High Fall

by Susan Dunlap

  “You know, you were right,” Talbot said, clearly surprised. “There was a guy, came through here a little over a year before Lark left. Just showed up one day and asked about a job. I was skeptical. He looked kind of seedy, you know. But when he did a routine on the mat, he was something else, and not just for an old guy. Something else, period! So I took him on.”

  “But he didn’t stay long?”

  “No—thing was, he wasn’t much of a teacher. He tried, and he was responsible, but his heart wasn’t in it. Didn’t really seem to care about getting the basics across to the little ones. I’d forgotten about him, because he didn’t leave much of a mark.”

  “On anyone except Lark?”

  “Right. He spotted Lark the first day, and he zeroed in on her. Well, hell, we’d all like to spend our time teaching kids like Lark. That’s what you do in heaven. But when you’re running a business, you have to take the clumsy with the good.”

  “You’ve got his name?”

  “Yeah. It was Luke Correra.”

  CHAPTER 34

  LUKE CORRERA,” SHE SAID as she put down the phone and grabbed the keys to the Triumph. “Correra, the cook! The big catering truck leaves every afternoon. Will he still be on the set, Tchernak?”

  “Maybe. It is the middle of the night, Kiernan. He might be asleep wherever he’s staying. People do sleep. The set was shutting down today. But when I saw him, he was cleaning out the small food trailer. I got the impression that he’d leased it himself. He could still be at it. Or he may have folded down his flaps and be gone.”

  “And if he’s gone, he’ll slip back into the netherworld he’s been in for ten years and we’ll never find him. Tchernak, you’re going to have to get the Social Security number he’s been using, and then check every record that exists: lawsuits, small claims, tax liens, assessor’s records, credit cards, the whole schmeer. We’ve got to get an address on him, now. If he’s not at Gliderport, he might make one stop at his home before he vanishes. We’ve got to be there.”

  Tchernak hesitated—biting back the words “protect you,” she was sure—then nodded.

  She ran for the Triumph—it was faster than the Jeep on curving roads—screeched out of the driveway, and raced for Torrey Pines Road. The top was down, and the damp night wind off the Pacific grazed her face and neck. She should have stopped to put the top up. And chance missing Greg by minutes? She turned on the heat, made a left from Pearl Street onto Girard, and hung a right onto Torrey Pines. It was somewhere after three A.M.; she felt no touch of weariness at all. Her body quivered to run, to leap, to grab the answers before they got away.

  She’d assumed she knew who Greg Gaige was when Greg was “dead.” The Greg who had died preparing to do the Move she could understand. But the man who had walked off the set into oblivion, abandoning the thing that made him alive, she couldn’t imagine.

  When she had still believed in forensic pathology as the path to Truth, and the findings of the sectioned stomach, the well-worn patella, the results of exhaustive toxicology tests as the scientists’ Stations of the Cross, what would have been seductive or terrifying enough to drag her from it? And even when she had realized that forensic pathology was just a tool, a stage in medicine no more absolute than the therapeutic bleedings of centuries past, a tool subject to the failings of the machines involved, she was loath to renounce her faith. It wasn’t until she had been fired and knew she’d never work as a forensic pathologist again, not until she’d spent two years adrift in India, that she had been able to start to think of life without the thing that had given it meaning.

  And Greg, who had been the best stunt man in the business—had he changed? Had he lost interest in the thing that made him feel alive? She couldn’t believe that.

  The wind stung her face as she turned off Torrey Pines into Gliderport. She pulled up at the night chain, turned the Triumph inland, and headed across the empty parking area at a run. The moonlight turned the ripples of the empty dirt lot into hillocks; the wind sprinkled her jeans with sand and dirt. The cordon that had encircled the film set was gone, as were all the cameras, lights, and most of the trailers. Only two trailers, and the food wagon—a small affair that could be hitched onto the back of a car—remained, standing icy silver in the bright moonlight, their black shadows quivering in the wind.

  If there was a guard—and she couldn’t spot one—he’d be by the crane at the edge of the bluff. The trailers looked as abandoned as a back-lot set. On the food wagon a loose hitch clattered in the wind, hitched to nothing now.

  She rounded the back of a trailer and was twenty feet from the food wagon awning before she spotted the gray-haired, ponytailed cook stretching up to fold in one of the support poles—as if he were reaching up for the high bar, ready to take his mount and swing up on it into a perfect handstand.

  She stopped, staring, her breath too shallow to feel. She had never let herself dwell on his death. When she thought of him since then, she’d been quick to tell herself it was stupid to wallow in grief for a man whom in fact she’d barely known. O’Shaughnessys did not wallow. But now the years of unexperienced sorrows bubbled over, washing her with a swirling mixture of emotions she couldn’t begin to understand. She felt full, flushed, as if the joy of it all were too much to contain.

  Greg had stopped, too, listening but not turning to look. For an instant he stood stone still, but it seemed as if every muscle, every fiber in those muscles was idling at full speed, ready to leap the highest, the longest, the best.

  She longed to forget about investigating, about Lark Sondervoil and Carlton Dratz, and revel in her own good fortune. She let herself wallow another moment, then walked across the blowing dirt to the wagon. “I’m Kiernan O’Shaughnessy. Remember me?”

  Greg turned, smiling. “Kiernan O’Shaughnessy! You disappeared on me in San Francisco.”

  “I pushed you farther than you wanted to go in San Francisco; you were probably relieved I left. I’m a private investigator now, and, Greg, I have to have answers.”

  She was braced to cut off a run, but she didn’t expect Greg to make a break for it, not now.

  The wary, fearful eyes that she’d come to associate with him had relaxed. “So you’re the one investigating Lark’s death. I wondered if you would find me out. Come on inside here while I finish up. There’s room for two old friends.”

  Two old friends. There had been times when hearing those words from Greg Gaige would have made her think she’d died and gone to heaven. She followed him into the trailer, blinking against the sudden light, and noted again how small a space a cook required. The whole trailer was hardly bigger than a good-size station wagon, with its entry through the passenger door, a restaurant-size stove midway down the driver’s side, a sink and counter, and the pulled-down awning across from that. Cardboard boxes filled the floor by the door and beyond the stove, and there must have been a greasy towel hanging from every cabinet handle in the place. Greg shrugged. “It’s a work in progress.”

  It had been eleven years since that night in San Francisco. Then, in San Francisco, it had been as if time had passed over him. Now, in the brash light of the trailer she could see the cracks, crumblings, and discolorations that had been unable to erode the granite of his greatness back then. They’d been restrained only temporarily, and then attacked with the vengeance nourished during their wait. His impish widow’s peak had disappeared into a hairline well back on his head. The shiny sandy hair was now wiry, gray, and caught in a rubber band at his neck. Worry lines marked his forehead and ran so deep between his eyebrows, they looked painful. But beside his mouth the skin was still barely marked, a reminder of the shyness that had kept him silent. And those blue eyes that had seemed to stare out of the poster in the Baltimore gym and into the soul of the observer, sparkled all the brighter from their faded surroundings.

  How long would it have taken her to recognize Greg, here in a role where he didn’t belong? To see the older face of a man who “died” a decade ago and
even to stop to wonder? How many times had Bleeker grabbed a sandwich or a Diet Coke and never looked at the man serving it? And Dolly Uberhazy? A quick stop for polenta sticks in the midst of a hectic day—not a time for reflection. Trace Yarrow, who had been Greg’s colleague, had come to the set only the day Lark died, and then he had stood along the edge near Kiernan, his attention on Lark. And Jason Pedora had not been allowed on the set at all. But Lark Sondervoil had known Greg. Lark had paused to give the cook a salute before she strode across the set to do her gag and die.

  Kiernan stood against the pulled-down metal awning, listening to the metal clanking softly in the wind and thinking of the pictures she’d seen in Lark Sondervoil’s notebook: Greg young, confident, full in control. To Kiernan’s eyes now, Greg looked every bit of his fifty-some years. To Hollywood eyes he would have been too old and unimportant to focus on.

  “A private investigator?” Greg said, pulling two cups from a box on the floor. “I’d wash them, but the water’s off. The whole place is covered in grease. It’s only the rubber mat on the floor that’s keeping us both from slipping on our asses. That, and all our training,” he added, grinning. He poured the coffee. “So you’re not with the police.”

  “No,” she said, taking a sip. It was cold; that didn’t matter, she was only drinking it to wet her dry throat. Greg seemed to loom over her, eight inches taller, with muscles visible in his arms and the mound of his buttocks. He was still thin, but no longer the wiry-thin necessary to double an actor who was himself expected to be reedlike. As he moved, his steps were firm but light, so easy and yet controlled that Kiernan had the feeling he could freeze at any point and hold that pose for the next half hour.

  But, she reminded herself, she didn’t know him. She’d created him from press clippings, wishes, and a hand on her shoulder.

  As if reading her thoughts, Greg said, “I didn’t kill Carlton Dratz.” He said it as matter-of-factly as he might have announced that the polenta recipe hadn’t originated with him.

  Kiernan nodded.

  “Greg, you’ve had years to ponder this. You didn’t orchestrate the switch with Dratz. Who did?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Her chest went cold. How could he not know? “Who killed Lark?”

  “I don’t know that, either.”

  “Greg, you must have some idea. Whoever did it is desperate. And once he finds out you’re here, he won’t have any choice but to kill you. We have to figure out who he, or she, is before he nails us! Think! Lark was going to hold a news conference. She was going to talk about you, wasn’t she?”

  For the first time he blushed. “I told her not to. She promised me she wouldn’t. Nothing I said could convince her I didn’t want to be Greg Gaige again. She was talking like a teenage gladiator, ready to resurrect my reputation.”

  “Just to announce you were alive would have been enough to open an investigation into Dratz’s murder.”

  “Lark never let on I was alive; I’m sure of that.”

  “Doesn’t matter. She’d made it clear she was going to say something about you, your death, or Bad Companions. And reporters, who invested the time to come to her press conference, would jump on a lead to a hot story on the movies, or a mysterious celebrity death, or a toxic waste scandal. The person who was involved in the toxic dumping on Bad Companions and in Carlton Dratz’s death couldn’t take chances.”

  He leaned back against the edge of the stove, took a swallow of his coffee, and nodded thoughtfully, as if he were contemplating murders in a movie script.

  She grabbed his arm. “Greg, you don’t have time to ponder at leisure. Once the cops know you’re alive, they’ll say, ‘Dratz wanted to do the gag, and Greg Gaige was only too ready to help him die, then to take his own insurance money and disappear. Dratz drove him crazy belittling his ability, and no one wants to give up the thing they’ve worked all their lives for.’”

  He laughed. “That’s an axiom in the business. As if ambition didn’t exist outside the pictures. Nothing could convince them there’s more to the world than pictures.”

  “Pictures … pictures’ Of course! Pictures!”

  “What?”

  “Greg, Liam McCafferty talked about pictures—about succeeding in politics and having his picture on the wall between Kennedy and the Pope.”

  “McCafferty?”

  “Of course, you don’t remember him. He was a drone on the set. No one remembered him except Trace Yarrow, and that was only because they worked together before Bad Companions. Worked,” she said slowly, “with Yarrow consulting for Pacific Breeze Computer and McCafferty doing the boss’s taxes there.”

  “And McCafferty arranged the dumping? Why?”

  “To preserve the place where he felt alive. Remember telling me that gymnastics was where we were alive?”

  Greg nodded. “You clutch onto those places, and they end up killing you.”

  “Politics was what made McCafferty alive. But the toxin dumping he engineered for revenge—and money. He wanted to get even with Dolly Uberhazy, in a way that would ruin the thing that made her feel alive—her career. And Greg, McCafferty’s the one who was in the location office, on Bad Companions the guy with the copy machine. It would have been no problem for him to make a new copy of the call sheet and leave it for a gofer to take to the fire house.”

  “So he engineered the dumping. I can see that. But why kill Dratz?”

  “To save his career. He couldn’t have it come out that he’d dumped toxins, not in environmental California. In politics that’s a liability that could be dug up anytime, forever.”

  Suddenly, she realized the sound of the metal rattling outside was louder. The door to the canteen opened, and a projectile flew through the door and landed on the stove. The stove burst into flames. The door slammed shut. Kiernan grabbed the handle. The door didn’t budge.

  “It’s bolted on the outside. Open the serving window.”

  “I can’t. It won’t move.”

  Flames shot up from the stove.

  CHAPTER 35

  THE RAGS ON THE stove blazed up. Pieces of cloth burned loose, fell to the floor. Kiernan grabbed the door handle. “It’s locked from the outside!”

  Greg pushed the awning. “Damn, I bolted that down myself.”

  All six burners were shooting flames. Beside the stove two of the rags on cabinet handles had caught fire. She yanked them down by the good ends, flung them in the sink and turned on the spigot. Nothing came out. “Water—where’s the water, Greg?”

  “Turned off.”

  She looked at the stacks of cardboard boxes, the greasy cloths hanging from cabinet handles. “Greg, this place is going to go up all around us.” Unbidden, she pictured Carlton Dratz, facing the wall of fire, unable to get through. She could tell from the look of horror in Greg’s eyes that he saw the same thing. But he wouldn’t be able to imagine Dratz’s corpse. That picture flashed in her mind, the heat-cracked bones, the charred teeth where the fire had burned into his mouth. Her throat closed, her eyes tightened, she felt as if panic were going to swallow her. She shouted to cover her fear. “We’ve got to get out. How can we get out, Greg?”

  “There is no other door.”

  The air was dry-hot. Snapping sounds came from the stove, and the floor was unsteady. It was moving.

  “Goddamned trailer’s loose!” Greg shouted as he pulled open a cabinet. “We must be rolling toward the bluff.” He yanked out a bag of flour, looked toward the shoots of flame coming from the stove, then turned and threw it on the burning rags in the sink.

  Not quick enough. Sparks shot off, to a roll of paper towels. The canteen hit a bump; the towels rolled off the sink onto a cardboard carton by the door.

  The canteen rumbled faster. Her breath was coming in fast puffs. What about the guard? Kiernan thought desperately. Was there still a guard? Even if there was, he’d be so startled to notice a trailer traveling across the sand that it would be over the bluff before he got himself in action
.

  “Awning!” Greg shouted. “It’s the only way. I’ll have to kick it free.”

  Smoke rose from the cardboard. “That’s going to be blazing in a minute!” Kiernan yelled.

  “I can’t get leverage to kick; there’s no place to hang on to.”

  “The cabinet door. I’ll brace it.” She pulled it open and pushed her knee in the opening. Her heart was banging in her chest. She’d never been so panicked.

  He grabbed it overhead, his back to the cabinet, flexed his biceps, lifting his shoulders to an inch below his hands, and kicked at the side of the awning with both feet. The latch in the middle held, but the metal of the awning gave, then snapped back, like the corner of a lid let go. The recoil thrust Greg back into the door. Into Kiernan’s knee. She braced her teeth to keep from yelping from the pain.

  He kicked again. And again. Harder. Faster. The metal gave in fractions of inches.

  The cardboard boxes burst into flames. Black smoke filled the trailer. She could barely breathe.

  He kicked again. The awning opening was four inches at its widest at the corner.

  The canteen rolled faster.

  “Push with your feet, Greg!”

  He braced against the cabinet door and shoved with both feet. The awning bent eight inches. He released. It sprang back. Coughing from the smoke, he let go.

  Flames shot from the floor.

  “Grease,” Greg shouted. “Christ! The propane tank is going to blow.”

  Shoving him to the side, Kiernan grabbed the top of the cabinet door and braced her feet against the awning. “Get out, Greg. You can squeeze through.” Maybe she would make it on her own, but he wouldn’t. His shoulders were too thick, too wide.