Murder in a Hot Flash

by Marlys Millhiser

  “Taught English literature at a private boys’ school in Virginia for years. Stood it as long as I could and hit the road. So, you don’t think your mother did it?”

  “I don’t think my mother did it. You have any children?”

  “Two that I know about. I don’t have the urge to look them up either. Understand your agency’s in trouble.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Gordon Cabot.”

  “Do you go way back with Cabot too?”

  “You going to submit to the old Hilsten line?”

  “Who do you think killed Gordon Cabot?”

  “Why don’t you save us both time and use your psychic powers?”

  “I think you’re really a studio spy.” Or an ax murderer. Or both.

  This time it was a relief to be stopped at a roadblock and this time it was much closer to the campground. The stoic deputy checked to be sure they were neither tourists nor reporters and let them pass.

  Even before she parked behind Howard’s Jeep, Charlie could see her mother’s tent trailer was occupied.

  “Sorry, Tawny got pissed and kicked me out,” John B. explained. He and Sidney Levit sat at Edwina’s tiny table over coffee, cream cheese, lox and bagels, and chocolate-coated strawberries.

  “You didn’t get that from these cupboards.”

  “No, but we used your mother’s gas to boil coffee.”

  “You better be careful, this woman’s a psychic and Jesus doesn’t like her.” Scrag helped himself to a strawberry.

  “What are you doing sitting here, Sid?” Charlie asked. “You’re supposed to be playing frenzied director about now.” His smile was warm and more fatherly than Howard’s had ever been. Charlie liked Sid a lot better than she had Gordon Cabot. He had liver spots on the backs of his hands. Had those hands wielded her mother’s ax three nights ago? “Don’t you have to get permission from the Directors Guild to take Gordon’s place?”

  “No, because we’re nonunion. Only two major location shoots left. Gordon already had the army set up for this one. Stan, my production manager, is putting the finish on the layout. Want to come watch?”

  No one even mentioned Edwina’s little problem. Charlie could very well be sitting in Edwina’s tent trailer with the murderer. Charlie didn’t mention Edwina’s problem either. “Wouldn’t miss it.”

  As it happened nobody wanted to miss this one. Charlie found herself driving Earl and Tawny out to the location site in Howard’s Jeep right behind Scrag and John B., who rode with Sidney in the Humvee. Return of an Ecosystem had nothing on the docket again until tomorrow.

  Isn’t it interesting, Charlie, that Mitch Hilsten didn’t seem worried about you coming out here to snoop out a murderer? Didn’t even warn you to be careful? In a book or film, he’d have warned you.

  In a film, I’d be in Moab washing the underwear and he’d be here doing the snooping.

  Unless he’s the murderer, or knows who is and that you aren’t in danger.

  Oh shut up.

  Like most people, Charlie’d learned to ignore her inner voice. It was invariably wrong.

  “So, how does John B. come in under budget flying dailies out and chocolate strawberries in and taking a whole day off?” she asked her passengers in the real world. And what is the scandal about him I can’t remember?

  “Guy that runs the lab, his brother-in-law’s Lew. Lew owns the plane with a couple of other guys. He’s trying to get flight hours,” Earl yelled in her ear and Charlie winced. Her hearing was painfully good. “Just charging Drake for fuel and repairs. We’re down to a skeleton crew now anyway.”

  She was thoroughly lost by the time they turned off the paved road back to the highway and then off it onto a dirt road wandering out across another mesa and down another dirt road to the benchland below it. And by this time she’d learned some confusing things about Tawny and the cameraman and clouds had appeared in what had been a perfectly clear sky when they started out.

  Tumbling clouds that propelled color and depth and shadow into an already overpowering landscape. And the other two people in the Jeep transmogrified just as suddenly, became unexpectedly striking and individual.

  Charlie knew she had no real psychic gifts because she tended to lump people together in stereotypes, Hollywood fashion, and then believe in these subdivisions because it made life simpler. This was not the first time she’d been brought up short by it.

  The clouds had black bottoms. The washed-out sky changed to dirty blue in between them. A distant mountain range grew purple and what had been sandstone-colored cliffs took on a greenish-gray hue. Giant cloud shadows raced across the benchland and the wrinkled craggy mesa faces rearing out of it, turning the green-gray to black and back again. Lightning notched down to the surface of a near rim and Charlie half-expected Moses (in the form of Charlton Heston) to descend with his tablets.

  “Pure Cecil B. De Mille, huh?” Earl shouted as if reading her thoughts and damn near put them off the road.

  This road down to the benchland was nothing like the one off Dead Horse Point but Charlie already dreaded the drive back up. You can’t very well keep your eyes closed if you’re behind the wheel.

  Earl was an ex-Marine who’d enjoyed the freedom of his service haircut to the point he kept his head shaved now to get even more air and sun to his brain. And his baldness had nothing whatsoever to do with Yul Brynner or Telly Savalas or trying to be different. Right.

  The government helped put him through some film classes at UCLA and he’d served his time making recruiting and instructional videos.

  Earl had known John B. Drake since his service years and even invested in some land scheme with him. Both lost their shirts on that one, went their separate ways but kept in touch. Earl lived in Phoenix because he loved baseball and it was fun to watch the spring training. He’d never had much contact with Cabot but kind of liked some of his films. “It’s like Vegas, you know? If you’re going after the gaudy and tawdry don’t be half-assed about it. Go balls out and make it an art form.”

  The beautiful Tawny had gone the predictable route of smalltime modeling, big-time waitressing, a few minor roles in films or commercials. She hung around the studios, on the fringes, waiting for a big break that never came.

  Tawny was sleek, knew makeup, and had the right bones. Worst of all, she had nothing hips and something boobs. Tight tush even. Skin the color of honey.

  She’d done a couple of silent bits for Cabot (nonspeaking bit parts), had seen him at a few parties, thought his stuff sleazy even for Hollywood. John B. now was a jerk, but he at least made “decent film.”

  Charlie, you’re questioning the wrong crew here.

  This time her inner voice was probably right.

  They stopped behind the Humvee on what was fast becoming a battlefield.

  Just before stepping out of Howard’s jeep, Tawny said, “I feel bad for your mom. Like, she can be a real witch, but she wouldn’t kill anybody. Not on purpose like that. If there’s anything I can do to help, you know where to find me.”

  And “just” Tawny, in her skin-tight, gold-colored jeans and matching cowgirl boots, sashayed off leaving Charlie with her jaw hanging.

  Chapter 13

  “Tell you the truth, I’m glad the fucker’s dead,” Dean Goodacre told Charlie and Earl around a wad of chewing gum. Dean was the helicopter pilot for Animal Aliens. “Sid’s not going to ask me to kill myself flying a cameraman too deep into some stupid canyon.”

  He had curly shoulder-length hair and buffalo-size pectorals on a short solid build. With his no-nonsense eyes, he conformed to no stereotype Charlie could muster. Just another suspect, probably trying to throw her off with all this openness.

  It was raining up on the rim but sunlight pierced cloud gaps to transform the muted color scheme and shadow shapes on the benchland yet again.

  Earl pulled his wadded baseball cap out of a hip pocket and covered his self-imposed baldness. It was a Rockies cap and he put it on backward to
shield his neck instead of his face. He was a squinter and the sun creases were already as deep as Edwina’s around his eyes.

  “Who’s the writer on this disaster?” Charlie asked. The way they’re treated in Hollywood writers had great motive for murder.

  “Mick Sensenbrenner was the latest sucker.” Dean nodded and chewed harder. “Cabot fired him. Two quit before that.”

  “Charlie here handles writers,” Earl told the helicopter pilot. “Tell us, how can grown-up people be dumb enough to ask for such punishment?”

  Both men watched closely as Charlie struggled for an answer but she was saved by the assistant director repeating what Sidney Levit had spoken from the Western dolly on its huge rubber wheels that could roll relatively smoothly over rough ground—

  “Quiet on the set!”

  An actress dressed as an injured forest ranger with torn clothes and false blood patches laid her half-eaten sandwich back in its box. She wasn’t plump and pink like the real rangers Charlie’d seen. A man stepped out of a portable outhouse and froze, leaving the door open despite the signs both inside and out pleading with him not to. Charlie remembered the harsh squawking noise it made when closing.

  Two harried women at the back of the Moab Whitewater Delicatessen and Bakery catering truck stood watching the silent, stilled battlefield over armloads of white box lunches. The mixer nodded and spoke into the mike on his sound cart. All was quiet but for Dean Goodacre’s jaws chewing.

  The thunder rumbling above was apparently permitted.

  “Rolling.”

  “Speed.”

  And Sheriff Sumpter rolled in with screaming sirens and tires and colored lights flashing back at the flashing sky. He leaped out of his four-wheeled Grand County patrol vehicle. He did a rewind and leaped back in to back up out again after speaking to an assistant gofer.

  Before everything started over, there was time for the guy to squawk the door closed on the movable outhouse and one of the overworked caterers to shove a box lunch at Charlie.

  “Quiet on the set!”

  “Rolling.”

  And this time Ralph Sumpter waited for—

  “Action!”

  —before rolling in with screaming sirens and leaping out of the Grand County four-wheel to gape dramatically at forty or so “rats” lumbering out of the mock-up of a spaceship. It had no back, sides, or insides and they lumbered because the men wearing the rat suits, one of whom had a father who’d fixed Charlie’s tire, were about three fourths the size of their costumes. Charlie couldn’t smell any ammonium hydroxide. She could smell some good odors from the box lunch though and cautiously lifted the lid.

  Sheriff Sumpter was actively acting but no match for monster rats. Not only did he die in an early frame but would probably do the same on the cutting room floor during editing.

  In the next shot, and after the sheriff was cleared away, all hell broke loose, at which exciting point Charlie finished the cream cheese, cucumber, tomato, sprouts, black olive, and cashew croissant sandwich.

  Soldiers, who looked no older than Libby and who were duded up in full desert combat camouflage, wielded weapons and launchers that appeared capable of taking out Tokyo during coffee break. But the rats, who had mysterious handgun-type weapons of their own, literally walked all over them in a series of shots that followed with surprisingly few retakes and delays.

  It would take some heavy editing to hide the seams in this picture. Sidney Levit must be determined to wrap while the director’s murder was hot enough to be remembered and provide a possible box office draw. Or before the backers withdrew. Or the Army went home. Come to think of it, Sid had more motive than anyone to wish Cabot dead.

  When their battle choreography and lumbering took them off camera, the rats circled behind the dolly and lined up for the next shoot to enter the set again from the original side, forming a seemingly endless army of giant rodentia.

  There were several tanks and every kind of macho pyrotechnics. But without the special effects that would be inserted later, the whole thing was highly hilarious. Galumphing rats with long plastic whiskers aimed what could well have been high-tech water pistols from Toys “R” Us at hapless soldiers who crumpled to earth even though nothing visible came out of the guns. Animators would add the “death rays” or whatever.

  Four alien animals surrounded a tank and shot it dead center from every direction with their dry water pistols and then had to back away, their arms and paws in front of their faces to shield them from an explosion that wouldn’t happen until the second unit crew blew it up when all the extras were at a safe distance. Insurance costs being what they are. Oh well.

  Smoke and little fires were kept flaming with some kind of wires in the grass pulled by crew members off camera. Eventually after many takes but with almost maniacal drive, the end grew near—the U.S. Army being mostly dead by now. The rat marauders kicked at the bodies to make sure and wouldn’t you know found one still alive but pretending.

  The Western dolly edged in and so did the handheld from a different angle as the giant rats hauled the soldier to his feet. This had to be the star because he was too old to really be in the Army and Charlie’d seen him around someplace. Another good suspect for the murder of Gordon Cabot?

  These aliens all had long rat claws and one raked bloody streaks down the captive’s cheek, the blood color probably transferring from the claws to the cheek. But our hero grimaced manfully, perfect capped teeth barred in perfect defiance.

  Charlie wondered how the rats could hold on to, let alone shoot, their weapons—not to mention fiddle the spaceship controls—with those nails.

  While two rats dragged our hero off the set, the wounded ranger carefully settled herself among the dead infantry to be discovered by another rat. She, of course, was carried off in his rat arms in order to look sexy and vulnerable.

  “Incoming,” the sound mixer said suddenly. Sid called for a cut as a small plane Charlie hadn’t noticed until now flew low overhead.

  “Who the shit?” the helicopter pilot of the Charlie’s crew asked no one.

  But Earl answered, “It’s Lew. What’s he doing here? And this early?”

  Lew had decided to fly in on his own schedule with a couple of wire-service reporters instead of John B.’s food order and the dailies. John B. was beyond furious, his mobile face so suffused he resembled her boss when somebody crossed him once too often. Charlie decided he must be the murderer, even though she’d also decided Gordon Cabot’s killer must come from his own crew.

  God, I wish I really was psychic sometimes.

  Drake had commandeered Howard’s Jeep to meet the plane while Charlie, Earl, and Tawny copped a ride in the helicopter pilot’s Land Rover to get back to the campground early. Dean Goodacre, Charlie, and Earl Seabaugh were poking around the scene of the crime when Sheriff Sumpter arrived back from the dead.

  “Out doing a little detecting, are we, Detective Greene? Or doing some divining maybe? When a proper daughter would be busy at the jail showing some concern for a mother who is in very serious trouble.”

  And a proper sheriff would be investigating an ax murder instead of assuming he had the case solved and there was time to cavort for the cameras.

  “You know this little lady is a famous psychic, don’t you?” Ralph Sumpter had to add dynamite to the beans.

  “You should talk to Hilsten about that,” Earl said as Sumpter swaggered off between scrub bushes and fire grates, laughing it up. “He consults one regularly, I think … uh, Lady Beverly or something like that.” He swiped biting gnats from his naked head with his Rockies hat.

  There went another childish illusion. Charlie had imagined Mitch Hilsten to be moderately sensible.

  A tiny sunning lizard skittered away when she kicked a toe at the cleaned-up crime scene. Even the crime-scene barf was gone. Nature had probably done most of the work. Blood, brains, barf—everything was recyclable in this deprived place.

  Dean pointed out the campsites of the Alien
s crew and who occupied which. He admitted that most everybody also had a room in town. Monster RVs, all rented, overwhelmed the dwarf forest and gave the lie to the term camping. The production manager, Stan Lowenthall, had shared a two-bedroom with Cabot, mostly as a base office but sometimes to sleep.

  “Most of the rest of these it depends on who’s spending the night here and who in town.”

  “So it might be hard to tie down who was here the night Gordon Cabot was murdered,” Charlie said.

  “No, that was the tour-bus scene—practically everybody connected with Aliens was on hand that night. You really psychic?”

  “Of course not. It’s just a rumor I can’t seem to stamp out.” If I were, I’d have Edwina out of jail by now and somebody else in it. Maybe you. “Gordon was one of the first ones back in, wasn’t he? Which might cut it down a bunch.” She’d been so furious at Edwina she couldn’t remember how many vehicles passed behind Howard’s Jeep after the Humvee that night. And she’d been inside Drake’s motor home after that and wouldn’t have seen who came and went. “How could I find out who was here when he was murdered?”

  “Ask me.” Dean was still chewing on the toothpick that had held his croissant together. It was a shredded mess. “I didn’t work that shoot. I was sitting right about here when he drove up, having me a beer. He was all by himself but he was laughing, sort of like that prick of a sheriff just now.” Goodacre crawled up on a picnic table and leaned back on one elbow.

  A slew of gofers and some makeup people had come in next and Cabot had headed off through the scrub. There were no water hookups at these campsites and storage in the RVs was limited. Dean had figured he was on his way to the toilets. “And that’s the last I saw him alive.”

  “What did you do for dinner?”

  “Chinese take-out from town. We were just reheating everything when you folks stumbled over the body.”

  “Dean, do you know anyone who wanted Cabot dead?”

  “Hell, I don’t know anybody who didn’t.”

  Chapter 14

  “I haven’t met anybody since I got here who didn’t wish the man dead,” Charlie groused to Mitch across the candlelit table. “Which isn’t a lot of help when you’re trying to clear your mom of a murder she didn’t commit. Too many suspects.”