by Susan Dunlap
“Without being the best? With being ordinary?” Kiernan said softly. “You think he chose to die?”
“Makes sense,” he choked out.
“No!” she snapped. She was out of her chair, leaning across the table at him. “Not Greg Gaige! Someone else, another stunt man, might have figured his career was over, but not Greg. Greg Gaige would die trying, right? Right?”
Yarrow’s mouth opened, but he didn’t speak. He yearned to agree, she could tell, but by now he didn’t even know what he really thought. She sighed, furious with herself. She’d pulled out his memories, twisted them to the shape she was desperate to see, and now they were worth nothing. Maybe Greg Gaige had gone into the fire the way suicides load their pockets with stones and walk into the sea.
But Yarrow had had a decade to reach his conclusion. If he’d considered Greg Gaige a suicide, he wouldn’t have been so outraged about Lark Sondervoil. “If Greg planned to kill himself, Yarrow, he wouldn’t have worn any fire suit at all. Right?” She waited till he nodded, then said, “Who was Greg’s beneficiary?”
Yarrow looked up, startled at her change of tone. “His mother. She and Greg hadn’t gotten along. She was probably happier with the insurance money. She only lived a few more years after he died.”
Something still wasn’t right about Yarrow. His eyebrows squeezed in toward each other, his cheeks toward his nose, his mouth was pursed. But he wasn’t balancing on the chair legs or pacing the way an athlete would handle things. He was too wary. Too afraid of revealing something? “Yarrow, you were on location, working with the man you idolized, the best acrobatic stunt man in films, and you didn’t bother to watch his final gag?”
He shrugged. “My work was done. When you’re done, you’re free to move on to other jobs.”
“And did you?” When he didn’t respond immediately, she added, “I can run a Social Security check.”
“I had a meeting in L.A.”
“I don’t think so. You said Greg got the call in the middle of filming. He replaced another stunt double, right?”
Slowly, Yarrow nodded.
“You were the stunt man, weren’t you?”
The glass bricks were night blue, the alley silent. A smirk passed across Yarrow’s face and disappeared like an offering rejected.
“Yeah,” he said finally. “I never did another gag.” He stared at the bricks, his lips together but his mouth moving silently. What was he adding? “Because?”
“Because … because I’ll never know if the fire gag was routine. Or if it was a killer and by rights I should be dead.”
Her breath caught. She didn’t have to worry about meeting Yarrow’s gaze; his eyes were cloudy, and he was seeing only within. Slowly, she said, “Why would anyone kill Lark Sondervoil to cover up a ten-year-old death that no one was thinking about? It doesn’t make sense.” She let a moment pass, waiting, and when he added nothing new, she said, “Look, I understand your feelings. But I have to tell you, as the base for an investigation, emotion is quicksand.”
“You mean you’re backing out? I gave you everything I’ve got. I can’t help it if it’s not the kind of evidence that any beat cop could take to the Supreme Court.”
She stood up and pushed the chair in under the table. “Yarrow, you don’t have anything, in either case. No motive, no means of murder; you can’t even say for sure that Lark Sondervoil wasn’t too loaded to perform.”
“Look, if you wanted certainty… Shit, I guess an investigation like this is just too hard for you.”
It was a moment before Kiernan smiled. “I am not quite that easy to manipulate. Got that?”
He shrugged.
“Okay, here’s what I can do,” she said. “I’ll check out Lark’s body. If she was snorting cocaine, there’ll be evidence of nasal deterioration; if she was shooting heroin, there’ll be tracks.”
“Maybe not. Cary Bleeker’s real fussy about drugs. He’s had a lot of problems, and he’s not one to take chances with anything as risky as a stunt woman on drugs. No stunt coordinator would touch her if they thought she was unreliable. As ambitious as Lark was—”
“Yarrow, if ambition precluded cocaine—”
“Yeah, I suppose. Especially in Hollywood. But my point is that Lark wouldn’t do drugs. And if she did, she’d never have tracks running down her arms and legs.”
“Which is what makes the problem so much harder.” Kiernan walked to the door and waited for him to follow. “The places she’d use are the ones no one would notice—under the tongue, between the toes, in the armpits and groin where the tracks are covered with pubic hair. They are spots that even the pathologist misses, unless he’s specifically looking for that evidence, and doing it with a microscope. Even then, the marks aren’t easy to find.”
“So you don’t think he will?”
“I don’t know. This is a big county. It depends on who does the postmortem. There’s no way to tell.”
“Well, hell, we can’t take that chance.” Yarrow grabbed her shoulder.
She patted his hand. “Exactly.”
If she was going to find any kind of answer, she had to start with Lark’s body. Tonight.
CHAPTER 10
SHE DROVE A COUPLE of blocks and parked by the beach. The town lights were behind her; ahead, a rumpled blackness. She sat with the window open, breathing in sea air thick with brine and the smell of earth, of the life in it and the death. Behind her, cars started, motorcycles roared, auto alarms beeped. She heard them vaguely, muffled by the pulsing of the sea.
And she remembered Greg Gaige as he’d been that night in San Francisco eleven years ago. She’d just started work as a forensic pathologist. The day had been long, and she’d ended it with an emergency postmortem of a hiker just back from the Sierra. Her finding: sufficient indicators, pending lab results, to suggest bubonic plague. Probably he’d been infected in the Sierra. But he could have brought back carrier fleas. Bubonic plague was endemic in the wilds of the west. But it wasn’t prevalent in her county, and her findings had alerted the health department and the sheriff. Bubonic plague was one of the few conditions still subject to quarantine. The smells of putrification from the autopsy room still cut the air, as if they were clinging to the inside of her nose. Her hands reeked of Clorox. The autopsy had taken hours. And when she looked at her watch, she’d discovered an extra hour had passed and she was likely to miss her one chance to see in person Greg Gaige do the Gaige Move.
She’d sped to the freeway, cut across lanes as if she were making a left-hand turn, and tailgated everything in the fast lane. She made it to the set with five minutes to spare. As it turned out, the scene had been delayed and she was hours early.
When she walked onto the set, she should have been exhausted, but instead she was striding on air, so excited that her thoughts bounced off each other in her head. The light over the autopsy table flashed against the banks of lights on the set, and she had to blink hard to black out her own triumph and concentrate on being a spectator at Greg Gaige’s.
Trailers surrounded the roped-off street. Cameras and wires and chairs and padded boxes of equipment littered the sidewalk. Drab-dressed assistants scurried in and out. The whole place had had the look of a rock band abandoning its digs moments before the arrival of the sheriff. She had spotted Greg Gaige just as someone called out, “Lunch break!” A midnight “lunch.”
It had been over twenty years since he’d been captured in the poster-picture doing the Move, but Greg Gaige looked like the same eager kid. Age had hardly changed him. His short straight sandy hair began just a bit higher on his forehead, and around his eyes and mouth lines were sketched so lightly, it seemed they could still be erased. And those startling blue eyes that had stared out from the poster still sparkled. They weren’t as piercing now as they had been years before—he wasn’t working now. But his walk was the same as if he’d been heading for the mat to start his floor routine; there was a bounce to his steps from those exquisitely toned muscles releasing, then tensing back. An
d when he stopped to swap sentences with one of the grips he was like a sports car idling. He grinned, slapped a shoulder, released into movement again, was stopped by the director and, Kiernan noted, greeted him the same way he had the grip. She stood, staring, mouth open, as if she were thirteen again.
But when she’d introduced herself, she could have been talking to a different person, an understudy to the real Greg Gaige.
“I’m so excited to meet you again,” she had bubbled. “I wrote you all about my gymnastic successes afterward, but I never really thanked you for your encouragement to me that day in the gym. It came at a vital time, and it really changed my life. I had your poster on my wall until I was in medical school”—she laughed—”and it was in tatters.”
He’d smiled then, but it wasn’t the expression that blazed from the poster picture. Rather, it was a hesitant gesture, as if he were unsure it was the right reaction. “How have you been?”
“Mr. Gaige, I’m from KHBK News.” A young blond man extended his hand to Greg. “We’re doing a segment on aspects of the movie business. What’s it like doing stunts?”
“It’s fun,” Greg said, and started moving again.
“But how do you plan?”
He shrugged. “The same way everyone else does.” He put an arm on Kiernan’s shoulder and kept moving.
“Don’t cut that interview short because of me,” she’d said.
“I’m not.”
“But the publicity—”
He’d laughed. “I don’t like doing interviews. They won’t have trouble finding someone who does. Now you—do you still do gymnastics at all?”
“Only for fun. There was a time I thought I’d be able to do your Move. When I was sixteen, I came close. Well, not what you’d consider close—you’d have thought a certifiable spastic was doing it—but to me it felt like it was within the specs. By the next year, I was already too tall, too developed.” She had tried to pass off the observation lightly, but fourteen years after the fact, she could hear her frustration that the day she’d come so close to nailing the Move had been a Sunday when she’d sneaked into the gym alone.
As they followed the cast and crew to the restaurant for the late-night “lunch,” she found herself telling him about medical school and her residency and her new job at the coroner’s office. “I never get over the thrill of uncovering the body’s secrets. People assume that with their bodies they get a standard issue, like there are a few different models with some variations—short, tall, wiry, thick—but that basically what’s inside is all the same. They all assume their spines are straight, their hearts perfect, that their brains fill their cranial bones like hard-boiled eggs inside the shells. They’d be shocked to discover how many women—maybe a third—have scoliosis, how many mitral valves are flaccid without their owners noticing more than the occasional heavy heartbeat, or that people with brains that look like the yolk is missing from the egg lead normal lives. In the case I had today, once I peeled back the skin of the forehead—”
It was at that point she’d realized he was looking away. She wasn’t a blusher, but she’d turned red then. The only time she could recall feeling that humiliated was when she’d tripped over her feet in the initial run of her floor routine. She’d been fourteen then. At the state meet.
“Sorry, Greg,” she muttered, “I forget that dead bodies aren’t everyone’s choice of dinner chat.” But it wasn’t his discomfort with the dead that bothered her; irrationally, she had expected him to be proud of her, to agree that she’d made the right decision abandoning gymnastics for forensic pathology, to give her a “ten” for her life. But she hadn’t realized that then. Then, she’d just felt small.
“No, no. Go on,” Greg had said, embarrassed. “I’m just having a hard time with the technical terms. There’s so much I don’t know.”
“You?” she’d asked, ridiculously amazed. “But you do the Move that no one in the world can. When you do it tonight, will it be the same as it was back in Baltimore?”
His blue eyes looked up and to the left, as if he were searching distant space for the answer. “It’s always changing. I’m always working on it, trying to squeeze more out of it, jack it around farther, do the punch back faster, harder, give it more zing.” He grinned. “I’m going to surprise ’em tonight, show ’em I’m not just getting older; I’m getting better.” He shrugged and turned away. She couldn’t decide whether he regretted having admitted worrying about getting older, or was embarrassed at how tritely he’d phrased it.
She’d liked that, the artist ever in process. “Like it’s alive, huh?”
“I guess.” He was eating soup that he’d gotten from the cafeteria line—only soup, because he didn’t know how soon the call for his gag, for the Move, would come.
She’d asked more about the Move, its evolution, but his answers were no clearer. He was entirely physical, she would say later, involved in the Move so viscerally that to talk about it was like translating what he was doing into hieroglyphs.
“The life-span of gymnastics seems eternal for men—compared to that of women,” she’d said as she finished off a steak, potatoes, beans, roll, and salad and was eyeing the side table of desserts. “Still, what will you do afterward?”
“I don’t have another picture in the works, but that’s not unusual. I can’t think about that till after the Move. Now everything, even this conversation, I’m afraid, is like it’s behind the curtain of the Move.”
“But after you stop doing the Move?”
“I keep working on it. I know I can get more out of the last twist—you’ll see tonight—I can jack it around farther.”
“But after you retire?” Suddenly it seemed vital to her to hear the answer she’d sought.
“My father’s retired.”
“But you will be someday.”
“I’ll have plenty of time to think about it then.” He pushed away the soup bowl. “See, the thing with that twist isn’t the hips, this’ll come from the shoulders. Once I push off…
She had stayed on the set for three hours huddling against the cold summer wind that brushed off the San Francisco hills, watching four takes of the scene before Greg’s Move. Greg had found her a director’s chair, but he himself had paced, wandered, and answered questions with monosyllables or shrugs.
But when the call sounded for his gag, the Greg Gaige who walked to the start mark could have been the Master of the World. Every step was sure, those blue eyes that had been vague at dinner seemed to take in the entire set, then narrow to a focus of such intensity, she half expected to see the set burn.
“Action!”
He ran surefooted. An explosion from Special Effects sent a fireworks of lights. Greg flipped like a rag doll, twisted as if he were out of control, landed and sprung back like a corpse, then abruptly, minutely shifted his shoulders and added a half twist and touched down with the ease of jumping from a stool.
The cast and crew leaped up and applauded.
Greg grinned, turned to the spot where he’d left her, ran over, grabbed her in his arms, and spun her around.
“Greg.” The director put a hand on his shoulder. “Give the media a word, huh?”
She kissed him, and before he could ask her to stay—or not to—she said good-bye.
Then she watched him stride across the set, settle on the stool before the cameras, under the Clorox white lights, and grin. The sweat on his arms and shoulders shined the muscles, and joy seemed to bubble at every pore. Those blue eyes that had been piercing a minute before glistened opaquely as if reflecting inward.
She stared, imprinting the moment in her memory. This is where you live, he had said back in Baltimore. Then, watching him again, she understood that as she never had before. Doing the Move was the only time he felt alive. She hurried to her car and drove, unwilling to watch him struggle to translate his triumph into the language of words, to slide back from glory into the mire of the ordinary, where he walked flat-footed in the land of the dead.
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That night she’d dreamed variations of the evening and awakened at four A.M. horrified at her intrusive questions. “Why was I so pushy?” she’d demanded of herself again and again, when her standard answer—I’m a pushy person—brought her no comfort. Greg hadn’t wanted to consider her questions. In the gray of dawn, she realized that she didn’t, either.
And then he called. Was it because of the question or the kiss? It didn’t matter, she told herself then. She could deal with neither. As a teenager, a kiss from Greg Gaige had been the stuff of Olympian dreams. Now it meant seeing beneath the laurel wreath, destroying her most cherished childhood memories. And that she couldn’t bring herself to do, even for Greg Gaige.
Now, eleven years later, she felt a tear wet her cheek. Could the man who had sat on the stool in the white light and wrapped himself in his smile have walked into the fire gag as if he were walking into the sea? By asking him her question, had she picked at a sore that would grow until it killed him?
The night fog off the Pacific dragged across her back and shoulders like rough raw silk, icing the sweat she hadn’t realized was there. She dug the heels of her hands into her eyes. There was no turning back; the questions were too much a part of her. With Lark, she had to find out who had snatched away her future. But with Greg Gaige, she had to know why he had died.
CHAPTER 11
SHE PULLED INTO HER driveway at twelve thirty. Tchernak was already in his kitchen—a kitchen worthy of Sharper Image’s front window, or so Kiernan called it, with every culinary novelty known to electrical outlet. She watched as he whipped the egg and milk for an omelet. The sun-dried tomatoes were already soaking in olive oil Tchernak got from a restaurant shipment flown in from Salerno. His nova of choice came via a connection in Seattle. Only the orange, whose peel he had grated, was local—and organic. “Garlic on a movie set? They have love scenes, they don’t have garlic,” Tchernak declared.
“Tchernak, I smelled garlic on the set, and in whatever the studio exec was eating at the rushes.”