River's End Read online

  exactly the same spot. He hadn’t worked up the energy to go back inside but got to his feet now.

  “Are you all right?” Moving fast, Frank came up the walk, took his son by the arm.

  “Yeah, but . . . well, take a look for yourself.” He gestured toward the door, then braced himself to step inside.

  “God almighty, Noah.” This time Frank laid a hand on Noah’s shoulder in support, even as he scanned the room, picking up details in the chaos. “When did you find this?”

  “About a half hour ago, I guess. I had an appointment in Burbank, just got back. I’ve been gone all day doing research.”

  “Did you call the cops?”

  “No, not yet.”

  “That’s the first step. I’ll do it.” He took Noah’s phone and made the call. “The electronics are still here,” he began when he disconnected. “You keep any cash in the house?”

  “Yeah, some.” He stepped through the debris and into the office, kicking papers out of the way. He found his desk drawer in the corner, with a fifty-dollar bill under it. “I probably had a couple of hundred,” he said, holding up the bill. “I’d guess the rest is buried under here somewhere. Everything’s still here, Dad. It’s just trashed.”

  “Yeah, I think we can rule out burglary.” He studied the monitor, felt a twinge of his own. He remembered when Noah had won that MVP trophy, the pride and excitement they’d shared. “Got a beer?”

  “I did, before I left this morning.”

  “Let’s see if you still do. And we’ll go sit out on the deck.”

  “It’ll take me weeks to replace some of this data,” Noah said as he rose. “Some I’ll never be able to replace. I can buy a goddamn new computer, but not what was in it.”

  “I know. I’m sorry, Noah. Let’s go outside and sit down until the uniforms get here.”

  “Sure, what the hell.” More sick than angry now, Noah found two beers in the refrigerator, popped tops on both and sat with Frank on the back deck.

  “You got any idea who or why on this?”

  Noah let out a short laugh, then tipped back the beer to drink deeply. “Just a little bunny boiler I know.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Caryn.” Noah dragged a hand through his hair, then sprang up to pace. “A little clip from Fatal Attraction. She didn’t take it well when I stopped seeing her. She’s been calling, leaving crazy messages. And the other day she was out here when I got home, all dewy-eyed and apologetic. When I didn’t bite, she got nasty. Keyed my car on the way out.”

  “You still have any of her messages on your machine?”

  “No. My strategy was to ignore her so she’d go away.” He looked in through the deck door and the light of battle came back into his eyes. “Didn’t work. She’s going to pay for this.”

  “You know what she drives?”

  “Sure.”

  “We’ll check with the neighbors, see if anyone saw her or her car in the area today. You give the cops her address and let them go have a talk with her.”

  “Talk’s not what I have in mind.”

  “The best thing for you to do is stay clear. I know you’re pissed, Noah,” he continued when Noah whirled around. “And we can have her charged with breaking and entering, destruction of property, malicious mischief, and all manner of things if we can prove she did this.”

  “Prove it, my ass. Who else? I knew she did it the minute I walked in.”

  “Knowing and proving are different things. Could be she’ll admit to it under a little pressure. But for now, you let the cops take the report, do their job, and you steer clear. Don’t talk to her.” Worry clouded Frank’s eyes at the battle light gleaming in his son’s. “Has she ever gotten physically violent with you?”

  “Jesus, I outweigh her by sixty pounds.” He sat again, then looked up quickly. “I never touched her that way. The last time she was here, she went at me and I hauled her out the door.”

  Frank worked up a smile. “You sure can pick ’em.”

  “I’m giving celibacy a try for a while.” With a sigh, Noah picked up his beer again. “Women are too much trouble. A couple of hours ago I got hit on by a TV star old enough to be my mother, and for a minute, it didn’t seem like such a bad idea.”

  “Your appointment in Burbank,” Frank said, primarily to keep Noah’s mind off his problem for a little while.

  “Yeah, Lydia Loring, she looks damn good.” He rubbed the bottle of beer between both hands. “I’m interviewing people connected to Sam Tanner and Julie MacBride. I’ve been to San Quentin. I’ve talked to Tanner twice.”

  Frank puffed out his cheeks. “What do you want me to say?”

  “Nothing.” Disappointment was just one more weight in his gut. “But I’m hoping you’ll cooperate, talk to me about the case, your investigation. I can’t write the whole story, do justice to it, without your end. Sam Tanner has brain cancer. He has less than a year to live.”

  Frank lowered his eyes to his beer. “Some things come around,” he murmured. “They take their own sweet time, but they come around.”

  “Don’t you want to know?” Noah waited until Frank looked up again. “You never forgot this case, never really let go of it, or the people in it. He confessed, he recanted, then he shut up for twenty years. Only three people know what happened that night, and only two of them are still alive. One’s dying.”

  “And one was four years old, Noah. For pity’s sake.”

  “Yeah, and her testimony damned him. Tanner will talk to me. I’ll convince Olivia MacBride to talk to me. But you’re the one who strings them together. Are you going to talk to me?”

  “He’s still looking for glory. At the end, he’s still looking for glory, and he’ll twist what he tells you so that he gets it. The MacBride family deserves better.”

  “I thought I deserved your respect. But I guess we don’t always get what we deserve.” He got to his feet. “The cops’re here.”

  “Noah.” Frank stood, touched a hand to his son’s arm. “Let’s table this until we get what’s going on here with you straightened out. Then we’ll talk again.”

  “Fine.”

  “Noah.” Frank tightened his grip, accepted the look of anger in his son’s eyes. “Let’s get through one problem at a time.” He nodded toward the living area. “This is a pretty big one.”

  “Sure.” Noah resisted the nasty urge to shrug the hand away. “One problem at a time.”

  It was one tedious routine followed by another. Telling his story to the police, answering their questions, watching them look over what was left of his things was only the first. He called his insurance company, reported the loss, dealt with the curiosity of the neighbors who wandered down.

  Then he locked himself inside and wondered where to begin.

  It seemed most practical to start in the bedroom, to see if he had any clothes worth salvaging or if he’d walk around naked until he could get more. He managed to pick through, find enough for one mixed load and dumped it all together in the washing machine.

  He ordered a pizza, got out another beer and, sipping it, studied the living room. He wondered if it wouldn’t be better all around to just hire a crew to come in with shovels and haul the entire mess away.

  “Start from scratch, Brady,” he muttered. “It could be liberating.”

  He was still scoping it out when someone knocked on his door. Since it was too soon for the pizza, he considered ignoring it. But decided even another nosy neighbor was better than stewing in his own helpless disgust.

  “Hey, Noah, don’t you ever return phone calls? I’ve been . . . whoa, some party. Why wasn’t I invited?”

  Resigned, Noah closed the door behind his oldest friend. Mike Elmo had been part of his life since grade school. “It was a surprise party.”

  “I bet.” Mike hooked his thumbs in the pockets of the Dockers he’d bought because the commercials had convinced him women couldn’t resist a guy wearing them and blinked out of eyes red rimmed from the con
tacts he couldn’t quite adjust to. “Man, this sucks.”

  “Want a beer?”

  “You bet. You get ripped off?”

  “Just ripped.” Noah took the path he’d already kicked clear into the kitchen. “Caryn’s a little irritated that I dumped her.”

  “Wow, she do this? Seriously twisted.” He shook his head, his chestnut-brown eyes soft and sad. “I told you.”

  Noah snorted and offered the beer. “You told me she was your lifetime fantasy woman and tried to pump me for every sexual detail.”

  “So my fantasy woman’s twisted. What’re you going to do?”

  “Drink this beer, eat some pizza and start cleaning it up.”

  “What kind of pizza?”

  “Pepperoni and mushroom.”

  “Then I can give you a hand.” Mike plopped his chunky butt on a torn cushion. “So do you think Caryn’d have sex with me now that you’ve split?”

  “Jesus, Mike.” Noah enjoyed his first laugh in hours. “Sure, I’ll even put in a good word for you.”

  “Cool. Rebound sex is very intense.” He stretched out his short legs, crossed his ankles. “Oh yeah, I get a lot of rebound sex. Guys like you shake a woman off, they’re prime for me.”

  “I sure do appreciate your support and sympathy during this difficult time.”

  “You can count on me.” He offered Noah his surprisingly sweet, puppy-dog smile out of his half-homely face. “Hey, it’s only stuff, and not really good stuff anyway. You go back to Ikea, or hit Pier 1 or something, and dump it all back in. Take you a few hours.”

  Because he’d been thinking the same thing about the bulk of his furniture, Noah scowled. “She broke my basketball trophy.”

  Mike straightened, and a look of utter horror whitened his face. “Not the MVP—not from the championship game of eighty-six?”

  “Yeah.” And since that had gotten the kind of rise out of his friend that soothed the soul, he narrowed his eyes. “She broke it by shoving it into my computer monitor.”

  “That sick, evil bitch broke your computer? Christ, God.” He was up now, stumbling through the wreckage to Noah’s office.

  Computers were Mike’s first love. Women could come and go—and for him it was usually the latter—but a good motherboard was always there for you. He actually yelped when he saw the damage, then leaped toward the once-sleek trophy.

  “Jesus, she killed it dead. She mutilated it. Butchered it. What kind of a mind does this?” He turned back to Noah, his eyes wide and bright and blinking as his contacts haloed his vision. “She should be hunted down like a dog.”

  “I called the cops.”

  “No, for this you need a vigilante like Dark Man, you need ruthlessness like the Terminator.”

  “I’ll give them a call next. Think you can salvage anything off the hard drive? She trashed every stinking one of my disks.”

  “She’s the Antichrist, Noah.” He shook his head sadly. “I’ll see what I can do, but don’t hold out any hope. There’s the pizza,” he said when he heard the knock. “Let me fuel up, then I’ll do what I can do. And you know what? I don’t even want rebound sex with her now.”

  fifteen

  It took Noah a week to get his house in order. The sorting, cleaning, dumping was purely a pain in the ass, but the demands of it kept him from feeling helpless.

  A new computer was a priority, and with Mike egging him on, he bought a system that sent his friend into raptures of delight and envy.

  He wouldn’t have bought all the damn software games if Mike hadn’t kept pushing them on him. And he sure as hell wouldn’t have sat up half the night playing video pinball if he hadn’t bought it in the first place.

  But he told himself that was beside the point. He’d needed the distraction.

  He outfitted his living room with cargo furniture, ordering straight out of an in-store catalog by pointing at a page and telling the salesman: “Give me that.”

  This delighted the salesman and saved Noah a headache.

  Within two weeks, he could walk through his house without cursing and made serious inroads on reorganizing his office and regenerating lost data.

  He had his car back, a new mattress, and a half-baked promise through Smith’s admin for a meeting when the lawyer returned to California the following month.

  And he managed to track down Lucas Manning.

  Manning wasn’t quite as cheerfully forthcoming as Lydia Loring had been, but he agreed to talk about Julie. Noah met him at Manning’s Century City suite of offices. It always surprised and slightly disillusioned Noah that actors had big, plush executive offices.

  They might as well be CEOs, he thought as he was cleared through several levels of security.

  Manning greeted Noah with a professional smile and assessed him with eyes of storm gray. The years had turned his once burnished-gold-coin hair into the brilliance of polished pewter and filed down his face to the sharp points and angles of a scholar. According to the polls, women continued to find him one of the most appealing leading men in the business.

  “I appreciate your taking the time to talk to me.”

  “I might not have.” Manning gestured to a chair. “But Lydia campaigned for you.”

  “She’s quite a woman.”

  “Yes, she is. So was Julie, Mr. Brady, and even after all this time it’s not easy for me to talk about what happened to her.”

  No need for small talk, Noah thought, and following Manning’s lead, he took out his recorder and pad. “You worked together.”

  “One of the happiest experiences of my life. She was a brilliant natural talent, an admirable woman and a good friend.”

  “There are those who believed, and still believe, that you and Julie MacBride were more than friends.”

  “We could have been.” Manning eased back, laid his hands on the ornately carved arms of his chair. “If she hadn’t been in love with her husband, we would have been. We were attracted to each other. Part of that was the intimacy of the roles we played, and part was simply a connection.”

  “Sam Tanner believed you acted on that connection.”

  “Sam Tanner didn’t value what he had.” Manning’s trained voice hardened at the edges and made Noah wonder if the delivery was emotion or simply skill. “He made her unhappy. He was jealous, possessive, abusive. In my opinion, his addiction to drugs and alcohol didn’t spark this abuse, it simply uncovered it.”

  There was a bitterness still toward Tanner, Noah thought, every bit as ripe as Tanner’s was toward him. “Did she confide in you?”

  “To an extent.” He lifted the fingers of one hand off the arm of the chair, then dropped them again, like a pianist hitting keys. “She wasn’t a whiner. I admit, I pressed her to talk to me, and we’d grown close during the filming, remained friends afterward. I knew she was troubled. At first she made excuses for him, then she stopped. Ultimately, she told me, in confidence, that she’d filed for divorce to snap him out of it, to force him to get help.”

  “Did you and Tanner ever discuss it?”

  Manning’s lips twisted into a smile. Wry and experienced. “He had a reputation for having a violent temper, for causing scenes. My career had just taken off, and I intended to be in it for the long haul. I avoided him. I’m not of the school that believes any press is good press, and I didn’t want to see headlines splashed around gloating that Tanner and Manning had brawled over MacBride.”

  “Instead they gloated that Manning and MacBride were an item.”

  “There was nothing I could do about that. One of the reasons I agreed to this interview was to set the record straight about my relationship with Julie.”

  “Then I have to ask, Why haven’t you set the record straight before now? You’ve refused to discuss her in interviews since her death.”

  “I set the record straight.” Manning angled his head slightly, lowered his chin. It was an aggressive stance with those storm-cloud eyes just narrowed. “In court,” he continued. “Under oath. But the
media, the masses were never really satisfied. For some the idea of scandal, of illicit sex, was as much of a fascination as murder. I refused to play into it, to demean Julie that way.”

  Maybe, Noah mused. Or maybe the mystery of it gave your rocketing career one more boost. “And now?”

  “Now you’re going to write the book. Rumors around this town are that it’ll be the definitive work on the Julie MacBride