Murder in a Hot Flash (15 page)

“I can't believe it, Charle—”

“Oh, knock it off.”

But it was a knock at the door that saved the superstar. Charlie yanked it open to stand eyeball to eyeball with Ralph Sumpter.

Her day was complete. And she hadn't even had breakfast.

“I didn't think Mormons drank coffee,” Charlie told the sheriff, sitting across from him and beside Mitch at the River Palace Café and Grill. The sheriff ordered a pot brought to the table and refilled his cup before she'd taken a sip of her milk.

“Bap-
tist,
” he pronounced, drilling her to the back of the booth with a hard stare. “South-
errn
.”

Charlie felt instantly like a fallen woman. But he gazed at Mitch with cloying respect.

Hey, you found
him
in that room too, don't forget. It's always the woman's fault because she asks for it. A guy asks for it because he's supposed to. Like nature tells him to.

You're just jealous. It's penis envy.

No, it's privilege envy.

The special was huevos rancheros and you could get it with pinto beans instead of yuppie black, and corn tortillas instead of pasty flour. And they'd all ordered it. Wel-l-l, Charlie'd used up a lot of energy last night. And the doctor had warned her not to skip meals.

“Wanted to tell you how much the wife and I enjoyed
Bloody Promises,
” the official prick told the superstar. “When you died I didn't think I was ever going to get her to quit bawling.” He nodded as if thinking about it awhile and then refocused on the present. “Suppose you heard about the watchman out at the mill? That's all we need on top of a murder. Getting to the bottom of that one's going to gain us nothing but ridicule.” He poured himself more coffee. “Why in my county? Why?”

“Plenty of lawmen have lost their jobs over this kind of thing,” Mitch said importantly.

“Don't I know. No matter how things appear during a scare, they look pretty silly by the time the next election rolls around. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't.”

And of course good old Mitch had to tell good ol' Ralph about the sort-of-shadow thing over the generator truck and they proceeded to argue over whether unidentified flying objects came from outer space or another dimension.

“Oh stop it,” Charlie worked up the nerve to say, refusing to be seen and not heard. “If there was really such a thing as UFOs somebody with a camcorder would have captured them on video long ago. And they'd get something more recognizable than nebulous shadows too.”

That at least gave them pause and gave her time to do a jump cut. “Sheriff, you never did tell me why you came to my room at the Pit Stop. Was there something you wanted?”

Other than to discover me
en flagrante
.

“Well now, yes, there was, Miz Greene. Two things. Just want you to know the serologist has finished with your mother's camper and Jeep. He took samples out at the campground and the vehicles are still there. You can move them when you're ready. Serologists study body fluids of all kinds. He can pin down identities even from dried semen, sweat, blood … and the other thing is your mother wants to see you.” He goggled meaningfully between Charlie and the limp hunk beside her. “If you can spare the time, that is.”

Charlie sat in the tiny interrogation room again with the woman cop and Edwina. Edwina looked rested, almost happy, as if she thrived on jail cells. And she knew exactly what she wanted.

“I want you out of here, Charlie. As a mother I have the right to request that. I want you home looking after my granddaughter and I want the high-falutin' lawyer to stay in Salt Lake. I'll take care of my own problems, thank you.”

“What should I do with Howard's Jeep?”

“What?”

“And the tent camper? And your house in Boulder? I mean, if you're going to fry for a murder you didn't commit they're going to come after me to help make decisions on your possessions. The state takes a third, the lawyer takes a third—have you left a will for what little taxes and legal fees won't eat up? Oh, and then there's CU. Do you want me to call the head of the department or the president of the university? I don't know the protocol here. And do you want to be cremated or buried next to Howard?”

“Charlie, stop it.”

“No, I'm not going to. You may not care what happens to you at the moment, but I'm the one left to deal with it if you cop out.”

“I always thought I'd be the one to say that. What do you want?”

“Talk to me.”

“I can't. You don't understand.”

“Then talk to the lawyer. But talk to somebody.”

Rita Latham was a slender, graying woman in a Chanel suit of red and black. Her gaze was direct and mischievous, her lips thin and pressed tightly between thoughts as if working hard not to grin. “So, what's the score here with your mom? She's holding back on me.”

“Yeah, me too. But I've got a gut feeling,” literally, “that it doesn't have anything to do with Gordon Cabot.”

“She's going to ‘let' me represent her only if I promise to help you and your daughter take care of the aftermath of her state-induced demise for the axing of Cabot, which she claims she didn't do but doesn't care if she ‘fries' for. This is a university professor?”

“Please stick with us, Ms. Latham. I can't get anything out of her either but I haven't talked to everyone else involved yet.” Charlie described the meager results of her search so far. “I haven't talked to anyone who couldn't have picked up her ax on the way by or anyone who might not wish to use one on Gordon Cabot. And I'm sure the sheriff is sure he has his murderer and isn't looking any further.”

“Your mother's in really deep, Charlie, I won't lie to you. You keep asking questions and help me and I'll help her. But we have to find out what's behind this brick-wall attitude she's putting up. She doesn't really come on as suicidal so much as—”

“Resigned.”

“That's it. Resigned. Why? Help me.”

Charlie and Mitch headed out of town in his Bronco that evening to find the cliff road where Ed Buchanan had been found wandering. Charlie visualized the night watchman as an older man, in his sixties maybe, wearing bib overalls, his eyes red-rimmed and lonely-looking.

She'd spent the afternoon out at Dead Horse Point, with little useful result for Rita Latham but with a dismaying revelation for Charlie Greene.

They were traveling along a highway next to the river and deep in the bottom of a canyon. Fading sunlight still highlighted the canyon wall above them but the river was shadowed for night. Mitch turned off on a rutted road that started up a side canyon and Charlie wished she'd stayed in Moab.

“The police will have gone over it pretty thoroughly,” she said.

“Doesn't mean they'd tell us if there was something there. Even Sumpter knows something's up but can't admit it or he'll lose the next election. You heard him this morning.”

Get real, the watchman drank too much and some mean-spirited jokesters drove him up there and left him. Of course he couldn't remember how he got there. But Charlie didn't have the heart to dump on Mitch's fantasies and didn't voice the obvious aloud.

This was not a very good road to be traveling on at night.

Charlie wondered what Libby was up to about now. She'd have had cheerleading practice after school. And that exam in chemistry. She probably went to Lori Schantz's after practice.

Lori's parents had never been married to anyone else. Lori's father was a lawyer who could afford to keep his wife home raising Lori and her younger brother. The woman played bridge and even baked cookies. And she didn't approve of her daughter's coming home with a latchkey Libby. Which made sense.

“Mitch, the fact that all those noted scientists say the whole UFO thing is a lot of bull, that there's no proof any of it exists—doesn't that mean anything to you?”

“Only means they haven't proven it exists,” he said. “Doesn't mean it doesn't.”

“I suppose you believe in ghosts and the whole enchilada.”

“I don't even believe in life after death.”

“Just because no one has proved that ghosts exist,” Charlie countered, “doesn't mean they don't.”

“That is not fair.”

Charlie concentrated on wondering why handsome was out in actors. Not the classic, perfect, surgically induced kind—but the natural with warts and unaffected charisma kind. Mitch had lots of moles on his back but it was still gorgeous.

They were on a shelf road again, one big rock with a ledge cut in its side, rather than merely a rocky shelf. Their ledge tilted toward the abyss like ledges always do. Charlie closed her eyes and breathed a lot. But she could see the faded orangy-red tint of the rock in her head.

Soooo … she concentrated on wondering what Larry might be doing with her job. How the
Hostage
project might have fared at Universal. She didn't want to think about the road or about the afternoon's earlier revelation. She'd talked to only two people out at Dead Horse Point and both from the wrong crew.

Earl Seabaugh and Tawny had sat with her on Edwina's concrete picnic table and argued with each other across her face.

The revelation was that the director of photography believed Edwina murdered Cabot. It hadn't occurred to Charlie that anyone but the stupid sheriff of Grand County could conceive of such idiocy.

“Earl's a guy, he doesn't understand women,” Tawny hastened to assure Charlie. “Besides, he and your mother had a blowout, and we're talking major.”

“Charlie, everybody within twenty miles of the woman had major trouble with Edwina.” Earl had looked serious for once. “I like you and I don't want to hurt you, but you have to consider the possibility that the sheriff is right about this. I'm not sure she's quite sane, are you?”

Charlie'd had about enough time to grab the pain in her middle before John B. came up to claim his employees.

“Did you love Libby's father?” Mitch asked now, breaking into her mental replay. Why was he so fascinated by Libby's father?

“We were totally unsuited. I could see that even at sixteen.”

“Then why did you have sex with him?”

“I wasn't thinking of having his baby … it was just … it just happened.” It had been a fun, freaky night in the local graveyard—Columbia Cemetery where the famous outlaw Tom Horn was buried among staunch pioneer families and only one block from the little brick house with the rats in the basement. The night had been unusually quiet and unusually warm—several couples, several six-packs. And a mood of some kind, Charlie supposed now. Libby had been conceived on the outlaw's grave. Charlie'd always wondered if there was something symbolic in that. “Do you usually ask such personal questions?”

“I don't usually let myself get so curious about people,” Mitch said. “Must be the scenery.”

Charlie opened her eyes and regretted it. The mammoth rock they were on overlooked the river and its canyon and the tiny road below. There was a corresponding rock cliff across the river and a millennium of sky with a helicopter hovering insectlike.

The cramping in her stomach and the tingles under her skin from breasts to thighs subsided when she looked away from “the scenery.”

“Did I ever tell you about the problem I have with heights?”

“And all the time I thought you were closing your eyes and breathing that way because you were fantasizing about me,” Mitch said and the Bronco rumbled on to the next switchback.

At the top of the mesa the scenery was, predictably, even worse. But the road ended on a broad flat expanse that lured her out to see what Mitch was investigating by flashlight.

The sun was nothing more than a colorful display in the west and even that was paling. The inevitable chilly breeze sneaked inside Charlie's clothes with her to dry the sweat induced by her trip up here, and harden her nipples. She wore a sweatshirt and he his handy sheepskin. Both smelled heavily of Room Eight at the Pit Stop Motel.

There were whorls in the rock dust under their feet mixed with car tracks and shoe prints.

“Probably a dust devil or two or three,” Charlie assured him before he could come up with something ridiculous.

“How would Ed Buchanan get here?” he asked. “Walk it the whole way?”

“Mitch, you realize that if you're looking for evidence of something … stranger than science will admit to, that's what you'll find, don't you?” How could normal rational people fail to see the obvious?

He studied her face with that mesmerizing scrutiny he was famous for on camera and left her to inspect other whorls in the dust.

She watched night advance on dusk. “Mitch, do you think Edwina has really gone crazy enough to kill someone?”

His answer came measured and thoughtful. “You're the one who's pointed out the personality change, Charlie. This is the only personality of Edwina's I've known. I like her anyway and don't want to think she could do that. But if Rita has to go after an insanity plea to save her, well—Charlie?”

His shape was a shadow above the cone of light at the end of his flashlight. It came up behind him as he came toward her. A dark piece of night that grew ever larger as it rose slowly above the rim. It was only a patch of dense fog. A cloud. Early dew. Ground mist rising up from the valley on the other side. It had distinctive nonwispy edges. Didn't it?

No, it didn't. Charlie was susceptible to suggestion. She realized she was pointing at it, the other hand over her mouth.

“Very funny, Charlie. All you cynics gotta be wise guys.” But Mitch turned to look over his shoulder. “I don't see anything. Jesus, Charlie, stop!”

It took a second for Charlie Greene to realize she'd been backing away from the dark thing she couldn't see now either. It was a miracle she hadn't tripped on the uneven rock surface. Just as her brain ordered her feet to stop her backward progress, her rearmost foot hit empty space. Charlie lost her balance and followed it over the side.