Soft Focus

by Jayne Ann Krentz

  “. . . The guy’s a master with a camera, especially handheld work. Can frame a perfect shot on the fly.”

  “. . . got a fabulous script, but so far, no backers . . .”

  “. . . completely misinterpreted the symbolism of the gutter scene . . .”

  The theater crowd thinned quickly just beyond the brilliant marquee lights. But as she and Jack walked through the parking lot Elizabeth saw another oasis of bright light and a small cluster of people gathered around it. An air of concentrated activity surrounded the scene.

  “They’re making a film over there,” Elizabeth said. “Must be one of the groups in the contest.”

  “They’d better not have blocked the exit with their equipment,” Jack replied, barely looking up. “I’m not going to miss that meeting with Ledger just because somebody has decided to shoot a movie in the parking lot.”

  Elizabeth studied the scene more closely. “The exit is clear. They’re working in the space next to it. Must be a murder mystery. See, there’s a body on the ground.”

  “Every film we’ve seen since we got here has had a dead body in it.” Jack dug his keys out of his pocket. “Murder seems to be a staple of the genre.”

  “Of course it is. Haven’t you learned anything this week? Noir is all about the dark underbelly of modern life. It’s a reflection of urban decadence and moral ambiguity. It came so naturally to American filmmakers in the forties that they didn’t even realize they were creating a genre. The French had to come up with the name for it.”

  “Don’t start.” Jack opened the car door and bundled her inside. “I am not in the mood for another lecture on film noir.”

  “I can tell.”

  Jack closed the door, walked around the car, and got behind the wheel. He pulled out of the parking space with smooth, economical skill and pointed the vehicle toward the exit.

  Elizabeth lowered her window to watch the filmmaking going on at the far end of the lot. There was a figure sprawled on the pavement. Two actors dressed in black masks stood over the “body.” One held a length of metal pipe. The other grasped an extremely realistic-looking pistol. A man with a handheld camera hovered over the scene. A woman fussed with what appeared to be sound equipment.

  “Okay, people,” a paunchy man in a billed cap shouted. “Let’s do it again. This time I want the beating to go on a little longer before Calvin pulls the trigger. This is the guy who supposedly double-crossed his partner and slept with his wife, remember? We’re talking revenge here. Let me feel it.”

  Jack drove out onto the street. Elizabeth sat back and raised the window.

  “Kind of chilly out here to be making movies,” she observed.

  “From what I can tell, these independent film people don’t let anything get in the way of making movies.”

  Elizabeth thought about that. “There’s something rather endearing about artists who are so passionate about their art.”

  “You call that art?”

  She smiled. “Given that you are about to sign on as a producer for something called Dark Moon Rising, I would think that you’d take a more open-minded approach to the subject.”

  “I’ve seen enough here this week to know that filmmaking is a business, not an art.”

  “Hah. I’ll bet you’ll take an entirely different attitude when you see your own name in the credits.”

  “I doubt it, but tell me, Elizabeth, will you attend the premiere of my film with me?”

  For some reason the invitation caught her off guard. Probably because it implied a future for the two of them, she thought. She hadn’t realized that Jack had been thinking that far ahead. She certainly had been trying to avoid the subject.

  She cleared her throat. “It, uh, generally takes quite a while to make a film and get it screened. Even a little independent film. Leonard probably won’t get his movie premiered until the next neo noir festival. That’s a whole year from now.”

  “Right.” Jack slowed for the turn into the Mirror Springs Resort parking lot. “So is it a date?”

  He was serious, she thought. He was talking about a date next year. As if he expected them to still be involved in a relationship twelve months from now. She noticed that she was breathing shallowly, the way she did when she was tense or anxious. Or scared. Or excited.

  “We’ll see,” she said quietly.

  He parked the car in a slot and ripped the keys out of the ignition with sharp, controlled motion. “I love it when you’re so decisive.”

  “Okay, okay, it’s a date.” Exasperated, she yanked hard on the door handle. “If you actually do produce a film, I’ll attend the premiere with you.”

  “Be nice to me,” he said in a voice that was heavily shaded with wicked innuendo, “and maybe I’ll let you have a walk-on.”

  “Does this offer involve a casting couch?”

  His eyes gleamed. “It sure does.”

  “Let’s go see Ledger.” She opened her car door quickly and leaped out.

  Jack climbed out from behind the wheel and joined her. Together they walked toward the lights of the resort lobby. A young man in a red shirt, black bow tie, and black trousers opened the door.

  The lobby was nearly deserted except for the front-desk staff. Jack did not stop to use the house phone to call Ledger. He headed straight for the elevators. She had to quicken her pace to keep up with him.

  He said nothing as they rode the elevator to the third floor and stepped out into the hushed corridor. Elizabeth could feel his anticipation. Adrenaline was flowing through her veins, too, but the sensation made her deeply uneasy. She should have been excited about the prospect of getting a lead on Tyler Page, she thought. Instead, she was aware of a gathering sense of dread.

  “Do you think he’s found Page for us?” she asked as they went down the hall to room 305.

  “He’d better have something useful. Ledger won’t get a dime out of me if I find out he’s wasted my time with some vague story about having seen Page around town.”

  They came to a halt in front of room 305. Elizabeth heard the faint sound of a television set emanating from inside. Jack raised his hand to knock.

  Elizabeth glanced down and saw the card key sticking out of the slot. “Jack, wait.”

  He followed her gaze and frowned when he saw the key. “Why in hell would he leave it in the door?”

  “It happens sometimes.” Elizabeth swallowed. “If a person has other things on his mind, he might forget about the key in the lock.”

  “Huh.” Jack knocked three times, very quietly, very deliberately.

  There was no response.

  Elizabeth felt the unease twist more tightly in the pit of her stomach. “I don’t like this.”

  “No kidding.” Jack slid the key in and out of the slot in a single, smooth motion, unlocking the door. “I was just thinking the same thing.”

  He opened the door and pushed it inward. The only light came from the flickering images on the television screen. Elizabeth braced herself, although she did not know what she was tensing against. She tried not to think of all the films she had seen in which the hero and heroine keep a midnight appointment only to discover that the person they were going to meet had been murdered moments before they arrived.

  The television set was louder now. A video. She recognized the dialogue immediately. Leonard Ledger’s Natural Causes.

  “. . . I trusted you, Verna.”

  “Big mistake. I’m attracted to men with brains. I could never fall for a guy who was dumb enough to trust me.”

  It was obvious from where she stood that the room was empty. Elizabeth breathed a small sigh of relief. Then she glanced at the bathroom door. It stood ajar. The interior of the smaller room was dark.

  Jack flipped the switch on the wall. “Ledger? Are you here?”

  The only response came from the television set. Elizabeth stared at the bathroom door. Jack met her eyes. Then he took a step forward, reached around the edge of the doorjamb, and turned on the light ins
ide the small room. He eased the door inward, revealing the tub, commode, and basin.

  Empty. Elizabeth exhaled deeply.

  “What’s the matter?” Jack gave her a humorless smile. “Expecting a body in the tub?”

  “Weren’t you?”

  “The possibility crossed my mind. We’ve obviously seen one too many movies in the past few days.” He opened a nearby closet. There were no clothes hanging inside. No body, either.

  Elizabeth took a closer look inside the bath. There were some wet towels on the floor but none of the usual male travel accoutrements. No razor, toothpaste, or condoms.

  She walked farther into the main room and watched Jack open a drawer beside the bed.

  “Anything inside?” she asked.

  “No.” Jack straightened. His face was grim. “The bastard’s gone. Packed up and left. Took off so fast, he forgot his key in the lock.”

  “The question is, why?”

  “I can think of one very likely reason.” Jack studied the room with brooding eyes. “Someone else offered him more money than I did.”

  “. . . You set me up, Verna.”

  The voices on the small screen were annoying. Elizabeth glanced around for the clicker and saw it lying on the bed next to a videotape box. She picked up the small instrument and silenced the TV. Then she took a closer look at the plastic tape container.

  “He left this behind.” She plucked the box off the bed and saw that there was a tape inside. She removed it and glanced at the hand-scrawled title. “Betrayal.”

  Jack put out his hand. “Let me see that.”

  She gave it to him. He took it and went toward the armoire that housed the hotel room’s entertainment equipment.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “What does it look like I’m doing? I’m going to play the tape.”

  “For heaven’s sake, why?”

  “This is the only thing left in the room, and it was left in plain sight.”

  She stared at him as he removed the previous tape and fed the tape into the slot. “You think Leonard Ledger wanted you to find that tape?”

  “It seems like a reasonable conclusion under the circumstances.”

  Jack punched a button. There was a soft, mechanical whir. New black-and-white images appeared on the television screen.

  The scene was grainy and obviously shot by an amateur, but Elizabeth had no trouble making out the setting. She was looking at the door of a hotel room. It appeared to be an inexpensive establishment. Portions of the carpeted hall were visible. As she watched, she saw a maid push a cart past the closed door and disappear.

  Another figure walked into view. Hayden Shaw.

  Elizabeth’s sense of foreboding went ballistic. Her stomach was a solid knot of tension now. She watched Hayden remove a card key from his pocket, open the hotel-room door, and vanish inside.

  “Jack, what’s going on here?”

  “I don’t know yet.” Jack did not take his eyes off the screen. “But the plot is starting to look interesting.”

  Another man bustled into camera range. He was short with a round face and a nervous air. The top of his head was completely bald. What hair he had left was too long and tied in a straggly ponytail. Gold, wire-rimmed glasses gleamed on his face. He wore a baggy black linen jacket and pants and a lot of gold chains. He clutched a briefcase.

  Jack whistled softly. “Tyler Page.”

  Elizabeth watched Page knock twice. The door opened almost immediately. Page disappeared inside.

  “That bastard,” Jack said very quietly. “I knew he was in this somewhere.”

  “Page? But we already guessed that he was involved.”

  “I’m talking about Hayden.” Jack gazed enigmatically at the screen. “I knew that he hated me. Just didn’t realize how much.”

  Elizabeth did not know what to say in the face of such overwhelming evidence of betrayal. She could only imagine what it would feel like to find out that your own blood kin would do something like this to you. She touched Jack’s arm. He did not seem to notice.

  Nothing else happened on the screen for a while. But the camera never wavered. Elizabeth wondered if the photographer had hung around to catch the two men leaving the hotel.

  Another minute or two passed. Elizabeth glanced back toward the door.

  “Someone could walk in on us at any minute, Jack. Why don’t we take the tape back to the house and finish watching it there?”

  “You’re right.” He started to walk toward the television to retrieve the tape.

  But just as he reached out to punch the button, a third person walked into view on the film.

  At first Elizabeth did not recognize herself.

  And then she did, and the floor seemed to fall away beneath her feet. Her hands suddenly felt as if she’d plunged them into ice water. The tingling was so sharp, it hurt.

  She almost stopped breathing altogether when she saw herself walk to the hotel room door and knock twice.

  No. Impossible.

  On the small screen the hotel door opened. Elizabeth watched herself enter the room where Hayden Shaw and Tyler Page waited.

  The video ended with shocking suddenness. She remembered the title. Betrayal.

  “IT WON’T BE much longer now,” she said in that warm, husky voice that sent exciting little chills down his spine. “Then we can be together. Think of it, Tyler. Paris. Rome. Madrid. The world will be ours.”

  “Yes.” Tyler Page held the phone to his ear with one hand. He used his other hand to dig more potato chips out of the bag.

  The house was dark. The only light in the room came from the video playing on the television screen.

  He munched chips and watched Bette Davis in The Letter. So good when she’s bad.

  “Tyler?”

  “I’m here, Angel Face.”

  On screen Davis, in the role of Leslie Crosbie, shot her lover in a jealous rage.

  “We must not see each other until this is finished. You understand that.”

  “I understand,” he said.

  “It’s hard on both of us.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Very hard.” And it was also becoming a bit boring. He felt as if he’d been sitting here alone in this house forever.

  “Goodbye, my darling.”

  “Farewell, My Lovely.” He hung up the phone and stared at the screen. He knew what would happen. Leslie Crosbie would go free in court, but she would die in the end. The Production Code had to be satisfied. She had to pay for her crime.

  He wondered if he would eventually have to pay for his crime, too.

  He reached into the bag for another potato chip.

  He thought about Angel Face. He had sacrificed everything for her. He had exchanged all that he had once held dear for the woman who held him in thrall. When it was finished, there would be no going back.

  No Going Back. A shudder went through him.

  No Going Back.

  Deep down inside he knew that he was already starting to miss his pleasant routine at the lab. Life had been so simple there. People tolerated his little idiosyncrasies. They left him alone with his work. He also missed the peace and quiet of his little house. At home no one pestered him about dishes in the sink or crumbs on the carpet. He could leave his dirty laundry on the floor for weeks if he wanted.

  But she didn’t approve of that kind of behavior. When this was over and they were finally able to be together, he would have to become Cary Grant for her. Debonair, articulate, clever, and above all, fastidiously neat. It was a daunting thought.

  It would be worth it, he assured himself. She was his Gilda, his Laura, The Woman in the Window, The Lady in the Lake.

  But sometimes she scared the hell out of him. Maybe that was why he’d bought the gun a few weeks ago.

  ELIZABETH COULD NO longer bear the silence. She was choking on it. She jerked her gaze away from the view of the narrow, winding road and looked at Jack. He seemed wholly absorbed in his driving. It was as if getting
back to the house they shared was the only thing that mattered.

  He had said nothing since they had left the resort. Not one bloody word. On the other hand, she reminded herself, neither had she.

  The shock was only now beginning to ebb. A rush of clean, hot anger was sweeping in to take its place. She could deal with this now. She would deal with it.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked.

  Jack frowned, as if he had forgotten that she was sitting there beside him. He turned briefly toward her and then returned his attention to the twisting pavement ahead.

  “I was thinking about that video we found,” he said.

  “What, precisely, were you thinking about it?”

  “Mostly I was wondering who planted it there in Ledger’s room for us to find.”

  She folded her arms tightly beneath her breasts and stared at the trees. “Someone who wanted you to think that Hayden, Tyler Page, and I all conspired to steal Soft Focus.”

  “Believe it or not, I had figured out that much.” He slowed for a sharp turn. Halfway through it, he accelerated smoothly. “The question is, who would want me to have that information, and why now?”

  “The information is false,” she said very evenly.

  “Sure it is. But that only makes the list of people who might have planted the video in Ledger’s room longer than it would have been if the tape was for real.”

  For a split second she did not think she had heard him right.

  She turned as far as the seat belt would allow. “Wait a second. Are you telling me that you don’t believe what you saw on that videotape?”

  “Give me a break.” He kept his eyes on the road, but his mouth twisted in cold amusement. “We are surrounded by several hundred professional filmmakers and video experts of all kinds. In addition, there are upwards of a couple thousand serious film buffs in the immediate vicinity of Mirror Springs, any one of whom probably knows how to fake a piece of videotape. Of course I don’t believe what I saw on the tape.”

  The great, icy monster that had sunk its claws into her insides released its grip so suddenly, she was surprised she did not take flight. Okay, so he had dismissed the evidence on the video on technical grounds. So what? He had refused to believe it. That was the important thing.