by Susan Dunlap
“How?”
Yarrow glanced around, eyes lighting on his motorcycle as if he’d come on it by surprise. “How do you mock up, detective? Look, you can mock up anything if you’re willing to pay for it. You hire an architect, he’ll build you the world—and have it blow up in your face eight times if you need it to. And to do a mock-up of this set, it’d be a snap. Mock up the bluff with a ten-foot drop onto Porta Pits or safety bags, do a cover shot—easy with a gag like this. Cut from Lark falling, to the cover shot of what would be her view straight down the bluff, then cut back to the dummy falling out of the bottom of the catcher. Simple.”
Kiernan nodded. “Like Butch and Sundance in their last leap.”
“Yeah, sure. It’s all illusion. All life’s illusion, if you know where the breaks are.”
Before he could change the subject, she said, “So why didn’t Bleeker do a mock-up?”
“You’re thinking logic. Forget it. Bleeker didn’t care about that. He wanted a ‘great’ shot. You’re not in the business, are you?”
“No, I just came to see Lark. I wanted to see the Gaige Move. And the high fall.”
“You and goddamned Cary Bleeker Only he wanted them on film. He wanted the high fall with the setting sun behind it. Artsy. So when Lark went off the bluff, both she and the sun were going down.”
“Couldn’t he have done that with the mock-up?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Couldn’t he have done it better in the studio, under controlled conditions?”
“He could have. He should have. But look, you’re missing the point.”
“Which is?”
“If he had had Lark Sondervoil do the Gaige Move on a mock-up and she had performed that Move as perfectly as she told everyone she could, what do you think people—by which I mean influential people in the industry—would be saying when the film was previewed?”
“‘Lark Sondervoil performed an astounding feat.’”
“You got it. Or let me shorten that for you. They’d be saying: ‘Lark Sondervoil …’ Those are not the words that Cary Bleeker wants coming from their lips. Not to warm his heart, not like ‘Cary Bleeker directed,’ or better yet, just ‘Cary Bleeker!!!’ You getting it yet?”
Kiernan nodded acknowledgment. “For Bleeker, this film is like a resume, right? The patient died, but the operation was still a success.”
“Yeah, and if the patient died onscreen, in a spectacular fall, you can bet the operation was a success that Bleeker couldn’t have hoped for. He says he figured she’d do the Gaige Move flawlessly. And she did. Not as good as Greg, but—but he never could have counted on her moving right into the high fall.”
“What do you mean? Wasn’t that in the script?”
“Sure. In the stunt plan. It was the next gag.”
Kiernan tapped a finger on the motorcycle seat. “You mean Lark was supposed to stop with the Gaige Move?”
“And harness up before she went over the bluff. No stunt double would do anything as suicidal as a fall like that, no matter how many times they’d routined it.”
“Except a daredevil.”
Kiernan expected Yarrow to snap back at her. Instead he shook his head. “You got it. That’ll be the official word.”
Behind them brakes squealed, police radios spat out syllables, doors slammed. The parking lot was as hectic as it had been when Yarrow first cut her off with his motorcycle.
“So what’ll happen now?” she asked Yarrow.
“Studio and everyone here will be covering ass like the queen was paying a surprise visit to Black’s Beach.”
She nodded. “The ‘clothing optional’ section.”
“Yeah, and by the time they’re finished, their buns will be under so many layers of clothes, you’ll think they’ve been invited to the royal ball.”
“But the police—”
He put a hand on her shoulder. “Honey, the cops may be good, but they’re dealing with the masters of illusion here, with a crew that’s so used to watching their backs, they can run full out with their eyes over their shoulders. And make no mistake about it, the last thing Cary Bleeker wants—any of them wants—is the truth. They’ve got their fall on celluloid. Already, they’re thinking how to get the biggest splash from it. They don’t want the police parceling out the news releases, showing the film before they can. With all the media here, it’s a publicity bonanza for them. All they’ve got to do is keep control.”
“And finding out what happened to Lark Sondervoil?”
“Dead is dead. In this business you only pack what you can carry on.”
“And that is?”
“The spin from the gag. Gags don’t get publicity. But this one, with all the media here, it could be a box-office bonanza. More to the point—the only point—it’ll make or break careers. Hey, you’re a detective, right?” he asked without a break.
“Yes,” she said warily.
“Okay, I’m hiring you.”
“Not so fast, honey. You don’t buy me like a pound of meat.” She caught herself before she went on about her medical expertise and her considerable fees. Or warned him that private investigators could not legally undertake murder cases without a police okay. That issue she could work around: no one else was talking murder yet.
And Yarrow—she knew he’d be trouble. She’d been attracted by guys with that raw intensity too often over the years; she knew its down side by heart. But none of that mattered; she owed Lark Sondervoil.
“We got a deal?” Yarrow demanded.
“Can I get a look at the film?”
“Sure. No problem.”
“No problem? The police will be confiscating the negative.”
“You think these guys are going to give up their only copy for something as inconsequential as death? The negative’s already at the lab, believe me. And tonight they’ll hold the postmortem over the dailies.”
“At the hotel where they’re staying?”
“Normally, yeah. But not tonight, not with the cops liable to trot in and confiscate that film. No, they’ll find somewhere else.”
“Yarrow, isn’t there anyone you haven’t ticked off too much to ask?” She sighed. Exactly the kind of trouble she’d expected.
She assumed he would snap back at her, but he laughed. “Not many. I call ’em as I see ’em. ’Course, there’s Liam.”
“Liam?”
“The city liaison. He and I go back more than ten years. I got him his first job in the movies. Took him away from doing the taxes for the head of Pacific Breeze Computer, a startup company where I was ‘consulting.’ He owes me. Besides”—he nodded in agreement with his thought—“he hates these slipshod bastards. This is his last dealings with the movie people. He’s going to a snazzy job in the state treasurer’s office. He says politics is the straight and narrow compared to this business. And this—Lark—it’ll be the last straw. He knew her. He’d be glad to help you—and to screw them.”
“Do I hear a but?” she asked.
“Alas, you’re dealing with the one person on the set for whom a contract is a contract, a commitment is a commitment. He’s still got a contract with them. He won’t betray them to you.”
“We’ll see,” she said.
CHAPTER 4
“THERE’S NOTHING MORE I can be telling you,” Liam McCafferty said to the reporters, clustered behind the line of trailers at the edge of the set. A growing number, Kiernan was sure. From his tone, she was also sure it wasn’t the first time McCafferty had made that announcement. In a tan suit and tie—the only suit on the bluff—he looked like an Irish schoolmaster dismissing an unruly class.
She waited until he had walked a few yards, past another trailer and a group of extras clumped together tearfully behind it, to catch up with him. “Terrible thing.”
He glanced at her, a glint of suspicion momentarily visible in his brown eyes. Then a smile pulled his skin into folds that seemed right for him. “Ah, the lass with the fine wolfhound. Where is the nob
le beast?”
“Back in the huge vehicle I bought for his comfort.”
“As it should be, lass. As it should be. But it is a wretched thing about poor little Lark.” He glared back at the sorrowful trio behind him. “Not that any of them cares. Crocodile tears, they’re shedding.”
“Just because they’re doing their mourning in full makeup in the parking lot, within camera range of the press?”
“Aye. They wouldn’t recognize a real emotion—not in Hollywood. If it’s not awesome,” he said acidly, “earth-shaking, five-star, it’s not worth a thing. They think they mourn, just as they believe they love, but they don’t love anything but their careers.”
The man was quite an actor himself, with his almost stage-Irishman brogue. “Is that so different from politics?” she couldn’t resist asking.
He paused, considered. “It is. There success is the only thing, but everyone understands the rules.”
“But—”
“Liam,” a woman called from across the set.
“Duty calls, lass,” McCafferty said, and shuffled off, looking out of place among the young, layer-clad denizens of the set.
She started after him, but it was no use. She’d come up empty. Damn! McCafferty did remind her of her uncle Matt, and Matthew O’Shaughnessy was a born politician, a man who could respond to a question with such charm that few realized he’d trailed them down the path of his own disarming philosophy and led them nowhere near the answer they sought.
No, wait. She wasn’t on empty yet. She caught one of the walkie-talkie crew. “Liam needs to know where the rushes will be tonight.”
“That’s not my area.”
“Find out! It’s important. I have to get back to him now! I’ll be over there fending off the press.” Without waiting for a reply, she strode across the edge of the parking lot. The reporters stood in a loose knot, as if they were in a moment of stasis before centripetal force whirled them in more tightly around their prey or centrifugal force spun them back to their offices. She recognized Jake Steingroot, the film critic for the Union-Tribune. She’d met him at the opening of the last Woody Allen picture. “Jake, do you have a copy of the press release?”
“Kiernan?” he said distracted. “Nah. Nothing in it.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Sondervoil came to the paper in person.” He paused, then shrugged. “Hey, it’s not us Pavlov-ing around a pretty young face. The girl hinted there would be more than met the eye about this gag.”
“More what?”
“Didn’t say. But I, and they”—he motioned at the rest of the press corps—”figured what the hell, it’s worth a chance. A slow Tuesday afternoon. Even if she didn’t say a word worth quoting, the shot of her going over the bluff would be a front page photo. How about that for prescient thinking?”
“Got it!” The walkie-talkie boy eyed Kiernan conspiratorially, waiting till she moved away from Steingroot. “The dailies,” he said, “they’ll be at the UC campus theater.”
She turned back for Steingroot, but the critic was ambling across the parking lot. And, she decided, he could no more answer the big question than she. Lark Sondervoil had gone to the media in person, a gutsy and time-consuming move for a nineteen-year-old. Why? Was she what the media called a publicity slut? Or was there something more to this gag, something that was connected to her death?
Kiernan pulled into the driveway of her duplex to drop off Ezra and grab dinner before the rushes—viewing the day’s film from all the cameras—began at seven. She sat with the Jeep window open, her head sticking out next to Ezra’s, the two noses alert for the same aphrodisiac—cooking odors flowing from Brad Tchernak’s flat. How could she think of food when a young woman was lying in the morgue? She’d been asked a variation of that question often enough. But not at the coroner’s office when she’d been there, nor in pathology rotation, nor by the cops in Homicide. In medical school she’d learned to grab a nap anytime, go without sleep for thirty-six hours at a stretch, and keep life and death separate.
Ezra leaped from the back of the Jeep and loped toward the kitchen—ever the optimist, she thought. It was well after six, time Tchernak should be chopping and sautéing, stirring—or whatever chefs did. It had been weeks since the last sauerbraten, or Tchernak’s succulent paella with sea anemones, baby cherrystones, and Walla Walla onions. She listened for the whir of the blender, the clatter of spoon against mixing bowl, the sounds appropriate to the kitchen of her cook/housekeeper/dog-walker.
What sounds emerged through Tchernak’s wide-open windows were clanking metal and grunting man.
Kiernan shook her head. Crashes of weight bars from Tchernak’s parlor-cum-weight-room had jarred her ten or twelve times an hour, at any hour of day, seven days a week, for over a month now. Dammit, she didn’t need to accommodate Tchernak in his lunacy. The man wasn’t a husband; he was merely an employee.
But Tchernak was more than an employee. He was an employee who wanted her. At least sporadically. And one, she had to admit, with a sexy, rough-cut face and a cute little beard, and a body she wouldn’t kick out of bed—theoretically speaking. You don’t sleep with the men you work with, any sensible woman knows that. Those relationships are like quicksand: real soft to slip into, worth your life to get out of, and you’re both left covered with muck. But in the same house, well, restraint certainly wasn’t easy. There were times when the lure of him was truly tempting. But he wasn’t her type, and besides, there were reasons why their relationship was a business one, or almost just a business one—reasons on both sides.
A voice in her head said: What’s the matter with you? A young, attractive guy with a body that’s state of the art? A guy who tracks down bluefish caught in one of the few unpolluted areas off Jersey and bakes them as God would if He cooked; who brings you doppio caffe latte in bed, in a Thermos that keeps it warm till you wake up. A guy who loves your dog. What more do you want?
But then, no one ever pretended pathologists were normal.
She got out, opened the back door, and watched Ezra bound into Tchernak’s half of the building. The clanking stopped, and the panting switched to eager canine greeting.
Kiernan leaned back against the fender. Why had she hired Tchernak to begin with? She’d wanted to simplify her life, stop hassling with housecleaning services, the takeout Thai, Vietnamese, and Mexican deliveries, and the pizza shop that would come through on the all-too-many nights when she forgot about dinner till everything else was closed. She’d been desperate to end the frustrating search for the perfect dog-sitter who would feed, walk, and fawn over Ezra and approve when his mistress called twice a day and asked “to speak to Him.”
She had wanted an unobtrusive cook/housekeeper, a mature lady with fifty years of experience over stove and vacuum cleaner, and five-mile-on-the-beach thighs for Ezra’s run. Was that asking too much? She hadn’t planned on a six-foot-four, 240-pound thirty-year-old ex-football star who couldn’t get it through his head that his days on the gridiron were over. Six years was the average career for an offensive lineman, she’d reminded him more than once. The average healthy twenty-eight-year-old lineman—if anyone could be considered healthy after being smacked around professionally sixteen weeks a year for six years—retired from the game or was cut from the team roster. What the hell made Brad Tchernak think that after three ruptured discs and three years out of the game, he could stage a comeback?
Tchernak grumbled amicably about being a servant, but for him, a job that provided free housing and didn’t interfere with his training schedule was a coup. Maybe too much of one. The man was setting himself up for a crashing disappointment that would leave him hanging around the phone every day for the entire football season, sure the call would come each time an offensive lineman went down. With each phone-silent hour, he’d be plunked deeper into the black well of despair.
He’d gone through this same torture last March. And April, May, and June, before he was finally forced to admit that he
wasn’t free agent material. He knew it was illogical, the odds astronomical, but he couldn’t give it up.
And she’d realized that she could do nothing to ease the pain he kept shoving into the future. Nothing except fire him, and she couldn’t bring herself to do that. It might be kinder, but she wasn’t that kind.
Maybe the Hollywood people were right about emotions. There was a lot to be said for celluloid emotions that didn’t mire you down and leave you distracted when you needed to work.
She ducked into her fiat to change into more businesslike attire, the tan pants and quasi-bomber jacket her dressmaker had created to keep her from the racks of bows and ruffles that pass for women’s clothes in the world of the petites. “I’ll be back late!” she called into Tchernak’s door on her way out. “I’ll grab a burger out.”
That Tchernak didn’t ask about her afternoon said something about his obsession. That he wasn’t curious about her sudden evening plans said more. But his indifference to her grabbing a burger, possibly fried rather than grilled, brown rather than gently pink, with no accoutrements more exotic than catsup spoke volumes.
She pulled out of the driveway and was back on Torrey Pines before she realized she didn’t have time for dinner at all.
CHAPTER 5
KIERNAN SPOTTED CARY BLEEKER at the screening room, a small theater on the campus of UC San Diego, across North Torrey Pines Boulevard. She was surprised to find the second unit director himself guarding the door. A flunky would have been her guess—and her preference. But if Bleeker was worried about the police, this made sense. She hurried along the cement path, past droughtscape tundra, a reminder of La Jolla before the days of well-watered Kentucky bluegrass lawns. Twenty feet from the glass door, she slowed and looked past Bleeker into the dim-lit lobby, where five people stood shifting their weight, glancing around. They were close enough to touch each other, but none were pressing flesh, none were speaking. They looked like distant relatives standing in the foyer of a funeral parlor, unable to leave but fearful of confronting the corpse. Going to a funeral, not a wake like the ones at Saint Brendan’s back in Baltimore, where a brief decrying of the irreplaceable loss was a mere prelude to making the most of it. More than once she had glanced at a silent face in the coffin and hoped the deceased’s spirit was not hovering, watching in frustration maneuvers that he could no longer influence.