by R. G. Belsky
“Any hunches?” I asked.
He thought about it for a second.
“If I had to bet, I’d put my money on the father.”
“Laura’s father?”
“Yes, Valentine. David Valentine. There was something strange about him.”
“They say he abused Laura when she was a little girl, abandoned the family when she was just four or five, and then showed up at the end to try to cash in on her fame and fortune. Maybe she turned him down.”
“I guess that could be a motive.”
“Why didn’t you like Valentine?”
“I thought he was lying to me.”
“About what?”
“I was never sure.”
“Any idea if he’s still alive?”
“Who knows? I haven’t thought about him in years.”
“Do you remember anything else about him?”
“He was in the Marines, I remember. He liked fishing too. I happened to remark that I’d been on a fishing trip, and he wanted to know all about it. He said he hoped to start a charter fishing business.”
Erlich looked over at me. “Are you going to try to find Valentine?”
“I think so.”
“If you do, give me a call.”
“Why?”
“Maybe I can help you nail the bastard.”
Chapter 20
DAVID Valentine, Laura’s father, was alive. I tracked him down to a trailer park in New Jersey.
It was on the Jersey Shore in the fishing town of Barnegat. There were lots of nice houses in the area, but Valentine’s place wasn’t one of them. The trailer park consisted of about twenty-five mobile homes clustered together in a wooded area about a mile from the beach. Valentine’s trailer wasn’t the worst looking of them, but it was pretty bad. There was a large dent on one side of it, a window was broken, and it badly needed a paint job.
I sat in my car at the entrance to the road leading into the trailer park and tried to figure out the best way to handle this.
It was possible that Valentine was the person who murdered Laura Marlowe thirty years ago and got away with it until now. He sure seemed like he could be a suspect, although I still couldn’t figure out how the Rizzo family fit into all of this.
At the very least, Valentine was a despicable human being who beat his daughter, sexually abused her, and then abandoned both his wife and child, coming back only when he thought he could get some money from them. No matter how you looked at it, this was not a very nice guy.
I decided I needed a plan. If I just barged in on Valentine now without any real plan of action, I might blow the whole thing. With a plan, I could milk this guy for information until I got what I wanted. With a plan, I could maybe gather enough evidence to point the finger of guilt at him. With the right plan, I could break this case wide open. I knew from experience that a good plan was often the difference between success and failure in situations like this. So I sat there in my car trying to come up with the best possible plan for approaching David Valentine. I weighed a number of options. At the end of all this, I was only sure of one thing. I had no plan.
I got out of the car, walked up to Valentine’s trailer, and knocked on the door. There was no answer. I knocked again.
After a few minutes, the door opened about an inch and a man peered out. I didn’t know exactly what Valentine looked like now, but he had to be nearly seventy years old. This guy seemed younger, although it was hard to tell while peering into the darkness of the trailer.
“What do you want?” the guy asked.
“I’m looking for David Valentine.”
“Why?”
“I want to talk to him.”
“About what?”
“Who are you?”
“Who are you?”
“I asked first.”
“Goodbye,” he said, and slammed the door in my face.
I stood there on the step of the trailer trying to figure out what to do next. It was the first really hot day of summer, and the sun hung large in the sky. I’d only been outside the air conditioning of the car for a few minutes, but there was already sweat trickling down my face and the back of my neck. I’d passed by a beachside bar a mile or so back on the road. I thought about how nice it would be to go back there, drink a cold beer on the beach, and forget all about David Valentine.
I knocked on the door again. The same guy opened it.
“How about we go back to square one and start over again?” I asked.
He eyed me warily. “Okay,” he said.
“My name is Gil Malloy. I work for the New York Daily News. I’m a newspaper reporter.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I want to talk to David Valentine. The father of Laura Marlowe, the old movie actress. I’m doing a story about her life and death. I thought Mr. Valentine might be able to provide me with some valuable insight and information on the subject.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Are you David Valentine?” I asked.
“Yes, I am.”
“Mr. Valentine, I’d be extremely grateful if you’d let me step inside.”
He thought about it for a second, then opened up the door wide enough to let me in.
“Why didn’t you just say that in the first place?” he said.
“I came without any plan,” I admitted.
* * *
The inside of the trailer was a surprise. It was clean and neat and very tastefully furnished. There was a large comfortable couch, an easy chair, and a big-screen TV tuned to a sports channel. There were bookshelves along every wall and several large paintings. One of them was Laura Marlowe. She was standing by the sea, looking out in the distance as if she was searching for something.
“I found that picture at a place on Hollywood Boulevard,” Valentine said to me. “I thought it captured the essence of her better than anything else I’d ever seen. That’s why I keep it there.”
I looked at some of the books on the shelves. There was stuff on philosophy, history, the arts.
“Do you read these?” I asked.
I knew it came out badly as soon as I said it.
“Yeah, but I move my lips while I’m doing it.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Sure you did, but that’s okay.”
Valentine was not what I expected at all. Inside the trailer, I could see him better. He looked like he was still in his fifties, even though I knew he had to be at least twenty years older. He had short, cropped, gray hair. He seemed trim and in good shape, and you could still see some of the good looks Laura had inherited from him. He gestured for me to sit down. I plopped onto the couch. He sat in the easy chair across from me.
“Why a mobile home?” I asked.
“Because I like to move around.”
“So you just hook the thing up to a car and go wherever you want?”
“Something like that.”
“What do you do for a living?”
“Fishing mostly. I’ve got a boat. I do charter fishing trips and catch some fish on my own too, to sell at the markets. I’ve also got another job on the boardwalk over in Seaside Heights. I run the tilt-a-whirl a couple of days a week, sometimes help out at the concession stands. I was in the Marines for a long time and got a pension out of that. I don’t need a lot of money. I just like to keep busy.” He smiled. “Of course, you didn’t come here to talk about me, did you? All you care about is Laura.”
“Like I said, I’m working on a story about her.”
I went through some of it. Especially my conversations with Beverly Richmond and Edward Holloway.
“What did you think of Beverly?” he asked.
“She’s a real grande dame of New York society now,” I said.
“She was a grand
e dame even before she was a grande dame, if you know what I mean. What about Eddie?”
“He seems to be enjoying his life too.”
“They don’t like me very much, do they?”
“No, they don’t, Mr. Valentine. Actually everyone I met had only bad things to say about you. They all seemed to hate you for some reason.”
“I don’t hate them. I don’t hate anyone anymore . . .”
There was a problem here. I had expected to meet a monster in David Valentine, maybe even a killer. But he didn’t seem like that. He seemed like a nice, easy-going, interesting guy. I didn’t want to like him, but I did. Frankly, I liked him a lot better than anyone else I’d met in Laura’s family.
Valentine looked down at his watch. It was a little after twelve.
“Have you had lunch yet?”
“No, I’m starving.”
“Let’s get something to eat. Do you like seafood?”
“Love it.”
“So let’s go catch some.”
* * *
We took Valentine’s fishing boat out about a mile from the marina.
“Do you know how to fish?” he asked.
“Not one of my skills,” I told him.
He brought out two fishing poles and showed me the basics. How to bait the line. How to put it in the water. What to do if I got a bite. I’m going to be perfectly honest here, I had no desire to actually catch anything. I didn’t know what happened after you caught a fish, but it conjured up images of cutting that sucker open and doing other unpleasant things. My feeling was that God made restaurants to do that, and then serve tartar sauce on the side.
I didn’t have to ask him too many questions about Laura. He seemed to want to talk about her.
“Beverly and I got married when we were still in high school,” Valentine said. “I was only seventeen, and she’d just turned eighteen. The pregnancy was an accident. We didn’t know much about protection or birth control. We were both stunned when we found out she was pregnant. Abortions weren’t such an easy option back then. So she had the baby, and I did the honorable thing and married her.
“My God, that was a recipe for disaster right there. Two teenagers who barely knew each other, rushing into marriage with a baby and no money; there was no way it was ever going to work. Beverly was miserable right from the very start. She had dreamed of being an actress herself, and now she was stuck with a baby and a husband instead of a career in show business. I guess that’s why she pushed Laura so hard to be a star. She wanted to make Laura achieve everything she’d missed out on herself. Laura was her only way out.
“We got this little place in New Jersey where we could live cheaply. I was working at a factory there. The pay wasn’t terrible, but it was never enough for Beverly. She was always talking about making it big and wondering why I didn’t care about being more successful. She’d go into the city all the time, looking for work as a production assistant or a gofer or whatever she could find in hopes of breaking into show business. But that wasn’t enough for her. I guess that’s when she first got the idea of using Laura to make all her own dreams come true. I wanted a wife. I wanted a daughter. I wanted to come home to them at night and be a real family. But Beverly . . . well, she never was interested in that. She wanted to be somebody.”
I took a deep breath before asking the question I had to ask.
“She says you did things to your daughter,” I said. “She says you beat Laura. She says you sexually abused her. She says that when she made you stop, you abandoned them and never cared about Laura again. Other people say that you only came back into Laura’s life at the end, after she hit it big. That you were looking to cash in on her fame and fortune. That’s what they say anyway.”
“All lies.”
“What’s the truth then?”
Valentine looked out at the water.
“First off,” he said, “I didn’t leave Beverly. She left me. I came home from work one day and she was gone. She took Laura, all her stuff, and whatever money we had. There was nothing. I finally tracked her down to a place in Manhattan. She’d started seeing some movie director, and she and Laura moved in with him. She hired a lawyer to go to court and get a restraining order that prevented me from going anywhere near Laura. That’s when all the lies about me started. She needed a reason for the court order, so she just made stuff up. Then she kept telling the story over and over again, until it just got a life of its own. By the time we got to divorce court, the judge refused to allow me any custody rights involving Laura. I tried to defend myself, but no one believed me. Besides, I didn’t want to put Laura through the trauma of a long custody battle. So I just gave up. I walked away from it all and I never looked back.”
“What did you do then?”
“I joined the Marines. I spent time as a paratrooper. And when I left, I got a pension that allowed me to start this fishing business. I don’t have to answer to anybody now. I like that.”
It was a nice story, but there was something wrong.
“Did you ever miss your daughter and wonder how she was growing up?” I asked.
“Sure I did. But there was nothing I could do.”
“Except you did go back and see her just before she died. Why?”
“She needed me.”
“How did you know that?”
“She told me so.”
I stared at him. “Laura herself asked you to come back?”
He nodded. “She called me up one day out of the blue. A few months before she died. I knew she was a big movie star now, so I was shocked to hear from her. She said she’d heard all the stories about the terrible things I’d done, and she wanted to know if they were true. I said they weren’t. She believed me. She said she had memories of me still from the time she was a little girl, and they were happy memories. They were the same kind of memories I had. Beverly had done everything to turn her against me, but she couldn’t erase those memories of a father’s love.
“After a while, Laura told me how unhappy she was. She said everybody wanted something from her, but nobody cared what she wanted. She said she was tired and worn out and scared about the future. She said she needed somebody she could trust. I told her I’d always be there for her, and I tried to do just that. I began spending time with her again in those last few months of her life. I’ll always be grateful that I at least had that time with my daughter.
“Of course, it wasn’t easy. Beverly was furious that I was there, but she couldn’t do anything about it because Laura wanted me. The husband, Edward Holloway, he always sided with Beverly. They were both using Laura to get what they wanted, as far as I was concerned. I told them that too. I said I was the only one that cared about her.
“That last night, Laura and I were supposed to meet after the party at her hotel. I was going to try to convince her she needed a long rest. She was only twenty-two years old, but it was as if she’d already lived a lifetime. I don’t know if she would have listened to me, but I like to think she might have. Of course, we’ll never know now, will we?
“I got to the Regent just a few minutes after the shooting. I ran to her side as she lay there on the ground. I prayed for a miracle just like everyone else. I was holding her hand when they put her into the ambulance. I’d promised I’d always be there for her until the very end, and I was.”
We’d been out on the ocean for more than an hour now and still hadn’t caught anything. I was hungry. I told this to Valentine. He said you never could predict when the fish would be biting, so you always came prepared. He went down below again and came up in a little while with a platter of sandwiches. Ham, turkey, tuna fish. I took a tuna fish sandwich and devoured it ravenously. It had lots of mayonnaise in it, bits of onion and celery, and a fresh tomato on top. It was very good. I decided this fishing business was okay as long as you ate them out of the can, not directly from the ocean.
> “Have you ever told this story to anyone else?” I asked.
“You mean to another reporter?”
“Yes.”
“No, you’re the first.”
“How come?”
“No other reporter ever asked me about it.”
* * *
The article appeared on Page One of the Sunday Daily News. The headline said:
THE BAFFLING CASE OF LAURA MARLOWE
New details emerge
In actress’s murder
After thirty years
BY GIL MALLOY
We all know the legend. Laura Marlowe, a beautiful, gifted young actress who had become America’s sweetheart, was taken from us in a tragic few seconds by a crazed fan who gunned her down outside the Regent Hotel on July 17, 1985.
There’s only one problem with the legend.
It’s not true.
A wide-ranging Daily News investigation—in the wake of the clearing of the long-dead man thought to have killed Laura Marlowe—has revealed a series of disturbing questions about what happened to her that night and in the final weeks of her life.
There are also indications that her murder could be linked to the killing of television personality Abbie Kincaid, who was shot to death recently after revealing secrets about the Marlowe case—and promising more revelations in the future.
* * *
The article started on Page One and jumped to an entire page in the back. I detailed all the differences between the widely accepted version of how Laura Marlowe died and the real account from the police files. I talked about my interviews with her mother, father, husband, and ex-agent, Sherry DeConde. And I raised the specter of Thomas Rizzo’s apparent involvement in her life during that period leading up to her death.
There were pictures of Laura at the height of her career, as a little girl, of her mother and husband, and of the vigil outside the hospital where she died thirty years ago.