Murder at Moot Point (33 page)

He started down the long flight of concrete steps lit by a milky globe on a pole every five feet or so. He stopped under the first one and turned to look up at her, those strange electric eyes glinting in the globe's light. “Charlie, I know you don't believe in it, but Paige swears you weren't really asleep when she got your fingerprints on Michael Cermack's revolver. She's seen my body when I've been having an OOBE and she swears that's what you were doing too.”

Charlie hated the cold finger of doubt playing up and down her vertebrae. “Try and make your deadline, and send me a copy of the manuscript when you send it to Morton and Fish. Plus copies of any correspondence. And Jack, if you ever OOBE again? Don't take me with you, okay?”

“I know I can't leave it alone. But I tell you what, Charlie Greene, if I ever see you on my bodiless travels I'll give you a sign. I'll do this.” He walked back up to her and mussed her hair again. Then he disappeared down the courthouse steps and into the fog.

Dawn was adding vague highlights to the fog but the sun hadn't breached the Coast Range yet when a weary Charlie and a wearier sheriff struggled out of a Moot County Sheriff's Department sedan and lowered themselves onto a driftwood log on the beach that had become the grave of the
Peter Iredale
.

“Why did you bring me here, Wes, you know what that wreck does to me.”

He chuckled short, like it hurt to even do that much. “Some ghosts need to be put to rest.”

“And why won't you tell me why you were rushing to the village so fast you mashed into Clara's old Ford? I don't care if the reason had nothing to do with me.”

He chuckled again and groaned for it. “Oh, Charlie Greene, you do have you an ego, don't you?”

“So?”

“So first things first.” The sheriff of Moot County pulled a chicken breast (original recipe) from the Kentucky Fried bag on his lap. “Us poor little injured men need strength.”

“Damn it, Wes—”

He stuffed a salty drumstick between her teeth. “I was rushing into Moot Point to tell you about a phone call I got at your cabin from your boss—Morse? After he read me the riot act and my rights, he ordered me to tell you he'd talked to your mother and learned about your problem with this wreck here and wanted you to know that, yes, you had seen it, a picture of it—sketch, he said—in the lobby of the bank building your office is in.”

Charlie tried to visualize the lobby. The whole building was in the process of being redecorated, and the lobby had been done first. There were all kinds of strange artwork on the walls. She looked out at the shadowy shape of the wreck emerging from the fog into the morning. “And that's one of them. It's just as you come out of the elevator on the ground floor.” She hugged the huge lawman and he gasped. “Oh, I'm sorry, but I feel so much better.”

“So you don't have to worry about nightmares and flying around in the night sky without your body.”

Charlie kissed his swollen, bruised nose gently. “Right, Sheriff. There're no such things as OOBE's.”

“Or things that go bump in the night. All that's now a—”

“Don't say it.”

“Moot point.” His eyes crinkled but his voice turned husky. “You sure you have to go home this morning?”

“Yes, but not right away maybe. I mean I do have a life and two jobs that need me. Then again, you did injure yourself trying to help me out of my superstitious—” Charlie jumped to her feet and the half-eaten drumstick fell to the sand.

“What's wrong? A bird crap on you?”

Charlie ran her fingers through the hair on top of her head. “Did you just see my hair move, Wes?”

“Probably just the wind.”

“There is no wind.”

After All

By the time Charlie and her buttery-smooth Toyota headed south, she and the sheriff had managed to rationalize away, as a vestige of an old nightmare, what had seemed to her an invisible hand mussing her hair.

She loved zooming along 101, and the gorgeous now sunny Pacific on her way to work she could handle. She was tired, glad to be heading home, pleased that the big sheriff had pleaded with her not to.

Mostly she was relieved to have avoided the lures of the alternative world she'd come uncomfortably close to in the last week. She'd take the rational any day.

The radio played sounds her tone-deaf ears couldn't appreciate but her spirit could celebrate. The windows were open to the sea air on one side of her and the forest on the other and she was in charge of her little world for a brief enjoyable moment.

“Back to Kansas, Toto.” Charlie Greene laughed and patted the dashboard. But she made one stop on her way out of Oregon. And that one was almost furtive. Charlie pulled in at a roadside greenhouse and bought a young potted aloe plant.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Charlie Greene Mysteries

1

Charlie Greene turned off the engine and rolled down the car window. When her eyes began to water from the fumes, she rolled the damned thing back up again.

Palm fronds peeking out from an expensive neighborhood on the other side of a privacy fence were drooping in the freeway air, too. Orangy-red roofs of new clay tile showed between the fronds in slices. They relieved the bleakness of a rush hour morning with slashes of color.

Charlie punched the office on her car phone and tried hard not to think of two-hundred-dollar Rollerblades. She tapped on the gray Toyota's gray steering wheel.

Five lanes of traffic sat idling poisons into the air on Charlie's side of the road, while all the cars in the opposing lanes zoomed by unobstructed. She'd left the fog behind shortly after leaving Long Beach, now it was just the usual haze clouding the air. But the sun was beginning to heat up the car through it, causing Charlie's pantyhose to start sticking uncomfortably.

“Congdon and Morse Representation, Inc.,” Gloria's New Jersey twang finally came over the line, and Charlie could hear the relentless soft click of the keyboard continue without hesitation. Anybody else would have left off the Inc., but not Gloria. Precise was Gloria.

“This is Charlie. I'm stuck in a grid on the 405 and won't make the Universal breakfast on time. Can Richard cover for me?”

“He left already to do that, Charlie, swearingeh under his breath. Is it really gridlock, or just Libby?” Gloria's conceit at being unencumbered by children was only one of her irritating traits. Nothing encumbered Gloria but her fingernails. Long, fire-engine red, with different tiny fake jewels set into each one, they were Gloria's glory. “Or did something odd and unexplainable happen to you like I've been saying? I'm tellingeh you, Charlie, it can't be long now. I can feel it.”

The only odd thing happening to me is Gloria Tuschman. “Is Larry in yet?”

Charlie dared to turn on the engine and the air conditioning, knowing she shouldn't keep throwing pollutants into the smog. But she needed to look good today.

“Everybody coming in this morning is in except you,” Gloria pointed out ominously. “And everybody but me has left again on some errand or other.” Larry, Charlie's assistant, had gone across the street to the Chevron to buy Gloria and himself Hostess Ding Dongs for their coffee break.

As soon as the receptionist started detailing the whereabouts of every last person at the office, Charlie cut her off. “I'll do my New York calling now and be in as soon as I can.”

New York was three hours ahead of time, and it was a nightmare to reach everyone before they went home. Of course, Charlie had found it equally difficult getting hold of the West Coast when she'd worked in New York.

Charlie Greene was the literary agent for Congdon and Morse. She handled screenwriters for the agency and served as contact with East Coast book publishers. She managed to complete calls now to a literary agency and a New York producer, and leave a message at McMullins Publishing before the gridlock suddenly opened up as mysteriously as it had closed in. As usual, she didn't pass a wreck or a tow truck or any sign of road construction to account for the traffic holdup. And, as usual, she wasn't as fresh as she would like to have been when she reached the office.

A talent agency on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, Congdon and Morse Representation, Inc. wasn't one of the best-known or more prestigious, but it had a few older stars on its roster, along with a fair number of up-and-comers. Although many more powerful agencies maintained their own imposing buildings, Congdon and Morse shared the fifth floor of the first Federal United Central Wilshire Bank of the Pacific building, a seven-story white stucco structure with black windows. Fortunately, tall palm tree stalks, sticking out of the sidewalk in front of it, didn't produce any small poofs of fronds until reaching the level of that fifth floor. The FFUCWB of P sat on a corner facing Wilshire with its drive-through banking across the side street, a paved alley running along the other side, its first floor halved in size to provide covered parking in back and two levels of parking underneath.

Charlie waved away the parking valet, swooped the Toyota down into its own stall on the first level, took the elevators up to the fifth, followed the carpeted hall until she came to a discreetly marked door, and buzzed the intercom. There was an even more discreet rear entrance that Richard Morse shared with a shrink at the back of the building's fifth floor, but the help had to use the front door.

“What do you want?” Charlie heard Larry's harried-sounding voice instead of Gloria's familiar insulting one. Gloria's voice could discourage more wannabes than a math teacher's.

“It's me, Charlie.” She had her own little card that would slide into the metal box next to the intercom and allow her entrance, but it was simply easier to buzz Gloria. She noted only two manila envelopes lying up against the door.

“Where is she?” she demanded as soon as Larry had let her in.

“Phone's driving me crazy. Our Gloria has disappeared on me.” Larry was petulant, California bronze, and big. Charlie often had to stop herself from hugging him. “She did it on purpose, the witch.”

“She didn't go far, her car's still down in the barn. Did she leave any Ding Dongs?” It was too late to even try to make the Universal breakfast.

“When I got back with them she was gone. More and more I like Richard's idea of installing voice mail,” Larry said, returning to the phones. The last time Gloria left on vacation, the temp had somehow shut down the system, and Richard (the Morse in Congdon and Morse) had threatened to replace the receptionist with voice mail.

Charlie grabbed a gooey cake and headed for the staff bathrooms down the private hall. There was no sign of Gloria in the ladies. It wasn't like her to leave her desk that long. When she took her lunch break she even turned the phones over to an answering service.

The hall was long, narrow, and dimly lit. At its end were the stairs to the VIP exit and a tinted window. Charlie peered into the stairwell, wondering briefly if Gloria had felt ill and had a sudden need for air. She couldn't imagine Gloria choosing anything but the public elevator, no matter how awful she felt. The spike heels she wore were bone crunchers. Charlie called down into the stairwell. Her voice echoed back to her from the floors above as well as those below.

Though the window looked dark from outside, she could see clearly into the alley that ran along the side of the building, the white tiered business buildings running along the other side to Charleville Boulevard, and the off-alley parking spots for the residences incongruously snuggled in behind the bank. A high concrete brick wall painted white with tall flowering bushes hanging over it ran parallel to the bank's rear and separated two parking spaces from the next residence. Just beyond it was the rusty-red of old tiles on a garage roof. A breeze set the leaves to fluttering on the wall, shadow-dappling the concrete below. Something in the bushes caught the sun in tiny glints before the breeze moved on across the alley to play with a discarded food wrapper.

A woman dressed for the office stepped out of a gate and walked toward the garage. She stopped partway there and picked up something red, looked around her, shrugged, and then stuck it in one of the huge garbage cans that lined the alley all the way to Charleville Boulevard.

Charlie turned back to the agency offices, catching herself on the metal railing that lined the stairwell as her heels slid on the gloss of the newly waxed floor. She stopped at a whisper behind her, but when she looked there was no one.

“Someone call me?” It had really been more like a sigh than a whisper. It almost sounded like someone had whisper-sighed, “trash can.” Charlie had extra-sensitive hearing, and often heard sounds that weren't there. She hated it.

She expected to find Gloria back at her desk, but Larry, still looking harried, motioned to her with a “we've got trouble” expression on his face.