Shooting for the Stars (23 page)

Chapter
43

F
LORENTINE'S
was more crowded this time. Most of the tables in the front room were filled. There were also people in the back room—the Thomas Rizzo enclave. I could hear them laughing and shouting to each other all over the restaurant.

I walked past the back room on my way to the bar and glanced in. The guy with the heavy cigarette habit who'd picked me up the other day was there. So was the young guy who drove the car. And the one who questioned me at the bar the last time I was here. There was no sign of Rizzo though. I kept going to the bar.

The same bartender was on duty.

“Oh, you again,” he said, as I sat down.

“Good to see you too.”

“What do you want?”

“A little civility would be nice.”

He was wearing a nametag on the front of his bartender vest. It said:
Sid
.

“How's it going, Sid,” I said. “My name is Gil Malloy. I'm with the
New York Daily News
.” I took out a business card and handed it to him. “I'm looking for Thomas Rizzo.”

The bartender glanced at the card, then put it on top of the cash register behind the bar.

“Who?” he asked.

“Didn't we go through this same charade last time? Thomas Rizzo. Gray hair. Dresses in fancy suits. Kind of a tough guy from what I hear. He kills people for a living. Those are some of his pals in the back room over there acting boisterous.”

“Okay, let's say I do know who Thomas Rizzo is. You're still not going to find him here tonight.”

“Maybe I'll just hang out here every night then until he comes in. Maybe I'll bring some of my friends along. You know, a lot of my friends are cops. That ought to be good for business. Police in and out of the place all night long. They'll make sure you don't have any undesirable elements finding their way in here.”

Sid disappeared from behind the bar. I watched him go into the back room. When he came back, he had some people with him. The guy with the cigarette—I decided to call him Marlboro Man—and the other two I'd met before. They came straight over to the bar.

“We seem to be having some communication problems,” Marlboro Man said.

He sat down next to me on an empty stool. The young one sat down on the other side. The third guy stood in front of me, blocking my path toward the door in case I decided to make a run for it. But I was right where I wanted to be.

“We talked about this the other day, Malloy. We explained to you that Mr. Rizzo was not a part of your story. But you don't seem to be getting the message, so I'll give it to you one more time. Leave Mr. Rizzo out of whatever you're doing.”

He took a big drag on his cigarette. A big cloud of smoke blew into my face. Maybe that was his plan to get rid of me. He wasn't going to shoot me. He was just going to kill me slowly with second-hand cigarette smoke.

“What happens if I don't stop trying to talk to Rizzo?”

He shook his head. “I like you, Malloy. I really do. And I know
exactly where you're coming from. You've got a job to do, and I respect that. But I've got a job to do too. I want you to respect that.”

“The Laura Marlowe story keeps leading me back to Thomas Rizzo,” I told him.

“Yes, Mr. Rizzo had a romance with her a long time ago. You've already written about that. But that's all there is. None of the rest of it has anything to do with Mr. Rizzo.”

“I think it does. I think there's more. I think Rizzo knows something about her murder.”

“He had nothing to do with that.”

“His name keeps popping up everywhere I look.”

“He didn't kill her, Malloy.”

“Why should I believe that?”

“Because he loved her.”

I stared at him.

“I was with him back then. I was just a young guy starting out. But I saw him with her. He loved her, believe me about that. Everybody always has somebody who's the true love of their life. Well, she was his. I know it didn't work out and he went back to his wife and they lived a happy life together. But I don't think he ever got over Laura. If her name ever came up or one of her movies was showing on television—well, he got this really sad look on his face. She was the one thing he wanted that he never could have. But he didn't kill her. You're wasting your time.”

“I'd still like to talk to him,” I said. “Tell him that.”

“It isn't going to do any good.”

“Tell him anyway.”

I took out some more of my business cards and passed them out to all three of them.

“I'm not going to stop working on this story,” I said.

“Yeah, I know,” Marlboro Man sighed.

“Like you said, it's my job.”

“I have my job too.”

“All I want to do is talk to him.”

I stood up from the bar stool and started for the door. But, before I got there, I turned around to say one more thing to Marlboro Man and his buddies.

“By the way, guys, if you want to mess with me in the future, try something else besides following me around in that damn brown car and sitting in front of my apartment house all night. It's really kind of annoying.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Marlboro Man said.

“I suppose you don't know anything about the break-in at my apartment or the graffiti on my wall either, huh?”

Marlboro Man shook his head.

“If we wanted to mess with you, Malloy, believe me—you'd know it was us doing the messing.”

Outside, I hailed a cab and paid the driver to wait with me there for a while. We parked on the street across from the restaurant so I could see who came in and out the front door. I'd made sure I got myself noticed by everyone in there. Now I just had to see what they were going to do about it.

About thirty minutes later, Marlboro Man came out of the restaurant, went into a parking garage, and came out driving a green Buick. I made a mental note that it wasn't a brown sedan. And he had seemed genuinely mystified when I asked him about following me or breaking into my apartment. Okay, so if it wasn't Rizzo's people, who in the hell was in the brown sedan?

I told the cab driver to follow the car. The driver gave me a quizzical look, but I promised him a big tip and he did it. Marlboro Man drove downtown, then made a left toward the Brooklyn Bridge. We kept a few car lengths behind him as he went across
the bridge, then headed south into Brooklyn. The cab driver asked me where we were headed. I said I wasn't sure. I was just going wherever Marlboro Man was going.

That turned out to be a small medical complex in Red Hook. He got out of his car and went inside. I paid off the taxi driver and followed him. The building was only a few stories tall, and it didn't look like it could admit a large number of patients. But there was a nurse at the reception desk inside the front door. I stood outside and watched as Marlboro Man got on the elevator. Then I went in, walked past the nurse station before she could stop me, and checked the floor. He'd gone to the fourth floor. By now the nurse was standing there next to me.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“Is this the veterans' hospital?”

“No, this is a private facility.”

“My father's in the cardiac care unit at the veterans' hospital. They just called me, but I was so upset I forgot the address. Do you know where it is?”

“There's a veterans' hospital about ten blocks from here. That might be the one you're looking for. Just make a left when you leave here. There's a sign at one of the traffic lights. You can't miss it.”

“Thanks a lot,” I said.

I went back outside, stood on a street corner, and waited. A little while later, he came back out and got in the green Buick. I waited until the nurse turned her back on the door to do some filing. Then I slipped past her onto the elevator and took it up to the fourth floor.

It was a hospital ward, alright, but most of the rooms seemed to be empty. Except one with a closed door. The number on it was 409. Like Sherlock Holmes, I quickly deduced that Room 409 was probably the one I was looking for. Then I smelled something. Cigarette smoke. I turned around, and there he was. Marlboro Man.

“You spotted me tailing you here from the restaurant, huh?” I said.

“Not on the way. I don't know how I missed that.”

“When you came out of the hospital?”

“Yeah, you were standing underneath a street light. I could make out enough to see it was you. So I waited to see what you were up to.”

“I'm impressed.”

He shrugged. “I've been doing this job for a long time.”

“So what happens now?”

“Now,” he said, “it looks like you're going to get a chance to meet Mr. Rizzo after all.”

Chapter
44

R
OOM
409 turned out to be a suite. In the first room, there were four men playing cards and watching TV. Some of them wore guns you could see, some didn't. But they were all armed, I knew that. They were Rizzo's soldiers. It was a good thing Marlboro Man had caught me. If I'd tried to crash in unannounced, I probably would have been dead by now.

Marlboro Man gestured to the four bodyguards that we were going through. He opened another door where there were two more guards. They had guns too, and seemed ready to use them when they saw me. But they relaxed as soon as they realized who I was with.

All this protection meant something pretty important—or more precisely, someone—must be here.

I didn't have much doubt who was that important.

He was lying in a bed in a corner of the spacious room.

Thomas Rizzo.

There were tubes hooked up to his arms and a heart monitoring device recorded his pulse and breathing. On the table next to him was a stack of pills. A large color TV was in front of him, showing a rerun of
Mannix
—the cop show from the '70s. Rizzo wasn't watching though. His eyes were closed, and he seemed to be sleeping peacefully.

“It's cancer,” Marlboro Man said to me. “Started in his lungs about a year and a half ago. They thought they caught it in time, but they were wrong. Now it's spread to his throat, his spine—all over his body. It's a helluva thing to see someone so strong wasting away like that.”

I looked down at Rizzo. He stirred gently in the bed now, as if he knew we were talking about him.

“We've tried to keep it quiet, mostly for practical business reasons. If a man like Thomas Rizzo appears weak, other people get ideas about trying to take advantage of the situation. Move in on his territory. You can't appear vulnerable in the line of work we're in. So we've never told anybody. He's stayed out of sight, and people think he's just reclusive. That's why I couldn't let you see him. But you showed up anyway. If you write a story about this, it will make life very difficult for us. So now that you know, it means we gotta”—he made a slitting gesture with his finger across his throat—“do something to keep you quiet.”

He was kidding, I think.

“The thing is I had to make a decision quickly when I realized you'd followed me here. Like I told you before, I understand you're just doing your job. I'm doing mine too. Part of that job is reading people's intentions. I'm pretty good at that. And you—well, you read to me like a guy with a terminal case of stubbornness. You're going to try to keep getting to Mr. Rizzo no matter how many times we try to make you stop. I realize this is very important to you. Believe it or not, it is to Mr. Rizzo too. He wanted to talk to you. It was the rest of us who told him it wasn't a good idea. But now here you are. So this is the deal: you don't write about Mr. Rizzo's condition, and I let you talk to him about the other thing. What do you say?”

I didn't really have much of a choice. Underworld boss dying of cancer was a good story, but it wasn't the one I was after. I'd never made a deal with the mob before, but there's a first time for every
thing. Besides, I knew there was no way I was voluntarily leaving the room at this point without getting some answers from the old man in the bed.

Rizzo opened his eyes as I moved toward him. Probably slept lightly like that all his life for self-protection. He had a lot of enemies. Old habits die hard, I guess.

“This is the reporter I told you about, Mr. Rizzo,” Marlboro Man said. “Gil Malloy.”

He looked up at me from the bed with surprisingly clear eyes. Whatever ravages the disease had done to his body, it didn't seem to have affected his mind. He still seemed to be a formidable presence, even lying in that bed hooked up to all the machines.

“How are you, Mr. Rizzo?”

“Oh, I've been better,” he smiled.

He reached out his hand to me. He was withered and frail, but his handshake was strong.

He gestured to Marlboro Man and the two bodyguards to leave the room. They didn't think that was such a good idea.

“We don't want to leave you alone, Mr. Rizzo,” one of them said.

“I'll be fine. The only person here is Mr. Malloy. He's not going to harm me. That's not why he's here.”

When they left and we were alone, Rizzo picked up the remote and turned off the sound of the TV.

“I watch a lot of these old shows now.” He smiled, gesturing toward the screen. “Never watched much TV before. I find I don't care for most of the new shows that are on today. But the old programs, they bring memories of a different time for me. A simpler time. A better time.” He shrugged. “Anyway, it helps pass the time for me.”

He gestured for me to pull up a chair next to his bed. I sat down.

“You were a friend of that TV reporter Abbie Kincaid, weren't you?” he asked.

“Yes, I was.”

“She came here to see me a while ago. Just like you. With a lot of questions.”

“She's dead now.”

“I know.”

“Did you kill her?”

I said it matter-of-factly, as if I were asking him what he'd had for breakfast.

“No,” he said softly, “I didn't kill her.”

“Do you know who did?”

“No, I'm sorry.”

“Why did Abbie come to see you?”

“For the same reason you're here.”

“Laura Marlowe.”

“Yes, everyone wants to talk about me and Laura.”

He told me the story then. An old man lying in a hospital bed talking about his romance with a glamorous movie star that had taken place more than three decades ago. At first, I thought it might be more lies. But he was beyond that now. He was telling the story for himself, more than for me.

“I met her at a party in Hollywood,” he said. “I was spending a lot of time out there then, getting very involved in the movie business. Part of the job of fitting in out there is being part of the social scene. So I was at this bash at a mansion in the Hollywood Hills, and someone introduced me to Laura.

“I'd already been married for a few years then. I had a wife and a young baby back in New York. I was always a faithful husband. Never a skirt chaser. I believe that adultery is a sin. That a man should not cheat on his wife. Like it says in the marriage vows, you're with this one woman until death do you part. That's how I
always felt anyway. Until I met Laura. There were never any women besides my wife before Laura, and never after her either. She was the only one.

“Laura was a working girl that night at the party. She was working for an X-rated film company that also provided some of the actresses as escorts for important people in Hollywood. I suppose that made it easier for me. It wasn't so much like just cheating on my wife, this was more like a business proposition. I began paying her to have sex with me.

“Of course, it quickly developed beyond that. I fell in love with her. I'd never felt like that about anybody before. Nothing else mattered to me—my business, my career, even my family. I just wanted to be with her. She loved me too. Or at least she saw something in me that she needed. She told me that she was happy for the first time in her life.

“Eventually, I helped her get her big break in Hollywood. I used all my influence out there—which was considerable then—to get her the role in
Lucky Lady
. Of course, no one knew how big
Lucky Lady
would turn out to be. It made her a star. And that, as it turned out, was the death knell for our relationship. Not because of her. Because of me. She was in the public eye now, and—sooner or later—the press would find out we were together. I had to protect her from that kind of scandal. So that's what I did.

“I sat her down one night and told her how much I loved her. I said I would always love her. I said I'd keep on doing everything I could to help her career. But I needed to go back to my wife. I'd taken holy vows to be with her as long as we lived. I had to honor those vows. ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery' is one of the Ten Commandments. I was violating that every second I spent with her. I couldn't keep living a lie like that for the rest of my life.

“I came back to New York and sold off most of my business interests in Hollywood. I didn't want to keep going back there and
be tempted. A little while later, I read that Laura had married that Edward Holloway fellow. I was happy for her. But I was sad too. Sad for both of us. After that, I just got on with my life. I thought she would too, but she didn't have much more life left. Such a tragedy.

“I hoped people would never have to know about any of this. My wife is dead now, and I wanted the secret to go to the grave with me. I didn't want to tarnish Laura's memory in any way. But you've already printed some of it. And I suspected you would keep on digging. In the end, I decided it was best for you to hear the truth.”

The story was really pretty ludicrous, if you thought about it. I mean here's Thomas Rizzo, a guy who's stomped all over the Ten Commandments for most of his life with a career of murder and robbery and God knows what else. But he's upset about cheating on his wife. That somehow violates his moral code.

On the other hand, it did make sense to me in a crazy way. We all have our own rules we live by. I did, and—it appeared—so did Thomas Rizzo. Now Rizzo was dying, and he was trying to make peace with God—and with himself—as best he could. He couldn't do anything about all those he'd killed and committed crimes against during his lifetime. But he wanted to set the record straight on Laura.

“That night you said goodbye to Laura,” I said, “was that the last time you ever saw her?”

“No.”

“What happened?”

“I couldn't forget about her. I tried, but she was always in my mind.”

“So you went back to her?”

“She came back to me.”

“After she was with Holloway?”

“Yes.”

He looked over at the television screen. The
Mannix
rerun was still on. There was a car chase with the good guys after the bad guys, or maybe it was the other way around. Rizzo watched the flickering images from the old show, but I imagined he was seeing something else. I think he was watching his own life flash before his eyes. Trying to make some sense of it in the little time he had left. Like everybody in this story, Rizzo hadn't turned out to be what I expected. I thought I'd hate him, but I didn't. He'd told me a lot of things about Laura. But no matter how much I found out about her, none of it was helping me find out the answer to who killed her.

“I slipped away for a weekend with Laura,” Rizzo said. “This was in the early summer of 1984, and she was really famous now. But she wasn't happy. She told me that. She said she wanted me to hold her and make her feel better and tell her how much I still loved her. The two of us checked into this out-of-the-way hotel, and we never left it the entire weekend. We talked. We ordered room service. And, most of all, we made love. I knew then that I'd made a terrible mistake. So did she. We belonged together. So we came up with this big plan. We were going to run off together. She was going to break her contract with the studio, and walk away from this next picture. I was going to try and become a legitimate businessman, because she said she didn't want to always be looking for policemen behind every door. I know it sounds crazy. We knew it was crazy even as we were talking about it. But I still think about that dream of ours all the time. If we'd done it, who knows how things would have turned out . . .”

He let his words drift off. But I knew what he was going to say. She'd probably still be alive.

“And that was the last time I ever saw Laura,” he said.

“Why was it the last time?”

“Her mother contacted me later. She told me some things. Then she said that if I ever tried to contact Laura again, she would make
sure that I regretted it for the rest of my life. She would go public with everything. She warned me that she had left a letter about me in a secret safe deposit box just in case I got any ideas about trying to shut her up. If she wound up dead, the letter would be opened. I couldn't stand that kind of a scandal. Not for my wife. Not for my family. Not for my standing in the—well, the business organization I was in.”

“So you walked away to make sure no one ever found out about the affair with Laura?”

“It wasn't just our affair that I needed to keep secret.”

“What else was there?”

There were tears in Rizzo's eyes now. The same man who had cold-bloodedly killed a lot of people in his life—most of the estimates I'd seen ranged somewhere from fifty to one hundred victims—was crying.

“I loved Laura,” he sobbed. “I loved her so much. I would have done anything for her. You have to believe me.”

“I understand.”

“But after her mother told me . . .”

“Told you what?”

“She said that Laura's relationship with Edward Holloway was just a sham. That she had arranged the whole thing to make sure Laura stayed away from me. Even made up a phony story about how they met like out of some Hollywood fairy tale. It was all part of her grand design for her daughter. She told me that Holloway and Laura . . . well, they'd never actually had sex together. He adored Laura like she was some princess or goddess, but he never touched her. He was completely impotent.”

“Why did she tell you all this?”

“Because Laura was pregnant.”

It suddenly all made sense.

“She was having our baby,” Rizzo said.