Free Night Night, Sleep Tight by Hallie Ephron Page A

not your friends. They want to fix blame and close the case. I know you think you have nothing to hide, but believe me, we all do.”
    As Deirdre watched him drive off she felt a chill as a light breeze rustled the leaves overhead. “So, tyell me zis,” Henry said, lowering his voice and imitating Sy’s accent. He put his arm around her and squeezed harder than he needed to. “Where’s that bag?”
    “In my car.” Deirdre crossed the street and opened the trunk.
    “You might have told me you’d taken it out of the house,” Henry said. “Freaked the hell out of me.”
    “You’re welcome.”
    “That, too.” He reached for the bag.
    “Back off.” Deirdre pressed down with the end of her crutch on Henry’s foot. Henry yelped in pain.
    Deirdre opened the bag and foraged around in it, pulling out a half-dozen twist-tied baggies of loose pills. Another contained a handful of the pot she’d already smelled, along with a packet of rolling papers. She gave all that to Henry, then rummaged some more, past papers, old clothes, and what she thought at first were telephone directories but turned out to be Motion Picture Academy Players Directories, making sure she hadn’t missed anything else that was illegal.
    Henry was on a slow burn. “What are you going to do with the rest of it?”
    “You heard Sy. I’m Dad’s literary executor. I’m going take it up to his office and start executing. Maybe I’ll throw all of it away. Maybe I’ll keep it all. I get to decide. You just take care of that shit”—she indicated what she’d given him—“so none of it comes back to bite us.”
    Henry turned and stomped back into the house.

 
    Chapter 12
    D eirdre lugged the bag up the driveway to the garage. The door to her father’s office turned out to be unlocked, so up she went, pulling the bag step by step behind her.
    As kids, she and Henry had been forbidden to so much as knock when their parents were up there working, so it felt strange to put her hand on the knob and just open the door. The little apartment exhaled stale, musty air. The walls were papered with fraying grass cloth and the ceiling was waterstained. An electric typewriter with a plastic cover sat on a metal table on one side of the room. Against a wall was a sagging pullout couch. On the table next to it Deirdre spotted a dust-free circle. That’s where the candlestick lamp the police confiscated must have stood. She raised one of the bamboo shades, releasing a cloud of dust motes, then cranked open one of the louvered windows.
    The floor was stacked with piles of papers and videocassettes, and below a large mirror on the opposite wall stood two-drawer metal file cabinets. Deirdre pulled open a file drawer and poked through. Contracts. Correspondence. Bills and receipts.
    Sort. Cull. Inventory. As Sy had said, she’d have to take it item by item, one thing at a time. It hardly mattered where she began.
    She pulled out a file at random. Telephone bills starting in 1963. That had been around the year that her parents lost their contract at Fox and started using this space as their office. Toss.
    The unlabeled folder behind it had about a dozen black-and-white stills from a movie she didn’t recognize. She set it aside. Keep.
    Another file folder contained stock certificates. One was from the DeLorean Motor Company. Hadn’t they gone bankrupt? Ask Sy.
    On top of the file cabinet Deirdre noticed a glass ashtray from Chasen’s, the celebrity hangout where her parents had dined regularly. She needed another pile for personal keepsakes. Not for any literary legacy, but because she’d always loved the restaurant with its red leather banquettes, dark corners for secret trysts, and special tables set aside for moguls and stars. Even if there’d been nothing on the menu that an eight-year-old could stomach.
    Four items and already she’d started four piles. She hadn’t even cracked open the closet. Make that closets—there were two of them. She’d be