Murder at Moot Point (3 page)

“See you haven't translated the menu into Japanese yet, Rose,” he said instead of answering her, and ordered pancakes and bacon.

“You got yourself a lot bigger worries right now than the Japanese, Sheriff.” She patted the top of his big head and took Charlie's order. Her slippers clapped measured applause as she shuffled off.

“When can I have my car back?” Charlie asked him, his change of mood from last night making her uneasy. Maybe that was part of law enforcement these days like teddy bears. Or maybe it was just that he didn't care for sunshine.

“Do you own a weapon, Charlie?” he said instead of answering her and leaned back into the painted bosom, part of his face shadowed from the light coming into the window next to them. Even the twinge of sympathy for her seemed to have been drowned in waves of exhaustion.

Charlie sipped at her coffee and stared out to sea. She could see the lighthouse from here too. It looked too good to be true, like a calendar picture. “There're knives in our kitchen but I don't own a gun. Guess my Toyota was a weapon last night, wasn't it?”

They sat in outward silence until their food arrived. Inwardly Charlie was talking over the possibilities with him. “Listen, I'm in some kind of serious shit here, right? Should I call my lawyer or what?” And he'd say, “You got one?” And she'd say, “A lawyer? Doesn't everyone?”

Charlie knew people who had lawyers. She wasn't one of them. Her egg came, over easy, and she chopped it up so the yolk ran and mixed it in with half the home fries and glanced up at Sheriff Wes. He was watching her plate, looking a little sick. Charlie had always done this to eggs. Was it a pathological sign?

She tried to peer between the wooden boobs into his eyes. “Listen, Sheriff Bennett, I'll say it again. I had been driving all day, hit bad weather. I'd had some trouble at home and I know I wasn't in great shape. But I still don't see how I could have hit and killed a grown woman on a bicycle and not known it, even in heavy fog. It just doesn't work. Now can I have my car back or what?”

“Your car is still under investigation. There are no signs of impact in the bodywork or paint immediately identifiable as being related to the death of Mrs. Glick or the destruction of her Schwinn. But we'll let the experts confirm that before we return your car.”

He would say no more until they'd eaten. Finally when the dishes were cleared he came out with it. “Charlie, Georgette Glick died of a bullet to the head. But her bike appears to have been struck and run over by a heavy object such as a motor vehicle.”

“You mean she was shot and dead before I ran over her?”

“She wasn't run over. Just the Schwinn.”

Chapter 3

The area in front of the Earth Spirit where the Toyota, Georgette Glick, and her bicycle had mysteriously come together in the fog was still cordoned off. A uniformed sheriff's deputy stood guard. He was talking to a tall lanky man in acid-washed jeans whose black hair was tied back with a ribbon but still reached halfway down his back. Oddly shingled bangs and side wisps curled and fluffed about his face as if he'd taken a blow dryer and a curling iron to it.

“Might know it was a California license plate,” the deputy muttered and then looked sheepish when he saw Charlie and the sheriff approach.

Wes Bennett gave him a stony look and introduced the other man to Charlie as “Brother Dennis.”

Brother Dennis was fifty if he was a day. He had arrow-straight posture and no paunch but the grooves and lines in his face were accentuated by the improbable flat black of his hair. He nodded at Charlie, studying her closely, as Rose had.

She looked away to the graveled area supposedly protected by bands of bright tape strung between street repair posts weighted with sandbags. It seemed everyone had tracked through the blood and stains on the ground, including a small animal. Probably the house cat she'd heard.

“How could you not have known about the gunshot wound last night?” she asked the law.

“Too much dark and fog and hair. Not enough blood.” Sheriff Wes jingled change deep in his pockets. “Seemed so obvious she'd been run over—dumbest fuck-up I've ever pulled on a crime scene. Can't wait to read all about it in the papers.”

“Election's not for a year yet, Wes,” Brother Dennis said. “Maybe by that time people will have forgotten this for something bigger you saved the day on. Are you going to arrest Miss Greene here? Going to have to do something.”

Frank Glick stepped out onto the porch of his immobile home with a cup in his hand, still in his safari outfit. It looked like he'd slept in it, and he would have looked less ridiculous if he'd had a tan. But like everybody here he was as white as baby powder. He stared morosely at Charlie, forcing her eyes back to the blood and footprints. She noticed a couple of gray hairs stuck in the stain and swallowed a throat lump so big it made her eyes tear. Was she really about to be arrested for the murder of a woman she'd never seen alive?

“Charlie, I've plugged the phone back in. You can call New York now.” Jack Monroe literally bounced across the porch of his shop and down the steps. “Must be halfway through the business day back there. See you've met my agent, Brother Dennis.”

“Your agent.” Brother Dennis nearly choked on his scoff.

“She's got me a deal with Morton and Fish. Must be a good agent, Brother.”

They dueled with their eyes, the tall man and the short, until Brother Dennis broke into a slow smile that threatened to join his ears. His teeth were spotted with stained plastic fillings. “For that pretense of a book you're working on, Jack? You don't know a chakra from a hole in a bucket. What's Bad Dog have to say about this?”

“What's he know about books? Can't even read.” But Jack had lost the eye duel.

“Who's Bad Dog?” Charlie asked her client when the communication with New York had ended.

“My spirit guide.” They sat on the unmade bed, under the prophetic sign, the telephone between them. “He was a member of the Modoc tribe. His father was Running Dog and his mother, Lame Deer.”

“I would have thought Mad Dog, for some reason,” Charlie said, really trying to get into this. Ten percent, after all, was ten percent. “But Bad Dog—”

“Mad Dog was his sister.”

“Right.” Charlie was clearly out of her element here. “Look, Jack, I have to call home. May I use your phone? I have my card.”

“It never ends, does it?” her mother laid into her right away. “You've got your own daughter to raise now. How do you expect her to turn out normal if you can't stay out of trouble yourself?”

“I told you it's all a mistake, Edwina. Can't you ever take my side on anything? Where is Libby?”

“She's going to need braces on those teeth and soon, got a mouth just like you did. You can't put this off any longer.”

“Is she there?”

“I knew I shouldn't have come out here. If I hadn't, you wouldn't have gone traipsing off up there and this whole business wouldn't have happened.” Edwina lived in Colorado where Charlie had grown up and where Libby was born. A biology professor at the university in Boulder, Edwina had dropped in on her only daughter and grandchild before a planned field trip to the desert. Charlie's work called for a good bit of travel and finding someone to baby-sit a fourteen-year-old, who was a baby-sitter herself, was something of a nightmare. “What if you can't get back before I have to leave?”

“I'll get back, Edwina. I've left her before. Maggie in the condo next door keeps track of her for me sometimes. Can I talk to Libby?”

“I'm here alone except for the cat.”

“We don't have a cat.”

“Remember when you brought that smelly schnauzer home one day? Followed you from school? Well—”

“Edwina, we can't afford a cat.”

“I couldn't afford Bowzer either, as I remember.”

“You tell her to take that animal to the shelter the minute she gets back. Do you hear me?” Edwina could never get enough revenge on her daughter by way of her granddaughter.

“Cute little thing, black and white. Name's Tuxedo.”

“Edwina, I'm going to hang up now, but you have my daughter by the phone tonight so I can talk to her from the motel or the jail or wherever I am. And that kitty damn well better be outta there when the phone rings. Edwina?” Her mother of course had gotten in the last word by hanging up first.

The lowest terrace of the village of Moot Point sat on a ledge about fifteen feet above the beach. A wooden stairway, complete with handrails, continued on down to the sand from all four of the streets that ended there. The horizontal street on that first terrace held what commercial district the town possessed—a craft shop, Rose's, tourist cabins, an art gallery, an antique store, a community center, several boarded-up buildings and a few falling down, an occasional vacant lot.

Charlie Greene pulled at a can of diet Pepsi and wandered up to the next terrace, still seething. Tuxedo, Jesus. Vet bills, kitty shots, stinking litter boxes, torn curtains, chewed houseplants. On top of the national debt to straighten Libby's teeth. “
Every child needs a pet, Charlie, it's part of having a home.
”

“
Libby doesn't need a pet. She's got a boyfriend who follows her around like a faithful dog.
”

“
Wouldn't you rather she became involved with a harmless little animal than become too involved with droopy old Doug?
”

“
A cat isn't going to ward off that danger. Ask Edwina. She thought Bowzer the schnauzer would take some of the pressure off my teen-raging hormones and was she wrong.
”

“
You're about to be arrested for the murder of a woman you never heard of until last night and you can still waste energy ranting on about how wrong your mother was?
”

“
Oh, piss off.
”

On this street, and the other two above, the houses were built to face the ocean and attached to the hillside so you looked at the roof of the buildings on the downside and the stairs leading to the front doors of those on the upside. This way the neighbor across the street didn't block your view. It made for some tortuous driveways though. Most of the homes were modest. There were no sidewalks and little lawn grass, but the yards dripped flowers. Charlie thought she'd seen roses in southern California, but there were some here the size of cabbages. She couldn't imagine how the bushes and spindly stalks held them up.

Charlie climbed to the top street and decided the whole village wasn't the size of a reasonable subdivision. The bay was formed by a long spit to the south and the promontory with the lighthouse to the north. Jack's store and the Glick's house, along with two more of the permanent mobile homes, faced the bay from the north side along the road that came into town from the highway and continued on out and up to the lighthouse.

The belated crime scene crew (which hadn't been called in until this morning when it was light and the news had spread of the bullet hole in Mrs. Glick's head) piled their samples or whatever and their cameras into the van. The deputy was hosing down what little remained of the gore when a battalion of cyclists swooped down from the highway and nearly collided with the official traffic headed the other way. The stream of bicycles managed to swerve in formation and eventually pull to a bunched-up stop in front of Rose's. They dismounted like cowboys and left their wheeled steeds lying flat in the vacant lot next to the restaurant with a delegated watchman.

“You going to toss that empty pop can or let me recycle the sucker?” Brother Dennis said behind her and laughed at her surprised yelp. He took the Pepsi can and mashed it flat between the heels of each hand. “Waste not, want not.”

“Were you following me?”

“I live here.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder to an oddly shaped building that appeared to be mostly roof. “I thought you were following me.” He and the can disappeared into the forest next to his house and Charlie was left with the impression of a scrawny wood nymph of exaggerated height.

By the time Charlie got down to the main street, Rose herself stood on the sidewalk in front of her eatery supervising the removal of the cleated footwear from the last of the cyclists. Pairs of such shoes lined the wooden sidewalk in rows stretching from one end of the building to the other. It made Charlie think of the old West and of sheriffs collecting sidearms when the cowboys came to town.

Speaking of sheriffs, Wes Bennett moved away from the small gathering on the steps of the Earth Spirit and sauntered down the street toward her. Charlie stopped and waited for him, trying on a hopeful smile that felt more like a wince. “So, am I under arrest or what?”

“Let's take a walk on the beach and have a talk.”

“I think Brother Dennis is scandalized that I'm not in handcuffs already,” she said as they descended the steep stairs to the sand. “Why
Brother
Dennis? Because of some kind of religion or just flaky stuff like Jack's store?”

“God knows,” Wes said heavily but again she was struck by the graceful almost stealthy way he moved across the sand. “This town's full of Grape-Nuts. But other than an improper mushroom or two they haven't given me much trouble.”

He went on to explain that, although there was some overlap, the village was made up of four basic subcultures. The true natives were mostly retired fishermen or lumbermen or their widows who lived on pensions and social security in the smaller wooden bungalows on the terraces. The second group were retired citizens from other places, like Frank, who'd come from California to Oregon where a piece of Pacific view was still affordable.

“They tend to live in those double trailer homes off minor investments and pensions and social security, but they aren't rich by any means. Then there's the merchant class trying to lure the tourist to these shores. They have the nicer homes on the hill as a rule. And last, the New Wavers or Agers or whatever they are. I still can't get a handle on these guys. Warlocks and witches is what they seem to me, Grape-Nuts one and all. But I'm just a country boy who wouldn't understand. Aren't many in any of the groups who'll see forty again.”