High Fall

by Susan Dunlap

  “Well, see, it’s not just the horses. Horses are a dime a dozen. They’re like toothpicks in a film budget. So nobody would smuggle in horses just for horses, right? It’s what’s inside the horses.”

  “And that is?”

  He leaned farther forward. She was afraid he’d fall off his stool. He whispered so softly, she was almost reading his lips. “Cocaine. The Mexicans sewed the cocaine inside the horses’ skin and smuggled them over the border. And then the trucks came at night and carted them off to the dealers in L.A.”

  “And they were replaced by a new batch of horses smuggled from Mexico?”

  “Right.”

  She hesitated, wondering how far to follow this delusion. A band of Mexican drug smugglers providing an endless supply of identical equines? She wanted to grab Pedora and scream, “Give me the truth!”

  But she couldn’t scream, not here, not without the neighbors calling the cops. If Dolly got another middle-of-the-night call about her “tenant,” she might retaliate with an answer different from last time.

  Besides, Pedora was too far gone in his own world to know the truth. What bits in Pedora’s tale were real? Horses stuffed like galloping turkeys? No. But horses? There must have been horses. And trucks. “Where did the trucks come from?”

  “The drug lords.”

  “The drug lords. What did they say on the side: ‘Los Angeles Cocaine Company, home deliveries at any hour of night’?”

  “‘Pacific Breeze Computer.’”

  “What?” she said, taken aback.

  “See, that’s how I knew. I mean, they didn’t need truckloads of computer equipment on the set. Why would computer trucks come in the middle of the night, once a week for three weeks? Doesn’t make sense, does it?”

  Bingo! “No, it doesn’t. But if they came in the middle of the night, they must have done that to avoid being seen, right?”

  He nodded, a small smile stretching his lips.

  He knows he’s got me, she thought. “So how did you come to spot them?”

  “They don’t let anyone on the set at night. They drive the actors back to the motel. That was fine for them. But me, I was sleeping in my car off the road at the bottom of the hill. It’s not real comfortable in a bug. I’d wake up two or three times a night all stiff and have to walk it out. After the time I spotted the ‘computer’ trucks, I started getting up on purpose to watch for them. I knew there was something clandestine going on.”

  “What made you think it involved the horses?”

  “They wouldn’t let me near them. Because the bags that the coke was in leaked, see? The Mexicans didn’t realize the horses would be running up a lather in the hot sun. They figured the horses were like mailing envelopes for their packages. They didn’t pack for action, if you know what I mean.” He didn’t wink, but his eyelid twitched. “The coke got into the horses’ systems, and the horses went wild.”

  “Is that what Greg thought, too?”

  He shook his head. “Greg didn’t have the mind to spot a conspiracy. He was too caught up in his Move. When I told him about the conspiracy, he looked at me like I was crazy.”

  Probably not for the first time. “Jason, do you have any proof?”

  “Sure. It’s in the hole in the road out there.”

  It took her a moment to regroup, so sure had she been that Pedora would begin waffling when facts were required. She made a “go on” motion with her hand.

  “The dead horses. They buried them in the road behind the cabin. The coke is still in them.”

  “They did that during the day?”

  “Of course not. They buried them at night, when the trucks came and they were making the switch.”

  “And did anyone but you see this entombment?”

  He sat up straight, eyes open wide. “You don’t believe me, do you?”

  “Did anyone else see it?” she insisted.

  “Yeah. Dratz was right there. Ask him.”

  “Carlton Dratz?” Perfect. The conspiracy theory supported by the person no one could find! “Was he involved in the conspiracy?”

  “Oh, yeah, he was running the whole thing. You don’t believe me, I can tell. But it makes perfect sense. See, he was working for his father, Kurt Dratz, head of production at the studio. Look, his father sends him down from L.A. There’s no real reason for him to be on the set. All he’s doing is hanging around bugging people. Usually, Greg was willing to listen to anyone. But Dratz even got on Greg’s nerves.”

  “Is there anything besides just his presence that makes you suspicious of him?” Besides your paranoia?

  “Yeah, look, here he is, the son of a studio exec. He’s got a room paid for at the motel. Does he sleep in it? Not on delivery nights. You know where he was then?”

  “Where?”

  Inn the wooden house on the set!”

  “The set house—the one that Greg died in?” Kiernan asked, amazed.

  “Yeah.” Pedora nodded slowly, smiling as if Kiernan were a particularly slow student who had finally gotten the point.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because,” he said, staring her in the eye, “I looked in the windows one night after I’d woken up the third time in the damned car. It was just an empty structure, but I figured it would be better than sleeping in my car. And it would show them, when they woke up and found me plumb in the middle of the set—sleeping! Hot-shot security!” He leaned forward and grabbed her arms. “You see now why they won’t buy my screenplay. Not just Summit-Arts Studios. None of the studios will touch it. They don’t want the country to know how they finance their movies with smuggled drugs. Truth”—he shook his head—“it means nothing to them.”

  Kiernan removed his hands from her arms and leaned back against the edge of the bar. What was worth saving of this tale? What could she believe? Cocaine-stuffed horses? Hardly! Yarrow and Pacific Breeze Computer—more likely. In the morning, Yarrow’d have plenty to explain.

  “Just like them,” Pedora muttered, his eyes twitching side to side, fingers typing on his thigh. He looked as if he might disintegrate at any moment. “Don’t believe me. I showed them. I showed …”

  “Showed who?”

  He pressed his lips into a pout. His head shook faster.

  She reached out and put her hands over his, pressing his palms onto his thighs, choking off the movement. “Bleeker? You showed him?”

  He didn’t reply. But his hands relaxed.

  “You orchestrated Bleeker’s ‘bad luck’—the short-circuits that blew out the lights, the lighted paper on top of the flowers, all the ‘bad luck’ that threw his films behind schedule. Very ingenious,” she said.

  Pedora nodded, smiling. “Greg ...”

  “Would Greg have been proud of you?”

  “Of course,” he snapped.

  “But Jason, why did all those ‘bad luck’ incidents include fire? Did Bleeker cause the fire Greg died in?”

  “He’s responsible. Greg told him he needed a special fire crew. ‘Too expensive,’ Production said. It wasn’t Bleeker’s decision, but Bleeker didn’t complain. Stunt coordinator! He should have been called the death coordinator! They used the regular emergency crew, which didn’t know fires from first aid, and the local fire department. And then—” He pulled his hands free and grabbed her arms again. “And then he couldn’t even give the fire department the right call time. Greg was already dead, and they were still driving to the set.”

  Her shoulders hunched forward, her breath caught. For a moment she felt at one with Pedora and his fury and frustration. No special fire crew—that explained how a cabin could burn in the midst of a crowd and a man could die before anyone got him out.

  And it explained why Cary Bleeker had taken no aggressive action about the pranks. The man was party to the guilt. And from a practical point of view, he wouldn’t have done anything to resurrect notice of his failure.

  She freed her hands and said more softly, “What happened to Carlton Dratz?”


  Pedora shifted back away from her, his face more relaxed than she’d seen it. He looked almost normal, as if her acceptance of his story had removed the turmoil outside. “Dratz took off with the extra. He saw me watching him that last night, and he got scared. The extra was finished, so no one cared if they left. No, not true—everyone, everyone was glad.”

  “Where did they go?”

  “Mexico, of course,” he said lightly. “It was the perfect escape route, all planned out and well traveled. He gassed up his ’Vette and headed south. With the help of his business partners down there, see?” he added. “Look, you’re supposed to be a detective, right? Well, that’s the only reason I’ve told you this. Don’t even think about writing a treatment of it. I’ve got my screenplay registered. You steal this, and I’ll sue you from here to the East Coast. I’m the one who’s suffered. I’m not going to have someone else collect.”

  Kiernan slumped forward; suddenly, all the exertions of the day caught up with her. And for this! she muttered to herself. Definitely time to go home and sleep it off. “It’s all yours, Jason. Write in peace.” She stood up, walked to the door, and opened it.

  A policeman stood on the stoop.

  CHAPTER 25

  “BAD LUCK? OR THE law of karma?” she asked herself as the patrol officer escorted her into the police station. He had ignored her explanation, kept her waiting half an hour until a backup unit arrived to take charge of Pedora, and he only grudgingly agreed to call Tchernak once he deposited her here.

  Her question arose again as she looked around. It might not be ill luck that the station serving Pacific Beach was an old, brown, one-story building at the Eastgate Mall in inland La Jolla, closer to her duplex than to the accident site in Pacific Beach. But walking into the white lobby and coming face to face with Officer Mark Melchior definitely suggested poor karma. Here, behind the scarred wooden counter, that round face with its deceptive halo of dark curly hair looked distinctly less benign than it had in the half-light of Lark Sondervoil’s Pacific Beach apartment. Under the interrogation-bright bulbs, his eyes looked not just dark but piercing, his brow not furrowed with miscellaneous worry but wrinkled in suspicion. And in his pale, round face there was definitely nothing jolly.

  Melchior poised his pen over a printed form. “Do you go out of your way to conduct all your lawbreaking activities in my district of the city, Ms. O’Shaughnessy? Or do you spend your daylight hours also careening through Point Loma or breaking into hotel rooms downtown?”

  “I told the patrolman and I’m telling you—I’m not the one who hit that car,” she said, taking a step back from the counter, which was almost chin high for her. The reception area was empty but for a couple of other cops—presumably business was slow here on Wednesday nights. “Check my Jeep for scratches; you won’t find any. I’m not the offender. I’m the one who tracked him down and kept him busy until your men could find us,” she said with a straight face. “Is this the kind thanks a citizen gets in San Diego for putting herself in danger? Or just here at the mall station?”

  Melchior hesitated just long enough to signal to the cognoscenti that he had heard enough cracks about the station’s Eastgate Mall address. “In danger? I assume, Ms. O’Shaughnessy, that you’ve been offered transport to a doctor?”

  “I am a doctor.”

  “A private eye and a doctor. My, oh my!”

  Glaring at him, she let a beat pass before saying, “I’m not a lawyer, but I’ll definitely call one if this keeps on. Now tell me what you need, and let me get out of here.”

  “Relax. You don’t make the rules here.”

  Her back tightened; her neck felt as taut as if it were in a brace. She pulled out her address book and began paging through it. If she called at this hour, Ardis Ramaswami would take her head off. And having disposed with that, she’d race down to the police station like a hungry tiger and not be mollified till she’d chewed off every head that poked out of a tan uniform. It was not a call to be made lightly.

  “We need your statement. In my office.”

  “I gave it to the patrol officer. I’m too exhausted to do it all again.”

  “Let me remind you, Miss—Doctor O’Shaughnessy, that we can charge you with reckless driving, reckless endangerment—”

  “No one saw me driving.”

  “Harboring a fugitive …”

  / didn’t know he was a fugitive, she started to retort. But she’d already blown that one. Melchior, she realized, had not yet gotten the official word on her. If the forces of Hollywood and municipal San Diego were already pushing him, he wouldn’t be wasting words like this. Either McCafferty had been leading her on—and she doubted that—or she had to get out of here before the word reached Melchior. “Look, I’ll come back in the morning and give you a statement.”

  “No, you won’t! You’re not leaving till you give me a damn good explanation of how you got hit over the head last night in an apartment rented to some woman in L.A. and ended up there tonight with the Evel Knievel of Pacific Beach paths.”

  How much to tell him? The years she had worked in the coroner’s department, the police had been her allies. But it had not been a natural alliance. Trusting the authorities was something she would never do easily. Their job was to protect the status quo, and she was by nature a perpetual threat to that quo. “Like I told you, I’m checking out the accident at Gliderport yesterday.”

  “With who?”

  No one, she almost snapped. Technically, Lark’s death wasn’t a murder. And the place where Lark had died wasn’t in his jurisdiction. The area around Gliderport was a quagmire of jurisdictional disputes. The land on top—the parking area—was city owned, the bluff itself was a state park, and portions of the beach belonged to each. “The cliff is the Parks Department’s. It never occurred to me you’d be involved in their case.”

  Melchior hesitated.

  Damn. She shouldn’t have baited him.

  Melchior glanced at his phone list, then apparently thought better of disturbing the overworked rangers. He opened the gate in the counter and motioned her to a hard chair by the metal desk behind. “So, Miss O’Shaughnessy, just why were you following—at whatever distance and speed you say—Mr. Pedora?”

  She didn’t move. “Because he tailed me from L.A. Finally, when I saw him sitting outside Liam McCafferty’s house—”

  “You’re involved with Mr. McCafferty?” Clearly, the words had escaped Melchior’s lips before he could censor them.

  With an effort, Kiernan restrained a smile. “You know Liam?” She hoped she wasn’t laying it on too thick.

  “We know city officials.”

  Melchior was doing his best to pass this off; she had every intention of letting him. The last thing she wanted was Melchior in contact with McCafferty and talking about her. But the interchange did tell her that McCafferty was more important than she’d realized. The assistant-designate to the state treasurer was a powerful man. A bad choice for an enemy. She stood. “So if that’s all then, I’ll be—”

  “Sit down!” The typewriter across the room stopped; the patrolman at the desk froze. Even the phones ceased ringing, as if every con in La Jolla and Pacific Beach had called a momentary work stoppage. “You’ll do the statement now!”

  The front door opened.

  Momentarily, Tchernak filled the empty space. Then he strode forward, eyeing the defensive team behind the desk like a line set to blitz his quarterback. He leaned his six-four-240 on the counter. His deep raspy voice was frighteningly quiet as he said, “I need to get this woman home.”

  Melchior looked at Kiernan and said in a stage whisper, “Is this the boyfriend you moved to Pacific Beach to get away from?”

  “You’re Brad Tchernak, aren’t you?” the patrolman blurted out. “Hey, I saw you play against San Francisco when you smacked Haley into the mud. You were great, man. And the Raiders’ game that year … you know, my kid would go crazy over an autograph. His birthday is next week, and—”

&nb
sp; All four phones rang. The outside door opened, admitting a loud argument and the couple creating it.

  Melchior threw up his hands. He stepped in front of the patrolman. “Okay, Mr. Tchernak, take her. Get her back here in the morning. You’re responsible.” To Kiernan, he added, “You get involved in one more thing, I’ll jail you as a public nuisance. I can do it.” He turned to Tchernak. “You were a great tackle, the best, but if you can’t keep her out of trouble, I’ll pull you in, too.”

  Kiernan glared. “Look—”

  Tchernak grabbed her arm, shoved her through the gate and on outside.

  “Don’t you know the first thing about taunting? In football, you can break a guy’s back and go on playing. But taunting—that can get you thrown out of the game.”

  “I don’t play team sports!”

  “You ever see the offense or defense down on one knee on the sidelines in communal prayer?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “Ever wonder what that prayer is? It’s thanksgiving that you’re not on their team.” He motioned across the parking lot to the Jeep. “What’s this about a car chase through Pee Bee?”

  “I got tired of Pedora following me. Where’s the Triumph?”

  “Changing the subject, eh? Well, Little T’s at home. I caught a ride up, because a good servant never knows when he’ll be called upon to chauffeur his mistress.”

  The hairs on her neck bristled, but she didn’t retort.

  “And I figured you wouldn’t want to wait to know what I’ve discovered about Jane Hogarth,” Tchernak added quickly. He climbed into the driver’s seat. Silently, she opened the other door.

  “Well, chief investigator,” he said as he started the engine, “your humble assistant had already pressed Persis at BakDat, right? I could have decided that it was late, that Persis had been staring at the screen so long, her eyes were crossed and the only thing that would lighten her mood was taking a bite out of me. I could have waited until tomorrow. That’s what the average guy would do. But the professional investigator”—he paused momentarily, daring her with a glance, then went on—”plans every move. He—or she—thinks ahead. And what’s ahead, you may ask. For Persis, it’s the prospect of some good jazz to unwind to, and sleeping till noon. So I started in about how bad I felt about ruining her morning tomorrow, and how I’d just give her the order now and at least it would save her that much shut-eye later and—”