The Last Cheerleader. Meg O'Brien

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СКАЧАТЬ been working. That was good. I started to turn back to the front door, but couldn’t resist a peek first at the finished sheets of manuscript. They were upside down, so I turned the entire stack over and saw the title: Under Covers.

      Odd. Did he mean Undercover? A spy novel? That didn’t sound like Craig. He was more into investigative nonfiction like Lost Legacy, where real-life mafia slugs were found under upturned rocks.

      A look at the next few pages revealed that the title was a play on words, and the book seemed to be a fictional account of the Hollywood scene “between the sheets.” He’d written about old Hollywood in the 1940s, accounts of wild exploits of high-level directors with young female stars, sexual harassment, and the fact that actors were forced to cover up their homosexuality to make them more of a heartthrob to female viewers. Names of stars, though, had been changed to protect the noninnocent.

      I’d had no idea Craig was writing a book like this, and I couldn’t see Paul Whitmore paying the same thing for this book as he was offering for Lost Legacy. While its mafia-don story had been told before, Craig had added a psychological edge to it that had made Whitmore take notice. This book, though it seemed well written, was as stale as yesterday’s news. The casting-couch angle had been done before, over and over. In fact, some of it seemed familiar, as if I’d read it somewhere before.

      What the hell was going on?

      I’d taken a speed-reading course years before, so it didn’t take me long to read the first few chapters. Confused and concerned, though, I stopped reading at page thirty-four. Setting the page down, I did something I’d never done before. Pushing the “on” button on Craig’s computer, I sat on his chair and tried to bring up the Under Covers document. I was pretty good with computers, but there was something odd about this one: there were no documents on the hard drive. None at all. No letters, no memos, no books. If anything had ever been on the hard drive, it had obviously been wiped clean. Puzzled, I opened the CD-Rom drive and the floppy disk drive, but both were empty.

      Before I had time to think it through, I heard a slight noise that seemed to be coming from behind the motel. A thud? Someone hitting the wall back there? Images of O.J. and Kato Kaelin came to mind—someone running into an air conditioner with blood on his hands.

      Then I realized the sound must have come from the bathroom. Without thinking, I strode over there and threw the bathroom door open, determined to confront Craig about why he hadn’t been answering his calls and why the hell he was hiding from me. It was his own fault, I thought, if I caught him on the john.

      But Craig wasn’t hiding at all. He was right there on the floor, blood all over his forehead that was slowly seeping onto the old, grubby tiles.

      In shock, I could barely move. I looked at the window, which was open. Cheap plastic curtains in a gaudy flower pattern were blowing in a light salty breeze that came off the ocean from this side of the motel. There were marks on the sill that seemed to be blood, marks that might have come from a killer, possibly escaping that way.

      I knelt down beside Craig, feeling for a pulse. I couldn’t find one anywhere. I touched his cheek. Still warm. He hadn’t been dead long.

      Stroking his forehead, I couldn’t hold back tears. The poor guy never got the chance to get out of the hole he’d dug himself into. And we were so close to getting what he wanted.

      Then, as if in a nightmare, I saw that the blood had originated at a large gash on Craig’s forehead, and that lying by his side was a bloody Chinese dildo—made of ivory, and intricately carved to please, I supposed, in all the right places. It looked very much like the one in Tony’s apartment the night before.

      I knelt there for a long moment, so staggered I wasn’t able to stand. I guess I noticed the draft, finally, that slammed the front door shut. Grasping the bathroom sink, I pulled myself up slowly and realized there was blood on my skirt and my knees.

      I was still standing over Craig’s body, blood all over me, when the police banged on the front door and piled in. “Don’t move!” they ordered, guns pointed directly at me.

      I didn’t even breathe.

      El Segundo is a smallish town along the coast, south of Santa Monica and north of Redondo Beach. It’s a nice town, growing perhaps too quickly, but the cops, I’d heard, were generally pretty friendly.

      My experience, however, was a bit strained because I’d been found at a crime scene, with blood all over me.

      Inside the El Segundo police station, I’d been allowed to wash most of the blood off me. A female officer stood outside the bathroom door, “just in case I needed help.”

      Yeah, right.

      After I’d done the best I could, I was escorted to an interview room where a Lieutenant Davies sat across from me at a table. He didn’t tell me much, but I knew by now that he was wondering if I’d also killed Tony and Arnold. Although the ESPD and the LAPD were entirely separate entities, surely they shared information when something as important as murder was involved.

      The one thing that probably kept me out of jail, at least for the moment, was the open bathroom window and the blood on the sill. I could have set that up, they thought at first, to make it look as if someone else had killed Craig Dinsmore and then escaped out that window. But when my prints didn’t turn up on the murder weapon and there was a third, unidentified person’s blood type on that sill, they couldn’t charge me.

      Which did not, however, exonerate me entirely. I could have been an accomplice, the lieutenant said, and just didn’t make it to the window before the police broke in.

      “I’ve been wondering about that,” I said. “How did you know to show up when you did?”

      He hesitated again, but shrugged. “We had an anonymous phone call saying a murder had been committed in that room.”

      “Do you mind telling me when that call came in?”

      He hesitated, but said, “One-forty or thereabouts.”

      “So, whoever it was, they called you while I was in Craig’s room.”

      He didn’t answer that, and for good reason, I thought. If I were an accomplice to the crime, why would the other killer call the cops at a time when I’d be caught there?

      I spent the next couple of hours in the interview room dealing with questions I had no answers to. In between questions I had time to think, and I figured that whoever had killed Craig did it while I was pounding on the door the first time. When I came back with a key, the killer was just getting ready to go out the window, but he hesitated when he heard me come in. The noise I’d heard while I was looking at Craig’s manuscript must have been the killer climbing, finally, through that window. I’d been so quiet, he probably thought I’d gone.

      Or maybe he was afraid that I might decide I needed to pee.

      “Ms. Conahan,” the lieutenant said at last in a hard voice, “I don’t believe in coincidence. There were two murders last night in Brentwood, and the LAPD says that both men were closely connected to you. Now there’s this third murder. I would think you might be getting nervous about that.”

      “Well, I’m not nervous,” I said calmly. “I’m sad. I’ve lost two very good authors and an ex-husband who didn’t deserve to die. But I didn’t do anything, so there’s nothing for me to be nervous about.”

      Lieutenant СКАЧАТЬ