"Back through town then north past the light. Stop at the phone booth."
"Stop at a phone booth? Are you putting me on?"
"That's what the directions say," Alex said. "I've got them written down right here. It says there's no sign outside, just a three-by-five card on the door. Dinky says it's an old gas station, but the food's great."
"Sure it is," I said, unconvinced. "Every old gas station serves great food. They've all turned into AM/PM Minimarts. What are we having? Ho-Ho's?"
"Beau," Alex declared firmly, "Dinky would never steer us wrong."
At the intersection, I turned left on Siskiyou Boulevard. "Wanna bet?" I said.
Fortunately, we didn't bet. The food at Cowboy Sam's New Bistro probably would have been excellent, if we had actually stayed around long enough to eat any of it. We drove to an ancient, porticoed gas station north of town. The only distinguishing feature visible from the road really was a phone booth, but the inside of the building had been remodeled into a series of small, intimate lace-curtained dining rooms. The several glossily enameled wooden tables-I counted only eight-were already filling up.
The proprietor, who must have been Cowboy Sam himself, led us to a table where Dinky Holloway was already seated and waiting. Even to someone who had only seen her once, she didn't look quite right. To Alex it must have been even more apparent that something was dreadfully wrong.
"Dinky, what's going on? You look terrible."
Dinky gave Alex a wan smile. We started to sit down. The way the table was arranged, I headed for the chair that was next to the wall, but this was a very old gas station. The low, sloping ceiling was too short for me to stand upright next to the wall. There seemed to be a lot of that going around in Ashland: first the sloping bathroom ceiling at the Oak Hill B now the same kind of construction at a converted gasoline station. I was beginning to think Ashland was built by and for midgets.
Alex and I quickly traded seats while Denver Holloway studied me with a frankly assessing look. "Are you really as trustworthy as Alex says?" she asked.
I glanced at Alex. "I'd like to think so, why?"
Dinky reached into a cavernous purse and extracted a semi-clear plastic container, the kind you get from video stores.
"What's that?" I asked.
She put it down on the table and then pushed it to the center as though she didn't want it too near her.
"Just what it looks like," she answered. "A videotape. It showed up in my inter-office mail this afternoon."
Since Denver Holloway was regarding the container with the kind of guarded wariness most people reserve for a coiled rattlesnake, it seemed possible she was leaving something unsaid.
"What kind of videotape?" I asked.
"Filth."
"Filth?" I repeated, not sure I had heard her correctly. "As in porno flick?"
She nodded grimly. "It came today along with this." She pushed a piece of paper across the table. Typed on it was the following: Dinky, Someone like this is a liability to the Festival and will drive away donors. Get rid of her as soon as possible. Monica.
"As soon as I read it, I went storming down to Monica's office and bitched her out. I'm a director with some artistic integrity. I'll be damned if I'll be threatened by some hotshot golden girl pulling the purse strings."
Alex looked at me and rolled her eyes. "That's one meeting I'm glad I missed. What happened?"
"Monica denied it," Dinky continued. "Said she'd never seen any videotape, and that she hadn't sent the note, either."
"What happened then?"
"I went back to my office to play the tape."
"And?"
Dinky's face crumpled. "It's awful. I've never seen anything like it. When I realized what it was, I turned it off."
Whatever Denver Holloway had seen, it had rocked her to the very core. There are only a few things guaranteed to produce that kind of appalled reaction in decent, law-abiding folks.
"Snuff film or kiddie porn?" I asked.
Dinky swallowed hard. "I couldn't believe what I was seeing, and she wasn't even that old. It's monstrous." She paused before continuing in a small, constrained voice. "Ever since, all I've been able to think about is what'll happen to her now, and what about the baby?"
Alex reached out and put a comforting hand on Denver Holloway's wrist. "The girl in the video is someone you know?"
Dinky nodded, her face a pasty white. Two gigantic tears spilled from her highly magnified eyes and dribbled slowly down her pale cheeks. "It's Tanya," she whispered miserably. "Tanya Dunseth-my Juliet. She must have been only eleven or twelve, but I recognized her instantly. I'd know that profile anywhere. What's going to happen to her?"
Full of brisk reassurance, Alex patted the back of Dinky's hand. "Nothing's going to happen to Tanya, and no one's going to hold it against her. She's the one who's been victimized. After something like that, it's even more of a wonder that she's been able to do what she's done. What a remarkable young woman!"
"But you don't understand," Dinky added shakily. "I recognized the man, too. The one in the videotape. He's younger than his picture in the paper today, but I never forget a face. It's him all right."
Suddenly, it all came together for me. "Martin Shore?" I asked in astonishment. "Martin Shore is the one on the tape?"
Dinky nodded.
"The dead man," Alex said, shaking her head. "I can't believe it."
"It's true," Dinky replied, her face suffused with grief. "I don't know what to do."
"This is important," I said at once. "We have to take the tape to Detective Fraymore, no question."
Dinky shook her head. "I was afraid that's what you'd say. Why?"
"Because it's against the law to conceal evidence in a homicide investigation, that's why. We're talking motive and opportunity here. I, for one, don't want to be charged with being an accomplice after the fact, and neither do you."
By now the restaurant had filled up. During our low-voiced, highly charged discussion, I had twice waved off the proprietor of Cowboy Sam's New Bistro. Now he approached us more determinedly. "Would anyone here care to see the wine list?" he asked.
I took several twenties out of my billfold and fanned them out on the table. Then, using a cloth napkin to protect any possible fingerprints, I picked up the box containing the videotape.
"The lady isn't feeling well," I said to Cowboy Sam, nodding in Dinky's direction at the same time. For her part, Denver Holloway did indeed look violently ill. "I'm afraid we won't be able to stay for dinner. Not tonight."
CHAPTER 7
Other people went to see Shrew in the Elizabethan that night. Alex and I didn't. Instead, we accompanied Dinky Holloway and spent most of the early evening closeted in Ashland's surprisingly modern city hall along with Detective Gordon Fraymore. He listened to what Dinky had to say in total silence. When she finished, he used a handkerchief to preserve fingerprints when he picked up the tape.
"Right back," he said. "I'm going to take this down the hall and have a look-see." He was gone a long time-half an hour or more. Back in the office again, he placed the tape in the middle of his cluttered desk.
"Looks like Shore all right," he muttered. "I thought there might be somebody else in the film as well, maybe another male we might have seen before or possibly even another kid. They sometimes do that-use more than one, but not this time."
"You watched the whole thing, didn't you?" Dinky said accusingly. "That's disgusting." Alex nodded in grim agreement, her lips pursed into a thin line of protest.
The expressions on both their faces said neither one of the women was buying Fraymore's excuse for watching the movie. I think they thought he was down the hall getting his rocks off. I wasn't fond of Gordon Fraymore, but I knew what he was up to. I didn't fault him for watching whatever was in that video because, unlike Dinky and Alex, I knew why he was doing it-because it was his job.