Killer Commute (3 page)

“I mean sexually?”

“Never bedded him.”

“I mean did he like women or men or both or animals or—”

“Since I've lived here, Jeremy has had a succession of younger women living with him for short periods—teens, mostly.”

“How old a man was he?”

“Mid forties, early fifties, I'd guess. He worked out constantly, so his bod was hard to gauge. Hell, you got my DNA report on your little computer. You should be able to call up his life history.”

“Not on record. In cyberspace he never existed. No Social Security number, no credit records, no tax records. Nothing,” Officer Mary Maggie said, stepping into the room from the kitchen. “He's what's known as one suspicious character.”

Officer Mason had stayed to see Betty Beesom settled for the night. She had been doing a great counseling job with the frightened witness when Detective Amuller insisted Charlie come to Jeremy's with him.

Two uniforms and a lab type had gone over every inch of Jeremy's condo for clues to his murder as well as his life. They were gone now, but Charlie was still to touch nothing.

Officer Mary Maggie had insisted that you can't catch a cat by chasing him. You had to ignore him until he came to you, curious about why you stopped chasing him and what you were going to do next. Charlie was skeptical—she'd never heard of anyone understanding cats. But sure enough, another uniformed officer followed Mary Maggie with a struggling cloth bag in each hand.

Just to be sure, Detective J. S. had both cats combed and clipped and pricked for blood samples. They moaned that eerie warning as the technicians tortured them on an old
Wall Street Journal
across Jeremy's kitchen table and at each other. When the torture was finished, Officer Mason handed Tuxedo to Charlie and sent Hairy home with a gofer cop.

Tuxedo didn't hiss or yrowal or moan or scratch at Charlie. He trembled and clung to her. Charlie was afraid to move. Tuxedo hated Charlie.

“Well, you could comfort him with a little snuggle or something,” the female cop said with disgust. “
He's
not as used to murder as you are.”

*   *   *

By the time Libby and Maggie Stutzman and “that man” drove into the compound within minutes of each other, Charlie was shaking worse than the cat. Officer Mary Maggie and the gofer cop were all that remained of the Long Beach PD. Jeremy was gone, the Trailblazer was gone. The blood was still on the pavement where Jeremy had dripped it.

“Glad to see you're human,” Mary Maggie said. “Some people go into shock and delay the normal reactions.” Besides a regular cop, she was a community outreach and liaison officer. Part of her job was to temper the impact of necessary police-work on victims, their families, and communities, and to train volunteers to do the same. Her ridiculous falsetto voice was comforting, and when her smile tightened up from sloppy, it was unexpectedly shy. “Want me to call your doctor?”

“God, no.” Charlie's only doctor at present was a gastrointestinal type who treated her incipient ulcer. “He only wants to talk to me when I throw up blood. How do you know so much about cats?”

“I don't really. Got two dogs myself. But I've seen chickens traumatized by murder.”

“You're kidding. Chickens?”

“Honest. Tuxedo and Hairy, now—they witnessed something they can't tell us about. Wonder what they'd say if they could.”

Charlie took another look at Libby's cat.

*   *   *

Both Libby and Tuxedo Greene slept with Charlie in her bed that night. Except when they went back to visit grandma in Boulder, Libby hadn't done this since the monster-under-the-bed or in-the-closet phase. Then she was tiny and blond and cute and forceful. Now she was about three inches taller than Charlie, drop-dead gorgeous blond and forceful.

“Mom, we've got to stay together for protection,” she'd said as she and her cat crawled into bed and fell protectively asleep while Charlie lay awake.

Maggie Stutzman and her stockbroker boyfriend, Mel, as in Clayton Melbourne, had no more than entered the fortress than the press had arrived in the form of a news helicopter. It dropped low enough to froth the fronds of Betty Beesom's sentry palm into a frenzy, suck dirt into the air from nowhere, and shatter the the peacefulness of the murder scene.

“Nobody's luck holds forever,” Officer Mason said with an exaggerated shrug. She shepherded them all into Maggie's house, the closest door. Tuxedo hung over Libby's shoulder, relaxed as a rag doll. All was well now that his pal was home.

“Is Maggie short for Margaret?” Charlie's best friend asked the cop when Charlie introduced the two Maggies.

“For Mary,” Officer Mason said and took Maggie Stutzman aside to grill her on where she'd been all evening and what she knew about Jeremy Fiedler and who might want him dead.

“I don't know that much about him, I guess,” Charlie'd heard her friend answer, with a regret and sadness that belied her words. “But if it wasn't for robbery or something, my guess is there ought to be some angry fathers out there. He dated only the nubile.”

Charlie's hearing was so acute, she often overheard conversations meant to be secret. It was both a blessing and a curse.

“Any names you can give us?”

“They just had first names, stock names like Stephanie and Michelle and Lisa.” Maggie's name was more German but she looked Irish. Lush black hair, pale, perfect, almost translucent skin, and snapping blue eyes. Maggie was a lawyer whose bottom was growing out of proportion to the rest of her. She was one of the dearest, most trusted people Charlie had ever allowed into her life.

Maggie was a total idiot to trust Mel-the-swell-stockbroker with her heart, body, or finances. And everybody could see it but Maggie. Even Jeremy, who lusted only after the nubile, could see that. Mrs. Beesom had dubbed Mel
that man
in protest, and that was his nickname around the compound.

Even now, Mel, who was married to Mrs. Mel but on the brink of a divorce any second for at least the last six months, was watching lovely Libby instead of Maggie. Maggie glanced over at him and didn't notice.

Unlike Charlie, Maggie needed a man. Nobody needed this guy.

When questioned,
that man
admitted to knowing Jeremy Fiedler only from a party Maggie had given on her patio one night to introduce Mel to the neighbors and a few friends from her legal life. He hadn't stopped smoking the whole time and had impressed only Maggie. Nobody wanted to say anything to hurt her. So they hadn't then. Still hadn't.

Charlie had finally just fallen asleep when screaming outside roused her yet again.

CHAPTER 4

CHARLIE
AND
MAGGIE sat on either end of Maggie's couch in their sweats, bare feet tucked under the center cushion, and raised some serious coffee in a toast to poor Jeremy.

It was a sort of a morning drunken spree without alcohol. Maggie had a cappuccino machine and had made them lethal lattes. Nobody but Libby and Tuxedo, still tucked up in Charlie's bed, got any sleep last night. Well, maybe Jeremy's spirit, somewhere.

They sat bleary-eyed, baggy-eyed, preshowered, preshampooed, even pretoothpasted. It took a community to face murder in the morning, a community minus the press and the
how-do-you-feels.
The silly doves were cooing their haunting mourning-mornings in the chilly air out there. In here it was cozy, and blessed with the vigorous smell of the coffee bean, freshly ground.

That man
had left before Maggie, too, had heard the scream. Even Mrs. Beesom, asleep at the back of the compound, had heard it. No cat this time, but a man very literally frozen in shock on the front of the front gate. A reporter for the Los Angeles
Times,
he'd decided to skip the glass and razor wire on top of the wall and climb over the front gate.

“I'll sue you,” he yelled as the ambulance types came to take him away.

“Two questions.” Charlie started the salvo. “One: Why, with all the murders in this combined city, would the
Times
be interested in the murder of Jeremy Fiedler?” Females between the ages of fifteen and twenty-two seemed to get murdered every five minutes. Of course, that was true everywhere. Maybe it wasn't news any longer. “And two, who wired the gate?”

“One, I don't know. Two, Jeremy. I thought you knew. He wired the back gate, too. And all on his own nickel. It was a good deal, Charlie, for all of us. Comes on only at night.”

“But why, and when? And what if Libby came home some night and didn't know, or one of her stupid boyfriends stopped by?”

“Jeremy pointed out that the high wall was not sufficient—anybody could climb the gates. He wired everything, Charlie, even the wall and razor wire. And Libby knew. You were probably on one of your trips—I think it was when you were in Las Vegas, and your stories were so horrendous we all probably forget to mention it. Or maybe we did tell you and you forget it. You're so overwhelmed at work and everything.”

“So where's the switch that turns it on and off? And can that reporter sue us?”

“I don't know.”

“But you're the lawyer.”

“I'm not that kind of lawyer.” Until recently Maggie had specialized in workmen's compensation suits—a sort of legal housekeeping that went nowhere and thus ended up in the hands of women. She'd burned out and was now with a firm that specialized in estate planning. “Maybe we could counter-sue for attempted trespass.”

As if on cue there was another scream outside, really more of a shriek this time. Neither woman jumped to her feet and ran to see what it could be.

“You know, Charlie, I'm beginning to regret your decision to vacation at home.”

“We haven't even had time to discuss poor Jeremy's murder.”

They carried their soup-bowl coffee cups and wandered out into the courtyard, disheveled and barefoot and beyond caring who saw them that way, too.

This time it was a reporter for the
Press-Telegram.
He'd managed to escape the electricity and razor wire and broken glass embedded in the top surface of the fortress's eight-foot wall by pole-vaulting into Mrs. Beesom's sentry palm. And the shriek had been Betty Beesom's.

The sentry palm had a history in the compound predating Charlie and Libby Greene. It was the tallest tree inside the walls, although there was a far-taller palm in front of Charlie's condo-house in the area between the curb and sidewalk. The sentry palm had been a gift to Betty from her church upon the death of her husband, and had special meaning. It was also a noted example of its type, and had been written up with its picture and hers in a garden section of the L.A.
Times.
A disintegrating copy of this newsworthy event still clung to the door of Betty's refrigerator with the help of a magnetized hummingbird.

That tree, by its very name, stood vigil over the compound, and the old lady was sure it looked after her safety just as her dear husband always had. Eventually, with some misgiving, she'd extended its protective qualities to include her neighbors within the stucco-covered walls.

Four rough trunks grew out of a base somewhere underground, the highest being maybe thirty-five feet and the shortest maybe twenty-five. Its spread among the drooping fronds was something like nine feet, and it had hung blessing over Betty's roof and the wall, too.

It now had three trunks standing and one fallen across Mrs. Beesom's patio—and across a very surprised journalist. He managed to wiggle out from under the palm trunk, narrowly avoiding poking out an eyeball on the pointed end of a sword leaf.

“Hi, I'm Mark Gifford from the
Press-Telegram.
And I'd like to ask you a few questions about…” Mark Gifford from the
Press-Telegram
was backing away from the three advancing woman even as he spoke.

“I hate strangers before breakfast,” Charlie said, meaning every syllable of it. She had a low, throaty voice that some people found sexy and others found threatening, and others still, depraved.

“And I am an attorney,” Maggie added, looking every inch a disgruntled housewife-before-makeup. “And I'll see you and your newspaper sued for breaking and entering, invasion of privacy, and unwarranted trespass. And my firm will see it through the Supreme Court.”

But it was Mrs. Beesom who slipped the key from under the potted fern and opened the gate behind him so he'd backed into the alley before he realized it. Mark Gifford was showing that
oh-you-panicky-women-always-overreact
look and was about to launch into a routine to intimidate them into apologizing when the old lady slammed the gate in his face and locked it.

*   *   *

The fortress's surviving occupants gathered in Charlie's kitchen for a breakfast of scrambled eggs and Betty's sinful cinnamon rolls with powdered-sugar frosting, hot from the oven, which nobody could figure out how she could produce at a moment's notice. And more coffee, this time from Charlie's percolator. Maggie, the health conscious, brought segments of sweet California oranges that probably came from Mexico and squirted juice across the table at every bite.

Charlie had a dining room table in the next room covered with paper—mail, catalogs, and such, which she periodically dumped when the piles began slipping onto the floor. The amount of money she had lost by not sending in her sweepstakes card from Publishers Clearing House must amount to billions, and could certainly buy out Ed McMahon twenty times over.

But her breakfast nook in the kitchen, a high-backed booth with a table that caught the afternoon sun through its barred window, was a favored neighborhood chat place, any time of the day. And since only four of the human inhabitants were left, it had plenty of room.

And the topic of the day was finally Jeremy Fiedler's death, his life, and his secrets.