by Susan Dunlap
Greg stopped, put an arm around her shoulder. “It’s like shimmying up that crane. Not many men could do it. Few would want to. But I do, and I want to get to the top.”
“And?”
“And keep adding new tops.”
“And when you have to come down?” she’d insisted.
“I don’t deal with down.” There was no bravado in his voice. In that moment she’d known that he didn’t look down because he couldn’t. Then she’d pushed away the question. From time to time later, she had wondered what he would see down below, from whence he came and would eventually have to go. Would he have seen the competition clambering up? But she had held the question gingerly, looking at it out of the corner of her eyes. Or would he have been so startled he’d have let go and fallen to—she stared at the barren grave—to this?
She turned and started back to the Jeep. Greg’s answer hadn’t been the same as Tchernak’s—that you can’t get to the top if your focus is half on the earth beneath. Nothing so sensible.
She walked faster, and once in the Jeep, she sent up plumes of dust as she headed out of town.
The Bad Companions location site was five miles south of Conroy, on a road that had been paved years ago. The surviving hunks of macadam merely added to the height of the ruts. It was impossible to tell whether it had been used in the last year or the last hour. There were no houses or barns alongside, no orchards, fields, or water towers. Just a clump of gray-green bushes and spindly trees at the foot of the hill, where the meager water runoff collected. The road must have been paved, she decided, by Summit-Arts. There was no one else around to care.
She followed the broken pavement around a sharp turn and up a breathtakingly steep hill with hairpin turns much too close together. From each straightaway the view below was of sharp boulders and a single dry stream bed curled near the bottom like the corpse of a snake dried out by the sun. No wonder Summit-Arts had chosen the location for a picture that dealt with death and bondage. It was as close to hell as California could offer.
Atop, the only buildings in sight were a couple of trailers, sagging, rusted, one toppled to the side. They were small compared with those at Gliderport, but it must have been all the drivers could do to get them up that miserable road. No wonder, she thought, they didn’t try to wrestle them back down it afterward.
Feeling overcautious, she parked the Jeep behind a stand of live oak on the far side of the hill from the trailers. The dying rumble of the engine trumpeted against the lone rustle of a leaf as a single bird flitted away. The swish of grasses hinted at unseen rodents. But there was no wind, no distant sound of traffic, no whir from hilltop power lines. The only regular sound was her own breathing.
The trailers sat to the right of the road. No one unfamiliar with the script letters of Summit-Arts Films would have been able to decipher the surviving black smudges amidst the rust and dents on their sides. Starting with the upright trailer, one that probably would have been a small one-bedroom home in a trailer park, she pulled open the door. Inside was air so stale and hot, it seemed unable to move through the doorway. She pulled her head back into the fresh air, took a breath, and peered in. She had suspected the trailer had been left here because of its size. But if the studio had left any furnishing, appliance, knickknack, or decoration inside, it was long gone. Even the interior paneling and walls were missing. The trailer was nothing more than an aluminum box.
A glance through the door of the toppled trailer showed an interior the same but for a doorless wall that divided the main room from another, presumably the bedroom. She poked her head inside and squinted against the dark, trying to discern the walls of the bedroom. There could be something in there, but she doubted it. I am not, she thought, hopping into an aluminum box, a coffin, in the middle of the desert when someone could be following me.
If some building were left here, why couldn’t it have been the barn where the horses were kept, or some scrap from the cabin where Greg died? But she couldn’t expect to have that much luck. After all, she did have the cemetery.
Fifty yards beyond, she found the remains of pole holes, but nothing else of the barn. The ground around was only slightly barer than the hillsides. If there had been horses scraping hooves on the dirt floor of the barn, a decade had done its work in covering up their traces. But the dumping hole—surely that would sport a different surface—lush from the churned earth beneath, or bare from the burn of the toxins. She moved on, fifty feet, then a hundred beyond, looking right and left as she went. But no rectangle of earth stood out.
She felt the cold draft of fear. If she couldn’t pinpoint the hole, she’d be at square one again.
She walked back to the trailers. The sun was getting hotter now. It hit the shiny creases in their aluminum sides and seared her eyes as it reflected off. To the south the surrounding hills were a quarter of a mile away. Closer—halfway between—was a knoll and what appeared to be a sharp, deep valley beyond. The knoll would be where the filming had taken place.
As she neared it she could make out the burnt foundation of the house. Fifteen feet square, somehow smaller than she had imagined. As with the barn, metal poles had been sunk into the ground, and it was to them that the few remains of blackened timbers clung. The rest of the burned siding was gone, and the ground within and around the house was covered with the same variety of dried brown desert grass as the rest of the hills.
If Yarrow was right about the intensity of the fire, she thought, there wouldn’t have been much left when it happened, let alone ten years later. Still, she surveyed the ground, moving toward the house. As she stepped across the line between the corner poles, a shiver traveled deep inside her back. Briefly she wondered, “Is this the spot where Greg was when he realized he couldn’t get out, that he would smolder inside his fire suit? Or was he conscious at all?”
Shaking off the question, Kiernan moved on, across the rectangle to the slope beyond. She had gone thirty feet when she stopped. “So it’s here!” she said aloud.
Running, she came to a nine-by-twelve plot, totally bare. She stepped gingerly onto the bare earth. It felt no different from the hard, grass-covered dirt around it. But then, it had had ten years to settle.
She crossed to the other side with relief, stood on the grass there, and scanned the ground ahead. There were no demarcations other than those caused by the terrain. No road south to the Mexican border, as Jason Pedora had said.
Walking back to the Jeep, she wondered at how little fact was the basis for Pedora’s fantasy. How long had he repeated the story to himself before it blotted out the question of reality?
A motion picture being filmed is a big deal, even in a major city. For Conroy it must have been the event of the decade. Very little that the actors, directors, even the gaffers and accountant did would have escaped notice. Every shirt any of them bought, every stroll they took, every piece of mail that came their way would have been meat for discussion in town. No way could daily trailers of horses from Mexico, driving right through town to the set, have gone unnoticed.
But a couple of trucks from Pacific Breeze Computer would have raised no comment at all.
Feeling better than she had since she’d left the cemetery, she walked back toward the trailers. Maybe one more look inside?
She could hear Tchernak’s appalled voice: “What kind of crazy woman, who knows she may have been tailed, hops into a metal box in the desert?” Dammit, the man was running not only her house but now her mind, too.
Why not give Tchernak this one? Take the safe route for once. She didn’t need a second look. She glanced around her and, assuring herself she was alone, she strode across the mesa to the stand of live oak and pulled a shovel and bag from the back. She headed back to the hole where—allegedly, she thought with a smile—whatever had come out of the Pacific Breeze Computer truck had been dumped.
She checked around her for movement, and finding none other than a slight rustling of leaves, she poked the shovel into the hard eart
h. There are many things a woman can do better than a man, she thought half an hour and a pint of sweat later, but digging in hard ground is definitely not one.
It was another half hour before she had scraped and dug far enough down to get a decent soil sample, bagged it, and headed back across the mesa to the Jeep.
With relief, she tossed the shovel into the back, climbed in, turned on the engine, and pushed the air conditioner knob to high.
As she eased toward the road, she considered calling Tchernak. If he had the lab ready to move on this soil sample, it could save a day. Still, she thought as she turned onto the road and started down the steep, winding incline, getting proof that the soil was contaminated would be pro forma. What she needed was to find out what had happened to Greg. Had he died from the fire, or had he been dead before? For that she needed to see his body. And that, she didn’t want to discuss with Tchernak.
As she drove back toward Conroy, she realized that she’d suspected that all along and hadn’t wanted to face it.
No good-bye slice. That had been a joke in medical school during the pathology rotation: the good-bye slice they’d laughed about and promised each other, as they held their breaths against the unavoidable smells of rot and Clorox and began the Y-shaped incision.
The rule had never been called “No Good-bye Slice,” but pathologists did not do postmortems on friends. Pathologists were notorious for being “not normal.” They themselves admitted they didn’t handle feelings well. But they weren’t so totally without emotion that they could cut into the body of a friend and see nothing but bones and flesh, organs and fluids, and when they looked through a microscope not find it clouded by a tear.
But the water rolling down her own face was sweat, surely. She could handle seeing Greg Gaige’s body. It was probably years too late to find more than bones and the metal rod in his leg. Still, if the coffin were lead-lined; if the drainage were a whole lot better than it looked down at the bottom of the cemetery, then maybe there would be something left of the nares of the nose, the throat, the esophagus, the lungs. Maybe she would be able to tell if his lung had been seared by steam or smoke, or if Greg Gaige had stopped breathing before the fire.
But how to get those remains exhumed? She could still quote from memory the California code on that, number 7500: “No remains of any deceased person shall be removed from any cemetery, except upon written order of the health department having jurisdiction, or of the superior court of the county in which the cemetery is situated.” Practically speaking, the only reasons for exhumation were suspicion of murder and contagion. Here there was no question of contagion, and the suspicion of murder existed only in her mind. The lab report on the soil could take weeks. And even if it were positive, it would implicate Pacific Breeze Computers—it wouldn’t prove Greg was murdered.
Ten minutes later, she was sitting across the mortician’s mahogany desk from Edmund Halsey, saying, “Greg was a man who lived to be at the top. He talked about climbing a crane higher than your flagpole and feeling the wind in his face up there. I can’t leave here knowing Greg’s body is down at the very bottom of the hill.” She’d meant it as an act, but as she said the words, she realized they were true and that the cold hollow in the pit of her stomach had never filled. “Don’t you have a free plot at the top, near the pole, where I could feel like his spirit was climbing?”
“Well, yes,” he said slowly, “but it’s one of our more desirable locations—”
“Money isn’t a problem.” She expected him to eye her dusty, rumpled slacks and shirt and allow a subtle look of suspicion to cross his face. But apparently Edmund Halsey had seen the poor and disheveled pony up for burials often enough to believe her.
“The remains have been in place for a decade. Our caskets are quality resting places, but—”
“I’d like him to have a new casket. A suitable casket.”
Halsey nodded approvingly. “Very well then, we can schedule the relocation for early next week.”
“No!” she said letting her frustration come out as distress. “I can’t leave until I see him moved. And I have to be in L.A. tomorrow.”
“I’m sorry, Ms. O’Shaughnessy, but I’m sure you’ll understand that our men have other jobs and commitments.” Halsey looked truly sorry. Thousands of dollars sorry.
“I’ll pay them double time. They can do the work after they get off from their other jobs.”
“Well—”
“And you, Mr. Halsey, I know I’ll be taking time you’ve allotted elsewhere. I’ll just leave it up to you what is fair recompense. Whatever, it will be worth it to me.”
“Well, I guess—”
“I’ll be back at six P.M.”
“You’re going to watch?” Halsey’s eyes opened wide, and he stared at her. It was the first time she had seen his professional composure fail.
“Oh, yes, Mr. Halsey. I missed Greg’s funeral. This is what I have to do. But please make sure this procedure is very low key. I don’t want gawkers.”
“Of course.”
Restraining a great sigh of relief, silently giving thanks to Always start as a relative, she pulled out her checkbook.
“It’s a formality,” Halsey said, “but I will need to see proof of your relation to the deceased.”
Damn! She didn’t have a backup plan. She always had a backup plan.
Halsey was within his rights, legally. Remains can be exhumed only on orders of the coroner, the county health director, or the next of kin. She allowed herself a sigh. “Mr. Halsey, Greg was my cousin, my mother’s sister’s son. Our names are entirely different. You don’t carry proof of that kind of relation in your purse. I’d think the commitment I’m making to his well-being—”
“I understand, Ms. O’Shaughnessy, and I’m sorry to have to bring up this problem at a time like this, but I’m afraid it is necessary.” He leaned forward, and his strained face said I feel every bit as bad about this as you do. “You could contact the closest surviving relative and get a notarized statement.”
“Which relative approved his burial?” With an effort she kept her voice soft, merely questioning.
“That was before my time. Let me check. Oh, hm. I see this was authorized by the brother of the deceased, Jason Pedora.”
“No problem,” she said, smiling to cover the lie worth a decade in purgatory. “We’ll be here tomorrow.”
CHAPTER 29
JASON PEDORA LOOKED OLDER and thinner than he had the night before. His matted clothes smelled of sweat; his face was lined with weariness and frustration. And there was a feverishness to his eyes. As he walked out onto the sidewalk, he stared at pedestrians in the same way he might have, had his incarceration been ten years instead of overnight.
“What about my car?” he demanded for the fourth time as he climbed into Kiernan’s Jeep.
“You can deal with that later. Now you can thank me for bailing you out.”
“Thank you! You’re the one who got me thrown in jail to begin with.”
“I’m the one who forced you to sideswipe a car? Grow up, Pedora.”
“I wouldn’t have had to go so fast if you hadn’t been after me.”
“I didn’t force you to follow me from LA.”
“If you’d—”
“Enough! Blame whoever you want! Spend the rest of your life blaming everyone else, I don’t care. But right now we need to deal with Greg.” She hesitated. Pedora was on the edge. In a more perfect world he would be under professional care and living in a safe and stress-free place. Instead, he was in the land of slippery truths, sliding on his own new scripts of his old events. She had to find a story line that fit with his. If she didn’t, she’d be the villain in his piece.
Pedora sat, his back to the door, ankle resting on knee, seat belt dangling loosely on his lap. He glanced at it and back at her, daring her to remind him that unbeltedness was illegal in California.
She started the engine and headed west toward the beach, driving in silence until
he asked, “What about Greg?”
“It’s probably not worth it,” she said, hoping to sound offhand.
“Worth what?”
“The funeral director has a spot vacant where Greg could have the kind of monument he deserves. He could be on the top of the hill, where he should be.” Watching out of the corner of her eye, she could see his mouth tighten. Quickly, she added, “On top, where you put him when he was alive.”
Pedora’s mouth relaxed, but he didn’t comment.
“You’re his older brother, right?”
“By five years.”
“So you were always there for him, making things easy for him, right? I had an older sister. She used to give me tips on how to deal with our parents, how to handle teachers in school, how to act cool.”
Pedora still didn’t reply. They were at the top of Soledad Mountain Road. Ahead were the tree-muted lights of La Jolla, and beyond the black of the Pacific. Her fingers were squeezed tight on the steering wheel. This was the part of being a private investigator she hated the most—this coaxing, ingratiating, this bedside manner stuff. If only she could be done with Pedora and get back to the cemetery.
She swallowed and said, “But you’ve done so much more. You’ve taken care of Greg when he was an adult. People don’t realize the sacrifices that helpers make. I’ll bet even Greg didn’t.”
“Even Greg?!” he shrieked. With an obvious effort at control he went on. “Especially Greg! Like he was doing me a favor allowing me to be his business manager!”
His business manager! Kiernan tensed her face to keep from reacting.
“Like it was a blast for me to go to the bank, and run the house, and go to the dry cleaner. And talk to reporters when he couldn’t be bothered. And make sure no one disturbed his sacred practice schedule.”