Murder in a Hot Flash (10 page)

“Well, I know it wasn't you or me.”

“Just how do you figure that?”

“We were together in one way or another the whole time. Gordon Cabot went by and gave us the bird while Edwina and I were eating dinner and you and the others came to John B.'s shortly thereafter.”

“Did you see us arrive together?”

“You were all there when I got there.” And in the meantime, I was very involved in an argument with Edwina. And I saw you and John B. and Sid Levit square off at Cabot that morning. Come to think of it, you and Edwina seemed the angriest and Edwina wouldn't murder anyone. Well, she might irritate them to death.

Now Charlie decided to change the subject. “Is this all legal—I mean keeping us at the campground? Can a sheriff do that without charging us with something?”

“I don't know, but I doubt he can keep it up for long. And what do you think is making the bats and rats and your mother act so strange? Is it just the filming at Dead Horse Point?”

Dust coated the dashboard. Charlie could see her handprints in it. She was suddenly too tired to even try to come up with an answer. Mitch was acting normal, friendly, nice. Of course acting natural was his acting style. His ex probably never knew when to trust him either. She just shook her head.

And he withdrew. Hard to explain how, but he did. Like he had in
After Hours
with Carly Shepherd, before he got out of bed and blew away the spy hiding in the shower stall. Or with Sally London in
Bloody Promises
, before he got out of bed to go off to be slaughtered in the trenches in World War I.

Sun flamed the upper reaches of the mesa cliffs in orange-red and yellow. But it was shadow-dark down here where the Bronco bumped over rocks and washouts. On the next level down, the river looked like ink sludge. Charlie knew she was vulnerable anywhere, but she felt it more in the middle of such spectacular nothing. Harsh and huge and empty, this whole place reminded her of another planet.

And Edwina sapped Charlie's vitality and self-confidence. She was stymied by her mother's presumption of control and by her own guilt. Richard Morse, her boss, laughed at her dread of going home. “Who would have thought it?” he said once. “Classy chick like you? Didn't know anybody felt guilty about that stuff these days. Unwed motherhood's all the rage.”

But Larry Mann, her assistant, understood. Larry was gay. He knew about guilt trips from childhood. And that, no matter what an enlightened world professed to believe, things were different when you went home to face the people you'd hurt.

It was dark by the time they reached an informal parking place outside the campground. Charlie expected the men guarding the gates to hear the engine, but no one challenged them as, loaded down with boxes and cartons, they made several trips between the Bronco and the big motor home, sneaking around behind the Visitors' Center.

By the time a tired film crew trailed in, she and Mitch had the charcoal glowing under five grates and they broiled the lavish T-bones Lew had brought. John B. sent everyone back to their own camps with sizzling steaks, coleslaw, and potato salad. Everyone except Mitch, Charlie, Edwina, Tawny, and the two cameramen, who were invited to eat with him.

Drake was jubilant but Edwina was strangely sullen, considering the director's high praise of her.

“We got rats, we got bats, we even got a fox eating a rat. A bat eating a moth.” He gestured wildly with his fork. Excitement animated his entire rangy length. “We'd been trying to find critters for days and all we came up with were ground squirrels and lizards. Edwina's worth her weight in gold.”

“I'm her agent and I heard that,” Charlie reminded him. The steaks were just right—scorched, salty, and crunchy on the outside, red, juicy, and tender on the inside. Of course they had cooked over charcoal briquettes and not wood, but she refrained from pointing that out to Edwina.

John B. uncorked several bottles of good red zinfandel, which didn't detract from the meal either.

Charlie was glad to see her mother eating heartily, even though so obviously angry about something. Edwina tended to eat from cans since she'd been living alone, too busy with her work to take much of an interest in cooking.

“And, for your entertainment pleasure, with our pie and coffee we will view some smuggled dailies,” their host announced. “The ones from the film Mike wasted on that something that wasn't there but that ruined so much of our take night before last.”

He set up a video on a small TV and they all sat too close to it and too close to each other.

Charlie was wedged thigh to thigh beside John B. on a booth seat. She'd eaten only half her steak and a few bites of the pecan pie but felt bloated and stuffed. The odd combination of coleslaw and wine lingered on her tongue.

Drake lifted his arms to ease the sardine-fit of his neighbors, but then brought one arm down to rest around Charlie's shoulders, the other around Tawny's. The dual gesture was not lost on the assembled.

The air reeked of coffee and too many bodies in too small a space. Someone turned off the last light and the glow from the little screen reflected harsh and flat on the faces around Charlie, lending them the look of performers in a rock video. Everybody turned back to stare at the screen except Mitch Hilsten. He stared at her.

A silent moving picture, just John B. clearing his throat. About the only thing that moved on the film was Charlie's unruly hair blowing in the wind and the branches of a pinyon in the distance. Then Mike had moved the camera higher to a patch of sky with only the top of the generator truck showing. Daylight had almost vanished, the light was murky. The few stars out that early barely showed up.

Still, it was obvious that a patch of not quite opaque darkness hovered in the sky above the generator truck. Mike had panned back and forth across it several times and then it was gone, so nebulous that its disappearance was all that proved its existence.

“Looks like the outline of a giant football,” Tawny murmured when Earl reversed the clip to show the panning frames again in slow motion. She snuggled deeper into Drake's armpit. So he hugged her and Charlie tighter. Charlie fought the urge to burp.

“More like a hot dog or a bratwurst,” Edwina said and turned to glare at Charlie. That's who she was mad at. Why?

“The shadow of a submarine without a conning tower,” Earl said, snapping his fingers. Charlie thought Earl's description the most apt of all.

And she noticed Mitch wasn't even looking at the screen. He was still staring at her.

Wouldn't it be interesting if Mitch Hilsten was angry because John B. had his arm around Charlie?

But Sheriff Sumpter arrived just then to arrest Charlie's mother for the murder of Gordon Cabot and all else was forgotten.

Chapter
11

Mitch Hilsten drove Charlie into Moab in his Bronco, Scrag Dickens riding along in the backseat. Ahead of them, Edwina rode with the sheriff.

“Where am I going to find a lawyer this time of night?” was all she could think of to say for miles. They were all pretty quiet. And then—“Will they let me see her tonight? I don't think she's feeling well.” Charlie was so numb she didn't realize she was crying until Scrag reached over the seat back to stroke her shoulders in silent sympathy. “How could they tell it was her ax? That someone didn't switch axes? Anybody could have left one of her cigarette butts there. I mean, if you wanted to kill Cabot and blame it on someone else, Edwina was the answer to a prayer. She knocked him on his ass right in front of the sheriff of Grand County. It's such an obvious frame-up.”

“You do love her,” Mitch said barely above a whisper.

“I never said I didn't love her. Just because I can't stand her, doesn't mean I don't love her.” Edwina had accepted the handcuffs and been read her rights without a whimper or a four-letter word. In fact with no word, just that scary gray acceptance. “Which doesn't mean she did it.”

“Mom?” Charlie, accompanied by a female cop, stood in her mother's cell in the Grand County Courthouse in the wee hours of the morning. Edwina sat on the edge of her bunk swaying with exhaustion.

“We're worried too,” the officer said. “Does she have any history of heart problems or other ill health? Do you want a doctor, Mrs. Greene?”

“I'm not deaf,” Edwina snapped back. “And no, I don't want a doctor.”

“She's not that old either.” Charlie was offended too. “You don't have to treat her like she's elderly.”

“Why not, you do,” her mother's voice croaked out of the partial darkness. And then, “Never learn, do you? Thought at your age and being a mother yourself you'd have learned something by now.”

“Hello? Are we on the same planet here? You have just been arrested for murder. And like, we're talking about
what?
”

But Charlie knew. Sheriff Sumpter had counted noses while she and Mitch were on the supply run and Edwina had overheard John B. explaining where Mitch Hilsten and Charlie Greene were and why they should not be disturbed. That's what her mother'd been so pissed about at dinner.

“And you believed him. Just because I made a mistake years ago and so should never be trusted again?” Not to mention that at thirty-two I have the right to sleep with someone if I want to. But Charlie knew that argument cut no ice with a parent.

“How was I to know what was bred into your genes?” her mother whispered with that hateful hiss. “Or who was into your jeans before I even knew the damn pants were hot?”

Charlie churned with a familiar impotent frustration, knowing she was breeding the same cancer in her relationship with Libby and helpless to stop it.

“And yesterday you went off with John B. to Moab. Charlie, I didn't kill anybody, but they can hang me for this one and I don't care. I'm worn out. So if you were planning on my raising Libby while you go off and have a wonderful life, you're skunked, aren't you?”

“I wouldn't let you raise Libby if you were the last adult on earth. And I'm not letting you take the fall for a stupid murder you didn't commit and my jeans are my own
goddamned business.
”

“Between the campers needing a break from filth and gnat bites, canoers, whitewater rafters, your generic tourist, religious people here for an experience, reporters on the trail of a Hollywood ax murder, and two film companies ‘lensing' (God, I hate that word), Scrag and I could come up with one motel room. It's not that great but it's yours for tonight. We'll be back tomorrow morning with your car and your toothbrush, take you out for breakfast, and help you find a lawyer. You gonna make it, Charlie?”

“Hey, you guy types just don't realize how strong we females are when it comes to chin-deep feces.” But she hugged them both long and hard before they left her for the night in one of the grossest motel rooms she'd ever smelled.

An old-fashioned double bed, not even a queen size. And the odor—decades of chemical cleaners and air fresheners and cigarette smoke decomposed to stale. And probably other things Charlie refused to think about.

She had the presence of mind to wash out her underclothes in the bathroom sink before crawling naked between the sheets. Despite a gut-gnawing fear for the health and sanity of her mother Charlie slept like a tank.

She was so deeply out of it that she had to answer the door, when Mitch and Scrag returned in the morning, wrapped in the limp bedspread that smelled like discount-store perfume. They'd brought the Corsica and, when she'd dressed, walked her down to the main street for breakfast. Charlie sucked in great thankful gulps of chilly fresh air.

Roses climbed trellises, fences, porches. They sat in clumps and on bushes. Glorious shades of red, peach, pink, and yellow. And poor Edwina sat in jail and couldn't see them. Somehow, unreasonably, Charlie felt it was all her fault.

“How old a woman is Edwina?” Scrag asked.

“Let's see … she must be … about fifty-seven.”

Both men stopped to gape at her.

“I know, she looks ten years older.” That's all supposed to be my fault too.

“More like twenty,” Scrag said indelicately.

The River Palace Café and Grill was doing a good business but they managed to snag a booth just vacated by the window. Everyone in the room stared at Mitch Hilsten, even the waitresses, not one of whom was under sixty, nor anything other than scrawny with dyed hair molded into place. Maybe the younger ones were out at Dead Horse Point getting eaten by giant rats. Mitch pretended not to notice the attention. Their waitress brought an extra menu for him to autograph and somebody behind Charlie snapped photos using a flash.

But it was Sheriff Ralph Sumpter who came up to the table, bill in hand. With the other he shook Mitch's. “Mr. Hilsten.”

“Sheriff.”

The lawman gave Scrag a curt nod and turned to Charlie, who sat across from her escorts. “And Miz Greene.”

Charlie couldn't tell you what a sneer sounded like but she knew one when she heard it.

“I have just learned something of your history, Miz Greene, and I want you to know I am not impressed. Are you impressed, Arthur?” he said to the big vacant-faced deputy behind him.

Arthur was not impressed. He had his sunglasses on indoors and they reflected a van with a kayak roped on top running the stoplight outside the window.

What, you've learned I'm an UM instead of divorced? UM stood for unwed mother, a label Libby inflicted when in need of heavy artillery.

“I have just learned from a newspaper reporter from Los Angeles that you are a famous psychic. I would like to make it clear that my temperament, my religion, and my common sense do not allow for such foolishness. Any special powers bestowed around here are bestowed by Jesus and I don't believe He believes in psychics either. Do I make myself clear?”

“You do, Sheriff, and I want you to know I think you and Jesus have got it dead right.”