by R. G. Belsky
I found the possible answer in one of the articles about the drugs that killed her. It described the heroin she took as a powerful new brand of heroin being sold under the street name of Scorpio. There it was. The astrological reference I was looking for. The connection to Sign of the Zodiac.
But why Scorpio? The other two murders had been Zorn and Mesa’s astrological signs. Who in the hell was a Scorpio? That stumped me for a while, until the answer hit me. It was so damn obvious I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before.
I looked up Charles Manson’s birthday.
Manson was born November 12.
He was a Scorpio.
And he’d been Russell Zorn’s idol.
* * *
Of course, none of this really proved anything. It was all speculation and conjecture.
And there was no astrological connection to Laura Marlowe’s murder that I could find. But I was convinced I was onto something. Russell Zorn had killed Deborah Ditmar. Bobby Mesa, maybe to carry on his leader’s mission, had killed at least three others—and maybe Laura Marlowe too.
So what about Abbie Kincaid? How did her murder fit into all of this? Or did it? Mesa was dead now. He’d been dead for a long time. Zorn too.
Still, one of those threatening letters to Abbie that Lt. Wohlers showed me contained the phrase “no sense makes sense.” That didn’t mean anything to me or to him at the time. But Sally Easton had said it to me again during her interview. She said it was Russell Zorn’s favorite phrase. He was constantly repeating it; so did all the rest of his followers.
And then it showed up again in a letter to Abbie Kincaid just before she was shot to death.
“No sense makes sense.”
Was there still someone out there from Sign of the Z after all these years who murdered Abbie as part of Zorn’s twisted vendetta against stars and celebrities?
Chapter 32
ON the flight back home, I excitedly went through my notes on everything I’d found out. It was all coming together now. I didn’t know all the answers, but I had a lot of them. This is what I lived for. Breaking the big story. It was the biggest high in the world. And I was riding that high now.
I was on the verge of finally solving the murder of legendary Hollywood movie star Laura Marlowe.
And maybe linking it to a series of other unsolved celebrity murders over the years too.
It all made perfect sense when you put all the pieces together. Russell Zorn wanted to be just like his idol Charles Manson—who’d killed a movie star, Sharon Tate. What better movie star to kill than one who’d abandoned his own flock? Even though he was in jail, maybe he somehow convinced Bobby Mesa, his right-hand man, to carry out Laura Marlowe’s murder. It would have been fitting symbolism to Zorn’s followers who thought he was a god. And even though I didn’t find any astrological reference connected to Laura’s murder, that didn’t mean there wasn’t one somewhere.
For some reason, Mesa then continued to kill celebrities—or at least that was what I now believed—even after Zorn was in jail and following his execution in the gas chamber.
Yep, the more I thought about it, the more I liked that scenario. I ordered a drink from the flight attendant, took a big sip, leaned back in my seat, and congratulated myself on what a great job I’d done in California. I was still a helluva reporter. I still had the old news instinct. Malloy’s the name, scoops are my game.
Of course, I still didn’t know exactly how Thomas Rizzo fit into all this, but he had to be involved somehow. He’d had an affair with Laura, he’d helped her become a movie star, and then he’d gone back to his wife and family. Now, thirty years later, his son—all grown up—had begun dating a TV journalist who was investigating what really happened. Then she winds up dead at the same hotel where Laura died.
There were too many coincidences here to ignore.
What I couldn’t figure out was how a mob boss like Rizzo and a wacky cult like Sign of the Z could be part of the same story.
Who did what and why?
Was there some connection between all of this that I was missing?
* * *
When my plane landed at Kennedy Airport, I got some startling news. After being without Wi-Fi for more than five hours on my flight, I turned on my iPad and saw a series of breaking news messages flashing across my screen. They said that a suspect had been arrested for the murder of TV star Abbie Kincaid. He was identified as Bill Remesch of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The story had broken on the rival New York Post website just about the time I was boarding my plane for the flight back.
I checked the Daily News site. I saw that our story didn’t go up until an hour or two later. It was clear from the way it was written that we’d had to scramble just to match the basic information of the Post story. There wasn’t a lot of detail. Remesch had been arrested at his home in Milwaukee for the Abbie Kincaid murder. New York City police had gone there with a search warrant for the house and also for his auto parts and body shop. They discovered a series of threatening letters directed at Abbie Kincaid—similar to the ones she’d been receiving at her studio in the weeks before her death. Even more importantly, they found a gun. A .45 caliber handgun. The same kind of gun that had been used to shoot Abbie. Final ballistics tests were still pending, but a police spokesman said they were confident it would turn out to be the murder weapon.
Her ex-husband. The one she’d humiliated on national television.
It made sense, I guess, and everyone had said the cops were zeroing in on him.
Except I wished it had been somebody else.
I’d wanted to believe all along that Abbie’s death really had something to do with Laura Marlowe. That way, by solving the Laura mystery, I would somehow gain some sort of closure on Abbie’s death too. It would have been a nice neat little package if it turned out that way. But as I’d found out a long time ago, life doesn’t usually work out the way you want it to.
Abbie was gone, and there was nothing I could do about that now.
All I had left was Laura Marlowe.
Chapter 33
THERE was a series of emails and text messages to me from Stacy Albright too. They had begun several hours earlier and become increasingly more frantic as they went on. The last one said: Malloy, I want to talk to you ASAP!! In addition to the capitalization and exclamation marks, she’d marked the ASAP!! in bold-faced letters. She’d also written the word URGENT at the top of the message. I had a feeling it might be important.
“What kind of a mood is Stacy in?” I asked Jeff Aronson when I got to the newsroom.
“Regarding?”
“Me.”
“Not good.”
“How not good?”
“Borderline manic, I’d say. She keeps asking for you. I don’t think it’s to name you Employee of the Month.”
“How can I get in so much trouble when I wasn’t even here?”
“It’s pretty amazing, when you think about it.”
“What did I do?”
“It isn’t so much about what you did, it’s all about what you didn’t do.”
“The Remesch arrest?”
Aronson nodded. “We got beat on the story,” he said. “The big bosses were very unhappy about that.”
“How in the hell was I supposed to know they were going to arrest someone? I was out in California.”
“Yeah, well the editor-in-chief wanted to know about that. He said he thought you were supposed to have some kind of an in on this story because you were friends with Abbie and all. He wanted to know who the hell sent you to California and why. Let’s just say he made it clear he didn’t think it was a particularly good idea.”
“Did Stacy happen to mention that she’d approved my trip? That she thought it was a good idea?”
“From what I hear, that wasn’t her version of what happened.”
“So the editor of this newspaper thinks I just went out there on my own and blew off the story he assumed I was working on.”
“That about sums it up.”
“And Stacy never said a word in my defense?”
“Did you really think she would?”
“I always believe in the innate goodness of my fellow human beings.”
“Stacy’s not a human being,” Aronson said. “She’s an editor.”
* * *
I went to see her. She was sitting at her desk with the New York Post website on her computer. The headline said: COPS NAB TV STAR’S KILLER.
“What happened?” she asked.
“My trip to California was very pleasant, thank you for asking.”
“What happened?” she repeated.
“Oh, I saw Hollywood and Vine. Went to the Beverly Wilshire where all the big producers hang out. I didn’t make it to Disneyland, but maybe next time. I’ll be sure to show you all my pictures as soon as I have them developed. There’s one of me standing in front of George Clooney’s house and . . .”
“You were supposed to be Abbie’s friend,” Stacy said.
“I was.”
“You said you had close connections to the case.”
“Yes.”
“So why is this story appearing in the opposition’s paper?”
“Because I was in California when it happened.”
“Which raises the question of why you were in California when the damn story was in New York.”
“Wait a minute, Stacy—you sent me there.”
“I didn’t send you. You asked me to go because you said you could get a big story out there. You said the Laura Marlowe case and Abbie Kincaid were all related. That if you solved one, you solved the other. I believed you. My mistake. While you were three thousand miles away, we got scooped on the real story right here.”
“I never said I was certain the two cases were connected.”
“Sure you did.”
“Stacy, I said I was doing the Laura Marlowe story. I said it was possible that her murder and Abbie’s were related. If so, by solving the Laura Marlowe case, I’d solve Abbie’s too. That’s what I told you. There were no guarantees. You don’t get guarantees with a story. You just follow it and see where it leads you. That’s how it’s done.”
She wasn’t listening to me.
It was pretty clear to me what was going on here. Stacy had gotten a lot of flack from above about why we got beat on the story. She dumped the blame off on me. Maybe she knew she was lying, maybe she’d actually convinced herself that it was all my fault. You never know how a mind like Stacy’s works. I couldn’t fathom it.
Just a few days ago, I’d been a big star again at the Daily News. Front page stories on Abbie Kincaid and then Laura Marlowe. The paper loved me. The readers loved me. Stacy loved me. And now I was back in the doghouse again. Welcome to my life. You’d think I’d have gotten used to the ups and downs of the newspaper business and how quickly you can become a star and then see it all disappear in an instant. But I never have.
“We need to go into damage control,” Stacy said. “The Post won round one of the Abbie Kincaid story, but the fight isn’t over yet. We still have you and your relationship with Abbie on our side to build readership and web traffic on in a bounce off the arrest. People still remember the way you cried on that webcast after Abbie’s death. The video of that went viral and is still all over the net. Okay, there’s a police press conference upcoming on Remesch’s arrest. We’ll have you liveblog it for the website, along with a biography stressing the close relationship you had with Abbie before she died. I want your byline on all of the follow-up stories on Remesch too. Maybe you can even write a first-person piece about your feelings on the ex-husband snuffing out the life of this beautiful, talented woman.”
“Why me, Stacy? I mean if you really feel I screwed up the arrest story that badly . . .”
“I need you to be the face of the Daily News on the Abbie Kincaid story, Gil. It’s just good business.”
I stared at her.
“What about Laura Marlowe?” I said.
“What about her?”
“I found out some really interesting stuff.”
“What do I care about a thirty-year-old murder?”
“You cared before.”
“That’s because I thought it was connected to the Abbie Kincaid case.”
“It’s still a good story.”
I told her everything that I’d found out. About Laura’s secret life as a young porn star before she made it big. About the details of her love affair with Rizzo. Most of all, about her being part of the Sign of the Z cult out in the California desert. And how there might even be a connection between the Sign of the Z cult and other killings.
But, even as I went through it all, I could tell she wasn’t really that interested. Laura Marlowe was yesterday’s news to her. No matter how sensational the details were, it was still about a murder that happened thirty years ago. Abbie Kincaid was today. Some editors—not many—have the capacity to see beyond the narrow confines of today’s story. Stacy wasn’t one of them.
“So go write the friggin’ Laura Marlowe thing,” she said when I was finished.
“But I don’t think it’s the whole story.”
“What is the whole story?”
“I’m not sure yet.”
“So when you find out, write that too. But in the meantime, get me something to put in our paper on the Abbie Kincaid arrest that I haven’t already read in the New York Post.”
Chapter 34
TELL me about Bill Remesch,” I said to Lt. Wohlers.
We were sitting in a Dunkin’ Donuts down the block from the 19th Precinct. This time I’d bought Wohlers a box of assorted glazed, sugar, and jelly donuts as a bribe to get him to talk to me. He was working on one of the sugar donuts at the moment. Some of the powdery sugar had dribbled down onto his chin and the front of his shirt. I thought about telling him he was a sloppy eater, but decided not to.
“They arrested Remesch in Milwaukee,” Wohlers said. “He waived extradition, he was flown back to New York, and he’s now sitting in the Rikers Island House of Detention. He was arraigned on a charge of first-degree murder, the murder of his ex-wife. The former Abbie Remesch. Who you and I and the rest of America knew, of course, as Abbie Kincaid.”
“What makes everyone think that Remesch did it?”
“Don’t you read the newspapers?”
“I work for one, remember.”
“One of your rival papers had a good story about it the other day.”
“Thanks for reminding me.”
“You got in trouble for that?”
“Let’s just say my editor prefers to read her scoops in the Daily News and not the Post.”
Which is why we were at the Dunkin’ Donuts this time. I figured Stacy wouldn’t be as generous with me on the expense account in her current mood. So I opted for the budget interview. Jelly and glazed and sugar donuts instead of corned beef. I do whatever it takes to get a story.
“How did you miss the arrest?” Wohlers asked me.
“I was out in California on the Laura Marlowe thing.”
“Bad timing for you.”
“My editor, Stacy Albright, got in trouble with her bosses for sending me. Stacy is very ambitious. So she blamed me even though she knew all about it beforehand. You know what they say—crap like this always runs downhill.”
Wohlers shook his head. “Boy, it does sound like you really managed to get that bitch’s tit caught in the wringer on this business about the Kincaid broad.”
“Uh, I don’t think you’re supposed to say stuff like that anymore, lieutenant.”
“Not say what?”
“Any of the three somewhat colorful—albeit offensive—comments about
women you just packed into that one sentence.”
“Why not?”
“It’s against the rules.”
“What rules?”
“The rules of political correctness.”
“There’s rules?”
“Oh, there’s rules.”
“What are they?”
“I’m not sure. They keep changing. But I’m pretty sure it’s illegal to say ‘tit caught in a wringer,’ ‘bitch,’ or ‘broad’ about a woman in the twenty-first century.”
“So call a cop,” he shrugged.
Wohlers took another bite of a donut. This time jelly spurted out onto his face and the front of his shirt. I decided I had to say something. He wiped some of it off his face, but he used his sleeve to do it. Now there was a combination of sugar and jelly on that too. He was rapidly becoming an environmental hazard.
“Anyway, we got a break when one of the bellhops at the Regent remembered seeing Remesch there the night that Abbie was killed. He identified a picture of him, then later picked him out of a lineup too. The bellhop can even put him on the same floor as the room where Abbie was staying. That means Remesch had the opportunity to kill her.
“Then we talked to some of the people from Abbie’s show, and they said he’d showed up there too. That’s probably why she was carrying a gun. She was afraid of her ex-husband. He told a lot of people that she’d ruined his life, and that someday he’d make her pay for it. He was mad because she’d trashed him on national TV. That’s what we call motive.
“Finally, we sent cops to go talk to him in Wisconsin. They got a search warrant and checked out his house and his auto repair shop. There was nothing at the house, but they found a .45 caliber revolver hidden at the bottom of an oil drum in the shop. Ballistics tests confirm it was the same gun used to kill Abbie Kincaid. That’s the means. Motive, means, and opportunity. We’ve got ’em all. End of story.”
“That’s very good thinking,” I said.
“Yeah, it was fine police work.”
