High Fall (22 page)

“But the stunt community—?” she prompted.

“That’s a little different. It’s small, and the guys who’ve been around awhile have a little more honor among themselves.” He lifted the Sierra Nevada to his mouth. It was empty. “You want a beer?”

“Yes.”

He reached over to the fridge, pulled two bottles from the door, and handed her one.

She opened it and drank, but her throat was so taut, it was hard to swallow. “And Greg, didn’t he have honor?”

Bleeker stared at the green bottle. “Yeah, he did. But he had only a few more good years left, anyone with any sense could see that. It was like the shorter the time, the more desperate he got. When he died, I thought …” Bleeker leaned back and took a long swallow of his beer. His eyelids shut. He took another drink. Kiernan was just about to prompt him when he spoke. “It was lucky he died before he lost the Move.”

Kiernan picked up her beer, but it was a moment before she could make herself drink. “I saw a still of Greg in the middle of the Move—smiling.”

“I know the one you mean.” A spark of enthusiasm flickered and died, like a match beneath thick green logs. Bleeker’s voice was without inflection. “It was from his first movie, the other time he did the Move. When I saw it, I was blown away. I mean, it was the most important publicity shot of his career, and he was
enjoying
it, as if he’d missed the line between work and play. I mean, I love directing, but I know it’s work.”

“Right. But it’s a fine line. And you’ve probably enjoyed it less since the bad luck incidents,” she said, aware that she had built a bond between them and now was snapping it back at him with an ease that was almost automatic. “They started on that set,
Bad Companions,
didn’t they?”

He reached for his beer, then let his hand drop. “Christ, does the entire world know about me? Or did Dolly inform you? Dolly, hell—she’s probably the only exec in Hollywood who’ll still take a chance on me.”

“Why did she?”

“Who knows? Maybe it was the Gaige Move. Hell, maybe it was something as quirky as my finding the polenta rolls she’s so crazy about.”

“The menu was in the contract?” Kiernan asked skeptically.

“I sent a box of them with my agent to spice up the deal,” he said with a wan smile.

“Or to remind Dolly that you recalled her eating them last time—on the same set she had an affair on?” Kiernan wanted his reaction to that affair.

“Listen, if I sent food to commemorate every affair on a set, I could feed Bangladesh.”

“Who was the guy?”

“If I could remember every guy—”

“Right,” she said giving up on that. “Dolly did tell me about Greg’s brother having to be barred from the set. And about Dratz. Do you think one of them is behind your ‘bad luck’?”

“Pedora? The guy was a nutcase, a paranoid would-be screenwriter who figured all Hollywood was united in one great campaign against him. Sure I figured it could be him. Or Dratz. Or Yarrow. Or anyone else on the set. Who knows? Don’t waste your time trying to figure it out. I’ve spent ten years. There’s no rationale. I’ve checked payroll logs, but there’s no one person who’s been on every set. I’ve turned my mind to mush thinking about motives. Was Yarrow pissed off at being fired? The guy was operating on a bum leg. He should have seen that coming. And Pedora, did he lose his mind because his meal ticket was killed? Like I said, the guy’s a nutcase.”

“But you’re not sure he’s
your
nutcase?”

“I only wish. If I could prove it was Pedora, or Dratz, or anyone else, I’d take out a full-page ad in the trades. My career would be reborn. Do you know what it’s like working my ass off year after year, directing second unit after second unit, never getting to work with a star? And waiting, always waiting for the disaster that’s coming?” His voice rang with emotion.

“Does it happen on every picture?”

“No. It’s almost worse that way. Intermittent reinforcement.”

“What kind of things do you mean when you talk about ‘disasters’?”

“Short-circuit in the wiring burns out a couple of banks of lights.”

“Couldn’t that just be an accident?”

“Of course.” He sat up straight. “But it had never happened before. And then, suddenly, two banks. One we could have done without. Two cost us a couple nights’ shooting.”

“What else?” Kiernan said, her shoulders tightening with excitement.

“Malicious pranks. Look, when you’re a second unit director, in charge of a lot of technical and mechanical devices, there’s a myriad of stuff that can go wrong.”

“Give me another example. What happened in your last picture?”

He started to protest, then shrugged. “Flowers. I don’t remember what they were called. They were some kind of delicate pastel things flown in from the end of the earth. The greensmen stuck them in the ground the day before the shooting. Next morning they were gone, the whole damned lot of them. Nothing but singed leaves. And you know what that means.”

“You have to wait to shoot till you can fly in another batch. In the meantime you pay people to stand around?”

“Exactly. Producer was so furious, I’m lucky to be sitting here with my balls in place. And my wallet. He threatened to take the overrun out of my check. I should have been making so much.” He shrugged. “Nothing wrecks a career like going over budget.”

“Singed leaves.” She leaned forward. “The plants were burned?”

“Yeah. Somebody threw a roll of paper towels over them and lit it.”

“These incidents, did they all use fire?”

“Yeah. Every one.”

She leaned forward, bracing her elbows on her thighs. She’d been so sure that moving the marker was the latest of the pranks, a prank that had gotten out of hand. But whoever spent years intermittently harassing Bleeker had been obsessed enough to include fire in every incident. Obsessives don’t suddenly drop their MO and opt for the easiest means. “Cary, the fires in these pranks, were they always central to the result?”

He shrugged noncommittally.

“Yesterday there was a fire in a trash can by the trailers, remember?”

Slowly, Bleeker nodded.

“And right after that,” she said, “the marker was moved.”

T
HE BEER CAN FELL
from Cary Bleeker’s hand. Bleeker leaned forward in his chair and clutched his head. Normally, Kiernan would have classified the reaction as theatrical. But now she, who’d been known to remind people of her lack of bedside manner, had the urge to scoop Bleeker onto her lap like a small child and hold him safe till the pain went away. Victims fell apart, but perpetrators carried on, too. She wasn’t sure in which category Bleeker belonged.

Either way, a wound like this one could throb for the rest of his life, and no amount of comforting would provide an opiate. If he was innocent, the most she could do was to give him time to let the initial shock pass. But if he had moved the cordon posts, she had to take advantage of his unguarded state. The truth came first. “Cary, maybe moving the marker doesn’t fit with the other pranks?”

Bleeker pushed himself up. Momentarily, his dark eyes brightened, then he shook his head and slumped into the leather chair. “No, it fits his MO.”

“Have there been injuries in the other pranks?”

“No.” He clutched his head again, but he didn’t sink forward, and in a moment he gave up the awkward position and let his hands drop. “This is it. He wins. I’m out of the business. I’ll never direct again. I quit.” An ironic smile flashed on his swollen features and was gone. “Who am I kidding? I won’t have the chance to quit—no one will ever hire me. Bad enough I’ve cost hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years, but now I’m responsible for killing people.”

“Cary, there isn’t time for self-pity.”

His head snapped up. “What kind of woman are you?”

Bleeker was angry, but at least he was alert. “Let’s look at this practically,” Kiernan said. “Who have we got as suspects? The pranks started on the
Bad Companions
set—”

“Christ! Carlton Dratz—someone spotted him on the set! How fucking fitting. Lark’s death has the earmarks of Dratz. He moves the marker—because he isn’t thinking, because it’s in his way, because he wants to see what will happen, who knows?—and ends up with a killing, for which someone else suffers.”

“By ‘someone else,’ you mean you as opposed to Lark?” So much for jolting him out of self-pity. “Where is Dratz these days?”

“Who knows?”

“Where did he go after
Bad Companions
?”

“Off with one of the extras—the girl he was so busy screwing in the honeywagon.”

“Her name?”

“I don’t know.”

“Cary, we’re talking about the man who might be ruining your life, and you haven’t even bothered to track down the woman he went off with?”

He jolted up. “Look, the guy wasn’t the center of my life. He was like a cold sore on your lip, you know? When it’s blooming, it’s all you can think about, but when it goes, you forget about it, and one morning you realize it’s been gone for days. When Dratz left, I was just relieved to have him gone. It wasn’t until three or four pictures later that there were enough incidents to form a pattern, and I began to think about Dratz. But by that time, no one remembered who
Companions’
star was, much less who all the extras were.”

“Wasn’t there a crew list?”

“Sure, but it didn’t include local hires; it wasn’t updated. It’s useless.”

“There has to be some way we can find out,” she insisted.

“I haven’t found one, not in ten years.”

“Bleeker, you are not an investigator. There have to be records from that set, contracts signed, salaries paid.”

Bleeker’s face brightened. “Yeah, of course. Hey, this is going to be easier than you thought.”

Kiernan scowled. If there was one thing she hated, it was civilians telling her her work was going to be a snap.

“Here’s why it’s going to be so easy for you to find out about Dratz. The accountant from
Bad Companions
is here.” Bleeker beamed at her. When she didn’t respond, he nudged: “He can get the payroll records from
Companions.”

“After ten years? You don’t even save tax forms that long.”

“Yeah, but see, accounting is so boring. It was a thrill for this guy to be on a movie location. All the hassles and changes, it was Hollywood with a capital H, and he loved it.”

“And that accountant was Liam McCafferty, the city media liaison, right? I talked to him on the set yesterday.”

Bleeker beamed brighter. “See, I told you he loved it.”

J
ASON
P
EDORA STOOD NEXT
to the little food trailer, panting from the double-time run in from Torrey Pines Boulevard. He wasn’t meant for that. Nobody’d asked Isherwood or Fitzgerald to jog.

But the bitch’s Jeep was still here. Jeep with a gas tank the size of Ventura.
She
didn’t have to gas up. So
she
chose a route where you had to sell your soul for a gallon. Damned bug’s tank only held ten point six. Took him half an hour to find a station that didn’t want the family jewels.

But she was still here. In Bleeker’s trailer. He heard her voice through the window. The trailer sat at the edge of the set; the guards didn’t bother to patrol it. As if they knew what Bleeker was worth. He could have doused a rag with gas and tossed it through Bleeker’s window, and no one would have been the wiser. Would have been easy, a no-brainer, a Dratz move.

Pedora smiled, thinking of Carlton Dratz and Bad Luck Bleeker, and all the “misfortunes” that had come to pass when Bleeker was on a set. He’d heard Bleeker whining. If Bad Luck thought
those
hits were big time, he hadn’t seen anything.

Not now. He made the rules, and the rule was one hit per production
and Edge
had already had that. And he had more important things on his mind.

Still … he’d learned a lot in the last decade, about wiring, and light and sound devices, and flash fires, and cables and brake lines, and grease fires. Hell, they could have had a fire department devoted to him. He laughed.

But no, this was serious. He hadn’t wanted to do fire. But this was the right thing. In memory of Greg. How long would it take the imbeciles to get that?

“If they weren’t so fucking cheap,” Greg had said, “Bleeker would have a fire safety crew. Wouldn’t depend on the regular, all-around, no-specialty crew, and the town fire department who couldn’t get their asses to the set on time.” Greg had had his own safety crew, but there was no question of them being on payroll, not with the tightwads in production cutting every corner and Bleeker too lame to put up a fight. A penny saved ... for Greg’s life.

Well, Bleeker, the cringing wimp—the set could be burning around him, and he still wouldn’t get it.

He looked back at the Jeep. It was her he had to watch. Couldn’t let himself be sidetracked. She would come right by here after she left Bleeker’s trailer. But he could slip around the side of the trailer out of sight. He rested a foot on the trailer hitch. It gave a slight bounce in reaction to the pressure. Pedora looked down. And smiled.

A padlock secured it to the next trailer. But the tongue hadn’t been pushed into the groove.

The O’Shaughnessy bitch was coming out of Bleeker’s. He couldn’t lose her, not now, not after all he’d had to do.

He looked back at the padlock. Trailers like this, they were so easy. They were asking for it. How could he not … ?

Pedora pulled off the lock and loosed the chain. Give it a shove, just a little one.

But no, he had his rules.

Besides, he might have to break them later.

“T
HE MOVIE BUSINESS,
I hated it. It was a quagmire then, and look, now ten years later it’s still taking up my time.” Liam McCafferty laughed. “ ‘Course, there’s no saying I didn’t leap at the chance and make the most of it. And when the city offered me its media liaison spot, I wasn’t about to give them a no.” McCafferty was a big man: big waves of faded red hair, features too big for his face, which seemed too big for his body, which in itself was big. He appeared to be in his midfifties, but she suspected closer to fifty was the truth. The disparity came from the sag of his body and the brogue he’d chosen to affect. He reminded Kiernan of one of the old ward pols who used to corral her father for meetings in the basement of Saint Brendan’s. And Uncle Matt, who’d been one of them.