"That won't work," I said. "All you'd have to do is get a statement from the carabineros and that would be that."
"I know, but it would be a lot of trouble, and it wouldn't help with the tattoos. Welcome to the site office of Kent Clarke films, better known as the garden shed," she said. "It's where the manager used to keep that little tractor thing he uses to cut the lawn. But it has electricity, and it keeps us away from the hotel bar, important for reasons I believe I have already mentioned. Here, have a seat."
"This is rather impressive, all this equipment, although I'll grant you it's small," I said. "What's going to happen to the documentary now that Jasper is, well, dead?"
"Good question," she said.
"Whose idea was it to hold the Moai Congress?"
Her lip curled. "Jasper's, who else? At least he said it was, although it may actually have been one of us, now that I think about it. There isn't a good idea out there that Jasper hasn't claimed as his own. He was a great one for ideas on how to promote himself. Please tell me you didn't think some prestigious organization was behind this, inviting Jasper as their guest of honor, did you?"
"I guess not," I said. "Was it Jasper who suggested inviting the Moaimaniacs?"
"The what?" she said.
"The Internet group on Jasper's Web site."
"I guess so. He just handed me a list of email addresses and told me to make it so."
"I never did get to see the rongorongo tablet up close," I said. "I had a migraine and had to leave. I suppose I never will now, unless you finish the documentary, that is. Then I might see it on TV."
"I can't even think about that right this minute," she said. "There's footage of it here somewhere, but I'm not sure where, or I'd show it to you. I'm just the money person, you know."
"Did Jasper bring the rongorongo tablet with him?" I asked.
"Jasper?" she said. "Of course not. The man could barely tie his own shoelaces."
"So how, then?" I knew what Seth had said. It would be interesting to see what Kent did.
"Dave Maddox brought it. We—Jasper—needed someone here early to help get everything set up as far as the actual presentation was concerned."
"Do you know where it is now?"
"No idea," she said. "The last person to have it was Jasper, I think. That's what I told the police. He had it under his arm when he left with Gordon Fairweather."
"He left with Gordon Fairweather? I thought they weren't speaking."
"I wouldn't know about that," she said. "I'd like to get my hands on the tablet, though. I'd like to have it tested, by a real expert, by which I don't mean Jasper or Dave."
"You don't think it's authentic?"
"I don't know. This is hardly my area of expertise. But Dave came to see me and told me he thought it was authentic, but just not from Chile. He said he and that other fellow, the one who hanged himself…"
"Seth Connelly," I said. Seth obviously had not made a big impression other than by his death.
"Right," she said. "Dave said he and Seth thought it was authentic."
"Did you believe Dave?"
"I'm not sure," she said. "There was a lot of smoke and mirrors around Jasper. In my opinion, Jasper was the biggest fake of them all."
"Why would you say that?"
"He just was," she said. "He was an all around jerk, too. I'm pretty well ruined, you know."
"You filmed a lot of Jasper's adventures," I said. "I guess this pretty well ends it."
"It was over anyway," she said. "Even before he died. You put up your savings, you give up custody of your daughter so you can do something, and what happens? You get screwed."
"That's too bad," I said. I waited. She seemed to be in a confessional frame of mind.
"I've been with Jasper for years. Kent Clarke Films was there in the early days, when he swam the Straits of Magellan," she said.
"Did he actually swim the Straits of Magellan?"
"In a manner of speaking," she said. "We just didn't show the time he spent in the boat."
"Seriously? He got out of the water and took a boat?"
"Yes and no," she said. "He had to be pulled out several times, warmed up and put back in the water."
"But that's fraud, really."
"Look, I was desperate. I was recently divorced, my husband wanted alimony, if you can believe it, and child support for Brittany. And it wasn't as if Jasper was the first person to swim the Straits. I might have had some qualms about faking that. I had a little film company, and Jasper helped make it a bigger film company. I've never made a lot of money on these expeditions of his, you understand. They are incredibly expensive to film. But I got something of a reputation and therefore other work. The thing was, Jasper started to believe his own publicity. He thought he was a real-life adventurer. He had a bit of amnesia where the early going was concerned. And perhaps because he came to believe in himself, things started happening for him. That fortress he found in northern Chile, for example. He did that. That was the real thing. Nothing like creating your own mythology, I suppose.
"And he did find the rongorongo tablet. I was there. I have it on film. I'll even show it to you if I can find it. And no, I didn't help him hide it. I thought this was the one, the one where I started to make decent money. Then Dave Maddox came to see me. He said that he'd had a good look at the thing, that he had a book on forgeries, and he was pretty sure that Jasper's rongorongo tablet wasn't one. I wasn't quite sure why he was telling me it was authentic. I thought maybe it was to make me feel better about it. Then he got to his second point, which was he was almost certain it hadn't come from Chile. Something about the wood."
"Didn't you just say you were there when Jasper found it, and you hadn't helped him bury it? Wouldn't that be a fairly elaborate fake for a guy who couldn't tie his own shoelaces, to hide it in a canyon in the Atacama Desert so you could find it on film?"
"For the man who faked swimming the Straits of Magellan?" she said, sourly.
"Point taken," I said. "What did you do when Dave told you about his concerns about the tablet's origins?"
She hesitated for a second before answering. "I told Jasper, of course."
"And what was the reaction?"
"He laughed. He said Dave had been a loser as long as he'd known him, 'a bloated bag of wind,' I believe the expression was. He said he'd talk to Dave."
"And did he?"
"I'm not sure, but I do know it didn't matter after that because Dave wasn't saying anything to anybody."
"Do you think it's possible Jasper killed Dave?"
"The idea did occur to me, but the police kept saying it was an accident. Apparently, if the gossip in the bar is right, they're not saying that anymore. But what does that mean? Let's assume for the moment that the tablet is a fake, or even that it's real, but didn't come from Chile. Then Jasper might kill Dave to keep him from telling anyone else. I have a feeling Jasper would be capable of it, to save his reputation, but Jasper died, too. Who killed him? Fairweather? That Seth person?"
"I don't know," I said. "Does the name Anakena mean anything to you?"
"Sure," she said. "It's a beach. I took my daughter there just before we were confined to barracks. You should go if you haven't been. There are actually palm trees there, several of them, rather refreshing after all this rock and grass."
"So is this the end of the documentary?"
"Yes, and it is also the end of Kent Clarke Films," she said. "I'll be filing for bankruptcy soon, unless a miracle occurs."
"You didn't make money on these escapades of Jasper's?"
"Far from it," she said. "We broke even on the last one, the one about the fortress in Chile. This one would have done it, I think. The trouble was it was going to be the last. Jasper was moving on. He said he'd had an offer from one of the large companies in California, and his next big adventure was going to be a feature film. He seemed to think an award of some kind was in the bag. He dropped that little detail on me when he got out here. I could have killed him."