High Fall (15 page)

The room seemed to have as little to hide as did Lark’s body. An illusion? Kiernan made another sweep with the light. Nothing on the floor, not even a phone book. She pushed herself up and braced against the wall till her light-headedness cleared, then walked unsteadily across to the closet. It was small—the average San Diegan who’d rent a studio in this loud and unprivate complex wouldn’t need space for more than a string bikini and a surfboard. Lark had three sundresses, a black scoop-necked all-purpose dress, half a dozen shirts and T-shirts (ironed and on hangers), and a variety of shorts hanging from clips on a ladder hanger. On the floor shoes were paired and aligned in two rows.

Lark’s mother would be proud, Kiernan thought sardonically, closing the door. Her mother would be escorted into a Heavenly viewing room, seated amongst her friends. From there they would all look down on Lark’s closet, and Mrs. Sondervoil would delight in saying, “Such a good girl, my Lark. I knew she’d have her closet tidy.” The late Mrs. Sondervoil’s late friends would murmur in approval and envy.

There was quite a different viewing room for mothers of women like herself, Kiernan suspected. With a start, she realized her mind was wandering; the blow to her head was taking its toll. Concentrating hard on the job at hand, she walked to the kitchenette and checked the refrigerator—hiding place of choice in recent years. But it held neither secrets nor food. Bottles of Calistoga water and trays of ice cubes were its entire payload. The cabinets and drawers echoed the transitory and indifferent quality of dwelling here: a set of cheap stainless, plastic plates from microwave dinners, two plastic glasses, and two mugs from Starbuck’s coffee, easily the nicest thing in the kitchen. Above the stove was a bag of loose tea.
PERUVIAN COCA TEA,
the label said! Another entry in the positive drug-findings sweepstakes. She poured an ounce into a plastic bag and pocketed it.

Beneath the counter, drawer after drawer was empty until she came to the row nearest the living room: One held phone books, another a scrapbook. Quickly she checked the phone books for turned-down pages or numbers noted in the front, but Lark had not personalized it.

Taking the scrapbook back into the living room, she smiled. In Hollywood a scrapbook must be as normal an accoutrement as a cellular phone. But in this utilitarian, impersonal room, it seemed almost whimsical. Had Lark Sondervoil lain here night after night listening to the salsa music, the roars of accelerating engines in the street, and the squeal of brakes and read clips about her own triumphs to lull her to sleep? Or perhaps she had savored the bursts of noise, assured that once she finished this picture and wowed the world with the Gaige Move, she would never have to stay in a place like this again.

Kiernan was shivering. From shock, physical shock, no doubt. But she didn’t have time to deal with that now. She moved over to the futon, slipped her legs under the cover, and opened the scrapbook. A wad of letters fell to the floor.

Again she smiled. So this was where her predecessor had looked. The Lark Sondervoil who lined up her sandals and slippers wouldn’t have
jammed
her correspondence into the only book she owned. These letters could be the ones her assailant had rejected, but their being jammed in here could also mean she had disturbed him before he’d had time to read them. Wouldn’t he have taken them with him? Not if he’d found the thing he needed. But a mention of Greg Gaige, a telling comment on
Bad Companions
—that could be in the middle of a letter he’d missed.

She closed the scrapbook and used the slick, hard cover to smooth out the envelopes and the papers inside. Damn, no letters at all! They were documents concerning the apartment. She squinted, trying to make out the fuzzy print. Dammit, did she have a concussion? She squinted harder and looked quickly at the documents before the words blended together. The pages were the lease, running for six weeks, signed by Dolly Uberhazy. Dolly—where had she heard that name? Ah, yes, the woman from the Hollywood studio who had strolled into the film rushes eating the concoction with the garlic or faux garlic that so intrigued Tchernak. The bottom pages were contracts for the phone and utilities.

She put the documents aside and paused a moment before opening the scrapbook. This was what she loved about housebreaking. A scrapbook; better than a dozen desk drawers, more intimate than a hundred closets. “The most important things in my life,” a scrapbook might be labeled. “The things that make up my image of me.”
The
book that the Righteous Dead in heaven bring to the special room to show their friends over and over, eternally. And in heaven their friends have to murmur in appreciation, if not envy. (Envy? Would that be allowed, even in her unorthodox heaven? But without the possibility of evoking it, what was the purpose of displaying a scrap-book?)

Pay attention! Stop drifting!

This scrapbook, the only personal item Lark Sondervoil had brought with her—or the only one the assailant had left in the apartment, Kiernan thought with a shot of regret—this would provide an exquisite view into Lark Sondervoil’s soul. She opened to the first page, and smiled.

The yellowed newspaper article was not a picture of a younger Lark winning a competition or signing a Hollywood contract, or a narrative piece on her experiences as a new stunt woman. No, this article was not on Lark at all but about Greg Gaige! Any clandestine knowledge Lark had about him, surely it would be filed away here. Quickly, Kiernan turned the scrapbook pages, but only the first two had been used, and three newspaper clippings were taped on.

On the first page a brittle and yellowed picture of a man suspended horizontal eight feet in the air, his body half twisted toward the camera, accompanied a column headlined
GAIGE MOVE STUNS STUNT WORLD.
The still photo failed to capture the vivacity of the Move. It was the height of the lift, the tight spiral of the twist, the explosive force when he landed and punched back up into the flip that made the Move so spectacular. It was the way he held his body ramrod straight, or alternately flailed his arms and legs to make the sequence look as if he’d been tossed out of control when the script called for that… She remembered it so well. She and the other teenage gymnastic hopefuls had seen that movie over and over. When he’d done it on the set that night in San Francisco, it took her breath away. But even here, with the Move frozen in yellowed newsprint, it was clear that the young Greg Gaige had been something special. In the midst of the flip and twist, Greg Gaige was smiling!

That photo—the same publicity shot that had been on the gym wall—had been the icon of her childhood hope. It had been at the far side of the vault horse, the first thing she’d seen when she looked up from her dismount, the first look of approval, the shared smile from the joy of it all. No words, no qualifiers, just the illusion of approval from the best of the best. In the ever bleaker days after her sister’s death, when her parents themselves faded back from life, the image of Greg and memory of him saying “Good feel for it.
You
are a gymnast,” had been her comfort.

Champion gymnasts whipped on smiles the instant their feet finally struck the mat and their arms shot over their heads, but when they were performing the flip or vault, they were as concentrated as heart surgeons. What an athlete Greg Gaige had been to perform the Move with such aplomb, with such joy. How could he have …

Kiernan turned the scrapbook page,
NEVER OVER THE HILL, SAYS 45-YEAR-OLD STUNTMAN
said the headline on the left. Kiernan nodded. What would constitute “over the hill” for a man who could smile in the middle of the Move? She checked the date: ten years ago to the month.

Less than a year after she’d been with him in San Francisco. After she’d ignored his telephone call. No,
ignored
was the wrong word—she hadn’t forgotten Greg. Every day after, twelve times a day, she’d started for the phone. But something for which she couldn’t find words had stopped her. And after the movie company had left San Francisco, she’d called the stunt doubles’ association in L.A.—and hung up without leaving a message. She never talked to him again, but the yearning never left her. It wasn’t the raw impatience of love or lust, when her insides twanged like guitar strings and her skin was eager to the touch. This had been different, an aching emptiness from her throat to her gut, a grieving for the loss of her icon, a fury at Greg’s unknowing betrayal of his image. She’d been desperate to find some angle from which to view him, some way to find the answers she had always assumed he possessed.

The last article, dated a week later, was only two paragraphs:
STUNTMAN DIES IN MOVIE SET FIRE
. A wave of cold passed through her. She wanted to turn back the page and ask, “Greg, what is it like to be the best of the best?”

And: “How can you lose the thing that was life for you?” “How can you face being Greg Gaige without the Move?”

Or maybe you couldn’t.

Kiernan shivered. God, she didn’t want to believe that—not for Greg ... or for Tchernak … or for herself.

She squinted hard and looked down at the article, datelined Hollywood: “Stuntman Greg Gaige, 45, was killed in a fire east of El Centro on the location set of the film
Bad Companions,
said the film’s producer Dolly Uberhazy.”

Dolly Uberhazy, again.

She peered closer at the yellowed page. Next to the article, in pencil, someone—Lark?—had written:
No Boukunas, not Greg!

Boukunas?

The door burst open, the lights came on. “Freeze!”

Kiernan yanked the blanket up to her shoulders and looked up into the barrels of two automatics, with two uniformed policemen holding them.

Fear flashed in her stomach and was gone. No time for that. She glared at the nearest cop. “What the hell are you doing bursting in here?”

“We got a report of a break-in—”

“It took you long enough to get here. He’s been gone half an hour. He could be in L.A. by now. Look at my head—I’ll tell you about the burglar. He was hiding in here when I got home. Knocked me cold. I’m going to have a lump on my head the size of El Centro. Hurts like hell,” she added.

“Have you had medical attention?” asked the shorter cop, a barrel-chested dark-haired guy with a bristly mustache. Melchior, his name tag read.

“Not hardly; I was waiting for you. If I’d gone to emergency, I’d still be there. The doctors there are busy with gunshot wounds and jump-starting dead hearts; by the time they got to my bump on the head, the sun would be up. In the meantime you’d be pounding at my door figuring some flake called you out to a false alarm.”

“Lady, you could have a concussion, a cracked skull.”

“So what are doctors going to do about that? Put my head in a cast?” Keep them on the defensive; don’t give them time to think. “And while I waited there in emergency, I’d be picking up every germ in San Diego County. No thanks.” She sighed and slumped back into the pillow. “Look, I’m a realist. What are the chances you’re going to track down this burglar who hit me over the head before I got a look at him?”

“Did you see your assailant, Ms.—?”

“O’Shaughnessy. No. He came up behind me, knocked me out cold, and was gone before I came to.”

“Well, you’re not giving us much to go on,” the dark cop said. Gun still drawn, he took a step forward.

“Another case of violence pays.”
No baiting! No speeding! No fenestration!
She sighed, again. “Well, let’s just forget it. Save you some paperwork, and let me sleep off my throbbing head. There’s not a thing I can tell you anyway.”

The policemen shared a glance. Melchior, the dark-haired one, wanted to leave; he could see the logic in her offer. The blond—Wycotte, his name tag said—still clasped his gun. He, too, would have left happy—
if
she’d let him think it was his decision. But she couldn’t have brought herself to do that, could she? She’d
baited.

The blond holstered his gun, but the movement was hardly conciliatory. Rather, it was a statement that the weapon was extra, his presence all the power he needed. “Lady, would you show us some identification.” It was not a question. And definitely a request she did not want to deal with. “And then,” he went on, “you can explain why, if you live here, you’re sitting in the dark holding a flashlight.”

She swallowed the urge to snap back at him.
Think jail,
she told herself. She raised her right knee to pull up the blanket, and catching the corner of the blanket between her shoulder and the wall, she slipped her hand underneath, as if to get it warm. “Like I told you, I need to get some sleep. I was just about to shut my eyes when you burst in here. My boss rented this apartment for me. It wouldn’t have been my choice. No furniture, and if you look around, you’ll see there’s not one lamp.” They couldn’t resist a visual survey of the room, she was relieved to note. As soon as their eyes shifted, she moved her under-cover hand to her pocket. “I read myself to sleep. Now what that means is, if I put the overhead light on, I have to strain to read, and more to the point when I’m sleepy enough to doze off, I have to get up and walk across the room to turn off the light, after which I’m not quite sleepy enough anymore, and I’m cold. Reading with a flashlight’s not great, believe me, but it’s better than that.”

Melchior nodded knowingly, but from the expression on Wycotte’s face, moving eyes across paper was not an activity he considered valuable.

“Look,” she said, “if you’re going to be staying here, then pass me a bathrobe.” Maybe that would decide them on leaving. Or at least the robe would cover her clothes. She didn’t want to be in the position of obviously pulling her driver’s license out of her shorts pocket. People may sleep in their clothes, but they usually empty their pockets first.

Neither of them seemed to be leaving. Restraining a sigh of frustration, she said, “The bathrobe is hanging inside the closet door.” They both turned only momentarily, but it was long enough. She slid her wallet out of her pocket and up near the pillow.

Melchior handed her a white terrycloth robe, thick enough to soak up sweat from an Olympic workout. She slipped her arms into it, and when Melchior made his request, she passed him the license from under her pillow. “You’re staying in an empty room in Pacific Beach when you live in La Jolla?” he asked suspiciously.