Free Shooting for the Stars by R. G. Belsky

to convince herself.
    â€œI did a good thing,” she repeated.
    Finally, she fell asleep. I put a blanket over her and turned outthe light. Then I went into the living room, lay down on the couch, and tried to figure out what was going on here. Sure, she was beautiful and sexy and exciting. And I sure as hell would love to have some kind of ongoing relationship with her, whatever that turned out to be. But she was clearly a troubled woman. And the last thing I needed in my life right now was someone with that kind of trouble. I knew plenty of troubled people already. Hell, if I wanted to meet a troubled person, all I had to do was look in the mirror.
    When I woke up in the morning, she was gone.
    So was the gun.
    There was a note on the table for me that said:
    Thank you so much, Gil. You’re a sweetheart.
    When I’m ready to tell someone my story, you’ll be the first.
    I promise to tell you all about . . . I owe you that.
    xxxx
    Abbie
    Except she never did tell me, of course.
    That night was the last time I ever saw Abbie Kincaid alive.

Chapter 11
    T HE police said it happened this way: Abbie Kincaid was found shot to death in a room on the ninth floor of the New York Regent Hotel. That was the same hotel where Laura Marlowe had died some thirty years earlier. Abbie had checked into the hotel at about 7:15 p.m. on the night before her body was found. She appeared to have gone directly there after leaving the TV studio, since people there said they’d seen her until a little after 6:30 p.m. They said she told them she was going to do more research for the story. They assumed she’d gone to the Regent—the place where the actress had been murdered—to get the feel of the story.
    She had made a series of phone calls from the hotel room. Most of them were to producers and other people at her show, talking about things she wanted to do the next day. One was to room service for a Caesar salad and a plate of fruit that was made at 8:46. That was the last time anyone heard from her.
    Abbie’s body was discovered the next morning when the maid let herself in to clean the room. The maid, who spoke very little English, had knocked on the door several times earlier, but had been reluctant to go in because she knew there was a celebrity staying there. When she finally did use her pass key to unlock the door, she discovered Abbie lying on the floor next to the bed in what the papers the next day described as “a pool of blood.”
    The police said she had been shot three times, twice in the chest and once in the head, in what appeared to be a coup de grace to make sure she was dead. Nothing had been taken from the room, so police quickly ruled out robbery as a motive. They also said there was no evidence of any kind of forced entry. Abbie seemed to have let her killer into the room. The person was either was someone she knew or at least someone she felt wasn’t dangerous.
    The ballistics report on the gun said it was a .45. It appeared from the trajectory and other evidence in the room that the shooter had been standing only a few feet from her when the gun was fired, another indication that Abbie was probably unaware she was in any danger until it was too late. There were at least a dozen sets of fingerprints in the room, but they proved to be of no help. The ones that had been tracked so far belonged to hotel staff and the others were probably from previous guests. A preliminary medical examiner’s report indicated that Abbie had died sometime between 10 p.m. and midnight. But no one heard any shots and no one saw anyone going into or leaving her room.
    It turned into a media circus, of course. There were Page One headlines about Abbie’s murder. Speculation about a connection to the story she’d just done about Laura Marlowe’s death thirty years earlier. Biographies of her life and career. TV reenactments of her death, or at least the likeliest theories on how it