A Knife to Remember (5 page)

Jane wandered into the next yard where another young man was sitting smoking and knocking back a soft drink on the metal steps leading up into the back of another truck. "Hi! Can I help you?" the young man said in a friendly manner.

“No, thanks. I'm a neighbor, just looking things over. What is this truck?"

“This is props. I'm Butch Kowalski, Jake Elder's assistant."

“Glad to meet you, Butch. I'm Jane Jeffry. Are you and Jake responsible for those fake buildings? They're really impressive."

“Naw, that's the set decorator's job. Props are in charge of any objects that are used or touched. Set decoration's everything that's just seen.”

Except for Maisie, this young man was the first person on the crew who was genuinely friendly and forthcoming. He looked like a thug, with muscles that started just below his ears. He had practically no neck at all and his biceps strained the sleeves of his plaid shirt. He had teeth that would have made an orthodontist rub his hands in anticipation of the challenge and he had an unfortunate New Jersey accent. But for all that, his smile was engaging and his eyes sparkled with good spirits.

“You don't sound like a Chicago native, Butch. Do you live here now?"

“Yeah, for as long as I'm with Jake. I still got a lot to learn."

“So you want to do this yourself? Be a prop man?"

“Property master, ma'am. Yeah. But I won't be ready for a while yet."

“So, what is all this stuff?" Jane asked, gesturing toward the interior of the truck. As she did so, she noticed a movement inside and a glimpse of orange fur. "Meow! What are
you
doing in there!" she exclaimed.

“Oh, is this your cat, ma'am?"

“I'm afraid so. I'm sorry—"

“Oh, it's okay. She's a nice little thing.”

Meow, who normally ran for cover when a stranger was within a block, picked her way daintily through the truck and came up to Butch to have her chin chucked.

“You must have a real gift with animals, Butch. Meow doesn't like anybody but me, and she only likes me when she's hungry. You haven't seen the other one, have you. The gray tabby?"

“The one with 'Max' on his tag? Yeah, he's takin' a nap in the cab of the truck.”

Jane sighed. "I'll take them home. It didn'toccur to me that I needed to shut them indoors this morning."

“Naw, don't do that, ma'am. They're having a good time and I like the company. I'll make sure they're back to you before we shut down for the night so they don't get shut in somewhere. Which house do you live in?”

Jane pointed it out, got Butch's repeated assurances that he'd be happy to keep tabs on her adventuresome cats, and went back to her own yard. Shelley had gone somewhere and Maisie was busy putting salve on an extra's insect bite. Jane wandered over to the table where the phone was. The table had colorful stacks of papers, each stack held in place against the breeze by an unopened soft drink can or other heavy object.

Most of the photocopied piles meant nothing to Jane: call sheet, second unit requirements, a chart that appeared to show which scenes would be shot which days. But one stack said clearly, "Welcome Packet." Jane looked around for somebody to give her permission to study this, and since no one radiated authority or showed the slightest interest in what she was doing, she helped herself to one packet and went back to her lawn chair to skim through it.

“Is it okay for me to look at this?" she said when Maisie was through with the extra.

“Sure. It's for anybody who's involved in the production and you're involved — in a way."

“Maisie, I was counting the people on the crew list. There are over a hundred of them and it doesn't include a single actor! That's amazing. I had no idea it took so many people to make a movie. But isn't it awfully wasteful? When I was roaming around earlier, there were a lot of people just sitting and doing nothing."

“Like me right now? Well, it's a hurry-up-andwait kind of business. Everybody's an expert in their special, narrow area and when they are needed, they're needed desperately. But the ones who are sitting and doing nothing at any given moment are on instant call. We all have to be poised to do 'our things' at a second's notice."

“Sort of like a mother," Jane said.

Just then a young woman in jeans and a denim jacket approached with a clipboard. "Are you Mrs. Jeffry from this house?" she asked briskly.

“Yes."

“I just wanted to let you know that we'll be breaking for lunch in ten minutes and you can let your dog out for an hour if you'd like." With that, she made a check mark on her clipboard and moved on up the block.

Maisie grinned. "As I said, there are a lot of very specialized jobs.”

Jane went indoors to get Willard, whose fear of the dog run had come back full force. She had to put his leash on him and lure him with a piece of lunch meat to get him out the back door and then he stopped dead in horror at the sight of all the people in his yard. She hauled him to the pen and left him cravenly glued to the inside of the gate to the run while she went next door to put Shelley's yappy little poodle into its run. By the time she'ddealt with all the livestock, she returned to her own yard to find another table being set up.

“No, no. Not in the shade," Lynette Harwell was saying to three young men who were trying to get the table placed to her satisfaction.

Jane was fascinated by the sight of the movie star. Though Jane knew Harwell to be her own age, she looked like a slip of a girl in her old-fashioned costume and blond hair done in an artfully disarranged braided coronet. Even the slight smudges of makeup soot on her face were placed so as to emphasize her enormous blue eyes and high cheekbones. She looked absolutely stunning and not quite real.

Jane had always imagined that unearthly beauty of some stars was a camera illusion and that in the flesh, they would look like normal people, but this was obviously wrong. Lynette Harwell was awesomely beautiful. Jane edged closer to the group surrounding her, a group including an adoring Mike Jeffry, and she was pleased to see that there were faint lines of age in the star's gorgeous face — tiny lines radiating at the corners of her eyes, a hint of the softness that precedes crepeyness on her throat, and the merest suggestion of the onset of a sagging chin. But these signs of aging only added character to the astounding beauty rather than detracting from it. Still, when you got close to her, it was clear that she was forty, not twenty — as her role demanded she look.

And as Jane gawked at her, Lynette turned to Mike and whispered something to him with an intimate smile that chilled Jane to the core, especially when she saw Mike's reaction. He grinned, looked at his feet, and all but scuffed his toe in the grass in pleased embarrassment.

She's playing mind games with MY child,
Jane thought furiously. That her "child" was eighteen and had always been remarkably self-sufficient made no difference. She'd have felt the same if he'd been a fifty-year-old "Captain of Industry."

“Yes, just there is perfect," Lynette was saying, sweeping forward to take her place at the table. Like Queen Victoria, she didn't look back to see if a chair was in place, she just sat down, confident that someone had taken care of it. Which they had.

“I'll get your lunch," Mike said. "What would you like? The menu on the catering truck said prime rib or grilled shrimp."

“No, no! I will get Miss Harwell's luncheon tray!" Olive Longabach said. She'd just caught up with them and was breathless and disconcerted by having lost sight of her charge, however briefly. "I know what she likes."

“Olive, dear, there's no need. Mike can do it," Lynette said, positively
twinkling
at Mike. But Olive looked as if she'd been stabbed in the heart and Lynette relented. "Oh, very well, Olive. Mike will stay here with me, won't you, dear?" She gestured for him to sit beside her.

Jane snatched up her lawn chair and plunked it and herself down at the table before anyone could stop her. "How do you do, Miss Harwell. I'm Jane Jeffry. Mike's mother.”

Lynette glanced at Jane for a fraction of a second, but didn't acknowledge her except with a slight compression of her lips. It was an unfortunate expression.

It showed up the "drawstring" wrinkles just starting around her mouth. Then she turned away. "Roberto, darling! Sit here with me! And George! Here!”

It was said in that soft, sexy voice, but it was an order just the same.

“May I join you, too?" Jake had approached just behind the director and the male lead. He was "technical" rather than "talent" but was apparently highly enough placed to horn in without violating the rules.

“Of course, Jake." A monarch granting a favor. "Why don't you go get your lunch, Mom?" Mike asked in a tone that verged on hostility.

Sensing that her place would disappear if she did, Jane said, "Thanks, Mike. But I'm not hungry. I'll just sit here.”

Mike stared at her as if to make her feel guilty for spoiling his lunch with Lynette. But, since that was exactly what she meant to do, Jane held her ground.

7

Jane listened carefully as they all chatted while luncheon trays were being delivered to them. She thought sure she'd recognize the voices of the blackmailer and the victim, but she could not. They were all speaking in their normal voices and the ominous discussion she'd heard earlier had been in abrasive whispers.

Going over it in her mind, Jane decided the victim must have been an actor or actress. Obviously somebody who made their living in front of a camera, not behind it. Lynette Harwell? Possibly. Or maybe George Abington. But if George or Lynette were holding any grudges against anyone at this table, they weren't evident at luncheon. The chat was general, professional: discussion of the weather as it related to filming, talk of the schedule. Very mundane stuff.

Jane studied George, suddenly recognizing him as the hero in a movie the children had loved when they were little. George was in his fifties, trying desperately to look thirty-five. He held himself rigidly upright, even seated, making Jane suspect he was wearing some kind of corset-type underpinnings. His hair was longish and unrealistically black andwhen a breeze lifted a lock of it off his ear, Jane could see the faint whitish line of a face-lift. His eyes, likewise, were too blue to be natural and the lashes looked tinted.

But for all the fraudulence of his appearance, he was still handsome. His manner, perhaps natural, or perhaps taken on for the duration of the filming, was Old-World, flowery and courteous, at least to Jane. He was the only one at the table who acknowledged her existence. "What a nuisance it must be for you, having your neighborhood invaded this way," he said.

“On the contrary. It's fascinating," Jane said. "I had no idea how hard — and early — all of you have to work. I couldn't even be myself, much less another character, so early in the morning."

“Ah, but you're seeing only a part of it," George answered, looking critically at a tray of food that a gofer had put in front of him. He turned over a lettuce leaf as if expecting something slimy to be on the other side of it. "Between jobs we lie about eating bonbons — or having wild affairs, if you were to believe the media."

“That may be how you spend your time, George," Lynette drawled. "I for one live a very spartan, healthy life. Rising early, exercising—"

“As well I know," George said with an excessively capped smile. "I remember all the exercise you used to get lifting glasses of wine to your lips. So good for the muscles of the arm, I always thought.”

Lynette glared at him for a second, then laughed with hollow merriment. "Darling, you know I don't drink. You must have been reading the sleazier tabloids. I don't know why that doesn't surprise me."

“At least I
can
read, my dear," he said, and winked at Jane, drawing her into the joke on his side. Jane tried to look pleasantly noncommittal.

Roberto Cavagnari joined them at this point with a tray piled high with food. "Jake, the campfires, they are not right. These people, they would be burning bits of buildings, not twigs and branches and natural rubbish.”

Jake set down his fork and said, "I don't agree. Remember, they have fled the fire into the country. There would be no buildings and they certainly wouldn't have carried pieces of buildings with them as they fled.”

Cavagnari apparently recognized the sense of this, but didn't want to back down, so he pretended he hadn't heard Jake and launched into a story of a film he had directed in Europe where a special effect fire had gone wrong and endangered the surroundings. The story was not only boring and pointless, but delivered with such drama and so extreme an accent that Jane couldn't follow it at all. Instead, she just studied the others, wondering which of them she had overheard earlier.

Lynette was picking daintily at her food, but managing to subtly put quite a bit of it away without looking piggy. She was gazing at (or through) Jake as she ate. She might well have been in a naughty movie in her youth, but her voice was so very distinctive that Jane couldn't have failed to recognize it if Lynette had been one of the unseen speakers. Jane certainly knewit was Lynette moments later when she overheard her talking to Mike.

Olive the Keeper stood behind Lynette, a sentinel. Her eyes were never still. Jane had once attended, unwillingly to be sure, a political rally where the vice president of the United States was present and had been fascinated by the way the Secret Service agents continuously examined the crowd the same way Olive Longabach was. It was as if she had it on reliable authority that a sniper was present.

And there were plenty, but the "snipes" were verbal and seemed to be bouncing off Lynette. Yes, Olive was the only one who appeared disconcerted, but it looked like an habitual attitude. And the idea of lumpy, frumpy Olive ever being in a skin flick was ludicrous.

Jane gave up speculating. After all, there were a hundred people on this set and there was no reason to suppose the two she had overheard were among those at this table. They were probably off someplace else right now, hissing more threats and excuses at each other.