Below the Fold

by R. G. Belsky

  What about the other three?

  CHAPTER 24

  “I REALLY SHOULDN’T be here with you,” I said to Scott Manning.

  “I really shouldn’t be here with you either.”

  “You’re part of the story I’m trying to cover as an objective reporter.”

  “And I’m married.”

  “That probably trumps journalistic integrity,” I admitted.

  We were sitting in a restaurant on the East Side, not far from his precinct. Manning looked good, even better than I remembered the last time. He was wearing an open collar white sports shirt, a blue corduroy blazer, and designer jeans. I’d fixed myself up a bit for this night too. I still wasn’t sure if this was technically a date or not, but it sure was shaping up that way.

  “I know your husband, Sam,” he said.

  “Ex-husband.”

  “Nice guy.”

  “Great guy.”

  “So how come it didn’t work out for you two?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t do marriage well.”

  I asked him about the police investigation into the Grace Mancuso/Dora Gayle murders to try to keep the conversation on a semi-professional basis.

  “How would I know anything about that?” he asked.

  “You’re a homicide detective.”

  “Who’s on restricted duty and under investigation for the Nazario death.”

  “So they haven’t told you anything about Grace Mancuso?”

  “Nope.”

  “No inside NYPD information of any kind?”

  “They barely talk to me these days.”

  He shrugged when he told me like it didn’t matter to him, but I could tell it did. This was the biggest murder investigation in town. He was a homicide detective. And he was being kept completely out of the loop because of the Nazario controversy as well as his own possible involvement in the Mancuso murder because his name was on that list.

  “They played around for a while with the idea of giving all of us on the list some kind of special protection, just in case it was a hit list by the killer. But the logistics of doing that were impossible. I mean, how do you guard someone like Brendan Kaiser or Bill Atwood or even the mob attorney twenty-four hours a day? And I’m a police officer. I damn sure don’t need anyone babysitting me. From what I understand, they’re basically baffled by it all—the murder and the reasons for our names being on that list. I think they’re also embarrassed by how you people in the media have been breaking so many of the new developments, instead of them. Like the relationship between Atwood and the Gayle woman.”

  “I’m not sure how much any of it helps us get to the real answers though,” I said. “So Atwood dated Dora Gayle three decades ago—what does that mean? And what possible link could there be between that and you and Kaiser and Lehrman being on that damned list? We’re still a long way away from the answers we need.”

  “It’s a piece of the puzzle though,” Manning said. “That’s how I do an investigation. A piece at a time until the pieces start to make some kind of sense. You’re doing a good job. Not as good a job as I could have done if I was working the case, but good enough.”

  He smiled at me and gave me a big wink as he said that. I smiled back. A flirtatious compliment. This was good. Very good. We talked more about the Mancuso case as we ate our dinner.

  At some point, I switched topics and asked Manning more about the status of his marriage.

  “You said before you’ve been married for a long time, right?”

  He nodded. “Susan was a cashier at one of the clubs I played at when I was with the band. I flirted with her a few times, and she flirted back. We had a lot of rock groupies chasing after us back then—even if we weren’t big stars—who were just looking for a good time. But Susan wasn’t like that. She wanted a house and a husband and everything that went with it. She liked the idea of me being a cop, at first. Later, that all changed though.

  “We haven’t really been happy together in a long time, I suppose. Oh, we put up a good front. We went to neighborhood barbecues and belonged to the PTA and looked just like any other normal suburban couple. I got along with my kids all right until recently. But that all blew up when the Tommy Bratton/Manny Nazario business became front-page news. They’re all embarrassed of me. And my youngest, Tim—the seventeen-year-old, who once wanted to follow in my footsteps with the NYPD—now thinks I’m some kind of killer or Nazi or something.

  “The dissolution of my marriage was a bit subtler. Over the years, me and Susan just grew further and further apart. I found myself avoiding going home, preferring the company of other cops. ‘I’m supposed to be your priority in life,’ Susan yelled at me one time. ‘But the only priority for you is that partner of yours, Tommy Bratton. Sometimes I think you care about him more than you care about me.’ Maybe she was right.

  “I’d had a few partners over the years. But of all of them, the only real partner I ever had was Tommy Bratton. We were like brothers, me and Tommy. We thought the same way on the street, reacted as if we were one. And, most of all, we trusted each other. I trusted Tommy Bratton with my life, and I knew Tommy felt the same way about me.”

  There was an obvious question I needed to ask him.

  “Were you telling the truth when you backed up your partner’s story about not being there when the suspect went out the window?”

  “I told you what I testified.”

  “Yeah, I know. But I also heard you just talking about how loyal you were to your partner. You seem like a stand-up guy to me. A stand-up guy stands by his partner. He also tells the truth under oath. But what if you have to make a choice between the two—telling the truth and loyalty to your partner? Did you have to make a choice?”

  “You expect me to admit to you that I lied under oath?”

  “Did you?”

  “You’re asking as a reporter?”

  “No, this is off the record. We’re just two people talking here. Even if I did tell someone about the conversation, which I won’t, you could deny it. But I’d like to hear the truth. I think what happened to you and your partner is somehow part of the story. Does it have anything to do with this murder case? I can’t imagine how. But your name is on that list, and we don’t know why. So we have to examine all the possibilities, no matter how far-fetched they might seem. At least that’s the way I see it. How about you?”

  He didn’t say anything, but I plunged ahead with the money question anyway.

  “Did your partner push that suspect out the window?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Manning said.

  “Did you ask him?”

  “That last night, before he died, Tommy and I went out drinking after we finished our shift. I wanted to ask him the question. About what really did happen in that squad room. But I didn’t. He never brought it up, and I felt uncomfortable raising it. You see, I knew Tommy would tell me the truth when the time was right. I just had to wait for the right moment. I figured there was lots of time.”

  “But then he died and left you with all these questions? Not just about the case, but about your whole career on the force?”

  Manning nodded sadly.

  “We all make these decisions in life,” Manning said. “We don’t think about them very much at the time. But later, looking back from the wisdom of all these years, you realize they were huge, life-forming decisions. I think about that a lot these days. I’ve had some pretty memorable moments along the way in my police career. Worked on big cases, got promoted to homicide lieutenant, was decorated for bravery in a couple of shootouts.”

  He was hailed as one of the best homicide investigators in the city, he said—not bragging, just stating it almost without emotion.

  “But you know what? The times I remember the best were those early days in New York when I was trying to make it as a musician. Me and the guys in my band. The future seemed so bright back then. And God, we had so much fun.

  “My roommate and best pal back then was our lea
d singer. His name was Dave, but no one called him that. His nickname in the band was Joey, because he loved Joey Ramone and the Ramones. So we always called him Joey. He was from Chicago where he had a girlfriend named Rebecca, but he didn’t want to bring her to New York until we made it big. He was desperately in love with her. Rebecca had long dark hair, almost down to her waist, in the picture of her hung next to his bed. Next to that he had a picture of Joey Ramone standing on the street in front of CBGBs, the punk rock club on the Bowery that was so popular back in the seventies and eighties.

  “I remember this one night we were playing at this club in the East Village. It was the night of Game 6 in the 1986 World Series, when the Mets came back from two runs down, two out in the 10th inning to beat the Red Sox and go on to win the World Series. We all assumed the Mets were going to lose. There was a big TV next to the bar, and everyone in the place—even us while we were playing—was watching to see if the Mets could somehow come back from the dead.

  “Then Joey suddenly began singing a Ramones song—the famous one with the chorus that goes ‘hey, ho, let’s go!’—and began chanting that over and over at the Mets on the screen as the rest of us in the band played. Pretty soon, everyone in the place was screaming ‘hey, ho, let’s go!’ And then came three hits, a wild pitch, and Mookie Wilson hit that ground ball through Bill Buckner’s legs for the Miracle Mets win.

  “God, I’ll never forget that. That chanting of ‘hey, ho, let’s go’ and the people there screaming and hugging each other afterward. It was such a special night. That phrase, ‘hey, ho, let’s go,’ sort of became my anthem to make something good happen. Sometimes, years later, I would even do it as a police officer. Mutter ‘hey, ho, let’s go’ to myself before walking into a dangerous situation. It was like my good luck charm, I suppose.”

  He sighed. “Until my luck ran out with Nazario.”

  We talked for another few hours that night. It was nice. I liked Scott Manning, even though I still wasn’t sure about him or his personal life or his possible involvement in the story. When we left the restaurant, I told him I’d catch a cab home.

  “Meaning you’re not going to invite me back to your place with you?” he asked

  “Uh, no.”

  “You don’t have sex with a guy on a first date, I guess.”

  “I do sometimes.”

  “But not with me, that’s what you’re saying?”

  “It’s more than that. It’s a simple decision whether or not to sleep with someone who you don’t really like. But, with you, this kind of decision is a lot tougher.”

  “Does that mean you like me?”

  “Well, you do seem to have some attractive qualities.”

  Then I kissed him quickly and got into a cab.

  Before the cab pulled away though, I rolled down the window and asked Manning: “Do you like to watch TV news?”

  “Oh, I’m a real TV news junkie. I can’t get enough to of it. Why?”

  “Just good to know,” I said.

  CHAPTER 25

  THERE’S NO BETTER feeling in the news business than breaking a big exclusive. Beating out your rivals with a scoop that has everyone talking. It’s always been a big adrenalin rush for me, a high almost like sex or booze or drugs for some people. I felt that way when I was a newspaper reporter, and I feel that way now in TV. It still didn’t get any better for me than breaking a big exclusive news story.

  But there’s no worse feeling in the world than when someone else breaks the exclusive instead of you.

  Which is what happened on Bill Atwood after his appearance on Heads-Up.

  A Benson University coed named Sandy Underhill had contacted the producers of a TMZ-like syndicated show called Inside Scoop. She said she’d had a torrid love tryst with former Congressman—and now Benson College president—Atwood in a Manhattan hotel room. She said she’d be willing to talk about it on TV for a price. The show, of course, accepted her offer. And why not? Atwood’s womanizing had been the subject of countless tabloid stories and gossip items. Now, with his connection to a murder case, he was an even hotter topic.

  Maggie and I watched the interview in my office. Sandy Underhill was blond, attractive, and slim—sexy slim—like a model. She said she’d met Atwood one day walking on the college campus and introduced herself to him because she always thought he was so good-looking and charismatic when she watched him on TV as a little girl growing up. She said she told this to him and he asked her if she would be interested in talking about a job as his student researcher. One thing quickly led to another and they wound up in the hotel room, which he rented to stay in the city when working late. But he also admitted to her he used the hotel room for his “entertainment activities.”

  She talked in the TV interview about how excited and flattered she was to be with the famous Bill Atwood. About his reputation in bed with women.

  “‘Everyone says you’re quite the ladies’ man,’ I told him when we were in bed. ‘And now I know they’re right. You are terrific.’ I meant it too. He was. Like he’d done it a lot of times before with other women, and he knew just the right buttons to push with me, if you know what I mean.”

  At one point, Underhill said, she asked him if he cheated a lot on his wife. “He told me ‘no,’—and then burst out laughing! He said I shouldn’t tell anyone about what we were doing, that it should be our little secret. But I think he knew I’d go right out and tell all my girlfriends I’d slept with Bill Atwood. How could I not? And I got the feeling that didn’t bother him too much. He liked the reputation. He even talked about how all the sex stuff wouldn’t prevent him from getting back into politics one day.

  “He said to me: ‘It just adds to the Atwood legend. Being known as a man who likes to bed women doesn’t necessarily hurt your political career, sometimes it actually helps it. A lot of voters like that kind of sexual prowess in their leaders. Look at Bill Clinton and John F. Kennedy and Donald Trump. They all played around.’

  “He made it clear to me that he was the kind of guy that got laid regularly. And that he even got off a bit on the danger of getting caught. He said the danger factor even made the sex more exciting. Like making love on an airplane or in a public spot.”

  The most sensational stuff came when the interviewer asked her more about the details of what she and Atwood did in bed.

  “Well, like I said, he was really great in bed—but a little weird too.”

  “What do you mean by weird?”

  “He asked me to spank him.”

  “You spanked Atwood?”

  “Yes, that seemed to turn him on.”

  “Did you spank him like he was being punished for something?”

  “That’s right. He acted as if he’d done something really bad and needed to be punished for it.”

  “Did he say what he might have done that was bad?”

  “Not really. But, while we were in bed, a story about the Mancuso woman’s murder came on TV. The one where his name was on that list found at her apartment. He stopped what we were doing to watch the news—he wanted to hear every word of it. I said it was a shame for a person to die so horribly as she did. He said that sometimes people deserved to die horribly because of things they’d done. He got very agitated. It was scary for a few minutes.”

  “Did Atwood say he ever knew Mancuso?”

  “Yes, pretty much so.”

  “What else did he say?”

  “He said the bitch got what she deserved.”

  Sandy Underhill looked directly at the camera then. She was clearly enjoying her moment in the limelight.

  “Later, when I heard more about his name being on that list in the apartment of the dead woman, I wondered if it might be connected …”

  After the interview with Underhill, Inside Scoop ran a segment where a reporter and video crew confronted Atwood with the bombshell story as he left a restaurant with his wife and daughter. He pushed past the camera crew and got into a waiting car. So did his wife, with a grim look
on her face. But not the daughter—who must be Miranda, the twenty-two-year-old Yale senior he’d talked about with me.

  “Get out of our way, you lowlifes!” she screamed at the Inside Scoop people. “Leave my father alone! He’s a wonderful man, and you people are all disgusting scum!” Then she tried to grab one of the cameras away before her parents dragged her into the car with them. It was all pretty terrific TV.

  “Well, that was fun,” Maggie said when the Inside Scoop report was over.

  “How in the hell did we miss this?” I muttered.

  “C’mon, Clare. They must have paid her for that story. That’s how Inside Scoop gets all these people to talk. They pay them—we don’t pay people.”

  “I think the Underhill woman was ready to talk anyway. Did you see her? She was loving the attention, even more than whatever money they paid her. All it took was someone to find her. They did, we didn’t.”

  “What do we do now?” Maggie asked.

  “The only thing you can do after you get beaten by someone else’s exclusive.”

  “Go out and find our own exclusive?”

  I nodded.

  “Another woman?” she asked.

  “Another woman.”

  “How can you be sure there is one?”

  “If Atwood was cheating on his wife with someone like Sandy Underhill,” I said, “then he was cheating on her with other women too.”

  “Maybe one of those other women was Grace Mancuso.”

  “He did call her a ‘bitch,’ according to Underhill.”

  “But Atwood still claims he never knew Mancuso.”

  “He also said he didn’t know Dora Gayle.”

  CHAPTER 26

  THE NAME OF the executive assistant in Bill Atwood’s office was Diane Rodgers. I was pretty sure Atwood was having some kind of sexual relationship with her the first time I visited his office. I was even more convinced of it now. All I had to do was figure out a way to get Diane Rodgers to talk about her and Atwood.

  I didn’t know what that might lead to, but Atwood was definitely shaping up as the person on that list of names who had the most to hide.