by Susan Dunlap
“I get the picture.” Tchernak, she had to admit—to herself, certainly not to him—had good instincts. Better assessments of people than she would have expected. Maybe all those years of pass blocking, of keeping a step ahead of the defensive end, guessing which way he’d move, guessing how he’d react and acting first, had honed his skill at reading an opponent.
“Not quite, you don’t. Persis decided she’d save herself the trouble and run Hogarth tonight—at day rates!” The hairs on his chin were virtually quivering with delight.
“Give yourself a bonus.”
“I’ve already added it to the Oregon cherry budget. Anyway, what Persis came up with was that Jane Hogarth shared an apartment with her sister Joyce, who cosigned a loan.”
“So you got Joyce’s Social Security number.”
“And, oh employer mine, her address in Los Angeles. Where I am heading in the morning. I figured she’ll be more susceptible to my charm in person. Right?”
Tchernak’s question hung in the air. Kiernan considered it. He deserved the chance; he’d earned it. And he could save her a lot of time. Chances were, he’d charm Joyce Hogarth. Women warmed right up to Tchernak’s sexy, unfinished face. There was a dangerous, exciting feel to the man. He loomed, but something about him made people think he loomed for them. Tchernak was the guy to have beside you in a dark alley, and the one you could bet your last breath would show up there. Maybe it was all those years of protecting the quarterback, of keeping the defensive end at bay no matter how many seconds it took for the quarterback to throw the ball. Or maybe it was his habit of concentrating intently on each person he met—flattering to those who didn’t realize that he was sizing them up, and that he’d have no qualms about using everything he gleaned against them.
But she wasn’t willing to give up being quarterback. And the idea of anyone, even Tchernak—or perhaps especially Tchernak—having the right to be involved in every case made her want to rip off her skin and run into the night. In her lexicon, consensus was synonymous with jail. On the other hand, she needed Joyce Hogarth’s information. And, hell, how could she tell Tchernak no? Another time, maybe, but not now. She shrugged. “Once you’ve gotten Joyce to tell you where Dratz and her sister parted company, call me.”
Tchernak looked over at her. “You okay?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“You’re so—well, down. I mean, like almost normal.”
She laughed, but as soon as the sound came out, she realized it was halfhearted.
“Is it the case? You frustrated? It’ll pick up. You’ve just started. You’ve got to be patient, make your plans, and wait.”
She leaned back against the seat, glancing absently at the lighted store windows on Girard Street. Tchernak turned left at the corner, and she peered at the black of the ocean each time she could see between buildings.
When Tchernak pulled into her driveway, he said, “Ezra could use a walk. Come with me. Unless you’re too tired.”
Kiernan laughed. A nighttime walk on the beach, next to the throbbing of the waves—the heartbeat of the earth—the briny smell of endless possibilities had never ceased to cheer her. The Elavil out the window, she’d called it. “Do I sound that bad?”
“Every bit. I’ve never seen you like this on a case before.”
“It’s not the case,” she said letting herself out of the Jeep and waiting while Tchernak got Ezra. “It’s, well …” She rubbed the big wolfhound’s back as he loped by to the sidewalk.
“Greg Gaige? Is that it?” Tchernak prodded.
“Well, yeah. I just hate to think Greg sank to stealing the job from a colleague and then died.”
Tchernak rested a hand on her shoulder. “Kiernan, job-stealing goes on all the time in business.”
“Of course,” she conceded. She stopped, rested her arms on the railing over the staircase to the beach, and looked out into the darkness. “It’s not just that Greg did it, Tchernak, it’s that he must have felt he had to. How could he have to? He was the best in the business.” She started down the cement steps to the beach. Ezra eyed the steps and chose a path beside it, half stepping, half slipping his way down.
“Maybe,” Tchernak said cautiously, as they reached the beach, “because of what he meant to you when you were younger—”
“No!” Kiernan snapped. Digging her heels into the sand, she strode across the beach to the water line. “Look, I don’t want to wallow in that, like I’m a member of Survivors of a Less-Than-Perfect Childhood. I’m over forty years old; I don’t need to blame my moods on my parents or parent-substitutes.”
Tchernak jumped back; she suspected it was not just to avoid the breaking wave. The water chilled her ankles; it felt good. Tchernak was right in part, but she didn’t want to get into that. “Look, you have to get up early. I’ll take Ezra the rest of the way.”
Tchernak laughed. “Very gracious offer. But I’ve defended myself against better tongues than yours. Down in a three-point stance on the line of scrimmage, you want to know what some of the ends have labeled me, my family, my friends, my sexual habits, my intelligence, or my chances of surviving the next play?”
She wrapped her fingers through his in the thanks she couldn’t choke out in words. It was foolish, this inability to put feelings into words. She’d strode so briskly through her adolescence, through the lines of neighbors who scorned her because of her sister’s suicide, that it had been a shock to discover she’d grown up and that people who knew nothing about the scandal were jumping back to avoid her. “When I saw Greg in San Francisco, he was as caught up in his work as Ezra is in running on the beach. He could have done TV interviews—the film company wanted him to. Instead, he went to dinner with me and figured someone else would like the limelight.”
“He was the best, then, right?”
“He was the leading gymnastic stunt man. He’d created gags no one could match.”
Tchernak sat down on a flat rock and rested his elbows on his thighs. “He was the best. He didn’t have to consider taking another guy’s job, not then.
“But when he got older, he didn’t move as fast, he’d broken too many bones, maybe he’d lost a step. You scramble and scratch—anything so you can hang on, just a bit longer.”
She settled next to him, watching the waves swell, pause momentarily balanced between before and after, then gush forth into frothy spray that spread like the lace doilies covering the backs of chairs in Rohan Street houses. She let her thigh rest against Tchernak’s.
“You can’t believe it can be over,” Tchernak laughed humorlessly. “Read the sports columns—they say smart athletes plan for the future. Sure. Makes sense. Sounds easy. But look, if you were thinking about broadcasting or writing your memoirs, you wouldn’t throw everything you’ve got into this play. You’d never chance it all to take down a guy who’s bigger, taller, smarter, and ten years younger. It wouldn’t matter more than the world that you toss him on his butt so your quarterback can make the play.” He looked over at her. “If it wasn’t all-important, you wouldn’t be great to begin with.
“Your whole life has been focused on playing sports, being in high school games that the entire town comes to see, getting a scholarship. In college you choose your classes so they don’t conflict with practice, because it’s the team that matters. All with the dream of someday playing in the pros. And then, there, football is your whole world. You can do something hardly anyone else can. You’re part of the team. When you’re away from the team, it’s like you don’t completely exist, like someone cut off your foot. But back on the field with all of you working together, eleven against the world—God, there’s nothing like it. You come off the field, and the next day you ache all over, but you can’t wait to get back into uniform.” He let his hands drop. “And then one day, like any other day, you walk in and you’ve been cut. Fired. Dumped. It’s like they’ve cut off your legs.” He swallowed and, still looking toward the ocean, said, “Suddenly you’re nothing. The guys are in there,
but you’re outside pressing your nose against the glass. They could see you out there, but they don’t want to, don’t dare. And you hobble off, knowing you’ve lost the one thing that makes you feel alive.”
Ezra ambled back, wet, panting, sand coating his whiskers. He sank into the sand and eyed Tchernak until Tchernak stretched out his legs and provided a shelf for the dog’s chin. He scratched the dog’s neck, and Kiernan rubbed behind Ezra’s ears, letting her hand come to rest on Tchernak’s. When Ezra stood, she wove her fingers in with Tchernak’s and walked back home, letting the sound of the ocean cloak them.
There was no comfort she could give him. After she’d been fired from the coroner’s office, she’d spent months with the drapes pulled, and two years in India packing her days too full for thought. And now investigating, and Ezra, and friends, and books and classes … maybe she was running to avoid the shadow Tchernak was staring at. But she couldn’t let herself slow down enough to find out.
As she thought of Greg Gaige and gymnastics, she realized this was the first time she didn’t envy men. Their careers in gymnastics were based on strength, agility, and the use of an adult body. For women, gymnastics ended with puberty, however long that could be postponed. But girls always knew their time was short. They were never given the illusion of forever; they didn’t wait until middle age to realize it had been a lie.
Greg Gaige had never faced that. And yet, for Tchernak, for herself, she wished he had lived to come head to head with it, had pushed, fought, scratched his way through, and shown them how.
CHAPTER 26
KIERNAN WOKE ON THURSDAY morning and looked at the bare wall opposite the bed, momentarily surprised to find the poster of Greg Gaige missing. But this wasn’t the Baltimore gym, and it had been in a dream that she’d tried vault after vault—the simplest ones—and landed on her face. In the poster, Greg Gaige—his sandy hair thinned, those startling blue eyes of his faded to gray—shook his head sadly and looked away.
It didn’t take a psychic to figure out the meaning of that dream, she thought as she pushed up and leaned against the chilly windows. Below, the Pacific inhaled and spat against the rocks. She wondered if she’d spent the whole night dreaming of Greg Gaige, guessing what the loss of his life’s focus would have done to him.
Tchernak was on his way to L.A., but the coffee he left for her was hot in the pot, and one of his fresh many-berry corn scones was waiting in the toaster oven for her to push the lever. (Tchernak, who felt she was operating at capacity just to find the toaster oven, had already set the timer for the correct period of reheating.) When it was ready, she took the tray with juice, vitamins, and fruit from the fridge and carried it into her flat. She sat looking out over the ocean, drinking coffee and sharing food with Ezra.
She thought of Greg and of Tchernak facing the ends of careers for which they’d spent their lives working. But what of Dolly Uberhazy? What if she were fired? She’d find other work. But after making movies how could managing a Payless or directing personnel in Paso Robles compare? And Bleeker—would he care any less? He was nearly a pariah in the trade, and still he hung on. The movie business—the glamour, the pressure, the multimillion-dollar gambles, the days of split-second decisions—it was the Indianapolis 500 of job scenes. After that, anything else would be like driving a bus. Or fixing computer glitches, like Trace Yarrow.
Yarrow, who had lost his job to Greg and never worked again. The man with the now-and-again limp. The man who worked for Pacific Breeze Computer.
At ten o’clock in the Ocean Beach section of the city, boys in cutoffs and girls in bikinis balanced body boards and coffee cups as they migrated toward the beach for the local equivalent of nine to five. They passed an apartment building with a wooden facade and geranium-filled window boxes, called Alpine Manor. And a pagoda-roofed building named Samurai Sunset Condos. In Trace Yarrow’s alley, the rear walls of the Manor and Samurai Sunset stood, devoid of decoration, like pastel ends of shoe boxes on a shelf. Inside, the tenants would have to look out the window to tell whether the cube of living space they inhabited was ersatz Swiss or Japanese. But in the alley it was all southern California, with the unfiltered sun bouncing brightly off the lime, apricot, and banana-tone stucco.
The shades of Yarrow’s tiny cottage were still drawn, his windows sealed tight.
Kiernan knocked and moved closer to the door as a Suzuki Jeep sped by, a brace of surfboards strapped atop it, pagodalike.
Yarrow opened the door, rubbing his eyes with his free fist. His dark hair was tousled, and the black and white Happy coat he wore was barely held together by a loose belt. “Kiernan, I didn’t realize detectives made their reports in person.” He put a hand on her arm. “But I like it.”
“It’s not a social call,” she said, pushing past him to one of the kitchen chairs. She had intended to demand an answer about the Pacific Breeze Computer trucks on the Bad Companions set, but seeing Yarrow, she changed her mind. She’d been suspicious of him, never sure he hadn’t sold his loyalty to Dolly Uberhazy. Maybe the feeling was right and it was just the source of his commitment that she’d erred on—not Dolly, but Pacific Breeze Computer.
He grinned. “So, let’s do business.”
“That’s exactly what we’ll do. And you can start by telling me why after ten years you decided to hire a detective.”
“Well, Lark—”
“No, not just Lark. Lark’s incidental. The death you want to know about is Greg Gaige’s. Why?”
“I told you—”
“You told me you were scheduled to do the fire gag. Maybe you would have died. Now you think that fire was suspicious?”
“I don’t know. That’s what I hired you to find out. I’m heating water for coffee. You want some?”
“No.” She watched him move to the stove, the sink, and back. “Pour your coffee and give me the truth.”
“Or?”
“Of I’ll find out anyway, but you will never know.”
The procedures for instant-coffee-making seemed to consume Yarrow’s attention. He made each trip slowly, poured each liquid without spilling a drop, stirred, washed, and dried the spoon. He pulled out a chair, sat, tasted the coffee, and said, “Okay.”
“Start with your limp.”
“Small stuff. I broke my leg ten years ago. I’ve got a pin in it. Just like Greg Gaige, a very exclusive club. I’d be limping if I hadn’t done rehab. I still favor the leg if I’m tired, or not thinking about it. But while I was limping big time, I learned the side benefits, like my own social blue curb.” A grin crossed his chipmunk face.
“You’re really a slime, Yarrow. If this is the way you treat people, it’s no wonder you question whether the fire was meant for you. On Bad Companions, you must have been the emotional equivalent of Dratz. Who else have you ‘gotten’ with your little acts?”
“No one. I didn’t do that then. I didn’t have to.”
“And what made you have to?”
He was in the same chair he’d used to balance on two legs Tuesday night. But this morning all four legs were solidly on the floor. Yarrow leaned forward onto the table with his hands cupped around the coffee mug.
“Ten years ago, when Bad Companions was filmed,” she prodded, “Greg Gaige snatched your job. And you were pissed, right? Anyone would be.”
“Yeah, but anyone wouldn’t stomp off, drive back to town in a fury, get out of the car, trip up the curb, and break a leg. So there, you’ve got my secret.”
She nodded. To an accountant or a physicist, she would have commented that accidents happen. But Yarrow’d been a stunt man. “Doesn’t look good on your resume, huh?”
“Believe it. If you’re labeled ‘delicate,’ you’re dead. Delicate is usually a euphemism for drugs, but if you’re likely to break bones, it adds up to the same thing for them—you don’t show, and it costs them money. Nobody’s going to take a chance on a delicate stunt man. No reason to, when there are plenty of other guys around. And if they heard that I broke my
leg because I was so pissed off about the job, well then, I’d be delicate and a jerk.”
“So you laid low?”
“Right. I didn’t call anyone in the business. But the damn leg took forever to heal, and by the time I got back in shape, I’d just been gone too long.” He downed the coffee, stood up, and took the cup to the sink.
“What about stunt coordinating?”
“I said I’d been gone too long.” His voice was as bitter as the coffee had smelled.
Kiernan sat back glancing at the tiny studio. Yarrow would have made good money when he did gags, but here he was living on the edge. He’d moved from gags to … this.
There was a piece missing here. Clearly, he wasn’t going to reveal it. Did he expect her investigation to shed light on it? Was it something to do with Greg Gaige’s death? Something to do with Pacific Breeze Computer? “Tell me about the Bad Companions set.” She waited until he sat down again, and watching his reaction, she asked, “How were the horses?”
“Fine. Why?” His brow wrinkled in question, but nothing indicated wariness.
“I heard they were uncontrollable.” She wasn’t going to go into Pedora’s paranoid fantasy about the Mexican cocaine.
Yarrow shook his head. “Hardly. There’s a reason why stunt coordinators pay the money they do for trained horses, and it’s not the desire to contribute to the well-being of the animal kingdom.”
“Specifically?”
“They don’t have time to waste with untrained animals. Look, the bottom line is, every day over schedule runs them a fortune. And stunt sets cost a bundle. They’re not going to take the chance of a horse screwing up the gag, running the film over schedule, maybe having to replace the set because part of the gag included getting the set destroyed.”