High Fall (25 page)

What?
“You’re going to have to be more specific. Set the scene for me.”

“It was the location site for
Bad Companions,
the place Greg died.”

“Describe it.”

“Out in the desert, way east of here. Not sand desert like the Sahara, but scrub desert.”

“Trees?”

“Short ones, maybe twenty feet. Thin foliage, like Jacaranda but not so pretty. Mostly just dirt and cactus and plants so brown, you couldn’t tell what they’d been. Hilly. A cabin in the middle of a high, wide, flat knoll—like a mighty god had sliced off the real top and left that. Land dropped off behind and to the right.”

“What kind of cabin?”

“Three-room house, weathered wood. Special Effects had treated the wood so it looked old. Sort of like a big outhouse. It was supposed to have been deserted.”

“Was it sitting on bare ground?”

“Yeah. No grass or anything. A couple of trees behind it, like it had been built in the one shady spot. That’s what settlers did out here. I’ve researched that.”

Common sense, she thought, could have saved him that research time. “The land dropped off on two sides. What was in front of the cabin?”

“The cameras. It was always shot from that direction.”

“So the land continued flat to the left?”

“Oh, yeah. All the trailers were parked there.”

“So if you took in the whole scene, was it like the cabin was—comparatively speaking—like an outhouse to the rest of the trailers?”

He typed that idea onto his thighs, paused, typed again. Was he expanding her image, she wondered, or typing over it?

“Yeah. Like an outhouse, set back in the yard behind the courtyard and an aluminum villa and an aluminum garage.”

“What was in the courtyard?”

“The food tables, and the cameras.”

“And what was in the garage? Cars?”

“Personal cars? Oh, no. They didn’t let them park their own cars there. There was a big stink about that. You shoulda heard Carlton Dratz. He’d just gotten a Corvette, and did it piss him off to see that baby covered with dust and dirt. Only he could put his car in the garage. He used to get it washed every time he drove into town, like it never occurred to him that there would still be dirt when he got back to the set.” Again he laughed, and this time Kiernan joined him, using the time to consider what he might know about Dratz.

Dratz and a stash in a garage? She could feel the answer getting closer. But she’d have to ease into questions about him. “So what else was in the garage then?”

He leaned forward conspiratorially and lowered his voice. “The horses.”

“Horses?” she said.
Horses!
An aluminum garage in the desert—it must have been over a hundred degrees in there. Trying to keep the skepticism from her voice, she said, “Why would they keep the horses in the garage?”

He leaned closer yet. “So they could load the wasted ones onto the trucks and unload the fresh ones and no one would see them.”

They couldn’t merely have been mistreating their animals. The SPCA had people on sets to protect animals. “Tell me about that.”

His fingers were poised above his thigh but didn’t move. Nor did he speak.

“Give me the story line,” she said, hoping that was the right jargon.

He shifted back, added a paragraph to his legs, then leaned forward and whispered, “Drugs. See, the set is right by the Mexican border. Border guards can’t be everywhere, right? It’s easy to run these horses across.”

Horse-rustling! I can’t believe it! I might as well be on the porch at Bellevue!
Her thighs tensed; she was ready to stand up and walk out. On the wards in medical school, she had dealt with delusional paranoid patients—it had been the final factor demonstrating she had no bedside manner and underlining the advantages for her of working with the dead. The dead are quiet, and their bodies reveal the truth. The living are loud and deceptive. And the unhinged don’t even realize they’re lying. But her dealings on the wards had taught her that as bizarre and far-spun as delusions might be, woven into them were bits of truth.

She took a breath and forced her throat to relax, and when she spoke, it was calmly. The room was cold and stuffy from being closed. “Why—motivation?”

“Well, see, it’s not just the horses. Horses are a dime a dozen. They’re like toothpicks in a film budget. So nobody would smuggle in horses just for horses, right? It’s what’s
inside
the horses.”

“And that is?”

He leaned farther forward. She was afraid he’d fall off his stool. He whispered so softly, she was almost reading his lips. “Cocaine. The Mexicans sewed the cocaine inside the horses’ skin and smuggled them over the border. And then the trucks came at night and carted them off to the dealers in L.A.”

“And they were replaced by a new batch of horses smuggled from Mexico?”

“Right.”

She hesitated, wondering how far to follow this delusion. A band of Mexican drug smugglers providing an endless supply of identical equines? She wanted to grab Pedora and scream, “Give me the truth!”

But she couldn’t scream, not here, not without the neighbors calling the cops. If Dolly got another middle-of-the-night call about her “tenant,” she might retaliate with an answer different from last time.

Besides, Pedora was too far gone in his own world to know the truth. What bits in Pedora’s tale were real? Horses stuffed like galloping turkeys? No. But horses? There must have been horses. And trucks. “Where did the trucks come from?”

“The drug lords.”

“The drug lords. What did they say on the side: ‘Los Angeles Cocaine Company, home deliveries at any hour of night’?”

“‘Pacific Breeze Computer.’”

“What?” she said, taken aback.

“See, that’s how I knew. I mean, they didn’t need truckloads of computer equipment on the set. Why would computer trucks come in the middle of the night, once a week for three weeks? Doesn’t make sense, does it?”

Bingo!
“No, it doesn’t. But if they came in the middle of the night, they must have done that to avoid being seen, right?”

He nodded, a small smile stretching his lips.

He knows he’s got me, she thought. “So how did you come to spot them?”

“They don’t let anyone on the set at night. They drive the actors back to the motel. That was fine for them. But me, I was sleeping in my car off the road at the bottom of the hill. It’s not real comfortable in a bug. I’d wake up two or three times a night all stiff and have to walk it out. After the time I spotted the ‘computer’ trucks, I started getting up on purpose to watch for them. I
knew
there was something clandestine going on.”

“What made you think it involved the horses?”

“They wouldn’t let me near them. Because the bags that the coke was in leaked, see? The Mexicans didn’t realize the horses would be running up a lather in the hot sun. They figured the horses were like mailing envelopes for their packages. They didn’t pack for action, if you know what I mean.” He didn’t wink, but his eyelid twitched. “The coke got into the horses’ systems, and the horses went wild.”

“Is that what Greg thought, too?”

He shook his head. “Greg didn’t have the mind to spot a conspiracy. He was too caught up in his Move. When I told him about the conspiracy, he looked at me like I was crazy.”

Probably not for the first time.
“Jason, do you have any proof?”

“Sure. It’s in the hole in the road out there.”

It took her a moment to regroup, so sure had she been that Pedora would begin waffling when facts were required. She made a “go on” motion with her hand.

“The dead horses. They buried them in the road behind the cabin. The coke is still in them.”

“They did that during the day?”

“Of course not. They buried them at night, when the trucks came and they were making the switch.”

“And did anyone but you see this entombment?”

He sat up straight, eyes open wide. “You don’t believe me, do you?”

“Did anyone else see it?” she insisted.

“Yeah. Dratz was right there. Ask him.”

“Carlton Dratz?”
Perfect. The conspiracy theory supported
b
y the person no one could find!
“Was he involved in the conspiracy?”

“Oh, yeah, he was running the whole thing. You don’t believe me, I can tell. But it makes perfect sense. See, he was working for his father, Kurt Dratz, head of production at the studio. Look, his father sends him down from L.A. There’s no real reason for him to be on the set. All he’s doing is hanging around bugging people. Usually, Greg was willing to listen to anyone. But Dratz even got on Greg’s nerves.”

“Is there anything besides just his presence that makes you suspicious of him?”
Besides your paranoia?

“Yeah, look, here he is, the son of a studio exec. He’s got a room paid for at the motel. Does he sleep in it? Not on delivery nights. You know where he was then?”

“Where?”

Inn the wooden house on the set!”

“The set house—the one that Greg died in?” Kiernan asked, amazed.

“Yeah.” Pedora nodded slowly, smiling as if Kiernan were a particularly slow student who had finally gotten the point.

“How do you know that?”

“Because,” he said, staring her in the eye, “I looked in the windows one night after I’d woken up the third time in the damned car. It was just an empty structure, but I figured it would be better than sleeping in my car. And it would show them, when they woke up and found me plumb in the middle of the set—sleeping! Hot-shot security!” He leaned forward and grabbed her arms. “You see now why they won’t buy my screenplay. Not just Summit-Arts Studios. None of the studios will touch it. They don’t want the country to know how they finance their movies with smuggled drugs. Truth”—he shook his head—“it means nothing to them.”

Kiernan removed his hands from her arms and leaned back against the edge of the bar. What was worth saving of this tale? What could she believe? Cocaine-stuffed horses? Hardly! Yarrow and Pacific Breeze Computer—more likely. In the morning, Yarrow’d have plenty to explain.

“Just like
them,”
Pedora muttered, his eyes twitching side to side, fingers typing on his thigh. He looked as if he might disintegrate at any moment. “Don’t believe me. I showed them. I showed …”

“Showed who?”

He pressed his lips into a pout. His head shook faster.

She reached out and put her hands over his, pressing his palms onto his thighs, choking off the movement. “Bleeker? You showed him?”

He didn’t reply. But his hands relaxed.

“You orchestrated Bleeker’s ‘bad luck’—the short-circuits that blew out the lights, the lighted paper on top of the flowers, all the ‘bad luck’ that threw his films behind schedule. Very ingenious,” she said.

Pedora nodded, smiling. “Greg ...”

“Would Greg have been proud of you?”

“Of course,” he snapped.

“But Jason, why did all those ‘bad luck’ incidents include fire? Did Bleeker cause the fire Greg died in?”

“He’s responsible. Greg told him he needed a special fire crew. ‘Too expensive,’ Production said. It wasn’t Bleeker’s decision, but Bleeker didn’t complain. Stunt coordinator! He should have been called the death coordinator! They used the regular emergency crew, which didn’t know fires from first aid, and the local fire department. And then—” He pulled his hands free and grabbed her arms again. “And then he couldn’t even give the fire department the right call time. Greg was already dead, and they were still driving to the set.”

Her shoulders hunched forward, her breath caught. For a moment she felt at one with Pedora and his fury and frustration. No special fire crew—that explained how a cabin could burn in the midst of a crowd and a man could die before anyone got him out.

And it explained why Cary Bleeker had taken no aggressive action about the pranks. The man was party to the guilt. And from a practical point of view, he wouldn’t have done anything to resurrect notice of his failure.

She freed her hands and said more softly, “What happened to Carlton Dratz?”

Pedora shifted back away from her, his face more relaxed than she’d seen it. He looked almost normal, as if her acceptance of his story had removed the turmoil outside. “Dratz took off with the extra. He saw me watching him that last night, and he got scared. The extra was finished, so no one cared if they left. No, not true—everyone, everyone was glad.”

“Where did they go?”

“Mexico, of course,” he said lightly. “It was the perfect escape route, all planned out and well traveled. He gassed up his ’Vette and headed south. With the help of his business partners down there, see?” he added. “Look, you’re supposed to be a detective, right? Well, that’s the only reason I’ve told you this. Don’t even think about writing a treatment of it. I’ve got my screenplay registered. You steal this, and I’ll sue you from here to the East Coast. I’m the one who’s suffered. I’m not going to have someone else collect.”

Kiernan slumped forward; suddenly, all the exertions of the day caught up with her.
And for this!
she muttered to herself.
Definitely time to go home and sleep it off.
“It’s all yours, Jason. Write in peace.” She stood up, walked to the door, and opened it.

A policeman stood on the stoop.

“B
AD LUCK?
O
R THE
law of karma?” she asked herself as the patrol officer escorted her into the police station. He had ignored her explanation, kept her waiting half an hour until a backup unit arrived to take charge of Pedora, and he only grudgingly agreed to call Tchernak once he deposited her here.

Her question arose again as she looked around. It might not be ill luck that the station serving Pacific Beach was an old, brown, one-story building at the Eastgate Mall in inland La Jolla, closer to her duplex than to the accident site in Pacific Beach. But walking into the white lobby and coming face to face with Officer Mark Melchior definitely suggested poor karma. Here, behind the scarred wooden counter, that round face with its deceptive halo of dark curly hair looked distinctly less benign than it had in the half-light of Lark Sondervoil’s Pacific Beach apartment. Under the interrogation-bright bulbs, his eyes looked not just dark but piercing, his brow not furrowed with miscellaneous worry but wrinkled in suspicion. And in his pale, round face there was definitely nothing jolly.