Then I heard the weeping woman say, “What’s happening, Cora? Why is this happening to us?” This was punctuated by the shrill wail of a small child.
Cora.
I went inside, gun first.
Though I saw the old woman, my attention was focused entirely on the other woman, who cowered on a suede love seat, shaking and clutching a weeping toddler in her arms. The woman was around thirty-five or so — my age — with curly brown hair and a plain but pleasant freckled face. She wore an oversized T-shirt and sweatpants, casual clothes for relaxing at home, but she was anything but relaxed. Rather, her wide, ice-blue eyes stared me down with equal parts horror and hatred, leaking tears and shimmering in the light of the faux Tiffany lamp between her and the old woman.
Gary Parson’s gun was more or less pointed at the lamp. I couldn’t aim it at any of the unarmed people in the room — two women and a child — but I wasn’t quite prepared to put it away, either. And despite the fact that I’d never laid eyes on Cora Parson, the still, scowling woman in the Queen Anne chair beside the love seat struck me as the very person I’d come looking for.
“What do you want from us?” the younger woman cried. Her outburst set the little girl into a fresh bout of screaming and sobbing. “My husband is dead! Do you understand me? Dead!”
David, I supposed. The thug Cora left to kill Jake and Barbara. The human monster who did kill Jake’s friend, or whatever she was. I narrowed my eyes and turned them on the old woman. She neither trembled nor cried. Her veiny hands curled like talons over the arms of the chair and her clear gray eyes regarded me with steely revulsion.
“Cora Parson?” I asked her.
“Mr. Woodard,” she answered me. It wasn’t a question.
“Cora,” the woman said, “who is this? Is this the man who killed David?”
Cora pursed her papery lips and said, “No, Sarah. This is not the man.”
“Then who is he?” She pressed the child’s head tight against her breast and redirected the question at me: “Who are you? What do you want from us?”
“My name is Graham Woodard,” I said. My voice was steady, but my heart was pounding out of my chest. This was not the scene I anticipated. “I was hired by a woman named Leslie Wheeler to help restore a motion picture — a very old motion picture that was thought lost for a very long time. That film was made by Mrs. Parson’s father-in-law, back in 1926.”
Cora shot me a bemused, smug look. Sarah knitted her brow and snarled, “I know what my husband’s grandfather did for a living, damn you. What has that to do with anything?”
“Then let me tell you something you don’t know. In fact, I can tell you a lot of things you probably don’t know, from the looks of it.”
“Don’t listen to this man,” Cora cut in. “He is clearly a lunatic. He may not be the one who murdered our poor David, but he is most assuredly allied with the killer.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that, Mrs. Parson,” I growled. “I’ve become a killer too, now. Your boy Gary paid a visit to me and some of my friends. This is his gun, as a matter of fact. I took it from him. I took his shiny car, too. He won’t be needing either of them anymore.”
“Oh, God!” David’s widow wailed. “Oh, my God!”
“But I’ve gotten ahead of myself,” I continued. I changed my mind about the gun and angled it to point directly at Cora. She didn’t change her expression one bit. “You see, Miss — it’s Sarah, right?”
“Go to hell,” she said.
“Right. You see, Sarah, Jack Parson — the elder Jack Parson — was apparently something of a sadist. I mean a real goddamned pyscho.”
“You shut your lying mouth,” Cora snapped. “Don’t you dare come into my house and disparage my husband’s father.”
I shook the gun at her. “Be quiet, Cora,” I said. “I’m nowhere near finished yet.”
“Jack Parson died before you were born!” Sarah said. “This is goddamn crazy.”
“Oh, it’s crazy all right. And I suspect Parson was pretty damn crazy, too. Christ, runs in the family, from what I can see. Maybe he was a genius, as well — I saw Angel of the Abyss, Cora. All of it, every reel. It’s a masterpiece. An honest-to-Christ work of art. It’s just such a crying shame a young woman had to die for it, which is why you’ve gone to such insane lengths to keep it buried, am I right?”
She only glared.
“Very few people ever saw it, but in Europe your father made a name for himself after Monumental folded — though that’s not why he left the country, is it? He’s well remembered, and that name still means something, doesn’t it? Your name. Parson. Your husband traded on it and so do you. It would be a hell of a blow should the world find out that the great Jack Parson murdered Grace Baronsky on film to satisfy whatever monkeyfuck crazy bloodlust he had eating away at his brain, don’t you think?”
“My father-in-law was an artist!” Cora shouted suddenly, lurching forward in the chair, her face twisting with impotent rage. “And my husband revived Monumental from the ashes when nobody else gave a damn. My family does have a good name in this business, Mr. Woodard, in this state. And I intend to make absolutely certain it remains that way.”
“Even if it means murdering anybody who threatens you with the bloody truth.”
“M — murder?” Sarah screwed up her mouth and looked at me as though I’d just dropped my pants.
“That’s right,” I said evenly. “Leslie Wheeler was the first. I took a bullet in the head that was supposed to kill me — I think that must have been your husband who pulled the trigger there. Then there was Florence Sommer, and a girl named Lou, and tonight two people who had nothing at all to do with any of it. Their names were Duff and Shawna, if you’re interested.”
“You’re lying,” she muttered. “What an awful thing to say. You’re a goddamn liar.”
“I didn’t leave the hospital with a fucking hole in my head and drive four hours to El Centro to tell you lies, lady. I came here to put an end to this nightmare, to stop your horrible mother-in-law from causing any more damage to me and my friends. I am a goddamned film restoration technician, for Christ’s sake. All I ever wanted out of this was to see Grace Baron’s only performance, and I sure as hell did. And by seeing it, I opened up Pandora ’s box and unleashed this piece of shit on half of Southern California.” I gestured at Cora with her dead son’s gun.
The child continued to quietly whimper, but thankfully she did so in her sleep. The trauma and excitement had been too much for her and she crashed right out. Her mother kept looking at me with those huge wet eyes for another minute before turning them on Cora.
She said, “Cora? What is he talking about?”
“I’m sure I don’t know. But certainly someone has called the police by now. That shot couldn’t have gone unnoticed. Not here.”
“I hope you’re right, you nasty old bag,” I said. “The Hollywood Police Department has been looking for you, Mrs. Parson. Showing up at Leslie and Barbara’s office was not a wise decision on your part.”
“What is this, Cora?” Sarah repeated.
Cora drew a breath in through flared nostrils and her right eye twitched. I guess she was imagining the tables turned, maybe one of her sons putting another bullet in my skull. It didn’t really matter. Not anymore.
“I loved my father-in-law,” she said after a while. “I loved him better than my own father. He was a great man. Can you understand that, Mr. Woodard? Only one in a million men are truly great, and Jack Parson was one of them. He was a visionary artist. And had the world been in any intellectual position to comprehend it, he would have changed the face of cinema while it was still in its infant state.”