Killer Commute (6 page)

Sounded good, neighborly—the sense-of-community thing. And after living with her growing daughter in a bed/sitter in Manhattan behind a six-inch-thick metal door it had seemed sort of free and pioneerish or something. But the fact was, if Charlie thought there was a burglar in Maggie's house, no way would she go in there, key or not. She'd call the cops. No—she would have called Jeremy, and
then
the cops.

The cops, of course, had not used Jeremy's key and lock. But when the two back houses in the complex had their front doors on the alley boarded up and stuccoed and plastered over, the city had pointed out that the fire code demanded two doors of egress for each home, so Jeremy and Betty had been forced to add a door inside the compound—but it had to be a certain distance from the other door. Since two sides of their houses were essentially fortress walls and the once-back-doors opened off the kitchens, they were forced to add a door abutting the side wall. Mrs. Beesom's was operable, but all but hidden behind a trellis of some cloying flowers gracing a vine and the sentry palm, and it was never used. Jeremy's was completely hidden by a torrey pine he'd planted after the inspectors left, and on the inside it was disguised by a media center on rollers that you could move if threatened by murderous burglars or a house fire.

Charlie had heard about this arrangement but forgotten it, as she did most things not of continuous threat or worry. Hers was a busy world, after all. And she was surprised when Betty brushed between the branches of the torrey pine and the stucco with her key. The tree allowed her to open the door far enough to permit Doug to slide in and push the media center inward over a new layer of carpeting.

All five of them gained entrance without disturbing the crime scene protection on the outside. They had two flashlights among them. Three of them wore pairs of Mrs. Beesom's gardening gloves. Libby wore a pair of gloves she'd used as a prissy librarian in a school play—convincing she was not. Doug wore rags wrapped around his hands, again compliments of Betty Beesom. Charlie had explained that fingerprints were not the only source of identity you could leave behind. You left skin flakes or follicles or something wherever you walked.

Maggie quickly brushed that aside. “They've already tested for all that. Besides we've already been inside and they have no reason to do those tests again. They are very busy people. And as long as it takes to test all the evidence anyway, Jeremy's murderer will probably be known by then.”

Half of Charlie was afraid Maggie was right. The other half hoped the lights would suddenly come on and Detective Amuller, in the company of a gofer or two, would swish his raincoat and announce, “Aha, we knew you would try this—and now explain yourselves.”

Well, that's how she'd write the script.

Charlie, babe, this is not a script.

“I know, but—”

“You know what?” Libby squeaked, stopping in front of Charlie so abruptly they both stumbled into one of the triangular coffee tables which upended and dumped its arty but empty vase, luckily on carpet so it didn't break. “Whoa, you can't even breathe in this place.”

“I feel like Nancy Drew,” Doug Esterhazie said without enthusiasm.

“You look like her, too,” Libby came back.

They all started when the refrigerator shut off. Even that slight white noise had been loud compared to the emptiness that replaced it. The house smelled empty, too. No lingering scent of soap or cooking or aftershave on the still air. It felt more than just forsaken, it felt void of Jeremy.

Mrs. Beesom opened the refrigerator and they all gathered around like ghouls, the light flattening and whitening their faces. Yogurt, bread, oranges, raisins, milk, vodka, vermouth, and gin—and a vegetable bin stuffed with plastic bags they didn't open.

The freezer side had ice cream, frozen pasta dinners. At least he ate here.

Charlie rolled back the top of a modern version of a rolltop desk (it was white, for one thing) in the dining room which, like in all the houses, was on a ledge level with the kitchen, two steps up from the living room.

A blank notepad, some pens, stamps, blank envelopes. No business cards, check blanks, credit-card receipts, bank statements. “How did he pay his bills? How did he pay Kate Gonzales?”

“He could have paid Kate in cash and other service and repair people,” Maggie said. “You can pay a lot of bills by direct debit of a checking account. I don't know about all of them. I wonder if he paid taxes.”

“He paid in full for this house, I know. So he wouldn't have a mortgage payment,” Mrs Beesom said, lowering herself to a stair with a grunt. “But he'd still have taxes. I just figured he sold another bigger house and put the money into this one.”

“Must have had a lot to hide,” Doug said, “to go to all that trouble.”

“By now Detective Amuller and crew have to have contacted, say, the phone company or Edison to find out how he was billed and how he paid. If it was a debit to a checking account, that account had to have been in somebody's name who had ID—Social Security at the least.”

“I don't know, Charlie. If you had your money in a trust fund, you could have all your bills sent there and the fund managers would pay them,” Maggie said. “Of course, your trust fund would know who you were.”

Charlie came as close to wetting herself as she had since the latter stages of pregnancy when a voice came from upstairs: “This is Jeremy…”

CHAPTER 8

CHARLIE
AND
MAGGIE were nursing hangovers with skinny lattes sprinkled with nutmeg the next morning, their toes tucked under Maggie's center cushion, when Officer Mason called ahead to be sure someone would let her into the fortress. She'd called Charlie's house, but Libby never answered the phone before noon on weekends.

When she arrived, Maggie Stutzman made the officer a latte and crawled back on the couch.

Mary Maggie looked at each of them several times and grinned, “Saturday nights suck on Sunday morning, right?”

They were again in their uncouth, uncombed, unbrushed, just-out-of-bed modes, and their senses of humor wouldn't show up for a couple of hours.

The scare last night had nearly forced them to go to Betty Beesom's church this morning. We're talking a serious fright here, that no loose cop grin could budge.

“How are the cats?” she tried again.

“Recovered.” Charlie slugged down the last of her latte and waved the empty soup-bowl cup at her hostess, not yet up to
please.

“You won't stop peeing for a week.”

“I'm on vacation for a week.”

The officer took too deep a draft of her latte, blinked back tears, pushed her glasses up her nose, and gave Charlie a conspiratorial look. “Any more …
interesting
ideas on Jeremy Fiedler's death?”

“Nobody disappears their identity that completely in this computer age.”

“Computers make mistakes. People make even more. Not nearly enough of the people responsible for things can keep up with the technology. All you have to do is hire a hacker and disappear.” Maggie Stutzman sang the same refrain.

“Shut up and make coffee.”

“You two sound married. So, what'd you do besides drink last night?”

The unmistakable voice of a dead man coming out of the upper reaches of a more-than empty house had sent the conspirators scattering and then back, clutching. Charlie thought Doug Esterhazie would crush her head into his breastbone. God, they make kids hard these days.

“Officer Mason, do you think Maggie's hypotheses about technology overpowering the official brainpower in this country has any validity whatsoever?”

“Well, let me put it this way.” Officer Mason took another gulp of her latte and fished in a uniform pocket for a tissue. “And I will never admit to saying this in a court of law—”

“We got the room bugged—but go ahead.” Their hostess poured steamed milk into Charlie's latte cup.

“We are reportedly looking into hiring, at minimum wage, a few underaged geeks for a summer recreational workshop to look into the possibility of recovering lost, stolen, deleted, or screwed-up files of interest, because we can't afford Bill Gates's programmers or their fresh-out-of-high-school replacements-in-training.”

“This sounds like really classified information.” Maggie handed Charlie her second serious jolt.

“Well, let's say that if we need a middle or junior-high group of experts to handle this admittedly serious problem, we won't be able to afford community-outreach types like me.”

“But aren't you worried those kids will go home and hack into stuff you don't want them to, once you give them the information to retrieve what you want them to? How are you going to keep them from babbling or selling the information they retrieve?”

“That's exactly the problem,” Mary Maggie said, looking impressed.

Why did people assume literary agents were stupid? Charlie was expecting Mary Maggie to say, “So, you broke into the murdered man's house last night without disturbing the crime-scene foils, huh? Congratulations. What did you find? Hand it over before I take you to jail.”

Actually the most impressive thing they found last night was the difficulty of getting back out the way they got in. If that media-center cabinet didn't want to push in for them over the new carpet, it turned really rebellious when Doug tried to pull it back in place. There was nothing to grip it with, and it was wider than the door and would be noticeable if left standing out a ways in the room because the indentation in the carpet would show between it and the wall concealing the door. And tugging too hard could knock some stuff off the shelves to be left on the floor and attract the attention of the next cop to enter and put the chief suspects, the neighbors, in an even more difficult spot.

Finally, Libby and Doug, probably because Libby's mom and her best friend were several sheets to the wind and Betty Beesom was crying again, took charge. They shooshed the three incompetent adults out the secret side door and closed it. Then they pushed the recalcitrant piece of furniture back in place and scratched the new indentation out of the new carpet and crawled out of the window. Since it was inside the compound, that window was not barred, and whatever crime-scene secret gizmos they might have set off somewhere did not send a team of LBPD types out to investigate. Of course, the problem now was there was no one inside to latch the window shut.

“Mo-om,” Libby had assured Charlie, “everybody but Doug's DNA could be in the house before the murder. And we don't have to mention him. And the first person who goes in surreptitiously locks the window and—”

“Surreptitiously?”

“Now stop that.” Libby left in a huff to take Doug home and left Charlie calculating all the ways Douglas Grant Esterhazie could be linked to the Greenes and the compound.

“This is Jeremy Fiedler,” the message on the answering machine upstairs in the murdered man's house had said last night to scare the sense out of the neighbors who'd sneaked in illegally. “Please leave a message.”

“But I didn't hear the phone ring,” Doug said.

“Fiedler,” said the man leaving the message. “I'm on to you and I'm going to blow your sick little world to pieces.”

“Sounds like a father all right,” Maggie had said. “He's just a little late is all.”

Jeremy never answered his wired phone and had turned off the ringer. The neighbors reached him by cell phone. He'd always been unlisted. Charlie was, too. So what?

“I've got it,” Maggie Stutzman said now. “Jeremy was in a witness protection program.”

“Their identities are falsified but they still have credentials,” Charlie told her, and turned to the policewoman. “Did Jeremy have his cellular with him in the Trailblazer when he died?”

“I'm the one who's here to ask the questions, Ms. Greene. And with your recent history, you might think you know all there is to know about murder investigations, but we can see in a weekend more murder victims than you've seen in the last three years.” Officer Mason set down her half-filled cup and stood. “Now, if you'd be so kind as to wake your daughter for me, I'd like to ask her some questions.”

“You'd be wise to let her shower first. She's not good in the mornings and doesn't have to go to work till noon.”

“You sound like you're afraid of your own kid. It's not like she grew up downtown, even if her mother did lay one on last night.”

They were halfway across the courtyard, Charlie and the lady cop, Charlie still cupping her coffee bowl in her hands, the coffee buzz beginning to cut through the wine hangover and sleep deficit.

“Just because you've seen countless disadvantaged and self-destructive teens in your work, officer, and are raising two dogs, does not mean you are up to Libby Greene this early on Sunday morning and before her shower.” But Charlie escorted the cop to the second floor, knocked on Libby's door, threw it open, and hurried downstairs and out into the courtyard to finish her coffee.

The air smelled clean and cool. The morning fog had burned off early and the sky was a California blue. Her little lemon tree was in bloom and smelled sweet. You need to notice these things when you're on vacation, especially the kind of vacation Charlie was having.

Her flower boxes were a riot of color—lots of pansies and she didn't know what else. Charlie had finally given in to her neighbor's pleas and hired a “gardener,” who was a totally different animal from a landscape architect, Jeremy had informed her, to plant the boxes and come around now and then to pick off the dead flowers and clean up plant debris on her patio and front yard.

He was one of Kate Gonzales's sons, and his name was Leroy. That was a strange family. He'd rigged up a little timed-drip system that kept things watered. Charlie'd thought it a total waste of money but had grudgingly come to admit that if she was going to be a full-time literary agent and a mommy, too, she had to hire help with the small stuff.