by R. G. Belsky
I clicked on the TV and began to scroll through the channels, looking for something mindless to watch so I could stop thinking about Sherry DeConde. I eventually settled on a rerun of Bewitched. One of the later ones with Dick Sargent playing Samantha’s husband, Darrin. Not Dick York, who was the husband in the first several seasons of Bewitched episodes, which inspired me to come up with another theory that might or might not be related to the “two Lois Lanes” theory.
There were two actors who played Darrin Stephens in Bewitched. They were both named Dick and—again—they both walked, talked, and looked amazingly alike. Even weirder was that they both died in real life only a few years apart from each other. Coincidence or conspiracy?
I pondered that for a while and drank some more beer.
While I was doing that, I also thought more about the Laura Marlowe story. Fragments of it kept running through my head, like they did with any big story when it was over. Only this time I played some of them back in my mind over and over again. I had a nagging feeling that I was still missing something. I went through the chronology again of everything I knew, and—more important—what I still wasn’t sure had happened.
Of course, some of these questions would never be completely resolved, but I thought I had come up with some pretty good answers for them. Such as:
Why did Abbie start investigating the Laura Marlowe case in the first place? Why was Tommy Rizzo going out with Abbie at pretty much the same time she started working on the story? Why didn’t Thomas Rizzo Sr. step in to end the relationship earlier when he realized his son was unwittingly dating his other child?
I was convinced that Thomas Rizzo had secretly kept tabs on Abbie over the years. I think the connection to his long lost daughter became even more important to him as he realized he was dying. And so he reached out to Abbie directly in some way and made a deathbed confession to her. That’s how she got onto the entire Laura Marlowe story.
Tommy had told me in the alley that he pursued Abbie because he wanted to impress his father. “He was always talking about this beautiful and talented woman on TV,” Tommy said. Rizzo Sr. was probably doing this even more after he met Abbie in his hospital room. Tommy just didn’t know why his father was so fascinated with her until it was too late. When he told his father he had gone out with Abbie and now didn’t understand why she’d suddenly broken it off, the result wasn’t what he expected. His father wasn’t impressed with him for dating Abbie, he ridiculed him. Then Thomas Rizzo told him the truth.
Abbie already knew because of Rizzo, which was why she broke off the relationship with Tommy. She just didn’t want to tell him the reason before the TV show. The journalist in her wanted to break it as an exclusive on the air. I could understand that. I was somehow happy that Abbie had found out the truth in time to avoid ever having sex with Tommy. That would have been kinda creepy.
Of course, it might not have all happened exactly that way. Some of the facts and the timing and the details could have been a bit different. But I was pretty sure the scenario must have played out something like that.
So then why wasn’t I satisfied with all the answers?
What else was I still missing?
Maybe it was the combination of drinking beer and watching mindless TV shows that did it. People say you can lose brain cells from that sort of thing, but I always thought it made me think clearer. Or maybe the doubts had always been there, percolating in my subconscious—and just waiting for the right moment to burst out into full-blown paranoia.
Whatever the reason, sitting there alone in my apartment, I finally admitted to myself that something had been bothering me ever since I wrote my story about how Laura Marlowe really died that night thirty years ago.
The details of the shooting. I went back and read through them all over again.
Laura Marlowe was shot at 10:15 on the night of July 17, 1985. The first ambulance arrived on the scene within minutes and took her to the hospital. They said her wounds were serious, but they thought they might save her. She arrived at Roosevelt Hospital an hour later at 11:15, where she was pronounced dead.
But why did she die? If the first medical personnel at the scene thought she might survive, then what went wrong? Of course, things like that do happen in ambulances and hospitals. Mistakes are made, misdiagnoses happen—and sometimes people just take a turn for the worse for no specific reason.
But what if something else happened in that ambulance? The ambulance didn’t arrive at the hospital until 11:15, a full hour after it left the Regent. Why? The hospital was a short distance away. And Erlich, the first detective on the scene, said the ambulance had already left by the time he got there. It should have been a much shorter ride to the hospital even in the worst of traffic—and it was late enough that the streets should have been fairly empty. So what happened during that unaccounted for time?
I’d discovered a lot of people who had possible motives for killing Laura thirty years ago while I was doing the story. I’d eliminated them all one by one—and then forgot about it after I found out she’d shot herself. But what if one of them wanted to make sure she was dead? What if they realized she might live through the suicide attempt, and made sure that didn’t happen? It was the perfect cover for a murder. She was already fighting for her life. All they had to do was help it along somewhere along the line.
But how? And who?
Not Holloway. He told me he was still back at the scene. He was too shaken up to go with Laura in the ambulance. He didn’t get to the hospital until after she was dead.
Not Laura’s mother either. She was on a cruise ship thousands of miles away and didn’t even know about Laura’s suicide try yet.
I went back and checked the notes I’d made from the original police report on the night of Laura Marlowe’s murder. Just to make sure. The facts were just the way I had remembered them.
There were two people who were there with Laura when she was put in the ambulance.
I knew both of them.
David Valentine, her father.
And Sherry DeConde.
Chapter 53
I FOUND her at the West Village townhouse. She didn’t seem surprised to see me. Maybe she was expecting me to come after her, sooner or later. We had unfinished business together, Sherry and me, and I think we both knew that.
I went over there with the intent of confronting her with all my questions about Laura Marlowe and Rizzo and Valentine and all the rest of the tangled web of lies and deceit that I’d uncovered about her.
But it didn’t work out that way.
Because the first thing she did was throw herself in my arms, press her head against my chest, and begin crying about how sorry she was.
Then she reached up and kissed me.
I kissed her back.
After that, I decided there would be plenty of time to talk to her later.
We started making out right there in the hallway, moved into the living room and then up the stairs—taking off each other’s clothing and dropping it piece by piece along the way—until we got to the bedroom. She pulled me down onto the bed next to her.
I was feeling so many things at that moment. I was mad at this woman, I cared about her, and—I suppose most of all—I was desperately happy and turned on to be with her like this again. All of this—the anger, the desperation, the sexual excitement—turned it into probably the most intense sexual experience I’d ever had. I think she felt the same way too. We went after each other like two animals, as if this kind of primal lust could somehow blot out everything else that had come between us. And, for a while anyway, that’s exactly what happened.
Later, as we lay in each other’s arms, I looked up and saw the picture of Laura Marlowe on the wall.
Like she was watching us.
Which I guess was kind of appropriate.
* * *
There was a balcony outsi
de the window of Sherry’s bedroom. When I thought she was asleep, I walked out onto it, sat down, and looked out over the Hudson River in the distance. It was dark and I could see the lights from boats out there. I thought again about Davy Valentine’s fishing boat. I wondered how far it could take Sherry and me. What if we just sailed off somewhere and lived happily ever after? Except I knew we could never do that. And I also knew that I was just killing time to avoid figuring out how to confront Sherry with the questions I needed to ask her.
I heard a noise and turned around. It was Sherry. She wasn’t sleeping any more than I was. She sat down beside me, put her arm around me, and pulled me close to her. She made me feel warm and comfortable and safe, just the way Laura Marlowe must have felt about her when she came looking for help at the end.
“I think there’s something you’re still not telling me,” I said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Laura. There’s a big chunk of unaccounted for time right after the shooting. Enough time for someone to make sure Laura Marlowe didn’t survive, if they really wanted her to die. You were there with her during that crucial time period. You and Valentine. What the hell were the two of you doing there anyway? Did you really leave when they put her in the ambulance or did you go with her? What happened on that ride to the hospital, Sherry?”
I felt her hand tighten on my shoulder.
“Are you asking if I killed Laura?” she asked.
“No,” I said, “I think maybe you tried to save her.”
Chapter 54
LAURA wanted to die,” Sherry said.
She talked about the emotional wreck Laura Marlowe had been when she showed up unexpectedly in Sherry’s office in the days leading up to the shooting. Laura was the big star that Sherry lost out on, the missed opportunity that had seemingly doomed her agency business. But she wasn’t acting like a big star that day, Sherry said. More like a scared little girl.
Laura told Sherry how sorry she was that her mother had cut Sherry out of her life. How Sherry had always been her friend, someone she could trust, someone who truly cared about her as a person—not just as a show business commodity. That’s why she was there now, she said. She had nowhere else to turn. She began to cry then and clung to Sherry, hugging her so hard and for so long that Sherry said it felt like a drowning person clinging to a life raft as the only thing keeping them afloat.
“She said she wanted to kill herself. She said she couldn’t live one more day with all the responsibilities, all the pressure of being Laura Marlowe. She said all of them—her studio, her fans, her mother, her husband—wanted her to be someone she wasn’t. All she ever wanted was to live her own life, she said. If she couldn’t have that, she didn’t want any life at all.”
When Laura finally left, Sherry called Davy Valentine. They decided they needed to do something to get her away from Beverly and Holloway and all the rest of the insanity in her life.
“Davy and I, we really just wanted to help her,” Sherry said. “But we didn’t know how. And so we reached out to Rizzo.”
Thomas Rizzo. Of course. He’d been at the center of the Laura Marlowe mystery all along. He was the one who discovered her. He made her a star. He was the father of her baby. And at the end, he was still there.
“Rizzo said we needed to come up with a plan,” Sherry said. “A way to make Laura Marlowe disappear forever and allow her to live her life on her own terms. Rizzo said he and Laura had even talked about doing this together in the past. Running off with each other and starting all over again. But in order to do that, they had to leave the past behind. Laura had to run away from her stardom, Rizzo from his past in the mob.
“They’d already devised this elaborate plan to fake one another’s deaths at one point. But Rizzo decided he couldn’t do it. He felt an obligation to his wife and young son. He had this weird set of values. It was alright to kill people, but he drew a moral line at abandoning his family. He still loved Laura though. He wanted to give her a chance, even if he couldn’t be with her.
“And so the three of us talked about all sorts of possible ways to fake Laura’s death. A drowning at sea. A fire where her supposed body was burned beyond recognition. It had to be something like that where there was no recognizable body, we decided. I mean how do you fake the death of someone as famous as Laura Marlowe if there’s a body? There’d have to be an autopsy—which would reveal the real identity. In the end, it seemed like a fake drowning was the best way to go. At least, that’s what the three of us were thinking at the time.”
They’d made a deal about what would happen after Laura “died” and disappeared, she said. Her. Valentine. And Rizzo. None of them would ever see Laura or contact her again. The only way Laura could live a new life safely was to put every piece of the old one behind her. It would be like disappearing into the witness protection program, Rizzo had told them. There could be no trace of Laura Marlowe and no links to the people she left behind. She would just disappear forever. He would make sure she was well taken care of. Before she changed identities, she’d get a big sum of money from Rizzo. Enough to live on for the rest of her life, if she needed to. Enough that she’d never have to come back looking for more.
Maybe it would have happened that way if Laura hadn’t killed herself.
Maybe Rizzo would have let her go on to live a new life on her own without looking over her shoulder.
“The idea was that Laura Marlowe had to die before Laura Makofsky could live,” Sherry said to me now. “The world—especially Beverly and Holloway and the people in Hollywood—would never leave her alone otherwise. It was a crazy idea, I know, but Rizzo really thought we could pull it off.”
“Then the shooting happened,” I said. “And it was too late for you and Rizzo and Valentine to put your plan into action. Did you know it was a suicide? That Laura shot herself that night?”
She nodded.
“Davy and I had showed up at the hotel to try to talk to her. The ambulance had just arrived there. We even got into the ambulance while the medical people were trying to save Laura’s life. I held her hand. She was weak but she could still talk. She said she’d tried to commit suicide, but Holloway showed up unexpectedly and she hadn’t counted on that. She was crying. She squeezed my hand and I held on to it as tightly as I could to somehow try to will her to stay alive. But then the medical people made Davy and me get out of the ambulance so they could work on her.”
“What happened on that ambulance ride?” I asked. “Why did it take so long to get Laura to the hospital?”
“I have no idea. Like I said, they wouldn’t let us stay with her. Maybe there was just a lot of traffic that night.”
“Did you ever talk to Thomas Rizzo after the shooting about the details of Laura’s death?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s Thomas Rizzo. You don’t talk to Rizzo. He talks to you.”
Then I asked her the real question that had been on my mind ever since I came over to see her.
“Do you think Laura Marlowe is still alive?”
Sherry stared at me.
“I’m serious,” I told her. “Is there any way at all that Rizzo might have put the plan to make Laura disappear forever in action on his own that night? Without telling you. Did that thought ever cross your mind?”
“C’mon, Gil,” she said finally, “it would be nearly impossible to fake the death of someone that famous when there’s a body. That’s why we had talked about the other scenarios with Rizzo like a fake drowning. But once Laura shot herself, it was too late. I mean with a body—especially a celebrity body—there’s going to be too many questions. She had to be identified before the body was cremated. There had to be some sort of medical investigation or autopsy to confirm the cause of death.”
* * *
I nodded. It all made sense except for one thing. Sherry sti
ll hadn’t really answered my question about whether she thought Laura Marlowe might still be alive. Was there any possibility at all Rizzo could have put his plan in action to fake her death that night without telling them? I asked her the question again.
“Let’s be real here,” she said, “there’s no logical way that could have happened. The evidence is overwhelming that Laura Marlowe died that night during the ambulance ride to the hospital. To pull off a fake death like that, Rizzo would have had to bribe and pay off and threaten everybody—doctors, ambulance attendants, people in the coroner’s office, the funeral home, the cops too for God’s sake. I mean I know he’s a very powerful guy, but it’s hard to believe even Rizzo could do something like that.”
“Virtually impossible,” I said.
“No way at all it could ever happen,” she agreed.
Then she looked at me and smiled.
“Did you ever read about all the people who still think Elvis and Jim Morrison are alive?” she said. “I mean there’s simply no way that could be true either. Elvis died at Graceland and there’s even a picture of him laid out at the funeral home. Morrison may or may not have really died of a heart attack in his bathtub as the official version goes, but they identified his body and buried him in Paris in 1971. And yet there are still people who ignore all of these facts and insist that Elvis or Jim Morrison are really still alive somewhere. That they just decided they didn’t want to be stars anymore. So they faked their deaths and fooled the world.
“You want to know something? I sometimes still have those same crazy doubts that Laura is really dead. Why did that ambulance ride take so long? Why couldn’t those doctors save Laura? Did Davy really have her body cremated so quickly to avoid a public spectacle or did someone tell him to do that? And then I think about Rizzo. And I think about how if there was anyone who could ever pull off something like that—no matter how farfetched it seemed—Rizzo was the one person with the power, the money, and intimidation to be able to do it.”