High Fall (12 page)

“It’s fun,” Greg said, and started moving again.

“But how do you plan?”

He shrugged. “The same way everyone else does.” He put an arm on Kiernan’s shoulder and kept moving.

“Don’t cut that interview short because of me,” she’d said.

“I’m not.”

“But the publicity—”

He’d laughed. “I don’t like doing interviews. They won’t have trouble finding someone who does. Now you—do you still do gymnastics at all?”

“Only for fun. There was a time I thought I’d be able to do your Move. When I was sixteen, I came close. Well, not what
you’d
consider close—
you’d
have thought a certifiable spastic was doing it—but to me it felt like it was within the specs. By the next year, I was already too tall, too developed.” She had tried to pass off the observation lightly, but fourteen years after the fact, she could hear her frustration that the day she’d come so close to nailing the Move had been a Sunday when she’d sneaked into the gym alone.

As they followed the cast and crew to the restaurant for the late-night “lunch,” she found herself telling him about medical school and her residency and her new job at the coroner’s office. “I never get over the thrill of uncovering the body’s secrets. People assume that with their bodies they get a standard issue, like there are a few different models with some variations—short, tall, wiry, thick—but that basically what’s inside is all the same. They all assume their spines are straight, their hearts perfect, that their brains fill their cranial bones like hard-boiled eggs inside the shells. They’d be shocked to discover how many women—maybe a third—have scoliosis, how many mitral valves are flaccid without their owners noticing more than the occasional heavy heartbeat, or that people with brains that look like the yolk is missing from the egg lead normal lives. In the case I had today, once I peeled back the skin of the forehead—”

It was at that point she’d realized he was looking away. She wasn’t a blusher, but she’d turned red then. The only time she could recall feeling that humiliated was when she’d tripped over her feet in the initial run of her floor routine. She’d been fourteen then. At the state meet.

“Sorry, Greg,” she muttered, “I forget that dead bodies aren’t everyone’s choice of dinner chat.” But it wasn’t his discomfort with the dead that bothered her; irrationally, she had expected him to be proud of her, to agree that she’d made the right decision abandoning gymnastics for forensic pathology, to give her a “ten” for her life. But she hadn’t realized that then. Then, she’d just felt small.

“No, no. Go on,” Greg had said, embarrassed. “I’m just having a hard time with the technical terms. There’s so much I don’t know.”

“You?” she’d asked, ridiculously amazed. “But you do the Move that no one in the world can. When you do it tonight, will it be the same as it was back in Baltimore?”

His blue eyes looked up and to the left, as if he were searching distant space for the answer. “It’s always changing. I’m always working on it, trying to squeeze more out of it, jack it around farther, do the punch back faster, harder, give it more zing.” He grinned. “I’m going to surprise ’em tonight, show ’em I’m not just getting older; I’m getting better.” He shrugged and turned away. She couldn’t decide whether he regretted having admitted worrying about getting older, or was embarrassed at how tritely he’d phrased it.

She’d liked that, the artist ever in process. “Like it’s alive, huh?”

“I guess.” He was eating soup that he’d gotten from the cafeteria line—only soup, because he didn’t know how soon the call for his gag, for the Move, would come.

She’d asked more about the Move, its evolution, but his answers were no clearer. He was entirely physical, she would say later, involved in the Move so viscerally that to talk about it was like translating what he was doing into hieroglyphs.

“The life-span of gymnastics seems eternal for men—compared to that of women,” she’d said as she finished off a steak, potatoes, beans, roll, and salad and was eyeing the side table of desserts. “Still, what will you do afterward?”

“I don’t have another picture in the works, but that’s not unusual. I can’t think about that till after the Move. Now everything, even this conversation, I’m afraid, is like it’s behind the curtain of the Move.”

“But after you stop doing the Move?”

“I keep working on it. I know I can get more out of the last twist—you’ll see tonight—I can jack it around farther.”

“But after you retire?” Suddenly it seemed vital to her to hear the answer she’d sought.

“My
father’s
retired.”

“But you will be someday.”

“I’ll have plenty of time to think about it then.” He pushed away the soup bowl. “See, the thing with that twist isn’t the hips, this’ll come from the shoulders. Once I push off…

She had stayed on the set for three hours huddling against the cold summer wind that brushed off the San Francisco hills, watching four takes of the scene before Greg’s Move. Greg had found her a director’s chair, but he himself had paced, wandered, and answered questions with monosyllables or shrugs.

But when the call sounded for his gag, the Greg Gaige who walked to the start mark could have been the Master of the World. Every step was sure, those blue eyes that had been vague at dinner seemed to take in the entire set, then narrow to a focus of such intensity, she half expected to see the set burn.

“Action!”

He ran surefooted. An explosion from Special Effects sent a fireworks of lights. Greg flipped like a rag doll, twisted as if he were out of control, landed and sprung back like a corpse, then abruptly, minutely shifted his shoulders and added a half twist and touched down with the ease of jumping from a stool.

The cast and crew leaped up and applauded.

Greg grinned, turned to the spot where he’d left her, ran over, grabbed her in his arms, and spun her around.

“Greg.” The director put a hand on his shoulder. “Give the media a word, huh?”

She kissed him, and before he could ask her to stay—or not to—she said good-bye.

Then she watched him stride across the set, settle on the stool before the cameras, under the Clorox white lights, and grin. The sweat on his arms and shoulders shined the muscles, and joy seemed to bubble at every pore. Those blue eyes that had been piercing a minute before glistened opaquely as if reflecting inward.

She stared, imprinting the moment in her memory.
This is where you live
, he had said back in Baltimore. Then, watching him again, she understood that as she never had before. Doing the Move was the only time he felt alive. She hurried to her car and drove, unwilling to watch him struggle to translate his triumph into the language of words, to slide back from glory into the mire of the ordinary, where he walked flat-footed in the land of the dead.

That night she’d dreamed variations of the evening and awakened at four
A.M.
horrified at her intrusive questions. “Why was I so pushy?” she’d demanded of herself again and again, when her standard answer—
I’m a pushy person—
brought her no comfort. Greg hadn’t wanted to consider her questions. In the gray of dawn, she realized that she didn’t, either.

And then he called. Was it because of the question or the kiss? It didn’t matter, she told herself then. She could deal with neither. As a teenager, a kiss from Greg Gaige had been the stuff of Olympian dreams. Now it meant seeing beneath the laurel wreath, destroying her most cherished childhood memories. And that she couldn’t bring herself to do, even for Greg Gaige.

Now, eleven years later, she felt a tear wet her cheek. Could the man who had sat on the stool in the white light and wrapped himself in his smile have walked into the fire gag as if he were walking into the sea? By asking him her question, had she picked at a sore that would grow until it killed him?

The night fog off the Pacific dragged across her back and shoulders like rough raw silk, icing the sweat she hadn’t realized was there. She dug the heels of her hands into her eyes. There was no turning back; the questions were too much a part of her. With Lark, she had to find out who had snatched away her future. But with Greg Gaige, she had to know
why
he had died.

S
HE PULLED INTO HER
driveway at twelve thirty. Tchernak was already in his kitchen—a kitchen worthy of Sharper Image’s front window, or so Kiernan called it, with every culinary novelty known to electrical outlet. She watched as he whipped the egg and milk for an omelet. The sun-dried tomatoes were already soaking in olive oil Tchernak got from a restaurant shipment flown in from Salerno. His nova of choice came via a connection in Seattle. Only the orange, whose peel he had grated, was local—and organic. “Garlic on a movie set? They have love scenes, they don’t have garlic,” Tchernak declared.

“Tchernak, I smelled garlic on the set, and in whatever the studio exec was eating at the rushes.”

“Couldn’t be real. Must be fake. Faux garlic, that’s great. Find out how they make it!”

“Tchernak, this a murder investigation, not a recipe swap. I need to think about the morgue, not the kitchen. I need to see a body, tonight.”

Tchernak handed her a plate.

“You’re not eating?” she asked, walking back into her own half of the duplex.

“Carb day.” Tchernak followed.

Ignoring the intricacies of his training regimen, she sat at her trompe l’oeil table, put her plate atop its painted likeness, and dug into the omelet. Ezra scarfed down his tithe of the food, then trotted over to Tchernak and plopped canine head on human knee. “He’s giving you a chance to make up for moments you haven’t been thinking of him,” Kiernan said.

Tchernak stared in the dog’s eyes, shaggy head to shaggy head. “You know you’re always first in my heart,” he said, scratching the hound behind both ears. To Kiernan he said, “So what is this crisis that draws a humble servant out of his bed at an hour for which he should be paid time and a half?”

“You heard about the stunt woman who died at Gliderport today?”

He nodded. “The one you went to see? I figured that’s why you were so late. You investigating that?” Tchernak’s brown eyes lit up. “Who’s your client? What do you figure happened? What do you need me to do? Let me think who I know with the Parks Department?”

“No need, humble servant. It’s the morgue where I need a connection.”

“What do you need from there?”

“Entry. Tonight.”

“That shouldn’t be any problem for you. Surely you know someone there from when you were a forensic pathologist.”

“Not well enough to call them at one in the morning and convince them to trot down to the morgue and twiddle their thumbs while I go over one of their corpses with a magnifying glass.”

“Ah, to be a pathologist, formidable enough to be allowed to sleep,” he said, glancing down at his own bathrobe. “Perhaps, Kiernan, they’d be more amenable in daylight hours.”

“By then, Tchernak, they’ll be dissecting Lark Sondervoil’s body. I need to see it before they’ve cut it open.”

“So delicately put. I’m just sorry I didn’t have cold chicken, so you could be gnawing on a leg while you’re talking.”

She grinned. It hadn’t occurred to her when she hired a former offensive lineman with a record of more surgeries than quarterback sacks that he would be queasy about autopsies. “To get in legitimately, I’d have to be under the umbrella of Lark’s lawyer or next of kin, whoever that might be. By the time I track down either of them and convince them to hire me, the body will be in the ground. What I’m looking for is the minute indentation that a slender needle leaves, and I’ll be searching in spots where the skin isn’t smooth. As you know,” she said, aware that she was moving into the area of more-than-he’d-wanted-to-know, “even in the freezer a corpse deteriorates, and we’re talking about a body that was battered as it fell and then lay under the hot sun for some time. It wouldn’t have been in too good a condition when it got to the morgue. If I have to go through channels and time passes, there won’t be anything left worth looking at. So, Tchernak, I need to get in there tonight.”

Tchernak leaned back against the green sofa cushions.

“I’m not about to endanger my license… No professional suicide.”

Tchernak ran his fingers down Ezra’s back.

“There’s no decent ruse I can use there at this time of night.”

“Nope. No decent ruse
you
can use.”

Kiernan stopped, her laden fork midway between plate and mouth. “What does that mean?”

“We all have our resources. Or right about now”—he grinned—”all but you.”

“By which you mean you
do
have a resource?”

He sprawled back on the couch, stretched his arms, and clasped his hands behind his head. “I might.”

“Tchernak! Who?”

“The morgue attendants.”

“You know the morgue attendants? All of them?”

“Well, maybe not the new ones.” He patted his knee, an invitation to Ezra. The big hound stretched his neck forward. Tchernak watched until the wiry head was on his thigh. “I could contact the senior guys.”

“Because?” she prodded.

Tchernak grinned. “Well, Kiernan, you were a forensic pathologist; you were busy rushing into the autopsy room, cutting up one corpse, and rushing on to the next. You had the exciting job. But time hangs heavy for the poor morgue attendant. The morgue attendant is a contemplative man.”

The light was beginning to dawn. Kiernan smiled. “And what he contemplates is football?”

Tchernak nodded. “You maybe recall five years ago, we had a defense known as The Morgue. The morgue for quarterbacks. They dissected the quarterback. The morgue attendants loved that. They sent us a body bag. The team got them a block of seats for the games. During one game every time we sacked the quarterback, the morgue held up a body bag. They loved it.”

“Why’d they stop coming?”

“Defense stopped getting sacks. And the city fathers,” Tchernak said with a raise of the eyebrows, “felt the body bag was insensitive. But the thing is, Kiernan, we had those guys to a team party. They loved being part of the ‘team’—well, there’s nothing like it.” He gave his head a quick jerk as if to shake off the memory. “They joked about owing us—offense and defense—offering us the best spots in the fridge, moving us to number one on the autopsy schedule. Getting a friend in for a free gaggle at one of their corpses will be a snap. Whoever’s on duty, it’ll make his night.” Tchernak pushed himself up. “Of course, nothing is without cost.”