And Charlie was a total stranger with no apparent motive. These two senior citizens were prime suspects—the spouse and the other woman. The county Bronco was gone and Charlie had debated using the nearest phone to call it back.
But, say Clara’s story was true, the reason offered for the Glicks’ disagreement didn’t sound strong enough to cause such reactions. Would Georgette be that upset about Frank’s clippings refuting her nutritional beliefs? Or had Frank parked the bike in back of the trailer knowing Clara might run over it after he shot Georgette but before he asked Clara to drive him into a motel in Chinook?
Charlie’d left the bird lady and her birdlike neighbors promising them to talk to Frank and get back to them again before she talked to Wes Bennett.
If Frank was home he wasn’t answering her knock at his door. Past the picnic table which was really getting to Charlie—God, Georgette’s daughters had sat crying on it just last night not knowing—Charlie could see over Jack’s store to the sea. If Jack built on a second story to the Earth Spirit it would take out about half of Frank Glick’s view.
The day was actually comfortably warm. A wood-and-lattice porch cover above Charlie protected five or six hanging baskets of a lush thick-leaved plant in full pink bloom, and a herd of bees grazed contentedly. Did Georgie get these plants from Paige Magill’s greenhouse or had she raised them from slips or whatever housewives do to create such splendid house jungles?
“You’re being sexist. Frank could be the green thumb in the family. Many men upon retirement specialize in such things.” Charlie had read a whole article on the topic in an airline magazine not long ago.
“He could also be the murderer.”
“You could also be putting yourself in deep shit by running around talking to Frank or anybody else before sharing with the sheriff the responsibility for the information you now have and he doesn’t. Hey, there’s a murderer loose in this peaceful little village and, since you don’t know who it is, that person could be the next human you approach and speak to. That person has killed twice and is not out there wanting to be caught. You could be a real irritant, Charlie Greene.” As her boss, Richard Morse, often said, “Some people you don’t need to irritate.”
Say Frank, and maybe even Clara, were responsible for Georgette’s death, why would they shoot her with Michael’s gun and then kill Michael? The whole thing sucked.
Charlie was about ready to go bang on the door again when a car coasted to a stop at the informal grass verge bordering the street and Frank and Randolph Glick stepped out. They were arguing. Charlie wanted to talk to Frank but not face his son too. She slid over the side of the steps, the two men so engrossed in their bickering they didn’t see her.
Charlie, Georgette’s cat, did however. It rose from a hidden place in the same bushes beside the steps, took a swipe at Charlie’s nose, made a “hissthwapt!” sound, and catapulted over the flimsy stair railing to bounce off the trailer home’s front and zoom off.
The Glicks looked up briefly when the feline flew over the street and then looked back to their feet, avoiding each other’s eyes as they strode angrily up to the picnic table on the patio.
“But think what it’ll do to the girls. Think how it will confuse the grandchildren,” Randolph said, stopping to lean on the picnic table with one hand while he gestured with the other like an Italian. “After sixty years … I just can’t believe what I’m hearing. It doesn’t make sense. You must be in shock or something.”
“Well, you’re a great one to talk, aren’t you?”
“My situation was totally different and you know it.”
“Which one?”
“Both of them. Dad, that woman has obviously got some kind of hold on you and I want to know what it is.”
“I forbid you to disturb her in any way.” The two Glicks would have stood nose to nose if the son’s nose hadn’t been a half a head higher. But there could never be a question of Randolph’s paternity. Even the patch of anger looked the same color on each face.
“She was my mother, the only mother I’ve ever known. I loved her and you can’t treat her memory like this.”
“Well, that’s all she is now, a memory. The rest of us have to get on the best we can. Thought if there was anybody I could talk to, it’d be you—another man. But I can see I was wrong. Now that we have your mother decently buried, you can just go right on back to your own life. And tell your sisters and all the grandchildren to do likewise.”
“Decently buried? Mother was murdered and there’ll be no decency until her murderer is made to pay.”
“Three months is what I told you and three months is what I meant. Now get out of here.” Old Frank stomped up the stairs past Charlie and she heard the door slam.
The angry color left Randolph’s complexion as he sat back on the picnic table where his sisters had mourned their mother, where that mother—if Clara Peterson were to be believed—had lain dead before being stuffed under Charlie’s car. He wept silently, shoulders heaving, great tears welling and spilling over. Like a child left helpless and marooned, his world destroyed.
Charlie’d had no reason to like Georgette’s son but the scary thing, the pathetic thing, was that he made no sound. She had one of those damned female urges to blow her cover and rush to comfort him. Female urges invariably led to disaster.
Randolph Glick was easily old enough to be her father, but his dad was a real bonafide shit. She hadn’t understood the argument and didn’t know what the three-month threat was all about, but it was never more apparent that if old Frank was in mourning, it was only for the lack of someone to make his Cream of Wheat and select his jockeys.
Fortunately, before Charlie was moved to move on her female urge, Randolph straightened and pulled a cloth handkerchief from his hip pocket. He cleaned up his nose and his face and straightened his body and his tie. He glared at the trailer above Charlie and nodded to himself as if coming to a decision. Charlie knew Libby could turn strong emotion on and off that quickly, but she didn’t know a man could. She was glad she hadn’t left the bushy plants that hid her when she saw how hard was the look that transformed his eyes under lashes still glistening with tear fragments.
Randolph Glick stood, licked his lips, and pressed them tightly. If he’d been heading for one of the morning staff meetings at Congdon and Morse Representation, Inc., Charlie would have headed for the restroom instead of the conference room. He stepped off purposefully, not back to his car, but around the side of his father’s house.
Charlie was about to rise from her squat to relieve aching ankles and feet when Randolph’s father thundered across the porch and down the stairs next to her head. “I told you to leave that woman alone, didn’t I? You’re just out to make trouble where there’s none to be made, damn you.”
Charlie figured it was now or never and tried to push off to a standing position, but one leg had gone to sleep to the hip and she stumbled. She put one hand on the stairs next to her face and the other one missed. It came down on the ground just below the edge of the open redwood steps and onto the feel of warm cloth.
She nearly screamed, thinking she’d found another body. But the cloth lay on bare earth. Charlie could see by the sunlight filtering through the space between steps a garment with buttons and pockets, shaped into a shallow circle like a nest. It was covered with short hairs.
Cat hairs, Charlie would have bet. She stood and brought the garment up with her. It was a safari shirt with buttons and flaps and pockets. And most of the hair clung to the rusty stains on its front. Bloodstains, Charlie would have bet.
She fought off another female urge, this one to rush to the local animal clinic and plead with Doc Withers to take in Georgette’s pet permanently. Charlie the cat might come home to sleep in the solace of its owner’s blood smell, but Charlie the agent doubted it still ate here.
“Hey, animals are adaptable and that shirt is evidence,” Charlie’s rationality warned. But the other Charlie returned the safari shirt to as
close to its original position as she could remember and stepped out of the bushes.
It sounded like all hell was breaking loose on the other side of the trailer house. Those could be old paint stains on that shirt, but Charlie squared her shoulders and walked into Frank’s house to call the sheriff of Moot County. She was clearly out of her league again and she knew it.
“Told Clara not to talk to you, damn it,” Frank said.
“Both you and Clara are going to have to talk to the sheriff about this, Frank, before things get any worse. There’s no other way.” Charlie eyed the telephone. What if the dispatcher had decided hers was a crank call? What if Wes was nowhere near his pager or car radio? Or so far away from Moot Point it would take him too long to get here?
She sat in the same recliner she had the night of Georgette’s murder. But now she knew how Georgette and her Schwinn had come to be under the Toyota.
Randolph had stormed in first, furious at not finding Clara at home and finding Charlie had invaded his father’s home instead. With a calmness she didn’t feel, Charlie informed them both she had called the sheriff and would wait for his arrival. That she’d talked to Clara and there was new information on Georgette’s death.
“Well, that’s all fine and good because I have some new information on my mother’s death too. I know now that the Peterson woman shot my mother in order to get her nasty claws into my poor old father.”
Charlie relaxed back into the recliner. She’d had it with these guys. “Your poor old father’s a lech, Randy. How many women and children did you have to trash to prove how wonderful you are?”
“Two marriages, two divorces, lost track of the assorted offspring long ago, and the mistresses,” Frank said gleefully. “And he wants to make trouble for me, man married to the same woman for over sixty years.”
“She was my mother,” Randolph said, “and our situations are as different as night and day. And no one calls me Randy.”
“Probably don’t seem so different to your assorted offspring,” Charlie said, knowing she was talking to the wallboard. It would take bypass surgery or a near-death experience to cut through his self-centered coating. “I promised Clara I’d talk to you, Frank, before I called the sheriff, but I’ve had to break that promise. She and … the people she’s with know I’m here and why. It’s up to you if you want Randolph to stay or not.”
“Just who the hell are you to talk to us this way? You’re involved in my mother’s murder too, probably in league with that woman next door.”
“Shut up, Randy,” Frank said.
“Now just a goddamn minute here.”
“Get out,” Frank said.
Both Charlie and Frank’s son stared at the old man, startled by the energy and authority in his tone and expression. Randolph headed for the door. “I’m going to tell the rest of the family. They should know about you.”
“I can’t stop you,” Frank admitted. “But you can’t stop me from marrying Clara in three months time, either.”
“We’ll see about that,” Randolph said and added with a sneer, “Dad. You both conspired with the Peterson woman to kill Mom. I don’t know why yet, but it’ll come out when this thing goes to trial.” Randy slammed the door behind him.
Frank lay out on the couch, his authority deflated. “Just like his mother—bulldogs, both of them. We had one boy, three girls—every one of them turned out like her. Don’t make sense. Hoped he might understand because he was a man like me, but you see what come of it.”
“Want to talk to me before Wes Bennett gets here?”
“Me and Georgette was married over sixty years. Hadn’t got along the last fifty-eight, but we stuck together. That’s what our generation did. Only way to raise kids and have ’em turn out decent, as you can see by what’s become of the world since the new generations decided to do it their way.” He sat up again and Charlie could hear joints popping. He looked directly into her eyes and Charlie wondered if there was a confession coming. “But I never wanted kids—just wanted to fuck. Children happen and there you are. I’d look at another woman and old Georgie’d throw a hissy-fit. But Randolph, he shit Chanel Number Five, far as his mother was concerned, and still bounced around beds like his balls belonged to a Ping-Pong parlor. Clara and me, we get along fine and she’s not dead set to deprive me of every last thing I fancy just for my own good. We’re comfortable together. That means a lot at any age. Now, nosy Miss Agent, have I answered all your damn questions?”
Even as he rose to his feet, even as Charlie’s rational self reminded her that she was alone with the new chief suspect in a murder case, even as she remembered the stains on that shirt, curiosity got the better of her. “All but one. Did you kill your wife, Frank?”
Chapter 29
“Things was going just fine till you come along,” Frank said, advancing as Charlie backed.
“You needed me to drive my car up to stuff her body under,” she reminded him.
“That was Clara’s idea. We was both so befuddled.”
“Clara ran over the bike and—”
“And then she come running around the house crying up a storm. And me standing there looking down at old Georgette in the fog. And old Georgette had no plans to move on her own, let me tell you. But would you move, please?”
“Excuse me?”
“All this heavy breathing and shouting’s inspired my bladder.” He grinned, knowing she’d thought he was threatening her. “And you’re blocking the door to the pisser.”
Charlie shrugged and stalked out onto the porch. She sat on the steps and waited. Randolph’s car hadn’t moved. He still sat in it, staring straight out to sea. Frank was a lech and a shit, as self-involved as his son. Poor Clara Peterson must need the money badly or perhaps just needed someone who needed her to bake lemon meringue pies—the creamy kind instead of the Jell-O-y. Still, Charlie couldn’t see Frank as a murderer.
Frank Glick joined her on the top porch step to watch, over Jack Monroe’s roof, the Pacific roll in in picture postcard perfection, ignoring the car at the curb and the man in it.
“Is it true you don’t drive? Never have?” Charlie asked.
“Some people never swim, others can never look down from great heights without fainting dead away. Some can’t bring themselves to drive cars. But I never killed my wife. She was just laying out there on the picnic table, dead. Like she was meant to go then and did.”
“What did you do before you retired that you didn’t have to drive a car?”
“Moved into Georgette’s old man’s grocery business when I married her and took it over when he died. What driving had to be done, Georgette did. Lived all our lives, till we come here, in Sebastopol, California. Knew her in high school and in the Biblical way.” Frank’s long stringy eyebrow hairs rose for emphasis. “Her old man hadn’t come after me, Randolph would have been born the bastard he’s proven himself.”
“You are everything I despise,” Charlie told him.
“I live long enough to see you get old and ugly, I’ll feel the same about you. But right now I love you, darling, can’t help it.” He moved closer and Charlie stood up.
Why couldn’t she say the obvious, that he was already old and ugly? Why couldn’t she be more like a man? “Like you love Clara Peterson?”
“Oh well, she’s more of a comfort than a … she’s the kind who makes a good—”
“Servant? Cook? Maid? Housekeeper? Nurse?”
“Yeah, housewife. Someone to comfort a man in his old age instead of torment him.”
“Plus drive him around. But Frank, what can you offer Clara Peterson?”
“Hell, I’m offering to marry the woman, ain’t I?”
“How many safari shirts do you own?”
He shrugged, “Three or four. Kids all went to that Banana Republic store to do their Christmas shopping one year. Can’t think for themselves, you know. Had to call up their mother and ask her what to buy. Thought your last question was going to be did I kill my wife or
not.”
Charlie stood on the little paving stones at the bottom of the steps and faced him, trying not to look at the corner of the safari shirt showing between the stairs under his right boot. “You lied to me that day on the beach, didn’t you? About your argument with your wife the night she died, it wasn’t about clippings on how wrong her nutritional beliefs were.”
“Certainly was. I had proof. Boy, I had her good.”
“But that’s not why she went off in the fog pretending to take her bike, maybe hoping to worry you.”
“We didn’t do much but argue, you understand.” He sat quietly, staring around her to the sea, as if deep in thought, or, Charlie worried, hoping the sheriff would get here to stop all this unofficial investigating. “But I guess the very last thing we had words over was she wanted me to go with her to the Bergkvists and make Mrs. Bergkvist admit Georgette was not either a crazy old woman for thinking she saw Olie in town this summer. Hell, Olie’s a rich man, he can have any woman he wants. Why’d he want to come home to that old wart if he had something better going? Told her to mind her own business for once. That woman had the longest nose on earth. But there was no talking to Georgie. So, she said she’d go herself. And I said fine. And that’s the last I saw her alive.”
“But you wanted Clara to take you to a motel in Chinook. I don’t see the connection.”
“Woman like Georgette’ll eat you alive if you don’t watch out,” he explained patiently. “She was always going off to that institute and leaving me alone if I didn’t do exactly what she wanted, see? Or the garden club, or this bunch of old biddies that played bridge. Every time the institute finished up a class there was a beach picnic. I never wanted to go to them because the people talked and acted stupid and it almost always rained and I was too tall to get under the tarps they’d prop up over the food. But all she could think to do was gripe that I was ‘antisocial.’ Older she got, worse it got. I never had no place to go except next door to Clara’s. Daytime, if the weather wasn’t too bad I’d walk into Chinook and buy stuff Georgie wouldn’t let me have. But she was always going off on her bike, see. So that night I got fed up and decided two can play that game. Let her worry for once, the old fool. I didn’t plan to come home till the six o’clock bus the next day either.”