Murder at Moot Point (27 page)

“You are everything I despise,” Charlie told him.

“I live long enough to see you get old and ugly, I'll feel the same about you. But right now I love you, darling, can't help it.” He moved closer and Charlie stood up.

Why couldn't she say the obvious, that he was already old and ugly? Why couldn't she be more like a man? “Like you love Clara Peterson?”

“Oh well, she's more of a comfort than a … she's the kind who makes a good—”

“Servant? Cook? Maid? Housekeeper? Nurse?”

“Yeah, housewife. Someone to comfort a man in his old age instead of torment him.”

“Plus drive him around. But Frank, what can you offer Clara Peterson?”

“Hell, I'm offering to marry the woman, ain't I?”

“How many safari shirts do you own?”

He shrugged, “Three or four. Kids all went to that Banana Republic store to do their Christmas shopping one year. Can't think for themselves, you know. Had to call up their mother and ask her what to buy. Thought your last question was going to be did I kill my wife or not.”

Charlie stood on the little paving stones at the bottom of the steps and faced him, trying not to look at the corner of the safari shirt showing between the stairs under his right boot. “You lied to me that day on the beach, didn't you? About your argument with your wife the night she died, it wasn't about clippings on how wrong her nutritional beliefs were.”

“Certainly was. I had proof. Boy, I had her good.”

“But that's not why she went off in the fog pretending to take her bike, maybe hoping to worry you.”

“We didn't do much but argue, you understand.” He sat quietly, staring around her to the sea, as if deep in thought, or, Charlie worried, hoping the sheriff would get here to stop all this unofficial investigating. “But I guess the very last thing we had words over was she wanted me to go with her to the Bergkvists and make Mrs. Bergkvist admit Georgette was not either a crazy old woman for thinking she saw Olie in town this summer. Hell, Olie's a rich man, he can have any woman he wants. Why'd he want to come home to that old wart if he had something better going? Told her to mind her own business for once. That woman had the longest nose on earth. But there was no talking to Georgie. So, she said she'd go herself. And I said fine. And that's the last I saw her alive.”

“But you wanted Clara to take you to a motel in Chinook. I don't see the connection.”

“Woman like Georgette'll eat you alive if you don't watch out,” he explained patiently. “She was always going off to that institute and leaving me alone if I didn't do exactly what she wanted, see? Or the garden club, or this bunch of old biddies that played bridge. Every time the institute finished up a class there was a beach picnic. I never wanted to go to them because the people talked and acted stupid and it almost always rained and I was too tall to get under the tarps they'd prop up over the food. But all she could think to do was gripe that I was ‘antisocial.' Older she got, worse it got. I never had no place to go except next door to Clara's. Daytime, if the weather wasn't too bad I'd walk into Chinook and buy stuff Georgie wouldn't let me have. But she was always going off on her bike, see. So that night I got fed up and decided two can play that game. Let her worry for once, the old fool. I didn't plan to come home till the six o'clock bus the next day either.”

“She was shot in the head, Frank. There would have been blood. Clara said you both thought she'd died a natural death.”

“The fog was gray, her skin was gray, her hair was gray—you couldn't see that well. So you decide what it is you think you're seeing. I didn't know about the blood till later.”

“That's why you wore the yellow slicker over your clothes when you rushed into the Earth Spirit to accuse me of running over your wife.”

“Already changed my shirt, give it to Clara to dispose of, but we weren't positive there weren't stains someplace we wouldn't see until it was too late. I need my reading glasses to see things close up and things got so jumbled I couldn't find 'em in time and Clara was too nervous about then to trust completely. Had to hurry in case you was going to leave soon or old Jack wouldn't let you in. So I slipped on my slicker. Changed clothes again when I got home before the sheriff brought you and Jack over here to question. You can't be too careful these days.”

Charlie drove slowly into Chinook and tried to enjoy the drive and the outlandish scenery along the way. But her head was back in Moot Point.

Sheriff Wes had arrived to hear her story, gather Clara, Frank, and Randolph together in the Glick trailer, praise Charlie on a “nice job, Detective Greene,” and essentially tell her to get lost. Charlie had been about to tell him of the bloodstained shirt under the steps, but his attitude pissed her off.

So she didn't. No doubt about it, a sheriff with an attitude misses things.

Charlie ended up at The Witch's Tit across from the Moot County Courthouse for a frozen yogurt lunch. So mad still at that particular county's sheriff, she splurged for chocolate sprinkles and cashews even.

She was crunching up the cashews with venom when Deputy Linda Tortle walked in, did a double take at the sight of Charlie, ordered a butterscotch sundae, and came to sit across from Charlie with her pickup ticket.

“Attacked any innocent men lately? You're the talk of the department, you know. First woman to ever beat up on Wes Bennett and get away with it.”

Charlie crunched her cashews harder.

Linda allowed the professional drag on her long face to lift into a teasing and toothy smile. “Told you he was a bastard … didn't I? Thought I had.”

The deputy went off with her claim ticket at an order barked from the PA system and returned with her caramel-colored lunch.

“Why do you work for him?”

“He's a good sheriff … hell, he makes a damn good bastard if that's all you aspire to. Charlie, he's not the first man to make big or muscle look sexy. Why do I have the feeling you already know that?”

“Why do I have the feeling some election year, he's going to read all about it in the local newspaper? And a woman named Tortle, not Tuttle, will be running against him?”

“And why is our sheriff been called off to the point by the California woman on an important development and low and behold we find the California woman right here in Chinook?”

Charlie told Linda about the spot Frank Glick and Clara Peterson were in at the moment.

Linda licked sticky butterscotch off her tongue onto her teeth. “What reason would Frank have to kill Michael Cermack? I can see him and Clara being panicked enough to dump all the grisly under your car in an emergency maybe, but a planned and cold-blooded attack—no way.”

“Hey, you can afford to say that. You're not an unofficial investigator, as in nonprofessional, who doesn't know the least thing about almost everything.”

Linda sucked on her plastic spoon a minute and studied Charlie. “And our Wes ticked you off. And you didn't tell him everything because he was being a big shit, right?”

Charlie shrugged noncommittally and got up to leave.

“You know, there's a great coffee bean place about three doors down,” the deputy said, getting up, too. “Could I treat you to some fresh-ground, roasted-on-the-spot, real caffeinated dessert, Ms. Greene?”

They soon strolled down the sidewalk toward the waterfront, like old friends, nursing thick paper cups of serious coffee.

“So what's it going to cost me to get this information you're withholding from Wes Bennett because he was being an asshole?” Deputy Tortle asked, breathing in the aromatic steam rising from her cup.

The cargo ship Charlie had seen while sitting on the wharf with the sheriff was gone. But a huge Hyundai ship like the one she'd seen approach from her cabin windows was loading sawn lumber from a barge out in the harbor. “I'll trade you for information that I want.”

“How do I know your information's worth anything?”

“You don't.”

“You tell me first and I'll decide.” Linda put on her tough act.

“No deal.”

“Listen, withholding information in a murder case can get you in deep waters fast, my friend. My advice to you is—”

“What information? Who said anything about information?” They stood in mild sunshine, but on the horizon behind the big ship and the barge of lumber the sky looked bruised and faintly dirty. A sea gull flew over them, shitting a three-foot-long string of white.

“What is it you think you need to know?” Deputy Tortle asked finally.

“The current status of the investigation into the whereabouts of Olie Bergkvist. I assume someone is looking into it. It should be easy to trace him if he flew into Portland, by checking computerized airline passenger lists.”

“Mr. Bergkvist left Buenos Aires about a month and a half ago to attend some art doings in New Orleans. He was seen there and told friends he planned further travel before coming home. So far none of those computerized passenger lists list him as coming into Portland International. And we have been able to make no contact with him, but then he probably doesn't know we're looking for him.”

“Is that all? Georgette Glick swore she saw him in town.”

“That's all so far. We're still investigating.”

“Could he have come by ship or train or rental car? Or to some other airport, maybe by small chartered flight?”

“Sure, and we're checking that out too. But if so it would be the first time. His pattern was to fly into Portland International and call his wife to come pick him up.”

“Don't you think it's odd that Gladys doesn't know where he is right now? That he spends most of the year away from her?”

“Might be odd, but it's not illegal.” They turned back to walk up the street toward the courthouse. Linda said, “Why are you so fascinated with Olie Bergkvist?”

“Two other people asked questions about him, too, and they're both dead. Georgette insisted she'd seen him and Michael was curious as to why he was so late coming home this summer.”

They'd reached the Toyota and the deputy leaned pointedly against the door on the driver's side and folded her arms. “Now it's your turn.”

“There's a bloodstained man's safari shirt under the front steps of Frank Glick's house. Georgie's cat made a nest out of it and it's full of hair.”

Linda Tortle stood absolutely still but took long blinks, reminding Charlie absurdly of a computer booting up. “When you withhold information,” she said finally, “you don't fool around, do you?”

Chapter 30

On the way back to Moot Point, Charlie turned off at a forest service sign and drove up to a scenic overlook high atop a “mountain.” Soaring walls of thick forest dwarfed the road and the Toyota. And Charlie.

Leafy vines crawled up tree trunks and weighed down bushes. Green moss spread along everything not covered by vine. Shorter trees, drooping under the burden of bright red berries, formed part of the undergrowth, and below them flowering bushes and below them clots of wildflowers fought for the sun at the edge of the road, like colored Christmas decorations against the forest green.

It was impressive yet depressing and Charlie was glad when, after a couple of miles of switchbacks and climb, her world opened out to the open sky above the open sea. A middle-aged couple sat outside their Ford pickup camper in webbed lawn chairs eating sandwiches. They nodded distantly as she stepped out of the Toyota.

She wandered over to the other end of the parking lot. A waist-high battlement, two feet thick, made out of rocks and concrete kept her from falling off the edge. And she tested her acrophobia by peering over it in a safe, sideways stance with her balance still on the mountain side of the overlook.

Great. Charlie had come here to get away and think and there were all her problems spread out below. She drew back when the sweaty sickness came over her, but could still see in remembered sight the tiny ribbon of Highway 101 broken only by curves in the landscape and juts of the mountain forest … leading back home to Libby and to Congdon and Morse Representation, Inc., where she was sorely needed if not always appreciated.

There was the white lighthouse with its picturesque red roof looking tiny and pristine in its jade setting … where Michael Cermack had driven his equally red Ferrari off the point to his death on the beach below.

There was Moot Point in its half-oval nesting place around the bay, a series of dot roofs and flowering trees, of pencil streets, idyllic in its gorgeous setting … where Georgette Glick was shot, her body left sprawled on her own picnic table, and then stuffed under Charlie's car in the fog.

There were the massive rock rookeries off the point where pinpoints of birds hustled over and about their own nesting places. There was the
Peter Iredale
nearly invisible from clear up here, except for the whitewash of foam breaking around it at odd angles to the beach. And the beach, a line from horizon to horizon unbroken except for jagged headlands, the multilines of breakers fading into sea mist at the far reaches of vision.

… and there was something out of order down there. Charlie dared her sickness to peer over again. Bright yellow and blue tents had been set up on the beach below the village of Moot Point. Or maybe huge beach umbrellas … something.

Charlie leaned back to the safe side of the battlement and stared out to sea. The horizon now looked grubbier and meaner than it had in Chinook—even though sun glorified the scene below and warmed Charlie's shoulders up here.

The couple folded their aluminum and plastic-web chairs, hung them on the back of the pickup camper, climbed into the cab, and drove off leaving Charlie all alone with nature and her thoughts. She'd come up here to be alone and expected to feel relieved. Instead she felt uneasy.