The Mountains Bow Down Page 6

  Milo Carpenter grabbed the bag and started to tear open the taped seal.

  “Don’t open it,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s evidence.”

  “Evidence.”

  I didn’t reply.

  He leaned forward, almost sneering. “You need more evidence she’s dead?”

  I kept quiet, to keep him talking.

  “What more!” he yelled. “What more!”

  “One more?” Corey called from the bar.

  Signaling a round for himself, Milo lowered his voice. “You better start talking. Why do you need more evidence?”

  For once, he looked genuinely curious.

  “Mr. Carpenter, are you certain your wife committed suicide?”

  The glaze over his eyes made it difficult to tell if he was thinking, or not thinking. Or trying to sober up enough to think. Or to lie.

  “Who wanted your wife dead?” I pressed on. “Someone on the movie crew?”

  “Everybody—”

  “Everybody?”

  “Nobody,” he said, addled. “Everybody loved Judy. They loved her.”

  The bartender appeared, setting the fresh drink on a new coaster. Milo shook his head.

  “Not right drink, yes?” Corey asked.

  Picking it up, the actor gulped like a man dying of thirst. He handed the glass back to the bartender.

  “One more, yes?”

  Milo nodded. The bartender walked away.

  “You told me this morning she was depressed.” I leaned forward. “Was she taking medication for the condition?”

  “You think I killed her.” His voice was flat, uninflected.

  “Mr. Carpenter, I don’t know what happened to your wife. But if she killed herself, there must be some reason. And if you know what it is, please tell me.”

  He grabbed the sunglasses from the table, sliding them over his face. Then he stood, swaying for a moment before he squared the wide shoulders and tried to walk out of the bar, bumping into the plastic chairs. Like a drunk.

  That part, I decided, was no act.

  Chapter Six

  The thin woman who answered the door to the ship’s penthouse had a pile of platinum hair. Her name was Larrah Sparks and her bikini was so small it could’ve belonged to the real Barbie, whom Mrs. Sparks closely resembled.

  I showed my FBI credentials, reminding the producer’s wife.

  “Huh,” she said. “Is this something with the movie?”

  “No.”

  “Did I ever tell you I did two movies that had FBI agents in them?”

  Three times. “Yes, you did.”

  “None of the agents was female,” she continued once more. “If I’d played the agent we would have made money.”

  I gave my official smile, an expression Quantico issued on graduation day. “Is Mr. Sparks available?”

  “You know how to spell my name, right?” She spelled it. “Rhymes with ‘Harrah.’”

  “Got it.” Larrah-Harrah. Scarrah.

  After Milo had staggered out of the bar, I went to ask Geert if the movie’s producer was taking any tours in Ketchikan. The ship’s computers at the gangway tracked each passenger’s boarding and reentry. Sparks had stayed on board.

  “He’s in the tub,” Larrah said over her shoulder, walking across the apartment-size cabin. “We was just taking a little splash.”

  The view from the patio was so beautiful it could have been a movie’s fake backdrop. Gravity-defying slopes, white-capped peaks, glistening ocean under a sparkle of sunshine. Sitting in the hot tub, Sandy Sparks was speaking on his cell phone, his back turned to the glory of Alaska.

  “You tell that jerk he’ll never find another gig in LA,” Sparks was saying. “I’ll make it my full-time job to cut him off.”

  The nubile Mrs. Sparks climbed the four steps to the edge of the hot tub, then made a slow descent into the water. Perhaps it was the pile of vanilla hair on her sticklike body, but she reminded me of an ice-cream cone dipping itself in melted chocolate.

  “Just get it done.” Sparks slammed the phone shut.

  When I held out my card, his wet fingers placed it on the edge of the hot tub. “What’s with the card? I know who you are.”

  I asked if we could speak alone.

  “Yeah, sure.” He looked at his wife. “Hey, Laurrie, give us a minute, would ya?”

  Laurrie—which I guessed was Larrah’s real name—glared at her husband before standing and climbed back out. She stomped over to the patio door. Her bare feet left surprisingly large footprints on the patio floor.

  She closed the sliding door behind her, hard.

  “Did I ever tell you I produced a couple other movies with Fed characters?” Sparks said.

  Twice. “Yes, you did.”

  “Only we didn’t cast women as agents. Laurrie thinks that’s why they tanked.”

  Each time they told me about their previous “Fed” experience, it was as if the previous conversations never happened. Once more I brought out the official smile. “Mr. Sparks, I wanted to talk to you about Judy Carpenter.”

  “Judy, yeah. That’s some crazy stunt she pulled. Amazing. Unbelievable. Did you know she made Milo a star? Seventeen years they were married.”

  “I heard twenty-two.”

  “Twenty?”

  “Two. Twenty-two.” These people didn’t listen to anybody but themselves.

  “That’s like two centuries in LA. They had the longest marriage I know. I was just talking to a producer friend”—he nodded at the cell phone resting beside my card—“and he couldn’t believe Judy checked out like that.”

  “It’s best if you don’t talk about it. Not yet.”

  He lifted his hands, inadvertently splashing some water on my shoes. “Hey, I wasn’t talking. I was just asking if he’d heard anything. My publicity people are working on an official statement, before the paparazzi come parachuting in.”

  “An official statement that says . . . ?”

  He scratched his rounded shoulders. The wet black hair lay as flat as a pelt on his pale skin. But he was a man who stayed in motion. Since I’d come on deck, he’d already scratched his shoulders twice, his face once, and nodded at the end of all my sentences, anxious to speak before the other person finished.

  “We’re still trying to figure out a way to spin this, so it doesn’t sound so bad. To most people. That nutty crowd of hers would believe anything. We could say she got abducted by aliens and they’d believe it. No offense.”

  “None taken.”

  That “nutty crowd” included my aunt Charlotte. Judy Carpenter agreed with all her ideas about crystals and reincarnation and all the other New Age claptrap. It was Judy who insisted my aunt work with the movie crew.

  “Did Mrs. Carpenter seem depressed to you?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “I wasn’t married to her.”

  “But did anything seem different about her in recent weeks?”

  “To tell you the truth”—he scratched again—“she seemed a little down this past year. Menopause, what I thought. She got fat, started getting emotional about everything. It wasn’t like her, so I figured it was hormone hell. You know, female stuff.” He looked at me. “You saw her. What’d she seem like to you?”

  During the two brief days I’d known her, Judy Carpenter never seemed completely there. Not so much a thousand-yard stare, but three hundred yards and looking at a different field altogether. “Distracted,” I said. “She seemed distracted.”

  I thought that had to do with work, with coproducing a movie. With a boozed up lead actor who was her husband.

  “She was a hard worker. You know she produced rock bands too? That’s how this whole crystal thing came into our movie.” He picked up my soggy card, reading it. “You’re Charlotte’s daughter?”

  “Niece.”

  He nodded, as if committing the fact to memory. “Judy really wanted Charlotte to come on this trip. She swore that if we did what Charlotte said, the
movie would be a hit.”

  My dad’s sister owned a New Age boutique called Seattle Stones. Last year she stumbled upon the idea that crystals emitted distinct vibrations, and each vibration matched a certain type of music. Tiger’s eye kept a hip-hop beat. Obsidian had the dark energy of heavy metal rock. Turquoise harmonized with folk. To test her theory, my aunt loaned some crystals to several Seattle bands. Two of them scored their first rocket hits on the Billboard chart. Other bands began packing clubs. One of those hit bands had an LA producer, Judy Carpenter. When she heard about the “rocks that rock” idea, she immediately called my aunt. Not surprisingly, they hit it off, and later Judy convinced Charlotte the rocks could work with acting too. And she had just the movie to try it out on. Did Charlotte want to come on a cruise to Alaska? Never shy, my aunt asked to bring her family. Four tickets. That was Charlotte’s fee. And when my aunt learned that Milo was playing an FBI agent, she offered my consulting services. That detail we kept from my mother.

  “Nobody worked harder than Judy,” Sparks was saying. “Back in the spandex-rock days she sewed outfits for some big-hair bands.”

  “I heard it was ice-skaters.”

  “Skating, yeah. That came first. The Mommie-dearest types really forked over some cash. But making the band outfits was how Judy got into the music biz. Then Milo started making money in action flicks, and since they didn’t have kids, Judy adopted bands. She had an ear. She made money. So when she told me about those Billboard hits and those stones from your mom—”

  “Aunt.”

  “—I was like, ‘What is this, Jack and the Beanstalk?’ She goes, ‘No, I’m serious. This woman in Seattle, she gets you in tune with the universe and everything just falls into place.’”

  I stared out at the water, resisting the urge to roll my eyes.

  “Between you and me, I wasn’t so excited. But Judy was desperate for Milo to make another hit.” He rubbed his ear, rapidly. “So I listened to her. Milo’s an old friend, and he’s on the skids. By just hiring the guy I’m out on a limb, but it’s a sequel. What can I do— cast a different actor? Never works. Okay, maybe with a part like James Bond. But Milo’s no Sean Connery. Not even Pierce Brosnan. He’s not even Tim Dalton.”

  “Judy was the film’s coproducer, is that right?”

  He nodded. “She offered to help fund the movie. I think she offered so we’d actually make the thing. But the deal breaker was we had to use these rocks from your mom—”

  “Aunt.”

  “—so we could find everybody’s wavelength. In the end I decided, what the heck? Rocks, what can it hurt? Hours at sea. And with Milo in the lead, we need all the help we can get.” He shrugged a hirsute shoulder. “And now it feels like a curse.”

  “What does?”

  “All of it. Her suicide. That’s like a curse.” He ran a wet hand over his thinning hair. “All we can hope for now is that she created some buzz at the box office.”

  I gazed across the patio to Ketchikan’s harbor. Seagulls perched along the dock rail, waiting for food. When I looked back at the producer, he had opened his cell phone again.

  “Mr. Sparks, one more question. If she wanted her husband’s movie to succeed, why would she ruin it by taking her own life?”

  He snapped the phone shut. “Okay. The truth?”

  I nodded, wondering what we were talking before.

  “Judy was madly in love with Milo.”

  I waited. “So she killed herself?”

  “He’s getting too old to play action. His career’s in the toilet. It’s not like he’s Bruce Willis. Or Nic Cage. He’s no Sly Stallone—”

  “I see, but how does that relate to her suicide?”

  “You Feds are sworn to secrecy, right?”

  “Confidentiality?”

  “Yeah, right, confidentiality. You can’t go to the tabloids, who have enough on the guy?”

  “Even if I could, I wouldn’t speak to the tabloids.”

  He considered my statement. “Here’s the bottom line: Milo’s an alcoholic.”

  I shifted, impatient. “No offense, Mr. Sparks, but that’s not news.”

  “Ten years ago, peak of his career, Judy got him dried out. The guy had started believing his press. It happens. Some not-too-smart actor decides he’s a genius because a writer put good lines in his mouth. After he got clean, Milo figured out he can’t drink. He’s a raging alcoholic.”

  “He’s drinking now.”

  “That’s what I’m saying: he fell off the wagon.”

  “So she killed herself?”

  “Oh, wait, I got it. You don’t read the tabloids. Milo, with the babe? It’s all over the Enquirer. It tore Judy apart.”

  “He’s having an affair?”

  “What did I just tell you? She was madly in love with him.”

  It didn’t add up. I pulled the plastic bag from my pocket and handed it to Sparks. He squeezed the bag, staring at the stones. “Something from Charlotte?”

  “Did Mrs. Carpenter ever wear this?”

  He drew the bag close to his face, getting a good look at the jewelry. “This is nice. Where did you get this thing?”

  “Did you ever see her wearing it?”

  He handed it back to me, shaking his head. “She could probably even afford it. But I never saw it on her.”

  Behind me, I heard the patio door slide open. Larrah Sparks had donned a white terry cloth robe, draped around her shoulders. In one hand she held the cabin phone, in the other was the receiver.

  “It’s for you,” she told her husband.

  “You can’t bring it to me?”

  With cold nobility, the terry cloth like a royal robe, she bore the phone across the patio.

  “You’re sweet,” he said sarcastically.

  Dropping the robe on the decking, she climbed the stairs and lowered herself inch by inch into the hot water.

  “Sandy Sparks . . .” he said into the phone. “Yeah, that’s my dad . . .”

  Suddenly Sparks shot up from the water. “She did what?”

  “Oh great,” Larrah mumbled.

  “I’ll be right there.” He slammed the phone into the receiver and churned toward the tub stairs.

  “What happened?” his wife asked in a bland voice.

  “Shopping for souvenirs. He turned around for one second and she was gone. They can’t find her.”

  He padded quickly across the patio, swimsuit dripping, then into the penthouse. He didn’t close the door.

  I looked at Larrah. “What’s all that about?”

  “His parents are on the cruise with us.” She sighed. “His dad got some convention going on, something to do with his matchsticks.”

  “The phillumenists?”

  She looked up, surprised. “Yeah, them phillum-a-whatevers. But Sandy wanted his mom to see Alaska before she loses all her marbles.” Larrah pointed to her head. “She’s got that old-timer’s thing, where she can’t remember anything? I told him she’d be trouble. Sure enough she locked them out of their room and lost his dad’s wallet on our first day. The first day! We hadn’t even left Seattle. I told him to leave her there with somebody, but does he listen to me? No. All I hear is, ‘Laurrie this and Laurrie that.’” Wiggling back against the hot tub jets, she stretched out her long neck. “I want to play an FBI agent. It seems exciting.”

  I turned, staring into the penthouse. A half-dressed Sandy Sparks was racing across the cabin carrying his shoes and socks. Within seconds he was out the cabin door, into the hallway.

  “See what I mean?” his wife said. “He didn’t even tell me good-bye.”

  Chapter Seven

  That afternoon, as the tourists came streaming back to the cruise ship, I swam against the current like a spawning salmon, walking along Front Street, where the road literally ended at the water. Abandoned crab pots dotted the rocky beach, the scent of rust rising in the warm sun. Farther out, fishing vessels chugged for the marina and seagulls circled, calling out for dinner. On one prow, a bu
rly man in hip waders threw a line to a man on the dock. He kneeled, knotting the rope to a steel cleat.

  I thought of Judy Carpenter’s rope.

  Whoever killed her picked an ideal location. Far from the captain’s bridge at the other end of the ship. No cabin windows. No security cameras. And that bracelet. I wasn’t sure what those gems were, except that they looked valuable—but valuable enough to cost Judy Carpenter her life? And I wondered why it was left behind.

  Lifting a hand, I shielded my eyes from the sun that refused to fade. No planes crossed the sky. I checked my watch. Thirty-five minutes. If he wasn’t here in thirty-five minutes, the ship would leave without him.

  Please.

  I climbed down from the pier and walked the coarse sand beach. Afternoon high tide was creeping up the shoreline, darkening the green sand until it looked black. Geologists have a term for the places where certain rocks or rock formations are initially discovered. It’s called “type locality,” and Ketchikan’s was a relatively recent volcanic basalt called the Gravina Belt. With heavy deposits of chlorite and epidote, two green minerals, the basalt produced beaches of dark sand. I pulled away the ribbons of rubbery sea kelp and dug my bare hands through the coarse sand. My hike was gone but there was still time to find some type locality samples for my rock collection. I rinsed the best candidates in the tide, the ocean so cold my fingers went numb. Later I couldn’t say where the time went, but my daydreams were shattered by a sound like a faraway buzz saw.

  I looked up. The wind blew my hair across my eyes, but I saw the plane turning sharply within the steep and narrow channel, then dropping through the air until the pontoons splashed on the glittery water.

  The window behind the rotating front blade was dark.

  The man who caught the rope earlier walked to the outer birth, waving in the plane and directing it to the outer bumpers. The plane taxied for the dock, where the man tied it. I held my breath as the cab door opened.

  Looking like an aviator sent from central casting, Jack Stephanson stepped out wearing a brown bomber jacket, Ray-Ban sunglasses, two days’ scruff of beard, and a smile that competed with the sun. He tossed a canvas duffel bag on the dock.