Killer Commute

  “Maggie, can I help you make coffee?” Charlie and her best friend went off to the house across the concrete courtyard, leaving Doug and Betty and the Grangers chomping merrily away. Forget Mrs. McDougal’s leftovers for a week.

  * * *

  Mrs. Beesom and Maggie Stutzman refused to go to the Esterhazie mansion for the night, but Betty did condescend to cross the alley to the Grangers, and Maggie insisted on going to Mel’s apartment instead.

  “What if you have to go to the hospital again?” Charlie worried.

  “Don’t mommy me, Greene, I’m older than you are. I can take care of myself. Have a great time not leaving town tomorrow.”

  Amuller had dutifully gone to the redwood house and found the Ferrari and the couple living there gone, on vacation according to neighbors. Furniture still in the house—nothing suspicious. Except their names were Gladys and Jonathan Phillips.

  Charlie, Ed, and Larry were out in the alley hammering holes in the back of the late Jeremy Fiedler’s house when Officer Mary Maggie Mason and her silly smile showed up. She’d come in the open front way and peered through the back gate at them. “Now what are you all doing? You’re just hanging poor Charlie by doing anything. The more you mess around, the deeper you bury her. And this case is still under investigation and you’re tampering with a crime scene. Now get away from that wall.”

  Larry had already moved his Bronco and Charlie’s Toyota to street parking some blocks away, which would be safe until the neighborhoods noticed—but Ed would ferry them there to pick up their cars too early for that.

  No one planned on sleeping tonight.

  Including Officer Mason, apparently. She planted herself and her black-and-white in the middle of the courtyard. From Charlie’s kitchen window, the conspirators watched her settle in to protect the crime scene.

  With a cop car protecting the place and keeping them from searching further, they decided Charlie and Larry should get some sleep and be ready for the big day tomorrow. Ed would stay awake, get them up in time to shower, and rush them out the front door to his car and then to theirs.

  But before they gratefully took him up on the offer, he asked, “So if this cash stash is so big somebody’s willing to commit murder and blow up neighbors for it—I’m assuming we’re talking about all the stock cashed in under assumed Beesom names and various Enterprises Doug found on the Internet—why are you so sure the couple in the redwood house with Jeremy’s Ferrari haven’t already found it and aren’t off to Switzerland with suitcases of hundred-dollar bills right now?”

  Charlie knelt to pick up a chewed Ben Franklin from under the table in the breakfast nook, smelled it, and handed it to Ed. “Because Tuxedo’s still finding them.”

  CHAPTER 36

  RUDY FERRIS AND half the Hollywood tabloid press (read half the Hollywood press) greeted Charlie and her boss, Richard Morse, at the Celebrity Pit when they stepped off the elevator.

  “Jeez, what’s Rudy got going I didn’t know about?” Richard side-mouthed to Charlie. “You know what this is? They don’t turn out like this for telethons.”

  “Remember what you told me about not questioning what went on in Daniel Congdon’s office? ‘You don’t want to go there,’ I think is what you said.”

  “That’s what I’m still saying. I still want to know the reason for the coverage here, and why the press is looking at you and not me. You know?”

  “Relax, Richard, and smile. Enjoy the coverage. Wait for my cues.”

  “Charlie, this is the first time you haven’t leveled with me. What’s going on?”

  They were talking through smiles for the cameras.

  “This isn’t the first time you haven’t leveled with me. Heads up, here comes the Reporter.”

  “Jesus, what do you have to know about Congdon?” Richard said through a particularly phony smile. “Charlie, don’t leave me hanging out like this.”

  “Does he smoke?”

  “Daniel? Not that I’ve ever seen. What’s that got to do with the price of blubber? You’re gettin’ strange on me, kid. And this ain’t a good time, if you know what I mean.”

  * * *

  Rudy and his people had tables pushed together on the pit level cordoned off from the adoring riffraff. The press, however, had been invited. Rudy was not happy with the attention his new agency was getting. He sat next to Charlie and informed her that his next telethon would be on breast cancer, and he wanted to have her as one of his guests because she was a survivor.

  “My mother had a mastectomy last year. Maybe that’s what you heard. I’ve never had cancer and I don’t want it.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Fiftysomething.”

  “Too old. Demographics. All the press you’re getting today, it would have been great. You know any twenty- or thirty-something survivors?”

  “They don’t usually survive, Rudy.”

  “Crap—I got this set up already. I need young breast-cancer survivors. We air in a couple months.”

  His people had apparently not done their homework. “You had old guys up there on your erectile dysfunction telethon.”

  “Young guys don’t have that problem,” he said patiently. “Nobody wants to see old women on my show, unless they’re running for president.”

  “Any news on when Keegan Monroe will get out of prison?” the reporter from the Reporter asked Charlie from across the table.

  Richard made a whiny sound on one side of her and Rudy sucked his teeth on the other.

  “He’s meeting with the parole board right now,” Charlie said.

  “How come you didn’t tell me that?” Richard whispered.

  “So when are we going to get back to breast cancer?” poor Rudy, the man picking up the tab for all this—including the bar bill, which looked to be getting extensive—wanted to know under his breath.

  Theirs was a campy lunch of grilled prawns and raw vegetables with various dipping sauces served with garlic mashers and roasted leeks.

  When Charlie’s cellular chimed faintly, she excused herself and took the gadget to the edge of the stage. Wouldn’t you know, Mitch Hilsten was tending bar. It was Larry on the phone. He’d had various inquiries as to the sensuous Monroe script. They had already decided who would see it this round, and Charlie was confident this round would do it.

  But she pretended to be making a selection from prospects as he ticked them off. This was all a setup and Charlie couldn’t believe the press didn’t know that, but she knew the reporter from The Hollywood Reporter had followed her from the table and there may have been others. “Only the majors, Larry, and send copies of the full script by runner.”

  “You doing this like a book auction?” the Reporter reporter asked. Several of his colleagues had joined him. “Isn’t that a little unusual?”

  “Yes.” Charlie excused herself again to rejoin Rudy Ferris and his quest for young breast-cancer survivors.

  She knew she was taking incredible chances here, betting the ranch by adding puff to the buzz early. But she was strapped for time.

  Ed had driven Charlie and Larry to their cars by circuitous routes before dawn. He’d wanted them to take the same car for safety reasons but they’d both thought they might have to go their separate ways during all the excitement they hoped to stir up today—cover for each other, who knew what? Charlie was not about to leave Keegan Monroe hanging just because the Long Beach PD was on the verge of bringing murder charges against her. She’d have things so far along even Richard could carry on if she was jailed—with Larry, of course, doing the real work in the background. She’d have the major ducks lined up and quacking before that.

  Mary Maggie had been snoozing in her car in the middle of the compound that morning and they’d snuck out the front door as planned without anyone noticing. They hoped. Officer Mason had kept them from looking for Jeremy’s stash, but she’d probably kept anyone else from doing so, too. No bombs had gone off in the night. Why the officer hadn’t noticed fewer cars in the c
ompound, Charlie didn’t know. They’d slipped Libby’s Wrangler into the Toyota’s space next to Mrs. Beesom’s Olds 88, but that was it.

  Anyway, Charlie expected to be arrested at any moment, so she wasn’t surprised when David Dalrymple appeared in the wings and Mitch Hilsten left the bar long enough to deliver a sealed note. Everyone at her table waited for her reaction, but she didn’t. The lookalike’s wink wasn’t bad, but his smile was wrong.

  “So,” Rudy said, trying to regain the limelight, “breast cancer is as much of a scourge to women as prostate cancer is to men, and we’re going to raise hell and money to fight it with a—”

  “I believe,” a woman of the press said, pausing to swallow a bite of prawn, “that breast cancer strikes and kills and maims far more women than prostate cancer does men.”

  “Okay, heart attacks then.”

  Charlie enjoyed another prawn, too. They were so good they didn’t need dipping. But then she thought of years of prison food and Keegan’s script and dipped it in drawn butter bubbling over a flame anyway.

  The note said, “When you get a minute—Dalrymple.”

  Charlie savored two more of the succulent prawns before taking her leave of the argument waging around the table, the naughty butter still coating her tongue.

  * * *

  “I have a job, David. A career. Responsibilities. I can’t just drop everything and stay home when big things are happening to people who depend on me just because some self-righteous twerp of the law decides to nail me for something I didn’t do. If you knew that you were going to die in a week and you had people you cared about, what would you do?”

  “Get my affairs in order, I guess.” He was driving her back to the agency where she could pick up what she needed to take home, and then he was to deliver her to Long Beach.

  “Exactly. Do you know Detective Amuller thinks I have time to sit home and watch daytime television? ‘Don’t leave town’ to him means I get to sleep in. Sleep in with Mitch Hilsten—”

  “Was that him at the Pit?”

  “No. Or sleep in with Esterhazie Cement who is divorced and dating a thirty-year-old. Or sleep in with my gay secretary. Or—if he discovers I have spoken to you several times—you. The man is out to get me because I’m an easy target.”

  “I think you feel victimized and therefore underestimate this Johann Sebastian Amuller, Charlie. He’s a human, too. And in many ways as insecure as you are.”

  “Johann Sebastian. Yes. J. S.—I love it, David Dalrymple, I know you’re a cop first and a friend second. And no, I’ll never trust you completely, either, but thank you for that little piece of information.”

  “You really think it will help you with any of this?”

  “No, but it solves one mystery in a life overrun with them.”

  “Now come the violins, Charlie? I watched you working that impressive crowd at the Celebrity Pit just now.” He followed her up to her office at the FFUCWB of P, determined she wouldn’t slip away.

  “So what’s happening, Larry?”

  “So far it looks like your gamble paid off. Even got an offer sight-unseen from Allied Sharks.”

  “Did you tell them what the floor is?”

  “Yeah, sputter, sputter, you gotta be crazy. That’s why I hate agents, especially pushy broads. Monroe’s just a goddamned writer for chrissake, sputter, sputter, hang up, bang.” Larry leaned back in his chair with his arms crossed behind his head. “How sweet it is. Looks like our other scenario is about to shoot.” He nodded at Dalrymple.

  “You know the script.”

  “Right. Break a leg.”

  “Charlie.” David Dalrymple followed her into her office and closed the door behind him, which elicited a guffaw or two from her secretary. “I strongly suggest you—”

  “You smell something?”

  “What?”

  “I smell cigarette smoke. I even know where it’s coming from.” Charlie pushed A. E. Mous’s Dead Men Don’t Need Jell-O poster aside. This was the other scenario. The hole behind the poster now was almost the size of the poster.

  “This is Daniel Congdon’s office. He doesn’t smoke. You want to stick your head in here and take a sniff?” Charlie watched David Dalrymple not move. “You don’t have to, do you?”

  “Charlie, trust me—”

  “Why? I thought Feds who still smoke were only on the Fox Channel or in vintage films.”

  But it was down in the parking barn where things really came to a head. “No, let’s take my car. Your secretary can bring yours.”

  “I need my car and Larry needs his. He has a life, you know.”

  “I insist. We need to talk.”

  “You can ride with me if you want. Find someone to bring you back into town—rent a car in Long Beach. Call a Fed.”

  “Charlie, I strongly suggest—”

  “That’s right, ex-Lieutenant Dalrymple. Because suggest is all you can do. Unless you’ve decided to work for a new organization, but I think you’re too old for the Feds. And I have not yet been charged with Jeremy’s murder and can’t be ordered to stay at home in Long Beach.”

  “Your attorney—”

  “—is very famous but human, and would probably love to see this case go to trial. I would if I were an attorney. If you want to talk with me, ride with me. Otherwise, I’ll see you in Long Beach and we can talk there. Remember, I don’t have to do this. Don’t you just hate pushy women?”

  But she was glad when he relented. Charlie intended to exceed the speed limit mightily and she could use some help when she reached Belmont Shore.

  CHAPTER 37

  “WHY ARE YOU coming back to Long Beach voluntarily if you’re so sure there’s no law that says you have to or that the LBPD or Attorney Seligman have any right to ask it of such an important personage?” David Dalrymple asked wryly as Charlie pulled onto the 10. He hadn’t admitted she was right in her assessment of his power to order her around just now, but he hadn’t denied it, either.

  “Because I’m a pushy broad. Because I’m tired of being expected to show blind obedience, allow others to make decisions for me that will affect them only a short time but could affect my entire life, and my daughter’s, forever. You don’t just hand your fate over to somebody because they tell you to. But I’m rushing back to Long Beach right now mostly because I’m very uneasy about Betty Beesom.”

  “You turn your fate over to someone else every time you let a broker make an investment decision for you. Or a banker. Or a doctor or a plumber or—”

  “Yes, but I am willingly paying them for a service, not being coerced into confessing to a crime I didn’t commit, and poor Betty—”

  “You should be more concerned for your own well being, Charlie, than your neighbor’s. You are in a lot of trouble.”

  “And she is eighty-three and defenseless. And, other than the murderer, I think I’m the only one who knows what’s going on.”

  “If you have any information you think the police don’t have, tell them right away before you get in deeper trouble.”

  “Not until I can prove it, so that information can’t be used against me.”

  “Leave that to the experts. Crime solving is not your specialty.”

  “But manipulating people and information is. I know how it works. Now you know why I’m speeding back to Long Beach and I still don’t know why there’s all that stale cigarette smoke in Daniel Congdon’s office and a master rat hole in the wall of mine.”

  “Explain to me first why you think the authorities will use information against you if you are not guilty of anything. Charlie, you’re just not being rational.”

  Charlie explained that the fact she knew the report in the P-T that Jeremy Fiedler was killed by a gunshot was misinformation only proved to Amuller that she was the murderer. “Hairy the cat, and the Trailblazer, didn’t smell like gun smoke.”

  “He could have been shot elsewhere and put into the car after.”

  “You know, I hadn’t thought of that.”
/>
  “See? Pushy broads don’t know everything.”

  A gurgling and then a hot feeling in one ear. “Oh, shit.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” Charlie pressed Betty’s number on her cellular and felt even worse when she got no answer.

  “Charlie, I would like to serve, unofficially, as a mediator here. What do you say?”

  I say I will not let this hearing thing get to me now. I will not. I will not. I just can’t—“So what’s with the hole in my office wall and the cigarette smoke?”

  “Unofficially, there was some surveillance of your office and the agency.”

  “Jeremy’s murder isn’t half as exciting as how he disappeared electronically, huh? What did they expect to surveil if I was on vacation? They already had my files.” Could he see her sweating?

  “Most investigations strive to leave no stone unturned and this Daniel Congdon, the silent partner with an office, is a suspicious character.”

  “You’re telling me. I’ve never laid eyes on him.” And you’re really not telling me anything I hadn’t already guessed or even suggested to you, mediator.

  “Now, what do you have for me?”

  “Remember when we lunched at the Pit and you encouraged me to trust my special senses to learn about Jeremy, even maybe contact him? Well, I did. There were several of us there who tried, and he had a different message for everybody. Told me to watch out for the four-oh-five.”

  “That makes sense.” Dalrymple put a hand out to the dashboard as she came up too fast on a gasoline tanker, pumping her brakes to warn the SUV behind her and flashing for a lane change. Hell, Charlie could do this while drying her hair.

  She told him of everybody’s warnings but Mrs. Beesom’s. She didn’t mention the old lady’s presence at the silly pseudoseance in her breakfast nook. “And our cat really came unglued.”

  “Animals are very sensitive to supernatural phenomena.”

  Yeah, and to murder and smoky hundred-dollar bills, too.