Blonde Ambition by Rita Cosby Read Free Book Online Page B

her."
       It would be the last time Virgie Arthur personally heard from her daughter.

    Sunday, September 10, early afternoon

    From the moments immediately following Daniel's death, until the day Anna died, she was often in a drug haze, a blurry void somewhere between conscious and unconscious.
       The normally joyous occasion of taking a newborn baby home from the hospital was filled with overwhelming sadness for Anna Nicole Smith, even though she had long hoped for a little girl. Anna's new friends, Immigration Minister Shane Gibson and Theresa Laramore, came to take the three-day-old unnamed baby of the as yet unnamed father, out of the chaos of room 201 after Daniel's death. Anna Nicole's new baby was whisked away quickly out the back door of the hospital to avoid attention. Anna Nicole stayed behind, clinging to the body of Daniel.
       It is a mother's worst nightmare—the birth of one child, the death of another. According to eyewitnesses, it was a terribly emotional, pitiful scene—having her son die in her hospital bed in a foreign country where she had just given birth, and then refusing to let them take his body to the morgue. Anna Nicole was uncontrollable, delirious, and had to be sedated before she would finally let go of Daniel's body.
       When Anna's grasp of reality and on her child had lessened, Daniel's body was taken out of her bed to the morgue for the mandatory autopsy. After Howard gave police his recollection of what had happened since Daniel's arrival, he, Ben, and several others loaded everything into Ben's rented van, and a heavily tranquilized, sobbing Anna was helped to the car. Rather than sealing the room and its contents, police weren't acting like the hospital room was a crime scene, so Howard and Anna were free to remove all their belongings— Anna's clothes, flowers sent to the hospital for her newborn, even Daniel's suitcase and some of Daniel's clothes that medical personnel had stripped from his body in the fruitless attempts to save his life.
       They were also able to remove what numerous friends have described as Howard's "goodie bag." Howard typically carried either a brown Coach bag or a black duffle bag. It was a repository for an assortment of drugs, which, according to employees, friends, and court testimony, he doled out to Anna on an "as-he-thought-she-needed" basis.
       "He was the pharmacist and that was the drugstore," Ben Thompson said. So much so that friends would later find it ironic when Larry King asked Howard K. Stern if Lexapro was an antidepressant, and Howard answered, "I'm not too familiar with how medications work but, yes, it's an anti– depressant."
       Anna's friend Jackie Hatten told me she's witnessed Howard giving Anna a medley of drugs: "Vicodin, Valium, morphine, Demerol, you name it, he had it."
       As they were leaving the hospital, Howard asked Ben to watch over the duffle bag and the camera bag, after he had taken a number of photos of Daniel. "I don't understand why the Bahamian Police didn't lock down that hospital room," Ben said. But they didn't. The bags were free to go.
       "Don't let them out of your sight," Howard said, pointing to the camera bag. "Anna's life is in that bag."
       As they left the hospital that tragic September day, two pills weren't in Howard's "goodie bag"—the two that were found in the bed where Howard had slept. Those two pills were now in a plastic bag and being held by the Bahamian police as possible evidence.
       That morning when Nadine Carey, the nurse on duty at 9:38 a.m., heard "Code Blue" she hurried to room 201 and found the medical team rushing around the bed where Daniel Smith lay lifeless. The medical equipment, life-saving apparatus, and numerous people, including a wailing Anna Nicole, were crowding the room. In order to free up space, Carey pulled the bed nearest the door out and into the hall in order to give doctors better access to try and work their miracles on