A Knife to Remember

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.'

“Isn't it awkward working with them?”

Someone walking by him tripped and sloshed some coffee. George quickly picked up the costume hat he'd set down next to the chair and checked it for spots. Satisfied it was unharmed, he said, 'Not for me. Roberto's unhappy with it, but that's his problem. He hates me. I think he feels that I deliberately unloaded shoddy goods on him. It wasn't deliberate, but she sure is shoddy.'

“You really dislike her?'

“Mrs. Jeffry—'

“Jane. Please.'

“Jane, in a business that attracts and creates gigantic egos, hers towers over everyone else's.

She's truly the only totally self-absorbed person I've ever known. To the point of psychosis, I believe. If you asked her what a mailman does for a living, she'd say he brings her mail. It would never cross her mind, such as it is, to imagine that anyone else gets mail, except those few she might write to. I honestly