Murder in a Hot Flash (8 page)

“It's a capture net.”

“—and has no alibi for the grizzly murder of a man she made no bones about hating. And that's just for openers, folks.” My livelihood may well be going up in smoke even as we speak and agencies in L.A. aren't hiring right now due to the economy or the taxes or the goddamned weather for all I know.

I have a killer mortgage, even though I've refinanced, on a home into which I've sunk everything, but on which the value is dropping like a rock in a bathtub, but not the payments, because nobody's buying California right now. Too many trying to get out. And I have a daughter with an attitude and an orthodontist. She'll soon be ready for college, but hey, she could have been out last night contracting AIDS and won't need college. “So, relax, Charlie. Stop and smell the cactus.”

“Your milk's boiling over,” her mother pointed out, calmly.

“Wanna come with me?” John B. whispered in Charlie's ear and glanced over his shoulder in a theatrical squint.

“Where? They're not letting anybody out of the park.”

“Somewhere where there might be a shower.” He'd found her pacing in front of the Visitors' Center hoping for word that a radio phone frequency had been freed up. Charlie was used to keeping in touch with life by car phone, office phone, modem, fax. The boondocks drove her nuts. How could people relax when they were so out of touch?

“Where?”

“You're not coming, I'm not telling.” He walked off behind the building and she followed to a shiny pickup parked in the scrub forest.

Charlie crawled in beside him. Why not? How much worse could things get?

Edwina would have had a full litter of kittens had she witnessed them weaving around bushy trees and rocks to make forbidden tracks through the virgin land, Charlie riding beside a man who made his living touting the fragility of the ecology. But it felt good to be shedding that trapped feeling. She kept turning to look through the rear window for the sheriff's department in hot pursuit but saw only dust.

Drake wore a cowboy hat, a couple days' worth of dark beard, and a bandanna yet. He leered from under his hat brim. “You must want a shower bad, Charlie Greene.”

“I'd kill for a shower.”

“You don't have to go that far.”

“How far do I have to go?”

John B. pulled an exaggeratedly straight face, patted her knee, and shifted down to eat a gully. “You only have to go as far as Moab.”

“Moab's that way.” Charlie pointed in the direction of the legal road and its roadblocks.

“No, Agent Greene,”—the pickup careened over a hillock like they do in those insane macho TV commercials and bottomed out with a thud that jarred Charlie's self-esteem and strained her seat belt—“as a matter of fact, Moab am …
that
way.” And he pointed straight down.

They came to two tracks with a lot of rock in the middle and more than enough under the tires. She looked at him with new respect. “There's a back way into Moab?”

“Sure am looking forward to that shower.” He scratched at his chin. “But you know, I think the trip's going to be half the fun?”

And he braked at the very edge of a precipice. Charlie reached for the dashboard with both hands. Drake batted eyebrows and lashes. “Want to walk home?”

She turned again to the rear window. Still no law enforcement. Cops in scripts and novels sure were more efficient than real cops.

The pickup headed down. “You can help hold the dashboard in the truck and squeeze your eyes shut, like you're doing now. Or you can keep watch for boulders on your side. Because one of those suckers could throw us off the road on my side. And that is
way
down there, lady.”

Most of the boulders were so big he couldn't miss seeing them himself but Charlie dutifully called out each one to irritate him. He was enjoying this too much.

“Your mother doesn't want us to use the term ‘desert,'” Drake said, “wants us to say ‘plateau' instead.”

“John B., we are all suspects in a horrible murder. I think your problems with Edwina don't count for much now.”

“No, they're her problems with me.” He turned to look at Charlie.

“Will you watch the road? Why don't you just say ‘desert plateau'?”

“Have been. ‘High-desert plateau,' too, but that doesn't suit. And there are all sorts of little nitpicky things she's raising a smell over that nobody's going to give a shit about.” He had a faint Western twang Charlie couldn't be sure was real. It tended to deepen when he thought he was being funny.

“Dr. Greene's renown in her field is well earned, Mr. Drake. And that is what led you to her to begin with.”

“Why are you doing this?”

I don't know. I'm an agent. I'm just not
her
agent. As far as Charlie knew, Edwina was a run-of-the-mill biologist approaching retirement. “And it was that very attention to detail that got her where she is today.”

This just happened to be one of those perpendicular shelf roads so beloved of Jeepers. Too narrow to pass when meeting another vehicle and narrowed even further in places by rocks sloughed off the vertical face on one side. Nothing but space on the other side, with little inroads made by washouts to catch tires on so you could get flipped off into eternity.

Sky-diving had to be safer than this road.

By the time they reached the bottom of it, Charlie needed a shower twice as much as she had at the top. “Something crazy has gotten into the bats around the campground,” she said in a steady voice to prove to the director that it hadn't really bothered her at all. “And Sid Levit tells me both companies can resume filming tonight. As long as they stay in the park. He's going to take over as director because they're so close to wrapping.”

“So close to wrapping
and
because Sheriff Sumpter gets to play sheriff in the film
and
half his family collect as extras
and
the Moab Film Commission represents a major portion of the power behind his paycheck.”

They soon joined the ribbon of road she'd seen from above. It was fairly straight and blessedly flat, crossing that broad benchland a thousand feet below the mesa tops but still a thousand feet above the river. A middle world—stark, arid, hot. He drove with the window down. Charlie's contacts felt like glue. They passed strange lacy tree-shrubs and an occasional puffy weed, both seeming too ethereal for this harsh place. Darker blobs of sage peppered the faint green fur of grasslands on flats and ledges inaccessible to grazing.

“Won't the sheriff have somebody watching this road?”

“He's spread pretty thin, for all his bluster. I'm banking on him and his deputies being unable to keep tabs on everyone at the campground, plus they still have a whole county to cover. I have a few people delegated to cover for me back there too. But not for you. You were sort of a last-minute opportunity.”

“They'll notice the truck's gone.”

“Earl's rental looks something like this. He's going to park it in my spot. They're more likely to notice my parking space empty than Earl's. But we may be turned back yet. If we are—no big deal—no shower.”

Charlie had reached the point where no shower would be a big deal. But John B. stretched a satisfied smile, one arm crooked out the window, one hand on the wheel, eyes squinting into the sun.

The solid rock of the mesa cliffs was easier to take looking up at than looking over. Charlie relaxed, wanted to admit he was right about Edwina's complaints, but she couldn't believe this little trip could go unnoticed. A few phone calls and a shower might just be worth the gamble though.

They came to a downgrade and rounded a curve. The APC holding ponds spread in dazzling blue below, much larger than she'd suspected from up there.

“This business,” John B. said, “you have to make it while you're hot. Nobody stays hot forever. Not even Mitch Hilsten.” He winked at her. “But do we salt some away for the future? No, we sink it into the next project. One failure and we lose it all. End up eating dog food on Social Security.”

“Or you sink it into new pickups, superstar narrators, gigantic motor homes, and sleek blondes. Is Mitch really working for practically nothing?”

“No,” Drake said, “he's working for absolutely nothing. But where he's coming from you don't admit these things.”

“Why? Because you're good friends?”

“Because he has to keep working. He's got bucks, though not what people imagine, but when you've been in this business so long, you're not fit for anything else. And, when you're living on your talent, any exposure is better than no exposure.”

“But
are
you good friends?”

“I don't have good friends, Charlie Greene. I have dreams, lovers, and obsessions. I have causes. But I have no alimony or child-support payments. Don't worry about Mitch. He knows the game.”

Here she was thousands of miles from L.A., surrounded by murder and wide and still wider open spaces, alone with one man, and he was talking Beverly Hills.

Chapter
9

They passed the ponds where, in a vast metal shed with hangar doors standing open, a man on a road grader pushed around piles of what looked like salt. Then the road smoothed out to pavement that stretched from the potash mine to a highway.

As they approached Moab, billboards advertised exciting whitewater river trips. And several repeated,
See the RIVER by NIGHT! Nationally renowned Sound and Light Show! Inspirational!

Drake turned off the main street at the first opportunity and found a motel with dusty stucco cabins. But the one he rented had all it needed—a shower nozzle hanging over the end of a stained bathtub and a telephone.

Charlie borrowed his shampoo and shaving gear while he went out to find some lunch. If a shower had ever felt this good, she couldn't remember it. The hot steam even got her contacts sliding smoothly on her eyeballs. She stood under the water jet so long that when she finally emerged and redressed in her dirty clothes, Drake was back with tuna salad submarines and arguing with someone on the phone.

“Listen, Lew, there has to be something. Mike must have shot sixty seconds. Well, bring it along with the shipment and this time bring some dessert. My sweet tooth is yearning … In a motel room in Moab with this agent, see … Snuck out the back way. You ever seen hair the color of burnished brass, Lew? Not copper, but brass?”

Charlie managed to duck the hand about to stroke her wet hair and grabbed half a sub and a paper carton of milk. “Cabot has cell phones, don't you?”

“Sheriff's hanging on to them for us.” He reached for her again, this time to pat her behind. So she sat on it. “Until after he solves the murder, of course.”

Charlie wasn't sure how much of the burlesquelike sneer was for the sheriff and how much was for her.

While he was in the shower, she tried to call Richard Morse, Maggie, and Libby and connected with nothing but answering machines again. She did get hold of Larry Mann, her assistant, at home and outlined what he'd have to do to cover her ass Monday. But there were so many things he couldn't do.

“Settle down, Charlie, or you'll end up in the hospital again. A day or two can't make things any worse at Congdon and Morse than they already are.”

“Yes, Mother. Any news on Eric Ashton and the
Alpine Tunnel
deal?”

“We're still hanging by our fingernails on that one. Nothing in the trades. Oh, boss, I have some good news.”

“I can sure use it.”

“Steve Hunter's going to renew the option on
The Corpse That Got Iced
. Called Friday. Five grand this time out for old A. E. He needs it.”

“God, does he.” Movie options were rarely picked up, but were found money for some of her older writers on the skids. This author had already made ten thousand against the purchase price of a hundred. Problem was, options tended to get their hopes up to unrealistic levels.

“Want me to call him with the good news?”

“No, let's wait till I get back.” Charlie'd known authors to quit their day jobs on the strength of an option, so sure were they their book would be filmed and they were headed for riches untold. This author had already quit his job and his wife was checking out at a grocery store trying to help support them.

“Have any idea how long you'll be out there? What do I tell Richard?”

“Tell him Gordon Cabot got himself sliced and diced last night at the campground where I'm staying with my mother and the law isn't letting any of us leave at the moment.”

Charlie was fantasizing that she'd solved the murder and was allowed to go home when John B. stepped out of the bathroom, clean and shaven, fully dressed but with that look in his eye.

“I came here for nothing but the shower,” she warned him off and tried to get Libby and Maggie again. Still no answer. All she could do was leave the message that she wouldn't be home today after all. “If you think you're going to—”

“I just want one little kiss. That's all. I swear it.”

“Yeah, sure.” Charlie opened the door and stepped out into the sun.

He gathered his toilet articles and joined her, making a big production of locking the door. He had a protruding Adam's apple and a dry swallow you could hear. And a dimple in his chin. “I want to be able to say that once I kissed a girl before Mitch Hilsten did. Because once he moves in, the rest of us are left in the dust. And make no mistake, he's moving in.”

“I've heard enough come-ons to detect an expert at work here.”

“There's no way either of us could get carried away standing out in broad daylight like this. And last I heard you can't get AIDS from a kiss. And look, there's even a witness.” John B. pointed to a heavyset woman standing in the doorway of the cabin across the drive. She leaned on an ancient Hoover and watched them with suspicion. “And if not for me you wouldn't have had that wonderful shower.”