Shooting for the Stars

by R. G. Belsky

  “Life’s a bitch, isn’t it?”

  He took another drag on the cigarette.

  “You’ve been asking around for Mr. Rizzo?” he said. “Why?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “He’s our employer.”

  “Thomas Sr. or Jr.?”

  The man with the cigarette looked at the guy in the front seat and laughed at that. The other guy laughed too. I wasn’t sure what the joke was, but I laughed along with them. I just wanted to be part of the group. “No, we don’t work for Tommy Jr.,” the one next to me smiled. “We work for Mr. Rizzo. Now why are you so interested in talking to him?”

  “I’m working on a story about Laura Marlowe’s murder thirty years ago.”

  “What does that have to do with him?”

  “Laura was having a love affair with Rizzo before she died,” I said as matter-of-factly as I could.

  Both men in the car looked at each other. The first guy wasn’t smiling anymore.

  “Who told you that?” he asked.

  “I can’t say.”

  “That’s not the answer we want to hear, Malloy.”

  “Look,” I said, “it’s not that I don’t want to tell you; I can’t. It came from what we newspaper types call a confidential source. I can’t disclose that kind of thing any more than you can talk about your secret Mafia handshake. I’m sure you understand.”

  The man with the cigarette looked over at the guy in the front seat and frowned. He frowned back. I was pretty sure they didn’t understand.

  “Well, it’s not really a rule,” I said quickly. “I mean it’s just sort of a journalistic guideline. I never even agreed with it, to tell you the truth. Besides, who’s ever going to know if I accidentally let slip to you who my source was just this one time, huh?”

  “Who told you, Malloy?” the guy with the cigarette asked.

  “I read it in the police report.”

  “The police report.”

  “Yes, there’s a secret classified section in there from the organized-­crime task force.”

  “And it talks about Mr. Rizzo having a relationship with Laura Marlowe?”

  “Page eighteen, Section C of the appendix,” I said, which I thought was a nice touch.

  I figured I was safe enough because there was no way they could check out my story.

  “So can I talk to Rizzo?” I asked.

  “He doesn’t talk to the press.”

  “Yeah, but now you can tell him what a nice guy I am.”

  “Sorry, but Mr. Rizzo is a very busy man.”

  He made a gesture to the driver to let me out.

  “Let me ask you one more question,” I said. “How does the kid Tommy fit into all this? I find it a heck of a coincidence that he was dating Abbie Kincaid, who was investigating the death of Laura Marlowe and then was murdered herself. What do you guys make of that?”

  The guy with the cigarette shrugged. “Do you have any children, Malloy?”

  “No.”

  “I have seven. I love them all dearly, but sometimes they’re a disappointment. Do you know one of my boys actually came home the other day wearing an earring? An earring!” He shook his head sadly. “They don’t always turn out the way you thought they would.”

  “Like Tommy?” I asked.

  “Tommy has caused his father some anguish. But Mr. Rizzo loves him very much. He would do anything for him. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  I nodded sympathetically.

  “Kids.” I smiled. “You can’t live with ’em, you can’t live without ’em.”

  They opened the door and let me out of the car. The one in the back seat with the cigarette smiled at me one more time through the open window.

  “Laura Marlowe died a long time ago,” he said. “Let her rest in peace.”

  Chapter 18

  I WAS on a journalistic high now. I felt the adrenaline rushing through me. The way it always did when I had a breakthrough on a big story. I’d pulled the thread on the Rizzo connection, and I’d gotten a nibble back. I knew now that Rizzo was somehow involved in all of this. I didn’t know how or why yet. But I was determined to find out, no matter what it took.

  Sitting at my desk in the newsroom that evening after my meeting with the Rizzo guys, I realized I was too excited to go home right away. I didn’t want to be in that lonely apartment right now. I wanted some kind of companionship. More specifically, I craved female companionship. For a long time, I’d held on to the hope that I could get back with Susan. But that clearly wasn’t going to happen. It was time for me to move on. Just like Susan had moved on.

  My brief time with Abbie—whatever that relationship had been—proved to me that I could be attracted to another woman besides Susan. All I had to do was find one. I thought about all the women I knew, all the women I’d met recently. I ranked them in the order of sexual attraction I felt toward them and wrote the names down on a sheet of paper. I stared for a long time at the top name on my list.

  Then I took out my cell phone, found a number, and dialed it.

  “Sherry DeConde Agency,” the voice at the other end said. “Sherry DeConde speaking.”

  “Hi, this is Gil Malloy. Remember me?”

  “Of course. Do you have more questions about Laura?”

  “Not really.”

  “What can I do for you then?”

  “Well, that depends. Would your answer be ‘yes’ to any of the following questions: A) Are you married? B) Are you in a serious relationship? C) Are you gay, asexual, or otherwise not interested in men?”

  “Uh, my answer to all those would be ‘no.’”

  “Then I have another question.”

  “Really?”

  “Bear with me.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you find me physically repugnant for any reason?”

  “I actually thought you were kind of cute.”

  She laughed. Still a nice laugh.

  “So would you like to have dinner with me tonight?” I asked.

  “C’mon, I’m old enough to be your mother.”

  “But you’re not my mother. That’s an important distinction.”

  “I’m still too old for you.”

  “Is that a yes or a no?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe yes?”

  She laughed again.

  “Where do you want to meet?” she asked.

  We met at a place in Little Italy. They knew her there, and she got us a nice booth where we could talk without being bothered too much. We talked a lot about a lot of things. Mostly about Laura Marlowe, of course.

  “Laura was such a troubled girl,” she said. “Booze, drugs, mental breakdowns—all in just twenty-two years. The mother pushed her to become a star all her life. I believe that was at the root of many of Laura’s problems. She had all this fame and stardom and money, but she didn’t care about any of it. It was what her mother wanted, not her. She was on a course for disaster long before someone shot her that night outside the Regent.

  “People didn’t write about stars’ personal lives so much back then. A lot of stuff was off-limits. Today the sad story of Laura Marlowe and her mother, and her struggles with stardom, would be big news. But thirty years ago, people just talked about it privately. To most people, she was America’s sweetheart. But there was a tremendous price she had to pay for that.

  “It was a lot like Marilyn Monroe. I heard that Marilyn never really believed she was pretty. She always thought of herself as plain, poor little Norma Jean Baker. She was convinced that everything she had would fall apart one day. In the end, I guess it did. That’s what happened to Laura Marlowe too. We idolize our stars, we put them on a pedestal and worship them. Maybe we should feel sorry for them.”

  I asked her about Thomas Rizzo. She sa
id she didn’t know anything about Rizzo or any connection with Laura.

  Then I told her about my meeting with Edward Holloway.

  “The luckiest guy in the world,” she said. “A real nobody who managed to marry the princess and get rich from her too.”

  “Do you believe that story about the way they met?” I asked.

  She chuckled. “The famous actress hits the ordinary Joe with her car. And right in the heart of Beverly Hills—on Rodeo Drive, no less. She looks down at him lying in the street, their eyes meet, they fall in love—and they wind up getting married. It’s a magical story, don’t you think? It’s got that whole Hollywood fairytale mystique to it. Dreams do come true in Tinseltown.”

  “I don’t think it’s true.”

  “No. But so what? Do you really think Lana Turner was discovered sitting at the counter of a drugstore? People make up stories like this all the time in Hollywood. They want to make the stars’ lives seem glamorous. What does it have to do with anything?”

  Eventually we got around to talking about my life. I told her everything. About my career ups and downs. About Susan. About my anxiety attacks. I know you’re not supposed to be that open and candid about yourself on a first date. But I wanted her to know the real me. I didn’t want to hold any secrets back from this woman. Somehow that seemed very important to me.

  “What about you?” I asked at one point. “Marriages? Children?”

  She took her fork and played with the pasta on her plate. I had a feeling she was trying to decide how candid to be with me.

  “I’ve been married,” she said finally. “A few times. None of them lasted. No children. I never made a conscious decision not to have children. It just didn’t seem that compelling to me while I was concentrating on my career. You don’t think about stuff like that when you’re young. Maybe some people do, but I didn’t. And then one day you wake up and you’re sixty years old, and you wonder how you got to where you were. No husband, no kids, no family. You’ve got your job and not much else. The only people you have any kind of relationships with are people you know professionally—and most of them are just trying to get something out of you.”

  “Like a newspaper reporter, huh?”

  “I didn’t mean that, Gil.”

  “Anyway, this isn’t a relationship.”

  “No, we’re just having dinner.”

  “So let’s enjoy it.”

  “I am enjoying it,” she said.

  Then she reached over and put her hand on top of mine.

  * * *

  We were headed in separate directions after we left, so we waited on the street for separate cabs.

  “What do you think would have happened if Laura Marlowe had lived?” she asked.

  “She would have had a great career,” I said automatically.

  “Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe not. I was thinking about Laura the other day when I saw an obit on a pop singer who died. She was sixty-one years old, and her last hit had been in 1975. Everyone thought she had a long career ahead of her too. She had it all back then, just like Laura did—beauty, a great voice, and she was a terrific performer. But there were some problems at her record company, she changed managers, and the public just forgot about her. She tried to make a comeback for years, but it never took. Eventually she went back to gospel singing in churches, which is where she started out. That’s what she was still doing when she died. She was sixty-one years old, and she was a long time away from being a star. She was a trivia item when she died. Who was the singer who was the one-hit wonder back in 1975?

  “You never know how it’s going to work out for any of them. It all seems so easy at the beginning when they’re young and new and the whole world seems to be there for the taking. But eventually the beauty fades, the talent gets corrupted, the public turns its attention to new stars—and one day they find no one is returning their phone calls anymore. It’s sad.

  “Laura Marlowe never had to go through any of that. She’s frozen in perpetual immortality. She’ll always be beautiful, she’ll always be a star, she’ll always be young in our memory.”

  “Just like Buddy Holly or Selena or James Dean,” I said.

  “Who knows what would have become of any of them? We’ll never know because they’re legends now.”

  I nodded. “Laura Marlowe achieved immortality by dying at the age of twenty-two. But she lost out on a life.”

  Her cab pulled up now. She turned to me before she got in and put her hand out. I didn’t shake it. I kissed her instead. She kissed me back. It was a nice kiss. A damn fine kiss. I decided I liked Sherry DeConde’s kisses even better than her laugh.

  Chapter 19

  OF the three main police investigators on the Laura Marlowe case, two of them were dead. McPhee collapsed of a heart attack in the squad room in 1988. Wiggins died in a car crash in 1996. The only one still around to talk to was Bill Erlich, the one I’d seen on TV. He was the junior investigator on the case, only thirty at the time of Laura’s murder. He retired from the force in 2005 and now was the head of security for an armored car service. I tracked him down at his office in Queens.

  “By the time McPhee, Wiggins, and I showed up, the place was a circus,” Erlich said. “Cops, press, weeping fans everywhere. The initial report over the police radio had just said there was a woman down with gunshot wounds at the Regent Hotel. The first uniformed cops who showed up in a black and white found out it was Laura Marlowe, and they put it out on the radio. That’s when all hell broke loose. One of the local radio stations picked it up, and everyone knew. The place was crawling with people within minutes. I’ve seen a lot of bad crime scenes since then, but that one was the worst. The integrity of the investigation was compromised right there from the very start, and we were never able to get it back. The ambulance was already gone by the time we got there. They’d taken her to the hospital.”

  “What did you do at the scene?”

  “I tried to find witnesses.”

  “Did you?”

  “Oh, I found lots of witnesses.”

  “What did they tell you?”

  “Anything you wanted to hear. Some of them claimed she signed an autograph for the guy before she was shot. Some claimed he kissed her as she lay there on the ground. One girl told me the killer left a dozen roses on the body. It was like everyone wanted to be a part of history, and they saw what they wanted to see or just made it up. We never found a witness who actually saw the shooting. Like I said on TV, there were people who saw this Janson guy hounding her—maybe even stalking her—but no one can definitely place him there at the time of the murder. We got people who heard the gunshot, we got people who saw someone running away, we got people who identified Janson at the hotel earlier on the day of the shooting. We just added it all up, and it seemed pretty obvious that Ray Janson did it. But now it looks like we were wrong.”

  I thought about what Susan had said. How the investigation somehow felt wrong, like the cops were racing to wrap it up in a hurry. I asked Erlich about it.

  “Yeah, we made a lot of mistakes,” he said.

  “It almost looks like you went out of your way to make sure Ray Janson got blamed for the murder. He made a good scapegoat. Especially if someone didn’t want the real killer caught.”

  Erlich snorted in disgust. “Oh, sure, the fix was in. Somebody paid off all of us—me, Wiggins, McPhee, our captain, the police commissioner, even the mayor—to cover up one of the biggest crimes of our careers. And if we got all this money, how come Wiggins and McPhee were still working as cops until the day they died. And I’m coming in here fifty hours a week so I can pay off the rest of my kid’s college tuition. Does that really make any sense to you?”

  “Actually it doesn’t,” I admitted.

  “Everyone’s always looking for a conspiracy when something like this happens because they don’t want to accept the simple tr
uth. The truth is we did rush to judgment a bit, but it wasn’t because we were corrupt. There was a lot of pressure to solve this case quickly. When Janson offed himself in the hotel room and everything pointed to him doing Laura Marlowe, we were relieved. No one wanted to keep looking for any other suspect. This was nice and neat. No trial, no lawyers, no appeals. Everyone was happy. So we closed the book on the case and went on to the next one. That’s what we do.”

  Erlich was right, of course. I’d covered the police for a number of years, and that was the procedure. If they had a suspect, they went out and gathered evidence that pointed to that guy so they could make their case. They didn’t go out and look for evidence that took them in different directions. If they did, they’d never solve any cases. Being a cop was like doing triage in an emergency room. You did what you had to do to get the job done.

  We talked for maybe an hour about the case. Then he told me about his career and some of the cases he’d worked on later. He said the security job was okay, but he missed the excitement of being a cop.

  “They tell me I can probably make a lot of money now off this Laura Marlowe stuff,” he said. “Somebody hooked me up with an agent who’s talking about a book deal and maybe even a made-for-TV movie. He says I’m a hot commodity. He’d probably be very unhappy if he knew I was talking to you here for nothing. But I don’t really care that much about the money. It was never about money for me, it was always about the job. I loved the job. I just wish I’d done this one right. We screwed it up—all of us did—and the real killer got away. That’s going to haunt me all the rest of my life.”

  I believed him. I didn’t think he was a bad cop or a dirty one or an inept one. He just got caught up in a strange set of circumstances that propelled everyone—the police, the press, and the public—into the wrong direction. Now I hoped it wasn’t too late to make it right.

  “Do you have any idea who might have really killed her?” I asked.

  “This all happened thirty years ago. Until now, everyone was sure Janson did it. I haven’t really given it a lot of thought over the years. God knows who might have killed Laura Marlowe. And even if you found out, how could you prove it after all this time? Damn, I’d sure like to try though. This one’s always going to bother me unless I find out some answers.”