Killer Commute

by Marlys Millhiser

  She and Rudy happened to be sitting side by side at a publisher’s luncheon, she unhappy because she thought it was to have been just her, her client, his editor—Joe Putnam, and a representative of Pitman’s marketing department. And Rudy Ferris happened to be fuming at his entertainment agent at TNT. One thing led to another. He recognized her as having a connection with Mitch Hilsten, superstar. She gave him her card. He called her at the office the next week and she set up a meeting with Richard Morse. Sheer dumb luck beat out hard work any day.

  “So what do you think everyone’s going to—”

  “Chinese, takeout/delivery,” Libby said. “With crab-cheese wontons, and cold peanut rice noodles for appetizers and—”

  “May I have dinner with you tonight if I promise to do the dishes?” Doug asked.

  “Let’s eat at your house and sleep at mine tonight so you don’t get blown up,” Lori offered. “You too, Doug, if you want to sleep with my little brother.”

  “And we can actually eat on the dining room table.” Libby sat up to stare at that piece of furniture as if she’d never seen it before. “We’ve got a cleaning lady.”

  Charlie and Larry left them arguing over the menu and choice of delivery service to stand in front of Jeremy Fiedler’s bombed-out house. It smelled of a fire that had been soaked down with water.

  “There’s no crime-scene tape, Larry.”

  “If they’ve found their murderer, they’ve found their bomber.” He let her lean on his arm.

  “Does Stew know you’re spending the night here? I don’t want anything happening to you.”

  “Stew’s a big boy and so am I, Charlie. Neither one of us want anything more to happen to you.”

  “Do you think kung pao shrimp will blow out my eardrums for good?”

  “Well, at least we’ll know. Keegan Monroe’s new script is filled with food. That’s so unusual for him. He and most men write of breakfast, lunch, and dinner to mark time. Woman write of eggs or bagels, soup and salads or sandwiches, fettuccine or meatloaf or salmon, and always of desserts.”

  “Most women writers who can sell are selling novels. Most screenplays are guy stuff written by guys. But I’m not surprised that Keegan’s getting into food, Larry. I expect the fare in prison makes him homesick for food.”

  Jeremy Fiedler’s house had blackened patches on the stucco around the windows and a seagull on the peak of the roof.

  Not-very-securely nailed boards blocked the doorway, almost like an invitation to danger. So they looked in the window next to it, into what had been the kitchen. A mangled light fixture hung on wires and cords almost to the floor.

  “How could the police just walk in and copy my computer files, go through my mail and records, Larry? Don’t you have to have a court order or something?”

  “Apparently not. But I think you should look into getting a lawyer.”

  “Then they’ll think I’m guilty for sure.”

  Larry walked around to peer in the window Doug and Libby had crawled out of the other night. “In my inexpert opinion I would say, Watson, that someone was attempting to destroy evidence here.”

  “Looks like they succeeded, Holmes.” Charlie came to stand beside him.

  The entertainment center/bookshelves piece had apparently protected the side door, and the torrey pine looked in better shape than the house. All Charlie could see inside here was dark, stinking, depressing. Tidy Jeremy would not have approved. Something inside creaked and snapped and a billow of ashy dust puffed out at them as if Jeremy had answered.

  They both stepped back in time to see Mrs. Beesom crossing the courtyard carrying something in a newspaper. She saw them and winked, set the newspaper on Jeremy’s picnic table, and walked over to them with a finger to her lips. A breeze ruffled the edges of the newspaper and Jeremy’s seagull floated down from the roof to eat the fish scraps from Mrs. Beesom’s dinner.

  “Seems like there ought to be a memorial service for Jeremy.” The old lady’s lips trembled. “Maybe this is as close as we’ll get to one.”

  “I hadn’t even thought of that,” Charlie said. “There should be some kind of service for him. But you’re right, that bird is the only being we know outside the compound who knew Jeremy.” Charlie wondered who would come if they held a memorial for him here. Or maybe at the seaside, how about on the bay? Would the woman in the long coat come? Would Charlie know her without the coat?

  Charlie was really missing Jeremy. Larry was wonderful and beautiful, but if it weren’t for the fact Jeremy was the victim in this travesty upon her fortress, he would have been the one she and everyone else who lived here would be counting on now. Weird. Major weird.

  Betty looked into Jeremy’s living room window and shook her head. “Don’t seem possible, but the fire inspectors think the house can be gutted and rebuilt inside. If it can be, I’m going to have it built back the way it was, exactly. That will be kind of a memorial, too, for the poor man.”

  “Will you sell it, do you think?” Larry asked.

  “No, I’ll rent it to some nice young man we all can trust like we trusted Jeremy.” Betty looked away quickly. She was always nice to Larry but never comfortable around him. Charlie wondered if that made Larry feel like being handicapped made her feel.

  They put newspapers over the gleaming table in the dining room and shared mooshu pork and kung pao shrimp, sesame chicken, moo gu gai pan, beef and broccoli in garlic sauce, Tai peanut noodles, and wanton cheese crabmeat wontons, along with bucket boxes of steamed rice with soy sauce and endless cans of Coke—an oriental pig-out Charlie knew she would regret in the middle of the night when raging thirst and the need to pass all that Coke would strike at the same time. God only knew what her ulcer would be thinking when she staggered down the stairs to the bathroom. Whoever said you get what you pay for had it all turned around.

  There would have been enough left over for another meal if Doug Esterhazie had not been with them. Larry confiscated a half-bucket box of rice he could microwave with cinnamon, sugar, and milk for breakfast to help alleviate his sodium hangover, and the rest was history.

  When he and Charlie were left alone with the cat, they discussed a memorial service for Jeremy. “It would make Mrs. Beesom feel better—people her age are really into death and stuff and maybe somebody who could be a fellow suspect might show up. What do you think? I mean, I kind of feel lonely in the suspect role here—could use the company.”

  “You’re the only one who actually saw the woman in the long coat running away from here before the blast inside Fiedler’s house.”

  “And the only one who saw Jeremy’s Ferrari come down the alley. Officer Mason saw it from behind later, going down the street, but the license plate was covered with mud and she didn’t see the woman driving it. She has no proof I wasn’t lying about it’s being Jeremy’s.”

  “I sure hate to tell you this, boss”—and he leaned across the crummied newspaper protecting the gleaming dining room table with one of his heart-stopping winsome looks—“but I can’t see what more you could lose at this point. Unless the bouquet bomber’s not done yet.”

  CHAPTER 20

  CHARLIE STOOD ON the crumbling cliff along the beach she’d never seen before. She wore a series of long scarves that blew in the sea breeze, something a sixties-type would have worn as an adult when Charlie was a kid. Major weird.

  Larry Mann stood in Lawrence of Arabia garb at the edge of a cliff with arms raised, invoking the gods to give peace to the poor murdered Jeremy Fiedler, who stood beside Charlie’s secretary, nodding his approval, and a seagull circled low overhead, looking for fish scraps. The breeze that blew Charlie’s scarves blew Larry’s robes and the long coat on the woman standing under a torrey pine that itself stood alone on this cliff. Betty Beesom, huddled on a rock nearby, her thin but careful hairdo gone ragged in the salty sea wind, smiled, nodded, and winked at Jeremy. And that was it—sea breeze, woman in the long coat, Charlie, Betty, torrey pine, Larry—all in motion with the wi
nd. Except Jeremy, in his usual tan pants and striped shirt and seriously thinning hair, was undisturbed by nature. But that made sense, since he was dead.

  Charlie’s problem, besides keeping the scarves in some semblance of propriety in case Detective J. S. Amuller appeared, was her overriding thirst. She was halfway down the stairs in her condo on her way to the potty when the transition from sea cliff in sunlight to stairs at night seemed perfectly normal. Maybe because of the thirst.

  Enough light from the streetlight penetrated between the bars on the window to reveal Larry Mann’s makeshift bed was empty. She passed a few gallons of Coke in the bathroom and headed for the bottled water in the kitchen. No Larry here, either.

  She found herself listening and holding her breath—good, she could hear the refrigerator and remembered now she’d heard the toilet flush. She hated these sudden and unreasonable panicky feelings when she remembered to worry about the loss of what had become such an unexpectedly vital part of her senses.

  The floor tile felt cool and oddly lacking in grit under her bare feet. Why had she waited so long to hire a cleaning lady? They weren’t that poor even before her recent successes professionally and her winnings in Vegas. It was just the memory of those struggling years trying to put food on the table while paying exorbitant rent for a bedsitter in Manhattan when she’d worked at a literary agency there. If her mother had not paid for Libby’s day care and private school, Charlie wouldn’t have made it. She’d felt so liberated having a home and a living wage out here, hated so having to depend on Edwina Greene, who had never forgiven her her teen pregnancy. Libby had to go to public school here, but they were a free family at last. Now that Charlie could afford private school, the kid didn’t want to leave her friends at Wilson.

  Charlie slipped into a windbreaker that hung on a hook inside the broom closet to one side of the kitchen door. It was scruffy but came down almost to her knees, covered the fact she slept in nothing but a T-shirt.

  The patio tile was really chilly on her feet but she wouldn’t be out here long, would just stand on the top step of her sunken patio and look around for her gorgeous secretary.

  Maggie Stutzman’s car was in its berth across from Charlie’s Toyota. Her car, a loaded Subaru, sat lonely there without the Trailblazer. Charlie wondered what “they” had done with it. What “they” had done with the copies of her files. Charlie didn’t think the Beverly Hill’s PD could invade the office that way without some kind of court-ordered search warrant. But it was rumored the Feds did such things and worse in a secret investigation. Larry was right—she needed a lawyer.

  Jeremy was something bigger than a neighborly murder. If he could disappear his identity … he could be a national threat. And if Charlie killed him she might be involved in this identity conspiracy, too.

  Charlie was glad her best friend was home—even though there might be a bouquet bomber about. Even though their fortress was no longer protected. Mel the merry-married was a real threat, too.

  A shadow moved away from the torrey pine at Jeremy’s house, slid around the patio flower boxes, and disappeared behind Maggie’s Subaru. It walked upright—so it was either man, ape, or big foot. It wasn’t thick enough for a bear.

  But Charlie regretted all that bottled water and moved ever so slowly backward down to the level of the patio—hoping she was in shadow, too—when something furry tickled itself between her ankles. She knew it was a cat, hoped it was Hairy Granger. He actually liked everybody. Everybody but Tuxedo.

  Another shadow—this one had to be luscious Larry—moved away from Jeremy’s house and toward Maggie’s Subaru. Beautiful men have a way of moving their shadows—no explaining the laws of nature.

  Charlie had just bent over to pick up Hairy Granger and keep him from tickling her into revealing her presence in the drama unfolding across the expanse of concrete courtyard only to find he was Tuxedo Greene instead, when the compound’s all-but-forgotten security system kicked in. Cars with unofficial light bars (yellow in color, but flashing) roared into the newly ungated compound and disgorged middle-aged male figures with sizable beer bellies and sleek Dobermans upon Charlie’s world.

  There had to be a god of the inane and poor timing following Charlie through life. Suffice it to say that by the time the first Doberman reached her, Tuxedo had climbed to the top of her head and she had released some bottled spring water onto her patio for the Doberman to stop suddenly and sniff. His burly-gone-pudgy handler couldn’t stop in time and took a nosedive over the attack dog in an attempt to land on top of Charlie Greene and her daughter’s cat.

  But Charlie and Tuxedo backed away in time to escape into the kitchen, only to find Hairy Granger right behind them, and the two felines, so happy to have escaped the Dobermans, were content to wage a sound fight that held to warning moans and occasional cat screams in Charlie’s condo. While she could only guess what the flesh-eating canines and ghostly shadows and uniformed geezers were doing without. At least she could hear it all. Where was luscious Larry?

  She’d found some Keds and fresh sweatpants to put on by the time the Dog Patrol types knocked on her door to report that a house in the compound had been gutted by fire and the front gate blown off. “What do you want us to do?”

  “Nothing. You are fired.”

  “Sorry, lady, but we got to talk to a Mr. Fiedler. He’s the one hired us.”

  “What, you don’t read the papers? He was murdered here a few days ago. The bombings and the fire are just the frosting on the cake. Besides a murderer and the bombers, we’ve had homicide, the bomb squad, and the fire department here. And now you show up. We’ve been paying you all these years, too. For what, I don’t know. But you’re still fired.”

  “Not our fault. Our computer broke down.”

  * * *

  The dog-guard people and their Dobermans had at least scared off one shadow, but Charlie, Larry, Maggie, and Betty Beesom all waited nervously for some hidden bomb to go off.

  They sat in Charlie’s breakfast nook drinking coffee and listening to what was left of the night.

  The shadow Larry had been following in the courtyard was not the woman in the long coat. He swore it was a man. And that man had been inside the burned-out shell of Jeremy Fiedler’s house. Larry had avoided the dog patrol by reclining on the backseat of Maggie’s Subaru, which she had not locked, still lulled by the habit of relying on the idea of Jeremy’s protected fortress.

  “Any other neighborhood, people would have moved to a motel to wait this out,” he offered languidly. “But never, do I think, has this been any other neighborhood.”

  “Motels are dangerous places. Read in the paper all the time about people getting murdered and raped and robbed in one. We’re safer here.” Betty had removed her nightcap but wore what she called a “duster” over her nightgown. It was pink and flowered and frilly but seriously machine washable. Charlie figured it must be called that because it was meant to be worn while you dusted your house before you took your morning shower. People who had to be on the road early to commute to work need not apply. If she lived long enough to retire, would Charlie wear a duster? Nah.

  “His ghost,” Betty said with certainty. “I been dreaming about him ever since he was murdered. That was no shadow. He still lurks around here, wanting to tell us who killed him.”

  This late at night, with Betty’s weepy red eyes magnified by her eyeglasses, and everyone’s lack of sleep after the dog patrol and bombers and murder had invaded the sanctity of their haven—Charlie could believe in ghosts, almost.

  Except that Jeremy was the least ghostly type person you’d ever met—a realist, an undramatic, dependable guy. But then, too, Charlie had been dreaming of him attending his own memorial service last night and driving a semi at her on the 405 before that.

  They all sat very quiet for a while. Tuxedo on top of the refrigerator glared hatred down on Hairy Granger, who sat in Larry’s lap, his furry coat rippling pleasurable trembles with every stroke of Larry’s hand.
Charlie squirmed only a tad.

  “Bet the man you saw tonight was the man that left that spooky message on Jeremy’s answering machine when we broke into his house,” Betty changed her mind. “Bet he was the one who killed Jeremy, too. ‘I’m on to you and I’m going to blow your sick little world to pieces,’ he said.”

  “You broke into Fiedler’s house?”

  “Before they blew it up, we all did,” the old lady assured him. “That nice Detective Amuller said it was all right we did that, Charlie. Won’t get us in any trouble. Wanted to know if I knew the voice of the caller. But I didn’t.”

  “You told Amuller we broke into Jeremy’s house? All evidence of that’s been destroyed by the bomber and the fire department.” Maggie Stutzman, in sweats to cover her sleepwear, scratched embarrassing places, ran her fingers through dark hair. Her hair was thick and luscious and wavy instead of curly and unruly like Charlie’s. “Now he knows anyway.”

  “When did you talk to him?” Charlie had this drowning feeling.

  “This afternoon. He was asking all about you, Charlie. I told him about how I didn’t care that much for you at first when you moved in, but how I’d come to see you in a Christian light.”

  Larry moaned and Tuxedo sat up on his ass on top of the refrigerator.

  “I don’t want to get your hopes up, Charlie. But I think that young man might be interested in you.”

  “Oh great, Mrs. Beesom. What kind of a Christian are you to want me to be suspected in Jeremy’s murder? Jesus, what else did you tell him?”

  “I don’t mean in that way, Charlie dear. I mean it’s possible he could be interested in you romantically. I just told him about you being all alone with a child to raise and how you worked so hard and lived so hard—you could sure use a rest. And how you came home from Las Vegas last fall and could still do your work and see to your mother and your daughter after all those people dying. Just take up your life like it hadn’t happened. You’re so strong to carry on like that after nine dead bodies … Charlie? I told him how I’d come to trust you after all that. What’s the matter? Did I say something wrong?”