A Knife to Remember

you get that speaking part?“ Jane asked before Angela could finish her own question.
    “I don’t know exactly,“ Angela said. She was starting to get a bit truculent. “George Abington, I think. Maybe Miss Harwell. Cavagnari. Possibly the producers. He hinted that he knew who they were. I don’t know who else.“ “And what did he say to all these people?“
    “Just that he thought I’d be good for the role that was left vacant.“ Angela was verging on snappish now. Jane sensed she couldn’t string her along much farther.
    “No, I mean what ‘pressure’ was he applying to them?“
    “I don’t know! You don’t think he’d have told me any of his secrets, do you?“
    “No, I guess not,“ Jane said mildly.
    She asked Angela a few more innocuous questions to defuse the young woman’s growing irritation, made a few vague half promises about keeping her in mind when she was working on the next script, then excused herself to go in the house and make an imaginary call to her agent.
    As she expected, Shelley followed along a few minutes later. “I wonder,“ Shelley said, “if she realized she was providing herself with the perfect motive for bumping off Jake?“
    “I thought about that, too,“ Jane said. “By trying to help her, thereby getting her into his bed, he was wrecking her fledgling reputation in the business. If she’s ambitious and greedy enough to fall for that ridiculous story about me being a famous writer, and put up with what we put her through just to suck up to me, she might have been ambitious enough to kill Jake to keep him from messing up her life.“
    “—and was she telling us because she’s dumb, because she’s innocent, or because she’s smart enough to play a double bluff?“
    “I don’t know.“
    “Excuse me a minute,“ Shelley said, heading for the guest bathroom just off the kitchen.
    When she came back, Jane was at the kitchen table, sorting a load of socks and underwear she’d just brought up from the dryer in the basement. “I’ve been thinking, Shelley, about a couple things that are bothering me. One, there’s this ‘bad luck’ thing. Why would anybody have unfortunate things happen on a set just because they’re there?“
    “I guess that’s the nature of bad luck,“ Shelley said, picking up a pair of socks and making them into a neat ball. “It just happens for no reason.“
    “I know. But having a murder on the set! That’s about the worst luck I can think of. As much as I hate to admit it, it clears Harwell as a suspect in my mind. If she’s the one who’s had to fight the reputation for bringing misfortune along, she’d hardly be the one to create the worst misfortune of all, would she?“
    “No, but we don’t know what sort of provocation she might have had. There are lots of things worse than being considered a jinx.”
    Jane went on sorting and Shelley continued turning socks into balls for a few minutes. “I’m also curious about the mysterious producers. I don’t know how on earth that could connect with a murder, but it is odd.“
    “Maybe it’s not as odd as it seems to us. Way back when Paul was starting the fast-food outfit, there were a couple of people who were willing to invest in him, but didn’t want anybody to know they were doing it.“ Shelley’s husband had built up one tiny, floundering Greek food restaurant in the heart of Chicago into a nationwide chain in a little over twenty years.
    “Why not?“ Jane asked.
    “Paul never knew. They just wanted it kept secret and he needed the money to get started and didn’t question them. Nobody asked him to do anything illegal, so it didn’t matter to him. It might have been some kind of tax dodge or hiding money to keep from paying alimony or anything. Maybe it’s the same thing with this. And we don’t know anything about the film business, Jane. Maybe it’s common.“
    “Still, it is a secret and secrets seemed to be Jake’s special interest.”
    Jane gathered up an armload of the sorted laundry. “I’ll be right back.“ As she headed for the stairs, she stopped and looked back. “Shelley, a horrible thought just struck me. We’ve mentioned this before but haven’t considered it as carefully as we should have. What if this blackmail had nothing to do with Jake’s death? Maybe the whole crew was being blackmailed, but somebody killed him for some other reason entirely?”
     
     

14
     
    Shelley’s outrageous lie about Jane’s being a famous