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  For Laura

  CHAPTER 1

  My cell phone rang while I was interviewing Madame Tina the Spiritual Reader. It was for a feature the New York Daily News, my newspaper, was doing on the legitimacy of fortune tellers and tarot card–reading businesses around the city. Until then she’d had three visitors—an ex-customer claiming to have been swindled out of her life savings; a process server with a complaint from the Better Business Bureau; and the building landlord threatening to evict her for forging a phony name on the rent check. Being an investigative reporter and all, I was beginning to suspect that Madame Tina might not be completely on the up-and-up.

  “You’re not gonna believe what just happened,” Zach Heller, an assistant city editor, said on the phone.

  “I won a Pulitzer Prize?”

  “No, Malloy,” he sighed, “you didn’t win a Pulitzer Prize.”

  “Wait until you see the story I’m working on now.”

  “Dani Keegan is dead.”

  “Our Dani Keegan?”

  “Yes,” Heller said. “Dani didn’t show up for work today. They found her body in the lobby of a building on the Lower East Side. She’d been shot to death. The cops have no clues, no leads whatsoever at the moment. Marilyn wants all hands on deck to cover the story. Even you.”

  He hung up the phone.

  I thought about asking Madame Tina if she had any leads or clues. But she had her eyes closed now, snoring loudly with a half empty wine bottle next to her. Probably communing with the spirits. I let myself out, got on a subway downtown, and headed for the Daily News office.

  • • •

  Dani Keegan was the daughter of legendary Manhattan district attorney Jack Keegan, who’d been putting mobsters and corrupt politicians and other bad guys in jail for more than twenty years. Dani planned on going to law school too, but she’d also gotten a Masters in Journalism from Columbia University and had wanted to try her hand as a reporter. So she got a job—through her family connections, we all assumed—at the Daily News.

  I’d worked with the kids of other prominent people over the years. A lot of them were just going through the motions, trading in on their family name and background. But Dani had seemed like the real deal. She’d covered some front-page stories and even broken a few exclusives during her brief time at the News. Many of them were about law enforcement, where her father’s distinguished background and connections gave her a unique advantage over other reporters in town on the big crime stories.

  One of the big TV network magazine shows had done a segment on her just a few weeks ago. Shot a bunch of stuff of her working at her desk in the newsroom, sitting in on editorial meetings and even asking a question at one of her father’s press conferences. There was an interview with her father too. He seemed very proud of her.

  She was attractive but never really flaunted it. Didn’t wear sexy clothes or flirt with guys in the office or any of that kind of thing. She had a boyfriend for a while, but I’d heard they had broken up. I didn’t know her very well—we’d probably exchanged only a handful of words during the time she’d been here—but she seemed to be one of those people who have their whole lives figured out at an early age. She was pretty, smart, fun, popular—she seemed to have it all.

  Except now she was dead and we were going to be writing a front-page story about her.

  My name is Gil Malloy. My future at the News was once as bright as Dani Keegan’s seemed to be. But I took a few wrong turns along the way—including screwing up big time on a front-page profile/interview I did with an infamous New York City hooker named Houston that won me acclaim when I first did it. The problem was I had never actually talked to Houston. I made up the quotes, which is about as bad a thing as you can do in this business.

  I almost got fired over that. Then I did get fired for another story that went bad. A front-page exclusive linking a series of murders in New York to a man obsessed with the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The story turned out not to be true, but this time it wasn’t my fault. The real killer—a deputy NYPD commissioner—had fed me false information in an attempt to deter suspicion away from him in the New York murders. I eventually tracked down the true story and got my job back at the Daily News.

  But I am still damaged goods as a reporter. And I know that will never go away. My career—no matter what else I accomplish—will always have an asterisk next to it. Oh yeah, Malloy, he’s the guy that made up that story about the hooker, right?

  • • •

  The afternoon editorial meeting had already started when I walked into the newsroom.

  Marilyn Staley, the city editor, was running down what we knew about Dani’s murder.

  “Dani Keegan’s body was found in the lobby of an abandoned building on the Lower East Side just off the Bowery,” Staley said. “She’d been shot to death. A single bullet to the chest.”

  “What was she doing there?” someone asked.

  “No one knows. People have speculated she was working on some kind of story, maybe meeting a source she wanted to interview. And that somehow the meeting went bad. Or else she got there early and was mugged or robbed or killed by a drug addict or someone like that. The neighborhood is supposed to be a high drug-trafficking area.”

  “Or maybe she was buying drugs,” another reporter said.

  Staley sighed. But it was a good reporter’s question. Reporters always have to look at all of the possibilities in a story, whether they like considering some of them or not.

  “Was she working on any story that might have taken her to that area of the city?” was another question.

  “Not that we—that is myself or any of her editors—know,” Staley replied.

  “What was she working on?”

  “A piece about the influx of bike riders in the city and the dangers—as well as the advantages—that it presented to pedestrians and drivers on already crowded Manhattan streets. Nothing about it would seem relevant to what happened to her.”

  The cops had already gone through what they could find of Dani’s stuff in the office and her home, looking for clues, Staley said at one point. Phone records, credit cards—that sort of thing. They found nothing unusual. The only recent substantial expenditure she made was a trip to Ohio.

  “What’s in Ohio?” I asked.

  “Who knows?” Staley shrugged. “She took a few vacation days. Flew to Columbus on the fifteenth of the month, rented a car there, and then was back here on the eighteenth. I guess she must have known somebody in Ohio.”

  Then Staley started handing out assignments. Reporters to work on the main story for tomorrow’s paper. Others to post and keep updating the story on the Daily News website. Someone to pull together a profile on Dani. Another to collect quotes and reactions from people who knew her. People to work the police angle, the scene, and so on. By the time she was finished, pretty much everyone was working on some aspect of the Dani Keegan story.

  Except my name was never called.

  “Just keep working on that fortune teller feature you were doing,” she said when I asked her about an assignment.

  “I could help with the Dani coverage too . . .”

  But Staley was already walking back to her office.

 
I stood there for a second or two feeling foolish. I tried to pretend it didn’t bother me. I forced a smile and started back toward my desk. But on the way I changed direction and went into the men’s room. I went inside a stall, pulled the door shut, and tried to take deep breaths. For a few seconds, I felt weak and thought I might pass out. After the Houston debacle, I’d suffered a series of anxiety attacks. Shortness of breath, a feeling of light-headedness as if I was going to pass out—and, at times, a terrible foreboding I was about to die. I’d wound up going to see a psychiatrist and took medicine for it, too. I’d been good for a while. The problem only flared up when I was under a lot of stress or anxiety, or experiencing insecurity about myself and my life. Like now.

  But this time, after a few minutes, I was okay. I came out of the stall, walked over to a sink to splash cold water on my face, and felt better.

  When I came back into the newsroom, the place was nearly empty. All the reporters had been dispatched and were out working the Dani Keegan story. The big story. The front-page story.

  Except for me.

  Gil Malloy, the forgotten man.

  All stressed up with nowhere to go.

  CHAPTER 2

  At 8 a.m. I was sitting on a park bench in front of Manhattan district attorney Jack Keegan’s office. I had a plan. It was quite an ingenious plan, and I was pretty proud of myself for thinking of it. Yep, you had to get up pretty early in the morning to stop Gil Malloy from getting involved in a big story like this. Somewhere about 7:30.

  “Hello, Susan,” I said to the attractive dark-haired woman who walked past me on the way to the DA’s building.

  “Gil,” she said with surprise. “So what do you need from me?”

  “What makes you think I need something from you?”

  “We were married, remember? I know you pretty well.”

  Susan Endicott—who once was Susan Malloy—sat down on the bench next to me. She looked good. She was wearing a pale blue pantsuit that fit snug enough to exude both power and sexuality. Her hair was longer than I remembered, hanging loosely over her shoulders. I got a whiff of perfume that reminded me of the time I smelled it every day. Back before I screwed the marriage up—I screwed up a lot of things in my life back in those days.

  “So the big story of the day is the murder of Jack Keegan’s daughter,” Susan said. “Me, your ex-wife, works for Keegan as an assistant district attorney. I figure your plan goes something like this: You get me to give you some inside information; you get an exclusive story out of it, which puts you back on the front page; and, in the process, you sweep me off my feet with your charm, get me to go to bed with you; I tell you I want to marry you again and then make you pancakes in the morning like I did when we were first married. Am I right?”

  “Actually, I’m more of a waffle guy these days. But, other than that, you’re pretty dead on.”

  Susan sighed. Her career had begun ascending around the same time mine went into reverse. She was now one of Keegan’s top deputies.

  “I’d help you if I could, Gil,” she said. “But we’re as much in the dark as you or the police or anyone else. No one has any idea what Dani was doing there. There are no suspects, no witnesses, no nothing. She was shot once in the chest with a small caliber gun, probably a .38. The medical examiner’s office estimates her time of death at around midnight. Her purse, money, and credit cards were all there so it wasn’t a robbery. Or a drug deal—God forbid—or anything else like that. Looks like she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But no one knows why she would be there at that hour.”

  “I think she was working a story,” I said.

  “The police checked with the people at your paper on that—they didn’t know about any story that would have taken her down to that area of the city.”

  “Maybe she was working a secret source of her own. Someone she didn’t tell any of her editors about. I haven’t always told my editors all the details of some things that I’ve worked on.”

  “How’d that work out for you, Gil?”

  I ignored the sarcasm.

  “Could you get me an interview with Jack Keegan about his daughter’s death?”

  “Are you kidding me? He won’t even talk to us about it. He’s going to be back at work today, too. Can you believe that? Says he’ll handle it just like any other case—everyone’s daughter should be treated the same as everyone else, blah, blah, blah. He’s gotta be devastated. He was so ecstatic every time she got a byline at the News. But you’d never know it from the way he’s acting. It’s just business as usual for him. I guess we all grieve in our own way.”

  “How about his wife?”

  “The same. She’s heartbroken too, but won’t say a word without the old man’s approval.”

  “Anyone else you can think of?”

  “Well, there is a sister. Christine. Keegan never talked about her as much. It always seemed like there were some kind of issues between the two of them.”

  “Issues about what?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “What does she do?”

  “I think Christine works at an art gallery somewhere in Greenwich Village.”

  “Where in Greenwich Village?”

  “I don’t know, Gil,” Susan said, getting up off the bench and walking toward her office building. “I’m late for work. I guess you’re just going to have to find that out yourself. Shouldn’t be too hard for you. You’re supposed to be a hotshot reporter, right?”

  Yeah, I was a hotshot reporter all right. Or at least I used to be.

  You see, I’d had a meteoric rise at the paper. I started as an intern copyboy at the Daily News while I was in college and soared to cub reporter, to star reporter, to, eventually, columnist. Then came the infamous Houston story in which I “quoted” a legendary New York City hooker at length about prostitution. There was a rationale for what I did, I suppose. But that really makes no difference. I screwed up. And I’ve been paying the price for that mistake ever since.

  There’ve been some other detours since then, too. Even though I have had a few more front-page stories along the way. At one point, I even claimed that I thought I could solve the mysteries surrounding the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963—the biggest crime story in American history. I came up with some answers, raising new doubts that accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was even there that day. But I never really made much progress beyond that. So far anyway. As a result, people in the office love to make jokes about the Grassy Knoll and the Magic Bullet and Oliver Stone and all the rest of the JFK assassination lore to me.

  Some of the problems I have are my own doing, no doubt about it. I want so badly to be a front-page reporter again that I get bored with the day-to-day routine stuff a reporter has to do at a paper like the Daily News. Which doesn’t exactly endear me to editors there. But I hated the fact that I was pretty much relegated to doing forgettable stories like Madame Tina now. Hey, once you’ve been a star it’s tough not being a star anymore. It just seemed so damned easy when I was starting out. I miss that.

  • • •

  It took me a day to find Christine Keegan. The art gallery where she worked was on Jane Street, just south of Fourteenth Street in Greenwich Village. I didn’t really expect her to be there so soon after her sister’s death, but she was. I guess private grieving time was not a big priority in the Keegan family.

  “I’m sorry about your sister,” I said. “I knew her at the News. She was a good person.”

  “I shouldn’t be talking to you. My father told us not to talk to anyone from the press about Dani. He said he wanted to be the only one to do that.”

  “Would you like me to leave?”

  She shrugged.

  “I’ve never listened to my father before, so why start now?’

  We sat in a small room in the back of the gallery and talked about Da
ni. Christine Keegan was pretty, like her sister had been, but not as glamorous. She was dressed very plainly in blue jeans, sandals, and a T-shirt speckled with paint. She had short dark hair and big brown eyes that were probably normally beautiful but now looked red and tired from crying.

  “Were you and Dani close?” I asked.

  “Emotionally, yes. I loved Dani, and I know she loved me. But we didn’t spend that much time together anymore. Some of it was just because of our separate lives—I was busy at the art gallery, and she was preoccupied with the Daily News. But I think the real reason we grew apart was this growing rift between me and my father. She didn’t understand it, and I think it made her uncomfortable.

  “What happened between you and your father?”

  “Well, let’s just say Dani was the apple of his eye.”

  “And you?”

  “Me, I’m pretty far down on the food chain.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Dani always did everything my father wanted her to do. She was making plans to go to law school, she got a job writing about law enforcement for the Daily News. He was really proud of Dani. Not so proud of me.”

  “Because you went to work in an art gallery instead of going to law school?”

  She nodded.

  “Also, because of my sexual orientation.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m gay.”

  “Nothing wrong with that,” I smiled, paraphrasing the classic Seinfeld line.

  “Tell that to my father.”

  “He doesn’t approve of the gay lifestyle?”

  “My father is a big champion of gay rights in the political world. He donates to gay groups and causes, prosecutes vigorously any cases of gay harassment. . . . Hell, he even made a big speech at an ABA convention hailing the Supreme Court decisions on DOMA and California gay marriage when those rulings came down. He’s all for gay rights. Except when it involves his own family. Then suddenly it becomes a little too close for him. So he says things to me like: ‘Why can’t you just like boys the way your sister does?’”