GHOSTS: 2014 edition (THE GHOST STORIES OF NOEL HYND # 1) Page 7

  She began to have nightmares: often a dark window would open to her childhood home and she would talk to her departed mother. She sleepwalked: often she would awake to find herself at the edge of a flight of stairs. Once she was near a third story window at the Bel Air Hotel. Another time she awoke to find herself outside in the street when staying at a girlfriend’s house in Princeton, New Jersey. On that occasion, a car horn awakened her. Not surprisingly, she obsessed about sudden mortality.

  Psychiatric attention helped, the best that money could buy in New York and Los Angeles. She even spent two weeks under a pseudonym as an inpatient at a mental hospital in Fairfield, Connecticut. The doctors were terrific. But—temporarily at least—a man named David McIntyre helped even more.

  She had first met David at a party in Brentwood at the sprawling $12,000,000 home of her Hollywood agent, Joe Fischer. This was about ten months after her Academy Award and it was Annette who spoke to him first.

  David was a big charmingly unpretentious Texan. He had studied at the University of Texas in Austin and originally had come west to be a stand-up comedian. But he didn’t look right for that. Nor did he have the face or delivery or, for that matter, the material. So instead, David had been making money writing good scripts that were optioned but never produced and repairing the structure of lesser scripts based on other people’s ideas. At this latter art, that of a script doctor, David was a master.

  At Joe Fischer’ party they had stood in the corner and compared notes about the technique of creating character before a camera—the writer’s view as opposed to the actor’s view. David fiddled with a toothpick and sipped papaya juice as he spoke. McIntyre, too, was one of Joe Fischer’ clients.

  David, eyeing her carefully, announced after about an hour that he’d said everything he had to say at this particular party. “Let’s split,” he said.

  “What?”

  Would she like to leave with him, he repeated. She considered it an affront at first.

  “Leave to do what?” she asked.

  He looked her straight in the eye. “I don’t know,” he drawled. “There’s got to be something more interesting than standing around Joe’s house. Let’s go bowling.”

  A pause. “Are you kidding?”

  “No.”

  “I’ve never bowled.”

  “Ah,” he said. “A virgin. Come along.” He held out an arm to lead her.

  Intrigued, she disappeared to find her coat.

  David turned out to be a free spirit, indeed. They drove to Culver City and found an art deco alley with pink and blue pastel pins. It was only in the middle of the second game, when she began to attract the attention of several middle-aged men in rayon shirts, that David started to catch on to something he had missed.

  “We’re getting stared at,” he said. “Is one of us famous? I know it’s not me.”

  Annette Carlson said nothing. He looked back at her.

  “I never did get your name,” he said. “Guess I should have.”

  She gave it.

  He thought for a moment. “Didn’t you just win something?”

  “An Oscar.”

  “What’d you do? Something technical?”

  “Best Actress.”

  “Oh. How ’bout that?” he said, as if in a revelation. “I never watch that stupid Oscars show. And I didn’t recognize you. I don’t much go to movies. I can’t stand the scripts that get produced.”

  “But you fix other people’s scripts for a living.”

  “Well, heck, yes! Of course I do!” he boomed as if it were self-evident. “If they stink less after I’m finished with them, I’ve done a public service, haven’t I?”

  She smiled and shook her head.

  “Hey, how’s this?” David continued. “When I get my own scripts produced, I promise to start going to more films, okay?”

  “Good idea.”

  “Thanks.” They both started to laugh. “By the way,” he said, “congratulations.”

  “On what? The Oscar?”

  “No. You broke a hundred twenty-five on your first game.”

  “Is that good?”

  He blinked. “What else did you do well on your first time?” he asked.

  She smiled like the Cheshire cat. “I’ll never tell,” she teased.

  “Good. Don’t.”

  They didn’t sleep together that night. She wasn’t attuned to casual sexual relationships. But over the next days, she realized that this was not meant to be casual. David, in his unpretentious straightforward manner was a perfect soul mate for her, a pillar of sanity and common sense.

  Eventually, after they had known each other for several weeks, they did become lovers. And when Annette confessed to him about her mental condition, her obsession with her mother’s passing, her suspicions that all the adulation and money heaped upon her would disappear overnight, it was always David McIntyre who was there to pull her up when she was emotionally down.

  She was in love with him. He made her laugh.

  He would do stand-up routines for her. He would skewer mutual acquaintances, usually from New York or Los Angeles, with offbeat, off-color imitations of them. Then he would perform with a ventriloquist dummy.

  Annette’s mother had bequeathed her a prize possession from her childhood, a life-size, four-foot-tall Charlie McCarthy doll, just like the one the famed Edgar Bergen had performed with from the 1930s into the 1950s. The dummy was in perfect condition. He wore top hat and tie, clown’s expression and a monocle, just like the original. David’s routines, performed for Annette alone, were irreverent and riotous. Best of all, David wasn’t even married. There was no wife somewhere to cause trouble. No personal baggage at all. His only real hang-up was his professional obsession: finally getting an original screenplay of his own produced. It would take time, she assured him, but it would eventually happen. She had read his work and knew how good it was.

  She had hoped to marry him. And had David not died in the crash of a private airplane in Santa Barbara in March 2007, she probably would have.

  Again, tears and smiles. Survival after death. Mourning. The rebuilding of her shattered emotions. Sleepwalking. Back to the psychiatrists. It was as if Annette’s life was trapped on a tragic cycle, always doomed to repeat itself. She found herself unable to even approach a relationship with another man.

  Worse, she lacked concentration upon her work. The supermarket tabloids and the movie star magazines would not lay off her. Every other week they manufactured an imaginative new spin on the “curse” that was upon Annette Carlson: how astrologers and Gypsy fortune-tellers agreed that she was doomed to always be unlucky in love and—when the hacks at the tabloids finally found out about it—how psychiatrists would always be unable to help her.

  Her life teetered on the brink of disaster, both professionally and emotionally. It was agent Joe Fischer who finally suggested a partial solution.

  “Bury yourself in your work for a while,” he said to her one day at his office in Century City. “I’ll find you the right projects. Rack up the money. Then buy a place of your own,” Fischer said. “Buy something far away. Out of the orbit of New York and Los Angeles. Some place where you can go, be alone, take the phone off the hook, be yourself and think. This is your life we’re talking about, Annie. Don’t squander a moment of it.”

  Annette was listening.

  “Joe knows best,” Joe Fischer said as a coda to his speech. “Trust Joe.”

  She did.

  Annette completed another television movie and another feature. In terms of financial ledgers, she found herself to be a lucky woman. After taxes, she had more than two million dollars in the bank. So she went house hunting.

  It took her a year to find what she wanted, looking in various quiet corners of the United States. But when an antique house on Cort Street in Nantucket came on the market, and when a realtor whom she trusted sent her the information on the property, Annette took the plunge.

  The house had been owned by Dan
iel and Martha Shipley, whom Annette met only at the lawyer’s office for the closing. The Shipleys were a couple in their seventies from western Massachusetts. They had habitually summered in Nantucket, but their two sons had now grown. They were anxious to sell 17 Cort Street, buy a smaller place and divide their retirement years between New England and Palm Beach.

  The house even came partially furnished. Everything was in move-in condition. The only blemish was a horrible old china cabinet in the living room, the dark hulking oak monstrosity that had been bolted to the wall by a previous owner—long before the Shipleys—many decades ago.

  But the cabinet wasn’t important. What was significant was that Annette Carlson was again taking the first steps of putting her life back together. She had wealth and fame in her youth. She had an apartment in Los Angeles and a home to retreat to in the Northeast. She had even stopped seeing her head doctors and had mercifully disappeared from the pages of the tabloids. There was no particular man in her life now, but she did not yet consider that a priority. The possibility of a new relationship was, in fact, something she still retreated from. The pain of the previous tragedy remained too great.

  So Annette’s biggest challenge now was not slipping back into the depressions and tormented mental states that had gripped her after her mother’s passing and after David’s sudden death. That, and selecting just the right script to do next—just the right offer out of the many that Joe Fischer was sending her way.

  There were a few smiles now, even if a few tears appeared at low moments. And as for survival of death, well, she seemed to have finally survived David’s.

  Everything was finally moving forward, she would later recall. It was moving very smoothly. And it remained so right up until the specter in white first stroked her forehead.

  If the specter had really been there at all.

  Chapter Eight

  Midway through Saturday afternoon, less than twelve hours after the death of Beth DiMarco, Detectives Dick Gelman and Al Rodzienko proceeded with all the subtlety of a pair of jackhammers.

  They had Eddie seated at the long steel table in the Gray Room. And they were working on him. Eddie’s father, Arthur Lloyd, was an executive with a medical supply company in Brockton. Lloyd Senior was flying to the island that afternoon from Boston to be with his son. A local attorney named Ned Schwinn had met with Eddie to make the interrogation legal. Now Schwinn sat outside the Gray Room at a cost of a hundred dollars an hour, kibitzing with the cops, all of whom he knew personally. This was great work for a small-town mouthpiece who made most of his living by overcharging his longtime friends for title searches. But Schwinn was there until an off-island counsel could be retained.

  “You and Beth must have had a fight,” Rodzienko suggested over and over as the walls of the Gray Room reverberated with his voice. “Was she seeing another guy? Did you think she’d been unfaithful to you?” Rodzienko was playing the tough guy, pacing the room, snarling, accusing. Sweat poured off him as he circled his young suspect.

  Gelman sat dispassionately, almost sympathetically. “What happened, Eddie?” he would say softly at the prearranged moments when his partner would be “called” from the room. “Come on. Tell me. Get this over with.”

  “Nothing happened,” Eddie explained more times than he could count, often choking with tears, fatigue, or both. Then he would run through his version of the evening again, recounting detail after detail. Unobtrusively, a tape recorder ran. Any small inconsistencies or tiny misstatements would loom larger when the two detectives eventually reviewed the cassettes. “We made love twice,” Eddie said. “We both fell asleep. In the middle of the night I got up to take a leak. I don’t know what time it was. I wandered off and…”

  “Where’d you go, Eddie?”

  “I don’t know. It was dark. There was this bunch of trees.”

  “Which bunch? How far did you walk?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You were there. Why don’t you know?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “What else don’t you remember, Eddie?”

  “Why didn’t you come right back?” Gelman soothed.

  “What time was it?” Rodzienko pressed.

  “I told you. I don’t know.”

  “Why don’t you know? Were you wearing a watch?”

  “I didn’t look at my watch.”

  “Sounds strange to me,” Rodzienko said. “Most people, when they wake up in the middle of the night, it’s the first thing they do, look at a watch. Huh?”

  “I didn’t,” Eddie Lloyd said.

  “Maybe ‘because you were too busy with something else. Like you’d just had a big fight with your girl.”

  “I passed out, I tell you.”

  “Eddie, there was no one else there,” Rodzienko said.

  Young Lloyd shook his head.

  “Eddie, listen to this,” Rodzienko said, swinging his leg across a chair and seating himself directly in front of the young man. “You and the girl had a disagreement. You hit her. You hit her hard. You didn’t mean to hit her hard but she’d done something to hurt you, didn’t she?”

  “No!” The boy was crying, shaking his head.

  “Slept with someone else, didn’t she?” Rodzienko pressed. “I bet that was it. Fooling around behind your back. It hurts, huh? I know how it is.”

  “No!”

  “Maybe she said something to you,” Rodzienko tried next, his voice rising. “Something that ticked you off, huh?” He thought about it. “Did she call you a lousy lover?”

  “No!” the boy insisted.

  Feigning sudden rage, Rodzienko sprung up from his chair so violently and abruptly that his movement made Lloyd recoil. “Ah, gimme a break, Eddie!” Rodzienko snapped. “What am I going to do with you, huh?”

  The detective paced off to a corner of the room. There he opened a pack of Juicy Fruit and went to work on three sticks at once.

  It was his partner’s turn. “It’s no shame, Eddie,” Gelman said softly. “Girls do things sometimes. They start seeing another guy. They say something mean. It’s like, they give you reasons to lash out, right?” Gelman paused. “I understand why you were so angry. You didn’t mean to do it, right? Tell us you didn’t mean to do it. You’re young and you have a clean record.”

  Eddie glanced up at the mention of no previous arrests. Yes, he realized to his horror, the detectives had already checked. “Courts take that into account,” Gelman said. “You’re a good kid. I know that. It was an accident that she died, right?” Eddie looked from Rodzienko to Gelman.

  “Tell us that you didn’t mean to hurt her,” Gelman said. “But you hit her, right? And she accidentally died.”

  “That’s not what happened!”

  “Then what did happen?”

  “I’ve told you!”

  “Eddie, we know you’re not telling the truth,” Rodzienko said calmly. “See, you were the only one there besides Beth. So it had to be you who hurt her.”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “Not me. I didn’t.” His face sank into his hands and he began to cry again. “Where’s my father?” he finally asked. He sobbed. “He should have been here by now.”

  There was a long silence in the room.

  Rodzienko came back. He sat down again. “Your old man’s going to be pretty disappointed,” the detective said. “Lying like this. Going to put the whole family through a trial. Not facing up to what you done.”

  Rodzienko paused. “Maybe you were real drunk, Eddie. So drunk that you barely remember doing it? Is that okay? I can accept that. Tell me that’s what happened and we can go with that.” He paused. “Yes?” he said hopefully. “Can we make that deal, Eddie? Will you tell me that?”

  Eddie looked up and saw both detectives staring at him, waiting for their moment of triumph. Their eyes were fixed and intense like a pair of stubborn but dutiful terriers.

  “I didn’t hurt her!” Eddie moaned. “I loved her. I would never have hurt her.”r />
  Rodzienko stood and leaned on the table, bracing himself with clenched fists against the metal tabletop. “We know you hurt her, Eddie!” he roared eye to eye. “So don’t give us that crap! There was no one else there! Understand me? No one else there!”

  Muffled desperate sobs sounded from the boy. In the adjoining room, attorney Ned Schwinn affably split a warm Diet Pepsi with one of the female police dispatchers.

  “Know what I think?” Rodzienko said to his partner. “I think Eddie here lured her out there with malice. He was planning to kill her. That’s why he won’t admit it was an accident. It wasn’t an accident. That’s why he won’t talk.”

  Rodzienko gathered some papers.

  “Well, Eddie’s making a big mistake. This was his time to tell us he didn’t mean to do it. Now we’re going to prove that he did mean it. That’s only going to make it worse, huh?”

  Silence, not a confession, from Eddie Lloyd. Rodzienko left the room. For several seconds Eddie and Gelman sat without speaking. Finally Gelman looked at his suspect.

  “Come on, Eddie,” Gelman said softly. “Ignore my partner. He’s a bastard. Talk to me, instead. Tell me what happened and I’ll keep Detective Rodzienko off your butt.”

  Eddie shook his head. His eyes were crimson. Dark circles were emerging beneath them. “I don’t know anymore,” Eddie cried. “I want my father.”

  Arthur Lloyd, Eddie’s father, arrived late on Saturday afternoon. The questioning of his son continued into the evening.

  Beth DiMarco’s shattered parents arrived on an earlier flight. The two families did not know each other. Gelman and Rodzienko kept them apart.

  Eddie would be released that evening in his father’s custody after posting half a million dollars in bond and on the condition that neither of them leave the island and that Eddie return for further questioning on Sunday morning. Rodzienko and Gelman then returned to the field where the girl was slain, accompanied by two State Troopers and a canine. They searched for anything that might reflect further on Beth DiMarco’s death.