That wasn’t cloud cover up there; it was the beginnings of rain clouds. Most likely another thunderstorm was on the way before the skies got brighter. Whether Fifer knew or not Yancy had no idea, but Yancy wasn’t going to tell him.
“Gotta talk to you,” Robin said to Yancy on one of his trips back and forth to fetch props.
Fifer snapped at Clem because the AD—not Clem’s fault—had herded Laura onto her mark instead of the stand-in. Laura threw a fit, went back to her trailer, and wouldn’t come out.
Nick, the unflappable professional, flubbed lines over and over on a scene Fifer was trying to shoot without Laura. Robin McCormack forgot a vital prop and had to go back for it. A light blew with a pop that sent everybody six inches off the floor. One take was going along fine, cast and crew just beginning to relax, when a camera jammed.
Fifer went very still, his face hardly moved when he spoke and his voice held the menace of a disturbed rattler. Everybody immediately got so tense a pin dropping would have shattered them like a footstep on thin ice. Yancy, caught up in the tension hanging like low-lying fog, was soaked with sweat, oppressed by the humidity, and limp as a rag. His rib hurt. Fifer called an early lunch break and everybody split like lightning.
In the caterer’s tent, Yancy slid next to Mac, who had his left sleeve rolled up above the bandage on his biceps. A plate piled with ravioli, salad, and chunks of bread sat in front of him.
“How’s the arm?”
“Hurts,” Mac said.
“You couldn’t wrangle a few days off?”
“I’d rather keep an eye on things.” Mac tore off a chunk of bread and shoved it in his mouth.
Odd, Yancy was under the impression Mac didn’t like Laura Edwards. What did he want to keep an eye on? “What’s wrong with everybody today?”
After washing down a mouthful of ravioli, Mac said ominously, “Jinx.”
“What?”
“Movie people are suckers for superstition. All of them; cast, crew, hired hands, above the line, below the line. They believe this movie is jinxed and they all tiptoe along looking over their shoulders waiting for the crouched beast to spring.”
Yancy hadn’t known Mac was so poetic. “You too?”
“Naw. I do my job, get paid. Don’t have my ego nailed to the floor.”
“Unless something happens to Laura Edwards while you’re driving her somewhere.”
“Better me than her.” Mac tapped the gauze on his arm. “Fifer, who knows what that one thinks. He’s spooky, is what he is.”
Yancy circled the tent looking for Clem. He found her in the rear, drinking lemonade and looking miserable.
“You okay?” he asked.
She spun around, face shutting down like a window closing. “Don’t creep up on me like that.”
“I wondered if you were all right?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Some people get upset,” he said mildly, “when they get yelled at for something that wasn’t their fault.”
“I’m used to it.” She stomped off.
Filming in the afternoon was a repeat of the morning—scene after scene went wrong, lines were forgotten, words were garbled, doors wouldn’t open, or wouldn’t stay closed. Fifer got more and more deadly quiet, which rippled out to cast and crew until everybody was ready to run shrieking into the woods. Yancy included.
There was no chance to talk with Robin, and when Fifer finally called a halt Robin couldn’t be found. Yancy decided to try base camp.
Robin was waiting at the prop trailer. “Listen,” he said, “there’s something you should know. A pair of handcuffs is missing.”
“Handcuffs are missing,” Yancy repeated.
“Yeah. You deaf or something?”
Yancy looked around at the long, crowded prop trailer. “You’re sure?” He found it hard to believe that Robin knew anything was missing.
“It’s my job to know,” Robin said, a mite irritated.
“Guns missing?”
“Hell, no. All you people ever think about are guns. Guns are locked in the safe. None missing.”
“Why would anyone steal a pair of handcuffs?”
“People are nuts. Some actor uses it, they want it. Don’t ask me why. We can’t even have snapshots developed at the local quick photo place, because some jerk off says, ‘Hey, that’s Nick Logan’ and prints up two dozen extra copies to pass out to his friends.”
“What can anybody do with handcuffs?” Yancy was talking more to himself than to Robin.
“Handcuff someone. Hang the cuffs on the wall, put them in a box under the bed. Who the hell knows.”
“Where do you keep them?”
Robin opened a chest drawer, five pairs of cuffs lay inside.
“When were they taken?”
“I can’t tell you. I had them in a bag with a bunch of other stuff we were using. Sometime this afternoon, I noticed they were gone.”
Yancy walked up and back looking at boxes and bins of props, chewing over missing handcuffs.
“I just wanted to let you know. Could you ruminate somewhere else? I’d like to lock up and get out of here?”
“Sure.” Yancy clattered down the metal stairs. Nobody was left except the security guys. He nodded to them and wandered around stepping over electrical cables. Something was nagging at him.
* * *
“The Blakeley girl’s in the interview room,” White said.
Susan looked up from her desk. “Her mother with her?”
White smiled. “Stephanie was playing tennis at Broken Arrow Park. I asked her if she’d like to come with me.”
White, with his blond hair, round face, and apple cheeks, looked like a Boy Scout. Even his severe crew cut didn’t detract from the image. He wouldn’t scare anybody.
Susan tucked in her blouse and went down the corridor. “I need to ask you some questions, Stephanie.” She put an edge in her voice.
Stephanie Blakeley turned from the mirrored glass that she’d been studying. At thirteen, she was tall for her age, almost as tall as Susan, and it was easy to see how, in a dimly lit area, she could look in her late teens. A loose T-shirt covered a thin boyish figure. Her brown hair with tawny streaks reached just past her ears, and could be worn by either male or female. Hazel eyes, clear and intelligent, were right now wary and frightened.
“Sit down, please,” Susan said.
Stephanie slid onto a chair, and turned wide-eyed when the Miranda rights were read to her.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were at the hotel the evening Ms. Lloyd was killed?”
The girl pushed her hands through her hair. “I know I should have.” A basically truthful child, this one, and relieved to be clearing her conscience. “I tried to tell Peter. Two days ago. But he looked so—you know, not feeling good and that other cop was there.”
Demarco looked like a marine with matters of national security on his mind. No teenage girl would be quick to confide in him.
“Tell me now.”
“I was there. Does my mother have to know?”
“You were there without permission?”
Stephanie stared straight ahead like a cadet being disciplined. “Worse. She said I couldn’t go.”
“Why did you?”
Stephanie sniffed and rubbed a finger under her nose. “There was no reason why I shouldn’t. I wouldn’t be late, it wasn’t a school night. How many times will a movie be made here? I wanted to be around where the actors might be. I wasn’t going to talk to anybody, or ask for an autograph or anything. That would be exceptionally gross.”
“Then why go?”
“You’ll think I’m silly. Childish.”
To a teenager, there was nothing worse than being thought childish.
“I’m going to be an author.” There, she’d said it. Make ridiculing remarks if you want.
“And?” Susan carefully kept the word neutral.
“I wanted to observe. See what they were like.”
Susan
put her through questions. When Stephanie accepted that she wasn’t being thought childish, she answered easily, but she didn’t have anything to add to what Susan already knew. She sketched out the scene with colorful detail. This girl might, indeed, be a writer. Unlike the others, she didn’t think Delmar Cayliff was ordinary. She thought he was creepy.
“How did you get to the hotel?”
“I rode my bike. Mom doesn’t want me to ride it after dark. It’s got lights,” she hastened to add.
At that point, Susan would have let her go, except something still sat on her mind, something that wasn’t going to be volunteered and Susan wasn’t quite sure how to get at it. “What happened on your way home?”
“Well—”
Right question.
“You know that curve on Arbor Street down by the quarry?”
Susan nodded.
“It’s sharp, and right there where it sort of bends there’s that flat field behind the fence before you come to where it drops off. Anyway, I was riding right at that bend when a car came roaring straight at me. I got pinned in the headlights. All I could think, I’m going to be killed and my mother will know I went out.”
“Who was driving?”
Stephanie hesitated.
Susan let her struggle with it.
“I’m sure he just didn’t realize how—” She let that trail off, not even believing it herself. “Anyway, when he saw me, he jumped on the brakes, they screamed, and the car fishtailed all over the place.”
“Who was it?”
“Kevin,” she said after another struggle. “Then he kind of got control and drove off and I came home.”
Stephanie sighed. “I figured maybe I’d just stay home next time.”
After she let Stephanie go, Susan sent White out to bring in Kevin Murphy.
* * *
In the interview room, Kevin slouched in a plastic chair, hands in his pockets. He smelled faintly of horses, having been picked up at the Lockett stables where he’d just finished making his movie debut. He’d pulled on a tank top, tight enough to outline the muscles in his chest. Not nervous, not scared and maintaining his parody of politeness, he looked at her with faint mockery.
“What happened to your eye?” She leaned against the wall, one knee bent.
With fingertips, he touched the fading bruise by his left eye. “I ran into a door.”
“Again? First a nosebleed, now a black eye. Clumsy.”
“Yes, ma’am, I certainly am.”
“On the night Sheri Lloyd was murdered, you were driving your father’s car. Tell me again what you did.”
“I got off work and went home to shower. Later I started out to see a friend, and then decided not to.”
“When you got home from work, you had an argument with your father.” She made it a statement, not a question. “He struck you. You took his car. You weren’t going to see a friend. Where were you going?”
He raked hair from his eyes. “Just driving.”
“With your father’s permission?”
Amusement flickered in his eyes. “Not exactly.”
She sat down across from him. He drew back and hung an elbow over the chair.
She leaned forward. “He hit you, you got angry and drove away in his car. Weren’t you afraid he’d report it stolen? Your emotions were so intense you nearly killed a girl on a bicycle.”
“I never got near her.”
Due to his young and extraordinary reflexes. “What were you trying to do?”
“See how fast I could take the curve.”
“The girl says you weren’t trying to make the curve, you were coming head-on.”
“She’s mistaken.”
The kid had been going to kill himself. Susan was at a loss about what to do.
She looked at him. “He would have wept,” she said softly. “And everybody would have believed him.”
She waited, then went back to it. “You drove around, picked up Raina Yancy and her dog, got blood on the steering wheel and the gearshift.” Osey’d also found blood on the door handle and the driver’s seat. The shirt Kevin had worn was splattered down the front and there’d been blood on Raina’s white skirt—even though it had been washed—as well as on Kevin’s handkerchief. It was all his blood. At least, it was all the same type as his. It wasn’t Raina Yancy’s type and it wasn’t Sheri Lloyd’s.
He looked at her, no squirming, no blustering. A bright young man with looks, artistic talent, athletic ability.
“You’re free to go,” she said.
He stood, pushed the chair back up to the table, and walked out.
There might have been time for him to follow Sheri Lloyd to her room and stab her, then go home, get smacked around by his father, and drive off. Except. Except. Why? Sheri might have been snooty to him; she was snooty to everybody she felt beneath her.
And the stuntwoman? A mistake, an attempt at Laura Edwards. Why would he want to kill Ms. Edwards? Well now, let’s see here. Perhaps Laura Edwards killed the stuntwoman and Kevin killed Sheri Lloyd. And the stalker stalked.
Sure.
Sitting at her desk, she let her mind drift, coaxing thoughts from the murk on the bottom to float up. She wasn’t one fact closer to a solution. One person dead, perhaps by mistaken identity. Another stabbed. Nothing mistaken about that. A stalker who confessed to both deaths. She shuffled papers until she found the autopsy report on Ms. Lloyd. Except for being dead, she was in great shape. Heart and lungs perfect. Kidneys and liver perfect. No diseased tissues anywhere. No traces of drugs beyond a small amount of alcohol in the stomach. The phone rang.
“Yes, Hazel?”
“The mayor is on the line.”
“Tell him I’m not in. I’m not available, unless it’s important. In which case I’ll be at home watching movies.”
“Excuse me?”
“Keep it to yourself.”
At the video rental place, Susan picked up When the Rose Blooms and Family Style and My Sister’s Friend, the movies Raina Yancy had watched on Wednesday. Popcorn? Sure. What’s a movie without popcorn. She threw in a box of microwavable popcorn and two Hersheys with almonds.
At home, Perissa, rapidly becoming more cat than kitten, greeted her with loud complaints of neglect and hunger.
“No way,” Susan said. “It’s not even two o’clock.”
She zapped the popcorn, stacked pillows on the couch, slid in Family Style starring Laura Edwards and Nick Logan, and settled the bowl on her stomach. Katie/Laura goes home for parents’ anniversary. Runs into old boyfriend Greg/Nick. Lots of unfinished family business, snappy dialogue, and touching moments of reality, happy ending.
Where the Rose Blooms, a thriller, also starred Laura Edwards and Nick Logan. Julie/Laura, your normal everyday fabulous beauty, gets threatening messages via her computer. Fast-paced with heart-stopping moments and car chases. Julia/Laura does have long blond hair and somebody does try to stab her. Could this have been the basis for Raina’s comment about the woman stabbed?
The third movie had Ms. Edwards but not Nick Logan. Heartwarming with social significance and tear-jerking scenes. Just as it came to an end, the kitten leaped on her stomach, knocking over the bowl and sending popcorn flying. Susan yelled, the cat got frightened, the remote got lost, and popcorn got all over the carpet.
On hands and knees, Susan gathered kernels and flung them in the bowl. Perissa, thinking this great fun, scooped them out and batted them across the floor.
“That’s it, cat. You’re an orphan.”
The credits were rolling before Susan rescued the remote from under the couch. She watched the names scroll by and told the cat. “Oh, my. Art director.”
Perissa approached her sideways, back arched.
“Just kidding,” Susan said.
29
Justin Wesley Kiddering the Third. The only person Susan knew down there in Los Angeles living shoulder to shoulder, or maybe acre to acre, with the rich and famous. It had been over ten years since
they’d spoken, and in fact, it was entirely possible he wouldn’t want to talk with her now.
His father, Justin Wesley Kiddering the Second, was the owner of everything that made money, shipping, land, fishing, stocks. His mother, in pearls and silk blouses, always had her picture in the paper on behalf of every charitable organization worth its name.
The Kidderings lived several blocks up in class, status, and size of residence from Susan’s family. He was a rich kid whose father gave him everything the wealthy are entitled to by birthright. Susan was the one who had first started calling him Just Kidding. They were buddies from the time they were eleven. He was tall, blond, and square-jawed, as befitted the heir to the throne.
In high school English class, she wrote his papers. Kiddering the Second wanted him to go to Brown, but he held out for UC Berkeley to be with her.
He went to law school because she did and he didn’t have any burning desire to study something else. It wasn’t as though he had to earn a living. They studied together, shared notes, and divided topics for research. They hung out in coffee shops that stayed open late, impressing each other with their intelligence, their grasp of humankind, and their free-thinking ability to get to the heart of the problem.
The Big Plan was to open a law firm together and take on causes, raise banners for the underdog and downtrodden. Even at their most committed, she thought they were only playing a fantasy. Shortly before graduation, they had a fight. She told him she was chucking it all to be a cop. A shouting fight followed; he stomped off. She felt he was secretly relieved; he wasn’t cut out to take care of the poor. That was the last time she saw him. She signed on with the San Francisco police force and he took his law degree down to southern California and made his name recognized in the entertainment industry.
It was 7:30 here, that meant 5:30 in California. Possibly still in his office. She couldn’t believe how shaky her hand was when she picked up the phone. Information gave her an office listing. That number gave her a secretary with a British accent who said Mr. Kiddering was not available, she would be pleased to take a message.
“I’m a police officer investigating a homicide. Tell him I’d greatly appreciate a few moments of his time.”
Murder Take Two Page 26