Star Island (40 page)

Trying not to sound mortified, Ned Bunterman said, “No, baby, that’s plenty.”

Cherry was in full costume—ruby spandex capris, four-inch stilettos and a neoprene bustier threaded with neon tubing that pulsed electric blue. The hair was Greta Garbo from
Grand Hotel
, the makeup was Alice Cooper from his python period. Cherry’s father had long ago given up on offering style suggestions.

He said, “Have a seat, honey.”

“What for?”

“We’ve got a bit of news,” Janet Bunterman said.

Cherry covered her ears. “No freakin’ thanks. Not today.”

“Sweetie, please.”

“Why do you always do this to me? God!” Cherry popped open a Red Bull and flung herself on the couch.

“Promise you won’t get upset,” her mother began. “It’s about the
Vanity Fair
cover.”

“Yeah?”

“Well … it’s not happening.”

Ned Bunterman flinched when Cherry hurled the can against the wall. The spray caught his wife flush in the face.

“Now, settle down,” he said to his daughter. “You’ve still got
Us Weekly.”

He hadn’t the nerve to tell her that she’d been demoted from the front to an inside feature, due to late-breaking news about the late Anna Nicole Smith. According to the Larks, being bumped from a magazine cover by a dead actress was only slightly less tragic than being bumped by a live one.

“I hate you both! You are the
worst
humans ever!” Cherry screeched at her parents.

“That’s enough.”

“What about
Esquire?
Scarlett got the front of
Esquire
last Christmas.”

“Please listen,” said her father.

“Details? Marie Claire?
God, what are you saying?” Cherry yanked off her spiked heels and threw those against the wall, too. While browsing through drugstores she always checked out the magazine racks to see which female entertainers were getting face exposure.

She said, “Mom, tell me what happened right this minute! I’m not kidding!”

After toweling off, Janet Bunterman laid out the situation. Eventually Cherry quit fuming and struggled to sort out the facts.

“So Claude wasn’t really working for
VF?”

“It’s complicated. He was trying to blackmail us,” Ned Bunterman said.

“Wow. We’re talkin’ about the same Claude, right?” Cherry could hardly believe it. “Who came up with this bizarro kidnap story? Was it Lucy or Lila?”

“Group effort,” her mother said.

“And how long was I a hostage? For when people ask, I mean.”

“Just say a couple of days. The Star Island pictures turned out amazing, by the way. Right, Ned?”

“Spectacular,” agreed Cherry’s father, who like his wife hadn’t seen a single frame. “They’ll be huge. Epic. We’re going to blame the kidnapper for leaking them to the tabloids.”

“This is after I supposedly escaped,” said Cherry.

“Exactly.”

“And how’d I pull
that
off?”

“Squeezed through a basement window and ran off into the swamp,” Janet Bunterman said.

Cherry perked up. “That’s pretty awesome. Was there, like, alligators and bears and stuff?”

“Sweetie, if you play this right, the new album shoots straight to number one and the tour sells out in a day. That’s where we’re at.”

“Cool. But what about the police?”

Ned Bunterman clicked his jaw. “You’ll have to tell them a little story, I’m afraid. You never saw the guy before. Don’t know his name. Didn’t get a good look at his face. You have no clue where he
was holding you prisoner. It was dark outside when you got away. You just kept running and running. Think you can handle that?”

“So what happens to Claude?” she said. “Like I really care.”

“He’ll stay out of the way. He’s totally down with this.” Janet Bunterman saw no need to mention that Chemo had seized Abbott’s photographs. Stripped of product, the paparazzo was no longer a factor.

Cherry was warming to the scam. “This is crazy sick,” she said.

“And it’ll work,” her father asserted, “if we all stay on the same page.”

“The twins are psyched,” Janet Bunterman added.

“Can I tell Tanny?”

“Absolutely not. You can’t talk to a soul about this.”

“That sucks!”

Ned Bunterman said, “Remember, honey, you’re supposed to be recovering from a horribly traumatic crime. You can’t go out for a while, okay? You’re damaged. You’re scared. You cannot be seen running all over South Beach, having a big old time. You’re a
victim
, Cherry.”

“Trust us on this one,” her mother added.

“Yeah, yeah.” Cherry got up and took a Gatorade bottle from the refrigerator. She had mixed in the Stoli earlier, after her parents had gone off to some business meeting. “So when does the story hit?” she asked.

“The Larks want to launch this weekend,” Janet Bunterman said.

“Oh wow.”

Ned Bunterman said they were waiting for Maury to sign off.

“Saturday or Sunday?” Cherry took a slug from the bottle. Vodka was clean and sneaky; that’s what she liked about it.

“Saturday morning,” her mother said, “right before CNN’s ten a.m. newsbreak.”

Not much time left to play
, Cherry thought. She would make the best of it.

•   •   •

Billy Shea was double-bogeying the fifth hole at Metacomet when his cell phone rang, violating a strict club rule that he routinely ignored. The man on the other end of the line was waiting at Miami International for a nonstop to Las Vegas.

“They got me in coach,” the man complained. “You promised first class.”

“Did I?”

“If the job got done, yeah. You said I could fly back in first.”

Shea sighed. “My travel agent, he’s a moron.”

“Can’t you make some calls?”

“Man, I’m stuck on the golf course. How was the trip?”

“It went fine. Maybe you should cash in some frequent-flyer miles, get me an upgrade?”

Shea said, “Didn’t I tell you the Keys was nice? The water down there, it’s so fucking blue.”

“Yeah, Billy, I speared me an eel.”

“Excellent.”

“A big sucker,” the man said. “Now call your travel agent and get my ass bumped to first class. They board in twenty minutes.”

Once Shea had concluded that no portion of his $850,000 would be returned in the foreseeable future, and that Jackie Sebago had spent most of the money before a single condo was built at Sebago Isle, he reached out to an acquaintance in the Providence underworld, who then put him in touch with a professional killer.

The killer normally used a .22, but Shea insisted on something special for Jackie Sebago, something that would give pause to other low-life Florida hustlers who preyed on earnest out-of-state investors. Shea was hoping for the murder to make a splash on TV, so he wanted it exceptionally messy, yet with a tropical touch befitting the locale. The Hawaiian sling was the killer’s idea. He said he would practice on coconuts.

“I heard they get a Vince Vaughn movie in first class,” the man was saying.

“Okay, let me see what I can do.” Shea motioned for his golf partners to play on ahead. He told them he’d catch up on the next fairway.

“A promise is a promise,” said the granite voice on the phone.

“Man, you’re absolutely right.”

Shea had no desire to end a murder-for-hire deal with hard feelings. The killer deserved to sit in the front of the airplane and watch a Vince Vaughn flick and order a Beefeater martini, whatever the fuck he wanted. Jackie Sebago was deceased with an exclamation point, and would never again enjoy the fruits of deceit. Shea knew a law firm that would chase down the shithead’s assets and tie up probate for years.

He dialed his travel agent and said, “Drop everything.”

The local police were harried but helpful. They gave Detective Reilly a street map and a stack of recent incident reports deemed unusual even for Miami Beach. He culled out the three most promising sightings and set out to find the witnesses.

Unfortunately, the desk clerk at the Marriott had a memory as vexing as his accent. He squirmed under questioning, and his description of the intruder who’d set fire to Marian DeGregorio’s luggage and stolen her Maltese changed repeatedly, until the suspect bore only a shaky resemblance to the Key Largo gypsy who was Reilly’s main suspect. The detective’s next stop was the duplex of a cocktail waitress who’d been rescued from a sexual assault on the beach; an anonymous Good Samaritan had put her would-be attackers into body casts. The victim told Reilly that her raging rescuer had a shaved head and wore a trench coat. It was the best she could do—she’d been drinking that night, and the scene of the attack had been very dark. Finally, Reilly attempted to interview a Haitian cabdriver who’d reported being carjacked by a tall, walleyed derelict, but the meeting was unproductive. The driver insisted he’d made a mistake; the crime had never happened. “He’s still afraid of being deported,” a Miami Beach detective explained to Reilly, “after twenty-seven years.”

The two cops were eating Cuban sandwiches when a disturbance call came over the Miami Beach detective’s handheld. Some big bald guy was going nuts down on Collins. Reilly figured it was
too good to be true, but what the hell. They rushed to a small hotel called the Loft and made their way through a crowd of amused onlookers gathered out front. The man prancing around a palm tree at the center of the commotion wasn’t the one whom Reilly was hunting. The prancer was somewhat tall and definitely bald, but he was also flabby, pale as a flounder and the owner of two functional though inflamed eyeballs.

Having worked the vice detail in Key West, a nightly festival of foolish behavior, Reilly was unfazed by the South Beach freak parade. That’s why he wouldn’t have been flabbergasted to learn that the shirtless man twirling and whooping near the hotel canopy was a well-respected podiatrist, Little League coach and church elder from Greenville, South Carolina. Evidently the fellow had been improperly briefed on the optimum dosages when mixing street MDMA with Xanax and mojitos. His Florida vacation had taken a turn for the worse.

As uniformed officers chased him in circles, the impaired tourist randomly snatched from the grass what appeared to be two multicolored cables, which he began slashing noisily back and forth over his head. “I’ll save you, Rapunzel!” he crowed up at the building. “Wait for me, my princess!”

The crowd laughed, though Reilly didn’t. He got a good look at what the man was whipping through the air: two silvery ropes of hair, strung with old shotgun shells. The cops tazed the wayward foot doctor, pried the pigtails from his fists and tossed them in the shrubs. Reilly waited until the man was hauled away and the gawkers dispersed before he retrieved the funky plaits, which appeared to have been freshly shorn at their roots.

The detective stepped back and looked up at the facing windows of the hotel. He saw only one that was open.

Ann DeLusia purchased a charger for the tangerine BlackBerry and, with trepidation, a pair of sea-green contact lenses. Then she went to see the henna artist.

“Why still on your neck this horrible thing?” Sasha demanded. “You promised to scrub off.”

“Soon,” Ann said. “But first I need a touch-up.”

“No, is too ugly. Who this angry face would be?”

“A famous rock singer. Please, Sasha, I’ll pay you a hundred dollars.”

“From band Kiss this singer? Tell his name to me. Or Jam Pearl?”

“No, it’s Axl Rose. The group is Guns N’ Roses.”

“And he paints up himself, this man, like wild zebra?” Sasha aimed the drawing lamp at Ann’s tattoo and went to work with her pens. “This time no penis,” she said firmly. “It for you is very wrong.”

“Fine,” said Ann. “No penis.”

Refusing the Buntermans’ money had been easier than she thought. She knew the fifty grand wouldn’t have liberated her—just the opposite. After what had happened with the photographer, Ann needed a clean, irreparable break from Cherry’s parents. From their laggard response to her kidnapping it was plain they wouldn’t exactly have been crushed with grief had she wound up dead or permanently missing. Ann wasn’t the vengeful sort but she had a mischievous streak and a flair for the ironic. She also believed that Cherry Pye would accidentally kill herself soon if nobody slammed on the brakes. Ann figured she might as well be the one.

“You don’t have to stay for this,” she’d told the governor.

“Of course I do,” he’d said, and then crawled beneath the bed to hide from the housekeeping staff. She had left him there when she headed out to the henna parlor.

Inside her handbag, the BlackBerry chirped constantly with calls and texts and voice mails. That’s how Ann had learned it belonged to Claude, although she wasn’t clear on how Cherry’s bodyguard had gained possession of it, or why he’d passed it along to her.

Up until then, Ann had never understood how the paparazzi always happened to be in the right place at the right time. Judging by the traffic lighting up Claude’s smart phone, his network of scurrilous snoops and informants was far-reaching and vigilant. While the henna artist reluctantly freshened her tatt, Ann scrolled through the latest spate of messages, which offered an up-to-the-moment
snapshot of celebrity activity from coast to coast. It reminded her of those flight-tracking Web sites that used real-time radar to show every jetliner in the air.

In New York, Kate and A-Rod were snuggling in a booth at the Gramercy Tavern.

In Las Vegas, Becks and Posh were quarreling in the lobby of the Bellagio.

In Santa Monica, Tom and Gisele were jogging on the beach with a rottweiler named Ludwig.

In Chicago, Jennifer Lopez was refusing to go on the Oprah show unless she could bring her Zumba instructor.

And in Miami Beach, Tanner Dane Keefe was sneaking through a backstage door of the Fillmore at the Gleason for a midday tryst with Cherry Pye, who was rehearsing for another comeback tour.

“Amazing,” said Ann, clicking away. Each nugget arrived with the name (or nickname) of the tipster. When there was more than one, the details of the sightings often varied. One guy had Khloe and Lamar checking into the National, while another placed them at the Metropole.