That voice moved the dudes to heroics and Eddie was saved. He went to the animal shelter in Chinook. What was left of Olie Bergkvist joined Michael in the morgue. The others went to the jail in the Moot County Courthouse. Except for Rose and Charlie. They went to the hospital.
Somehow, in the chaos of the leaping dog and people scurrying every which way, Rose had shot herself in the foot. She got nowhere insisting her doctor of choice was Paige Magill.
After making Charlie perform various eye and balancing exercises, another doctor decided her head injury was not serious.
“How bad is he?” Charlie asked Linda Tortle when they finally leaned against the two-toned wall (hospital puce and mortuary gray) outside Wes’s room, waiting for the nurse to complete her ministrations and give them permission to enter.
Linda peered down her long nose at Charlie and smiled a lazy, triumphant smile. “Bruised, scratched, dislocated shoulder, lumps, aches and pains. Miracle it wasn’t worse. He was really tooling.”
“But Rose made it sound like all three were near death.”
“That’s because she got her information from two highly excited sisters. Frank and Clara are a little worse off, but not much. Lucky they were wearing seat belts and driving big, heavy, rusty, old Detroit steel though. Makes me think I’ll keep my Pontiac yet a while after all.”
“If you can afford to feed it,” Charlie parried, vastly relieved they weren’t about to die. “So, uh, while he’s sitting in the hospital getting his cuts and scrapes cleaned up, a female detective overhears the confessions and saves the life of another intended victim. Good work, Deputy Tortle, but the bumbling Olsen will probably get the credit for it.”
“I can’t discuss the case of course, but I expect there’s a certain intended victim witness who’ll be called back for the trial to tell it like it really was.”
“I think it’s bargain time again, don’t you?” Charlie asked nonchalantly.
“Jesus, you’re cold-blooded. Okay, one question.”
“Two.”
Linda groaned behind clenched teeth, raising her palms toward the ceiling in a pleading gesture. “Okay, two. But that’s it. You are something else, you know that?”
“It’s what I don’t know. I don’t know why you lied to me about Olie’s airline schedule. Or didn’t he come by plane?”
“Right on schedule. So Georgette Glick probably did see Gladys Bergkvist driving him into town from the airport. All I didn’t tell you was that there was a computer shutdown on Delta’s files for that time and when I talked to you, Delta was the one airline we hadn’t been able to check out. I walked back in the courthouse after our lunch today and they’d retrieved damaged files and there his name was.”
“Was Wes rushing to the village to tell me that when he had his accident?”
“You know what the real mystery is here? Why didn’t anybody hear Rose shoot Georgette in such a small, quiet place as Moot Point? The shot was fired outside, it wasn’t that late at night, and sound carries on fog. I doubt there was a silencer for that revolver.”
“Backfires,” Charlie assured her. “Was he rushing to save me when he had the accident then?”
“What do you mean backfires? Oh, trucks on 101. People probably hear them all the time. Good work, Agent Greene. Hell, I should have thought of that.”
“Well, why was he rushing to Moot Point?”
“Don’t ask me. So, you tell it exactly like it happened when the first one of them goes to trial. Deal?”
“I haven’t asked my second question yet.”
“You sure as hell have. Why was the sheriff rushing to Moot Point? And why didn’t I tell you all I knew about Olie’s flight schedule? And I did. I just didn’t know it all when I talked to you this noon. So, we got a deal?”
“No, this is what we’ve got. Olie Bergkvist comes home and learns of Gladys’s affair with the local veterinarian and stalks off to the institute to confront him. Why not to the holistic animal clinic?”
It was Tuesday night, Linda explained, and when there were no outsiders in for seminars the privileged few met for the heavy stuff with Brother Dennis at the institute on Tuesday nights. Channeling and telepathy, tarot and even séances. “So Doc would have been at the institute. Probably Gladys too if Olie hadn’t come home.”
“How do you know all this?”
Linda shrugged. “Common knowledge. And I did have some contact with Doc and the institute once, remember. I heard they were seriously looking into Rose’s psychic powers too. Gladys told me on the way to the courthouse that she was running along behind Olie trying to reason with him when he went down. She left him there in the woods to get help at the institute. When they all got back, Olie was not only dead but being mangled by good old Eddie, who ‘would never harm a soul.’”
“And so they talked it all out to their mutual advantage.”
“And decided a missing Olie was more profitable than a dead one, so Gladys could liquidate the assets. Paige said as long as he was dead anyway, they weren’t hurting Olie. But Eddie kept digging him up and Georgette Glick snooped it out and Brother Dennis discovered her at the grave and convinced her to go down to Gladys’s with him where all would be explained and they could con her into joining into the conspiracy for a price. Georgette wouldn’t con. She locked herself in the bathroom and tried to crawl out the window, whereupon Rose shot her.”
“Do you really think Rose’s psychic powers told her to run up and find Michael’s gun so, just as she was coming down the stairs from his studio, Georgette was climbing out the window?”
“Who cares? She confessed. You’re a witness and Olsen and me. And the rest are going to fall apart and spill all to make it easier on themselves anyway. Meanwhile, a suspicious artist named Michael Cermack comes across Olie’s luggage in the garage his Ferrari shares with the Bergkvists’ cars and demands more quiet money than Olie’s widow is prepared to pay, and she doses his wine with cherry debris. He probably convulses, and having started the car stomps down on the accelerator and runs the Ferrari off the point. It’s all there.”
“Jack wasn’t part of it? He was closely connected with the institute,” Charlie said.
Jack Monroe and Brother Dennis had grown apart recently and Jack was no longer of the inner circle. Deputies Tortle and Olsen had come into town looking for Charlie and stopped at the Earth Spirit where the party was in full swing. Jack had told them he hadn’t seen Charlie since the picnic but he had an uneasy feeling something weird was going down up at the institute because Brother Dennis had insisted on crowding the party into the Earth Spirit. “Jack said it would have been easier for him to nip down to get the tapes and take them back up to the institute which has a lot better sound system. Then Brother Dennis orders him to keep the searchers there and runs off with Rose. How many questions is this, anyway?”
“How did Paige Magill get my fingerprints on Michael’s gun?”
Deputy Tortle couldn’t answer that one. Neither could Wes Bennett. He manufactured his own release, prematurely Charlie thought and so did the hospital staff, by the sheer force of his size, his office, and his bullheadedness. Charlie rode back to the courthouse with him and he spent the entire trip gloating over the fact that both confessed killers were women. “Have to see about building more female holding cells.”
Paige wouldn’t see her but she did see Jack Monroe, who was busily rounding up legal counsel for his friends, and what comforts were allowed them. “I’m sorry I got you involved in all this, Charlie,” he said as they both stood wearily on the courthouse steps and watched a glimmer of dawn lighten the foggy night. He mussed her hair in a fatherly gesture. “I just can’t fathom five intelligent people getting themselves into such a mess. It’s heartbreaking. Nor why I was so dense I didn’t suspect anything until it was nearly too late for you.”
“Did you ask Paige about my fingerprints on the gun? It’s driving me crazy.”
He nodded. “She said she took it to your cabin to hide it in y
our car to further connect you to Georgette’s murder, but the sheriff had taken your car. Then she found your door unlocked and slipped in, thinking to hide it inside. But you slept so soundly she was able to get your prints on it without waking you. So she put the gun in a Baggie and threw it in the ditch, knowing Mary and Norma would find it if the sheriff’s department didn’t.”
He started down the long flight of concrete steps lit by a milky globe on a pole every five feet or so. He stopped under the first one and turned to look up at her, those strange electric eyes glinting in the globe’s light. “Charlie, I know you don’t believe in it, but Paige swears you weren’t really asleep when she got your fingerprints on Michael Cermack’s revolver. She’s seen my body when I’ve been having an OOBE and she swears that’s what you were doing too.”
Charlie hated the cold finger of doubt playing up and down her vertebrae. “Try and make your deadline, and send me a copy of the manuscript when you send it to Morton and Fish. Plus copies of any correspondence. And Jack, if you ever OOBE again? Don’t take me with you, okay?”
“I know I can’t leave it alone. But I tell you what, Charlie Greene, if I ever see you on my bodiless travels I’ll give you a sign. I’ll do this.” He walked back up to her and mussed her hair again. Then he disappeared down the courthouse steps and into the fog.
Dawn was adding vague highlights to the fog but the sun hadn’t breached the Coast Range yet when a weary Charlie and a wearier sheriff struggled out of a Moot County Sheriff’s Department sedan and lowered themselves onto a driftwood log on the beach that had become the grave of the Peter Iredale.
“Why did you bring me here, Wes, you know what that wreck does to me.”
He chuckled short, like it hurt to even do that much. “Some ghosts need to be put to rest.”
“And why won’t you tell me why you were rushing to the village so fast you mashed into Clara’s old Ford? I don’t care if the reason had nothing to do with me.”
He chuckled again and groaned for it. “Oh, Charlie Greene, you do have you an ego, don’t you?”
“So?”
“So first things first.” The sheriff of Moot County pulled a chicken breast (original recipe) from the Kentucky Fried bag on his lap. “Us poor little injured men need strength.”
“Damn it, Wes—”
He stuffed a salty drumstick between her teeth. “I was rushing into Moot Point to tell you about a phone call I got at your cabin from your boss—Morse? After he read me the riot act and my rights, he ordered me to tell you he’d talked to your mother and learned about your problem with this wreck here and wanted you to know that, yes, you had seen it, a picture of it—sketch, he said—in the lobby of the bank building your office is in.”
Charlie tried to visualize the lobby. The whole building was in the process of being redecorated, and the lobby had been done first. There were all kinds of strange artwork on the walls. She looked out at the shadowy shape of the wreck emerging from the fog into the morning. “And that’s one of them. It’s just as you come out of the elevator on the ground floor.” She hugged the huge lawman and he gasped. “Oh, I’m sorry, but I feel so much better.”
“So you don’t have to worry about nightmares and flying around in the night sky without your body.”
Charlie kissed his swollen, bruised nose gently. “Right, Sheriff. There’re no such things as OOBE’s.”
“Or things that go bump in the night. All that’s now a—”
“Don’t say it.”
“Moot point.” His eyes crinkled but his voice turned husky. “You sure you have to go home this morning?”
“Yes, but not right away maybe. I mean I do have a life and two jobs that need me. Then again, you did injure yourself trying to help me out of my superstitious—” Charlie jumped to her feet and the half-eaten drumstick fell to the sand.
“What’s wrong? A bird crap on you?”
Charlie ran her fingers through the hair on top of her head. “Did you just see my hair move, Wes?”
“Probably just the wind.”
“There is no wind.”
After All
By the time Charlie and her buttery-smooth Toyota headed south, she and the sheriff had managed to rationalize away, as a vestige of an old nightmare, what had seemed to her an invisible hand mussing her hair.
She loved zooming along 101, and the gorgeous now sunny Pacific on her way to work she could handle. She was tired, glad to be heading home, pleased that the big sheriff had pleaded with her not to.
Mostly she was relieved to have avoided the lures of the alternative world she’d come uncomfortably close to in the last week. She’d take the rational any day.
The radio played sounds her tone-deaf ears couldn’t appreciate but her spirit could celebrate. The windows were open to the sea air on one side of her and the forest on the other and she was in charge of her little world for a brief enjoyable moment.
“Back to Kansas, Toto.” Charlie Greene laughed and patted the dashboard. But she made one stop on her way out of Oregon. And that one was almost furtive. Charlie pulled in at a roadside greenhouse and bought a young potted aloe plant.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Charlie Greene Mysteries
1
Charlie Greene turned off the engine and rolled down the car window. When her eyes began to water from the fumes, she rolled the damned thing back up again.
Palm fronds peeking out from an expensive neighborhood on the other side of a privacy fence were drooping in the freeway air, too. Orangy-red roofs of new clay tile showed between the fronds in slices. They relieved the bleakness of a rush hour morning with slashes of color.
Charlie punched the office on her car phone and tried hard not to think of two-hundred-dollar Rollerblades. She tapped on the gray Toyota’s gray steering wheel.
Five lanes of traffic sat idling poisons into the air on Charlie’s side of the road, while all the cars in the opposing lanes zoomed by unobstructed. She’d left the fog behind shortly after leaving Long Beach, now it was just the usual haze clouding the air. But the sun was beginning to heat up the car through it, causing Charlie’s pantyhose to start sticking uncomfortably.
“Congdon and Morse Representation, Inc.,” Gloria’s New Jersey twang finally came over the line, and Charlie could hear the relentless soft click of the keyboard continue without hesitation. Anybody else would have left off the Inc., but not Gloria. Precise was Gloria.
“This is Charlie. I’m stuck in a grid on the 405 and won’t make the Universal breakfast on time. Can Richard cover for me?”
“He left already to do that, Charlie, swearingeh under his breath. Is it really gridlock, or just Libby?” Gloria’s conceit at being unencumbered by children was only one of her irritating traits. Nothing encumbered Gloria but her fingernails. Long, fire-engine red, with different tiny fake jewels set into each one, they were Gloria’s glory. “Or did something odd and unexplainable happen to you like I’ve been saying? I’m tellingeh you, Charlie, it can’t be long now. I can feel it.”
The only odd thing happening to me is Gloria Tuschman. “Is Larry in yet?”
Charlie dared to turn on the engine and the air conditioning, knowing she shouldn’t keep throwing pollutants into the smog. But she needed to look good today.
“Everybody coming in this morning is in except you,” Gloria pointed out ominously. “And everybody but me has left again on some errand or other.” Larry, Charlie’s assistant, had gone across the street to the Chevron to buy Gloria and himself Hostess Ding Dongs for their coffee break.
As soon as the receptionist started detailing the whereabouts of every last person at the office, Charlie cut her off. “I’ll do my New York calling now and be in as soon as I can.”
New York was three hours ahead of time, and it was a nightmare to reach everyone before they went home. Of course, Charlie had found it equally difficult getting hold of the West Coast when she’d worked in New York.
Charlie Greene was th
e literary agent for Congdon and Morse. She handled screenwriters for the agency and served as contact with East Coast book publishers. She managed to complete calls now to a literary agency and a New York producer, and leave a message at McMullins Publishing before the gridlock suddenly opened up as mysteriously as it had closed in. As usual, she didn’t pass a wreck or a tow truck or any sign of road construction to account for the traffic holdup. And, as usual, she wasn’t as fresh as she would like to have been when she reached the office.
A talent agency on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, Congdon and Morse Representation, Inc. wasn’t one of the best-known or more prestigious, but it had a few older stars on its roster, along with a fair number of up-and-comers. Although many more powerful agencies maintained their own imposing buildings, Congdon and Morse shared the fifth floor of the first Federal United Central Wilshire Bank of the Pacific building, a seven-story white stucco structure with black windows. Fortunately, tall palm tree stalks, sticking out of the sidewalk in front of it, didn’t produce any small poofs of fronds until reaching the level of that fifth floor. The FFUCWB of P sat on a corner facing Wilshire with its drive-through banking across the side street, a paved alley running along the other side, its first floor halved in size to provide covered parking in back and two levels of parking underneath.
Charlie waved away the parking valet, swooped the Toyota down into its own stall on the first level, took the elevators up to the fifth, followed the carpeted hall until she came to a discreetly marked door, and buzzed the intercom. There was an even more discreet rear entrance that Richard Morse shared with a shrink at the back of the building’s fifth floor, but the help had to use the front door.
“What do you want?” Charlie heard Larry’s harried-sounding voice instead of Gloria’s familiar insulting one. Gloria’s voice could discourage more wannabes than a math teacher’s.