The Desert Waits

by J. Carson Black

  “Well, the fact she was playing a game with you.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “She asked you here to show off. To make sure you realized that she was the winner and you were the loser.”

  “That’s ridiculous.” But a tiny doubt crept into Alex’s soul.

  “Maybe you think it’s ridiculous, but that’s what she told me.”

  “She wanted me here because of the stalker.”

  “Alex,” Ted said patiently, “Caroline’s been stalked all her career. One woman even broke into her house and stayed there for a month while Caro was on vacation. This stuff was old hat to her. Besides, what could you do? You’re not a bodyguard.”

  Alex was stunned.

  “She loved a crisis. The more turmoil in her life, the better. If there wasn’t enough excitement, she’d invent it. Caro thought it would be fun to hang you out to dry.” He added soberly, “I guess it backfired.”

  “Why? Why would she want to do that?”

  Ted sighed. “I don’t know if I should say.”

  “Come on, Ted, don’t tell me half a story.” Her pulse pounded in her ears. “Why did she want to do that?”

  “I can’t talk about it here. It’s private.”

  Alex heard the clink of glasses, ceramic mugs. A waitress was clearing the table. “Out by the pool then.”

  They walked out into the blinding sunshine and sat down at one of the tables in the shade of a striped metal umbrella. Royal palm shadows combed the pool. Out of the corner of her eye, Alex saw Nick McCutcheon and Luther van Cleeve emerge from the double doors on the other side of the restaurant and sit down at a table across the water. “Why did she want to ‘hang me out to dry,’ Ted?” she demanded.

  “Because she was jealous.”

  Ted was the second person to tell her that. But how could Caroline Arnet, the movie star, be jealous of a high school friend she hadn’t seen in fifteen years? “That doesn’t make any sense at all.”

  “You have no idea just how much Caroline hated you.”

  “Hated me? Why?” Her voice crept up the graph toward hysterical.

  “Oh, there were several reasons.” He counted them on his long, manicured fingers. “Because you had a normal childhood and she didn’t. Because you could remain anonymous and she lived in an aquarium. Mostly because she felt you didn’t ever really know her at all. She thought you let her down after everything she did for you. You left with your parents and never looked back.”

  He’d hit the bull’s-eye. After the first month or so, she never had looked back, and she still felt guilty about it.

  “And because you knew she was being molestated and never did anything about it.”

  Light exploded behind her eyes. She closed them, trying to shut out the crushing pain. “No,” she said when she could speak.

  Ted Lang looked at her sadly. “You honestly don’t remember anything strange about her home life?”

  “I … I don’t know.” There was that slithering doubt again, as much due to the look on Ted’s face as from any real memories.

  “She blamed you, and that was wrong. I told her you didn’t know, couldn’t know, but she wouldn’t listen. She wanted to rub it in how well she’d turned out and how you were just a nobody.”

  Alex felt ill. “I can’t believe it. There was nothing ... I don’t ...” She floundered.

  “Maybe this will jog your memory.” He pushed a greeting card across the table. It said “I know all about you” and was signed Uncle Wiggly.

  “Where did you get this? I thought the sheriff took those cards as evidence.”

  “I found it among her things.”

  “You should give it to the sheriff.”

  “What good would it do now? Anyway, Caroline was terrified at the thought of the guy still being around, that’s the real reason I came back from scouting locations for Filthy Lucre. Uncle Wiggly wasn’t really her uncle, he was a family friend. Her mother’s lover, to be more succinct. I think you met him once at the beach.”

  The man watching baseball on television, fixing himself a sandwich. Alex remembered she’d been frustrated that he wouldn’t leave, that their good time at the beach had been held hostage by some boorish stranger. Maybe that was what the argument had been about. But she didn’t remember Caroline calling him Uncle Wiggly.

  Ted poured Alex some ice water from the pitcher the waitress had brought them. “I don’t think you’d gotten to know Caro yet when he was living with her mother. Lived with them for almost a year, and that’s when he victimized Caroline.” His face was grim, hard as granite, and his usually vague eyes gleamed with righteous anger. He looked away, obviously trying to contain his emotion. “Excuse me, Alex, but I just get so goddamn mad. They ought to shoot guys like that on the spot.”

  “Caroline told you about him?”

  He looked startled. “Of course she did. I was her husband.”

  “She never told me.”

  “She was embarrassed. She never told anyone except me.”

  “Why are you telling me this now?”

  “Because I thought you should know what her motive was in getting you here. You’ve been thrown in with the sharks and you don’t even know why. As much as I loved Caro, I think that’s unfair.”

  “It’s over now,” Alex said, still numb. Caroline’s life seemed like hell on earth.

  “Oh, but it’s not. Booker Purlie couldn’t have known about Uncle Wiggly. I thought I should warn you.”

  “You think he’s still around? He’d have to be close to fifty!”

  “Child molesters don’t stop, Alex.”

  “But I’m not a child.”

  “You’re the only one who saw him, could recognize him. Maybe he thinks you could identify him.”

  Although the sun was warm on her skin, Alex felt cold to the core. “But I don’t understand—”

  “I think he was blackmailing her.”

  “But why would he kill her?”

  Ted shrugged. “I don’t have the foggiest. Unless he drove Caroline to kill herself, with Luther’s help. That’s Latte’s theory, but she’s got a screw loose herself.”

  “I don’t believe Luther would do that.” She didn’t know what to believe about Caroline.

  “I don’t either, it’s a puzzle.” He reached out and squeezed her hand. “I know we got off on the wrong foot, but I really do admire you, Alex. I’m sorry Caro used you; I’m sorry she dragged you into this mess. I just can’t help feeling she’s put you in danger. Maybe you should go home, forget about chasing this jaguar.”

  “Jaguarundi,” she corrected automatically. Seeing the concern in his eyes, Alex began to feel guilty. She’d rebuffed him badly, and why? Just because he’d seen her through the open door of her room and come in to wake her up. She’d been too hard on him, had been too hard on him from the very beginning. “I’ll be okay. But thanks for being concerned.”

  “You still going out in the desert?”

  She nodded.

  “I could go with you.”

  “Thanks, but I’ll be all right.”

  “You have a gun?”

  “Mace.”

  “Well, that’s something.” He opened the card again, read it over, tapped his fingers on the table. “Maybe I should go to the sheriff. Or that deputy what’s-his-name—”

  “McCutcheon.”

  Ted blew air from his pursed lips. “Hard to know the right thing to do. Caroline and I have kept this secret all this time. She was dead scared the tabloids would get hold of it. It would kill her if she knew.” He didn’t seem to realize what he’d said. He leaned forward taking both her hands in his. “Promise me you won’t do anything foolish. Be careful.”

  “I promise.” At that moment she felt an odd kinship with Ted. He had been there when she found Booker’s body, and he’d been another one of Caroline’s sidekicks. Like it or not, Caroline’s shadow loomed over them both.

  As if he understood, he withdrew his hands. He st
ared at the sky, blinking back tears. “Jesus.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what I told her to do when she got the first note. I said, ‘Don’t do anything foolish.’ And now I think it might have sent her over the edge.”

  Nick McCutcheon found his attention wandering, his gaze returning again and again to Alex Cafarelli and Ted Lang across the pool.

  She was beautiful—even more so because she didn’t seem to know it. Nick could see they were having an intense conversation, and he felt a pang of jealousy. Ted Lang had a certain boyish charm that made women want to take care of him, and Nick sensed that the guy wasn’t as broken up about his wife’s death as he appeared.

  Luckily for Ted, his trip back from Italy had checked out or he would be the number one suspect in Caroline’s death. Spouses usually were.

  With an effort, he pulled himself back to the present. Luther had been talking about Caroline in a sort of fragmented stream of consciousness.

  Nick leaned forward and Luther stopped mid-sentence. “I have to ask this. I’m sorry, I know it’s hard. But is there any way you would believe that Caroline switched the magazines in that gun herself?”

  Luther reared back in his chair. “No way!”

  He was lying.

  “You’re absolutely positive?”

  The war going on in Luther’s mind was clear on his face. “She wouldn’t do that,” he said at last, his voice plaintive.

  “Even if she was facing a slow, hideous death?”

  He shook his big head. “She wouldn’t have shot herself. She wouldn’t have wanted to ...”

  “Wouldn’t have wanted to… ?” Nick prompted.

  “Look like that. She wouldn’t have done it that way.”

  Nick asked softly, “How would she have done it?”

  As Alex walked back to her room, her mind kept returning to the guy at the beach house. She thought he might have been in his thirties, but that was all she remembered, except for the impression that he was dressed cheaply in dark trousers and a short- sleeved shirt. She tried to picture his face, but couldn’t.

  The unpleasantness that she’d felt when she first remembered him had spread to her vitals. She’d known there was something bad about him even before Ted told her that Caroline had been molested.

  It was almost as if, on some level, she knew.

  The feeling that she was hanging over the precipice again, trying not to look, shot through her.

  Had he tried to molest her, too?

  “I’d know if that happened,” Alex said as she unlocked the door. Paloma, Spanish for “dove,” strolled up and curled her tail around Alex’s ankles like smoke. Alex picked her up and stroked her. “If he’d tried anything, wouldn’t I know? I was twelve years old,” she said to the cat. “I knew what sex was.”

  She’d heard about repressed memories. A couple of years ago, they were all the rage. Droves of people who thought they’d had otherwise-perfect childhoods were beginning to remember monstrous acts perpetrated on them by their parents. Some of these parents went to prison; others fell victim to lawsuits. The latest school of thought was that unscrupulous or sometimes well- meaning psychiatrists actually elicited false repressed memories in their subjects. After hearing that on the news, Alex had dismissed all repressed memories as bunk.

  She didn’t suffer from repressed memories. She remembered that day just fine. The guy sitting on the couch, his feet up on the ottoman, munching on a sandwich that smelled of hot mustard, yelling at the umpire. She remembered how she’d wished he’d leave and how Caroline had come back, still in a huff, and how she’d gotten mad at Alex all over again, flouncing around the room and acting as if she were—

  Jealous.

  No. That couldn’t be. If that guy was Uncle Wiggly, Caroline’s molester, the man who stole her innocence and destroyed her life—why would Caroline be jealous?

  No, no, no. Alex thought. Caro wasn’t jealous. She was just angry because they’d had a fight earlier. Maybe playing both ends against the middle a bit, to make Alex feel really bad, like she was the outsider.

  More than ever, Alex felt that Caroline had whacked her with a double-edged sword. She’d hurt her feelings, made her go home, spoiled that great week at the beach. But had she also saved her from Uncle Wiggly?

  Later that day, still troubled by these fresh memories of Caroline and the beach house, Alex met Maybelle Deering at the turnaround and packed her equipment onto Fred, a brown-and-white spotted llama with soft eyes and an amiable disposition.

  Alex tied Fred far down the canyon from the blind, just in case his scent would spook the jaguarundi.

  Although she tried to stay awake, focusing blearily on the log and cat food, Alex caught herself dozing several times.

  Something—a sound? a feeling?—jerked her awake. She glanced at the luminous dial on her watch. After two.

  Even before she looked through the gap in the blind, Alex could sense a presence. With exaggerated quiet, she lifted the camera off the blind floor and peered through the lens.

  The cat was crouched on the log, crunching on kitty kibble.

  It was small, dark, thin.

  As Alex automatically fine-tuned the focus ring and checked the aperture, she registered the cat’s features and applied them to the catalog in her head.

  Bullet-shaped profile. Narrow body. Ears recessed, way back on the head. Uniformly dark, with a hint of ticking at the edges of the fur like a sprinkle of sugar—

  She snapped; the flashes tripped. Got off another couple of shots as the cat’s head turned in surprise. It left the log, its powerful hindquarters propelling it into the brush where it disappeared like smoke, as real now as a vaguely remembered dream.

  Nineteen

  “It was about that time I sat Caroline down and explained to her that if she wanted a career, she was going to have to make sacrifices. I laid down the law: no more drugs and partying till dawn, and she’d have to watch her diet. Once the ground rules were established, her career took off.”

  —Excerpt from FALLEN ANGEL: THE CAROLINE ARNET STORY, by Ted Lang

  Grey Sullivan was just leaving the hotel when Nick arrived. The director carried an overnight bag in one hand and a golf bag slung over his shoulder. “Help you with that?”

  “Thanks.” They walked to Sullivan’s rental car. “I guess you’ll all be out of here soon,” Nick said, trying to put the director at ease.

  “Uh-huh.” Sullivan seemed remote behind his Ray-Bans. “Thought I’d play some golf in Tucson before I fly out. I hear it’s pretty nice up there. The greens’re surrounded by desert.”

  Nick didn’t say he thought the golf greens looked too green, garish and out of place when compared to the subtlety of the desert. “Do you have time for some iced tea before you go?”

  “Look, I told you guys every—”

  “This isn’t official business. I just want to find out a little about Caroline. Please.”

  Sullivan’s mouth tightened. “All you have to do is read the tabloids.”

  “I have a feeling she knew who her killer was. I just want you to tell me about her.”

  “Booker Purlie killed her.”

  Nick grinned, trying to be charming. “Not necessarily.”

  Grey Sullivan closed the trunk, leaned against the car, and folded his arms. “Go ahead, ask.” He glanced at his Rolex. “But I want to be in Tucson by noon.”

  “Caroline was brilliant but hard to work with. A lot like Streisand. I didn’t know her very well, to be honest. And her husband is an enormous pain in the ass. It was a big relief to me when he left for Italy. Don’t get me wrong, I was very upset when she died. I’m still having dreams about it.” Grey Sullivan shook his head and drank more iced tea. He’d changed his mind pretty quickly about standing outside in ninety-degree temperatures.

  “What do you think she wanted?”

  “Shit, I don’t know. She was a perfectionist. I’ll say that for her; she really cared about the film. We argued cons
tantly, but she was only doing what she felt she had to. On a bigger scale, what she wanted? Relief, maybe.”

  “Relief?”

  “She was always ‘on.’ Everything was a performance. Even her stunts were put-ons. The hard drinking, one of the boys. It was all an act. At least that’s my opinion. Maybe she just got tired of peddling as fast as she could.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “The last month or so she really drove herself frenetic. Drank hard, played hard, worked—God, she drove me nuts. We’re ahead of schedule because of her. It was almost as if she knew—” He shook his head.

  Nick’s heart picked up a beat. “Knew what?”

  “Nothing. Something like this happens, you start to believe in ghosts, fate, things like that. I do find it amazing, though.”

  “What? What’s amazing?”

  “The fact that the last important scene she was in, the scene we really needed—she finished. She died, but she finished the scene. I just find that ... spooky.”

  Nick’s stomach tightened. “Have you ever seen the movie Saratoga? “

  “Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. 1937. You’re talking to a movie nut, the kid who never grew up. What about it?”

  “Is it going to be anything like that, finishing the film without the star?”

  “No, that’s just what I’m saying. She completed every major scene. All we’re going to have to do is touch-ups—a few shots from a distance. Nothing like the mess they made of Saratoga.”

  “You thought it was bad, too.”

  “The movie just lurched to a stop three-quarters of the way through. Depressing as hell, if you ask me. I guess you can’t blame them, the way the public was clamoring to see it. And they didn’t have the technology we have today.” He glanced at his watch and stood up. “Look, I’ve really got to go. Thanks for the tea.”

  Nick stood, too, peeled back his notebook. “Grey, she left a note in her appointment book. ‘Ask Lana to ask Barry.’ Do you have any idea who Barry is?”

  “My first AD. He’s Lana’s boyfriend. I’ve got to go.”

  Nick kept in step with him. “Do you have any idea what Lana might ask Barry?”