The Bequest (14 page)

Teri dropped the
phone on the passenger seat, her attention still
riveted to the SUV up ahead. Why wasn’t Mona picking up? If she was out
somewhere, surely she had her phone with her. And if she was asleep,
well, she always kept her phone on the nightstand.

The SUV had gone north on the 405, hit the 101 west and north, and
then connected with the Pacific Coast Highway in Ventura. Teri stayed
with it, just two lonely cars on the California coast. Occasional traffic
passed by the other way, heading toward Los Angeles, but other than that,
Teri felt totally alone. The moon was partially obscured by clouds, forcing
her to concentrate on the road. Fortunately the taillights of the lead
vehicle clued her in to curves ahead. To her left, the ocean glittered an
inky blackness, topped by occasional whitecaps. The actress in her said this
was a great setting for a movie murder. The mood was ominous, the road
treacherous, and the audience would be on the edge of their seats. Not
even Leland Crowell could write a better scene.

As they passed the turn-off to William Randolph Hearst’s castle at
San Simeon, she wondered how much farther they would go. And just
where in the hell were they going? Ahead was a small parking lot for a
convenience store. She eased her foot off the gas. The distance widened
between her and the scraggly-haired man’s SUV. She had to decide now.

The SUV rounded a curve then eased to the side of the road at a
particularly sharp drop-off near Ragged Point. The identical spot where
Leland Crowell had met his demise. The passenger door opened and the
scraggly-haired man stepped out. He walked around to the cliffside and
stepped over the guardrail. He perched precipitously on the edge, never
looking down, his back to the open driver’s side window of the SUV. The
roar of the waves wafted up and a breeze mussed his hair, but he heard and
felt nothing. He stood riveted to the spot. Frozen. Almost zombie-like.

A gunshot echoed from inside the car, briefly lighting the interior like
a firecracker.
The bullet slammed into the scraggly-haired man’s back, driving him
forward.
Off the precipice.
Head first, into the blackness below.

In the immortal
words of Yogi Berra, it was like déjà vu, all over
again, as California Highway Patrol detectives Howie Stillman and Jeff
Nichols pulled their Chevy Tahoe behind a cruiser, its rear passenger door
open, lights striking against the darkness of the early morning sky. A
paramedic unit was parked in front of the cruiser and several utility
vehicles from the power company rounded out the group. Both men
looked puffy-eyed, as if they had just been awakened, both carrying paper
cups of coffee. Just as they had two years earlier, they watched as a crane
pulled up a paramedic riding a basket, perched next to a body in a rubber
bag.

A CHP officer, whose name tag identified him as “Gerrit,”
approached. He was young, almost baby-faced. He pointed up the steep
inland hillside. “We got a report of a suspicious vehicle from some hikers
who were camping up there.”

“Suspicious, how?” Nichols asked.
“They said they heard the vehicle slowing down, then it pulled over
to the guardrail and just sat there. Someone got out on the passenger side,
but they couldn’t tell anything about him in the dark. Just a shadow. Then
whoever it was walked around to the cliffside. At that point, they lost
sight of him, but the vehicle pulled away in a hurry.”
“What kind of vehicle?”
“They said it looked like an SUV.”
“Where are these hikers?”
“Back seat of the cruiser.”
Stillman and Nichols approached the opened rear door of the cruiser,
where two young people, probably no more than twenty or twenty-one
sat. The male had close-cropped hair, while his female companion was
frizzy-haired and freckled. They huddled against each other, as if they
feared they were about to be implicated in this whole mess.
They slid out of the cruiser when they heard the detectives approach.
“I’m Detective Nichols, this is Detective Stillman,” Nichols said.
“Billy Williamson. This is my girlfriend, Sheri Slade.”
Nichols gestured up the hillside. “We understand you folks were
camping up there?”
“We know we’re not supposed to, but we were hiking and it got
kinda late on us, so we decided to stay the night,” Billy said. “That’s why it
took us so long to call anyone. We were afraid we’d get in trouble, but
after we saw what had happened, we knew we had to.”
“Nobody’s in trouble,” Nichols said. “But why don’t you walk us
through what you saw.”
“Well, like I told the other officer, we heard a car that sounded like it
was going pretty slow. Sound really carries up here, so when the noise
stopped, we figured the car stopped. Then—”
“We got that part already. Fast forward a little bit.”
“Okay, well, like I said, we were afraid we’d get in trouble, and
besides, it didn’t seem like anything had really happened, anyway. We
thought it was kind of strange that the passenger got out and we didn’t see
him get back in, but he could have gotten in on the other side of the car.”
“You said ‘him’ and ‘he.’ Was this a male?”
“We couldn’t tell. We just sort of assumed that, but I don’t know
why.”
“Could you hear anything? Voices, anything like that?”
“No, just a popping sound.”
Stillman and Nichols exchanged glances. “Popping sound?” Stillman
asked. “What kind of popping sound?”
“It wasn’t loud, but, I don’t know, just a popping sound. Anyway,
this morning, when it got a little bit lighter, we decided to come down
and see if we could see anything. All we saw were some tire tracks at first,
so we were about to go back up, but then Sheri saw footprints on the
other side of the guardrail.”
“I wasn’t sure at first,” Sheri said, “so I shined my flashlight over there
and you could see them pretty clear. That’s when I also saw some red
splashes on the guardrail.”
“We didn’t know if it was blood or not, but it was all getting a little
too weird. That’s when we decided we had to call someone.”
“Detectives.” Gerrit called from the edge, where the basket was
reaching the top.
“Wait here,” Nichols said. He and Stillman hustled over and stood
next to Gerrit, by the guardrail.
“Give me your flashlight,” Stillman said to Gerrit.
The young officer dutifully unholstered it from his belt and handed it
to him. Stillman shined the beam on the top of the guardrail and both
detectives bent close to study the metal. And there it was. The red
splashes the girl had mentioned. They had both seen enough blood splatter
before to recognize it immediately.
“Make sure no one disturbs this until the techs get here,” Stillman
said, and Gerrit nodded.
The basket had reached the top, and the paramedic scrambled off as
his colleagues hauled it over the guardrail.
“Can you tell anything?” Nichols asked.
The paramedic unzipped the body bag, to reveal a pulpy mess of a
face. Again, shades of déjà vu. “But that’s not the interesting thing,” the
paramedic said.
“What is?”
Using both hands, he twisted the torso onto its side. “Look in the
middle of his back.”
Leaning close again, using the flashlight, there was no mistaking what
they saw: a bullet hole.
As the paramedic rolled the body back over, one arm flopped free
and dangled over the side of the basket. Both Nichols and Stillman froze at
what they saw: a blue tattoo, smeared but clearly distinguishable as the
shape of a football helmet with a star in the middle.
“Well, son of a bitch!” Stillman said.
“Amen, brother,” Nichols replied. “Amen.”

After returning home
at close to 9:00 a.m., Teri stripped to
her underwear and a tee-shirt and crawled into bed, but sleep did not
come easily. Who was driving the look-a-like SUV? Was it all part of an
elaborate ruse perpetrated against her by the scraggly-haired man and his
mother? And where was Mona? Teri had tried her cell phone time and
again on her way home, but finally concluded that Mona’s battery must
have died without her knowing. After all, that phone was Mona’s lifeline
to the world, and she wouldn’t be caught dead without it.

Between long periods of lying awake and staring at the ceiling, Teri
thrashed and flopped like a fish on a deck. It wasn’t until the sun was fully
up that she finally succumbed to exhaustion. Even then her dreams were
haunted by visions of the scraggly-haired man, his faded blue tattoo, and
the screams he hurled at her as she left Caleb’s Diner.

The buzzing of the doorbell roused her from her shallow slumber.
She wiped sleep from her eyes and glanced at the clock. Nearly three in
the afternoon. It was probably Mona at the door, apologizing for not
answering her phone. Teri snatched hers off the nightstand to see if she
had missed any calls from Mona, but there had been none.

Teri disentangled herself from the sheets, slipped on a pair of gym
shorts, and staggered to the front door. She put her eye to the peephole
and looked out, shocked to see three men she had never seen before on
the front porch—two relatively young and an older man with gray hair.

She slid the chain-lock off and opened the door. The three men
stepped back almost as one.
“Sorry to disturb you, Ms. Squire,” said the man with the badge. “I’m
Detective
Walter Swafford, Beverly
Hills PD.
These are
Detectives
Stillman and Nichols with CHP. May we come in?”
“Why? Is something wrong?”
“Ma’am, do you know a Leland Crowell?”
Teri hoped she didn’t react at the sound of the name, but the whole
affair with the screenwriter had been in the media, so there was no use
denying it. The real question wasn’t whether she knew who Leland
Crowell was; the real question was whether these cops knew about last
night’s shouting match with the resurrected Leland Crowell at Caleb’s
Diner.
“Yes,” she said. “I mean, no. I know who he was, but I’ve never met
him. He died a couple of years ago. I’m sure you must have heard about
it.”
“Yes, ma’am, we know the legend,” Swafford said.
“Legend?”
“Let’s just say there are some unanswered questions that we’d like to
clear up. That’s what we want to talk to you about.”
Teri stood rooted to the floor for a few beats, conscious of the
pounding of her heart. She was an actress, trained to fake emotions and
put up façades, but the rush of blood in her ears and the tingle in her
cheeks told her she was failing miserably.
She stepped back. “Come in.”
As the men crossed the threshold, they gathered in the entryway, as
if waiting for still another invitation. She appreciated their restraint. She
had seen on the news and read in the Los Angeles papers every day about
over-the-top searches and aggressive interrogations. She’d even conducted
one or two herself playing a cop on the big screen, and she had been the
subject of one years ago back in Texas. Now was the time to marshal her
thoughts
and
remember what police
consultants
had told her
about
strategies and mind games in interrogations. She was starting to wish she
had played more cops and fewer romantic leads, and gotten into the heads
of more detectives and fewer love-starved professional women.
Wordlessly, Teri closed the door and led the men to the den. The
room was still darkened by closed drapes, but she pulled the curtains back
in front of the sliding doors to illuminate the sitting area. Her spirits were
dark enough without the gloom.
None of the men sat. The one identified as Stillman went to the
sliding doors and stared out at the hills, wisps of smoke still hovering on
the horizon.
“Do you mind?” he asked.
She shook her head, and he unlocked and slid the door open. He
stood in the doorway, his frame blocking the entire opening. “The fires are
completely out now,” he said.
“It looks that way,” she said.
“I bet it worried you for a while.”
Tired of waiting for the men to sit, Teri perched on the arm of the
couch. “I’m sure you didn’t come over here just to talk about wildfires,”
she said. “You were asking about Leland Crowell.”
Swafford leaned against the mantel, while Nichols stood to the side,
as if on guard duty. “Yes, ma’am,” Swafford said. “You said he died a
couple of years ago?”
“I’m sure you already know all this. It’s been the biggest Hollywood
story in years. He killed himself and willed his screenplay to me. I got it
from his mother, but I never met him.”
“Why do you suppose he willed his screenplay to you?” Nichols
asked.
He
stepped
forward, as if he
was assuming control of the
conversation, while Swafford seemed to fade into the background. The
fact that there were two CHP cops and only one Beverly Hills cop told her
that Swafford had just been brought in as a
courtesy, to preserve
jurisdictional niceties. She had learned that, too, from playing cops in the
movies.
But why in the hell was CHP here? Unless something had happened
farther up the Coast Highway after she had turned back last night. Was
that it? She shifted uncomfortably on the couch arm, pulled a leg up
beneath herself, and waited for the other shoe to drop.
“Believe me, I was the most surprised person around when I found
out that he had willed it to me. His mother even said that he wrote it for
me. I guess he was a fan.”
“I am, too,” Swafford said. “And so is my wife. She’s not going to
believe it when I tell her I met you.”
He smiled at her, but she didn’t return it. She figured out by now
that he was the good cop, Nichols was probably going to be the bad cop,
and the other guy by the open glass door—well, she guessed he was going
to be the silent cop. She glanced his way and saw that he was still in the
middle of the doorway, staring straight ahead at the hills, but she could
also tell by the tilt of his head that he was carefully listening to everything
that was being said.
“Didn’t that strike you as odd?” Nichols asked. “Him leaving his
screenplay to you?”
“It struck me as weird as hell,” Teri said. “I’ve had people try all
kinds of things to get scripts to me. I had one delivered once with a singing
telegram. Another time, someone threw one in my open car window
when I was stopped at a red light. I’ve even had people—men, in fact—
follow me into the ladies room and slide one under the stall door. But this
is the first and only time someone left me one after he died.”
“Do you know how he died,” Nichols asked.
“I was told he jumped off a cliff up near Big Sur. And that’s what the
papers all say.”
“Stillman and I worked that case. We were there when they brought
up his body.”
“Then you already know all this.”
Stillman turned around and lasered his focus on Teri. “What we
know is that
somebody
jumped off that cliff back then. It might have been
Leland Crowell; might not. We sure thought so back then, but now we’re
not so sure.”
Teri felt her antennae start quivering. Something did happen last
night, but what? “What do you mean, you aren’t sure?” she asked.
“Because he went off that same cliff again last night,” Stillman said.
“This time with a bullet in his back.”
She felt her pounding heart suddenly stop. The blood rushing in her
ears drained away, and the tingle extended all the way down her neck and
shoulders, to her fingertips. “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
“What we’re saying,” said Nichols, “is that we’re no longer sure the
man who jumped off that cliff a couple of years ago was Leland Crowell.”
“Then who was he?”
“We’re still working on that.”
Lightheaded, Teri slid off the couch arm and onto the seat. She
needed the back of the couch for support.
“What does this have to do with me?” she asked.
“Well, Ms. Squire, we know you talked to this man—I’ll call him
Leland Two—last night at Caleb’s Diner,” Stillman said. “What did you
talk about?”
Teri felt as if she might throw up. Her words froze in her throat.
“Ms. Squire, you okay?” Nichols asked. She detected genuine concern
in his voice.
“I’ll get some water,” Swafford said, heading for the kitchen. In a
moment he was back with a glass half full and handed it to her. She took a
small sip, just enough to wet the inside of her mouth.
“Ms. Squire,” Stillman said, “what did you talk about last night?”
“I told you I’ve never met Leland Crowell.”
“Okay, let’s go with the idea that it wasn’t the real Leland Crowell.
But you were at Caleb’s Diner last night, weren’t you? And you talked to
somebody. The same somebody that our witnesses say threatened you.
And they also say he left the diner with you.”
“That’s impossible.”
“I’d love to hear why.”
Teri remained silent, trying to process what she had been told with
what she had seen last night. Who had been driving that SUV, the one that
looked exactly like hers? Whoever it was had killed the scraggly-haired
man and was doing exactly what she feared: trying to frame her.
“Ms. Squire, I’m kinda like Detective Swafford’s wife,” Stillman said.
“I’m a big fan of yours. And I keep up with all the movie gossip. So, yeah,
I know all about your big movie about to open up from Leland Crowell’s
screenplay.”
“Everyone knows that,” she said.
“But here’s what I keep asking myself: What if it turned out that
Leland Crowell wasn’t really dead? What if he was still alive? Would you
still own his screenplay?”
“I’m not a probate lawyer, detective. I don’t know what the law is
about people faking their deaths. Assuming your scenario is correct, of
course.”
“But it would sure solve a lot of problems for you if he turned up
dead before he could make a stink about it, wouldn’t it?”
“And wouldn’t it open up a whole lot of new questions?” she asked.
“Like just exactly who was it who went off that cliff two years ago?”
“Another question for another day,” Nichols said. “Our question for
today is who put a bullet in that man’s back last night.”
“Ms. Squire, do you own a handgun?” Stillman asked.
“You don’t ask many questions you don’t already know the answer
to,” Teri said. “I’m sure you already know I have a registered twenty-two.
I keep it in the coffee table.”
She leaned forward to grab the drawer. As if in one motion, all three
cops grabbed for their weapons. She froze, her hand just inches from the
handle.
“Maybe one of you would like to check,” she said.
Swafford stepped over and grabbed the handle. Teri leaned back as he
slid the drawer open.
To reveal nothing.
Teri looked at Swafford, who met her gaze with a skeptical eye.
“That’s where I always keep it.”
He straightened and backed away.
“When’s the last time you saw it?” Stillman asked.
“I don’t remember. It’s always in there, so I hardly ever notice it or
even think about it.”
“Well, here’s what we know so far,” Stillman said. “You argued with
Leland Two last night at Caleb’s Diner. Leland Two then got into a car
that witnesses describe as looking exactly like the one that’s registered to
you. Then someone put a bullet in his back. A twenty-two. You have a
twenty-two registered to you, and it’s missing. Do you have any
conclusions you suggest we draw from all that?”
Teri felt numb. Everyone in the room knew the conclusion to draw.
The
unspoken line
was that she
had motive—a multi-million
dollar
motive; she
had means—a
missing
.22; and
she
had opportunity—
witnesses who placed her with the victim last night, and even placed him
in her car.
“Do I need a lawyer?” she asked.
Stillman took a deep breath then paused, as if weighing his next
words very carefully. “I suspect that would be a pretty good idea, don’t
you?”