The Mountains Bow Down (8 page)

“Did the saint happen to leave a suicide note?”

He froze.

I wasn't his buddy. I wasn't interested in his charm. And somebody killed his wife.

After a moment, he shook his head, indicating she left no note, and I pulled the plastic bag from my pocket. With the room's intense illumination, the blue gems glowed like tiny gas flames. Hypnotic pilot-light jewels. “Did this bracelet belong to your wife?”

He pulled the sunglasses off his face. The famous green eyes were bloodshot, bagged with dark circles. “Where did you find that?”

“Did it belong to your wife?”

“You found that on her?”

I left the bag on the table. Light poured into the facets. But the colors kept shifting from light blue to navy to that fierce violet hue. I'd seen sapphires do something like that, but only really nice ones. Amethyst could also color-shift, despite its classification as only a semiprecious stone. But maybe the idea of amethyst came from the sharp scent on the actor's breath. The ancient Greeks named the purple stone
amethustos
, meaning “not intoxicated.” Believing violet quartz protected against drunkenness, the Greeks even made their drinking vessels out of amethyst.

Milo Carpenter grabbed the bag and started to tear open the taped seal.

“Don't open it,” I said.

“Why not?”

“It's evidence.”

“Evidence.”

I didn't reply.

He leaned forward, almost sneering. “You need more evidence she's dead?”

I kept quiet, to keep him talking.

“What more!” he yelled. “What more!”

“One more?” Corey called from the bar.

Signaling a round for himself, Milo lowered his voice. “You better start talking. Why do you need more evidence?”

For once, he looked genuinely curious.

“Mr. Carpenter, are you certain your wife committed suicide?”

The glaze over his eyes made it difficult to tell if he was thinking, or not thinking. Or trying to sober up enough to think. Or to lie.

“Who wanted your wife dead?” I pressed on. “Someone on the movie crew?”

“Everybody—”

“Everybody?”

“Nobody,” he said, addled. “Everybody loved Judy. They
loved
her.”

The bartender appeared, setting the fresh drink on a new coaster. Milo shook his head.

“Not right drink, yes?” Corey asked.

Picking it up, the actor gulped like a man dying of thirst. He handed the glass back to the bartender.

“One more, yes?”

Milo nodded. The bartender walked away.

“You told me this morning she was depressed.” I leaned forward. “Was she taking medication for the condition?”

“You think I killed her.” His voice was flat, uninflected.

“Mr. Carpenter, I don't know what happened to your wife. But if she killed herself, there must be some reason. And if you know what it is, please tell me.”

He grabbed the sunglasses from the table, sliding them over his face. Then he stood, swaying for a moment before he squared the wide shoulders and tried to walk out of the bar, bumping into the plastic chairs. Like a drunk.

That part, I decided, was no act.

Chapter Six

T
he thin woman who answered the door to the ship's penthouse had a pile of platinum hair. Her name was Larrah Sparks and her bikini was so small it could've belonged to the real Barbie, whom Mrs. Sparks closely resembled.

I showed my FBI credentials, reminding the producer's wife.

“Huh,” she said. “Is this something with the movie?”

“No.”

“Did I ever tell you I did two movies that had FBI agents in them?”

Three times
. “Yes, you did.”

“None of the agents was female,” she continued once more. “If I'd played the agent we would have made money.”

I gave my official smile, an expression Quantico issued on graduation day. “Is Mr. Sparks available?”

“You know how to spell my name, right?” She spelled it. “Rhymes with ‘Harrah.'”

“Got it.” Larrah-Harrah. Scarrah.

After Milo had staggered out of the bar, I went to ask Geert if the movie's producer was taking any tours in Ketchikan. The ship's computers at the gangway tracked each passenger's boarding and reentry. Sparks had stayed on board.

“He's in the tub,” Larrah said over her shoulder, walking across the apartment-size cabin. “We was just taking a little splash.”

The view from the patio was so beautiful it could have been a movie's fake backdrop. Gravity-defying slopes, white-capped peaks, glistening ocean under a sparkle of sunshine. Sitting in the hot tub, Sandy Sparks was speaking on his cell phone, his back turned to the glory of Alaska.

“You tell that jerk he'll never find another gig in LA,” Sparks was saying. “I'll make it my full-time job to cut him off.”

The nubile Mrs. Sparks climbed the four steps to the edge of the hot tub, then made a slow descent into the water. Perhaps it was the pile of vanilla hair on her sticklike body, but she reminded me of an ice-cream cone dipping itself in melted chocolate.

“Just get it done.” Sparks slammed the phone shut.

When I held out my card, his wet fingers placed it on the edge of the hot tub. “What's with the card? I know who you are.”

I asked if we could speak alone.

“Yeah, sure.” He looked at his wife. “Hey, Laurrie, give us a minute, would ya?”

Laurrie—which I guessed was Larrah's real name—glared at her husband before standing and climbed back out. She stomped over to the patio door. Her bare feet left surprisingly large footprints on the patio floor.

She closed the sliding door behind her, hard.

“Did I ever tell you I produced a couple other movies with Fed characters?” Sparks said.

Twice
. “Yes, you did.”

“Only we didn't cast women as agents. Laurrie thinks that's why they tanked.”

Each time they told me about their previous “Fed” experience, it was as if the previous conversations never happened. Once more I brought out the official smile. “Mr. Sparks, I wanted to talk to you about Judy Carpenter.”

“Judy, yeah. That's some crazy stunt she pulled. Amazing. Unbelievable. Did you know she made Milo a star? Seventeen years they were married.”

“I heard twenty-two.”

“Twenty?”

“Two. Twenty-two.” These people didn't listen to anybody but themselves.

“That's like two centuries in LA. They had the longest marriage I know. I was just talking to a producer friend”—he nodded at the cell phone resting beside my card—“and he couldn't believe Judy checked out like that.”

“It's best if you don't talk about it. Not yet.”

He lifted his hands, inadvertently splashing some water on my shoes. “Hey, I wasn't talking. I was just asking if he'd heard anything. My publicity people are working on an official statement, before the paparazzi come parachuting in.”

“An official statement that says . . . ?”

He scratched his rounded shoulders. The wet black hair lay as flat as a pelt on his pale skin. But he was a man who stayed in motion. Since I'd come on deck, he'd already scratched his shoulders twice, his face once, and nodded at the end of all my sentences, anxious to speak before the other person finished.

“We're still trying to figure out a way to spin this, so it doesn't sound so bad. To most people. That nutty crowd of hers would believe anything. We could say she got abducted by aliens and they'd believe it. No offense.”

“None taken.”

That “nutty crowd” included my aunt Charlotte. Judy Carpenter agreed with all her ideas about crystals and reincarnation and all the other New Age claptrap. It was Judy who insisted my aunt work with the movie crew.

“Did Mrs. Carpenter seem depressed to you?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I wasn't married to her.”

“But did anything seem different about her in recent weeks?”

“To tell you the truth”—he scratched again—“she seemed a little down this past year. Menopause, what I thought. She got fat, started getting emotional about everything. It wasn't like her, so I figured it was hormone hell. You know, female stuff.” He looked at me. “You saw her. What'd she seem like to you?”

During the two brief days I'd known her, Judy Carpenter never seemed completely there. Not so much a thousand-yard stare, but three hundred yards and looking at a different field altogether. “Distracted,” I said. “She seemed distracted.”

I thought that had to do with work, with coproducing a movie. With a boozed up lead actor who was her husband.

“She was a hard worker. You know she produced rock bands too? That's how this whole crystal thing came into our movie.” He picked up my soggy card, reading it. “You're Charlotte's daughter?”

“Niece.”

He nodded, as if committing the fact to memory. “Judy really wanted Charlotte to come on this trip. She swore that if we did what Charlotte said, the movie would be a hit.”

My dad's sister owned a New Age boutique called Seattle Stones. Last year she stumbled upon the idea that crystals emitted distinct vibrations, and each vibration matched a certain type of music. Tiger's eye kept a hip-hop beat. Obsidian had the dark energy of heavy metal rock. Turquoise harmonized with folk. To test her theory, my aunt loaned some crystals to several Seattle bands. Two of them scored their first rocket hits on the Billboard chart. Other bands began packing clubs. One of those hit bands had an LA producer, Judy Carpenter. When she heard about the “rocks that rock” idea, she immediately called my aunt. Not surprisingly, they hit it off, and later Judy convinced Charlotte the rocks could work with acting too. And she had just the movie to try it out on. Did Charlotte want to come on a cruise to Alaska? Never shy, my aunt asked to bring her family. Four tickets. That was Charlotte's fee. And when my aunt learned that Milo was playing an FBI agent, she offered my consulting services. That detail we kept from my mother.

“Nobody worked harder than Judy,” Sparks was saying. “Back in the spandex-rock days she sewed outfits for some big-hair bands.”

“I heard it was ice-skaters.”

“Skating, yeah. That came first. The Mommie-dearest types really forked over some cash. But making the band outfits was how Judy got into the music biz. Then Milo started making money in action flicks, and since they didn't have kids, Judy adopted bands. She had an ear. She made money. So when she told me about those Billboard hits and those stones from your mom—”

“Aunt.”

“—I was like, ‘What is this, Jack and the Beanstalk?' She goes, ‘No, I'm serious. This woman in Seattle, she gets you in tune with the universe and everything just falls into place.'”

I stared out at the water, resisting the urge to roll my eyes.

“Between you and me, I wasn't so excited. But Judy was desperate for Milo to make another hit.” He rubbed his ear, rapidly. “So I listened to her. Milo's an old friend, and he's on the skids. By just hiring the guy I'm out on a limb, but it's a sequel. What can I do— cast a different actor? Never works. Okay, maybe with a part like James Bond. But Milo's no Sean Connery. Not even Pierce Brosnan. He's not even Tim Dalton.”

“Judy was the film's coproducer, is that right?”

He nodded. “She offered to help fund the movie. I think she offered so we'd actually make the thing. But the deal breaker was we had to use these rocks from your mom—”

“Aunt.”

“—so we could find everybody's wavelength. In the end I decided, what the heck? Rocks, what can it hurt? Hours at sea. And with Milo in the lead, we need all the help we can get.” He shrugged a hirsute shoulder. “And now it feels like a curse.”

“What does?”

“All of it. Her suicide. That's like a curse.” He ran a wet hand over his thinning hair. “All we can hope for now is that she created some buzz at the box office.”

I gazed across the patio to Ketchikan's harbor. Seagulls perched along the dock rail, waiting for food. When I looked back at the producer, he had opened his cell phone again.

“Mr. Sparks, one more question. If she wanted her husband's movie to succeed, why would she ruin it by taking her own life?”

He snapped the phone shut. “Okay. The truth?”

I nodded, wondering what we were talking before.

“Judy was madly in love with Milo.”

I waited. “So she killed herself?”

“He's getting too old to play action. His career's in the toilet. It's not like he's Bruce Willis. Or Nic Cage. He's no Sly Stallone—”

“I see, but how does that relate to her suicide?”

“You Feds are sworn to secrecy, right?”

“Confidentiality?”

“Yeah, right, confidentiality. You can't go to the tabloids, who have enough on the guy?”

“Even if I could, I wouldn't speak to the tabloids.”

He considered my statement. “Here's the bottom line: Milo's an alcoholic.”

I shifted, impatient. “No offense, Mr. Sparks, but that's not news.”

“Ten years ago, peak of his career, Judy got him dried out. The guy had started believing his press. It happens. Some not-too-smart actor decides he's a genius because a writer put good lines in his mouth. After he got clean, Milo figured out he can't drink. He's a raging alcoholic.”

“He's drinking now.”

“That's what I'm saying: he fell off the wagon.”

“So she killed herself?”

“Oh, wait, I got it. You don't read the tabloids. Milo, with the babe? It's all over the
Enquirer
. It tore Judy apart.”

“He's having an affair?”

“What did I just tell you? She was madly in love with him.”

It didn't add up. I pulled the plastic bag from my pocket and handed it to Sparks. He squeezed the bag, staring at the stones. “Something from Charlotte?”