God, why hadn’t she stopped outside to listen before barging in on this good-old-boy party?
Or was it just Charlie’s paranoia interpreting this scene?
“What? I’m interrupting something?”
There was still a pause after she spoke that her paranoia construed as quick assessments of just how much she’d heard. They didn’t know she hadn’t listened outside. Lightning flashed white in the sky behind her and the forms in the tableau took on shadow and expression. The men may have been silent, but for a brief moment those expressions talked. Again there was fear and suspicion but it had suddenly been redirected toward Charlie.
And then the world righted and the people in it moved and spoke. Mitch Hilsten took on an oily expression like in Trophies when he was about to put the sting on Marlena whatwashername. Sid and Dean got up to offer her their rock. Homer rose to offer her the sandwich intended for John B., who pulled a little boy face and unbuckled his belt to get to his plastic canteen. Earl went back to studying the ceiling and Scrag patted the dirt next to him in invitation.
Charlie sat in the dirt like Scrag but not next to him, the cool dark dankness, the balogna sandwich with mustard and pickle, the sweet warm water, and the relief of being off her sore feet bringing her mood back to conciliatory, if not normality.
She should right now be sitting in her cool clean office on Wilshire anxiously awaiting word as to the fate of Tina Horton’s Southwestern Exposure pilot for CBS. Barry Zahn at ZIA had called just before she left to say Carl Shapiro had promised to decide by today whether it would be on the fall schedule or put off once again. It had been one of those projects pitched, sold, and developed in record time and then it had languished.
But instead of biting her nails in her air-conditioned office Charlie sat sweaty, dirty, sunburned, with no fingernails to bite. On the dirt. Eating with unwashed hands. Dying to find her own privacy to pee.
Homer munched on his sandwich, trying to clear the residue of the pasty white bread out of the gap between his front teeth and talk at the same time. He explained that the hollowed-out bowls grooved into the surface of a low flat boulder were made by Anasazi women grinding seeds and grains with handheld stones.
The blackened roof was from cooking fires and the layered chiseled-flat rocks piled to the ceiling in one corner with mud plaster for mortar had once protected food from rats.
Homer was the only one who bothered to stoop and peer into an ancient hole of a doorway. “Last time I looked, it was rats living in there.”
Edwina would have loved this.
The Anasazi had made pictures on the walls here too. The larger ones resembled floating Indian rugs hanging from crowned skulls, painted in faded red and blue. The animal drawings weren’t stick figures, like the deer in the cave along the river, but crude creatures with bloated bodies and short legs like those children draw before they’ve mastered the intricacies of proportion.
Rows of orange handprints filled an unblackened edge of the ceiling Earl had been studying when Charlie arrived. Humans had dipped their palms in dye and pressed them flat against the rock. Small humans. Adults and children left their marks, but even the largest was smaller than Charlie’s.
The base of this low cliff, eroded away by some long-forgotten river or stream, formed deep overhangs that would come to be human shelters. First for the Anasazi and later the cowboys who shepherded cattle like sheep, living with them, moving them when the meager graze was used up.
Homer offered everybody another sandwich and Charlie was the only one to refuse. Finally, he led his refreshed and cooled, but still uneasy and watchful, crew to the next overhang shelter.
It had a little sign identifying it as Spring Cave. A crevice ran all around the cavern where two different-colored layers of rock met. Water seeped from that crevice so sparingly it dried up before reaching the sand floor. But every now and then a green plant had found a root hold. Some were ferns hanging upside down. One looked like watercress.
At the back, in the deepest recess, the water seeped heavily enough to form a dark puddle on the floor that lengthened to a stream but disappeared into the sand before it reached the point where the overhang met the desert. Homer told them the spring provided water all year.
No ancient Anasazi fires had blackened the ceiling here or cowboy fires either. Both groups may have slipped in for water, but they didn’t stay to live. Charlie didn’t stay long either. The spring that provided water all year bred the largest, most vicious mosquitoes she’d ever met.
Homer was pontificating outside. “The corral, of course, was built relatively recently by ranch hands and meant to keep the cattle out of the remuda and the cowboys’ hair—except at branding and roundup when they were herded inside a few at a time. Trucks hauled them off for slaughter.”
Charlie hurried along the corral fence after the others, encouraged by sharp lightning cracks, one hand picking up slivers on the weathered wood. Two untrimmed fence posts with a long pole nailed between—a hitching post. More fencing almost hidden in bushes and tall weeds and a gate wide enough to straddle a one-lane road, a high cross pole above it, but no road.
The wires that had held the gate shut were broken and it hung slack in the sand, propped up by strong wiry weeds.
The overhang here sheltered a large wooden box with a lid. Homer made much over the fact that the air was so dry the metal hinges still worked without squeaking and that the lid had kept the pack rats out of the fine layer of dusty oats once used to feed the horses.
“Charlie?” Earl Seabaugh appeared at her side to help her study the oats. “The night of Cabot’s murder? I went up to the Aliens campsite to talk to Dean. Cabot roared in, in his fucking Humvee, rushed to his big rig and couldn’t get the door unlocked. Big joke, Dean tells me, is the size of Cabot’s bladder.”
Both John B. and Mitch Hilsten had paused in their euphoria over the boring landscape to watch them, eyes hooded halfway like the clouds trying to squash the sunlight with lightning. “Why are you telling me this now?”
“Mitch says you aren’t going to give up. Not smart, but understandable. Maybe you like your mother more than anybody thought.” He too noticed the men noticing them and started to wander off.
“Wait.” Charlie grabbed a camera strap around his neck so that he had to stop or choke. “He can’t get in his motor home and he has to use the john. So?”
“The last anybody but the murderer saw of him was him starting off to the public potty.”
“Why didn’t he just unzip his fly the minute he got behind a bush?” Like the rest of you’ve been doing all day.
“Maybe he did. Looked like he was heading for the concrete crappers. I don’t know if the autopsy mentioned the condition of his fly, do you?”
“Did you tell the sheriff this?”
“I was too close to the scene of the crime at the time of the crime to tell the sheriff anything. But when I passed your mother’s campsite, you two were sitting at the table eating. Her ax was leaning up against the trailer tongue. Next time I see you, you’re rushing into John B.’s motor home all torqued at Edwina and wanting to tell us about it at dinner. And your mother and her ax are still running loose out there.”
“You didn’t see her on the way back to John B.’s for dinner?”
“Didn’t walk that way. Sid and I walked the other side of the loop. John B.’d asked me to see if I could get Sid down to discuss the mess Cabot was making of the landscape.”
Charlie found it all very curious but couldn’t see that it proved or disproved anything. Her own need to find a bush was passing the urgent level.
But she damn near lost it all with the cameraman’s parting shot. His earring and green eyes glittered hard in a lightning flash and he patted his little Handycam. “I don’t know if Sid’s crew got any footage of Tawny’s death last night, but I think I did.”
Chapter 24
Charlie was leaning nonchalantly against the gate while she frantically eyed sagebrush and sa
ltbush, when Dean Goodacre found her.
She clamped her teeth in a false smile and crossed her legs. Either she or the gate creaked in the wind. Her nose was swollen so red with sunburn she could barely see around it.
The helicopter jockey had seen her see him last night talking to Tawny shortly before her death. The bulge of his bared stomach was turning pink with white blotches. “Promise you won’t say a word to anybody about this, but I thought it might help.”
Charlie realized the man was so uncomfortable he wasn’t even chewing on anything. “Not if you don’t tell me what it is.”
“She wanted me to fly her out of Utah last night. Didn’t say why, but she offered me five grand plus expenses to do it. And I said yes.”
“Where did she want to go?”
“Vegas. I think she was scared, Charlie.”
Charlie raced off to find a big enough bush thinking that the dead woman hadn’t seemed afraid during the ride into town from Dead Horse Point yesterday afternoon. And she had looked cheerful enough when she’d waved at Charlie across the substation compound before the shoot.
After half a day of stonewalling, everybody suddenly wanted to ’fess up. What was going on?
“You probably think I’m heartless to be gallivanting around out here after what happened to Tawny, huh?” John B. whispered to Charlie in the next overhang shelter, the largest so far. “Mitch thought I needed to get away, think about something else.”
Charlie absently kicked a poof of sand-dirt through the frame of an old-fashioned bedspring of wire coils that had never known padding. The whole place looked like somebody’d dug up a venerable garbage dump on a poverty-stricken ranch and set out the worst of it as a display for tourists. Or filmmakers.
“Hey, my mom’s in jail charged with murder and I’m out here gallivanting right along with you. I can’t very well say anything, can I? Everybody needs a break now and then.”
“I suppose they told you all about Ben. Tawny and Earl, I mean.”
Raw two-by-fours formed a trencher table and crude benches, even a chair with a high back but no legs. Just enough to keep your buns up out of the dirt without having to hunker. The table legs were coated with MJB coffee cans.
“The theory,” Homer had told them, “is that desert wood rats won’t climb metal.”
As Charlie remembered, those in Edwina’s basement climbed anything. Maybe because they were caged. The men here acted caged, trying to fake their way out of a maze they thought she had the key to.
“Ben … Tawny’s husband? She told me he was a lot older. Earl said he’d committed suicide. Mitch that he’d failed in a business venture with you and Earl. That’s all I know.”
He was much taller than Charlie, but he raised his head to look down at her, long lashes almost meeting as his eyes turned to slits and the rubber mouth formed a false happy-face grin.
“Tawny also told me you two were breaking up,” she persisted.
He wore his versatile bandanna rolled into a sweatband around his forehead. His eyes were a deep chocolate brown. In a sort of nerdy way, John B. Drake was good-looking.
Is that possible?
The grin opened to a knowing smile as he recognized her unexpected rush of attraction.
Charlie, your mother’s in jail, his latest squeeze burned to a crisp, and you just slept with his best friend. You are here to figure out at least one murder—how would you explain all this to Libby?
That’s when Charlie decided John B. was the murderer.
A long stovepipe lay on the floor next to a narrow metal box that once was a primitive oven. A clutter of coffeepots, frying pans, plates, cups, stirring spoons, and platters spread over the tabletop as an open display for tourists. All of them metal, all blistered and blackened, all with holes worn through. Yet none with a speck of rust.
Another table held stiffened dried horse tack—bridles, reins, leather straps.
Sid was the next to sidle over with helpful details, his high forehead beginning to blister like the cookware, his beautiful white hair sweat-plastered to his head like his shirt to his chest.
Sid wanted to know why Scrag’s fingerprints weren’t on Edwina’s ax, since he’d made an oft-repeated display of carrying it about. “That’s something you should look into, Charlie.”
Charlie looked into Sid Levit’s eyes instead and found there the sincere conviction that he could manipulate her in any direction he chose. What, all females are looking for a father figure? That’s when Charlie knew for sure that the producer and now director of Animal Aliens had murdered his predecessor.
Mitch gave her a secret look. Like, she was supposed to know what it meant. He put an arm around Earl’s shoulders, the other gesturing in earnest about the possibilities of this place.
“Sort of a three-generation thing, see? Get some footage here we can discuss later. The Anasazi, the cowboy, and the modern tourist.”
Earl concentrated his Handycam on different shots of the intricate prints left by opposing sportswear at different light angles.
You really can tell the difference in the prints left by Adidas and Reeboks. Charlie wished she’d thought to look for shoe prints around Gordon Cabot’s body while she was losing her cookies three bushes to the left.
She’d no sooner entertained that thought than the river guide slipped her a couple of Oreos. “I saved some back for you.”
Jesus, maybe he’s psychic.
Then he whispered, “Keep your expression neutral. I don’t understand it, but they all think you’ve figured out Cabot’s murder and came along to force or surprise a confession. And I think you’re in serious danger here.”
They both looked at Charlie’s awkward footwear. She was going to flee this danger in a couple of rubber tire slats with canvas straps, right?
“They think you’re psychic and ‘sense’ more about them than you let on. Mitch Hilsten even hinted you would know if the woman who burned to death on the set last night … if her death maybe wasn’t accidental.”
That’s what they were talking about when I came into the first cave after everybody else. That’s why all the helpful hints.
“I’m not psychic, Homer, and God help me, I want to believe poor Tawny was murdered because my mom couldn’t have done that one from a jail cell. And two murderers on the same location doesn’t seem likely.”
“What I want to know is, have we come too far downriver in an overcrowded boat with half the water and provisions we should have and a murderer on board?”
“If we have, it doesn’t mean he has any reason to kill again.”
“Unless he feels threatened. Say, by you. Don’t do anything to excite him till we get back up the river to Moab? I’ve got this senseless, unwarranted, crawly feeling somebody dumped sand in the gas tank of the lead boat back there. It sounded weird, started, then choked on something.”
In fact, he was anxious to return to the one boat left and be the first there, in order to thwart any more tampering.
“Homer, even a murderer wouldn’t want to get stuck in a place like this without enough water and food.” Or fax, E-mail, cellular. “If production companies can get cellular phones out here, why don’t you carry one with you?” John B. had returned his in a fit of austerity when they’d packed up and left the campground.
“They’re of limited use this far out and down,” he said as if insulted. “People come this far out and down to get away from that kind of thing. And they’re too expensive for plain old river guides.” But then he relented, “I could sure use one right now though.”
Charlie once again limped along behind the “guys” back to the river, trying to determine if she’d learned anything for all this effort and discomfort.
She was really more worried about the next storm rolling in than the possible sabotage of the boat. Not that the last one had shed more than three drops that made it to the earth. But the lightning was difficult to ignore.
Mitch seemed to be keeping her in sight from up ahead, the las
t of the gang on a trail marked for tourists with painted rocks lining it on each side.
By the time Charlie and her rubber clogs caught up with the group, they’d formed a dejected semicircle around the remaining jet boat. The slit at one side of the floor (hard to imagine the pliable black rubberlike stuff as a “deck”) gaped in an even zag. One section of the pontoonlike rim was underwater and appeared as deflated as the men standing above it.
“No rock did this.” John B. was the first to voice the obvious.
“There aren’t any rocks on this beach,” she pointed out, soaking up the moods around her with stomach-dropping intensity. If they’d been in a room the fear, anger, and suspicion would be bouncing off its walls.
The director knelt to ream the slit edges with a finger, his gaze lingering, accusing each of the group in turn. Even Charlie. “Smooth, like a knife cut.”
Homer Blankenship checked his belt to find his hunting knife still in its sheath and gestured above his wounded craft, palms up, as if he were offering it a baby goat with a slit throat. “I’m not going to sabotage my own boats.” He raised and lowered the invisible offering and then repeated the action. “Christ, the wife’s barely eking out grocery money cooking and slaving in a bed and breakfast, our house. I’m not going to risk my river license and have to move my family back to the city … who could have done this?”
Charlie’s half-baked idea that the killer was along on this trip instead of back in California, soaking up civilization, was on the money. It made her feel less triumphant than trapped. One thing to ask for something, another to get it.
A totally insensitive idiot could have sensed Charlie was not alone with this inspiration. The difficulty with being accused of psychic sensitivity is you can never tell what’s normal intuition because anything you say is held up to you as proof of your superiority to rational thought processes. It was a royal pain.
Mitch Hilsten wasn’t the only one giving Charlie slit-eyed, sideways glances. What, they wanted her to make an announcement?
Murder in a Hot Flash Page 16
