by Brad Smith
Virgil broke a pretzel in half and put one piece in his mouth. “So if Ronnie wasn’t your number-one suspect before, he’s moving up the list.”
Claire shrugged. “Maybe the woman died of an overdose. I told you Kari Karson admitted that she dabbled in drugs.”
Virgil finished his beer and went for another. Claire, who’d been doing most of the talking, had barely made a dent in hers. He twisted the cap off and tossed it on the kitchen counter before sitting again.
“Kari mentioned that Ronnie was pressuring her,” he said.
“She told you that?”
“Yeah.”
Claire picked up a pretzel and examined it as if it were a piece of evidence. “That’s interesting. She didn’t mention it to me, and I’m a police officer investigating a death.” She looked up at Virgil. “I didn’t know you and Kari were so tight.”
Virgil had a drink and said nothing.
“Pressuring her to do what?” Claire asked.
“What do you think?”
“Did she tell you that the girlfriend was along as a buffer?”
“Not in so many words,” Virgil said. “But I got that impression.”
“You and Kari,” Claire said, not letting it go. “How long have you two been sharing secrets?”
“I never did any sharing,” Virgil said.
“You never do.” Claire lifted the beer bottle to her mouth, but instead of drinking, she clicked it against her teeth as she thought. “So—what else can you tell me about Kari?”
“She’s a good kisser.”
“You kissed her?” Claire demanded.
“No, I didn’t.”
“Then what?”
“She kissed me.”
“Where?”
“In the barn.”
“I mean where.”
“On the lips.”
Now Claire took a gulp of the beer and set the bottle loudly on the table. “And then what happened?” she asked sweetly.
“I told her I had a girlfriend who packed heat for a living.”
“You think this is pretty funny,” Claire said.
“You’re making it that way,” Virgil replied. “I thought we were discussing murder suspects. You have two dead bodies on your hands.”
“It’ll be three if you kiss her again.”
“I never kissed her the first time.”
“Okay, we need to stop this,” Claire said. She rubbed her eyes with her fingertips a moment, then looked over. “But we will get back to it.”
“Okay.”
“So she told you that Ronnie Red Hawk was putting pressure on her. What else?”
“She said she didn’t want anything to do with him.”
“Did he threaten her?”
“Don’t think so,” Virgil said. “I kind of got the impression it was the other way around. He was smothering her with kindness. She doesn’t strike me as the type who would respond to that.”
“Kari expert that you are,” Claire said.
“Thought you were going to stop that.”
“I am,” she said. “Eventually.” She took a drink of beer. “So he wasn’t overtly threatening her. Ronnie seems like the passive-aggressive type anyway, so that really doesn’t surprise me. But I could see him being intimidating on a subliminal level. Although killing someone with a deliberate overdose really isn’t all that subliminal, is it?”
“Neither is drowning somebody in Rondout Creek,” Virgil said. “By the way, did Olivia Burns have a cell phone with her the night she died?”
“If she did, the killer took it. Or it’s still at the bottom of the creek. Why?”
“Because one of the crew members saw her talking on a cell phone and walking toward the creek.”
“Which crew member?”
“Nikki. She works on the truck that does the food. She was with Tommy Alamosa that night—he’s assistant director or first assistant, something like that. He basically runs the show.”
“I talked to him the next day,” Claire said. “He never said a word.”
“Maybe he didn’t know at the time,” Virgil said. “They were having a little party down by the creek and she went back to the hotel for a bottle of wine. That’s when she saw Olivia. But she did tell Tommy at some point and he told her it was best not to get involved when it had nothing to do with them.”
“She say what time it was?”
“Midnight or so.”
“And what were they doing down there?”
Virgil smiled. “I suspect what Buddy Townes calls the old slap and tickle.”
Claire sighed at the adolescent term, typical of Buddy. She glanced at her beer to see it was nearly empty, and finished it. “Olivia Burns did not have a cell phone registered in her name. Which is extremely odd in this day and age.” She looked pointedly at Virgil. “Well, maybe not for a stubborn farmer living in the past, but for a film actress on a movie location? Very odd.”
Virgil didn’t rise to the bait.
“So that means she had someone else’s phone that night,” Claire continued. “If we could find out who that someone is, then we could figure out who called her. Or who she called.”
“They can do that, even without the phone?” Virgil asked.
“They can. We need the number and the server.” She hesitated. “So Tommy Alamosa was out there on his own while this girl Nikki went back to the hotel. Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“I haven’t seen you,” Virgil said. “Besides, I was told it in confidence.”
“You’re allowed to break a confidence when there are killers at large,” Claire said. “I’m going to have to talk to them both about this. And I’m going to have another look at this Tommy guy. We ran his name before, like everybody in the crew. He’s got a couple of cocaine possession convictions from thirty years ago, out in California.”
“That’s got nothing to do with this.”
“No, it doesn’t,” she admitted. “But I’m going to talk to him. You like him, don’t you?”
“I do.”
“I won’t mention your name.”
“You can tell him I told you. Because I did.”
She nodded and stretched before lifting her legs from the chair beside her and straightening up. She rotated her shoulders in an effort to loosen them up.
“I could use a back rub, Mr. Cain.”
“I could do that.”
“Give you something to do while you’re apologizing for kissing the movie star.”
“I’m not apologizing for something I didn’t do,” Virgil said. He paused. “I’d like to know what’s going on. For the most part, I couldn’t care less about those people. But there’s a little girl in the middle of it all. And she’s kind of all alone.”
“So you’ve been watching out for her?” Claire asked.
“Maybe a little,” he said. “Somebody should.”
She watched him for a long moment. “I think you have a knight in shining armor complex, Mr. Cain.”
“So do you, Claire,” he said, getting to his feet. “You want a back rub or not?”
“I do,” Claire said.
“You going to stop talking about the actress?”
She smiled. “Depends how good the back rub is.”
SEVENTEEN
When Virgil arrived at the log cabin in the hills two days later, the actor Daniel Vardon was there, dressed in buckskin breeches and a slouch hat, preparing to get cut down in the yard by the marauding Indians, although the actors playing the marauders were not on location yet.
Bob and Nelly were required again as background, which meant another slow day for Virgil. He’d finished his combining the day before, so he was actually caught up at the farm for the time being. He would soon have plowing to do and it wouldn’t be long before the second cut of hay was ready to come off, but for now he would take advantage of the money offered by the film business.
Upon arriving, he released the two Percherons into the pasture field behind the cabin a
nd sat on the tailgate of his pickup to watch as the crew rigged Daniel’s clothing with a heavy cork pad for the arrow that would strike him down. Tommy Alamosa was standing by, talking to the head prop guy, and after a while he walked over to where Virgil sat, lighting a cigarette as he approached.
“Hey Virgil.”
“How do they do this?” Virgil asked. “They really going to shoot an arrow into him?”
“That’s what they’re going to do,” Tommy said. “The prop guy will shoot it from a few feet away. Special bamboo arrow that sticks in that pad beneath the shirt, with the blood pack. They’ll speed it up in post. And then shoot it from behind, and from the side, with the arrow sticking through him. Back in the day, they’d shoot the guy standing there with no arrow, then shoot him with the arrow already in him, and then edit it with a quick cut and some sound effects so you’d swear you saw the arrow hit him. Remember F Troop?”
Virgil smiled. “Larry Storch. The arrow through the hat?”
“That’s how they did it.”
“Don’t tell me you worked on F Troop.”
“No, but I was on the lot at the time. I was a gofer on a Howard Hawks western. Highlight of the shoot for me was when John Wayne sent me into town for a couple bottles of bourbon one day. He and Bob Mitchum got drunk as lords that night and were pretty green around the gills the next day. Hawks blamed me because he couldn’t blame the two of them. Mitchum would have knocked him on his ass.”
“You and the Duke, eh?”
“Me and the Duke,” Tommy said, pulling on the cigarette. “He was a good guy, remembered everybody’s name, always on time. You just didn’t want to talk politics with him. And you sure as hell couldn’t spark a doobie in his presence. He’d have called the cops.”
“Speaking of cops,” Virgil said. “You hear from Detective Claire Marchand?”
“I talked to her the day after they found Olivia. Not since.”
“You’re going to,” Virgil said. “She knows you and Nikki were down by the creek that night. And she knows that Nikki saw Olivia.”
Tommy fell silent. He looked at the cigarette in his hand, flicked the ash into the dirt at his feet. “How does she know that?”
“I told her.”
“I see. And who told you?”
“If it wasn’t you, it must have been Nikki. Right?”
“I guess so.” Tommy shook his head unhappily. “I gotta say, you don’t seem the type to go running to the cops, Virgil.”
“I didn’t run anywhere. But I figured Claire should know that Olivia was talking on a cell phone before she was killed.”
“So you have some connection to this cop?”
Virgil nodded. “We shower together from time to time.”
Tommy had a last pull on his smoke and then dropped it to the ground and put his heel on it. He watched the prop guys across the yard. “There was nothing to it. I mean, Nikki didn’t see anything suspicious or she would have come forward. Thing is, I have some history with the police from my rebellious younger days. I’d rather not draw attention to myself, if you know what I mean.”
Virgil nodded but didn’t say anything. If Tommy was looking for Virgil’s blessing, he wasn’t going to get it.
“What I’m saying is that I’ve been arrested a few times,” Tommy elaborated.
“Me too.”
“Does your detective girlfriend know that?”
“Hell yeah. She arrested me.”
Tommy shrugged. “Then you know what I mean. I didn’t want my record brought to the attention of my employers. I need this job. I’ve been broke pretty much every day of my life and I need the paycheck. You think I’d be working for these fuckwads otherwise?”
“Probably not,” Virgil said. “I’m working for them for basically the same reason. Anyway, I just thought I’d give you a heads-up. The cell phone is what she’s interested in. Whoever Olivia was talking to that night could be the key.”
Tommy nodded, letting it go. Virgil couldn’t be sure if he was pissed off or not but he didn’t really care. He wouldn’t have done anything differently.
A van pulled up then, parked maybe thirty feet away in front of the barn, and a man in a cowboy hat got out and walked around to open the rear doors.
“Our weapons guy,” Tommy said.
The man reached into the vehicle and brought out four long leather cases, which he leaned against the open door of the van. He then produced an open tote filled with powder horns and brass flasks and shot.
Tommy watched, then turned to Virgil. “The genius director has decided that our frontier mother and daughter are going to fight off fifty or sixty Indians all by themselves. How’s that for reality TV?” He shook his head at the notion. “Which means that Will there has to teach Kari and little Georgia how to handle some antique weapons.” He glanced toward the scene in front of the cabin. “I have to go. Looks as if we’re about ready to shoot some arrows into poor Daniel.”
Virgil watched as the weapons guy carried his goods into the barn, where he removed the muskets from their cases and leaned them in a row against the open door. The man was probably seventy or older, tall and sinewy, with gray hair that reached past his collar and a loping ease to his stride. He looked like he came from the same period as did his guns. Daniel Vardon, now lying in the dirt a hundred yards away, with fake blood dribbling from his chest, looked much less authentic. The director, who hadn’t been anywhere in sight while they were setting up the shot, had now appeared and was waving his arms about; apparently he was unhappy about something.
Virgil heard footsteps behind him and turned to see Georgia approaching. It was the first time he’d seen her in anything other than her period costume. She wore red flip-flops and pink jeans and a T-shirt with some pop singer’s face on the front.
“Hey Virgil,” she said.
“Hello.”
“Guess what I’m doing today?”
“Learning how to shoot?”
“Yes.” She watched as the weapons guy went about getting things ready and then exhaled heavily. “I’ve never shot a gun before. This wasn’t in the original script. It wasn’t in the book either, but I don’t think Robb ever read the book.”
“You don’t think he read the book?” Virgil asked.
Georgia leaned into him and dropped her voice to a whisper. “I don’t think he’s read any book.”
Virgil smiled. “You nervous?”
“Little bit.” She looked at the muskets lined up and ready a moment longer, then turned to Virgil. “I haven’t seen you. I guess our schedules haven’t meshed.”
Virgil smiled at the phrase. “I guess not.”
“I was saving apples and carrots for Bob and Nelly. I ended up eating the apples myself.”
Virgil gestured to the horses grazing in the pasture beyond the cabin. “I bet they’re still in the market for carrots.”
“I’ll take them some later,” Georgia said, looking toward the trailers. Levi Brown was approaching. “Here comes Bert Lahr. I have to go.”
“Good luck,” Virgil said.
She gave him a little smile, but it was thin and disappeared quickly, defeated by her anxiety about the guns. He wondered again why she didn’t have someone with her, a kid that age.
“Hey,” he said. “Would you mind if I tagged along?”
This time the smile was genuine. “Would you?”
• • •
The weapons guy, whose name was Will, led them to a little clearing in the trees beyond the trailers, away from the filming in the yard. He set up a folding table and laid out the four muskets with the powder flasks and other equipment before walking a target on a tripod a hundred yards or so farther back into the brush.
After a time Kari Karson showed up dressed in street clothes as well, her dark hair hanging damply to her neck, as if she’d just gotten out of the shower. She was quiet, uncharacteristically withdrawn, as would be expected of someone who’d just lost a friend to an overdose, Virgil thought. Levi hung
around too, acting as if he were in charge. He had a walkie-talkie and was connected to someone on the set who would tell them when it was all right to fire the guns, so as not to disrupt the filming. He wore a nylon jacket, in spite of the heat, and seemed determined for a while to demonstrate his knowledge of firearms to the man named Will. The man named Will did not appear to be overly impressed with Levi, who, slighted, suddenly noticed Virgil standing off to the side.
“You can go,” he said. “This has nothing to do with you.”
Georgia piped up before Virgil could reply. “He needs to hear how loud the guns are,” she said. “ ’Cause they might scare Bob and Nelly.”
Virgil smiled at the quick response. She was a smart kid. Levi glared at her, then back to Virgil, as if suspecting a conspiracy of some kind, but said nothing further.
“Well,” Will said in a quiet drawl, glancing at the two actresses, “I’ll show you how they did this in the nineteenth century.”
He very slowly and methodically went through the process of loading the muskets—using the powder flasks, the wadding, the shot, and the ramrod—and then demonstrated how to fit the firing cap to the nipple beneath the hammer. Then he had both Kari and Georgia fire two of the muskets with just the caps, no powder or shot, which is how they would shoot them during filming.
Kari had handled firearms before, albeit modern weapons, in various films, and she had no trouble catching on. Georgia was a quick study too, but it was soon obvious that the musket was too heavy for her to hold out from her little body for more than a second or two. Not only that but the gun was so long she couldn’t reach the end of the barrel to load it.
“You got something smaller?” Levi asked.
“They don’t make a junior musket,” Will said with a touch of sarcasm.
Levi flinched; he liked to present himself as an important cog in the machine and it was obvious he wasn’t thrilled about being treated like an idiot. Virgil couldn’t care less about him, but he could see that Georgia was upset that she couldn’t handle the gun. She was an earnest kid and she wanted to do well. Virgil watched her for a moment before turning to Kari.
