by Harper Lin
A streak of hot pain lashed the palm of my hand. As the script flew to one side, we could all see the knife Mary held hidden underneath.
“Heartbreaker!” Mary shouted, lunging for Cliff Armstrong.
I got her just in time. Ignoring the pain in my palm, I gripped her wrist and used my other hand to bend her knife hand backwards. If you do it right, you don’t need to be very strong, and I had trained with this move for years. Mary let out a cry of pain and the knife fell to the ground. A couple of the extras grabbed her arms. One of the film security personnel took over and cuffed her while Liz fetched her medical kit.
“Are you all right? What happened?” my son Frederick asked. Blocked by the crowd they hadn’t seen what had happened. Good. The less they knew about my abilities the better. I had hidden my career from him all his life. I wasn’t about to reveal myself now.
“The script coach cut me while trying to get at Cliff Armstrong.” I said. The cut was bleeding a lot but didn’t look too deep. Hurt like the dickens, though. I turned to Mary Ellworth. “You had an affair with him, didn’t you?”
“An affair? Ha! It barely lasted a week before I got tossed aside for someone from catering. Do you even remember what movie that was?”
Cliff Armstrong looked embarrassed.
“Uh, no. But it was a while ago, wasn’t it? Why are you still angry at me?”
“I’m not the one who’s really angry. I said yes and had fun. Sure, the rejection hurt, but it hurt Gary a lot more.”
“You were dating Gary?” the movie star asked, looking confused. “You told me you were single.”
Mary hung her head. “I lied. I cheated on him because I was so flattered you were flirting with me. He went insane with rage when he found out. He never blamed me. He insisted that you seduced me or forced me. No matter how many times I told him it was my fault, he wouldn’t listen. I ended up breaking up with him because he couldn’t let it go, and that just made him worse.”
“So you helped him try and kill me?”
Mary shook her head.
“No. Gary never told me he was going to try and kill you. I figured it out, though, when he tried to blow you up.”
Cliff Armstrong looked shocked. “Why didn’t you go to the cops? He could have killed me!”
“And he did kill Bert,” I reminded him.
“Oh yeah.”
I hoped Frederick had pulled my grandson out of earshot. I didn’t want him hearing this conversation. It was bad enough that I knew my movie star hero had feet of clay. I didn’t want poor little Martin to find that out too.
Mary hung her head. “I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I love him, even if he is crazy. I tried to reason with him, and make him promise not to go through with it again. But he got even crazier than before. He actually blamed you for Bert’s death!”
“You should have gone to the police,” Vance Randolph said.
“I couldn’t,” Mary whispered. “He’d have been locked up in a lunatic asylum, and Mr. Great Movie Star here would have been free to break up more relationships. Plus I was … afraid of him. I though he might hurt me.” She turned to me. “When he dropped the boom mic, I pointed him out to you, remember?
“That’s not enough,” I said. “You figured he would get away from me, and you only said something because you were standing so close you obviously saw him knock out the boom mic operator. You could have named him. Take responsibility, Mary, you are an accessory to murder. You even let me open that trailer door and nearly get blown up by a pipe bomb. Good thing Gary had been trained in safety so thoroughly that he didn’t know how to make an effective bomb, otherwise I would have been killed, and Cliff Armstrong along with me.”
“I didn’t know he was going to do that. I swear,” Mary pleaded.
“Forgive me if I don’t believe you. Besides, I would have never been in danger if you had told the police in the first place. And then you tried to finger William when Gary made his next attempt. The police were right there and you could have told them, but you let Gary go once again, and then let him try a final time. How many people would he have killed or maimed with those fireworks? How many children?”
Mary didn’t reply.
I shook my head in disgust. I had met all kinds of people in my career in the CIA—drug lords and mercenaries and tin-pot dictators—but no one had earned more of my contempt than this weak woman who let her crazy ex-boyfriend do her killing for her.
“Take her away,” I sighed, turning my back and pushing through the crowd. I wanted to see my family.
A week later, everything had settled down. At the preliminary hearing, Gary was judged to be criminally insane and would be tried accordingly. Mary was charged as an accessory to two counts of murder and seventy-three counts of attempted murder, for the total number of people who had been in danger from Gary’s various attempts. I shuddered to know that the “three” in that “seventy-three” included myself and my son and grandson. Neither she nor Gary would see the light of day again.
I’d like to say that made me feel glad, but it did the opposite. It had all been so unnecessary. When Cliff Armstrong talked to me on the last day of shooting and thanked me once again, I gave him a long lecture about the ramifications of his behavior. He promised he would change.
I actually believed him. He had started being courteous to the cast and crew. He even said “please” when he asked for something, and “thank you” when he got it. No one knew how to handle that.
I could only hope that it would continue.
Now I was back to my usual routine. Martin had gone back to school and so I had the weekdays to myself. I attended my book club, went out with Octavian, puttered around my garden, and caught up on my reading.
I was reading in my living room, with Dandelion curled up on my feet like a purring foot warmer, when there was a knock at the door.
After covering up the spyhole for a moment to make sure I wasn’t going to get shot (I may have gotten rid of two new killers, but I still had a few old killers after me), I looked out and saw it was Liz.
I opened the door.
“Well if it isn’t my nudist detective. Come on in!”
“How’s the hand?” she asked as she came in.
“Oh, it’s fine. You did an excellent field dressing. Everyone was convinced you were a real nurse.”
“At least I didn’t need to use the defibrillator. When those fireworks went off right in front of me, I thought I was going to have a heart attack.”
Within a few minutes we were sitting in my living room sipping tea, Dandelion curled up in my guest’s lap.
“I must thank you again for all your help,” I said. “You may have saved my grandson’s life.”
“Oh, you had the case solved without me. I just added some muscle.”
“Some much-needed muscle. I drove through downtown this morning. All of the sets and trailers are gone. It feels like a ghost town. I guess Cheerville will go back to its old placid self. I’m glad, but in a way I’ll miss all those crazy film people.”
Liz flashed me a mischievous grin over the rim over her teacup.
“They’re not all gone.”
“What do you mean?”
“We had an unexpected guest at the nudist colony. One of those movie people you’re missing.”
“Really? Who?”
I had visions of a naked Harvey stumbling drunkenly around the colony’s tennis court. It was not a pretty thought.
“You have to swear not to tell anyone.”
“Who would I tell? They’d think I was a member.”
“You still are a member. Your membership doesn’t expire for several months.”
“You know what I mean. Who is it?”
She set her teacup down, a smug smile creeping across her lips.
“Cliff Armstrong.”
“No!”
“Yes. He’s been a nudist for years. It’s amazing he’s been able to keep it out of the press. He says he spends several days at
a nudist colony after every movie. It helps him unwind.”
“He said he felt like he could never be himself. Perhaps that’s one way he’s trying. Wait, you spoke with him?”
Liz giggled. “Yes. We went swimming in the lake together.”
“You went skinny dipping. With Cliff Armstrong.”
“Yes.
My teacup clattered as I set it down. My head spun. Visions of a naked Cliff Armstrong diving into that beautiful lake filled my mind’s eye.
“Barbara, are you all right?”
“Oh my. I think it need that defibrillator.”
