Shooting for the Stars

by R. G. Belsky

  On the last page of the file, there were no notes. It was just a single sheet of paper with a verse of some kind on it, written in a different handwriting from Abbie’s. It looked like the threatening emails that Lt. Wohlers, the detective at the 19th Precinct, had shown me, except this message had been hand-delivered somehow instead of being sent by email. The verse said:

  Sign of the Z.

  Sign of the Z.

  Where or where

  Can you be?

  Sign of the Z,

  Sign of the Z,

  Please stay

  Away from me.

  Sign of the Z,

  Sign of the Z,

  Now coming

  After Abbie.

  There was a date at the top of the page. It was the same date that Abbie had showed up at my apartment, babbling something about “sign of the Z” and carrying a gun. Now I knew why she was so scared that night.

  Below all this, written in big block letters—again not Abbie’s handwriting—were the names of the dead women celebrities.

  Plus one more name.

  Abbie Kincaid.

  Chapter 23

  VINCENT D’Nolfo had a new job. He was working security at a nightclub off of Union Square. It was one of those trendy places with loud music, flashing lights, and beautiful people all over the place.

  “This is just temporary,” D’Nolfo told me. “Until I get something else.”

  “What happened at The Prime Time Files?”

  “I screwed up.”

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “Abbie’s dead. I was supposed to protect her.”

  “You couldn’t have known something was going to happen that night.”

  “That was my job—to know.”

  We were sitting in front of the club. It was nearly 11 at night, but the streets were crowded with people on a balmy summer night. Some of them going in and out of the place where he worked, others heading for other nightspots in the area. Many of the women were wearing extremely skimpy outfits. Short skirts, short shorts, tight-fitting and revealing tops. As a reporter, I have a keen instinct for observing stuff like this.

  I studied several of the women carefully, especially a young blonde who passed by us with a swivel-hipped walk in what must have been six-inch-high platform heels. Just getting detail for my story, of course. All part of the job of being a professional journalist. Sure, it’s tough work, but somebody’s gotta do it.

  As for D’Nolfo, he didn’t seem so scary to me now. He didn’t give me a hard time either like he did before. I think he might have even been glad to see me. He’d been really shaken up by Abbie’s death, he said, and I got the feeling he wanted to share that grief with someone.

  “Do you remember in the movie The Godfather when Don Corleone—Brando’s character—is shot? His bodyguard had taken the day off. The family kills him later. Partly because they figure he must have known something in advance. But also because they wanted to blame somebody. You always blame the bodyguard when the client gets killed. That’s just the way it is.”

  “And the show blamed you.”

  “Lang did. He said I’d gotten his star killed. He said I’d screwed up his career. He said she was his meal ticket and now she was gone. That’s when he fired me. Can you believe that guy?”

  “Bereavement takes many forms,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “Sometimes we say things like that to hide our true feelings.”

  “Lang’s only true feelings are for himself. He doesn’t give a damn about Abbie.”

  “How did you feel about her?”

  “I liked her. I really did. She was the real deal. It wasn’t just about the job, she was a friend too. I feel bad enough already about what happened. I don’t need that jerk Lang telling me how I should have saved her. I beat myself up enough over it without anyone else’s help.”

  “How long did you do security for her?”

  “Since she came to Prime Time.”

  He said he’d been working for another show at the network that got canceled. He told me about being in the Army. After that, he was an ex–Housing Authority cop. He’d spent eight years patrolling the city’s projects and then left to go into private security work where he could make more money. He said he and Abbie hit it off right away, and things had been great. Until that last night.

  “She told me not to come,” he said. “She said she had to do something personal. She said she wanted to be alone and I could take the night off.”

  “Did you know she’d been carrying a gun for protection?”

  “Of course I did. She said it was no big deal. Just a precaution.”

  “Did you believe her?”

  “I wasn’t sure what to think. There was that period just before she died when we became aware of all the scary emails and threats she was getting. And the show put all the extra security on her. That’s when she started carrying the gun too. But she told me that last day before she went to the hotel that there was nothing to worry about. That she knew where the threats had come from and that they weren’t real. I don’t think she was even carrying the gun anymore on the night she died. She thought she was in no danger. She was wrong.”

  I explained to him how I was doing a story about Laura Marlowe, the last story Abbie was working on when she died.

  “Do you think this Laura thing had something to do with what happened to her?” he asked.

  “It’s possible.”

  “Well, the cops don’t agree with you. They came to talk to me the other day. They asked me a lot of questions about that last day, enemies Abbie might have had, arguments I remember—stuff like that. I mentioned the Laura Marlowe story, but they weren’t very interested. They’re focusing more on the present. I got the feeling they think it was Tommy Rizzo or that kid from Wisconsin she was married to.”

  “What did you tell them about Rizzo?” I asked.

  “I said they went out for a little while, and then they broke up. I thought it might get ugly. I was worried about that because I wasn’t sure how to handle the situation. I mean the kid is Thomas Rizzo’s son, so I didn’t want to have to rough him up if things got out of hand. But it never came to that. He was always very polite to me. We got along okay.”

  “What about her ex-husband?”

  “He showed up on the set one day. He was still upset over the piece she’d done about him on her old daytime show. About how he’d abused her and beaten her and been pretty much of an all-around jerk. He was furious. He kept ranting about how she’d ruined his life and made a fool out of him. I had to throw him out of the building. He thought he was a tough guy—some kind of a big football player back in high school, Abbie said—but he was out of shape and not much of a fighter. He came back again a few days before she died. I guess that’s why the police are so interested in him. Abbie didn’t want to see him, so I just escorted him out of the building. I had no trouble with him.”

  I tried to return the conversation back to the Laura Marlowe story. He didn’t know a lot about that. Abbie had been incredibly secretive about what she was doing, not telling him much more than she’d told Lang. He did say that she’d asked him for help in tracking down information on a couple of things though.

  “The first was about a month ago. She asked me if I knew any law enforcement people in Los Angeles. I said I had an ex-partner who’d moved out there and was now with the LAPD. I called him up and got her some information.”

  “What was she looking for?”

  “She wanted to know about some old movie company that used to be around years ago. I’m not sure if it had anything to do with the Laura Marlowe business. But I just assumed so because of the Hollywood connection and all.”

  “Do you remember the name of the company?”

  He thought for a second. “Glow worm, glitter . .
. something like that . . . wait a minute, glimmer. Yeah, that was it. Glimmer Productions.”

  “What else did she ask you?”

  “She was also looking for information on some kind of cult or radical group.”

  “What was the name of the group?”

  “It didn’t actually have a name—just a letter from the alphabet.”

  “The letter Z?” I asked.

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “Did she ever say ‘Sign of the Z’?”

  “That sounds familiar.”

  I told him about the verse I’d found in Abbie’s office about a “Sign of the Z.” About her talking to me about it at my apartment. And about the threatening note to her I’d seen in Wohlers’ office, which included the phrase: “Beware the Z.”

  “What does it mean?” D’Nolfo asked.

  “I’m not sure.”

  * * *

  Glimmer Productions wasn’t listed anywhere. It wasn’t registered with the Hollywood Writers Guild or any other group in the filmmaking industry. I couldn’t find anything about it on the Internet or in the Daily News library or anywhere else I looked. As far as I could tell, Glimmer Productions didn’t exist.

  But it did once. Of course, that was thirty years ago. Even the big movie studios had changed a lot since then. Some of them weren’t around anymore. No reason to expect something like Glimmer Productions—which was probably much more of a second-tier operation—to still be there.

  I started making calls at random to some movie studios and productions companies and agents. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. I wasn’t sure what else to do though. So I just decided to throw a bunch of stuff up against the wall and see if anything stuck. Sometimes that worked, sometimes it didn’t.

  When I was a young reporter, I sat next to a rewrite-man from the night shift who said he was the best telephone guy on the paper. He boasted he could get more over the phone than most people could get at the scene. I watched him one night while he got an exclusive interview with the parents of an NYU coed who’d been brutally slain in her dorm room. No one else could get them to talk, but he did. I asked him later how he pulled it off. He said he’d called them the first time, and they hung up. They kept doing this every time he called. So how did he get the interview? I asked. On the fifteenth call, they broke down and told him everything. I was the only reporter willing to make fifteen calls, he told me. I never forgot that lesson.

  It only took me nine calls to find someone who remembered Glimmer Productions. The guy was an executive now with one of the major studios, but he said he’d started out working in the same specialty area as Glimmer.

  “What specialty are we talking about here?” I asked.

  “Pornography.”

  “Real X-rated stuff?”

  “Softcore.”

  “Did people take their clothes off?”

  “Frequently.”

  “I think I’ve got the picture.”

  I asked him if he remembered the name of the head person at Glimmer Productions.

  “No, but it wouldn’t matter anyway.”

  “Why not?”

  “An outfit like that never was upfront with you. The nominal head of the company wasn’t really in charge. There were people that pulled the strings. People who had a lot of money and a lot of clout. But they didn’t stand too well in the eyes of the law. So they stayed in the background and let somebody be up front and pretend to be in charge.”

  “Are we talking about the underworld here?”

  “Yes, we are.”

  “Any names?”

  “Hey, I’m just talking out loud here.”

  “How about Thomas Rizzo?”

  “Sure, I’ve heard of him. I can’t really say though.”

  “So what do you think became of Glimmer Productions?”

  “My God, the whole market’s different now. Now you can just get instant access to the porn site of your choice from your computer. Something like Glimmer Productions would be long gone.”

  “Who were the girls who acted in these films?”

  “Who knows? No one cared that much. Basically, you just got attractive-looking people and turned the camera on them. There’s always plenty of candidates around for that sort of stuff. They come in by the busloads every week looking for their big break in Hollywood. If they’re lucky, maybe they wind up in something like what Glimmer Productions used to be. The rest go back home again on the bus.”

  * * *

  The Sign of the Z was easier to track down. I found some old articles about it online and more buried deep in the Daily News library.

  The leader of the group was a man named Russell Zorn, a kind of Charlie Manson wannabe. It was back in 1969 when Manson and his band of crazed hippies murdered actress Sharon Tate and a bunch of other people in Los Angeles. That cold-blooded killing spree sent shock waves through the nation, symbolizing somehow once and for all that by the end of the ’60s the days of the flower children and the good vibes were definitely over.

  Zorn had tried to set up a cult family too, just like Manson did. He attracted a handful of zealots to a remote ranch in the California desert near Barstow. There was a picture of him in one of the newspaper clippings. In it he even seemed to have tried to emulate Manson’s look. Long shoulder-length hair, piercing eyes, and a tattoo on his forehead. There were several women looking at him adoringly in the picture. Just like the Manson women used to.

  The idea of the Charles Manson wannabe group was intriguing. You could float a theory, I suppose, that they’d murdered Laura Marlowe as some sort of Sharon Tate–type ritual killing. Except Zorn had been arrested for another murder the year before Laura’s death, and he was executed in 1988. His followers died or went to jail along with him. So what about all the names on Abbie’s list? Most of them happened after Zorn was dead and the Sign of the Z gone. Why did Abbie think there was a common thread between all of the killings?

  And what about Abbie? Did some renegade member of the Sign of the Z come back and murder her after all this time just because she was looking into Laura Marlowe’s death all over again? That scenario was so unlikely it would test the credulity of even the most ardent Kennedy conspiracy advocate.

  I didn’t have the answers to a lot of these questions, but I knew where I might find them. California. California was where Laura Marlowe had been a big movie star. California was where Thomas Rizzo spent a lot of time back then. California was where Glimmer Productions had been. And California was the home of the group called Sign of the Z.

  If I wanted the answers to these things, I knew I had to get to California.

  Chapter 24

  ON the night before I left for Los Angeles, I hooked up with Sherry DeConde again. I’d been thinking about her a lot. I tried telling myself my interest was at least partly because she was a potential source of more information for my story. But I sure wasn’t thinking about Laura Marlowe when I remembered that first night with her. I was thinking about the kiss we shared on the street.

  Sherry met me at my office this time. She was wearing a denim jacket, gingham blouse, tan jeans, and moccasins. Her blond hair was combed straight back and hung down almost to her jeans. She looked good. She sure as hell didn’t look sixty.

  “I still haven’t gotten used to the way a newspaper office looks these days,” she said. “It’s so much different than the newsrooms I remember when I was starting out and visited a few. There were a lot of grizzled old men back then smoking cigarettes, banging away on typewriters, and wearing those green visor hats you always see in all the old newspaper movies.”

  “This place is a bit more like an insurance office,” I said. “Nice neat little work cubicles. Computer terminals at each desk. No smoking allowed in the building. As for the grizzled old men, fifty-five percent of our staff is now women and thirty-one percent is under the age of thi
rty. We’ve even got a daycare center on the first floor.”

  I gave her a brief tour of the building. Told her how we’d moved downtown from our previous location on West 33rd Street. Before that, (and before I came to the News), the paper was on East 42nd Street in the building where they shot some of the exterior scenes for the Superman movies. This wasn’t nearly as romantic as the building on 42nd Street, but it was still a newspaper office. That was what really mattered.

  “It looks like an exciting place to work,” Sherry said.

  “Yeah, sometimes I still yell ‘stop the presses’ when I walk in the city room.”

  She looked around. “Where are the presses?”

  “Actually, they’re in New Jersey now.”

  “So saying ‘stop the presses’ really doesn’t make much sense.”

  “I know, but it makes me feel like Perry White at the Daily Planet.”

  We went to a steak restaurant on 47th Street. It was the kind of place where New York celebrities sometimes dropped in. I once saw Regis Philbin there. I wasn’t sure if Sherry would be impressed by Regis Philbin, but the steaks were pretty good. Besides, I was going to let Stacy and the Daily News pick up the check. Hey, Sherry was a source. Anyway, I didn’t figure Stacy would complain much. She didn’t bat an eye when I told her I wanted to go to California. I was the golden boy again, riding high with my stories about Abbie Kincaid and Laura Marlowe. And one thing I’d learned over the years was that when you’re on a roll, stay with it.

  The only problem with Sherry being a source though is it presented me with a bit of an ethical dilemma. What if I got lucky with her tonight? The rule is that reporters aren’t supposed to sleep with sources. Of course, I have a somewhat more flexible interpretation of this rule. Yes, I think it’s wrong for a reporter to sleep with a source to get a story. On the other hand, if you’re going to sleep with the source anyway, and you just happen to get the story along the way . . . well, then that’s okay.