Star Island

  I will get a picture of that crazy twat in all her dysfunctional glory, he vowed bitterly, no matter what it takes.

  2

  Ann DeLusia woke up at 4:09 a.m. in Room 409, and she couldn't go back to sleep. When the first call came, she was soaking in the bathtub.

  Not a world-class marble bathtub, either, not at this lame Deco hotel. Somebody had figured it would be cool to keep the old plumbing fixtures from the thirties, a real design treasure. The tub was so short and shallow that Ann DeLusia couldn't stretch without raising her feet from the water and bracing them on the clammy wall tiles.

  Although she wore noise-suppression headphones, Lenny Kravitz rocking full blast, she still heard the phone ringing. How could she not have? It was mounted on the wall right next to the damn toilet, on the notion that important people liked to chat while taking a dump. Even in her new five-star life, Ann refused to embrace this custom.

  By the time she'd removed her iPod, climbed out of the munchkin-sized bathtub and wrapped herself in a towel, the phone had stopped ringing. She put on a terry-cloth robe that she found in the closet and sat on the bed to wait. Two minutes later, the phone rang again. Ann picked it up and said, "Yo."

  "Can you get down here right away?" Janet Bunterman asked.

  "It's my night off. I've got company." A harmless lie--Ann didn't wish to be taken for granted.

  "We need you," said Janet Bunterman.

  "What's the dress code?"

  "Take the stairs. Hurry up."

  "All I've got on is a robe."

  "They won't care one bit at the hospital."

  Here we go, thought Ann DeLusia. "Gastritis? Again, Janet?"

  "Get your butt down here, Annie. The ambulance is coming any minute."

  The mood inside Cherry Pye's suite was urgent but not panicky. Lev covered the door, conversing in hushed tones with a stranger toting a black bag. Cherry's hairdresser, Leo, was at the bar, mixing himself a Tom Collins. The publicists stood in tandem by the bay window, chain-smoking and murmuring gravely into matching cell phones. The starlet herself had already been moved to the master bedroom, where she was being tended by her mother and a Spanish-speaking nurse who'd been sent by hotel security.

  Kneeling among the medicine bottles and empty Red Bull cans was a young curly-haired actor whom Ann recognized from the MTV awards, although she could not recall his name. He wore a sleeveless gym shirt and inside-out boxer shorts, and he was picking up pills from the carpet. Ann leaned over and told him, "You'd better get outta here."

  "In a minute," the actor said, not looking up. He wasn't leaving without his Vicodins.

  "How's our homegirl doin'?" Ann asked.

  The young man shook his head. "She ate, like, a pound of fucking birdseed. She said she was coming back as a cockatoo."

  "Coming back from where?"

  "You know--from the other side. After she dies, she wants to come back as a cockatoo."

  Ann said, "Oh, I like it."

  "We went to Parrot Jungle today and got a private show, just for the two of us. There were all these cool birds doing far-out tricks, riding tricycles, dancing with umbrellas, shit like that. Cherry, she was totally blown away. On the way home we had to stop at PetSmart for a bag of seed."

  "Good thing you didn't take her to a rodeo," said Ann.

  "She's been listening to Shirley MacLaine's books on tapes, so she's like totally into reincarnation." The actor stood up, cupping the recovered tablets protectively. "Have you seen my jeans?" he asked.

  By then they could hear the siren of the ambulance. Lev hustled the young man out of the suite and warned him to keep his mouth shut.

  "Where do you want me?" Ann asked.

  "It's not my show," Lev said, nodding icily toward the twin publicists.

  One of them, still glued to the phone, pointed at an uncluttered section of floor near the bar. Ann arranged herself in a convincing sprawl. Leo knelt down and mussed her hair meticulously. "Undo your robe," he whispered. "Quick, you're supposed to be sick."

  "Dying sick or just party sick?"

  The second twin loomed over Ann DeLusia and said, "We need you to hurl when the paramedics get up here."

  "Okay." This was one of the improvisational talents that had helped Ann win the job.

  Clicking her phone shut, the publicist explained, "It was called in as an overdose."

  "Imagine that."

  "So we'll need some vomit for verisimilitude."

  "For what?" Ann was thinking about what she'd eaten for dinner: room-service lasagna and a small Caesar. But that was eight hours ago.

  She said, "You might have to settle for dry heaves."

  The publicist would have frowned were it not for the fact that her face was paralyzed from brow to chin with an exotic Brazilian bootleg strain of botulinum toxin.

  She looks so shiny and new! marveled Ann, gazing up from the floor. Like glowing ceramic.

  Leo hurried out of the suite, followed by the grim sisters. The man with the black bag was admitted to Cherry's private bedroom, and the door was locked from within. Moments later, the paramedics arrived and Lev, playing the anxious boyfriend, let them in.

  Ann DeLusia flopped around impressively on the carpet and even managed to hack up some bile. The only unstaged moment of her performance occurred when she jerked the IV out of her arm; Ann was genuinely terrified of needles.

  She overheard Lev tell the paramedics that he didn't know her name, much less her next of kin, because he'd met her for only the first time that night in the VIP room at the Set, where she'd been grinding on the lap of a second-string NBA power forward. Ann thought the last fictional detail was unnecessarily salacious.

  "Are you sure she's over twenty-one?" one of the paramedics asked Lev.

  "The bartender said he checked her ID."

  "Then where's her purse?"

  "How should I know?" Lev said.

  So Ann DeLusia was strapped onto the stretcher as an unaccompanied Jane Doe. She was a bit disappointed that only one paparazzo--a grimy toad that she'd seen before--was lurking in the alley as she was wheeled to the ambulance. Where was the rest of the maggot mob? she wondered. Britney or Paris must be in town.

  The ride to the hospital was smoother than most, though Ann had to fight off two more attempts to poke a glucose drip in her vein. At the emergency room, the paramedics informed the admitting nurse that Jane Doe's vital signs appeared to be completely normal--pulse, BP, respiration--which seemed weird considering she was supposed to be an overdose. The nurse wasn't exactly consumed with curiosity, and within minutes Ann found herself unattended in a small examining room that smelled like Pine-Sol and stale piss.

  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 Pari
sian 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 cliche, and I don't represent cliches."

  "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.