A Knife to Remember (11 page)

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Jane patted Angela's hand absently while Angela cried it out. Shelley leaned over and whispered to Jane, "Don't let her off the hook yet. Find out what he had over people.”

Jane whispered back, "A little recess first." Shelley nodded her agreement.

Angela was sniffling into a paper napkin. "I'm — I'm sorry. I didn't mean to — I wasn't—"

“It's all right," Jane said in her best motherly tone. "We artists often wear our hearts and emotions very close to the surface.”

Angela clutched her hand gratefully. "You
do
understand! I knew you would."

“If you aren't in a scene this morning, what are you doing here?" Jane asked, shifting the subject.

Angela relaxed visibly. She sniffled a few more times and pulled herself together. "I came to watch Miss Harwell do the crucial scene when Dora — that's the character's name — comes back years later and meets the man who betrayed her years before. It's a make-or-break scene any actress would kill for, but be terrified of. Very emotional. Calls for enormous restraint without actually pulling backand will take perfect timing. It's a long, complex scene with a lot of emotional shifts. I thought I might learn a lot from watching her. Whether she gets it right or wrong, there's bound to be a lesson in it."

“Do you think she will get it right?”

Angela thought a while before answering. "I don't know. She's done so many doggy films that she may have lost whatever magic she once had," she finally replied. Now that the subject had turned from her, she had a surgical coldness regarding another's performance.

“Why do you think she made those films?" Jane asked. She wasn't fishing for anything in particular, just trolling for facts and impressions.

“Drugs, I guess," Angela said. "People do a lot of really stupid things for drugs. Not only to get their hands on the money they need, but because it makes their judgment real bad. Who knows? She might have actually thought they were good films."

“She does a lot of drugs?" Shelley asked.

“Oh, not anymore!" Angela said. "Not with that dragon woman on her case."

“Olive Longabach? Wasn't that her name?" Jane asked.

“Yeah, I think so. I heard Miss Harwell went to one of those Betty Ford places and since then the keeper won't let her out of her sight. I think this is the first film she's made since they dried her out."

“How do you suppose she got cast for such a good role? I'd have thought her career was pretty much dead," Jane said, genuinely curious now.

“That's quite a mystery. Her
and
Cavagnari. You know he's never done anything but spaghetti westerns and some male adventure stuff. Made a ton of money on them. Big box office, but no respect. The critics think he's a joke. Everybody's wondering how he and Harwell got chosen for this movie. It would have been a great role for Glenn Close or Meryl Streep or even Jane Fonda, if she was still making movies. There are a lot of big box office stars of the right age who can still just barely pull off looking young enough for the early scenes. There was even gossip about Cavagnari really wanting Jennifer Fortin, but I guess he was so glad to get the job himself that he didn't dare push too hard for her."

“Jennifer Fortin?" Shelley asked. "Why is that name familiar?"

“Oh, Shelley. You know who she is. She's done a lot of little arty things and got an Oscar a year or two ago for that film about Catherine the Great that you and I went to see and liked so well."

“Oh, yes! She was terrific!"

“This is very odd," Jane said. "Why not get one of those actresses for this role?”

Angela shrugged. "Who knows?”

In the back of her mind, Jane sensed gears turning, but couldn't quite sense what it all meant. Still, she was sure it meant something. "Just what kind of movie is this? We can't tell from back here.”

The moment the words were out of her mouth she suddenly remembered that she was supposedto be "unofficially" involved in it, but apparently Angela was so interested in expounding her own theories that she didn't notice this
gaffe.

“
Arty and commercial both. Everybody's always looking for the perfect mix. You know,
The Last Emperor,
that kind of thing. Not that this is on that kind of scale and budget, but you know what I mean. Something the critics and the public will like. It almost never happens, but it might with this one. And if it's a success, Cavagnari and Harwell will both have it made. As long as the luck holds for Harwell…" she added.

This rang a faint bell in Jane's mind. "Oh, yes. Somebody else said she'd been on bad luck sets. But nothing's gone wrong on this one, has it? Until Jake's death, I mean."

“Only that girl getting sick and somebody at the studio got a burn from a light. But that's normal stuff," Angela said. "But Jake's death — well, that's really beyond bad luck, isn't it? I mean, somebody killed him. It wasn't just one of those things that happen for no reason. Now, about those scripts of yours—”

Recess was over.

“Who did Jake talk about you to… when he was trying to help you get that speaking part?" Jane asked before Angela could finish her own question.

“I don't know exactly," Angela said. She was starting to get a bit truculent. "George Abington, I think. Maybe Miss Harwell. Cavagnari. Possibly the producers. He hinted that he knew who they were. I don't know who else." "And what did he say to all these people?"

“Just that he thought I'd be good for the role that was left vacant." Angela was verging on snappish now. Jane sensed she couldn't string her along much farther.

“No, I mean what 'pressure' was he applying to them?"

“I don't know! You don't think he'd have told me any of his secrets, do you?"

“No, I guess not," Jane said mildly.

She asked Angela a few more innocuous questions to defuse the young woman's growing irritation, made a few vague half promises about keeping her in mind when she was working on the next script, then excused herself to go in the house and make an imaginary call to her agent.

As she expected, Shelley followed along a few minutes later. "I wonder," Shelley said, "if she realized she was providing herself with the perfect motive for bumping off Jake?"

“I thought about that, too," Jane said. "By trying to help her, thereby getting her into his bed, he was wrecking her fledgling reputation in the business. If she's ambitious and greedy enough to fall for that ridiculous story about me being a famous writer, and put up with what we put her through just to suck up to me, she might have been ambitious enough to kill Jake to keep him from messing up her life."

“—and was she telling us because she's dumb, because she's innocent, or because she's smart enough to play a double bluff?"

“I don't know."

“Excuse me a minute," Shelley said, heading for the guest bathroom just off the kitchen.

When she came back, Jane was at the kitchen table, sorting a load of socks and underwear she'd just brought up from the dryer in the basement. "I've been thinking, Shelley, about a couple things that are bothering me. One, there's this 'bad luck' thing. Why would anybody have unfortunate things happen on a set just because they're there?"

“I guess that's the nature of bad luck," Shelley said, picking up a pair of socks and making them into a neat ball. "It just happens for no reason."

“I know. But having a murder on the set! That's about the worst luck I can think of. As much as I hate to admit it, it clears Harwell as a suspect in my mind. If she's the one who's had to fight the reputation for bringing misfortune along, she'd hardly be the one to create the worst misfortune of all, would she?"

“No, but we don't know what sort of provocation she might have had. There are lots of things worse than being considered a jinx.”

Jane went on sorting and Shelley continued turning socks into balls for a few minutes. "I'm also curious about the mysterious producers. I don't know how on earth that could connect with a murder, but it is odd."

“Maybe it's not as odd as it seems to us. Way back when Paul was starting the fast-food outfit, there were a couple of people who were willing to invest in him, but didn't want anybody to know they were doing it." Shelley's husband had built up one tiny, floundering Greek food restaurant in the heart of Chicago into a nationwide chain in a little over twenty years.

“Why not?" Jane asked.

“Paul never knew. They just wanted it kept secret and he needed the money to get started and didn't question them. Nobody asked him to do anything illegal, so it didn't matter to him. It might have been some kind of tax dodge or hiding money to keep from paying alimony or anything. Maybe it's the same thing with this. And we don't know anything about the film business, Jane. Maybe it's common."

“Still, it is a secret and secrets seemed to be Jake's special interest.”

Jane gathered up an armload of the sorted laundry. "I'll be right back." As she headed for the stairs, she stopped and looked back. "Shelley, a horrible thought just struck me. We've mentioned this before but haven't considered it as carefully as we should have. What if this blackmail had nothing to do with Jake's death? Maybe the whole crew was being blackmailed, but somebody killed him for some other reason entirely?”

14

Shelley's outrageous lie about Jane's being a famous writer must have spread. Angela apparently didn't mind sharing the news. When Jane went back out in the yard — minus Shelley, who had an errand to run — wondering how she'd get anybody else to speak to her, she found George Abington looking for her.

“Mrs. Jeffry, do you have a minute to talk?" he asked.

“Uh — sure."

“Let me get you a cup of coffee or a soft drink. Which do you want?"

“If there's an RC over there, I'd be grateful to get my hands on it," Jane said.

George rejoined her with her request and sat down next to her in Shelley's lawn chair. He was in costume, and made-up to look much older than he'd looked the previous day. Actually, he was made-up less, to look his real age. He wore graying muttonchop whiskers, a very realistic mustache, and a stiff-collared, turn-of-the-century suit. He must not have been wearing the punishing underwear because he had a bit of a paunch today. He looked like a prosperous Victorian banker. He sat down very carefully to avoid wrinkling the suit and set his hat down on the grass beside the chair.

“I hear you're a very successful scriptwriter," he said bluntly. "I just wanted to ask you to keep me in mind for a role. I know the writer doesn't always have any say-so in casting, but suggestions that a role was created with a certain actor in mind can't hurt.”

Jane liked this approach much better than Angela's oblique obsequiousness. "What kind of a role are you interested in?" she asked, feeling utterly at sea. If she
were
a famous writer — a fabulous leap of imagination — would this be a logical question or was she blowing her cover?

“Anything. Anything at all to pay the taxes and mortgage," he said cheerfully.

“You can't mean that. Even a villain?"

“I'd be a hunchback child molester if the money was right," he said, then laughed at her surprised expression. "I don't know how many actors you know well, Mrs. Jeffry, but I'm the plumber kind."

“What does that mean?"

“Look, if I were a plumber, would I set myself up to only work on houses I felt were beautiful or had a sensible floor plan? Or worth more than X number of dollars? No. I'd work wherever I'd get paid. Same if I worked in a department store. I wouldn't say to a customer in the suit department that I didn't think his shape would do the reputation of my line of men's wear any good. I'd sell him the damned suit if he wanted it. Same with acting,in my mind. I'm an actor; that means I act. And if it means acting the part of a bartender with a facial tic, or a leading man, it's all the same to me."

“Well, that's a refreshing attitude."

“Not really. I think most people in the business feel that way, they just don't admit it. They dress it up in artistic crapola — you know, 'The role was small, but it gave me insights into the mind and soul of a waitress.' " He said this in a mocking voice surprisingly like Lynette Harwell's. "That's bullshit. Nobody can understand anybody else's soul. You just have to learn the lines and say them the way the director tells you to."

“What if you've got a lousy director?”

He shrugged. "Then you get a lousy movie. There's lots of those. But lousy or not, I've paid my kids' school fees, so what do I care? You'd be amazed how many rich actors there are that you've never heard of. Sometimes the really bad roles pay the best."

“You've got kids?" Jane asked, surprised. She'd never thought about any of these people being parents. Or going to the bathroom or doing anything else ordinary and human.

“Sure. I've even got a grandchild. A gorgeous little girl named Georgina, for me. Wish I had a picture along to show you. She's a doll."

“I'm confused," Jane said. "These aren't Lynette Harwell's children, are they?"

“Lynette? Have a baby?" He laughed. "No. Lynette wouldn't ever share a spotlight with a child, much less risk getting stretch marks. She'd have been the kind of mother who would make Joan Crawford look like Mother Teresa.”

He shifted around getting more comfortable, apparently happy to settle in for a long chat. "No, these children are from my first marriage. My wife was a dress extra and I was playing one of sixteen thousand Roman legionnaires in an old epic. Just a couple dumb kids, although she wasn't half as dumb as I was. Now Ronnie's a fat granny married to a retired dentist in Encino. He was an orthodontist to stars' kids and made a bundle. Ronnie still keeps a hand in the business, but not as an actress."

“But you
were
married to Miss Harwell, weren't you?"

“For about a minute and a half. We weren't together long enough to even use up the leftover wedding cake in the freezer before she'd gotten her claws into Roberto. And he didn't last much longer."