by Ed Gorman
She laughed. "Oh, Puckett, I wish you were a shit like all the other men I've known. Why do you have to be so decent?"
"I'm afraid for you, Anne. I'm afraid of what might happen to you."
Slap of waves; pitch of ship; high, wet stink of human meat.
"Stand up and turn around," she said. "Slowly."
He complied.
When he got turned around and saw her standing there, the butcher knife huge and terrible in her fine, small hand, he was shocked at the amount of blood splattered across her face and white blouse. It even tainted her coppery hair. She looked as if she'd worked a hard, pitiless shift on a killing floor.
She held the knife out straight at his chest so that he would not be inclined to lunge at her. Then she stooped slightly and reached around him and picked up the gun from the top of the refrigerator.
In her hand, the weapon looked outsize, even comic, like an ugly German handgun in the tiny hand of a little girl.
"I wish it could have worked for us, Puckett," she said. "I really do. But it was too late. Everything was already set in motion. Inside my head, I mean. A lot more than I knew."
She looked right at him, pretty, delicate, mad. "I want you to help me, Puckett."
"I want to help you, Anne."
"I want you to hold me."
There was no evidence of fear, no evidence of sadness. He had never seen her more controlled.
"All right," he said.
"Don't try to take the gun from me."
"All right."
"You promise?"
"I promise."
He took a step forward, letting more of the backglow into the room.
The refrigerator light was unkind to her face, gave her hollows and angles where they were not becoming. And all the while, he could feel Cobey's blue eyes on them, staring, staring.
"I really was starting to love you again, Puckett. I really was."
She walked toward him one, two steps, and he slid his arms around her and gently took her to him, lover, brother, father, priest.
He heard the knife hit the floor.
He held her even tighter.
"I love you, Anne."
"Even after all I've done?"
"Yes. I think I loved you the first time I ever saw you. It was just—that way. Nothing I could do about it."
"I'm sorry, Puckett."
"It's all right."
"You know what I'm going to do?"
"Yes."
"Will you help me?"
"No. No, I couldn't do that, Anne."
"But you said you loved me. You'd help me if you loved me."
"I'm sorry, Anne. You'll have to do it yourself."
"I'm afraid..."
"I know."
"Hold me tighter, Puckett. Hold me tighter than you've ever held me before."
And so he did, there on the pitching yacht in the rolling, foggy, isolated darkness. He held her until he felt her get the gun set in the proper direction, and slip her finger against the trigger, and jerk backward as the bullet ripped through her ribs.
"Oh, Puckett," she said. "Oh, Puckett..."
And then he thought she might cry, but of course, it was too late for that.
She was dead.
3
"I suppose she loved him," Veronica said at O'Hare the next day as Puckett was headed west and she east. "Even though she killed him. I mean, just because you kill somebody doesn't necessarily mean that you don't love them."
And what, exactly, was one to say to that?
4
There were a lot of nasty jokes in Hollywood that next week about how Cobey Daniels had lost his head over the woman who'd killed him.
There were three hundred people at Cobey's funeral, six hundred if you counted press, and Puckett and Veronica stood in the front line graveside, right next to Lilly Carlyle and Wade Preston, both of whom were dressed in dramatic black outfits straight out of Sunset Boulevard. Lilly kept shooting angry glances at Preston.
The grass was very green and the sky very blue and there was a sweet, soft, April breeze.
By now, Puckett knew everything that had happened. Anne had left a letter for him and the police gave him copies of the tapes Cobey had made.
Veronica had admitted, just as they'd entered the church in Beverly Hills, that she'd "stoked up on franks." She seemed almost oblivious to everything that was going on. He envied her.
After the ceremony, Puckett gave her a ride to LAX, where she gave him a chaste kiss good-bye.
In the afternoon, Puckett went to a pet store and bought the tiniest, most heartbreaking little kitten he'd ever seen and he wasn't even sure why.
He took her back home and set up her food bowl and her water bowl and her litter box.
And then he spent the rest of the day following her around like some moonstruck adolescent.
He did not consider it sentimental to call her by the name of Anne...
From the December 2, 1994 edition of The National Tattler
"Starmaker" Finds New Youngster
Discoverer of Cobey Daniels says new boy "even more appealing and handsome"
Lilly Carlyle, the Hollywood talent agent who discovered and built the late Cobey Daniels into a teenage mega-star, says that five-year-old Brad Cudahy will soon be the "biggest child star to ever hit TV."
As she did with the late Cobey Daniels, Carlyle sought permission to take the boy from his parents on an Illinois farm. After getting their agreement, Carlyle, who first saw Brad on a Chicago talent show, flew the boy to Los Angeles where he will live with her and receive the same kind of "special treatment" that Cobey Daniels enjoyed.
Of Daniels, all Carlyle would say was, "The pressures of fame were just too much for him."
Cobey Daniels was killed last year in a grisly Chicago murder.
"I'm really looking forward to living with Brad," Lilly Carlyle told our reporter enthusiastically. "There's so much he can learn from me."
