Margin of Error

by Edna Buchanan

  “You talk to him?”

  “No,” she said impatiently. “It’s a monthly service. I call in and they read me my messages.”

  “That’s ridiculous. How could—”

  “No, it isn’t,” she snapped. “How do you think I got your home number? Lance left it for me on the service.”

  I swallowed, stomach suddenly queasy. “I wondered how you got it.”

  She nodded. “He told me where you live, too. And he left word that he would be in LA for the premiere. Even told me what flight to take. But”—she pouted—“he didn’t say you would be there.”

  My mouth felt dry. “When did you start receiving these messages?”

  “I always used the service, back in Boston. But Lance didn’t call until after the time in New York, in his hotel room. I was so depressed after he married Lexie. I was afraid we would never be together. I didn’t want to live and I did something stupid. I just wanted to die. But then, after I got out of the hospital, something wonderful happened. The messages began and I saw hope, that he did care, that I just had to be patient—”

  “Why would he leave messages telling you where he was and then have you arrested?” I felt bewildered, as though this was another crazy dream.

  “That,” she said, misty-eyed and shaking her head, “is something I have to talk to him about. There is so much I don’t understand.” She looked up at me, gray eyes inquisitive. “Why? Why did he get involved with you?”

  “I’m going to find out,” I said. “This is insane.”

  She gave me the number.

  The service was office style. For seventy-five dollars a month, live operators answer calls twenty-four hours a day with a generic greeting. No voice mail.

  “Miami office. Can I help you?” a cheery voice asked.

  “Stephanie Carrollton, please.”

  “She’s not in, would you like to leave word?”

  “When do you expect her?”

  “She calls in regularly to pick up her messages.”

  I called back in twenty minutes. “This is Stephanie Carrollton,” I said. “Any messages?”

  “Nothing at the moment, Ms. Carrollton.”

  “Nothing from Lance?”

  “No messages at all since you last checked. Sorry.”

  “How long do you keep my messages?”

  “They’re usually destroyed after you pick them up, Ms. Carrollton.”

  “No old ones there?”

  “Let me see. There’s something in the box here, from Sunday night. Umm, you got this one.”

  “Could you read it?”

  “Sure. Lance works late tonight at the News, then goes back to the house.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s all.”

  “Would you save that one for me, please? I’d like the hard copy. Along with any other old messages of mine that you can find. I’ll have someone pick them up.”

  I slept with Lance that night, searched his eyes, and saw only honesty and affection. Of course, I realized, he was an actor and I was not in my right mind.

  24

  While Lance slept I searched his desk, his wallet, and his address book and scrolled through the files in the computer room down off the kitchen. His schedule, the production’s daily call sheets, and e-mail memos from the Margin of Error office were all in there, but I did not find Stephanie’s number or anything else that appeared incriminating. That did not mean it was not him.

  I crept back into his bed, as guilty as a thief in the night. “What’sa matter?” Lance mumbled. “Where you been?”

  “Couldn’t sleep,” I said truthfully.

  “Nothing new. Join the club.” He pulled me close.

  As his breathing became slow and rhythmic, my mind raced. The chain of evidence would be broken if I picked up the messages, and they would lose any value in court.

  Whom could I trust?

  I slipped out of bed again.

  “Britt, are you all right?”

  McDonald sounded sleepy but not angry that I had called him at home at 2 A.M. I wondered if he was alone.

  “Where are you?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” I gave him the number and the address of the service and explained. He instantly understood the implication.

  “You think the son of a bitch deliberately led her on for some reason?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.” I was near tears. “I don’t know what to believe. It could be somebody else.”

  When I went back to bed, Lance was sitting up. My heart sank when I saw his face.

  “What’s going on?” he asked me.

  “You tell me,” I said.

  I told him about my visit to Stephanie and about the messages.

  “But who?” He leaned forward, peering into my eyes as though something disturbing lurked there. “You think it was me? You believe her?”

  “Somebody’s been fucking with that sick woman’s life.” I stood and paced the room.

  He was slumped in an armchair now, smoking a cigarette, eyes smoldering, wearing only loose pajama bottoms. “And somebody’s been fucking with mine.” His voice had a razor edge.

  I began to get dressed.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “Home.”

  “You can’t leave till we settle this.” He stabbed out his cigarette. “Look at me,” he said, moving between me and the door. “You goddam know better, and if you don’t, you should be ashamed to be here.”

  I sat abruptly, face in my hands. “Well,” I said, after a moment. “Let’s brainstorm. Stephanie said the messages began after her suicide attempt in New York. What was happening in your life then?”

  He took a deep breath. “Me and Lexie were going down the toilet.” He reached for the cigarettes on his desk, lit another, then exhaled. “I was leaving WFI and about to sign to do this picture with Titan.”

  “What else?”

  “I dunno.” He raised his eyes and his hands in a helpless gesture.

  “Try.”

  “I was working on Dark Journey, skirmishing with WFI because they didn’t want me to leave. They wanted to keep me there.”

  I thought for a moment. “At the News, we have on-line access to everything published about both studios, about you, about Lexie, at around that time. Let’s go search through them, see if anything rings a bell. Maybe we can come up with some lead…”

  He grabbed a shirt. “I’ll get Dave and Al.”

  “Wait! How do you know you can trust them? They could be on somebody’s payroll.”

  “That’s crazy.” He snorted. “I’d trust those guys—”

  “You say you didn’t leave those messages. Then who did?”

  We slipped out of the house in the dark and took my car. My gun was in the glove compartment. I thought about it as I drove to the News, conscious every moment that the man beside me might not be who I thought he was at all.

  Streets were deserted. The only lights in the sky came from incoming jets as they broke through the cloud cover that hung over the city.

  The security man was missing from behind the glass at the employees’ entrance. The News was probably shorthanded again, which would put him on rounds through the building, or perhaps he had taken a break.

  We settled in at my desk, at the computer terminal. I tapped into the library system, summoning the world and its data bases to my fingertips. Lexis-Nexis; Dialog; DataTimes; Cypress, which accesses Dow Jones and other financial services; SEC reports from the Internet; and Baseline, rich with biographies of entertainment figures, their past work, the budgets of their films in progress, and industry financial reports. We began scrolling through stories in search of something, I wasn’t sure what, printing out whatever appeared interesting.

  “All these old films of yours,” I said. “All WFI.”

  “Right, I’ve been with them since the start.”

  “Hmmmm.
Does Titan have life insurance on you? A key-man policy for this film?”

  “Sure. That’s not unusual.”

  The newsroom was eerie at 3 A.M., the silence broken only by the click of my computer keys and the steady hum of the printer.

  “There were more stories about you last year,” I muttered, “than about Fidel Castro, Mother Teresa, and Newt Gingrich put together.”

  I glanced up, to refocus and rest my eyes for a moment. We were not alone. A man stood, silent, just feet away, in the shadows from the lobby’s dim light. I experienced the same moment of madness, the same gut-wrenching sensation, as when I saw the Lindsey Hopkins security guard and mistook him for poor dead Randall Fairborn.

  I blinked. But the specter remained the same. Oh my God, I thought. Tears stung my eyes. “Oh my God,” I murmured aloud. He wore black and a ponytail.

  Lance looked up from the printout he was reading. I heard his sharp intake of breath.

  “Christ!” He sprang to his feet. “Thank God you’re alive!”

  “Too bad I can’t say the same for you, amigo.” Niko stepped forward, a dark snub-nosed .380 automatic in his hand.

  “We thought you were dead,” I said stupidly.

  He smiled. “Exactly what you were supposed to think.”

  “Who was he?” I asked.

  “Somebody who won’t be missed.” He sounded impatient.

  There was a sound, a movement behind him, and I realized that he had a companion. A woman lingered in the darkened lobby.

  “Hey, babe.” Niko spoke over his shoulder. “Take the keys, bring up the car, and put it right next to hers.” He tossed a set of car keys in her direction. She stepped forward and caught them, one-handed, in midair, the light bouncing off her blonde hair.

  “Okay, honey,” she sang out. I had seen her only once before but would never forget her face: Karen Sawyer, the woman on the elevator, the fan who had sprayed the love potion in Lance’s eyes.

  “Niko,” Lance said. “What are you doing? What have you done?”

  “It pains me to say this, amigo, but some people are worth more dead than alive.” He did not look pained.

  “You sent those messages to Stephanie, didn’t you?” I said.

  He sighed in exaggerated fashion. “I was afraid somebody might listen to her. Lucky it was only you, and I heard in time.”

  “How?” Was he tapping Lance’s phone?

  “Let’s just say I have friends in the right places.” The gun still pointed at us, he plucked a sheet from our stack of printouts and scanned it. Tongue at the corner of his mouth, he raised an eyebrow.

  “Not stupid,” he said admiringly. “Good thing I’m nipping this in the bud.”

  “I trusted you,” Lance said emotionally. “You were the only one I trusted. How could you do this to me?”

  “It’s always you, you, you, isn’t it, Lance? Didn’t you think I’d ever get tired of it? We started out equals. You never admitted it, but I was the better ballplayer in high school; now you’ll have to agree that I’m the better actor. Yet somehow we wind up with you the star and me the gofer. Is that fair?”

  “You coulda quit.”

  He smirked. “Consider this my resignation. Sign off that terminal. Bring those printouts,” he ordered, waving the gun at me impatiently, “and your purse. We don’t want to leave any mess behind. Let’s go.”

  “Somebody at Titan didn’t want him to finish Margin of Error,” I said.

  He smiled suavely. “Right pew, wrong church.”

  We were marched down the shadowy hallway toward the employee entrance. My eyes searched for the security guard, or for some late-night sports reporter or movie reviewer who might wander into the office. But even the cleaning crews had long since left for the night. The back of my neck tingled in fear. I thought he would shoot us there. He was going to kill us. He had to kill us now. Lance knew that too. He reached for my arm.

  “No touching. No sudden moves. Just do what I tell you.” Niko obviously enjoyed giving the orders for a change.

  If we were going to die, I had to know why.

  “What is this all about? Why does somebody want Lance killed?”

  “Think about it. Death does wonders for a career. You’ll be a legend, Lance. Look what it did for Selena, for James Dean. Instant legends. The kid only made three movies. If he’d lived, he wouldn’t be an icon. He’d be an old man nobody remembers.

  “But the big bucks keep on rolling in. Look at Marilyn Monroe and Elvis. Still making more money than they ever did when they were alive.”

  “WFI,” Lance said bitterly. “They own the negatives, the library, all my films.”

  “Now you’re getting smart,” Niko said. “Do you have any idea of the revenue stream that your death or disappearance will generate from video cassettes alone? If you never finish a movie for another studio, they own it all. Your entire body of work, your image on coffee mugs, T-shirts, all that shit, in perpetuity. Merchandising rights. A fucking gold mine. You’ll be immortal.”

  “This has nothing to do with her,” Lance said.

  “Nobody ever said life was fair. Too bad, Britt. No offense.”

  I tried to take a deep breath but had trouble inhaling.

  “I told the cops—McDonald—about Stephanie’s messages,” I said. “He’ll put it together.”

  Lance looked startled. Niko looked surprised but unperturbed. “You wouldn’t do that; it might make macho man here look bad, and you’ve been having far too good a time to do that. You don’t want to lose your piece of the action.”

  “You misjudge me, like I misjudged you.”

  “How much is Gettinger paying you?” Lance said. “He hired you, didn’t he?”

  “Tch-tch, Lance. You know all you need to know.”

  He pressed the elevator button. Somewhere, downstairs, I heard it clunk and grind into slow motion. Once we were in his car, if that was where he was taking us, we were totally at his mercy and I saw none in his eyes. Did we have a better chance out there or here in the building? At least I knew the building.

  The doors slowly yawned open and he waved us inside with the gun. Who had died in his place? I wondered. How did he manage to find a victim with hair long enough for a ponytail?

  “Hit lobby,” he said.

  I punched three. Watching Lance, Niko didn’t notice I had hit the wrong floor. I hoped Lance did. I caught his eye and glanced toward the control panel, hoping to give him a high sign.

  The elevator lurched to a stop. The doors began to open and Niko stepped to the rear to follow us out. As he realized we were on the wrong floor we both broke into a run.

  “Hey! Halt!” Confused for a moment, he hesitated for a split second to check the floor. The cafeteria doors might be locked. No time to check. I burst through the other one, into the stairwell, Lance right behind me. I dropped my purse and let the printouts scatter.

  “Let’s go! Let’s go!” As he passed me, he grasped my hand and dragged me, as we dashed down the stairs. Karen Sawyer was waiting, I thought. Did she have a gun? Was she capable of using it?

  Too late. No way would we make it far enough to find out. Niko crouched, cursing aloud, at the top of the flight behind us and squeezed off a shot. It hit the poured concrete stairs and ricocheted off the metal railing with a clang. I winced, as we dove out of his line of fire, through the doors to the pressroom.

  The sign on the wall said, FOUR DAYS WITHOUT A LOST TIME ACCIDENT. “No!” This was no place to be trapped, to try to hide and wait for help. No one would be here until 6 A.M., when the dayside crew arrived to run advance advertising sections. Niko would have the rest of the night to hunt us down like animals.

  “Where then?” Lance demanded.

  Niko’s footsteps pounded down the stairs behind us. No time. No place else to go.

  The presses were silent, the shadowy machines like huge dinosaurs in repose. The acrid odor of their inky breath hung on the air
. We ran toward a ladder to the catwalk. If we climbed up and lay flat we would be hidden from Niko’s sight.

  “What are you doing?” I cried as Lance broke away. He sprinted to the control room, mashed the buttons that start the presses, and killed most of the lights. With a rumble, the machinery slowly began to turn and pick up speed.

  We scrambled up the ladder as Niko burst in the door.

  I didn’t know whether an alarm would sound, but hopefully security would hear the presses running and investigate. The noise would prevent Niko from hearing us, but it also masked from us any sounds he made.

  He seemed to be groping the walls for a light switch. We reached the first tier of the double bank of catwalks and crouched away from the edge. I wondered if there might be an emergency telephone up here somewhere.

  The web that threads paper through the rollers was moving like an endless conveyor belt. Pressmen work on the catwalks to monitor the ink feed, conduct inspections, and make repairs. The catwalks are kept clear, a strict safety rule. I groped in vain for anything a worker might have left behind, anything that could be used as a weapon. The presses stirred up the ink particles in the air and my eyes burned. The dinosaurs were awake. Their voice was deafening.

  Lance suddenly touched my shoulder. Niko was climbing the ladder at the other end of the catwalk, already halfway up to our level. He nudged me and we moved, scrambling the ten feet or so to the ladder that stretched to the top level. I went first, Lance behind me. I felt, rather than heard, a bullet slam into the wooden platform and moved faster. He had seen us. He knew exactly where we were.

  On the upper level, I slipped and kicked something over as I turned to take Lance’s hand. A spill of the oil-based ink had left a slick spot on the catwalk. What I had kicked was a bucket of wiping rags left behind. A tool, some sort of narrow wrench, lay a few feet away.

  I guided Lance’s hand over the slippery spot to warn him it was there. He nodded and took the wrench. I clung to the pail.