Clea's Moon

by Edward Wright

  “It’s not important.”

  “All right.”

  “Tell me about yourself.”

  “Well, you probably heard I got married.”

  “I think somebody mentioned it. Who’s the lucky guy?”

  “Name’s David Peake,” she said over the clatter in the sink. “Davey, everybody calls him. You might have heard of him. He rides the rodeo, got a couple of championship belts riding broncs last year.”

  “Is he around?”

  “Huh-uh. He’s out on the circuit. Should be in Tucson this week. He’s only thirty-one, says he wants to get everything he can out of the next few years.”

  “You married a young stud.”

  “Ain’t I entitled?” she said as she entered the room, using the drawl he had last heard in Bandit Girl.

  “Sure you are. What else you been up to?”

  She laid a steaming mug on a rough wood table in front of him. “Well, like I told you in the letters, I quit the movies.”

  “You just never said why.”

  “Oh, it was a bunch of things. I did love it, you know. I had almost ten wonderful years. I worked with good people and made good money, and I sure liked all the attention. Every time somebody asked me for an autograph, I swear that for just a second I couldn’t believe they meant me. Did I tell you I met the Duke of Windsor?”

  “No.”

  “He was visiting over here after the war, and he came out to the set with the mayor one day. Mask of Monterrey, it was. That’s him and me in that picture on the wall.”

  “You look like you’re having a good time. What did you two talk about?”

  “Oh. . . how to fall out of the saddle without getting hurt. Who’s best at jumping, us or the English. You know, your usual elegant tea-party conversation.” She smiled. “The Duke of Windsor. For a little girl from Arizona, that’s about the ultimate.”

  “So why’d you quit?”

  “For one thing, the injuries were piling up. Especially that time I chipped my spine when I did that fall from the car. We were shooting The Secret Code down in Long Beach. That one stayed with me for a while.” She blew into her coffee cup. “There were younger actresses coming along at Medallion, and Bernie Rome was using them in the kind of pictures I was good at. Bernie Junior told me once I could work more if I would just put out.” She laughed softly. “I left and slammed his door, broke one of the panes in it. You know, I try never to think ill of man nor beast. But for a few seconds there, I was glad you’d broken the little shit’s jaw.”

  “Me too.”

  “I suppose I was finally getting tired of it. So one day, it was a week or so before we were supposed to start shooting another 15-chapter epic—with me in some kind of leopard-skin thing—I realized that my contract was up for renewal. I told Junior to get one of his starlets. I was done.”

  “Good for you.”

  “I bought this place, and God, do I love it,” she said. “Got a couple dozen quarter horses and three or four hands, depending on how busy we are. People rent horses from me, take them out on the back roads. Some of them bring their kids here for riding lessons. When a studio’s shooting something with a lot of horses, they can lease some from me. Business is all right.”

  “I’m glad for you, Maggie,” he said. He studied her as she leaned back in her blanket-covered chair, her boots up on the table. The hands that framed her coffee mug were graceful and strong, their backs freckled like her face. There was a time, he thought, when I knew just where all those freckles ended.

  “So, are you married?” she asked.

  “Nope. Once was enough.”

  “Not for Iris, what I hear.” She caught his look. “I shouldn’t have said that. Now you tell me about you. What have you been up to?”

  “Since I got out? Working for Mad Crow.”

  “Gambling?”

  “More like bookkeeping.”

  “Oh.” She didn’t sound convinced.

  “I haven’t had a chance to thank you for the letters,” he said. “They meant a lot. I’m sorry I only answered a few, but. . . .” He shrugged.

  “Well, if you’d have answered more, I would’ve written more,” she said. “And I’m still holding your things for you. Pick ‘em up any time you want.” Noting his confused look, she laughed and said, “You forgot? It’s a trunk full of odds and ends you’d left with Joseph, but when he was building his new place he ran out of storage space and asked me to take it.”

  “I clean forgot, Maggie,” he said. “I guess it’s all old stuff I don’t need any more. But thanks for hanging on to it. Anyway, the reason I’m here, I need a favor.” He took a few minutes to describe his search for Clea and what he had found out so far. To keep it simple, he omitted any mention of Scotty or old man Bullard, or the photos.

  “So I think this guy does stunt work, or used to,” he summarized. “Tuck told me you’ve got the list of all the stunt men in town. Can I look through it?”

  She gazed at him evenly, as if trying to read his intent. He thought he knew what was on her mind: Was he there only because she could help him? He didn’t want her to think that.

  But if she felt hurt, it didn’t show. “You bet,” she said with a smile, getting up and reaching for something high on a shelf. She handed it across the table to him, a clipboard thick with pages. “I think they elected me to this job because I’m the only one who has the patience for it,” she said. “Each one has several pages, with vital statistics and work history. Most have a photo too. They’re alphabetical. More coffee?”

  He began leafing through the pages while she refilled his cup. Then she sat quietly as he looked. Some of the faces were familiar to him, men he’d worked with while making dozens of westerns at Medallion. A few of the faces were female.

  He was about three-quarters of the way through when he spotted the man. The face that stared up at him was clean-shaven, but there was no mistaking it. Expressionless as it had been in the alley the night before, the face looked vaguely menacing, the cords in the neck visible. Horn felt an ache in his kidneys and silently cursed the man.

  “Something?” Maggie asked him.

  “Something,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Horn eased the Ford down the dirt slope, stopped under the shade of a big valley oak, and set the brake. A few dozen yards downhill stood a row of equipment trucks and trailers, and beyond them the shooting location, a valley of high grass and big trees and abrupt, knobby hills, all crisscrossed by a network of dirt trails.

  This was the southeastern corner of the Medallion Ranch, where the studio shot most of its rural scenes. Horn had ridden after many a villain in this valley, cut off many a runaway buckboard bearing a gingham-dressed leading lady, defended many a stagecoach against marauding Indians or masked desperadoes. “If they saved up the gunpowder in all those caps we popped,” Mad Crow had said to him once, “we could have invaded Mexico.”

  Although the ranch had hosted hundreds of westerns, it had also played as backdrop for Nazi spies, French musketeers, and invading Mongols. Today, Horn knew, it was the location for a sequence in one of the studio’s many serials, Air Ace and the Ray of Death. By making a few inquiries, Maggie had determined that the stunt man Horn sought was working here today.

  His name was Gabriel Falco. Maggie’s file on him was not much help. He was thirty-three and from New York City and had done stunt work for several studios around town, notably Republic and Medallion. The last association newsletter she had mailed out to him had come back with no forwarding address.

  The sun had been up for an hour or so. Horn noted some activity clustered around a canvas-sided truck out on the valley’s main dirt road. But it didn’t look as if anything important was going to happen in the next few minutes.

  Coming here involved risk, he
knew. His muscles and face still ached, and the prospect of encountering Falco again made his stomach flutter unpleasantly. But finding the man could bring him one step closer to Clea. He decided to go ahead, be careful, and not waste time worrying about the consequences.

  He walked down the slope and along the row of vehicles. He wore his hat pulled low, hoping he’d spot his man before the other got a look at him. He noticed a few familiar faces among the crew, and one or two of the men appeared to recognize him, but there were no greetings. After a minute, he found the director sitting at a work table under an awning stretched out from the side of a trailer. “Hello, Dex,” he said quietly.

  The other man looked up. “Hello, John Ray,” he said after only a second’s hesitation.

  “How you been?”

  Dexter Diggs had a square face and a stocky build and wore khakis and a hunting vest over a canvas work shirt. Years before, he had written and directed big-budget features during the silent era and had been a man with a future. But he liked the bottle too much and lost a series of jobs before landing at Medallion, where he became known as an all-purpose director of B-pictures. Diggs obviously knew he was doing hack work, but he always tried to turn out a respectable product, on time and under budget. He never yelled at his actors. Horn liked him.

  “Oh, you know,” Diggs said, pushing to one side the script he had been reading. “Still managing to fool ‘em.” He looked Horn up and down, as if to measure the man he saw against his memories.

  “You mind if I watch you shoot today?”

  “Ah, well, that might be a problem.”

  “Nobody has to know,” Horn said with what he hoped was an ingratiating grin.

  “Father and Son are coming over this morning to watch,” Diggs said. “You know what that means. You’re not supposed to be around here.”

  “Look, Dex, I don’t want to get you in trouble. I won’t hang around for the shoot, all right? Just help me out a little for a minute. I need to find out something about one of your boys, Gabriel Falco. I hear he’s working today.”

  Diggs looked toward the truck out on the main road as he drummed his fingers on the script. Finally he indicated a folding camp chair next to the table, and Horn sat down. “I don’t want to be rude,” the director said. “But I don’t want to lose my job either.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m glad to see you back. You working?”

  “Uh-huh. I’m doing a little work for Mad Crow.”

  “That’s good,” Diggs said without much enthusiasm. “Joseph’s come a long way since he was working around here, wearing buckskins and talking bad English. He’s going to wind up richer than all of us.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me.”

  “You, uh, got any other irons in the fire?”

  “You mean is anybody offering me honest work? Come on, Dex, you know nobody’s hiring me, not after Mr. Rome put out the word to all the studios. I take what I can get, and I can’t afford to be picky.”

  “I’m sorry about what happened. We all are.”

  Horn shrugged, wanting the subject to go away. “About this Falco?”

  “Yeah. He’s my lead stunt man on this thing.”

  “Is he around right now?”

  “He was earlier, but now he’s over at the air strip, getting ready for this shot. This is his only scene today. You know Air Ace?”

  Horn shook his head.

  “We got him from the comics. The kids are crazy about this character. He flies planes, chases spies, that sort of thing. Rod Blakeley’s the hero. You remember him. This morning we’re shooting the big scene in Chapter Five. Master shot; I’ll do the inserts back on the lot tomorrow. It’s a transfer, and this guy Falco’s doubling for Rod.”

  “Hell, I used to do those myself, without stunt man’s pay,” Horn said with a laugh. “You remember? Horse to train, horse to buckboard, horse to stagecoach. . . .”

  “This transfer’s a little different,” Diggs said. “Plane to truck.”

  “Really?”

  “No kidding. Hero climbs down a rope ladder from the plane, jumps into a speeding truck. They’re gonna love it.”

  Horn whistled through his teeth. “Wish I could see that.” Then, seeing the look on the director’s face: “Like I said, I won’t stick around. But what do you know about this Falco?”

  Diggs looked at his watch. “Enough to know I wouldn’t want him mad at me. He’s the best stunt man I’ve ever worked with. Absolutely no fear. But off camera. . . I don’t know. He’s cold as ice. You know how scuttlebutt spreads around a studio. Word about this guy is he did time for armed robbery back east. One story says he beat a man to death in prison, but they never proved it. I wouldn’t find that hard to believe. Whatever reason you have for asking questions about him, I hope you’re careful.”

  “I will be,” Horn said. “How’s the work going?”

  “Oh, it’s not like when I was directing Gloria Swanson and that gang. But it’s regular. You wouldn’t recognize things, though.”

  “How so?”

  “No more westerns, at least not the kind you’d recognize. I haven’t shot one in almost a year. Funny thing happened: The big studios discovered ‘em. Over at Fox, John Ford lined up Henry Fonda for one of his. And Howard Hawks is shooting one with Montgomery Clift. You imagine Monty Clift on a horse? Anyway, everybody takes westerns very seriously now. They’re not fun any more, and nobody’s interested in the cheap kind we do. They don’t want a hero who carries a guitar or wears fringe on his shirt.”

  Horn looked disgusted. “I never did any of that.”

  Diggs laughed. “Couldn’t see your shirt for all the dust. Sierra Lane always looked like he just finished a hundred-mile cattle drive.”

  “Horn!”

  They looked down the row of trailers to see the diminutive figure of Bernie Rome Jr. advancing on them, his face twisted into something ugly. Close behind him was his father.

  As the two men reached the tent, Horn came quickly out of his chair, sending it to the ground behind him. Reaching across the table, he grabbed the script and flung it into Diggs’ chest. “Go to hell,” he said loudly. “I don’t need a job around this place.”

  “You!” Rome yelled, stopping about ten feet away. “Somebody get the police.”

  “Never mind, I’m leaving,” Horn said, brushing past the smaller man. “Your puppy dog there doesn’t feel like helping an old friend, so to hell with both of you.”

  For one second he locked eyes with Bernie Rome Jr., who stood there with clenched fists and reddened face. Horn hadn’t seen him since the trial. Junior was a little fleshier but otherwise unchanged. He still affected the dress of a rich sportsman, down to the ascot at his throat. In a quick image, like a single frame of film, Horn glimpsed the man’s bloodied face under him, felt the impact of his knuckles on bone. He expected the old hatred to wash over him, blind him, as it had on that day three years earlier. But he felt nothing.

  Ignoring him, Horn turned to go, stopping briefly in front of Bernard Rome—Mister Rome to his employees—who, as always, was dressed in an immaculate dark suit. The older man’s eyes were expressionless behind thick glasses, the fringe of hair around his bald head whiter than Horn remembered. As Horn walked away, he heard the studio chief’s son shouting again for the police and Diggs reply, “He’s leaving, Bernie.”

  Horn walked to his car, backed out of the trees, and took the dirt access road farther into the valley until he came to a smaller road that wound up a mountainside. He drove slowly for about ten minutes, the Ford laboring up the steep, rutted road, until he came to a smooth, rounded-off clearing encircled by trees and underbrush. This was Dome Rock, a popular location for the studio because of its panoramic view.

  Horn pulled a pair of Army-surplus binoculars from under the car seat, rested them on a ro
ck, and trained them down toward where Diggs’ crew was visible. He could see most of the valley, and he wanted to watch Gabriel Falco at work.

  The sun was higher now, the day growing hotter. The dry, sage-scented air parched his throat, and he wished he had brought some water. He swept the valley with the binoculars every few minutes, and soon Diggs’ boys appeared busier. People climbed into the cab of the canvas-sided truck, and a few seconds later a smaller film truck—outfitted with a rear platform for the 35-millimeter camera along with the director and his assistants—pulled out into the road ahead of it. The film truck was swarming with people. Then he saw a figure he recognized as Diggs climb aboard, and soon thereafter both trucks began moving slowly in Horn’s direction. He moved the binoculars up and could make out the speck of an airplane. It grew larger, and then he heard the sound of it. The plane was a twin-engine with a silver fuselage, and it came in just above stall speed, descending gradually until it was about fifty feet off the ground.

  A door in the side of the plane opened, and a rope ladder was flung out, whipping wildly in the wind. Then a man came out the door and began descending the ladder. He wore boots and jodhpurs and some kind of jacket along with a flight helmet with goggles and a white scarf around his neck. An outlandish outfit for a flyer today, Horn thought, but just right for the hero of a 15-chapter serial aimed at any 12-year-old boy who had a quarter for the ticket. The man descended lower and lower on the ladder until he was just above the truck, which was moving fast now, but the road was uneven and the truck bounced and pitched. The man on the ladder abruptly rose and dipped as the pilot fought to maintain altitude. At one point the ladder swung inward, slamming the stunt man against the side of the truck, but he recovered. Then it all came together and the man saw his chance. Just as the plane began to pull ahead, dragging the man out of range, the ladder dipped one more time, and he found himself level with the driver’s side door of the truck. He reached out, caught the door, swung himself over onto the running board, then wrenched the door open, grabbed the driver, and extracted him neatly, tossing him onto the road. In an instant he was inside the cab of the truck.