High Fall (17 page)

“Take Jason Pedora—”

“Who’s he?”

“Greg Gaige’s half-brother. Been working on the story of Greg ever since he died. He didn’t kill him—I’m not suggesting that—but if he’d thought there was a story in it, he might have. Guy’s a nutcase. If Dolly said she’d buy his screenplay, he’d be willing to mow down everyone west of Burbank.”

“Was he on the set yesterday?”

“Can’t swear to it. Then again, can’t imagine he wouldn’t be. You want me to check?”

She nodded, and stood up. “Yarrow, I appreciate the warning. I was a gymnast, I’m used to scoping out things before I make a move. But Dolly Uberhazy hasn’t called me to her own office to blow me away.”

“Not literally. What she’s going to do is try to co-opt you.” He walked to the casement windows, the limp apparent. “She’s going to tell you that she got me to agree to tell her what you find.”

“She bought you!” Kiernan snapped.

Yarrow turned. “She
thinks
she bought me. I haven’t told her anything.”

“You don’t have anything to report. Lark’s been dead less than a day!”

“Look, I didn’t have to let you in on this. I could have just taken my studio job and my health coverage and let you walk blind. But I’m risking the last chance I’ll get for good medical and telling you the woman’s a viper. A viper with friends and lackeys.” He headed for the door.

“Yarrow! Wait! Who or what is Boukunas?”

“A. J. Boukunas? A stunt man. Died in a three-figure high fall. Designed a new air bag to land on, smaller, less expensive. Did a three-hundred-twenty-one-foot high fall onto it to prove its worth.”

“And?”

“Proved it wasn’t good enough. It exploded. He died. Why?”

“
‘No
Boukunas,
not
Greg!’ Lark wrote that in her scrapbook. What did she mean?”

Yarrow shook his head. “Greg didn’t do three-figure high falls.”

“And? Come on, Yarrow, this is our only clue. They were both stunt men. They had different specialties, used different equipment—”

“But Greg never experimented with equipment. Never. He never took a chance on equipment that wasn’t proven. The risks are in the illusion, not the props—that’s what he said.”

She watched Yarrow walk out. He’d answered her question and told her nothing. Lark Sondervoil hadn’t put her career on the line for a press conference to announce what the stunt community already knew, that Greg Gaige was careful.

J
ASON
P
EDORA WAS NOT
standing at the bar. He didn’t do that kind of thing—too much of a Hollywood cliché. He was damned if anyone would call him a failed screenwriter, draped like a dish towel over the bar, trying to impress ingénues with tales of his dead half-brother. He sat at a corner table by the railing, his espresso with a twist just far enough past the center of the small red-clothed table to pass for a
NO ADMITTANCE SIGN
. A drink—straight Tanqueray—was what he needed, but he didn’t allow himself liquor before eleven thirty in the morning; he wasn’t about to be the Betty Ford prospect cliché, either.

Pedora ran his fingers through his wavy gray hair. Still thick if not still black. And he had a lot more of it than that little prick of an agent of his. Last time he did lunch with him, he was sporting a rug and drinking Perrier like all the yuppie Puritan post-boomers who ran Hollywood. Whole scene was so uncomfortable, he could hardly taste the Tanqueray without thinking that every ginny breath reeked has-been. Or never-was.

He swallowed the rest of the espresso. He could pick up one of the wanna-bes. Venice was full of them. To hear them tell it, the movies were peopled by B-list actresses with A-list luck, while they, au contraire … They were full of it, but he didn’t care; the dreams, the delusions, the outright lies—it was all material for a writer. And
Venice Nights
, his screenplay, had almost made it. Even before Greg died, there’d been studio people in Creative hooked on that one. Or almost hooked.

He eyed his watch: eleven fifteen. Damn! He could break his rule. He laughed to himself: he’d broken more than rules in the last twelve hours. Why not a drink? He needed it this morning, hell, he deserved it, after what he’d been through yesterday: the whole bit in the apartment, and before that, seeing Greg’s Move again. He’d had to see it, to catalog his own reaction to it. That second script guy in Creative, the one who’d called him—not vice versa—after Greg’s death—damn, Greg would have been proud if he’d known about that interview—studio’d come within a hair of buying
Venice Nights
then… Not enough guts, emotion, Creative had said. Well, how could he be expected to create emotion on paper after his brother had been burned to a crisp? ’Course, he shouldn’t have expected a twenty-five-year-old in Creative to have any compassion, he knew that now. He should have cottoned to it then. Youth and nepotism, the twin horsemen of Hollywood!

Well, he for one had never traded on his youth. And there’d never been any big Pedora back at the studio to open doors for him, like that little prick Dratz on Greg’s set. Not even Greg had really been any help.

Well, not a total loss. In fairness he’d gotten some of his insurance money, but only because his mother—their mother—had given it to him. Hardly what you’d call brotherly love. He’d helped Greg perfect the Move. Fat lot of credit he got for that. The Gaige Move. Not the Gaige-Pedora Move. But no use in telling that to anyone now. Just sounded like whining. Even when he’d wowed the young, lithe stunt hopefuls with his tales of Greg, he’d had to watch it, to make sure he came across as not whining. And now, it was so long since the fire, none of these girls even remembered Greg.

Until now.

When he went to La Jolla yesterday, he’d expected to spike the creative juices by seeing Lark Sondervoil do Greg’s Move. Who the hell was she to do the Move that he and Greg had created! There had been something fishy on that set. Just like on
Bad Companions:
trucks sneaking onto the set in the middle of the night. They’d barred him from the
Bad Companions
set—Greg’s fault—but in the last ten years he’d learned how to keep out of sight. Yesterday they hadn’t even noticed him on the set. Ten years ago, if he’d been as smart as he was now, he’d have had proof about what was in those trucks. He saw them driving onto the set and pulling back out half an hour later.
PACIFIC BREEZE COMPUTER,
they’d said. Shit, they don’t deliver computers in the middle of the night, even in California!

He had put it all in
Midnight Cargo.
And they’d called that screenplay unbelievable! In Hollywood! Well, he’d give them believable. That trot over the bluff yesterday, that was believable. And that little blonde, how had the little bitch learned so much about Greg? What else did she know? Had Greg told her what was going down at
Bad Companions,
when he hadn’t let on to his own brother? There’d been no letters from Greg in her apartment. No diary. Nothing. He could have landed in jail, and all for nothing.

Of course, the cops wouldn’t have caught him. They
didn’t.
He was too smart and too quick; the bitch who walked in on him found that out. Even afterward, when he’d stood under the window and listened, neither one of San Diego’s
finest
had heard a sound.

Pedora turned to face the ocean. The water was too far away to see, but he could hear the crash of waves and smell the brine that seemed to come directly from teahouses on the shores of Yokohama.

No, wait—damn!—this Lark girl had been nineteen years old. She was nine years old when Greg died! Greg wouldn’t have talked to her or written his secrets to her; he wouldn’t have
known
her.

There
had
to be some connection.

That fall over the bluff had been no accident. Of course she had had it coming, stealing the Move he and Greg created. How had she figured out the tricks no one but Greg knew?

Notes—maybe she did have notes stashed away somewhere else. Somewhere the little dark-haired bitch discovered after she’d forced him out of the apartment. If she had let the police see them—Sweat poured down his sides. The cops wouldn’t understand the value of those notes. They’d leak them to the press! His material! The final touch for
Midnight Cargo
!

He lifted the small white cup and waited for the last brown drop to roll down the inside into his mouth, then swung his long legs over the wrought-iron fence that separated the cafe from the Venice sidewalk beside the beach. The morning fog still hung over the sidewalk and the beach. He eased his hands into his jacket pockets. A block beyond the cafe, the sidewalk was empty, the sand as bare as some tropical island. Some
cold
tropical island. Even the beach houses that faced the canals like rows of stamps in a five-dollar book—rows of stamps, that was a good image, he’d have to remember that—even the houses seemed attached to the canals rather than the beach. If it were night, cops would be driving by on the sand, warning him not to walk alone. But he didn’t worry; he’d lived here too long, knew too many of the guys that the cops were warning him about, knew too much for them to mess with him. Hell, he could have written a blockbuster about some of them—if he didn’t mind it being published posthumously.

But no time for that now. Lark Sondervoil’s notes; he had to find them. He could get back in her apartment… Dangerous; the cops would be watching it… But no, no need to risk that. The little dark-haired bitch, she had had time to hunt around in there—the time she’d robbed him of. She’d know.

A smile spread across Jason Pedora’s narrow face. Her, he knew just where to find. She and Dolly together—he liked that. Should he take her down right there, in Dolls’s office, or wait and get her alone? No need to decide now; when he had her face to face, his gut would tell him what to do.

He’d let his chance get away before and had paid for it with ten years of living like a bum. This time nothing and no one was going to stand in his way.

K
IERNAN PULLED UP TO
the Summit-Arts Studios gate at twenty to two. Hot valley air oozed in through the open window; spears of light reflected off the chrome of the Miata ahead, pricking at her eyes. The sky was an opalescent blue, a million miles away, with no connection to this exposed platter of a city too naive or distracted to shade itself with more than a palm tree. She leaned forward, shaking her shoulders to free the sweat-stuck blouse. Every time she left the ocean breezes at home for L.A., she dressed too warmly. Now she could have done without the gray linen jacket and the long sleeves on her green silk blouse.

While the guard checked his list for her name, she glanced ahead. The studio looked like a boomtown grammar school. In layout it resembled a dead flightless bird, its body the sound stage, and its low, limp wings the stucco block offices that wrapped around to create a courtyard filled with lines of prefab units, and between them, trailers. Apparently, Kiernan thought, Summit-Arts Studios had had a burst of good fortune.

“One car pass, name of O’Shaughnessy.” The guard waved her through. “Ms. Uberhazy’s in the second building on the left.”

She had allowed herself fifteen minutes to get a feel of the studio. Walking toward the bird’s belly, she found her self amidst the airplane-hangarlike sound stages, and warehouses so ordinary they could have held cartons of cleansers or sides of steer. Or M-16s. The only thing that distinguished them from any other storage facility in Burbank was the absence of traffic. Unmarked eighteen-wheelers were parked in front of a couple, but what commerce there was on the alleys seemed to be handled by baggy-pantsed bicycle messengers on old fat-wheeled Schwinns with big wire baskets in front. The town that time forgot.

She stared through an open door at paintings one above another up the warehouse wall, furniture stacked like the spoils of a distress sale. A messenger screeched to a stop inches in front of her, grabbed a manila envelope, and raced inside.

Around the corner dust floated thick, as carpenters hammered and sawed on a black wooden cave. Across the alley an open-sided slice of submarine sat aground on cement. She turned another corner and was abruptly at the corner of New York’s Fifty-second and First Avenue—the back lot—with dark-red-brick four-floor walkups, street-level boutiques and delicatessens, an alternate side of the street parking sign, and cans of Pabst and
BLACK COFFEE
$.60,
REGULAR COFFEE
$.65 posted in the delicatessen window. The small, splinted street trees looked as if they’d spent their frail lives battling carbon monoxide, and a copy of the
Times
was pressed against the wire mesh of a trash can. But in the hot California sun nothing moved, and Fifty-second and First looked as abandoned as a city after the plague. And it seemed fitting to glance through the East Side Cleanette’s open door at an empty shell holding nothing more than worn sawhorses and plastic makeup cartons so brittle and dusty, the potions inside them were doubtless drier and more fragile than the skin they’d been bought to save.

She shook off the thought, suspicious that Yarrow’s warning was tinting her thoughts. But still there was an emptiness to the studio that made the facades seem thinner, the bicycle messengers look as if they were riding to nowhere. The people she saw could have worked in a third as many buildings. So Summit-Arts’s burst of good fortune had bloomed and—burst. Lark Sondervoil could be the focus of a helluva wrongful death suit, maybe one big enough to scuttle the studio. Ambulance chasers and “next of kin” would be popping up like crocuses. No wonder Dolly Uberhazy was a little jumpy at the thought of a private investigator.

Kiernan walked into Building Two, one of the stucco block affairs, five minutes early. A larger-than-life, brighter-than-sight poster from a film she hadn’t seen dominated the room. The receptionist in front of it was not harried by phone calls, and there were only two other people waiting. As she asked for Uberhazy, Kiernan had the feeling that both of them—a woman Lark’s age, and a man in his fifties—were straining to hear not her words to the receptionist, nor the receptionist’s into the intercom, but those coming back out of the intercom.