to everyone. I was pretty sure I was the main topic of conversation—a TV reporter asking questions about a murdered woman employee tended to draw a lot of attention. But I didn’t really learn anything in the Revson offices.
I’d just about given up when a young woman walked by carrying a pile of file folders and heading toward a small office in the corner. If Vernon Albright’s office was a battleship, this one was like a small dinghy. It appeared she didn’t rank too high in the Revson hierarchy. I wouldn’t have even given her a second thought except she said softly to me as we passed each other: “Starbucks, two blocks north of here. Twenty minutes.” At first, I thought she might be talking to someone else. She didn’t even look at me and just kept walking. No one in the office could see we’d made any kind of contact, Which, as it turned out, was her idea.
Later, sitting with her and drinking coffee, the woman introduced herself as Lisa Kalikow.
“I didn’t want to talk in the office,” she said. “People are watching. They know I know things about Grace. They don’t want me to tell anyone anything. I could lose my job if I do, and I need this job. But Grace was my friend. I want people to know the truth about her. How much did they tell you back there?”
I went through everything Vernon Albright had said. Kalikow didn’t say anything until I was finished, but she smiled a few times. Especially at the end where I recounted how Albright had said the company had never determined whether Grace Mancuso was involved in the scandal or not. But that he had encouraged her and all other employees to do the right thing and tell prosecutors anything they knew.
“You don’t buy that?” I asked.
“Grace was into the scandal up to her neck,” she said. “She was in as deep as any of the ones going to jail. The only reason she didn’t was that she went to the authorities when she saw what was happening and made her own deal. The deal was to give up other people in the company to save herself from prosecution. The feds needed her to make their case, so they agreed. Grace always made sure she was protected, even if someone else had to take the heat.”
She said it matter of factly, not with any anger. I wondered if she had been fingered by Grace Mancuso in the investigation.
“I thought you were her friend,” I said.
“I was.”
“You don’t sound like it.”
“You don’t understand Grace. She wasn’t like most people. She had no … no conscience. I know that sounds terrible, but that’s the way Grace was. There was just something missing from her. A human gene or something. Whether something was right or wrong didn’t bother her. She was out for herself first. When it came to a moral dilemma like the scandal here, it was an easy decision for her. She bailed out on her friends and took care of herself. That was her one weak point. I guess you’d call it a character flaw.”
“That sounds like a pretty big character flaw to me.”
Lisa Kalikow shrugged. “We all have character flaws. Hers was just more apparent than others. When it came to money, she was the most cutthroat person I’ve ever met, and believe me I’ve run across some real doozies in this business. But I liked Grace. As I said, we were friends. Or at least as good a friend as anyone could be with Grace.”
“When I spoke to Albright, he said she was planning on leaving the company in a few months.”
Kalikow nodded. “It was made very clear to Grace that she was on the way out. Oh, they couldn’t fire her right away—because then it would have looked like she was being punished for cooperating with the investigation. But she would leave in a few months. She couldn’t do anything about it. They held all the cards. She was into the whole scandal mess pretty deep.”
“How deep?”
“Albright told you it involved Revson giving people false information about their portfolios to artificially raise or lower the prices of certain stocks? Well, that’s how it started out. But it got a lot worse. They eventually were actually stealing money out of people’s accounts. They told the investors—most of them small time, working folks—that the money was lost in the stock market. Most of these poor people believed it—at least for a while—because they didn’t know much about how it all worked. You trust your stockbroker or investment counselor. Big mistake in this case. There were families that were completely wiped out of their life savings or pension accounts.”
“Didn’t the people at Revson who did this figure they’d eventually get caught?”
“They thought they were too smart, I guess. Or maybe they thought it was worth the risk. They were making a lot of money, and it was so easy for them until it all blew up in their faces.”
“And Grace Mancuso was one of those involved?”
“That’s right. So she wasn’t going to be working here for very long—whether or not she made a deal with the prosecutors to cooperate. She was damaged goods for this place or anybody else in the financial world.”
“She had a pretty expensive lifestyle to maintain,” I said, thinking of the fancy furnishings and antiques I’d heard about in her apartment. “How was she going to pay for it?”
Lisa Kalikow stared down at her coffee. She tried to pick it up, but her hand was shaking. This was obviously very difficult for her.
“Look, I’m not sure about any of this. But something else happened a few days before she was killed. We went out for drinks after work, and Grace got a bit loose and started talking more than she normally did. Most of it was about work and stuff like that. But then she said this strange thing. Afterward, I thought about
it a lot. I was going to ask her what she meant, but I never got the chance.”
“What did she say?”
“She told me she had a way to make a lot of money.”
“Did she say what that was?”
“No.”
“Do you have any idea?”
“My guess is she had something on someone.”
“She was blackmailing somebody?”
“That’s what it sounded like.”
CHAPTER 12
I’VE INTERVIEWED THE families of lots of murder victims over the years. There are usually no surprises for me anymore as a journalist with this kind of thing. The emotions all tend to run pretty much the same. Grief, anger, despair, and—most of all, I suppose—an overwhelming sense of loss. But it was different with Grace Mancuso.
“I suppose I should feel worse,” Roger Mancuso said to me when I tracked down him and his wife in New York City, where they’d come to deal with their daughter’s murder.
“What do you mean?”
“Grace is dead. I should be devastated. But I’m not. Last night, I ate a great meal at the restaurant in the hotel. I walked around Times Square and looked at the sights. I watched a movie on TV. I enjoyed myself. How can I do that if my daughter is dead?”
“We all grieve in different ways. Sometimes we hide it.”
“I’m not hiding anything.”
“In a few days or a week …”
Mancuso shook his head. “You don’t understand, Ms. Carlson. I just don’t feel anything. Oh, I feel badly that she died. Just like I’d feel badly that any human being died, especially like that. But I don’t feel the kind of grief that a father is supposed to feel. She was our daughter, for God’s sake. But when I hear about the things she did at that company—the way she stole from people—it’s like I’m reading about someone else. Someone I didn’t know. I guess I lost my daughter a long time ago. A long time before she died.”
We were sitting in a restaurant at the hotel where Roger Mancuso and his wife were staying. His wife was still upstairs. He said she’d be joining us in a few minutes. Mancuso was eating eggs over easy, bacon and home fried potatoes. I just had orange juice and coffee. I never ate much when I was working on a big story. Too much adrenalin or something, I guess.
“Tell me about your daughter.”
“Do you mean about her life here in New York?”
“That’s fine.”
“I don’t know much about that.”
“Then tell me what you do know.”
“All I know is about her growing up in Pennsylvania.”
“That’s good too.”
“Why do you care about that?”
“I care about everything at this point, Mr. Mancuso. I’m trying to put together a picture of your daughter’s life in the hopes that it will give us some clues as to how she died.”
Grace’s story turned out to be a variation of one I’d heard a lot of times before. She’d grown up on a farm in a small town called Brockton. Brockton was outside another small town called DuBois, which was about 100 miles from the Ohio/West Virginia border. Roger Mancuso had run their farm for years. His father and grandfather owned it before him. This was definitely a family from heartland America.
Grace was no typical farmer’s daughter though. She was constantly getting in trouble as a young girl and as a teen. Some of it was just normal kid stuff—running around with boys, drinking and smoking, hell-raising. But, when she was sixteen years old, she was arrested for shoplifting. The police found some earrings, a watch, and a necklace in her purse.
“She just wanted them,” Mancuso said. “When I asked her why she did it, that was her answer. She just wanted them. There was no remorse, no guilt—the only thing she was upset about was that she’d gotten caught. I looked in her eyes and … well, that’s the first time I realized that I didn’t know my own daughter. The first time that I realized I was losing her. It was like there was something missing from her. A conscience. A sense of right and wrong. She didn’t have that.”
Grace had this one flaw—she had no conscience, her friend at the Revson company had said. Now her father was saying the same thing.
“What happened to her after the arrest?”
“She got off on probation.”
“Did she do it again?”
“Not that. But other stuff. Cheating on her SATS. Breaking into a neighbor’s house and stealing money. There were other incidents too. I didn’t find out about all of them until she left.”
“Where did she go?”
“We never knew at first. She just seemed to disappear off the face of the earth for a few years. Then she called one day out of the blue. She needed money. We sent her some, then never heard any more for a long time. By bits and pieces, we later found out how successful she had become. But not from her. We only heard from her when she was in trouble and needed money.”
“When was the last time you talked to her?”
“Several weeks ago.”
“Tell me about that conversation.”
“She said she was going to leave her job. She said she had a lot of bills to pay. She said she needed money in a hurry. She said her financial problems were only temporary, until she figured out a way to make more. She wanted us to take out a loan for her. She wanted us to take out a loan on our farm as the collateral.”
“What did you say?”
“Nothing. I was too stunned. She asked me to think about it. She said she really needed the money because she’d had some setbacks in her career.”
“What happened after that?”
“She said she’d call back for my answer. But she never did.”
“And this conversation with your daughter was how long ago?”
“A month or two.”
“Why do you think she never called back?”
“I know why.”
“Because she found the money some other way,” I said.
Mancuso nodded sadly. “You have to understand my daughter,” he said. “That’s what she was all about. Money.”
Ruth Mancuso came down and joined us. She looked tired and washed out. “I’m sorry I’m late, but I was on the phone making the funeral arrangements back in Pennsylvania,” she said. “It’s a little complicated, because we don’t have her body yet. The Medical Examiner’s office here says they can’t release it until the inquest is completed.”
“So you’re going to be burying her back in Pennsylvania?”
“Of course. That’s where she’s from.”
“I thought that maybe since she’s been gone so long, you might want to hold the service here where her friends are.”
“I have no idea who her friends were.”
“She never told you?”
“Grace never confided anything in us,” Roger Mancuso said. “Not even as a little girl. That’s why we were so confused when she came to us with this last request to use the farm to give her money. We had no idea what was wrong, why she needed it—or what she planned to do next.”
“Did you two decide not to give her the money?” I asked them.
Ruth Mancuso looked over at her husband for a second, then just nodded without saying anything. I got the feeling they’d had a lot of discussions about this. How far do you go to save your only child? I wasn’t sure about the answer to that one myself.
“When was the last time you talked to your daughter, Mrs. Mancuso?” I asked.
“I can’t remember.”
There was something hesitant about the way she said it. I picked up on it immediately. She was lying.
“Did you get on the phone during the conversation with your husband about the money?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“You talked to her after that conversation, didn’t you, Mrs. Mancuso?”
She looked flustered for a minute, then gave it up. “Yes … yes, I did.”
“Ruth!” her husband said in astonishment. “You never told me.”
“I had to try, Roger. I coul
dn’t leave it like that between us. I wanted to try and talk to her. Talk with her like a mother and a daughter. I wanted her to tell me the truth for one time in her life.”
“But it didn’t work?”
“No. She didn’t even want to spend any time on the phone with me. She was too busy. Some big meeting she was going to.”
“From work?”
“No, it was something else. That’s all she would say. She didn’t seem to care one way or the other about the farm loan anymore.”
“She’d figured out some other way to get the money and she didn’t need you anymore,” I said.
“Yes.”
CHAPTER 13
HOW FAR DO you go to save your only child?
That was the question Roger and Ruth Mancuso said they’d had to deal with even before their daughter’s tragic death. They were never sure of the answer. Neither was I.
I remembered something else that Roger Mancuso had told me about his daughter over breakfast: “We lost her a long time ago,” he said.
I could sure relate to that.
I took out my cell phone after I left the hotel and called a number I knew all too well from the endless, fruitless calls I’d made to it in the past. Not that I expected any actual response this time either. But I had to make the effort. You always had to make every effort to make things right when it was your own daughter.
“I had to try,” Ruth Mancuso had said. “I couldn’t leave it like that between us. I wanted to try and talk to her. Talk with her like a mother and a daughter.”
I thought about that—and a lot of other things—as I listened to my call ringing the number until someone picked it up on the other end.
“Senator Elliott Grayson’s office,” a woman said.
“This is Clare Carlson from Channel 10 TV News in New York,” I said. “I have to speak to Senator Grayson urgently.”
“Is this about a story?”