Murder at Moot Point

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Murder at Moot Point

A Charlie Greene Mystery

Marlys Millhiser

For Deborah Schneider

Chapter 1

Outside, Charlie Greene pressed her nose against the cold glass of the window. Inside, a man dressed in black meditated next to a bronze Buddha, legs folded in the classic lotus, back straight, thumbs and forefingers pressed together.

Outside, surf exploded against rock somewhere near and somewhere distant a buoy croaked warning. The sounds carried on air so clogged with fog Charlie could barely make out the shape of the car she'd left at the bottom of the steps. A fog so dense it held flavors—sea salt and raw wood, exhalations of wet plant life.

Inside was a clutter of oddities—antiques, books, signs, shelves of things, and things hanging from the rafters. Outside, a rustling of leaves and the ragged howling of a house cat—all vowels, no consonants.

Charlie rapped at the window again, moved back to the door to rap there again too. Finally she heard movement and the man clearing his throat. When he opened the door he stood blinking rapidly to transfer his mind from his meditations. Then he squinted and mumbled something about a dog.

“Are you Jack Monroe?”

“I'm closed.” His voice was still thick but perception leaked steadily into his eyes. His body seemed to gather energy.

“I'm Charlie Greene … your agent?”

He backed up just enough for her to slip out of the fog into murky light drugged with incense, his sigh more depressing than the warning buoy. He closed the door. An embroidered sign above it read,
To the blind all things are sudden
.

“I'm sorry to barge in this late but I've been driving all day. I'm not even sure where my motel is and the fog's so thick I was lucky to find Moot Point.” Which wasn't what Charlie had planned to say but nothing about this trip was going as she had planned.

Jack Monroe was a short stocky man, his dark hair laced with gray, the sleeves of his turtleneck pushed up to show hairy forearms.
ONE
was printed in large white letters on the shirt's front. His eyes were an electric blue that appeared to take on a charge as she watched. He was all wrong. Nothing like she'd expected after meeting his son or reading his stuff. Keegan was colored fair, built light, his temperament gentle, whimsical. Charlie remembered the father's writing as ebullient, almost fey in tone. There was nothing ebullient about the dark muscular man standing before her.

“I would have called first but—why did you stop answering your phone and your mail, Jack? Keegan's worried, too.”

He reached out a hand to give hers a choppy shake but there was little welcome in his expression. “Have you had dinner, Charlie Greene?”

He turned before she could answer and she followed him to a curtain at the rear of the store.
NESS
was printed on the back of his shirt. Behind the curtain a miniature kitchen with two stools for seating at a U-shaped counter shared space with an unmade bed. Another embroidered sign above the bed read, “
Toto
,
I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.
”

Charlie crawled up on one of the stools while he savaged things with a knife the size of a machete. She'd always thought of “New Agers” as being more mellowed out, smug in their know-it-allness. Maybe his meditation hadn't taken.

“This is it?” She gestured to the room.

“There's a bathroom there.” He pointed the knife at a side door.

“Where do you write?”

“I write in here.” He pointed the knife at his head.

“Keegan says hello and please contact him.” She hoped he wouldn't point the knife at her. Keegan Monroe was also a client of Charlie's. But he was a screenwriter and him she could deal with. Screenwriters were used to having their work hacked, razed, and reconstituted beyond recognition by story committees and soon lost any prima donna illusions.

Keegan had said, “My dad's writing this book. Could you show it around for him? I mean as a favor to me? It's harder to get an agent than a publisher these days.”

The air in the tiny kitchen filled with frying garlic and olive oil and peppers and spices as Jack Monroe threw chopped thingies at a pan while making soft growling noises in his throat.

Charlie had recently moved from a literary agency in New York to Congdon and Morse Representation, a talent agency in Beverly Hills. She'd brought some of her book clients with her but now she mainly handled screenwriters like Keegan.

Once the son had described the type of book it was, Charlie turned it down with relief. “I don't think I have the right contacts for your dad. He'd probably be better off shooting it to a smaller publisher here on the West Coast on his own. And don't forget you've got a treatment due day after tomorrow yourself.”

Charlie forgot about Keegan's dad until several days later. She was on a trip to New York and having lunch with Shelly Hummer, an editor friend at McMullins, when Shelly expressed interest in New Age nonfiction. “California's always been the hotbed of New Age thinking. Can you scout out some possibilities for our list, Charlie?”

“I don't know about California, and you won't believe this, but there's this guy on the coast of Oregon who may be writing just the book you have in mind.”

Charlie knew little about New Age thinking except what had crept into the mainstream and she didn't really understand that. She knew and understood even less after reading Jack Monroe's sample chapters and outline but sent them on to New York where they were met with great excitement. The proposal must be turned into a completed manuscript last week. A contract specifying a nice but modest advance and a letter specifying editorial suggestions and changes would be rushed through the mill the soonest. There hadn't been another word for six months.

Keegan's dad sliced the sautéed meal down the middle of the frying pan and ladled each half onto a separate plate. He sliced crusty bread, poured a deep red wine, and came to sit beside her on the other stool. The wine was a smooth rich merlot and the sauté was light and crunchy, hot and satisfying.

“Like it?” Jack Monroe asked after a while.

“Love it,” Charlie answered. “But I don't want to know what it is, okay?”

“Okay.” He poured more wine, sliced more bread.

“Probably scrambled tofu with seaweed or something else awful.”

“You have very discriminating taste buds.” His voice dripped condescension.

Charlie pushed her plate away. “No, really I did love it, but I always only eat half of what's on my plate. Weight control. Fat women aren't highly regarded in our culture.”

“Why don't you take half to begin with and not waste food?”

“That doesn't work. I tried it. Gained ten pounds.”

“You people living in the old world get very peculiar.” He emptied his plate and then finished off hers.

His movements may have been slightly slowed because of his interrupted meditation when he answered the door but his eyes sparked energy now and his movements had grown increasingly fidgety. He slammed their plates into soapy water with a vengeance and then jammed coffee beans into the grinder. Charlie hoped she hadn't made a mistake coming here alone. Keegan was such a lamb, she couldn't believe his father was dangerous.

“You know why I didn't answer my mail, Charlie Greene?” Jack Monroe exploded finally. “Because I didn't go to the post office to pick it up. You know why I didn't answer my phone? Because I ripped it out of the wall.”

“Listen, if you're going to get violent I'm going back out into the fog.”

“You know why I tore out the phone? Do you? Because I don't give a fucking nose hair what those silly-assed, prissy, snot-nosed little editors in New York City think of my book. Isn't one of them old enough to know her behind from her left kneecap anyway.” He grabbed the screaming teakettle from the stove and poured water over the grounds in the filter. He was lucky he didn't scald himself the way he jerked the kettle around.

“And even if this Shelly, whatever her name is, did want to buy the damn thing, she'd have to get it through the little lard-assed Fauntleroys in marketing who don't read books anyway. All they can read is charts and the charts don't mean a damn thing because the pimply adolescents who make the charts don't know shit about what they're doing but that doesn't matter because they're just stopping over in publishing on their way up the corporate ladder to something meaningful like chemicals and bombers and old world trivia.”

“You been reading
Writer's Digest
, Jack?”

He grabbed the coffee pot and the wine bottle and slammed through the curtain. Even the
NESS
on the back of his shirt appeared to pulsate with rage.

“Welcome to Oregon,” Charlie told herself and slid off her stool.

Out in the store Jack Monroe pulled floor cushions up to the bronze Buddha, who dwarfed them both, and grabbed mugs off a nearby shelf.

They sipped coffee deeper, richer even than the merlot. The warning buoy croaked so far away, now that Charlie was inside some walls, it sounded almost comforting. Buddha smiled indulgently, his metal gaze locked on some distant Nirvana. The inscription on Charlie's plastic mug read
WHOLENESS
. Its price tape read $19.95.

Just as she felt the energy about to erupt from the man on the other side of the Buddha, she said, “Morton and Fish wants to buy your book, Jack. They're offering a far better deal than McMullins. Keegan would have come up himself but—”

“Morton and Fish?” Jack Monroe asked the Buddha.

“And all the Fauntleroys and at least one of the prissy-assed editors who doesn't know her behind from her hubcap.”