Star Island (3 page)

Beyond the half-open door she heard the moans and wails of real patients, and she felt a twinge of guilt for occupying a needed bed. She hopped down, tied the sash of her robe, pulled her hair into a ponytail (which she secured with an elastic examination glove that she’d fashioned into a scrunchie) and walked barefoot out of the hospital. Nobody tried to stop her. Nobody said a word.

A white Town Car was out front, idling in a handicapped spot, exactly where Lev had told her it would be. Ann got in the backseat
and rolled down the window to admire what was left of the Florida sunrise.

“I got some bagels,” the driver offered.

“Sounds good.”

He handed the bag across the seat. “They said I’m supposed to bring you back to the hotel.”

Ann DeLusia blinked up at the brightening sky. “Where else would I go?” she said.

Cheryl Gail Bunterman was born in Orlando, the youngest and most outgoing of four children. At age six she won first place at a regional talent show with a spirited off-key version of “Big Yellow Taxi,” a song she’d learned from one of her mom’s Joni Mitchell albums. As she grew older, Cheryl’s stage poise improved far more than her singing, but her parents aggressively compensated by supplying provocative wardrobe and dance lessons from a petite stripper recruited at a local gentlemen’s club, the Central Florida equivalent of Parisian cabaret. Ned and Janet Bunterman were determined to make a superstar of their lil’ punkin.

Debuting her new show-business name, Cherry Pye auditioned for, and won, a small role as a cartwheeling cowgirl in an ill-conceived after-school TV special called
Hudson River Roundup
. The story followed a group of innocent yet resourceful Wyoming teens who get lost on a school field trip to New York and are forced to pitch camp in a Bronx subway tunnel.

The former Cheryl Bunterman had only one speaking line—“Back off, buckaroos!”—but her spunky delivery enchanted a viewer named Maury Lykes, who had TiVoed the program in the Key Biscayne penthouse where he spent three months a year. Maury Lykes was a record producer, concert promoter and talent shark who addictively monitored the Nickelodeon channel in search of fresh prospects. That, and he nursed a criminal fondness for underage girls.

Cherry Pye underwent three months of expensive coaching before Maury Lykes resigned himself to the fact that she had the
weakest singing voice he’d ever heard from anyone not confined to a hospice. A well-known backup vocalist was brought to the recording studio while Cherry herself was whisked away to study the valuable craft of lip-synching.

Her first single, “Touch Me Like You Mean It,” was released with an accompanying video podcast on her fifteenth birthday. The ensuing uproar from offended Christian groups caused a spike in sales that vaulted Cherry Pye’s inaugural effort to number nine on the
Billboard
charts. A CD with the same title was rushed out three months later, selling 975,000 copies. It proved to be the biggest hit of the year for Jailbait Records, and Maury Lykes rewarded Cherry with a contract that made her an instant millionaire though essentially a slave to him for life—and an eventful, high-maintenance life it was. These days her reckless escapades made more of a splash than her music, a situation that Maury Lykes was eager to rectify. He’d heard from reliable sources that, anticipating her final crash, one of the major tabloids had already composed Cherry’s obituary.

“She goes on tour in three weeks,” he reminded Janet Bunterman.

“Don’t worry, Maury. She’ll rebound.”

They were standing at the foot of the bed, in a private room at Jackson Memorial. Cherry lay before them, fast asleep and snoring like a trucker. A bedpan had been wedged unceremoniously under her bare bottom because the laxatives had struck with magnum force.

“She’s your daughter, for God’s sake. Get her under control,” Maury Lykes said, a replay of more conversations than he chose to remember. “Whatever it takes, I don’t care. Stick a LoJack up her butt.”

“Not so loud,” Cherry’s mother whispered.

The promoter led her outside, to the hallway. He noticed that the door to Cherry’s hospital room stood unguarded. “Where the hell is Lev?” he asked.

“Oh, we had to fire him.”

“What for?”

“Insubordination,” Janet Bunterman replied.

“Huge mistake. Gi-mongous mistake,” Maury Lykes said irritably. “Lev was sharp. He stayed on top of things.”

“Yes, including my daughter.”

“That was all Cherry’s move. You can’t blame Lev.”

Janet Bunterman said, “She has a weakness for certain types of men.”

Yeah, thought Maury Lykes. Anybody with an eight ball and a nut sack.

“So what happened last night?” the promoter asked.

“She went out clubbing with that boy from the new Tarantino project.”

“The one who plays the necrophiliac surfer? What’s his name—Tanner something?” Maury Lykes always liked to know whom his troubled wards were dating. He didn’t wish to read it first in the tabloids, or see it on TMZ.com. “Is that the asshole who fed her all the pills?”

“It’s just gastritis, Maury. Cherry ate some bad scallops.”

“Right. Last time it was eggplant.”

“What’s your point?” said Janet Bunterman.

“And the time before that, Cobb salad.”

“She has a hypersensitive stomach. Ask her doctor!”

Maury Lykes appreciated the value of occasional public misbehavior—it had prolonged the careers of several clients who would otherwise have vanished from the celebrity radar due to a manifest lack of talent. Airport tantrums, DUIs, botched shopliftings and other episodes of delamination could be useful between projects, when there was no other way for a young star to keep from being forgotten. But soon Cherry Pye would be launching a much-anticipated comeback CD (her second), and embarking on a twenty-seven-city concert tour that was (to the deepening consternation of Maury Lykes) not yet sold out. Rumors of another sloppy overdose would dampen advance ticket sales, for at this point even Cherry’s most loyal fans wouldn’t pay forty-two bucks to see her perform in a trashed condition. They could already watch that for free on YouTube: the infamous aborted show at the Boston Garden, a crisp spring evening two years earlier.

Before the opening number, Cherry had whimsically decided to try crystal meth—“just to see what all the buzz was about,” as she later explained to
Details
magazine. She’d lasted for three songs, and at no time had the movement of her lips matched the voice track being piped through the speakers. When the crowd in the first few rows had begun to jeer, Cherry had spun around, dropped her leather mini-shorts and bent over to moon the offenders. Naturally she’d lost her balance and fallen on her head, leaving Lev to haul her offstage with a modified fireman’s carry.

“Pay attention,” Maury Lykes said to Janet Bunterman. “Your daughter’s turning into a cliché, and I don’t represent clichés.”

“You do if they sell records, Maury.”

“But they don’t sell records. They just sell magazines,” he said. “So clean her up, and keep her that way.”

“She needs to watch what she eats,” Janet Bunterman muttered.

“And don’t let her fuck any more actors, okay? They’re a bad influence.”

“Now hold on—that boy she was with last night, he’s done Tennessee Williams in Chicago.”

“I don’t care if he did Tennessee Ernie Ford in the basement of the Grand Ole Opry,” Maury Lykes said, “keep the kid away from her. You got a pen?”

Janet Bunterman found a pink Sharpie in her purse. Maury Lykes grabbed it and wrote a phone number on the back of his business card. “Cherry’s going to need a new bodyguard.”

“Who is he? Does he work for you?”

“If you don’t call him, I will.” Maury Lykes pressed the card into her palm and said, “He’s an expert on ‘gastritis.’”

Cherry Pye’s mother frowned. “I hope he’s nothing like Lev.”

“Oh, he’s not like Lev, honey. He’s not like anybody you ever met.”

Bang Abbott still found pleasure in his craft, such as it was. Unlike most paparazzi, he had once worked for a serious newspaper, back in the day when newspapers mattered. For four years Claude J. Abbott had been a staff photographer for the
St. Petersburg Times
,
and during most of that time he’d performed his job without controversy or distinction, shooting murder scenes, car wrecks, hurricanes, flash floods, birthday parties at nursing homes, adoption days at the Pinellas Humane Society, the Buccaneer cheerleader tryouts, the Rays dancer tryouts, the Hooters calendar-girl contest, the trial of a county commissioner who trolled the Internet for Cub Scouts, a 10K run against skin cancer, a 5K run against HIV, a one-mile walk/run against osteoporosis, the birth of a rare snow leopard cub at Busch Gardens, the death of the world’s oldest circus fire-eater in Sarasota, and an Ecstasy raid that snared a prominent transsexual evangelist.

Crashing several company cars earned Bang Abbott his nickname, and he was on the verge of being fired from the
Times
when he’d stunned his editors by winning a Pulitzer Prize for spot news photography, one of the most prestigious awards in journalism. Bang Abbott’s self-nominated picture of a Canadian tourist being mangled by a lemon shark would soon become a focus of dispute, but for a short while he’d been able to bask in his triumph. Anticipating trouble down the road, he’d made a point of quickly spending the ten thousand dollars that had come with the Pulitzer, selecting a superb Japanese entertainment system for his small apartment in Clearwater Beach. As it did for all its award winners, the newspaper had presented Bang Abbott with a raise, which he’d pronounced insufficient.
The Boston Globe
and
Washington Post
made better offers, but these eventually were rescinded when the distasteful circumstances surrounding the shark photograph began leaking out.

It was one night during that dark and turbulent period when the
Times
sent Bang Abbott to shoot a Hannah Montana concert in Tampa, an assignment he’d correctly perceived as punitive. Afterward he’d gone out for drinks with a group of paparazzi who were pursuing the young singer, and he had listened with hungry fascination to their lurid battle tales. It had dawned on Bang Abbott that he could make more dough with one titty shot of a wayward starlet than he would busting his hump for six months on a newspaper salary. Better still, freelance photographers were unbound by
any of the snooty ethical rules against bribing tipsters, for example, or misrepresenting one’s self as, say, a CSI. A paparazzo was limited only by the breadth of his imagination and the size of his balls.

Bang Abbott had left his new acquaintances roaring at the bar and driven directly to the newspaper office, where he’d furtively removed his Pulitzer certificate from a trophy case in the lobby. Five days later he was in Beverly Hills, trailing Cameron Diaz down Rodeo Drive. At first the all-night hours jarred his system, but Bang Abbott eventually came to believe it was the life he was meant for. Being punched, shoved, cursed, toe-stomped and spat upon didn’t bother him at all. The waiting could be a drag, but a hot chase was always fun.

And the money … well, the money was excellent.

Despite his sullied exit from conventional journalism, Bang Abbott never regretted his impoverished years as a daily news photographer. In truth, the experience helped make him a more agile and resourceful paparazzo. His predaceous instincts were exceptionally keen and much admired by competitors, which is why he was so enraged about being faked out of his shoes at the Stefano.

Loath as he was to concede defeat, he knew there was no point in checking the numerous hospitals in the Miami area; Cherry Pye’s handlers were skilled at smuggling her in and out of medical facilities. In every city she visited, the services of a discreet physician were arranged in advance, with an agreement that he or she would serve on call for the duration of the superstar’s stay. If an emergency arose, the doctor would remain at Cherry’s side throughout the ordeal until she was safely aboard a private jet, homeward-bound. The woman never flew commercial unless she was traveling overseas.

For that reason Bang Abbott didn’t waste his time staking out the nonstop clusterfuck known as Miami International. Instead he raced out to the Tamiami Executive Airport, which was favored by celebs sneaking in and out of the city. He parked near the charter-jet terminals in a shady area from which he could scout for an approaching black Suburban.

At that very moment, a gaggle of Bang Abbott’s ruthless cohorts
was swarming the doors of a sushi bar on Lincoln Road where Jennifer Aniston was innocently sharing California rolls with Robert Downey, Jr. A waiter had called to tip off Bang Abbott and, for an extra hundred bucks, offer exclusive access through a fire exit.

Although the Jen shot would have been a slam dunk, Bang Abbott had blown it off in favor of a fading, no-talent pop bimbo who was one bumbling overdose or drunken car wreck away from Slab City. The paparazzo was convinced that when Cherry Pye finally bought the farm—either by gagging on her own puke or wrapping her Beemer around a utility pole—it would be chronicled as an American tragedy, the death of a beautiful and ruined innocence.

Marilyn redux.

Bang Abbott wanted to be the one who documented this tawdry decline in photographs, which he grandiosely imagined as one day hanging in some museum of hip modern art, next to those of Avedon or Annie Leibovitz. And of course he wanted the body-bag shot.

Now a black SUV appeared in the distance, and Bang Abbott used his binoculars to verify the make. It was a GMC Yukon, not a Suburban, but that brainless bellman could easily have confused the two wagons. Bang Abbott waited until it pulled to the curb and then lurched from his rental car, aiming a camera with the motor drive whirring.

Cherry Pye did not emerge from the SUV, but her bodyguard did.

“Hello, douche nozzle,” he said to Bang Abbott.

“Give me five seconds, Lev, that’s all I need,” the photographer pleaded, gesturing at the tinted windows. “One pretty smile for all her fans.”

“She’s not in there,” Lev said.