Deirdre reached for her crutch, opened the door, and got out. “Sorry, sorry!” She held up a hand in surrender. “Is everyone okay?”
The big biker took off his mirrored aviator glasses. His hair was nearly all gray and pulled back into a long, thin ponytail. “You act as if you want to get killed,” he said, his voice a gravelly John Wayne imitation.
Deirdre relaxed a notch. It was a line from Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, a movie John Wayne wasn’t in. She even knew Doc Holliday’s deadpan response: Maybe I do. But now was not the time to show off.
“Nice wheels,” the big biker went on, stepping over to her Mercedes and stroking its fender. “Can it do any other tricks?”
The other dudes who’d gathered around cracked up. Deirdre’s face burned.
“Hey, you okay?” one of them asked. “Maybe you’d better sit a spell.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I’m fine. Just stupid.”
That earned nods all around. Then, one by one, they got on their bikes and took off. Last to leave was the guy who’d greeted her, revving a whole lot louder than he needed to and shooting a cloud of soot out the tailpipe. “Let’s be careful out there,” he shouted to her over the din. Hill Street Blues. “I wouldn’t want to find your pretty little bumper hanging from one of these trees.” Sounded like that line he’d written all by himself. He put his glasses back on and roared off. Into the sunset, only it was well past high noon.
A skim of fine dust had settled over Deirdre’s car. With her finger, she wrote on the front fender: JERK. What she should have scrawled there was DAMNED LUCKY THIS TIME. Her rear wheels were just a few feet from a forty-five-degree drop. She leaned against the guardrail, waiting for her heart to stop pounding. Her mother’s string of prayer beads would have come in handy. Her white sneakers were streaked with dust and she felt ridiculous in her new outfit with her perfect hair.
Two cars sped past. Then a bike. The sweat coating Deirdre’s face cooled as she turned and gazed out past trees and scrub and into the omnipresent haze that settled over Sherman Oaks, turning landmarks, if there’d been any, into smudges.
A sharp smell wafted from the surrounding chaparral. For a moment it took her back to when she’d been carried from the underbrush. She remembered staring up at a moon that seemed to be caught in tree branches.
But she didn’t remember hearing the sounds that she heard now, thunks and clangs like dull wind chimes, from beyond the edge of the overlook. She stood and turned to get a better look. There really was a car bumper hanging from a branch of one of the trees growing on the embankment. Sunlight reflected off its dull chrome. The remnants of a bumper sticker, REAGAN in blue block letters under a wave of stars and stripes, came in and out of view as the bumper twisted in the breeze. Other branches were hung with hubcaps and license plates. One sagged under the weight of a car’s dented front grille with a Volkswagen W in the middle.
At the tree’s base, maybe fifteen feet down a scrubby incline, lay bouquets of flowers, one merely wilted, the rest virtually mummified, along with framed photographs and stuffed toys, including a teddy bear that looked like her Ollie. But not Ollie, of course.
As Tyler had said, there was a reason this spot was called Suicide Bend. Nailed to the tree’s thick trunk was a plank of wood hand-lettered in red paint: SLOW DOWN OR REST IN PEACE.
All the way back to the house, Deirdre seethed. She scolded herself for driving so stupidly and putting her own and others’ lives at risk. She was no longer fifteen years old. She was also furious that all these years she’d allowed herself to be convinced that there was no way to find out where she’d crashed. That she’d been blind to the fact that she’d been driving. What else didn’t she know?
She parked the car in front of the house and went inside, slamming the door behind her. “Mom? Henry?” she called out.
“Hello, dear! In here.” Her mother’s reedy voice came from the den.
Deirdre stomped in. “Did you know?” she said.
“Oh good. You’re back.” Gloria looked up from the legal pad on which she’d been writing. Scattered about at her feet were videocassettes of the movies she and Arthur had written. The VCR was going—Fred Astaire in top hat and tails danced his way across the tabletops of a French sidewalk café.
Gloria paused the video and put the pad on the desk. “Just in time to help us put together a list of clips for a montage to show at the memorial service.”
Deirdre put her hands on her hips. “Did you know?”
Her mother blinked. Then frowned. “Goodness. What did you do to your hair?”
Immediately Deirdre felt twelve years old. She could just barely stop herself from shooting back, And what did you do to your hair? Since when is shaving your head a fashion statement? It was so aggravating that her mother still had the power to push her buttons.
Deirdre leaned forward on her crutch. “I just found out that everything I thought I knew about what happened to me the night of the car accident that did this to me”—she lifted the crutch—“is a lie.”
Her mother’s jaw dropped but she didn’t say anything.
“Deirdre? What is this all about?” Deirdre jerked around, recognizing the deep, gravelly voice with just a hint of an Eastern European accent. Sy Sterling rose from the wing chair.
“What about you? Did you know, too?” Deirdre threw the words at him. “Because you’re the one who kept telling me there was no way to find out where the accident happened. Turns out it’s ridiculously easy.”
“I did try to find out for you,” Sy said. “The record wasn’t there.”
“It was there. In the Los Angeles Police Department records.”
Gloria turned to Sy. “What on earth is she talking about?”
“See for yourself.” Deirdre tossed the report on the desk. “Since when is Mulholland Drive on the way from the Nichols’ house to ours? And who made up the fiction that it was Daddy driving—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Sy held up his hands. “Slow down. Sit.”
Deirdre didn’t want to sit but she did, perched on the edge of the chair opposite her father’s desk. Sy came around behind the desk and put his hand on her mother’s shoulder. “Okay, then. Let me see what you have here.” He slipped on reading glasses and picked up the report. As he read, his scowl darkened. At last he handed it to Gloria.
“See,” Deirdre said. “That’s the official report of my accident. One person in the car. Not two. I was driving, on Mulholland Drive. And all this time—”
“You were not driving that car.” Her mother’s hand trembled as she stared at the report. “I don’t care what this says.” She tossed the paper back on the desk.
“Then what happened? Dad drove up to Mulholland for a joyride? Crashed the car and then abandoned me?”
Gloria and Sy looked at each other, but neither of them spoke.
“The police thought I was driving. I didn’t have a driver’s license, I got into an accident, but charges against me were never filed. Was that your magic?” Deirdre stared at Sy. “Was that the trouble you said you kept me out of?”
Sy didn’t answer, just raised his eyebrows, allowing that there might be some truth to that.
“And there’s more,” Deirdre went on. “Yesterday, very early in the morning, around two A.M. or so, before you came over to read us the will, I woke up and found Henry dragging a bag out of my father’s bedroom. A bag of things that he said Dad would have wanted him to get rid of. There were snapshots of young women in there. Lots of them. One of the girls”—she stared hard at Sy—“and she was just a girl, was Joelen Nichol.”
“Christ,” Sy said. He seemed dismayed but not particularly surprised.
“Know what else I found in that bag?” The words came tumbling out. Now that she’d started, she couldn’t stop herself. “A dress. The dress I was wearing at the party earlier that night. The night Tito was killed. So here’s what I want to know: How did the dress get covered in blood? And how did my father end up with it?”