Triple Threat

guy.
    Whoever showed up at the quarry to kill him would be the guilty party.
    Taylor was at the hospital in Redding for observation. Ed Billings had whaled on him pretty bad. When he’d said good-bye to Pellam a half hour before, he’d smiled ruefully and said, “Hey, quite an experience, hm?”
    “Good luck with the poems,” the location scout had told him as he walked to the ambulance.
    “Say,” Werther now asked Pellam, “
did
you get anybody on tape at Devil’s Playground?”
    Pellam gave a sour laugh. “Not a soul.”
    “Hm, too bad. Though I don’t suspect we need the evidence.”
    “You’ve got property around there, too, don’t you, Sheriff?” Pellam asked wryly.
    “Oh, what Rita was saying? Yeah, I do. Vacation house that I rent out. Helps for some of the expenses my son has.”
    For his autistic grandchild, Pellam recalled.
    “You suspect me?” Werther asked.
    “No, sir, never occurred to me.”
    It had.
    “Okay… Now, about that little matter you and I horse traded on? It’s all taken care of,” the sheriff said.
    “Thanks.”
    “You earned it.”
    Pellam then asked for his brother-in-law’s phone number.
    “Rudy? He can’t get your camper in shape until tomorrow.”
    “This is about something else.”
    Motion in the corner of his eye. Hannah Billings was being led across the parking area in front of the quarry to a squad car. She glanced his way.
    A phrase came to Pellam’s mind:
    If looks could kill…
    # # #
    Here’s Rita at the diner, her name proudly stitched on her impressive bosom.
    She’s doing what she does best with diligence and polite mien, and with no tolerance for nonsense from former movie directors turned location scouts, from flirtatious poets, from killers noir at heart, from saints. Anybody. She takes waitressing seriously.
    Pellam wasn’t in the mood for frozen so he’d arranged a private vehicle rental from Rudy (yes, the bile-green Gremlin, which was, he knew, a very underrated vehicle—it could beat the Pinto and VW Beetle hands down, at least with the optional four-speed Borg-Warner).
    He’s finished a meatloaf dinner and orders pie with cheese. He didn’t used to like this combo but, really, who shouldn’t? It doesn’t get any better than sweet apples and savory Kraft. He’d go for a whiskey, but that’s not an option at the Overlook, so it’s coffee, which is exemplary.
    He gets a call on his Motorola cell phone. The director of
Paradice
is ecstatic that Pellam has secured a permit to shoot in Devil’s Playground after all.
    “How’d you do it?”
    Put my life on the line to catch a femme fatale, he thinks, earning Sheriff Werther’s friendship and assistance in all things governmental here.
    “Just pulled some strings.”
    “Ah, I love string-pullers,” the director says breathily.
    Pellam thinks about suggesting a new name for the film:
Devil’s Playground
. But he knows in his heart that the director will never buy it—he just
loves
his misspelled title.
    Fine. It’s his movie, not mine.
    As he ends the call Pellam feels eyes aimed his way. He looks up and believes that Rita is casting him a flirt, which is not by any means a bad thing.
    Then he glances at her with a smile and sees she is, in fact, looking a few degrees past him. It’s toward a young man standing beside a revolving dessert display, featuring cakes that seem three feet high. He’s looking back at her. The nervous boy is handsome if pimply. He sits down at the end of the counter, isolated so he can gab a bit with her in private. He also will, Pellam knows, leave a five-dollar tip, though he can’t really afford it, on a ten-dollar tab, which will both embarrass and enthrall her.
    Ain’t love grand?
    The pie comes in for a landing and Pellam indulges. It’s good, no question.
    His thoughts wander. He’s considering his time in Paradice, wait, no in
Gurney
, and he decides that, just like State Route 14, life sometimes is a switchback. You never know what’s going to happen around the next hairpin, or who’s who and what’s what.
    But other times the road doesn’t curve at all. It’s straight as a ruler for miles and miles. What you see ahead is exactly what you’re going to get, no twists, no surprises. And the people you meet are just what they seem to be. The environmentalist is simply passionate about saving the earth. The hitchhiking poet is nothing more or less than a self-styled soulmate of Jack Kerouac, rambling around the country in search of