Murder at Moot Point

by Marlys Millhiser

  “Didn’t you bring extra?” Linda Tortle leaned against the doorway of the bathroom of cabin three at the Hide-a-bye Motel, arms and ankles crossed, eyebrows looking just plain cross.

  “I can’t find them. The maid was here. But why would she move them? She didn’t anything else.” Something had gotten into Charlie’s eye and she’d had to remove a contact lens. It was of the flimsy disposable kind and she’d torn it. She never traveled without a spare for each eye, but the little zipper bag with the eye drops and rewetting solution and spares was no longer tucked away in her cosmetic kit. “Why would anyone swipe prescription lenses?”

  That deep impatient groan again. It seemed to come up from Linda’s knees. “You just misplaced the damn things. I can get along on one in a pinch, can’t you?”

  “Looks like I’ll have to.” Charlie went back to the fire and Paige’s proposal, feeling uneasy. Now she had one lens instead of four. She hated not having a backup for something she was this dependent upon. But the deputy was right. Her contact eye soon took over the distance work, while her uncorrected eye did the close-up. But it would tire of reading soon enough. She remembered seeing the little zipper bag with her eye supplies in her cosmetic kit this morning. Or was it yesterday morning?

  Unlike Brother Dennis’s screenplay, Paige’s mystery proposal had a title, Death of a Grandmother. There were two completed chapters and the rest was summarized. It seemed more an attempt to needle Charlie Greene than it did to interest an agent in handling a book. Paige was a far better writer than the local guru, however.

  The story varied some from the real thing. Gertrude Geis, the grandmother, was found dead on a Pacific beach by a woman named Patsy Prudhomme. Patsy was on vacation from her smog-choked home in Los Angeles and one foggy night while wandering on the beach (for no reason mentioned) she tripped over Gertrude’s body. “Even in the thick fog, Patsy realized immediately it was no driftwood log that had tripped her up, but the cold dead body of a woman.” So Patsy hies for the nearest communal gathering of lights seen “wavy through the fog-shrouded air” and raises the “alarum.” She pounds on doors next to lighted windows from behind which come the sounds of life—“television sitcoms, blenders, dishwashers”—but no one will open to her.

  “That Paige Magill’s an asshole,” Deputy Linda decreed when she’d given up on holistic pet medicine and nutrition and begun to pick up pages of Death of a Grandmother as Charlie finished them.

  “She sure writes and plots fast though.” Charlie admired anyone who could get this much material down in a couple of days without any glaring sics while running a greenhouse-dreamhouse business.

  Finally, poor Patsy gains entrance to the studio of a dashing young painter who calms her down with a glass of wine (and his dashing profile) while he calls the authorities. Who arrive to find no body on the beach but—and this is the hook at the end of chapter one—they do find Gertrude’s body beneath Patsy’s “little foreign-made” car.

  Charlie sat back and let one eye water while she stared at the dying fire, suddenly aware that the storm had given up outside, and inside her unwilling companion was thinking of young Peety. When she said as much, Linda put down her reading too and looked at her watch.

  “I never learn. I promised we’d do all kinds of things. Today was supposed to be my day off. First Saturday off in months.” She eyed Charlie grimly and leaned forward with her forearms on her knees, hands dangling toward the floor between her legs in a curiously masculine pose.

  “I know the feeling,” Charlie said. “This job wasn’t supposed to entail much travel—one of the reasons I took it. But I find myself on airplanes more than I’d planned. I’ve been lucky to find sitters and friends. Libby’s been through the whole schmear—day care, preschool, nursery school—even went to my local high school with me so I could graduate. Volunteer ladies came in to take care of the infants of teen mothers.”

  “No father in the picture at all?”

  “Not since the moment of ecstasy.” Charlie laughed and was surprised at how little bitterness she heard in that laughter. Charlie’s own father had even died, shortly before Libby was born.

  “No thought of abortion?”

  “I was too stubborn. Anyway, now I have a daughter who won’t accept a sitter in the house because she is a baby-sitter herself and is too old and sophisticated to need one. She knows everything, is totally able to take care of herself, and believes I’m paranoid like you do. Her grandmother happens to be visiting right now or I’d be having panic attacks.”

  Peety Tortle’s father was threatening to contest Linda’s custody of their son and she worried he’d get worked up sometime and decide to kidnap him. “One of the reasons I trained so enthusiastically for this job. He’s a slob, drunk half the time. I don’t want Peety around that shit.” And then Linda said with a certain lack of sympathy for Charlie or herself, “Life’s rough on single parents, isn’t it?”

  “At least you don’t have the stigma of unwed motherhood dragging at you.”

  “What stigma? That’s so common nowadays, nobody blinks.” The deputy was not about to give Charlie an advantage here either. “Libby and I are right, you really are paranoid.”

  “Edwina, that’s my mother, says it’s always been common because most single mothers are “common”—read slut, whore, whatever. And that they never make anything but disasters out of their lives and mess up the lives of their unfortunate offspring as well.” Charlie had been out to prove Edwina wrong since she was sixteen.

  “Looks like you’ve made a pretty good recovery,” Linda stood and stretched, opened the sliding door, stuck her head out into the foggy gloom, and brought it back in, “unless of course you’re sent up for the murder of Georgette Glick.”

  “Or set up.”

  Linda came back to her chair, little beads of mist clinging to fluffy bangs. “Like who? Can you honestly see Brother Dennis setting anybody up for murder? Or even Paige Magill, who God knows is capable of a lot? Chuck Withers is obviously too stupid to figure out how to do anything that complex. And Jack Monroe wouldn’t want his agent behind bars.”

  Charlie sensed she was getting to the deputy and pushed harder, asking every question she could think of about the residents of Moot Point.

  Linda Tortle was anxious to get home to her son and equally anxious to stay personally uninvolved with a murder suspect. But she was bored and also liked to gab.

  According to Linda, Paige Magill slept occasionally with both Brother Dennis and Jack Monroe and reveled in the estrangement that caused the two men. “Heard they used to be close friends. Now they’re competitors and competition of that sort is not well thought of in the teachings at the Moot Point Consciousness Training Institute. Whether she knows it or not, Paige Magill is into power and I’m talking heavy. She enjoys every minute of it.”

  Which also went against the grain of the teachings of the institute. Charlie tried to fathom how this gritty, logical female deputy could ever have been attracted to the institute in the first place.

  And Doc (Charles, Chuck) Withers was a brain-dead asshole from the word go. He let any critter take over his house, bed, or attention span (which was none too long) the instant it came into view.

  “Has he ever been married or anything?” Charlie asked, remembering Brother Dennis’s insinuations when Linda confronted him while Charlie hid in a legless chair at the institute that morning.

  “Fortunately for the planet, no.”

  “How did you meet him … and all the others? When you were a student at the institute?”

  “Well, then, yeah, but I’ve been back here a lot since … complaints about dogs and anything unimportant they can send a woman after.”

  “Dogs like Eddie?”

  “You’ve met Eddie?”

  “Yes, and I’d like to file a complaint. Right now. He attacked me twice today, once in front of the veterinary hospital where he escaped while Doc Withers was trying to do surgery on an infected dewclaw and shortly after
on the grounds of the institute.”

  “Somehow you don’t look attacked.”

  “I was knocked over, threatened, growled at, intimidated and drooled at by a dog running loose. What more do you need?”

  “You’re complaining because Eddie drooled at you? Didn’t you just read this screenplay?”

  “You know that village a lot better than you want to let on, don’t you? Especially Doc Withers.”

  Linda the deputy stood and switched on an overhead light. The fire was out, the battle lines drawn. The fog was a darker gray. “And you still think you’re a detective instead of a suspect, don’t you?”

  “You don’t believe anybody you know in Moot Point would be capable of murdering Georgie Glick, do you? So I’m the easiest answer, right?”

  “Lots of people are capable of murder that you’d never suspect. Maybe you. It’s not for me to say. Where are you going?”

  “To look for my contacts.” Charlie dumped her cosmetic kit on the floor and put everything back one item at a time. As she already knew, they weren’t there. She pulled her luggage out from under the bed and searched linings and pockets. She looked inside her shoes, in coat pockets. She searched the three drawers in the dresser and the one in her nightstand. Nothing.

  “Maybe they’re still in your car.” Linda ran her hands over the high shelf above the clothes pole and came away with only dust. “Maybe they fell out of your luggage.”

  Charlie didn’t think so, but it was possible. She was about to pick up the telephone to call the motel office and have them question the maid, when it rang. It was Jack Monroe with his deep jerky voice. It sounded like he’d just won the lottery.

  “How’s it going, Charlie? Say, if you’re looking for that little paisley colored purse thing with the eye drops and other mysterious packets in it, it’s under the bed. Told you I hid something. Remember?” He laughed so hard he started to cough. “Oh, and tell Linda she’s got no call to be so hard on Doc. Just because she can’t stand to crawl into bed with a man who sleeps with ducks that’s no excuse to mean-mouth him.”

  “Jack, how do you know all this? Where are you?”

  “Home. Hurried back to my body to call before you two tore the place apart. Tried to talk to you while I was there but neither of you would pay attention. Oh, and Charlie, don’t worry, I’ll find you a lawyer if it comes to that, but I don’t think it will. We got a book here or what?” He hooted this time and broke the connection.

  Charlie stood looking at the receiver until the deputy took it from her hand and cradled it. Then Charlie repeated every word Jack said. Then she explained about Jack Monroe’s supposed OOBE’s.

  “Jesus, I knew old Jack was into some strange stuff, but running around without his body?”

  Then they both rushed to look under the bed.

  Leaning up against the inside of the plastic wheel on the metal bedframe at the head of the bed on the nightstand side was the small zippered paisley bag in which Charlie kept her eye supplies.

  Neither she nor Linda said a word as Charlie looked through it, went to the bathroom to wash her hands, and inserted a replacement for the lens she’d torn. They were back sitting in the recliners in front of the dead fire not looking at each other when Linda snapped her fingers and grinned.

  “He’s got the place bugged. I don’t know why, but that’s the answer. Damn you, Jack, I’ll get you for this. And those ducks were dirty and mean.” She said it loud enough to be picked up by hidden “bugs” and jumped up to run her hands along the fake mantel and under the chair arms and under the table. “Don’t you see? When he snuck over to hide your contacts he planted the bugs.”

  Charlie felt the goosebumps subside on her arms. The last time she’d felt this relieved somebody had told her Libby had been born and she could stop pushing. “Thanks, he really had me going there.”

  They were both running their fingers over and under and around everything and giggling at each other when Charlie asked, “What does one of these bug things look like? How big are they? What exactly are we looking for? And did Doc Withers really sleep with ducks … and you? At the same time?”

  They were standing about three inches apart, laughing into each other’s faces like the world’s best friends, when they realized Sheriff Wes Bennett had walked through the door and stood in the short hallway staring at them, wide-eyed and open-mouthed.

  Chapter 16

  “Don’t you ever knock?”

  “Don’t you ever lock your doors?”

  “Sheriff, the suspect has been here all afternoon and has had contact with no one,” Linda’s drawl was even more pronounced when she was nervous, “except Jack Monroe on the telephone and me of course.”

  “Of course. Surprised I didn’t find the two of you in bed, so cozy are we here. Tuttle, I want you—”

  “Tortle, sir.” Angry red flared everywhere uniform or hair didn’t hide it.

  “Linda Tortle,” Charlie added, feeling the warmth of anger diffusing her skin too.

  “Deputy,” the sheriff compromised, “write up your report and be back here by six tomorrow.”

  “Sheriff, she was supposed to have today off to be with Peety and you wouldn’t let her. She should spend tomorrow with him to make up for it.”

  “Peety? You get married again, Tuttle … Tortle?”

  “I can handle my own affairs,” Linda warned Charlie. “Sir, I think you should know about the telephone call from Jack Monroe. It came just—”

  “Write it down, Tortle, hmm? Back at the courthouse, please? In your report? I’ll read it tomorrow first thing.”

  Deputy Tortle left them with a series of snaps—a snap in her eyes as she looked from Charlie to her boss, a snap of her teeth as she bit down on what she couldn’t say, and a snap of her heels as she grabbed her Smokey the Bear hat and headed for the door. Charlie wanted to go after her and make amends but knew better. She liked the deputy, hated to see her treated this way, and was about to vent her indignation on Wes Bennett when she noticed him studying her again, this time with his eyes so squinted he could have been staring into the sun.

  Charlie sipped some kind of Oregon-grown wine and watched Sheriff Bennett cook dinner for the chief suspect. It reminded her of her first night in Oregon with Jack chopping and stir-frying for her. Except then she hadn’t been a suspect yet. Then it was olive oil, now it was corn oil. Then it was tofu and seaweed, now it was thin strips of sirloin and onions and peppers.

  Why wasn’t the sheriff worried that if Charlie ever got to court, her lawyer would pounce on this little “date” that wasn’t a date like the proverbial chicken on a June bug?

  They were up above the fog in the sheriff’s mountaintop eyrie. Having been born in Colorado, Charlie would never be convinced anything low enough to have trees on top could be a mountain. Mountains had bald jagged rock on top. Foothills had trees. But she didn’t say as much. Had this been a real date, that would have made wonderful verbal fencing material.

  But on the way here he hadn’t unclamped his jaw long enough to clear his throat. He had stared steely-eyed at the road and gripped the wheel like he was practicing strangling techniques. Charlie had braved the tension enough to risk, “Come off it, you don’t really think I’m a suspect here? What are you so frosted about? Just because your deputy and I were laughing when you came in the door. Just because I nosed around the village for a while—”

  “Oh, but you’re wrong, Charlie Greene,” Sheriff Wes Bennett uttered the only words he would relinquish on the entire trip. “You are my chief suspect.”

  Wes’s house reminded Charlie of Gladys, Olie, Eenie, Meenie, Miney, Mo, and Joe Bergkvist’s house in that it was largely redwood, decks, and windows. But this was a smaller, less opulent version, more of a bachelor pad version. Still, he lived pretty well for a sheriff with child-support payments. The place reeked of raw wood and the damp fire trying to survive in the rock fireplace, of the fajitas, frijoles, and south-of-the-border spices.

  As they
ate, Wes loosened up enough to tell her that under the fog to the west was a stunning view of the lights of Chinook and the Pacific Ocean. To the east was a stunning view of the Coast Range.

  Right now they seemed to be floating on dark moonlit clouds like flying on a jet at night. But instead of having to peer through tiny portholes onto a scary life-sustaining wing, they were surrounded by windows. The floating view, the spicy food, the wine, the massive man across the butcher-block table were all heady stuff. Charlie caught herself wishing this was a real date. And then she remembered his treatment of Deputy Linda, set her own jaw, and offered up not a word.

  Wes rose to uncork another bottle of Oregon red and slam it down on the table between them in a gesture Charlie identified with childish-male gauntlet slapping. She reached for the bottle and poured for them both.

  He grunted, did his malevolent squint again, and jabbed his fork in her direction. “You are in a who-o-le lot of trouble, lady.”

  “You’ve got sour cream on your chin.”

  He wiped his chin and threw his napkin on the table and then his fork at the plate. It bounced. He took a slug of wine and swished his teeth with it. People really could flare their nostrils. “Think you’re real tough, don’t you?”

  “Michael Cermack’s gun is missing.” Charlie wanted to reach for her wine glass but didn’t want him to see her hand shaking.

  “Who the fuck is Michael Cermack?”

  “The artist I told you about meeting yesterday. His paintings take up most of the Scandia Art Gallery. He lives above the Bergkvists’ garage in a studio loft. I asked him if he had a gun and he said yes but when he went to show it to me, he couldn’t find it. He seemed furious, but then he’s a moody, arty type so it’s hard to tell.”

  “You just walked up and asked a total stranger if he had a gun in a village where a woman had just been shot to death.”

  “I asked him a lot of other things first. Do you know Olie Bergkvist?”

  “I couldn’t pick him out of a lineup, but I know who he is.” The sheriff looked disgusted, thwarted, drowning in the unreasonableness of the moment, but at least the massive hands were bringing food to his mouth again instead of encircling Charlie’s throat as she’d sensed their urge to do.