Killer Commute

  That tree, by its very name, stood vigil over the compound, and the old lady was sure it looked after her safety just as her dear husband always had. Eventually, with some misgiving, she’d extended its protective qualities to include her neighbors within the stucco-covered walls.

  Four rough trunks grew out of a base somewhere underground, the highest being maybe thirty-five feet and the shortest maybe twenty-five. Its spread among the drooping fronds was something like nine feet, and it had hung blessing over Betty’s roof and the wall, too.

  It now had three trunks standing and one fallen across Mrs. Beesom’s patio—and across a very surprised journalist. He managed to wiggle out from under the palm trunk, narrowly avoiding poking out an eyeball on the pointed end of a sword leaf.

  “Hi, I’m Mark Gifford from the Press-Telegram. And I’d like to ask you a few questions about…” Mark Gifford from the Press-Telegram was backing away from the three advancing woman even as he spoke.

  “I hate strangers before breakfast,” Charlie said, meaning every syllable of it. She had a low, throaty voice that some people found sexy and others found threatening, and others still, depraved.

  “And I am an attorney,” Maggie added, looking every inch a disgruntled housewife-before-makeup. “And I’ll see you and your newspaper sued for breaking and entering, invasion of privacy, and unwarranted trespass. And my firm will see it through the Supreme Court.”

  But it was Mrs. Beesom who slipped the key from under the potted fern and opened the gate behind him so he’d backed into the alley before he realized it. Mark Gifford was showing that oh-you-panicky-women-always-overreact look and was about to launch into a routine to intimidate them into apologizing when the old lady slammed the gate in his face and locked it.

  * * *

  The fortress’s surviving occupants gathered in Charlie’s kitchen for a breakfast of scrambled eggs and Betty’s sinful cinnamon rolls with powdered-sugar frosting, hot from the oven, which nobody could figure out how she could produce at a moment’s notice. And more coffee, this time from Charlie’s percolator. Maggie, the health conscious, brought segments of sweet California oranges that probably came from Mexico and squirted juice across the table at every bite.

  Charlie had a dining room table in the next room covered with paper—mail, catalogs, and such, which she periodically dumped when the piles began slipping onto the floor. The amount of money she had lost by not sending in her sweepstakes card from Publishers Clearing House must amount to billions, and could certainly buy out Ed McMahon twenty times over.

  But her breakfast nook in the kitchen, a high-backed booth with a table that caught the afternoon sun through its barred window, was a favored neighborhood chat place, any time of the day. And since only four of the human inhabitants were left, it had plenty of room.

  And the topic of the day was finally Jeremy Fiedler’s death, his life, and his secrets.

  “How did Hairy Granger get inside the Trailblazer with Jeremy?” Charlie asked. “Was that where Jeremy died? I mean, I was in and out carrying groceries and then sat out there to eat a sandwich. I’d have seen anybody around the Trailblazer, except when I was putting the food in the cupboards and changing clothes. He was still dripping blood, so it doesn’t seem likely he was already dead when I got home.”

  “Maybe he killed himself.” Libby had showered, her hair still wrapped in a white towel that contrasted with the even, light tan of her presently flawless skin. Dark eyes mocked the older women, and she flashed the perfect smile for which Charlie had payed the orthodonist dearly. “And, Mom, do you actually know how long people drip blood after they die?”

  “Not really.”

  “Listen to us, talking blood dripping, and the poor man’s murdered.” Mrs. Beesom looked toward the end of the table where Jeremy had usually pulled up a chair from the dining room if they’d all gathered at once.

  They looked in that direction as if expecting him to appear, to right the imbalance his sudden death had created in the concept of home.

  “I feel as bad as you do, Mrs. Beesom. I was probably closer to him than anyone, but I didn’t realize until that Maggie cop asked me directly how little I knew about him.” Maggie the attorney, like Charlie, was still in her sweats and dishabille. Mrs. Beesom still wore her housecoat and sleeping cap that kept her thin, white curls safe between bimonthly visits to the hairdresser. Three different generations of women here around this table. Only the youngest seemed to be coping with things. “That never bothered me when he was alive. Now it does. But we need to talk this out, no matter how crass it seems. We can’t let it fester.”

  “All I know about him really is he liked to work out and he had a weakness for girls young enough to be his daughter,” Charlie said. “Neither is an unusual personality trait in the business I’m in.”

  Now they were all looking at Libby.

  “Hey, don’t worry there. Jeremy wasn’t that dumb.” The willowy girl/woman cut her sweet roll in half. “He knew there was one person in our complex capable of murder if he fooled around with me. And who’d hear any naughty suggestions if he even whispered them.”

  Now they were all looking at Charlie. “What, you think I would kill somebody if he—”

  “Threatened your kid in any way? Yes,” Maggie Stutzman, Charlie’s best friend, said with no hesitation whatever.

  Charlie’s kid, all five-foot-nine of her, slithered out of the booth with her half of a frosted cinnamon roll and sashayed off to the hair dryer before her hair set-dried into permanent snarls. The cat on the refrigerator jumped to the counter and then to the floor to follow his buddy, sounding like a falling elephant with each landing.

  Now they all stared at the remaining half of Libby’s cinnamon roll.

  Maggie and her butt won (maybe lost) as she reached for it first.

  “Okay, what’s the back story here?” Charlie finished up the scrambled eggs. “Why did Jeremy electrify the compound? Did he have enemies? Something worth stealing?” And why hadn’t it occurred to Charlie to worry about him noticing Libby before now?

  Betty Beesom scraped up the crumbs and melted frosting from the cinnamon-roll pan and licked them off her butter knife. “What I want to know is who called the police last night, Charlie? It wasn’t us, and it wasn’t either of the cats. I say it was the murderer of Jeremy himself.”

  “Maybe he had his cell phone in the Trailblazer with him and made the call as he was dying,” Maggie offered. “Maybe he knew he was in danger so that’s why he wanted the compound wired. So how did the murderer get in, then?”

  “Maybe one of Jeremy’s young lovers had a card to the obelisk,” Charlie said. “Maybe her father found it and got in to murder the pervert who had ruined his innocent daughter. But even stranger—they can’t seem to find Jeremy in any records, in cyberspace, nowhere. He has no existence.”

  “That’s impossible,” Maggie said. “Unless he wasn’t really Jeremy Fiedler, but somebody else. His cars had to be registered to somebody. Maybe he just got deleted.”

  “Yeah, I’ve always worried about the lack of a paper trail now that everything’s going electronic. Or maybe the Long Beach PD isn’t that computer savvy.”

  How did Hairy Granger get inside the Trailblazer with Jeremy? What was Tuxedo Greene tying to tell Charlie and Betty when he sat on top of the vehicle? “Could you really disappear electronically and turn up dead anyway? And why didn’t we get a shock off the back gate when we went out in the alley last night?”

  “Maybe that part of it doesn’t work,” Betty Beesom answered.

  So many questions. Only maybes for answers.

  CHAPTER 5

  CHARLIE HAD JUST stepped out of the shower when Detective Amuller rattled and banged at the security grate covering her front door.

  The obelisk originally had a buzzer and a speaker for each house to communicate with the gate as well as a button to open it for those permitted within, like the door release in an apartment building. Only the release button
s remained because vandals kept breaking the obelisk speaker or yelling obscenities into it when the fortress dwellers preferred to sleep. Visitors now had to park in the street. They could use the front doors of the two condos in front and call ahead for the two houses on the alley, where no one was expected to venture but the garbage man, cats, and homeless. One never put out the garbage or collected the empty cans at night.

  There was only one bathroom in Charlie’s house, and it was downstairs. And of course she hadn’t bothered to bring a robe. Yelling for Libby to let in the police, she raced upstairs and threw on clean sweats.

  “See you’re still not home,” J. S. Amuller commented when she came down trying to sort out her messy mass of wet curls with a wire brush. He was watching Libby ignore him. “How is it she survived in this institution with a practicing nubiphile?”

  “Jeremy never bothered Libby.”

  “He wouldn’t dare. My mom’d kill him.”

  “Libby—”

  But the kid had trounced out the door, pulling her car keys from her pocket.

  “Kind of chilly for shorts today,” the cop said, starting to follow her, but he’d hesitated at her wonderful pronouncement long enough to give her a head start.

  “She’s slinging at the diner today. Green shorts, pink shirt.” The Long Beach Diner was better known for its meatloaf and mashers than its color scheme.

  There was room only for one car for each house in the designated parking between patios, and Libby usually parked next to their patio heading out. She had the Wrangler started and through the gate before the detective could reach her.

  They stood on the steps of Charlie’s sunken patio watching the gate close. “I’d like to explore that last statement of hers. Have to catch her at the diner, I guess. What’s this about Art Corry from the Times getting a real shocker off that gate last night?”

  “Hey, that’s nothing. We had a guy from the P-T pole-vault over the wall and break Mrs. Beesom’s sentry palm this morning.” A seagull sat statue-still on the pink-tiled peak of Jeremy’s roof, like he thought he was a pigeon. The gulls were everywhere out here. They fought the cats and drunks for edible garbage in the alley.

  “Against the law to electrify security systems without displaying warning signs.”

  “Don’t look at me, I didn’t know anything about it. Jeremy apparently had it done and paid for it himself while I was out of town last fall. Nobody thought to tell me about it until this morning.”

  “Convenient. Everything about this murder is so convenient. For some people.”

  “Then it was murder for sure, not suicide?” The gull activated effortlessly and glided over the compound, feet flattened up under his tail feathers, gray wingtips on his underside.

  “Mr. Fiedler was suicidal?” Detective Amuller’s blond hair was clipped short, but still it curled. It gave him a babyish appearance at odds with his considerable height—six-two or -three.

  “Not that I ever noticed. But we survivors were talking about it this morning—like it would have been a way for Jeremy to die while I was watching the courtyard and the Trailblazer.”

  “I’m afraid things aren’t that convenient, Charlie Greene.”

  * * *

  Charlie and J. S. Amuller stood with Maggie Stutzman in Jeremy Fiedler’s living room.

  “What does J. S. stand for?” Charlie asked him, distracted. There was something wrong with the script here. Or was it the set? She loathed it when people talked cinema—life was too surreal anyway. Now she was doing it. Even in her thoughts. Jesus.

  “Stands for ‘Just Standard’ for cops, okay? I don’t want to hear that question again. Understood?”

  “No problem. I’ll ask Officer Mary Maggie.”

  “I am looking for clues into the life of a man you two have been living close to for years and tell me you know nothing about but didn’t realize that until he was murdered.”

  “What I want to know is why he thought he had to hotwire the compound.” Charlie reached a hand to the art-deco angular light fixture hanging way off center from the ceiling. “And why you didn’t get a shock when you opened the back gate last night.”

  “Don’t touch anything. Either of you,” the homicide man yelled for the umpteenth time.

  Maggie straightened and pounded her chest. “He’s making me afraid to breathe. I’m not getting enough oxygen.”

  “Okay, you both make great comediennes, but we have a murder and those who live here are at the top of the list as suspects. If you get my drift.”

  “No.” Charlie reached for her friend. “She’s on allergy medication and it makes her heart beat funny. This has nothing to do with you, J. S., honest.” But even as she said it, she saw the disbelief in the detective’s eyes. Some people are just never convinced that there is anything that has nothing to do with them.

  For some reason it was at this point that Charlie Greene had a glimmer as to how deep this shit could get here.

  Detective J. S. stomped across Jeremy’s living room and up the two steps to the dining-room ledge. (All the living rooms and patios in the complex were sunken, for some reason that escaped Charlie altogether). He wore a longish raincoat like he was auditioning for a TV movie. Under the raincoat he wore the same sport coat and pants as last night. The result was rumpled, again suggesting a TV cop circa the 1980s.

  Maggie mentioned the M word and it turned him off so, he was speechless. His grimace, as loose as his grin, made the chipped tooth add to his boyishness.

  Maggie lay on the floor with her bottom up against Jeremy’s couch and bent her knees, putting her lower legs and feet on its seat, her hand over her heart. Charlie laid her hand over Maggie’s and after a few minutes she could feel the tempo of the heartbeat’s sudden return to normal.

  “You’re too young for menopause, Maggie—what forty, forty-one? Has to be those allergy pills. You’ve got to get off them. So your nose runs all the time—”

  “I haven’t taken them for three months. Charlie, my clock’s running down.” Those snapping blue eyes dripped tears into her ears.

  J. S. groaned. “I hate to bother you two at such a dramatic moment but—”

  “Kate said it was estrogen deprivation and not to let the doctors talk me into heart disease. They’re so set on getting women for heart trouble—don’t distinguish between the sexes.”

  “Kate? Kate Gonzales? Is she—?”

  “Started last week. I was at the top of her list, Charlie. You’re next. Now with Jeremy gone, you should—”

  “Who is Kate Gonzales, and what did she have to do with the murder victim?” Drops of sweat beaded the detective’s forehead.

  “She cleaned this house, every other week.” Charlie helped Maggie to her feet. And great, now we have another reason for me to want Jeremy dead.

  “You take the word of a cleaning lady over a medical doctor?” the cop said, as if he’d stumbled into an Alzheimer’s unit.

  Lots of glass and triangles in Jeremy’s house, like triangular tables where the narrow end wouldn’t hold anything, where if you put anything heavy on the wide end it would tip it up and dump it. Jeremy’d always come to parties at Charlie’s house and Maggie’s, too, but she’d only known him to throw one at his house in the time she’d lived here. Granted, everyone worked a lot and entertained little. Still.

  Even that once, when filled with people, it didn’t take so many people to fill these little houses, this one had never looked that lived in. Even when his young lovers were in residence, if they smoked or chewed gum, they had to do it out on the patio.

  Why did all this seem strange only now that he was dead?

  CHAPTER 6

  “DID YOU LIKE Jeremy Fiedler, Charlie Greene?” Detective Amuller asked as they walked upstairs. He’d dropped his silly raincoat on the floor below and looked a lot cooler. You so rarely saw raincoats in Southern California.

  “You know, I kind of did. I’m not sure why, considering his taste in females.”

  “I know w
hat you mean,” Maggie said behind them. “He was always so dependably here. But he never demanded anything of you.”

  “Yeah, anything happened, you call Jeremy and then the police. Even Betty Beesom did.”

  “So, you like having guys around if you don’t have to do anything for them?”

  The stairs in these houses crawled up one wall of the living room. He turned at the top to bar their way. Charlie looked back at her friend. They both nodded—but thoughtfully.

  “And you don’t find that a selfish reaction?”

  Charlie and her friend shook their heads—but thoughtfully.

  “I don’t get this. Here you are in the guy’s house, you sort of like him, he’s been murdered, and nobody sheds a tear except for wound-down clocks. Fiedler’s clock will never strike again.”

  “We didn’t really know him that well,” Maggie said. “It’s not like he’s Mel. Not like we won’t miss Jeremy.”

  “Jeez, he could have been a dog.” The representative of the Long Beach PD lifted his arms in the air like the ceiling was about to fall on them. “I gotta be dreaming. You’re professional, educated women.”

  “Jeremy wouldn’t have shed tears for us,” Charlie said, trying to help. It’s not as if a homicide detective wouldn’t have served in far worse neighborhoods than this one.

  “Yeah, but guys don’t cry.”

  Jeremy Fiedler’s bedroom didn’t look slept in anymore than the rest of the house looked lived in. Then again, Charlie and Maggie weren’t allowed to look in closets and drawers, and obviously their dead neighbor hadn’t slept here last night. A short stack of Business Investor’s Daily on the nightstand was the only reading material evident.

  Charlie dropped to her knees for a quick look under the bed.

  “What, you think the experts haven’t already looked there?” the detective condescended. “Maybe we should have this Kate-the-cleaning-lady up here for some expert advice?”