by R. G. Belsky
Just thinking about all of this was almost enough to push me into another panic attack. But after a few deep breaths and an almost Zenlike effort to remain calm, I was okay again.
I took a swig of beer and tried to put all of these thoughts out of my mind. I focused my attention back on Gilligan’s Island. No matter how many times I watched these episodes, I always think that maybe this is the one where they’ll figure out how to get off the island. They never do, of course. They finally do get rescued in one of the sequel TV movies made years later, but by then I had pretty much lost interest. I hummed the theme song of the show to myself now. A three-hour tour. Three-hour tour.
By the time the episode was over, my beer bottle was empty. I had a couple of options. I could walk into the kitchen, get myself another beer, and keep watching Gilligan while I either fell asleep or simply passed out.
Or I could get out of this lonely apartment for a while.
I looked at the time. Just past ten o’clock. The first edition of the Daily News would be hitting the newsstands with my story. I could always read it online, of course. But I still loved the feel of holding an actual newspaper in my hands. I walked over to the window. Even from the thirty-sixth floor, I could tell it was a nice night out there. One of these comfortable early summer evenings in New York City before the heat and humidity settled in for July and August. I decided to go out and buy a copy of the paper.
On my way out through the lobby of my building, the doorman gave me a friendly greeting.
“How are you, Mr. Malloy?” he said.
“I met a TV star today,” I told him.
“Good for you.”
“Abbie Kincaid.”
There was a blank look on his face.
“She has a news program called The Prime Time Files. It’s a newsmagazine kind of thing. Sort of like Barbara Walters or Diane Sawyer. Take my word for it, Abbie Kincaid is a big star.”
“I’m sure she is.”
“A big, big star.”
“Good for you,” he said again as he held the door open for me to go out.
Yep, this was my new life.
High-rise apartment.
High floor.
High rent.
Same old high anxiety.
Chapter 8
I WATCHED Abbie Kincaid’s show at a place called Headliners. Stacy Albright wanted me to write a follow-up article on whatever Abbie said about Laura Marlowe. She’d invited several of the editors and reporters to watch with her. I was one of them.
For those of us in the newspaper world in New York City, Headliners bar is legendary. There’s an old-style printing press in the front. Blowups of famous Page Ones from the city’s newspapers—most of them no longer around—hung from behind the bar. There was also something called a Gallery of Page One Heroes on another wall, pictures of reporters who had broken memorable stories over the years. One of them was me for a big exclusive I’d done. There was a plaque above the picture, which said: Gil Malloy, Reporter of the Year. I was smiling in the picture, standing between Marilyn Staley, who was the Daily News city editor then, and Rick Hodges, the managing editor. Hodges died of a heart attack a few years later, and Staley was fired more recently to make room for Stacy Albright. It all seemed like a million years ago now.
When I got to the bar, Stacy and the others were sitting around a table underneath a big wide-screen TV. I pulled up a chair at the end of the table, as far away from Stacy as I could get. Jeff Aronson, a reporter who covered the federal courts for the News, was next to me. He was drinking a bourbon on the rocks.
Jeff and I had started out at the paper together as copyboys. My rise had been more rapid, but then so had my flameouts. Aronson, on the other hand, had been a steady contributor for the Daily News the whole time. Never a big star, but highly thought of as a federal court reporter.
I’d drunk with Jeff before, and I knew his routine. Always drank bourbon on the rocks. He’d have two of them—no more, no less. Then he’d catch a train to the suburbs in New Rochelle, where he’d go home to his nice house with his nice wife and his four nice little children. He was one of those people who seemed to have it all. He even went to church and visited hospitals on Sunday. Of course, you never really knew for sure about a person. A guy like Jeff Aronson could have bodies of teenaged girls buried in his basement, I suppose. But as far as I could tell, he seemed to be a good reporter, a good husband, and a good father. He had his life in order, everything under control. I never understood how people could deal with all that kind of responsibility. Me, I had trouble just getting to work on time. Maybe it was some sort of a character flaw in me.
“How many stupid things has she said so far?” I asked Aronson.
“Who?”
“Stacy.”
He laughed.
“Her record is twelve in one hour,” I said. “That was the day she said Joe DiMaggio played for the Brooklyn Dodgers and she couldn’t remember if there were four or five Beatles.”
“She’s young.”
“Youth is no excuse for ignorance.”
“Weren’t you ever young?”
“No,” I said, “I was born at the age of thirty-seven and immediately became a cynical, embittered newspaper reporter.”
The Laura Marlowe story was the first segment of The Prime Time Files. It started with a montage of pictures showing the movie star at the height of her career. Winning an Oscar for Lucky Lady. Arriving at a premiere for The Langley Caper. On the set of Once Upon a Time Forever. Signing autographs for fans. And finally showing up at the party in New York on the last night of her life.
“Even though Laura Marlowe died thirty years ago, her legend continues to grow,” Abbie said. She was standing in front of the New York Regent Hotel where the shooting took place. “One story is that she’s still alive somewhere, that she really didn’t die that night at this hotel. Like UFOs or Elvis Presley, there are reports of Laura Marlowe sightings in the tabloids and even some of the more legitimate press on a regular basis. Fans have set up websites devoted to the ‘Laura isn’t really dead’ theory. We take a look at this and many other questions about the tragic ’80s star in this Prime Time Files special report tonight. Some of the answers we found will shock you.”
She spent the next several minutes of the segment debunking all those rumors. She said the evidence proved incontrovertibly that Laura Marlowe was indeed dead. Then it started to get interesting.
“The person who police say killed her was a man named Ray Janson. Janson was obsessed with the actress and told people he wanted to marry her. He also said ominously at one point: ‘If I can’t have her, then no one will.’ Janson had stalked her for several days, according to the cops, building up to the final deadly confrontation at this hotel on the night of July 17, 1985. Police say Janson fled the scene, then committed suicide by hanging himself a few days later in a Manhattan hotel. The case was closed. But should it have been?”
Abbie went to an interview with a retired Long Island police sergeant named Greg Birnbaum, who told the following story:
On the night of July 17, 1985, Sgt. Birnbaum had arrested a man for speeding in Southampton, not far from where Laura Marlowe had a summer beach house. The driver had been going seventy-two miles per hour in a forty-five zone. His license was also expired and he became belligerent with the officers, saying he was in a hurry to get somewhere. The police report said it appeared he was under the influence of drugs or alcohol, although subsequent tests turned up negative.
The suspect was eventually taken to the Suffolk County Court and booked at 9:20 p.m. He spent the night in jail, paid a $150 fine, and was released on his own recognizance in the morning. The name of the suspect, taken from his expired license and his car registration, was James Janson. Which, it turns out, was the Laura Marlowe stalker’s real name—James Ray Janson.
He had begun using his mid
dle name of Ray because it was the name of the character Laura marries in the movie Lucky Lady. “A check of old police records by The Prime Time Files turned up a form that Janson had signed while he was in custody,” Abbie said. “We discovered the signature matched that of the Ray Janson who had died in the hotel room days later. It was definitely the same man.”
This was followed by an interview with another retired cop, a New York City homicide detective named Bill Erlich. He was one of the detectives who worked on the Laura Marlowe murder case. Erlich said that, contrary to legend and popular lore, no one actually saw Janson shoot the actress. A lot of people saw him hanging around the hotel the day or so before the shooting, asking questions about her and hoping to get a glimpse as she walked through the lobby. Then an eyewitness saw someone running away from the scene that he identified as Janson.
“When he turned up as a suicide in the hotel room a few days later, we just figured it all fit together,” Erlich said. “In retrospect, maybe we should have investigated it more.”
Then came an interview with Laura’s mother and husband. They talked about how shocked they were over these new disclosures. They speculated on how big a Hollywood star the actress would have become if her life hadn’t been cut short so tragically. They also threw in a few plugs for the Laura Marlowe museum, memorabilia, and website.
I remembered the two of them shared in the actress’s estate. This story would be a bonanza for their business, I thought to myself. Birnbaum and Erlich, the two cops on the program, would be courted for big bucks by all the media. And Abbie’s ratings would soar. Everyone was going to make money off this. Everyone except Laura Marlowe.
“The big question this leaves us with, of course,” Abbie was saying on the screen, “is who really killed Laura Marlowe? If Ray Janson didn’t do it, and it now appears that he was in police custody some seventy-five miles away on Long Island at the time of the shooting, then someone else did. That person has gotten away with murder—one of the most famous murders of all time—for the past thirty years. Next week on The Prime Time Files, we’ll have even more shocking revelations about this case. Tune in then.”
The segment ended with the famous picture of Laura Marlowe, blowing a kiss to her fans just before she died.
* * *
When it was over, Stacy came and sat with us.
“That’s a helluva story,” she said.
“Yeah, ain’t it?”
“Did she tell you anything about what she was going to say?”
“No.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Stacy, you said to write a story about her story without knowing what it was going to be. The whole thing was your idea.”
“And she hasn’t told you anything about what she’s got coming up next week either?”
I thought about our conversation on serial killers.
“No,” I said, which was sort of the truth.
“Can you try to talk to her again?”
“Sure.”
“This could be a really big exclusive.”
“Yeah, but it’s her exclusive—not ours.”
“Who cares whose story it really is?”
“Well . . .”
“You better get back to the office and write it up right away. I want to get it up on our website as soon as possible. Hell, if we play this right we’ll get more traffic from it than The Prime Times Files’ own webpage does.”
On my way out of Headliners, I passed by the picture of myself on the wall again and wondered why the guy in it looked so happy.
Chapter 9
I TRIED reaching out to Abbie a couple of times after the telecast, but never got any response from either her or Lang.
I figured whatever connection I’d made with her during that interview in her office was just my imagination.
But then she called me up out of the blue a few days later and asked me to have dinner with her.
We met on a rainy night at a coffee shop near Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. Abbie was wearing jeans, cowboy boots, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap. She looked comfortable, more relaxed than she had that first day we met. I was expecting a place a bit more glamorous and chic than a coffee shop. But she picked the spot, so it was fine with me.
“I love this place,” she said. “I’m sick of all those goddamned pretentious, upscale meat market spots where everybody goes just to show how happening they are. I like the atmosphere here. I like the people. It takes me back to when I first came to New York City as a struggling young actress.”
“You ate here then?”
“I worked here.”
“As a waitress?”
“That’s right.”
I looked at one of the waitresses serving food to a family at a booth next to us. I tried to picture a young Abbie wearing a waitress’s uniform and dreaming of her big break. I’d eaten here a few times myself over the years. Maybe she even waited on me back then.
“So now you still like to eat here?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“To see how far you’ve come since those days?”
“Something like that.”
“I understand.”
“Besides,” she smiled, “the macaroni and cheese is real good too.”
Vincent D’Nolfo, the big security guard I’d seen at The Prime Time Files studio, was sitting in a car outside. He’d dropped her off and stayed close by in case she needed him at any point during the evening. That made me a bit uncomfortable. But it was sure better than having him join us inside at the table.
The waitress came over and took our order. She was blond and pretty and very young, probably just out of high school. I wondered if she was an aspiring actress or dancer or TV anchorwoman, like so many waitresses in New York City. I was pretty sure she recognized Abbie, but she didn’t say anything. Abbie gave her a warm smile. Maybe she saw herself in the girl a long time ago.
“Did you hate it?” I said to Abbie after the waitress left.
“Waiting on tables here?”
“Yes.”
“No, it really wasn’t so bad. I mean I was in New York City. I was young. I had all these big dreams. Besides, working in this place was a lot better at the time than the alternative.”
“Which was?”
“Being a housewife in Milwaukee.”
Abbie told me how she’d grown up in a small town in Wisconsin. She had been her high school homecoming queen, worked summers at the Dairy Queen, and then gotten married at the age of eighteen to her high school boyfriend, a football player named Billy Remesch. He didn’t have the grades to get a football scholarship to college, so he took a job in an auto body shop in Milwaukee. It looked like she would settle down there with him for the rest of her life.
Then Abbie won a drawing at a movie theater. The grand prize was an all-expenses-paid trip to New York City. She was having lunch at the Four Seasons as part of the prize package when a Broadway producer saw her, cast her in a small role in a show, and—just like that—she became an actress. She divorced her husband and never went back to Wisconsin.
There were some hard times at first, and that’s when she worked as a waitress to pay the bills. After a few years, she became moderately successful—working enough to make a living. Some decent supporting roles in movies, TV commercial work—and even a recurring part in a hit sitcom that lasted for a season and a half.
After that, she did a pilot for a daytime TV talk show, Girl Talk, that quickly took off. She signed a multi-year deal with a top syndication company and became a bigger star than she’d ever been as an actress.
The show stressed reality, and nothing was off limits. Abbie wore her emotions on her sleeve. She’d tell the audience about her diets, her sex life, and her innermost secrets. When she was happy, they laughed. When she was sad, they cried. She knew how to push just
the right buttons to connect with the viewing public.
Maybe the show’s biggest moment came when she revealed on national television how she’d been physically, sexually, and emotionally abused by her husband while they were married. She said she’d kept it a secret for years. She told the TV audience she was coming forward so that other abused women would also find the courage to deal with the problem. She ended the show with a poignant plea to her ex-husband to get professional help before he hurt anyone else. The show set new ratings records.
Later, she got an offer to do her own news-magazine show on nighttime network TV. The little girl who once worked at a Dairy Queen was now interviewing heads of state and some of the biggest names in show business.
“It’s a funny thing about fame,” she said at one point. “Fame comes and goes very quickly sometimes, like a thief in the night. Take Laura Marlowe, for instance. One minute she’s a struggling actress who’s going nowhere, the next she’s the biggest star in the world. And then she’s dead. It all happens so fast. Even if we get lucky like Laura did, we need to be able to enjoy the moment. Because no one ever knows how long it will last. I guess that’s the message we can all learn from her life.”
As we ate, we talked about the fallout from her story. The cops had reopened the Laura Marlowe investigation. The trail was very cold after thirty years, of course, but they were at least going through the motions of trying to find the real killer. The press had picked up on it in a big way too, with Laura Marlowe’s name back in the headlines all over again. And everyone was talking about Abbie and wondering about the blockbuster exclusive she had promised for next week’s show.
“Tell me about the serial killer angle,” I said.
“I can’t.”
I stared at her in amazement. “You showed me a picture of a dead singer named Cheryl Carson and three other women. You suggested to me that their deaths were somehow connected. You all but told me you thought they were killed by one person—the same person who killed Laura Marlowe thirty years ago. If it’s true, that’s one of the greatest serial killer stories of all time. So what else did you find out?”
