High Fall (19 page)

“As I recall.”

“What about Pedora?”

“Even Gaige had had it up to here with him.”

“Maybe he thought he’d still inherit. Any chance he affected the fire gag?”

Dolly leaned back in her chair and laughed. “Sweetie, if we could pin it on Jason Pedora, the Red Sea would part. But by the time
Bad Companions
went on location, we’d had to post a guard to keep him out.”

“Guard or not, he could have gotten onto the set.”

“On a location like that, of course. But could he have turned up the gas spigots or changed the fuel? What do you think Special Effects is going to tell me? I’ve got power—I insist and men jump. But that power comes from the studio, and believe me, the studio did not want to discover any cause other than—”

“Idiopathic?” Kiernan offered. “Spontaneous eruptions of unknown origin is a popular medical diagnosis, too.”

“And probably for the same reason.”

In the fish tank an automatic feeder spewed flakes of food. She watched as they floated down on the miniature Fifty-second Street like acid rain. The air conditioner hummed louder; a draft chilled her back, or perhaps the draft was merely dread. She had to know, but God, she didn’t want to ask: “One more thing—”

“Yes?”

“Tell me about the fire.”

Dolly jolted up straight. She looked ready for attack from any direction, ready to spin and strike. It was a moment before she spoke, and then her tone was all business.
“Bad Companions
was a coming-of-age film—spoiled city kid defies society, runs into
Deliverance
-type hicks in the back country with a hole in the road the size of a boxcar to catch strangers. Of course, by then the hole had been filled in, but that’s off camera. In this scene she forgets about the coal stove—”

“She? Greg was doubling a woman?”

Dolly let out a bark of a laugh. “Sweetie, men run stunt work. They get the stunt coordinator’s jobs; they do the hiring. And who do you think they hire? When there’s a nondescriptive job—one like this where the double’s supposed to be all covered in a fire suit—ninety percent of the time it goes to a man. Women with thirty years in the business can’t get enough work coordinating to make a living.”

So Lark Sondervoil’s matching the legend of Greg Gaige was more important than she’d realized. And the rumor that she’d been incompetent enough to cause her own death could set a stunt woman back—well, back farther.

Dolly lifted her head, stretching out her back. “Okay, so he sets the cabin on fire. The script read that the fire engulfed the house, and he escaped—at the last minute, of course. Pretty routine as these things go.”

“He did the Move earlier, right?”

“The Move saved a dog of a scene. Had only been done on film once since Greg’s first movie, and that was so long before, no one but stunt buffs would remember. It was a knockout. And Greg’s adjustment was half of Yarrow’s.”

Trace Yarrow had negotiated himself twice what Greg Gaige would get? “Yarrow was that hot?”

“Wrong again. Greg was so desperate, he would have worked for free.”

A cold wash of sorrow flowed over her. She thought of Greg in San Francisco, unwilling to admit there
was
a future after gymnastics. Greg’s mounting desperation didn’t surprise her. But it shocked her that he had let himself become so transparent.

“He
had
to do his Move,” Dolly went on. “Forty-five years old, he wasn’t going to get many more chances, not with a maneuver like that.”

“You talked to him on the set, right? You sat outside in the shade of the catering truck with him.”

“Possibly, who knows?”

She slammed her fist on the desk. “You
know,
dammit! Greg Gaige wasn’t someone you forget. He could do what ninety-nine percent of the world couldn’t dream of and smile while he was doing it.” Dolly was staring at her as if she were a groupie. What did Dolly take her for? Of course Dolly had—

But no, she was letting her feelings block her vision. In movies, spectacular was the norm. Stunts, even the Gaige Move, were just another day at the store. And away from the set, away from gymnastics, Greg Gaige had been just another person. She’d let herself forget that. Greg hadn’t been easy to talk to. She’d chosen to forget that, too. But for someone like Dolly who wanted to talk
at,
he might have been fine. “Maybe you talked to him about the affair you were having with the good-looking hunk.”

Dolly brightened. “Jeez, I’d forgotten about that myself. Couldn’t dredge up the guy’s name if it meant a million gross.”

“Try.”

“No way. It was just a fling. You’ve been around. I don’t need to tell you it doesn’t pay to get involved. You make a commitment, you hang your ass out. And, sweetie, it gets kicked every time.”

“But Greg—?”

“Nah, the affair was over before he got there, or I wouldn’t have had time to shoot the breeze with him. We sat outside the catering truck, nibbling, drinking gallons—it must have been a hundred degrees out there. But I needed to get out of the smoke inside the catering truck. The location out there was on top of a mountain with one winding unpaved road up to it, so we didn’t have a big catering truck like you saw at Gliderport, or the usual honeywagon—”

“Honeywagon?”

“Sort of a house trailer the crew uses to freshen up in. It’s got small dressing rooms, bathrooms. Actors can wait there for their calls. Like I said, the road up to
Companions
was too bad for big vehicles, so we had a couple of smaller ones. Dratz started storing his day gear in the honeywagon that Greg was using, and soon Dratz was in there every free moment screwing one of the extras. Greg didn’t want to make waves. So he and I sat outside and joked about being runaways.” She paused, and the expression on her face seemed to change, as if she were pulling something from a deep internal reservoir to soften the tension lines. The approval was clear in her voice as she said, “He was a professional, a man committed to his work and willing to make sacrifices for it.”

“Sacrifices of himself and others,” Kiernan said slowly. The one person he had sacrificed without a thought was Trace Yarrow, and Yarrow had never worked again.

Why did Yarrow still care about Greg’s death, much less his successor’s? Steeling herself, she asked, “So the fire gag, what happened?”

Dolly’s eyes half closed, the skin that had just relaxed stiffened. When she opened her mouth, the movement looked painful. “Everything went wrong. The day before, there’d been a Santa Ana-type wind blowing in from the east, pushing that dry desert heat. The grasses were brown, there were big cracks in the ground. People had seen Santa Ana brushfires take out entire canyons of homes. No one had slept well, tempers were on edge.”

“And Greg got there early to do his preparations?”

“He insisted on doing it all himself. Great for us—one less Special Effects guy needed. By the time the rest of us staggered up there, Greg was in the cabin, ready to go. You could see him through the window, sitting in the rocker, waiting.”

“How did he look?”

“Okay. He had a fire hood and the wardrobe dress on. They’d already done the close-up of the star sitting there in the dress. When it all got to editing, they’d be interspersed with the long shots at the beginning of the gag.” Dolly rolled her pen slowly back and forth on the maharajah’s table. That control of hers, so evident before, was gone. “There could be only one take. It was dawn. The A.D. called: ‘Scene five-sixteen, take one.’ You always do a take number. Special Effects turned on the gas jets; flames leaped up the front and sides of the house. The dress caught. Greg was supposed to get up, bang at the window, then go to the door and burst out—twenty seconds max. There were three cameras—all rolling. The A camera was on a crane, moving upward and in toward the cabin. The air was dead still, and hot as day; the birds were silent. The camera kept moving in. The flames were thick as curtains. We were all staring at the window; Greg should have been there. He wasn’t. He didn’t make it to the door. The flames shot higher—they weren’t controlled by the jets anymore—the house was going up. Flames were shooting toward the camera. Still Bleeker didn’t call cut; he was counting on Greg to pull it off. ‘He’s a pro,’ Bleeker was thinking, ‘he’s stretching the gag.’ The flames were all over the house, catching faster and faster, higher, nearer the camera. Then they hit a wire, sparks flew everywhere. Bleeker yelled for the emergency crew. Too late. Fire was out of control.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “Greg never came out.”

The air conditioner groaned, and the water filter in the fish tank chugged. Outside, an engine started and a car burned rubber racing away.

“The cabin was engorged. By the time our emergency crew realized what was happening, the building was embers. And when the town firemen got control and went inside …” Dolly swallowed hard. When she resumed her voice was barely audible. “They said the intense heat and the lack of oxygen would have killed him almost immediately. Maybe they were being kind; I don’t want to know. They figured he must have gotten disoriented, thought he was starting through the door and walked into the wall. It was like lying facedown on the broiler.” She swallowed again. “He just burned to a crisp.”

Kiernan tightened her muscles, forced her concentration onto the sequence of questions. No personal thoughts; no feelings; she couldn’t allow that. “Dolly, what do you think happened? Could someone have substituted diesel fuel for gasoline? Diesel is sticky. It’d catch on the fire paste on the outside of the dress.”

Dolly sat staring as if she had heard nothing. Behind her the dirt-brown fish swam through their empty windows and along the glass walls of their world.

A mistake,
Kiernan wanted to reiterate. She was offering Dolly an out. Why wasn’t the woman leaping for it? How could a mistake be more damning than the alternatives? “Dratz? You suspect Dratz screwed up the gag?”

Dolly squeezed back against her chair. It was probably as close to cringing as she came. “Possibly. He’d been discovered in the cabin a couple of times. Once screwing that extra of his.”

“Dolly, you would have been delighted to pin this on Pedora. Why so unnerved about the hated Dratz?”

“Who knows?”

“You do! Tell me. Now!”

Dolly’s shoulders pulled in. She sat staring at the fish. Finally she said, “I’ve never admitted …” She swallowed. “The whole time I was on the set Dratz was dogging me … like I’d been rubbed down with hamburger. I couldn’t have him barred from the set. Couldn’t send him back to L.A. Can you imagine what it’s like to try to carry on a clandestine affair with Dratz on your ass? Half the reason I cut the guy loose was Dratz—I knew he was telling his father every detail. I wasn’t about to be the laughingstock of Burbank. But even then, Dratz didn’t let up. I couldn’t stand the sight of him one more goddamned moment. So”—she swallowed again—”I told him there was a can’t-miss gag first thing in the morning. He would have to be up at five
A.M.
Figured he’d be bushed and out of my hair the rest of the day. Told him they’d need extras; maybe he could get himself on camera. They all want to be in the movies, every visitor on every set.” Momentarily, her face relaxed, as if comforted by the respite into the normal. “Cary wasn’t using extras in the fire scene, of course.” Uberhazy breathed in deeply. The lines between her brows dug in bone-deep. It was a moment before she said, “I’m not liable. It’s not my fault. Even if Dratz did … I’ll pay you twice your normal fee, and I know just how much that is, if you can assure me that Dratz didn’t screw up the gag somehow and … kill Greg.”

A M
ERCEDES CONVERTIBLE PULLED OUT
in front of Jason Pedora. Pedora’s foot hit the gas pedal.
Let’s see how that rich asshole takes a dent! ’Nother nick in the fender wouldn’t cut into the VW’s resale value. That’s right, baldy
—
Move your fat ass out of the lot before I get you!
It wasn’t that bitch Uberhazy, but what the hell. He lifted his foot off the pedal and leaned back in the unmoving car. He didn’t need to watch the Mercedes and Maseratis in the parking lot. It was the red Jeep Cherokee he was waiting for, and that was right across the aisle. No way the little bitch—he glared at her business card for the fiftieth time—O’Shaughnessy—could escape him.

Dolls thought he’d sit outside her office and just wait. Wait while she talked to the other bitch. Well, he’d waited ten years. And Dolls, she owed him. She knew it. He’d given her plenty of chances to make amends. But no more.

As for the other one—O’Shaughnessy—she’d stared him right in the face, had the gall to give him her card, then shove in front of him into Uberhazy’s office. He looked at the card again. No address, just a phone number, as if she were daring him to find her, search her house—which meant she didn’t have the stunt woman’s notes there, right? She’d stashed them somewhere else, or—Oh, no, maybe she was giving them to Dolls. Should he key into Dolls instead of her?

But no, she was the one who’d challenged him. And here was that Jeep of hers sitting in front of him like a big red duck. He could take his shears and run the tip from bumper to bumper—one long scar. How much would her insurance nail her for two doors and two fenders? A grand, easy. Or the tires—a couple of flats would keep her in the lot a helluva lot longer than she planned. Or maybe a slow leak that would land her on the shoulder of the freeway for an hour. He smiled. Or maybe the brake lines, a quick cut… No, too pedestrian—he giggled at that,
pedestrian
—he’d only stoop to that if he had time for nothing more creative, nothing worthy of him. The tension was building within him, making him strong. He could wait, let his strength grow till it … but he couldn’t wait too long.

If only Greg were here. Greg understood his—had he called it genius? Greg knew his screenplay would make the Move hot. He would see it was a natural, box-office magic, from the horses and the drugs, the whole international conspiracy, to the movie set, and then the murder,
Greg’s
murder! He’d been the only one to spot the conspiracy. And to see its potential for an Oscar-winning screenplay. With his genius, his brother would have been the most famous stunt double ever.