Death of a Telenovela Star (A Novella)

by Teresa Dovalpage

  Other people took out their phones and began furiously Googling Carloalberto. Sarita was now crying hysterically.

  Turtle approached them. “I’m so sorry. I’ve been following the news since yesterday. Did you know that gentleman?”

  “No,” Marlene answered.

  “Yes,” Sarita said at the same time. Then her hand flew to her mouth and she quickly added, “I mean, no.”

  When Turtle led the group to the exit, everyone was quiet.

  “The gods did take the best,” Sarita mumbled, tears running down her face. “The most handsome and perfect one.”

  13: The Return Trip

  In a subdued mood, the group boarded the bus that would take them back to the Chichen Itza airport. Sarita was searching the news frantically, her phone battery running low.

  “Can I use yours, Tía? Please?” she asked.

  “I left it on board. I didn’t think we’d need it.”

  Sarita sighed in frustration and sat, sulking. Marlene took a seat next to the other woman who’d been smoking outside the night of the party. The woman recognized Marlene, too, and introduced herself as Lucy.

  “I bet what we heard was that poor man jumping into the ocean,” she said in hushed tones. “Isn’t it terrible? I wish we’d said something then. Maybe someone could’ve saved him.”

  “I doubt they would’ve found him in the dark,” Marlene answered. “But why do you think he jumped?”

  “Oh,” Lucy replied, “they found a recording. He left a final video message on his cell phone.”

  Sarita barged in on the conversation.

  “Where did you hear that?” she asked urgently.

  “On Univision,” Lucy answered. “The video was posted there. It’s heartbreaking.”

  Lucy pulled up the Univision website on her phone, but they were just streaming an interview with Helen. She was still at the Cozumel port, the North Star towering behind her.

  “I’ve said it all along,” the screenwriter said. “Carloalberto was depressed, no matter what other people claim. Yes, he’d been offered a new job on a feature film. And I was working on a pilot for the telenovela he was going to star in after that. But that doesn’t mean we weren’t devastated when—”

  The Internet was slow even on Lucy’s fully charged phone. The video stopped, Helen’s face frozen, mouth open.

  “There’s zero doubt that he killed himself,” Lucy explained to Sarita. “In the video, he said something like, ‘Don’t blame anybody. My life isn’t worth living.’”

  “But when did he record it?” the girl asked.

  “I assume before jumping.”

  The bus had arrived at the airport. After all the passengers had boarded the Cessna Caravan, the pilot asked them to turn off their cell phones. Reluctantly, Lucy and Sarita obeyed, and moments later, the plane took off.

  The sapphire waters of the Caribbean Sea gleamed below the plane. A few boats, like toy ships in a miniature lake, were eclipsed at times by the lacy veil of the clouds between. Marlene looked distractedly at them, but her mind wasn’t there. It was back on the North Star. She had seen Carloalberto after he and Helen were knocked out of the contest—that evening on deck fifteen, when he was happily taking selfies with “his women.” He didn’t seem fazed, much less depressed. His own wife had was saying he had been all right. So it was her word versus Emma’s.

  On the other hand, if Carloalberto had died the night of the party, and his body was what she had heard going overboard, he must have died shortly after Marlene had spotted him at the roulette table. He clearly owed money to some unsavory characters—speaking of which, where had that blond guy been that night? Perhaps a streak of bad luck at the tables had driven Carloalberto over the edge.

  Still, the time window was tight. He would’ve had to go to his room, shoot the video and make the jump in less than half an hour. Could he have been killed by one of “his women”? Emma, so cold and reserved? What if she had eventually caught him and Helen? Those two weren’t exactly careful.

  Sarita turned on her cell phone mid-flight. Marlene shot her a warning look.

  “Sorry.” The girl put the phone away.

  “We’ll be landing soon,” Marlene said, “and then you can find out what’s going on. We’re almost there. See? That’s the North Star.”

  The ship’s brightly painted hull stood out among the other boats docked at the Cozumel port.

  “This was supposed to be so much fun,” Sarita said with a sad sigh. “Cruising the Caribbean with you, visiting cool places, sending pics to my friends. But now it’s turned into a nightmare.”

  Marlene put a hand on her niece’s shoulder. “Don’t take it so hard, mijita,” she said gently. “This is awful, yes, but you didn’t know him.”

  “What do you mean? My friends and I have followed The Terrific Two since it first aired! And I was supposed to—” She stopped herself.

  “Supposed to what?” Marlene asked, eyebrow raised. Perhaps Sarita would come forward about the WhatsApp group herself.

  “Nothing,” said Sarita, looking down.

  Marlene put her arm around her niece. “I know you were rooting for him, but if he hadn’t been on the cruise, this wouldn’t have mattered as much to you,” Marlene concluded. “It would’ve just been another piece of bad news.”

  “But he was here,” Sarita answered.

  14: Carloalberto’s Last Video

  From the Cozumel airport, the group took a bus back to the North Star. Alejandro Fernández was on the radio singing “El Rey.” Thinking of her king, Sarita burst into tears.

  “There, there,” Lucy said, patting her on the back gently. “We all had a crush on him, didn’t we?”

  Marlene shot her a curious glance. We all?

  “Damn right,” Sarita sniffled.

  During the ten-minute ride, thanks to Lucy and the other passengers, Marlene pieced together recent events. That morning, when checking her email for the first time in days, Emma noticed one from Carloalberto with a video attachment. “And there he was, my Carloalberto, saying that he was sorry for the pain he’d cause to those who loved him.”

  Emma stopped, her beautiful face grief-stricken. “It doesn’t make sense. My husband was so happy-go-lucky. If being kicked out of the contest affected him that way, he never said so. In fact, when the last segments were being filmed, he told me was fed up with the whole thing and wanted to move on. He didn’t care about that project anymore.”

  “I wonder what Helen will say now,” Marlene whispered to Lucy.

  “She’s probably mad because the reporters aren’t interviewing her,” Lucy replied. “But some trip this has been, eh? This Chichen Itza excursion was highway robbery, if you ask me.”

  “Yeah, for the price, I expected at least half a day there,” Marlene agreed.

  “This whole cruise—I would’ve been better off staying home in Tucson. And I was so looking forward to my ‘ocean view cabin,’ but—” Lucy drew a cigarette out of her purse. Marlene did the same, and they began to smoke under the disapproving gaze of the other passengers. Some opened their windows, if only to make a statement, as the outside air was thick with exhaust fumes.

  “But even that went wrong,” Lucy continued. “The cabin was supposed to have a balcony, and I guess it does, technically, but there’s a row of lifeboats in front of it blocking the view!”

  “Yikes, sorry about that. Which deck are you on?”

  “Twelve.”

  “We’re on fourteen.”

  “Right above me, then—there’s no deck thirteen on the North Star.” Lucy chuckled. “Some kind of sailors’ superstition, I guess.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Marlene said, realizing that Carloalberto and Emma must have been on deck twelve as well.

  “Well, at least I got the cabin cheap,” Lucy concluded. “This was my first cruis
e, and I didn’t realize the fine print said ‘partially obstructed view.’ Well, you get what you pay for.”

  When they arrived at the dock, the reporters had already left. Marlene hoped for a reprieve from the whole Carloalberto affair, but as soon as they returned to their cabin, Sarita plugged her phone in to the charger and asked to borrow her aunt’s.

  “Can you give it a rest, mijita?”

  “Tía, please! You know how important this is.”

  Marlene was too tired to argue. She retrieved the device from the depths of her purse and handed it to Sarita. After shaking her head at the cheap Motorola, the girl Googled Carloalberto’s name and found the video. It was short, less than a minute, with the man’s whole upper half onscreen.

  “I’m addressing you all, dear ones, at the threshold of death. I’m sorry for the pain that my actions may cause you, but my life isn’t worth living anymore, so I’m taking it. Don’t blame anyone. Adiós.”

  Carloalberto remained expressionless as he spoke. No emotion whatsoever in his voice or eyes.

  “He sounds like he was reading off a piece of paper,” Marlene said, having watched without much interest. “It just doesn’t seem natural.”

  “How can you say that?” Sarita asked, horrified. “He was desperate!”

  “But he doesn’t look desperate,” Marlene replied. “If anything, he looks bored.”

  “Shut up, Tía! Don’t you have any respect for the dead?”

  Then Marlene noticed something in the background. She asked Sarita to replay the video, watching attentively this time. The video had been filmed in one of the ship’s cabins with Carloalberto’s back to the balcony, an unobstructed view of the night behind him.

  Marlene went outside, looked down and checked again the balcony where she had caught Carloalberto and Helen making out at the beginning of the trip. A compact row of lifeboats sat in front of it.

  “He didn’t film this in his cabin,” she said to herself.

  “What are you mumbling about?” Sarita asked.

  “Nada,” she said, not wanting to plant ideas in her niece’s head.

  The boat would stay in port until 5 p.m., when it would head back to Miami. Marlene wondered if she would have time to find out . . .

  The captain’s voice came through the loudspeakers, interrupting her thoughts.

  “Those passengers who are currently in their staterooms must remain there until further instructions. Those who are anywhere else, proceed to your muster stations, where a crew member will be waiting for you. The Mexican police are coming aboard.”

  15: Cues from the Video

  Marlene and Sarita lay around the cabin for the next two hours. In the meantime, Google News informed them that Emma was flying to Costa Maya to identify her husband’s body.

  “She’ll have to make arrangements to take him home,” Sarita said, blowing her nose. Her eyes were still red.

  From their balcony they could see the dock, where three Mexican police cars waited near the ship.

  “Does this have to do with Carloalberto?” Sarita asked. “If he killed himself, why are the cops here?”

  Marlene could have explained to her niece that the suicide theory needed to be confirmed, but didn’t want to rile the girl up again. She had rewatched the video a third time. While general consensus was that Carloalberto had placed his cellphone on a table and recorded himself, Marlene thought it looked as if someone was holding the phone and moving around a bit, creating a slight panning effect. At a certain point in the video, it slid so much to the left that the edge of a blue frame with a butterfly inside was visible for a few seconds.

  Marlene glanced at the print that hung near their own balcony—it depicted a butterfly in a blue frame as well. For a fleeting second, she wondered if the video could have been shot in here, but knew the idea was absurd. All the cabins on the boat probably had the same framed prints.

  Sarita pointed outside and yelled, “Look, Tía! There’s the guy who was dancing with Emma the night of the party.”

  Fernando, now in handcuffs, was escorted out of the boat by four federales.

  Marlene wondered why the Mexican cops hadn’t interviewed the passengers or conducted a more thorough search of the boat. She was sure they hadn’t been on her deck. How had they caught the guy so quickly?

  Soon, the passengers were allowed to walk freely on board. The ship set sail. At 6 p.m., when the Cozumel coastline was only a thin blue line on the horizon, the captain made another public announcement on the ship’s TV channel.

  “On behalf of the North Star crew and the entire company, we want to apologize to our guests for the inconveniences suffered during this trip. Though these regrettable events are due to circumstances outside our control, we understand that they have disrupted what should have been a pleasant experience. For this reason, we have decided to credit the accounts of each of our passengers with one thousand points, meaning one thousand dollars that can be applied toward any other cruise with our company.”

  The staff manager also made an appearance, explaining that the man arrested by the Mexican authorities was Pietro Monty, also known as Fernando Pedraza. Emma had accused him of running illicit gambling rings in Florida and blackmailing her late husband, which might have driven him to his death. She had reported him to the police as soon as she left the boat.

  Marlene met Benito before his evening shift. He agreed that the federales had done a quick-and-dirty job.

  “They arrested what’s-his-name because Emma tipped them off,” Benito said. “They couldn’t very well ignore threats. But other than that . . .”

  Marlene nodded.

  “I’ve been thinking about it, and you know what? I don’t believe they care about this. It happened at sea, not in their jurisdiction, and they’d rather not make a big deal out of something that could hurt tourism.”

  “Yep, our federales have more to worry about than onboard crimes,” Benito said. “Better for them to let the American police deal with that. Now, for something a little more pleasant. Can you guess tonight’s featured main course at The Ambassador?”

  Marlene waited, batting her eyelashes in mock ignorance.

  “A very Cuban dish,” he said. “Ropa vieja.”

  “Ooh.” Shredded beef, one of her favorites. “Did you use tomato paste?”

  “Goya tomato paste. I happened to have some in stock.”

  “What are you serving it with?”

  “White rice and fried plantains.”

  “Perfect,” Marlene chuckled. “Can’t wait to see Sarita’s face when she’s presented with a dish called ‘old clothes.’”

  They had a nice time together, as usual, but after Benito left, Marlene stayed. She just couldn’t get Carloalberto’s death out of her mind. The suicide theory made sense, given his obvious gambling problem and the threats she’d overheard at the start of the trip. But that last video bothered her. Where had it been shot, if not Carloalberto and Emma’s cabin? Marlene pondered whether it was worth finding out, and ultimately decided it was.

  You are a natural-born bloodhound and will soon follow another trail.

  This was their last full day at sea; they would arrive in Miami the next morning at six o’clock. If Marlene was going to do some digging, she only had the evening for it. But how would she occupy Sarita? She certainly didn’t want her niece tagging along with her for this.

  Her answer came when the “last and best sale of the cruise” was announced at 7:30 p.m. Marlene sent the girl straight to the boutiques with her credit card.

  “Buy yourself something nice, mijita, but don’t you spend over fifty dollars,” she said.

  Sarita pranced off.

  It was about the time when the room attendants made their pre-dinner rounds to make the beds for the night and tidy up the cabins. Marlene knew that they usually worked on several staterooms at once,
leaving the doors open while vacuuming to move between them faster. She hung out by the elevators, keeping an eye on the cleaning crew.

  Most rooms were empty. Not only was the “awesome sale” going on, but a Cirque du Soleil show—the only one of the cruise—had begun. A young man began knocking on doors. If no one answered, he swiped in and began to vacuum, leaving the door open behind him so he could change the linens.

  As soon as he opened Helen’s cabin door, Marlene hid around the corner and waited. When the attendant left it open and moved to the next, she went quietly inside.

  16: Poetic Justice

  Her first glance was to a print of a butterfly in a blue frame on the wall next to the balcony door. So all the stateroom rooms did look exactly the same—two beds, a dresser, an armchair and a big closet. Marlene opened the closet doors and saw only a few dresses and a pair of jeans. A silver tray and two glasses sat at the minibar, but her trained eyes noticed the absence of the stainless-steel carafe.

  She proceeded to the dresser and, as silently as she could, opened the first drawer. A leather-bound journal was inside. The first page read: Love Gone Wrong. A pilot for a miniseries. Synopsis: Antonio, a philandering, too-handsome-for-his-own-good rapper, leaves a series of spurned lovers in his wake. But when he’s rejected by the one woman he truly falls for, he despairs and eventually commits suicide.”

  Marlene began leafing through the journal’s handwritten pages—fortunately, Helen’s penmanship was easy to read.

  The characters, of course, were familiar: Antonio was a poorly disguised version of Carloalberto. There was a mean, pretty fashion icon standing in for Emma, who had been demoted in the script from wife to one of the protagonist’s many girlfriends. Another character was an enigmatic older woman who Marlene assumed was Helen herself.

  The script was middling, but Marlene wanted to finish it anyway. She considered taking it to her cabin when a page caught her attention. Some lines were underlined in red: