by Susan Dunlap
His full lips pressed hard together. He shut his eyes and breathed in deeply, and when he spoke, it was without the easy sociability, and Irish lilt, of earlier. “I asked you not to—”
“Liam, two stunt doubles are dead. No secret is more important than that—particularly a ten-year-old affair. Or is it?”
“No, of course not,” he said a bit too quickly. Turning, he walked across the room, picked up his glass, and took a sip—a sip too small to ease discomfort, Kiernan thought.
She restrained the urge to look from the man to the photo and back. The decade of good life had transformed McCafferty from a gangly god into a middle-aged accountant. The stars in the middle of the photo probably looked much the same now. Your tires are your life, she thought inanely, recalling her Jeep salesman’s pitch. For stars, their skin was their tires. For McCafferty, the tire was around his middle. She walked to the mission chairs, glad she didn’t have to repeal that clutch of observations. “Liam, did you really think I wouldn’t be able to find this? Why did you make such a point of keeping it from me?”
“That was a bad time in my life. I’d been sheltered. You know how it is, the good Catholic boy.”
She nodded.
“Looking back, it’s hard to believe I was ever so naive, and at so late an age. I did a whole life’s worth of growing up in a month. Ah, the heady thrill of being chosen, being pulled into the center of ‘The Movies.’ When I told my parents I was ‘dating’ a movie producer, they pictured the grandchildren they’d been hoping for since I graduated from college, and me the next CEO of the studio. I was on top of the world. And when the end came … one moment I was the apple of her eye, and the next … She went back to LA. and—bingo! Nothing. She didn’t return my calls.” He set the glass down in the center of a coaster.
“It’s not pleasant to be tossed aside like—like yesterday’s contract.”
“That’s Hollywood.”
He shrugged. “That’s what they all said. A bucket of cold water, I’d have said. It sure woke me up. Give me politics any day, where friends are friends and enemies are remembered.”
“Liam, forget it. That was ten years ago.”
“But this—you,” he said with an icy anger that was the first thing about him she’d been certain was real, “you sneering at my hospitality, that is today.”
She pointed to a figure in the photograph, “This is Trace Yarrow, right? Who’s the guy with his arm around Yarrow?”
McCafferty hesitated, then shook his head. “That is Carlton Dratz.”
“Dratz? Was he friends with Yarrow?”
“Dratz didn’t have friends.”
“Was there maybe more—”
He snatched the photo out of her hand. “Nothing more! Trace Yarrow didn’t even recognize Dratz on the set yesterday. That’s how much there was between them. So don’t go calling them fags. Now you’ve abused my hospitality once too often. It’s time you’re going.”
“I wasn’t judging; I was just asking.”
“Enough!” He grabbed her arm.
She shook him off, pulled out her card, and put it on the table. “In case you change your mind.”
“No, not for someone the likes of you. I’ll give you one word of warning, though you’re nowhere near deserving it. The city’s already got calls about you. In budget crunch times like this, movie money’s a handy extra. The city’s not about to thumb its nose at Hollywood, not for the likes of you. You step one foot out of line, one mile over the speed limit, and—”
“And since you’re the city’s media liaison, when Dolly Uberhazy laid on the pressure, she called you?”
McCafferty didn’t reply, but his stony glare told her that Uberhazy had indeed called.
She walked down the stairs wondering just how much of McCafferty’s threat was true. One mile over the speed limit; she could be in jail before she got home.
The VW bug with the wooden bumper pulled away from the curb.
CHAPTER 24
THERE MUST BE A jet engine in that bug, Kiernan thought as she yanked the Jeep’s steering wheel hard around and swung a U across four lanes of road. The Volkswagen was almost out of sight. And she, still in view of Liam McCafferty’s window, couldn’t afford to go one mile over the speed limit. Yet.
In the distance the bug’s taillights, two small red ovals, shifted closer together and disappeared. He’d turned right. Uphill. Back into La Jolla. She floored the gas pedal, veered to the left, and as she neared the corner, cut across the empty left lanes to make a wider turn. She started up the steep hill, jerking the clutch lever into third with one hand as she let the wheel spin back.
Ahead, the only lights were the blurs from windows and intermittent splashes of streetlights. No taillights! Where was he? Dammit, he must have turned off on a side street. She downshifted, slowing as she reached the first corner. No sight of him either way. But he could have turned off his lights. He could have—
No time to ponder. No, go on. Try the next street. Nothing suggested she was dealing with a stunt driver. At this speed it would take a normal driver more than a block to get his bug under control. She pushed harder on the gas and as she neared the corner glanced both ways—no sign of him. To the left the street went downhill. She pulled the wheel to the right and headed up the sharp, narrow incline. He wouldn’t know the area, he’d take the streets he could see, not the dark downhill drops.
“Where are you, dammit?” Sweat dripped down her back; the ridges of the steering wheel pressed into her hands. The road curved steeply up to the left. Glancing quickly back and forth, she checked the parked cars along the curbs.
The headlights hit the side of a car—twenty feet ahead! She slammed on the brakes. The Jeep squealed to a stop inches from the car. Sweat ran down her face; she was shaking. She backed up and looked around the car she’d almost hit. It was parked! At the curb! The road had ended at the cross street.
She sat in the middle of the street, glaring at the car, her skin quivering, her mind a muddle of anger and frustration. The driver had spent half the day following her; what was he after? And now when she was offering him his prey, he couldn’t get away fast enough.
It was a minute before she saw the Volkswagen easing silently out from the curb nearly a block away to the right. She yanked the wheel to the right. Ahead, the bug popped into gear and raced down the hill.
She hit the gas.
Near the corner, the bug veered into the left lane. Headlights came at it. The oncoming driver hit the horn. Kiernan held her breath. The car slid by the bug and moments later passed her, something in its window shaking—a head, or more likely a fist.
The bug turned right.
She swung right—onto Soledad Mountain Road. No houses faced the road. It was steep, dark, empty. At the bottom on the hill was the red light at Felspar Street. A short block beyond that, cars whizzed by on Garnet, the feeder to I-5.
The bug was halfway down the hill.
Closer, she realized with a start, was an amber traffic light. She shot underneath it just as it turned red.
Ahead, Soledad Mountain Road was black. The bug was gone. This time she smiled. “Amateur.” She veered to the left, ready to swing a loose right. If you were smart, you’d have gone on to Garnet and merged into the traffic. I’d never have found you then. Before Garnet, the only exit was onto Felspar. She hung a left.
The bug was a block ahead, speeding down a flat street of cottages and apartments. Parked cars dotted both curbs. He was a couple of blocks from Lark Sondervoil’s apartment.
Kiernan slowed. Go ahead, lead me there.
The bug slowed at Noyes, then jerked left.
Damn! He must have seen me.
At the corner she made a left, just in time to see him turn right and into an alley and hit the gas, swinging too wide to the right, trying to compensate. Houses backed tight into the narrow alley. Garbage cans poked out from garages. The bug was doing fifty. It wove left, then right, barely missing a storage locker. He was
in the middle of the block, jerking frantically from side to side. Metal scraped metal. He’d sideswiped a parked car. Oblongs of white cut the street as house lights came on. A woman in purple ran into the alley. The bug reached the corner, turned right again, then left.
Kiernan followed, a third of a block behind. She floored the pedal. She’d have him before he made the next turn.
In the middle of the block he screeched right and bounced between parked cars, two wheels on a lawn, two on cement steps leading to a walkway. Kiernan slammed on the brakes. Ahead on either side were two garden apartment buildings. The bug was on the pedestrian walk, between the two buildings, inches from the stucco walls on both sides.
Dammit, the driver was maneuvering as if he were on a Harley. Was the space big enough for the Jeep? Could she make it?
Hardly. Too dangerous. Much too dangerous, picturing apartment doors opening. One mile over the speed limit, indeed. She backed up, hit the gas, and drove around the block, jumped out of the Jeep, and ran to the walkway.
Garbage cans lined the walk. The bug had slowed down. He was inching past the last can when she got to the car, pulled open the driver’s door, grabbed his ponytail, and yanked. “Pedora!”
He yelped and hit the brake. The car bounced. Kiernan held on to door and hair.
“Leggo!”
“Shut up or I’ll rip your head off.” Her heart was banging against her ribs, her palms so sweaty, she could barely hold on. “Now, ease this car over to that driveway and on down to the street. There—over there—put it in that parking spot.” She said, balancing on the running board.
Pedora inched toward the curb, moving with such caution that she was sure he was seeing not the grass and cement in front of him but every danger he’d managed to avoid in the last fifteen minutes. Death in a dozen forms winked at him. The man was terrified. Her own head throbbed with tension, fury, and frustration.
“Get out!” she said to the shaking figure. “Walk across the street, in front of me. Go on! To the apartment.” Her apartment, as far as the police were concerned.
At the apartment door, she said, “Take out my key ring.” Her assemblage of keys for clandestine entry that he’d taken after assaulting her. “Come on, come on! That’s it. Use the key next to the flashlight. Let’s get inside before anyone connects you”—or me, she thought—“with all the laws you’ve broken.”
Hands quivering, he unlocked the door.
“Hold the keys out behind you, and walk on inside. Leave the light off.”
As he pushed open the door, she grabbed her keys. “Over on the bed, facedown. Go on!”
“Hey, I’m not planning to run out on you!”
“How do I know that?” she said, making a snap decision. He wasn’t going to be a shaking leaf, following orders, forever. “Do I have your word?”
He hesitated.
“Your word?”
Finally he said, “Yes.”
“Okay,” she said, turning on the light. “I’m going to believe you. But you make one wrong move, and I’ll have the cops here. You are in a shitload of trouble.”
As he got up, Kiernan checked him more closely. His long gray ponytail was tangled, and the teal chambray shirt he wore unbuttoned over a faded blue T-shirt and jeans was so faded, it looked as if it had been washed every day for the last decade.
She looked at his hands. They were what her mother had called artist’s hands—long, narrow, with just enough padding to keep the smooth skin from hugging the tendons. He didn’t look out of place at all in the little studio. She could picture him sleeping on the futon, and using the ladder of dowels on the wall for—well, not for exercise.
“Sit down.” She motioned to the chairs by the kitchen counter. And when Pedora had folded and unfolded his limbs onto one and she had climbed up onto the other, she said, “What were you doing outside Liam McCafferty’s tonight?”
“I wasn’t—”
“Don’t insult me by lying. You followed me from Los Angeles, didn’t you?”
His fingers twitched, paused, moved again, and stopped dead. “Okay, okay. So I was on the same freeway you were. It’s a free way. I have as much right to drive it as you do.”
“You followed me to Gliderport and then up to McCafferty’s, right?”
The fingers moved slightly right and left and made little tapping motions. “So? That’s not illegal, either.”
“But assault with a deadly weapon is. We’re not going to talk about your attack right here last night, not for the moment.”
“You burst in on me. What else could I do?”
“Jason,” she snapped. “Why—were—you—following me?”
“Because,” he said, with the sharp nod of the righteous, “you’re nosing around into Greg’s life. Greg’s death. I’ve got the right to know what you’re finding out about him.”
Damn. Could that really be the whole reason? That was nothing! “And what do you assume I’ll find?”
Again his fingers moved. The man was typing on his thighs. Despite her frustration, she almost laughed. Pedora was so much in the persona of a writer, he could only think through his fingers! She was surprised he hadn’t asked for time to jot down notes on the car chase for a screenplay. Was it possible he had chosen the route between the apartment buildings for that reason? Reality and the movies, how different were they in Pedora’s mind?
His hands stopped. He stared at her. “They killed Greg.”
“They?”
“The movie people.”
“Why?”
“He knew too much.”
If this was the quality of his screenplays, it was no wonder they hadn’t sold. And yet … talking as she assumed someone in Creative might, she said, “Can you flesh that out? What did he know?”
“About the horses, and the drugs and the trucks.”
What? “You’re going to have to be more specific. Set the scene for me.”
“It was the location site for Bad Companions, the place Greg died.”
“Describe it.”
“Out in the desert, way east of here. Not sand desert like the Sahara, but scrub desert.”
“Trees?”
“Short ones, maybe twenty feet. Thin foliage, like Jacaranda but not so pretty. Mostly just dirt and cactus and plants so brown, you couldn’t tell what they’d been. Hilly. A cabin in the middle of a high, wide, flat knoll—like a mighty god had sliced off the real top and left that. Land dropped off behind and to the right.”
“What kind of cabin?”
“Three-room house, weathered wood. Special Effects had treated the wood so it looked old. Sort of like a big outhouse. It was supposed to have been deserted.”
“Was it sitting on bare ground?”
“Yeah. No grass or anything. A couple of trees behind it, like it had been built in the one shady spot. That’s what settlers did out here. I’ve researched that.”
Common sense, she thought, could have saved him that research time. “The land dropped off on two sides. What was in front of the cabin?”
“The cameras. It was always shot from that direction.”
“So the land continued flat to the left?”
“Oh, yeah. All the trailers were parked there.”
“So if you took in the whole scene, was it like the cabin was—comparatively speaking—like an outhouse to the rest of the trailers?”
He typed that idea onto his thighs, paused, typed again. Was he expanding her image, she wondered, or typing over it?
“Yeah. Like an outhouse, set back in the yard behind the courtyard and an aluminum villa and an aluminum garage.”
“What was in the courtyard?”
“The food tables, and the cameras.”
“And what was in the garage? Cars?”
“Personal cars? Oh, no. They didn’t let them park their own cars there. There was a big stink about that. You shoulda heard Carlton Dratz. He’d just gotten a Corvette, and did it piss him off to see that baby covered with dust and dir
t. Only he could put his car in the garage. He used to get it washed every time he drove into town, like it never occurred to him that there would still be dirt when he got back to the set.” Again he laughed, and this time Kiernan joined him, using the time to consider what he might know about Dratz.
Dratz and a stash in a garage? She could feel the answer getting closer. But she’d have to ease into questions about him. “So what else was in the garage then?”
He leaned forward conspiratorially and lowered his voice. “The horses.”
“Horses?” she said. Horses! An aluminum garage in the desert—it must have been over a hundred degrees in there. Trying to keep the skepticism from her voice, she said, “Why would they keep the horses in the garage?”
He leaned closer yet. “So they could load the wasted ones onto the trucks and unload the fresh ones and no one would see them.”
They couldn’t merely have been mistreating their animals. The SPCA had people on sets to protect animals. “Tell me about that.”
His fingers were poised above his thigh but didn’t move. Nor did he speak.
“Give me the story line,” she said, hoping that was the right jargon.
He shifted back, added a paragraph to his legs, then leaned forward and whispered, “Drugs. See, the set is right by the Mexican border. Border guards can’t be everywhere, right? It’s easy to run these horses across.”
Horse-rustling! I can’t believe it! I might as well be on the porch at Bellevue! Her thighs tensed; she was ready to stand up and walk out. On the wards in medical school, she had dealt with delusional paranoid patients—it had been the final factor demonstrating she had no bedside manner and underlining the advantages for her of working with the dead. The dead are quiet, and their bodies reveal the truth. The living are loud and deceptive. And the unhinged don’t even realize they’re lying. But her dealings on the wards had taught her that as bizarre and far-spun as delusions might be, woven into them were bits of truth.
She took a breath and forced her throat to relax, and when she spoke, it was calmly. The room was cold and stuffy from being closed. “Why—motivation?”