Power Slide (14 page)

“Jesus! What’s that asshole—”

Metal crunched.

“He hit my car! He hit my fucking car!” He ran.

I jumped and whipped around the side of the garage.

Blink kept on going down the hill.

“THE COP DIDN’T get close enough to see your rear plate?” I asked.

“He couldn’t even make out the color of the car. Honey-love, I’m the best.”

“You sure are in my book. You saved my hide on this one. I had—”

Blink Jones made a “stop” sign with his hand. “Don’t tell me! I make it a point not to know what I shouldn’t. I make sure everyone’s aware of that. That’s how I’ve survived as long on the outside as I have.”

I could believe that. The first time I’d come across him, he’d beat it off a set a hair’s breadth before the sheriff pulled up.

He hoisted his glass and drank. “Like I told you, better to not know what you don’t know.”

I shrugged. The nondescript wooden booth in this easy-to-miss tavern east of Santa Barbara was the architectural equivalent of Blink himself, who’d made being unmemorable his life’s work. He was a short, muscular guy in loose chinos and an oversized T-shirt that hid his physique. Brown stubble covered his head above his round face. I was holding my own with him, but inside I was shaking, and the more so the farther I got from my crazy afternoon. I was desperate for someone with whom to talk it out, sorry it wouldn’t be him.

Logically, that was just as well. Regardless of his protestations, Blink Jones lived too close to the edge to be a secure receptacle for anyone’s secrets. I didn’t know a lot about him, but that much I did. I was drinking Scotch. I hate Scotch, so it’s the only safe liquor when I don’t dare drink as much as I need. And rattled as I was tonight, I needed to upend the bottle. “Sidescraping the patrol car was brilliant. And that 360 you did? How’d you know where the road could take it?”

“You askin’ how well I know Guthrie?”

“How well do you?”

“Like I say, I steer clear of secrets.”

“And he had some. Which one, in particular, are we talking about?”

“Like I say—”

“Blink, to a woman trying to find out about a guy she cared about, discretion isn’t a virtue, it’s a pain in the butt. Guthrie’s dead. Murdered. I’ve known him for years and I’d’ve sworn he wasn’t a guy to bring down murder on himself. And yet . . .” I looked over at him, waiting till I caught his eye. “And yet he ended up with the back of his head bashed in. He’s not asking you to keep secrets now. You know where he lived. What else?”

If he hadn’t had nearly a full glass, he would have been waving the waitress over and chatting her up while he decided how to handle me. As it was, he sipped his drink, washed it down with a swallow of water, and sipped again. “I don’t like knowing things, even—especially—about a guy who gets murdered. I half wish I hadn’t caught your call. Only half, and that’s a compliment. But, okay, Guthrie. Hard not to like the guy, right? Great trucker, the best! He loved that truck, would spend days tweaking the systems, getting that baby to slap left like a hand after a mosquito. And other gags, high falls, bike work, tube climbs. I’d see him out at Zahra’s hole in the desert—”

“Blink, he had some strange things at that house. There’s a green Mustang that’s a ringer for the car in
Bullitt.
And, even odder, he had an Oscar.”

“Stuntmen don’t get Oscars.”

“Exactly. But”—I didn’t want to say I’d been rooting through his closet—“he had one. In his possession.”

“Whose?”

I hesitated. I liked Blink; I owed him; but trust him? I was on the fence.

“Damn. You can’t sell them. You get one and hit hard times, tough; statue has to go back to the Academy. That’s the contract.” Now he did signal the waitress and pointed to his empty glass. “You can’t sell them,
legitimately.
’Course private collectors’ll buy anything. They say there’s a guy in Vegas who’s got one from every year. There was a spurt of movie memorabilia burglaries a while back—you wouldn’t believe what Mary Pickford’s headdress or Silver’s harness sold for. The real Oscar winners panicked. They started putting copies on the mantel and the real ones in the vault. There’re always stories about statues going missing. One ended up on the edge of the La Brea tar pits. And it wasn’t for
Jurassic Park.
”

I laughed. God, it felt good to laugh again. In that spirit, I jumped off the fence on his side. “Casimir Goldfarb.”

He actually whistled. “Guthrie had Old Oscarless’s Oscar? Damn.”

“Come on, tell me!”

“Goldfarb was a director and a prize asshole, though that’s not what he got the award for. He pissed off a kid. Kid slashed his tires and snatched his most prized possession.”

“And?”

“Kid vanished. Goldfarb never came near winning again. Thus the epithet ‘Old Oscarless.’”

“Didn’t he—”

The door to the bar opened to let in an appalling sight. Two uniformed officers. One was bald.

“Yikes, cops!”

“Stay cool.”

I clutched my glass, my hands just about melting the ice cubes.
They aren’t the same guys. There are thousands of cops in Southern California. Probably thousands with shaved heads. Relax.
Relax—was there ever a more useless order?

The hairless cop took a bar stool. The other headed for the john.

“I’m too visible,” I said. “I should have shaved my head, too. Look at this, it’s—”

“A red flag?”

“Right.” The time for chitchat was over. “I have to get out of here. I’ll owe you that fancy dinner.”

“Hang on. They’ll be leaving.”

“How do I know they aren’t reconnaissance?”

“Like ants?” He was laughing.

Maybe he was right. But the arrival of cops was a bad omen. I leaned forward and lowered my voice. “Listen, I know you keep secrets ’cause it’s healthy. My mom’s that way; it’s how she survived raising the seven of us. But Guthrie’s dead and you know more than you’re telling me. So spill it.”

“Or?” He was still grinning.

“Just cut the crap. If he’s so crazy about his truck, how come he’s living up in the canyon where he can’t drive it? If he’s so straightforward”—shit! I hated to sound like such an utter patsy—“how come he’s coming on to me while he’s got a wife down here he’s living with?”

“Whoa! A wife?”

“Well, a woman who
says
she’s his wife.”

“News to me.”

“Opens the door of his house, gun in hand, and says she’s his wife.”

Blink shook his head. “Doesn’t that gun bit send off a few flares? Sure doesn’t sound like ‘the little woman’ to me.”

“Okay, then, live-in?”

“Not as I saw.”

“Then who the hell is she? She called herself Melissa Guthrie.”

“Good question.”

A wave of emotion—relief, guilt, the whole mix—swept through me.
I am so sorry, Guthrie!
I felt like shit. I wanted to take this new info and run with it. But this time caution prevailed. “Okay. If she wasn’t his wife and wasn’t his girlfriend, just how’d she get into his house? The door wasn’t forced.”

He glanced at his glass that was, once again, too full to provide an excuse to call the waitress over. “You know Guthrie. He’s a loose guy. Gone a lot. Work’s tight, we all know. So you give someone a hand—”

“That woman wasn’t bunking in there till she could find work.”

“Hey, we all take Acting 1A.”

I had one more question. I could have asked him, but I was sick of Blink’s loop of not-knowing. Besides, I could find out a lot more easily without him.

I had come up empty on Guthrie’s house. Going back there was not merely tempting fate; it was poking it in the eye. Guthrie’s house was the last place I ought to be. The last place I wanted to be.

To Blink, I said, “You drive up the road again and let me know if anyone’s watching his house.”

I PICKED THE darkest spot at the bottom of Guthrie’s canyon and waited for Blink’s call. It would take him a good fifteen minutes to get to the house, which would be all the time I would need to do a little research.

It was almost midnight, but I wasn’t exhausted, or apprehensive, or anything else. Blink had, after all, insisted on having his promised dinner. We’d talked about the decline in live stunt work, the rise in electronics, the shift in emphasis to acrobatics that left old guys like Blink focusing on car gags and praying that they wouldn’t be digitalized. I’d been lucky, he’d said. It was true, though not flattering.
He’d
been unlucky. But we all make choices.

Guthrie’s choice may have been to let friends use his house. An Oscar was stashed there. I hauled out the new everything-phone that my brother Gary had given me (so I could figure it out for him), pulled up Google, and typed in “Casimir Goldfarb + Oscar theft.” The first hits were trade rag stories on the theft that told me no more than Blink had. I tried the name of the movie and scrolled through the cast and crew on three sites before I found one that named personnel down to the gaffers and grips who assisted the lighting techs.

One of the grips was Ryan Hammond.
Ryan Hammond,
Guthrie’s friend from the Union Street bars.

The Oscar theft was in July, two and a half months before the Loma Prieta earthquake. Now, twenty years later, there’s the statuette in Guthrie’s closet. What did that mean?

My phone vibrated. “Yes?”

“It’s clear.”

“Thanks.”

“You want me to help?”

“Yeah, answer me this about Casimir Goldfarb’s Oscar, was Ryan Hammond the kid who stole it?”

It was a moment before he said, “That’s the story. But there’s no proof.”

“Circumstantial evidence?”

“One day that kid and the statuette are there; next day both are gone. That’s all I can tell you. But listen, you find anything tonight, let me know.” Before I could protest, he clicked off.

Blink might be trying to figure out how the Oscar got from Ryan Hammond to Guthrie, but he didn’t know about their San Francisco connection. Had they been friends all along? Or not-friends? Whichever, Ryan Hammond was my best bet to find out about Guthrie. But where was Hammond?

That was one of the things I was hoping Guthrie’s house would tell me. It took me twice as long as I expected just to get up the winding road in the dark. In daylight, finding Guthrie’s place had been easy, but now picking out the house was a whole lot harder. I parked a hundred yards farther down and walked back, eyeing cars that might be there for surveillance. Carefully, silently, I crossed the uneven slab steps, tossed a pebble down against the house, and stood dead still. But there was no sound, no reaction. I had to believe no one was there.

The police had closed up the house. But, of course, I had the key.

There is no way to search a house in the dark, on a moonless night, except with a flashlight. You can keep the light low to the ground, shield it with your hand, and turn it on only at strategic moments, but if anyone’s watching, you’re busted.

I unlocked the door and walked into the living room where Guthrie’s not-wife had greeted me with a pistol nine hours ago. I crossed the tiny hallway where she’d tossed me aside. At the bedroom door, I switched on the flashlight and laid it on the floor, whipped back into the kitchen, and waited. If anyone showed, I’d be out of here in a snap.

As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I thought again how much this place resembled a college guy’s apartment, with its easy-to-move furniture, makeshift coffee table, and the predictable candles on the mantel.

After five minutes, I began to worry more about the batteries running out than being discovered. I’d known so little about Guthrie, I’d automatically made up the rest. Whatever I’d assumed was like a dream, and with the same staying power. Leo kept reminding me I was looking through my own eyes, but this was way worse. It wasn’t that I’d so much
believed
he lived in his truck as that I’d never really thought about him living elsewhere, certainly not a place like this. Had he actually lived here with the hostile Melissa? Surely, Blink would have known. Surely, Blink would
not
have told me, either. I wanted to trust Guthrie the way I had the day before he died when he was so tormented, when I was ready to overlook anything. But now, he was making it damned hard.

Now, something didn’t feel right about this place. Something niggled—what was it?

It suddenly occurred to me what was missing. There were no newspapers, magazines, mail, glasses, plates, napkins, tissues—not a scrap of the detritus of people living here.

Outside, a car engine strained coming up the hill.

No time to stand around and ponder. I headed back to the bedroom. The sweaters were in a heap, the underwear scattered over the floor, and the laptop gone. I lifted the bedspread.

It wasn’t a bed at all. I yanked the spread off and stared at the cardboard boxes underneath. Big boxes that held brown paper, bubble wrap, tape. I picked up one and tore it open. It held two framed pictures, wrapped professionally. I pulled out one and stared, dumbstruck, at a poster from the original
Stagecoach
—not the remake—the one with John Wayne, Claire Trevor, and Yakima Canutt doing his famous gag. For an instant I imagined standing in the back of a dark theater in 1939, watching him work his way back between the pounding hooves and under the stagecoach.

I checked the back, but any key to the provenance was covered beneath the frame backing. I pulled the wrapping off the other:
The Grapes of Wrath
. There was Henry Fonda under the orange title, above the credits. The colors weren’t even faded. The corners were worn, but otherwise it was perfect—no rips. It barely looked handled.

I cut open the boxes that had been the bed and unwrapped masks—elaborate painted numbers with curved feathers two feet long. Obviously costume artifacts. Likewise a red damask robe. None of it was priceless, but none would sell for less than three figures, and none, I was willing to bet, was here legally.