Death of the Office Witch (33 page)

“Where was Linda Meyer, his receptionist, all this time?”

“In the outer office, typing dictation with earphones on.”

“But Mary Ann wasn't a threat to anyone. Why did she have to die?”

“We were hoping to hear your ideas on that.”

“I don't have any.”

“Oh, I think you do. Charlie,” David Dalrymple's voice softened, and he'd used her first name again. “Whatever you think of your powers of deduction, which are impressive and imaginative, you have another power that's kicking in to help out when you forget to fend it off. How else could you have known Mr. Lavender and Miss Vance were involved at all in Gloria Tuschman's death before they came to the hospital yesterday?”

“Oh, didn't I tell you? Damn, I forgot.” Gotcha now, Dalrymple. “I assumed you knew about the tapes under Gloria's desk.”

Over the protests of everyone she knew, Charlie was at work the next day.

She missed seeing gorgeous Larry in his cubbyhole. He and Stew had sent flowers to the hospital, but Larry was doing
real work
today. She checked the wall behind A.E.'s poster and found the outlines of Irma's hole. Somebody had done a good repair job. She sat behind her desk, put her feet up. Charlie loved this place and the excitement of the work. Would she kill to keep it?

Someone had left a callback slip on her desk from Carla Ponti at Goliath. Charlie punched the number, dreading that Mary Ann's death would have cooled Goliath's ardor for the
Shadowscapes
project. They'd probably use the economy as an excuse. They always did.

“Charlie, the script is wonderful. This one's definitely a green light. It's going to be bigger than
Witches of Eastwick
. We're so impressed. And it's good to hear you're back at work. I heard about the kidnapping. Are you and your daughter all right?”

“We're fine, thanks, Carla. Um … you don't have any problem about Mary Ann's murder influencing the project?”

“Oh, God no, it's instant publicity if we move fast enough so everyone doesn't forget the details. In fact, I just got out of a meeting where they were throwing around the idea of a spin-off about her death. You know, witch writer comes to Hollywood, gets murdered by a coven of rival witches or something. Any writers you might suggest to work it up for us? You've been coming up with winners lately.”

Charlie's spirits rose for a minute. She straightened up in her chair and nodded at Luella Ridgeway, who'd stepped in the door, and gestured for her to take a seat. “Well, yeah I have several,” Charlie told her, feeling like a working agent again instead of a sick-at-heart detective. “Let me send you over some samples.”

Luella had gone to stand in front of the window instead of sitting. She turned from watching the street below when Charlie put down the phone. “Charlie, I've come to apologize for blaming you for doing what you had to do. Someday, years from now, I will probably discover how we have all benefited from your strange need to confess the truth to everyone you meet and tell the police every last thing you know or even suspect about the rest of us.”

Actually, Luella couldn't be more wrong, Charlie thought as she headed the Toyota out of the alley and up Wilshire only minutes later.

But when she arrived, Dalrymple's unmarked car and a black and white already sat on the leveled parking area below the house in Coldwater Canyon. Charlie almost turned around, but decided that wouldn't change anything.

Keegan Monroe wore a pair of faded jeans and his tinted glasses, no shirt or shoes. He hadn't shaved in several days. He made a sound low in his throat when he saw her, but that was the only greeting.

He and the homicide lieutenant sat in Keegan's kitchen drinking coffee. Like friends.

“I'm sorry, Charlie,” her client said. “I just wanted her okay on the script. I thought she could swim.”

“I would have expected you to have been here long ago.” Dalrymple pulled out a chair at Keegan's table for Charlie. “When did you know?”

Always, never. He was the only one with a motive. He never called or came to the hospital to see me. She reached across the table to take both of Keegan's hands in hers. They were clammy. “Better not say any more until you've talked to a lawyer. You've called someone?”

“Yeah. But Charlie, when I left, Mary Ann was swimming back to shore, I swear it.”

Mary Ann had been hiding out at Roger Tuschman's because, according to Roger, she couldn't face working on the script with Keegan that night as she'd promised. He was younger, faster with words, accustomed to working under intense deadlines without breaking for sleep at night, working through a project without giving a thought to anyone else's schedule.

Mary Ann had spent her working life fitting her work around the lives and schedules of husband and children. The last child no sooner left home than the husband retired and the grandchildren showed up at times scheduled by their lives and not hers. She wasn't that aware of the difference until she began working intensely with a younger single man who had never known those constraints and who was also very talented.

“She fled rather than face working with Mr. Monroe that night. Writing must be more competitive than I would have thought to arouse that kind of sentiment,” David Dalrymple told Charlie as they once again sat on the stone steps between terraces outside Keegan's house. Charlie's client and two uniformed officers had driven off in the black and white.

“Mary Ann
had
been invited to that exotic memorial service,” Dalrymple continued, “but I think she chose not to go, fearing she could be a suspect in Gloria's murder because of her dispute with the Tuschmans. She'd hoped to distance herself from them at that point. But when it came down to it, she headed for a familiar place and familiar face. She feared the city.”

Mary Ann had seemed like such a tough lady. Charlie had figured almost everybody wrong. Good thing she wasn't in law enforcement, or the psychic business, either. Manipulative, coercive Roger Tuschman really had adored his grating wife.

Flabby, grizzled Marvin the Shaman had never intended to get help to rescue Charlie and Libby from mad Roger.

Maurice, the lover and womanizer, was in reality devoted to the shell of a wife. Irma, of the razor-sharp brain, was an ex-mental patient. Luella, Charlie's role model, had a prison record. And Dorian Black, whom she could barely tolerate and considered a sleaze, apparently had a clean record. Charlie was no judge of character, that was certain. And then there was Keegan Monroe … one of her favorite people in the world.

Keegan had tracked Mary Ann down to the place where he first met her on a Halloween night, to get her literary blessing on a copy of the
Shadowscapes
screenplay already turned in to Charlie. “Your client says he needed her reassurance.”

And he told me at Richard's party he thought Mary Ann was dead, and yet he went looking for her. But Charlie said aloud, “Didn't you check Roger's place when Mary Ann went missing?”

“We were looking for a body underwater in a car by that time.”

“Oh, boy.”

When Keegan found her, the night before Charlie saw her body in the orange grove, the novelist was depressed, bored, and housebound. And she'd run out of vodka. Again, according to Roger—she was anxious and a little ashamed of her erratic behavior and didn't know how to explain it to her family. They had already shown some impatience with her unpredictability symptoms, and she put off coming out in the open, not knowing how to explain her disappearance without looking foolish.

“In other words she was at sixes and sevens by the time Mr. Monroe located her. She told him she had to get out of the tiny condo and consented to read the screenplay if he would buy vodka and meet her up at the reservoir, which she had visited with the Tuschmans on an earlier trip to California. The two had the place to themselves, but Mary Ann made fun of the script and of Keegan's writing. He replied in kind. The bruising of two eggshell-tender egos and a bottle of vodka—and murder, involving two essentially decent people—was done. And two brilliant careers wasted.”

“Did he push the car into the water with her in it?”

“He may well get off with manslaughter,” Dalrymple backpedaled, “if a jury believes his story.”

Keegan's story was that Mary Ann, furious and drunk, jumped into her car on the gently sloping beach and released the emergency brake, holding her door open to yell obscenities back at him. She belatedly tried to start the car but wasn't paying attention to her clutch work or her steering, and by the time she began turning the car around, it was too late. It lurched into the water like the Toyota, with Libby at the wheel, had jerked into an oncoming lane between two blind curves just the other night.

“Your client claims his first thought was of your foretelling this very thing at the beach house in Malibu, Charlie. His second was that the door was still swinging open, and Mrs. Leffler had gotten out before she actually hit the water and so could save herself. He drove off in an equally inebriated state without making sure she was safe. He knew she could swim. He swore she was doing just that and was on her way to shore as he turned his car around to leave. She might have had too much alcohol in her body to get it there. The reservoir falls off quickly. He made it home without being pulled over and says he didn't know she was dead until he watched the wrecker pull her car out of Rizzi Reservoir on the evening news the next day.”

“Do you believe him?”

“Frankly, his story is complex and fantastic enough to be true. Then again, the man's a writer.”

You're learning. “More to the point, Keegan's persuasive in an honest rather than a slick way, and he's impressive verbally. He could clean up on a jury. He's pitched to the pros. Irma, Maurice, and Dr. Podhurst, on the other hand, are going to look very strange in court.”

“The courts will, I'm sure, impose penalties, possible prison sentences, and probable probationary terms in the death of Gloria Tuschman. But the department has decided not to bring murder charges in that death. There's no excuse for the cover-up of an accidental death that way—”

“When did you decide on accidental … for sure?”

“We suspected the possibility when we connected the stair railing to the blunt object that killed Mrs. Tuschman and the fact the floor in that hall had been waxed the day before. And we have located your security guard, Mr. Maypo, and both the body movers from the dumpster. But from the beginning, and overriding all, was your sense that Gloria thought she was still in a waste receptacle in that back hall and not in the alley and, later, your sense that it was indeed an accident.”

“You trust my ‘sense' that much, huh?”

“Gloria did, didn't she?”

“Oh, boy.”

34

Charlie took a Saturday afternoon off from the household grind to go to the athletic field at Wilson High and watch Libby practice with her junior cheerleading squad, something inside her relieved that there was more to her life than her work. Without it, she'd still have her tiny family to justify her existence.

Yeah, but who'd pay for it?

That evening, while they were folding laundry, Libby surprised her mother with, “Mom, if you're not psychic, how did you figure out all that stuff about how Gloria died and that Mary Ann would drown?”

“I didn't.” And Charlie explained, it seemed for the trillionth time, how each of her conclusions was based on fact, or at least logic, and not psychic fantasy. “And I just said Mary Ann was underwater in her car to get them off my case so I could get back to the agency. Haven't you ever blurted out something and wondered where it came from?”

“No.” Libby added another piece of folded nothing to her pile. It was getting harder to tell the underwear from the bathing suits.

“Well, you're young. Besides, I was wrong. She wasn't inside her car.”

“Okay, then why was Gloria asking you for help when she was dead in that creepy hallway?”

“I'll admit that's a stickler. But there's a rational explanation for everything, Libby.”

“I know.” Libby somehow slipped her sandals under her butt and raised herself to a standing position in one graceful movement. “We just can't always figure out what it is.”

Libby glided between piles of folded laundry to fondly muss Charlie's hair. “
You
are seriously anal.”

Libby headed for the front door.

“Where're you going?” We have to have a talk about the cat. “Do you have a baby-sitting job?”

“No, Mom, it's Saturday night. Everybody but you goes out on Saturday night. I'll put my stuff away tomorrow. Hey, if I can't make my medieval curfew, I'll call you, okay?”

“But we have to talk about the cat,” Charlie told the closing door.

Charlie was on her feet before she knew why, before she registered the familiar sound outside. A sound like the death throes of a dinosaur.

She was through the door and had let the security grate close and lock her out of her own home before she recognized the rusting hulk of Jesus Garcia's challenge to birth control lurch off down the street.

Tuxedo watched Charlie's inelegant reaction from the comfort of an inside windowsill. As if in commentary, he gracefully pointed the toes of a rear foot toward the ceiling and washed that portion of his anatomy at the very base of his tail.

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