Ghosted by Robert J. Binney

Ghosted by Robert J. Binney

In hindsight, I never should have told Scott Stamper he could get away with murder, let alone with killing his wife.

“Bullshit,” he protested, but I could see wheels turning. Maybe not calculation; curiosity?

“Turn off the tape” is what he should have said, but he wasn’t that clever. Still, I didn’t think he’d go through with it. Even if he wanted to.

Scott was right to be skeptical – he was one of the most recognizable and beloved men on the planet. Scott Stamper was his own brand. But think about it, I told him, that was exactly why. Half of America would reflexively believe his innocence, the other half his guilt, and pundits everywhere would blindly venerate his exposure of the so-called “hypocracy.”

Thirty years ago, Scott played the captain on that beloved space show; at the height of its popularity, he sang and danced in that light beer commercial which led to a two-record deal and ten weeks on Broadway as the tap-dancing president in Pearl! Say what you will – and the critics certainly did, calling it “an opening night that will live in infamy” – but they sank a fucking battleship on stage six nights a week, twice on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

At one point he had been on magazine covers in more countries and languages than Princess Diana. No one behaved well in the 90s, and Scott suffered consequences before rehabilitating himself – rather, I rehabilitated him – and now he’s one of the few bona fide movie stars we have left. There’s the guy who does all his own stunts, the one who chases younger women for the tabloids and goes home to the guy from the comic book movies, and Scott.

His wife is – or rather was – Genevive Zuma, a world-renowned scientist who gained late-in-life notoriety for questioning vaccines; paired with his very public anti-gun stance, no one on cable news knew how to pigeonhole them. Of course, it was my anti-gun stance, not his, but the point remains.

Which is why Howie Spangler asked, mouth full of turkey-and-swiss-on-focaccia, what I thought about Zuma’s shooting.

He was casual, with no more emotion than if he asked what I thought about the Knicks’ lack of rebounding, more focused on wrapping another sandwich in a napkin and shoving it in his jacket. Who was I to judge; even though it was a sunny June day, I wore my London Fog and was stuffing its deep pockets with everything I could grab off the hotel buffet: carrot sticks, mini-quiche, snickerdoodles by the handful.

It was Howie who taught me the art of what he called “ghostery shopping.” And he was also the only person – outside of my agent and my accountant – who knew the extent of my relationship with Scott Stamper. I was Scott’s memoirist. His ghostwriter. In fact, I’d written two best-sellers by Scott.

Today was the quarterly session of the Association of Gotham Ghostwriters and neither Howie nor I ever missed it. Every twelve weeks, about two dozen scribes crammed into the Excelsior Hotel’s Millard Fillmore Room. The forty-watt lighting obscured the sienna-and-avocado carpet and formerly white moire satin wallpaper; its moveable walls barely obscured the raucousness from the perpetual Fraternal Order of Bison meetings next door. We didn’t care, we were happy to fill our stomachs and pockets with industrial cuisine and gloat over word count. We even had a pool for most anonymous pages published since the last meeting.

In other words, you don’t know who any of us are, even if you have definitely read our work. You wouldn’t know my name at all if it hadn’t been for the Stamper trial. Howie specialized in true crime confessionals, the kind you see in the checkout lanes, between Soap Opera Digest and 50 Years of Fleetwood Mac. If things go tits up for me, he has dibs on drafting my prison diaries. He is remarkably prolific, publishing books more frequently than I change bed linens, and usually won the pool.

Intellectually, everyone knows ghostwriters exist, even if we’re not acknowledged on covers or mentioned in Times’ reviews. That “daring and rare burst of genuine honesty” from the farm-belt senator who wrote about his dual life as a drag queen? I wrote every word. A forty-eight-year-old straight guy from Brooklyn. The once-heralded ska drummer who gave up heroin and found Jesus on the Paris Metro? Me. A hypochondriac Jew who took the D train into Manhattan two weeks before 9/11 and hasn’t left the island since. The “brave, “sincere,” and “raw” memoir from the former teen sensation assaulted by every responsible male in her life (and knocked up by more than a few of them)? Me again. I still haven’t listened to her music. My CD player broke a few years ago and I just won’t bother with signing up for Spotify.

It was usually a genial crowd at the Excelsior, happy to close our laptops and speak to other humans using our own voices. Inevitably it turned into a “can you top this”: the politician who got cold feet days before publication or the athlete whose history was made up out of whole cloth. (One time I needed to end an astronaut’s memoir; I completely fabricated an anecdote about his starting a bar fight with a motorcycle gang. He – the astronaut – gave me shit later because I used the wrong brand of beer bottle he smashed in the Grand Eagle’s face. Completely gliding over the fact that he’d never set foot in a biker bar.)

Howie didn’t know anything more about Geraldine Zuma’s murder other than it happened, or even if it was murder or suicide; my New York Herald news feed (it’s a crappy paper, sure, but unparalleled for finding clients) didn’t have anything more than that she’d been found dead in her New York hotel room, shots had been fired, and Stamper was “on location” in Baltimore and couldn’t be reached. Of course, I had known most of this already. The gunfire was an unexpected detail.

Stu Bernstine pulled a key lime mini-tart from his shirt pocket – back in the day, it would have been a Pall Mall – and asked, as he has as long as I’d been coming to these things, who pays for all of this?

“We do,” Gary Fieber – he once spent three weeks on safari with that blond-haired star of those heist pictures, only to be told it was all “off the record” once the actor decided to shoot a black rhino  – was always more patient with Stu than the rest of us.

“I don’t understand, I never paid a dime to attend. Dues can’t cover this.” Stu wrote legal thrillers – you’ve probably bought one at an airport – under a popular author’s name. That author is still in his pre-pandemic fentanyl-induced coma outside Coeur d’Alene and still has published six best-sellers. That’s all Stu!

“The publishing houses pay us less,” Gary explained, “then they take that money and rent this shitty room to feed our egos. You clearly don’t understand economics.”

Lee Kurtzman, who had been collecting all the Equal packets in the room, sat down and scoffed. “They could keep paying us less, then take that money and give it to themselves. You clearly don’t understand economies.” Ever since Lee had been hired by Princeton University to ghost-write its faculty’s op-eds, he’d become intolerable.

“What’s the point?” Bernstine always had to push.

“That one’s easy,” interrupted Billy Adams, the “literary representative” assigned to our table, while rolling the centerpiece bouquet up in a linen napkin. He was meeting his girlfriend later, and his wife had eyes and ears at every florist in a nine-block radius. Why he just didn’t go to D’Angelo’s on 61^st was beyond me, that place was the model of discretion and had all the exotics. And was generous with samples. “You put all that work into your book, then you don’t get your name on the cover. The publishers feel bad. You sell books, we buy lunch.”

I could feel eyes on me. My neck burned a little, but these things run in cycles. I’ll sell books again.

 “Guilt assuaged and problem solved. Clearly you don’t understand…” Billy waggled his finger and trailed off.

“Egonomics!” burst out of Simon Jensen’s mouth. He does that – he writes for politicians so he’s always looking for clever wordplay. Puns and portmanteaus were his specialty.  That senator’s wife from the Cape who ran for president? The one whose 900-page chapbook won the American Book Award for its “insightful and clear-eyed look at the back rooms of misogyny”? Every word written by Simon, a 38-year-old Oklahoman high school dropout who had never actually met her. Every fucking word. That’s the one where he coined “Hypocracy.”

Not to imply for a moment that only pasty white guys can speak for women. Simon’s ex, in fact, was on the best seller list for seven weeks with her “self-portrait” of the Brill Building chanteuse at the same time as her memoir from that guy who rescued the cable car. And Lekeisha Montrejo over there, the one with the bullring in her nose and semi-ironic Strawberry Shortcake purse, has written an entire series of self-help guides “by” vitamin-shilling drive-time talk show hosts and podcasters. I used to wonder how she could stomach penning instruction manuals for toxic masculinity, until I found pictures of her East Village loft online. Her monthly window-washing bill must be more than I made on my last three books.

Howie ceremoniously wrapped the last stuffed pepper in his handkerchief and slammed the chafing dish shut, officially adjourning the meeting and leading us to the elevator. There was a Grand Staircase right there, it was only one floor, but there wasn’t a one of us willing to do that much physical activity. I took one final look back at the room. I don’t even know why the Excelsior hires busboys – we’d picked the joint clean. If our event planners were smart, they’d go to an all-soup menu; their catering bill would drop threefold.

I wanted to get back to work, but I didn’t really have anything to get back to. So I decided to reach out to Scott Stamper.

& & &

“When did you return to New York?”

“Why do the police want to question you?”

“What’s your beef with Tom Hanks?”

“Who are you wearing?”

The thing about tabloid press is how predictable they are – when and where they show up, the questions they ask. Scott and his team stepped off the elevator at the Carlyle and seemed surprised, though, at the bloggers, reporters, paparazzi, and fans gathered in the hotel lobby. His publicist glared like it was my doing; I wondered why she thought I had that kind of juice.

It was the day after the news broke, and I caught up with Scott in his Manhattan suite for a quick review before he was dragged in for questioning. Before I got there, his manager had him on a Zoom with some talk-show lawyer, prepping him for the NYPD. But I knew Scott – I grabbed a pen and some stationery off the desk and wrote out answers to the questions I figured they’d most likely ask. He’d spent eight years on soaps in the 80s – you can find clips online, just search “meat cleaver amnesia wedding” – and could memorize dialogue faster than I can read. Better to give him fully-baked replies he can regurgitate than a list of Dos and Don’ts. He doesn’t ad-lib well.

I wasn’t too worried: By “dragged in for questioning,” I mean he was meeting homicide detectives in the hotel’s Bemelman’s bar. Between “Sorry for your loss” and “Can I get a selfie,” I doubted they’d even try to sneak in some police work.

 “Thank you for coming, partner,” Scott engulfed me in his arms and pounded, once, between my shoulder blades. It was over as fast as it began. One dramatic sniff – one – to show that there could be tears, if needed. He looked genuinely broken up. Then again, he is a big-time movie actor.

“I know this must have come as a shock.” I, on the other hand, am not a big-time actor. There was no way I was going to make that sound convincing.

“Yes… It was… Who would do this?” He almost had me believing we hadn’t discussed this very thing a few weeks ago. I thought I detected actual pain in his eyes.

I snagged a mini Dasani and some grapes off the amenity tray and joined his entourage.

They were tense – it was their first celebrity scandal, and I could tell they weren’t happy with my presence. As a rule, I never bother learning anyone’s names. Clients are always changing out their staff, and each time I saw Scott he had different people. But you can tell who’s who by what they do with their hands: Publicists are always typing madly on their phones, and managers constantly schlurp water out of Hydro Flasks. I’d never met a group of people better hydrated than Hollywood managers.

I offered Scott my ballcap, the universal celebrity camouflage. Even if he couldn’t be anonymous, it lent a sheen of humility.

“Whatever you do, don’t smile,” I whispered to Scott. I knew he had been about to. The sight of fans, paired with his people-pleasing instincts, could be overpowering. Watching the muscles in his face adjust, his getting into character – even when the character was himself – was always fascinating.

“What have you told the police?”

“Are there any suspects?”

“When did you last see your wife?”

Scott turned to the microphones. “I am shocked and saddened that the most important person in my life, my jewel and my North star, was so violently taken from me.” It hurt hearing him say the line as much as it had hurt writing it; wasn’t I the most important person in his life? Genevive hadn’t even come around until I after I put him on the bestseller list the first time.

The manager was getting huffy, trying to nudge him into the bar. I think I’d met this one before. That’s okay, she didn’t remember me either.

Someone with pink hair and a Bob Barker mike plugged into their iPhone yelled, “Is it true Ms. Zuma was about to leave you?”

I had not anticipated that question, which meant Scott didn’t have an answer for it.

I turned to the crowd. “Mr. Stamper has only just arrived in the City, he took the train up from Baltimore. He is looking forward to meeting with detectives and clearing his name.”

“Clearing his name” set off a whole firestorm. He hadn’t been seen as a legitimate suspect until I said that. Someone asked about an A-List celebrity slumming it on the train.

“As a committed environmentalist, and in the interest of time, Mr. Stamper used the convenient, less-than-three-hour commute by rail. There’s a train at least every hour, every day, making that route.” Scott was no eco-warrior; he’d burn tires in his driveway if he could.

“And who are you?” a middle-aged woman with too much lipstick and a faux-fur hat yelled. We’d met at a dozen junkets over the years; she always used her fingers to pick through charcuterie trays.

Scott, bleary-eyed, affected an obviously-forced smile. “This man is my partner.”

The gaggle exploded: What did he mean by “partner”? How long had we been together? Had Genevive known? And, the one that stung, Couldn’t he do better?

The publicist looked up from her phone, gasped, her thumb-typing shifting to overdrive attempting a magic tweet that would make it better.

“It’s nothing like that,” I offered. Now you know why Scott wasn’t allowed to speak off the cuff. But he also just added 100 grand to my advance for his next memoir. Net net, all good.

He took one last look at the crowd and softly apologized to me. “I’m used to this sort of thing, everywhere I go. Price of fame and all. Wish I could be treated like a nobody, like you.”

I grabbed a handful of Starlight mints off the hostess stand and followed him into the bar.

& & &

The interview did not go as I expected. For one thing, Bemelman’s changed its nut mix. Now they put out those horrible rice crackers, the ones that taste like a Korean grocer’s ass and get compacted on the tops of your molars. Yes, I know that’s called the “marginal occlusal ridge” – in my lean years I wrote medical/dental textbooks on the side. You cannot imagine the lack of fact-checking and proofreading that goes into them. Seriously, half the shit in Van Buren’s Principles of Medicine was made up.

But back to Scott. It’s a well-worn Hollywood saw that any actor playing a cop does a ride-along with the NYPD; in interviews, said actor tosses a bone to the “bravery” of the force, blah blah blah. Not only did Scott not do that years ago on the publicity tours for Heart of Gold, Shield of Tin but he apparently made a god-awful mess of the patrol vehicle. One story I heard limited the damage to Funyuns and Cheetos dust in the electronics, the other stories unprintable. This was before I started working with him, naturally.

Which meant the detectives were aggressive from the start. Wanted to paint Scott as a hothead, particularly after reports of actual fighting on the set of his latest movie. The lead investigator, a guy named Kopacki, pressed him on his supposedly violent tendencies.

“I’m an artist, not a savage!”

One could argue his artistic merits, but the guy definitely could not throw a punch.

“Sees, that’s where I gotta ask,” the detective laid it on thick. He fumbled with his phone, pulling up videos of Scott from earlier that week. “About that fracas with your coworker.”

Scott looked to me, for permission, I guess. I nodded. I had written out an answer for him. Artistic differences, the set is a safe space, nothing but respect. Instead he ad-libbed.

“The son of a bitch had it coming. Nobody likes Tom Hanks.”

That was not what I wrote. I boosted the waiter’s pen and jotted some notes on the back of a menu so we’d be ready for next time.

Kopacki leaned forward. “So you admit you punched him?”

“Show me a director or co-star who hasn’t taken a swing at that insufferable blowhard. He’s had his nose broken so many times his ENT is an executive producer on the project. Sucker-punching Hanks doesn’t mean I’m violent, it means I’m decent. And it sure doesn’t mean I shot my wife.”

“Who said anything about her being shot?”

“You did. That’s what the papers said?”

This was what I was interested in. I had some questions.

“We found a gun in the room. The papers made the rest up. Imagine that.”

“That explains things.” I hadn’t meant to chime in. Everyone looked at me.

“Explains what?”

I shook my head, Never mind.

The detective continued. “We haven’t released the cause of death. We’re waiting for the results of the toxicology report. Right now, the M. E. is calling it a heart attack. But with obvious signs of assault – the room in disarray, nothing taken… It feels domestic.”

The other detective, a pencil-neck who’d been picking his nails with the edge of a coaster, spoke for the first time. “We’d like you to come downtown for further questioning.”

Everyone stood, nice and polite-like. Kopacki extended his hand, leading the way. No cuffs, no photo ops for the paparazzi.

I stayed behind and waited for the sliders we’d ordered. Signed them to Scott’s room.

& & &

This was moving faster than I would have anticipated. My job is literally to control the narrative, but usually after the fact. Working in real-time was complicated. I was glad that Howie and I were going out to dinner that night. I had questions.

We met at the Trader Joe’s on 14^th. Sometimes we got fancy and went to the Union Square Whole Foods, usually around the holidays when they put cubes of turkey and stuffing out; this time of year it was hit or miss. If they were having a special on barbecue sauce, sometimes there’d be little toothpicks of brisket, but you couldn’t bank on it.

We huddled over my notes while sipping plastic cups of Two-Buck Chuck and eating spanakopita out of little paper ramekins.

Part of the trick of being a good ghostwriter is to demonstrate just enough empathy that your clients open up and share their deepest and darkest. That doesn’t mean that, on our own time, we’re a particularly empathetic – or even sympathetic – bunch.

“If she died of natural causes, that’s barely news. Cycles out in one day. He’s back at work by the weekend and that’s that. But if there’s a whiff of scandal…” Howie rubbed his thumb over his index and middle finger. “Then there’s panels on cable shows, think pieces, sidewalk shrines, you name it.”

A short-haired woman in a blue suit and white Hoka Sevens tried stepping between us to try the tortilla chips and pepita salsa on display. Howie’s brushback look will haunt her until the end of her days.

“If you want my advice on solving this thing…”

I didn’t. But I was interested in his take, for different reasons. Howie Spangler was not just a basher, a so-called churnalist, but a damn good crime-solver in his own right. He cracked half the cases he wrote about, and even some others he didn’t. There were detectives in at least four precincts – also in Los Angeles and Las Vegas – that never did a lick of work on their own, they just hired Howie to do the investigating and they took the credit. I didn’t know how he put up with it. Checks only buy so much dignity.

Howie rattled off everything that he would have wanted to review at the crime scene – most of what you’d expect if you’d ever read one of his books. He framed everything around “the Three F’s”: Fingerprints, Fibers, and Phone Calls. It flows better on podcasts. Personally, I think he’d been spending too much time with Simon Jensen, the political writer.

I had already thought of those three. I’d seen TV shows. But then he threw in an “F” I hadn’t expected – Foot Traffic. Not just visitors and service calls, but also room deliveries.

“So what’s his alibi?”

“He was alone in his trailer. Lot of people saw him go in that night, after the brawl with Tom Hanks. No one saw him again until the assistant director knocked the next morning.”

“So it’s only a matter of time before someone does the math.”

“What math?”

“You said it yourself – Amtrak trains are frequent and fast. He could ferry up and back in no time flat.”

“But no one saw him on any train—”

“No one saw him in his trailer, either! You may have inadvertently destroyed your own guy’s case.”

He invited me for dessert – neither one of us had ever been heavy drinkers, but he knew an AA meeting nearby that put out lemon sandwich cookies. I ran into the Carvel next door for a few wooden spoons of rum raisin to make it a la mode.

& & &

Police stations were nerve-wracking enough; they didn’t need to put the sergeant’s desk that much higher than everything else, so the bored man could look down his red potato nose at me. Judging me. I was at the precinct house on 67^th and Lex, waiting to meet with Detective Kopacki. I told a white lie to the sergeant, that it was about information on the Stamper case; that much was true, but I was seeking details, not offering any.

I signed in at the small table to my right. Some bastard had snapped the pen off its chain. There were stacks of pamphlets on CPR and boating safety; I stuffed a couple of each into my inside jacket pocket.

The detective finally came out and introduced himself. I reminded him that we’d met; earlier that day, in fact. He pretended to recognize me.

“The lawyer, yeah, right.”

I corrected him, and he nodded to the sergeant to buzz me through the gate. I followed him toward the interview rooms.

“So, like, he just talks and you type it into a book?”

I tried to explain that it was more complicated than that, that I helped my clients process their stories and identify their unique voices. How I unearthed their innermost beliefs and values and, essentially, was a vessel so they could articulate this in a clear and cogent manner.

I tried to explain all that, but he kept walking when I stopped at the coffee set-up – an orange-handled Bunn carafe scorching on a too-hot burner. There was a piece of masking tape on the glass indicating it was not “decalf”, so I poured a cup and fixed it with powdered non-dairy creamer. Like it would kill the city to buy those individual cups of flavored half-and-half.

I had expected the interview room to match what I’d seen on teevee – stainless steel furniture bolted to the floor, one-way mirrors, inky fingerprints smeared on cinder block walls. But this? Textured carpet, Herman Miller chairs, and a subtle blue-gray on the walls that evoked the NYPD’s brand identity.

I waggled my finger at the surroundings. “Upper East Side. Nice.”

The detective plopped an overflowing manila file folder onto the table and fell into his seat behind it. “Nah, this is the VIP room. For movie stars, rock singers. They’re the real heroes.”

“I don’t usually get this treatment.”

“Figure you’re close to a movie star, right? You put the words in his mouth?”

I was changing my mind about this guy. “I hadn’t thought you were a fan of my client.”

He waved it off. “Bah, that old Funyuns thing? Yeah, well. That’s nothing. When I was a rookie, Sandy Bullock left half a tuna salad from Kossars under the passenger seat of my patrol vehicle. Had to ditch it – keys in the ignition – somewhere over in Jersey. Heard they never did get the smell out.”

“Of the car?”

“Out of Jersey.” He clicked his pen and opened the folder just enough to let me know he wasn’t letting me see inside. “Yeah, meeting this Stamper guy was a real treat. Lotta charisma. Posed for those whaddayacall, selfies. Charmed everyone here in the One Nine.”

Cops can never just say a number. “So you think he’s pretty innocent?”

“Oh, no, not at all. I liked the guy, but I also like him for murder.” He clicked the pen again and raised his eyebrows to impress me. It didn’t work. “I figure you’re kinda like his lawyer, or his priest. You know what’s goin’ on in his head, but you don’t have, like, a code of ethics or anything to keep you from sharing that.”

I ignored the implication. Like I said, I was here to get information, not give it. I was perfectly happy to trade, but I wanted to see his cards first. “I’m just curious why you brought him into the station for more questioning. He has an alibi, there’s no motive, you said yourself it looks like natural causes. I mean, you haven’t found anything poisonous in the room, right?”

He spread his hand over the folder, like it was a lead shield protecting the contents. “Interesting you should mention poison. And that alibi is sketchy – you know it is, you said it yourself. Between you and me, we have good evidence he was in her room that night. But you’re right. I’m stuck on motive. That’s where I hoped you could help. You ever spend time with them? Just the two of ‘em? Together?”

“Sure. He dotes on her.”

“Ed. Dot-ed.”

I conceded the point. “Scott looks – looked – at his wife like she hung the moon and the stars, as they say.” But what about when his alma mater hung an honorary doctorate of literature around his neck? That was in recognition of the book I wrote for him.

“Never saw any trouble? Any jealousy?” The detective was relentless.

I wasn’t going to mention how bitter he was at that baccalaureate dinner, when the university board orbited Genevieve, fascinated by her research into cyberbiotics and could care less about Scott’s learning tightrope walking for Operation: Bravo VI – Solar Midnight. Or the night we went to Gramercy Tavern. While Scott signed autographs for the busboys and B girls, Anderson Cooper and Neil deGrasse Tyson – you didn’t hear that from me – split a bottle of Macallan Red with Genevieve. Didn’t make him angry so much as sad. Insecure.“Insecure? That guy?”

“The biggest egos have the most insecurities, for sure. How would you feel if you put your heart and soul into your art, only to watch someone have a brighter spotlight?”

“So you’ve stayed close, huh?”

“Very. I’m always collecting new material.”

“Bet somethin’ like this would be a good read. Hey, maybe you can make me look good when you write it up?”

“Something like, ‘The smart detective put me in prison but he was just doing his job’?”

Kopacki laughed. “Perfect. Guess you agree with me he’s heading to Sing Sing.”

We chatted a bit more. He asked how I kept the details straight; I mentioned that I recorded my conversations with Scott. Eventually, of course, the DA subpoenaed those recordings.

He walked me back to the front door.

“You’re doing it,” I said.

“Doing what?”

“You’re whistling that song. From Scott’s light beer commercial.”

Kopacki laughed. Sounded like he was clearing his throat. “I guess I was. You know, I don’t think I’ve heard that in thirty years. I’ll be damned.”

I saw a copy of Letters from the Heart of the Sun, the first of Scott’s autobiographies I wrote, on his desk. I would have offered to sign it, but it was a library copy. Cheapskate.

& & &

“I can’t believe this crap! The press is focusing on her!” Scott Stamper was having one of his trademark hissy fits, slamming his fist down on the room service tray and smashing the complimentary box of water crackers Carlyle management sent up. It had come with a nice baked brie, but to be honest I like the individually-wrapped wedges better.

“To be fair, she is – she was – a leader in her field.”

“I have two Academy Awards! And I’m nominated for another! What does she have?”

A Nobel, I reminded him.

“So does Bob Dylan! And how many Oscars does he have?”

“One.”

“See!”

I was ready to be done with this. But as long as the police dragged on the tox screen, I knew nothing would happen. Scott was good at acting innocent – and in this case, he was – but it was only a matter of time before they got him. I laid out the evidence Kopacki shared with me, and even though it was all circumstantial, I’d seen better people do hard time for less. Which reminded me that a certain actress still owed me an SAT coach recommendation for my niece.

“That’s all absurd!” Scott double-dipped an apple slice in the brie. Guess it’s his now. “Those boys in blue really liked me! Detective Kopacki and I bonded – can we check his Insta? I bet he’s getting some Likes.

“Besides, I don’t even know what hotel Genny was staying in.”

“The Marriott,” I told him.

“The one with the puppet show in the lobby?”

“The other one.”

I hoped he would calm down, but NY1 cycled back to her case. It wasn’t quite nonstop coverage, but it was close.

Scott threw a perfectly good Vitamin Water at the widescreen. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to live in the shadow of someone else? Someone who believes they’re better than you? When you have so much greatness to offer the world? How hard that is?” He stared at me, catching his breath. “I can’t imagine you would.”

& & &

In the end, that was all the motive they needed: Professional jealousy. The State made a compelling case that a bruised ego can do crazy things to a man – even lead him to commit murder. They got so much right, and so much wrong.

At my apartment, I lit an Aveda tester candle and unfolded a “Give Your Baby CPR” pamphlet as a placemat. The verdict had come back earlier, and I was celebrating with a bit of a feast. I laid out a spread I’d picked up from the green room backstage at Fox News. Like NY1, they’d been covering the trial around-the-clock, and had brought me in several times as an expert. I never got on air, of course, but I was the “voice in the ear” of several of their blonder anchors. I say it here, it comes out there.

No matter. Fox pays their invoices and has a really nice cold noodle salad that keeps for days. Stinks up the fridge, but what can you do. With a couple of soy sauce packets from Hunan Juan’s, and a Papaya Dog napkin tucked in my collar, I was set.

They had Scott dead to rights on signing for a flower delivery from D’Angelo’s in her hotel room the evening she died. The courier didn’t recognize him with a Mets cap pulled down over his head, but he recognized the autograph. Certainly matched Scott’s signature.

Scott tried arguing that he wasn’t even a National League guy, but without me writing everything out for him, he fumbled the testimony. Besides, dozens of witnesses saw him wearing a Mets cap on his way into Bemelman’s for that initial questioning with the cops.

But the key was the flowers.

His wife died of a heart attack brought on from exposure to foxglove. Typically, you have to ingest its blooms – forensics finally checked her tea cup – and even then, it’s not always fatal. It slows down the ticker, makes you delirious, but lots of times you’ll be okay.

Not Genevieve. She was particularly allergic. Just being in the same room was toxic.

Scott testified that he had no idea of his wife’s allergies. And then the prosecutor read several long excerpts from his second memoir Star-Crossed, the one I wrote for him while he learned to snorkel: in one passage, Scott described how carefully he had to curate her bouquets when they dated. Another was a recounting of a fictional trip they took to the emergency room after her “exposure” to larkspur. I guess even then I was planting seeds.

It was his own autobiography, so it was tough for him to deny it. And Scott would rather go to prison than admit that he’d never read his own book.

And, speaking of exposure, it was indeed the Trial of the Century. Beautiful people, movie stars, cutting edge scientists, all doing bad things to each other.

I should have been able to collect huge royalties for writing Scott’s prison memoir. I was literally banking on that. But New York’s damn “Son of Sam” laws kicked in. I’ll get nothing. I pitched Tom Hanks an idea, but he’s too scared to speak out.

And, with the simultaneous publications of two “Trial of the Century” paperbacks, Detective Kopacki’s Badge of Honor, and a collection of Kosher sandwich recipes from Sandra Bullock – yes, she sent samples – Howie easily won the pool at the next luncheon.

A bruised ego can do crazy things to a man. I thought I’d get a third Scott Stamper book out of this deal.

Instead, I’m out of pocket sixty bucks for all that foxglove.

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Robert J. Binney 2025