Voices in the Wardrobe (11 page)

“He's an investigative reporter like you,” Charlie said and ordered another margarita, “and my client, Kenneth Cooper.”

“
The Last of the Manly Hardy Boys? Dead Time in Disneyland?
And you wrote for the
Miami Herald.
” Jerry Parks had a boyish look about him, sideburns and mustache notwithstanding. “I thought you were a much older guy.”

“And you thought I was too young to be a grandma. Where did that come from?”

Keegan Monroe pulled a folded newspaper clipping from his shirt pocket and handed it to her. “Was hoping, as busy as you are, you might possibly miss this.” He was an odd man. Prison seemed to have given him more confidence than success had. “
Star Universe.
”

The Star Universe
, a tabloid actually not published in Florida, tended to concoct stories about Hollywood stars and their peccadillos and families. Rarely did they bother with mere agents. The picture was of Libby Greene dancing with (to Charlie) a total stranger at some outdoor venue and under lights. He had “predator” written all over him.
Libby Greene, daughter of Mitch Hilsten's agent-girlfriend, seen partying at producer Clint Melneck's estate with his youngest son, Gary, is rumored to be pregnant with Melneck's first grandchild
. It was this sort of unfortunate wording that had gotten Charlie in trouble before—she was an agent but not Mitch's. Congdon and Morse would be flooded with filmscripts for Mitch and they would get tossed unopened. Libby Greene, however, was her daughter.

Charlie took her margarita and cell out to the rescued sea lion garden next to the patio bar but concealed by palms and spiky things. Paths circled a series of connecting pools where the sea lions could glide over huge rocks and slumber still in the deepest part of the pool but not hide from the hotel guests wanting to stroll by and watch their every move. Today, Charlie could really identify with the sea lions.

She stopped to lean on the stone wall of an arched footbridge between pools, the fronds of some exotic swordlike thing clacking in the breeze, when Libby and not her cell's voice mail answered Charlie's sweaty panic attack. She nearly choked on a slug of salty margarita and relief.

When she returned to the table she was much settled down, even had some more nachos.

Kenny's grin was both satyrical and satirical though it showed little of his teeth and less mirth. “You should be listening to this, Charlie. Dr. Howard knows a few things about the Sea Spa at the Marina del Sol.”

Jerry Parks, busy with PDA and stylus, apparently happy to have been abducted now, was so intent on the tiny screen, he had to keep blinking his eyes back into focus.

“Poor Judith. She deserved better.” He teared up and shook his head. “She and Caroline VanZant were thrick as thieves, before the divorce. I, pershonally, do not condone divorce.”

“You, personally, have a wife who'll put up with anything, even you.” Sarah Newman was losing a few inhibitions herself. “My sister never did have enough starch.”

“No amount of starch could straighten the spine of a female that rotund.” Even with the slurs, his trained voice and perfect modulation would have made that last pronouncement a momentous statement. But if written, the period would have been drowned in an even deeper, yet still modulated belch.

“Married to you, she'd have to find something to enjoy.” Sarah had an old-fashioned pageboy without the bangs and a good start on the wrinkles.

“Tell Charlie about the relationship between the VanZants and Judith Judd,” Kenny said in a calming voice and signaled to the hovering waiter for another round.

Charlie waved a hand over the salt-encrusted rim of her goblet-glass and shook her head to be left out of this largess, and noticed the admiration in Jerry Parks' eyes as he stilled the stylus to consider Kenneth Cooper. She wanted to tell him that Kenny Cowper had not become rich because of his books. He was a trust funder. They were everywhere in the arts that paid only the top one or two percent and then often grossly. But trust funders had the money to appear, to a struggling novice, extremely successful in whatever field they chose. Talented trust funders, fortunately, could even afford to be book editors and live in Manhattan. Charlie knew more than a few who made grotesque jewelry instead and lived a lavish lifestyle that announced their jewelry was art, not grotesque. You can't argue with insured incomes.

“Caroline and Dr. Judy were thick as thieves before which divorce? They both were,” Charlie said. “Divorced.”

“Warren VanZant divorced Judith to marry Carolyn Hammett. Didn't you know that?”

How would I know that? I assume Detective Solomon knows that. “Dashiell Hammett. Wow. Well that opens a whole new docket. What happened to Mr. Hammett senior?”

“I've got to talk to my editor.” Jerry Parks tried to stick his stylus behind his ear but it snapped back to his handheld on its bungie cord.

“You've got to read my treatment,” Brodie Caulfield told Charlie.

“I've got to get Maggie out of that place.” Charlie dipped her last nacho in the pineapple-chile salsa.

“I'll take Elmer Fudd here back to his conference,” Sarah said and winked at Charlie. “Don't forget Uranus for
The Rites of Winter
, will you?”

Jerry Parks called in to his editor on Charlie's cell while en route to the Spa with Charlie and Kenny in Kenny's rental. Brodie and Keegan planned to go out to dinner somewhere in Charlie's pickup, after Sarah took them as well as her brother-in-law back to the Hyatt.

Libby and her cell had been at Mrs. Beesom's and Jacob Forney too, when Charlie called from the sea lion garden. They figured that Betty Beesom took all her pills and forgot and took them again. She had this plastic case with pills doled out for morning, noon, dinner time, and bedtime in little pockets. But it got tipped over or something and they all spilled out. She may have mixed them wrong. Anyway, they pumped her stomach in the emergency room and sent her home, telling Libby and Jacob that now her stomach was pumped she wasn't sick so she wouldn't be admitted to the hospital.

“I said if she's not sick how come she's taking all those pills and they said to keep from getting sick. All she can have is Jell-O and chicken broth. She's really pissed. And I wasn't even at that party with Gary Melneck. First time I even met him. He's a jerk. I went with Lori and some other cheerleaders. Anyway, you gotta get back here, Mom. Jacob leaves for his convention tomorrow. I've got more parties coming up.”

“Sorry honey, Maggie's in real trouble too. I can't leave her now.”

Charlie informed her daughter that anyone responsible enough to get a job and an apartment after graduation from mere high school could be depended upon to forgo partying and care for an elderly neighbor. That neighbor had come through for Libby on numerous occasions.

It was the second time in twenty-four hours someone had called Charlie a bitch.

“So, what story are you really covering? The conference, the Institute, or the murder at the Sea Spa at the Marina del Sol?” Charlie asked the reporter when he'd informed his editor of Warren VanZant's relationship to both Dr. Judy and Caroline, that he was safe but separated from Ted, his photographer, and on his way back to the scene of the murder.

“You, actually,” Jerry Parks said. “And now I can honestly report and probably sue for being abducted and having my property stolen by a subject I was investigating.” He produced a theatrical sneer. “Little guys always get the wrong end of the stick, right? Makes great press.”

“You weren't wandering the halls of the Spa because of the murder there when I first saw you?” Charlie asked.

“Well, yeah, but I had already registered for the conference on my own and seen your photo in the brochure, so when I spied you at the murder scene I got assigned you too.”

“You want to write screenplays?” Kenny turned from traffic to the backseat long enough to make Charlie nervous.

“Doesn't everyone?”

“In your investigations did you come across how Dr. Howard knew Dr. Judy? He seemed pretty upset by her death,” Charlie said.

“Let's just say they go way back.”

“Wonder who is the most likely person at the Spa that night who would want to murder Dr. Judith Judd. Or did someone from outside come in and do it and leave before the alarm was sounded?” Charlie pondered aloud.

Between the three of them, they came up with a list for each scenario and even a third. The guests and staff of the Spa, Judd's family and the staff of her production company who knew she would be there, and the owners of the Spa itself. Or a complete stranger looking for someone to kill or looking for somebody else and killed her by mistake.

“In murder mysteries,” Charlie said, “the list has to be select and identifiable, but in real life the ‘random' is as real as it is in the universe. That's why more murders go unsolved than not and why mysteries are so popular.”

“God, you're depressing,” Kenny Cowper said. “Okay, Parks, give your list and pick three candidates and I will too. Charlie will probably choose a wandering unidentifiable vagrant or something.”

“Not so,” Charlie said. “I pick Dashiell Hammett, Ruth Ann Singer—the dead doctor's assistant, or Warren VanZant. Or the pharmaceutical industry.”

“Why the pharmaceutical industry?” Jerry Parks leaned forward to stick his face between the seats. “That's very interesting.”

“Because I'm really, really pissed at them right now. How did Dr. Howard know about the VanZants and Dr. Judy?”

“Given that we don't know all the clients at the Spa that night or members of the film crew, I'd pick Maggie Stutzman as first choice because she found the body, the doctor's manager Ruth Ann Singer next because she knows everything about Judd's business, and Warren VanZant because he's an ex. And the movie industry because I can't sell them a screenplay,” Jerry from the
San Diego Union-Tribune
said. “So, you answer me a question for a change, discouraging agent-person. Did Margaret Stutzman mention seeing anybody else out at the Jacuzzi pools when Judd died? If she didn't do it, she might have seen whoever did.”

“I'm sure she would have said. She's not that far gone.” Charlie felt insulted, for Maggie's sake.

“I don't know most of the people there but I'd pick Dashiell Hammett any day, because he's a jerk with a loose screw, as my first candidate for murderer, Warren VanZant second because he's an ex, and that weird guy in the swimming pool with the aging musculature and dramatic presentation because he could be jealous that Dr. Judy gets on TV ad nauseam and he doesn't,” Kenny said. “And Mitch Hilsten because I'm jealous of him.”

“Raoul.” Charlie had forgotten about him.

“He's another good candidate,” Jerry said.

“How do you know that?” Charlie asked him.

“Research.”

When they crested the ridge above the staggered and tight development to the open sea and sky, they found San Diego County police cars awaiting them. There had been another murder at the Sea Spa at the Marina del Sol.

Fifteen

Maggie Stutzman sat wrapped in spa towels looking rather exotic with the towel as a turban leaving only a dark curl dangling down her forehead, dark blue eyes sparking again instead of dulled. Which was not necessarily a good sign, but somehow made her beautiful. She sat with her legs crossed on the edge of the oversized swimming pool, one foot in the water.

Charlie tried to blink away tears and it only seemed to make her nose run. Indelicate for sure. Kenny handed her a cloth handkerchief yet. People still used non-disposable nose wipes?

As before, Charlie arrived too late to see the dead body in situ. Raoul Segundo had drowned in his pool. And while he was treating Maggie's addictive, suicidal, destructive, and capricious temperament with soothing water relaxation and hypnosis therapy too. Maybe he put himself to sleep.

Problem was, this time the Spa was filled with day customers, some of whom had wandered by the windows that exposed the pool from various sides and many were now being questioned by members of the homicide department of the San Diego County Sheriff's Office, Detective Solomon no doubt among them. And here of course sat a defiant Maggie Stutzman in the thick of another murder.

She used to be the most reasonable person Charlie had ever known. And now she defied reason like an out-of-control teenager. At the pool's edge Sue, of the ponytail and aging bounce, rose stiffly off her knees, one of which creaked.

“Am I glad to see you, Miss Greene. Could you take her up to your room while I help see to the day spa clients? She's not to leave this building, you understand. I'll get back to you in half an hour, but it's situation-frantic right now. We've replaced the television up there but left the lid off the stool tank. She can plead insanity with no trouble.” Sue cocked her head, shrugged on that side, and lifted her eyebrows into her bangs, rather eloquently pronouncing Maggie's condition unstable-extreme.

To Charlie, her friend seemed more in control than Sue Rippon. On first arriving Charlie and both her companions were kept at the gate until their identities could be checked inside, at which time Charlie was escorted directly to the pool area and Kenny and Jerry detained in the lobby. The enormous parking lot had been nearly full. The day spa crowd must be what kept so expensive a business venture afloat.

“Do you want Dashiell to help get her upstairs?”

“No way, absolutely.”

Up in the room, there was indeed no lid on the toilet tank and the television in place in the wardrobe was smaller than the last. Charlie stood looking at the latter and then turned to Maggie. “Can you still signal for the TV to go on and off with the remote when the door's closed?”

“You have to aim it right for the slot there. Doesn't work as well with this smaller set. So I just turn it on and then close the door.” Maggie shed her towels and spa tank suit and headed for the shower.