by R. G. Belsky
She shook her head no. “If I told you everything I know right now, you’d think I was paranoid and/or crazy.”
“Abbie, I don’t think you’re paranoid or crazy.”
“Well, I guess it’s sort of like the old joke about the guy who says: ‘Okay, I may be paranoid, but that doesn’t mean people aren’t following me.’ That’s kind of the way I feel about my life right now.”
“Does this have anything to do with Tommy Rizzo?” I asked.
“Tommy? No, Tommy’s the least of my worries. You’re wrong about him—he’s really a nice guy. Besides, I think he’s finally given up on me. We had a long talk. I haven’t heard from him since.”
“Whatever story you’re working on sounds like it could be dangerous,” I said. “Maybe you should just walk away from it.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why?”
“Have you ever walked away from a big story?”
“No.”
“My point exactly,” she smiled.
It was one of those special New York City moments that don’t happen to me too much anymore. The rain falling gently on the streets of the Village. The parade of people—an entire gamut of New York nightlife ranging from funky-looking neighborhood folks to wide-eyed tourists to street hustlers—passing by outside the window.
We talked about some of my notoriety—the good as well as the not-so-good moments I’d had in the public spotlight. Eventually, of course, the conversation got around to the Houston story. The low point of my career. The story that nearly got me fired from the Daily News and would remain as an albatross to my career for as long as I was in the newspaper business.
“I’ve replayed it all over in my mind so many times over the years,” I said. “How I ever made the decision to put the imaginary quotes in the story and make it sound like they were really coming from this legendary New York City streetwalker called Houston. I dream about being able to go back in time to undo everything I did wrong on that story. And about how different my life would have been if I hadn’t put those fictional words in her mouth. But I did. I’m still not sure why. The only thing I do know for sure is that I will never do anything like that again.”
She brought up some of the big stories I’d done at the Daily News. The high points. There were plenty of those too. Many of my biggest crime exclusives had involved serial killer cases. Which is probably why Abbie had asked me all those questions that first day on the serial killer angle.
“So how come you’re still a newspaper reporter?” she asked me at one point. “You’re a talented guy. Don’t you want to do something better than that?”
“Some of us think of it as a noble calling.”
“Newspapers are dying.”
“So I hear.”
“TV, the web, social media—that’s how people are getting their news these days.”
“Gee, you sound like my city editor.”
“Have you ever thought about going into television?”
“I don’t think it would be a good idea.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve got a big mouth and I annoy people.”
“Sounds like you’d be perfect for TV,” she laughed.
I wasn’t sure if I would ever see her again. I mean I didn’t know if this was supposed to be a date or a business meeting or what. But, before we left, she said to me, “We should do this again, Gil.”
“Definitely,” I said.
“Dinner soon?”
“Sure.”
“It’s a date then,” she said.
On my way home, I couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened that evening.
I mean I’d just had dinner with TV celebrity Abbie Kincaid.
And she wanted to see me again.
Me and Abbie Kincaid.
Zowie!
Chapter 10
I SAW Abbie a few more times after that.
Once, she simply called me up unexpectedly and asked me if I’d like to hang out with her again. I asked her where she wanted to go, and she said nowhere. Told me she just wanted to kick back and relax for a night without being out in public. She asked if she could come over to my place.
We ordered pizza and watched a Laura Marlowe movie on TV. The first one, Lucky Lady. I found it on Netflix and thought it might be fun to watch a few minutes of it with Abbie. We wound up watching the whole thing. Neither of us talked a lot during the movie, we just kept watching Laura Marlowe on the screen. She was simply mesmerizing. So young, so beautiful, so talented. She had the whole world, her entire future ahead of her then. Instead, it would end too soon in tragedy.
When the movie was over, Abbie made a call on her cell phone and a few minutes later Vincent showed up. She hugged me and gave me a kiss on the cheek before she left. Vincent stared at me the entire time. I gave him my best hard stare back. I don’t think he liked me any better than the first time we met. But that was okay. I was getting used to it.
The next time I saw Abbie was completely different. She took me to some fancy restaurant on the Upper East Side that always got written up in the gossip columns. There was a constant parade of fans and other celebrities coming to our table to greet her. She signed autographs, let people take pictures with her—she was playing the star again. Me, I just watched it all unfold and wondered how this could be the same Abbie Kincaid I’d eaten pizza with in my apartment a few nights earlier.
After the restaurant, we went to some private club where she was again given the star treatment. She exchanged meaningless chatter with all sorts of beautiful people, drank a lot, and even put on a show out on the dance floor. She pretty much ignored me the entire evening. I was just window dressing for her, not anyone important in her life that night. I understood. I guess. I mean I never knew why she wanted to spend time with me anyway. I figured she’d just gotten bored with me and this was the real Abbie Kincaid I was seeing.
At the end of the night, Vincent dropped me off first. He didn’t speak to me during the ride to my apartment. Neither did Abbie. She just looked out the windows of the limo at the lights of Manhattan buildings and passing cars as we made our way downtown to my place in Chelsea. When we got there, she gave me a peck on the cheek, Vincent opened the door of the limo, and I walked inside my building without looking back, confused and—truth be told—a little pissed at the way the evening had turned out. I was pretty sure I’d never see either of them again.
It was a few hours later, and I was asleep, when I woke up to the buzzing of my intercom. I looked at the clock. Two a.m. The buzzing continued. Over and over and over again. At first, I wondered if maybe the building was on fire or something. But when I pushed the intercom button to talk to the doorman, he said there was someone there who needed to see me. Abbie Kincaid.
I opened the door a few minutes later and saw Abbie standing there. She looked disoriented, disheveled, and desperate—nothing like the big arrogant star she’d been when I’d seen her just a few hours ago.
She was crying too.
And—most important of all—she was carrying a gun.
* * *
I let her into the apartment. She was really sobbing now. I gently took the gun from her hand and laid it on a table. She didn’t resist. I wasn’t sure she even knew she was holding it. She buried her face in my chest, crying.
“What’s going on, Abbie?” I said.
She just kept sobbing uncontrollably.
“Where’s your security guard?”
“I sent him home. Then I came here on my own.”
“But why . . . ?”
“I just . . . I just want to feel safe with someone.”
She held on to me tightly. She had clearly drank a lot more after she left me. I walked her into the bedroom and laid her down on the bed. She kept muttering a lot of stuff, but most of it just sounded like gibberish to me.
“Sign of the Z, sign of the Z, please stay away from me,” she said at one point. I asked her what she meant, but she just shook her head and wouldn’t say any more. I remembered one of the threatening letters sent to her had used the phrase “Beware the Z” and figured it must be about that. But I had no idea what any of it meant.
I walked back out to the kitchen, made some black coffee, and took it to her. She drank some of it and, after a while, began to pull herself together a bit.
I sat on the bed next to her.
She didn’t want to talk anymore about what she was afraid of, and I didn’t want to push it given her condition. So I just kept talking to her about a lot of other stuff until she sobered up. The show. Her career. To try to make her feel better, I pointed out how amazing her meteoric rise to stardom had been. How that big break of winning the contest back in Wisconsin had turned her life around. How she’d gone from being an unhappy housewife to an actress and then a big TV star virtually overnight.
“Television is really simple,” Abbie said after she’d pulled herself together a bit. “All you have to do is stand out in some way, break away from the pack, do blockbuster things that make people notice you. You can’t worry about the consequences. You’ve got to make news. That’s what I do.”
“You mean like revealing that your husband abused you in front of the entire nation?” I asked.
“As a matter of fact, yes.”
“I’m just curious. What happened to him afterward?”
“He lost his job. His new wife divorced him. I heard he was talking about trying to move away and start a new life where people didn’t know him. Not much chance of that. I ran his picture for weeks on my daytime show. He can run, but he can’t hide.”
“Did you ever have any regrets about doing that?”
“I did a good thing,” she said.
“Okay.”
“Do you know that after we did that show, calls to battered women hotlines went up three hundred percent?”
“That’s great.”
“Wives told me they came forward to talk about their husbands just because of what I did.”
“Good.”
“A lot of lives were turned around by that show.”
I wasn’t sure if she was talking to me anymore, or simply trying to convince herself.
“I did a good thing,” she repeated.
Finally, she fell asleep. I put a blanket over her and turned out the light. Then I went into the living room, lay down on the couch, and tried to figure out what was going on here. Sure, she was beautiful and sexy and exciting. And I sure as hell would love to have some kind of ongoing relationship with her, whatever that turned out to be. But she was clearly a troubled woman. And the last thing I needed in my life right now was someone with that kind of trouble. I knew plenty of troubled people already. Hell, if I wanted to meet a troubled person, all I had to do was look in the mirror.
When I woke up in the morning, she was gone.
So was the gun.
There was a note on the table for me that said:
Thank you so much, Gil. You’re a sweetheart.
When I’m ready to tell someone my story, you’ll be the first.
I promise to tell you all about . . . I owe you that.
xxxx
Abbie
Except she never did tell me, of course.
That night was the last time I ever saw Abbie Kincaid alive.
Chapter 11
THE police said it happened this way: Abbie Kincaid was found shot to death in a room on the ninth floor of the New York Regent Hotel. That was the same hotel where Laura Marlowe had died some thirty years earlier. Abbie had checked into the hotel at about 7:15 p.m. on the night before her body was found. She appeared to have gone directly there after leaving the TV studio, since people there said they’d seen her until a little after 6:30 p.m. They said she told them she was going to do more research for the story. They assumed she’d gone to the Regent—the place where the actress had been murdered—to get the feel of the story.
She had made a series of phone calls from the hotel room. Most of them were to producers and other people at her show, talking about things she wanted to do the next day. One was to room service for a Caesar salad and a plate of fruit that was made at 8:46. That was the last time anyone heard from her.
Abbie’s body was discovered the next morning when the maid let herself in to clean the room. The maid, who spoke very little English, had knocked on the door several times earlier, but had been reluctant to go in because she knew there was a celebrity staying there. When she finally did use her pass key to unlock the door, she discovered Abbie lying on the floor next to the bed in what the papers the next day described as “a pool of blood.”
The police said she had been shot three times, twice in the chest and once in the head, in what appeared to be a coup de grace to make sure she was dead. Nothing had been taken from the room, so police quickly ruled out robbery as a motive. They also said there was no evidence of any kind of forced entry. Abbie seemed to have let her killer into the room. The person was either was someone she knew or at least someone she felt wasn’t dangerous.
The ballistics report on the gun said it was a .45. It appeared from the trajectory and other evidence in the room that the shooter had been standing only a few feet from her when the gun was fired, another indication that Abbie was probably unaware she was in any danger until it was too late. There were at least a dozen sets of fingerprints in the room, but they proved to be of no help. The ones that had been tracked so far belonged to hotel staff and the others were probably from previous guests. A preliminary medical examiner’s report indicated that Abbie had died sometime between 10 p.m. and midnight. But no one heard any shots and no one saw anyone going into or leaving her room.
It turned into a media circus, of course. There were Page One headlines about Abbie’s murder. Speculation about a connection to the story she’d just done about Laura Marlowe’s death thirty years earlier. Biographies of her life and career. TV reenactments of her death, or at least the likeliest theories on how it happened. And lots of discussion about the price of fame for someone like Abbie Kincaid or Laura Marlowe in our society.
I was part of all this, of course. I did the first news story on the discovery of the body, covered all the press conferences on the status of the investigation, and attended the star-studded funeral they held for Abbie. I also wrote a bylined first-person piece about the time I had spent with her. Everyone told me it was one of the best things I’ve ever done. But I was doing it all on autopilot. The days were all a blur to me as I tried to deal with Abbie’s sudden death.
The most traumatic moment happened when Stacy came up with the idea of me doing a live webcast on the Daily News website about my personal relationship with Abbie in the days before her death.
The paper’s online audience would email or text or tweet me questions, I’d answer them onscreen for the website, and our internet traffic would soar, Stacy proclaimed proudly.
It didn’t seem like that good an idea to me, just crass and sensationalistic. I wanted to be a real journalist, not some gimmick to boost net traffic or newspaper sales by exploiting my relationship with Abbie. But Stacy was insistent. She might not know much about journalism—but she sure as hell knew how to draw a big audience. And I was her star attraction, whether I liked it or not.
The webcast lasted for thirty minutes. I held up pretty well through most of it. I answered questions about Abbie’s career, the murder investigation, and how I’d gotten to know her after the interview in her office—as well as a lot of other, straightforward material. But then, just before the end, someone asked me this question: “What will you remember most about Abbie Kincaid?” And all I could think of was that last night at my apartment when she’d come to me in tears, buried her head against my chest, and said, “I just want to feel saf
e with someone.” I teared up as I tried to give an answer; my voice broke with emotion, and I dabbed at my eyes on camera as I tried to regain my composure. Somehow I made it to the end of the webcast.
Afterward, Stacy was ecstatic.
“That was terrific, Gil. We set all kinds of new traffic records with it. Maybe we should do another webcast with you tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Hell, we can keep doing them all week if there’s that much interest out there in the Abbie Kincaid murder.”
“I’m sorry about that bit at the end,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“Stacy, I almost cried on camera.”
“That was the best part.”
“I thought you’d be upset.”
“Upset? That video with you wiping tears out of your eyes is already going viral on social media. It was incredibly compelling. You showed real emotion to them. You opened up your heart, you opened up your feelings, and they loved it all.”
“Uh, well, I’m glad I was able to put on a good show.”
“I just have one request if we do another webcast tomorrow.”
“What’s that, Stacy?”
“Do you think you can cry on camera like that again?”
* * *
One night, not long after Abbie was killed, I went back to the coffee shop in Greenwich Village where we’d eaten dinner together that first night. I sat there for a long time, looking at the waitresses and wondering if any of them would ever wind up like Abbie. I tried to imagine Abbie waiting on tables and dreaming of becoming a big star someday. I wondered what would have happened if she hadn’t made it big. What if she’d just kept working as a waitress? What if she’d gone back to Wisconsin? What if she’d stayed married to her husband back there? She probably wouldn’t be too happy, but she might still be alive.
At some point, I came up with a wild theory that maybe Abbie wasn’t really dead. That it could all be a publicity stunt. I mean I thought about what a great ratings bonanza it would be if she had faked her own death. Then Abbie would show up a week or a month later—and say it was all a case of mistaken identity. Claim she had amnesia or was working undercover on a big story or was out of the country—and the girl in the hotel room was really somebody that just looked like her. I actually convinced myself it might be true for a few minutes.