High Fall (27 page)

“But when he got older, he didn’t move as fast, he’d broken too many bones, maybe he’d lost a step. You scramble and scratch—anything so you can hang on, just a bit longer.”

She settled next to him, watching the waves swell, pause momentarily balanced between before and after, then gush forth into frothy spray that spread like the lace doilies covering the backs of chairs in Rohan Street houses. She let her thigh rest against Tchernak’s.

“You can’t believe it can be over,” Tchernak laughed humorlessly. “Read the sports columns—they say smart athletes plan for the future. Sure. Makes sense. Sounds easy. But look, if you were thinking about broadcasting or writing your memoirs, you wouldn’t throw everything you’ve got into
this play.
You’d never chance it all to take down a guy who’s bigger, taller, smarter, and ten years younger. It wouldn’t matter more than the world that you toss him on his butt so your quarterback can make the play.” He looked over at her. “If it wasn’t all-important, you wouldn’t be great to begin with.

“Your whole life has been focused on playing sports, being in high school games that the entire town comes to see, getting a scholarship. In college you choose your classes so they don’t conflict with practice, because it’s the team that matters. All with the dream of someday playing in the pros. And then, there, football is your whole world. You can do something hardly anyone else can. You’re part of the team. When you’re away from the team, it’s like you don’t completely exist, like someone cut off your foot. But back on the field with all of you working together, eleven against the world—God, there’s nothing like it. You come off the field, and the next day you ache all over, but you can’t wait to get back into uniform.” He let his hands drop. “And then one day, like any other day, you walk in and you’ve been cut. Fired. Dumped. It’s like they’ve cut off your legs.” He swallowed and, still looking toward the ocean, said, “Suddenly you’re nothing. The guys are in there, but you’re outside pressing your nose against the glass. They could see you out there, but they don’t want to, don’t
dare.
And you hobble off, knowing you’ve lost the one thing that makes you feel alive.”

Ezra ambled back, wet, panting, sand coating his whiskers. He sank into the sand and eyed Tchernak until Tchernak stretched out his legs and provided a shelf for the dog’s chin. He scratched the dog’s neck, and Kiernan rubbed behind Ezra’s ears, letting her hand come to rest on Tchernak’s. When Ezra stood, she wove her fingers in with Tchernak’s and walked back home, letting the sound of the ocean cloak them.

There was no comfort she could give him. After she’d been fired from the coroner’s office, she’d spent months with the drapes pulled, and two years in India packing her days too full for thought. And now investigating, and Ezra, and friends, and books and classes … maybe she was running to avoid the shadow Tchernak was staring at. But she couldn’t let herself slow down enough to find out.

As she thought of Greg Gaige and gymnastics, she realized this was the first time she didn’t envy men. Their careers in gymnastics were based on strength, agility, and the use of an adult body. For women, gymnastics ended with puberty, however long that could be postponed. But girls always knew their time was short. They were never given the illusion of forever; they didn’t wait until middle age to realize it had been a lie.

Greg Gaige had never faced that. And yet, for Tchernak, for herself, she wished he had lived to come head to head with it, had pushed, fought, scratched his way through, and shown them how.

K
IERNAN WOKE ON
T
HURSDAY
morning and looked at the bare wall opposite the bed, momentarily surprised to find the poster of Greg Gaige missing. But this wasn’t the Baltimore gym, and it had been in a dream that she’d tried vault after vault—the simplest ones—and landed on her face. In the poster, Greg Gaige—his sandy hair thinned, those startling blue eyes of his faded to gray—shook his head sadly and looked away.

It didn’t take a psychic to figure out the meaning of that dream, she thought as she pushed up and leaned against the chilly windows. Below, the Pacific inhaled and spat against the rocks. She wondered if she’d spent the whole night dreaming of Greg Gaige, guessing what the loss of his life’s focus would have done to him.

Tchernak was on his way to L.A., but the coffee he left for her was hot in the pot, and one of his fresh many-berry corn scones was waiting in the toaster oven for her to push the lever. (Tchernak, who felt she was operating at capacity just to find the toaster oven, had already set the timer for the correct period of reheating.) When it was ready, she took the tray with juice, vitamins, and fruit from the fridge and carried it into her flat. She sat looking out over the ocean, drinking coffee and sharing food with Ezra.

She thought of Greg and of Tchernak facing the ends of careers for which they’d spent their lives working. But what of Dolly Uberhazy? What if she were fired? She’d find other work. But after making movies how could managing a Payless or directing personnel in Paso Robles compare? And Bleeker—would he care any less? He was nearly a pariah in the trade, and still he hung on. The movie business—the glamour, the pressure, the multimillion-dollar gambles, the days of split-second decisions—it was the Indianapolis 500 of job scenes. After that, anything else would be like driving a bus. Or fixing computer glitches, like Trace Yarrow.

Yarrow, who had lost his job to Greg and never worked again. The man with the now-and-again limp. The man who worked for Pacific Breeze Computer.

At ten o’clock in the Ocean Beach section of the city, boys in cutoffs and girls in bikinis balanced body boards and coffee cups as they migrated toward the beach for the local equivalent of nine to five. They passed an apartment building with a wooden facade and geranium-filled window boxes, called Alpine Manor. And a pagoda-roofed building named Samurai Sunset Condos. In Trace Yarrow’s alley, the rear walls of the Manor and Samurai Sunset stood, devoid of decoration, like pastel ends of shoe boxes on a shelf. Inside, the tenants would have to look out the window to tell whether the cube of living space they inhabited was ersatz Swiss or Japanese. But in the alley it was all southern California, with the unfiltered sun bouncing brightly off the lime, apricot, and banana-tone stucco.

The shades of Yarrow’s tiny cottage were still drawn, his windows sealed tight.

Kiernan knocked and moved closer to the door as a Suzuki Jeep sped by, a brace of surfboards strapped atop it, pagodalike.

Yarrow opened the door, rubbing his eyes with his free fist. His dark hair was tousled, and the black and white Happy coat he wore was barely held together by a loose belt. “Kiernan, I didn’t realize detectives made their reports in person.” He put a hand on her arm. “But I like it.”

“It’s not a social call,” she said, pushing past him to one of the kitchen chairs. She had intended to demand an answer about the Pacific Breeze Computer trucks on the
Bad Companions
set, but seeing Yarrow, she changed her mind. She’d been suspicious of him, never sure he hadn’t sold his loyalty to Dolly Uberhazy. Maybe the feeling was right and it was just the source of his commitment that she’d erred on—not Dolly, but Pacific Breeze Computer.

He grinned. “So, let’s do business.”

“That’s exactly what we’ll do. And you can start by telling me why after ten years you decided to hire a detective.”

“Well, Lark—”

“No, not just Lark. Lark’s incidental. The death you want to know about is Greg Gaige’s. Why?”

“I told you—”

“You told me you were scheduled to do the fire gag. Maybe you would have died. Now you think that fire was suspicious?”

“I don’t know. That’s what I hired you to find out. I’m heating water for coffee. You want some?”

“No.” She watched him move to the stove, the sink, and back. “Pour your coffee and give me the truth.”

“Or?”

“Of I’ll find out anyway, but you will never know.”

The procedures for instant-coffee-making seemed to consume Yarrow’s attention. He made each trip slowly, poured each liquid without spilling a drop, stirred, washed, and dried the spoon. He pulled out a chair, sat, tasted the coffee, and said, “Okay.”

“Start with your limp.”

“Small stuff. I broke my leg ten years ago. I’ve got a pin in it. Just like Greg Gaige, a very exclusive club. I’d be limping if I hadn’t done rehab. I still favor the leg if I’m tired, or not thinking about it. But while I was limping big time, I learned the side benefits, like my own social blue curb.” A grin crossed his chipmunk face.

“You’re really a slime, Yarrow. If this is the way you treat people, it’s no wonder you question whether the fire was meant for you. On
Bad Companions,
you must have been the emotional equivalent of Dratz. Who else have you ‘gotten’ with your little acts?”

“No one. I didn’t do that then. I didn’t have to.”

“And what made you
have to?”

He was in the same chair he’d used to balance on two legs Tuesday night. But this morning all four legs were solidly on the floor. Yarrow leaned forward onto the table with his hands cupped around the coffee mug.

“Ten years ago, when
Bad Companions
was filmed,” she prodded, “Greg Gaige snatched your job. And you were pissed, right? Anyone would be.”

“Yeah, but anyone wouldn’t stomp off, drive back to town in a fury, get out of the car, trip up the curb, and break a leg. So there, you’ve got my secret.”

She nodded. To an accountant or a physicist, she would have commented that accidents happen. But Yarrow’d been a stunt man. “Doesn’t look good on your resume, huh?”

“Believe it. If you’re labeled ‘delicate,’ you’re dead.
Delicate
is usually a euphemism for drugs, but if you’re likely to break bones, it adds up to the same thing for them—you don’t show, and it costs them money. Nobody’s going to take a chance on a delicate stunt man. No reason to, when there are plenty of other guys around. And if they heard that I broke my leg because I was so pissed off about the job, well then, I’d be delicate
and
a jerk.”

“So you laid low?”

“Right. I didn’t call anyone in the business. But the damn leg took forever to heal, and by the time I got back in shape, I’d just been gone too long.” He downed the coffee, stood up, and took the cup to the sink.

“What about stunt coordinating?”

“I said I’d been gone too long.” His voice was as bitter as the coffee had smelled.

Kiernan sat back glancing at the tiny studio. Yarrow would have made good money when he did gags, but here he was living on the edge. He’d moved from gags to … this.

There was a piece missing here. Clearly, he wasn’t going to reveal it. Did he expect her investigation to shed light on it? Was it something to do with Greg Gaige’s death? Something to do with Pacific Breeze Computer? “Tell me about the
Bad Companions
set.” She waited until he sat down again, and watching his reaction, she asked, “How were the horses?”

“Fine. Why?” His brow wrinkled in question, but nothing indicated wariness.

“I heard they were uncontrollable.” She wasn’t going to go into Pedora’s paranoid fantasy about the Mexican cocaine.

Yarrow shook his head. “Hardly. There’s a reason why stunt coordinators pay the money they do for trained horses, and it’s not the desire to contribute to the well-being of the animal kingdom.”

“Specifically?”

“They don’t have time to waste with untrained animals. Look, the bottom line is, every day over schedule runs them a fortune. And stunt sets cost a bundle. They’re not going to take the chance of a horse screwing up the gag, running the film over schedule, maybe having to replace the set because part of the gag included getting the set destroyed.”

“Like the fire scene?”

“Exactly. They had to build another house just to shoot the exit.”

Kiernan stared at him, incredulous. “You mean they used the footage in which Greg Gaige actually died? It’s part of the film? People sat in theaters all across America watching Greg Gaige die?”

If Yarrow caught her horror, he certainly didn’t reflect it. His tone was matter of fact as he said, “Oh, yeah. It was touch and go whether they would—but not because Cary Bleeker or anyone above him in Summit-Arts had any ethical qualms. The only reason they hesitated was that the footage was pretty ordinary, not the spectacular gag Cary expected when he thought Greg would race out the door of the burning building and do a flashy flip. Instead, what they had to go with were shots of arms pounding at the windows as the cabin burned. See, the plan was for him to race out the door all covered with fire and then cut. When the director edited the film, he’d splice in a cover shot of the explosion, with dirt and debris flying. So when he comes back to Greg, the house is pretty much destroyed, right?”

Kiernan nodded.

“In fact, the next shot of Greg would be after he got out of the fire suit. Special Effects would set up the fire behind him so it looked like it was still on his skin. He’d cover himself in the fire-resistant gel and then put a couple of dabs of flammable liquid on top to get a partial burn going. He’d have to move fast. If the gel dries, it’s not much use. Then Special Effects would do the bang, spread the dirt, and he’d do the flip with the backdrop of fire behind him, where it wouldn’t get in his face. It’s easy, once you realize you can stop whenever you need to. It’s all a matter of planning.”

Kiernan nodded slowly, noting the transformation in the man. The frustrated man of minutes ago now leaned forward, eyes shining with pride.

“What went wrong? Surely Greg must have checked it out?”

“The timing was way off. I went over and over the film. There’s no way he should have stayed in that burning house so long. The gag wasn’t routined for that long. In full burns like that house, the temperature can get into the thousands of degrees. And covered in a suit like that, your sweat will turn to steam and you can end up with second-degree burns. If you didn’t have the hood on and you breathed the air, the heat would burn your lungs. So usually there’s a bottle of compressed air inside the suit.”