Death of the Office Witch

  Detective Gordon, the one with the Marine haircut and the smirk, opened her door when they reached the Goliath beach house and nodded the driver away.

  Charlie had actually been to a party at this house one night with a crush of people dressed in dress and undress you’d have to have seen to believe.

  It looked very different now, empty and in the light of day. There were signs of wear on the redwood decks that sported two hot tubs and a flowering vine-coated arbor that sheltered a padded picnic booth. All this bordering the walkway to the entrance, which was down a stairway. The door was in the roof, and you could see the ocean over it from the decks.

  The house below spread along a low cliff, opening every room but the kitchen to the sea view, a back hall running the length to give access to each room. It was an odd arrangement. First you entered the kitchen, which looked over cooking islands and countertops onto a vast living and entertaining area surrounding it on three sides. You saw there free-standing fireplaces, wet bars, and several conversation nooks on both sides of the sunken dining room. Everywhere were bleached wood floors with oriental area rugs and sand scratches, and side tables graced with dust catchers and lamps. All this punctuated by floor-to-ceiling pale rose sheers blowing in the salt breezes, a narrow balcony, a stretch of beach, the Pacific Ocean, the horizon, the sky.

  It almost seemed as though you could invite the whole world into the room, and the heavens, too. The side walls were mirrors that made the room and the view even more limitless. How could Mary Ann and Keegan ever have concentrated in such unstructured space?

  David Dalrymple startled Charlie when he rose from a couch in front of a far mirrored wall, looking like two men, one front and one back. The room was so disorienting—or else it was her empty stomach—that she would have tripped into the sunken dining room had Detective Gordon not caught an elbow to steady her until she regained her balance.

  “Have you had lunch, Miss Greene?” Lieutenant Dalrymple asked.

  She shook her head, and even in a room this large the rumble of her stomach was an audible answer. She had not accompanied Tina to her atta-girl breakfast and was operating on one Diet Coke.

  “We have some quarter-pounders and fries on their way by patrol express. We’ll be happy to share them with you.”

  “I take it you’ve found Mary Ann.”

  “Before we discuss that, I’d like you to relax and be comfortable,” he motioned to the pillowed couch he’d just risen from, “and be quiet for a moment. Tell me if you sense anything unusual here. Try to forget about your busy day for a while.”

  “I take it that means she’s dead, too.” But Charlie sat and leaned back into the pillows. If the burgers and fries didn’t arrive soon, she could always take a nap.

  “Don’t worry about that just now. Sit quietly and rest, see if you can tune into the atmosphere here. It’s important. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  Charlie closed her eyes and propped her feet on the coffee table. For some reason her thoughts meandered to Jesus Garcia. Libby had said he didn’t go to Wilson High. Charlie wished she’d told him to never return, but the whole situation had conspired to make her feel mean and greedy, especially with the girls standing there watching. She told him he could come only on Saturday mornings. She’d see to it Libby had chores to do on Saturday mornings. Which would guarantee Libby wouldn’t be home on Saturday mornings.

  Charlie didn’t sense anything in the atmosphere of the house until she smelled lunch. She considered making up something just to get even, but shared the greasy repast with Gordon and Dalrymple, grateful to assuage the painful demon in her belly.

  Charlie nursed her shake. A recent column on the health-fad pages of the L.A. Times assured a worried public that milk products and slimy fat coatings did not really soothe angered stomach linings. They were wrong. The burning went away. But it was followed by a bloating nausea. Did doctors work on weekends? Did Charlie really need one more thing to worry about?

  At Dalrymple’s request, Detective Gordon left them alone in the massive room, and for a time they sat quietly, he chewing on cold limp fries and Charlie sucking in air up her straw.

  “You’re not cooperating,” he said finally.

  “What is it with you? I know most of my impressions of the police are stereotypes from TV and novels, but I really can’t believe you’re serious about this psychic stuff. I mean, I know you could not do the work you do and be gullible enough to believe in Marvelous Marvin Grunion and the like. What I don’t know is why you’re pretending otherwise. It’s frightening.”

  “As a matter of fact, I increasingly find my colleagues imitating TV cops, Miss Greene, and that’s what you should find frightening. Life imitating art, if one could be so gullible as to call that art. Maybe the phrase should be ‘fact aping fiction.’” Definitely a PBS kind of guy. He removed his thick glasses and polished them absently with a handkerchief. With their removal, his eyes became tiny and sunken—his entire face appeared smaller. “I hate to disillusion you further, but scratch an ordinary policeman and you’ll find all the foibles and weaknesses inherent in mankind, with some submerged and others hardened to allow him to function in law enforcement. Or her,” he added quickly.

  “You don’t really think I can help you in any psychic way. You suspect me of murdering Gloria or knowing who did. I can’t even defend myself, because you don’t say what you’re thinking. And now I suppose you think I did something to Mary Ann, too.”

  “Granted that, until we find the motive and the murderer everyone involved is suspect, you among many, I am still sincere in asking for your help. Please hear me out,” he said when she groaned and started squirming. “Let me tell you a story.”

  Like most people, most cops didn’t believe in what he called the paranormal. And until about six years ago, David Dalrymple didn’t, either. He had been working in Las Vegas at the time. There was a particularly grisly murder of a child. Kidnap, rape, torture, murder, dismemberment. It had been so monstrous even the hardened investigators handling the case had severe difficulties with it both in their work and in their personal lives.

  “In order to live anything remotely resembling a normal life, to get on with family and the civilian population—people in law enforcement, rescue work, emergency and long-term medical care and similar professions have to separate their personal and professional lives and feelings. If they don’t they become dysfunctional in both.” He leaned forward with forearms on knees, staring past her out to sea between blowing curtains. He sounded like a textbook, but he looked like a deeply troubled man who was, in reality, staring within.

  “The case was getting a great deal of press, my kids were talking about it, my wife was teaching school, and everyone she met at work wanted to know the latest on our attempts to track the killer. It was the same for my colleagues. There was no relief from the nightmare, day or night. And when there is notoriety with a case, the nuts come out of the woodwork. They all claim mysterious powers and knowledge that will help solve the crime.”

  “And help them cash in on the publicity.”

  “Some shun publicity, send their information in anonymously. But they are all so vague and mysterious that they end up half-right and half-wrong, so they never come out looking like they missed totally. In many ways, like politicians and preachers. It’s an art.”

  “But this time somebody came up with the right answers,” Charlie prompted, trying to hurry him along.

  “This little girl, her name was Deborah Ann—she was wearing a hooded sweatshirt jacket when she was abducted.”

  “In Vegas?”

  “It can get quite chilly at certain times of the year. Anyway, it was pretty much intact. It was a cheap little affair, red, with the regular drawstring through the hood and zipper up the front. It was all there but for one arm, which we later found on one of her arms lying across the top of a slot machine in one of the better casinos. But the first trace of her we found was the rest of the sweatshirt jacket hangin
g from its hood by a clothespin on a wire draped with Christmas decorations in another casino. A description of what the child was last seen wearing had been heavily publicized, and an alert security guard called the department immediately. The jacket plus a recent photo of the child was shown on the local television news in hopes the two together would trigger a memory in someone who might have seen Deborah Ann without realizing it.”

  “And the nuts came out of the woodwork.”

  “One woman became so hysterical in my office that I finally let her see and hold the jacket. She was on vacation from Chicago, the exact stereotype of what you’d expect, an aging sixties flower child. Made her living as a psychic. Told fortunes, performed séances, complete fruitcake. Pretty, in a maternal, well-worn way. Comfortable woman when she was in control of herself.” He stood and walked over to the sheers, their billowing motion arranging and rearranging the lighting in the room, the shadows on his face, and the bald swath of scalp above it. “Did I tell you my daughter’s name is Deborah Ann Dalrymple?”

  “Bummer,” Charlie said and meant it. Then when he turned back to the sea and didn’t speak, she added, “Look, for all I know this is a hoax and you’re really pitching a true crime or a novel or even a treatment. But I’m hooked, okay? Don’t blow it now. She takes a hold of the jacket, and—?”

  “She took the jacket and told me where the child’s head was. And then through her sobbing she told me things I could no more write about than I can tell you now. But things I will take to my own grave.”

  “Things like—?”

  “How confused a four-year-old child can be when a beloved uncle hurts her, how she feels sure she’s done something wrong to deserve this—even that young they feel it’s somehow their fault.” The homicide lieutenant’s voice broke, and he stood silent for a few moments, staring at the toes of his shoes and shaking his head at his own memories. “We started calling him Uncle Christmas around the department.”

  “Her uncle?”

  “We were out rounding up known child abusers and creeps. We’d looked at family and neighbors first thing, of course, and found nothing. The uncle was a forty-five-year-old airline pilot with a solid twenty-year marriage, three kids with no records, and his only recorded offenses were two traffic tickets and a personal bankruptcy. A churchgoer, no heavy drinking or drug habits. A man in good health. We found out later his one verifiable vice was visiting porno movies when out of town—which was often, considering his occupation—but who knows?”

  “And you just took this flower-child fruitcake’s word for it? I can’t believe I never heard of this case.”

  “You might have. Something makes the national newscasts one night, maybe two. So much goes on in our world that if the threat doesn’t appear in our own community it sort of blends in with all the horrors on ‘News from Around the World with’… the latest blow-dried network celebrity. But if you live in the same area, the fear factor aids memory immeasurably. And nobody believed the middle-aged fruitcake. Including me. But if you’d been there and heard her, you’d be haunted for life anyway. I told my superior about it. I was the psychic’s only witness, which had been a stupid mistake, but I hadn’t wanted anyone who worked with me to know I’d been a wuss and let her in to begin with. Great way to lose your job, for one thing. Anyway, we had a good laugh and no good leads, so he said to take a day or two and follow it up and we’d run a check on the fruitcake from Chicago.”

  “And you found she wasn’t who she said she was.”

  “She was exactly who she claimed to be, a respected psychic by people who respected psychics, and who was at home in Chicago when the kidnapping occurred. Deborah Ann’s head was exactly where she said it was, in the uncle’s storage locker at a small municipal airport—in north Vegas, where he kept his private plane, not McCarran.”

  “It would begin to smell, wouldn’t it?”

  “We don’t know to this day how long she was kept in a casino hotel room and molested and tortured before the butchery began. The storage locker was in an air conditioned building, but there had been some unheeded complaints, as it turned out. It was in late December—Merry Christmas, Deborah Ann, from Uncle Mike.”

  Charlie rose, and he followed her out to the cool Pacific breeze and warm sun and fishy ocean smell that cleaned the sinuses and bathed the contact lenses. “It’s a gripping story, but I am not a psychic who can help you.”

  “You know the funniest thing about it all? My fruitcake had it all right, everything. We never gave her credit. She didn’t want any, as a matter of fact. And the body parts showed up as she predicted. We followed the uncle delivering the last two of his morbid messes before taking off on a flight. But the strangest part of it all is, my fruitcake from Chicago was lousy at gambling. You’d think she could psych that out, too, wouldn’t you? Anyway, the whole situation was treated like an oddity and an embarrassment best forgotten, and I soon was too, even though we got a signed confession. But I was so bowled over by it—I was the only one, remember, to actually hear the child speak through this woman from Chicago—I couldn’t leave well enough alone.”

  “That stuff can be faked, Lieutenant. I don’t see how holding something that a dead person has worn can connect you to them—or sitting around in an orange grove holding hands, either.”

  “I have come to believe that sometimes some aspect, that I don’t pretend to be able to identify, of a dead person lingers behind and sometimes on or near personal effects and that some people can form a link with it somehow.”

  The atmosphere in the Vegas P.D. had soon convinced him to begin hunting a job elsewhere. The Beverly Hills Police Department was a great deal more tolerant of the inexplicable. “Not that I’m encouraged to pursue investigations in this manner, but as long as I get results, my methods are tolerated. I just don’t believe in closing off any possible avenue when tracking down a murderer.”

  “And you’re right, he’s a kook,” Detective Gordon said behind them, “but he gets those results in spite of himself.”

  14

  Mary Ann Leffler’s clothes still hung in a corner of the walk-in closet over her shoes, her empty suitcases on the floor in another corner. Two drawers in one dresser were half-full of things that didn’t hang. A laptop computer sat open on a bedside table. Makeup and toiletries were scattered sparsely across a bathroom the size of Charlie’s bedroom.

  Mary Ann’s presence hadn’t made much of a dent in all this space. Neither did her absence. Charlie obediently ran her fingers over the terry-cloth robe hanging behind the bathroom door, parted the clothes on the hangers—mostly blue jeans, sweats, sundresses, and informal cotton knits. She picked up a shoe. “So is she dead or what?”

  “You’re supposed to tell me,” Detective Gordon said as she passed him on her way to the balcony.

  “I’m not getting a feeling either way. I don’t think I’d know it if I did.” And I don’t like pawing through other peoples’ things. It’s sad.

  “I heard you up in the orange grove.” Besides a bull neck and a smirk, Detective Gordon had freckles, lots of freckles. “‘Touch my things,’ you said.”

  There had to be an explanation for that, too. She just couldn’t think of one. Charlie didn’t believe in psychics, but if there were such a thing a person wouldn’t reach the ripe old age of thirty-one before knowing she was one.

  If I was psychic—whatever that is—I’d know where Libby was last Friday night and how she feels about Jesus.

  The wind was growing stronger and seemed to blow sound as well as sand in circles. For instance, she could hear the wind chimes on the deck above and behind her, but not the voices of the two men on the beach in front of and slightly below her.

  Keegan Monroe and David Dalrymple stood in that peculiarly male pose of discreet discomfort—hands deep in pants pockets, eyes glued to their shoes, rocking back and forth, shrugging with their elbows. Less cerebral types would probably be spitting, as well.

  If something had happened to Mary Ann
by the same hand that did in Gloria, the only people that Charlie knew who were even acquainted with both of them were herself, Keegan, Richard Morse, and Roger Tuschman. But their common connections to weird types could be infinite. Or Mary Ann could have seen who killed Gloria and been a threat. Anybody who thought Charlie had some kind of pipeline to dead or missing people or any innate expertise in matters of murder simply did not know Charlie Greene. She grinned, remembering her daughter and best friend going into hysterics at the very idea last Saturday night, and heard herself tell Detective Gordon, “She’s in her car.”

  “Who, the Leffler woman?”

  “What?”

  But he yelled to Dalrymple, “She says she’s in the rental car.”

  The homicide detective and the screenwriter hurried across the scuttling sand. The wind chimes went bonkers.

  Oh that’s just great, Greene, now what are you going to do, put on a turban and buy a crystal ball? How about some tarot cards?

  “Where?”

  Dalrymple’s sharpness surprised her into saying, “Underwater somewhere. Maybe somewhere not too far.”

  He drove her up and down the coastal highway, into and out of every beachfront and access road and even some driveways before he gave up and let Keegan drive her back to the agency.

  “How do you know she’s in her car underwater?” Keegan asked.

  “I don’t. I don’t even know why I said that. It’s like I’m trying to get out of work, for God’s sake.” Charlie checked her watch and groaned. “You know what I think? I think I’m the only sane person left in this world. I think I’m letting you all talk me into something here. I think you’re right about the ulcer.”

  “You know what I think? I think there’s a great story in Lieutenant David Dalrymple.”

  “He told you about Deborah Ann and the Chicago fruitcake, right?”

  “Charlie, think of it—a homicide detective sympathetic to the paranormal arts. Sounds like a great concept for a TV series to me.”