Deirdre felt exhausted and drained. She took a breath. They were all watching her. “He says it was arson.”
“Arson? But that’s absurd,” Gloria said.
“The fire started in a big bag of potting mix, but it was the wrong kind. Too much nitrate, or something like that. He said you’d never have used it for growing geraniums. There were cigarette butts in it. And kerosene.”
Henry’s gaze shifted toward the garage. “So does this mean the insurance claim gets tied up?”
“It means somebody deliberately set fire to the garage,” Deirdre said.
“Henry’s right,” Sy said. “This will surely tie up any kind of settlement. The insurance company will send in an investigator, and the police will be back, too, asking the obvious question: Was the fire connected to your father’s death?”
The logic was inescapable. A death that turned out to be murder. Two days later, a fire that turned out to be arson. How could they not think there was a connection?
“What should we do?” Gloria asked.
“There’s nothing to do,” Sy said. He crossed to the television and unpaused the VCR. A jazz trumpet blared and on the screen, Fred Astaire twirled, scooped up a silver tray with demitasse cups on it, and gracefully leaped off the table without losing a cup. “Just sit tight and try to give Arthur a proper send-off.”
Chapter 30
It’s only a movie. It’s only a movie. That was what Deirdre used to whisper to herself as she tried to drown out the sound of her parents arguing. She’d repeated those same words to get her through round after round of torturous physical therapy.
It’s only a movie, she told herself now, as she made phone call after phone call, working her way through a list of Arthur’s friends and associates, telling everyone that Arthur’s memorial service had been scheduled for Wednesday, day after tomorrow. I hope you’ll be able to make it. We’ll have sandwiches at the house after if you can drop by. She tried not to think about when the police and insurance investigators would descend next.
Henry worked the other phone line while Gloria cleaned the house. After about an hour, Gloria put out a platter of tuna fish sandwiches and the three of them took a break to eat. Deirdre tossed her leftover crusts to the dogs and then went back to making calls.
Meanwhile, Sy went out for a case of Arthur’s favorite scotch and bags of ice. When he came back, he stood beside Deirdre and leaned close. “I noticed,” he said under his breath. “You did not seem worried about what the police might find out in the alley when they come back.” It smelled as if he’d helped himself to a nip of the liquor he’d purchased.
Deirdre had forgotten her lie, so it took her a moment to realize that he was talking about the knife. Flustered, she started to dig herself in deeper. “I took it up the alley and buried it in a bag of grass clippings.”
“Grass clippings? You’re sure about that?” When she mustered a weak response, he held up his hands. “No. It’s better that I am ignorant. But try not to forget, I am much better at sussing out lies than you are at telling them.”
Deirdre’s face grew hot. Henry, who was standing in the doorway, must have overheard that because he guffawed.
“Henry,” Sy said, “that goes for you, too.”
The smirk wiped itself off Henry’s face. Abruptly, he turned and walked away.
Sy turned back to Deirdre. “And you really do need to find that person who helped you with the exhibit Friday night in the gallery. If she verifies your account, the police will back off. If you do not . . .”
Sy’s tone shook Deirdre into action. She called Stefan at the gallery. “Did you talk to Avram?”
“I’ve tried, believe me. But . . .”
“But?”
“When I call the number he gave us, I get a recorded message that isn’t in English. At first I thought it was just a problem with international connections, but—”
“There has to be a way to reach him. Stefan, this is serious. His assistant is the only person who can vouch for where I was that night.”
“I get that. But listen, I think we have a problem. I tried calling some other galleries, thinking maybe one of the other dealers might know how to reach him. Not one of them has ever heard of Avram Sigismund.”
Deirdre felt like a stone sank in the pit of her stomach. “I thought you checked him out.”
“I did. His portfolio seemed solid. His sales records in Europe looked good. But it was all a sham. On top of everything else, the last check he wrote us bounced.”
“I don’t understand. Why—?”
“And you know what else? Turns out I could have stayed at the gallery that night and worked on the exhibit with you after all. That journalist I was supposed to meet? She stood me up.”
“Stood you up?” Deirdre felt numb.
“Didn’t even call to apologize. Can you believe it? I drove all the way down to Coronado, waited at the bar at the golf course for over an hour.”
It didn’t require much paranoia to wonder if someone had gone to a lot of trouble to ensure that no one could vouch for Deirdre’s whereabouts that night. Then she herself had sealed the deal by picking up that shovel from the driveway and leaving her fingerprints on the shaft.
By the time Deirdre hung up the phone, her hands were sweaty. When Detective Martinez returned, she’d have to explain to him that she had no idea how to reach the person who was in the gallery with her until late Friday night. That the artist whose show Deirdre had been preparing to open could not be reached and might not, in fact, exist. That she and Stefan had been conned by cartons of smelly old shoes and the promise of payment up front.
Chapter 31
That night, Deirdre had dinner with her mother and Henry at Hamburger Hamlet. Then they drove to Hollywood Boulevard for sundaes at C.C. Brown’s, where the booths were like church pews and they served mammoth scoops of ice cream in chilled tin cups with thick hot fudge and crispy whole almonds, a pitcher of extra fudge sauce on the side. Deirdre would have preferred the small, elegant sundaes served with a single amaretto cookie at Wil Wright’s, but Brown’s had been her father’s favorite and Wil Wright’s had closed.
Later, when Deirdre got in bed, she thought about how readily Sy had seen through her lies. Knew full well that she hadn’t gotten rid of the knife. She wondered if he knew that Arthur had been working on a memoir. It seemed so unlikely that Arthur would have kept that from his oldest friend and closest confidant.
Deirdre pulled the manuscript out of the drawer in her bedside table. One Damned Thing After Another—not only was it the perfect title for Arthur’s memoir, but it also described precisely what her life had turned into since the moment she’d agreed to help him get his house ready to go on the market. She paged through the beginning, skimming past what she’d already read. In the next section, Arthur wrote about arriving in Hollywood and rapidly blowing through his savings. Broke, he’d holed up on a friend’s couch. Crashed some cocktail parties. Made connections and bullshitted his way into some low-level jobs, working with other talented newcomers. Met and fallen in love with a chorus girl. Born Gertrude Wolkind, she’d changed her name to Gloria Walker. The truth was, she was a whole lot smarter than she was sprightly, and soon she’d quit dancing and started to work with Arthur. Helping him write was how Arthur saw it.
From the moment Arthur started collaborating with Gloria, his luck changed. Deirdre had intended to skim the pages—after all, she’d heard most of the stories many times over. But she found herself caught up in her father’s storytelling.
In one chapter he told how he and Gloria talked their way into getting assigned their first movie script. Gloria stole a copy of the Academy Award–winning screenplay for Casablanca from the studio library and they cribbed shamelessly from it for story structure and formatting. When their script passed muster, they had their first movie credit and their career took off.