Death of the Office Witch (32 page)

“Are they covering for you, Richard?”

He pulled long fingers through short hair and then ran them down the back of his neck before he met her eyes. “I knew Gloria was getting information over the phone lines, didn't know she was taping it. Irma found the tape machine when she felt it with her foot while working the reception desk after Gloria died.”

“Who was bugging my office, then?”

“Irma. Charlie, I had to know how things were coming with your snooping. I'm responsible for the whole agency. I knew Dalrymple would be talking to you about things he wouldn't let you share with me. I knew you were ornery enough not to share them anyway. I had to have that information. Think about it. Makes sense, babe.”

“If Larry loses his job because of your stupid mistrust, I will never forgive you, Richard.”

“No stress now, remember?” Maurice gently pushed her back into the pillows and patted her hand instead of stroking it.

“I like The Kid. Hell, I like Stew Claypool. But I admit if Larry's new career leads him elsewhere I'm gonna be relieved. He comes back from wiggling his buns on the beach and takes up his old job, I don't say anything to the agency insurance company unless they come say something to me. Best I can do.”

Charlie still wasn't satisfied. “I have trouble believing Dalrymple's people didn't find Gloria's recording machine. Now you're telling me they didn't find Irma's? I know they searched her office.”

“Yeah, but they didn't search my partner's. At least not very well.” Richard allowed a slow, satisfied grin. He'd always resented Dalrymple's coming in and taking over.

“You hid the recorder in Mr. Congdon's office?”

“Right, but we accessed it through your wall. So there were no footprints in the dust in his office. Looked like nobody'd been in there to set it up, see? Irma's idea. Sharp lady, Irma.” Richard nodded emphasis and then kept on nodding.

“Through my wall … there's no hole in my wall.”

“I sort of cut one, Charlie dear. Behind that garish bookstore poster you insisted upon installing. On the other side of it, in Mr. Congdon's office, there's an enclosed cupboard with shelves but no backing. The drywall could be cut, lifted out, and slid back in after the recording device was inside. No one had to disturb the dust on Mr. Congdon's floor. So the police assumed no one had been in the office, which was true, and they therefore did not make a very thorough search.”

“But the hole's still there, right?”

“Let's say it's no longer apparent. If you insist upon pointing it out to the police, I'm sure they'll find it.” Irma's demeanor said that if the police made a big deal of this, Larry Mann and probably Charlie Greene could go whistling for work in this town, even if the executive secretary had to arrange it from a jail cell.

Richard turned to the door. “Just get well fast and wrap things for us, will ya? So we can all get back to work.”

Irma gave Charlie a calculated look before she followed him.

Maurice lingered a moment as if not quite sure she should be left alone. “I'm sorry for all this, sweetie.”

“Maurice, how could you let Irma talk you into moving Gloria?”

“Scarborough House housed only the most violent and dangerous of the mentally ill, Charlie. Irma's life was completely turned around by a new drug twenty years ago. Dr. Podhurst still administers it. She would have been a prime suspect if it was deemed a murder. And you know how much the agency means to her. Me, too. But Charlie, neither of us had anything to do with Mary Ann Leffler's drowning, I swear.”

Sheldon Maypo was Charlie's next visitor. “Your hunch was right. I even managed to interview one of the culprits. They hadn't been questioned by the police yet, either. We're ahead of dippy Dalrymple, my dear, even though we're denied his sources of information. And without the use of psychic powers, too.”

“I just can't factor Mary Ann into it. It seems like too much of a coincidence that the two deaths weren't connected.”

“I'll keep snooping around, drop in earlier in the day, talk up more people.”

“The thing is, I don't want it to be anybody I like, Shelly. I'm already sick that Maurice is involved. He might get some kind of a deal. But I think Irma's in big trouble. After all she's been through, she finally has some luck and wins big in Vegas, and then has to go to jail instead of enjoying it. And if Luella is involved I'll slit my wrists. And if it's Richard, well, that's the end of everything. Why couldn't it be Dorian the Jerk? Or even Tracy? And if it's Keegan.… I even fantasize that it was Roger and Marvin Grunion who killed Mary Ann because I don't like them.”

“Promise me you'll never go into police work,” Shelly chided her and took his leave.

Charlie was sent home that day, told to rest a week before returning to work. Right. Sure.

Doug Esterhazie dropped off a large, elegantly wrapped package practically the moment she arrived. It was from “Ed and Dorothy.”

“Doug says it's really from Mrs. McDougal, which means it's food. Mom,” Libby's hand stopped Charlie's still trying to untie a six inch wide ribbon. “Do you mind a lot?”

“God no, Mrs. McDougal is probably among the ten best cooks on earth.”

“No, I mean about Dorothy. Here I got you and Ed together and he goes back to her. I feel bad. Now that I've thought about it I think you're better off, but still it was wrong to get your hopes up if—”

“Honey, I like Doug's dad.” Charlie clasped the hand that had been over hers for a rare, intimate moment and even got in a squeeze before it withdrew. “He's a nice guy, but there was no … we didn't feel uh—”

“Sexual attraction?”

“Welllll yeah, for starters.”

Charlie's condo mates all showed up to get the latest news on the murders and to pay for it with gifts and opinions.

Mrs. Beesom handed Charlie a tuna casserole. “It was those two warlocks that kidnapped you and Libby. They look like murderers.”

Charlie so wished Mrs. Beesom could be right. But as Libby pointed out, “If they already knew, why would they tie us to chairs and ask mom all those questions?”

“Maurice might be able to plea bargain his way out of an actual prison term if he agrees to testify against Irma,” Maggie offered on the death of Gloria when she brought over a fruit basket.

“The D.A. will say it's murder instead of an accident. Whoever chased the witch down the hall will be accused of murder, the other one an accomplice,” Jeremy predicted. “Probably settle for manslaughter or something.”

David Dalrymple gave her until the next afternoon. He brought Detective Gordon. They settled out on Charlie's patio with tall glasses of iced tea.

Marvin Grunion had been traced to San Francisco and arrested for kidnapping and for selling illicit drugs to the Tuschmans' coven. They'd charged Roger with kidnapping as well.

“But not for the murder of Mary Ann Leffler,” Charlie said.

“Not for the murder of Mary Ann Leffler.”

“Made some arrests on the Tuschman case though,” Detective Gordon said with satisfaction, ignoring the sharp look from Dalrymple.

“Maurice and Irma, right? Lieutenant, that was an accident, and a stupid attempt at a cover up—surely you can see that.”

“I'd like to have your version of what happened to Gloria Tuschman that morning, Charlie, before my colleague and I go into any more detail. Please?” This was the first time she could remember him using her first name.

Charlie told him about the Tuschmans profiting from insider information at the agency. “It got so lucrative Gloria threatened to expose personal secrets to the tabloids as a way to throw her weight around and force the staff to cooperate. That morning Irma came back early from Vegas, unannounced, to find Gloria using poor Medora Lavender's existence to persuade Maurice. He probably has the highest-quality insider info in the agency, next to Richard Morse. Irma is a formidable lady, and her fury over what Gloria was doing scared the witch into throwing down the pencil stubs and taking off for the back hall. Gloria knew about Scarborough House and Irma's violent past, remember. Gloria may have fled to the ladies to lock herself in a stall, I don't know. Eventually she had to come out, and there was Irma. They haggled and Irma probably fired Gloria on the spot. Gloria ran for the back stairs and slipped on the newly waxed floor, and hit her head on the metal railing in a freak accident. Leaving Irma with a body instead of the simpler problem of replacing a receptionist.”

“Why didn't she fire Gloria earlier? The woman had made enough trouble before this.”

“It wasn't that easy. Gloria had something on Irma, too. Richard Morse knew about Scarborough House, but that didn't mean Irma wanted the rest of the world to.”

“So Gloria fell and died in a bizarre accident?”

“Right, then Irma rushed back to get help from Maurice, and they decided it would look like murder, especially with Irma's history. The dirt on everyone else would surface with an investigation, too. Maurice is such a gentleman he couldn't let Irma take the blame, so they hatched this incredible plot to move the body. First they hid it in the utility closet and left the building. It would look like Maurice was out on business, and Irma wasn't even due in that day. Then later, when the coast was clear, they trundled Gloria out to the alley to make it look as if the death was not agency-related.”

“Miss Vance and Mr. Lavender, fifty-five and sixty, toss a dead body up over a high concrete wall with such force it sinks into the bushes on the other side?”

“They toss Gloria into the dumpster off the alley next to the end wall of the bank parking. Two homeless men in the dumpster resent Gloria's arrival, so they haul her out and toss her up over the next wall and into the bushes. They're younger and stronger. People who live on the streets often sleep in the alleys, scrounge meals from the dumpsters behind buildings that have restaurants, but prefer to sleep in those behind office buildings with better-smelling trash. And on a street like Wilshire, they don't want to be too obvious, so they tend to lie low when they can or risk being relocated by the Beverly Hills P.D. or private security forces. And at that time of day that dumpster would have been emptied, so they wouldn't be disturbed, and it would be in the shade. Good place to sleep or do some serious drinking without being seen.”

“And how could a woman who wears the kind of shoes you do and who so rarely investigates that neighborhood possibly discover all this?”

“I have a friend on the security staff snooping for me, and he even interviewed one of the homeless men involved, and occasionally I do step outside and see guys, mostly, rifling through alley garbage for food. And just recently I tossed something into the dumpster in question and somebody inside tossed it out again and started heaving other things, too. And the night of Richard's party my date and I stopped in at the agency on the way home and we were shushed by a guy trying to sleep on the other side of the wall. And that,” Charlie said triumphantly, “is where I got the idea. No hocus-pocus, just good old following through with logic.”

“Why would these vagrants risk becoming involved in a murder, as vulnerable as they are to suspicion by civilian and police alike? And you still haven't explained how Mr. Lavender and Irma Vance could have tossed the body up into the dumpster, not to mention move her five floors down to the alley level.”

“Shelly, my informant, says those alleys are a jungle, and the bums get territorial. Most of the good alley shelters are taken, and the current residents don't encourage newcomers. Too many vagrants in one place invites eviction. Both had left once they'd sobered up and realized there'd be cops around soon, but one guy came back because he couldn't find another place. And I think a third person helped Irma and Maurice with the body, but I don't know who.”

“We do,” Detective Gordon said.

33

Dr. Evan Podhurst had confessed to helping Irma and Maurice hide Gloria in the janitor's closet, and later in the day he and Maurice hauled her down in the bag from the cleaning trolley while Irma went ahead to let them know when the coast was clear.

“You know, that's possible,” Charlie said. “I went up and down those back stairs several times the other day and didn't see a soul. They must have really been surprised when Gloria turned up in the bushes. Why did Dr. Podhurst help them? You'd think he'd have some sense, if they didn't.”

“Two reasons. He claims to have heard a sound from his office and opened the door onto the private hall just in time to see Gloria slip and fall. He also claims that Irma Vance was just stepping out of the ladies' room at the time. He had treated her in Scarborough house some twenty years ago and was still responsible for her drug therapy. Scarborough handled only the most difficult patients—”

“Yeah, and it's been closed for years, so those kind of nuts are on the streets now,” Gordon added. “Think about it.”

“Ms. Vance's terror of being accused of murder, and the certainty that Gloria's death would not even be considered as an accident convinced the other two to attempt a cover-up.”

“Why in hell would Morse hire someone like her?” Gordon wanted to know. “He knew about Scarborough House.”

“That's just like him,” Charlie said. “He likes to think he runs a tight ship, but when it comes down to it, it's Irma who takes care of most of the problems you have to deal with, and usually you figure it isn't worth it to bring one up. Now I know why. But Podhurst didn't have his new hearing aid yet the day Gloria died. How could he hear something going on in the hall that morning?”

“He says he often heard sounds such as people speaking but couldn't make out what they were saying. His hearing loss caused him to search out sources of sounds he could not identify to reassure himself they were real and not a sign of something dangerous hidden in his mind. Which, given his profession, isn't as far-fetched as one might at first think.”