High Fall (6 page)

A voice in her head said: What’s the matter with you? A young, attractive guy with a body that’s state of the art? A guy who tracks down bluefish caught in one of the few unpolluted areas off Jersey and bakes them as God would if He cooked; who brings you
doppio caffe latte
in bed, in a Thermos that keeps it warm till you wake up. A guy who loves your dog. What more do you want?

But then, no one ever pretended pathologists were normal.

She got out, opened the back door, and watched Ezra bound into Tchernak’s half of the building. The clanking stopped, and the panting switched to eager canine greeting.

Kiernan leaned back against the fender. Why had she hired Tchernak to begin with? She’d wanted to simplify her life, stop hassling with housecleaning services, the takeout Thai, Vietnamese, and Mexican deliveries, and the pizza shop that would come through on the all-too-many nights when she forgot about dinner till everything else was closed. She’d been desperate to end the frustrating search for the perfect dog-sitter who would feed, walk, and fawn over Ezra and approve when his mistress called twice a day and asked “to speak to Him.”

She had wanted an unobtrusive cook/housekeeper, a mature lady with fifty years of experience over stove and vacuum cleaner, and five-mile-on-the-beach thighs for Ezra’s run. Was that asking too much? She hadn’t planned on a six-foot-four, 240-pound thirty-year-old ex-football star who couldn’t get it through his head that his days on the gridiron were over. Six years was the average career for an offensive lineman, she’d reminded him more than once. The average healthy twenty-eight-year-old lineman—if anyone could be considered healthy after being smacked around professionally sixteen weeks a year for six years—retired from the game or was cut from the team roster. What the hell made Brad Tchernak think that after three ruptured discs and three years out of the game, he could stage a comeback?

Tchernak grumbled amicably about being a servant, but for him, a job that provided free housing and didn’t interfere with his training schedule was a coup. Maybe too much of one. The man was setting himself up for a crashing disappointment that would leave him hanging around the phone every day for the entire football season, sure the call would come each time an offensive lineman went down. With each phone-silent hour, he’d be plunked deeper into the black well of despair.

He’d gone through this same torture last March. And April, May, and June, before he was finally forced to admit that he wasn’t free agent material. He knew it was illogical, the odds astronomical, but he couldn’t give it up.

And she’d realized that she could do nothing to ease the pain he kept shoving into the future. Nothing except fire him, and she couldn’t bring herself to do that. It might be kinder, but she wasn’t that kind.

Maybe the Hollywood people were right about emotions. There was a lot to be said for celluloid emotions that didn’t mire you down and leave you distracted when you needed to work.

She ducked into her fiat to change into more businesslike attire, the tan pants and quasi-bomber jacket her dressmaker had created to keep her from the racks of bows and ruffles that pass for women’s clothes in the world of the petites. “I’ll be back late!” she called into Tchernak’s door on her way out. “I’ll grab a burger out.”

That Tchernak didn’t ask about her afternoon said something about his obsession. That he wasn’t curious about her sudden evening plans said more. But his indifference to her grabbing a burger, possibly fried rather than grilled, brown rather than gently pink, with no accoutrements more exotic than catsup spoke volumes.

She pulled out of the driveway and was back on Torrey Pines before she realized she didn’t have time for dinner at all.

K
IERNAN SPOTTED
C
ARY
B
LEEKER
at the screening room, a small theater on the campus of UC San Diego, across North Torrey Pines Boulevard. She was surprised to find the second unit director himself guarding the door. A flunky would have been her guess—and her preference. But if Bleeker was worried about the police, this made sense. She hurried along the cement path, past droughtscape tundra, a reminder of La Jolla before the days of well-watered Kentucky bluegrass lawns. Twenty feet from the glass door, she slowed and looked past Bleeker into the dim-lit lobby, where five people stood shifting their weight, glancing around. They were close enough to touch each other, but none were pressing flesh, none were speaking. They looked like distant relatives standing in the foyer of a funeral parlor, unable to leave but fearful of confronting the corpse. Going to a
funeral,
not a wake like the ones at Saint Brendan’s back in Baltimore, where a brief decrying of the irreplaceable loss was a mere prelude to making the most of it. More than once she had glanced at a silent face in the coffin and hoped the deceased’s spirit was not hovering, watching in frustration maneuvers that he could no longer influence.

Though the group here looked familiar, Kiernan couldn’t say for sure whether she had actually seen them on the set or not.

And she didn’t have time to think about it. She had only a few steps until she would face Bleeker at the door. She’d planned on employing the truth—not always her first choice—but the silent tableau behind Bleeker screamed wariness. The last thing these people were likely to do was invite in a stranger—a stranger with a PI’s license.

So on to Plan B, the result of a couple of calls and a little luck.

In the lobby a man leaned over and whispered to the woman next to him. Kiernan almost smiled in recognition. His face had none of the fervent, guilt-free conspiring that centuries of Celtic wakes had imbued, but there was no mistaking that look of machination.

She rapped on the door.

Bleeker’s forehead wrinkled. “This is a private affair.”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“Who are you?”

“Kiernan O’Shaughnessy. SAG,” she said. Screen Actors Guild—
union
—the last word anyone in management wants to hear. She flashed her PI’s license, knowing that Bleeker was not about to peruse it, not at a time like this. “So how long do you expect the rushes to take?”

“What? You know we don’t let reps in to see the rushes.”

Oh, shit! What you don’t know—it will kill you every time. “Normally, sure,” she said, “but we’re not talking everyday event here. We’re talking accident, fatal accident to one of our members.”

“No way. I’ve got enough problems without you.” Probably he hadn’t realized he’d groaned out loud.

“Look, one of our members died on the set, going over a bluff for chrissake. We’re going to have a shitload of questions to answer. We’re in this together. We all want the same thing, right? Make it easy on yourself.”

Behind him, the quintet edged toward the screening room door. The gray-carpeted, gray-walled, half-lighted lobby looked too sterile to be real. The darkened candy counter sported not cascades of soda pop but bottles of designer juices. Too
California
to be real! The odds were only fifty-fifty that she would manage to slither into the screening room; best to hit the other questions while she had the opportunity. She waited until the screening-room door closed behind the five, then said to Bleeker, “You’re the stunt coordinator. What went wrong with this gag?”

Bleeker swallowed, bobbing an Adam’s apple large enough to choke him. The black fringe of hair, goatee, and twill-and-denim ensemble accented the sudden movement in his pale neck. He looked like a second-story man caught with his glass cutter out. “Nothing, except at the end. She had no business going right into the high fall.”

Kiernan put a hand on his arm. “Cary, baby, I’m going to need an answer a bit more incisive than that.”

“Look, can we talk about this later? Show a little respect. Lark’s only been dead a couple of hours.”

She patted his arm. “You know I’d take that plea more seriously if you weren’t here ready to go over the rushes. So, Cary, you coordinated the gag?”

He glanced behind him, but there was no one there to save him. “I sketched it, but you know how it is. Nothing in this business is one person.”

“Yeah, unless it’s a credit on the trailer.”

“Well,
credit
’s not the operative word when you’ve got a girl dead. Look, I spent the last couple hours with the police asking me ten questions for every one answer they thought they needed. I’m already a week behind schedule, and if I have to do this gag over, I’m going to be so far over budget that I might as well have jumped over the cliff with Lark Sondervoil, so can we talk about this after the rushes?”

She wasn’t about to be put off. “Let’s get it over with now. Just tell me what part of the gag you routined.”

“The concept. Over the bluff. It was a helluva high fall gag. Dammit, it could have been a helluva gag. All I needed was a competent stunt woman to go flying over the cliff.” He shook his head. “I got her the best catcher built. The supports are drilled ten feet into the bluff wall. Do you have any idea what I had to go through with the city to get a permit to drive metal beams into their sandstone bluff? You’d think I wanted to climb up Mount Rushmore and sink two-by-fours in Lincoln’s nose! Damned negotiations with the city took so long, it threw the whole location schedule off, even though we’d allowed double the time we thought we’d need. McCafferty wouldn’t give us the okay until two weeks ago.”

McCafferty? Liam McCafferty, the wolfhound lover? “Well, why didn’t you just use a mock-up in the studio?”

“Verisimilitude.” He shrugged. “We could’ve shot it against a blue screen and dropped in the background later, but there were things we’d have lost. Look, everyone discussed this ages ago. Lark herself was all for it.” He shrugged again. “Okay, so her real reason was the notoriety of doing the Gaige Move, then going over a bluff. I’m no innocent; I knew she was using us. But that’s the business. But no way did I realize she’d use it as a gimmick to draw the press.”

“Did she tell them she was going off without the wire?”

“Who knows? The first I heard of the goddamned press conference was when a reporter banged on my trailer door this morning. By then, it was too late to cancel it. Left us with enough gawkers to watch the parting of the Dead Sea. Security was snowed under. So if you’re asking what went wrong with the gag, I’ll tell you. Lark screwed it up with that crowd.
She
got ’em here, the pressure got to her, and she freaked.”

“All her fault, right? And tell me, Cary, just why would she do that? If she called the press on her own,
if
she created a security nightmare—and mind you, I’m not copping to that—then why? People never work again for lots less, right? A girl like Lark, she didn’t need to be grandstanding. She was headed straight for the top.” Kiernan was getting into her role. “So why risk it all? What could have been so important for her to say?”

He shook his head. “No idea. Nobody knows. If you don’t believe me, ask anyone.”

Bleeker tossed in qualifiers with the instinctive defensiveness of the perpetual goat, Kiernan noted. “You’re saying she took fatal risks for a little publicity? Come on. Our members are careful. We remind them their lives depend on checking their equipment themselves. Special Effects screws up a wire; they’re sorry. The stunt double is dead.”

“Look, if you’re thinking it was me who suggested no net or wires, you’re crazy. I had a decelerator. Wardrobe made her outfit so it would conceal the harness. The wire would have come out her ankle. If she’d been hooked on to the decelerator, she’d have braked all the way down the bluff. By the time she got to the beach, she’d have been going slow enough to pick daisies off the wall.”

“So?”

“She couldn’t do the Gaige Move with a wire on. But she was supposed to be on a wire for the fall. I insisted on it.” He put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed. “I’m going to be straight with you. Lark Sondervoil was not the best woman for the high fall, nowhere near it. But she came in under budget. And she was the only one who could do the Gaige Move. And she was happy doing it at the edge. With this film as far over budget as it is, and the studio brass chewing on me like I was lunch, I couldn’t pass that up.”

Kiernan shook loose of the hand. “Come on, you’re the director. You’re telling me that a second-rate stunt woman forced you to forget about safety? Our members will be delighted to hear they’ve got such power.”

“Okay, not forced—she didn’t force me. I could have insisted she do the Gaige Move back from the edge. She was wired every time she tested the catcher. She must have jumped off that bluff five times a day every day this week. If I hadn’t seen her go over today ... if someone had just told me she’d bought the farm, I would have guessed she’d slammed into the catcher so often, she broke the supports.”

Kiernan shook her head theatrically.

He flung up his hands. “So I got greedy. No greed, no lead in this business. I knew we’d get a better shot the way she wanted it. I’d seen her do the Gaige Move. Done her way, it would be a show-stopper. Maybe a saint would have turned that down, but lady, I’m just a man, and I’m not about to give up a lead. And I trusted her judgment. Who could imagine she’d just go on over? I didn’t think she was a daredevil,” he said, spitting out the last words like a slur.

“Hey, Cary, we don’t have all night!” a bushy-haired man in work shirt and bandanna called from the theater.

“Look—”

“It’s okay,” Kiernan said, starting toward the theater.

“SAG—just for Lark’s gag,” Bleeker said to the quintet as he and Kiernan entered. It was more of a warning than an explanation, Kiernan could tell. He motioned her to a seat on the far side of the aisle from them. Rejecting that, she slipped into one at the back of their section. Bleeker shrugged and moved to the front and was no sooner in a seat than the lights went out.

In the darkened room, the air seemed raw with anticipation and dread. And she had the feeling that the finger of fate pressed across each pair of lips. No comment was worth prolonging the suspense.

The door opened; the lobby light smacked Kiernan’s eyes. As the lobby door swung shut, Kiernan could make out the form of a small, sturdily built woman in what was probably a business suit. She was eating a bar of something that smelled of garlic.