Murder in a Hot Flash (29 page)

Scrag claimed to have been terribly shaken by the cameraman's murder but the lure of fame, fortune, and world travel is very powerful to someone whose libido demands an image that life consistently thwarts. And so tonight, he had been asked to lie again, this time to prove his prowess as an actor.

‘“An audition,' John B. called it,” Scrag told them after the sheriff and his powerful deputies had pulled the fighting men apart. This time Scrag had been supposed to convince as many people as possible that a UFO sighting had happened out on the tip of Dead Horse Point.

While Charlie Greene had been greasing herself up again with soothing lotion in the bathroom—the press, the sheriff, a good many campers, most of the rangers, Sidney Levit, and even the lady lawyer had fallen for Scrag's acting and hurried out to the overlook at the end of the Point.

Looking out the car window at the alien scenery now, Charlie could see how all those people could fall for the desert rat's story. Jagged black tree skeletons pointed at dark heavens blinking with misty starlight. Every bush, every cactus, every stunted tree, every mound or weed or sand hill had an angular moon shadow. It was like driving through an unfocused cubist landscape. It could all easily put you in an “alien” frame of mind. Then again Charlie had experienced near-death, near-rape, and been hissed at by a big live buzzard.

“It'd be dead easy to see flying saucers and little green men and stuff in this place. That's why Hollywood comes out here to make it all happen,” she told the lawyer. “Did you see anything out at the overlook?”

“No, but we wasted a lot of time looking, or imagining we saw something. Then we noticed Scrag, who'd sent the rest of us packing out there, hadn't bothered to join us. That alerted the sheriff and Sidney Levit.”

Scrag had stayed behind to try to convince Mitch, who should have been an easy target for that sort of thing, but Mitch began to smell a rat (a human one) and started looking for Charlie. Scrag eventually let his conscience catch up with him and began worrying about her too.

“I wonder why Mitch didn't fall for it,” Charlie said. “He really believes in UFOs.”

“Maybe he was more worried about you. Or maybe he's not as naive as you think,” Rita said and suddenly stood on the brakes.

“What?” Charlie hit the end of the seat belt and bounced back.

“That stupid rat, it ran right out in front of me.”

Charlie let that sit in her weary brain until they reached the highway and headed for Moab and the motel and Edwina before she asked, “Was it—the rat—like, staggering drunk?”

“Yeah. Really weird.”

“Did we hit it?”

“Yeah, yuck.”

They drove in silence for a few miles, then Charlie asked, “Would you really have used menopause as a defense for Edwina?”

“If it came down to it, I'd have used anything. And you know, from what I've learned of the whole situation tonight, that was a large part of the problem.” Rita shivered, and sent the windows back up to close out the night. “Except it was male menopause.”

Chapter
35

Charlie sat ensconced in the breakfast nook of her modest but costly nest in Long Beach, scarfing down Mrs. Beesom's hot tuna noodle casserole with peas and potato chips. And Maggie's homemade rolls and salad.

“Tastes like hot lunch in grade school.” Libby's elegant features warped with distaste. She pushed the Tuna Supreme to the edge of her plate and buttered another roll. “Why does she always bring this over?”

Charlie thought it tasted wonderful, real comfort food. She was so grateful to be alive. And home. And sitting across from Miss Pucker Puss.

Maggie Stutzman grinned at Charlie and passed the beautiful brat the salad bowl. “Try some veggies. You need more than bread and milk.”

Libby speared a tomato wedge and a carrot slice. Everything else was the wrong color.

Besides the casserole, Betty Beesom, who lived behind Charlie's patio, had brought over a clip from one of her birding magazines about turkey vultures. Charlie had thanked her profusely and dumped it in the trash with a shudder the moment her neighbor left.

The house had been returned to reasonably good order, but Charlie would have to replace most of the blinds. What had they done, swung on them? There was not a lot she could say now though.

Libby's indiscretions had at least been passably private, while Charlie's were broadcast worldwide in living color. When Charlie reluctantly broached the subject of her own misdeeds, Libby blushed a deep red with ugly white blotches.

“I just don't want to talk about it, okay?”

Charlie'd been stunned. First of all, because she didn't know the kid could blush. And second, Libby never missed a chance to criticize her mother or gain leverage in the Greene household's battle of wills.

“She's not sick,” Maggie had assured Charlie. “But nobody wants to think of their parents in a sexual context. How would you approach Edwina if she were the one on national television accused of an affair with a famous sex object?”

Charlie got the point. She also knew she hadn't, by any means, heard the end of this.

Mrs. Beesom had blushed, too, when she handed over the casserole and buzzard clip. Charlie didn't even want to think about what was going on in that mind. It was a toss-up as to which topped the woman's priorities—her church, or wild birds, or her neighbors' private lives.

Maggie was all cool amusement and patient smirks, knowing she'd get the whole story in due time. And then, of course, there was thegoddamnedcat. Tuxedo took a header into the side of the refrigerator while riding the area rug that had been in front of the sink, did a 180, and gallumphed back into the dining/living room and up the stairs. The gallumphing continued above their heads.

“Probably just took a dump,” Libby informed Maggie, throwing several feet of platinum hair over a haughty shoulder. “Always turns him on.” The kid pried a tomato bit out of her braces with a fingernail and asked Charlie, without quite meeting her eyes but with the return of the interesting coloring, “So, uh … is Grandma going to be all right?”

“Well, she's no longer in any trouble with the law obviously—but something's still the matter and was, even before Gordon Cabot got his brain carved with her ax. She won't talk to me, but I know I haven't heard the last of that one either. I sure hope it's not her job. I will
never
understand that woman, never.”

Edwina had presented her daughter a hangdog look and a pat on the arm when they parted, and given a long weary sigh.

“Oh Jesus, there's trouble coming down the freeway on that one,” Charlie said grimly now. “But all I can do is wait for the collision.”

Her daughter and her best friend rolled their eyes knowingly at each other. They always sided with Edwina when Edwina was safely off in Colorado.

“Was she really in that much danger of being accused of Cabot's murder?” Maggie asked.

“Boy, was she. Those dried blood chips in Howard's Jeep
were
Gordon Cabot's. We all wondered what had happened to the murderer's clothing.” John B. had owned several sets of his standard locationwear—jeans, red-and-black-plaid flannel shirts, and hiking boots. He'd stashed those with the blood and brains somewhere outside the campgrounds and hitched a ride back on the generator truck, appearing to Mitch to have been the last of the diners at his RV to arrive that fateful night.

In reality, he'd been among the first and had sent Earl Seabaugh off to invite Sid to dinner to discuss Cabot's misuse of the landscape as a ruse. He'd grabbed Edwina's ax and set off to murder Earl.

“You see, both Earl and Gordon Cabot were bald as buzzards.” And in the dark and in his haste, the director had struck down the wrong man. “He thought that Earl and Tawny had discovered his murder of Tawny's husband, Ben, years ago. I don't think they had a clue, but it must have been working on him all these years and living with Tawny had to keep reminding him of Ben. She told me he was going through some kind of change of life and that might have made him unstable.

“John B. planned for Tawny and Earl to meet accidental ends on a dangerous location. But then when he saw me and Edwina—who was acting like a true nut case—arguing over dinner and the ax so handy, he suddenly had an even better idea.”

When Lew flew in the reporters and John B. took Howard's Jeep to intercept him, the director had picked up the incriminating set of clothing on the way, leaving the blood chips. Then he threw the clothes over a cliff into an all but inaccessible canyon before he reached Lew's plane.

Only recently, and after two more murders, a group of rock climbers had brought out the plaid shirt and alerted authorities, thinking there might be the body of a fallen climber somewhere below.

“Well, what about the rats and bats?” Maggie dished herself another helping of Betty Beesom's casserole and then dished half of it back, ruefully.

“There's this hilarious show on the local cable channel I watched my last morning in Moab.” Charlie slid out of the nook's high-backed bench seat to make coffee. There were still plenty of sore places on and in her poor body to remind her of the Canyonlands of Utah. “And this guy, sitting behind a bouquet from the sponsoring local mortuary, was wondering if the strange animal behaviors around Moab lately had been caused by the release of uranium into the Colorado River from the tailings pile next to the shut-down mill at the edge of town. And the APC's pumping of that water into the potash holes. Something about wildlife getting nuked from the evaporation process, or getting into its salty leftovers, or something.”

Only blank looks from the two at the table.

“Potash, it's used as a slurry in oil drilling and in fertilizers and it's a basic mineral for all kinds of things, even dietary supplements.” Charlie had learned this from one of the canned messages in the Visitors' Center's basement that fateful night at Dead Horse Point State Park.

Still no reaction that made sense from her audience.

Charlie tried again. “Hey, the drunken rats and bats I saw were two thousand feet above the river. That's not where they get their drinking water and they don't take vitamins.”

Maggie and Libby stared at Charlie expectantly, waiting for the punch line.

“But Edwina thinks their strange behavior is because of all the filming and tourist disruption in the area. Mitch Hilsten and the
National Inquirer
now, they think it's an alien presence that we can't see or hear that disrupts the bats' sonar system and drives the rats drunk because they, too, can hear what we can't.”

Charlie stopped laughing when she realized she laughed alone. She ought to be the expert on aliens. She lived with them.

“You know, after the weird time you had in the Canyonlands,” Maggie said, “that doesn't sound so far-fetched.”

“Potash—potassium carbonate, hydroxide, any of several compounds containing potassium—particularly soluble compounds such as potassium oxide, chloride, and various sulfates,” quoth the blond metal mouth, fresh off a chemistry exam cram. Full of half-digested facts she'd soon forget when her brain cells were needed for something more important. Cute guys, for instance.

Libby wrinkled her forehead with effort. “One of those is also used, I think, to help out the way hormones work or something … maybe the guy behind the funeral flowers is right.”

“Libby!” Charlie burned her finger on the stove burner under the teakettle and grabbed a paring knife to cut an end off the aloe plant she'd picked up in Oregon several years ago.

The goo you can squish out of the cut ends of the cactuslike leaves seems to erase the pain and prevent blistering. It was the only houseplant his royal highness hadn't eaten down to the potting soil and then barfed all over the carpet.

“I wonder if rats have PMS.”

“Maggie!”

“What,” the most formidable teen in the world said, meeting Charlie's eyes head on now, “you're such a big deal you know everything? You know for a fact everybody else's ideas are wrong just because you can't explain it all? Like, who are you to say there's no such thing as an alien presence?”

Chapter
36

Mitch Hilsten arrived at the party at Richard Morse's home in Beverly Hills with Cyndi Seagal on his arm. They made a truly stunning pair. She, tiny and dark, with her medically enhanced tits blossoming out of the top of her dress. He, darkly tanned against a white dinner jacket.

Of course everybody watched Charlie for her reaction and even some of the cameras were aimed her way. Her escort, however, was even more gorgeous. He managed to guide her away from approaching reporters without touching her.

“Okay, I can almost believe you'd sleep with him,” Larry Mann said, “but not for the good of the agency. Independent guy that you are.”

“I didn't.” Charlie snagged a glass of champagne off a passing tray and a cracker covered with ground black pepper, capers, and a huge naked shrimp from another. Then the shrimp reminded her of herself at the top of the steps at the Visitors' Center when press and posse arrived together and she dropped it in an artificial floral display.

“Didn't sleep with him? Or didn't do it for the agency?” Larry enjoyed the camera and video attention. People at all savvy to Charlie's particular echelon in the industry (lower) knew that he was her assistant (secretary) and both were here on command. But Congdon and Morse was hardly a well-known agency and many of those present were impressed by her “date.” And who knew but what some producer would see his picture in the trades and think, “Who is the hunk? Get me that hunk. He's perfect for the Handsome Hunk part. We'll make him a star!”

“Thanks for helping out with the condo damage in Long Beach, Larry. I really appreciate it and I don't know what Maggie would have done without you.” They were speaking through false smiles and sounded weird. But right now it was what they looked like that mattered.