Antonio (looks at the camera with a gun in his hand): I’m addressing you all, dear ones, at the threshold of death. I’m sorry for the pain that my actions may cause you, but my life isn’t worth living anymore, so I’m taking it. Don’t blame anyone. Adiós.
“What are you doing here?”
Marlene spun around. Helen was standing behind her, wrapped in a purple sarong and dripping, just back from the pool. She grabbed the journal from Marlene and shot toward the balcony.
But Marlene reacted quickly, back to her former self as a Cuban Revolutionary Police lieutenant. She forced Helen against a wall and recovered the journal.
“I’m going to call security!” the screenwriter said unconvincingly.
“Yes, why don’t you?” Marlene shrugged. “Save me the trouble. They’ll be happy to find Carloalberto’s killer.”
Helen walked to the door. She hesitated, then looked back.
“I have no idea what you mean. And why do you care anyway?”
“I don’t, really,” Marlene admitted. “But,” she pointed to the underlined words. “his last words. A pretty strange coincidence, isn’t it?”
“I wrote that long before Carloalberto died,” Helen said. “I’d even shown this to him. The fact that it did end up happening that way was almost poetic justice.”
“Poetic justice,” Marlene repeated. “That’s a couple of big Sunday words to describe what you did. You had him read from your script, took a recording and killed him. It’s as clear as the Cozumel waters you threw his body into.”
A room attendant came in. “Oh, pardon me,” he said on seeing the two of them. “I’ll be back later.”
He slipped out, closing the door behind him.
“Look, I can explain everything,” Helen said.
Marlene settled down on one bed, keeping the journal out of Helen’s reach. She knew it wasn’t the best idea to sit in a locked room with a stone-cold killer, but the attendants were right outside, and Marlene would raise hell if Helen even got close to her. And besides, it was highly unlikely the woman could be hiding a weapon under that wet sarong.
“Go ahead,” she said.
Helen sat on the other bed, facing Marlene.
“Carloalberto and I have known each other a long time,” she said. “Long before he was famous—or almost famous. He’s always been a smug bastard, but I still fell for him.”
Like Marlene had fallen for Yoel.
“I kept trying to protect him, giving him money to get him out of trouble because he’s—was a compulsive gambler. I must have loaned him over ten thousand dollars that he never intended to pay back.”
There was a pause. Marlene gazed out the glass balcony door. No land in sight. The ship seemed perfectly suspended between sea and sky.
“So you killed him over a few thousand dollars?” she prodded.
“No, no! I was working on that script—the one in the notebook—for a contest like the one we lost and needed an actor to read from a scene. I asked Carloalberto to record it on his phone since mine was gone.”
“I remember.”
Helen’s voice wavered. “You must think I’m so silly. He probably did, too. The night of the party, after he’d maxed out his credit card in the casino, he finally agreed to do me this favor. We were friends, after all.”
“Not just friends,” Marlene corrected.
Helen’s cheeks turned red. “No, much more,’” she said. “We met right when he’d arrived from Cuba. I was his first American girlfriend, and I was devastated when he left me for Emma. But then he came back, begging for forgiveness. He said he wanted to finance his own movie. It’s time-consuming and expensive to do. I put a second mortgage on my house so we could start production and find co-sponsors. We never got them, and I—I lost my home.”
Heat flared on Marlene’s cheeks, too. She felt a pang of empathy from the corner of her heart that still grieved for her mother’s house.
“When we teamed up for the contest, he made me lie about our story,” Helen went on. “He wanted to pretend it was the beginning of our collaboration. He got back together with Emma and proposed right away, ‘for publicity,’ he swore, even though it was clear she really loved him.”
“He really got away with that?” Marlene asked.
“She was already famous, and their marriage did actually give us a leg up on the show. Of course he was in love with her, not me, and I refused to see it.” Tears began to trickle down Helen’s face. She wiped them away. “He kept saying I was ‘the one.’ And I would’ve believed anything, coming from him.”
The ship lurched. High waves, uncommon in the summer, began to rock it back and forth.
“What I don’t understand,” Marlene said, “is why you took this trip knowing he would be here with his wife. It makes it seem like you were stalking him.”
Helen blinked. “No! In fact, he was the one who persuaded me to come on this cruise. I wanted to move on and forget him. But he was so convinced we would win the competition that he insisted I come with him and Emma. If the two of us were aboard when the winners were announced, we’d get amazing press. The cruise company might even offer us a sponsorship, or him and Emma a contract for a couple of commercials. He was always thinking along career lines. I should’ve known better, though. He wasn’t a great actor. We only managed to stay on the show that long because of his looks.”
Marlene nodded. “His ‘farewell speech’ certainly wasn’t too convincing.”
Helen threw her hands in the air. “Tell me about it! That was the crappiest acting I’ve seen in years. He was drunk by then. So was I, by the way. I’d had one too many during that silly party and I was . . . not thinking clearly, I guess. When he finished recording, I tried to ask him about us. Absurdly, after all that time, I’d still held out hope that we had a shot. That I hadn’t ruined my life for nothing. In response, he just asked if I could help him pay his debts one last time. ‘La Eme is after me,’ he said. The Mexican mafia, serious stuff.”
“Were you planning to bail him out again?” Marlene asked.
“I didn’t have the money for it.” Helen put her head in her hands. “I begged him to tell me if our relationship had a chance. He laughed. ‘Relationship? Your only relationship with me is as my screenwriter. And you suck at it, writing these stupid script about kings and knights! You couldn’t have done a little better?’” Helen was crying again.
“He put the blame on me for losing! After everything I’d sacrificed for him. He turned to leave, and I was so furious that I took the water jug and hit him in the head.”
Marlene pictured an enraged Helen going after her former lover with the stainless-steel carafe. It almost made he laugh.
“But that alone wouldn’t have killed him,” she said.
“No, it only dazed him. But he was already drunk. He fell down and banged his head on the door. Passed out immediately. I started to think about what would happen if he was found wounded or unconscious in my cabin. All the explaining I’d have to do! And how he’d treated me—I was done. Had I been sober, I would never have . . . I’m not a violent person, no matter what you might think.”
Helen stopped and shook her head slowly, as if processing what she’d just said herself. Then she went on in a hoarse voice. “I dragged him to the balcony and threw him overboard, then the water jug after him. I knew Emma wouldn’t look for him until morning, since he spent half his nights in the casino.”
Marlene inhaled loudly and asked, “Was it then that you decided to try to make it look like a suicide?”
“Not right away. It wasn’t until later that night. I’d kept his phone, and there was the recording. It was a godsend. The timetables weren’t perfect, but I hoped no one would notice. I sent off an email with the video attachment to Emma from his account. To go with it, I wrote something pretty close to what he’d said in the video.”
“I wiped it down and dropped it by the roulette table when we came back from the dolphin excursion. Someone returned it to Emma. In the meantime, I told everybody he’d been depressed. Even Emma accepted it after seeing the email.”
Helen seemed sad, but not particularly remorseful. Marlene peered into her eyes.
“Do you resent Emma?” she asked.
Helen sighed. “Of course I hated her at first. I saw her as the woman who stole Carloalberto from me. But then I found out he’d cheated—was still cheating—on both of us with so many other women. She never suspected it—she’s way too naïve. I ended up feeling sorry for her. And I know she loved him. She must be devastated right now. But she’s young and beautiful and has so much going for her. I think he would’ve ruined her life, too.”
Helen fell silent. Marlene thought of Yoel again and looked at the screenwriter. As a police officer, she would never, ever have empathized with a criminal like this, but she wasn’t a detective anymore. She had left that life behind on the island, along with her uniform and her old Makarov. Now, she was the owner and manager of La Bakería Cubana, anxious to return to her oven and storefront. And her dog, Max, who would never betray her.
“One last thing, Helen,” she said softly. “Why in the world did you keep this journal? It’s damning, even you must know that.”
“I didn’t think there would be a search,” Helen answered. “Even if they didn’t believe it was suicide, Carloalberto has so many unpaid debts to dangerous people. And . . . well, I just couldn’t let that one last piece of him go.”
“I’m afraid you’ll have to.”
“What do you mean?”
Marlene stood up and walked to the balcony. Helen followed. The waters were choppy, and the wind had picked up. Marlene threw the journal into the ocean.
“Adiós, Carloalberto,” she said.
Epilogue
The North Star was finally docked in the Miami port. It was nine-thirty; disembarkation was scheduled for ten. Marlene lingered on the promenade deck, watching Sarita, who was busy snapping pictures of the Miami skyline. But her heart, her aunt noticed, wasn’t in it. This murder business must have been hard on her. With any luck, her grief would be short-lived. Most things were, at that age. Marlene hoped she’d soon have another crush to obsess over.
Speaking of crushes—where was Benito? Marlene had hoped to see him again before leaving the ship, but told herself she didn’t care. He hadn’t gone out of his way to find her, and anyway, he was just an acquaintance, someone she would probably never see again. She had real life to think about now.
The memory of her conversation with Helen and the discarding of the notebook haunted Marlene. How could it not? Her former homicide-detective self bucked against letting the screenwriter get away with literal murder, but the scorned woman in her gleefully approved of it.
Sarita joined her, still looking downcast. Marlene put an arm around her.
“You okay?” she asked softly.
“Yeah, but I have to rethink my future. I wouldn’t make a very good journalist,” Sarita said.
“Oh?” Marlene raised an eyebrow. “And why’s that? From what I understand, you did quite well at your internship with the Journal.”
“It’s a long story.” Sarita fiddled with her phone case until the glitter started to rub off. “Jane, Lupe and I have this online newspaper. It was just a class project at first, but we kept it going. I was supposed to interview Carloalberto for a big feature. But now it’s too late—I’ve let the girls down.”
Marlene held back laughter at her paranoid suspicions about what the three of them had been up to. “You can still do your feature, mijita. Instead of an interview, just write about what happened. ‘Aspiring actor’s mysterious death on cruise,’ or something like that. What’s the saying? If it bleeds, it leads, right?”
As Sarita considered the idea, her eyes brightened.
“Okay,” she said. “But instead of ‘aspiring,’ I’ll say ‘famous.’ Or just ‘actor.’ In this business, you have to be careful with adjectives.”
“Hola, chicas!” said a voice behind them. “I’ve been looking for you all over the place.”
There was Benito, carrying a round cardboard box. He tipped an imaginary hat to Sarita and handed the box to Marlene.
“From one baker to another,” he told her. “A culinary souvenir.”
Marlene blushed. Sarita grinned and muttered something about eggs needing salt.
“Thank you,” Marlene said. “What is it?”
“A fresh bonbon cake.”
The box was wrapped with a red ribbon, tied into a lush bow on top.
“This is so sweet of you, Benito.”
She gave him her business card from La Bakería Cubana. Benito looked at it and put it in his pocket. “I’ll be visiting very soon.”
“And I’ll present you with my very own version of this cake.”
Disembarkation was underway. Five thousand travelers left their staterooms, their pools, their casinos, their open bars. While awaiting her turn, Marlene saw Helen approach the walkway with a genuine smile on her face and a lightness in her step and wondered how many other illegal acts had gone unremarked during that short cruise. After all, what could be expected from such a crowd in close quarters but shenanigans?
Death of a Telenovela Star (A Novella) Page 7