Murder in a Hot Flash (20 page)

Charlie tried to scratch an itch on her neck with nails filed to nubbins. She'd take canyons walled by buildings any day.

They beached on a porous hardened mud bottom dotted with rotting weeds, a dead rat, driftwood. Homer guided them past a tiny horizontal forest of petrified logs felled aeons ago and back into a cave with a sliver of sunlight coming from a crack in the cliff rock a thousand feet above. The stick figure of a four-legged animal was etched in the wall.

“I tell the tourists this is a deer drawn by the Anasazi.” Homer had a gap between his front teeth and whenever he paused in his speaking his tongue would play with it. “Can't help but wonder if some weren't carved by bored cowboys working from the line camps that used to litter the area.”

“Or by river guides who want to have something to show the tourists?” Charlie voiced the thought by mistake.

The cave was small and somebody kicked a hole in an old pack rat midden that showed only as a dark patch along one wall. A familiar odor saturated the air and they all stepped out.

“Edwina says the pack rats make their nests by mixing dried pellets of their shit with urine. Kind of like rodent adobe,” John B. said and stripped off his shirt. The day was heating up. “Talk about your recycling.”

“Be like living in your own toilet.” Sid just rolled up his sleeves. They'd all glanced quickly at Charlie at the mention of Edwina.

John B. carried his muscle on his shoulders and back, leaving a chest full of ribs and tufts of black hair in front. He used his cowboy hat to fan himself.

Mitch took off his shirt too and followed the director up a rock outcropping where they could pose while surveying the possible scene from three angles instead of one.

“I'm curious,” Scrag said quietly behind Charlie in that country-western-singer voice. “Aren't you the least bit worried being out here in all this vastness, alone with seven guys all wearing their identities in their shorts?”

Mostly Charlie envied them their right to go topless when not doing so made life miserable. She turned to find Scrag wearing his shirt wrapped around his head to keep off the heavy sun and sporting a more impressive chest than either the director or the superstar.

His grin made her giggle. “Aren't
you
a little nervous by the fact that one of these people could be a murderer?”

His know-it-all look wavered and his shirt nodded with his head. “If that
was
lighter fluid I smelled on or around Tawny, they could have the wrong person in that jail cell in Moab for murdering Gordon Cabot.”

“Exactly. And Tawny, for your information, was the only one of your little clique who agreed with me that Edwina couldn't have done it.” Could Tawny have been murdered for that reason alone?

“You're out here today to pick up psychic ammunition for your mamma's defense, darlin', I suggest you be right careful.”

It wasn't difficult to be intimidated by a bunch of guys showing off their musculature. But Charlie didn't have to be psychic to feel the undercurrents, know they had little to do with her. Tawny's “accident” may have gotten them all rethinking Cabot's murder.

“You'll have to admit your mom's one weird duck though,” Earl said in tune with her thoughts, as they sat on petrified logs to eat bananas and Oreo cookies, Homer's idea of a morning coffee break.

“That personality change you noticed and her behavior,” Sidney Levit joined in, “you have to consider the possibility of your mother's mental instability. It can happen to anybody. At different periods in our lives, our bodies are driven by chemical and hormonal reactions nobody can predict or explain.”

Finally it had come out in the open. Everyone had been dancing around it since Charlie arrived, including Charlie. “Are you suggesting, Sid, that my mother went crazy and murdered Cabot because she's menopausal? Most violent crime, including murder, is committed by people suffering from testosterone overload not estrogen deprivation.”

“Every man has male hormones, damn few commit murder. It affects them in different ways. You women lump all men in some common pot. It might not be politically correct to say so but the fact is, we are individuals.”

“Charlie lumps Mitch in a different pot than the rest of us,” Scrag said.

Mitch glanced briefly at Charlie, who along with everybody else ignored that remark.

“Sid, that fist you waved at the heavens last night just before the shoot went wrong?” Charlie took a swig from her canteen. “I saw it and
that
looked like odd behavior to me.”

Sid glanced shyly away from Charlie, rubbed his hands together. “I really thought we had that one. From up where I sat, Charlie, that was one hell of a take. I felt bigger than God for a minute there. In fact, I think we might still be able to save it. I'll have to see the dailies.”

“Sid, did you see Tawny from up there?”

“No, I only saw Koop, our stuntman, set his protective suit on fire. He had his own set of problems and didn't even see her until it was too late. What I can't figure is why the hell she was in there.”

“The camera might have seen her. It might show what happened to her. The insurance company would want that footage.”

“And I'll be sure they get it, if there's anything to see. Charlie, I'll never forgive myself for that poor woman's death. Accidents like Tawny's are terrible, but they do happen.” He was into his kindly, shy, fatherly routine. Charlie could not forget that he'd been closer to Gordon Cabot than anyone here. “Gordon's death,” Sid reminded her, “was no accident.”

The men wandered around for a while longer, some probably to pee in private, and when they'd all boarded the jet boats for the next leg of their journey, one of the engines refused to start.

It was the lead boat and Homer had a few descriptive phrases for the occasion. Dean wanted to know if the other craft could tow it, but Homer didn't think the remaining engine had the power.

“And we're going downriver now but we'll have to fight the current coming back.” He and Dean fiddled with the engine to no avail. Homer asked for volunteers to stay behind and be picked up on the way back to no avail either.

He could well be the only person on this excursion who did not suspect that one of the group was a murderer. Nobody wanted to be abandoned on a strange beach with one of those.

Homer grumbled that he could lose his guide license for putting them all in the same boat. But he did.

This time Charlie sat between a cooler of food and a red can of extra fuel from the abandoned boat, trying to put as much space between her and the testosterone as one could get in the crush. The smell from the red can made her half sick. It reminded her of a flaming makeup artist.

Mitch was watching her again. Just let the bastard watch.

But later, when they pulled over for their last stop and started off across country to view an old cowboy line camp, he dropped back to walk beside her.

“Careful how you handle the menopause angle, Charlie,” he warned. “Rita may need it to defend your mother.” He was down to two small bandages on one hand and one wraparound on the other.

“You think my mother's crazy enough to commit murder?” And you pretended to like her. Me too, for that matter.

“That's not what I said. But Rita may need all the ammunition she can get. Don't say anything here that can be used against Edwina at the trial. Any of these people could be called back to testify.”

He walked off to join the guys all trying to outdo each other in the I-can-hike-faster-than-you-can tournament, leaving Charlie to limp along behind. Feeling sorry for herself. One foot throbbing again.

Edwina probably had ten years on anybody there except Sid and Homer. But they had
all
passed their life's testosterone peak.

Mostof the men—except for Sid—were wearing their shirts like turbans. Earl wore his under his baseball hat more like a Bedouin.

Charlie slapped at something she couldn't see biting her arm and hoped the Arabs up ahead were getting eaten alive. She was still trying to digest the word
trial
.

Somewhere in Charlie's fantasy world, Edwina's innocence would be proven before this whole nightmare reached the trial stage. And old Sheriff Ralph would be eating crow. Or turkey vulture.

Denial fed a good portion of Charlie's fantasy. She simply
had
to get home—to work she much preferred to this detecting. To a daughter who—The pain in her stomach made her foot feel like a coward. Charlie once again switched thought scenes and fast.

Chapter
23

The path was well worn and Charlie had no trouble finding the line camp even though the men had vanished from sight before she reached it. It was past lunchtime and the afternoon weather built as she watched.

A dust devil careened across the path ahead and wind stirred up the scratchy scents of sage and dead wood. Lightning lit the face of the cliff in front of her, etching the desert varnish splashed across it like stage paint.

That peculiar prestorm light, where the sun shines low under a darkening sky, lengthens shadows to stark angles, glows only on one side of things. Charlie notched up her pace despite her complaining feet.

The path ended at a wooden pole fence, unpainted, weather-grayed, forming the outer boundary of a corral. It made a large semicircle closing in on a sandstone cliff face at each end. A wooden chute for loading animals sagged inside it.

Desert weeds of mixed parentage crowded up to the chute as if demanding transportation out of here.

She stepped into a black half-moon hole yawning in the cliff and the weight of the sun lifted off her head and shoulders so suddenly she took a surprised intake of cool damp air. It was like entering a darkened movie theater, the light from outside blinding the eye to any solid forms, causing them to gradually emerge like the rows of seats and the people in them.

Like the seven men in various positions who'd gone still as stones and as silent the minute she'd entered. Not a gallant among them, they'd gone off and left her and now seemed hostile at her approach.

They'd beep talking about her.

And they weren't sure what she'd overheard. And she'd been so busy getting herself spooked by mother nature she hadn't overheard anything. Damn it.

During that instant tableau when their shapes firmed up gray out of nebulous blackness, Homer Blankenship knelt in the dirt with a plastic-wrapped sandwich in the hand he was pulling from the mouth of a bag.

John B. Drake hunkered next to him, hand and arm angled over to receive the sandwich. Hunkered in that odd Third World posture that's a substitute for chairs—legs folded double, thighs tight against chest and stomach, buttocks just off the dirt. Pretty limber for forty-five. Three minutes in that position and it would take a crane to get Charlie unfolded.

Mitch Hilsten looked to have been pacing. He lowered a gesturing arm. Earl Seabaugh had been studying the ceiling but glanced down now at Charlie with a flash of anger so sharp and sudden it felt like a blow. He tried to blink it away. Dean Goodacre and Sidney Levit perched on a boulder as if an audience for Mitch's presentation, twisting to look over their shoulders at her. Scrag Dickens relaxed on the dirt floor leaning against the rock wall at the back of the cavern, legs crossed at the ankles, head cocked to study her.

God, why hadn't she stopped outside to listen before barging in on this good-old-boy party?

Or was it just Charlie's paranoia interpreting this scene?

“What? I'm interrupting something?”

There was still a pause after she spoke that her paranoia construed as quick assessments of just how much she'd heard. They didn't know she hadn't listened outside. Lightning flashed white in the sky behind her and the forms in the tableau took on shadow and expression. The men may have been silent, but for a brief moment those expressions talked. Again there was fear and suspicion but it had suddenly been redirected toward Charlie.

And then the world righted and the people in it moved and spoke. Mitch Hilsten took on an oily expression like in
Trophies
when he was about to put the sting on Marlena whatwashername. Sid and Dean got up to offer her their rock. Homer rose to offer her the sandwich intended for John B., who pulled a little boy face and unbuckled his belt to get to his plastic canteen. Earl went back to studying the ceiling and Scrag patted the dirt next to him in invitation.

Charlie sat in the dirt like Scrag but not next to him, the cool dark dankness, the balogna sandwich with mustard and pickle, the sweet warm water, and the relief of being off her sore feet bringing her mood back to conciliatory, if not normality.

She should right now be sitting in her cool clean office on Wilshire anxiously awaiting word as to the fate of Tina Horton's
Southwestern Exposure
pilot for CBS. Barry Zahn at ZIA had called just before she left to say Carl Shapiro had promised to decide by today whether it would be on the fall schedule or put off once again. It had been one of those projects pitched, sold, and developed in record time and then it had languished.

But instead of biting her nails in her air-conditioned office Charlie sat sweaty, dirty, sunburned, with no fingernails to bite. On the dirt. Eating with unwashed hands. Dying to find her own privacy to pee.

Homer munched on his sandwich, trying to clear the residue of the pasty white bread out of the gap between his front teeth and talk at the same time. He explained that the hollowed-out bowls grooved into the surface of a low flat boulder were made by Anasazi women grinding seeds and grains with handheld stones.

The blackened roof was from cooking fires and the layered chiseled-flat rocks piled to the ceiling in one corner with mud plaster for mortar had once protected food from rats.

Homer was the only one who bothered to stoop and peer into an ancient hole of a doorway. “Last time I looked, it was rats living in there.”