Shooting for the Stars (28 page)

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 des
perately 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 outside 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

L
AURA
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 still 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.”

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.