Shooting for the Stars
Page 29
I didn’t say anything. I just wanted her to keep talking. I knew she’d held this in for a long time.
“After Laura shot herself,” Sherry told me, “Rizzo offered to invest in my business. I wasn’t sure if he did this out of gratitude for what I’d done for Laura or to buy my silence about all the secrets I knew about the suicide and the rest of it. But I took his money. I even worked with him for a while when he operated as a silent partner in my agency. He was never around or anything though. It was just another investment to him.
“He gave money to Davy too. The two of us wound up getting married after all this happened. I guess the whole Laura business brought us together so closely that it seemed like a good idea at the time. Well, it wasn’t. Davy’s a nice guy, but we really had nothing in common except for our love for Laura. The marriage only lasted a couple of years.
“I never heard much from Rizzo after a while. But I knew he was out there. And I made sure never to do anything that might make him feel threatened by me. That’s why whenever some law enforcement agency came around on a Rizzo investigation, I clammed up and said nothing. I wanted him to know that he could trust me to keep my mouth shut.
“As it turned out, he never bothered either me or Davy. Maybe because he knew we wanted to keep the truth about Laura a secret as much as he did. Me, I made peace with it all. As the years went by, I just tried to pretend that none of it had ever happened. I almost did that too. Until you showed up at my door.”
Another boat passed by on the horizon, its lights twinkling in the evening sky. I thought again about sailing away on a boat and starting over again with Sherry DeConde—just like Laura Marlowe and Thomas Rizzo had once dreamed of doing.
It was an impossible dream, of course.
Sherry and I weren’t going to live happily ever after. We were just two ships passing in the night. We both had too much emotional baggage and too many secrets and too many demons from our past to put this all behind us and start our lives all over again together. It was just a crazy dream. Sherry and I both knew that. Those kinds of dreams only happen in fairy tales.
But what if—no matter how crazy and impossible it seemed—Laura Marlowe really had made her own fairy tale come true thirty years ago.
Just disappeared out there somewhere.
To a new life.
And no one had ever found her.
I think I wanted to believe in that almost as much as Sherry did.
Sherry reached over and pulled me closer to her now. She kissed me again, and I kissed her back. No, this would not last forever, I knew that. Tomorrow or the next day or the day after that, Sherry DeConde would be gone. She was not the one for me. Any more than Susan had turned out to be. But Sherry was here with me now. And so I held on to her tightly for as long as I could, just like Laura Marlowe had done a long time ago.
Chapter 55
I STILL think about the Laura Marlowe story. A lot.
And wonder what really did happen on that long-ago night.
Like I said, there’s a part of me that wants to believe—just like Sherry DeConde—that Laura Marlowe really is still alive out there somewhere. That she didn’t die in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. That Thomas Rizzo somehow pulled off the impossible and came up with his own plan to make Laura disappear into a new and better life after the shooting.
What a story that would be, huh? I mean just imagine if I amazingly tracked down this legendary actress thirty years after she supposedly died, wrote about how she faked her death all this time, and told the world about her new life. That would be the exclusive of a lifetime. I’d be famous all over again.
But I know that will never happen.
Whatever secrets Thomas Rizzo still had about Laura . . . well, he took them to the grave with him.
In the end, it really didn’t matter though. Because even if I did discover that Laura had somehow lived that night, I don’t think I’d go looking for her. Not because I’d be afraid I might fail to find her. Because I’m afraid I might succeed.
I fear there is no happy ending to the Laura Marlowe story. Even if she had managed to run away to a new life, there was no reason to think she wouldn’t have made many of the same mistakes all over again that she made in those first twenty-two years of her life. Wherever she went, she probably would have wound up with someone just like her mother or Edward Holloway or Thomas Rizzo. No matter how far you run, you can’t run away from yourself. I knew this better than anyone. Eugene O’Neill said it best a long time ago: “There is no present or future. Only the past, happening over and over again.”
Laura Marlowe may have been America’s sweetheart, but she was inexorably doomed to a life of unhappiness.
Sometimes late at night, when I’m sitting alone in my apartment, I go on Netflix and watch Laura Marlowe’s final movie, Once Upon a Time Forever. The one about a beautiful princess who runs away from all her fame and power and riches—and lives happily ever after with the man she loves.
She looks so young on the screen.
So beautiful.
So full of hope.
This is the way I want to remember Laura Marlowe.
I still want to believe in the fairy tale.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’ve spent a lot of time as a celebrity journalist. I was news editor of Star magazine during the ’90s. Managing editor for features/entertainment at the New York Daily News in between news desk jobs there. City editor at the New York Post when we launched Page Six as a must-read gossip column. And I’ve covered all the big celebrity news stories like O. J., John Lennon, and the death of Princess Diana.
So for a follow-up to The Kennedy Connection—which is about the most famous unsolved murder of all time—I decided to make Gil Malloy’s next front-page story about the death of a famous celebrity. Because so many people—and I’m one of them—care passionately about the lives and deaths of celebrities just like they do about the JFK assassination. Laura Marlowe is fiction. But I touch upon some true celebrity crime in the book—notably the murders of John Lennon and movie actress Sharon Tate. And I draw on my real-life journalistic experience to paint a picture of Laura Marlowe as a tragic celebrity who had it all for too short a time.
Most of this book was written at The Writers Room in New York City. This is a wonderful workplace located in the East Village—my new office, as I call it since I left daily journalism at NBC News—that is home to more than 200 writers of all types. Thanks to Donna Brodie and the staff there for providing such a creative environment that makes it almost impossible to find an excuse not to write.
I’d also like to express my gratitude to all the terrific booksellers at stores around the country I’ve met over the past year who prove that reading is still alive and well; fans of the first two Gil Malloy books—The Kennedy Connection and The Midnight Hour—that have given me so much encouragement; Todd Hunter at Atria Books, who made Gil Malloy come alive in the series; and Nalini Akolekar, my agent who has believed in Gil (and me) from the beginning.
Finally, they always say writers should write about what they know, and I couldn’t have written these books without the knowledge and inspiration I’ve gotten from working in newsrooms for so many years. The front pages, the circulation wars, and—most of all—the colorful characters. I love it—and I’ve tried to put that same passion for the news business in my Gil Malloy character. My favorite newspaper movie of all time is Deadline—U.S.A with Humphrey Bogart as a newspaper editor. At one point, he tells a kid looking for a job at the paper: “About this wanting to be a reporter, don’t ever change your mind. It may not be the oldest profession, but it’s the best.” Gil Malloy couldn’t have said it better.
Enjoy more Gil Malloy mysteries
Gil Malloy breaks the story of the link between seemingly unconnected murders where a Kennedy half dollar coin was found at each of the crime scenes.
Th
e Kennedy Connection
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Gil Malloy picks up a lead a fellow reporter kept secret which may have led to her murder.
The Midnight Hour
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photograph by John Makely
R. G. Belsky, a journalist and author based in New York City, is the former managing editor of news for NBCNews.com. Prior to joining NBC in 2008, he was the managing editor for the New York Daily News, the news editor for Star Magazine, and the metropolitan editor of the New York Post. He is the author of the Gil Malloy mystery series, which began with The Kennedy Connection.
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OTHER GIL MALLOY MYSTERIES
The Kennedy Connection: A Gil Malloy Novel
The Midnight Hour: A Gil Malloy Novella
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by R.G. Belsky
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Belsky, Richard.
Shooting for the stars : a Gil Malloy novel / R. G. Belsky.—First Atria paperback edition.
pages ; cm.— (The Gil Malloy series)
1. Reporters and reporting—Fiction. 2. Serial murder investigation—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3552.E53385S55 2015
813'.54—dc23
2014049242
ISBN 978-1-4767-6236-4
ISBN 978-1-4767-6237-1 (ebook)