Death of the Office Witch (25 page)

Mary Ann had what looked like dried snot or spit caked around her mouth and nostrils, an ugly funny-colored splotch on her nose and forehead. Her eyes were open but rolled up so far that eyelids frozen halfway permitted no sign of pupil or iris or color. Like when Marvin the Shaman passed out at Gloria's séance and dance. Mary Ann's hands lay across her pelvis, their backs bruised. “She's not even wet.”

Lightning, thunder, and the smell of ozone struck their little scene just then as if the witches had summoned up a sudden rain to solve that problem. Roger Tuschman and Marvin Grunion began to keen as the intensity of the wind grew. Police laboratory types scurried to erect a tent over Mary Ann and her evidence.

“What,” Dalrymple shouted through the mounting noise of a tent refusing to be erected and a wind blowing orange petals into their hair and faces and onto Mary Ann, “what do you see, Miss Greene? Please, it's important.”

Charlie didn't tell him about the tapes burning a hole in her purse. He was making her late home, and who knew what trouble was brewing there? It was all take and no give with this guy, and she was fed up. She stared defiantly back at his oddly opaque eyeglasses. The approaching clouds darkened the grove, and they backed away from the lights to avoid the men struggling with the tent in the wind. That and the way he held his head changed the lighting on his face to mysterious.

Charlie couldn't see his eyes, but she was sure he knew she was withholding something important. Several orange blossoms slid off his bald spot. She couldn't see her reflection in those glasses, either, but she did see Mary Ann in them. Mary Ann floating face down. Knees bent. Arms hanging. Forehead, nose, hands, knees, and toes brushing rocks as the water rocked her. It was no irrigation ditch.

“Miss Greene?”

“I have to get home. Now. Please. It's important, too.”

“Lieutenant? Norton's here, and he's got something for you,” Gordon called from across the road.

Dalrymple told Charlie to stay where she was and crossed over to them.

“Husband's alibi holds,” said a voice she didn't recognize, probably Norton's. “Unless all eight people in that copy shop are lying for him. Nobody even saw him go to the crapper. Could have hired someone to kill his wife. Don't have anything on Morse and Greene yet, but it sounds like more than a few people at Congdon and Morse had reason to prefer Tuschman dead.”

They spoke in low voices, and with the distance and the wind and the human commotion centering around poor Mary Ann, they certainly didn't expect their words to be overheard. What they didn't take into consideration was the direction of that wind and Charlie's acute hearing. Her family doctor once told her that her early pregnancy and resultant rejection by teen society, coupled with her tone deafness, must be partially responsible for it. Charlie had attended few rock concerts and rarely listened to loud music. Dalrymple, if he knew, would have chalked it up to some psychic ability that it was not.

What Charlie thought she'd seen in the reflection of his glasses had been imagination, pure and simple. No mystery there, either—and after the day she'd had, no wonder. But what she heard now, although not always complete, was real. Real evidence she was not supposed to have. Yes! Yes!

Charlie learned that Maurice had never gone to Cancun at all. Dalrymple said he'd suspected as much, because Maurice had not been tanned. Charlie, of course, hadn't noticed that. Charlie decided to notice everything from now on and beat David Dalrymple at his own game, the smug dweeb. Reliable witnesses saw Maurice visiting someone named Medora every day of that week, and that knowledge apparently was what could drive him to murder. Poor Maurice, you might know it would be a woman.

The tent was up and holding—sort of—and Charlie stood where she could see inside the flap just enough to notice someone scraping the funny dried mucus from Mary Ann's lips onto a glass slide and some more into a plastic sandwich bag. It was a pinkish color. Maybe Charlie wouldn't notice quite everything.

I hope from somewhere, you get to see the movie, Mary Ann. If it gets out of development.

Something about Irma, Charlie didn't quite hear—the words Scarborough House—and, “Not a bad motive for that shrink Podhurst down the hall, either. That leak could have come from his office.”

But the clincher was that Luella Ridgeway had once “served time.”

Larry Mann's “guy lover” may have been exposed to AIDS, and the county had tested Larry, warned him to inform any other lovers. “This Gloria might have threatened to spread the word, would have put a crimp in his social life. Those guys live for it.”

Any of Tracy's dirty secrets had to be put on hold, unfortunately, when Charlie happened to notice Mary Ann's clothes. The dead author wore a thin cotton-knit jumpsuit. Kind of thing you see around the beach a lot. It was tight fitting, and the knees were torn. The tops and outer sides of her toes were discolored like her forehead, nose, and the backs of her hands. Like she'd floated face down and the lowest parts of her body were battered by rocks. Who had taken her shoes off?

Nothing on Dorian, the jerk? And Charlie couldn't believe what she'd heard about Luella. And what was Scarborough House? She wondered what they would dig up about Charlie Greene, whose biggest sin sat at home probably seething because there was no food in the house. But the fact that Libby had no father had never been a secret. Charlie usually told everybody right away, just to get it over with.

“Yeah, but does any of that explain the Leffler woman over there?” Detective Gordon said. “I still got my money on that Keegan Monroe. Anything new on him?”

If there was, Charlie was not meant to hear it. Besides all the background racket going on and the growing special effects dubbed by the weather mixer, Marvin Grunion and Roger Tuschman were shouting at each other.

“I knew it was somebody at the agency,” Roger yelled and started for Charlie with blood in his eye. Charlie backed into the tent, nearly tripping over the man leaning over Mary Ann.

“Here, this is a crime scene, lady.” The man pushed her aside. “You're contaminating a crime scene.”

Marvin grabbed Roger's arms from behind and stopped him before he could knock the tent down in his fury. Grunion was soon replaced by two uniforms and Detective Gordon. They had him by both arms and around the neck, and still he struggled, as if possessed.

“It has to be her or why would you keep bringing her here? The bitch killed my wife and Mary Ann, too.” A lightning flash reflected off Roger's gold loop earring, the tears on his cheeks. “If you're trying to get her to confess, I'll make her confess.”

“Are you saying,” Lieutenant Dalrymple drew Charlie out of the tent and into the fray, “that Miss Greene drove up here this afternoon and killed Mrs. Leffler when everyone thought she was at the agency?”

“She didn't die this after—” Roger Tuschman went suddenly very still in his captors' arms.

“No, she didn't, did she? And she didn't die here.”

Marvin the Shaman still wore khaki work clothes and hiking boots and sprouting bristle hairs. “I told Roger to come clean about this, but he hasn't been right since Gloria—” He shrugged and swallowed hard, unable to finish.

“Where's her car?” Dalrymple asked.

“Rizzi Reservoir.” Grunion nodded at the valley's ridge. “She called to me—”

“Shut up, Marv.” Gloria's husband sagged now in the arms of his captors. “They won't believe anything we say.”

“She kept sending me visions … images … of a place. I finally realized it was Rizzi. She kept saying she was in her car underwater.”

Both Dalrymple and Gordon shot a glance at Charlie.

“But when we got there she wasn't in it. The window was open on the driver's side. She wasn't hard to find … floating nearby.”

“But why did you bring her body here?”

“Roger thinks this part of the grove is a special place. That if Mary Ann could tell us more about what happened to her and to Gloria, it would be here.”

“Do you think this is a special place, Mr. Grunion?”

“Yes. But we weren't getting anything. I told Roger we had to call you.”

The rain started suddenly, and Charlie was a lot wetter than Mary Ann by the time Dalrymple got her back along the line of emergency vehicles to a patrol car. One pair of pumps and one dry-clean-only dress ruined. The ladder in her hose that had started up one leg after snagging on the tape recorder under Gloria's desk had vast holes between rungs. She handed him his coat, which hadn't fared well, either.

He got in beside her to shelter from the rain. “I'd like your thoughts about this.”

“My first thought is a question. Why don't the owners of this grove, who bother to put ‘No Trespassing' signs on the gate, sue Roger and the witches?”

“Because he owns it. And a fair number of the condominiums in the complex behind us. He leases this land to a grower.”

“On the proceeds of a copy shop in a broken down shopping center in Pasadena? And a receptionist's salary? You don't know the miserly Richard Morse.” The business of defrauding Hollywood wannabes must really be lucrative.

“What else?”

“Mary Ann Leffler has been missing a week. She hasn't been dead that long. Unless she drowned in ice water in the North Atlantic. Where has she been all this time? And what was that dried pinkish stuff on her face? And was it an accident, suicide, or murder? She wasn't the suicidal type.”

“I have no word as to the time of death as yet. The pinkish stuff is called edema, in this case dried mucus, which is often present in drowning cases. The rest I don't know.”

“Remember when your expectations conned me into guessing she was in her car underwater? We were at the beach house in Malibu. That was six days ago. She obviously wasn't drowned then or in her car.”

“No one conned you into anything. You were foretelling, Miss Greene. Too bad poor Mrs. Leffler was not there to hear you.”

“You have an answer for everything. You don't think, you just spout your own beliefs and twist everything I say to fit them. And if she hasn't been dead all this time, where has she been? And where is this husband of Mary Ann's who was supposed to be in Canada fishing?”

“He and a large contingent of the family are staying at the beach house. They've been notified and are on their way up here.” He stepped back out into the rain. “Would you like to stay and meet them?”

Charlie accepted a ride back to Wilshire and her Toyota instead, then headed for home in the rain, playing the tape she'd found under Gloria's desk and calling Libby on the way.

“Don't worry, Mom, Lori and I have dinner under control. Just come on home. How's your poor tummy?”

Something about the oily-smooth tone in her daughter's voice set Charlie's “tummy” off again. But she'd hit a lull in the choking traffic between full-bore rush hour and the evening go-out-to-dinner crowd and barely had time to digest what she heard on the illicit tapes before she was in Long Beach.

Most of the first tape was simply the give-and-take of office phone conversations, most from the day before the murder, including Charlie's call to Gloria from her car that morning. The second tape was of conversations around the reception desk only. And toward the end of it, Charlie could hear Gloria talking to Irma in the room, with Gloria's words clear and close and Irma's distant and incomplete, as if the executive secretary was standing far away from what was probably a “bug” hidden somewhere on the desk.

“Thought you were still in Vegas. How come you're back so early?”

“How dare you.… that poor man … of his situation.”

“I didn't threaten him, merely suggested he could be a little more polite and helpful is all. In fact, so could you. Don't think I don't know about Scarborough House and you still getting therapy for your problem from old Podhurst. Irma Vance, don't you give me that look. I'm warning you.”

“Don't think … bring down … Mr. Morse, you …”

“I'm not trying to bring down the agency or ruin your precious Mr. Morse, only asking for a little respect and cooperation around here. Irma? Irma!” Gloria's voice faded as she left the desk. Then nothing except the ringing of unanswered phones. Just before the tape ran out, Charlie could hear Irma calling for Maurice very faintly and in a panicky voice quite unlike her. “Maurice, hurry, we need help!”

Keeping that tape would be “withholding of evidence.” In the real world, did people go to prison for withholding evidence in a murder case?

Maybe Charlie could wipe all her prints off it and put it back under Gloria's desk when no one was looking.

26

Charlie sat cocooned in a dry fleecy sweatsuit, in the cozy breakfast nook in her snug home, eating beanie wienies and deli coleslaw. Across the table sat two bright-eyed, guileless teenage girls, transparently guilty. They had even turned off the damned radio when she came downstairs.

“How was your day, Mom?” Libby poured Charlie more milk and took a drink of her own, leaving a little mustache on her upper lip that Charlie used to think was cute.

You didn't notice my ruined hair, makeup, dress, hose, shoes, and mood. What can I tell you? “Pass the ketchup.”

The girls exchanged winces and began mashing their beans in the Campbell's Pork and Beans sauce and stirring it into the ketchup juice. Libby mouthed to her friend, “On the rag.”

Beanie wienies were filling, solid, inexpensive, comforting (and occasionally embarrassing the next day). And coming home to a warm dinner prepared by someone else after a stressful week … no wonder men got married. Charlie wasn't about to take on the download waiting to happen across the table until she'd savored for a bit, grabbed a moment. They might just as well learn how to handle the guilt burden now while they were young and strong.