by Alan Russell
“You wheel, I’ll lead the way.”
The doctor had to be pushing seventy, but there was plenty of spring in his step. As the two men ran along, Dr. Burke continued to ask questions of Lanie’s condition. Graham got a feel for how paramedics were pumped for information as they delivered their charges to the ER.
The office was unlocked, and they lifted her atop an examining bed. Everything had been set up in readiness to receive Lanie. There were monitors, and the counter was laid out with tubes, syringes, and oxygen.
“Alcohol in combination with the pills she took causes respiratory depression,” Dr. Burke said. “She’s essentially switched off her respiratory muscles. I am going to have to switch them back on.” He lifted up a syringe. “A shot of Romazicon is usually efficacious.”
“Good luck,” Graham said.
“Wait in the next room,” Dr. Burke said. “Stay handy in case I need you.”
As Graham walked out the door, the doctor added, “Don’t think about leaving.”
The doctor was apparently a mind reader.
Graham paced in the waiting room. Despite what he had been told, he thought about taking off anyway, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to leave. It was possible the doctor might really have some need of him.
The minutes dragged. At one point he heard some kind of alarm sounding in the next room. He wondered if Lanie’s heart had shut down. It was easy to imagine the worst, especially since he was involved. The alarm eventually stopped. Graham held his breath and waited for the emergence of Dr. Burke, and the telling sad shake of his head. When the doctor didn’t appear, Graham crept over to the room and looked in. Dr. Burke was still working on Lanie. There was a tube in her mouth, and IV drips going into her arms. She was still alive, but she looked like hell.
Graham framed the picture in his mind. The tabloids would have loved that photo for a cover shot—assuming Lanie lived. How the mighty had fallen was one of their favorite photographic themes. Weight gain photos were always well received, as were any pictures that intimated death, disaster, or duress.
He backed away from the door. Part of him was glad he didn’t have a camera. It saved him from the inner debate of whether he should snap pictures or not. But the absence of a camera made him feel naked. He never went anywhere without his cameras. Since leaving them behind, he had felt unbalanced. The only thing he had from the night’s shoot was the memory card in his pocket—something that could ultimately be worth a fortune, or could land him in jail.
Graham finally took a seat. He needed to make some calls, but decided to wait until the verdict came in on Lanie. There was still a story that needed to accompany the photos.
It wasn’t every day that stars tried to kill themselves. Most of them worked too hard to get to the top and invested too much of their egos to want to end their lives. Graham went through his mental checklist of actors who had committed suicide. The subject was personal to him, one he had morbidly researched even before becoming a paparazzo.
Marilyn Monroe headed the list, though some contended she just popped one pill too many. The same could be said for Judy Garland. Freddie Prinze killed himself, as did Gig Young. Graham could never watch The Wizard of Oz without thinking that Clara Bandick, who played Auntie Em, committed suicide, but then she had been eighty-one years old and suffering from a severe case of arthritis. Like Lanie, Clara had used sleeping pills and tied a plastic bag over her head. He also had trouble listening to the music of Nirvana because of Kurt Cobain’s suicide. And when Robin Williams killed himself, Graham had almost felt as if he’d lost a friend.
There were dozens of other entertainers who had chosen suicide. Naked, John Bowers went into the Malibu surf with the intention of drowning himself. He did.
Patricia “Patty” Porter died in a similar manner. Her body washed in along Santa Monica’s beach. But Patty Porter’s death never even got a mention in any of the Hollywood exposés. She was considered a bit actress at best. Her film résumé was scant: three credits, two of them as a stand-in. She was mostly an extra, a face in the crowd. For all her dreams, her one speaking role amounted to a dozen words in a very forgettable film called Lace Wings.
Patty Porter was her stage name. Her married name had been Mary Wells. She was Graham’s mother. He had been three days shy of his tenth birthday when she killed herself.
Ancient history, Graham told himself. Mom had been desperate like the others. None of the actors had gone out like centurions proclaiming, “It’s a good day to die.” The closest thing to that was George Sanders, whose suicide note said in part, “I am leaving because I am bored.” There had been reasons behind what they had done, just as something had driven Lanie to her act of desperation.
The plastic bag around her head showed how serious Lanie was. There had been no suicide note that Graham had seen, nothing to explain her act. She had chosen an efficient, if anonymous, manner to die. No grand exit à la actress Millicent Lilian “Peg” Entwistle, who committed suicide by jumping from the famous hollywood sign.
I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille, thought Graham.
It was a tough town. But most of the suicides were second-tier actors, not like Lanie Byrne. She breathed the rarified air of a genuine superstar. It didn’t make sense for Lanie to want to leave the stage at the top of her game.
Maybe Lanie was sick. She might have a terminal illness and not want to deal with the pain and suffering. That was something he would have to check.
Or it could be that her heart was sick. Stars weren’t immune to love affairs gone wrong, but usually they loved themselves more than anyone else. Still, it was possible Lanie had pursued a drastic cure for a broken heart.
Depression was something else he would have to look into. Some people found it impossible to crawl out of that black hole. It was hard to imagine why she would be depressed, though. In terms of her career, Lanie’s last two films had been both commercial and artistic hits. As for her most recent project, filming was wrapping up on The Blue Waltz and insiders were saying Lanie should be practicing her Oscar speech. Still, Graham knew that when it came to clinical depression, accomplishments didn’t matter. He wondered if Lanie had been put on antidepressants. Maybe Dr. Burke had prescribed Lanie Xanax because he misdiagnosed her condition, or maybe she had misrepresented it.
Graham needed to try and get the story behind that prescription. The doctor didn’t strike him as a pill-pusher. There were plenty of those around town, Dr. Feelgoods happy to practice their license to pill.
Approaching footsteps from the other room prompted Graham to stand up. Dr. Burke looked like he wasn’t too far from needing emergency care himself. His shirt was sweat-soaked, and his face pale.
“I wouldn’t have done this for anyone but Lanie,” he said.
“Is she okay?”
“She’s breathing by herself now, and resting as comfortably as could be expected.”
“Did you have any idea she was suicidal?”
“Lanie says it was an accidental overdose.”
“She chugalugged two glasses of cognac along with the bottle of pills. When I found her, she had a plastic bag over her head.”
“God. I never would have imagined she would do anything like that.”
“Why the Xanax prescription? Did something happen to her recently?”
Burke ignored Graham’s questions. “Excuse me. I have to see to Lanie.”
He was probably going to make sure there were no sharp objects or pills in Lanie’s reach. Graham wished he had gotten an answer or two out of the doctor. Soon enough, the only people who would be available to answer his questions would be spin doctors.
The doctor’s pager went off before he could exit the room. Annoyed, he looked at the number on the readout and grunted.
“It’s my service,” he said. “You’ll need to sit with Lanie while I call in.”
Her eyes were shut as Graham tiptoed inside the room. Lanie’s face had regained some color and she looked a little more like the Lanie Byrne you saw on posters and marquees. A thin medical blanket partially covered her. Lanie had fared better than her ensemble. Her makeup was smeared, her pants were dirtied, her sweater had been cut off, and the top three buttons of her blouse were either missing or opened. Graham rearranged the blanket to better cover her up.
She opened her eyes, and the faintest smile came to her face. The reassurance, Graham felt, was just for him. Still, he sensed that a second chance at life hadn’t brought her any joy. He stood frozen, expecting her eyes to close, but she didn’t release him from her sight.
“My guardian angel,” she rasped.
Her whisper made him wince. He could feel the rawness of her throat, but she ignored it, as if it was an insignificant part of her pain.
“I get in trouble when people think I’m something that I am not,” he said.
Her inquiring eyes made him continue. “A few years ago a woman thought I was a pilgrim. I should have disabused her of that notion right away. I won’t make that mistake with you. I’m no guardian angel.”
Lanie motioned for him to sit. He found a chair and pulled it up near her. “You talk,” she whispered. “Tell me your pilgrim story.”
It occurred to Graham that he had never told anyone about his walk on the Camino. He knew where not to start his story, but not where to begin.
“I was in this little town in Spain. I sort of stumbled upon it, and didn’t know for the last thousand years or so it was the traditional starting place for pilgrimages across the north of Spain.”
At first the words didn’t come easily. There were too many blanks in the story, too many gaps that he couldn’t explain, or didn’t want to, but his listener didn’t interrupt, and gradually Graham found his rhythm. He described the history of the Camino, and where it started and ended, and remembered some of his tales from the road.
“What I liked most was that no two days were alike. The scenery kept changing, and so did the accommodations. Pilgrims get to stay in the refugios—refuges for those walking the Camino—that are spaced about a day’s walk from one another.”
Graham noticed Dr. Burke enter the room, but he didn’t stop talking. Lanie seemed to be enjoying what he had to say. “The Camino is a mix of every type of road. One day you trek along a dirt path, and the next you’re walking along a highway. Mostly, it’s a rural route. You pass by farms and country roads. Some days I would have long stretches of solitude, and on others I would have the company of other travelers, or locals who would always begin the conversation by asking me if I was going to Santiago.”
Lanie’s breathing was more regular, and her eyes were beginning to close.
“Not a day went by where I didn’t wonder what I was doing on the Camino, but a part of me wanted the road to never stop. I had this purpose of walking toward a goal every day. But roads always end.”
For a moment, Graham tensed. He was getting too close to the other story, to his secret. But Lanie had fallen asleep and Dr. Burke didn’t seem to have noticed. The doctor motioned for Graham to quietly leave the room. Outside it, they spoke in whispers.
“I guess what Lanie needed as much as anything was a friend.”
To the doctor, Graham’s storytelling must have made him appear as if he was a good friend. Graham didn’t do anything to dispel that notion.
“It’s already started,” said Dr. Burke.
“What has?”
“That page. The caller misrepresented himself to my service by claiming he was a patient and saying it was an emergency. But it was only some reporter.”
“Reporter?”
A nod. “He kept asking, in a rude and offensive manner, ‘Is Lanie alive?’ ”
“How could he have known?”
“The vultures always hover over Lanie and never give her any peace. The only reason I agreed to treat her here, especially under these conditions, is because I know how much she values her privacy. If Lanie had gone to the hospital she would have been harassed beyond belief.”
“What did you tell that caller who paged you?”
“I hung up on him without saying anything.”
“It’s just the start.”
“I know. For Lanie’s sake, I intend to release a statement that she’s suffering from exhaustion and what appears to be the flu.”
The flu. That was the favorite excuse of publicists. It was good for everything from a hangover to a bad hair day. But this was the blue, blue flu.
Dr. Burke continued: “We need to get Lanie out of here before the paparazzi start camping on the doorstep. I’ve called for a medical van to pick her up and take her back to her house.”
“What’s going to stop her from trying to kill herself again?”
“I’ll be putting Lanie under the care of an exceptional psychiatrist I know, as well as assigning her round-the-clock staff. They’ll be under my instructions not to leave her alone for a moment.”
“Will they know it’s a suicide watch?”
“They’ll know to be vigilant.”
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
Graham wasn’t worried so much about other photographers arriving any minute as by the expected arrival of the police. If they showed up and started asking questions, Graham stood to be exposed, and the memory card he was holding could potentially be confiscated. Around town the police and county sheriffs had the reputation of acting like private security for the stars.
He considered hiding the card but wasn’t sure if he would be driving the Jaguar back to the Grove. Besides, the police might extend their search there. Graham knew he was probably being paranoid, but he didn’t want to chance losing possession of the card. He knew of another paparazzo who had been forced to surrender his camera to the LA county sheriffs after a celebrity had falsely complained that the photographer had been stalking her. When he got his camera back, the memory card had been removed.
If possession wasn’t nine-tenths of the law, it was close enough. It was better to err on the side of caution.
Graham remembered seeing a bank of mailboxes in front of the medical building. After a short search, he found some FedEx mailers in the bottom drawer of the receptionist’s desk. Graham sealed the memory card inside an envelope and put it into the FedEx mailer. He scrawled out his address and billing information, checked the one-day priority option, then ran outside and tossed the mailer into the box. The first pickup would be at eight in the morning.
Depending on how the night turned out, Graham thought, it was possible the package might even beat him home.
As the evening wore on, Graham regretted his precautions. The police never showed up, and even more surprising, neither did the expected photographers and news crews. For once, news hadn’t traveled fast. Dr. Burke’s caller apparently hadn’t made like the town crier, and from what Graham could see, he inexplicably never showed up himself. For as many people as were gathering at the medical building, all part of Lanie’s support system, it was a miracle the jig wasn’t up.
It was almost midnight when the assembled help finally set out for the Grove. The return trip was much slower than his ride into town, and for that Graham was grateful. Estelle Steinberg, Lanie’s publicist, was waiting at the gates of the Grove. At Lanie’s request, Dr. Burke had called and asked her to be there. Estelle was a veteran at damage control and greeted the arriving caravan of doctors and nurses like a strict camp counselor taking in new charges. While everyone else was tending to Lanie, Graham parked the Jaguar and slipped out the front gate.
For the second time that night Graham made his way along the fence line of Lanie’s property. He wanted to grab his equipment and get out before security showed up, or someone thought to start asking him questions. The disabled lights made it easy for him to pick out his surveillance area
. As he approached the patch of darkness, he came to a sudden stop. His cameras should have been hanging from the fence, and the rest of his equipment lying nearby. Graham turned around in a circle, taking inventory of the area. He was in the right spot, but everything he had left behind was gone.
“Shit!”
The equipment he could replace, albeit for a few thousand dollars. But he’d taken some pictures with his other cameras. You never knew which ones would turn out. The thief could now be holding the only viable shot.
From what Graham knew, the Grove had remained deserted except for Estelle, and it was unlikely she would have scouted the grounds and found the cameras. Someone had, though. Maybe the same someone who had paged Dr. Burke and asked about Lanie’s condition. Graham might not have been the only one monitoring Lanie. That would have meant his actions were also being watched. Graham looked around. No one was in sight, but he knew only too well that meant nothing.
Graham didn’t linger. He couldn’t exactly go knocking at Lanie’s door and ask if anyone had seen his equipment. Without the weight of his bags encumbering him, Graham ran up the hill. Several times he glanced back to make sure he wasn’t being followed.
When he reached his van, Graham found that his luck was still running bad. Someone had broken into his vehicle. Whoever it was hadn’t needed to resort to a smashed window or jimmied lock. The neat break-in didn’t extend to the inside of the van. There, his visitor had left more signs of entry than Goldilocks. Bags and boxes had been opened, and everything examined. Tidiness hadn’t been a priority. All the papers in the glove compartment were scattered.
Not your usual smash and grab, thought Graham. His car had been methodically rifled.
It was a little after one when Graham pulled into his apartment’s parking garage. The traffic had been light on his drive home, giving him a chance to concentrate on the events of the evening. He suspected someone else had been watching Lanie while she downed her pills. If that was the case, her observer had done nothing to try and prevent her suicide. That might not be defined as murder, but it sure qualified as cold-blooded.