by R. G. Belsky
The Elliott Grayson file information confirmed it was the same person who had been in touch with him, just like Schacter had said.
There was a series of email exchanges between Grayson and the same email address. The contents of the messages had been deleted, probably by Grayson. But Schacter was still able to track the IPO number Grayson had communicated with—and it was the same one as the original email about Lucy in New Hampshire.
I read through all the other information in the file Schacter had given me, then got up and poured myself another big drink.
I sat there for a long time in my apartment thinking about what I knew now.
Well, I knew who sent the original email.
And I knew that person could be—in all probability really was—Lucy Devlin, the daughter I had been searching for so long.
I knew too that all I had to do was to go to Winchester, knock on the door of her house, and maybe get answers to all of the questions that had been haunting me for so many years.
Yep, that was all I had to do, all right.
I finished my drink, closed the file, and put it away in a drawer.
There would be plenty of time for me to deal with it later.
But now, I had a big story to work on right here.
And so I tried to put any thoughts about Lucy Devlin out of my mind—just like I’d done so many times in the past—and think about what I was going to say and do the next day when I went back to Revson.
CHAPTER 50
VERNON ALBRIGHT SEEMED different this time.
The CEO of the Revson Securities firm had worked hard that first day I was there to put on a good face for the media—to show how compassionate and concerned he was about the death of an employee and the possible link to the Revson scandal.
Now, as I sat in Albright’s office again, he seemed more cocky, more self-assured. I picked up the sense that he wasn’t worried as much about the Grace Mancuso murder anymore. He’d probably gone through a tough time with the scandal and the murder, but now the worst was over. Things were getting back to normal for him, and he was going to survive this without a scratch. Guys like Albright usually did.
“I understand you’ve made some progress on Grace’s murder,” he said, glancing down at his watch in a not so subtle sign that his interest in finding out who killed his employee was limited now. “I saw your piece about the picture of those five people from the list. It sounds like that’s the way to go in looking for Grace’s killer.”
“Certainly seems like a strong possibility.”
“And then there have been those messy revelations about Grace’s love life. The affairs with men. And women too. My goodness, a lot of those people she was involved with certainly had a motive to kill her, didn’t they?”
“There’s a number of leads still being pursued,” I said.
“Do any of them seem promising?”
“Well, that’s why I’m here, Mr. Albright.”
I took out the two pictures we had of Dora Gayle—the one of her looking young and beautiful in college, and the other off the documentary as a homeless woman living on the streets.
“Do you know her?” I asked Albright.
“Well, I know who she is from the stories you and others have done about her.”
“Did you ever meet her?”
“Of course not.”
“So she never came here to Revson for any reason?”
“Why would someone like that have anything to do with us here at Revson?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Of course, there shouldn’t be any connection between this homeless woman and a place like Revson. But what if there was? That might help explain a lot of things.”
“I can’t imagine any possible connection to Revson.” He pushed the two pictures of her back to me across his desk. As if just looking at a person like Dora Gayle was terribly distasteful to him.
“Okay, then I want to talk to you a bit more about the scandal here and the repercussions from it.”
“I don’t understand,” Albright said. “I thought everyone believed now this must have had something to do with that list of people from the eighties that was on the list in Grace’s apartment. The people in that picture you found.”
“That’s the operative theory.”
“So why are you still asking me these questions about what happened at Revson?”
I shrugged. “The idea that Mancuso was involved in a scandal here, that she ripped off hundreds of investors and then turned state’s evidence against some of the other people here … well, that’s a pretty good motive for murder. Maybe we’ve been trying too hard, making this case too complicated. Maybe the answer is right here where she worked.”
Albright didn’t look at his watch this time. He was not happy about this line of conversation. Yep, he’d definitely assumed the focus of the police investigation was shifting away from Revson, not toward it. But he was too good, too cool to let me see his anxiety. He nodded solemnly as if I were talking to him about opening up a new brokerage account.
“You think that one of our disgruntled investors could have killed her?”
“That’s certainly a possibility.”
“And the other?” he asked, even though he knew the answer.
“Someone at the company who thought she knew too much.”
Albright nodded solemnly. He didn’t even flinch. This guy was good.
“I can’t even imagine that,” he said. “But, like I said before, there’s always a few bad apples in every company. I want to help you and the authorities, to do anything I can to find any of them here at Revson. You have my solemn word on that, Ms. Carlson.”
That’s when I knew. I just knew. Albright was involved in the scandal. Maybe he found out about what was going on but didn’t do anything. Maybe he helped plan it. Maybe he was the brains behind it, the one who put the whole scam together. If so, he probably insulated himself with layers of protection so that the other people involved—like Grace Mancuso—didn’t even know about him.
But now, if someone dug too deeply and didn’t accept the “just a few bad apples theory,” they might eventually get to him.
Is that what happened to Grace Mancuso?
Had she found out?
Had she tried to blackmail him just like she did with Atwood?
Had he murdered Mancuso to keep her quiet?
But, even as I was thinking it, I knew that was unlikely. Albright wasn’t the type of guy to kill someone like Grace Mancuso. He would have used his money and his power and his influence to buy her off. Besides, I remembered what the killer had done to Grace Mancuso’s body. This was a crime of passion. There was no passion about Vernon Albright.
Still, the guy was dirty. I was sure of that. If not this scandal, then another one. I wondered how many people Albright had stolen money from over the years while maintaining the image of corporate respectability. The more I thought about it, with Albright sitting there smiling smugly at me from behind the big desk, the madder I got. There were people who had died here. Dora Gayle first. Then Grace Mancuso and Bill Atwood. Lisa Kalikow was going to spend the rest of her life in prison for a moment of violent passion. Lives had been ruined, but not Albright’s life. Not yet anyway. But I couldn’t worry about that now. I needed this guy to get more information.
“Let’s forget about Dora Gayle and the people on the list for a minute,” I said. “Focus instead on the idea that it could have been a disgruntled Revson investor who lost money—and blamed Mancuso enough to kill her. It’s a long list of people, but we’ve narrowed down the list to several leading suspects. I’d like to run through them with you and see if any of them strike a chord of recognition.”
“Of course.”
I took out four folders I’d gotten from Maggie. They included pictures and information on Gary Myers, Maryanne Giordanno, and Joseph Ortega, the most obvious cases of disgruntled investors we’d discussed earlier. The fourth file was for a man named David Zach
ary from Chicago. Maggie had gotten this information from the Revson security people, who reported it to the police. They said Zachary had caused a big scene there not long ago, demanding to see Grace Mancuso. The incident—with Zachary’s picture—had been captured by security cameras.
“First, we have Gary Myers, a construction foreman from Dublin, Tennessee,” I told Albright now, showing him the picture of Myers.
Albright shook his head no. “I’ve never seen him before,” he said. “There were, as I’m sure you would expect, many angry investors in the days when all this came out. But this man … well, I don’t remember anything about him that would make him stand out from any of the others.”
I showed him a second photo. Maryanne Giordanno. Another shake of his head from Albright. “I know about the case. It was one of Grace’s accounts. I know the woman’s husband died, and she couldn’t afford proper medical treatment at the end. Terrible, just a horrible tragedy. But I don’t know anything personally about this woman. I never saw her, never heard from her—don’t know that she even had any firsthand contact with Grace before her death. Much of this stuff would be handled by lower-level employees. That’s probably who she was talking to. Not Grace. And certainly not me.”
I took out the third photo. The one of Joseph Ortega from the Bronx. Albright shook his head no again.
I sighed and showed him the last photograph. The security camera shot of David Zachary, the one who’d shown up at the Revson building. This time there was a look of recognition on Albright’s face.
“Do you know him?”
“Yes, I saw this man. He caused a loud disturbance in the lobby. Demanding to see the person in charge of the company. I decided it was best under the circumstances to humor him, before we called the police or anything.”
“What happened?”
“He wanted to talk to Grace Mancuso.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That he couldn’t see her.”
“What did he do then?”
“He got very upset—but eventually he left.”
I nodded. “Do you have any idea how much money he lost with Grace Mancuso in the investment scam?”
“That’s the strange thing. We checked on that afterward. It turned out he hadn’t put any money at all into our company. There was no record of him anywhere. He was never one of Grace’s clients. He was never one of our investors.”
“So why was he so upset?”
“I have no idea.”
Back at the office, I went over everything with Maggie and her team of reporters. I invited Manning to the meeting too. Since he was supposed to be working on the story with us, I wanted to hear his thoughts and opinions. But I figured his presence wouldn’t go over well with Maggie, and I was sure right.
“I’m Detective Scott Manning,” he said when I introduced them. “I’m—”
“I know who you are.”
“I’m just interested in doing anything I can to help.”
“I don’t see how you can help us on this story.”
Manning looked confused. “Did Clare tell you what she and I discussed for my role here?”
“Yes, she did. And I told her I thought it was a very bad idea.”
At least she wasn’t a hypocrite.
“Clare’s my boss,” Maggie said now. “I have to do whatever she decides. Even if that decision is stupid like this one.”
I thought it might really get ugly, but Manning just smiled at Maggie. “Well, I’m glad we got that all straightened out,” he said.
We went through everything about the story again. The things we did know, the things we didn’t know, and the things we didn’t even know if we should know or not. The list of names. The old picture from the East Village. The Revson scandal. Grace Mancuso’s torrid love life along with her blackmail and scheming for money. Had we missed something? We must have, but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what it might be. Neither could anyone else in the room.
When we got to the Revson angle, I told everyone about my meeting with Albright. My suspicion that he was somehow involved in the scandal. His “just one bad apple” excuse. But I also said how I felt that whatever he did—or didn’t do—with the Revson scandal, I did not see any reason to think he was actually involved with Grace Mancuso’s murder.
Finally, I went through the list of suspects from Maggie that I’d run through with him to see if there was any possible link to Revson.
There was a computer in the conference room where we were meeting, and Maggie—sitting at a computer—would project on a wall screen the images of whatever we were discussing.
She did that now with the four people connected with Revson that I’d shown to Albright:
Grey Myers.
Maryanne Giordanno.
Joseph Ortega.
David Zachary.
“Oh, my God!” Manning suddenly yelled out.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
“That last guy! David Zachary!”
“What about him?”
“That’s Joey! He used to be in my band—the one who called himself Joey because he idolized Joey Ramone! He was my roommate! He was my best friend!”
PART IV
CINDERELLA—AND OTHER FAIRY TALES
CHAPTER 51
DAVID ZACHARY WAS a high school music teacher in a suburb of Chicago.
I found a number for him, called, and got his wife who said he wasn’t home. I told her I was a TV journalist in New York City and I wanted to interview him for a story. I didn’t say specifically what the story was. I figured I’d see where this conversation went first.
Scott Manning and Maggie were in my office, and I put it all on a speakerphone so they could jump in when needed.
“Did your husband ever mention the name Grace Mancuso to you?” I asked Mrs. Zachary.
“No. Who is she?”
“An investment banker here in New York.”
“Dave hasn’t been in New York in years.”
“Have you ever had any business dealings with a company called Revson?”
“Never heard of them.”
“They’re a big investment firm in New York.”
“We don’t have any investments in New York. What is this about anyway?”
“I really need to speak with your husband, Mrs. Zachary,” I said, trying to make it sound as casual as possible.
“I told you that David’s not here.”
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know.”
I assumed at first—wrongly, as it turned out—she might be lying, trying to cover for her husband.
“You must have some idea of his whereabouts or when he’ll be home, Mrs. Zachary. I really can’t believe …”
“My husband has terminal cancer,” she said. “A malignant brain tumor. It was diagnosed a few months ago. He doesn’t have a lot of time left. Three months, maybe six at the most. He still has some good days and bad days, but they’re mostly bad now. The doctors said there was nothing they could do.”
I glanced over at Manning who had a stunned look on his face. It must have been a double shock for him about Zachary, I realized. First, he finds out that his old friend might be involved in this somehow. Then he learns that the friend is dying.
“Mrs. Zachary, my name is Scott Manning,” he said now. “I’m a detective with the New York City Police Department. But I’m also an old friend of your husband. I’m sure he must have mentioned my name to you over the years.”
“What was your name again?”
“Scott Manning.”
“No, I don’t recall anything.”
There was a moment or two of silence on the line, and I was afraid maybe we’d lost the connection with Mrs. Zachary. Or she’d hung up. But she was still there. Maggie jumped in to ask if she could tell us any more about her husband’s disappearance.
“He just left,” Mrs. Zachary said. “He’s done this a few times in the past month or two, ever since he got the bad ne
ws from the doctor. There were a lot of loose ends he needed to tie up, that’s what he told me. Before he died is what he meant, even though he didn’t say it. He just said there were things he needed to make right. Whenever he went away before this, he came back. Until this time. He left a few weeks ago, and I haven’t heard anything from him since. David’s not well. I’m very worried about him. That’s why I finally reported him missing to the police. I don’t think they took me very seriously though. Do you think you can talk to them, Detective?”
We got a cop named Kowalski on the phone at the Chicago police precinct where Mrs. Zachary had filed the missing person report.
“There’s not much to tell you,” Kowalski said. “You know the routine. We get hundreds of missing person reports in here. Most of them don’t want to be found. Runaway kids, husbands skipping out on their wives, businessmen trying to avoid debt collectors—there’s no violence, no crime. We just don’t have the manpower to really check them all out. We go through the motions, and maybe every once in a while, we get lucky and stumble on the missing loved one. It happens. Of course, I could also win the Illinois lottery tomorrow. But I don’t count on either one.”
“David Zachary falls into this category?” Manning asked.
“He got bad news from the doctor. That’s enough to send anybody over the edge. So he takes off into the night. Maybe he kills himself. Maybe he just turns up dead somewhere. Maybe he shows up back at his wife’s door tomorrow with flowers and candy for her. Like I said, the guy’s not breaking any laws so there’s a limit to what we can do.”
“David Zachary could be a murder suspect in New York,” Manning told him.
“No kidding? Who’s the victim?”
“An investment broker. A woman named Grace Mancuso. She worked for Revson, the company that’s in a big financial scandal.”