by R. G. Belsky
Rizzo knew that. And so, like a modern-day Tale of Two Cities story, the mob boss did a far, far better thing than he had ever done before. He walked away from the woman he loved. He made the ultimate sacrifice to make sure no one ever learned that Laura Marlowe, America’s sweetheart, was pregnant with his baby.
That’s how he related it to me as he lay there in his hospital bed with the life seeping away from him.
Laura was supposed to get an abortion; that was her mother’s plan. But then Laura decided she couldn’t go through with the abortion. She said she could never kill their baby, Rizzo told me. It was the only thing she had left of their love, of their relationship. Later, he found out she’d had the baby—and given it up for adoption. That happened right before she died, he said.
Sitting there next to this dying old man, I put the rest of the pieces of the puzzle together. Laura had disappeared several times from the set of Once Upon a Time Forever, her last film. The longest period was for a few months at the beginning of 1985. Everyone thought it was drugs she’d been getting treated for. Or booze. Or a mental breakdown. Maybe she was. But there was something else too. She had disappeared from the public eye to have a baby. Rizzo’s baby.
I talked to Rizzo for maybe an hour. Rizzo finally fell asleep, looking exhausted and spent from the emotional ordeal of reliving it all one more time for me. I sat there for a while longer, watching him breathe heavily and wondering what he might be dreaming about at that moment. Then I got up, walked to the door, and told Marlboro Man I was ready to leave. If there were any more secrets Rizzo was going to reveal, they would have to wait for another time. And I didn’t think he had too much time left.
* * *
So what happened to the baby?
Rizzo never told me that, but I was pretty sure he knew the answer to that question. A man like Rizzo would have made it his business to find out.
I had a crazy hunch about it too.
Or maybe it wasn’t so crazy.
There was something I picked up on when Rizzo talked about Abbie Kincaid coming to see him for an interview too before she died. He didn’t talk about her as if she was just another reporter. His voice had a sadness to it that fell right in line with my theory about what happened to Laura Marlowe’s secret baby.
Bill Remesch had said to me during his jailhouse interview that Abbie’s mother was a very plain-looking person, nothing like Abbie’s natural beauty. He said he used to kid her that the stork had made a mistake and dropped her off at the wrong house.
Of course, there was another possible explanation for why Abbie didn’t look at all like her mother or father.
I went through the phone listings for the name Kincaid in the Wisconsin town where she grew up and tracked down Abbie’s mother. She confirmed to me that my speculation was dead on target. Abbie had been adopted. Mrs. Kincaid said she had been unable to have children and she and her husband had tried for a long time to adopt a baby until they found Abbie.
“Did Abbie know she was adopted?” I asked.
“Yes, we told her when she was very young.”
“Did you tell her who her birth mother was?”
“We couldn’t—we never knew.”
“How did you get Abbie?”
“We adopted her through an agency here in Wisconsin.”
“So the mother was from that area?”
“No, she was from California.”
“California,” I repeated.
“Yes, that’s where the adoption actually took place.”
“Where in California?”
“From a hospital in Santa Barbara,” she said.
She gave me the name of the hospital.
It turned out to be the same place where Laura had been a patient in those months at the beginning of 1985 when she left the set of Once Upon a Time Forever.
I’ve got a big story I’m going to break, Abbie told me. I thought she was talking about the serial killer angle. No, this is even bigger, she said. I didn’t understand what she was talking about then. But now I did. I knew the big exclusive she was going to break on her next show if she hadn’t died.
Abbie was the illegitimate daughter of Laura Marlowe and Thomas Rizzo.
And now she was dead.
I’d gone looking for Laura Marlowe’s killer, not sure exactly what I would find—but my instincts kept telling me to find out whatever really happened to her.
Now it had brought me back to where I knew it would all along.
I was looking for Abbie Kincaid’s killer too.
* * *
I went back to the Daily News, sat down at my desk, turned on the computer, and typed in everything I’d found out. I needed to do this while it was still fresh in my mind. I hadn’t wanted to take notes while I was talking to Rizzo, because I was afraid it might freak him out. So I memorized the things he said, then jotted it all down in my notebook as soon as I got outside the hospital. I had a lot of stuff. It took me a while to decipher my hastily scrawled notes and put them into the computer.
It was late by the time I finished, and all the top editors were long gone from the office. I had a big story here. Mob boss had secret love child with murdered movie star. And that love child turned out to be murdered TV star Abbie Kincaid—who was investigating her mother’s long-ago murder.
I could have called Stacy at home and told her all about it to get a story up on the website as quickly as possible. But I didn’t.
For one thing, there was no real urgency with this story. It was completely exclusive, so no one was going to beat me on it. The story could easily wait until tomorrow when Stacy and the other editors were here to figure out the best way to break it.
But there was something else too. Sure, it was a good story. A great story. But it wasn’t the whole story. I still didn’t know who murdered Laura Marlowe. Or Abbie Kincaid. Or the answers to a lot of other questions. I wanted to know it all. And I wasn’t going to let go of this story, no matter what Stacy or anyone else at the paper decided. I was going to tell Stacy that in the morning. Yep, tomorrow should be a really interesting day, I thought to myself as I shut off the computer and left the office.
On the way out of the Daily News building, I was so excited about all of it that I didn’t even notice the brown sedan outside this time.
Not until I was walking across the street, heard the roar of an engine, and saw the car barreling toward me.
I leaped out of the way and landed on the curb.
I was shaken up but not hurt.
The car raced away without stopping.
“If we wanted to mess with you, Malloy—believe me, you’d know it was us doing the messing,” Marlboro Man had said to me.
No, it wasn’t Rizzo’s people I had to worry about.
I didn’t think they were the bad guys anymore.
This time I’d seen who was driving the brown sedan.
Chapter 46
I THINK I know who killed Laura,” I told Edward Holloway.
“Who?”
“You.”
Holloway looked stunned.
“Why would I do that?” he asked.
“For the money.”
“I loved Laura.”
“You loved the money even more. I figure Laura—or more probably her mother, Beverly—made sure you signed a pretty strict pre-nuptial agreement before the marriage. I think Laura was getting ready to dump you. So you’d have been left with nothing. Unless she died, of course. If she died, you got the money. Even more important, you got the Laura legend. You became one of the caretakers of the Laura Marlowe legend. You made a career out of being the grieving husband. And you earned a fortune from it. That’s why you killed your wife thirty years ago and that’s why you killed Abbie when she got too close to figuring out the truth.”
We were sitting at the same table at Sardi’s, wher
e I’d met him before. Holloway had come a long way since Laura Marlowe’s murder. He’d gotten his fifteen minutes of fame, and he’d parlayed it into a lifetime of big money and quasi-celebrity status. And now I was about to take it all away from him.
“I know it was you who tried to run me down on the street,” I said. “I checked and found out you drive a brown Lincoln sedan. And I caught a glimpse of you behind the wheel. Which means you were the one who was following me the other day. And the one who trashed my apartment and spray painted the letter Z on the wall. Why did you do that, Eddie?”
“I wasn’t going to hurt you,” Holloway said meekly. “I just wanted to scare you.”
“I also know that you were a member of the Sign of the Z. That’s where you met Laura, long before that supposed ‘traffic accident’ on Rodeo Drive. Both of you had been in that crazy cult together. A cult whose leader wanted to emulate Charles Manson with his own bloody murders of famous people.”
I took out a sheet of paper with the four dead celebrity names on it—Deborah Ditmar, Susan Fairmont, Stephanie Lee, and Cheryl Carson—then slid it across the table to Holloway.
“I think all four of these people were killed by someone in the Sign of the Z cult, and you knew that,” I said. “You gave these names to Abbie, didn’t you? Sent them to her in an anonymous letter after she came to you with questions about Laura’s death. Along with a lot of other threatening notes and emails. That’s why she was so scared and had all that security. You wanted to make her suspect that the Sign of the Z cult had been behind Laura’s murder too. That way this crazy cult—with most of its members dead—could be blamed for all of the deaths, including Laura, and no one would ever look at you as a suspect. You made Abbie terrified that the Sign of the Z was out to get her. That’s why she was in such a frazzled emotional state until right before she died.
“Then, when I started asking the same questions about Laura, you did it again with me. Painted that big Z on the wall of my apartment. Followed me down the street. Pretended to try and run me over. All so that I would believe that the Sign of the Z was after me too. So I would go off in the wrong direction, just like you sent Abbie, rather than finding Laura’s real killer. Blame it all on the big bad Sign of the Z. Except there is no Sign of the Z anymore, Eddie. Just you.
“I think Abbie figured that out at some point, just like I eventually did. She realized just before she died that she wasn’t really in danger from any crazy Sign of the Z cult. And that they weren’t the ones who killed Laura Marlowe either. It was all a misdirection orchestrated by you. You were the one who killed Laura thirty years ago, and now you were trying to cover that up. She was going to reveal that—along with a lot of other secrets—on her TV show. That’s why you had to kill Abbie. Once I tell the cops about this, they’ll put it together pretty quickly. There are all sorts of new crime detection and DNA techniques they didn’t have back then. Even after all this time, maybe they’ll find something to directly link you to Laura’s murder. And Abbie, well that should be easier. As soon as they zero in on you as the main suspect, they’ll track down someone who saw you at the Regent that night. The night you killed her because she knew what you did to Laura.”
Holloway sat there with a deer-in-the-headlights look of fear on his face. He’d built his whole life on a lie, and now it was finally over.
“That’s not the way it happened,” he said softly.
“Sure it is.”
“I didn’t kill Abbie Kincaid and I didn’t kill Laura.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“No, no, you have to believe me . . .”
“I know about the baby, Eddie. Thomas Rizzo’s baby.”
Holloway nodded.
“Beverly told Laura she had to get an abortion,” he said.
“But she never had the abortion, did she?”
“No, it was the only time Laura ever stood up to her mother. They finally worked out a deal. Laura would have the baby, but then give it up for adoption afterward. In the meantime, they’d come up with some sort of cover story about her being in the hospital for another reason to explain why she was missing time on the set. Fortunately, Laura never really began to show she was pregnant until the last few months. There were a few gossip items about her putting on a little weight, but no one ever figured out the real reason. By the time she came back to finish the movie she looked normal again. And the baby was gone. Beverly thought they’d weathered the crisis, but she was wrong. It wasn’t over.”
“Why not?”
“Laura never got over giving up the baby. While she was pregnant, she seemed okay with the idea. But after the baby was born—well, everything really fell apart for her. They let her hold her daughter in her arms for a just few minutes after the birth before they took her away. She never saw the baby again. That really upset Laura. She believed she was supposed to be the mother of that baby. That giving birth to that human life was the only worthwhile thing she’d ever done. She was never the same after that. And then she died.”
“Which brings us back to you,” I said. “She had a baby with another man, Thomas Rizzo. She wanted to run off with him. You were jealous, you were angry, you were convinced she was going to leave you with nothing. That’s when you got the idea, isn’t it? If she was dead, all your problems would be over. You’d be Mr. Laura Marlowe for the rest of your life.”
“I didn’t kill Laura.”
“Why not? You had the motive. And the opportunity too. You left the party and went back to the hotel that night where she was shot. You’re the one who claims to have seen the killer running out of that alley. You’re the only witness who saw him standing over her with the gun. I think that’s because you were the only one there. There was no other gunman. You were the one who shot her.”
“I didn’t kill anyone,” he said. “I couldn’t kill anyone.”
“Okay,” I sighed, “if you didn’t murder your wife, who did?”
“Nobody killed her,” Holloway said.
“Are you going to try to tell me she’s still alive?”
“No, Laura died,” he said sadly. “She died on July 17, 1985, just like everyone thinks.”
“So who killed her? If it wasn’t you, someone else had to do it. Do you know who shot her?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“Laura Marlowe.”
That’s when I realized I was still missing something. I thought I was so smart, I thought I’d figured it all out. But there was something else going on back there that night thirty years ago when Laura Marlowe died. Something I didn’t count on.
“Laura killed herself,” Holloway said.
Chapter 47
HE told me the whole story then.
“That night, Laura didn’t want to go to the party,” he said. “She was in pretty bad shape. She hadn’t been sleeping, she was tired, she was depressed. I tried to talk to her. But nothing really helped. She’d been going downhill for a long time, and now she’d hit rock bottom.
“The only time she ever really seemed happy was back when I first met her at Zorn’s ranch in the desert. It was as if she’d gotten this giant load off her by breaking from her mother and running away to California. She was free for the first time in her life, she said. I guess we were both pretty confused back then, looking for something that Zorn provided—at least for a little while. But eventually the two of us realized we didn’t belong there. You have to understand something: Laura and I, we were never really lovers—not in the traditional sense. But we connected on some sort of spiritual level. So we ran off together.
“Laura never could get completely free of her mother’s influence though. Beverly had told her all her life she was destined to become a movie star, and so she wound up in Hollywood. She started out making those porn movies, then got into the legitimate kind. That’s when Beverly took control of her career again.
“But Laura was such a troubled person. She kept talking about killing herself. One night she took too many sleeping pills and had to have her stomach pumped. Another time she made a halfhearted attempt to cut her wrists, but didn’t do any real damage. I was never sure if these suicide attempts were for real or just dramatic calls for help. Then, she was hospitalized for wounds to her face. We said it was from a car crash, but the truth is the wounds were self-inflicted. Laura had cut her own face. She told me afterward that maybe if she wasn’t so beautiful, then everybody would just leave her alone.
“Beverly was terrified the truth would come out, but the secret held. Everyone bought the cover story about an accident. Eventually Laura’s scars healed, and she went back to work. But Laura was an emotional wreck. Then Rizzo saw her again, and we found out she was pregnant with his baby. No matter how hard Beverly tried, she couldn’t convince Laura to have an abortion. So Beverly decided I would marry Laura in a big Hollywood ceremony. That way, if anyone did find out about the baby, they could say it was mine. Laura had the baby in early March of 1985, we turned it over for adoption right away, and then we even dragged Laura to the Oscars a few weeks later so that no one would suspect anything was wrong. But it was the beginning of the end. She never got over giving up that baby.
“That last day in New York, she started drinking and doing God knows what else very early. By the time she got to the party, she was pretty wiped. But she always put on a good show. She was an actress. And she played her part to the hilt that night. Greeting people, acting charming—being the Laura Marlowe all her fans expected. It must have been very difficult for her. But she pulled it off.