Дана Стейбнау - Spoils of the Dead

“More of a reader.”

A rough laugh made both of them look at the kitchen where a man was filling a mug with coffee. He brought it to the living room and sat down next to McGuire. “Leonard Needham. You’d be the trooper.” Liam nodded, and the man jerked his head at McGuire. “Kid told me you’d be coming. Thought I should come on over to make sure you don’t get out the rubber hose.” He waggled his considerable eyebrows and his cheeks creased in a close-mouthed smile. White, five seven-eight with a kind of muscular thinness that defied an estimate of weight. His eyes were brown with startlingly long lashes and his hair was a wiry gray cut to a drill instructor’s specifications. His hands were enormous and large-knuckled, dwarfing the mug he held. He was dressed like McGuire, in a worn white T-shirt advertising nothing and jeans faded at the knees and seams. He was also twice McGuire’s age, and although the two men looked nothing alike there was a certain similarity in the way they held themselves, a quality of awareness, Liam thought. Perhaps the consciousness that there was always someone watching, which would be endemic in people employed in the on-camera end of filmmaking. He recognized it because nowadays if you were in law enforcement you were always aware that someone was watching, usually with their camera phone up and running.

“Generally speaking, we don’t break out the rubber hose until the second interview,” he said. Needham bent his head, acknowledging the unspoken reproof. Both men wore almost identically bland expressions and Liam said, “Are you an actor like Mr. McGuire, Mr. Needham?”

“It’s Len, and call him Gabe,” Needham said. “And no, I’m not an actor, I work for a living.”

McGuire might have rolled his eyes a little.

Liam reminded himself that this was an official interview regarding a murder committed very likely not a thousand feet from where he sat and managed not to smile. “What do you do, Len?”

“I’m a stunt man. Or I was.”

“Nowadays he’s my pilot,” McGuire said.

“And this punk’s uncle, for my sins.”

Liam gave up and let himself be distracted. “How did you get into that?”

Len correctly identified which part of his life Liam was asking about and said, “I’m a pilot. I was two tours in the Air Force, did time in the Sandbox, got out when the hypocrisy got to be a little too much. A friend already in the business was working on a film that needed a stunt pilot right now and the money was good.” He shrugged.

“Ten years later he owned his own company, and then he recruited me out of high school.”

“Kid played every sport. Coulda gone pro.”

“Boring,” McGuire said.

“And then…”

McGuire gave a shrug identical to the one Needham had just given and the similarity between the two shifted into a sudden focus that was so startling that Liam was amazed he hadn’t seen it before. “A director gave me a line, and in his next film a couple more, and then a supporting role in a film that got some traction at Sundance, and then, and then.” He drank coffee. “It’s all luck, really. Plenty of actors better than me didn’t get the breaks.” He looked at his uncle. “Didn’t have Len.”

“Stop it, kid, you’re making me blush.” He pointed at Liam with his mug. “And it’s not what you came here to talk to us about.”

“Erik.” Gabe sat back with a sigh. “Damn it.”

“Why damn it?” Liam said.

Gabe met Liam’s eyes squarely. “He was a friend.”

Len snorted again. “He wasn’t always.” When Gabe glared at him Len glared right back. “Tell him. Tell him right now, tell him all of it. Otherwise he’ll find out from someone else and he’ll be back here all pissed off and suspicious because you didn’t. It’s not like you haven’t made that picture, kid.”

Gabe dropped his head. “Fuck.” He looked up at Liam. “Fine. This house is in a subdivision called Bay View. Yeah, I know, original as hell. The trail to Erik’s dig has been public for a long time, people driving down to park at the roundabout and rappel down to walk on the beach. It isn’t officially a public right of way but it’s been used as one. The neighbors tell me it’s an historic make-out spot for the local teens and lately it’s been a problem area for raves.”

“Define ‘problem.’”

“Drug deals. Underage drinking. Accidents originating therefrom—you’ve experienced the grade. Imagine you’re a dumb kid and high or drunk besides. ODs and even a few deaths back in the day.” Gabe rubbed the heels of his hands against his eyes. “And then along comes Gabe McGuire, the rich and famous Outsider, who buys the house right next door and, worse, moves in. Word gets around, rubbernecker traffic increases, the neighbors are unhappy.”

“Made even more so when Erik Berglund sets up an archeological dig at the foot of the trail,” Len said, with a glance at Gabe. “Because Erik is bent on establishing a traditional Alaska Native trail leading from the beach up the hill and all the way over the bluff, that he is going to prove has been used ever since there have been Alaska Natives living in the Bay. Which would be, give or take, ten thousand years. You’ll have noticed the rocky spur that runs out of the cliff and down the beach. Makes kind of a natural harbor.”

“He gave me the tour,” Liam said.

“In the meantime,” Gabe said, looking a little clenched around the jaw, “the rich and famous Outsider has approached the Borough to vacate the trail right of way in exchange for putting in another, more accessible trail, at his own expense, on the right of way between this subdivision and the next one south of here, Mountain View. Another exemplar of originality in binomial nomenclature.”

This time Len rolled his eyes. “Forgive the kid. Every now and then he reads a book and wants to make sure everybody knows it.”

Liam’s eyes raised involuntarily to the bookshelf that covered the entirety of one wall, floor to ceiling. There were no empty spaces, and all the covers were worn. “So you were trying to vacate the right of way to the beach.”

“This one, yeah.” Gabe shifted uncomfortably. “There have been some incidents.”

“What the kid means and is too embarrassed to say is that fans today have no boundaries, women fans in particular.”

“What about the gate? Don’t you close it?”

“They climb over it. One of them took the trail down to the beach, walked down it a ways, climbed back up to the edge of the cliff—” Len nodded at the yard which ended at the cliff’s edge “—and came over the top, herself in the altogether. If she’d managed to pack a platter with her I reckon she would have served herself up on it.”

“You mean she was naked?”

“Yep. I’ll never understand why she didn’t leave her clothes on for the climb and just strip after she got to the top. She sure was scratched up in some interesting places. I have no objection to naked women, mind you, but that was not a sight you want to see over your first cup of coffee in the morning.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah.”

Liam digested this in silence for a moment. “So your plan was to vacate the right of way—”

“There is no right of way, not officially.”

“Hard to make that stick with umpteen generations of people who have been using it for whatever,” Len said.

“And then,” Liam said slowly, “along comes Erik Berglund, who says the trail might go back millennia for the Sugpiaq.”

Gabe nodded glumly. “And if he’s right, there will be zero chance of me gaining title to that trail.”

“And now he’s dead.”

It was his turn to be glared at. “I can always buy another house.”

“Yeah, but you like this one,” Len said.