Killer Commute

by Marlys Millhiser

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Also by Marlys Millhiser

  Copyright

  For Joy and Mike,

  Long may you love

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to Wendy Hornsby and Jan Burke for the Long Beach update and to Kate Gonzales and Mary Maggie Mason for their sense of humor.

  CHAPTER 1

  CHARLIE GREENE TURNED her Toyota into the drive and stopped at the obelisk. White and pink obscenities already marred its new coat of dark olive paint. She stuck her card into its slot, knowing the black metal grate of a gate wouldn’t open for her without further persuasion, and stared between bars into the courtyard with a sigh so deep it had a trace of voice in it. Bags of groceries redolent with celery, ground coffee, and spicy cold cuts filled the seat beside her, and the backseat, too.

  She could see the gate to the alley clear across the courtyard in the dimming dusk. Mrs. Beesom’s light was on over the door to her kitchen, lighting up a raft of bird feeders and the rear of her ancient Olds 88. Libby’s Jeep Wrangler was gone.

  Charlie stepped out of the Toyota. Her feet hurt, her head hurt, her stomach hurt—even her hair felt like it had an ache. Time for a break.

  One whole week without the killer commute, the telephone glued to her ear, worried writers, prima-donna writers, office politics, studio execs, and harried producers. No teleplays, book proposals, manuscripts, pitches, or story treatments. No office meetings, business lunches, screenings.

  The point of the obelisk opening the gate to the courtyard was so you didn’t have to get out of the car and expose yourself to roving gangs of criminal kids, increasingly Asian and ruthless, who were supposedly responsible for the graffiti that graced convenient surfaces.

  Charlie slugged the obelisk in the appropriate places and caught her foot before giving the damn thing a kick, having almost broken a toe last night. She noted some new obscenities on the compound’s wall—all in English and spelled correctly, like their predecessors. And some squiggles that suggested petroglyphs.

  When the gate swung open, she grabbed her card, jumped back in the Toyota, and gunned it into the compound before the portal closed on the big bad world.

  Charlie swung in beside the looming Oldsmobile and stepped out into her own little fortress—well, she and Libby shared it with three other households. But tonight it seemed exceptionally secure because she was home, yet she wasn’t home.

  A bag of groceries in each arm, she managed to open the kitchen door, switch on the lights, and kick off her shoes. Back out in the free air—rich with the ocean smell of the bay tonight, though her home was some blocks inland—she felt the cool of the concrete through the feet of her pantyhose.

  That was another thing—no pantyhose for a week. Just sloppy sweats and comfortable shoes, shorts on a warm afternoon. On her last trip to the car, Charlie nearly tripped over Libby’s cat who, instead of hissing with surprise and mauling Charlie’s hose with her in them, rubbed his jowls and neck against her leg and mewed—like a real cat.

  “Libby must not have fed you again.” But Tuxedo’s food bowl beside the refrigerator was about a third full of dry food mixed with foul-smelling meaty food. He always saved a portion of his dinner for a postmidnight snack so he could regurgitate it on the stairs to the second floor on his way to bed. Tuxedo was the one part of her vacation she could have done without.

  But once she’d changed into sweatpants and shirt and fuzzy slippers she figured she could even put up with the cat. Charlie could hear him still outside meoyowling as she filled the refrigerator and cupboards with provisions for her getaway. This was not only her home and her fortress. This was Charlie’s hideout.

  She nearly forgot and answered the phone while making herself a fried-egg sandwich with ketchup. Betty Beesom’s voice on the answering machine in the living room reminded Charlie not to answer the phone because she wasn’t home.

  When she took the sandwich and a tall glass of milk out to the patio, Tuxedo Greene grew more insistent, pacing back and forth, pinning her with those big, luminescent eyes.

  “If you want to go in the house, you’ve got your own door. Shut up and let me enjoy my retreat.”

  The sea breeze washed the car exhaust from the air. Night birds called in the trees. Airliners circled overhead. The roar of rush hour sounded far away. The egg and bread soothed her stomach, the milk seemed to wash away her aches.

  Maggie Stutzman’s house was dark, her parking spot next to Jeremy’s Trailblazer empty. Her house and Charlie’s faced the street and formed the front corners of the compound. Jeremy Fiedler’s house and Mrs. Beesom’s fronted the alley and formed the back corners. High masonry walls coated with stucco and topped with rolled razor wire and broken glass attached the small homes, forming what the city termed a “condominium complex.”

  Betty Beesom and her husband had at one time owned a small house in the middle of a large lot. In the boom days, before cuts in military spending hit Long Beach hard, a builder had talked the widow into the scheme by practically giving her one of the houses.

  There were few secrets inside these walls with muted lighting spaced along them. Charlie didn’t know anyone outside them in the surrounding neighborhood.

  Each of the houses had a sunken patio, with identical flower boxes arranged for privacy and the parking spaces in between them. Visitors had to park in the street. Jeremy also had a Ferrari but kept it in a private locked garage some miles away. He was an odd duck who kept odd hours. His Trailblazer was there, but his house stood dark. He worked out in a health club not far from here, might even now be walking home.

  Charlie sprawled on a lounge, letting go of tensions incrementally, sucking in sea salt and dead-fish smells.

  Tuxedo Greene exploded onto the glass tabletop beside her, knocking over her empty milk glass. If cats can bristle, he did. A tiny, malnourished kitten when Libby found him abandoned in a McDonald’s parking lot, he’d grown into a sleek, slender teen who was now a formidable, muscular tom. His coat was black, his toes and a V-shaped blaze on his chest, white. At the moment his coat and tail puffed to make him twice his size, and the white of his chest and the yellow of his eyes stood out as if animated.

  “I take it you are trying to tell me somethi
ng, cat.”

  Cat meorowelled. They don’t really meow; they do all kinds of irritating language things, if you listen to them—which Charlie preferred not to. She didn’t like cats, particularly this one. But she loved her daughter beyond all reason. And Libby loved this animal.

  This animal puffed some more and then exhaled. He jumped onto her lounge, close enough for her to smell the horrid cat food on his breath when he said something else, then leapt to a planter full of blooming plants. Tuxedo stared at her over his shoulder, his eyes expressionless yet weird and somehow momentous. Then he disappeared, dispersing petals.

  Charlie relaxed into the lounge again, feeling chilly and drowsy, trying to persuade herself to take her dishes in and sprawl on the couch instead, watch some TV. Options, so many options—that’s what this disappearing act was all about.

  We aren’t trying to talk ourselves into anything here, are we? I mean, we aren’t afraid of a real vacation for once, right?

  Charlie’s inner voice was in the habit of voicing her fears and uncertainties, just so she wouldn’t overlook them. She ignored it, but there was now an edge to her mood that even the commute and the cat hadn’t managed to generate.

  Charlie was almost to the kitchen door with her dishes when she dropped them to break on the quarry-tile paving of the patio because the cat screamed.

  * * *

  “If you was home, I’d tell you how sick I’m getting of these cat fights, that’s for sure,” Betty Beesom said, careful not to look at Charlie.

  Charlie, with whisk broom and dustpan, had cleaned up the shards of glass and pottery as well as she could under the light above the kitchen door. She set them carefully on the edge of a planter before putting her arm around the older woman.

  “Mrs. Beesom, just because I’m taking my vacation at home doesn’t mean you can’t talk to me.” The home vacation had actually been Betty’s idea, after Charlie’s disastrous, if profitable, one in Las Vegas last fall.

  “Oh, I know I’m just a nosy old lady who gets on people’s nerves. But we all worry about you. We want you to get a decent rest this time.”

  The woman was a nosy old lady who got on people’s nerves, but Charlie worried about her, too. Her eyes were always red and teary. She blinked a lot. “You’re a neighbor and a good friend. Let’s go look for those cats so you can get some sleep tonight.”

  Tuxedo sat on top of Jeremy’s Trailblazer. He and Hairy Granger ruled the night—in the compound and the alley, anyway. Hairy was middle-aged, so Tuxedo, in his prime, reigned as king of the hill at the moment. Hairy lived with the Grangers across the alley from Betty, and until about a year ago cleaned Tuxedo’s clock regularly. Now it was the younger cat’s turn.

  The turf wars were noisy. If you kept the cats in, they kept you awake. If you let them out, the neighbors suffered. They were both neutered, but when Tuxedo started spraying the baseboards, Charlie had a cat door installed.

  “Libby’s at the Esterhazies’ tonight, and Mr. Esterhazie called to say he’d see she stayed out of trouble and got home all right,” Betty said.

  “You know Ed Esterhazie?”

  “Well, I know he’s Esterhazie Cement.”

  “Concrete.”

  “Concrete. And he called Maggie, who told me. Maggie’s out with that man again. Jeremy’s home and said not to bother you. Here I am talking to you.”

  “You’re not bothering me.” I kind of love you. I must need a vacation.

  They were circling the Trailblazer, their eyes on the cat on its roof. He hissed and spat, arched his back and quivered his tail.

  “Think he’ll bite us?”

  “I guarantee it, if we can catch him. Let me do it. You just keep him nervous on that side. If Jeremy’s home, why aren’t there any lights on in his house?”

  “Maybe he went out again. Maybe—Charlie, something moved in there—” Betty backed away and Libby’s cat flew off the Trailblazer, his forelegs out like a falling squirrel. Charlie looked into the vehicle and the manic stare of Hairy Granger.

  “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

  VEHICLES 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.”