Shooting for the Stars (19 page)

Chapter
35

B
ILL
Remesch was one of those guys whose life story you could read the minute you looked at him. The stories about his arrest said he'd been a football star in high school before Abbie married him. He was big, and you could see how he might have once been an athlete. But the years had not been kind to him. He'd put on a lot of weight. He had a huge gut now, and his face looked bloated too. If I didn't know he was the same age as Abbie, I'd have thought he was at least fifteen years older. In high school he'd been voted the most popular guy in the senior class. High school had been the high point of his life. After that it was all downhill.

Sitting there across from him now in the visitors' area of Rikers Island Prison, I couldn't imagine Abbie ever being with him.

“It was a different time,” he said, as if he sensed what I was thinking. “Everything was different. Abbie was so young. I met her after a football game. I was an all-conference halfback. She was a cheerleader. She just walked up to me one day after practice and introduced herself. She said she thought I was cute. Well, one thing led to another, and we made out under the bleachers. We started dating when we were juniors, went steady the entire senior year, and got married right after graduation.

“We were the golden couple back then, that's what people used to call us. The high school football star and the beautiful cheer
leader. There's all kinds of pictures of us in the yearbook I have at home. Best-Looking Couple. Steady Senior Couple. King and Queen of the Senior Prom.

“Like I said, she was a knockout. I'd never seen anyone so beautiful as Abbie was when she was young. Oh, she was still pretty on TV and all, I know. But there was something so pure and innocent and perfect about her back in Wisconsin. I used to kid her because her mother and father were both very ordinary looking, and a little overweight. I'd say she must have been a mistake that the stork dropped off at the wrong house. She'd laugh and ask me if I'd still love her when she got old and fat. We were really happy there for a while. I thought it would last forever. But it didn't last very long at all. Not after she won that damn contest and went to New York.”

Remesch wore a prison uniform that didn't fit him well. It was baggy around the shoulders and tight around his stomach. His hair was greasy, he hadn't shaved, and his eyes looked like he hadn't slept for days.

I'd gotten in to see him by telling the public defender lawyer assigned to his case that I wanted to give him a chance to tell his side of the story to the public. I said the press and police had practically convicted him already. I told the lawyer that an interview with me couldn't do anything but help.

That wasn't strictly true.

But he wasn't a very experienced lawyer, and I think he wanted the publicity anyway. His only concern was that he knew I'd been a friend of Abbie's, and he wanted to make sure I wasn't prejudiced against his client. I said I was an objective reporter, and I had no preconceived notion about his guilt or innocence. The truth was I wasn't sure how I felt about Remesch.

“So what happened to your marriage after Abbie went to New York?” I asked.

He shrugged. “She was different.”

“And you didn't like that?”

“I married the old Abbie.”

“She was growing as a person.”

“I didn't want her to grow. I liked her just the way she was.”

“Maybe that was the problem,” I said.

He told me more about how she'd won that contest to go to New York City, the one Abbie had said led to her big break. She went without him, and she'd met people in New York who told her she had a big future in show business. She wanted to move to New York. He said no. They argued about it until one day she just left him—and never came back.

“Is that when you started to beat her?” I asked. “When you were arguing about her going to New York?”

“I didn't beat her.”

“Okay, you hit her.”

“We were fighting a lot. It got physical. She hit me too. She never mentioned that on her TV show, did she?”

“It's hardly the same thing,” I pointed out. “You were a football player. She was maybe a hundred and ten pounds. You could have killed her. That's why she went public with the whole thing. She was trying to save other women's lives.”

Remesch shook his head no. “It wasn't like that.”

“You hit her, didn't you?”

“Yes, and I'm sorry about that. I was mad and I was confused and I didn't understand why she wanted to leave me. But it was never as bad as she said on TV. She made me out to be this terrible person. I still get letters from people calling me all sorts of terrible names. My second wife eventually left me over it, my business is on the verge of bankruptcy—my life is a mess. All because of Abbie.”

“That's a pretty good motive for murder,” I pointed out.

“I didn't come here to kill her. I just wanted her to tell the truth.”

“Is that why you kept trying to see her?”

“Yes, I wanted her to set the record straight.”

“What happened when you caused a scene on the set of her show a while back?”

“Things got out of control. I couldn't believe what she'd done to me. I was very upset. I was really hot under the collar. So I tried to force my way into the studio set. The security guys stopped me before I got to her dressing room. One of them put a choke hold on me. I took a swing at him. I'm not in as good a shape as I used to be. He messed me up pretty badly.”

“And the incident when you showed up at
The Prime Time Files
studio just before she died?”

“I came here to try and see her again. To try and convince her to clear my name on TV. I was desperate, I didn't know what else to do. But they wouldn't let me see her.”

“What did you do then?”

“I sent her a note. I asked one of her people to deliver it to her. I said I was sorry about everything that had happened. I said I just wanted to clear the air. I told her about how screwed up my life was now. I said she could make it better with just a few words on her TV show. I'm not perfect, but I'm no monster. That's all I wanted her to say. I said I loved her once, and I knew she loved me then too. That was a long time ago, of course, and we were different people. She had it all now, and I had nothing. I asked her to help me. For old times' sake. For what we once meant to each other.”

“What happened?”

“She called me.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I was surprised too. She said I was right. She said there
were things that needed to be made right between us. She asked me to come see her.”

“And that's why you went to the hotel?”

“That's right.”

“Wasn't she afraid to meet you without any bodyguards around?”

“She knew I wasn't going to hurt her.”

“So what happened that night?”

“It was nice. We talked about old times. We laughed a bit. She admitted to me that she'd exaggerated some of the stuff for TV ratings. She knew now that was wrong. She said she'd discovered things about herself in the past few weeks that had changed her entire outlook on what was right and wrong about life. She wanted to repair some of the damage she'd done to people. She said she was going to be revealing a lot of things on her next show. That it was going to be a blockbuster show and the entire nation would be talking about it. She said she'd include me in the show too, and that she'd set things right by me. She said she'd set things right by everybody. ‘The truth will set us all free,' she told me. I remember her saying that just before I left.”

“What did you do the rest of the night?”

“I went to a bar and had a few drinks.”

“By yourself?”

“Yes.”

“After that?”

“I went back to the hotel where I was staying.”

“So you have no alibi?”

“I'm afraid not.”

I thought about what he'd just told me. Abbie said she was going to tell the truth about a lot of people on her next show. The show she never got a chance to do. So who was she going to tell the truth about? Laura Marlowe? Remesch? Thomas Rizzo? Or
maybe someone else too. Someone who didn't want the truth to come out.

“My lawyer thinks I should plead guilty,” Remesch said. “He says I don't have much of a chance. He says they've got all this evidence against me, and the jury is going to know all about my reputation. He thinks I should make a deal for second-degree murder. It's twenty-five years to life, but that way I won't get the death penalty. He says it's my only chance.”

“Is that what you're going to do?”

“I didn't kill her.”

“Okay.”

“I didn't kill her,” he repeated.

“Just keep telling them that.”

“No one believes me.”

“I think I do,” I said.

Chapter
36

M
Y
interview with Remesch became a Page One story for the
Daily News
. The headline was:

I DIDN'T KILL ABBIE . . . I LOVED HER!

Exclusive jailhouse interview

With Abbie Kincaid's ex-husband

I managed to pack a lot of his emotional quotes—as well as his seemingly genuine affection for Abbie and confusion over what happened—into the piece. I also listed all the evidence against him, including my conversation with Wohlers about the case. All in all, it was a pretty compelling article. Stacy and the other editors liked it too. We broke it on the website, made it a two-page spread in the morning editions, and the paper even set me up to do some TV interviews to promote it.

It was pretty amazing the way I'd been able to pull myself out of the mess over getting scooped on the Remesch arrest. But, as they always say in the newspaper business, you're only as good as your last story. And my last story was pretty good.

I also wrote up the Laura Marlowe story. The Sign of the Z stuff, how she was a member of the cult for several months, plus all the new details from Jackie Sinclair about the romance with Thomas
Rizzo. I didn't include any of the serial killer stuff yet though. I needed to pin that down more before I could go with it. That piece got me some attention too after it ran in the
News
. But not nearly as much as the Remesch interview. Maybe Stacy was right after all. The Laura Marlowe story was in the past, and people didn't care as much about the death of a long-dead movie star as about the murder of Abbie Kincaid, a genuine TV star today.

Unless, of course, the two were related. But everyone—from the cops to Stacy—now seemed to have eliminated that possibility. No one thought there was a connection anymore after the arrest of Remesch. Except me. Because if Remesch really was being framed somehow for Abbie's murder, that meant Abbie's real killer was still out there. And maybe—just maybe—that killer was responsible for the murders of both Abbie Kincaid and Laura Marlowe.

When I left the
Daily News
building, a car was sitting out front across from the entrance. It was a brown sedan. Looked like a Lincoln to me. The car wasn't doing anything.

I began walking up the street toward the subway station. When I got to the end of the block, I crossed the street. That's when I saw the car again. It was moving now. Slowly. In the same direction I was.

I figured it must be Rizzo's people again. He probably didn't like the fact that I'd mentioned him again in the article about Laura Marlowe, the Sign of the Z, and Jackie Sinclair's movie business. Hell, I'd done more than mention him; I'd talked about their affair. So my new friends from Florentine's might be a tad cranky with me at the moment.

I decided not to go down into the subway. If someone followed me there, I could be trapped. So instead I hailed a taxi. I got in
quickly, told the driver to take me to my apartment building, and looked behind me. The brown sedan was following.

I figured telling the cab driver to
lose that car behind us
would sound a bit melodramatic. Besides, the driver was engaged in an animated discussion on his hands-free cell phone, arguing with someone in a language I didn't understand. So I just let him make his way up to my place in Chelsea. The brown car stayed behind us the whole way. But it never got close enough for me to see who was inside.

As we approached my building, it dawned on me that I might not have made the wisest decision coming straight there. Now Rizzo's people would know where I lived. Still, the high-rise gave me a sense of protection I might not have elsewhere. There were several hundred apartments here. Plus a doorman. And even a concierge, for God's sake! The ad for the place when I moved in had stressed the top-notch security and sanctity from crime. Of course, I wasn't sure how a concierge would stand up to a mobster with a gun, but at least it might buy me some time.

I walked through the lobby, got on an elevator, and then—­instead of going to my apartment on the thirty-sixth floor—got off at the pool and sundeck on the eighth floor. I knew I could look down from there at the street. Which is what I did. I saw the brown sedan parked in front of the building.

I sat there for about an hour. I didn't move from the spot. The car didn't move either. This was turning into a standoff. I went through my options. I could 1) call the police or 2) go up to my apartment and ignore the car outside or 3) confront whoever was in the car, tell them it was getting late, and ask if they wanted to come up and tuck me in for the night. The problem with going to the police was no one had broken any laws, and the third option seemed a little pushy to me. And so, after another thirty minutes of waiting, I gave up and went up to my place on the thirty-sixth floor.

I realized something was wrong right away. My door was already open. The lock had been broken.

So much for the sanctity of the building.

I pushed the door open slowly and looked inside. The place was a mess. Furniture overturned. Drawers emptied. Pillows ripped open. A lot of my stuff—papers, books, DVDs—lay all over the floor.

I went back into the hall and used my cell phone to dial 911. They said a team of officers would be right over. I probably should have waited for them. I mean whoever did this could have still been in the apartment. But I went in again.

There was no one there anymore.

I walked carefully around to check out all the damage.

First the living room, then down the hall into my bedroom.

That's when I saw it.

Someone had spray-painted a big letter on the wall of my bedroom.

It was the letter
Z
.