Killer Commute

by Marlys Millhiser

  Charlie came as close to wetting herself as she had since the latter stages of pregnancy when a voice came from upstairs: “This is Jeremy…”

  CHAPTER 8

  CHARLIE AND MAGGIE were nursing hangovers with skinny lattes sprinkled with nutmeg the next morning, their toes tucked under Maggie’s center cushion, when Officer Mason called ahead to be sure someone would let her into the fortress. She’d called Charlie’s house, but Libby never answered the phone before noon on weekends.

  When she arrived, Maggie Stutzman made the officer a latte and crawled back on the couch.

  Mary Maggie looked at each of them several times and grinned, “Saturday nights suck on Sunday morning, right?”

  They were again in their uncouth, uncombed, unbrushed, just-out-of-bed modes, and their senses of humor wouldn’t show up for a couple of hours.

  The scare last night had nearly forced them to go to Betty Beesom’s church this morning. We’re talking a serious fright here, that no loose cop grin could budge.

  “How are the cats?” she tried again.

  “Recovered.” Charlie slugged down the last of her latte and waved the empty soup-bowl cup at her hostess, not yet up to please.

  “You won’t stop peeing for a week.”

  “I’m on vacation for a week.”

  The officer took too deep a draft of her latte, blinked back tears, pushed her glasses up her nose, and gave Charlie a conspiratorial look. “Any more … interesting ideas on Jeremy Fiedler’s death?”

  “Nobody disappears their identity that completely in this computer age.”

  “Computers make mistakes. People make even more. Not nearly enough of the people responsible for things can keep up with the technology. All you have to do is hire a hacker and disappear.” Maggie Stutzman sang the same refrain.

  “Shut up and make coffee.”

  “You two sound married. So, what’d you do besides drink last night?”

  The unmistakable voice of a dead man coming out of the upper reaches of a more-than empty house had sent the conspirators scattering and then back, clutching. Charlie thought Doug Esterhazie would crush her head into his breastbone. God, they make kids hard these days.

  “Officer Mason, do you think Maggie’s hypotheses about technology overpowering the official brainpower in this country has any validity whatsoever?”

  “Well, let me put it this way.” Officer Mason took another gulp of her latte and fished in a uniform pocket for a tissue. “And I will never admit to saying this in a court of law—”

  “We got the room bugged—but go ahead.” Their hostess poured steamed milk into Charlie’s latte cup.

  “We are reportedly looking into hiring, at minimum wage, a few underaged geeks for a summer recreational workshop to look into the possibility of recovering lost, stolen, deleted, or screwed-up files of interest, because we can’t afford Bill Gates’s programmers or their fresh-out-of-high-school replacements-in-training.”

  “This sounds like really classified information.” Maggie handed Charlie her second serious jolt.

  “Well, let’s say that if we need a middle or junior-high group of experts to handle this admittedly serious problem, we won’t be able to afford community-outreach types like me.”

  “But aren’t you worried those kids will go home and hack into stuff you don’t want them to, once you give them the information to retrieve what you want them to? How are you going to keep them from babbling or selling the information they retrieve?”

  “That’s exactly the problem,” Mary Maggie said, looking impressed.

  Why did people assume literary agents were stupid? Charlie was expecting Mary Maggie to say, “So, you broke into the murdered man’s house last night without disturbing the crime-scene foils, huh? Congratulations. What did you find? Hand it over before I take you to jail.”

  Actually the most impressive thing they found last night was the difficulty of getting back out the way they got in. If that media-center cabinet didn’t want to push in for them over the new carpet, it turned really rebellious when Doug tried to pull it back in place. There was nothing to grip it with, and it was wider than the door and would be noticeable if left standing out a ways in the room because the indentation in the carpet would show between it and the wall concealing the door. And tugging too hard could knock some stuff off the shelves to be left on the floor and attract the attention of the next cop to enter and put the chief suspects, the neighbors, in an even more difficult spot.

  Finally, Libby and Doug, probably because Libby’s mom and her best friend were several sheets to the wind and Betty Beesom was crying again, took charge. They shooshed the three incompetent adults out the secret side door and closed it. Then they pushed the recalcitrant piece of furniture back in place and scratched the new indentation out of the new carpet and crawled out of the window. Since it was inside the compound, that window was not barred, and whatever crime-scene secret gizmos they might have set off somewhere did not send a team of LBPD types out to investigate. Of course, the problem now was there was no one inside to latch the window shut.

  “Mo-om,” Libby had assured Charlie, “everybody but Doug’s DNA could be in the house before the murder. And we don’t have to mention him. And the first person who goes in surreptitiously locks the window and—”

  “Surreptitiously?”

  “Now stop that.” Libby left in a huff to take Doug home and left Charlie calculating all the ways Douglas Grant Esterhazie could be linked to the Greenes and the compound.

  “This is Jeremy Fiedler,” the message on the answering machine upstairs in the murdered man’s house had said last night to scare the sense out of the neighbors who’d sneaked in illegally. “Please leave a message.”

  “But I didn’t hear the phone ring,” Doug said.

  “Fiedler,” said the man leaving the message. “I’m on to you and I’m going to blow your sick little world to pieces.”

  “Sounds like a father all right,” Maggie had said. “He’s just a little late is all.”

  Jeremy never answered his wired phone and had turned off the ringer. The neighbors reached him by cell phone. He’d always been unlisted. Charlie was, too. So what?

  “I’ve got it,” Maggie Stutzman said now. “Jeremy was in a witness protection program.”

  “Their identities are falsified but they still have credentials,” Charlie told her, and turned to the policewoman. “Did Jeremy have his cellular with him in the Trailblazer when he died?”

  “I’m the one who’s here to ask the questions, Ms. Greene. And with your recent history, you might think you know all there is to know about murder investigations, but we can see in a weekend more murder victims than you’ve seen in the last three years.” Officer Mason set down her half-filled cup and stood. “Now, if you’d be so kind as to wake your daughter for me, I’d like to ask her some questions.”

  “You’d be wise to let her shower first. She’s not good in the mornings and doesn’t have to go to work till noon.”

  “You sound like you’re afraid of your own kid. It’s not like she grew up downtown, even if her mother did lay one on last night.”

  They were halfway across the courtyard, Charlie and the lady cop, Charlie still cupping her coffee bowl in her hands, the coffee buzz beginning to cut through the wine hangover and sleep deficit.

  “Just because you’ve seen countless disadvantaged and self-destructive teens in your work, officer, and are raising two dogs, does not mean you are up to Libby Greene this early on Sunday morning and before her shower.” But Charlie escorted the cop to the second floor, knocked on Libby’s door, threw it open, and hurried downstairs and out into the courtyard to finish her coffee.

  The air smelled clean and cool. The morning fog had burned off early and the sky was a California blue. Her little lemon tree was in bloom and smelled sweet. You need to notice these things when you’re on vacation, especially the kind of vacation Charlie was having.

  Her flower boxes were a ri
ot of color—lots of pansies and she didn’t know what else. Charlie had finally given in to her neighbor’s pleas and hired a “gardener,” who was a totally different animal from a landscape architect, Jeremy had informed her, to plant the boxes and come around now and then to pick off the dead flowers and clean up plant debris on her patio and front yard.

  He was one of Kate Gonzales’s sons, and his name was Leroy. That was a strange family. He’d rigged up a little timed-drip system that kept things watered. Charlie’d thought it a total waste of money but had grudgingly come to admit that if she was going to be a full-time literary agent and a mommy, too, she had to hire help with the small stuff.

  She looked around her now and made a point to enjoy it. Most days she left for work before daylight and got home at dusk or after dark, and was too tired to notice Leroy’s work.

  The seagull who thought he was a pigeon posed on top of Jeremy’s roof again. Okay, it probably wasn’t the same one, but he did appear to be doing his statue thing in the same place.

  Mrs. Beesom’s sentry palm clattered merrily even though it was only three-fourths of its former self. Charlie must ask Leroy if he could help dispose of the dead fourth. Jeremy would have taken care of that once.

  How could Jeremy have been so indispensable and still such an unknown quantity, and why hadn’t she or Betty or Maggie raised this question while he still lived? Such mysteries can be fun—but not when they happen to you and your neighborhood.

  Officer Mason slid out the back door and slumped into the deck chair across from Charlie. “She’s taking a shower.”

  “Good plan.”

  “We’re going to talk afterwards. I’m sticking with dogs.”

  “Another good plan.”

  “How can some young snit with three huge zits make a cop feel like a leper? Even if she is a blond?”

  “Zits? Oh, there is a God.” Charlie’s buzz hove to and she stood. “Want some breakfast?”

  “Already had my bagel.” But Mary Maggie followed her into the kitchen and watched her poach an egg and heat milk, pour it all over a piece of toast. “I’ve heard of hang-over medicine, but—you’re not going to eat that?”

  Charlie grabbed some leftover orange slices and took her breakfast to her sunken patio to enjoy the birds flitting around Mrs. Beesom’s feeders, the wonderful scents and colors of her own private patio garden, and what promised to be a beautiful day. She was on vacation, and would not obsess over the poor cop who’d stayed in the house to interrogate Libby, or even a murdered friend and neighbor. Not right now. Every minute counts in this crazy world. If you can enjoy one, grab it.

  Even her commute—often two hours each way, if not held up by an accident or construction or whim of the freeway god—offered chances to grab some time to do something or enjoy something, like eat a bagel or dry her hair while sitting in gridlock and talking on the cellular to New York which was three hours ago on the wrong time and maybe already out to lunch.

  The options were endless with her notebook computer and e-mail, her electronic scheduler. Gridlock used to be an ulcerating, unscheduled hassle in an already frantic day. But Charlie had adjusted, and now she was woefully behind in her day and makeup et cetera if there was no grid to use to get ready for the office. She’d been known to arrive without her pantyhose on. No way could you drive a freeway and put on pantyhose.

  It was the return journey at night that was the problem. As she’d increasingly lost any pretense of control over her only child, she’d sort of given in to the exhaustion besieging her on the return trip and risked drowsiness and death from inattention.

  But in Charlie’s crazy world, this day had become special suddenly, and she spooned up the rest of the warmed eggy milk with a satisfied sigh. Three whole zits that weren’t there yesterday. What more could the mother of a teenaged girl ask? Libby Abigail Greene was about to have her period.

  CHAPTER 9

  CHARLIE UNLOCKED HER mailbox, one of four silver doors in a black metal casing on a pole carefully lettered with a number of crude suggestions. It stood outside the compound, and she had to step aside when the gate swung open and Officer Mason strode out to the street and her car.

  Before the gate could close, Libby and her Wrangler roared out, too. Thankfully, the cars headed in opposite directions. Neither female saw Charlie, or pretended they didn’t. Both looked royally pissed. Charlie figured Doug Esterhazie had lost his anonymity with the Long Beach PD.

  Maggie slipped out her front door as if she’d been watching for them to leave. She opened her box and Mrs. Beesom’s. Whoever got to the mailboxes first usually brought in everybody else’s mail and left it on their doormats. It had been Jeremy’s idea, so anyone coming home after dark wouldn’t be exposed to mugging. The same key worked for all four boxes. Charlie and her best friend stood looking at Jeremy’s box.

  “I don’t remember ever bringing in his mail,” Charlie said.

  “You’re usually the last one home. I took his in when he went on trips.” Which wasn’t very often.

  “He must not have picked his up Friday, either, if he didn’t pick up ours. Maggie, when you took in his mail, was it addressed to Jeremy Fiedler?”

  “I’d think I’d have noticed if it wasn’t, don’t you?”

  “You don’t remember.” They stood talking to each other but looking at Jeremy’s mailbox, like they were talking to it. Neither wanted to admit what both knew they were about to do. “If he got mail, he had to have an identity recorded with the post office. I mean, they won’t just deliver to an address. Will they?”

  “We better hurry before someone sees us.”

  Charlie emptied the last mailbox and both of them rushed to her front door. She’d blocked open the security grate that guarded it from a surprise visit from the big bad wolf.

  “What happened to your key? You’re going to lock yourself out again.”

  “It’s just easier to block it open. You know, there’d be one way for sure to prove Jeremy had no identity—if he didn’t get any offers from credit-card companies to lend him buckets of cash at twenty-two percent after six months.” Charlie rummaged through her mail, all junk, not even a doxy magazine for her teen, and threw it at the pile already overloading her dining room table. They settled at the breakfast nook with the rest.

  “We should be wearing gloves,” Maggie said.

  “Too late now.” Charlie helped her best friend sort through their dead neighbor’s mail and then looked up, astonished. “God, they actually send credit-card stuff to Occupant?”

  “Do you suppose they have those phony checks made out that way? There’s no bank statement or bills.”

  “Mine and Libby’s was all junk the last two days, too. Even Edwina e-mails now or calls. What did you get?”

  “Hardly anything of importance comes through the U.S. Post Office anymore, when you think about it.” But Maggie fanned out her mail on the table, too. Two mail-order catalogs and her ten-million-dollar winnings from Publishers Clearing House came to Maggie—the rest came to Occupant or to Resident.

  “You didn’t get a bank statement, either.”

  “My bank’s gone electronic.”

  “So has mine. Do you think if you are totally electronic you can escape your identity?”

  “Charlie, there’s always the IRS, and the city and county and state governments have to keep track of you for tax purposes.”

  “The IRS has gone electronic for filing and billing simple tax statements. If you could get access to their computers, which are rumored to be medieval anyway, you might disappear yourself.”

  “But what about your Social Security number? Have you noticed how we keep changing sides in this argument? You scare me.”

  They looked at Betty’s mail. Three mail-order catalogs for sensible shoes, Stylish, but with big toe boxes and slender heels, for the mature, stylish woman. One birdwatcher’s newsletter. A glossy quarterly report from Sara Lee. Three glossy brochures spouting the advantages of Celerium, the anti
aging pill. How to live longer and enjoy it. The miracle cure for cataracts and senility. Orgasm for those over eighty!

  “Maggie, these are all addressed to her, at least. We all worry about our personal business, buying habits, finances, and health problems becoming public knowledge to whoever buys the right mailing list.”

  “Vibrators? Porno videos?”

  “Look—here’s a come-on from two brokerage firms. They know she’s got Sara Lee, and she probably has other investrnents. They know her age, probably that she’s widowed, may even know what she has in her checking account. Here’s something from her bank, looks like. It’s all addressed here, and to her. She’s targeted. Ah, here’s AARP. See what I’m saying?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “They make dress shoes with big toe boxes and narrow heels? How come I can never find any? And if I order a catalog like this, they’ll give the AARP my name and address and the people who want me to have orgasms after I’m eighty.”

  “Maggie, the important thing is, almost everything is known about Betty Beesom. Almost nothing about Jeremy Fiedler. He didn’t seem like the hacker type, but if the Long Beach PD can hire some hackers, he sure could.”

  “To get himself erased from all electronic records. But there are still paper records on him somewhere—backup copies of computer disks and CDs.”

  “Could be hard to find. Software changes, and companies don’t back up the dated versions long anymore.”

  “Yeah. Look, they’ve even got pumps like mine—but with a wide toe box and a narrow heel.”

  Outside, the gate grated open and Betty’s Olds 88 roared in. They looked across the table at each other, sharing a familiar thought. The old lady drove only to church, the supermarket, doctor, dentist, and beauty shop. To the homes of a few close friends, and even fewer restaurants. She did much of her shopping by mail. But it was only a matter of time before she and that juggernaut hit something. Charlie and Maggie dreaded the day Mrs. Beesom could no longer drive. Particularly now that Jeremy was gone.