High Fall (23 page)

It had been after nine when Kiernan called McCafferty at home, but once she identified herself as the woman with the Irish wolfhound, McCafferty insisted she come right on over. Now, at almost ten o’clock, he was seated in one of a pair of brown leather mission chairs facing a wall of windows that looked down from the top of La Jolla’s Soledad Mountain. Below, lights around Mission Bay shone like yellow crystals against the royal blue of the water. Party lights twinkled white from the masts of ships in the bay and San Diego Harbor beyond. Concentric cords of white and red, the warnings and memories of cars, surrounded the water like ribbons on a holiday package.

Delighted, Kiernan settled in the other chair and accepted a drink in the kind of Waterford crystal glass she recalled being in the locked cabinet of her mother’s sister, who had married above herself.

“I’ll bet your family’s proud of you,” she couldn’t resist saying.

“That they are, Ms. O’Shaughnessy. Now I don’t want you to think I go around spouting this to everyone I meet, but you being back-east Irish—I can hear mid-Atlantic in your voice—I know you’ll understand. I’m the only one of my generation to finish high school—of all the cousins, and there was a heap of us kids. I worked my way through college; it took eight years. But when I graduated, with honors yet, you’d ha’ thought John Kennedy had been resurrected. And then, years later, for me to come out here to the Golden State and get a job in the movies.” He shrugged in an attempt at modesty that couldn’t cover his pride. “Well, when I went back home after that, the likeness of myself was on the wall between the Kennedys and the Pope.”

She smiled comfortably, able to picture the scene without effort. She mentally filled in the background Tchernak had been able to squeeze from BakDat’s tardy—and guilty—Persis in the half hour it had taken her to drive to the top of the hill in La Jolla—Soledad Mountain—then added, “And now that you’re in line for assistant to the state treasurer—”

He raised a meaty finger. “Hush now. Nothing’s firm yet.”

“I’m sure that my small mention of it won’t alert the gods. You’ll be in Sacramento before the gods know you’re available. And with the wind at your back,” she said with a laugh.

McCafferty smiled, sipped his drink—a pale rye and ginger—and sat back comfortably in his soft leather chair. Like the watered drink, he was an interesting mixture of the old and the new, of traditional Irish and the competitive edge of California. At ten in the evening he might well have been dressed in sweats or jeans, but he was in corduroy slacks and a tweed jacket, and his pale blue shirt still looked fresh.

“So why were the books for
Bad Companions
such a quagmire?”

He glanced accusingly at his desk in the far corner of the room, as if it were responsible for his past errata. “I’ll tell you, I wasn’t a natural for accounting. If I’d been the son of a rich man or grown up with educated people, I would have relaxed in college and taken classes in sociology, and theater arts, and who knows what. But just getting to college was such a big step, and I was working so hard to pay my way through, and afterward to repay the loans, that I felt I had to take classes that would lead directly to work. Thus accounting, and later computers. For an insecure kid like me, the rules were a comfort. With them, I felt as if I could go anywhere and I’d be able to make it.” He smiled expansively. “Well, you can see how innocent I was. Which is what I realized in spades when I got a look at the cost runs on that film. I’d just finished doing the taxes for a startup company, and they were a breeze compared to that.”

The startup company where he’d met Trace Yarrow.

“Rules? I’ll tell you, Kiernan, these folk don’t deal in fantasy only on the screen. To them contracts mean nothing. Salaries are changed more often than the weather. People were hired for two months, and after a week they were gone. The studio accountants were screaming—literally screaming—on the phone that we were over budget, then the next thing I knew there were two new limousines for the stars. I’d go to do the payroll and discover there were three people working I’d never been notified about. No one kept receipts for anything. It would have been easier to plan the budget for an emerging nation.” He shook his head. “I did the best I could. In retrospect, I’m sure I stuck a lot closer to the truth than they wanted. They got to the point where they were virtually swatting me away with all my questions. But then, it was me those cost runs were going to reflect on, and I knew from the second week there that I’d be moving on.”

“Because you’d found another job?”

“Not yet, but I knew I would. They’d loaded the whole of the office work on me. I was so busy taking messages, ordering envelopes, and running the copier, it’s a miracle I had time for the cost runs at all.” He lifted his drink to his mouth and held it there, tapping his teeth on the glass before taking another sip.

Watching him, Kiernan wondered if those small sips were signs of caution, adjustment to the California mores of wine or mineral water, or merely indications of distaste for the weak drink. As the saying went, the Irish were divided into drinkers and teetotalers. Her own parents had been the latter, and for her the lure of liquor had been mixed with the lure of freedom. There had been nights she couldn’t remember the next day, and ones she wished she couldn’t. School and then work had limited those nights. And once she’d started postmortems, pictures of gnarly liquor-hardened liver tissue seemed to float in each glass.

He rested the glass back on its coaster. “I was a token in the movie business, a poor straitlaced bean counter in a rich game run by people with fewer rules than lovers. I could see early on that no matter how hard I worked, I’d always be an outsider.”

“I know the feeling,” Kiernan said, though it had been many years since it had bothered her. Smiling suddenly, she said, “Why is it that the name Carlton Dratz comes to mind?”

McCafferty did a momentary double take then threw his head back and guffawed. “Say no more. The twerp was a poster child for nepotism. He burst through the set like a greased pig, leaving a bog of mire and sh—of droppings wherever he went. I’ll tell you, when he started through my books—him without so much as an accounting course to his name, and not enough sense to keep the pages together—he fouled me up for weeks and got both the union and the studio screaming. The next time you stick your head between the covers of my books,’ I said to him, ‘I’ll mash it like a pressed flower.’ I could ha’ done it, I must have been twice his size.” He shot a glance at his midsection. “Or at least I am now.”

“But you restrained yourself?”

“Indeed. Provoked as I was, I knew that if I waited, he’d take care of it himself. He was instructing the director how to direct, he was chatting aloud on the set—I don’t know how many extra takes they had to do because he couldn’t keep quiet. You can’t believe how much money that runs! A week into shooting, he took a nap in the ‘fire’ house, woke up, and strolled into the middle of a scene out in front of it. He ‘borrowed’ a guy’s motorcycle and tried to jump it across the trap in the road, and it ended up a pile of metal at the bottom of the hole. All that, and there wasn’t a thing anyone could do about Dratz, what with him being the anointed one. I’ll tell you, Kiernan, I grew up in a family where people talked about ‘the Troubles’ as if they happened half an hour ago instead of over half a century ago and an ocean away, but I never understood what it is to be ‘in an occupied land’ until I dealt with Dratz. We were way over budget, but when Dratz finally left, Cary Bleeker ordered cases of champagne.”

“Dratz went off with one of the extras. Bleeker told me that. He said you never forget a name and you would remember hers.”

“I do. But alas, not so much because I’ve the memory of an elephant, but because she passed on a few months ago. Jane Hogarth was her name. I don’t recall
her,
but she couldn’t have been very old even now, ten years later. She’d been working in the costumes department of some studio; that’s the only reason she merited an obituary.” He glanced over at Kiernan. “I suppose in your business, you need to check for foul play, so I’ll save you some work. The obit called it death after a long illness.”

Kiernan sighed. “I’m sorry for her, and sorry for me.” She lifted her glass but stopped abruptly before it reached her lips. “Jane Hogarth? What did she look like?”

“That I don’t recall.”

“There must have been pictures,” she said. “Publicity photos, newspaper shots.”

“Not of her, an extra. Only the stars are in the papers.”

She smiled at him, understanding the unspoken half of the sentence. “But you do have pictures of the stars, then.”

Lights flashed outside the window.

“Ah, Kiernan, the fireworks from Marine World! ’Tis the joy of living on Soledad Mountain. Better than the Fourth of July. They’re usually set off only in the summer. Tonight must be some special occasion down there. Or,” he said with a smile, “perhaps it’s in honor of yourself being here.”

A veiny mushroom of lime and silver spread above the black bay water. She moved closer to the window. Fireworks had always entranced her; no matter where from or how often seen, the spray of sparkles, the glittering foam of color bursting one upon another dazzled her. Watching, she became a child again, the child who had begged, cajoled, sneaked out, and later stomped out to Gunther Hill on Fourth of July nights to see the once-a-year magic in the sky.

Roman candles burst higher in the air, still well below McCafferty’s window. The Fourth of July was a season away. Memorial Day wouldn’t come for months, but fireworks streaked the dark starry sky, reminding viewers on the hills of La Jolla, Claremont, and Linda Vista, in the flatlands of Mission Beach, Ocean Beach, Pacific Beach, and south to the rising land of Point Loma, and the high rises of downtown, that every day in San Diego is a holiday, every night spent there a cause for celebration.

“Liam, I envy you. It would be worth living in a treehouse to see this every night. Better even than the fireworks by the Lincoln Memorial.”

“’Tis grand, indeed.”

“But you haven’t diverted me from your pictures. What do you have from
Bad Companions?”

“Nothing,” he snapped. It was a moment before he forced a smile and added, “You’ll have to take me at my word. I wouldn’t be telling untruths, not to you.”

Kiernan matched his smile, in length and insincerity. McCafferty was certainly lying, but she wasn’t willing to call him on it, not without a fallback position. The man was a pol, a professional Irishman who tempered his cadence with the resin of the old sod and burnished his statements with reminiscences true or useful. His whole demeanor insisted that he was a charmer with old-fashioned standards. It was an affectation, or more likely a mere exaggeration, that would warm the hearts of transplanted Irish as well as those who had never been east of Reno. And it would pull the wool over those who had not grown up surrounded by Aran sweaters.

She walked to the window and looked down Mission Bay at the gold spray of fireworks. And closer, at McCafferty’s street.

Parked fifty feet in front of her Jeep was the blue Volkswagen bug with the wooden bumper. The same car that had been behind her on the I-5! Who the hell—

She turned and was into the motion to race down the stairs and yank open the Volkswagen door, when she caught herself, turned back, and took another look at the street. A jogger was chugging down the sidewalk. In less than a minute he’d be next to her Jeep. In a minute he’d be beside the bug. “Hey! Hey! Get away from that Jeep!” She started toward the door.

McCafferty caught her arm.

“What’s going on?”

“A guy followed me from L.A. In a Volkswagen. Now he’s fiddling with my Jeep. I’m going to drag him up here and make him—”

“A little thing like you? No, no. You let me handle this.” McCafferty, ever the old country gentleman, headed down the stairs, no doubt grateful for the excuse to escape her questions.

McCafferty should be gone for a good five minutes, but she couldn’t count on that.

Quickly she surveyed the room. Where would his pictures be? Obviously somewhere he figured she wouldn’t find. The man was an accountant, an orderly person. He would keep all his records from
Bad Companions
together. And whatever these photographs were, they would be with those records. But where?

His desk? He had glanced in that direction earlier. Not in his desk, though. A desk is for today’s problems, not last decade’s memories.

She hurried across the room and eyed the three cases of shelves above the desk. On the top left shelf were eight books with
Accounting
in their titles. On the shelf below was a file box, followed by
Bookkeeping
titles,
California Government, California History, Car Repair …
“Alphabetized!” She smiled. Would that every house she searched were kept by an accountant. The movie records could be placed under
Movie
,
Summit-Arts,
or something more obscure, but that file box on the second shelf was just where
Bad Companions
belonged. She climbed up on the desk and hauled it down.

Outside, tires squealed. McCafferty was shouting.

Wedging the box against her chest she jumped down, opened it, and leafed rapidly through the file folders inside. She opened
“Bad Companions
Miscellaneous” and, ignoring the papers, pulled out the one photo. It was not a publicity picture, nor one of just the stars, as McCafferty had suggested, but three rows of grinning people, arms over neighbors’ shoulders, beer cans in hand. It could have been the picture from any company picnic, if that company had hired for looks. With youth and hair, Cary Bleeker had had a bit of star quality. Trace Yarrow stood uncomfortably inside the arm of a man of similar stature but with a smirk that suggested he’d nabbed Yarrow unawares. And even Dolly Uberhazy, smiling happily, seemed caught by the communal glitter. Or maybe her reaction was to the tall man under whose arm she stood.

Kiernan’s smile widened. She had been right. Unless Uberhazy had had a profligate life, this was not a man she’d forget. He was a knockout—tall, with waves of red hair, and eyes that rested on her alone. Kiernan held the picture closer.