Star Island (17 page)

“One day with Cherry is all I need. Once she sees the pictures, she’ll be so blown away that she won’t press charges. Hell, she’ll put me on the payroll.” Bang Abbott had never done any studio work in his entire life, though in the grip of fantasy he cast himself as a natural auteur. “Besides,” he said, “she owes me.”

“The sex wasn’t so hot, huh?”

“Ha! Off the charts.”

Ann repositioned her Jackie O. shades and leaned back against the headrest.

“Don’t underestimate me,” the photographer warned, patting the Colt on his lap.

“Let me out of the car. Come on.”

“Forget it.”

“But I can’t help you, Claude. I’ve never even met her.”

“Yeah, right.”

Ann said, “Seriously. She doesn’t know I’m alive.”

The photographer sagged. So Cherry hadn’t just been playing dumb on the plane ride when he’d asked about her double—she’d truly had no idea what he was talking about.

“Fuck me,” he said.

Ann clapped her hands. “Exactly. So this whole operation, all the drama and gunplay, it’s pointless, okay? Now, please pull over.”

Bang Abbott was sickened with indecision. “Shut up and let me think.”

“Anything but that,” Ann said.

He spotted a Comfort Inn and stopped near the lobby entrance. It was excruciating to know that he’d been suckered once again—the lengths these people went to! The actress’s henna tattoo was identical to the one in the photos of Cherry Pye that Bang Abbott had found in his camera. He told Ann to lift the hair away from her neck so he could have another look.

“What the hell’s it supposed to be?” he grumbled.

“A centaur. Half Axl Rose, half zebra.”

“No kidding? She likes Guns N’ Roses?”

“I wouldn’t know, Claude. This is all according to her mom,” Ann said. “And, FYI, I really need to pee.”

Bang Abbott was angry at himself but even angrier at Cherry for heaping one more crushing humiliation upon him. He said, “That’s the ugliest ink I’ve ever seen on a woman who wasn’t screwing a motorcycle gang. What the hell were you thinking? Your boyfriend must be thrilled.”

Ann said, “It’s a paycheck, is what I was thinking.”

The photographer cocked his moist, globular head. “Listen—no sirens. That’s weird,” he remarked. “I figured they must’ve called the cops by now.”

Ann agreed that it was odd. After what had happened in front of the Stefano, police cars should’ve been wailing all over South Beach.

Unless Janet Bunterman had done something low and unforgivable—such as neglecting to inform the cops that Ann had been inside the Suburban. In that case, the crime would be treated as a routine auto theft instead of a kidnapping.

“I’ll break her neck,” Ann mumbled.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Bang Abbott reached into the backseat for his camera bag. “I can’t believe you’ve never even met her. That’s fucked up.”

“Her handlers believe she’d react badly if she knew.” Ann shrugged. “I’m okay with it. I don’t need another BFF.”

“But when she OD’s for good, you’re out of a job.”

“Well, there’s always Broadway. What do you need with me, Claude?”

“You’ll see,” he said. “Let’s go check in.”

“God, they’re gonna think I’m a hooker.”

“No way. Porn star? Possibly.”

The pistol was well concealed in Bang Abbott’s belt, beneath abundant folds of belly, as they entered the motel lobby as a couple. As soon as they got to their room, Ann headed for the bathroom, shut the door and turned on the water spigots, to create some background noise.

She sat down and hurried to retrieve her phone from the tiny black handbag that sort of matched her tiny black dress. Accidentally she must have pressed the redial button, because she could hear ringing on the other end. A man picked up, and she felt a hitch in her breathing when he said, “What is it, fair Annie?”

At that instant she recalled what she had done the night before, alone in her junior suite at the Stefano, when she couldn’t stop thinking about her big adventure on the road to Key West. After a hot bath and three glasses of cabernet she’d found the matchbook that the motorcycle driver had given her at the hospital, the matchbook from the Last Chance Saloon. In a half-tipsy moment of boredom she’d dialed the phone number written on the inside flap—and then, startled by her own boldness, hung up before he could answer.

And now he was on the line.

“Are you there?” he asked in that volcanic rumble of a voice.

“I need some help,” she whispered.

“Tell me where.”

To Ann it sounded like he was running in the wind.

She said, “A Comfort Inn on Miami Beach.”

“Sounds cozy.”

“His name’s Claude. He’s got a gun.”

“Ah.”

“But I can handle him,” she said, “for now.”

“Hang up and call 911.”

“Okay—”

The door burst open and there was Bang Abbott, crouched and florid, aiming the pistol shakily at her head. “You think you’re so damn smart?” he yelled. “Gimme that thing!”

“Do what he says,” said the voice at Ann DeLusia’s ear.

“Okay.”

“Don’t worry, Annie. I’ll find you.”

“Excellent,” she whispered, and dropped the phone between her knees, into the toilet bowl.

The Larks were fraternal twins, and for the first thirty-three years of their lives it had been easy to tell them apart. Lila was a natural ash blonde with light cinnamon freckles and a thin nose; Lucy had auburn hair and an unmarked complexion and a slightly squared-off chin. They stood the same height and had the same lupine smile, due to oversized incisors inherited from their father, yet the twins were taken for cousins more often than sisters.

Ever since they were toddlers, the two Larks had longed to be identical. As they grew up it became an obsession that greatly worried close friends and family members. Lila and Lucy were continually on the hunt for a cutting-edge surgeon, and over the years they interviewed scores of candidates. Being perfectionists, the Larks never failed to find a disqualifying weakness. However, there was one doctor who had eluded their dragnet—a Brazilian with fabled flesh-sculpting skills, brilliant and fearless. The sisters tracked him down at a polo match in Wellington, Florida, where he listened to their extraordinary request and examined them side by side in a stable, behind a curtain fashioned from pony blankets. He then quoted them a fee so preposterously out of reach that they simultaneously burst into tears and fell to their knees, splatting horse dung.

Eventually the Larks’ childhood dream was made possible
because of Presley Aaron, the troubled country-western star. It was his public tailspin into a haze of dope haunts and riotous whores that ultimately financed the comprehensive transformations of Lucy and Lila, who’d been called in to salvage what remained of the singer’s image. At the time, the Larks had not yet achieved the status of legends in the show-biz firmament, although they’d been hired, fired and re-hired by some of Hollywood’s A-list flakes and substance abusers. Even as young publicists, the twins had become known as cold-blooded, discreet and impossible to impress. Lucy once made the gossip blogs by walking out on a patio lunch with Tom Cruise because he wouldn’t let her light up a smoke.

The day the Larks first met Presley Aaron was the same day he’d lost his record deal with Maury Lykes. Lucy and Lila listened without judgment to the strung-out musician’s tale of woe, and then knocked out a boilerplate press release announcing he had quit drugs and found Jesus Christ. Presley Aaron actually wound up doing both, so the sisters set aside their skepticism and went to work publicizing his heartrending climb from the depths. Their efforts culminated with an interview on
60 Minutes
in which even the hard-bitten Steve Kroft was moved to a sniffle.

Presley Aaron was a bit of a bumpkin, but Lucy and Lila liked the guy enough not to sue him for their fee, which was hefty and three months in arrears. After a lengthy Caribbean rehab, Presley Aaron self-attached the title of “Reverend” and soon thereafter was given his own Sunday television show on the Holy Word Network. The day he inked the contract (a three-year deal providing a cathedral and the use of a Falcon 900), he FedExed to the Larks his outstanding balance, plus a six-figure bonus. He included a note: “Dear L and L, thank you for believing in me. Praise the Lord!”

As a matter of policy, the twins never believed in any of their clients. They’d always assumed that Presley Aaron, like so many others, would end up jailed, deceased, or featured on a cable reality show for junkie has-beens. The generosity of the singer’s payment check was quite startling, and right away the Larks knew how they would spend their windfall. After five fuzzy weeks in Rio de Janeiro, they stepped off the plane at LAX as shining mirror
images of each other. Practically every feature was new: noses, cheeks, chins, teeth, breasts, tummies, buttocks and thighs. Their own mother didn’t recognize them.

From then on the sisters were unstoppable, the go-to team for celebrities in mid-flameout. When Cherry Pye’s high-paid publicist jumped ship—after accompanying her to an NPR interview in which she pretended to deep-throat the microphone—the rocket ship was already on fire. It was Maury Lykes himself who called the Larks, asking for help. When he sullenly agreed to their outlandish fee, Lila and Lucy put on hold their current project—a fifty-four-year-old actor who’d recently become a sex addict in order to revive his career—and dedicated themselves to stabilizing the nose-first descent of the former Cheryl Bunterman.

“What now?” asked Cherry’s mother, minutes after the carjacking.

She sat pondering a watery Bloody Mary while the Larks paced the suite and chain-smoked brazenly, the latter to underscore the seriousness of the situation.

“This one has the potential for ruination,” Lila declared.

“It’s beyond the pale,” Lucy agreed, which was code for “Wait until you get our next bill.”

Janet Bunterman coughed glumly. She was still grappling with the notion that a paparazzo had snatched Annie DeLusia. The new bodyguard had recognized the chubby maggot from a previous encounter. Undoubtedly, the intended quarry was Cherry.

“We’ll have to call the police soon,” Janet Bunterman said. “The limo company will be missing their Suburban.”

As they passed each other on the carpet, the Larks pivoted and sniffed at the unseemly task confronting them. Lucy said, “First thing we do is pay off the driver.”

Cherry’s mother frowned. “For what?”

Lila impatiently swirled one hand in the air. “To lie to the cops, of course. To say there was no passenger on board when the SUV was jacked.”

“But what about Annie?”

Lucy tapped her cigarette ash into a dish of stale cashews. “Annie who?” she said.

Janet Bunterman sipped her drink and fell silent. The Larks had a point. If it became known that Cherry Pye’s organization employed a full-time look-alike to help cover for her skanky romps, the publicity would be disastrous. The new CD would immediately become suspect, and the concert tour would turn into a media smackdown. Maury Lykes, ever true to his word, would cut Cherry loose and then sue the piss out of the Buntermans.

Lila said, “If this psycho lets Annie go—and let’s pray he does—we’ll pay her off and put a muzzle on her. But if he should kill her, well—”

“Then there’s only the chauffeur left to dispute your story,” said Lucy.

Cherry’s mother could hardly believe what she was hearing, although she had to admit it made sense. As soon as the deranged photographer figured out that he’d grabbed the wrong blonde, he would either free Ann DeLusia or murder her and dump the body. She wasn’t the least bit famous or important, and therefore had no value as a hostage.

“This sucks,” Janet Bunterman said. “I really like Annie. She’s a good kid.”

The Larks agreed in unison, although their Botoxified features made it difficult to gauge the depth of their sincerity. Sometimes Janet Bunterman felt like reaching out and tapping their faces, to find out if they felt as laminated as they appeared.

She said, “Here’s another idea—we could put out a release saying a ‘valued employee’ of Cherry Pye was abducted, and then we post a reward. Nobody knows that Annie works as Cherry’s double—she could be a PA, or a dresser.”

Lucy crossed her arms as she turned away, and in profile Janet Bunterman noticed the carved resemblance to a sphinx. From the other side of the room, Lila said, “And what happens if the police catch the bad guy and rescue Ann? Think of the downside, Janet.”

“Downside?”

“Annie becomes famous overnight is what happens,” Lila went on. “The morning shows,
Access Hollywood, ET
, you name it. It would be a distraction that your daughter definitely doesn’t need, not while she’s out promoting a new CD.”

Lucy said, “Not to put too fine a point on it, but there’s no room on this ark for two hot babes. Annie’s an actress, Janet. She gets a whiff of the limelight, it’s game over.”

They’re brilliant, these twins, Janet Bunterman thought. Sneaky, but brilliant.

“All right, how much do we pay the driver?” she asked.

Lucy held up one finger. “A grand, tops.”