Death of the Office Witch

by Marlys Millhiser

  “But not for the murder of Mary Ann Leffler,” Charlie said.

  “Not for the murder of Mary Ann Leffler.”

  “Made some arrests on the Tuschman case though,” Detective Gordon said with satisfaction, ignoring the sharp look from Dalrymple.

  “Maurice and Irma, right? Lieutenant, that was an accident, and a stupid attempt at a cover up—surely you can see that.”

  “I’d like to have your version of what happened to Gloria Tuschman that morning, Charlie, before my colleague and I go into any more detail. Please?” This was the first time she could remember him using her first name.

  Charlie told him about the Tuschmans profiting from insider information at the agency. “It got so lucrative Gloria threatened to expose personal secrets to the tabloids as a way to throw her weight around and force the staff to cooperate. That morning Irma came back early from Vegas, unannounced, to find Gloria using poor Medora Lavender’s existence to persuade Maurice. He probably has the highest-quality insider info in the agency, next to Richard Morse. Irma is a formidable lady, and her fury over what Gloria was doing scared the witch into throwing down the pencil stubs and taking off for the back hall. Gloria knew about Scarborough House and Irma’s violent past, remember. Gloria may have fled to the ladies to lock herself in a stall, I don’t know. Eventually she had to come out, and there was Irma. They haggled and Irma probably fired Gloria on the spot. Gloria ran for the back stairs and slipped on the newly waxed floor, and hit her head on the metal railing in a freak accident. Leaving Irma with a body instead of the simpler problem of replacing a receptionist.”

  “Why didn’t she fire Gloria earlier? The woman had made enough trouble before this.”

  “It wasn’t that easy. Gloria had something on Irma, too. Richard Morse knew about Scarborough House, but that didn’t mean Irma wanted the rest of the world to.”

  “So Gloria fell and died in a bizarre accident?”

  “Right, then Irma rushed back to get help from Maurice, and they decided it would look like murder, especially with Irma’s history. The dirt on everyone else would surface with an investigation, too. Maurice is such a gentleman he couldn’t let Irma take the blame, so they hatched this incredible plot to move the body. First they hid it in the utility closet and left the building. It would look like Maurice was out on business, and Irma wasn’t even due in that day. Then later, when the coast was clear, they trundled Gloria out to the alley to make it look as if the death was not agency-related.”

  “Miss Vance and Mr. Lavender, fifty-five and sixty, toss a dead body up over a high concrete wall with such force it sinks into the bushes on the other side?”

  “They toss Gloria into the dumpster off the alley next to the end wall of the bank parking. Two homeless men in the dumpster resent Gloria’s arrival, so they haul her out and toss her up over the next wall and into the bushes. They’re younger and stronger. People who live on the streets often sleep in the alleys, scrounge meals from the dumpsters behind buildings that have restaurants, but prefer to sleep in those behind office buildings with better-smelling trash. And on a street like Wilshire, they don’t want to be too obvious, so they tend to lie low when they can or risk being relocated by the Beverly Hills P.D. or private security forces. And at that time of day that dumpster would have been emptied, so they wouldn’t be disturbed, and it would be in the shade. Good place to sleep or do some serious drinking without being seen.”

  “And how could a woman who wears the kind of shoes you do and who so rarely investigates that neighborhood possibly discover all this?”

  “I have a friend on the security staff snooping for me, and he even interviewed one of the homeless men involved, and occasionally I do step outside and see guys, mostly, rifling through alley garbage for food. And just recently I tossed something into the dumpster in question and somebody inside tossed it out again and started heaving other things, too. And the night of Richard’s party my date and I stopped in at the agency on the way home and we were shushed by a guy trying to sleep on the other side of the wall. And that,” Charlie said triumphantly, “is where I got the idea. No hocus-pocus, just good old following through with logic.”

  “Why would these vagrants risk becoming involved in a murder, as vulnerable as they are to suspicion by civilian and police alike? And you still haven’t explained how Mr. Lavender and Irma Vance could have tossed the body up into the dumpster, not to mention move her five floors down to the alley level.”

  “Shelly, my informant, says those alleys are a jungle, and the bums get territorial. Most of the good alley shelters are taken, and the current residents don’t encourage newcomers. Too many vagrants in one place invites eviction. Both had left once they’d sobered up and realized there’d be cops around soon, but one guy came back because he couldn’t find another place. And I think a third person helped Irma and Maurice with the body, but I don’t know who.”

  “We do,” Detective Gordon said.

  33

  Dr. Evan Podhurst had confessed to helping Irma and Maurice hide Gloria in the janitor’s closet, and later in the day he and Maurice hauled her down in the bag from the cleaning trolley while Irma went ahead to let them know when the coast was clear.

  “You know, that’s possible,” Charlie said. “I went up and down those back stairs several times the other day and didn’t see a soul. They must have really been surprised when Gloria turned up in the bushes. Why did Dr. Podhurst help them? You’d think he’d have some sense, if they didn’t.”

  “Two reasons. He claims to have heard a sound from his office and opened the door onto the private hall just in time to see Gloria slip and fall. He also claims that Irma Vance was just stepping out of the ladies’ room at the time. He had treated her in Scarborough house some twenty years ago and was still responsible for her drug therapy. Scarborough handled only the most difficult patients—”

  “Yeah, and it’s been closed for years, so those kind of nuts are on the streets now,” Gordon added. “Think about it.”

  “Ms. Vance’s terror of being accused of murder, and the certainty that Gloria’s death would not even be considered as an accident convinced the other two to attempt a cover-up.”

  “Why in hell would Morse hire someone like her?” Gordon wanted to know. “He knew about Scarborough House.”

  “That’s just like him,” Charlie said. “He likes to think he runs a tight ship, but when it comes down to it, it’s Irma who takes care of most of the problems you have to deal with, and usually you figure it isn’t worth it to bring one up. Now I know why. But Podhurst didn’t have his new hearing aid yet the day Gloria died. How could he hear something going on in the hall that morning?”

  “He says he often heard sounds such as people speaking but couldn’t make out what they were saying. His hearing loss caused him to search out sources of sounds he could not identify to reassure himself they were real and not a sign of something dangerous hidden in his mind. Which, given his profession, isn’t as far-fetched as one might at first think.”

  “Where was Linda Meyer, his receptionist, all this time?”

  “In the outer office, typing dictation with earphones on.”

  “But Mary Ann wasn’t a threat to anyone. Why did she have to die?”

  “We were hoping to hear your ideas on that.”

  “I don’t have any.”

  “Oh, I think you do. Charlie,” David Dalrymple’s voice softened, and he’d used her first name again. “Whatever you think of your powers of deduction, which are impressive and imaginative, you have another power that’s kicking in to help out when you forget to fend it off. How else could you have known Mr. Lavender and Miss Vance were involved at all in Gloria Tuschman’s death before they came to the hospital yesterday?”

  “Oh, didn’t I tell you? Damn, I forgot.” Gotcha now, Dalrymple. “I assumed you knew about the tapes under Gloria’s desk.”

  Over the protests of everyone she knew, Charlie was at work the next day.

&
nbsp; She missed seeing gorgeous Larry in his cubbyhole. He and Stew had sent flowers to the hospital, but Larry was doing real work today. She checked the wall behind A.E.’s poster and found the outlines of Irma’s hole. Somebody had done a good repair job. She sat behind her desk, put her feet up. Charlie loved this place and the excitement of the work. Would she kill to keep it?

  Someone had left a callback slip on her desk from Carla Ponti at Goliath. Charlie punched the number, dreading that Mary Ann’s death would have cooled Goliath’s ardor for the Shadowscapes project. They’d probably use the economy as an excuse. They always did.

  “Charlie, the script is wonderful. This one’s definitely a green light. It’s going to be bigger than Witches of Eastwick. We’re so impressed. And it’s good to hear you’re back at work. I heard about the kidnapping. Are you and your daughter all right?”

  “We’re fine, thanks, Carla. Um … you don’t have any problem about Mary Ann’s murder influencing the project?”

  “Oh, God no, it’s instant publicity if we move fast enough so everyone doesn’t forget the details. In fact, I just got out of a meeting where they were throwing around the idea of a spin-off about her death. You know, witch writer comes to Hollywood, gets murdered by a coven of rival witches or something. Any writers you might suggest to work it up for us? You’ve been coming up with winners lately.”

  Charlie’s spirits rose for a minute. She straightened up in her chair and nodded at Luella Ridgeway, who’d stepped in the door, and gestured for her to take a seat. “Well, yeah I have several,” Charlie told her, feeling like a working agent again instead of a sick-at-heart detective. “Let me send you over some samples.”

  Luella had gone to stand in front of the window instead of sitting. She turned from watching the street below when Charlie put down the phone. “Charlie, I’ve come to apologize for blaming you for doing what you had to do. Someday, years from now, I will probably discover how we have all benefited from your strange need to confess the truth to everyone you meet and tell the police every last thing you know or even suspect about the rest of us.”

  Actually, Luella couldn’t be more wrong, Charlie thought as she headed the Toyota out of the alley and up Wilshire only minutes later.

  But when she arrived, Dalrymple’s unmarked car and a black and white already sat on the leveled parking area below the house in Coldwater Canyon. Charlie almost turned around, but decided that wouldn’t change anything.

  Keegan Monroe wore a pair of faded jeans and his tinted glasses, no shirt or shoes. He hadn’t shaved in several days. He made a sound low in his throat when he saw her, but that was the only greeting.

  He and the homicide lieutenant sat in Keegan’s kitchen drinking coffee. Like friends.

  “I’m sorry, Charlie,” her client said. “I just wanted her okay on the script. I thought she could swim.”

  “I would have expected you to have been here long ago.” Dalrymple pulled out a chair at Keegan’s table for Charlie. “When did you know?”

  Always, never. He was the only one with a motive. He never called or came to the hospital to see me. She reached across the table to take both of Keegan’s hands in hers. They were clammy. “Better not say any more until you’ve talked to a lawyer. You’ve called someone?”

  “Yeah. But Charlie, when I left, Mary Ann was swimming back to shore, I swear it.”

  Mary Ann had been hiding out at Roger Tuschman’s because, according to Roger, she couldn’t face working on the script with Keegan that night as she’d promised. He was younger, faster with words, accustomed to working under intense deadlines without breaking for sleep at night, working through a project without giving a thought to anyone else’s schedule.

  Mary Ann had spent her working life fitting her work around the lives and schedules of husband and children. The last child no sooner left home than the husband retired and the grandchildren showed up at times scheduled by their lives and not hers. She wasn’t that aware of the difference until she began working intensely with a younger single man who had never known those constraints and who was also very talented.

  “She fled rather than face working with Mr. Monroe that night. Writing must be more competitive than I would have thought to arouse that kind of sentiment,” David Dalrymple told Charlie as they once again sat on the stone steps between terraces outside Keegan’s house. Charlie’s client and two uniformed officers had driven off in the black and white.

  “Mary Ann had been invited to that exotic memorial service,” Dalrymple continued, “but I think she chose not to go, fearing she could be a suspect in Gloria’s murder because of her dispute with the Tuschmans. She’d hoped to distance herself from them at that point. But when it came down to it, she headed for a familiar place and familiar face. She feared the city.”

  Mary Ann had seemed like such a tough lady. Charlie had figured almost everybody wrong. Good thing she wasn’t in law enforcement, or the psychic business, either. Manipulative, coercive Roger Tuschman really had adored his grating wife.

  Flabby, grizzled Marvin the Shaman had never intended to get help to rescue Charlie and Libby from mad Roger.

  Maurice, the lover and womanizer, was in reality devoted to the shell of a wife. Irma, of the razor-sharp brain, was an ex-mental patient. Luella, Charlie’s role model, had a prison record. And Dorian Black, whom she could barely tolerate and considered a sleaze, apparently had a clean record. Charlie was no judge of character, that was certain. And then there was Keegan Monroe … one of her favorite people in the world.

  Keegan had tracked Mary Ann down to the place where he first met her on a Halloween night, to get her literary blessing on a copy of the Shadowscapes screenplay already turned in to Charlie. “Your client says he needed her reassurance.”

  And he told me at Richard’s party he thought Mary Ann was dead, and yet he went looking for her. But Charlie said aloud, “Didn’t you check Roger’s place when Mary Ann went missing?”

  “We were looking for a body underwater in a car by that time.”

  “Oh, boy.”

  When Keegan found her, the night before Charlie saw her body in the orange grove, the novelist was depressed, bored, and housebound. And she’d run out of vodka. Again, according to Roger—she was anxious and a little ashamed of her erratic behavior and didn’t know how to explain it to her family. They had already shown some impatience with her unpredictability symptoms, and she put off coming out in the open, not knowing how to explain her disappearance without looking foolish.

  “In other words she was at sixes and sevens by the time Mr. Monroe located her. She told him she had to get out of the tiny condo and consented to read the screenplay if he would buy vodka and meet her up at the reservoir, which she had visited with the Tuschmans on an earlier trip to California. The two had the place to themselves, but Mary Ann made fun of the script and of Keegan’s writing. He replied in kind. The bruising of two eggshell-tender egos and a bottle of vodka—and murder, involving two essentially decent people—was done. And two brilliant careers wasted.”

  “Did he push the car into the water with her in it?”

  “He may well get off with manslaughter,” Dalrymple backpedaled, “if a jury believes his story.”

  Keegan’s story was that Mary Ann, furious and drunk, jumped into her car on the gently sloping beach and released the emergency brake, holding her door open to yell obscenities back at him. She belatedly tried to start the car but wasn’t paying attention to her clutch work or her steering, and by the time she began turning the car around, it was too late. It lurched into the water like the Toyota, with Libby at the wheel, had jerked into an oncoming lane between two blind curves just the other night.

  “Your client claims his first thought was of your foretelling this very thing at the beach house in Malibu, Charlie. His second was that the door was still swinging open, and Mrs. Leffler had gotten out before she actually hit the water and so could save herself. He drove off in an equally inebriated state without making
sure she was safe. He knew she could swim. He swore she was doing just that and was on her way to shore as he turned his car around to leave. She might have had too much alcohol in her body to get it there. The reservoir falls off quickly. He made it home without being pulled over and says he didn’t know she was dead until he watched the wrecker pull her car out of Rizzi Reservoir on the evening news the next day.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  “Frankly, his story is complex and fantastic enough to be true. Then again, the man’s a writer.”

  You’re learning. “More to the point, Keegan’s persuasive in an honest rather than a slick way, and he’s impressive verbally. He could clean up on a jury. He’s pitched to the pros. Irma, Maurice, and Dr. Podhurst, on the other hand, are going to look very strange in court.”

  “The courts will, I’m sure, impose penalties, possible prison sentences, and probable probationary terms in the death of Gloria Tuschman. But the department has decided not to bring murder charges in that death. There’s no excuse for the cover-up of an accidental death that way—”

  “When did you decide on accidental … for sure?”

  “We suspected the possibility when we connected the stair railing to the blunt object that killed Mrs. Tuschman and the fact the floor in that hall had been waxed the day before. And we have located your security guard, Mr. Maypo, and both the body movers from the dumpster. But from the beginning, and overriding all, was your sense that Gloria thought she was still in a waste receptacle in that back hall and not in the alley and, later, your sense that it was indeed an accident.”

  “You trust my ‘sense’ that much, huh?”

  “Gloria did, didn’t she?”

  “Oh, boy.”

  34

  Charlie took a Saturday afternoon off from the household grind to go to the athletic field at Wilson High and watch Libby practice with her junior cheerleading squad, something inside her relieved that there was more to her life than her work. Without it, she’d still have her tiny family to justify her existence.