Just Evil

by Vickie McKeehan

  When the three of them walked up the back staircase from the kitchen to the second floor landing, Jake realized something that he’d missed yesterday, probably because he’d been so caught up in finding that damn closet. But once he got past the landing and veered to the left, this part of the second floor was like a labyrinth.

  Following Kit’s precise directions, Jake led the way down the narrow hallway, past the alcove, past Kit’s Closet, to a remote passage leading to yet another corridor and realized that someone would have to know the attic’s exact location in order to get to this spot. Based on that, there was a good chance no one had bothered searching it.

  Sure enough, as soon as he got the door open and flipped on the light, it became apparent that the people who’d ransacked the house hadn’t made it this far.

  Larger than it looked from the second floor, the attic covered a minimum forty feet by forty feet of space. The mess here wasn’t due to an intruder, but rather because Alana had been a major pack rat. It soon became clear that this room held what was important to her: possessions left from her past, stacks of boxes containing souvenirs from her days as an actress, memorabilia from a bygone Hollywood era, as well as stacks and stacks of out-of-date clothing and costumes packed away from floor to ceiling. No wonder she had spent so much time up here.

  Reese groaned when he saw the condition of the place. “You can’t be serious. How the hell are we supposed to find anything in this mess? Look at all this crap. There must be at least sixty cartons to go through and not all of them are marked as to what’s inside.”

  He sneezed several times in rapid succession in response to the layers of dust and sent Jake a go-to-hell look that said “You owe me big time for this, pal.”

  “Look, I have no idea what’s going on or what I’m dealing with. If you have any ideas, now would be a good time to let me in on it. I’m not exactly crazy about spending my Saturday afternoon up here either. If you can come up with a reasonable explanation as to why Auslo and Taft waited two years to hit our offices in retaliation for getting fired, I’ll be more than happy to listen, fold my hand, buy the beer, and get the hell out of here.”

  Reese didn’t have a reasonable explanation, but he wanted Jake to know, “I followed up with the police and there’s already a warrant out for both of them. It’s only a matter of time before they’re sitting in a cell. Maybe then they’ll feel like talking.”

  But if Dylan was correct, Reese had a more pressing problem to flesh out. It was time to run interference. “Let’s talk about this woman, this Kit that Dylan’s been telling me about, the one with the great body. What kind of a woman has a name like Kit, anyway? Sounds more like a stripper.”

  Jake shot Dylan a lethal glance, but Reese was on a roll. “You’re entitled to a distraction now and again even if this one’s a little on the young side. And Dylan says she’s hot, which tells me you’re finally moving on past Claire. But you need to start thinking with the head on your shoulders, not your dick…”

  Out of frustration, to shut him up, Jake shoved Reese with such force he went flying into a stack of boxes. He fell back into the cartons before bouncing off and hitting the floor, busting his lip.

  Calmly, Dylan walked over and helped Reese to his feet, dusting off his shirt. “Guess I should have warned you Jake’s kind of touchy when you try to talk to him about Kit. Personally, I think her name’s kinda cute, sort of goes with the woman. Doesn’t look much like a stripper though, too classy.”

  Reese wiped at his already-swelling lip, saw the blood. “Jesus, Jake, I have a date tonight. What the fuck am I supposed to tell her happened to my mouth?”

  “Like I give a shit. If both of you would stop needling me for five fucking seconds I might not get so pissed. Just because I fucked up once, and it was major, I’ll give you that, doesn’t mean I have to spend the rest of my life listening to the two of you preach at me about every goddamn relationship. I know what I’m doing with Kit. She isn’t Claire, for chrissakes. Now back off.”

  Reese pulled his T-shirt up and used it to blot the blood from his lip, exchanged a look with Dylan, who just shrugged and said, “Jake and I already had our little run-in about her. It just didn’t come to pushing and shoving.”

  “As your friend and attorney, I was merely trying to point out you’re entitled to a little fun. But…”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  Reese gritted his teeth. “Just don’t do anything stupid like you did the last time. Just because she’s Gloria’s niece, just because you knew her when she was what, fourteen, doesn’t mean you know that much about her now. For fuck’s sake, people change.”

  Dylan tried to mend fences. “Jake’s had a rough couple of days. Let’s not forget someone tried to make toast out of him and Kit earlier in the week; somebody hacked our network, and now this morning two former employees hit our offices. I’m with Jake on this. I think everything that’s happened is connected.”

  Disgusted now, Reese grumbled, “Let’s just get this over with. I’d like to get out of here sometime today.”

  Dylan wanted to know, “What exactly are we looking for, Jake?”

  Looking around the packed attic, trying to figure out where to start, Jake scratched at his chin. “That’s the tricky part; I’m not sure. Just look for anything that might be valuable, anything that looks important enough that someone would risk the hunt. Or anything that jumps out at you and just doesn’t look right. I don’t know. But you saw the rest of the house. Someone tore the place up, didn’t find what they were looking for, and then came looking in my direction. Until I find out why, I won’t rest easy.”

  Anxious to get started, Jake took out his pocket knife and slit the tape on the first box that wasn’t labeled. The dust flew off the carton. Tiny dust particles filled the space and filtered down through the air onto his jeans. He dug into the contents of the box as if on a mission and directed Reese and Dylan to do the same with the others. “Just pick a box and dig in.”

  Dylan looked around. Some of the boxes looked so old it seemed they’d been stored up here since the beginning of time.

  They bypassed the ten boxes or so labeled Christmas decorations, and another half dozen or so labeled books. At least they had no interest in them for now. If they turned up nothing else, they’d save those boxes to go through last.

  Dylan cut into a box, peered inside, and immediately made the determination the contents weren’t worth going through since it held nothing but old clothes. However, he picked up a second carton labeled movies, organized by the year of their production. At some point in her life Alana had taken copies of her old movie reels and had them converted to VHS. Dylan started rummaging around in the box until he picked up one of the tapes. “Hey, remember this movie, Savage Monster? We saw it when we were twelve down at that old theater on Main with all the murals on the wall. They were having a horror film festival.” Studying the picture of the actress on the box cover, he added, “Oh. I get it now. Alana Stevens is Kit’s mother. This is her house. Wow. She was hot, hotter than Elvira. Both of them caused more than a couple of wet dreams back then.”

  He was grinning like a fool until Jake jerked the box out of his hands.

  “You aren’t twelve anymore. Come back from your sick fantasy world long enough to focus, okay? We aren’t interested in what you used to jack off to.”

  While Dylan and Jake were going at each other, Reese pulled an old trunk away from the wall. Hidden behind the trunk he discovered a box of old movie reels, for whatever reason these hadn’t been converted to VHS. Each canister inexplicably was marked with the letter P. Curiosity overcame Reese as he popped open one of the canisters, peeled off several inches of film, and held it up to what little light the attic provided. As soon as he saw the images, he let out a laugh and shoved his find toward Jake.

  “Jesus, I think I’ve found blackmail material right off the bat. Looks like porn, pretty raunchy, and a bit amateurish if you ask me.”

  Jake took the reel
and held it up to the light and swore. “Okay, our first find. Dylan, start stacking these reels into that empty box over there.”

  Evidently proud of her early work in the porn industry Alana had kept no less than twenty or so of her X-rated eight-millimeter films. Curiosity piqued now, Dylan waited for Jake to put down the reel he was holding. When he did, Dylan took his turn at holding the frame up to the light and whistled. “I don’t care what you say; she was hot. This is pretty X-rated stuff, though.” He began loading each movie reel into a box until he got them all stacked and decided to check out each reel individually.

  When Jake saw what he was doing, he said, “Geez, Dylan, grow up. It’d be great if you’d do a little work here other than get off on that stuff. If you’re going to check out every frame of film scene-by-scene, this’ll take forever. Besides, consider how old those people on that film are now. Unless old people do it for you, really, really old people, you can’t possibly think they’re that hot to look at now.”

  Once again holding up a frame to the light, Dylan’s answer was purely male. “Hey, I’m just trying to be thorough here. Old or not, and I might point out, on the film they aren’t that old, and porn’s porn. If I’d known we’d find porn, I might have been a little more enthusiastic about giving up my Saturday for this.” As he eyed the film with closer scrutiny, he added, “These people were really into this stuff, weren’t they?”

  It was some time before Dylan got back to work.

  The three of them rummaged through boxes containing nothing more than old real estate contracts or paperwork from some of Alana’s past business dealings. And there were tons of discarded contracts and real estate documents, as if she never threw a single piece of paper away. Not knowing if any of the papers held anything of interest, they set them aside for now, but not before organizing the stacks, depending on the date, into a pile labeled Business.

  Jake found a large plastic container that held old photo albums and an old scrapbook. Not knowing if these might be of interest to Kit one day, he set them down by the attic door to take with him. Curious though, he picked up one of the photo albums, flipped through the pages thinking he’d found family pictures and might happen upon a baby picture or two of Kit. But after several minutes he realized these were not pictures of children but rather stills of adults in various forms of undress—some in sexual positions he hadn’t yet had the opportunity to try even during his college days.

  When he tossed the book down in disgust, Dylan got nosy, picked it up, and thumbed through several pages, before looking over at Jake. “Have we just busted a porn ring or maybe a blackmail ring here? What was wrong with these people?”

  Jake thought of Alana and replied without thinking, “The woman was just evil.” Thinking about Kit growing up in that environment made him sick. Why the hell hadn’t her father taken her away from Alana long before the girl had turned twelve? Why hadn’t he fought harder for custody?

  The porn they’d found confirmed the fact that he’d never seen a father with more ammunition on his side to get full custody of his child than John Griffin, even if the two of them had never been married. And yet time and time again he’d left his daughter with a sick, perverted woman like Alana. John Griffin had turned his back on the situation, gone on with his life, ignoring Kit’s environment.

  And that just pissed Jake off.

  He turned his attention to another box of papers and began sorting through each piece, checking out the dates, and then further organizing them by year. He did the same with each pile until he got to the mound of business stuff.

  Sifting through the papers, one piece of paper in particular caught his eye. A yellowed blank sheet of letterhead held a somewhat familiar-looking logo. Was he imagining the similarity? The logo on the stationary depicted a lone cowboy in blue sitting atop a black horse riding off into a brilliant orange sunset in the background. There was no mistaking the resemblance to the toy cowboy Kit had given Holloway. Under the logo, the letterhead read, “The Sundown Ranch, Hollywood Hills, CA.” Hadn’t the elderly couple from Kit’s dream lived on the Sundown Ranch? Folding the single sheet of paper, he stuffed it into his shirt pocket before eyeing the rest of the cartons stacked around the room.

  After an exhaustive search, they had accumulated a surplus of studio contracts and real estate paperwork. For organization purposes, they separated the assortment of papers into four piles: Personal, Business, Bank Records, and Actress. When Reese found Alana’s old union cards, one from the Screen Actors Guild and another from the American Guild of Variety Artists, he threw those in with the stack marked Actress. Old out-of-date cancelled checks were placed in the Bank Records pile. They found more than a dozen odd keys that weren’t marked. Having no idea what any of the keys opened, or for that matter why Alana would have kept so many, Jake found a large-size manila envelope for the purpose of organization and dumped all the keys into it for safekeeping so they’d be able to keep up with them.

  At one point the lawyer in Reese began to re-examine each of the items in the stack marked Personal until he came across the original deed to the house. “Look at the date, July 1969. She owned this house for more than forty years. Wonder what she paid for a house like this back then?”

  “No idea. Didn’t realize porn in the sixties was that lucrative.”

  Reese put the deed on the top of the Personal stack for later examination and decided to try to find the original purchase price of the house. But in the pile marked Bank Records, he got sidetracked when he discovered several worn-out, copies of cashier’s checks, each made out for the same amount: $25,000. Each check was for a different month, dated from December 20 1967 through August 20 1969. Each was made payable to Alana Stevens, drawn on a bank in Beverly Hills that he was pretty sure was no longer in business. The color might have faded, but the printed indentations were just as legible now as they had been back then.

  He counted each check…twenty checks in all, each for $25,000, totaling $500,000 over a time period of twenty months. He tapped Jake’s arm to show him what he’d found. “You said to look for anything odd. You said this woman was an actress turned real estate broker, right? Well, if these checks were monthly commission checks, why was the payment made via a cashier’s check when they should have been drawn on a real estate company account? And if they’re for acting jobs, why are the checks not drawn on a regular business account such as a studio account? Actors aren’t usually paid for a job spread out over twenty months. These cashier’s checks total a half a million dollars over a two-year period. In my book, that’s weird.”

  It wasn’t lost on Reese or Jake that the last of the cashier’s checks conveniently came at about the same time Alana had purchased her house in July of the same year.

  “Maybe she saved her money from these checks so she could pay cash for the house.”

  That’s what Jake thought as well, but they needed to know how much she’d paid for the house. So Reese and Jake set out to find the original purchase contract. She hadn’t thrown anything else away so it was a pretty good bet it was here somewhere; they just had to find it. It took some time, but Reese eventually uncovered the contract in the pile of real estate stuff. “She paid a hundred and twenty grand for the house. So a portion of the cashier’s checks would have been more than enough to buy the house.”

  As Dylan burrowed further into the stack of business stuff, he discovered Alana’s original real estate license dated November 5, 1969 and pointed out, “If she didn’t become a realtor until four months after she bought the house, the checks couldn’t have been commissions from real estate sales. If they weren’t commissions or from acting jobs, then what were they payment for?”

  “Let me see that.” Jake checked out the date of the license. “Son of a bitch.” He remembered what Kit had said last night about the Sundown Ranch and how valuable the land would have been. So Alana had had her real estate license back in 1969, years before she became a single mother in need of extra income.

&n
bsp; But even with that, Jake wasn’t sure they’d found anything important. Let down over that, he didn’t expect much when Dylan popped open a box labeled Books and hit the mother lode.

  Nestled under the works of D.H. Lawrence, Dylan found a small mobile safe with a key-fitting lock. Reese immediately thought of the keys they’d found earlier and retrieved the envelope, dumping the collection of keys on top of an old trunk. The three of them took turns trying to fit each of the keys into the lock until finally they ran out of keys.

  Dylan was the first to offer a solution. “I know a locksmith. We can take this to him, get him to pop it open.”

  “You sure?”

  “Won’t be a problem. He’s a…how do I say this…a former expert in his field.”

  “Geez Dyl, you’re just full of surprises, you know that?”

  “I have very diverse friends—except, of course, for you and Reese. You two are about the most conservative guys I run with.”

  Insulted, Reese threw Dylan a furious glare. “You think Jake and I are conservative? Is that a code word for boring?”

  “Well. Yeah. Duh. Former nerd programmer, stuffy lawyer. You guys are boring.”

  “I hate to point this out to you, Sherlock, but you’re a nerd programmer. If we’re boring, that makes you one of us.”

  “Yeah, but I’m a lot less boring than you guys. I know how to have fun. I hate to say this, but you guys just can’t help being killjoys. We never do anything fun anymore. With the two of you, it’s all work, work, work.”

  Reese didn’t care for the assessment. “We went skiing at Mammoth last year, didn’t we? What about that?”

  “Isolated incident.”

  Without waiting any longer for an apology that obviously wasn’t coming, Reese immediately threw his shoulder into Dylan, bouncing him up against the attic wall.

  Before Jake could react, the two of them were pushing and shoving like two power forwards fighting for the ball. Jake stepped into the fray planning to referee, but in two seconds he was blocking blows now turned on him. They wrestled with the energy of ten-year-olds until Jake pushed between both of them and threw all of his weight into Dylan. “Knock it off. I think we’re done here. Let’s load up this shit. Beer’s on me.”