Shooting for the Stars (22 page)

Chapter
41

I
HAD
a story. A good story. Edward Holloway—New York social figure, Broadway public relations–man and producer, and husband of the legendary Laura Marlowe—had been a member of the same radical cult as her. The whole story of how they met was all a lie. It was another dramatic development in the debunking of the Laura Marlowe legend.

The problem was I was pretty sure there was an even better story out there. A story I didn't have yet. If I wrote this one now, I might blow my chance to get the rest of the story.

I wished I could talk to my editor about the dilemma. But I knew I wasn't going to get any help from Stacy.

Over the years, I've had some really good editors. My first city editor was a legend in the New York newspaper world, a colorful character named Paul McDermott who talked out of the side of his mouth like Humphrey Bogart and smoked big cigars all day long. He was famous for his boozing and brawling, as well as his journalistic skills. The legend was that once in the days before computers he picked up one of the metal spikes that were used to collect used wire copy and used it like a sword to chase a reporter around the room. Another time a dispute with the copy desk chief over a displaced comma degenerated into a wrestling match, with the two of them rolling around the floor of the newsroom.

But McDermott had a sensitive side too. In my first year at the paper, I blew a crucial stakeout assignment. I was supposed to stand outside a building until a key murder witness came out. I did just that for hours, until the call of nature intervened. I found a nearby coffee shop, used the bathroom, and then ran back to the stakeout location. While I was gone, the witness had come out and another paper got the story. I was devastated and wondered if I would be fired. Especially when McDermott called me into his office the next day. But he didn't fire me. He said bad breaks like that happen to even the best of reporters sometimes. He said I'd get a better story the next day. He said I shouldn't get too down about it, because he thought I was a terrific reporter with a great future in the newspaper business. When I told him that I'd been afraid my gaffe might have cost me my job, he just smiled. “I've never fired a reporter for taking a piss, kid,” McDermott said.

Of course, that was a long time ago. There weren't too many editors around like Paul McDermott anymore. They were mostly like Stacy Albright now.

I sat at my desk in the newsroom for a long time, trying to figure out what to do next.

Then my telephone rang. It was Lt. Marty Dahlstrom, the cop I'd talked to when I was in Los Angeles. I'd gone to see him again before I left LA and told him about the possible astrology connection I'd found in the four celebrity murders. He told me now that they were still looking into the astrology angle. Nothing definite yet, but it did look like a promising lead, he said. If something did develop, he promised he'd give me the exclusive before it was released to anyone else in the press. I guess he felt he owed me a favor.

“I've got something you might be interested in,” Dahlstrom
said. “I checked out all those names you gave me on Laura Marlowe and Rizzo and all the rest. I did find a connection between Rizzo and one guy you mentioned.”

I wasn't sure who he was talking about.

“Edward Holloway?”

Of course, that would make perfect sense. Holloway kept popping up everywhere in this story. He'd met Laura in the cult. He'd made up the whole story of how they met. He was also another surviving member from the Sign of the Z cult. Holloway had lied to me and everyone else about a lot of things. Maybe he had a reason. Maybe he was connected to the other deaths, and they all had something to do with what happened to Laura.

“Not Holloway,” Dahlstrom said. “The other one.”

It took me a second to realize who he meant.

“David Valentine,” I said.

“David Valentine,” he said, sounding as if he was reading from a file in front of him. “He was discharged from the Marine Corps. A dishonorable discharge, by the way. AWOL, drunk on duty—lots of other complaints like that. One night he had too much to drink and decided he didn't like the way a colonel's face looked. He tried to rearrange it. The colonel wound up in the hospital, and Valentine went to the stockade for six months. When he got out, they booted him out of the Marines. He lost everything—his pension, his benefits, the whole works.”

“Valentine told me he was living in part on his Marine pension.”

“Well, he lied to you.”

“So how did he live?”

“He drifted around the country after that, doing a lot of odd jobs—mostly in private security. He got married for a while, he worked as a bodyguard for a couple of people in Hollywood that he apparently knew through his daughter before she died. None of the jobs lasted very long. He kept going from place to place.
Most of them aren't that interesting. But one of them was. He was a bodyguard for a guy out in Hollywood back in the '80s. Not your typical Hollywood executive. This was a very shady guy. A guy with big connections to the underworld. Those connections got a lot bigger as the years went by. Do you have any idea who I'm talking about?”

“Thomas Rizzo,” I said.

“You're a very sharp guy, Malloy.”

Valentine had told me he never knew anything about Rizzo. So that was a lie too. I wondered how many other lies he'd told me.

“Oh, one other thing,” Dahlstrom said. “When I got the readout from the FBI computer in Washington, I found out something kind of interesting. It turns out I wasn't the first person to ask for the information. Someone else had done it just a few weeks earlier. They said that's why it was so easy to get it. They had all the information accumulated already. Do you know who made the other request?”

“Abbie Kincaid,” I said.

“Weird, huh?”

“No, it makes perfect sense.”

There was something else Dahlstrom had said that intrigued me.

“You said Valentine got married. Did you mean the marriage to Beverly, Laura's mother?”

“No, he remarried after her. Right around the time Laura died actually. The marriage only lasted a couple of years. Divorced in '87.”

That might be another lead. If I could find Valentine's ex-wife, the one he married after Beverly, she might be able to give me the real story about him. Especially if the marriage happened near the time of Laura's death.

“Do you happen to know the name of the woman?” I asked.

I heard him rustling through papers on his desk.

Like I said before, a good newspaper reporter pulls on all the loose threads of a story—without knowing what they might mean or what he might find out from them or where they might take him.

Doing that can take you to a lot of strange places.

And sometimes you wind up wishing you hadn't pulled on that thread at all.

“Her name was Sherry DeConde,” Dahlstrom said.

PART FIVE

TELL LAURA I LOVE HER

Chapter
42

I
NEED
your help,” I said to Susan.

“Wow, I sure didn't expect to hear from you so soon.”

“Why not?”

“I know you, Gil. You were hurt by what I told you. When that happens, you go off and sulk and brood and try to be angry with me. Some people can be mature about this kind of situation. Be friendly with their ex even after that person has moved on to someone else, be happy for them. You're not one of those kind of people. So this must be about something pretty important. What is it?”

Susan was right. I sure as hell didn't want to make this phone call. In fact, I had to summon up all my strength and resolve to do it. But, like Susan always said about me, I'll do anything for a story. Well, this was proof of that.

“I want you to do a background check on a woman named Sherry DeConde. She's a theatrical agent in Greenwich Village. She lives there too. I need to know if she has any kind of criminal history or anything else in her past that might have put her on law enforcement's radar over the past thirty years or so.”

I gave her as much specific information about Sherry as I could.

“Why do you want to know about this woman?” Susan asked when I was finished.

“I can't tell you.”

“That's not good enough, Gil.”

“I've been seeing Sherry DeConde, okay? We had a couple of dates. I slept with her too. I like her, Susan. I like her better than anyone I've been with since you. Do you need more details than that?”

“I'm glad you found someone you like. But I sure as hell am not going to use the DA's office to do background checks on women you have the hots for.”

“I think she's involved in the Laura Marlowe story,” I said.

“How?”

“I'm not sure. But I think she knows a lot more than she's telling me.”

I laid out everything I'd found out about Sherry and Valentine and Rizzo and the mysterious connections between all three of them.

“Will you help me, Susan?” I asked.

There was a long pause at the other end of the line.

“Let me see what I can find out and get back to you,” she said finally.

Some of what Sherry DeConde had told me turned out to be true. Some wasn't. And she'd left out a lot of stuff according to the results of the investigation that Susan ran for me.

Sherry had been a struggling young agent in New York City—one of many trying to get a toehold in a tough business—when Laura Marlowe walked into her life. She nurtured the young actress, got her a start in show business with some small parts, but then lost out on the big prize when Laura Marlowe hit it big.

That was the way she had told it to me.

What she didn't say was that her agent business failed after
that, she filed for bankruptcy, and wound up working a string of secretarial jobs on the side to make ends meet.

Then, not long after Laura Marlowe's death, her agency business got a fresh influx of capital from a new investor that put her back on her feet. The agency began signing clients, making deals with big people in the entertainment world, and turned Sherry DeConde into a bit of a player in the show business world.

The new investor was never publicly named, but law enforcement authorities determined it was Thomas Rizzo.

Sherry DeConde was quietly put on a “known associates” list of Rizzo by a federal–New York joint task force investigation monitoring Rizzo and his underworld connections. On several occasions, she was called before secret grand juries and other investigative bodies looking into Rizzo's criminal empire. In all of the cases, she refused to testify, pleading the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination.

The last entry on Sherry DeConde said that—as far as law enforcement sources could determine—Rizzo remained a silent partner in her agency.

The marriage with Valentine appeared to have taken place at around the same time she got the money from Rizzo for the agency. That seemed significant to me, but I had no idea how or why. As Dahlstrom had said, the marriage ended a few years later. There were no further details. But the background report did point out that Valentine had worked for Rizzo as a bodyguard and described him as another “known associate” of the mobster.

I barged into Sherry's office unannounced. She looked up, startled, and happy at first to see me. But then she saw the look on my face.

“What's wrong?”

“Do you still keep in close touch with Thomas Rizzo?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You and Rizzo worked together.”

“I've worked with a lot of people over the years.”

“He gave you the money to set up this agency.”

“Who told you that?”

“Are you working with Rizzo now?”

“No, I'm not working with Rizzo now.”

“Still exchange Christmas cards with him?”

“Look, I'm sorry . . .”

“And what about Davy Valentine?”

“Gil . . .”

“You neglected to mention him to me when you were running through your list of ex-husbands. Why didn't you tell me about any of this?”

“Some of the things I've done in my past I'm not proud of.”

“How in the hell did you ever hook up with someone like Rizzo in the first place?”

“I got to know him through Valentine because Rizzo was seeing Laura.”

“So you knew first-hand about the affair with Rizzo?”

“Well . . .”

“And you lied to me about it.”

“I told you I was sorry.”

“Are you lying to me about other things too?”

She didn't answer.

“I'll take that as a yes.”

I whirled around and started to storm out of her office. She followed after me and tried to get me to stay.

“Can't we just get past this?” she pleaded.

“I have to know the truth first.”

“I told you the truth now.”

“All of it.”

“That's all there is to tell.”

“I don't believe you.”

I drove down to Barnegat on the Jersey Shore to find Valentine again. I wanted to confront him with all this. Maybe he'd tell me the truth.

But when I got there, his trailer was gone. Someone nearby told me Valentine had driven off with the trailer an hour earlier. Sherry must have called him after I left and told him what happened.

I tried her on the phone, but just got an out-of-office message saying the Sherry DeConde Agency was closed until further notice.

Sherry.

Valentine.

Rizzo.

The answer to the Laura Marlowe mystery was there somewhere if I could just figure out how to connect the dots.

I drove back to New York, went into the office, and read as many past stories as I could find that had been done about Rizzo. There were a lot of them. Murders, bribery, bookmaking, drug dealing—you name it. He'd sure become a mob superstar in the years since Laura's death. The media talked about him the way they used to talk about John Gotti or Al Capone. He seemed to like the publicity too. There were stories and pictures of him showing up at parties, movie premieres, and fine restaurants. He was a celebrity—just like a movie star or a Super Bowl quarterback or a rock idol.

It took me quite a while to go through all the stuff on him. I actually thought it would take me longer, except coverage suddenly stopped. About a year ago. There were only a few mentions of him after that, and even those were about his new low profile around town. There were no more movie openings, no more restaurant appearances—it was as if he'd become shy after years and years of
being an underworld celebrity. One article speculated that it might mean some sort of mob war was about to break out, and that Rizzo didn't want to make himself too easy of a target. There were even rumors that he might have left the country.

I wasn't sure what any of this meant, but I was sure about one thing. Rizzo was the only clear-cut connection between both Laura and Abbie's murders. And when you linked those two murders up—when you made the leap to the assumption that Abbie died because of something she'd found out about Laura's murder—then everything started to fall into place. I'd been nibbling around that idea ever since the story started, but now it was time to embrace it wholeheartedly.

Whoever killed Laura Marlowe thirty years ago also killed Abbie.

Thomas Rizzo seemed to be the most likely candidate. Rizzo was a killer, we all knew that. He had a motive—he'd had an affair with Laura that went bad. And, most damning of all, he was the only one directly linked to both cases. His son was dating Abbie at the same time she was uncovering new evidence that reopened the Marlowe murder case. Thomas Rizzo's fingerprints were all over this, and it was hard to ignore that fact.

Davy Valentine was gone, in the wind now.

Maybe Sherry too.

I knew one thing for certain though. Thomas Rizzo was the key to this entire story. Rizzo was somehow at the center of everything that had happened. Rizzo had all the answers.

All I had to do was find him.