Angel Among Us (33 page)

When the time came to interrupt them, the EMTs were gentle with Danny Gallagher. They let him hold his wife's hand as they wheeled her toward the ambulance. He kept rubbing his thumbs over the red marks gouged into her wrist from where she had been shackled to the wall. Every few steps, he would raise her hand and gently kiss her wounds, as if he might heal them with his tears.

Arcelia balked when they tried to load her into the ambulance. ‘Not yet,' she said to the people hovering around her. ‘I must talk to the woman who helped me.'

‘I'm here,' Alice said quickly. She had never been more than a few feet from her side. ‘What is it?'

‘There was someone else down there with me,' Alice explained to her, speaking in English so that the others could understand. ‘When I was down there, I could feel him with me and I saw the bones coming out of the earth.'

‘There was a body down there with you?' Alice asked. She, like the others, was wondering if Arcelia was thinking clearly. She had been through a lot.

‘Yes,' Arcelia said. ‘There is a body down there. I am sure of it. I felt the finger bone and I brushed the earth away from it. I know the rest of the body is there.'

Maggie had heard her and showed no hesitation. ‘We'll send someone down and check,' she told her. She touched Arcelia's baby, her hand lingering on the clean white blanket that now bound the child from head to toe. ‘I'll make sure they check carefully. You go now. Your husband can ride with you to the hospital. Go and show him your little girl.'

‘What about him?' Arcelia asked Maggie, nodding toward the house. She could not bear to say Lamont Carter's name.

‘There are officers taking care of that now,' Maggie promised. ‘You don't have to worry about him any longer. No one does.'

I
arrived back at the house in time to see Lamont Carter being dragged down the grand staircase in handcuffs. He had drawn in even further on himself and he radiated sullen hatred toward all. As he was hustled toward the foyer, I felt the house itself gather around him as if it were anxious to spit him out of its front door.

Carter was dragged into a night made bright by the glare of television lights. The media had arrived. It seemed as if every network covering Arcelia Gallagher's disappearance had been tipped off and were now crowded at the front gate, pressing against the bars or surging against the hapless line of uniformed men sent to guard the low fence on either side. Dozens of reporters and their crew members shoved for position, determined to bring their viewers the unexpected happy ending to the Arcelia Gallagher story. Lindsey Stanford stood at the front of the pack with her camera crew, resisting all attempts to share her premier spot in line. She would be first through the gate when it opened. Maggie's ex, Skip Bostwick, stood beside Stanford. He had become one of them. He threw elbows like an experienced reporter.

For days, the media had accused Danny Gallagher of killing his wife, and Aldo Flores of helping him. Then they had cast suspicion on non-specific illegal immigrants. They had, in fact, pretty much blamed everyone but the man now being dragged out to a waiting police car in front of them all. It made absolutely no difference. The reporters smelled blood. Better yet, they smelled a huge story: Hollywood and crime intertwined. It was a ratings dream.

As soon as Lamont Carter came into view, Lindsey Stanford went live with a pompous intro about the dark face of Hollywood fame. But an intrepid reporter had slipped past the guards and found the manual switch to the main gate. He flipped it before he could be stopped. Like a pack of hyenas falling on a dead beast, the journalists crashed though the front entrance, trampling Lindsey Stanford as they ran toward Lamont Carter.

Skip Bostwick stepped over Stanford as unconcerned as if she had been a boulder in his way and dashed toward Carter and his police escorts. The cops saw the crowd converging on them and practically threw Carter into the back seat, shutting the door just before a flood of reporters overcame the car.

In the chaos, I was the only one, at first, to see the spooky figure framed in the front door of the mansion, looking out into the night, her eyes bleary and unfocused. At first, I thought it was an apparition. But it was Dakota Wylie, dressed in a nearly transparent negligee with her emaciated, decidedly non-pregnant body on full display. Her face was stripped of bandages and bare for all to see in its horribly altered state. She was barefoot and her hair was disheveled. She was also clearly confused about what was happening or where she was. The pills had hit her hard before the noise woke her from her drug-induced sleep.

‘Lonnie?' Dakota called out into the night. ‘Lonnie, where is the baby? You promised me a baby.'

When Carter did not respond, and I was not even sure he could see her through the crowd of reporters blocking his view, she began to scream his name again and again, attracting the reporters' attention. One by one, they fell silent and turned to stare at her standing in the doorway, looking for all the world like a young Blanche Dubois – wilted, frail and teetering on the verge of madness.

There was a moment of utter silence as they realized who they were seeing and then it sounded as if a thousand crickets and ten times as many locusts had descended on the scene. Whirring and clicking filled the air as every single camera leapt to action, their operators surging forward as they fought for a better shot of the star.

Dakota was too confused to move. She was too doped up to realize that her ravaged face had been exposed for all to see – the misshapen mouth, too wide and unnaturally thick; the bruised eyes, with the right one off-kilter; the strangely asymmetrical tilt of her right cheek; the ghastly pulled-to-one-side stretch of her skin.

It was awful. It was humiliating to think of someone once so beautiful, and still so fragile, trapped in the frames of all those cameras, exposed for the world to see.

‘Is that Dakota Wylie?' Skip Bostwick shouted frantically. He was ignored by the others. They pressed forward, shouting questions at her. Dakota stared back, eyes wide, and reached a hand out to steady herself against the door frame. She was too stunned at what she had finally noticed to react.

Calvano came out of the blue.

Like a defensive lineman intent on sacking the quarterback, he shot out of the crowd and cut in front of the cameras, bent low. He scooped up Dakota Wylie and folded her over his shoulder, then raced back inside the house and slammed the door shut with his heel.

The crowd froze. No one moved. No one understood what had just happened. And I think more than a few thought that they had, perhaps, imagined it all.

But that one act of kindness would later become the defining moment in Adrian Calvano's career, long after the tabloid covers faded. It would lead to his new nickname – Sir Calahad – and, I suspected, be talked about for years, if not decades, to come. He'd had no white horse, but that had not stopped Sir Calahad from galloping to his lady's rescue.

I don't think Calvano cared what others were thinking when he did it, though. I think all he cared about at that moment, and all he would care about afterwards, was protecting someone he saw as too frail for this world, someone who was about to be thrown to the lions. If she had once been his dream girl, he would now be her knight.

Adrian Calvano, it turns out, really was a romantic.

I was not the only one who thought that.

That night, long after the media had left, long after Lamont Carter had been taken into custody and a psychiatrist called to attend to Dakota Wylie, when the crime scene crew was still deep below, processing the cave, and the moon above was giving way to dawn, Calvano stood alone on the edge of the great lawn, looking out over the grounds, perhaps wondering what was going to happen to his dream girl now.

Alice Hernandez had seen him walk out by himself to the edge of the lawn. She joined him there, in the shadows, with the smell of roses all around them.

‘That was a very kind thing you did back there,' Alice told him. ‘I confess I was impressed.'

‘I didn't do it to impress anyone,' Calvano said gruffly. He jammed his hands into his pants pockets and would not look at her. Somewhere close by, a night bird trilled.

‘I know you didn't, that's why I was impressed.'

‘Don't mess with me, Hernandez,' Calvano said. ‘I just don't have the energy tonight.'

Alice put her hands on his arms and turned him to her. Her voice was soft and she dropped all pretense of being the tough cop who liked to tease him. ‘Adrian, there is nothing in this world that I would like better than to go out with you. OK? Just the two of us. And if you will agree to do that, to go out and be just you and me, then I promise you I won't make a single smart-ass remark all night. Not one. I mean it. I think we should try.'

‘You mean it, Hernandez?' Calvano asked, a goofy smile spreading over his face.

‘I mean it,' she promised. ‘Do you want me to prove it to you now?'

‘Sure,' he said, reaching for her.

Oh, to be alive.

N
ot everyone thought Dakota Wylie deserved rescuing. Especially not after the man and woman I had seen cruising the Delmonte House in a beat-up Chevy with Alabama plates stepped forward as exclusive guests on Lindsey Stanford's cable show. Turns out they were Dakota Wylie's parents – and Lamont Carter was not just her manager, he was also her brother. Their real names were Lonnie and Dixie Earle.

According to their parents, Lonnie and Dixie were ingrates who had turned their backs on a loving but poor family and traded Sundays at church for the money and bright lights of Hollywood, then left their parents to poverty once they found fame.

Not a lot of people bought it. Those two had hungry eyes and they couldn't quite keep the greed from their voices as they talked about their daughter's wealth. I know I didn't buy it. I thought back to the father snatching handfuls of cash from Lamont Carter and the mother whining about how ungrateful Carter was. Somehow I doubted they were the upstanding people Lindsey Stanford tried to present them as on her show. Besides, I had seen the way that Lamont Carter slept, enfolding his sister to keep her safe, coiled as if ready to do battle against the entire world. He had grown up protecting her from
someone
and I was pretty sure it was those two. No one was born that hard or that angry. Life had made Carter that way.

I didn't know what would happen to Dakota Wylie without her brother around to protect her. I think he was the only person in the entire world who loved her, not for who she had been on the screen, but truly for herself.

Lamont Carter proved his love for his sister when he pled guilty to avoid her being forced to testify. It was with no small satisfaction that everyone involved in the case realized that his plea had also robbed Lindsey Stanford and her peers of the opportunity to wallow in the sordid details of the case.

Within months, Carter was to be in a prison outside Philadelphia, where he was initially kept in solitary confinement until his fame cooled down. His sister visited him often, arriving in a limousine and trailing a parade of cameras behind her as she marched in, dripping in diamonds and decked out in all the brand names that Lamont Carter could no longer have. She was a walking reminder of the life he had fought so hard to win and then had lost. But she was, of course, oblivious to what she was doing to her brother each time she visited, as well as oblivious to the difference in the way the world had treated her compared to him. And it had treated her very differently indeed.

Dakota Wylie was never charged in connection with Arcelia Gallagher's kidnapping. She insisted that she thought her brother had arranged a legitimate adoption and that she had simply been waiting for that baby to be born. Her helplessness and her insistence that she never paid attention to complicated legal affairs like adoption agreements convinced the grand jury not to indict her.

To be fair, she paid a price nonetheless. She cried for weeks after her brother was arrested, both for the loss of him and for the loss of the baby she had been promised, perhaps never once quite understanding what her brother was willing to do to get it for her. Or maybe she was just putting on the performance of her life? It was hard to say. She still seemed to have no awareness as to how she looked, and that required a
real
break from reality. She sat behind her brother in court, dabbing her ruined face with a Kleenex and reapplying lipstick to her misshapen lips for the cameras without a clue as to how she was now seen. Perhaps it was better that way. She had lost everything she had in the world: her looks, her career, her brother and even her husband, for Enrique Romero did not stand by her, not even for a day. In fact, he never returned to the Delmonte House again.

Dakota Wylie did not, however, lose her wealth. Someone – and my money was on Calvano – got her a very good divorce lawyer indeed. A lawyer who somehow knew to subpoena the photographs Gonzalez had stored away of her husband cheating on her in California. That was enough to invalidate the prenuptial agreement and make Dakota Wylie a very, very rich woman. She would never work again, not after what she had done to her face, but she would have enough money to live like a queen for the rest of her life. People would still photograph her, not because she was beautiful, but because she was a freak with an inconceivable amount of money. I'm not sure she could tell the difference, or if she would even care if she knew. She just needed the cameras trained on her. Without them, I suspected, she believed that she didn't exist.

Though others disagreed – most loudly, Lindsey Stanford, who called for her arrest nightly for awhile – I preferred to think of Dakota Wylie as an innocent. To do otherwise was impossible. It was simply too much for me to acknowledge that she might, instead, be a perfect storm of self-absorption meeting need and denial; a confluence created by poverty and covetousness, turned into a dangerous monster by the power her beauty gave her.