Death of the Office Witch

  “I had to meet a friend. It has nothing to do with Gloria or the agency or any of this, I swear.”

  “A friend? Larry, I thought you and Stew were solid.” Stewart Claypool was Larry’s significant other.

  Color flowed back into her assistant’s complexion. Anger pushed him to his feet. God he was something—sort of a combination Superman and Mitch Hilsten, Charlie’s favorite superstar. “Stew and I are solid, Charlie. Just because you don’t need anyone doesn’t mean you know shit about relationships or that just because I meet someone it has to be about sex.”

  He slammed the door on his way out and, having propped her feet on the coffee table in front of the couch, she stared at the run in her hose as it zipped up from a big toenail to a knee. She stared at the lavender and beige dried arrangement in the dark blue pot in the center of the coffee table. When did that arrive? She honestly couldn’t remember seeing it before. Hadn’t there been something similar but with yellow in it? Irma must see to these things, too. Charlie watched the palm fronds droop outside the wall of window. They reminded her of droopy Doug Esterhazie.

  What did he mean she didn’t need anyone or know anything about relationships or sex? Why did life have to get so damn complicated just when it was getting so good? Charlie slipped out of her ruined hose and into one of the spare pairs she kept in a lower drawer.

  Besides being an irreplaceable assistant, Larry Mann was an irreplaceable friend. “Know why you like him so much, don’t you?” Richard Morse had said to Charlie no more than a month ago. “Because he’s safe. You, lady, have a problem.”

  I do not have a problem.

  Charlie slipped back into her killer heels and marched out to the cubicle. “You think you’re so picked on,” she told her assistant. “You don’t have to go home to Stew and hear about cats who kill birds and two-hundred-dollar Rollerblades and sororities, huh?”

  “Charlie?”

  “You get me Keegan Monroe on the line and no more bullshit, understand? And after that be ready to plug back into Alpine Tunnel.”

  “And where are you off to?”

  “If the good Lieutenant Dalrymple is not lurking nearby, I’m off to beard the Vance about our little problem. But the deal is, my friend, that we mix business with snooping or you are back on your own. Right?”

  “Right.” He flashed her that smile. His parents must still be paying off the orthodontist.

  Which reminded Charlie that this weekend when she wasn’t doing all the other chores she’d promised fate—she’d better pay the bills. Was it any wonder she didn’t look forward to weekends?

  The Vance—Irma Vance, harridan of the paychecks and the paper clips, and scourge of Las Vegas—was appropriately paper thin with skin dried to parchment, her hair so long dyed that the expected glassy auburn had leaked to pink-tinted puffs resembling rice noodles. But her eyes soon laid to rest any illusion that she might be old-lady fodder for con artists.

  “Charlie,” she grimaced, her capped teeth too large for a shrinking face, “how’re the adorable Libby and her harried mother surviving since last we spoke?”

  People of Charlie’s generation might have said something like, “Yo, Charlie, how’re you and the kid doing these days?”

  Charlie countered with, “Irma, I’m dying to hear all about Vegas. Did you win? Why are you back so early?”

  “Yes, I won. That’s why I’m back so early. Good morning, Congdon and Morse Representation. May I ask who’s calling, please? Oh yes, Mr. Monroe, she’s right here.” Irma Vance flashed her caps again, this time with a wink. “It’s for you, dear.”

  Larry, it turned out, had not located Keegan. He was calling from across the street on his own initiative. He said he needed to meet for a talk and would reveal little more over the agency line than that he meant right away.

  They met in the lobby of the Beverly Pavilion, and Mary Ann Leffler was with him.

  “Were you followed?” Mary Ann whispered.

  “Hell, anything’s possible now that there’s been a murder at the agency. You two decide to work together? Why all the secrecy?”

  “Let’s take a walk,” Keegan said and took her arm.

  “In these shoes?” But Charlie found herself tugged along between the two writers to the end of a hall and out a service door, past a dumpster in which a man rummaged for food or aluminum.

  Charlie would never get over how quickly Wilshire could end once you turned onto a side street. Richard Morse maintained that a Wilshire address was money in the bank. It was a wide, sun-drenched street with palms and flowers and imposing structures of glass and concrete and marble—elegantly proportioned, clean and bright compared to New York City standards—as if to announce that here there was so much money they didn’t need to build too high.

  But turn off Wilshire and you could be in a residential neighborhood in less than a block, sometimes with a buffer of small apartment buildings and sometimes with no buffer at all. Charlie couldn’t help but notice how much better kept the tiny front lawns looked here than did hers in Long Beach.

  “You realize you guys are being pretty silly. The Beverly Hills P.D. is not the gestapo. So out with it.”

  Mary Ann coughed something up from her knees and lit a cigarette while she walked. “We’ll cooperate on the screenplay and have it in, in less than a week if you’ll help us.”

  Charlie pulled them all to a stop. “You two have tied up development, damn near killing off the project because of scheduling problems, which you knew about.… Last time I saw you guys you were barely speaking, and now you’re going to cooperate?”

  “Before we met you at the Polo Lounge,” Keegan stared at the pointy toe of his cowboy boot, “Well, we’d been to the agency first.”

  “Same morning that secretary was killed,” Mary Ann added needlessly. She was wearing blue jeans, a T-shirt, and running shoes. The letters on the front of her shirt read, “Grandmother” surrounded by four arrows, pointing up, down, right, left. Charlie’s own grandmother had worn polyester pantsuits, and her great grandmother wore dresses gathered big at the middle that needed ironing.

  “What are you two worried about? Mary Ann, you didn’t even know Gloria. And, Keegan, about all you ever knew of her was to have her buzz you into the office. I realize writers are paranoid, but I really don’t have time for this. I hate to disillusion either of you, but yours is not my only project.”

  Keegan fronted the pointy toes of his boots up against the toes of her pumps. Since Charlie’s heels were higher than his, he was no more than a few inches taller, and she could feel the warm breath of his sigh tickle her forehead. “Charlie, did you ever really read Shadowscapes?”

  “I read so much, I can’t remember all the details of everything forever—uh, it’s about witchcraft and a ranch and Indians, but very intense and literary and full of meaning.” And the film adaptation will probably be about men in mid-life crises with government agents breathing down their necks while they try to save beautiful heroines from something they’re too stupid to realize has put them in mortal danger. Keegan, I do not want to discuss this in front of the author, okay?

  “Witchcraft,” Keegan said. “Witchcraft.”

  “I knew Gloria Tuschman,” Mary Ann said.

  Charlie was beginning to look forward to the freeway and Libby.

  8

  Mary Ann Leffler had been a noted novelist as a young woman, hit a long dry spell, and reemerged, years later, with Shadowscapes.

  “The New York Times and the Rocky Mountain News said ‘Grandmother writes another book!’ You ever see, ‘Grandfather, Clive Cussler, writes another book’? ‘Tony Hillerman, grandfather, writes another book’?”

  Mary Ann had taken up a few other hobbies when her books stopped selling to publishers. One of them was alternative philosophies and a newsletter on that subject.

  “Well, I had to do something. Being a housewife can drive a sane woman crazy, and if you’ve been writing fiction very long, your brain’s too dead to be
good for much else.”

  “So how did you know our particular witch?” Charlie asked for the third time. She’d yet to meet an author who could come out with a straight answer. They always had to fill in the backstory.

  “She’d been a fan of mine for years, and we’d corresponded.” Mary Ann stared down at Charlie with a sideways slant as if one eye saw a lot better than the other. “It may take a year, but I always answer my readers’ letters personally, and just because I wasn’t selling to publishers didn’t mean my readers had given up hope.”

  “About Gloria?”

  “She offered to put the newsletter on a computer, print out a master with columns and everything. Hell, before Shadowscapes I couldn’t even afford a computer. Her husband owned a print shop and had a fancy system that did mailing labels. They sort of took over publishing the thing. Made it a lot easier for me. All I had to do was write my part of it and edit the stuff that came in, send it on to Gloria and Roger Tuschman, and forget about it.”

  “So you’d talked to her on the phone and written her. Had you ever met her before the morning of the Universal breakfast that I just learned, by the way, didn’t take more than a half hour?”

  “I’d been out here doing research for Shadowscapes, stayed with Gloria and Roger.”

  “Why? It takes place in Montana.”

  “Well, there’s lots more good stuff on witchcraft here.”

  “Mary Ann, get to the point,” Keegan said, “Charlie’s attention span is atrociously short.”

  “The point is I didn’t know any witches in Montana, and the Tuschmans offered to help me. Simple as that.”

  “That’s why you’re worried about becoming involved in Gloria’s murder?”

  “No, Charlie,” Keegan spoke through a grimace of impatience, “Shadowscapes was starting to make some money.”

  “And damned little of it trickling down to the author,” Mary Ann stomped on a cigarette butt. “Try to tell that to Gloria and Roger.”

  “But the Tuschmans wanted a piece of it,” Keegan added.

  “Oh-oh,” Charlie said.

  “Right,” Keegan said.

  “Shit.” Mary Ann Leffler lit another cigarette.

  That evening, sweeping in on the 405 and getting off on Seventh, Charlie stopped at Ralph’s for makings for BLTs. There was a white Porsche sitting in front of her house that she figured was visiting at a neighbor’s until she’d parked in her courtyard slot and reached the top step to her sunken patio.

  It wasn’t dark yet, but a candle flame fluttered in an elegant cut-glass thing Charlie had never seen before, sitting on a tablecloth she’d never seen before, either. It covered the perpetually dirtied glass top of her picnic table. There were matching cloth napkins folded into fluted shapes on china she’d kept locked in a glass cupboard. The table was set for two.

  Never mind that, who’s the guy?

  A man in a white dinner jacket stubbed a cigarette butt in one of Charlie’s flowering plants and stared at her, as if this were his house and she’d just walked in uninvited.

  “Hello?” Charlie asked. He did look familiar, yet she could swear she’d never seen him before.

  He had one foot up on the edge of a planter set into a low concrete wall, an elbow resting on the raised knee, looking over his shoulder at her. He stepped back and straightened, his eyes moving from her shoes to her face. “You can’t be Libby’s mother.”

  Libby strikes again. Jesus, now what?

  A slow smile replaced the shock on his face. “You weren’t expecting me, were you?”

  Before Charlie could answer, Libby rushed through the kitchen door to grab the grocery bag, briefcase, and purse from her arms. “Dinner’s almost ready, Mom. Don’t you want to change into something more comfortable?”

  Like what, shorts and a T-shirt? “Libby, what’s going on?”

  The man who’d apparently come to dinner laughed behind dark-rimmed glasses. He had dark hair and graying sideburns like Richard Morse. Add the dinner jacket, and he looked like an ad for Dewars. “Those kids are up to something. I thought I was the only one not in on it. I’m Ed Esterhazie.”

  “You’re droop … I mean you’re Doug’s dad?” She finally walked down the three steps to her own patio to shake his hand. “You don’t look like an Ed.”

  But he did look a little like droopy Doug, who appeared from nowhere with a pewter tray Charlie had last seen hanging on her dining room wall. It held two drink glasses, each with an ice cube and a lemon slice floating on amber liquid. The kid wore a sport jacket over dirty shorts and one of her dirty dish towels over his arm. “Charlie, I’d like you to meet my father.”

  “Doug, who’s doing the cooking?”

  “Libby.”

  “Oh God.” Charlie grabbed a glass.

  When Doug was gone, his father sat in a chair, still grinning. Charlie collapsed on a chaise, took a slug of scotch and soda, and had a good laugh herself. “How did you get roped into this, Ed?”

  “I’m still not sure. I was made to feel I would be a cad, a subhuman, if I did not accept your dinner invitation. You were presumably prepared to jump off the Queen’s Way Bridge if I did not grant your wish to meet me. Libby is very persuasive. The kids painted you as a poor lonely heart adrift in the world who wanted nothing more than to spend the day preparing me a gourmet meal. Instead, I arrive and find you not even home from work yet.”

  Yeah, well maybe so, but don’t you think the dinner jacket’s a little much, Ed? “Every night I come home to a new surprise. All I can tell you is that whatever’s going on has something to do with Rollerblades or cheerleading or high school sororities or all of the above and that your dinner will be unique.”

  “Now that you mention it,” he said when the feast was set before them. “I don’t believe I have ever had Dom Perignon with macaroni and cheese before.”

  “There was a bottle left over from a party we had last night.” She added quickly, in case he thought Libby was right and she really did like to cook, “Sort of a potluck with the neighbors … to celebrate.” Then, of course, she had to go into her work and the agency and the Alpine Tunnel project and the murder—wishing all the while she hadn’t started this in the first place.

  But Ed Esterhazie was flatteringly attentive. All Charlie knew about him was that he and his ex had split the children, Ed taking Doug and she taking a daughter. The ex had remarried and lived in Florida and Ed and Doug lived with a housekeeper in a house, worthy of Bel Air, a few blocks away. He traveled extensively, mostly for pleasure as far as she could tell. Anyway, he was not the macaroni and cheese type.

  She broke off finally with, “You know, actually you’re lucky? I make Libby cook dinner one night a week, and it’s almost always beanie wienies.”

  “With ketchup?”

  “Of course with ketchup. You can’t eat beanie wienies without ketchup. But I do think we might be wise to make our own coffee.”

  When they carried their dirty dishes inside, the kids were in with the TV and didn’t even notice.

  “What’s that smell?” Ed asked.

  “Just rotten bananas,” Charlie assured him.

  “Don’t you ever pull a trick like that again,” Charlie rounded on her daughter when they were alone. “I’ll make my own social arrangements, thank you.” God, my life’s a sitcom.

  “No you won’t. You don’t ever go out with guys. All you do is work and complain that I cost too much money. Do you know that Doug’s father belongs to the yacht club?”

  “I am not the yacht club type, and I like my work, Libby.”

  “Here I go to all that trouble and planning. I was just thinking of you. But do you appreciate it? Noooo.”

  “Yeah, well you’ll notice who’s doing the dishes.” Charlie straightened from bending down in front of the dishwasher, wanting to take back that last remark but knowing it was too late. You didn’t get a second chance with Libby Greene. Charlie realized again and with that same little shock that Libby was taller t
han she was.

  By the time she reached the office the next morning, Charlie was still drained from the verbal knock-down-drag-out she and Libby had had the night before and the icy stone-cold silence of mutually hurt feelings instead of breakfast.

  Libby had finally come up with the ultimate weapon … well no, that would have been, “Guess what, Mom, I’m pregnant.” What she had come up with was a new euphemism for Charlie, “UM.” It stood for unwed mother.

  Charlie’s mood was foul. Maurice Lavender was fortunate not to share the elevator and his friendliness with her on this morning, and Lieutenant Dalrymple was lucky he wasn’t lurking outside the public door with a breakfast invitation. There were already five or six manila envelopes leaning against the door, and an intense young man with a juvenile mustache and sparsely bristled chin lurking near the public restrooms at the end of the hall. He did not look like a reporter.

  He started toward her as she pressed the buzzer. She was frantically searching her purse for the card that would gain her entrance when the Vance asked who was there.

  “It’s Charlie, and I’m being followed.” The latch clicked open and she slipped inside but then couldn’t close the door behind her because there was a boot in it. Charlie shrugged an apology to Irma and raced to the back corridor to her office while the formidable executive secretary, sounding as cold as Libby, asked the hopeful if he had an appointment.

  Charlie slammed the door to the hall and leaned against Larry’s emergency sport coat.

  He gave her his long-suffering glance and reached into a lower cupboard beside his chair. “If it’s a Maalox moment, I just happen to have a spare fifth.”

  “Now she’s trying to marry me off.”

  “Libby.”

  “Libby. To the yacht club, no less.”

  He knew her moods well enough to let her get halfway through her calls and some of her mail before he slipped into her office. “So, did you learn anything yesterday? Why did Irma come back early?”