JP Beaumont 11 - Failure To Appear (v5.0) Read online

  I didn’t blame anyone for wanting to forget. I did, too.

  On the lowest level of the deck stood a redwood picnic table with two splintery benches. We both sat. While we waited for Tanya to appear, I studied Ralph Ames. Not particularly tall or powerfully built, he was an unlikely-looking candidate for the role of knight in shining armor. I knew a daily regimen of swimming laps in his Scottsdale pool kept his body in fighting-trim condition. He was dressed casually that day, which, for Ralph, meant a Polo golf shirt, impeccably creased Ralph Lauren trousers, and blemish-free Johnston & Murphy loafers. Wing tips. With tassels.

  “What will you do if Tanya turns you down?” I asked somberly.

  “She won’t.” Ralph’s reply was brisk and confident. “I’m prepared to play hardball.”

  Tanya, her hair pulled back in an unruly ponytail and wearing shorts and a tank top, emerged from the house a few minutes later. She was drying her hands on the back of her shorts, while Amber trailed behind, dragging along an assortment of toys. We both rose to meet them.

  “Sorry it took so long, Mr. Beaumont,” Tanya apologized. “House rules say we all have to clean up together after mealtimes.”

  Plainly, Tanya Dunseth was not at all herself. Her skin seemed exceptionally pale. Ralph and I sat back down, but she didn’t.

  “How’s Kelly?” Tanya asked anxiously. “Is she all right?”

  “I hope so,” I told her. “According to the doctor, it’s still too soon to tell.”

  “And the baby?”

  “Karen’s fine,” I said. “A few weeks early, but fine.”

  Tanya breathed a relieved sigh. “I was so worried. It’s bad enough that Kelly’s hurt. I don’t know what I would have done if something happened to her baby. I know it’s all my fault. None of this would have happened if Kelly hadn’t been helping look for Amber.”

  “Don’t blame yourself. Kelly was doing what anyone would do. But that’s not why we’re here. Right now I’d like you to meet a good friend of mine, Ralph Ames. He’s an attorney.”

  At the word “attorney,” an expression of guarded wariness crossed Tanya’s face. She didn’t actually move away from us, but there was a perceptible drawing back—a distancing.

  “He’s a personal friend of mine,” I continued reassuringly. “I guess you two weren’t introduced at the brunch.” Tanya shook her head.

  Ralph smiled and reached across me to her, holding out his hand. “The name’s Ralph,” he said.

  They shook hands, but Tanya’s heart wasn’t in it. She stood there facing us like a watchful bird poised for flight. At the slightest provocation, I was afraid she would scoop Amber into her arms and disappear. If she did that, Gordon Fraymore would be pissed off at everybody, including Ralph Ames, self-appointed attorney for the defense.

  “I asked Beau here to bring me out so I could meet you,” Ralph said, speaking calmly, addressing himself directly to Tanya. “I wanted to talk to you in private.”

  She examined his face with a puzzled frown. “How come?”

  “I believe you may need our help,” he answered quietly.

  Tanya’s mouth tightened. She folded her arms in front of her. “Why would I?”

  With a glance at me, Ralph said, “I presume Detective Fraymore has been by to talk to you?”

  Her eyes flitted apprehensively from Ralph’s face to mine. “Several times so far, but I don’t see how that’s any concern of yours.”

  “Do you mind my asking what he said?”

  “Yes, I mind,” Tanya replied with a flash of anger. “I mind a lot.”

  She vacillated between being frightened and argumentative. Didn’t she understand what was at stake here? Surely, she realized Gordon Fraymore meant to arrest her. Or did she? I couldn’t tell.

  Meanwhile, Ralph was growing frustrated. He’s used to having his polite, understated manner achieve instant results, but this time that tried-and-true technique wasn’t working. He must have drawn much the same conclusion, because his next depth-charged statement jarred me, and it shocked the hell out of Tanya Dunseth.

  “Beau here and I haven’t actually seen the videotape of you and Martin Shore, but we know all about it,” Ralph said quietly.

  He might as well have dropped a bomb onto the middle of the wooden deck. Tanya’s body stiffened. She glared at Ralph from flat, angry eyes. “I didn’t kill him,” she declared. “I didn’t kill either one of them.”

  “Did Detective Fraymore ask you about them?”

  Tanya ignored Ralph’s question. “Are you really an attorney?” she demanded. “I’ll bet you’re from the Festival. Did they send you out here to make me quit?”

  “Please, Miss Dunseth. I’m not with the Festival. We’re here to do nothing of the kind.”

  “Then how do you know about the tape? Who told you? Fraymore?” Her eyes darted furiously from Ralph’s face to mine.

  “Actually,” Ralph said, “Mr. Beaumont is the one who first brought the tape to Gordon Fraymore’s attention.”

  She turned on me. “Thanks a lot,” she jeered. “Nice guy. Remind me to return the favor sometime.”

  “You don’t understand,” Ralph interjected quickly in my defense. “He had no choice in the matter. As soon as he realized both you and Martin Shore were in the film together, he was legally constrained to turn it over to the investigating officer. That’s the law, Tanya. It’s the way things work.”

  “Not if I didn’t kill him,” she retorted.

  “And you didn’t?”

  “No.”

  “But you did know him.”

  “Of course I knew him. I was on the tape with him. You said so yourself. I just want to know one thing. That tape was made years ago. Where did it come from after all this time? Did they find it on Martin Shore’s body? In his room?”

  “Fraymore didn’t tell you?” Tanya shook her head.

  “It came from Denver Holloway.”

  Tanya’s eyes widened in alarm. “Dinky? The director?”

  Ralph nodded. “She received it in her mail yesterday, along with a note from Monica Davenport asking if she knew anything about your previous acting experience.”

  The shock of that news wiped out Tanya’s last reserves of strength. Her knees wobbled under her. She grabbed the edge of the table for support and eased herself down onto the bench while Ralph leaped to assist her. Amber had been playing contentedly near her mother’s feet. Now, instinctively knowing something was wrong, the child clambered onto her mother’s lap. Tanya gripped the child tightly as though drawing some of the child’s natural resilience into her own grown-up body.

  “So the Festival knows about that, too,” Tanya breathed.

  Ralph nodded. “I’m afraid so,” he said.

  Tanya shook her head despairingly. “I haven’t done anything wrong, but that’s the end of it. The Festival won’t keep me on, not with all the adverse publicity.”

  “Don’t you see? That’s why we came,” Ralph said. “I’d like to be your attorney.”

  “Do I need an attorney?”

  “Did Gordon Fraymore tell you you were a suspect?”

  “No, but…”

  “You are,” Ralph asserted. “In not one but two cases, and unless someone helps you, you’re going to jail. Now tell me, was Martin Shore blackmailing you?”

  Staring blankly at Ralph’s face, Tanya shook her head. “No. Why would he?”

  “To get something you had that he wanted.”

  “What would that be? I don’t have any money.”

  “Maybe he found out you were becoming an established actress, and he wanted you to make another movie for him.”

  “No,” Tanya said, shaking her head. “I’m too old for what he does.”

  I had stayed quiet because Ralph was doing an admirable job without any help from me. In that kind of situation, it’s best not to interrupt. Now, though, I couldn’t help asking a question of my own. It was, after all, the question that had dragged me into this fracas to begin with.
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  “What about Amber?” I asked. “Is it possible that he wanted to use Amber instead?”

  An almost visible jolt shot through Tanya Dunseth’s body, a tremor just like the one I had seen two nights earlier in the Members’ Lounge. Tanya hugged a now sleeping Amber tightly to her breast, but the gaze she turned on me was filled with murderous intensity.

  “Is that why he came to town?” she asked in a hoarse whisper.

  “We don’t know,” Ralph answered for both of us. “That’s what we’re trying to find out.”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me,” Tanya hissed. “If they had tried that, I would have killed them myself. In fact, just thinking about it makes me wish I had.”

  “But you didn’t?” Ralph asked.

  “No. So help me God, I didn’t.”

  Ralph is good, but he missed the most important part of what Tanya Dunseth had said. My homicide-trained ear zeroed in on it.

  “You said ‘they,’” I pointed out quietly. “They who?”

  Tanya looked over at me, her eyes suddenly steady and solemn. “Martin Shore and Daphne Lewis,” she said. “Who else did you think I meant?”

  Ralph and I exchanged startled glances. “You knew them both?” I asked.

  Tanya shook her head. “Go away,” she said. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

  “But you’re saying Martin Shore and Daphne Lewis were connected? That they knew each other?”

  “I’ve said too much already. Leave me alone.” Her eyes filled with tears.

  Gordon Fraymore had told me he was looking for a connection between Daphne Lewis and Martin Shore. He claimed that if one existed, he hadn’t found it yet. Either he had lied to me—a distinct possibility—or Tanya hadn’t told him what she’d just told us. Which was it?

  “When Fraymore was here, did you tell him about that?”

  Tanya shook her head. “He’s getting paid to find things out. Why should I tell him anything? Why make it easy? Like you said, he already thinks I killed them, and he’s going to arrest me.”

  She stood up suddenly. “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “To put Amber in her crib. She’s too heavy to hold like this. I’ll be right back.” With that, Tanya Dunseth hurried into the house, leaving Ralph and me sitting on the picnic benches and stewing in our own juices.

  “Will she come back out?” Ralph asked.

  “Beats me,” I said. “That’s anyone’s guess, but I don’t think we’d better go in after her. We weren’t invited.”

  Where Marjorie Connors was concerned, I wasn’t about to take any chances.

  CHAPTER

  11

  We were ready to give up and leave when Tanya returned to the deck. Her eyes were red; she’d been crying. She had changed out of her shorts into a denim skirt. In the soft evening light, she seemed both insubstantial and defeated. This time she sat down on the bench next to Ralph. She folded her hands together on the table and sat staring at them.

  “I wouldn’t want what happened to me to happen to anyone else, but I’m not ashamed of what I did,” she said thoughtfully. “Even though I was very young, I’m willing to accept full responsibility for all of it. No matter what anybody says, where I ended up was way better than where I started. But now it’s not just me anymore, either. There’s Amber to worry about. I’ve spent all afternoon trying to decide what to do. It’s hard to know where to turn, who to trust.”

  “You have to start somewhere,” Ralph replied.

  She looked over at him through lashes still veiled in tears. “You want me to talk about it?”

  “If you want us to try to help you, yes.”

  “But it’s so hard. I’ve spent years trying to forget it—to block it out of my memory, to make myself believe that it never happened. Or, if it did, that it happened to someone else.”

  Ralph reached over and gently placed one hand over Tanya’s. “Please tell us, Tanya,” he urged quietly. “It’s the only way.”

  When Tanya spoke again, her voice was a hushed whisper. “I thought I had forgotten about it, but then, as soon as I saw Elise, it came back. All of it.”

  “Elise?” I asked. “Who’s she?”

  “Elise was what she called herself years ago when I first knew her. Detective Fraymore told me her name was Daphne Lewis.”

  “This was when you saw her in the Members’ Lounge?” Tanya nodded. “What came back?” Ralph prodded.

  His insistence propelled Tanya up off the bench, away from the table and us. She paced over to the handrail where she stood facing off the deck, gripping the railing with thin, white-knuckled fingers. For several long minutes, she didn’t speak.

  “Tanya,” I said finally. “Were Shore and Daphne in the movie business together?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can see why it’s difficult for you to talk about it, but you have to understand that the people who make kiddie porn are animals, the very worst kind of vermin. Whatever Martin Shore did to hurt you…”

  Tanya Dunseth spun around and faced me, her face distorted into an ugly mask by a burst of derisive, caustic laughter. “Martin Shore? He never hurt me, not once. Oh, he tried, but he wasn’t any good at it. What Jacques liked—that was his name back then, Jacques—was that I was still so flat-chested and young-looking. He thought that meant I was a virgin. The idea of cracking a virgin on film was a real turn-on for him.”

  She paused. “I wasn’t, though,” she continued. “Hadn’t been for years, but I let Jacques think I was. I always wanted to be an actress, and I told myself it was my first real acting job. When he came into the room to get me, I knew he wanted me to be scared, so I acted scared. When he wanted to hurt me, I screamed and cried and pretended like it hurt. And when he wanted me to like it? Well—I knew how to do that, too.”

  Her voice drifted away and disappeared, the way a dying breeze leaves behind an unexpected silence. I felt as though her story had taken an unforeseen detour, wandered off the beaten path and left me flailing around an unfamiliar cross-roads in the dark. Tanya was telling us a story I hadn’t expected to hear.

  “You say Martin Shore never hurt you?”

  “Never. Sometimes I had to fight to keep from laughing. Nothing poor old Jacques ever did to me for the camera was any worse than what my own father had done to me a hundred times before. Nothing that happened to me later was worse than that.”

  Her father? Stunned by Tanya’s words, I glanced at Ralph Ames. His face was ashen, his jawline set. The horrific similarity to Anne Corley’s own story was far closer than either one of us could possibly have imagined. Or wanted to.

  “That’s my first conscious memory,” she added quietly, “my father coming into my room at night. His shadow would fall across my bed, and then he’d be standing in front of the window, blocking out the moon. For years the memories ended there.”

  I found myself cursed with sudden, unwanted insight. “Is that what you meant when you said seeing Daphne brought it back? You remembered?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  No wonder she had spilled her drink in the Members’ Lounge.

  When Tanya continued, her eyes gazed off into space, her voice distant, remote. “I remember the terrible weight of him on my body, so heavy I could barely breathe, the ugly noises he made, and the pain, the terrible pain. And I remember going to the bathroom in the dark to clean myself up. Afterward, I cried myself to sleep. Why didn’t my mother ever come to me or hold me? Why did she let it happen?”

  Finally, Tanya fell silent, and a long, involuntary sob shook her body. I wanted to go to her and do for her what her mother never had, put an arm around her and offer some word of comfort, but I didn’t dare. For one thing, I didn’t know what Tanya’s reaction would be. For another, I didn’t trust myself to talk. No words are enough to counter that kind of parental betrayal.

  Even Ralph was stunned beyond his depth. We both sat there like lumps and waited for the wild onslaught of tears to subside.

  “Is
that how you ended up with Shore and Daphne?” he asked at last. “To get away from your father?”

  Tanya nodded. “Like I said, Daphne wasn’t her name then, not when I first met her in Walla Walla. She called herself Elise—Elise Morgan. She was only a few years older than I was, but she claimed to be a well-known New York model. She and Jacques went to small-town schools all over Washington and Oregon running seminars that told star-struck kids like me to forget about investing in modeling school. Not to brother. All they needed to break into modeling was a great portfolio.”

  “Ah,” Ralph said in sudden comprehension. “The old modeling-portfolio scam. Were they really selling portfolios?”

  “Some of the time,” Tanya replied.

  “Martin Shore was the photographer?”

  “Sort of,” Tanya answered. “I mean, he took the pictures, and they did sell some, but mostly they claimed to be running a contest. An all-expense-paid modeling shoot in Mexico was the grand prize. To me, that looked like the perfect way out of the trap. I couldn’t wait to sign up. As soon as I filled out the entry form, I knew I was on my way to stardom.”

  “How exactly does it work?” I asked.

  Ralph explained. “These guys go around the country, usually to small towns, and offer to turn ordinary kids into overnight modeling successes. All they have to do is pose for and buy this outrageously expensive portfolio of modeling photographs. Taken by none other than the world-famous Jacques himself. Right?”

  Tanya nodded.

  “Did Jacques have a last name?” I asked, trying to put together a starting place for unraveling this part of the story.

  Tanya shook her head, but Ralph Ames answered for her. “You don’t understand, Beau. Topflight fashion photographers don’t bother with last names, do they, Tanya?”

  She allowed him a wan smile. “I didn’t find out the truth until after I won the contest.” Leaving the handrail, Tanya came back over to the table and sat down on the opposite bench.