by Lanyon, Josh
“Not good.” He rose, reaching for my empty glass, and I added, “Not bad enough to do a Norman Maine.”
He laughed at the A Star is Born reference and went inside the house. It took him about four minutes. When he came back he had refilled my glass and poured himself a beer.
“So…what happened?” He handed me my glass.
I took it and set it down on the table. “I asked him whether he had talked to you about getting me committed.”
“He never used the word ‘committed,’” Steve said, as though—in fairness to Dan—it was really important to keep this point straight.
“Yeah, that’s what he said. In fact, he said he never had any such discussion with you at all.”
“What’s he going to say?” Steve asked reasonably.
“True.”
“So he just denied everything?”
“Pretty much. He admitted he asked you to stop encouraging me to believe Hammond was still out there.”
“Threatened me is more like it,” Steve said.
“Really?”
“He wanted to keep you in a bubble,” Steve said. “Like it was just you two and nobody else existed. That’s not healthy.”
He glanced at my untouched glass.
I said, “He also admitted he was having Maria pick up the threatening postcards each day before I could see them.”
“Ah,” Steve said. “Makes sense.”
“Does it?” I grinned twistedly. “I thought for sure you were going to suggest that he might be the one sending them.”
He met my eyes. “So you have considered that possibility?”
“For about three seconds. It wouldn’t make a lot of sense for him to head off his own death threats.”
“Oh. Right. But I don’t know if he was exactly balanced in his feelings for you. I mean, think about how possessive he was. And controlling. And way overprotective.”
I reached up, automatically touching the ring on the chain around my neck. Steve’s eyes followed my hand.
“I guess I just never trusted the guy,” he said.
“I guess it was mutual.”
He stared. “What do you mean?”
“You said he threatened you.”
“Oh. Yeah.”
He glanced at my drink again.
I asked, “So when do I start work on the film?”
“The…film?”
“The Charioteer. What did Bruce say when you told him I was in?”
“Well, actually, I didn’t get a chance to call him yet. I’ll phone him tomorrow.”
I said, “It’s almost funny. I see this direct parallel between the characters in The Charioteer and what happened with Dan and me.”
Steve blinked. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. In the book, Laurie keeps getting angry because Ralph keeps trying to fix things for him, but the truth is, Laurie is the one who sets that dynamic up. He turns to Ralph every time he has a problem. He knows how Ralph is. So why does he get so angry when Ralph tries to protect him?”
“Uh, dude, I have no clue what you’re talking about.” His eyes traveled to the lounge chair and the marked-up copy of The Charioteer script. “So which one offs himself?”
“What?”
“I read the scene in the script where the one guy is reading the other guy’s suicide note.”
“Oh.” My smile felt like it was on crooked. “Things aren’t always what they seem.”
“You got that right.” He held his beer out to me, and said, “Well, here’s to not looking back.” He nodded at my moisture-beaded glass, and I picked it up. He clinked the rim of his mug against my glass, and drank.
I watched the muscles in his throat move as he swallowed. I could remember kissing his throat—he had this way of throwing his head back when he laughed. I could vaguely recall what his mouth felt like on me, although those memories faded next to the vividness of my memories of Dan.
I said, “Like, for example, I can pretty much tell when someone is acting. Dan wasn’t acting. You are.”
Steve lowered his mug. Beer slopped out the top. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
I thought I had myself pretty well under control, but heat suffused my body and my heart began to slug against my ribs in hard measured punches; I felt breathless with something akin to stage fright. “Can we just cut the bullshit?” I requested.
His eyes narrowed.
“You want to know where you first slipped?” I didn’t wait for his answer. He didn’t look like he would have one anytime soon. “It was that crack about changing my will. I haven’t thought about my will since I first made it out—back when we were living together.”
Steve gave a strange laugh. “Hey, dude, don’t go psycho on me, okay?”
“Up until the bit with the will you’d been pretty subtle.”
“You really are losing it, Sean. Dan’s right.”
“Dan was right about one thing,” I said. “You do know how to play me. You know just what buttons to push, what triggers my self-doubt. And there was always just enough truth in what you said. But you way overshot the mark with that story about Dan wanting me to check into UCLA.”
Steve seemed to struggle with himself. Apparently the desire to show me how smart he was, won out. “You wouldn’t take a hint,” he said. “You hardly knew the guy but you were so goddamn stubborn about him.”
I stared. I knew Steve so well. I knew everything from how he took his coffee to the sounds he made during sex. And it turned out that I didn’t know him at all.
“You had to know he was going to deny it.”
“So?” He smiled, spreading his arms. “He denied it, but here we are. I guess you believed it on some level. Maybe not for long, but long enough.”
I swallowed hard. The truth was a bitter pill.
“How did he take it, by the way? You didn’t really say. Was he iron-jawed and dignified, or did he cry?”
Stern and silent, actually, but I wasn’t going to discuss Dan with Steve. Not now, not ever. I said, “Once I finally accepted that Hammond had been dead the whole time, I started thinking about who had a reason to want me out of the way. I remembered your comment about the will—and then I remembered that the will was still in your favor.”
“I guess the fact that you never changed it says something,” he said lightly.
We were silent for a moment.
“Why, Steve?” I asked finally.
He didn’t speak, didn’t look at me.
“Is it just for the money? Because I would have given you the goddamn money.”
He rose then, shaking the table. He walked over to the railing, bracing both hands on it, staring out at the blue dazzle of the water. “No. It wasn’t just the money. Not like you think. I got in deep. Too deep. I owe over four hundred grand in gambling debts—to people who don’t understand installment plans.”
“F-four hundred grand?” I said. “You owe almost half a million in gambling debts? How the hell did you manage that?”
“Easier than you think. I convinced people I was good for it. Actually, I convinced them that you were good for it.”
“Why didn’t you stop? When you were like…I don’t know…eighty grand in? Why didn’t you come to me for help?”
“How could I? Besides, I thought I could win it back. I thought my luck would change. It always changes sooner or later.”
“Jesus Christ, Steve!”
“Don’t be so self-righteous,” he said hotly. “It’s an illness—compulsive gambling. Like alcoholism. It’s not like I could control it. You of anybody ought to understand about that kind of illness.”
Was I supposed to feel sorry for him? Because it was hard to feel much of anything other than bewilderment.
“And one of the symptoms was you planned to kill me and inherit my trust fund?”
He looked me right in the eyes and said, “I never wanted that. Never. You’re all I’ve got. I love you. I do. But…it’s you or me, Sean. And I don’t want to die.”
I said, “I know the feeling.”
He reached behind himself and pulled out a gun. I was willing to bet it was a 9 mm semiautomatic. He came back to the table and sat down. Meeting my gaze, he gave me a sad lopsided smile.
Bitterly, I said, “Why the big charade? Why the postcards and killing my neighbor’s dog? Why not just shoot me on the deck one afternoon?”
“Because as soon as your will was read I’d have been the cops’ number one suspect.”
“You got the idea when Hammond’s body didn’t turn up.”
“That’s right. That was what originally gave me the idea. I realized that if Hammond had killed you, my problems would have been over. And when they couldn’t find his body, I thought maybe if something happened to you, it would be blamed on Hammond.”
“So you created the illusion that Hammond was still out there.”
“It was easier than I expected. I still had copies of those first letters he sent you. So I just faked the postcards.”
The idea he wanted me dead was bad enough, but the deliberate cruelty of sending those cards shook me.
“What did you do, hire some asshole who looked like Hammond to follow me around? Yeah, you did. And that’s why the fake Hammond never really did or said anything to threaten me.”
He got a weird look on his face. He didn’t reply.
“Or was that you?”
“No.”
I stared at him, and then I realized what I was seeing in his eyes.
“Did you…” I swallowed hard. “Jesus. He’s dead, isn’t he? That’s why he disappeared again.”
He said with macabre cheerfulness, “He asked one too many questions.”
I absorbed this and realized that I was going to have to give up any hope of talking Steve out of killing me.
“So what was Plan B?” I asked. “If you pushed hard enough I might have another breakdown and hopefully do the job myself?”
“If you had another breakdown and…did yourself, that would be like your choice.” He was reasoning with me as though he believed he could somehow make me see it from his point of view. “I mean, you could have a breakdown a few years from now and off yourself and it wouldn’t help anyone—whereas this way you’d be saving my life.”
“But Dan kept running interference.”
“Yep.”
I owed Dan an apology.
I glanced down at my drink, the ice melted in the glass. “So what happens if I drink this?”
“You just go to sleep,” he said earnestly. “Very peacefully and naturally. There’s no pain or anything. Your heart just stops. That would be the best way. I don’t want to…” he glanced down at the gun lying between us, and swallowed.
“Why not? You shot Hammond’s double. You killed Lenny Norman, right?”
His eyes did this queer little flickery thing, like his brain was short-circuiting. But before I had time to react, he smiled, once more in control. “Lenny Norman was an asshole. I thought you might actually appreciate that one.”
Years of training, but I couldn’t quite control my expression, and reading my face, Steve said thickly, “I thought for sure that would be the end of that damned film. And I figured that might tip you over the edge—you were so obsessed about that role. But it was…bad. He begged me…”
“My God, Steve.” I put my hand over my eyes, and then remembered I needed to keep watch on him. “Think about what you’ve done.”
“I know exactly what I’ve done, and we both know I can’t go back now. Look, I don’t want to hurt you, Sean. Just drink the stuff and…go to sleep.”
I stared into his eyes. This was Steve. Steve whom I had known forever. My partner, my friend, my former lover. I just couldn’t seem to wrap my mind around it. Maybe because I didn’t want to. I picked up the glass. “You know what? You’re right. Living is overrated. Between you and Dan—I am a little tired.” I put the glass to my lips and his eyes flared with—surprise? Excitement? Fear? Maybe he didn’t know himself.
Wet touched my lips and I paused. “But you do know Dan isn’t going to believe this suicide scenario. Not unless I leave some kind of a note.”
He hesitated, glanced toward the house, and I chucked the glass with all my strength at his head. It connected with a satisfying thunk and he fell out of his chair, nearly taking the table with him. As he collapsed, he grabbed for the gun, which went off with a bang, taking a chunk out of the railing a few inches to my left. Jeeeeesus.
I hopped up from my chair, wiping my mouth with my arm. I hadn’t swallowed anything but who knew what the hell he’d laced my drink with.
“God damn you, Sean!”
His fury triggered a hysterical laugh. He was angry because I was trying to stay alive. And I was the crazy one?
Jumping from the deck, I hit the sand and sprinted for the side of the house, yelling, “Markowitz, where the hell are you?”
I slammed into a wall. A wall of hard muscle and bone and warm flesh. The wall reached out and steadied me. Dan. I blinked up at him dazedly. With his free hand he was holding a gun. Definitely not a movie prop.
Without a change of expression he put me behind him and trained the gun on Steve who had paused at the stairs of the deck.
“Freeze, Kreiger.”
Steve stared down in disbelief. Blood trickled from a cut in his hairline.
“What are you doing here?”
“Drop the gun.” Dan ordered, adding, “Or I’ll blow your fucking head off.” Which was probably not LAPD-approved script.
Steve hesitated. I could see him running his options, weighing the risk, figuring his odds: always the gambler.
Dan was like a statue; he didn’t flick an eyelash, didn’t move a muscle. He was ready and waiting—and despite the fact that Steve had wanted me dead, had cold-bloodedly plotted and planned for that very thing—I couldn’t take the idea of seeing his head blown off. I croaked, “Please, Steve…”
I spotted Markowitz edging behind the railing on the other side of the deck, his own weapon drawn.
Steve’s eyes met mine over Dan’s shoulder. He laughed the old Steve laugh and dropped his gun. It landed on the sand with a dull sound.
“Hey, what the hell.” He held his hands out. “Book ‘em, Danno!”
Dan went up the stairs, shoved Steve back into the table hard, and while Steve was picking himself back up, jammed his gun in his back waistband and took out a pair of handcuffs. Markowitz joined him a moment later.
“So it was a trap,” Steve said, trying to look over his shoulder at me. “You knew and you set me up?”
“It’s called acting,” I said.
Dan’s eyes met mine briefly. Blue and bleak. I had no idea what he was doing there—I had set my “trap” with Markowitz’s assistance—but I was glad to see him.
The wail of sirens floated in the distance.
Steve was still trying to make eye contact. He said urgently, “Hey, Sean. I’m sorry, man. If there had been another way…”
My throat closed up, choking off anything I could have said—if I’d had anything left to say.
“Very touching, asshole,” Dan growled.
* * * * *
“When did you know?” I asked Dan.
The sheriffs had come and gone, taking Steve with them. Markowitz had followed shortly after, and it was just Dan and me now. Past that adrenaline overdrive, I felt a little numb and a lot shaky. I’d have given anything for a hug from Dan, but there were no hugs forthcoming. Dan looked like Dan, but there was a force field around him that even the StarCatz would have trouble neutralizing.
“That Steve was planning to kill you?” His smile was humorless. “I knew for sure this afternoon. That bullshit story of his—the only possible reason for that was to play on your insecurities and distrust. To drive enough of a wedge between us that either you would send me away or I’d get fed up and leave.”
“He was running out of time,” I said. “It made him desperate.”
“And
stupid.”
“I need a drink,” I said, and went to the bar. I poured myself a Bushmills. Dan’s whiskey. Apparently the one and only reminder of his brief stay in my life. “Did you want something?”
Anything?
“No.”
I could see the tiny lines of weariness around his blue eyes and unsmiling mouth, but he didn’t sit down, and he didn’t take his jacket off. He wasn’t staying. He didn’t want anything I had to offer.
I tossed back the whiskey, welcoming the burn in the back of my throat. It distracted me from the burn at the back of my eyes. That wasn’t going to get me anywhere. It would just embarrass us both.
Refilling my glass, I said, “But you already suspected Steve, didn’t you? That’s what you meant today when you said you weren’t sure who was sending the postcards.”
Eyes on my glass, he said, “You were right about the odds of attracting two aggressive stalkers in such a short space of time; so I knew after Hammond’s body turned up that I needed to look for someone with another motive for getting rid of you. Steve fit the bill.”
I forced myself to meet his gaze. It was hard because, as I feared, there was nothing in his eyes. No emotion. “Thank you,” I said. “You saved my life.”
He shook his head. “I was just tagging along. It was Markowitz’s show—and yours.”
“Markowitz told you—?”
“He thought I’d be interested. He thought I had a right to know.”
There was no accusation in his voice, but I knew that he was sore about that. I took a deep breath.
“Dan, I owe you an apology.”
“You don’t owe me anything,” he said flatly. He looked at his watch. “If you’re okay now, I’ve got someplace to be.”
“I’m okay.”
If he walked out that door I was never going to be okay again.
I set my glass down and followed him through the rooms to the front door. Hand on the door knob, he paused.
“That reminds me.” He pulled his keys out and began to work one off the ring.
“Don’t.” The word startled me. Startled him. I said, trying for lightness, trying to hide the desperation, “There’s no hurry, right?”
“And no reason to stall, right?” He smiled—and he was either a better actor than me or he really didn’t give a damn. He handed the key to me, and like a little kid I put my hands behind my back.