A Knife to Remember

her...“
    “Now, now. Don’t think about that. Would you like for me to keep her things in my house until somebody can pick them up?”
    George was still standing guard over her. “Don’t bother, Jane. I’ve already arranged to have them sent back to the hotel. Olive, you should stay here today. I don’t want you back there by yourself. Roberto may need you, too. And there’s a wrap party tonight, you know,“ he went on. “You must come.“
    “Oh, no. I couldn’t.“
    “But you must come in Lynette’s place,“ George insisted. “You know she’d want you here, and so will the cast and crew. If we can’t have her, we must have you. Very few of these people will be able to come to the funeral, but they’ll want to say their good-byes through you.”
    It was a gracious gesture, beautifully done, Jane thought. George Abington might consider himself a plumber of an actor, but he was a nice man. He’d sensed that Olive Longabach would have been miserable and lonely this evening by herself, but had appealed to her psychotically overdeveloped sense of duty to Lynette to get her out.
    “Well, if I must—”
    Maisie had joined them, checking on Olive’s well-being and Jane felt free to wander off. She spotted the production assistant who always found her when it was time to let Willard out and waved that she understood the message.
    As she brought him outside, Shelley was just putting her little orange poodle Frenchie into his smaller dog run. “Shelley, did you ever know anybody named Veronica?“ Jane asked.
    Shelley unsnapped Frenchie’s collar, closed the gate, and leaned on it. “I don’t think so. Oh, yes. A girl in my grade school.“
    “And what did you call her?“
    “Call her? Ronnie, I think. Why on earth do you ask?“
    “Because I have a sneaking suspicion I know who the mysterious producers are.“
     

21
     
    “What did you say your wife’s name was?“ Jane asked George Abington a few minutes later.
    She and Shelley had tracked him down in his dressing room, which was the other half of the same trailer that housed Lynette’s space. It was very nice, but quite cramped and impersonal. There was a couch/sofa, a table big enough to eat or do paperwork or play cards with one friend, an open closet, a counter beneath a well-lighted mirror, a couple of chairs, and visible through another door, a train compartment–style bathroom.
    George was sitting at the small table and had apparently been studying his script when the brads holding it together had come apart. He fussed with the pages, trying to get the holes lined up. “My ex-wife, you mean? Mrs. Johnson,“ he said. “Why do you ask?“
    “Ronnie, I think you called her,“ Jane persisted.
    “Yes. Hell! Where did that other thing go?“ He leaned down and looked at the carpet for the other brad.
    “George, is your ex-wife one of the producers of this movie?”
    He finally gave up pretending interest in the reassembly of the script and smiled. “You’re clever, Jane. Yes. She is.“
    “And are you another?”
    He nodded.
    “And who else?“
    “Who do you think?“ he shot back, grinning. “Lynette Harwell.“
    “Bingo. How in the world did you figure it out? Am I such a poor actor that I gave it away or did Lynette blab?“
    “Nobody blabbed. I just heard your rep on the phone, addressing the person he was speaking to as Veronica. And I remembered you calling your wife Ronnie. I also remembered you saying you’d made good money doing so many roles and I figured Lynette probably had, too.“
    “Come on, Jane. There are a lot of Veronicas in the world and a lot of actors who are fairly well off.“
    “But there aren’t a lot of producers who would risk putting a ton of money into a movie starring Lynette Harwell—except Lynette herself. She hadn’t made a decent movie for ten years and was considered a jinx besides.”
    George nodded at the logic of this.
    “I asked myself, why would you agree to work with her, given your personal history, unless you had money in it, too? And you did say your wife was wealthy and had kept in touch with the business, but not as an actress. You also mentioned how good she was with contractual things in the movie business. So instead of having absent producers, you had two of the three on the set, right in the middle of things, and a third handling the money from a safe distance.“ “You’d make a good detective.”
    Jane hoped he’d never repeat this remark in front of Mel, who