Murder in a Hot Flash
Page 14
The crowd was respectfully quiet. But the hum and buzz of transformers inside the fenced compound drowned out the sound of Moab’s swamp coolers. A sudden lightning streak above the transformers haloed Rita’s hair. “But if someone hated Edwina Greene that much,” the lawyer said, “why wouldn’t he have axed her instead of Cabot?”
“That’s only three choices.” Charlie didn’t really want to hear the fourth.
“The state serologist has found chips of dried blood in your mother’s car.”
“We went into Moab for groceries Saturday. I know there was raw chicken, could have been some ground beef—probably leaked out of the bags.”
“My sources say the preliminary lab reports suggest human blood. If they test out to be Gordon Cabot’s …”
“But the body and the weapon were found at the scene. And believe me, that was the murder scene. I was one of the first to see it. Nothing was moved. There was no car involved.”
“That was a messy murder, Charlie. It’s unlikely the murderer came away from it clean. No bloodied clothes have been found. They could have been transported out by car.”
And of course it was Edwina’s car they searched. The killer probably dumped the clothes down a hole in the concrete toilets. Maybe the sheriff had thought of that too. Charlie remembered the truck roaring next to them this afternoon.
“The fourth choice, Charlie, is that your mother axed Gordon Cabot and if I’m to be of any help to either of you, you are going to face that possibility. Either help me prove that wrong or prove her insanity. I’m not God.”
Chapter 20
A patch of white lightning jagged along a metal beam of the substation’s open superstructure high above the transformers. The red cliff wall behind it glowed and darkened, shadows dancing across it to disappear in deeper shadow.
A used condom glowed too, but dully, on the barbed-wire baffle that topped the chain-link fence under a security light.
John B., Scrag, Earl, and Mitch Hilsten hunched close in a protective covey not far from Charlie and her mother’s lawyer. All but Earl turned their backs when any of the roving lights threatened to expose them. He trained a tiny camcorder or mini/micro camera of some kind on the second-unit crew working under the substation’s lights.
Sidney Levit and Stan Lowenthall conferred with a city policeman beside a patrol car.
Tawny and the heroic Dean Goodacre talked earnestly at the other end of the crowd behind the barricades.
Charlie wondered what the pilot had been doing up in the helicopter last night. God, was it only last night? That feathery sensation in the sudden crater of her interior merely at the memory—Charlie switched thought scenes fast.
Tawny caught her eye, waved, smiled. She’d ridden in from Dead Horse Point with Charlie in the Corsica. One of those beautiful women other women love to hate, but she’d tried hard to lighten Charlie’s mood, to lend a sympathetic ear. Charlie felt guilty now for having been so single-minded.
Of course Edwina hadn’t killed Gordon Cabot with an ax, Tawny assured Charlie. “Earl and John B. and Scrag think it’s highly likely but they’re guys. You know, the almighty law can’t be wrong stuff.”
She and John B. were breaking up. Remembering the director’s randy handiness last Sunday in the motel room with the shower, Charlie wasn’t that surprised. But she had the good grace to ask why.
Tawny sighed. “Too much water under the bridge, I guess. We kind of slipped into a relationship we shouldn’t have. Been friends for years. This will probably kill even that.”
They’d met through. Tawny’s husband, the architect partner who’d taken his own life when the land deal fell flat. “I was only fifteen when I married Ben. John B. helped me finish school and got me interested in modeling and makeup and here I am. He’s forty something and sort of going through a change of life. I can’t deal with it. Life’s too short.”
Sidney Levit crawled onto the platform of a crane with a camera operator and they rose grandly into the air. Another cameraman on the ground moved into position with a steadycam on a body frame. Second-unit crew members made last-minute adjustments and backed out of camera range. A camera on a tripod in the bed of a truck was trained on the town in the opposite direction. Assistants fanned out to hush the crowd, who were, in fact, an inordinately orderly bunch.
Charlie didn’t know all that much about the technical side of the business but even she could tell there was a lot of expensive equipment here. The crane would have cost a bundle to ship to location. No wonder Cabot and his producers had squared off. Or perhaps so much science fiction was filmed in this alien countryside one was kept here to rent out.
Sid spoke into his headset and motioned to his first AD on the ground. It could have been the funny lighting on the crane, but he looked strangely jubilant.
In Hollywood, everybody wants to be a director. Sometimes even producers. It’s considered the highest form of artistry in the business. Worth chopping up somebody with an ax?
“Why does this look like a civil trial attorney’s dream?” Rita whispered.
“Most of it’s smoke and mirrors.” But this setup was asking for trouble. It would have been no use to try to keep people away. Better to invite them and try to control them. And Moab was pathetically eager to cooperate.
Why couldn’t this be done by miniature in a studio as Sid had wanted Gordon Cabot to do with some of the helicopter scenes? Or even a mockup? Maybe Sid too was going for “verisimilitude” instead of common sense. Was he now feeling a surge of power, of ultimate control?
The sky was clear of clouds and suspicious shadow-shapes, the moon and stars not yet showing. Standing around and waiting took up most of the time on any shoot, especially on location. Charlie was absently watching the condom, trying not to think of Mitch Hilsten, when the globed security light above the flaccid rubber sheath exploded with a pop.
Street- and houselights in the town below blacked out in sections. But the substation grew brighter. Balls of fire bounced from ceramic knobs to wires to the DANGER! KEEP OUT! signs. One by one the rest of the globes on the security lights exploded. Lightning fingers traced every wire of the chain link. Sparks showered into the night.
It was like fireworks, only in black and white.
Charlie’s clothes grew stiff and abrasive. Her skin pricked and tingled. Her hair felt like it wanted to stand on end. The smell of sulfur saturated the air.
Two figures writhed and staggered between transformer bases, aflame with Hollywood magic. The air filled so full of smoke Charlie could no longer see the movie-in-the-making. But between the cracks, and pips, and zings and spits of explosive she assumed it was still playing to a camera somewhere.
She’d even lost Rita Latham, who had to be within reach. But it was odd what Charlie could see. A lot of stage smoke swirling up from the ground. Mitch Hilsten’s head and shoulders in a less dense patch of it appeared to be floating away by themselves around a corner of the fence. She looked for other familiar faces, beginning to feel isolated and anxious.
“Jesus, this whole place is charged.” Scrag’s unmistakable voice in her ear, no attempt to be quiet on the set. An arm encircled her waist. “You okay, darlin’?”
Charlie coughed in the acrid smoke. Above it the long lean form of Sidney Levit raised a fist toward the sky as his crane chariot descended from the heights, his white head glowing godlike.
Charlie, this is show biz, let’s not get carried away here.
One of the pips or pops became a boom. And the milling crowd was growing restless and noisy.
But the fireballs finally began to fizzle. Charlie squirmed out of Scrag’s hold and lost him in the smoke. The spark showers dried up. The light show faded. Charlie’s hair relaxed and her clothes settled more comfortably. Over the coughing and increasingly perturbed voices around her, calling out names like lost souls, she heard the sirens of emergency vehicles. Headlights rushing up from the street looked like floodlights bouncing through the stage smoke.
She wanted to make some snide remark about heroism to Mitch but was coughing too hard to speak.
He fought their way through a ganglion of milling bodies until the air freshened enough to breathe. But her lungs and throat and eyes felt seared.
As they joined a group at the crest of the hill, lights popped up in batches all over the town below, stoplights blinked red on the main thoroughfare. Rita was there, hovering over John B. He sat with head in hands and bent over his knees. Dean Goodacre and Earl Seabaugh stood against a yellow triangular YIELD sign, crying smoke tears. Mitch deposited Charlie next to John B. and plowed back into the vapor and fumes. Heroically.
It wasn’t all stage smoke either.
No stuntwoman had been suited up for that shoot.
The unusual odor over the stage smoke was just plain Tawny.
Chapter 21
Mitch, John B., and Earl decided not to cancel their river trip the next morning. Even Sid and his helicopter pilot, Dean, were going along.
“They might as well,” Rita Latham said. “The paparazzi will be back in full force. Death stalks tragedy-prone movie! Or some such. Nobody’s going to get much done in this town. Including, I’m afraid, you and me. Think I’ll head back to Salt Lake for a day or two.”
“Rita, Mitch is still speaking to you, right? Think you could get me invited along on that little jaunt?”
The attorney tilted her head back on a long neck and turned it to squint at Charlie. “Wouldn’t you rather spend the day with your mother?”
“She’s not talking to me either. I need to go down the river.”
“Charlie, I’ll have to admit I’m confused here. I’m usually a pretty good judge of people. But Mitch will make up his own mind about any commitment to a relationship with you whether you’re there or not. You seem so altogether, certainly not the type to chase a man this way.” The woman’s disappointment with Charlie was palpable.
It’s degrading as hell, but I’ll seem like whatever I have to, to get in that boat. Time is running out for Edwina and that boat’s going to be full of possible ax murderers planning to leave Utah the day after tomorrow.
And what if Tawny’s horrible accident hadn’t been an accident?
For once both of Charlie’s inner voices agreed.
As it turned out, Scrag Dickens invited himself along on the river trip too.
“Damn it, now we can’t tell guy jokes and piss over the side of the boat,” Earl complained when he saw Charlie, but made a place for her on the seat beside him. Those green eyes weren’t laughing this morning.
It was a somber group that climbed aboard two shallow-drafted jet boats, the grim picture of a tortured Tawny still writhing flames in their memory vision, the ghastly smell of her death still a ghost in the air they breathed.
Mitch, John B., Sid Levit, and the guide, Homer Blankenship, rode in the lead boat. Charlie, Dean Goodacre, Earl, and Scrag in the second—Earl and Dean pouting because the guide chose Scrag to drive their boat. To add to the insult, the desert rat explained the workings of the craft to the other males.
If the boats were shallow-drafted so were the engines. They looked like outboards but instead of propellers had pumps that sucked in river water and forced it out in a “jet” of water to propel the boat forward. And unlike the propellers, the pumps were enclosed and didn’t snag as easily on sandbanks, logs, and rocks.
These were black rubber boats with white foam coolers holding their passengers’ lunch, water, and canned drinks. Homer insisted they all wear bright orange life vests. A colorful, if short, caravan formed on the dark water.
The river looked black down here instead of the chocolate-mud color it took on from above. Maybe because it reflected the vertical rock walls, looming maroon-black with shadow, that channeled it at this point.
Over a hundred feet wide and shallow enough in places to expose rotting tree limbs stuck on sandbars, the Colorado River slithered instead of flowed. Heavy with residue of the canyon it was busy carving, it moved strangely silent for water.
Ducks bobbed along the edges, upending to feed on the bottom, their small pointy tail feathers and paddle feet sticking up from the surface like overturned bathtub toys.
Mitch was avoiding Charlie, which was fine with her. She had to keep her perspective. Of the seven men, six were possible candidates for murderer. And she must study them all on this, the last day she had to prove her mother’s innocence by finding someone else’s guilt. Not that Charlie felt she should be doing this. Simply that she didn’t know anybody else who would.
Perhaps it was learning of Tawny’s death, but suddenly Edwina had remembered how she’d propped the ax up against the trailer hitch before they’d sat down to dinner that fateful evening. Charlie had been facing away from it and Edwina was probably too upset to notice any movement around it.
While she and Charlie were arguing, a hand could easily have slipped out of a night shadow and grabbed it, even before Gordon Cabot came back from his tour-bus shoot in the Humvee. The murderer could have lain in wait for him to start off for the concrete johns. Which meant anybody could have done it—including Mitch Hilsten.
Homer Blankenship, a plump man with a benign smile and graying temples, stood knee-deep in the river, his pants rolled to mid-thigh, and showed Scrag how to start his engine. Then he leaped into the other boat. A surprisingly strong current, for what appeared so sluggish a river, had shoved them sideways out into the stream of things before the quiet was shattered as first one outboard roared to life and then the other.
The plan was that Scrag would follow Homer exactly because Homer knew where the channels and snags were. Charlie’d hoped for a quieter trip, where the men would talk to each other and to her and she could watch and listen. But it was hard to talk over the jet engines and she couldn’t see much in the way of expressions in the boat ahead of them.
Still, she could hear some of the conversation from the lead boat because the people in it had to yell over their own engine and because sound travels over water and because Charlie’s hearing was unusually acute. Not that she expected anyone to conversationally admit to killing Cabot.
And if Tawny had been murdered, it couldn’t have been Sid because he was way up on the crane. And if her death was not the accident it seemed (her hair and clothes had apparently caught fire in a wayward spark shower), the chances of it being a different murderer were slim.
Two murderers on one set was pretty far-fetched even for Hollywood. Which meant that all the people here except Homer were at the scenes of both crimes.
Charlie knew she just wanted poor Tawny to have been murdered because Edwina couldn’t have done it from her jail cell, which meant she didn’t kill Cabot either if one person did them both in.
The giant uranium dump below the mill slid by, abandoned and misshapen. Was it safe to have radioactive material so close to the river’s edge? If Charlie remembered correctly, the Colorado nurtured a fair portion of the country. And a fair portion of that in California, where even now Libby might be drinking some.
The morning had been pleasantly warm until the boat started moving. Now Charlie hugged her life vest, wishing it had sleeves to break the cold wind of their passage, which dried out her contacts even behind sunglasses.
She turned around to look at their driver. Scrag smiled intimately. He’d made a ridiculously overblown point of showing off Edwina’s ax practically the minute Charlie stepped out of the car her first night at Dead Horse Point. And he’d been even more obvious about what a threat Charlie’s mother supposedly was. He could have been setting Edwina up to take the blame for Cabot’s murder even then.
Scrag had hun
g around the fringes of the industry long enough to have developed some grudge against the director. Or he could just be nuts enough to have taken more than an ordinary dislike to Edwina and decided to set her up for disaster.
Charlie was on the canyon’s third level this time, at the very bottom. Vertical walls gave way to turrets and spires and ledges. Massive shapes in front of even more massive shapes. Hollywood could make you feel small, but she’d always resented nature for doing it so much better.
Sidney Levit, now, might have seen murdering Cabot as a chance to save the Animal Aliens budget and realize a dream of being a director at the same time. Edwina would be a convenient scapegoat to his ambition and business acumen. Or maybe just working closely with Cabot could actually drive one to murder.
Blue and purple shadow hues changed to russets and dull oranges when the sun hit the rock cliffs and formations rearing to either side of Charlie. It was as vast and alien as the other levels but in a different way. It would be so easy to disappear here. The only softness in the whole landscape was the water and it would want to drown you.
In the boat ahead of her, Mitch Hilsten reached an arm around the hunched shoulders of his friend, the director of Return of an Ecosystem.
According to the dead Tawny, John B. Drake was going through a life change. In men, that often meant the need to sleep with ever-younger women—as if that proved prowess and youth, rather than privilege and exploitation. Tawny hadn’t been able to “deal with it.”
So what does life change mean in women, Charlie?
It means hot flashes and mood changes and panic attacks. It does not mean murder.
The hard cliff walls amplified the harsh sounds of the engines. The jarring of the boat against the water brought back all the soreness of Charlie’s cliff-hanging experience. One foot had started throbbing again. The tastes of coffee and bacon mixed unpleasantly with sloshing stomach acids and returned, burning, to her tongue.