High Fall (11 page)

“He’d wander around the set like he had a day pass. On
Bad Companions,
I remember people saying he spent his time sitting in the shade of the catering truck, talking—or more likely listening—to whoever came by, from the grips to the line producer. If I hadn’t known him and you’d told me this guy was a tennis pro or a ski instructor waiting for the season to start, I wouldn’t have questioned it, except I’d have expected them to be more savvy socially. But then he’d start discussing stunts, and it was like someone pushed the plug in the socket. He just lit up.” He shook his head. “I was up and coming then, hot stuff. Figured that beam of attention was just for me.”

“And?”

“I grew up.” He let go of the chair. The front legs jumped and banged to the floor. Yarrow walked to the door in three uneven steps.

Behind him, headlights glowed white in the glass brick window. Kiernan realized with a start that she hadn’t noticed the engine roar worthy of Cape Canaveral. What had it been about Greg Gaige that called people to nurture illusions about him? Was it his total commitment? His innocence? The odd purity of the combination? Most people could never attain that purity, and if they were like her, they were very thankful they couldn’t. She forced herself to lean back in her chair and said, “You told me Greg died in a fire gag. But he did high falls and acrobatic stunts. Why was he doing the fire gag at all?”

“The stunt business is a small world, O’Shaughnessy,” Yarrow said, easing back into the comfort of pedantry. “Everyone’s got his specialty, but if you want to work, you’ve got to be able to do it all. Take me—I did great motorcycle gags, but if they needed a double for a cycle crash and a stair fall and it was a location picture, they’d have taken a guy who couldn’t handle the cycle as well but who could do both, before they’d pay two doubles.”

Kiernan nodded. “The bottom line is the bottom line.”

“And Greg, well, he was over forty. I’m sure when they called him in the middle of the movie, he told himself he couldn’t afford to turn down a job. And this one offered him the chance to do the Gaige Move—not in the fire gag, in an earlier scene. He hadn’t done that onscreen since his first picture. It was one more time to do the thing that he did better than anyone else in the world. Fire scared him shitless, but he wouldn’t have let that opportunity go even if it meant doing the fire gag nude.”

Kiernan shivered. “One last chance to say it’s not just a memory, that you’re not a memory, yet.”

Yarrow was staring at her. She realized she’d spoken out loud, and words he didn’t want to hear. But retirement wouldn’t have meant just the loss of fame, she felt sure, or even surrendering a way of life. For someone as consumed as Greg, it would have meant abandoning the rationale for living, watching what makes life make sense slip away. Leaving him with … nothing. She swallowed and forced out the words: “How exactly did he die?”

Yarrow trekked back, and as he was taking up his post behind his chair, he said, “I wasn’t on the set then.”

“But you think it’s suspicious. Why?”

“Why? I don’t know. It’s just that he was too good to die like that.”

“Too professional?”

“Yeah.”

“Like Lark?”

His eyes widened. “Exactly. Like Lark.”

“Then you think one of those five people killed him?”

His eyes widened in surprise. “I never considered that.”

“Yarrow! What the—”

“Greg was meticulous about his preparations. He put everything he would need in that cabin the night before so it would be ready at whatever ungodly hour of the morning he needed to start smearing the fire-resistant gel—very pricey stuff—on every inch of his skin. You can’t get that stuff in your eyes, and it tends to run, so you’ve got to be real careful. Then he put on a Nomex suit over it—he should have put more than one on. Each suit is an extra layer of protection. I’ve seen guys use six suits in a ninety-second fire drop. But Greg never did; he couldn’t stand being confined like that. He dabbed flammable gel on the parts of the material farthest from his body. He should have …” He closed his eyes against the decision Greg had made. “Look, he should have been wearing three or four suits. He decided to wear only one. He had an oxygen bottle right there in the cabin and didn’t use it. What does that make you think?”

“What did the autopsy find?”

“I don’t know. Honestly. If they came up with anything fishy, it never made the trades—the papers—or the rumor mill.”

“Yarrow, what is it you think happened?”

He swallowed. “There’s nothing like doing gags. You’ve got friends you trust with your life, literally. Working gags are fun. Lots are challenges. There are always new skills to learn, vital things to figure out. Every day is different. I know what it’s like to leave. My job now, computer troubleshooting, is fine. I don’t hate it. Some days are more interesting than others, but none of them
matter.”

A truck roared down the alley. Yarrow didn’t look up. “What would Greg have done if he retired? Sell real estate in San Bernardino? He’d been the best; how could he live without—”

“Without being the best? With being ordinary?” Kiernan said softly. “You think he chose to die?”

“Makes sense,” he choked out.

“No!” she snapped. She was out of her chair, leaning across the table at him. “Not Greg Gaige! Someone else, another stunt man, might have figured his career was over, but not Greg. Greg Gaige would die trying, right?
Right?
”

Yarrow’s mouth opened, but he didn’t speak. He yearned to agree, she could tell, but by now he didn’t even know what he really thought. She sighed, furious with herself. She’d pulled out his memories, twisted them to the shape she was desperate to see, and now they were worth nothing. Maybe Greg Gaige had gone into the fire the way suicides load their pockets with stones and walk into the sea.

But Yarrow had had a decade to reach his conclusion. If he’d considered Greg Gaige a suicide, he wouldn’t have been so outraged about Lark Sondervoil. “If Greg planned to kill himself, Yarrow, he wouldn’t have worn any fire suit at all. Right?” She waited till he nodded, then said, “Who was Greg’s beneficiary?”

Yarrow looked up, startled at her change of tone. “His mother. She and Greg hadn’t gotten along. She was probably happier with the insurance money. She only lived a few more years after he died.”

Something still wasn’t right about Yarrow. His eyebrows squeezed in toward each other, his cheeks toward his nose, his mouth was pursed. But he wasn’t balancing on the chair legs or pacing the way an athlete would handle things. He was too wary. Too afraid of revealing something? “Yarrow, you were on location, working with the man you idolized, the best acrobatic stunt man in films, and you didn’t bother to watch his final gag?”

He shrugged. “My work was done. When you’re done, you’re free to move on to other jobs.”

“And did you?” When he didn’t respond immediately, she added, “I can run a Social Security check.”

“I had a meeting in L.A.”

“I don’t think so. You said Greg got the call in the middle of filming. He replaced another stunt double, right?”

Slowly, Yarrow nodded.

“You were the stunt man, weren’t you?”

The glass bricks were night blue, the alley silent. A smirk passed across Yarrow’s face and disappeared like an offering rejected.

“Yeah,” he said finally. “I never did another gag.” He stared at the bricks, his lips together but his mouth moving silently. What was he adding? “Because?”

“Because … because I’ll never know if the fire gag was routine. Or if it was a killer and by rights I should be dead.”

Her breath caught. She didn’t have to worry about meeting Yarrow’s gaze; his eyes were cloudy, and he was seeing only within. Slowly, she said, “Why would anyone kill Lark Sondervoil to cover up a ten-year-old death that no one was thinking about? It doesn’t make sense.” She let a moment pass, waiting, and when he added nothing new, she said, “Look, I understand your feelings. But I have to tell you, as the base for an investigation, emotion is quicksand.”

“You mean you’re backing out? I gave you everything I’ve got. I can’t help it if it’s not the kind of evidence that any beat cop could take to the Supreme Court.”

She stood up and pushed the chair in under the table. “Yarrow, you don’t have anything, in either case. No motive, no means of murder; you can’t even say for sure that Lark Sondervoil wasn’t too loaded to perform.”

“Look, if you wanted certainty… Shit, I guess an investigation like this is just too hard for you.”

It was a moment before Kiernan smiled. “I am not quite that easy to manipulate. Got that?”

He shrugged.

“Okay, here’s what I can do,” she said. “I’ll check out Lark’s body. If she was snorting cocaine, there’ll be evidence of nasal deterioration; if she was shooting heroin, there’ll be tracks.”

“Maybe not. Cary Bleeker’s real fussy about drugs. He’s had a lot of problems, and he’s not one to take chances with anything as risky as a stunt woman on drugs. No stunt coordinator would touch her if they thought she was unreliable. As ambitious as Lark was—”

“Yarrow, if ambition precluded cocaine—”

“Yeah, I suppose. Especially in Hollywood. But my point is that Lark wouldn’t do drugs. And if she did, she’d never have tracks running down her arms and legs.”

“Which is what makes the problem so much harder.” Kiernan walked to the door and waited for him to follow. “The places she’d use are the ones no one would notice—under the tongue, between the toes, in the armpits and groin where the tracks are covered with pubic hair. They are spots that even the pathologist misses, unless he’s specifically looking for that evidence, and doing it with a microscope. Even then, the marks aren’t easy to find.”

“So you don’t think he will?”

“I don’t know. This is a big county. It depends on who does the postmortem. There’s no way to tell.”

“Well, hell, we can’t take that chance.” Yarrow grabbed her shoulder.

She patted his hand. “Exactly.”

If she was going to find any kind of answer, she had to start with Lark’s body. Tonight.

S
HE DROVE A COUPLE
of blocks and parked by the beach. The town lights were behind her; ahead, a rumpled blackness. She sat with the window open, breathing in sea air thick with brine and the smell of earth, of the life in it and the death. Behind her, cars started, motorcycles roared, auto alarms beeped. She heard them vaguely, muffled by the pulsing of the sea.

And she remembered Greg Gaige as he’d been that night in San Francisco eleven years ago. She’d just started work as a forensic pathologist. The day had been long, and she’d ended it with an emergency postmortem of a hiker just back from the Sierra. Her finding: sufficient indicators, pending lab results, to suggest bubonic plague. Probably he’d been infected in the Sierra. But he could have brought back carrier fleas. Bubonic plague was endemic in the wilds of the west. But it wasn’t prevalent in her county, and her findings had alerted the health department and the sheriff. Bubonic plague was one of the few conditions still subject to quarantine. The smells of putrification from the autopsy room still cut the air, as if they were clinging to the inside of her nose. Her hands reeked of Clorox. The autopsy had taken hours. And when she looked at her watch, she’d discovered an extra hour had passed and she was likely to miss her one chance to see in person Greg Gaige do the Gaige Move.

She’d sped to the freeway, cut across lanes as if she were making a left-hand turn, and tailgated everything in the fast lane. She made it to the set with five minutes to spare. As it turned out, the scene had been delayed and she was hours early.

When she walked onto the set, she should have been exhausted, but instead she was striding on air, so excited that her thoughts bounced off each other in her head. The light over the autopsy table flashed against the banks of lights on the set, and she had to blink hard to black out her own triumph and concentrate on being a spectator at Greg Gaige’s.

Trailers surrounded the roped-off street. Cameras and wires and chairs and padded boxes of equipment littered the sidewalk. Drab-dressed assistants scurried in and out. The whole place had had the look of a rock band abandoning its digs moments before the arrival of the sheriff. She had spotted Greg Gaige just as someone called out, “Lunch break!” A midnight “lunch.”

It had been over twenty years since he’d been captured in the poster-picture doing the Move, but Greg Gaige looked like the same eager kid. Age had hardly changed him. His short straight sandy hair began just a bit higher on his forehead, and around his eyes and mouth lines were sketched so lightly, it seemed they could still be erased. And those startling blue eyes that had stared out from the poster still sparkled. They weren’t as piercing now as they had been years before—he wasn’t working now. But his walk was the same as if he’d been heading for the mat to start his floor routine; there was a bounce to his steps from those exquisitely toned muscles releasing, then tensing back. And when he stopped to swap sentences with one of the grips he was like a sports car idling. He grinned, slapped a shoulder, released into movement again, was stopped by the director and, Kiernan noted, greeted him the same way he had the grip. She stood, staring, mouth open, as if she were thirteen again.

But when she’d introduced herself, she could have been talking to a different person, an understudy to the real Greg Gaige.

“I’m so excited to meet you again,” she had bubbled. “I wrote you all about my gymnastic successes afterward, but I never really thanked you for your encouragement to me that day in the gym. It came at a vital time, and it really changed my life. I had your poster on my wall until I was in medical school”—she laughed—”and it was in tatters.”

He’d smiled then, but it wasn’t the expression that blazed from the poster picture. Rather, it was a hesitant gesture, as if he were unsure it was the right reaction. “How have you been?”

“Mr. Gaige, I’m from KHBK News.” A young blond man extended his hand to Greg. “We’re doing a segment on aspects of the movie business. What’s it like doing stunts?”