Loverboy Read online

He cleared his throat. He seemed confused. I guess people generally get more excited when they’re offered a part in a Hollywood movie.

  “Ms. Anson would really like to meet you,” he said. “We’re doing some scenes right now at the Limelight—”

  “Sorry, but I’m not interested.”

  “This is going to be a very big movie, Miss Shannon. It’s a fascinating story.”

  “Not for me it isn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I lived through it, remember? And I still have the nightmares.”

  Chapter 6

  That night I went to Headlines. Headlines is a bar on Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village. A lot of newspaper people hang out there.

  There was a time, when I was drinking, that I used to regularly close the place down. I’d arrive after work at about eight or nine, have a couple drinks to unwind, and the next thing I knew, it would be 4 a.m. Sometimes things got out of hand, and on more than one occasion the manager had to tell the bartender to stop serving me and make sure I got home all right.

  I didn’t go to Headlines for the booze anymore. But I still went.

  It was important to me. I didn’t want drinking, or the lack of it, to change the way I lived my life. A good deal of that life was spent in bars—talking to sources, picking up tips or just schmoozing with politicians, cops or other newspaper people. If I couldn’t drink anymore while I did it, well . . . that was the way it had to be.

  I once met a woman at an AA meeting who worked as a cocktail waitress. She did this for two years while she stayed sober, hanging out with drunks every night and never touching a drop of the stuff. Then one time when she was on vacation in a remote mountain cabin in Vermont, she impulsively drove thirty miles to the nearest package store and proceeded to get royally blitzed.

  Moral of the story: If you’re going to drink, you will. If you’re not, you won’t. The circumstances don’t really matter.

  Janet Wood plopped down on the bar stool next to me.

  “I think I’m in love,” she announced.

  “With who?”

  She pointed to a guy standing at the end of the bar wearing a New York Jets T-shirt. He was dark-haired, handsome and muscular.

  “What’s his name?”

  “I don’t know yet. But I’m calling him Mr. Touchdown.”

  “Interesting approach.”

  “Speaking of approaches, how do you think I should try to meet him? My discreet move or the aggressive one?”

  “What’s the discreet?”

  “I pretend to spill a drink on the front of my blouse and ask him to help wipe it off.”

  “I’m not even going to ask about the aggressive way.”

  The bartender brought us refills. A light beer for Janet and a Perrier for me.

  “How did it go with the missing girl in Brooklyn today?” I asked her.

  “I went out and talked to the mother. It’s a sad story. Theresa Anne Vinas is a straight-A student, never been in any trouble, hardly ever even dated. And a real beauty too. Did you see the pictures of her?”

  I nodded, remembering the smiling face framed by dark hair.

  “Anyway, her friends decided to go to a singles bar in the city for a celebration because Theresa had gotten a big scholarship to Princeton. One thing led to another; the friends all drifted off with different guys and eventually wound up back in Brooklyn. All except Theresa. No one’s heard from her since that night.”

  “What do you think happened to her?” I asked.

  Janet shrugged. “Dead.”

  “Yeah. Me too.”

  We sat there in silence for a minute. To anyone else it might seem cold and heartless to talk about Theresa Anne Vinas so casually. But newspaper reporters, like cops, have to handle things that way. Otherwise every murder—every story—tears you apart.

  A little later, Norm Malloy showed up with the first copies of the Blade off the press.

  This was a nightly ritual. Malloy was a sixty-year-old desk assistant. He had never worked anywhere else but at the Blade, and insisted he would stay there until the day he died. Malloy lived alone and seemed to have no interests of any kind outside the newspaper.

  “Better give your paycheck back today,” he said as he handed a copy to me.

  Malloy said that to everyone on the staff who didn’t have a byline in the paper that night. When it was there, he called out the page number of the person’s story in a loud, booming voice. It was irritating, but kind of nice too.

  Janet’s interview with Theresa Anne Vinas’s mother was on page 1:

  MISSING GIRL’S MOM PRAYS FOR HER RETURN

  by Janet Wood

  On the mantel of Carmen Vinas’s Brooklyn living room is a statue of St. Jude. St. Jude is the saint of lost causes.

  Eighteen-year-old Theresa Anne Vinas is lost.

  So her mother prays to St. Jude for a miracle.

  “I get on my knees and beg the Lord to send my Theresa Anne home to me,” sobbed Mrs. Vinas yesterday in her tiny apartment.

  “I’ll never ask Him for anything else again in my life. I promise. I just want my Theresa. I want my little girl back.”

  Meanwhile, Police Lt. William Masters said a massive search had so far failed to turn up any sign of the missing teenager.

  Theresa Anne Vinas disappeared after going to a Manhattan singles bar with a group of friends. . . .

  I idly skimmed through the rest of the story, sipping on my Perrier as I read.

  Something was bothering me, but I wasn’t sure what it was.

  I just had this nagging feeling I was missing something.

  I read the story from the beginning again, this time more carefully. Then it hit me.

  A singles bar!

  The guy I had talked to at Partners, where Barry Tischler was last seen, said he was in a bad mood because he’d been hassled by reporters for the past few days. Why were reporters hassling him? It didn’t seem important at the time. But now . . .

  Theresa Anne Vinas had disappeared after going to a Manhattan singles bar. Just like Barry Tischler.

  Of course, it could just be a coincidence. There were lots of singles bars in Manhattan.

  I walked over to where Janet was now deep in conversation with the hot guy in the football T-shirt. They were staring intently into each other’s eyes.

  “Janet, I’ve got to talk to you.”

  “I’m busy,” she said out of the side of her mouth.

  She did not turn around.

  “This is important.”

  “I’m very busy.”

  “It’s very important.”

  Janet looked at the guy and smiled. “Can you excuse me for just one second? My friend here seems to have an emergency.”

  I pulled her off into a corner.

  “This better be really good,” Janet said.

  “The singles bar Theresa Anne Vinas went to. What was its name?”

  Janet stared at me. “That’s what you called me over here for?”

  “C’mon, Janet.”

  She thought for a second. “Uh, Partners, I think—”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “What?”

  “You know my guy, Barry Tischler, the missing department-store Romeo? I think he was at Partners the same night.”

  “You mean . . . ?”

  “Yeah,” I told her. “I figure when we find Barry Tischler, we’ll find Theresa Anne Vinas.”

  Chapter 7

  They found them both the next day.

  It was late afternoon, and the temperature was holding at eighty, with bright sunshine glinting in through the window next to my desk, when the call came in to the office.

  “Get over to the auto pound on West Fiftieth Street,” the voice on the other end said.

  It was Lieutenant William Masters, the cop who was heading up the search for Theresa Anne Vinas.

  “Why?”

  “You did us a favor last night by passing along the information about Tischler. Now I’m doing one
for you.”

  “Okay, but—”

  “You better get moving, Shannon, if you want this story first.”

  I got moving. When I got to the auto pound, Masters was standing next to a silver Mercedes sedan. The trunk was open, and a half-dozen cops were examining it. Masters said something to one of them, then saw me and walked over.

  Masters was about fifty years old. He was wearing a pinstriped suit, crisp white shirt, silk tie and Italian loafers. Masters always looked good. Like he’d just stepped out of an ad in GQ.

  I’d worked with him on a few stories before, mostly when I was younger and doing the police beat on a regular basis. He was okay, I guess, as cops go. Decent, hardworking, street-smart—and probably relatively honest.

  “I checked out Barry Tischler a little more carefully after you called me,” he said. “Tracked down his car with Motor Vehicles. They ran it through their computer. Found out his Mercedes had been towed here from a pier down by the East River a few nights ago and never been claimed. There’s two bodies inside the trunk.”

  “Theresa Anne Vinas and Barry Tischler?”

  Masters nodded. He took a package of Tums out of his pocket and popped one in his mouth.

  “They were both in various stages of undress.”

  So much for innocence.

  One of the cops by the Mercedes came over and said something to Masters. The guy was a lot younger, closer to my age. If Masters looked like something from GQ, this guy was right out of Rolling Stone. He had shaggy brown hair—the longest I’d ever seen on a cop—and a mustache. He was wearing jeans, a khaki blazer and a T-shirt. He looked really rumpled, sort of a cross between Serpico and Columbo.

  He smiled at me. I smiled back.

  “What do you think happened?” I asked Masters.

  “Not too hard to figure. The Vinas girl is innocent and naive, but she’s pretty. So she goes to the singles bar with her friends and Tischler hits on her. I hear the guy had a thing for the ladies.”

  I remembered the phone book in his dresser drawer. “I don’t think it will take exhaustive police work to prove that.”

  “Anyway, he probably offered to take her home and she got in his car. Only instead of going to Brooklyn, he convinced her to park with him and they started going at it. While they were in the middle of it, someone came up on them, opened the door and shot them both.”

  I walked over to the car and looked inside. “Where’s all the blood?”

  “Someone cleaned it up,” he said. “That’s why no one noticed anything when they towed it away. Wiped up all the blood and stuffed the bodies into the trunk.”

  “Very thorough,” I said. “And neat. Not to mention weird.”

  “Yeah, ain’t it?”

  The ME’s people were there now, taking the bodies out of the trunk. They put them in green plastic bags and then carried them over to the waiting morgue truck.

  I caught a glimpse of the faces before the bags were zipped up. There wasn’t much of Tischler’s face; it had been blown away by the force of the blast. Must have been a powerful gun. Theresa Anne Vinas still had an innocent look on her face, though.

  “You got a motive?” I asked Masters.

  “It sure looks like a jealous lover to me.”

  “You mean with Tischler?”

  He nodded.

  “Any ideas?”

  “I’d say his wife is shaping up as a helluva suspect.”

  I made a face. “Emily Tischler? No way. Wait’ll you meet her.”

  “Appearances can be deceiving. And she had plenty of motive. He played around a lot—you said so yourself. So she gets mad when he goes out again, follows him to the bar and sees him leave with the girl. She waits for the right moment and then—bam!—no more Barry Tischler.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Then she sticks her trusty cannon back into her purse, drags the bodies into the trunk, washes down the car and makes it back to her father-in-law’s store in time to catch the late Gucci handbag sale.”

  The young cop next to Masters snickered loudly.

  Masters gave him a dirty look. Then he turned back to me.

  “Well, it could have happened that way,” he said.

  But he didn’t sound all that convinced himself.

  “Yeah, and she could have pulled the Brinks robbery too, but she didn’t.”

  “You don’t like her for it, huh?”

  “Nope.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” he said softly.

  He walked back toward the car. The other cop didn’t move. He was still smiling at me.

  “How ya doing?” I said.

  He stuck out his hand.

  “Detective Mitch Caruso.” He nodded toward Masters. “The lieutenant isn’t very big on formal introductions.”

  “Lucy Shannon. I’m a reporter with the Blade.”

  We shook. His grip was strong and firm. I thought he held onto my hand just a little too long. But maybe it was my imagination.

  “You figured this out by yourself?” he said, gesturing at the Mercedes.

  “It was a lucky guess.”

  “Cool.”

  I pulled my hand away.

  “Would you like to have dinner with me, Lucy?”

  “Excuse me, Detective?”

  “Mitch. Call me Mitch. Look, I don’t like to waste time. I mean, I could have led up to it with a lot of small talk about people we both know in the department and stuff. But I figured I’d get right to the point.”

  “Then you’ll like my answer. It’s short and to the point too. No.”

  “C’mon, we’ll get some Italian. I’m Italian, and Italian cops know all the best Italian restaurants in the city. Think about it.”

  I pretended to ponder for a second.

  “No,” I said again.

  “It’ll be fun. We can exchange war stories. You tell me about all your big scoops and I’ll tell you about the time I almost arrested John Gotti. Plus, if you’re really good, I’ll do my Jack Webb Dragnet impression for you.”

  “You do Jack Webb?”

  He started talking in a clipped monotone.

  “New York. This is the city. Everyone here has dreams. Some people want to be stars. Some want to get rich. And some people just want to steal other people’s dreams. That’s where I come in. I’m a cop . . .”

  I laughed in spite of myself. It wasn’t bad.

  “Look, Detective—”

  “Mitch. I know it’s a toughie.”

  “Mitch, I just don’t date cops.”

  “Is this some sort of religious or political statement?”

  “I was recently married to one.”

  “It didn’t work out?”

  “None of my marriages did.”

  “How many are we talking about here?”

  “Three.”

  He whistled softly. “Boy, you must be a barrel of fun to live with, huh?”

  I smiled.

  “How about you? I can’t believe a charming guy like you hasn’t lured some lucky bride to the altar yet.”

  Caruso shook his head.

  “Unlike you, I’m waiting for the right person before I get married. I have this old-fashioned notion that marriage is forever. You know . . . love, honor, till death do us part . . . that sort of stuff.”

  “Yeah, I used to feel that way too. I thought my Prince Charming would come along one day and we’d live happily ever after.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I was misinformed.”

  Chapter 8

  It had been a long time since I’d had a page 1 story.

  I didn’t realize how much I missed it. Before everything went wrong, I used to keep a scrapbook of all my newspaper clippings. I’m usually not good at stuff like that. I don’t save letters from friends or pictures of my vacation or keep a diary. But I was very conscientious about that scrapbook. It was like a record of my life.

  I took it down now from a shelf in the closet and began going through the pages.

 
; There were a lot of clippings from when I first started with the paper. I was so young then—just in my twenties—but I found myself thrown into one of the biggest stories in New York City history. A serial killer was stalking the streets of New York, gunning down young women and couples—and sending taunting messages to the media. All the letters contained the killer’s trademark phrase: “I love you to death.”

  I looked at some of the headlines: “Loverboy Writes to Blade Reporter”; “Serial Killer Tells Shannon: I Want to Be Caught!”; “Crusading Young Woman Reporter One Step Ahead of Cops on Baffling Case.”

  I remembered those days. How I had felt on top of the world. Indestructible. Like nothing would ever go wrong. God, it seemed like such a long time ago.

  Now they were making a movie about it.

  Beautiful.

  The pages in the scrapbook got emptier after that. Oh, I had some good stories along the way. I covered cops and the police commissioner’s office for a long time. Got a city councilman indicted with a series on corruption in the city’s urban-renewal program. Did a little rewrite, copyediting—even tried a brief stint as an assistant city editor until I decided that wasn’t for me. But the truth is, my career was all pretty much downhill after that great start.

  My apartment is on the sixth floor of a big building near Gramercy Park, just off Third Avenue. I stood by an open window, listening to the sounds of the city below. Horns honking. Car doors slamming. A radio turned up loud to a Top 40 station. A loud argument of some sort. I couldn’t pick up all the details, but it seemed to be between two people named Ray and Maria and involved an alleged act of marital infidelity by Maria with someone named Hector.

  Down on the street, I could see couples walking hand in hand, looking lovingly at each other. Everybody seemed to have somebody. Except me.

  Of course, I had something they didn’t have—a front-page story in tomorrow’s paper.

  I looked at my watch. The early edition of the Blade—with my exclusive about Barry Tischler and Theresa Anne Vinas having been found murdered—would be arriving at the newsstands pretty soon. I could go pick up a copy. I left my apartment, went outside and started up Third Avenue to Twenty-Third Street, where there was a newsstand that stayed open all night.