Just Evil (36 page)

Dylan looked around. Some of the boxes looked so old it
seemed they’d been stored up here since the beginning of time. 

They bypassed the ten boxes or so labeled Christmas
decorations, and another half dozen or so labeled books. At least they had no
interest in them for now. If they turned up nothing else, they’d save those
boxes to go through last.

Dylan cut into a box, peered inside, and immediately made
the determination the contents weren’t worth going through since it held
nothing but old clothes. However, he picked up a second carton labeled movies,
organized by the year of their production. At some point in her life Alana had
taken copies of her old movie reels and had them converted to VHS. Dylan
started rummaging around in the box until he picked up one of the tapes. “Hey,
remember this movie,
Savage Monster
? We saw it when we were twelve down
at that old theater on Main with all the murals on the wall. They were having a
horror film festival.” Studying the picture of the actress on the box cover, he
added, “Oh. I get it now. Alana Stevens is Kit’s mother. This is her house.
Wow. She was hot, hotter than Elvira. Both of them caused more than a couple of
wet dreams back then.”

He was grinning like a fool until Jake jerked the box out of
his hands.

“You aren’t twelve anymore. Come back from your sick fantasy
world long enough to focus, okay? We aren’t interested in what you used to jack
off to.”

While Dylan and Jake were going at each other, Reese pulled
an old trunk away from the wall. Hidden behind the trunk he discovered a box of
old movie reels, for whatever reason these hadn’t been converted to VHS. Each
canister inexplicably was marked with the letter P. Curiosity overcame Reese as
he popped open one of the canisters, peeled off several inches of film, and
held it up to what little light the attic provided. As soon as he saw the
images, he let out a laugh and shoved his find toward Jake.

“Jesus, I think I’ve found blackmail material right off the
bat. Looks like porn, pretty raunchy, and a bit amateurish if you ask me.”

Jake took the reel and held it up to the light and swore.
“Okay, our first find. Dylan, start stacking these reels into that empty box
over there.”

Evidently proud of her early work in the porn industry Alana
had kept no less than twenty or so of her X-rated eight-millimeter films.
Curiosity piqued now, Dylan waited for Jake to put down the reel he was
holding. When he did, Dylan took his turn at holding the frame up to the light
and whistled. “I don’t care what you say; she was hot. This is pretty X-rated
stuff, though.” He began loading each movie reel into a box until he got them
all stacked and decided to check out each reel individually.

When Jake saw what he was doing, he said, “Geez, Dylan, grow
up. It’d be great if you’d do a little work here other than get off on that stuff.
If you’re going to check out every frame of film scene-by-scene, this’ll take
forever. Besides, consider how old those people on that film are now. Unless
old people do it for you, really, really old people, you can’t possibly think
they’re that hot to look at now.”

Once again holding up a frame to the light, Dylan’s answer
was purely male. “Hey, I’m just trying to be thorough here. Old or not, and I
might point out, on the film they aren’t that old, and porn’s porn. If I’d
known we’d find porn, I might have been a little more enthusiastic about giving
up my Saturday for this.” As he eyed the film with closer scrutiny, he added,
“These people were really into this stuff, weren’t they?”

It was some time before Dylan got back to work.

The three of them rummaged through boxes containing nothing
more than old real estate contracts or paperwork from some of Alana’s past
business dealings. And there were tons of discarded contracts and real estate
documents, as if she never threw a single piece of paper away. Not knowing if
any of the papers held anything of interest, they set them aside for now, but
not before organizing the stacks, depending on the date, into a pile labeled
Business.

Jake found a large plastic container that held old photo
albums and an old scrapbook. Not knowing if these might be of interest to Kit
one day, he set them down by the attic door to take with him. Curious though,
he picked up one of the photo albums, flipped through the pages thinking he’d
found family pictures and might happen upon a baby picture or two of Kit. But
after several minutes he realized these were not pictures of children but
rather stills of adults in various forms of undress—some in sexual positions he
hadn’t yet had the opportunity to try even during his college days.

When he tossed the book down in disgust, Dylan got nosy,
picked it up, and thumbed through several pages, before looking over at Jake.
“Have we just busted a porn ring or maybe a blackmail ring here? What was wrong
with these people?” 

Jake thought of Alana and replied without thinking, “The
woman was just evil.” Thinking about Kit growing up in that environment made
him sick. Why the hell hadn’t her father taken her away from Alana long before the
girl had turned twelve? Why hadn’t he fought harder for custody?

The porn they’d found confirmed the fact that he’d never
seen a father with more ammunition on his side to get full custody of his child
than John Griffin, even if the two of them had never been married. And yet time
and time again he’d left his daughter with a sick, perverted woman like Alana.
John Griffin had turned his back on the situation, gone on with his life,
ignoring Kit’s environment.

And that just pissed Jake off. 

He turned his attention to another box of papers and began
sorting through each piece, checking out the dates, and then further organizing
them by year. He did the same with each pile until he got to the mound of
business stuff.

Sifting through the papers, one piece of paper in particular
caught his eye. A yellowed blank sheet of letterhead held a somewhat familiar-looking
logo. Was he imagining the similarity? The logo on the stationary depicted a
lone cowboy in blue sitting atop a black horse riding off into a brilliant
orange sunset in the background. There was no mistaking the resemblance to the
toy cowboy Kit had given Holloway. Under the logo, the letterhead read, “The
Sundown Ranch, Hollywood Hills, CA.” Hadn’t the elderly couple from Kit’s dream
lived on the Sundown Ranch? Folding the single sheet of paper, he stuffed it
into his shirt pocket before eyeing the rest of the cartons stacked around the
room.

After an exhaustive search, they had accumulated a surplus
of studio contracts and real estate paperwork. For organization purposes, they
separated the assortment of papers into four piles: Personal, Business, Bank
Records, and Actress. When Reese found Alana’s old union cards, one from the
Screen Actors Guild and another from the American Guild of Variety Artists, he
threw those in with the stack marked Actress. Old out-of-date cancelled checks
were placed in the Bank Records pile. They found more than a dozen odd keys
that weren’t marked. Having no idea what any of the keys opened, or for that
matter why Alana would have kept so many, Jake found a large-size manila
envelope for the purpose of organization and dumped all the keys into it for
safekeeping so they’d be able to keep up with them.

At one point the lawyer in Reese began to re-examine each of
the items in the stack marked Personal until he came across the original deed
to the house. “Look at the date, July 1969. She owned this house for more than
forty years. Wonder what she paid for a house like this back then?”

“No idea. Didn’t realize porn in the sixties was that
lucrative.”

Reese put the deed on the top of the Personal stack for
later examination and decided to try to find the original purchase price of the
house. But in the pile marked Bank Records, he got sidetracked when he
discovered several worn-out, copies of cashier’s checks, each made out for the
same amount: $25,000. Each check was for a different month, dated from December
20 1967 through August 20 1969. Each was made payable to Alana Stevens, drawn
on a bank in Beverly Hills that he was pretty sure was no longer in business.
The color might have faded, but the printed indentations were just as legible
now as they had been back then.

He counted each check…twenty checks in all, each for $25,000,
totaling $500,000 over a time period of twenty months. He tapped Jake’s arm to
show him what he’d found. “You said to look for anything odd. You said this
woman was an actress turned real estate broker, right? Well, if these checks
were monthly commission checks, why was the payment made via a cashier’s check when
they should have been drawn on a real estate company account? And if they’re
for acting jobs, why are the checks not drawn on a regular business account
such as a studio account? Actors aren’t usually paid for a job spread out over
twenty months. These cashier’s checks total a half a million dollars over a two-year
period. In my book, that’s weird.”

It wasn’t lost on Reese or Jake that the last of the
cashier’s checks conveniently came at about the same time Alana had purchased
her house in July of the same year.

“Maybe she saved her money from these checks so she could
pay cash for the house.”

That’s what Jake thought as well, but they needed to know
how much she’d paid for the house. So Reese and Jake set out to find the
original purchase contract. She hadn’t thrown anything else away so it was a
pretty good bet it was here somewhere; they just had to find it. It took some
time, but Reese eventually uncovered the contract in the pile of real estate
stuff. “She paid a hundred and twenty grand for the house. So a portion of the
cashier’s checks would have been more than enough to buy the house.”

As Dylan burrowed further into the stack of business stuff,
he discovered Alana’s original real estate license dated November 5, 1969 and
pointed out, “If she didn’t become a realtor until four months after she bought
the house, the checks couldn’t have been commissions from real estate sales. If
they weren’t commissions or from acting jobs, then what were they payment for?”

“Let me see that.” Jake checked out the date of the license.
“Son of a bitch.” He remembered what Kit had said last night about the Sundown
Ranch and how valuable the land would have been. So Alana had had her real
estate license back in 1969, years before she became a single mother in need of
extra income.

But even with that, Jake wasn’t sure they’d found anything
important. Let down over that, he didn’t expect much when Dylan popped open a
box labeled Books and hit the mother lode.

Nestled under the works of D.H. Lawrence, Dylan found a
small mobile safe with a key-fitting lock. Reese immediately thought of the
keys they’d found earlier and retrieved the envelope, dumping the collection of
keys on top of an old trunk. The three of them took turns trying to fit each of
the keys into the lock until finally they ran out of keys.

Dylan was the first to offer a solution. “I know a
locksmith. We can take this to him, get him to pop it open.”

“You sure?”

“Won’t be a problem. He’s a…how do I say this…a former
expert in his field.”

“Geez Dyl, you’re just full of surprises, you know that?”

“I have very diverse friends—except, of course, for you and
Reese. You two are about the most conservative guys I run with.”

Insulted, Reese threw Dylan a furious glare. “You think Jake
and I are conservative? Is that a code word for boring?”

“Well. Yeah. Duh. Former nerd programmer, stuffy lawyer. You
guys are boring.”

“I hate to point this out to you, Sherlock, but you’re a
nerd programmer. If we’re boring, that makes you one of us.”

“Yeah, but I’m a lot less boring than you guys. I know how
to have fun. I hate to say this, but you guys just can’t help being killjoys.
We never do anything fun anymore. With the two of you, it’s all work, work,
work.”

Reese didn’t care for the assessment. “We went skiing at
Mammoth last year, didn’t we? What about that?”

“Isolated incident.”

Without waiting any longer for an apology that obviously
wasn’t coming, Reese immediately threw his shoulder into Dylan, bouncing him up
against the attic wall.

Before Jake could react, the two of them were pushing and
shoving like two power forwards fighting for the ball. Jake stepped into the
fray planning to referee, but in two seconds he was blocking blows now turned
on him. They wrestled with the energy of ten-year-olds until Jake pushed
between both of them and threw all of his weight into Dylan. “Knock it off. I
think we’re done here. Let’s load up this shit. Beer’s on me.”

As they packed up the stuff they thought was important and
loaded it into boxes to cart downstairs, Dylan wanted to know, “You planning on
telling Kit that at one time her mom was the queen of porn?”

Thinking of Kit in this house as a child, Jake answered
simply, “What makes you think she doesn’t already know?”

As she locked up the Book & Bean, Kit felt only a slight
twinge of guilt for not following Jake’s directive to the letter. But when
Sarah had grown fussy with all the classic symptoms of cutting another tooth,
Kit had sent Baylee home early to take care of her daughter. And since Baylee
was practically living with Glo, it would have made sense if Kit had closed up
the store then and gone home with Baylee. But she hadn’t thought of that until
Baylee was halfway to Agoura Hills.

To keep her promise to Jake, though, she’d called Gloria and
invited herself over for Chinese take-out. It would be the perfect time to sit
down with her aunt, get her take on the dream, and see what she had to say
about the fact that Alana and her father had never been married. And while she
was at it, she might as well tell her about Ben Griffin.