Authors: Susan Dunlap
Kiernan nodded, already sorry she hadn’t caught herself before encouraging Tchernak in this “second career.” “Did she confirm that her sister was attracted to Dratz?”
“Well, she didn’t actually say that. I got the impression that the attraction was to Dratz’s money and the fact that his father was a big shot. The sister did plan to go to Mexico with Dratz. But here’s the thing; they weren’t going to go to Mexico until they finished shooting. That was the plan.”
“But?”
“In all the commotion after Greg died, someone mentioned seeing Dratz near the gas nozzles—seems they used butane spigots to simulate the fire. They looked around for Dratz, but he had split. Had taken that little red ’Vette of his and vamoosed.”
“And didn’t take Jane with him?”
“She was already gone,” Tchernak said smugly.
“Gone?”
“Yeah, seems she’d gotten a message that there was a casting call back in Hollywood, and she telephoned Joyce to come get her under cover of dark. All very hush-hush. Joyce arrived before dawn and carted Jane away, so Jane didn’t have to face a scene with Dratz. The story is Jane was fed up with him, realized he wasn’t going to be of any use to her, and wanted to dump him but was afraid he’d use his father’s influence to get even.”
“So she snuck out.” Kiernan shrugged. “Not how Dear Abby would have advised, but a method of problem-solving that has years of tradition behind it. And what about the casting call?”
“A bust. Director didn’t show. But Jane was so exhausted from the
Bad Companions
experience, Joyce said she’d never have gotten the part anyway.”
Kiernan nodded. She could imagine Jane, the extra, sneaking out for the lure of a better part, particularly since her work on the location set was over. She could certainly picture Carlton Dratz schlemieling around the gas nozzles by the set house, turning a knob too high so the gas jet blocked Greg’s expected exit, or managing to wedge a door so he couldn’t get it open—whatever. She could almost see the bumbling Dratz watching, horrified, as Greg died, as the realization burned into him that his fumbling had killed Greg. Jumping into his sports car and heading across the border seemed perfectly likely. And once he was gone, the production company closed ranks, buried Greg without question, and got back to the business of mass entertainment. All the parts fitted—but not
together.
“It’s too fortuitous that Jane Hogarth got the casting call just before Dratz ran out. Are you sure there was a casting call?”
“I saw the message.”
“Who from?”
“Bleeker gave it to her.”
“Joyce is sure of that?”
“Yeah, because Jane was flattered that he recalled who she was.”
“Okay, so there was a note—if Bleeker didn’t write it himself. Then there was a—Tchernak, how many other people came to the casting call? Did Jane hang around with a bunch of other hopefuls until she realized the director wasn’t going to show?”
“I don’t—what Joyce said was that Jane had to be in Burbank at ten in the morning, knew she’d get caught in all the rush-hour traffic so she left at seven, which meant she had to get up at five thirty, and then she was back at ten thirty.”
“Ten thirty! No hanging around, then. Either it was canceled—”
“Wasn’t canceled. Jane groused that the bastard didn’t even bother to call in. She said—wait—she said everyone else in the room was there for another part, a clown. She said she’d already been a fool, she’d be damned if she was going to be a clown, too.”
“So odds are, her casting call never existed,” Kiernan said triumphantly. “And Tchernak, Dratz was a sleazy little playboy. He’d irritated everyone else on the set. It’s not likely he’d send his only companion on a wild-goose chase for no reason. Everyone figured he’d taken off with her. Why would he get rid of her, even if he expected to leave the next day? And we don’t have any reason to suspect that he planned his departure.”
“But if he screwed up with the fire,” Tchernak postulated, “and panicked, it was convenient for him not to have to deal with her right when he wanted to take off.”
“He wouldn’t have known the day before that he’d ignite a killer blaze. If Jane’s note was planted then, that means someone premeditated Greg’s death—his
murder
.” She sat a moment, feeling as if a heavy marble had rolled off the tip of her tongue. Greg murdered—the idea didn’t come as a shock to her, rather as a legitimization of a concept she had pushed out of her consciousness. Bad enough to die in a fire. Accidental death probably followed a fall, a hit on the head, unconsciousness. A bad death, but nothing like the terror of being trapped in a burning house, of being scalded to death inside your fire suit. Kiernan’s throat tightened; she couldn’t swallow. How could a stunt man, with bodily control that normal people only dream of, die because he couldn’t walk out of a cabin? Her voice was only a little shaky as she said, “Was Greg killed because he heard something or figured out what was going on in the garage? If Dratz was dealing drugs there—we need to know the whole works on that. And Tchernak, if Joyce Hogarth had to drive out to the set at night, she had to have had good directions. And I’ll bet she’ll be glad to give them to you.”
Tchernak grinned. “Just my point! And you, oh primary detective, what will you be after?”
“Pacific Breeze Computers.”
It was midafternoon before the print search turned up an article on Pacific Breeze Computer:
LA JOLLA COMPUTER COMPANY FINED FOR DUMPING TOXICS.
And three thirty when she reached Martin Jameson, vice-president of PBC.
“Karen Sherman, with the
Union-Tribune
.” Kiernan said. “I’m doing a story on local firms that are now conforming to the EPA guidelines. Sort of an other-side-of-the-coin from our story about your infraction ten years ago.”
“That! You’re still on that?” Jameson’s outrage certainly sounded genuine.
The original scandal must have been a major one, Kiernan decided. And Jameson must have been with PBC long enough to be involved personally. “Like I said, I’m presenting the other side of the coin. Readers aren’t going to care what you did back in the dark ages. They’ll be impressed by how you’re conducting yourselves now, right?”
“I suppose so.”
“Great. So let’s start right after that infraction. That was April twenty-fourth, ten years ago. Along with the fine, you got a cease and desist from dumping your toxics in north county, right?”
“Your own paper made that real clear, Miss Sherman.”
She could hear Jameson’s irritated breaths against the receiver. Ignoring them, she said, “So then you started complying. First you had to dispose of your waste elsewhere. Where did you find?”
“Moss Valley.”
“The municipal government there?”
“Actually, the scavenger service—you know, the garbage company.”
“How did you find it so quickly? You must have been in a great rush.”
“Miss Sherman, surely you know court hearings take forever. We could have built an incinerator in the time it took to appeal the desist order.”
“But the desist order held while you appealed. You had to stop dumping immediately.”
“Obviously you’ve been over these facts. All I can tell you is, we have complied faithfully ever since then. Check with Moss Valley.”
“Very well. Thank you, Mr. Jameson.”
It was another twenty minutes before Kiernan got off the phone and sidled to the trompe l’oeil table where a platter of hors d’oeuvres—braised crab on jalapeno zucchini bread, topped with a sharp cheese—sat atop the faux French bread. Atop the faux Ezra head was the real one, the real canine eyes eyeing the real hors d’oeuvres. She scooped off the crab and cheese topping, held it out for him, and plopped the zucchini bread into her own mouth, all before Tchernak, across the room making Tanqueray and tonics, could see. Then she picked up another piece.
“What we have,” Kiernan said, “is an unexplained gap. Jameson at Pacific Breeze Computer says they stopped dumping illegally April twenty-fourth. But Moss Valley has no record of accepting their refuse until June first.”
“So what did they do with five weeks’ worth of toxic waste?” Tchernak demanded, clearly caught between interest in the solution and his environmentalist’s outrage at the likely answer.
Kiernan plopped the crab into her mouth, chewing slowly to savor the sharp taste of the cheese and the peppers. “No one has an answer for that. But we do know that out there on the
Bad Companions
set, there was a big hole filled with something in the month of May that year. Have you got the directions from Joyce Hogarth?”
Tchernak got up, walked to the office, and silently walked back with a print-out in hand. “Yes, I have the directions.”
Kiernan held out a hand.
“No, no. This is nothing so mundane as that. This, mistress mine, is one of those connections you love so much. It closes one of the gaps. It—”
“Tchernak!”
Tchernak grinned. “I got the background check on Trace Yarrow. Seems he does some consulting, troubleshooting new computer programs.”
She nodded. That she knew.
“Doesn’t work steady, doesn’t work much. But would you like to guess where he’s worked on and off for the past fifteen years?”
“Pacific Breeze Computer,” she said, almost as an afterthought. “Doesn’t work much. ... I wonder just how much Pacific Breeze paid to get rid of their embarrassing five weeks of toxic wastes.”
K
IERNAN CAME DOWNSTAIRS AT
five
A.M.
A steaming plate of eggs, scrambled with fresh salmon and fresh dill and sprinkled with freshly ground and roasted sesame seeds, sat next to a basket of popovers, a glass of orange juice, and a Thermos of coffee. Tchernak and Ezra had just left. She pictured them loping sluggishly on the beach. Ezra was not an early-to-rise hound. He could have been a pub or cafe hound, wandering among the brethren until closing time, and after a brief morning walk, happy to devote his
A.M.
hours to watching his person peruse the
Times
. And Tchernak, she felt sure, was slogging through the sand because nothing but distance could keep him from commenting on the foolhardiness of a solo trip to wild country where a murderer could misbehave.
She ate quickly, barely tasting the scramble. Her mind was on the trip ahead to the town no one could remember, and on Trace Yarrow, who was suddenly not home. She wouldn’t have admitted it to Tchernak, but it made her uneasy. Yarrow had double crossed her, triple crossed Dolly; had he been back in contact with the producer for the quadruple cross? The lines of communication were too easy for all the suspects. Anyone she’d talked to could know where she was headed. She pulled a piece of paper off her desk and wrote:
Tchernak, see if you can find out just how much Pacific Breeze paid for their illegal dumping.
She propped it amidst the breakfast dishes and headed out for the desert.
The road east out of San Diego changed rapidly from the downtown neighborhoods of white stucco and Jacaranda trees, comfortable four-plexes, and stark new high rises softened by patches of purple Mexican sage bush, golden day lilies, or the salmon-colored pods of Chinese flame trees, to shake-roofed suburban tracts so new, the landscape bushes still wore their burlap sacks. The developments butted up to four-way, four-lane stoplights with left-turn lanes and green-lighted arrows for each direction. At six thirty
A.M.
all four turn lanes were occupied, and Kiernan sat through the entirety of “Sunday Mornin’ Coming Down,” followed by “Monday, Monday,” before her turn came.
Then, as if she had turned a page, all signs of suburb ceased, the last fifty years vanished, and she found herself on a two-lane blacktop winding between the gnarly lumps of hill. She grinned with delight as she pulled the steering wheel right and left, testing the curves at a speed nearly double that posted. The joy of desert driving. In the distance the land resembled the mounds and creases of a wadded bedspread that the cat had tracked dirt on. There were sprinklings of clover here and there on the spread, but mostly it looked as if the cat had been left in charge for a week. It said something about just how intrinsically dry the desert was that even after an abnormally wet winter, the ground cover was already tan. With the window down an inch, the air was still cold from night and smelled of straw and dirt.
She passed through Dulzura, under tall canopies of palm fronds and fenced-off stacks of hay. Any trace of fog had long gone, but a haze still covered the sky. From time to time she slowed—once she stopped at a cafe that surely had sat unchanged since the twenties. Inside she asked if there was a military town along the road. The only official force was the border guard, the waitress assured her.
Back on the road, she checked the mirror for cars. There was dust in the distance—maybe a car, maybe not. But a car on the road didn’t mean she was being tailed. Still, she slowed, trying to make out the car; but it was always too far away.
The whole trip could be a bust, as skimpy as her directions were. The sun glared off the rocks, the land grew drier, the radio station faded and died out. She turned off the road, checking out small town after town, asking the military question, getting the same nonplussed reply. There was no army, navy, or air force base; no military town.
It was still early morning, but she felt as if she’d been driving for hours. Bleeker had told her there was no military base near the movie location. And yet why would Yarrow have lied? Or been mistaken? What would have made him think: military? A tank in a park? A statue? He hadn’t been on the set long enough to recall the town as Bleeker did. For Yarrow, the town would have shrunk to no more than an image in memory.
She drove on, windows open wide, feeling the dry air scraping against her skin, the sway of the Jeep as she leaned into curves Tchernak would tell her she was taking too fast. One more hour, she told herself, and she realized as she did that the possibility of not finding Greg Gaige’s grave was as much relief as frustration.
CONROY 1M.,
the sign said. She signaled to the empty-looking road behind. Then she saw it. Atop a bare hill, on what was clearly the side of the town, was a giant flagpole with the biggest American flag she’d ever seen. At the base was some sort of monument. She was willing to bet it and the flag were lit at night. Yarrow’s military image.