Below the Fold

by R. G. Belsky

  Damn!

  I was running out of options on Lucy.

  I was running out of options on a lot of things in my life.

  I’m a news junkie at heart. The most important thing in my life has always been the news stories I covered. I really liked the stories. Well, I suppose it was more than that—I needed the stories. Like a heroin addict looking for the next fix, searching for that next big story had always been the most important thing in my life.

  I cut short my honeymoon with husband #1 to go cover a plane crash. I walked out in the middle of an anniversary party with husband #2 to go to the scene of a building collapse. And I drove Sam nuts by reading Twitter news and texting to reporters when we were in bed together, sometimes before or after sex. Okay, that even happened during sex a few times. Hard to believe my marriages didn’t work out, huh?

  But when I remember wanting and needing and chasing a big story the most was when I was unhappy about something else in my life. I wrapped myself in the safe, protective cocoon of the news so I didn’t have to deal with the problem. I simply threw myself into my work as a reporter and shut all the rest of the world out of my mind for a while. That’s what I did after all my marriages fell apart. And that’s what I wanted to do now after my conversation with Elliott Grayson in order to forget about babies and men and all the rest of it.

  I needed a story.

  A big story.

  And there was one big story still waiting out there for me that needed some kind of closure.

  “The Grace Mancuso story is back on,” I announced at the next news meeting we held at Channel 10 to go over the story assignments for the reporters.

  “Well, it will be once they catch someone for it,” Maggie said.

  “No one’s done a very good job of that so far,” Brett said with a laugh.

  “Including us,” added Dani, drawing a few more giggles from around the room.

  I didn’t laugh. That surprised a lot of people, I suppose, because I’m always the first one to laugh at news meetings. But I wasn’t joking about this. I was deadly serious.

  “That’s because we were distracted by Atwood,” I said. “All of us—the media, the cops, social media—began to focus entirely on him. All the evidence anyone gathered was only looked at from that one perspective—how does this prove Atwood did it? Now we have to go back and look at all the evidence again.”

  You see, that was the decision I’d made after my confrontation with Elliott Grayson. You could call it a life decision, I guess. I had no control over most of the problems in my life right now. I couldn’t do anything about the daughter that was lost to me. Or my failed relationships with Scott Manning and all the other men in my past.

  But I could do one thing.

  One thing was still under my control.

  I could go after the Grace Mancuso story.

  I could find out the answers to what really happened to her.

  “There’s two possible keys to this crime,” I said to everyone in the room. “Has been since the very beginning. The scandal at Revson that Grace Mancuso was involved in. And the list of names found at the crime scene. One of those two things is the key to us for finding out what got Grace Mancuso killed. All we have to do is figure out which one it was. We go back and dig into the Revson mess. Find out everything we can find about that scandal—investigators, financial records, interviews with the key participants. See if we can find a suspect there. Second, there’s the list. There were five names on that list found at Grace Mancuso’s apartment. Two of them are now dead, along with Mancuso herself. That leaves three—Scott Manning, Emily Lehrman, and Brendan Kaiser. Somewhere there has to be a clue there to what this is all about.”

  “But we already did all that,” one editor said.

  “Let’s do it all again.”

  “Do you really think we’ll find anything?” someone asked.

  “Look, there’s only one thing to do when you screw up a case as badly as we did,” I told everyone in the room.

  “What’s that?”

  I started to answer, but Maggie did it before me.

  “We just start all over again at the beginning,” she said.

  PART III

  HEY HO, LET’S GO

  CHAPTER 34

  “FOLLOW THE MONEY” has been the mantra of every investigative journalist since Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein said it about the Watergate scandal in All the President’s Men. Well, sort of said it. Because the real Woodward and Bernstein never actually uttered those words—and the phrase is not mentioned anywhere in their nonfiction book. It was made up for the movie version with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman.

  But it’s still damn good advice for a reporter.

  Money usually is, as they say, at the root of all evil.

  In this case, the money was at Revson Investments.

  So that seemed like the first logical place to go back to looking for answers.

  Going over the records of the company’s recent scandal, I discovered there were 138 clients of Revson Investments who’d been swindled out of money. Thirteen Revson employees were indicted—mostly due to the testimony of Grace Mancuso, who turned state’s evidence and gave them up in return for immunity from prosecution herself.

  That made at least 151 possible murder suspects for Grace Mancuso, the way I figured it.

  Not even counting, of course, family members and friends of those 151 people who also might have been mad at Mancuso.

  I started with the client list first. I obtained a list of all the names of the victims of the scam from the public government documents filed in the courts about the case, and then went through them one by one.

  The victims were from all over the country—and ran the gamut of occupations and financial worth. A few were relatively wealthy, but most of them were ordinary working people who’d invested their life savings and retirement money, only to have it all disappear.

  Several had already filed lawsuits to recover what was stolen, but that could take years—and a lot of them were too old to ever see any return from that. I could understand how any one of these people might have gotten mad enough to kill Mancuso. It made me mad just thinking about it.

  There was a farmer in Nebraska who was going to lose his land because of what had happened. A couple in Arizona who depended on the money to supplement their meager Social Security income. A woman in California who no longer could afford her critically ill husband’s medical treatments. “That woman killed my husband,” said the man’s wife when I got her on the phone.

  There were plenty of potential suspects among them too. One disgruntled investor had threatened to burn down the Revson building. Another wanted to punch Vernon Albright, the head of Revson, in the nose. There was even a woman who said she put a curse on the company and everyone in it, sending along a voodoo doll as proof of the evil she had wished upon the people who stole her money.

  Most of these were isolated incidents, impulsive acts of anger by people who felt powerless to fight back after having their life savings taken away from them. But some of the victimized Revson investors seemed to be doing more than just venting understandable anger at the company.

  One called the Revson offices relentlessly, sometimes forty or fifty times a day. The operators were instructed not to let him talk to anyone, but he went by different names and disguised his voice. Another sent so many faxes that they had to change their number because it clogged up the system. Then there were the emails—thousands of pieces of it sent to the Revson website by one disgruntled investor. First, it was just simple harassment. Then she started sending computer viruses in the attachments that collapsed the entire Revson system on several occasions.

  I eventually winnowed down the list to what I considered to be the three leading suspects. Gary Myers, Maryanne Giordanno, and Joseph Ortega.

  Gary Myers was a construction foreman from Dublin, Tennessee. He and his wife invested about $210,000 of their life savings with Revson. The money was suppos
ed to be for their two daughters’ college education. Myers was furious and made all sorts of threats when he found out that the money was gone

  Maryanne Giordanno worked as a nurse in Berkeley, California. Her husband had leukemia. They needed the money to pay for his medical bills. But when they went to draw it out of the account, they discovered it was gone. Because they couldn’t pay, the treatments were put off. Her husband died. She was the one who had clogged up the Revson computers on several occasions with harassing emails and computer viruses. Anyone who would go to that amount of trouble might be capable of murder too.

  A man in the Bronx named Joseph Ortega had invested a total of $351,000 in Revson over the years. Most of it 401(k) and IRA money, his life savings for retirement. He was fifty-nine years old, and he planned to buy a condo in Florida to retire before he was sixty-five, he had said on his financial application. The money was all gone now, along with his dream for a comfortable life in Florida. He had threatened to burn down the Revson building.

  There was a lot of anger like that, and I thought again about how Grace Mancuso’s body had been battered beyond recognition even after death.

  That made it even more likely that her death could have something to do with what had happened at Revson.

  But I still had absolutely no idea how or why or what that was.

  Or how it might possibly be connected to the other names on the list found next to Mancuso’s body.

  Then there were the people at Revson who were probably going to jail because of her testimony against them. Most of them wouldn’t talk to me when I reached them, on the advice of their lawyers. But I tracked down the lead prosecutor on the case, an assistant U.S. Attorney named Karen Fenton.

  “They were all really mad at Mancuso,” Fenton said.

  “How mad?”

  “When we first brought them all in for questioning, we offered everyone the same deal. The first one who agreed to cooperate with us would get a get-out-of-jail-free card. No prison time in return for a plea bargain. The rest of them all turned it down. I guess they figured they could get out of it somehow if they all stuck together. But Mancuso went for the deal. She gave us chapter and verse on all of them, and now they’re going to jail for a long time.”

  “That sounds like they’d be awfully upset with her.”

  “The funny thing is that after we made the deal with Grace, we suspected she was the real ring leader of the whole thing. I think she planned it, recruited the others to help her—and then hung them out to dry when the shit hit the fan. Doesn’t seem fair, does it? But we wanted to get convictions in this, and her testimony was the only way to do it. So we let her walk.”

  “What happens to your case now that she’s dead?”

  “Well, we’ve still got her sworn testimony, which we’ll introduce in court. But it isn’t quite the same as having your key witness testifying on the stand. So I guess you could say her death helps the indicted people, which probably makes them pretty happy. Not to mention the people she swindled. I guess they’re happy too.”

  “That’s a lot of suspects,” I said. “A lot of people happy to have her dead.”

  “Hey, maybe it’s like that old Agatha Christie book. Murder on the Orient Express. The one where all the suspects get together to all kill one person they hated. They each stab him individually, so they can each get revenge for what he did to them. What if that’s what happened here? All thirteen of these people we indicted because of her, maybe the 138 swindled investors too—they all get together for this one murder.” Fenton sighed. “I guess that doesn’t make much sense, huh?”

  “Why not?” I told her. “It makes as much sense as anything else about this case.”

  Of course, Grace Mancuso’s murder didn’t necessarily have to be about the Revson financial scandal.

  The reason for it could have been personal.

  Mancuso was having a lesbian affair with Lisa Kalikow. She was having another affair with Bill Atwood at the same time she was blackmailing him. She was involved with one guy and had just broken off a relationship with another. While I was digging into the Revson story, I even heard rumors that she was sleeping with Vernon Albright, the head of the beleaguered company.

  Yep, Grace Mancuso had sure been a busy girl.

  Embezzlement.

  Blackmail.

  Promiscuity.

  But which one had gotten her killed?

  CHAPTER 35

  THE BEST WAY for a reporter to find out the truth is to figure out who’s lying.

  Sure, that sounds like a fairly simple journalistic principle, and it has served me well in the past on other confusing stories.

  The trick is you have to catch someone in a lie.

  Well, I knew Bill Atwood had lied—but he was dead and out of the picture now.

  Same with Dora Gayle—she was gone too.

  That left three names from the list: Emily Lehrman, Scott Manning, and Brendan Kaiser. If Bill Atwood had lied about his connection to Grace Mancuso that got his name on that list found at the murder scene, then maybe one of the others lied too. Or all of them. I sure hoped it wasn’t Brendan Kaiser that was lying though. Pointing the finger of guilt at your boss as a potential murderer is generally not a smart career move.

  I painstakingly went through the notes of my interviews with all of them and the stories they had told after their names turned up on that list. In Scott Manning’s case, it was more than just an interview. He had given me a lot of information about him and his background in the bar and the restaurant the night we went out together. I checked and re-checked every fact that they gave out to me and the rest of the media since the story began. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was looking for. Some kind of discrepancy, I guess. Something that didn’t quite ring true. Except I couldn’t find anything.

  I thought some more about the three surviving people from that list. Manning, Kaiser, and Lehrman. If one of them was hiding something—or at least not telling the whole truth—my best guess was it might be Lehrman. She was the only one who’d refused to talk to me for the story.

  Why was that?

  Maybe because there was something she didn’t want me to find out.

  I had no idea what that was, of course—but I decided to pretend I did.

  I was going to run a bluff on Emily Lehrman.

  I tracked Lehrman down in a courtroom near Foley Square, where she was working her legal magic on a judge and jury—cross-examining a young police officer who had arrested her client.

  The client was a mobster named Tony Rinaldi, who’d been busted for running a numbers operation. The cop had stumbled onto it while he was responding to a disturbing the peace complaint. He’d taken Rinaldi into custody, confiscated the money, and found all the betting slips.

  The only problem was he violated Rinaldi’s constitutional rights about a dozen times. He might have gotten away with it if the person he arrested couldn’t afford a good lawyer. Rinaldi hired the best. He got Emily Lehrman.

  As I watched her expertly and brutally taking apart the young cop on the stand, I thought again about how she’d once been a public defender dedicated to seeking justice for the poor and downtrodden—instead of representing mobsters, drug lords, and wealthy white-collar criminals like now.

  What changed her?

  Of course, none of this had anything to do with me or why I was there.

  When the court session was over and the case against the mobster Rinaldi dismissed, I confronted her in the corridor outside.

  “Doesn’t your conscience ever bother you about doing stuff like that?” I asked, pointing over to Rinaldi who was accepting congratulations for beating the court rap.

  “A simple hello would suffice.”

  “Hello, Ms. Lehrman.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I have another question for you about Grace Mancuso.”

  She stared at me with the same calm, cool expression she had on her face when she was in the courtroom cross-exami
ning the cop. If I’d shaken her up at all with my appearance there, she hadn’t shown it so far.

  “Well?” she said finally. “What’s your question?”

  “What would you say if I told you that your phone number was found by police going through Grace Mancuso’s call log?”

  “What would my number be doing in her phone records?”

  “That’s what I’m asking you.”

  She looked at me blankly. No reaction at all. She was good. Very good.

  “Was my phone number really found in Grace Mancuso’s records?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  She shook her head sadly. “But you hoped it might rattle me, and I might say something to confirm it or say something else damaging. My God, that’s the oldest courtroom trick in the book. I’d heard you had a reputation as a pretty smart journalist. I guess I overestimated you.”

  “So that’s your official—on the record—reply to my question?”

  “What is it you want from me?”

  “I want you to talk about how your name might have wound up on that list at the Grace Mancuso crime scene!”

  She turned and began to walk away.

  “I have one more question for you. It’s not about the Mancuso murder. I read up on all your background. You used to be a whole different kind of lawyer, a whole different kind of person. You worked with the homeless, tenants getting evicted and clients like that who couldn’t afford to pay you much money. Then suddenly you became a high-priced attorney for a completely different kind of clientele. I’m just curious. Why?”

  “I decided I was wasting my time being a do-gooder.”

  “What took you so long?” I asked.

  “Sometimes it takes a while to see the obvious.”

  For just a second or two, I thought she actually might open up to me. That I had gotten through the cold attorney exterior of hers to reach the real Emily Lehrman. The one who used to represent the poor and the downtrodden instead of drug czars and mob bosses. The real person, not the high-powered attorney.