Killer Commute (2 page)

“This is the whole problem, Mrs. Beesom. Hairy'd—” But Charlie registered that Hairy wasn't alone in there just as she opened the door. An arm and a hand and a head hung out over the seat. Some part of the man's body dripped blood onto the concrete courtyard as Hairy flew into Charlie's arms.

The cat trembled. His breath smelled a lot like Fancy Feast fishy supreme. He was a lush longhair, and when he puffed up he looked like a porcupine on helium. He was black and white, too, but all over in patches, like a cow. Feminine instinct told Charlie she should comfort him. Common sense told her she should see if the man hanging out of Jeremy's Trailblazer was dead and then call the proper emergency folks.

But plain old selfishness uttered, “Shit, my vacation doesn't even start until tomorrow.”

Before she registered that Betty Beesom's face had disappeared from the car window opposite (but after Hairy Granger detonated a thick layer of cat hair in her face, racked a set of razor-wire claws down her cheek, and erupted out of her arms), Charlie realized that the man in Jeremy Fiedler's Trailblazer was Jeremy Fiedler. And he was quite dead.

CHAPTER 2

V
EHICLES WITH LIGHT
bars flashing packed the compound, fortress, retreat. But they were oddly quiet.

Maybe Charlie was in shock. Maybe she was in denial. The official personnel spoke low if at all, gestured, nodded. Cameras took pictures with flashes but no sound. Video cameras made barely perceptible whirrs. An occasional beeper prompted someone to bleep a cell-phone number, speak in secretive monosyllables and
hmmms.
In the old days, like maybe a year or two ago, Charlie's fortress would have filled with the static of two-way radios.

The only real racket now was two cats squaring off out in the back alley.

“They” wouldn't even let Charlie comfort Mrs. Beesom, who had come to and then passed out again when she saw Jeremy and the blood on Charlie's sweatshirt.

“Hairy flew out of the car and I caught him but he panicked and scratched my cheek,” Charlie told the guy next to her in one of the cars. He was clicking computer keys while another official person got some more footage of her in her fuzzy slippers and bloody sweats, picking up sound on a small mike on the camera's front. Next they'd be taking DNA with a technomagic spoon.

“Harry. There were two men in the Trailblazer?”

“
Hairy,
the cat, he—”

“Cats don't fly.”

“Neither do men.”

“All that blood on your shirt came from a scratch on your cheek left by a cat? I want that shirt.”

Charlie started to pull it up over her head and thought again, but not in time. “I forgot. I'm not wearing a bra.”

“I noticed.”

“Well, I just started my vacation and vowed to be seriously comfortable for a whole week.” She didn't have much in the way of boobs, anyway, which was cool when she was growing up and totally slender was in. Now you had to be slender and buxom at the same time.

“Some vacation.” He glanced over at the backs surrounding poor Jeremy, kneeling, standing, measuring, all bent forward to study him in this last indignity.

“Mason,” Charlie's detective yelled, and a woman cop helping a wobbly Betty Beesom to stand looked over at his car.

*   *   *

“Mary,” Detective Amuller yelled from downstairs as Charlie stripped off her sweatshirt and slipped into another.

“Maggie,” the woman in the black uniform yelled back and made a face.

“Mary Maggie,” came the reply from Charlie's living room.

Officer Mary Maggie Mason shrugged, shook her head. “That kid needs help.”

Charlie didn't think they were related but they both had a chipped front tooth and silly, sort of loose, uncoplike smiles. She followed Mary Maggie downstairs, where the detective swore under his breath at the little computer on the coffee table. Officer Mason moved behind the couch to look over his shoulder, still holding Charlie's bloody sweatshirt.

“Don't be so ham-fisted,” she advised.

“Charlie Greene, first twelve out of five thousand,” he groused. His name sounded German but he looked to Charlie like a blond Irish Presbyterian from New England.

“Press the CA button on the tool bar.”

“What's that, California?”

“Criminal activity,” the lady cop said and giggled.

“Charlie's no criminal.” Betty sat uneasy in an easy chair, red-eyed and weepy, washing her hands over and over in her lap with nothing but air.

Charlie knelt beside the chair and clasped those hands to still them. They were icy. “You all right, Mrs. Beesom?”

“Poor Jeremy—why? I'm scared, Charlie. A murderer walked right in here, Those cats didn't even warn us.”

“I don't think cats warn you. I think it's dogs that—”

“All right.”

“Bingggg-go.”
Officer Mason's voice had a falsetto tone to it, and she kept trying to tuck recalcitrant hair behind her ears.

“You work in Beverly Hills and live here?” Detective Amuller slopped an astonished grin. “That's a killer commute.”

“Tell me about it.”

“They've even got your DNA record on file.” Mary Maggie's grin faded. She came around the couch to sit beside her cohort. “They usually only do that for people who've been arrested. Jesus, J. S., keep scrolling.”

Finally, both cops looked up at her and blinked—his expression quizzical, her mouth hanging open.

“Mr. Fiedler isn't your first murder victim, I see. You've been busy the last few years, huh?” Officer Mason pushed her glasses back up her nose. They slid down again the minute her finger moved away.

“I have never murdered anyone. That's not
my
criminal activity.” Charlie was simply an absolute genius when it came to being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

“Charlemagne Catherine?”

“My father was a history professor.”

“How did
he
die?”

“Heart attack.” Of course, his heart had been fine before Charlie announced she was pregnant at sixteen.

“Oregon, Beverly Hills, Utah, Boulder, Vegas.”

They'd been bobbling between the little screen and Charlie, but when the phone bleeped and then bleeped again, the Long Beach Police Department watched Charlie not move.

“Aren't you going to answer?” Mary Maggie said finally, her jaw returning to the ajar position the second she stopped saying it.

“She can't,” Mrs. Beesom said. “She's not home.”

“She's on vacation,” Detective J. S. explained.

“Oh.”

“Charlie,” Richard Morse of Congdon & Morse answered Charlie's message on the answering machine, “I know you aren't home and I'm glad you didn't answer, but I just wanted you to know Ferris signed at dinner tonight. I'm calling from the Celebrity Pit. Congratulations, babe, you got a sweet bonus coming on this one. Have a great vacation, toots.”

“Toots?” Officer Mason held Charlie's bloodied sweatshirt up to the light of the table lamp next to Betty's chair.

“That wouldn't be Rudy Ferris?” Detective J. S. asked.

But Officer Mary Maggie interrupted, “Mrs. Greene—”

“Miss Greene.”

“Whatever. Did you handle Mr. Fiedler's body?”

“No.”

“Then how do you explain the bloody smudges on the inside of the sleeves?” She cradled her arms.

And Charlie and Mrs. Beesom chimed in unison, “Hairy.”

“I want that cat,” Detective Amuller demanded. Just like he had for Charlie's sweatshirt.

*   *   *

“Uh, this isn't going to be as easy as the sweatshirt,” Charlie informed the Long Beach Police Department.

“Those animals are darn near feral,” Betty Beesom agreed and reached for the key under the fern-plant pot to unlock the gate.

“This gate always kept locked?” Detective Amuller took the key and opened it himself, careful not to touch the gate, or let them touch it, either.

“We only use the alley for garbage pickup,” Charlie said. It was normally left to homeless drunks and cats, homeless or not. She had never seen it so full of people before. Neighbors she'd never met filled the alley on the other side of the gate, had to shuffle aside to let them out of the courtyard. They were quiet, too. Too quiet. The world had seemed so unrealistically silent since Jeremy Fieldler all but fell out of his Trailblazer. Maybe Charlie's ears were plugged.

But she heard Detective Amuller speak softly behind her. “Which of you ladies called in about finding Mr. Fiedler's body?”

Both Charlie and Mrs. Beesom whirled to stare at the detective. He and Officer Mary Maggie stood in a sea of faces with emergency-vehicle lights strobing off eyeglasses and foreheads.

Charlie decided she must be in shock—seeing and not hearing things the way they really were. Jeremy had lived in the same fortress with her for over five years.

“I don't think we did, did we, Charlie?” Mrs. Beesom didn't look too good either.

“Somebody must have,” Charlie said. “You suddenly showed up. I remember thinking how fast you were. I'd just gone around the Trailblazer to find Betty passed out and she came to but passed out again when she saw Jeremy and you all showed up.”

“Do you have any idea how long it was after you discovered Mr. Fiedler that we appeared?”

“I really don't. This is the strangest evening. Maybe one of these people called.”

“J. S., we could be looking at shock here. Take it easy.” Officer Mary Maggie took a close look into Charlie's eyes.

J. S. seemed to have lost interest in the cat. He asked Charlie to introduce him to her neighbors.

“I don't know them.”

“Not any of them?”

“I spend my whole life working, commuting, raising a daughter, and sleeping.” And not nearly enough of the latter.

“This is Wilma and Art Granger.” Betty offered up the couple standing beside her. “They live with the cat that scratched Charlie you was looking for.”

Wilma and Art blinked behind their eyeglasses in the blinking light. They stood between Betty and Officer Mason. It was probably just a reflection of Charlie's present state of mind, but they looked like four owls in a cage with the gate-bar shadows crossing their faces.

“We came out to see what all the lights were about,” Wilma said. “Seemed like the alley was safe enough—all the commotion being over the wall there.” She was short and pudgy, her husband tall, stick thin, and stooped.

“What do you know about Jeremy Fiedler?” Detective Amuller asked and Mary Maggie stared at the heavens, shaking her head.

“Don't know any Jeremy Fiedler.” Art Granger straightened to look the young officer eye-to-eye. “Know Betty here because she belongs to our church.”

Betty didn't know any of the others in the alley, but the Grangers knew another man who knew another couple who knew two women who identified one of their neighbors. Everyone seemed to live in houses or apartments that backed on the alley in some way. Nobody claimed to know Jeremy or to have called the police, either.

But all kept their voices low—not, Charlie thought, out of respect for someone dead, nor out of fear or curiosity.

More out of remoteness.

The bystanders, the paramedics, the police, the crime-scene specialists, the homicide detectives—one and all remote from the crisis of Jeremy. Even Charlie and Betty. And that quiet. Something was wrong with that quiet.

J. S. garnered as many nods, head-shaking nos, and shrugged don't-knows as he did whispered answers. And others in the alley crowded around, leaned into the conversations to hear, and kept silent themselves so they could.

Charlie could even hear the sea-laden breeze stir the fronds of Mrs. Beesom's sentry palm into slithery whispers and rustling
clacks.

“The press,” Charlie said much too loud and everyone in the alley turned to stare. “There's no press.”

“Well, thank a kind Lord,” was Art Granger's fervent reply to that and several amens supported him.

“So many crimes reported in L.A. they can't get to them all,” Mary Maggie said, and opened her face in a huge grin. “Kinda nice, huh?”

That garnered more amens.

But since there were no pesky journalists, a shrieking cat fight soon shattered the peaceful crime scene.

CHAPTER 3

JEREMY'S
HOUSE, LIKE
Betty's, had its front door and two windows on the alley boarded up—stuccoed over on the outside and plastered over on the inside. The windows on the inside of both had been transformed into recessed, arched art niches. Betty's were adorned with Jesus Christ on black velvet in one and a painting of the Last Supper in the other, both bought in a Tijuana street market for bargain prices.

Jeremy's niches sported expensive metal-sculptured nudes of women in various stages of sexual congress with each other.

The upstairs windows fronting on the alley were heavily barred on the outside, as were all outside windows, up or down, in all four houses of the complex. These windows pulled inward so they could be washed. Jeremy's always gleamed because he had a cleaning lady who actually did windows. Her name was Kate, but her heritage was definitely Latino. An older, no-nonsense woman, she refused to work for beans. Both Charlie and Maggie were on her waiting list for clients. She was the best, and Charlie figured Kate would be retired before Charlie made it to the top of the list. Interestingly enough, Kate Gonzales refused to clean for the very wealthy because they preferred cheap, illegal labor and would not pay her price.

Maybe vast mansions didn't show the grit and kitty litter like Charlie's little nest.

Detective Amuller studied the metal sculptures in the niches in Jeremy's living room. “What kind of a guy was he?”

“He wasn't poor, I think—”