Killer Commute

  “In a garage somewhere, not too far away. He’d drop off a sweet young thing at this gate and take off to park the Ferrari and maybe ten minutes later he’d arrive on foot and let himself in the front gate.”

  “This is the screwiest setup. I just can’t believe he lived here with three women and a teenaged girl and nobody got curious about his comings and goings.”

  “I can’t either, Officer Mason. Mrs. Beesom was always nosing around. We could ask her, but I think she’s taking her nap now. I wonder if my lab reports will take months, too.”

  * * *

  “Oh, a meestery. I luff a meestery,” Kate Gonzales exclaimed from the stepping stool she’d hauled up to Charlie’s room where she swiped tons of crud off the top of the door moldings. “Thees house will take a few visits to bring hup to snuff, you know?”

  “That’s fine,” Charlie said quickly, already impressed with the way the windows and mirrors sparkled. “So Jeremy didn’t pay you in cash?”

  Officer Mary Maggie, stonewalled because Kate refused to go over to Jeremy’s until she’d cleaned Charlie’s house, paced and glowered, her expressive face convoluting in uncoplike expressions of impatience.

  “He pay hevery six months. He pay ahead. I am going to miss poor Meester Fiedler very much. His company pay my company. It go right into my account in thee bank.”

  “What was the name of his company?” Officer Mason came to a halt.

  “Fiedler Henterprises.”

  “Well, finally we’ve got something. What’s your bank?”

  “HHTP of thee Pacific.”

  The cop pulled out her cellular and stepped into the hall.

  “Did you ever see any checks with that company name on them?” Charlie asked. “Or cash lying around?”

  “Mr. Fiedler very tidy. Nothing left around and Hi don look in desks and drawers. The young ladies leave things out, but not heem.”

  Kate had streaks of gray in dark hair wadded into a knot on the back of her head, dark eyes full of mischief, and a sure and easy posture that wasted no energy on unnecessary or clumsy movement. She sort of flowed around the room, plastic bags tied to the belt loops of her jeans offering up cleaning rags and spray bottles that left the odor of oils and vinegar like a salad on the air instead of chemical cleaners. It was hard to gauge her age—Leroy had to be well into his thirties, and there were lines in her face, but her skin glowed, and before she left she hauled a heavy-duty vacuum upstairs and down with little effort.

  Charlie wrote her a check on the glossy empty tabletop in the dining room and wished she’d gotten someone in sooner. Kate Gonzales accompanied Officer Mason over to Jeremy’s. When they returned, appearing the best of friends, Leroy had his mother’s vacuum and mops and bags of rags and cleaners stashed in the back of his pickup.

  Charlie and the cop watched them drive off from the ruin of a security gate. “It was nice of you to be patient with her. You could have pulled your official rank.”

  “Sometimes it’s easier to get what you want with honey. That’s why I’m here right now instead of J. S. He’s about to blow his toupee.”

  “Detective Amuller wears a rug?”

  “No, but he will by tomorrow if he keeps pulling his hair out over this case.”

  “Officer, I think you need to talk to Libby. If you can win over the legendary Kate Gonzales, you might stand a chance of keeping J. S. from doing something stupid that will make my daughter clam up for good.”

  “That’s also why I’m here.”

  “Are you up to meatloaf with mashed potatoes and gravy?”

  “You cook?”

  “Libby works at the diner tonight. Gets off at nine. How about it?”

  “The L. B. Diner? I haven’t had Jell-O in months. You’re on.”

  “Detective Amuller thinks I’m the murderer, doesn’t he?”

  “Look, you and Betty Beesom were the only two people in this little group of domiciles when Fiedler was killed. You are both prime suspects but you look a lot better than Betty. Help me find some other people in Fiedler’s life we can add to the suspect list. He’s a known nubiphile and your own daughter lives here and it never occurred to you to worry about it. He’s dead and you now have a cleaning lady many people would kill for. I’ve seen her stuff. She even likes pets. And thirdly, if we’re counting, you’re the one coming up with all the false leads here. If you’re guilty, we’re going to nail you. If you’re not, we got to know that, Charlie.”

  “Ohmygod, there it is.”

  “What? There what is?”

  “The Ferrari—get the license number, quick. My eyes aren’t that good.”

  A red Ferrari had cruised by the compound as they parried and sped up when the driver saw them.

  “What, mine are?” But the woman cop was out in the middle of the street staring after the disappearing vehicle, pulling out her cellular.

  Charlie said, “There was a license plate but it was—”

  “Smeared with mud. Old ploy. See you at the diner at seven for meatloaf.” And she was in her black-and-white with the sirens blaring and off down the street, leaving Charlie to turn back to the scary fact that her fortress was unprotected, and her hearing could leave the country forever at any moment.

  And Jeremy wasn’t here to know who to call to fix the gate.

  CHAPTER 14

  LIBBY SERVED THEM Southern-fried chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy instead of meatloaf. This place was so bad it was sinful and thus crowded, but Charlie and the woman cop had Jell-O anyway. “You want meatloaf, you got to get here by six. We’re famous for it. Hey, Mom, you still hearing? Means I better get home tonight on time, right?”

  “How can anybody with three zits that size sashay her little butt around like she owns the joint?” the cop asked, turning in the booth to watch the sashay hustle down the aisle to the kitchen door.

  “Well, she’s young and blond and this is Hollywood,” Charlie offered ruefully, and sat back at the sudden change in Officer Mason’s expression.

  “That’s it. It’s been driving me nuts. I knew I knew your face from somewhere. I guess I expected you lived in some mansion in Malibu or some place. It’s not your name so much as—your face has been around.”

  “What are you talking about?” But Charlie knew. She always felt the one place she was safe was in Long Beach. You can’t be anybody if you live here.

  “You’re Mitch Hilsten’s girlfriend. I feel so dumb.” Mary Maggie Mason slapped her forehead and then had to readjust her glasses. “Jesus.”

  “You had my DNA info on your computer and not that?”

  “As we both know, modern technology is not perfect.”

  “I’m beginning to think it’s a nightmare. But I’m just his friend, not his girlfriend.”

  Mitch Hilsten, superstar, was still successfully overcoming the female preteen craze for pasty-faced adolescent-looking twentysomethings. Mitch Hilsten was a fair actor, classically handsome, midforties. Charlie’d had untold fantasies about him in her own teens. Through a series of impossible events, which were becoming standard in her life, she ended up spending some time with him at the most vulnerable time of her month. In fact, a couple of them. Libby hated him and the publicity. Charlie just wished he’d get over it.

  “Is he really as aloof and moody as he seems?” Officer Mary Maggie gazed off into some remembered fantasies of her own.

  “Actually, he’s quite sensitive and friendly.”

  “That smile and those eyes. He doesn’t take his teeth out at night or anything?”

  “No, but they’re capped. Officer Mason, don’t mention him around Libby, okay? We want her cooperative.”

  As it turned out Libby was quite cooperative on her own.

  The diner was long and narrow, with booths and tables spread out to either side of a sizable semicircular counter complete with bar stools and foot rest and revolving-glass pie displays. The carpet was threadbare, the decor in pastel shades of green and pink. The waitpersons wore shorts all
year round and T-shirts with L.B.D. lettered on front and back.

  Charlie’s daughter slid her green shorts and pink L.B.D. shirt into the booth beside Charlie and good-naturedly admitted to the policewoman that she didn’t really know more than two of Jeremy’s girls, and one of those only by sight. They were the only two who went to Wilson. She’d just been torqued at Detective Amuller. She didn’t know Tanya’s last name but had walked home from school with her one day, and Tanya had confided that Jeremy let her use his computer. “And she said it was encrypted.”

  “He never made any sort of advances toward you?” Officer Mason asked. “Like squeezing your bottom, wanting to hug a lot, or sit close and put his hand on your thigh?”

  “Never touched me. He was usually helpful and he could fix things, knew what repairman to call if he couldn’t. He was good at geometry and stuff, would most times help me out. I never felt like I knew him very well, but I’m going to miss having him around.”

  Officer Mason leaned forward, leveling a squint through her eyeglasses that reminded Charlie of Tuxedo’s intense bird or bug focus. “What’s this ‘usually’ and ‘most times’ all of a sudden? It’s always been good old dependable, reliably unchanging Jeremy with you guys.”

  “Well, sometimes he’d be grouchy. Hey, sometimes I get grouchy, right, Mom?”

  “I don’t remember him being grouchy very often. Distracted maybe. Self-involved at times.”

  “How would you know, you’re never home. And when you are, your mind’s still at work.”

  “All you have to do,” Charlie told the officer, “is check for Tanyas on the class lists at Wilson.”

  “Maybe it was Tony,” Libby said and left to find Charlie a styrofoam doggie box for the half of her dinner she didn’t eat.

  Back at the compound Mary Maggie drove her squad car into Jeremy’s space and got out.

  “You going to spend the night?”

  “Charlie, I want you to come see something.” The officer took Charlie’s arm and walked her down the driveway and turned her around. “I want you to tell me what you see.”

  “I see unchecked access to my home and to Maggie’s and Mrs. Beesom’s, and to our cars—we’re wide open.”

  “Now I want you to look down the street both ways and then I want you to turn around and check out the houses across the street.”

  It was dark, but streetlights lit up some things. Most things Charlie knew from memory anyway by coming and going twice a day. “I see houses and trees and lighted windows and parked cars—what you’d normally see in a neighborhood. What I’ve been seeing for five years.”

  “No, what you haven’t been seeing for five years. Describe what’s right across the street.”

  “A car parked at the curb, a palm tree like mine, a sidewalk. A house with flower boxes on the porch. A car in the driveway, flat roof—what?”

  “You still don’t see it. People nowadays really astonish me. Tell me what’s not there that’s here.”

  “No signs of explosion. The sidewalk leads right to the front door like here. Look, I’m tired. Get to the point.”

  “The point, Ms. Charlie Greene, is that there’s no gate to blow up. Never was. No walls with razor wire on top. Do you see anything on this street as fortified as your house and fellow condos were? No. Christ, this is Belmont Shore, the safest part of town.”

  “But they’re all single-family. Apartment and condominium units have security gates. Whole subdivisions in the newer parts of Long Beach are gated. There is nothing unusual about security gates in Southern California. We even have an alarm system.” Charlie pointed out the little sign on the front yard that boasted, DOG ALARM SYSTEM. “Hey, they haven’t shown up yet.”

  “They’ll get around to it if they’re still in business. They know we’ll have been and left by the time they do. And, Charlie, two or three blocks north of here there’s an apartment complex that’s not gated. What I’m saying is this place stands out like a sore thumb in this neighborhood. Mrs. Beesom told me that the walls between the houses were part of the original development. But the razor wire, the gates that needed locking, the alarm system were all Jeremy Fiedler’s idea, and the new widow felt very vulnerable. And he paid for it all and she was grateful.”

  Charlie looked at Mary Maggie Mason long and hard. “I think you should be heading up this investigation. And maybe, like Betty, we all didn’t want to doubt or question Jeremy Fiedler because we appreciated the convenience and safety we felt he provided living among us.”

  “Looks to me like you were all wrong about the safety part.” Officer Mason ran a hand over the obelisk. It was bent over like the neck of a grazing giraffe.

  Charlie walked back to the center of the compound and did a full circle here, too. She decided she preferred Jeremy’s excessive security system, especially now that she might lose her ability to hear.

  Swallowing back the terror that thought brought up, she told the cop, “I can’t believe Jeremy could have owned a home in this city without having an identity. I can maybe see driving an unregistered car hoping no one would stop you, but you’d have to renew license plates somehow. He must have owned things under a different name. If we could find that name, we could trace the Ferrari and find out more about him. Maybe Jeremy had a bunch of names.”

  “Don’t know about the Ferrari or even the Trailblazer yet, but his house is officially owned by a trust administered for one Elizabeth Ruth Beesom. The trust pays all the bills.”

  “Electronically? Did Betty know about this?”

  “Apparently not. Doesn’t seem possible, but it’s being investigated. We’re trying to get the IRS interested in this but their computer systems are in a worse mess than ours. City started to upgrade a few years ago.”

  “Jeremy must have lived here what, ten years—long before electronic banking. What’s the name of this trust?”

  “Beach Enterprises. You know how many businesses in Long Beach use beach in their names? Can’t trace it any farther. All computer data seems to have been lost in cyberspace.”

  “That information has to be backed up somewhere.”

  “That’s the problem—somewhere. Too much somewhere. Not enough people and time to track it down. And you honestly never saw anything strange about this mysterious guy?”

  “I thought he was something of an oddball, but he was so dependable. Hell, this is Southern California. My life’s full of oddballs.” Mitch Hilsten even believed in UFOs. “I really don’t think Jeremy was ever on anything, but sometimes he’d forget he’d asked you the same question a day or two before. But stress plays havoc with short-term memory for all of us.”

  A car engine started somewhere up the alley and headlights suddenly revealed Tuxedo hunkered down, sniffing a wrapped bouquet of flowers leaning against the back gate this time.

  “Cover your ears,” Officer Mason yelled and yanked Charlie down behind her squad car, just as Libby’s Wrangler pulled in from the street.

  CHAPTER 15

  “I DON’T BELIEVE I ever met Mr. Fiedler,” Ed Esterhazie told Charlie. “Doug mentioned him once or twice. They had any response from the ad in the P-T?”

  They sat on Charlie’s picnic table, watching the bomb squad disperse. The wrapped floral arrangement had been just flowers this time.

  “If they have, they haven’t told me. But then Betty and I were the only suspects in the compound when he died.”

  “With your history, Mrs. Beesom doesn’t seem the likely candidate.”

  “Her stock must have gone up some when they discovered Jeremy’s house had been her’s all along. Since they can’t find anybody else who knows him, they don’t have anyplace else to look.”

  “I think your idea of an enraged father makes sense. Anybody working that hard to hide his identity must have had enemies he needed to hide from. And I don’t think it’s possible to own a house and not know it. Not unless it was an all-cash deal and no bank was involved.”

  “Jeremy did pay cash for it. Be
tty figured he’d sold a bigger house and put it all in this one. And all this new computerization and constant upgrading doesn’t leave people time to learn one software before they have to learn the next because the first will ‘no longer be supported.’ An awful lot of stuff can fall through the cracks. And if it’s being purposely manipulated by someone who knows how to do it…”

  “Yeah, we just changed over to a whole new system at Esterhazie Concrete and lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in the process. I’m told it’s going to be worth it, but you have to trust the people doing the installing and the training. Kind of a helpless feeling. Speaking of which, do the doctors think your hearing has returned for good?”

  “The doctors don’t know it’s returned at all. No more vacations for me, that’s one sure thing. Too stressful.”

  Ed had come in shortly after Libby and before the bomb squad arrived. He’d brought some flowers and a bottle of single-malt scotch, which tasted kind of good with water and a little lemon in it.

  “Remember when Doug and Libby served us dinner out here?” Doug’s father said.

  “Yeah, Kraft Macaroni and Cheese from the box and Dom Perignon. And Doug served it in a sport coat and shorts with my dirty dishtowel over his arm.”

  “And they told me you would slit your throat if I didn’t come to dinner. I expected you’d been cooking all day, wore aprons or something.”

  “And I came home from work, dead tired, to find a strange man in a dinner jacket on my patio.”

  “And me with no idea I was competing with the likes of Mitch Hilsten.”

  “Oh, Ed, I hadn’t even met him then. And Mitch and I are really not an item. No matter what the tabloids say. Just friends. I know it’s none of my business, but what happened to you and Dorothy?”