Shooting for the Stars by R. G. Belsky Page A

he might have killed her?” he asked.
    â€œYou said he was very angry. Maybe he was angry enough at her and her mother to shoot her as some sort of twisted revenge for cutting him out of all her money.”
    â€œI’ve never thought about it, but it could have happened that way.”
    â€œIt’s just a theory,” I shrugged.
    â€œI’ve spent thirty years hating Ray Janson for what I thought he did,” Holloway said. “I guess I can’t hate him anymore. But I want someone to blame for what happened to Laura. If it turns out to be Davy Valentine, her father, that would be great. I’d love to hate that bastard Valentine for the next thirty years.”

Chapter 15
    S HERRY DeConde, Laura Marlowe’s first agent, had an office on the second floor of a townhouse in Greenwich Village.
    â€œI remember the first day I met Laura,” she told me. “I was just starting out then, barely out of college and trying to break into the business of being an agent. She came up to see me with her mother. I knew right away she could be a star. Even at that young age you could tell. She had something special. You spend a lifetime in this business looking for someone like Laura. And she just walked into my office that day.”
    Doing the math, I knew that Sherry DeConde had to be close to sixty. But she looked a lot younger than that. She had long, blond, straight hair that hung halfway down her back and made her look a bit like like a ’60s hippie. She was wearing blue jeans, brown leather boots, and a T-shirt underneath a checkered flannel shirt on top. It wasn’t exactly sexy attire, but somehow it made her look sexy. Not in a young girl way, but that “been there, done that . . . this is the real me, take it or leave it” look.
    â€œPeople talk about overnight stars, but there really aren’t any,” she said. “Sure, stardom is about luck and opportunity and sometimes even talent too. But most of all, you can’t give up. That’s what I always told Laura and her mother. I put her up for everything—teen shows, commercials, movie roles. But she was just another facein the crowd. Then suddenly, when she was nineteen, she exploded into this incredible superstar. I’ve been in this business a long time, and I’ve never seen anything like it. It was amazing.”
    â€œHow did Laura handle the early rejections?”
    â€œShe was fine, but it really bothered her mother. Beverly is not what you would call a patient woman. She was, to put it bluntly, the stage mother from hell. Always second guessing, always criticizing, always giving me a hard time over everything I did. Look, I know Beverly wanted to be an actress herself once so there was a lot of frustration on her part. Unfortunately, she took it out on everybody around her—me, producers and, worst of all, on Laura. I felt sorry for that girl. I took care of her. Somebody had to.”
    â€œDidn’t her mother take care of her?”
    She shrugged. “I’m sure Beverly loved her daughter. But she showed it in funny ways. It was like she wanted to turn Laura into what she always wanted to be. She said she was doing it all for Laura, but I think she was really doing it for herself. Maybe it would have been different if Laura’s father was around. But he left when she was just a little girl. Laura had no one to rely on but Beverly and me. I think she was very lonely. So I wound up spending a lot of time with her. I was more than Laura’s agent. She became kind of like a daughter to me.”
    That’s what Abbie had said. Sherry DeConde had been almost like a “surrogate mother” to the struggling young actress.
    â€œBut you were probably only a few years older than her back then, right?” I pointed out.
    â€œOkay, maybe I was more like a big sister,” she laughed.
    It was a nice laugh. A helluva laugh actually. I looked around the office.