Chapter 9

I left my apartment at a little after eight pm and found myself nervously scanning the streets for police cars as I drove. The idea that Barry Rank was after me definitely had me spooked. It's no fun being on the wrong side of a cop, let me tell you - especially a cop as nasty as Rank.

I left George Cahn's distasteful amateur productions with Tina, and then drove up into the hills, arriving at Claire's house at a little after nine. As before, it was silent and still under the bright wash of the outside floodlights. I parked on the street and watched my mirrors for a while, in case I had been followed. There was no traffic at all.

Claire took a long time to answer her front door. When it finally opened, she was wearing only a blue silk robe, and her hair was damp at the ends.

"Hi Frank. Sorry to keep you waiting - I was in the tub, soaking the kinks out. Today's script called for me to get pushed to the ground and spit on, and it took us five takes."

Her big green eyes settled on the tapes I was carrying as she shut the door behind us. "God, I really thought I'd never see those again."

"Do you want to take some time to verify them?" I noticed a large gap in the front of her robe, and then I saw her noticing me noticing.

Smiling, she took the tapes and looked at them closely. "At least you had the decency to rewind," she joked. "No, I don't need to watch them, I recognize the labels."

She moved toward the living room, talking to me over shoulder. "I want you to do two things for me, Frank. First, open that champagne. Then I want to hear all about how you found the tapes."

A bottle of Dom Perignon was sitting in an ice bucket on the coffee table, along with two glasses. I pulled it out and started peeling away the foil, feeling like Cary Grant.

"A beautiful movie star and French champagne ... I should have worn a tux."

She chuckled. "I'm just a TV star right now. But thanks to you I've got a fighting chance to be a movie star."

I pulled the cork, and champagne gushed out of the bottle and onto the table. I guided the flow at the glasses, almost dropping the bottle in the process.

"Sorry - I'm a little out of practice."

"That reminds me," she said dryly. "I also owe you a personal reward, don't I?"

"Um ... I wouldn't want you to do anything that made you uncomfortable just out of obligation, Claire."

I handed her a glass, and we drank. I'm not a real connoisseur of fine wine, but it certainly hit the spot.

We sat down next to each other on the couch, and I told her how I found the tapes. Claire was a good listener, laughing when I said something funny, nodding in all the right places. I told it pretty much straight, just leaving out my impromptu masturbation session at the end.

"Somebody could have searched forever and not found the tapes," she said admiringly. "The police never found it, and they ripped the place apart."

"It was just luck that I happened to look closely at the picture in the bathroom," I said modestly.

Smiling at me, Claire loosened the sash of her robe and let it fall open.

"I guess these must look familiar," she said, letting the robe slide down off her shoulders.

I reached over and gently cupped the soft, warm weight of her left breast. Some sort of comment was no doubt called for, but I was speechless. Claire leaned back and dribbled champagne over her breasts. I licked it off, tentatively at first and then eagerly as she purred with pleasure. Her nipples hardened under my tongue, growing into fleshy points as I sucked on them like baby. Her skin was sweet with the scent of bath oil.

After several minutes of this she pushed me away gently and sat up. "Let's see if I can still give a nice messy porn star blow job."

"You talked me into it," I said, loosening my pants. I pried my rigid cock out of my tangled boxer shorts and Claire kneeled on the carpet between my legs and inhaled it with a throaty groan of pleasure, sucking it to the back of her throat. She pumped up and down a few times, and I almost shot my wad right then, but fortunately she slowed down and began teasing me with gentle nibbles and wet smacking sounds. Let me tell you, might look sort of cheesy when you watch it in the movies, but when it's happening to you in real life its a different story.

She pulled my shirt out of the back of my pants, and I felt her fingernails scrape across the bare skin of my back. She took her mouth away from my cock and looked up at me, her gaze suddenly narrow and calculating. All the misgivings and suspicions that I had conveniently been repressing suddenly flooded back. In that single instant I knew I was fucked, and that there was no time.

Pain exploded into my lower back, and my body jerked violently as every muscle suddenly contracted. A flashbulb went off inside my head, and then darkness.

When I woke up, I was staring up at the ceiling, and my whole body felt like it was on fire. I couldn't move. I couldn't even figure out how to try to move. I was sure I was dying, or maybe I was already dead.

Claire was standing over me, her robe belted back in place.

"Can you hear me? Blink once if you can hear me."

To my surprise, my eyelids went down, and then up again.

"The pain will go away in a couple minutes. In about half an hour, you'll be able to get up." She took a little device out of her pocket and showed it to me. It looked like an electric razor with two short antenna on the front.

"I tasered you," she informed me. "Fifty thousand volts."

I stared at her blankly.

"I'm sorry, Stern. I can't afford any loose ends. Maybe you saw the whole tape, and maybe you didn't."

I thought about this for a few seconds. What the fuck difference did it make whether I watched the tapes all the way through or not?

"If you had watched the final scene in 'Double Cross'," she continued, "you would have seen the evil twin sister, played by me, having sex with the good twin sister.

Claire let me think about that one for a few seconds. Filming an entire sex scene with a body double would have been logistically difficult and time consuming, two things porn movie producers avoid like the plague. Unless, of course, you didn't need a body double. Light started to dawn.

Claire said "So if you had watched the scene, you would have realized that I must have a real-life twin sister."

I closed my eyes. It all made sense now. Claire Ingleford really did kill George Cahn, while I was taking pictures of her twin sister on Sparkle Beach, unwittingly helping her with her alibi. I opened my eyes again, tried to form a question, and couldn't. But Claire seemed to understand.

"Twelve years ago, my twin sister Christine and I ran away from home. We grew up in Iowa, so its not like we needed much excuse. We came out to LA, to make it big. I loved the fast-paced life out here, the parties, the sex, all of it, but Christine hated it. She developed a serious drug problem, then she kicked the habit, went back to Iowa, worked her way through college as a waitress. She's a lawyer now, has a nice husband, a good life.

"That was the only porno scene she ever did, the one with me. She was drugged out of her mind when we filmed it, you can tell when you see it."

She laughed mirthlessly.

"The only scene she ever did, but it was a hell of a scene. Sex with your sister. It sounds disgusting, doesn't it? But at the time it seemed like no big deal. Christine and I had both slept with women before."

She was silent for a few seconds.

"Anyway, a few months ago my ex-husband started blackmailing me by threatening to show that scene to the world. He was in big financial trouble, and he kept asking for more and more money. I've got a big movie coming out, my career is about to take off, so his position was just getting stronger. He was bleeding me dry, and at the same time I felt like he might release the tape just out of spite, or that someone would find it at his house during one of his parties. Poor Christine, she would have been caught in the crossfire. Can you imagine what they would think of all this in Iowa?"

"Mmph," I said. Or something like that. I could make sounds and move my lips a bit, which was an improvement.

Claire nodded as if I had asked a probing question.

"You're wondering why I wanted to buy those pictures back. Christine and I had hatched what we thought was a perfect plan. She would pretend to be me in public while I went to San Diego and forced Cahn give me the tape. But when she showed up here at my house, there was a problem..."

Her voice trailed off. She was staring across the room at something out of my range of vision, her eyes wide.

"She put the tattoo on the wrong ass cheek," said Tina Callahan. She walked over to where I could see her. She was dressed in tight, dark clothes, and she looked athletic and dangerous despite her small size. The gun in her hand helped, of course.

Tina said "Your twin sister Christine used the centerfold picture from your Playboy spread as a guide for the rose tattoo, didn't she? She had no idea that the negative had been reversed. When you discovered the mistake it was too late, and you figured she could just keep the tattoo covered up. But a wave knocked her bikini bottom up into her ass crack, and Frankie here caught the tattoo on film. Bad luck for you."

"Right," said Claire, after a pause. "So who the fuck are you?" She tried to sound tough, but couldn't quite pull it off.

"Detective Tina Callahan, LAPD. Off duty at the moment. I'm Frank's partner. Right Frank?"

I opened my mouth and managed to croak out "Nice timing, partner."

"Glad I could help. Sorry I let her taser you, though. I thought I was doing you a favor by not interrupting the blow job."

I made a noncommittal sound.

"So what do you think we should do, Frank? I could call it in, get a bunch of cops out here right away. Be a nice bust for me. On the other hand, maybe we could shake down Claire for some cold hard cash and let her off with a warning. I don't think she'll be doing any more killing, now that we've got the goods on her. Blink once if you want to-"

"I can talk," I mumbled irritably. I was getting sick of staring up at the two of them from the floor, but I still couldn't move my limbs. "Why don't you shoot her, and then we'll take all her money. Make it look like a burglary."