High Fall (28 page)

“Usually?”

“Right. Greg didn’t use it. He had it there; he just didn’t use it.”

“Why not?” she demanded.

“Who knows? Arrogance? Whimsy?” He seemed to discount the reasons as he offered them. “Oxygen bottles are awkward; they make it harder for you to move. He should have made it out in plenty of time. Look, we had an emergency crew, not a fire crew, but still—the gag wasn’t supposed to run more than twenty seconds. The suit held enough air for a couple of minutes—ample time to cover suiting him up, the gag, and getting him out. The emergency guys could have sprayed him down and slit the suit in plenty of time.”

“But?”

“He just never came out of the building. The fire got hotter and hotter. It was like he was dazed.”

“Or drugged? Like Lark?”

“Exactly. Too much of a coincidence. That’s why I hired you.”

“But Yarrow, why didn’t you tell me the firemen in town had the wrong call time?”

“What?”

“You didn’t know?”

“No.”

Maybe.
She was past the point of believing Yarrow on anything. “What did the autopsy say?”

“There was no autopsy.”

“What?” she said amazed. “I can’t believe that. Here in California? Even in a rural area that doesn’t have a pathologist on staff—”

“It had nothing to do with the place. Greg had some kind of religious thing about autopsies. He’d signed some form refusing to be cut up.”

Greg Gaige with a religious objection to autopsies? Frantically she tried to recall any hint she’d heard in Baltimore, anything he’d said in San Francisco. But she had to admit, it was a topic not likely to arise either in the gym or at dinner. “Oh, shit! California government code 27491.43,” Kiernan said, recalling her frustration when she’d come up against it in the medical examiner’s office. “The deceased has signed an affidavit indicating he does not want to be autopsied because of a religious belief. It’s not like applying for conscientious objector status where you have to convince the court of the validity of your belief. Here the deceased just has to have stated he has one. And the only circumstance under which the court can order an autopsy is if there is suspicion of homicide or contagious disease. I take it there was no suspicion at the time?”

“Wouldn’t have made much difference. The fire got so hot it split the suit, and by the time they got to him, there was nothing left but a skeleton that looked like it had been on a barbecue spit.”

She stood up, willing the vision to dissipate. After a moment she said, “Yarrow, where is Greg buried?”

“In a little cemetery out by the set. Last thing the studio wanted was a big Hollywood funeral. They wanted it quick, cheap, and over,” he said with such undisguised bitterness that she believed him.

“And the location set—where was that?”

Yarrow stood and shoved the chair under the table. “East of here, in the mountains.”

“Can you be more specific?”

He shrugged. “It’s been years. I can picture it, outside a little town. But ten years in San Diego County”—he shrugged—”ten years ago half of San Diego didn’t exist.”

“What was the town like then? You must remember something about it.”

“No. Well, wait. It was a military place.”

“A base?”

“No, I never saw that. But the town had a military feel.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I don’t know. The only place I ever stopped was the cemetery. Look, that’s the best I can do.”

Maybe so. But Dolly Uberhazy had been the line producer on that set. She could do better.

F
ROM THE
J
EEP,
K
IERNAN
called Dolly Uberhazy.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Uberhazy’s in a meeting,” an uninterested voice said.

“Tell her it’s”—she discarded
important
—”vital. I need to talk to her now.”

“I’ll give Ms. Uberhazy the message.”

Half an hour later, when Kiernan came to her own street, the phone hadn’t rung. She wasn’t surprised. She kept going, heading north through the still sleepy morning of La Jolla, past Wipeout Beach and the more benign Children’s Pool behind the breakwater wall, and her favorite tourist attraction, Sunny Jim Cave, which was more than a hundred wooden steps beneath the middle of the La Jolla Shell Shop. She drove north along Torrey Pines Boulevard, past dazzlingly white stucco walls overhung with vermilion bougainvillaea. In the unshaded sun the red and yellow hibiscus seemed to glow, the fronds of fan palms preened, and the orange and blue birds of paradise looked ready to take wing. And the short, wind-twisted Torrey pines, which grew nowhere else in the world, seemed gleeful about their choice of home.

She turned left into Gliderport. Had it been only two days since she’d been here watching Lark Sondervoil die? Summit-Arts should be doing clean-up shots today, but from the look of the parking lot, they might have advertised another spectacular killing. “Like a necrophiliac’s convention,” she muttered, driving between cars till she found a spot large enough for the Jeep. Spectators in shorts and cycle shirts milled around the edge of the set, staring at the cordon line, peering at the banks of lights, snapping photos of the giant crane that still sat at the edge of the bluff.

The set itself was calm. Under the awning by the catering truck wagon, twenty-five or so people—some Kiernan recognized as production assistants—were drinking Calistoga waters and eating salads, burgers, polenta sticks. The place smelled of chili and garlic.

She’d planned to beard Bleeker about Greg’s stunt time and the fire department crew who hadn’t arrived in time, but Bleeker was in no condition to answer. Leaning an elbow on the catering truck counter, Cary Bleeker looked in danger of crumbling slowly to the ground. He was wearing the same black ensemble, more wrinkled and farther from clean than the night before. His fringe of dark hair was stringier, and even his skin seemed to have lost its connection to his face, so that it hung like a too-big mask bought in desperation for Halloween. If he’d been up all night, drinking till morning, she wouldn’t have been surprised. When he spotted her, he groaned. “Ms. O’Shaughnessy, you, too? Everyone else has been here today. Every reporter in San Diego and a bunch from L.A. have been tailing me. Did you see the trades this morning?”

She shook her head.

“I knew they’d dredge up the ‘bad luck’ business. I just never figured they’d find it so soon. I’d better stock up on this food while it’s free—I’ll be on unemployment for the rest of my life.” He turned and watched the gray-haired cook flip a hamburger. Out of the corner of his eye, the cook glanced at Bleeker and then at her.

“Which are the garlic polenta things Dolly Uberhazy loves? I’ve got a friend who would kill for the recipe.”

She expected the cook to answer, but he concentrated on burger and roll with the attention Tchernak might have given his cilantro, Italian fontina, and expensive-mushroom soufflé. It was Bleeker who said, “Here, the garlic polenta sticks with herbs, so you don’t smell like a garlic-mouth. Sounds like nothing special, but if it’s your thing, you’ll never forget them. Would that Dolly had, that she’d never heard of this set, that she’d never thought of me.”

Ignoring his whine, Kiernan took a bite of the polenta stick. It was wonderful. “The recipe would really make my friend’s day,” she said to the cook.

“Leave me your card,” he said as he added lettuce and tomato to the burger. He pocketed her proffered card, passed Bleeker his burger, and walked out the back door.

“I wouldn’t count on making that recipe for dinner,” Bleeker said. He picked up his burger, and she followed him to a table away from the others.

“Have you found anything about Lark’s death?” he asked, in the tone he might have used for
Is it really cancer?

“I know that Greg Gaige was real uncomfortable with Dratz. How come?”

Bleeker shrugged noncommittally and took a bite. “If all you’ve come up with was that someone didn’t like Dratz, your job prospects aren’t any better than mine.”

“What about Dolly and Liam McCafferty? Do you remember them as a pair?”

He shook his head, then said, “Could have been, though. An affair with any two people on any set could have been. How could I remember? I’ll bet even Dolly couldn’t. Affairs, they’re like Fourth of July sparklers—you can’t take your eyes off them, and then poof, they’re nothing more than black sticks.” He took a drink of his coffee. “Like my career.”

“I need to see the location set from
Bad Companions.
Here, I’ve got a map. How do I get there?” she said briskly.

But Bleeker was not spurred. “Map’s not going to be any help to me.”

“Think!”

“Okay, but it’s been so long.” He rubbed the side of his chin. “We started on that road through Balboa Park and then skirted southeast for an hour or so. Maybe two. The set was a few miles outside a small town. Christ, what was the name of that place? I can’t remember.”

“It was a military place, right?”

“No.”

“You sure?” Military was the one thing Yarrow
had
remembered about it.

“Yeah. If there’d been a base nearby, there would have been stores in the town. But there was nothing there; the only thing worth buying in the town was gas to get back to San Diego.” He took another bite of his burger. Finally he said, “Let me call Dolly. She was the line producer; she’d remember.” He walked a yard away, unfolded his phone, and dialed.

For him, Kiernan noted irritably, Uberhazy. wasn’t in a meeting. She had to keep herself from demanding the phone, confronting Uberhazy, and getting her answer directly. Or
not
getting it. Better to see what Bleeker came up with.

He was back in two minutes.

“You got her?” Kiernan asked.

“Yeah. But she doesn’t remember the location site.”

“Doesn’t she have records?”

He fingered the rest of the burger. “Not that she could get to. Records that old could be anywhere.”

“She must have remembered something.”

“No,” he said to the burger.

Damn! She
should
have grabbed Uberhazy when she had the chance. Damn! “Okay, so you took the Cabrillo Freeway through Balboa Park. Did you go through Dulzura?”

“I don’t remember.”

“What about—”

“I said I don’t remember. Leave me alone.”

She grabbed his arm. “You remembered five minutes ago. What did Dolly say to black out your memory?”

He shook off her grasp.

“Cary, what’s she afraid I’ll find out there? Think. There’s plenty of guilt to go around. If she can escape her part, she’s going to leave all the more for you.”

He tossed the rest of the burger in the trash. “There’s nothing she can do to me. I’m finished in this business.” He glared at Kiernan. “There’s nothing anyone can do anymore.”

“Damn, damn, damn,” Kiernan muttered as she strode back to the Jeep. What, specifically, was Dolly hiding?

She climbed into the Jeep. She’d have to have Tchernak track down a videotape of
Bad Companions.
But that could take weeks. She didn’t have that kind of time. She had to see the location where it was filmed. And now the only two remaining people who’d been there were Jason Pedora—whose memory might include anything true or false—and Liam McCafferty, who wasn’t likely to tell her.

At two in the afternoon, Kiernan paced from the shale slab fireplace to the glass brick interior wall of her former-kitchen-now-office. “I know the law is the law, Tchernak, but it is insane to have a professional stunt man die in a gag and not even check out his body for drugs. Pedora’s a loony, but even so, when you’ve got suspicion of drug-running on the set and then a death that screams ‘Drugged!’ and no one bothers with an autopsy … even if Greg was burned as badly as Yarrow says, there could still have been clues.”

Tchernak looped his aviator’s jacket over a hook hidden beneath a frond of the pygmy palm tree next to the door. “Listen, I got ahold—”

“The body doesn’t burn at the same rate all over, not in a situation like that, when he’s in a fire suit. There could have been organs intact, plenty of tissue to check for cocaine. How could they—”

“Listen to what Joyce Hogarth told me. Joyce—”

“Now the body’s been buried ten years, probably in the cheapest of pine boxes. By now, there really would be nothing left but bones. Not that it matters if I can’t even find the location set, much less the body.”

“Joyce’s sister, the extra, knew Carlton Dratz, all right. She—”

“I’ve got to get a look at that location, Tchernak. I’ve been calling McCafferty all afternoon, and all I get is his machine. I’ll bet he’s sitting right next to it, grinning self-righteously, dreaming of a meteoric rise to the exalted spot of state treasurer itself. I’m going to drive right up there—”

“She had an affair with Dratz. She—”

“Even if I could find the body, I couldn’t get it exhumed. The only way they’d exhume is for suspicion of murder or contagion. Damn. He’s hardly going to be contagious after a decade. Even if he was positive for plague ten years ago, it won’t matter now. No, I need to see if there’s anything buried on that location out there in the country that no one seems to remember.”

“Not no one.”

She stopped midpace and stared at Tchernak. “What do you mean?”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. So if you’ll listen …” He plopped himself onto the big yellow-sunflower couch and patted the other cushion in invitation.

Kiernan sat and crossed her legs under her. “So?”

“Probably no other operative in San Diego County could have gotten past Joyce Hogarth’s door. But—”

“Don’t tell me Joyce Hogarth was a Chargers fan?”

“Nope. Wouldn’t know the side of the football from the end. I borrowed a red ’fifty-six Corvette from a buddy.”

Kiernan slapped her hands together. “Give that man another bonus! A red Corvette like Carlton Dratz’s! Did Joyce Hogarth make the connection?”

“At first she just stared, But that baby’s a crowd-pleaser, so I wasn’t sure if she was just ogling. I didn’t want to lead the witness, right? So I let her circle it, pat the fenders, finger the steering wheel, all the time me saying nothing leading, like I’m just the proud parent, until she said her sister’s boyfriend used to have one.”