by Susan Dunlap
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 doc
tors 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.
“Not really. My stuffs still there, but I needed to get away. The guy I live with says I’m too hard to get along with, can you imagine that?” she demanded, keeping eye contact and a straight face. She could almost hear the laughs they’d have when they got back in the patrol car. “So I’m here for a while.”
Wycotte couldn’t resist the smallest of snorts before saying, “You’re certain you don’t wish to pursue the burglary complaint.”
“Certain. But thanks for coming.”
He turned toward the door. But Melchior didn’t move. His forehead was creased, his finger tapping against his equipment belt. “You said your boss obtained this apartment for you. Do you have some verification of that?”
Damn! Now she was moving onto thin ice. “To show that I’m not some vagrant in for the night?” she laughed, and pulled the lease from the scrapbook.
He glanced over it. “Dolly Uberhazy, you work for her?”
Kiernan nodded.
“In what capacity?”
Crystal-thin ice. She could take slow soft steps and hope to ease herself to the other side, or she could try it in one leap. If she miscalculated, she’d land in water up to the lump on her head. She leaped. “Background investigation on Lark Sondervoil. I’m an investigator.”
His face hardened. Behind him Wycotte stiffened. The air in the room felt prickly. Their stances, their expressions said: You played us; you don’t get away with that.
“Driver’s license?”
She pulled it out of her wallet. “Look, if you have questions, call Dolly. She’ll be at home in L.A.”
“You have her number?”
“No. The studio would, of course. But you’re police, you can get it. Call her. I can’t spend the whole night on this.”
Now it was Melchior who hesitated. Wycotte moved by the door as if to say to his partner, “You brought this up, you handle it.”
Kiernan waited a beat, then offered, “Or I can have her call you in the morning.” When he didn’t reply, she chose between options—silence or sweeten the offer—and said, “She was here for this evening, so she’ll have gotten back to L.A. late.” How could the cop not go for the option of avoiding another cranky career woman in the middle of the night?
But, as if reading her, a knowing smile wafted across Melchior’s lips and disappeared. “I’m sure she’ll appreciate our protecting her property. I’ll give Ms. Uberhazy a call to confirm”—his tone reversing the meaning of the verb)—“her arrangement with our Ms. O’Shaughnessy here.”
CHAPTER 14
DOLLY UBERHAZY SMACKED ON the bedside light and reached for the phone. She’d had to drop everything and drive to San Diego to see the stunt they’d paid a bundle for. And then there’d been that awful accident, and then those ghoulish dailies. No lunch, no dinner, other than those wonderful polenta-garlic rolls (the one good thing in the whole day), and she’d spent half the night trying to keep Bleeker and everyone on the location set from falling apart—and doing it in front of the police and the press. Then it had taken another three hours to drive home, what with the tie-up on the Santa Monica Freeway. She never should have taken the coast road. But she’d had plenty of time to think about that while she sat a mile from the Malibu turnoff, a foot behind an organic vegetable truck filled with cartons of greens and a shitload of, well, shit. Stunk like a fifty-million-dollar box-office flop. Like Edge of Disaster could smell, if she didn’t keep control of things. In the next lane was a carload of kids blasting their music so loud it felt like another earthquake. She could barely hear Bleeker whining over the cellular phone. Christ, it was bad enough to have the Sondervoil girl dead, without Cary Bleeker sniveling about keeping a low profile with the press—as if the press were going to give them a choice. As if she would leave to Bleeker a decision that could destroy the picture. He should have known that, as long as he’d been in the business. Too soon for a wave of publicity, he’d whined. By the time Edge opened, the public would be sick of hearing about it. Maybe so, maybe not. She glared at the phone. God, she hoped this wasn’t Bleeker again, not at three thirty in the morning. No, whatever Bl
eeker’s failings, the man wasn’t that stupid.
On the fourth ring she picked up the receiver. Whoever was calling had better have a damned good reason, but she’d learned long ago not to snap before she knew what she’d find between her teeth. Her tone was neutral as she said, “Yes?”
“This is Officer Melchior, San Diego Police Department. I’m sorry to have to wake you. Are you Ms. Dolly Uberhazy?”
“Yes?”
“Are you familiar with a Kiernan O’Shaughnessy?”
Who? … Don’t wake me up in the middle of the night to play guessing games! she wanted to shout. “Why do you assume I am, officer?”
“She says you hired her.”
“She told you I hired her?” she repeated, tacitly demanding more information. In a business with egos bursting into bloom at every turn, she had made her way to senior vice-president by listening to the rants, forcing the ranters to explain more and more, a helluva lot more than they wanted to—and never exposing herself. She gave a little grin of amusement. For a woman in Hollywood, never exposing oneself was quite an accomplishment. But then to the boys in charge, there were men and there were women, and someplace in the murky area between, there were women studio executives.
“Ms. O’Shaughnessy is a private detective down here. She told us you hired her to do background on Lark Sondervoil, the stunt woman who went off the cliff, right?”
“Go on.”
“Ms. O’Shaughnessy told us you rented her an apartment.”
“Why did she tell you that, officer?”
“We got a call that a unit in the Salem Harbour Studios had been burgled. And when we got there, we found her in it. You rented that, is that right?”
“Officer, I am an executive with one of the busiest movie studios in L.A. I deal in a ton of paperwork. I can’t possibly remember what specific units I rent out of town or for whom. Perhaps if you describe this woman,” she said, buying time. If it had been any apartment but Lark Sondervoil’s, she’d have been off the phone and back to sleep by now. But she couldn’t afford to be sloppy about anything to do with Sondervoil. Sloppy was what she’d been when she’d agreed to have Sondervoil in the film at all. Or greedy. Or just plain stupid.
