“Is this for the film you’re making about Sly?”
“In part. Most of all, it’s for Sly. Not knowing gnaws on him.”
“You want to take some shots of the area up there?” Roger said. “Railings, floor-you know the drill.”
Dutifully, I turned the camera back on and started shooting the area around Holloway, continued, focused on the floor, as I walked back downstairs.
“It’s important to know where you came from,” I said.
“You would know that better than most of us,” he said, referring to my own recent discovery of family I had grown up knowing nothing about.
When I reached the bottom of the stairs, I asked, “Will that do it?”
“One more thing,” he said, gesturing me closer.
He took the camera from me and scanned me with it, front and back, hands and feet in close-up.
“Insurance for you,” he said, handing the camera back, “in case some idiot detective gets notional about you.”
I turned the camera off and started to take out the photo disk to give him. But he stopped me.
“Any way you can make a copy of what you got before we hand it over?”
“Sure.” Like hell he wasn’t back in the saddle. I dug a memory storage stick out of my bag, plugged it into the camera’s USB port, and made a copy of the photo file. Then I made a second copy. One I dropped back into my bag, the other I handed to him, along with the camera’s image card.
“That do it?” I asked.
“Just one more thing,” he said. “Any idea where we can find a coffeepot around here? It’s going to be a long night.”
Chapter 7
“You knew the guy?”
Kevin Thornbury, the more senior of the two detectives sent out from the LA County Sheriff’s Homicide Bureau, looked down his nose at me, accusation, skepticism in his tone-pure cop.
He was a man about my age, early forties, average height, average weight, average looks. Mostly, he looked tired, the sort of tired that a good night’s sleep won’t fix. But then, it was Friday night, and hours past the end of his regular work week. We knew from the deputy coroner, who had arrived a full hour earlier, that traffic leaving central LA had been brutal. Of the three groups who eventually showed up, the detectives, coming out of City of Commerce, had the furthest to travel and several more gnarly interchanges to navigate than the others.
Long before they arrived, Roger had unlocked the staff lounge and put on a pot of coffee. Thornbury and I, seated at a table in the lounge, both had steaming mugs beside us, but neither of us was drinking from them. Thornbury’s partner, a rookie detective named Fred Weber, was out in the lobby overseeing the crime scene. Roger was overseeing Weber, though he had no official role in the investigation other than local liaison. So except for technicians from the coroner’s office or Scientific Services Bureau coming in occasionally in search of coffee, Thornbury and I were alone in the lounge.
Thornbury waited for my answer, tapping the table between us with the end of his ballpoint pen.
“I didn’t know Holloway well,” I said.
“You know him well enough, though, to make the identification.”
“Yes,” I said. “Park Holloway was the college president. I work here.”
He looked at something in his notebook and then up at me.
“You said, ‘Park Holloway’?”
“Yes.”
“That Park Holloway?”
“He’s the only one I know.”
“Huh.” He studied the page again, crossed something out and wrote something down. Had he not recognized Holloway’s name until now? Genuine surprise on his face, or theatrics? I couldn’t get a handle on him. Was he playing me?
“You work here?” he asked, that skeptical scowl back in place.
“Temporarily,” I said. I had earlier spelled my name for him, and it had apparently rung no more bells than Holloway’s had initially.
“You’re a temp, huh? What, like a secretary?”
“I’m teaching in the film department this semester, part-time, filling in for someone who’s on sick leave.”
“Oh yeah?” A dismissive quality in the question. “What, you have the kids watch movies in class?”
“Sometimes,” I said. “I teach film production; the kids are making movies.”
He flicked his chin toward the door that led to the lobby. “Any idea what happened out there?”
“None,” I said. “He was hanging from the ceiling when I came in.”
“Anyone else in the building when you arrived?”
“I didn’t see or hear anyone.” I shrugged. “People generally leave early on Fridays.”
“Yeah?” he said. “Except you. Mind telling me what you were doing here?”
“You saw that apparatus Holloway is hanging from?” When he nodded, I said, “It was installed to hang a sculpture.”
“I wondered what that was.”
“I came here to shoot it.”
“Shoot it?” He tensed as his hand reflexively dropped to the butt of the gun holstered on his belt.
“With a camera,” I said. “I wanted to shoot some footage of the empty space before the sculpture is hung there next week. I’m making a short film about the artist and his work and I wanted a ‘before’ shot.”
Cradling his mug between his hands, Thornbury took a long look around the bright and airy room and out at the enclosed garden beyond tall glass doors. With a scowl he said, “This place looks more like a fancy hotel than a college administration building.”
“You know what the kids call it? The Taj Ma’Holloway.”
He chuckled. “So the president, this Holloway, wasn’t so popular, huh?”
“Not very, no.”
“You have any run-ins with him?”
“We had a little kerfuffle shortly after I was hired. He asked me to make a film about the campus for him to show at his state-of-the-college address. I told him I would have it done as a class project, but he wanted me to do it myself. I turned him down.”
“So he didn’t get his movie?”
“He did. His media staff put together a very nice production-that’s what they’re paid for. I was more worried about stepping on their toes than about making Holloway unhappy; sometimes I need to borrow Media’s facilities for my classes.”
“You said that at the end of the semester you’ll be out of a job. Your, what’d you call it, kerfuffle, with the college prez have anything to do with that?”
“No. I only contracted to work this semester.”
“Where’d you work before?”
“In television. My series was canceled.”
“So, what, Holloway wanted a little Hollywood glitz for his film?”
I shrugged again, noncommittal, but he was correct.
“How’d you end up here, from TV?” he asked, smug, patronizing in the way he said here, as if there was something deficient about the place. Or colleges in general; I’m a filmmaker, not a shrink, but if I had to guess, I’d say that academics were never Thornbury’s strong suit.
I told him, “When my series was cancelled a friend told me about this gig. I thought, why not? Something different to do until the next thing comes along.”
“Next thing? You a Hollywood gypsy, going from gig to gig?”
“I suppose.” Not exactly correct, but why get into it? I knew he was grilling me under the guise of small talk, and doing a decent job of it though he apparently found Hollywood to be as deficient as teaching. At the moment I was the only warm body available to put on a suspects list, so I knew it was in my best interests to keep things superficial; you never know when a bad impression or a wrong sort of answer might set complications in motion. I did not explain that I’d had my own network television series, “Maggie MacGowen Investigates,” for a long time, until a recent corporate reorganization.
My show was fairly cheap to produce and the audience numbers were respectable, so the chances of getting picked up elsewhere were fairly good. I’d been through this shuffle before. If something didn’t turn up, there was always independent production to fall back on. In the meantime, I was enjoying the break from the pressures of TV Land and I was having a great time working with young people who were excited about what they were doing. Teaching turned out to be demanding work, but I found it to be more rewarding than, for instance, reporting from the jungles of Guatemala about militant separatists, or dodging gangbanger bullets in any of LA’s benighted housing projects.