Killer Commute

  CHAPTER 21

  OFFICER MASON ARRIVED while they were eating breakfast. She thought the idea of a memorial service for Jeremy was a good one. “Be interesting to see if anybody shows up. I’ll see if I can’t pull some strings and get notification of it in the morning’s P-T.”

  “He must have known somebody outside these walls. I’ll post a sign on the wall out front. Maybe one on the back wall, too. Hold it tomorrow down at the beach walk.”

  “That’s a little soon to get a minister lined up, isn’t it?”

  “Larry can officiate. He’s an actor. Can’t you, Larry? Betty and Maggie and I’ll write you a script.”

  Right now Larry looked more like a handsome derelict in need of a shower and a shave. But he set down his bowl of rice with cinnamon, sugar, and milk, turned his palms toward the ceiling, and shrugged at Officer Mary Maggie.

  She shrugged back. “No law against it, I guess.”

  Charlie had poured the broth off the rest of the Mamas’ chicken soup to heat separately in a cup in the microwave and poached an egg on top of the chicken and noodles. Still made her thirsty, but she felt better. Betty and Maggie had gone home to breakfast and Maggie was driving off to work late when Officer Mason and Charlie stepped out onto the patio. Charlie described the recent attack of the dog-protection folks and Larry’s following a shadow in the darkened courtyard just before that.

  “Without police backup, those home-guard things are a rip-off. And house burglaries are not top priority at the Long Beach PD, but we still get there before most private security agencies. Was this shadow the mysterious woman in the long coat you keep telling us about?”

  “Larry swears it was a man. And he’d been inside Jeremy’s bombed house.”

  “So why are you in such a hurry to have a memorial service?”

  “I have the gut feeling the longer I’m the only suspect, the deeper the shit I’m standing in. Betty told me about talking to Amuller yesterday.”

  “Your gut has good instincts. You’re playing games with us and the doctors about your hearing. And you have Mitch Hilsten. And you just spent the night with your hunk secretary. You don’t come off exactly like Snow White, you know.”

  “What I know is Amuller’s after me. But I thought you had some sense of fairness. You’re beginning to sound like Kenneth Starr, too.”

  Officer Mason flinched as if she’d been slapped. “That’s the nastiest—how—don’t you ever compare me to that—cops have feelings, too.”

  Officer Mason, in a huff, passed Detective Amuller as she and her car roared out of the wide-open-ended compound. And, of course, J. S. was sitting in Charlie’s living room when her hunk secretary stepped out of the bathroom shaved and showered.

  “I’m going to run into the office. I’ll be back tonight and bring something to wear to the memorial service.”

  “Don’t wear robes,” Charlie told him.

  “Uh, right.” He paused on his way across the room to ponder that with a knitted brow, gave the homicide detective a nasty scowl, and left. He’d thoughtfully folded up his bedding and stashed it somewhere so it looked like he had slept upstairs last night and would again tonight.

  The homicide cop shook his head and sighed like a man twice his age. “You’re certainly a busy single mother, I’ll say that for you. Officer Mason told me about Mitch Hilsten.”

  What she didn’t tell you, because she didn’t know, was that I have been celibate and happy to be so since Las Vegas last October, which is probably more than you can say. What’s more, I plan to remain celibate the rest of my life. Besides, my gorgeous Larry’s gay. “Detective Amuller, this is not what it looks like. Larry worries about me being alone after murder and bombings and fire here.”

  “Oh, I’ll bet he does. Where do you stash your kid on nights like last night? She’s at a pretty dangerous age, you ask me.”

  “She spent the night with a friend.”

  “Your millionaire friend, the president of Esterhazie Cement? Or his son?”

  Charlie tightened up somewhere inside as she had with that unsympathetic doctor at the hospital. She could hear the defiance and resentment in her voice. “It’s concrete.”

  Careful Greene, you know how much trouble you can get into when you let yourself hate someone. He’s just doing his job.

  “He’s never been a deaf single mom.”

  “It’s hearing-impaired these days, lady. You seem to have this impairment intermittently, when it’s convenient. And I’m never going to be a mom. But I am a cop, lady, with a job to do. And I don’t care who you sleep with, I’m going to do that job. I assume, with all the trouble you’ve been in, you have a lawyer. But I suggest, since you aren’t charged with anything, you don’t call him in just yet. You noticed what happened to the Ramseys in Boulder. Since you were born and raised there, you must have sat home and watched the play-by-play on television.”

  “I work. I don’t sit home, I don’t watch daytime television.” Again, that dangerous growl in her already growly voice scared her. She knew she was highly vulnerable as a mere citizen and a woman, but her taxes helped pay this guy’s salary and he had no right to judge her on what he considered her profile or her noncriminal-related morals.

  Don’t get mad, Charlie. Get cool. And then get even.

  “So why would I want a lawyer? I didn’t kill Jeremy or blow up things around the compound.”

  Detective J. S. Amuller had been intimidated and insulted by Charlie and Maggie’s take on Jeremy’s house and their lack of involvement with him as a neighbor. But Maggie had that man, the married Mel, as an airtight alibi, and Betty Beesom, the only other known candidate for suspect, was a frail eighty-three-year-old. Charlie could think of only one other ploy to disrupt the cop’s headlong course toward the easy way out.

  “Somebody has been searching my computer files at work since you probably told them I was home watching daytime TV. I have the feeling the Feds are more interested in how someone could disappear electronically than—”

  “That’s their problem. Mine is who killed a man outside your back door. Even if his identity was erased from data files everywhere. They’ve got the computer problem. I’ve got the body. We all have a job to do, Ms. Greene.”

  His grin appeared more malevolent than silly now.

  That’s just your fear talking. Ever since your “intermittent” handicap you’ve felt more vulnerable. Charlie’s inner self was ever trying to impose sanity on insane situations, when it should be panicking.

  “And right now, you have everything going for you.” He settled more comfortably into her couch, his long legs bent at the knees like a grasshopper’s, and grinned with his lips together for the first time Charlie could remember seeing. They were going to have a nice long chat with no Maggie Stutzman to interrupt with talk about menopause. “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. And you’ve been involved in a lot of homicide cases.”

  “But in every one the killer was identified as someone else.”

  “The right people are not always brought to justice, but the wrong people always slip up some time. And I’m a patient man.”

  “That’s nice, but I’m still not following you.”

  “You had motive, a nubile daughter in contact with a predator. Mother nature teaches us that there is no more dangerous animal than a mother protecting her young. And when he dies, you get his cleaning lady. You had the trust of and ready access to the victim. Were at the scene of the crime. People are most often murdered by someone they know. Plus you had the victim’s blood on your sweatshirt. And you want to know the most damning thing against you? In all those investigations in the last three to four years of your highly questionable history, you were instrumental in solving many of those murder cases. No professional training for it, either, no education or experience in professional law enforcement. Lady, you stand out like a red light here, a sore thumb. What better way to escape a murder trial than to pin the murder on someone else? Plus, you exhibit no sorrow over th
e violent death of a man who was your neighbor, and according to your own words a valuable handyman and resource person in this woman’s commune. Anyone fits the profile, lady, it’s you.”

  It seemed everybody was looking for a profile these days—a way to group people. Millions and millions of individual people were too much even for computers, which could supposedly do math in the gadzillions squared, could sort out the individual intricacies of genetic codes—and even play chess. But people had to fit a profile—fit into a group to be understood. Used to be called type, and then category, and now profile.

  With the commercial use of information on the Internet, telemarketers could target individuals who fit a profile—who bought types of stocks, gave to types of charities. They probably knew which geezers used Viagra so they could target their sex mates with K-Y Jelly. Medical histories could be passed on to health insurers who wouldn’t want to deal with people who might actually get sick, let alone those who already were. Is this why Jeremy wanted to lose himself in cyberspace?

  CHAPTER 22

  CHARLIE SHOWERED AND dressed in a cream-colored pants suit, green blouse, matching scarf tying her hair back, emerald stud earrings, and knee-highs with green slings. She made up announcements for the memorial the next day and taped them on the front and back walls of the compound.

  Then, leaving a note for Libby and with her inner voice throwing a royal hissy fit, Charlie drove the gray Toyota out of the ruined gate and headed for Beverly Hills.

  After Detective J. S. had convinced her she possessed every known reason for killing Jeremy Fiedler, so why waste time looking for another killer, the hearing specialist’s nurse had called to remind her she needed to come in to determine if “appliances” could help with her problem. Apparently Charlie had made an appointment. Maybe they’d written her a note to that effect and she’d stuffed it in a pocket with the used Kleenex yesterday when Larry Mann had held her while she cried. Odd, the nurse didn’t seem surprised that she and Charlie were carrying on normally over the phone. She couldn’t remember the conversation now exactly. Maybe the nurse thought she was talking to Charlie’s caregiver. Modern life was one big disconnect.

  Anyway, after Amuller, that call from the Ear, Head, and Neck Clinic set off a growing rage Charlie wasn’t sure either she or her inner voice could control.

  I’m your common sense.

  “Oh, bugger off.”

  Charlie had either to take charge of something or lose her mind. So she took charge of the Toyota, and it felt good. What she would do was drop into the clinic and inform Dr. R. Rodney where he could stick his hearing aids. Then she’d drop into the agency, find out if there was anybody in the office next to hers and how come the authorities were allowed into her computer files. Then she’d go somewhere for a nice lunch.

  The wind blew in off the Pacific and made a hole in the smog that lasted from Inglewood to the Santa Monica Freeway, letting the sun shine through. Charlie rolled down her window and wished she’d learned how to whistle. The wind mussed her hair but she didn’t care. She even stuck her elbow out the window.

  The hours of her life she’d spent on the 405, and never once had she been pulled over. Jeremy could drive without car registration for a long time, without a driver’s license. But how could he get license plates for it—or them? You couldn’t always keep old plates covered with mud. Most of Southern California was covered with concrete.

  Speaking of which, another thing she could do, she decided now that she felt she had some control over her life, for the moment at least, was to further enlist the aid of Ed Esterhazie. The man was no fool. She needed to talk this out with someone like him. Who else could she turn to now? Bounce ideas off of?

  Several years ago when the office receptionist was murdered, Charlie had met David Dalrymple of the Beverly Hills PD. One day soon, if she had one, Charlie should get in touch with him. He thought she had psychic powers then, but he’d probably gotten over that. Yes, there were positive things Charlie could do and not just let her anger play into an inexperienced cop’s daydreams of an open-and-shut case.

  For once, Charlie’s inner common-sense voice remained silent. Did that mean the two Charlies agreed? Or that even her inner hearing had disappeared itself again, like Jeremy did his identity?

  Charlie listened to the wind and road noise and bleating of domesticated car horns and relaxed. Relaxed, sort of. This handicap threat at a gut level was almost worse than being accused of murder.

  * * *

  At the Ear, Head, and Neck Clinic Charlie was told that she’d been a bad girl by hiding the fact that her hearing loss was intermittent rather than total, that she’d wasted the valuable time of real important people who could have been dealing with her problem in a different way or dealing with someone who had total hearing loss.

  After Detective J. S. Amuller of the Long Beach PD, Charlie didn’t bat a guilty eyelash. She was kind of proud of herself. Did this mean a real live woman could outgrow guilt? Even one under suspicion in a murder investigation? Nah.

  Dr. R. Rodney looked in her ears again with the icy little light probe, coldly asked her about unusual sounds, tingling, itching, pain then sent her to a technician across the hall who played a succession of silly sounds through earphones and asked her to evaluate sharpness, volume, and the register of each one.

  What was it Art Granger had said about his brother who’d fallen off a tractor back in Iowa? His hearing came and went for a week, then was gone? “Deaf as a post the rest of his life.”

  * * *

  At Congdon & Morse Representation, Inc, no one bothered to conceal their surprise at seeing Charlie.

  “What the hell you doing back at the office dressed for work? You’re on vacation. Your next-door neighbor gets murdered, his house burned, somebody blew your gate in and you standing so close you’re deaf as a post half the time.” Richard Morse accosted her, and in the agency lobby on her way in before she’d even closed the door. He stood there blinking his bulging eyes for a moment and shrugged. “Guess maybe I wouldn’t wanna stay home either.”

  In his office (which was even more spacious than her’s—he had one of those mahogany Admiralty desks you could serve the President’s cabinet a seven-course dinner on—the smaller the man, the bigger the desk in good old Hollywood) Charlie accosted him back. “Richard, how could you allow the police access to my computer files without a court-ordered search warrant?” Or whatever the hell they’re supposed to have.

  “They had one, Charlie, and besides, it wasn’t the police.” He sat in the giant leather chair that accompanied the giant mahogany desk and disappeared. Why can’t guys ever see themselves from the vantage point of those on the other side of their desks? Just next door sat Larry Mann, who had to be six-two if he was an inch—he lifted weights so he could be a he-man in beer commercials—dwarfing the cubicle and narrow ledge that held his computer and all the filing cabinets and shelves spilling over with the written dreams of hopefuls neither he nor Charlie could get through in a decade. Sort of like Charlie’s dining room table before the magical Kate Gonzales walked through the door. Charlie wondered if Kate did offices.

  “Charlie, can’t you hear me now?”

  “What? Oh, no, I’m sorry, just thinking instead of listening. What did you say?”

  “I SAID—”

  “DON’T YELL—I mean, don’t yell. I had no idea how much crap deaf people have to put up with.”

  “YEAH, WELL, I mean, yeah, well, it ain’t that easy for the rest of us either, babe. But what I said was, because of that little problem Evan Black got us into last October with the invasion of Area 51 and all the loot looted from Vegas, the Feds are after our balls. They wrangled an investigative search warrant into the agency’s files and, working at the agency, you were meat, too, you know?”

  “How? Is the agency being charged with anything?”

  “No, but Evan is, and we represent him.”

  Evan Black, an incredibly talented producer/director/writer
and pathological troublemaker, was wrapping up the filming in Spain of a media baby starring Mitch Hilsten and Deena Gotmor, financed with money made in Vegas on the wager of the century. Suffice it to say he’d infiltrated the secret sanctity of the unacknowledged air base known as Area 51 and made the military almost as much of a laughing stock as Kenneth Starr did the U.S. Congress.

  “And they’re also interested in how Jeremy Fiedler could erase his identity by using cyberspace.”

  “That’s how I figure it, kid. But you don’t have any stuff on him at work here?”

  “No, but this rookie homicide critter is lining up merit badges by convincing himself and me that I killed Jeremy because I fit the profile while a murderer’s busy erasing his involvement with every passing minute—which is tightening the noose around my neck.”

  “Jeesh,” Charlie’s boss said, “even our boy Monroe in Folsom couldn’t write something this weird.”

  “I need your help, Richard.”

  “You got it.”

  “I do?” Usually he told her she was imagining things.

  “Babe, with your luck, even I may not be enough.” He sounded like he couldn’t believe that, either.

  “I wondered about contacting Lieutenant Dalrymple. Remember him?”

  “Remember? Charlie, he was one of the locals escorting the Feds in here to look over your files.”

  If Charlie weren’t already so suspicious she could play Mitch Hilsten’s stalker in Satan’s Sadists, his next-to-shoot film according to Variety—she would have decided it was a joke when Dalrymple agreed to a meet for lunch at the Celebrity Pit in an hour. She handed Richard back his phone. “That was too easy. Something big’s happening. Is it Jeremy or Evan Black or Detective J. S. Amuller?”