Death of the Office Witch (10 page)

“Sheriff Bennett said you'd put it something like that.”

“I suppose he also told you I'd just run out and do my own detecting. That's why you keep setting me up for it.”

“No, as a matter of fact, Mr. Morse at your agency informed me that if I didn't hurry and ‘wrap' the investigation so that business can get on as usual, he'd sic his own in-house detective onto the case and clear it up in hours. I realize this is show biz, Miss Greene, but does everybody in that place live in a fantasy world?”

His bewilderment was obviously genuine this time, and Charlie bumped his shoulder gently with her head and laughed. “We probably all seem nuts, huh? The frenetic energy, bursts of excitement, incredible optimism, improbable dreams?”

He peered down at her from the tops of his lenses now. His eyes were still huge. “That was very well put. Right on the money, as they say. Perhaps you should consider writing instead of agenting other writers' work.”

“Nah, that came straight from a manuscript somewhere. As I remember it had to do with football.” But she suddenly had a take on what was so familiar and yet incongruous about his speech. She'd bet the mortgage he watched mysteries from England on PBS.

“If you come across anything else, I would appreciate your passing it on promptly.”

Charlie smiled and promised him nothing.

He rose to leave and turned back several steps down. “And, Miss Greene, the insider's view, the mind unclogged by routine and past failures, the fresh approach, is often quite helpful. Obviously there's much I can't divulge, but if I can help you in any way I'll try.”

Jesus, he must read the stuff too. Charlie waved as he turned his unmarked car in the driveway, stood, brushed off her skirt, and went to find her writer—realizing she hadn't even asked the details of Mary Ann's disappearance. Keegan would know.

Charlie and Keegan sat on the balcony of the Pane Caldo Bistro on Beverly Boulevard. She picked at the calamari (chewy squid) bits littering her pasta al dente (tough spaghetti). She'd already eaten at Richard's but wanted Keegan Monroe well fed and happy to hear her pitch. Instead, he wanted to talk about nothing but fucking murder.

“Thought you gave up swearing because you were a mommy,” he said, and she realized she'd let her thoughts trespass on her tongue again. She had to quit this. Show business was largely subterfuge, and one should never lose control of one's pitch.

“Thought you gave up smoking,” Charlie countered and nodded at the ashtray, where he'd left a smoldering butt when his cioppino was set before him.

“What do you expect? The guy practically accused me outright of killing Gloria and Lady Macbeth and then stuffing Lady Macbeth someplace he couldn't find her.” He broke open a dripping clam shell and left bloody tomato-goo drops on the tablecloth as if in emphasis. “You got to do something here. Ask around, you know, like you did in Oregon? My dad said you worked it all out before he did, and he knew everyone involved in that murder.”

First Larry, then Richard, then Lieutenant Dalrymple for God's sake, and now Keegan. Keegan was a very intelligent person. “It's got to be television,” Charlie pointed her fork rudely. “Everybody watches too much television, and they're starting to believe that stuff. Keegan, you're a writer. You make it up. You know better. You know it's make-believe. Don't you?”

He didn't answer her, just dunked a piece of garlic bread in the cioppino broth, glanced around to see who might notice he was lunching with his agent.

“I mean, having nonprofessional people solve crimes is good for entertainment purposes, but we're all supposed to know better. It just makes you feel good to think you maybe could. But, Keegan, I didn't solve anything or figure anything out in Oregon among your dad's friends. I stumbled, no, bumbled into a nest of amateur killers who any cop will tell you are very dangerous, and damned near got myself killed.”

And I'm not real anxious to jump into that little sauté pan again, let me tell you.

But Monday you're going into CBS with Tina Horton to support her pitch of a television series based on just such a premise—that a little old lady veterinarian in Sun City, Arizona can solve crimes the Phoenix police can't figure out because she has raised eight children and treated thousands of animals and therefore knows all there is to know about the human condition. You are a fake, Charlie Greene.

10

It was a hot day for April, and heat waves shimmered off the Writers Guild building down the street. Traffic noise and exhaust stink swam up from Beverly Boulevard to the Pane Caldo's balcony. Charlie would have preferred to eat inside where they didn't have to yell over the Boulevard.

“Hey Charlie,” a man leaned from a table across the aisle, “what's Congdon and Morse up to now, knocking off secretaries just to get mentioned in
Variety
?” He wrinkled his nose like a rabbit. “Just kidding.”

Charlie couldn't place him, but his red plaid sport coat and brown pants screamed agent. She gave him a smile filled with a lack of humor and ignored him. “Look,” she said to Keegan, “Mary Ann Leffler probably got her snoot full of the show biz set, and to make a point, lit out for someplace to cool off without telling anybody. She'll turn up.”

Mary Ann had been staying at a beach house in Malibu owned by one of the muckety-mucks at Goliath Productions. After she and Keegan talked to Charlie yesterday afternoon, the two writers parted, making a date to meet at the beach house that evening. Keegan was to bring Chinese carry-out, and they planned to stay up all night wrestling the
Shadowscapes
script into line. (It was a fact that many of Charlie's writers worked best at night.) But when Keegan and the carry-out arrived, he couldn't get Mary Ann to answer his knock. She'd always kept the doors and windows locked tight. He waited around until one of the producer's yes-men showed up to see how they were doing. He and Keegan broke in. No sign of Mary Ann. They warmed up the carry-out and ate it, got on the phone, and started calling. Mary Ann and her rental car were missing, but her things were still at the beachfront house.

“She didn't even call her kids to let them know.” Keegan didn't find Charlie's solution reassuring. “She's a devoted mommy, too, remember, and grandmommy. The husband's up in Canada fishing.”

“That's probably where she went. I don't know why everyone is jumping to the conclusion something happened to her.”

“Because, Charlie, she had a connection to Gloria Tuschman. And Gloria was murdered.” He studied the glass of milk she was nursing. “Ulcer acting up again?”

“I do
not
have an ulcer. Merely an easily upset stomach. Indigestion. Okay?”

Today he wore a bolo tie with a big piece of turquoise and silver holding it together. His mustache looked weedier than usual with cioppino spots dotting the light hairs.

She figured one of the reasons he was so successful was that he was nonthreatening. Which was not an asset that normally played well in the industry, but somehow worked for him. Maybe it was the clear, dead-center sort of thinking his eyes persuaded you he was always doing. The wire-rimmed eyeglasses with deceptively expensive tinting suggested honesty, dependability, keenness.

Most of Charlie's writers lived from hand to mouth, had mates with honest work, or shagged part-time jobs wherever they could. She figured that's how valet parking came to be invented. She even represented one who worked nights as an armed security guard. But a handful like Keegan had hit it hot early and remained consistent. And he had a good head for a writer. Lived well but not lavishly, didn't spend a lot on his women, had few illusions about the industry. However, lighting a fire under him, as her boss asked her to do, was not an easy job.

“You're a workaholic,” he said. “You know that.”

“And you're not, I suppose?”

“I'm dedicated. That's different.”

“You don't want the
Alpine Tunnel
script?”

“No, but I need it. And you know that, too. Someday, oh Siren of the Checkbook, I will write the screenplay of my own published novel, and I might even let you run the deal. But don't count on it.”

“I promised I'd send your novel out for you when you finished it, didn't I? How far along is it now?”

“I've started over. It got too long.”

“I told you to just finish it and then go back and cut and shape. You have room to explore and invent, surprise yourself and me. You're not under contract, you can do what you want.”

“I will. This is the last start-over. I promise.”

“Too many adverbs, right?”

He always had great concepts for novels, but somehow they got lost in the mechanics. He rewrote all the freshness out of them, worried them to death, often never completed them. Charlie loved writers, made her living off them, but would never understand them.

While they waited for the parking valet to walk five feet to collect Charlie's Toyota (there was no avoiding the ransom here) they watched Guy Matell, the executive director of the Writers Guild, pull in in his new Jaguar.

“Must be slumming,” Charlie muttered.

“He has to deal with money and power for the rights of some seventeen hundred writers,” Keegan whispered through his teeth—not an easy thing to do. The Guild provided the Jag. A new one every year. One of the perks of the privileged. “He's not going to cut much green in a Chevy.”

While they waited to pull out into traffic, Keegan said in that reasonable, innocent manner of his, “I assume we're heading for the print shop.”

“Print shop?” Charlie had planned to hurry him back to Coldwater Canyon and then herself to Wilshire and the agency to find out any new developments in the
Alpine Tunnel
-Ursa Major deal and to try to make another dent in her phone log. “What print shop?”

The Kwick Kinky Kopy Shoppe was in Pasadena. It sat in a dying shopping center—two newer, more upscale malls were nearby—weeds sprouting in the outlying concrete cracks of the parking lot, the shop windows on either side of it empty but for “For Lease” signs. There was a “Closed” sign next to the one announcing that Kwick Kinky Kopy was open eight days a week, twenty-five hours a day.

Keegan got out to read the small hand-lettered card taped to the glass door and returned to the Toyota. “Closed for Gloria Tuschman's Memorial Séance and Dance.”

“Maybe we can talk to Roger next week. Right now—”

“We go to Gloria Tuschman's Memorial Séance and Dance.”

“Keegan—”

“Sign says it's in Happy Valley Canyon, 1132 Honeah Place. Number 568. I never heard of Happy Valley Canyon.” He started pawing through the glove compartment. “You got a
Thomas Brothers Guide
?'”

Happy Valley Canyon was all the way back the way they'd come and then a good forty minutes north and west. 1132 Honeah Place backed onto a commercial grove of orange trees now in bloom. Electric voltage hummed through multilayered wires overhead, and down below bees by the zillions hummed around the trees. The air was almost too sweet to breathe. The clingy dripping fragrance of orange blossoms always reminded Charlie of gardenia. Gardenias always reminded Charlie of a drink at Trader Vic's. She took off her suit jacket and threw it in the back of the Toyota.

She stood on the paved parking lot behind an old stucco apartment-turned-condo complex that appeared to be its own community. It spread to either side as far as the curvature of the earth allowed, and you could tell it was old because the stucco had metallic glitter flakes in it. The orange grove was planted in straight lines like a field, with irrigation pipes set to dump water in tidy trenches carefully maintained between them.

Heat roiled off car roofs. Most of the condo dwellers were down in the city at work this time of the day, and the lot was more than half empty. But a familiar forest-green sedan was parked next to the fence. It looked a lot like the unmarked one Lieutenant Dalrymple had been driving that morning in Coldwater Canyon.

“Here to study the suspects?” Keegan asked, following the direction of her gaze and her thoughts. There was another note taped to the window on the back door of Number 568. “Through the gate and into the woods.” Charlie and Keegan followed the fence line to the nearest street, where half of a vehicle gate stood open, posted with “No Trespassing” signs and warnings that the fence was wired with electricity.

The road beyond the fence was dirt, with an assortment of shoe prints snaking along in the dust. The skin under Charlie's pantyhose and bra itched as if demented fire ants were dancing on her body before she and Keegan came to the end of the shoe tracks. A lone drop of sweat tickled between her breasts down to her navel.

No one danced. The road was one lane wide and blocked completely by a circle of people sitting close together on webbed lawn chairs and folding stools. Lieutenant David Dalrymple knelt on one knee between two elderly ladies. He alone was watching their arrival. The rest had their eyes clenched tightly as they gripped the hands to either side of them.

A man sitting next to Gloria's husband, Roger, looked as if he were undergoing a helium enema—face puffed scarlet with purple highlights and body arched.

Everyone dripped sweat and chanted, “Glor-e-ah, Glor-e-ah.”

Bees droned and high-voltage wires hummed backup. It could have been church.

Another man stood away from the group over in the shade of an orange tree, a suit coat hooked over his shoulder by an index finger, his other hand shooshing bees with his handkerchief. His hair was cut in the old astronaut crew. His expression was plenty fed up. He looked a lot more like a cop than David Dalrymple.

The man who appeared about to explode relaxed a little, and, opening his eyes, said, “Wait, I think I'm getting something finally.” He looked up into Charlie's cynical gaze. “Gloria?”