Killer Commute (16 page)

“But in every one the killer was identified as someone else.”

“The right people are not always brought to justice, but the wrong people always slip up some time. And I'm a patient man.”

“That's nice, but I'm still not following you.”

“You had motive, a nubile daughter in contact with a predator. Mother nature teaches us that there is no more dangerous animal than a mother protecting her young. And when he dies, you get his cleaning lady. You had the trust of and ready access to the victim. Were at the scene of the crime. People are most often murdered by someone they know. Plus you had the victim's blood on your sweatshirt. And you want to know the most damning thing against you? In all those investigations in the last three to four years of your highly questionable history, you were instrumental in solving many of those murder cases. No professional training for it, either, no education or experience in professional law enforcement. Lady, you stand out like a red light here, a sore thumb. What better way to escape a murder trial than to pin the murder on someone else? Plus, you exhibit no sorrow over the violent death of a man who was your neighbor, and according to your own words a valuable handyman and resource person in this woman's commune. Anyone fits the profile, lady, it's you.”

It seemed everybody was looking for a profile these days—a way to group people. Millions and millions of individual people were too much even for computers, which could supposedly do math in the gadzillions squared, could sort out the individual intricacies of genetic codes—and even play chess. But people had to fit a profile—fit into a group to be understood. Used to be called
type,
and then
category,
and now
profile.

With the commercial use of information on the Internet, telemarketers could target individuals who fit a profile—who bought types of stocks, gave to types of charities. They probably knew which geezers used Viagra so they could target their sex mates with K-Y Jelly. Medical histories could be passed on to health insurers who wouldn't want to deal with people who might actually get sick, let alone those who already were. Is this why Jeremy wanted to lose himself in cyberspace?

CHAPTER 22

CHARLIE
SHOWERED AND
dressed in a cream-colored pants suit, green blouse, matching scarf tying her hair back, emerald stud earrings, and knee-highs with green slings. She made up announcements for the memorial the next day and taped them on the front and back walls of the compound.

Then, leaving a note for Libby and with her inner voice throwing a royal hissy fit, Charlie drove the gray Toyota out of the ruined gate and headed for Beverly Hills.

After Detective J. S. had convinced her she possessed every known reason for killing Jeremy Fiedler, so why waste time looking for another killer, the hearing specialist's nurse had called to remind her she needed to come in to determine if “appliances” could help with her problem. Apparently Charlie had made an appointment. Maybe they'd written her a note to that effect and she'd stuffed it in a pocket with the used Kleenex yesterday when Larry Mann had held her while she cried. Odd, the nurse didn't seem surprised that she and Charlie were carrying on normally over the phone. She couldn't remember the conversation now exactly. Maybe the nurse thought she was talking to Charlie's caregiver. Modern life was one big disconnect.

Anyway, after Amuller, that call from the Ear, Head, and Neck Clinic set off a growing rage Charlie wasn't sure either she or her inner voice could control.

I'm your common sense.

“Oh, bugger off.”

Charlie had either to take charge of something or lose her mind. So she took charge of the Toyota, and it felt good. What she would do was drop into the clinic and inform Dr. R. Rodney where he could stick his hearing aids. Then she'd drop into the agency, find out if there was anybody in the office next to hers and how come the authorities were allowed into her computer files. Then she'd go somewhere for a nice lunch.

The wind blew in off the Pacific and made a hole in the smog that lasted from Inglewood to the Santa Monica Freeway, letting the sun shine through. Charlie rolled down her window and wished she'd learned how to whistle. The wind mussed her hair but she didn't care. She even stuck her elbow out the window.

The hours of her life she'd spent on the 405, and never once had she been pulled over. Jeremy could drive without car registration for a long time, without a driver's license. But how could he get license plates for it—or them? You couldn't always keep old plates covered with mud. Most of Southern California was covered with concrete.

Speaking of which, another thing she could do, she decided now that she felt she had some control over her life, for the moment at least, was to further enlist the aid of Ed Esterhazie. The man was no fool. She needed to talk this out with someone like him. Who else could she turn to now? Bounce ideas off of?

Several years ago when the office receptionist was murdered, Charlie had met David Dalrymple of the Beverly Hills PD. One day soon, if she had one, Charlie should get in touch with him. He thought she had psychic powers then, but he'd probably gotten over that. Yes, there were positive things Charlie could do and not just let her anger play into an inexperienced cop's daydreams of an open-and-shut case.

For once, Charlie's inner common-sense voice remained silent. Did that mean the two Charlies agreed? Or that even her inner hearing had disappeared itself again, like Jeremy did his identity?

Charlie listened to the wind and road noise and bleating of domesticated car horns and relaxed. Relaxed, sort of. This handicap threat at a gut level was almost worse than being accused of murder.

*   *   *

At the Ear, Head, and Neck Clinic Charlie was told that she'd been a bad girl by hiding the fact that her hearing loss was intermittent rather than total, that she'd wasted the valuable time of real important people who could have been dealing with her problem in a different way or dealing with someone who had total hearing loss.

After Detective J. S. Amuller of the Long Beach PD, Charlie didn't bat a guilty eyelash. She was kind of proud of herself. Did this mean a real live woman could outgrow guilt? Even one under suspicion in a murder investigation? Nah.

Dr. R. Rodney looked in her ears again with the icy little light probe, coldly asked her about unusual sounds, tingling, itching, pain then sent her to a technician across the hall who played a succession of silly sounds through earphones and asked her to evaluate sharpness, volume, and the register of each one.

What was it Art Granger had said about his brother who'd fallen off a tractor back in Iowa? His hearing came and went for a week, then was gone? “Deaf as a post the rest of his life.”

*   *   *

At Congdon & Morse Representation, Inc, no one bothered to conceal their surprise at seeing Charlie.

“What the hell you doing back at the office dressed for work? You're on vacation. Your next-door neighbor gets murdered, his house burned, somebody blew your gate in and you standing so close you're deaf as a post half the time.” Richard Morse accosted her, and in the agency lobby on her way in before she'd even closed the door. He stood there blinking his bulging eyes for a moment and shrugged. “Guess maybe I wouldn't wanna stay home either.”

In his office (which was even more spacious than her's—he had one of those mahogany Admiralty desks you could serve the President's cabinet a seven-course dinner on—the smaller the man, the bigger the desk in good old Hollywood) Charlie accosted him back. “Richard, how could you allow the police access to my computer files without a court-ordered search warrant?” Or whatever the hell they're supposed to have.

“They had one, Charlie, and besides, it wasn't the police.” He sat in the giant leather chair that accompanied the giant mahogany desk and disappeared. Why can't guys ever see themselves from the vantage point of those on the other side of their desks? Just next door sat Larry Mann, who had to be six-two if he was an inch—he lifted weights so he could be a he-man in beer commercials—dwarfing the cubicle and narrow ledge that held his computer and all the filing cabinets and shelves spilling over with the written dreams of hopefuls neither he nor Charlie could get through in a decade. Sort of like Charlie's dining room table before the magical Kate Gonzales walked through the door. Charlie wondered if Kate did offices.

“Charlie, can't you hear me now?”

“What? Oh, no, I'm sorry, just thinking instead of listening. What did you say?”

“I SAID—”

“DON'T YELL—I mean, don't yell. I had no idea how much crap deaf people have to put up with.”

“YEAH, WELL, I mean, yeah, well, it ain't that easy for the rest of us either, babe. But what I said was, because of that little problem Evan Black got us into last October with the invasion of Area 51 and all the loot looted from Vegas, the Feds are after our balls. They wrangled an investigative search warrant into the agency's files and, working at the agency, you were meat, too, you know?”

“How? Is the agency being charged with anything?”

“No, but Evan is, and we represent him.”

Evan Black, an incredibly talented producer/director/writer and pathological troublemaker, was wrapping up the filming in Spain of a media baby starring Mitch Hilsten and Deena Gotmor, financed with money made in Vegas on the wager of the century. Suffice it to say he'd infiltrated the secret sanctity of the unacknowledged air base known as Area 51 and made the military almost as much of a laughing stock as Kenneth Starr did the U.S. Congress.

“And they're also interested in how Jeremy Fiedler could erase his identity by using cyberspace.”

“That's how I figure it, kid. But you don't have any stuff on him at work here?”

“No, but this rookie homicide critter is lining up merit badges by convincing himself and me that I killed Jeremy because I fit the profile while a murderer's busy erasing his involvement with every passing minute—which is tightening the noose around my neck.”

“Jeesh,” Charlie's boss said, “even our boy Monroe in Folsom couldn't write something this weird.”

“I need your help, Richard.”

“You got it.”

“I do?” Usually he told her she was imagining things.

“Babe, with your luck, even I may not be enough.” He sounded like he couldn't believe that, either.

“I wondered about contacting Lieutenant Dalrymple. Remember him?”

“Remember? Charlie, he was one of the locals escorting the Feds in here to look over your files.”

If Charlie weren't already so suspicious she could play Mitch Hilsten's stalker in
Satan's Sadists,
his next-to-shoot film according to
Variety
—she would have decided it was a joke when Dalrymple agreed to a meet for lunch at the Celebrity Pit in an hour. She handed Richard back his phone. “That was too easy. Something big's happening. Is it Jeremy or Evan Black or Detective J. S. Amuller?”

“Got me, kid. I'll ask around if the industry knows anything they'll tell an agency who's files are being searched by the Feds. Charlie, you be careful, hear?”

“Okay, but I have one more question.”

“Shoot.”

If he only knew. “Richard, is Michael Congdon back in his office?”

“Let me give you some advice, Charlie.” He tipped back his giant chair so he could put his little feet up on his gargantuan desk and did something with his eyes that demanded a mustache and a cigar. Sort of the Godfather meets Groucho. “You got enough trouble now. I know—God, do I know—how good you are at trouble, but trust me. Leave that one alone.”

“That one what?”

“That last question you asked me.”

Almost back to her own office, Larry Mann, dwarfing his cubicle, stopped Charlie with another telephone and mouthed, “Your mother.”

It wasn't so much his message as his amusement that made Charlie want to lob a loaded file cabinet at him. Instead she grimaced an I'll-get-even-and-you-will-suffer-boy look, reaching for his phone rather than going to her own in the plush digs next door.

“Glad to know you're not dead. You haven't answered your e-mail so I had to call,” is how Edwina Greene answered Charlie's, “Hello, Mom?”

“You, as I remembered, wanted me to get e-mail. I got e-mail. Did you say ‘Mom'? How thoughtful. Well, it's about time. But it's too late.”

If Evan Black, writer/producer/director, was a pathological troublemaker, Edwina Greene, professor/biologist/widow/mother/grandmother, was a pathological mystery. She thought Kenneth Starr was cool. And that was only the beginning.

“Too late for what?” Oh please, Edwina, my trouble-quotient glass runneth over.

“Just wanted to let you know, so you could explain it to my granddaughter.”

How does she know when I'm the most vulnerable? “What now?”

“Oh, ‘what now'? As if I'm the trouble in this so-called family.”

“Edwina, please, I know you're busy, but—” Over the phone Edwina Greene hit Charlie up the side of the head. At her expression, Larry grabbed the receiver and started talking to Charlie's mother and Libby's grandmother and Charlie couldn't even hear the crickets in her ears. She sat in the visitor's chair crowded into the almost nonexistent space between the door and this towering drop-leaf file cabinet whose doors would not close even when hell froze over.

When he finally hung up, Charlie was crying. He wrote out a note, walked around his computer ledge—he was even bigger when she was helpless and handicapped—and handed her the note. “Your mom has a boyfriend. She thought you should know.”

CHAPTER 23

DAVID DALRYMPLE ROSE to meet Charlie when the Sharon Stone lookalike hostess showed her to his table. “You haven't changed a bit.”