Unhinged (21 page)

She leashed Monday; when they’d gone I checked the e-mail on Sam’s computer and found the follow-up I’d been waiting for from Jemmy Wechsler. As before, no personal remarks were in Jemmy’s message, only info-bits.

“Samantha Greer, born Yonkers, NY 1976, hired by Roy McCall personally for
Shake It Till You Break It,
her first professional appearance and McCall’s first project for music video company Top Cat Productions
.
”

He went on about the dancer: blah blah. Jemmy’s own survival depended on his knowing many odd details, so not surprisingly his write-up was full of them. But the final part was fascinating.

“She will be replaced in the production by Tonya Hemming, rumored associate of . . .”

Here Jemmy named a guy so terrifying, I’m not even going to identify him. Suffice it to say that when anybody big vanishes west of the Mississippi, this guy did it.

Or had it done. If he was hiring for Top Cat Productions, it was a revelation that put an entirely new spin on Roy McCall’s situation. Next paragraph, new subject:

“Wyatt Evert aka Walter Evers, wants and warrants numerous, scam specialty charitable nonprofits, travels w/ female Frances Marie Hargreave aka Fran Hilyard, Fran Hannaford, probation state of Florida rsp, no other record.”

And aka Fran Hanson, I was willing to bet. Fran was turning up like a bad penny all of a sudden; rsp was short for “receiving stolen property.”

Jemmy’s scam info was always superb; before he got into the money game he’d been a scam guy himself, moving VIN numbers off totaled wrecks and onto stolen cars of the same model and year. Last on his list was a single line.

“HM: Bronx H.S. > NYPD > detective 1
^st
grade
>
retired.”

Harry Markle; the brevity of the entry meant nothing notable between high school graduation and retirement from the cop shop.

Finally, two comments:
“Longer a guy’s memory, more he will have a sense of humor, my experience.”

And: “
Look at McCall. Show business: no such thing as bad buzz.
”

Jemmy was noting the prank aspect. As grisly as they’d been, there was a ghoulish humor about the deaths. Drowning because your boots leak, being walled up, even grabbing a live wire were things that could have happened in an animated cartoon.

And with the memory comment he was suggesting a possible Mob connection. No one knew better than Jemmy Wechsler how long those guys’ memories were.

I closed the e-mail program and shut down the computer as footsteps came up the back porch. Wade had gone down to the fish pier to see if any freighters were scheduled imminently; if so, he’d said he would get the other harbor pilot to work them.

Which meant that despite the reassurances he’d given me, he was worried, too. Wade went to work with a bad case of flu, once, ate sleet for a week when a nor’easter blew up unexpectedly and came home with double pneumonia. But he’d had his paycheck, and forgoing one now was a storm signal clearer than the red pennant flying down at the Coast Guard Station.

“Wade,” I began, “how about some . . .”

But when the door opened it wasn’t Wade. It was Roy McCall, looking every inch the successful music-video producer: manicured hair, black Top Cat Productions T-shirt, jacket and slacks.

Jemmy’s e-mail revelations washed over me like an icy wave. Roy might be charming but his production company was hooked up with crooks. Bad ones.

“. . . coffee,” I finished flatly.

Roy glanced warily at me, headed for the stairs up to his room. “Oh, no, you don’t. Right this way.” I steered him back to the kitchen.

“Sit,” I said as Ellie came back in, too.

“No sign of Fran,” she reported. “Or Wyatt. But I did learn a very interesting new—”

Then she saw Roy, and her tone chilled noticeably to match the atmosphere in the room. “Oh, hello.” She hadn’t liked Roy’s grandstanding on MTV.
Dancing on a grave,
she’d called it.

“What’s going on?” Roy wanted to know, so I told him that I knew his financial angel was a devil so dark even I wouldn’t have had him as a client, not that the guy hired people like me.

He killed people like me, and anyone else who got in his way or had anything he wanted.

Like Samantha. “I didn’t have a choice,” Roy protested half an hour later. It had taken that long to get him to admit Jemmy’s report on him was true.

Then he caved, telling us more. “I was coming off a flop. It wasn’t my fault. It was that misbegotten girl group whose leader suddenly came out with news that she’s really a boy. Can you imagine how that would’ve played in Paducah?”

Nope. And I didn’t much care, either. But as Roy went on it hit me that Jemmy was right:
publicity
. For his maiden effort, Roy McCall desperately needed all the prerelease ink he could get, even if—maybe even
especially
if—the ink was mixed with blood.

“Okay, so my backers aren’t Boy Scouts. But they wouldn’t kill the talent just to get rid of it,” Roy went on. “Or to get rid of me. We’ll be back in production again, soon. What you are thinking is ridiculous,” he finished indignantly.

Actually, it wasn’t. Not that Roy would necessarily be to blame, personally; he might not even have known about it until it happened. But his buffed, sunshiny pizzazz wasn’t so charming anymore. I noticed he hadn’t once called Samantha by her name. She was dead, but this was all about
him
.

“Anyway, it’s not like you go there, Los Angeles, everyone wants to hire you,” he said sulkily. “It’s not about
talent
.”

Some guys hit a little adversity, they go from being the cat’s pajamas to the cat’s litter box in no time flat.

“You need connections,” he said, trying to explain. “And you can’t do it all your own way, either. There’s no such thing as creative freedom, and no one cares about your artistic vision.”

In L.A., he meant, as if it might be different anywhere else. Personally I’ve always liked coloring inside the lines. You watch who you sign up with but when someone hires you, you do what they want or you walk away from it, end of story.

But it sounded as if it had come as a bad surprise to Roy that the world wasn’t a fairy tale, that it was run by guys who would slit your throat as soon as look at you. Or someone else’s throat, as a demonstration of what might happen to yours if you crossed them again.

“So you hired Samantha even though your backers wanted Tonya Hemming, their own talent. Who’s a known associate of someone you knew didn’t like being contradicted. What’re you, stupid?”

Across from him Ellie sat listening silently, connecting the dots. She connects dots the way a herring weir collects herring, gobs at a time.

McCall’s shoulders sagged. “I’d done everything else they asked. I hired their musicians, their hair and makeup people.”

“But you liked Samantha. You thought she was good. So you went ahead and hired
her
. Figuring maybe they wouldn’t notice.”

“Or wouldn’t care. Tonya’s one of their girls, she works all the time.”

He looked up at me, hurt confusion in his eyes. “What’s
she
need me for? I don’t get it. They’re taking her off a toothpaste commercial, reshoot the whole thing with other talent so they can send Tonya here? Why?”

I knew, even if Roy was telling the truth and he didn’t. But I didn’t have the heart to enlighten him. He needed to learn a lesson about the guys he’d partnered with. When they say jump you don’t tell them you want artistic vision, or creative freedom. You say
how high, sir?

And when you say it, you’re already in the air, if you know what’s good for you. Maybe someone was trying to teach Roy that lesson. On the other hand . . .

“I don’t know. It doesn’t seem efficient,” Ellie said when Roy had gone upstairs. With most of his crew already out of town for the production hiatus, the Motel East had vacant rooms again and he was moving to one. It was the insurance people, he said, not his backers, who’d shut him down.

But only temporarily. If Roy had it right, and I believed he did, a new girl would still be dancing in
Shake It Till You Break It,
and Roy sounded as if he, at least, believed that his backers hadn’t been angry enough over Samantha to get rid of her permanently.

“I see how an ‘accident’ would send a message to Roy,” Ellie mused.

“Sure. You want me to get the message, forget Western Union. Chop someone’s head off with a helicopter blade, or shoot them with a slug that was supposed to be the harmless
pop!
of a fake pistol. I’ll catch the drift.”

“But Roy
didn’t
sound frightened enough for that to have happened, did he?” Ellie asked thoughtfully. “And it’s not just Samantha,” she went on. “A lot of people are dead, or nearly.”

And professional killers don’t do extras to cover their tracks. Pros don’t leave tracks. “Where was Roy before?” Ellie asked.

“New York. Getting his crew together. Lights, craftspeople, all that.” Because while we had plenty of painters and carpenters here in Eastport, we were short on costumers and choreographers.

“Like Harry,” Ellie mused. “First in the city, now both of them here. He’d have had access to the wire Samantha grabbed. He was here in the house, too. He could have gotten into Wade’s shop and at Sam’s car. He had a house key?”

I nodded. Supposedly Roy had been in Portland the night of the intruder and the prank call. But Portland was just a charter flight away, and if he’d asked to have it kept confidential, it would be. If he’d wanted to badly enough, he could’ve gotten here and back with no one the wiser. “Forrest Pryne said Roy was here in town when Harriet went missing, as well,” Ellie reminded me.

“If Roy had heard of Harry’s New York history . . . but I don’t know,” I said doubtfully. “Kill Samantha himself to get publicity for the video, try blaming it on Harry, somehow? But if Harriet getting killed was to set
that
connection up in advance, with the newspaper page . . . then why
hide
her body?”

“And why the other stuff?” she agreed, backing off the idea. “Speaking of which, remember how flustered he got just trying to hold a video shoot together, at the Danvers’ house?”

“Right. It’s got to be someone who can handle something as
complicated
as this is turning out to be.”

“Roy doesn’t have it, does he?” Ellie concluded unhappily. “The daring, or whatever it is that it would take.”

“No. I could be wrong, but I don’t think he does. Scratch one suspect, maybe.” The part about it being complicated still bothered me, though; somehow I thought it
wasn’t
complicated, that we were missing something.

Something . . .
simple
. “Speaking of Harriet,” Ellie told me, “I saw Bob Arnold on my way back here.”

I turned from the window. No sign of Wade on the street, and I could see the tugboat’s blue stack over the roofs of the houses downhill. So he hadn’t gone out on it.

“He says the autopsy was inconclusive. The lime in the wall didn’t help the coroner’s people, of course.”

I could imagine. And neither had the weeks Harriet had spent
in
the wall
with
the lime. Luckily, the weather had been cold.

“Lots of general bruising,” she went on, “but so much time’s gone by it’s hard to tell from when. No head traumas or hits on the tox screens.” From this summary I knew Harriet hadn’t been shot, stabbed, skull-clubbed, or poisoned. “So they’re doing more tests,” Ellie said.

“Good. She didn’t wall her
self
up in that cellar.” I glanced out the window again. Sam was coming up Key Street, pushing Maggie in a wheelchair. One-handed, he spun her around under the spring-green trees, both of them laughing.

“But the other thing Bob Arnold said
really
opened my eyes,” Ellie continued. “I thought I knew everything about everyone in this town, but it just goes to show . . .”

“. . . that in Eastport there’s always more to learn,” I finished as I turned from the window. “What did Bob say?”

“I asked him about Fran Hanson, where she might be.” She was peeling an apple, its skin unfurling like a red ribbon. I like to fix things when I’m thinking; Ellie cooks.

“Harriet
was
disliked,” Ellie said in apparent non sequitur. But with Ellie, it was never a non sequitur. I waited.

“Harriet,” she said, “had all the enemies she needed, right here in Eastport. Maybe we’ve been ignoring things we shouldn’t.”

I got two eggs from the refrigerator, lined them up with the other ingredients Ellie needed as Maggie and Sam came in.

“Mmm, apple cake,” he remarked. “You know, Mom, if you cooked more instead of spending all your time on house projects, we’d eat a lot better around here.”

“If I cooked more, we’d be eating at the hot dog stand and the house would be falling down,” I retorted.

I handed Ellie the baking soda as Sam and Maggie took the long way out to the parlor, avoiding the hall floor; they’d left the wheelchair outside. “Plunge,” Maggie said schoolmarmishly, to which he responded in obedient tones: “Fall, collapse, descend.”

They were working on synonyms now. But moments later the TV went on, an old sitcom theme burbling cheerily.

“The simplest way of hiding in plain sight
is
to be here all along,” I conceded as Ellie creamed sugar into the butter. “But who among the locals have you got in mind?”

She’d cut apples into slices so thin you could read through them and spread them in a buttered dish. I glanced out the window again, saw Wade, felt my shoulders sag in relief. But . . .

“Anyway, what Bob Arnold told me,” Ellie said, “is that Fran Hanson
is
from here. I can’t imagine how I missed knowing that. But it explains why she isn’t at a motel. She doesn’t need to be. She’s staying with her sister, who happens to be . . .”

The penny dropped. “Wilma,” I said, gazing in dismay out the window. “Fran’s sister is Wilma Bounce, isn’t she?”

Floating beside Wade was a tentlike smock so bright it could put your eye out at twenty paces, inside it a woman I recognized only too well, talking a mile a minute: Wilma in the flesh.