"So did lots of other people," Dinky countered, "that is, if you believe Gordon Fraymore's damn Henckels slicer is our Henckels slicer. They're not all that uncommon, you know. And ours is a prop. Killing someone with a prop knife is about like shooting someone with a cap pistol. Impossible."
I remembered the way the stage lights had glinted off the metal blade as Juliet had plunged it home. "It looked lethal enough to me," I said.
"That's the whole point," Dinky returned. "Looks are everything. From a distance, prop knives are supposed to look dangerous, but they're dull. Deliberately dull. We keep them that way so no one gets hurt."
It felt pretty damn sharp when it sliced into me, I thought. And my wrist wasn't sporting make believe stitches, either. The coincidence of two identical Henckels slicers was more than any self-respecting homicide cop could accept. That went for me as well as Gordon Fraymore.
"But couldn't someone have sharpened it?" Alex asked. "All it takes is one of those little rocks…What are they called?"
"Whetstones," I supplied. "You're right. With a whetstone and ten minutes, a dull knife can be as good as new. A grinding wheel would take about thirty seconds. I'm sure the scenery shop has one of those."
"Oh," Dinky muttered, crushing out her cigarette stub on the sidewalk. Without another word, she stalked off toward her ancient Datsun wagon.
Alex and I drove back downtown and lucked into a parking place. As we set off walking down a virtually empty main street, a trumpet blared a brief, shrill flourish, announcing curtain time at the Elizabethan. It seemed likely that the people watching Shrew that night would be seeing one of Tanya Dunseth's last public performances.
We turned away from the theaters and walked in the opposite direction. It was Sunday evening. Most of the gift shops, stores, and businesses were locked up for the night. The restaurants were still moderately busy as locals, finished for the day and the week in their own shops, ventured out for an evening meal now that most of the out-of-town visitors were otherwise engaged.
Toward the end of June, sunset doesn't arrive in southern Oregon until well after eight-thirty. In the gathering dusk, Alex and I wandered the deserted streets. Holding hands and not talking much, we window-shopped for a good half hour before stopping at an old-fashioned ice-cream parlor complete with a genuine soda fountain. There, over root-beer floats, we finally allowed ourselves to discuss what was going on.
I knew that Alex was upset. Even though she had never met Tanya Dunseth, she was convinced that Tanya was the real victim of the piece, that as someone who had suffered appalling abuse at Martin Shore's hands, Tanya had the God-given right to dish out whatever revenge she could manage. In fact, Alex held that a quick death was far too good for him. That was a surprising statement from an authentic card-carrying liberal.
"I think we should warn her," Alex declared as she hit the bottom of her glass and noisily sucked up the dregs of her float.
"Warn her?" I repeated. "Are you crazy?"
"Don't you think we should?"
"Absolutely not," I said, shaking my head.
"Why?"
"Didn't you hear what Detective Fraymore said? Warning her is the last thing we should do."
"She should have a chance to make some kind of care arrangements for Amber," Alex declared.
I tried to be patient. "You're not listening, Alex. This is a murder investigation. Homicide. Cops don't call up their top suspects in advance and say, ‘By the way, maybe you'd like to hire a baby-sitter before we come drag your butt off to jail.' And they don't like it if other people do, either."
"She wouldn't really run away."
"What makes you think she wouldn't? And if she did and Fraymore found out about it, the two of us would end up in deep caca, to quote the Laredo Kid."
Despite the seriousness of our discussion, Alex smiled at my reference to the afternoon's play. "At least you were paying attention to the dialogue," she said.
For a minute, I thought she might drop the subject. No such luck. The lady had a one-track mind. "If Tanya goes to prison-for years, let's say-what happens to Amber then?"
I shrugged. "The state appoints a guardian, most likely a relative."
"What if there aren't any? Didn't Kelly and Jeremy say something about her folks dying in a house fire when she was little? That's how she ended up with a guardian."
"There's always Amber's father."
"Right," Alex replied caustically. "If he walked out the day Tanya found out she was pregnant, I'm sure he's great fatherhood material. There has to be something we can do."
"Alex, listen to me. There's not one thing you and I can do. It's out of our hands. It never was in our hands."
She looked at me reproachfully. "I suppose you're right," she said at last. "It's just so awful. I mean, it's bad enough that she was forced to be in that terrible movie in the first place…"
"Hold it," I said. "You're jumping to conclusions. What makes you so certain she was forced? She may have been a willing participant. Not legally, of course. But Kelly and Jeremy said she was out on her own. She probably made good money."
"At twelve?" Alex demanded. "Are you kidding? Kids that age don't make informed choices."
"Willing or not, here it is all these years later. She thinks she's put that part of her life totally behind her. Then, out of the blue, Martin Shore turns up and threatens to blow her nice, respectable new life right out of the water. I think he tried to blackmail her. When she didn't come across right away, he sent the tape to Dinky."
"How could it be blackmail?" Alex returned. "Tanya Dunseth doesn't have a dime. The actors down here aren't in it for the money. If she weren't poor as a church mouse, she wouldn't be living at Live Oak Farm."
"Maybe he wanted something besides money," I said.
"What?"
"Maybe he wanted her to work for him again, make another movie. In fact, since the tape showed up in Dinky's inter-office mail, maybe someone inside the Festival was working as Shore's accomplice. Anyway you slice it, a porno flick featuring a rising young legitimate actress would be a hot property."
"I don't like the way you're talking about this," Alex said levelly.
"How do you want me to talk? It's only a theory."
"Whatever's in that video was bad enough to make Denver Holloway physically ill. Here you are talking about it as though it's the latest money-making sitcom some network is getting ready to put into syndication."
"Porn's big business," I told her. "We're talking millions of dollars."
"I refuse to think about it that way," Alex returned. "I absolutely refuse." She didn't raise her voice, but the way she said the words should have warned me. I trudged right on.
"I'm a cop, Alex. I have to think that way. It's part of who I am. I've been working the streets for a long time now. Over the years, I've seen plenty of twelve-year-old hookers, little girls-and little boys, too, for that matter. Kids who would do anything for a price, including turn an unsuspecting John into a stiff. Once you've seen that a time or two, it's hard to regain your belief in absolute innocence."
What followed was a long silence. As the gulf between us grew wider, I felt a dull ache in my gut. Alexis Downey and I were having our first major disagreement-one that couldn't be walked around or ignored or swept under a rug. It wasn't over something inconsequential like lumpy futons or man-hating cats. We were staring into the fundamental differences between us, grappling with disparities that arose out of who we were, what we did, and what we believed.
I was seven years older than Alex. I had been a cop for almost twenty years, more than half her lifetime. Cops see too damn much.