The Bequest

by kindle@netgalley. com

  She grabbed the door and swung it closed, but it caught with a sudden jolt. Gloved hands appeared on the edges, and she knew that a rubber-soled shoe had braced against the bottom to keep it from closing.

  She screamed then turned and leaned her back against the door. She spread her legs, dug in her bare feet on the carpet, and pushed. For a moment she made progress, closing the door until it appeared it might cut off the fingers on one of the intruder’s hands. Then her feet lost their tenuous grip on the fabric. The person on the other side of the door pushed it open six inches, then ten. Her feet continued to slide.

  “What do you want?” she screamed. “Who are you?”

  No answer from the intruder; just a redoubled effort to force the door open.

  “Please, what do you want?” Her voice sounded shrill. Even as she spoke the words, she knew they were meaningless. Besides, she thought she already knew what the intruder wanted, though she found it hard to believe. Was Doug Bozarth really the kind of man who would kill just to squelch an investigation into his business? If so, that meant there was something to be found that Bozarth wanted to keep buried.

  The door was open maybe a foot now. A hand slipped all the way inside and clamped around her throat. She felt the leather grip her skin. The intruder pressed forefinger and thumb on either side of her trachea and squeezed. At first it was the pain that weakened her, but then came the lack of oxygen. Her feet slid further, and the door opened wider. The man was able to force his shoulders into the opening now. She felt his breath on her cheek, the sound of his breathing muffled by something. A mask probably.

  She suddenly remembered that she was still holding the BB pistol. How could she have forgotten that? She raised her right hand, her wrist turned unnaturally as she tried to point it at the intruder’s face.

  The hand on her throat lurched away, and air flowed into her lungs. The hand grabbed at the gun.

  She pulled the trigger. A voice screamed, the sound deep and guttural. She didn’t know where she had hit him, but she knew she had. His hand let go of hers. She pulled the trigger again. Another scream.

  Then the door slammed shut, her body weight full against it. She gathered her feet under her, ready to brace again if he renewed his assault. But there was nothing. Only silence.

  And her own ragged-sounding breaths.

  She willed herself to stop breathing, to hold her breath and listen. Was he still there? How bad was he hurt? She cocked her head to listen, but heard nothing.

  The silence was suddenly filled with Hawaiian music. Drums of the Islands by the Makaha Sons. She glanced at her cell phone on the nightstand. Did she dare chance it, to dart to the phone? What if the man wasn’t hurt bad but was simply waiting for a chance. A chance she would give him if she went for her phone.

  The music ended, the caller having hung up. There was silence again.

  Then she heard another sound, one she had heard before on movie sets. The sound of a slide being racked on a gun. But she knew this one didn’t contain blanks.

  The last thing she heard before she felt a burning pain in her back was the roar of the weapon as it was fired through the door.

  CHAPTER 24

  Teri dropped the phone on the passenger seat, her attention still riveted to the SUV up ahead. Why wasn’t Mona picking up? If she was out somewhere, surely she had her phone with her. And if she was asleep, well, she always kept her phone on the nightstand.

  The SUV had gone north on the 405, hit the 101 west and north, and then connected with the Pacific Coast Highway in Ventura. Teri stayed with it, just two lonely cars on the California coast. Occasional traffic passed by the other way, heading toward Los Angeles, but other than that, Teri felt totally alone. The moon was partially obscured by clouds, forcing her to concentrate on the road. Fortunately the taillights of the lead vehicle clued her in to curves ahead. To her left, the ocean glittered an inky blackness, topped by occasional whitecaps. The actress in her said this was a great setting for a movie murder. The mood was ominous, the road treacherous, and the audience would be on the edge of their seats. Not even Leland Crowell could write a better scene.

  As they passed the turn-off to William Randolph Hearst’s castle at San Simeon, she wondered how much farther they would go. And just where in the hell were they going? Ahead was a small parking lot for a convenience store. She eased her foot off the gas. The distance widened between her and the scraggly-haired man’s SUV. She had to decide now.

  The hell with it. She turned into the convenience store parking lot, whipped around, and pulled back out onto the highway heading south. The SUV rounded a curve then eased to the side of the road at a particularly sharp drop-off near Ragged Point. The identical spot where Leland Crowell had met his demise. The passenger door opened and the scraggly-haired man stepped out. He walked around to the cliffside and stepped over the guardrail. He perched precipitously on the edge, never looking down, his back to the open driver’s side window of the SUV. The roar of the waves wafted up and a breeze mussed his hair, but he heard and felt nothing. He stood riveted to the spot. Frozen. Almost zombie-like.

  A gunshot echoed from inside the car, briefly lighting the interior like a firecracker.

  The bullet slammed into the scraggly-haired man’s back, driving him forward.

  Off the precipice.

  Head first, into the blackness below.

  CHAPTER 25

  In the immortal words of Yogi Berra, it was like déjà vu, all over again, as California Highway Patrol detectives Howie Stillman and Jeff Nichols pulled their Chevy Tahoe behind a cruiser, its rear passenger door open, lights striking against the darkness of the early morning sky. A paramedic unit was parked in front of the cruiser and several utility vehicles from the power company rounded out the group. Both men looked puffy-eyed, as if they had just been awakened, both carrying paper cups of coffee. Just as they had two years earlier, they watched as a crane pulled up a paramedic riding a basket, perched next to a body in a rubber bag.

  A CHP officer, whose name tag identified him as “Gerrit,” approached. He was young, almost baby-faced. He pointed up the steep inland hillside. “We got a report of a suspicious vehicle from some hikers who were camping up there.”

  “Suspicious, how?” Nichols asked.

  “They said they heard the vehicle slowing down, then it pulled over to the guardrail and just sat there. Someone got out on the passenger side, but they couldn’t tell anything about him in the dark. Just a shadow. Then whoever it was walked around to the cliffside. At that point, they lost sight of him, but the vehicle pulled away in a hurry.”

  “What kind of vehicle?”

  “They said it looked like an SUV.”

  “Where are these hikers?”

  “Back seat of the cruiser.”

  Stillman and Nichols approached the opened rear door of the cruiser, where two young people, probably no more than twenty or twenty-one sat. The male had close-cropped hair, while his female companion was frizzy-haired and freckled. They huddled against each other, as if they feared they were about to be implicated in this whole mess.

  They slid out of the cruiser when they heard the detectives approach.

  “I’m Detective Nichols, this is Detective Stillman,” Nichols said.

  “Billy Williamson. This is my girlfriend, Sheri Slade.”

  Nichols gestured up the hillside. “We understand you folks were camping up there?”

  “We know we’re not supposed to, but we were hiking and it got kinda late on us, so we decided to stay the night,” Billy said. “That’s why it took us so long to call anyone. We were afraid we’d get in trouble, but after we saw what had happened, we knew we had to.”

  “Nobody’s in trouble,” Nichols said. “But why don’t you walk us through what you saw.”

  “Well, like I told the other officer, we heard a car that sounded like it was going pretty slow. Sound really carries up here, so when the noise stopped, we figured the car stopped. Then—”

&
nbsp; “We got that part already. Fast forward a little bit.”

  “Okay, well, like I said, we were afraid we’d get in trouble, and besides, it didn’t seem like anything had really happened, anyway. We thought it was kind of strange that the passenger got out and we didn’t see him get back in, but he could have gotten in on the other side of the car.”

  “You said ‘him’ and ‘he.’ Was this a male?”

  “We couldn’t tell. We just sort of assumed that, but I don’t know why.”

  “Could you hear anything? Voices, anything like that?”

  “No, just a popping sound.”

  Stillman and Nichols exchanged glances. “Popping sound?” Stillman asked. “What kind of popping sound?”

  “It wasn’t loud, but, I don’t know, just a popping sound. Anyway, this morning, when it got a little bit lighter, we decided to come down and see if we could see anything. All we saw were some tire tracks at first, so we were about to go back up, but then Sheri saw footprints on the other side of the guardrail.”

  “I wasn’t sure at first,” Sheri said, “so I shined my flashlight over there and you could see them pretty clear. That’s when I also saw some red splashes on the guardrail.”

  “We didn’t know if it was blood or not, but it was all getting a little too weird. That’s when we decided we had to call someone.”

  “Detectives.” Gerrit called from the edge, where the basket was reaching the top.

  “Wait here,” Nichols said. He and Stillman hustled over and stood next to Gerrit, by the guardrail.

  “Give me your flashlight,” Stillman said to Gerrit.

  The young officer dutifully unholstered it from his belt and handed it to him. Stillman shined the beam on the top of the guardrail and both detectives bent close to study the metal. And there it was. The red splashes the girl had mentioned. They had both seen enough blood splatter before to recognize it immediately.

  “Make sure no one disturbs this until the techs get here,” Stillman said, and Gerrit nodded.

  The basket had reached the top, and the paramedic scrambled off as his colleagues hauled it over the guardrail.

  “Can you tell anything?” Nichols asked.

  The paramedic unzipped the body bag, to reveal a pulpy mess of a face. Again, shades of déjà vu. “But that’s not the interesting thing,” the paramedic said.

  “What is?”

  Using both hands, he twisted the torso onto its side. “Look in the middle of his back.”

  Leaning close again, using the flashlight, there was no mistaking what they saw: a bullet hole.

  As the paramedic rolled the body back over, one arm flopped free and dangled over the side of the basket. Both Nichols and Stillman froze at what they saw: a blue tattoo, smeared but clearly distinguishable as the shape of a football helmet with a star in the middle.

  “Well, son of a bitch!” Stillman said.

  “Amen, brother,” Nichols replied. “Amen.”

  CHAPTER 26

  After returning home at close to 9:00 a.m., Teri stripped to her underwear and a tee-shirt and crawled into bed, but sleep did not come easily. Who was driving the look-a-like SUV? Was it all part of an elaborate ruse perpetrated against her by the scraggly-haired man and his mother? And where was Mona? Teri had tried her cell phone time and again on her way home, but finally concluded that Mona’s battery must have died without her knowing. After all, that phone was Mona’s lifeline to the world, and she wouldn’t be caught dead without it.

  Between long periods of lying awake and staring at the ceiling, Teri thrashed and flopped like a fish on a deck. It wasn’t until the sun was fully up that she finally succumbed to exhaustion. Even then her dreams were haunted by visions of the scraggly-haired man, his faded blue tattoo, and the screams he hurled at her as she left Caleb’s Diner.

  The buzzing of the doorbell roused her from her shallow slumber. She wiped sleep from her eyes and glanced at the clock. Nearly three in the afternoon. It was probably Mona at the door, apologizing for not answering her phone. Teri snatched hers off the nightstand to see if she had missed any calls from Mona, but there had been none.

  Teri disentangled herself from the sheets, slipped on a pair of gym shorts, and staggered to the front door. She put her eye to the peephole and looked out, shocked to see three men she had never seen before on the front porch—two relatively young and an older man with gray hair.

  “Who is it?” she called.

  The older man held a badge in front of the peephole. “Police, ma’am,” he said. She slid the chain-lock off and opened the door. The three men stepped back almost as one.

  “Sorry to disturb you, Ms. Squire,” said the man with the badge. “I’m Detective Walter Swafford, Beverly Hills PD. These are Detectives Stillman and Nichols with CHP. May we come in?”

  “Why? Is something wrong?”

  “Ma’am, do you know a Leland Crowell?”

  Teri hoped she didn’t react at the sound of the name, but the whole affair with the screenwriter had been in the media, so there was no use denying it. The real question wasn’t whether she knew who Leland Crowell was; the real question was whether these cops knew about last night’s shouting match with the resurrected Leland Crowell at Caleb’s Diner.

  “Yes,” she said. “I mean, no. I know who he was, but I’ve never met him. He died a couple of years ago. I’m sure you must have heard about it.”

  “Yes, ma’am, we know the legend,” Swafford said.

  “Legend?”

  “Let’s just say there are some unanswered questions that we’d like to clear up. That’s what we want to talk to you about.”

  Teri stood rooted to the floor for a few beats, conscious of the pounding of her heart. She was an actress, trained to fake emotions and put up façades, but the rush of blood in her ears and the tingle in her cheeks told her she was failing miserably.

  She stepped back. “Come in.”

  As the men crossed the threshold, they gathered in the entryway, as if waiting for still another invitation. She appreciated their restraint. She had seen on the news and read in the Los Angeles papers every day about over-the-top searches and aggressive interrogations. She’d even conducted one or two herself playing a cop on the big screen, and she had been the subject of one years ago back in Texas. Now was the time to marshal her thoughts and remember what police consultants had told her about strategies and mind games in interrogations. She was starting to wish she had played more cops and fewer romantic leads, and gotten into the heads of more detectives and fewer love-starved professional women.

  Wordlessly, Teri closed the door and led the men to the den. The room was still darkened by closed drapes, but she pulled the curtains back in front of the sliding doors to illuminate the sitting area. Her spirits were dark enough without the gloom.

  None of the men sat. The one identified as Stillman went to the sliding doors and stared out at the hills, wisps of smoke still hovering on the horizon.

  “Do you mind?” he asked.

  She shook her head, and he unlocked and slid the door open. He stood in the doorway, his frame blocking the entire opening. “The fires are completely out now,” he said.

  “It looks that way,” she said.

  “I bet it worried you for a while.”

  Tired of waiting for the men to sit, Teri perched on the arm of the couch. “I’m sure you didn’t come over here just to talk about wildfires,” she said. “You were asking about Leland Crowell.”

  Swafford leaned against the mantel, while Nichols stood to the side, as if on guard duty. “Yes, ma’am,” Swafford said. “You said he died a couple of years ago?”

  “I’m sure you already know all this. It’s been the biggest Hollywood story in years. He killed himself and willed his screenplay to me. I got it from his mother, but I never met him.”

  “Why do you suppose he willed his screenplay to you?” Nichols asked.

  He stepped forward, as if he was assuming control of the conversation, wh
ile Swafford seemed to fade into the background. The fact that there were two CHP cops and only one Beverly Hills cop told her that Swafford had just been brought in as a courtesy, to preserve jurisdictional niceties. She had learned that, too, from playing cops in the movies.

  But why in the hell was CHP here? Unless something had happened farther up the Coast Highway after she had turned back last night. Was that it? She shifted uncomfortably on the couch arm, pulled a leg up beneath herself, and waited for the other shoe to drop.

  “Believe me, I was the most surprised person around when I found out that he had willed it to me. His mother even said that he wrote it for me. I guess he was a fan.”

  “I am, too,” Swafford said. “And so is my wife. She’s not going to believe it when I tell her I met you.”

  He smiled at her, but she didn’t return it. She figured out by now that he was the good cop, Nichols was probably going to be the bad cop, and the other guy by the open glass door—well, she guessed he was going to be the silent cop. She glanced his way and saw that he was still in the middle of the doorway, staring straight ahead at the hills, but she could also tell by the tilt of his head that he was carefully listening to everything that was being said.

  “Didn’t that strike you as odd?” Nichols asked. “Him leaving his screenplay to you?”

  “It struck me as weird as hell,” Teri said. “I’ve had people try all kinds of things to get scripts to me. I had one delivered once with a singing telegram. Another time, someone threw one in my open car window when I was stopped at a red light. I’ve even had people—men, in fact— follow me into the ladies room and slide one under the stall door. But this is the first and only time someone left me one after he died.”

  “Do you know how he died,” Nichols asked.