The Bequest

by kindle@netgalley. com

  The paramedic pulled the zipper down farther then extricated the corpse’s right arm. He rolled up the sleeve and, sure enough, there was a blue star in a football helmet.

  “How ‘bout them Cowboys,” Annemarie said in a deep monotone.

  Stillman and Nichols exchanged looks. What a perfectly bizarre thing to say.

  “Is that him, ma’am?” Stillman asked.

  “Deserted his mother again.”

  Yet another perfectly bizarre thing to say.

  “Take me home,” she said.

  Stillman took Annemarie by the arm and turned her to the car. “Get the thing,” he said to Nichols.

  As Stillman put Annemarie in the car, Nichols approached the Regal, reached in through the open window, and grabbed the bound pages that Leland had tossed inside before jumping. He carried it back to the Tahoe and handed it to Annemarie. She looked at the cover—“THE PRECIPICE, a Screenplay by Leland Crowell”—and put it on her lap without opening it.

  “Ahh, yes, the masterpiece,” she said.

  Then she pulled her door shut.

  CHAPTER 4

  Teri carried a tray with ice, diet soft drinks, and two glasses onto the deck. In the distance, a smoky haze hung over the hills, testifying to yet another wildfire out of control. This one had raged for nearly a week now, but news reports had firefighters finally turning the tide.

  She set the tray on a table. Mona Hirsch, her partner in SH Productions, curled her legs under herself on the padded loveseat as she poured a drink into one of the glasses. Mona was nearing forty, but fighting age with everything she had, including regular visits to the gym that kept her frame lithe and lean, as well as nips, tucks, and color-in-abottle that kept the gray away from her otherwise jet-black hair. She and Teri had set up the production company five years earlier, just prior to Teri’s second Academy Award, and it had all been downhill from there. Not that it was Mona’s fault; that’s just the way things had gone.

  Teri poured herself a drink then sat on a lounge chair. She took a deep drink, then refilled her glass, leaned her head back, and closed her eyes. They sat in silence for a few moments. The smell of smoke made Teri think of fires in fireplaces, and that made her think of Texas.

  “Have you read all the reviews?” Teri asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “And?”

  “Illegitimi non carborundum. Don’t let the—”

  “—bastards get you down. I know. But the bastards didn’t drag your

  name through the mud. And what gets me is they act like they enjoy it. It’s one thing to be critical. It’s another to be so mean-spirited.”

  “It’s what makes them the illegitimi in the first place.”

  Teri combined a swallow with a laugh, followed by a fit of coughing.

  By the time she was through, both she and Mona were doubled over with laughter. Teri wiped tears from her cheeks and sat up straight. “My side hurts,” she said. “And I can’t tell you how good it feels.”

  “It’s the first time I’ve seen you laugh in weeks.”

  “Let’s just hope it’s not the last time.”

  Mona opened her mouth to reply but stopped short at the ringing of

  Teri’s cell phone. Both women froze in place and stared at the phone on the table. It kept ringing, the theme song from Magnum, P.I. Teri looked at the read-out, then at Mona. She nodded.

  “You gonna answer it?” Mona asked.

  “I’m not sure I want to hear what he has to say.” She downed the rest of her drink, then snatched up the phone. “But I guess I better get it over with.”

  Mike Capalletti’s office befit his status as one of Talent Agency of America’s rising young stars. He didn’t have a corner office yet, but that was just a matter of time. Sitting in the middle of an oversized U-shaped, glass-top desk, his back to floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked Century City, he wielded multiple phones with the panache of a hibachi chef on steroids. After graduating with his MBA from Harvard, he’d started in the legendary mailroom of TAA, but was now on the cusp of achieving his dream as a full equity partner in the agency. He represented some of Hollywood’s hottest talent, both actors and directors, with a sprinkling of writers thrown in. But you were only as good as your A-list clients’ last movie. And only one thing could stop his ascent now. Hard to believe, but only one client stood between him and his dream.

  He spun in his chair and stared out the window. He had come a long way in such a short time. The tough streets of Chicago’s southside seemed but a distant memory now. Sporting the accoutrements of success, such as thousand dollar suits and two-hundred-fifty dollar haircuts, he wasn’t about to let anything or anyone drag him down. Not when he was this close.

  Silver-haired Bob Keene entered with his strange walk caused by unnaturally bowed legs and small feet. He sat down in one of the plush leather-covered chairs across from the desk. Mike spun around suddenly, startled by the intrusion. He stared hard at the man he idolized and emulated. The man cut from the same pretentious cloth as he, albeit three decades apart in age.

  “Are you going to be able to do this?” Bob asked.

  Mike spun back around and faced the window. “Don’t worry about me.” Teri entered the elevator on the ground floor of TAA’s building on Century Park West, in Century City, and took a deep breath. She pushed “12” and the car began its slow ascent. When the doors opened, she got off on TAA’s floor and followed the hardwood floors toward Mike’s office. Dread tugged at her mind with each step. The sounds of her footsteps, though softened by the rubber soles of her running shoes, seemed to echo just as Poe’s telltale heart had driven a man mad. Mike had been closemouthed when he called. “I just need you to get down here,” was all he would say in response to her questions. “We’ll talk about it when you get here.”

  She could almost predict what was coming: She was losing her housekeeping deal at Cinema USA Studios. She’d had the deal since winning her second Oscar and setting up SH Productions with Mona. Cinema USA had outbid several other major studios and given her offices on the lot, a small staff to take care of clerical work, first look at any projects she developed, and agreed to distribute any movies she made. Initially, it looked like a stroke of genius for them when Teri won her second Oscar in relatively short order after the first, but then the drought hit, culminating in her most recent failure. Cinema USA was already bleeding red ink, for a whole list of reasons unrelated to Teri, but her latest movies not only failed to stem the blood flow, they also seemed to open up new veins.

  She reached the door to Mike’s office, which was uncharacteristically closed. Teri’s anxiety kicked up a notch as she knocked.

  “Come in,” Mike said.

  When she opened the door and saw Bob Keene sitting there, she knew instantly things were worse than she imagined. Neither man stood as she entered. Wordlessly, she sat in the guest chair next to Bob, directly across from Mike. Mike looked guilty, Bob looked resigned. Teri wondered if she looked panicked.

  “The deal’s gone, isn’t it?” she asked. Her tone was matter-of-fact, as if this were just another business meeting, even though she knew full well it wasn’t.

  “You’ve got to look at it from their perspective,” Bob said. “You’ve lost them a lot of money.”

  “I made them a lot of money, too.”

  “Old money is a forgotten memory.”

  “Then we’ll go to another studio.”

  “No other studio’ll take you. Right now, you’re poison.”

  The words stung more than Teri could have thought possible. Her own agents, quoting the press as if it were truth. She looked at Mike, silently pleading with him to come to her rescue.

  “You’ve seen this coming for a long time, Babe,” he said. “Remember what you said just the other day? No studio wants an actor—”

  “I don’t need you to remind me what I said,” she snapped. “I need you to remind the studio who I am.”

  “What you need is a hit,” Bob said.<
br />
  “Look, Babe,” Mike said, “no one believes you’re washed up as an actress. The problem’s been the movies you made; not you.”

  “You and Bob were involved in every decision I made. In fact, as long as we’re talking about short memories, do you recall that it was you two who brought this last fiasco to me and insisted that I do it?”

  “And that was our mistake,” Bob said. “But by that point, we were desperate to find something to let you break back out.”

  Teri tried to make eye contact with Mike, but he seemed more interested in looking at the desktop, the floor, and the ceiling, than at her.

  “Look, maybe it’s time we switch gears,” Teri said. “No more romantic comedies, no dramas, and damn sure no period pieces. How about a thriller? I haven’t done a thriller in a long time.”

  “Do you have a thriller script?” Bob asked.

  “Isn’t it y’all’s job to find one for me?”

  She could tell when she said it that, as usual, the “y’all” was like fingernails on a blackboard for Bob. She couldn’t help the way she talked. Her Texas roots were deeply engrained, but sometimes, when she was annoyed at Bob, she made it a point to sneak in a few extra “y’alls” and “fixin’ to’s” just to piss him off.

  “Y’all can’t tell me there are no good thrillers making the rounds right now.”

  “Everything out there that’s worth a damn has got a male lead,” Mike said.

  “So we tweak it a bit, turn it into a female lead. Any writer worth a damn can do that. And y’all do rep writers, don’t y’all?”

  “Sarcasm doesn’t become you,” Bob said evenly.

  His calmness pissed her off even more. “What do I care what becomes me? I’m poison, remember?”

  She turned her attention to Mike, banishing Bob to invisibility. “We just need one hit—”

  “You mean you just need one hit,” the refusing-to-be-invisible Bob said.

  “No, I mean we need one hit. We’re a team, aren’t we?”

  Mike spun his chair around and looked out the window. She glared at Bob, who met her gaze with the same evenness with which he had spoken earlier.

  “The executive committee has discussed it, and we think maybe it would be best if you sought representation with another agency,” Bob said.

  She pulled back and cocked her head, as if she hadn’t heard him clearly. “You’re firing me?”

  “Technically, we’re simply exercising the termination provision in your contract. It happens all the time in this business.”

  She looked at Mike, who still faced the window. “Mike?”

  No response.

  “Mike, look at me.”

  He slowly spun his chair back around. She saw nothing in his eyes. Not tears, not remorse—nothing but a blank stare.

  “Did you know about this?” Teri asked.

  “He was sworn to secrecy until I could tell you,” Bob said.

  “What did you expect me to do? I’ve got an obligation to the agency,” Mike said.

  “You’ve got an obligation to me. ‘Home is here.’ Isn’t that what you said?”

  “It’s not personal; it’s business.”

  “Then I guess sleeping with you makes me a whore.”

  Teri felt tears welling in her eyes, but she willed them back to their ducts. She’d be damned if she was going to cry in front of these two jackasses. The phone on Mike’s credenza rang, but everyone ignored it. It stopped on the second ring, and the room went deathly silent. Finally Teri spoke in a low voice, almost a whisper.

  “I’m telling you, all we need is the right script.”

  “It’s not about scripts anymore,” Mike said. “I hate to say it, but Bob’s right. You’re box office poison right now. You just don’t want to admit it.”

  Bob stood and clapped his hands, like a football player breaking the huddle. “We’ll give you a good referral, Teri. After all, we’ve had a lot of good years together. Hell, we’ll even make it seem like it’s your idea. It’ll be better for everyone.”

  “You’ll understand if I disagree.”

  “Think of it as a new opportunity.”

  Before Teri could respond, there was a knock on the door, then it opened and Philip, Mike’s assistant, stuck his head in. He seemed petrified of interrupting the meeting.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt, but there’s a call for Ms. Squire. It’s a lawyer. Something about somebody died.”

  The words hit hard at Teri’s heart. Bingo? Had Daddy had him put down? Then she thought better of that idea. Lawyers didn't call about dead horses.

  She walked behind Mike’s desk and picked up the phone. Her voice quivered as she spoke. “This is Teri Squire.”

  “Ms. Squire, my name is Spencer West. I’m Leland Crowell’s attorney. I’m sorry to have to tell you that Mr. Crowell has passed away.”

  “I don’t know any Lester Crowell.”

  “Leland. And he knew you. He’s left you a bequest in his will.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Wearing a black dress that stopped just above her ankles, Annemarie Crowell stood alone in a broken-down cemetery just outside of the town limits of Ludlow, California, barely more than a ghost town in the Mojave Desert. The town had once known better days. Founded as a water stop for the railroad, it briefly flourished as a tourist stop on Route 66 before the construction of Interstate 40 drove a spike into its heart.

  The cemetery was as sad as the town, brown and barren, devoid of color. There was a scattering of simple headstones, a few wooden crosses and, to mark yet other graves, nothing more than indentations in the ground where the soil had settled over the years. Two elderly Mexican men—illegals, Annemarie was sure—shoveled dirt into a rectangular hole. At the bottom of the hole sat an unmarked pine box. Final resting place for Leland Crowell.

  Annemarie stood rigidly as rocks and dirt clods thudded onto the casket. A hot wind blew, its touch like a furnace on her face. A trickle of sweat painted a tiny streak on her left cheek, the only crack in her mask. Her lips pressed tight, gray hair pulled back in a schoolmarm bun, her face revealed nary a hint of emotion. There was no crowd, no preacher, no mourners, no weeping and wailing. Just Annemarie, face painted like a clown, two Mexicans, and her dead son’s body.

  A helluva send-off into the afterlife.

  The last shovel of dirt fell into place, and one of the Mexicans patted the ground with the back of his shovel, then stamped on the dirt to pack it down. Annemarie reached into the pocket of her dress and extracted two fifty-dollar bills. She pressed one each into the hands of the shovelers, who mumbled their gracias, then left without looking back.

  Annemarie stepped close to the edge of the loose dirt. She glanced around, as if looking for something. Her eye fell on a crude cross on a nearby grave. Made of wood, it was nearly rotten with age and leaned precariously to the side. Inscribed with a simple R.I.P., but no name, it fit her needs. She walked to the grave and pulled the cross out, then returned to Leland’s site. She shoved the cross into the loose dirt at one end of the grave, but it immediately listed to the left.

  She stepped back and eyed the cross. Another stream of liquid coasted down her cheek. With her index finger, nail long and painted red, she traced it back up her face to its source. She was stunned to find that it originated at her lower eyelid.

  She wiped the tear from her cheek, grabbed the wooden cross, and threw it as far as she could.

  Then she returned to her car.

  CHAPTER 6

  Teri didn’t consider herself a snob, and she certainly didn’t think of her home in the Hollywood Hills as an ivory tower, but as she wheeled her dark blue hybrid Toyota Highlander SUV past a row of crumbling frame structures wedged one after the other along a street that hadn’t seen any tender loving care in decades, she felt as if she had entered another world. Most of the houses were set back mere feet from the curb, some with fading memories of white picket fences. She knew that this had once been a neighborhood of blue-collar workers
who took pride in their homes as they raised their families in the shadows of downtown. But urban blight had crept in, families moved out, and now gangs, prostitutes, and drug addicts reigned.

  She pulled to a stop in front of a frame house with aluminum siding that flaked huge chunks of paint like canker sores. She double-checked the number on the mailbox with the number written on the notepad in the passenger seat. A perfect match.

  She killed the engine and stepped out of her SUV. She looked around, wondering where the roving pack of car strippers lurked that would surely denude her car in a just a matter of minutes, but no one was in sight. She probably should have taken Mike up on his offer to accompany her, but the last thing she wanted from him right then was either his company or his advice. She paused for a moment, debating whether to get back in her vehicle and get the hell out of there. But the siren call of the mystery was too much. She shut the door, punched the remote lock, and headed toward the front walk.

  A rusty gate, barely thigh high, swung by one hinge. She pushed it with her foot and stepped inside the gated area that passed for a front yard. Maybe at one time kids had played with toys in this yard, but that would have been a lifetime ago, if ever. She stepped over a broken step at the front porch, sure her foot would punch through and a rusty nail would impale her ankle. The porch creaked, and she wondered whether it would hold her weight any more than the step would have.

  A sign on the front door, made of letters nailed to a wooden block, said: SPENCER WEST: ATTORNEY AT AW. The missing L lay on the porch beside the door.

  “I’ll just bet ‘aw,’” she said as she rang the doorbell. She was surprised to hear it ring somewhere in the house. She would have bet it didn’t work. After about thirty seconds of no response, she rang it again then knocked.

  Still no answer. She tried the doorknob and found it unlocked. She turned it and pushed the door open. As she did, a small bell over the doorway rang.

  “Hello? Anybody home?” she called.

  Silence. She slipped inside, but left the door open behind her. She found herself in a tiny space that passed for an entryway, crowded with a hat rack, a small table with newspapers and magazines piled on top, and an umbrella stand. A lone umbrella rested forlornly inside the stand.