Killer Commute

  “Got me, kid. I’ll ask around if the industry knows anything they’ll tell an agency who’s files are being searched by the Feds. Charlie, you be careful, hear?”

  “Okay, but I have one more question.”

  “Shoot.”

  If he only knew. “Richard, is Michael Congdon back in his office?”

  “Let me give you some advice, Charlie.” He tipped back his giant chair so he could put his little feet up on his gargantuan desk and did something with his eyes that demanded a mustache and a cigar. Sort of the Godfather meets Groucho. “You got enough trouble now. I know—God, do I know—how good you are at trouble, but trust me. Leave that one alone.”

  “That one what?”

  “That last question you asked me.”

  Almost back to her own office, Larry Mann, dwarfing his cubicle, stopped Charlie with another telephone and mouthed, “Your mother.”

  It wasn’t so much his message as his amusement that made Charlie want to lob a loaded file cabinet at him. Instead she grimaced an I’ll-get-even-and-you-will-suffer-boy look, reaching for his phone rather than going to her own in the plush digs next door.

  “Glad to know you’re not dead. You haven’t answered your e-mail so I had to call,” is how Edwina Greene answered Charlie’s, “Hello, Mom?”

  “You, as I remembered, wanted me to get e-mail. I got e-mail. Did you say ‘Mom’? How thoughtful. Well, it’s about time. But it’s too late.”

  If Evan Black, writer/producer/director, was a pathological troublemaker, Edwina Greene, professor/biologist/widow/mother/grandmother, was a pathological mystery. She thought Kenneth Starr was cool. And that was only the beginning.

  “Too late for what?” Oh please, Edwina, my trouble-quotient glass runneth over.

  “Just wanted to let you know, so you could explain it to my granddaughter.”

  How does she know when I’m the most vulnerable? “What now?”

  “Oh, ‘what now’? As if I’m the trouble in this so-called family.”

  “Edwina, please, I know you’re busy, but—” Over the phone Edwina Greene hit Charlie up the side of the head. At her expression, Larry grabbed the receiver and started talking to Charlie’s mother and Libby’s grandmother and Charlie couldn’t even hear the crickets in her ears. She sat in the visitor’s chair crowded into the almost nonexistent space between the door and this towering drop-leaf file cabinet whose doors would not close even when hell froze over.

  When he finally hung up, Charlie was crying. He wrote out a note, walked around his computer ledge—he was even bigger when she was helpless and handicapped—and handed her the note. “Your mom has a boyfriend. She thought you should know.”

  CHAPTER 23

  DAVID DALRYMPLE ROSE to meet Charlie when the Sharon Stone lookalike hostess showed her to his table. “You haven’t changed a bit.”

  He had. The semicircle of hair cupping his baldness had shrunk to a ring around the edges and grayed, the lines in his face multiplied and deepened. His jowls sagged. But the biggest difference was the absence of eyeglasses.

  He smiled at her surprise and lost twenty years. “Laser surgery. It’s miraculous. I still need reading glasses for fine print and if I become too studious. But it’s been a wondrous improvement, and my sinus condition, allergy, whatever disappeared with the eyeglasses constricting my nose. How about you? I notice you’re not wearing those stiletto heels.”

  “Out of fashion except with spaghetti straps.” Fashion designers from the East Coast and their hauteur masters from Europe still had their models wear them down the ramp and they were big in sex sitcoms, but clumpy squares had caught on and insisted on staying in. Besides, it was the frigging pantyhose that drove Charlie nuts.

  Larry had chased Charlie through the hall and then the lobby, catching her at the elevator just as her hearing returned. She saw him see her recoil when it hit her up the side of the head.

  “I have a luncheon appointment,” she’d told her secretary. “I’ll see you back in Long Beach.”

  “Charlie, you can’t just wander around on your own never knowing when it’s going to happen again.”

  “Well, maybe I’m going to have to. Maybe I’m not going to let it louse up my life. Hell, I’m probably going to end up in prison for a murder I didn’t commit anyway. I don’t have as much to lose as you think.” Besides, my mother has a boyfriend.

  “Hi, I’m Tom.” The Tom Hanks lookalike handed them menus and smiled way down at them. “I’ll be your server today. Can I bring you something to drink while you decide on your order?”

  Charlie realized she was turning her head toward the speaker because only one ear was hearing. She couldn’t remember if that was the ear hit up the side of or not. Edwina had been a widow since Charlie was sixteen and pregnant with Libby. She had a profession and menopause. What could she want with a boyfriend?

  Without even consulting Charlie, David Dalrymple ordered a bottle of Beaujolais.

  “I’m off duty,” he answered her blink. Soft-spoken, gentle, thoughtful, deliberate, he reminded Charlie more of a kindly professor than a cop. Made you want to confide in him, trust him.

  Careful, Charlie.

  I know.

  Why did she even come once she knew he was in on the search of the office? Because she wanted to get away from the office and her secretary’s pity. Because even though the man across the table was no longer a disinterested party, she might learn something she needed to know. Because he was so different from Detective J. S. Amuller. Because Edwina had a boyfriend? “I just remembered. Didn’t I read somewhere that you’d retired?”

  “I have, but I do part-time consulting. My wife couldn’t stand my pacing the house all day.” The skin crinkled around his eyes with the self-deprecating smile, but the watchful Dalrymple watched her from within those eyes—so small now without the bifocals.

  The wine arrived for his approval and Tom Hanks poured them each a glass. Charlie’s companion told her, “I remembered your preference for red in the days when white wine was so politically correct.”

  They both ordered the salad special that came with soup and hot rolls. David Dalrymple raised his glass. “To our meeting once again. Under less stressful circumstances this time, I hope. I’ve thought of you often.”

  They talked of their daughters and his granddaughter, circling the important stuff for now. Even the bus girl/water pourer/coffee refiller was an almost dead ringer for Deena Gotmor. Makeup, disguise, and impersonation had made giant strides since last Charlie’d noticed. You put the real Mel Gibson down there behind the bar with the bartender and you could probably tell the difference, but right now that guy looked and acted and smirked like Mel Gibson. And was that Charlton Heston or a plant at the table by the window?

  The Celebrity Pit only recently opened just off Wilshire. Intended to lure tourists, it had become a campy destination for real Hollywood celebrities to appear and confound the commoners. It was an easy walk from the agency and Charlie’d been been here once before. The bar formed the center of the pit part surrounded by an expanse of stage where the likes of the Beatles, Liberace, Elvis, and the Herbicides cavorted for the diners in the evenings. A walkway under the pit allowed the drink waiters access to Mel or whoever was bartending that night—Arnold Schwarzenegger, the last time Charlie was here—without walking across the stage when the fake performers performed.

  The people might be fake but the food was excellent: The salad special today was hot grilled portobello mushroom strips on a bed of icy lettuce leaves with grilled red, yellow, and orange peppers; the soup a creamy puree of squash spiced, according to Tom Hanks, with nutmeg and tumeric. The crusty french rolls steamed when you split them to spread whipped butter.

  A woman appeared suddenly at their table and pointed at Charlie. “Wait, don’t tell me—”

  “What?”

  “I know who you are. The name just won’t—Jesus, I took my gingko this morning, too. It’ll come to me. But then I won’t know if you??
?re the real one or not, will I?”

  Charlie’s bad ear ticked, buzzed, hurt, and then opened up for business. “I’m the fake.”

  “The fake who? Don’t tell me. I’m so close. It just pisses me off when this happens.” She walked to a table with several other women seated about a quarter of the way around this level of the graduated rings that surrounded the pit, each higher than the one below.

  “Is it just me or is—”

  “The world’s getting crazier by the minute,” Dalrymple finished for her, nodding, and refilled their glasses before Tom could do it for him.

  “This is wonderful. I didn’t realize how hungry I was.”

  “My pleasure. Like I said, it’s good to see you again. And see you looking so well. I pulled you up on the computer the other day. A lot has happened to you since last we met.”

  Charlie couldn’t remember the last time she’d cleaned up her plate unless it was eggs. But the salad and the soup and the bread disappeared as she told him about Jeremy Fiedler. Hell, he’d probably only seen Amuller’s take on his computer. They had rich, strong coffee with the last of the wine. He ordered a chocolate dessert of some kind she refused even a bite of.

  “It’s interesting that so much of your life is on the computer, when your deceased neighbor isn’t there at all.”

  “Jeremy’s disappearance in cyberspace is more than interesting, it’s impossible.”

  “I don’t know, Charlie, I’m beginning to think nothing’s impossible these days. You can’t believe the squads of people it took to explain to me how to call you up on that goddamned computer.”

  “Just click CA for criminal activity at the top of your screen.”

  “You’re computer literate on the law-enforcement channel or whatever?”

  Charlie had to laugh at the helpless cast of his expression. She feared him but she liked him. She relented finally and explained Officer Mason explaining the procedure to Amuller. “He thinks because of my ‘history’ that I run around convincing law enforcement wherever I go that somebody else committed my murders. I have a life. A busy one. What he’s talking about takes a cunning and time for planning I don’t have. But he’s so busy building a case against me he’s not looking for the murderer.”

  “You have to admit that your encounters with death and destruction are bound to raise suspicions.”

  “Yeah, but look at Kinsey Millhone and V. I. Warshawski and—”

  “They are fictional creatures, Charlie.”

  “Oh, well, okay but—”

  “You”—the lady with the pointy finger was back in Charlie’s face—“are Mitch Hilsten’s fake girlfriend. I can’t remember your name, but I know who you are. God, I feel so much better. I thought I was going crazy.” She and her friends left the Celebrity Pit with a wave and a smile. They were all different ages, all appeared related and relieved.

  Charlie and Dalrymple watched them leave, looked at each other, and then into space, trying to remember what they’d been talking about.

  Dalrymple recovered first. “That’s another thing, your notoriety. The police are going to look at that when your name pops up on the computer repeatedly—and Mitch Hilsten is not small potatoes.”

  * * *

  Charlie was back on the 405 regretting all the wine and coffee. This was one long commute, and you get off on an off-ramp this close to rush hour—you could disappear in cyberspace, even.

  We have an idea here.

  No, we don’t. We have a bladder here.

  Put all this day together, all the things we’ve heard—the answer to Jeremy’s murder is there. Somewhere.

  It was at this point that Charlemagne Catherine Greene realized she was hearing her stupid inner voice and that was all. No crickets in her ears. No tickling. No NPR on the radio. No traffic on the 405.

  She began watching traffic and the speedometer. Jeremy Fiedler might be able to beat the odds out here in the real world but Charlie, with this constant reminder of the end of her life as she wanted to live with it, did not feel so lucky. Not that being murdered was lucky, but her mysterious neighbor had gotten away with the impossible for years apparently.

  The answer’s there. Somewhere. In your last thought.

  Now stop that.

  Charlie didn’t hear the siren—just noticed suddenly the flashing lights coming up behind her.

  “Excuse me, officer, but I can’t hear you. I’m handicapped.”

  “I don’t see that on your license.”

  “I’m new at this. I didn’t know you had to put it on your license.” (Was it under height, weight, hair color, eye color? Probably under CA for criminal activity.)

  But by the time Charlie had slowed enough to pull off onto the no-drive lane, the CHIPY had roared past her. Now she could hear her heart pounding blood in both ears. But that was all.

  CHAPTER 24

  CHARLIE, FANTASIZING ABOUT all the horrible things that would happen to her in prison if she couldn’t hear, drove the speed limit, pissing off the drivers behind her. And she’d thought the hospital was a scary place under those conditions. She sat so straight and tight her fingers and arms tingled. Funny how different her mood was now, driving back home, from her sunny attitude on the way up the 405 this morning.

  David Dalrymple had promised he’d do what he could to find ways for her to clear herself. “The best thing would be to remember some clue about Mr. Fiedler that would explain how he disappeared from computers, figure out how he could operate in the real world that way, talk to your neighbors again, and to Libby, to see if they can come up with details they’ve forgotten about him. And maybe trust your psychic instincts, listen to them. You may know more about all this than you realize. I’ll keep in touch.”

  And about the investigation of the agency and her files. “Evan Black is in serious trouble with the federal government, Charlie, and has some very unsavory and questionable friends. Your agency has been pulled into the mess and, I’m afraid, your boyfriend, too.”

  “Mitch Hilsten is just a friend.” Who, damn him, knows how to work my monthly clock. “And film making is big bucks. You know as well as I do that where there’re big bucks, there’re questionable and unsavory people. And Evan’s always been in trouble with the government and the courts. They’re making him famous. You can’t tell me this wasn’t also a good excuse to look into Jeremy Fiedler’s cyber disappearance as well. Let’s face it, if you can erase your electronic identity, all government and business is at risk, big risk. The opportunities for attaining great wealth illegally is mind-boggling.”

  Dalrymple had just crinkled his eyes and watched her.

  Maybe they had separate wings in prison for handicapped people. Maybe Edwina came up with this boyfriend idea because Charlie hadn’t called her in a while. Maybe there was no boyfriend. Maybe Charlie’s mom just wanted some attention. Edwina was a biology professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and certainly busy enough. Was the boyfriend another professor?

  Could Charlie or her neighbors or Libby really know something they’d forgotten? Charlie’s undependable hearing returned to one ear with a gurgle when she drove the gray Toyota safely into her disabled fortress at last. There truly was no place like home, even if portions of it had been blown up. By the time she’d changed back into comfortable clothes, the other ear had come on line.

  * * *

  Mrs. Beesom, Maggie, Libby, and Charlie sat in the breakfast nook in Charlie’s kitchen and concentrated. The formal dining room table was too formal for the tight neighborhood grouping, even now when you could see it. Larry was out picking up Italian carryout.

  “Maybe if we hold hands and close our eyes,” Libby suggested.

  Everyone looked at the kid like she was nuts, but reached across the table and joined hands anyway.

  “Mom, you’re peeking. Now let’s repeat ‘Jeremy Fiedler’ a lot of times and then be quiet for a while. See what happens.”

  “Where do you get this stuff?” Charlie asked her daugh
ter.

  “Watched Rudy Ferris this afternoon after school. He had two whole segments on concentrating and remembering buried memories.”

  “I thought you thought he was gross.”

  “Gross grows on you. Now get with the frame here.”

  They repeated ‘Jeremy Fiedler’ a lot of times and then were silent for a while.

  Gross grows on you? Gross.

  Shut up and concentrate. Jeremy, you out there?

  “Does this ‘marinara’ sauce have hamburger in it? I like meat sauce on my spaghetti.”

  “Jeremy?”

  “Mom, did he speak to you?”

  “Didn’t anybody else hear it? He said he didn’t like marinara sauce on his spaghetti if it didn’t have hamburger in it.”

  “Mom, Jeremy ate pasta, not spaghetti.”

  “Charlie, he never ate hamburger. A hundred percent no-fat ground sirloin of buffalo once or twice a year, maybe, but that doesn’t sound like Jeremy at all. That sounds like—”

  “Sounds like me, because I said it. I mean, I thought it.” Betty looked frightened. “I didn’t know I said it.”

  “You didn’t,” Maggie and Libby said almost in unison.

  Everybody stared at Charlie now, everybody except Tuxedo on top of the fridge, who began washing the Stinky Slimy Salmon Supper Stuff off his whiskers. At least the cat had some sense.

  “Hey, we came up with something we didn’t know on Jeremy anyway,” Libby said. “I didn’t know buffalo grew a hundred percent no-fat sirloin anything. Let’s try again. And, Mom, if you can pick up on Mrs. Beesom’s thought, what else could be out there?”

  Yeah, like your grandmother’s boyfriend. But Charlie joined back into the ritual.

  “Grandma’s got a boyfriend? She’s too old. She’s a grandma.”

  Now everybody was looking at Libby. Everybody but Charlie, who as a mother did not like the idea of the kid picking up on her thoughts.

  “Edwina has a boyfriend?” Maggie said. “When did this happen?”

  “I don’t know. It just popped into my head,” Libby said.

  They tried again. And just as Larry Mann walked in the door with Mrs. Beesom’s least-favorite spaghetti sauce, Jeremy spoke to them all, and it freaked Tuxedo of the salmon breath right off the refrigerator and onto the middle of the table.