Voices in the Wardrobe

by Marlys Millhiser

  “Was there a time on that first message?” Mitch finally broke the silence.

  “Five? Five forty-five, I think.”

  “He’d finally gotten off the drugs and alcohol,” Dashiell Hammett’s mother said to no one and in a deadened tone beyond feeling. “He was clean for a year. My nightmares had all but stopped. There’s nothing more devastating than an adult child you can’t help and you can’t help their hurt and they can’t help but hurt you.” No tears, she barely blinked, picked up her sandwich, set it down twice without taking a bite. “He’d worked so hard.” Her melodious voice had flattened.

  “Caroline,” her husband said softly, “it’s time for your medications.”

  The second message left on her voice mail had been from Kenny Cowper—both Maggie and Luella’s luggage had disappeared from the hotel. “Hope you took yours because it’s gone too. Hope you’re okay. I’m on my way to the Spa.”

  Charlie had left a message that she was down at the marina and to call her back, but he hadn’t yet. Her suitcase was still locked in the back of the extended cab of the Ram, she hoped.

  “The press up at the Spa is going to be almost as bad as down here. What do we do?”

  “My car is on this side of the bridge, give me your keys and I’ll see if I can get someone to steal your truck and take it up to the Spa. I’ll take you and the VanZants in my passenger-concealing rental. Just for the hell of it, why don’t you try to get a hold of Luella?”

  All Charlie got was Luella’s professional voice mail. Even that was painful to listen to. Charlie left a message anyway, that she was heading up to the Sea Spa.

  Charlie sat alone on the Motherfricker’s deck and watched the night, tried to make a connection between Dr. Judy’s hyping of the product, Redux, as well as the hotly contested HRT treatments for women, and four murders including her own—between the Sea Spa at the Marina del Sol and the Film Institute—between prescription drug peddling and profiting from screenwriter hopefuls.

  It was all about communication for profit, about misleading people—what was she missing here?

  In Mitch’s Stealth on the way up to the Spa, she asked the VanZants who Judith Judd’s lover was and got one connection. She also noticed a new message on her cell. It was Libby telling her she was headed for the Spa because her mother hadn’t answered her last message. Charlie called Libby to inform her daughter’s voice mail that she must absolutely stay away from that place at all costs but to let Charlie know where she was going. “Keegan’s at Les Artistes in Del Mar. A better place to head for because something very deadly is going on at the Spa.”

  But when Mitch’s Stealth breached the promontory Libby’s Jeep was already parked in the lot.

  Twenty-Five

  “Oh shit,” Charlie said as the other Agent Green pulled up behind Mitch’s rental. At least Libby’s Jeep was empty and the people getting out of the low black Stealth probably didn’t know who the dented Wrangler belonged to. Maybe Mitch, but she didn’t think so. And probably not Charles Green, who worked so hard to imply he knew all, either. It sat at the end of a short line of cars, and Mitch would pull right in next to it instead of starting a new line.

  Two San Diego sheriff’s cars were parked there too so Charlie’s daughter might be safe with them—but she didn’t want Libby and Charles meeting up.

  Charlie couldn’t remember when she slept last. The crab salad croissants and scotch did help to keep the jitters at bay. A cup of coffee wouldn’t hurt about now—wouldn’t you know she was at probably the only place in Southern California where she couldn’t get one.

  How can you be thinking about such banal things when three of the most important people in your life are hopefully just in danger and not dead? “I don’t know.”

  “Oh really? I thought you knew everything,” the funny-haired agent in safari dress said pleasantly.

  Kenny Cowper’s flashy red rental pulled up to extend the line. Even so, there weren’t an awful lot of people here.

  “You don’t know what?” the FBI man insisted, adding a touch of triumph to his pleasantness.

  “I don’t know where my friends are. Hi, Kenny, this is Mitch. Mitch, this is Kenny.” And this has got to be a bad dream, right? “Oh, boy.”

  Charlie Greene decided she had a plan and was about to attempt an escape when she smelled the coffee. The VanZants, the Feds—three in number now—Charlie, Mitch, and Kenny, Sue Rippon, and Ruth Ann Singer sat in the Spa’s kitchen at a long staff table. Somebody on the other side of a head-high partition was making coffee. Smelled like the real thing—as in caffeinated.

  Dr. Grant Howard of the San Diego Film Institute had been Dr. Judy’s lover. That was the connection between the Sea Spa and the Institute. And they were both murdered—another connection.

  “So, Dr. Judith Judd prescribed medicines for your son’s condition, is that right, Mrs. VanZant?” asked a man sitting next to Charles Green. He had a folder of papers he rustled through and tilted his head back to study them through bifocals. Neither he nor the gentleman on the other side of the FBI agent had bothered to introduce themselves. All three were so smug, intimidating, and patronizing Charlie would have been furious if she weren’t so worried about her friends and her daughter, if she weren’t so very weary.

  “Judith was one of his doctors,” Warren answered for his wife.

  “He was addicted to drugs so you all gave him drugs?” Charlie asked. She’d always had trouble getting her head around that one.

  “Just because you’re allergic to milk doesn’t mean you can’t drink water. Dashiell was on medications to control his addiction to drugs and alcohol. The medications were for behavior control and cravings, not euphoria. It’s possible to forget to take medications. They are definitely needed but one does not feel the need.”

  “There’s a pill for everything.” Charlie accepted a hot mug of the evil brew with a grateful sigh, refusing cream or sugar, wondering if there was a pill for caffeine addiction, vowing to flush it down the toilet if it was ever prescribed for her. This wasn’t euphoria as much as an aid for getting through a horrible night. Right? Their server was Deputy Saucier of the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department. She had a cute pug nose just right for her face. Where was Solomon?

  Caroline VanZant wept softly into her hand and Charlie felt like a creep for questioning Dashiell’s treatment. If she’d seen Libby in the condition Caroline had her son a few hours ago she would not have waxed flippant either. Did whoever killed Dashiell have Maggie and Luella, Libby even? The thought turned the coffee sour in her stomach and she set the mug down.

  “And your daughter and her cell phone appear to have disappeared from the face of the earth, Mrs. Greene,” said the smug Fed to the left of Agent Green. “I should think that would worry a mother.” He was the youngest of the three but with only a fringe of head hair left.

  “It’s Miss Greene. I have never married. And I’m always worried about my daughter. How do you know her cell is missing?”

  His scorn seemed triumphantly justified by Libby’s fatherless state. “I suppose you don’t even know which one was the father.”

  “Kenny, leave it,” Charlie warned the stud beside her as he threatened to bestir himself. “As a matter of fact I do and he’s a creep.”

  “Next time your daughter uses her cellular, we’ve got her. Been having some trouble with the system, but it’s all fixed now. You might as well tell us where she is. You are both suspected of interfering with a federal investigation.”

  Agent Charles Green asked to see her purse again. And again found no cell—not even her little address book, both having been hurriedly secreted in the crack between the front rider’s seat and the gearshift console in Mitch’s rental. Not that hard to find if they went searching for it, but all Charlie could manage in the time she had upon her arrival tonight.

  “Your ‘system’ must be pretty crowded if you monitor all the cells in Southern California,” Mitch said.

  “Only selec
ted frequencies or signals. And if you have nothing to hide it should be of no consequence. There will be some glitches, that’s to be expected, but—”

  “Yeah, like when I was getting your e-mail,” Charlie said.

  “What?” bifocals said. “It wasn’t in code?”

  “Her daughter decoded it.”

  “Ahhhh well, we must speak to her then, mustn’t we?” Bifocals relaxed back into his smirk.

  Charlie, who’d studied no more history than the general required courses in college, tried to remember if it was somebody named McCarthy or something called the Inquisition where religious fanatics tortured witches or, under that pretext, anybody who got in their way. She often listened to NPR on her long commute, but spent many interruptions on her cell, talking to New York before her contacts went to lunch. She had assumed the government just listened in on foreign terrorists abroad or when found in the country.

  Charlie rarely voted because she had all she could do to keep her head straight on work, personal, and family matters, so she rarely registered political stuff. A single mom with a scary teen, incipient ulcer, titanium plate in her neck, felonious feline, and a high-stress job can only compute so much without risking insanity. But, as often as she’d run into trouble with official types since her move to California, Charlie wished now she’d paid more attention. Not that she believed one person could make enough difference to change anything, but it is wise to be forewarned when the “rabids” are in charge of anything. Both rabid rights and rabid lefts drove her nuts. And then add the rabid religious and any attempt at reason was useless.

  “Now I assume, Mr. VanZant, that you are aware of the vast wealth your previous wife salted away offshore.” The Fed with the bifocals peered over them at Warren with a quick side glance at VanZant’s present wife. “And that all the money is to be doled out to your daughter and granddaughter by a trust, with the stipulation that none of the money goes to you or the Sea Spa or several other individuals named.”

  “Judith was paid well to promote certain types of medications, but not brands, in her public appearances. I was not privy to exact figures, but was aware that our daughter and granddaughter would be well taken care of should something happen to their mother.”

  “She was paid a percentage of royalties for promoting types of medications, which is unethical but not illegal—hormones, anti-inflammatories, mood stabilizers—in other words, happy pills.”

  “To relieve misery, not to induce euphoria. There is a difference.”

  “Warren,” Sue Rippon interrupted as Caroline VanZant rolled her head back and slid to the floor.

  Charlie felt a lot like doing the same.

  “Hey, my daughter, my best friend, and my mentor may be out here somewhere dead or alive in pain or in grave danger of one or all those things. Will you guys get real?” Charlie told the studs.

  It’s your own fault for getting involved with these types.

  “I know. Now shut up.”

  The studs looked at her and then each other and shrugged, but still with proper squints of hostility, and said almost in tandem, “She talks to herself.”

  “Knock it off,” Charlie warned.

  They were wandering in the garden of pseudo earthquake Grecian, Roman ruins with two wimpy flashlights and a waning moon to light their way. One of them grabbed her as she was about to sprain an ankle, dislocate a knee, or bust her head missing a ruined step down into the cracked basin where the well-hung Mediterranean boy leaned over the crevice that snaked across the length of the promontory.

  After Caroline VanZant did her fainting thing and brought the inquisition to a halt, and Detective Solomon arrived within minutes to report some matter of apparently grave significance—Charlie and “the guys” had the opportunity to slip away and took it. Actually, Charlie took off by herself and they chose to follow. If they got in trouble—it was their choice. She had people out here to look for and intended to do just that before she succumbed like Caroline VanZant had. Besides, she couldn’t breathe without getting off that chair and taking action of some kind. Her head throbbed with the need to search for those most important to her.

  Mitch fished a coin out of his pocket and dropped it down into the crevice. It didn’t seem to ever land or to bounce off ledges either. “I don’t see how they can monitor transmissions on selected cell phones in a place so crowded with conversations as Southern California. I mean … if you can’t search out and destroy spam before it clogs computer networks … I don’t claim to be able to keep up on technology, but it just doesn’t ring true.”

  Kenny Cowper stepped up on a broken rock ledge so he could look even farther down on the superstar. Night light cast him a faint shadow. “So, you think those guys in there are faking it?”

  “I think they believe what they are told to believe because they believe in their leaders and we all believe what we want to, doesn’t make them all that different from the rest of us.”

  “Like assuming Middle Easterners are national, rather than tribal,” Charlie said. Even she knew that, although she couldn’t remember why. “Oh yes I do, a screenplay that never made it, Wag the Camel.”

  “Charlie, I think you should go lie down somewhere.” Mitch aimed the business end of the flashlight into the crevice, walked toward the sea as far as the night and the condition of the ruins allowed, turned back and stopped to bend closer to the fissure. “Jesus, look at this.”

  Twenty-Six

  “Friend of mine got an assignment from The Times to investigate the problem of government use of technologies that change faster than people can be trained for it. Lots of the bugs are discovered when the new technology is out on the market and by the time it’s perfected a new and better product is developed by the same or a competing company. Government moves too slowly when retraining people and can’t just fire the old specialists and hire new every time that happens because of seniority issues and those hired because of connections to congressmen, senior staff, and so on.” Kenny Cowper sat on the ledge now and dangled his feet over the side, Charlie and Mitch on the base of a pedestal that no longer supported its statue. The pedestal leaned and they leaned against it. It was almost comfortable.

  “Wow, how come you didn’t get that assignment?” his agent wanted to know.

  “She has better connections than I do.”

  Charlie was afraid to find her daughter and friends and afraid not to. Fear and fatigue had brought her to this impasse and she couldn’t make a decision, couldn’t risk making the wrong one. If any were alive, she could put them in danger of being located, if they were dead it didn’t matter. They would all have normally pulled out their cell phones to locate somebody, but were afraid to now. Kenny was the only one who had his on him.

  “So your point is?” Mitch insisted. “We worry more about Big Brother or less because the guys in the trenches can’t keep up with the advances of spying on us?”

  “I don’t know. But now that we’re trying to monitor communications all over the world it seems likely there’d be gigantic probabilities for error. A whole lot of innocent people could be falsely jailed and charged on inaccuracies in the information gathering. I guess that’s already true somewhat—but now it would be on a far grander scale.”

  They sat there in pretty much a state of exhaustion waiting for dawn and for an official in some capacity to track them down, tell them what to do or not to do, show him what they’d found in the crevice.

  “I vote we take a chance. Do something. Before Charlie wigs-out on us.”

  Kenny drew his cell, flipped it open.

  “I second the motion. Charlie, we’ve got to get something moving here.” Mitch put an arm around her shoulders. “I’d sure be relieved if you’d just cry.”

  Charlie mumbled Libby’s cell phone number, watched Kenny punch it, heard the improbable tinkle of a John Philip Sousa march. It came from the jagged fracture. She could hear her daughter’s voice message explain that “Libby Greene” in Libby’s voice was unabl
e to get back to him but if he’d leave a name, number, and good reason—she’d make an attempt.

  Kenny repunched the number twice and twice it rang from the crevice where Charlie and Mitch were pulling out an assortment of clothes and prescription medicine vials, CDs, and sheets of paper that could be records, too dark to tell. “Careful you don’t dislodge it and send it to the center of the earth.”

  That’s why they hadn’t searched the stuff crammed into this section of the opening to begin with.

  “Charlie, none of them can have gone down that hole. It’s not wide enough for them to fall forever down there.”

  “They could be under all this though. Caught up somewhere. Libby? It’s me. Can you hear me? Maggie? Luella? They could be hurt or—I am not going to cry. I hate it when I cry.”

  “That tough-girl image is rough to maintain, huh?”

  “Don’t push your luck, Cowper,” Charlie warned.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “This it?” Mitch held up somebody’s cell. He opened it and read the lighted screen. “This is it.”

  “Stick it in your pocket, Hilsten, and quick. Be sure it’s turned off,” Kenny whispered behind them. “Both of you get back to your pedestal. Company approacheth.”

  Charlie saw the dance of high powered flashlights before she heard the approach of authorities or reached the pedestal. Kenny was shoving stuff back into the crevice, but slowly and carefully, when he was yanked away.

  “You will be happy to know that we have located your daughter’s cellular telephone from satellite, Miss Greene,” bifocals gloated. “Take them back to the lodge, deputy,” he ordered just as he tripped on a shadow, misjudging his step down to something that existed only by moonlight and was caught by Deputy Lydia Saucier, the quickest, most agile, youngest, and probably strongest of those close by. He managed to fall on her nonetheless.

  Kenny grabbed Charlie’s elbow and had her started for the “lodge” before Deputy Lydia could squirm out from under the Fed and a fair way to their destination before Mitch caught up.