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  “I have an idea,” I said. “What if . . .”

  “Shut up and stay out of this,” Marilyn snapped at me.

  “Yeah, what does this have to do with you?” Stacy said.

  “I’m the guy you’re fighting over,” I pointed out.

  That stopped them both temporarily.

  “Look,” I said, “interviewing Wylie is a onetime thing. I can do that in an hour. So I go ahead with that as planned. That’s all I have to do on the mayoral race for now to give us the Wylie exclusive. Then the rest of the time I’ll work on the Issacs murder story. Make sense?”

  Marilyn and Stacy looked at each other warily, each to see what the other one’s response would be. I didn’t really have a side in this fight, but I was kinda rooting for Marilyn. Even though she had once fired me from the News and demoted me during all of the original Houston controversy a few years back. On the other hand, Stacy had given me the opportunity to become a TV star. Although I respected and even sort of liked Marilyn, at least as much as it is possible to like and respect an editor, I didn’t feel that way about Stacy. I have a unique set of values when it comes to judging people.

  “Do you really think that you can work on both these stories at once?” Marilyn asked me now.

  “C’mon, this is Gil Malloy you’re talking to. I can leap tall buildings in a single bound. Disguised as a mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper—fighting for truth, justice . . .”

  “Cut the crap, Malloy,” she said.

  “. . . and the American way.” I shrugged. “I figured you’d want to hear the ending.”

  “Can you do both stories at once? Yes or no?”

  “Uh, yes.”

  Marilyn looked back at Stacy again.

  “I guess I can live with that arrangement,” she said.

  “Me too,” Stacy agreed.

  Ah, Malloy, you talented son of a gun. Ace reporter. TV star. And now add peacemaker to the résumé too. Maybe when I was done with these stories, I could hire out to the UN and go try to straighten out that whole mess in the Middle East.

  * * *

  “What do you think about Bob Wylie?” I asked Zeena as I passed by the receptionist desk.

  “Why?”

  “I’m supposed to interview him about the mayoral election on Live from New York.”

  “I’d vote for him.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s hot.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You know, like . . . ,” she put her finger in her mouth, licked it, and held it up to make a sizzling sound, “. . . hot. Handsome. Nice body. Terrific buns. Now, that’s what I call a law enforcement figure. I mean this guy could put a pair of handcuffs on me anytime he wanted.”

  I sighed. As Winston Churchill once said, the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.

  On my way out of the newsroom to meet Wohlers for the Victoria Issacs interview, I ran into Marilyn Staley.

  “Thanks for stepping up for me in the news meeting the way you did, Gil,” she said. “I don’t know how this thing with Stacy and me is going to play out. But it’s good to know you’re on my side.”

  “Don’t worry, I got your back, Marilyn,” I said.

  Then—when I got to the elevator bank, there was Stacy holding a cup of coffee.

  “Gil, I know you have to go along with the crime story thing for a while,” she said. “But you and I both know how big the mayoral connection with Wylie could be leading up to the election. The man is on his way to Gracie Mansion. I don’t see any of the other contenders stopping him. And—with you on the inside of his campaign—we’ll be there with him every step of the way. I really appreciate your support in the meeting. It really makes me feel better knowing I have you on my team.”

  “Right back at you, Stacy,” I smiled.

  Malloy’s the name, diplomacy’s my game.

  CHAPTER 7

  OVER the years I’d interviewed a lot of families of crime victims—and it never got any easier.

  Sometimes they fell apart completely, screaming and crying and pleading to God for answers. Other times they were angry and demanded revenge against the criminal who took their loved one away. And then there were those who reacted with no emotion at all, acting almost as if they didn’t understand what had happened.

  But interviewing Victoria Issacs about the murder of her husband was going to be different.

  Because I knew her.

  Because I liked her.

  And because—for better or for worse—her life and mine had somehow become inexorably intertwined ever since I wrote that memorable Houston story for the News.

  “What are you going to say to her when we get there?” I asked Wohlers as we drove up to the townhouse on Sutton Place where she lived.

  “I’m going to ask her if she knows who killed her husband.”

  “She doesn’t.”

  “Yeah, well . . . I’d still like to hear her answer.”

  Wohlers was driving with one hand and eating a meatball sandwich with the other. He was a big man—maybe six-foot-five, 240 pounds—and the most prodigious eater I’d ever seen. He told me he’d just had time to grab the sandwich at the deli before he picked me up near the station house. Eating a meatball sandwich can be a messy business under any circumstances. But doing it while driving a car is almost impossible. I looked at his shirt and saw a big stain of meatball sauce. There was also something ­yellow—maybe mustard—from a previous meal. At one point, he dropped one of the meatballs on the floor of the car as he made a turn. He reached down and picked it up when we stopped at the next red light, then popped it into his mouth. I was hungry too when I got into the car, but watching him eat had pretty much made me lose my appetite.

  “Do you really think Victoria Issacs knows something?” I asked.

  “She knew her husband was fooling around. You told me that. Jealousy over a cheating spouse is a pretty good motive for murder.”

  “I thought we went through all that on the phone.”

  “You say Victoria Issacs is not the blonde on that hotel security camera video. But I haven’t seen her yet. Maybe she wore a disguise.”

  “Walters Issacs took that woman on the video to the hotel to have sex.”

  “So you never heard of a man taking his wife to a hotel for sex?”

  “Victoria Issacs is not a killer. She’s a good person. A good mother. A good wife.”

  “Who just happened to be the most notorious hooker in New York City at one time.”

  “Turning tricks is not the same thing as murder.”

  Wohlers grunted, finished the meatball sandwich, and wiped off the last of the sauce with his sleeve. “They’re both against the law.”

  * * *

  Victoria Issacs greeted us wearing a pair of blue jeans, a green sleeveless top, and open-toed sandals. Subdued enough attire, but she still looked sexy. I did my best not to leer. But I did wonder idly what the mourning period was for a widow whose husband had cheated on her, before she could have sex again. Three months? Six months? That was a long time to wait. Of course, if I ever did have any kind of personal relationship with Victoria Issacs, it would only complicate the whole Houston mess even more. Then again, I was already deep into the Houston thing again anyway, so I might as well go for it all.

  We sat in the living room—the same living room where she and I had sat when I tracked her down as Houston a few years earlier. There were pictures of her two young daughters on a table next to me. She said they were staying with her husband’s relatives until the funeral was over. I did not see any pictures of Walter Issacs. I wondered if maybe they had been there, but she took them down when she found out about the tawdry circumstances of his death.

  “Wow!” Wohlers said to me under his breath, when she was out of earshot.

  “Yeah, wow,” I muttered.

  I thought maybe he would get right
to the picture of the woman in the elevator. She hadn’t seen it yet. No one had, the photo hadn’t been made public. If she could somehow identify the woman, that would help answer a lot of questions.

  But he started out slowly instead, quietly asking her questions about her husband and herself.

  “Did you know your husband was spending the night at the hotel?” Wohlers asked her.

  “No, not specifically. I didn’t know where he was. That’s why I went to see Malloy. I was scared.”

  “But had he ever spent the night in a hotel before?”

  She got a tight expression around her mouth.

  “Yes, he sometimes did that when he was working late.”

  “Working in the city?”

  “Yes.”

  “So why would he stay at a hotel in the city when he had this townhouse?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Mrs. Issacs, he was there with another woman. We believe he had sex with the woman before he was killed.”

  She stared at him blankly.

  “Do you think that maybe this woman’s jealous husband or boyfriend killed Walter?” she asked.

  “No, we think the woman did it.”

  “But why would she do something like that?”

  “Well, that’s what we’re trying to find out. Mrs. Issacs, I need to ask you about the letter you received just prior to us finding your husband. The one that talks about your past as a prostitute named Houston.”

  She whirled around and glared at me.

  “You promised you wouldn’t tell anyone!”

  “I kept my promise. Until now. Now it’s become a murder investigation, and all bets are off. I’m sorry. I had no choice.”

  “You promised . . . ,” she said again angrily.

  Well, so much for my plan to woo and seduce the Widow Issacs. I’d gone from a good guy to a bad guy in her eyes in those few seconds it took for Wohlers to tell her that he knew about her being Houston.

  “Will this have to be made public?” she asked Wohlers.

  “That depends on whether or not it becomes relevant to the investigation into your husband’s murder.”

  “What does one thing have to do with the other?” she asked pleadingly.

  “You got a note from someone who knew you were Houston and seemed to know what had happened to your husband before anyone else,” I said. “We gotta figure that’s going to be relevant to the murder investigation.”

  I think she already knew that. She was just hoping she could delay the world finding out as long as she possibly could. I knew the feeling too. Because I was going to have a lot to answer for at the paper myself when this became public.

  I could see the conversation between Marilyn and Stacy going something like this:

  Marilyn: “I think we should suspend Malloy.”

  Stacy: “I think we should fire Malloy.”

  Marilyn: “I think we should suspend him and fire him.”

  Stacy: “Is tar and feathering still legal in this state?”

  Marilyn: “I’ll provide the tar if you get the feathers.”

  Well, on the bright side, at least the two of them would be able to finally agree on something.

  Wohlers took out the picture from the video showing the blonde on the elevator with Walter Issacs.

  “I want you to look at this photo, Mrs. Issacs, and tell me if you recognize the woman with your husband at all. You can’t see her face. But there might be something . . .”

  “How would I know her?”

  “Maybe she’s someone in your social circle.”

  “My husband wouldn’t fool around with any of my friends,” she snapped.

  She said it as if it was a conversation she’d had before, like with her husband. Maybe she was willing to look the other way and ignore his fooling around as long as he didn’t do it with anyone they knew.

  “Please look at the picture, Mrs. Issacs,” Wohlers said.

  “All right, I will. But it’s a waste of time. I’m telling you, I don’t know anything at all about who this woman is . . .”

  There was a stunned look on her face as she saw the woman on the video.

  Even without the face, she recognized something.

  “Oh, my God,” she said. “It’s Melissa!”

  CHAPTER 8

  THE woman with my husband is Melissa Ross,” Victoria Issacs told us. “But why would she want to hurt Walter?”

  “How did you recognize her so quickly when her face wasn’t visible in the picture?” Wohlers asked.

  “The tattoo on her arm. It’s a heart. Split in two pieces. Melissa talked about it with me the first time we met. She said it symbolized how men always broke your heart. She was very proud of that tattoo. She kept saying I should get one too. She said it would make me feel better about . . . well, about what my husband was doing to me. About his cheating.”

  “So tell us what you know about Melissa Ross.”

  She looked down at the photo.

  “Melissa is a private investigator. I hired her to spy on Walter. I’ve never done anything like that before. But I just didn’t know what else to do.”

  Now it was my turn to be angry. She hadn’t told me any of this when she asked me to go looking for him.

  “Why didn’t you tell me that in the beginning?” I said to her.

  “I didn’t think it was important.”

  “You didn’t think it was important to inform the guy you asked to search for your missing husband that you’d put a private investigator on his tail to catch him in the sack with another woman?”

  “Okay, I was embarrassed. I’m still embarrassed by it, Gil.”

  She talked about how she’d suspected her husband of cheating on her for a long time. How he’d been staying out late at night. Every time she confronted him, he denied it though. She began hoping against hope that maybe she was wrong. Even though she knew in her heart she wasn’t. So she hired the private investigator, Melissa Ross, to find out the truth once and for all about his infidelities. She said Melissa Ross specialized in that kind of work—catching cheating husbands in the act.

  “How did you find out about her?” Wohlers asked.

  “She bought one of my paintings,” she said, looking up at her artwork on the walls of the living room. “I’ve been painting for a number of years now, and I finally did my own show at a gallery in SoHo. It was my first exhibit and I was very excited, and I was also nervous that no one would buy my work. But Melissa did. She bought two of my paintings and told me how much she liked my style. We talked about art, and then we talked about other stuff. I liked her. Eventually she told me she was a private investigator and what she did. So I hired her to follow Walter for me.”

  “When is the last time you heard from her?”

  “A few days ago. She said she had some information for me. But she wasn’t ready to tell me just yet. She said she’d be in touch, and that I’d finally get some answers about Walter.”

  “Can you describe her at all for us?” Wohlers asked.

  “She’s very beautiful.”

  “So everyone says.”

  “Well, she is.”

  She looked down at the photo of her husband with Melissa Ross on the hotel elevator one more time. She began to cry again.

  “Did you tell Melissa Ross about your past as Houston?” I asked her.

  “No.”

  “Then why did that note you got know you were Houston?”

  “I have no idea.”

  * * *

  I had a hot story here, no question about it. I had the identity of the blonde killer. Melissa Ross, a private investigator who hired her services out to women with cheating husbands.

  Of course, there were still a lot of things I didn’t know.

  Like why she had killed Walter Issacs.

  And exactly how she managed to do it.

  And why she stayed around in the hotel room all night.

  And where she was now.

  And then, of course, the
re was the most pressing question of all. If she sent the note to Victoria Issacs, how did she know about her really being Houston?

  Now I just needed to focus on getting the story out. I grabbed a cab back downtown to the Daily News offices. When I got there, I filled in Marilyn and Stacy on what I had, pounded out a quick first story on my computer, and we put it up on the website. The headline said: EXCLUSIVE: BLONDE BEAUTY ID’D IN KILLING OF TOP LAWYER.

  After that, I kept working to gather more details from the cops and everyone else I could think of before the rest of the media in town caught up to the story.

  There was no sign of Melissa Ross anywhere.

  Police descended on her office, which was in Queens. Inside, they found a cluttered but otherwise typical office. It had a desk, a computer, file cabinets, a couple of chairs, and a sofa for clients to sit on. The cops found a half-drunk cup of coffee, an empty pizza box, and an unfinished crossword puzzle. But no Melissa Ross.

  It was the same thing at Melissa Ross’s apartment building a few blocks away when the cops burst in there with guns drawn. Nothing seemed to be missing. The closets were filled with clothes. Everything looked completely normal, except Melissa Ross was nowhere to be found.

  Neighbors said they didn’t really know her that well, only saw her coming and going from the building. Often at night.

  “The last time I saw her she was all dressed up,” the building super told me when I got him on the phone. “Tight pants, low-cut sweater or blouse, really high-heeled boots. She looked very, well . . .”

  “Hot?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did she say where she was going?”

  “She said she was on her way to work.”

  “Dressed like that?”

  “I think it was part of her job.”

  Through the night I kept adding to the story, until it was more than thirty inches in length—and with sidebars on what we knew about Melissa Ross and a profile of Walter Issacs.

  The one thing I still didn’t include though was the note Victoria Issacs had gotten—just before her husband was found ­murdered—calling her Houston. Wohlers hadn’t released anything official on that. He and I—and Victoria Issacs, of course—were the only people who knew about that note. Well, there might be more—Wohlers probably would have given the information to other people in the police department. Or, if he hadn’t done that yet, he would have to include it in the case file. And sooner or later, it would become public.