Murder at Moot Point

by Marlys Millhiser

  Speaking of sheriffs, Wes Bennett moved away from the small gathering on the steps of the Earth Spirit and sauntered down the street toward her. Charlie stopped and waited for him, trying on a hopeful smile that felt more like a wince. “So, am I under arrest or what?”

  “Let’s take a walk on the beach and have a talk.”

  “I think Brother Dennis is scandalized that I’m not in handcuffs already,” she said as they descended the steep stairs to the sand. “Why Brother Dennis? Because of some kind of religion or just flaky stuff like Jack’s store?”

  “God knows,” Wes said heavily but again she was struck by the graceful almost stealthy way he moved across the sand. “This town’s full of Grape-Nuts. But other than an improper mushroom or two they haven’t given me much trouble.”

  He went on to explain that, although there was some overlap, the village was made up of four basic subcultures. The true natives were mostly retired fishermen or lumbermen or their widows who lived on pensions and social security in the smaller wooden bungalows on the terraces. The second group were retired citizens from other places, like Frank, who’d come from California to Oregon where a piece of Pacific view was still affordable.

  “They tend to live in those double trailer homes off minor investments and pensions and social security, but they aren’t rich by any means. Then there’s the merchant class trying to lure the tourist to these shores. They have the nicer homes on the hill as a rule. And last, the New Wavers or Agers or whatever they are. I still can’t get a handle on these guys. Warlocks and witches is what they seem to me, Grape-Nuts one and all. But I’m just a country boy who wouldn’t understand. Aren’t many in any of the groups who’ll see forty again.”

  The country boy had a few gray hairs himself, but his curls were cut short and tight to his head. His eyes weren’t brown or hazel so they must have been blue. Nothing startling like Jack Monroe’s but with a lot of savvy lurking behind a weary front.

  “So where do those young waitpersons at Rose’s live?”

  “Mostly in Chinook, where there’s apartment-type housing and a small college. Hardly fifteen miles from here.”

  “So why are we walking the beach and why are you filling me in on the history of Moot Point if I’m a suspect in a murder in your county, Sheriff Bennett?”

  They had come to the beginning of the headland that held the lighthouse and he sat on one of the black rocks at its base. Swallows dived and swooped from the cliff above and noisy sea birds filled the air around three huge rocks in the sea in front of them. “Because, Charlie Greene, I like your company. Because I’m thoroughly stumped as to why anyone would want to harm so harmless a person as Georgette Glick—Frank maybe—but Georgette? And mostly because, Charlie Greene, I’m waiting for the computer in the courthouse to cough up your entire life history.”

  Chapter 4

  “So Libby doesn’t have a father, never did?” Wes asked around a bite of his banana split with nuts and whipped cream and chocolate sprinkles and maraschino cherries over three flavors of yogurt.

  They sat in a booth in The Witch’s Tit, a frozen yogurt shop in Chinook that had one menu for the fat and one for the lean. Charlie worked on a small cone with less enthusiasm. This was supposed to be lunch but every time she brought the yogurt to her mouth she noticed again the ink smudges left on her hands from when he’d had her fingerprinted at the courthouse.

  “I suppose the computer told you my bank balance and my bra size too.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.” The thing was, he wasn’t fat, just big enough to eat like he was.

  “Obviously there was a man involved, boy really—it would have been stupid to marry him. I’m just one of the statistics you read about.”

  “Looks like you landed on your feet. Lots of kids don’t. College degree. Car and condo payments in LA. Good job. No police record. Your daughter either. Must have been a hard pull.”

  “I had a lot of help from my mother,” Charlie admitted with that familiar twinge of guilt. “Can a computer really tell you everything about a person? Aren’t there privacy laws or anything?”

  “Tells us a lot more than we need to know. Have to hire somebody just to sort through all the sludge.”

  “You didn’t answer my question either. About the laws.”

  “Nothing modern technology can’t get around.” He was still doing that low rumble in his chest that was supposed to be a laugh and his tongue was still working cashew bits from between his teeth when they stepped out onto the sidewalk.

  “Well, even without a computer I’ll bet I can come up with a few facts about you, too,” Charlie told the sheriff of Moot County. “You had some experience with football and the Marines before you got into law enforcement. Am I right?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You don’t seem pigheaded, rednecked, or mean enough.”

  “You’d be surprised how life can rub some of the rough edges off even us rednecks.”

  They strolled companionably down a block to the wharf, the sheriff and his suspect in a murder that didn’t make sense. The sun was warm and the harbor smelled of dead fish and deader sewage. The sea gulls appeared to be enjoying both. Here the bars and restaurants had names like the Harbor Master and Pilot House and the Broken Ore. The dockworkers were beefy and pale skinned, lots of red and blond hair and names like Bjorg and Olaf and Sandy. Wes greeted them all and they all called him Wes and they all gave Charlie a curious once-over.

  “Most murders make a lot of sense,” the sheriff said as though reading her mind, “even the accidental ones.” He took off his jacket for her to sit on and sprawled beside her on the wooden planking.

  “Maybe someone intended to shoot somebody else and Mrs. Glick got in the way in the fog,” she said, “and then he stuffed her body under my car to make it look like an accident long enough for him to get away. I can see somebody wanting to shoot Frank.”

  “Maybe we don’t know all there is to know about the Glicks. Or Charlie Greene for that matter. Maybe there’s something the computer and I haven’t turned up yet.” He leaned on an elbow to stare at a humongous black-and-red cargo ship sitting high in the water and empty.

  “I suppose it delivered Hondas,” Charlie said lazily. “Wonder what it will take back?”

  “Part of the national forest probably. Their own population explosion took care of theirs long ago. Now because people like you buy their cars they can afford to buy up our dwindling forests. Along with most everything else.”

  “I have no use for a gargantuan gas guzzler I can’t find parking space for,” Charlie said defensively. “Old macho Detroit refused to build a reliable, energy-efficient, well-made, affordable compact so I had to go foreign. They didn’t want my business for so long I got tired of waiting.”

  “What do all those limos on Rodeo Drive do for parking?”

  “They don’t have to park. Their chauffeurs just keep driving around the block.”

  He grunted and laid his head back on his hands to gaze up at scudding cloud puffs. He had to be the most unsherifflike sheriff in the country.

  “Don’t you have work to do in your office or anything?”

  “I do my best work outside. And I’m working right now. I’m thinking.”

  “Must be a great confidence builder for your voters.” Charlie was thinking she should call her own office, let them know what happened. “How long before I can go home?”

  “Couple days, probably. Unless we find the gun that killed Mrs. Glick and your fingerprints are on it. Or we find out you have some connection with the lady. Or you could go home sooner if the murderer steps forward. Which doesn’t happen often. Relax and enjoy the scenery. We don’t get sun like this on a regular basis.”

  Charlie’s head was too busy looking for a way out of this mess. “Tell me more about Moot Point and these New Ager people. What exactly is it that they do?”

  “Christ, what don’t they do? They go out to communicate with the whales when t
he poor critters are trying to migrate. They sell crystals and tarot cards … hell, broomsticks for all I know. They make a living on mail order tapes and video cassettes telling people how to wrap their bodies into knots and communicate with the universe. They compose music that sounds like wind chimes in a San-O-Let. They hold seminars and retreats on how to see auras and go back to talk to the people you were in previous lives. Grape-Nuts. But nothing you can’t find worse in Southern California. And nothing that would lead anyone to want to kill a little old lady on a Schwinn. You read Jack Monroe’s book, you tell me.”

  “Just the proposal. It’s about how to raise your ‘level of consciousness’ so you can always be serene and successful through meditation, yoga exercises, diet, and training your mind to leave your body or something. Maybe Jack’s mind left his body while he was meditating while I was watching him through the window, and he shot Georgette, stuffed her under my car, and crawled back into his body to answer the door. Tell me about the murders you’ve worked on that do make sense.”

  Problems with family and/or sexual relationships came first to his mind, and drug-related crime was next. “Comes under the heading of greed. There’s so much loose cash around before it can be laundered. Ripping off dealers is a growing industry and often leads to murder, given the sums and personalities involved.”

  “What about accidental murder? Someone’s target shooting and Georgette rides by and—”

  “At night? In the fog? On a public road?” He came back up onto an elbow and squinted at her suspiciously. “What was a seventy-eight-year-old woman doing riding her bicycle at night in the fog? This case is all questions and no answers. There’s no place to start putting the puzzle together from.” He stood and lifted her off his jacket. “I’m taking you back to the Hide-a-bye. Tough little agents from LA are too distracting.”

  “But I’m hungry and there’s no food there.”

  “You just had lunch.”

  “You just had lunch. I had worries.”

  “You don’t now?”

  They stopped at a bakery for French bread and sticky buns, screeched up to a supermarket for smoked salmon, butter, coffee, milk, cold cereal, Tillimook cheese, coleslaw, ripe Bing and Royal Ann cherries, juicy plums, and a bottle of Knudsen Erath Cabernet. As he broke the speed law on their way to the Hide-a-bye he pointed out that everything but the cereal was made not only in the U.S. but in Oregon. He didn’t offer to help her carry the food into her cabin, but shooshed her out of the Bronco and took off for the village of Moot Point to talk to Frank Glick.

  Sitting on the built-in bench out on the deck, her Keds propped on the railing, Charlie ate bread and fruit and watched the Pacific roll in and roll in and roll in and a jogger go by in the direction of the point. She finished the last tasty crunch of bread crust and waited. The jogger didn’t come back. Now that she thought about it, the jogger had been a dead ringer for her client. Charlie sat forward and stared at the southern end of the beach. She could see the lighthouse on the cliff above and part of one of the huge rocks out in front of the point with birds all over it.

  She stared until her contacts started scratching. Jack still hadn’t come back. Why should he? He lived over there. There must be a way to walk over there and back for a poor suspect bereft of her car. Perhaps to talk to her client. Perhaps to snoop around the town, since nobody was going to fess up to Wes Bennett. He was the law for godsake. But why would anyone fess up to the logical suspect who was also a perfect stranger to everyone in town and therefore the last priority on anyone’s conscience? Except Jack’s. Then again Jack could decide he didn’t need her now that the deal was all but done with Morton and Fish.

  Charlie found a path leading to the beach on the other side of the first cabin. It was longer than it looked to the black rocks that cluttered the shore at the end of the point. They were foamy with approaching tide but she could see the path leading up the cliff. Surely Jack Monroe could drive her back to her cabin.

  One of the rocks moved and startled Charlie into a sudden stop. A sea lion sunning on the rock had been rolled by a rogue wave. It flapped a flipper at her as if waving hello and made a sound he intended to be a roar suggesting she buzz off.

  This was the closest Charlie had ever come to one of these creatures and she wished she hadn’t left her little camera in her luggage. She could remember how taken Libby had been with the sea lions that hung around the wharf in Santa Cruz because local vendors sold bait fish to the tourists for feeding them. Libby had begged for every last buck in Charlie’s billfold to buy fish.

  But this one was young and slim and unscarred and wild. He was beautiful. Even with his fangs showing and his whiskers laid back there was something sweet and innocent about him that Charlie wished she could share with her daughter. Another wave forced Charlie to run up the beach to keep her Keds dry, and when she turned he was gone. She was almost to the path when the obvious struck her. What was a seventy-eight-year-old woman doing on a bicycle, period? Never mind that it was at night, that it was in the fog.

  Charlie didn’t realize she’d stopped again to stare at the sea birds screeching around the black behemoths offshore and clinging to the grassy areas on top until sea foam slithered up over her shoes to her ankles. It receded, slipping the sand out from under her heels and tugging at her to come with it.

  She swore and squelched on up to dry land, following the footpath around the point until it met the road that led up to the lighthouse. Charlie followed this road down instead to the Earth Spirit. The Moot County sheriff’s patrol Bronco still sat in front of the Glicks’.

  Charlie slipped quickly into the Earth Spirit. Jack Monroe perched behind the cash register with a pencil and a yellow legal pad. He still wore his jogging sweats.

  “Aha, caught you. You don’t either write in your head.” Before a tourist could wander in or her author could conjure up one of his diatribes, she asked him about Georgette Glick. “Was she really strong enough to ride that bike at her age?”

  “Every day the weather permitted. That’s why they retired here. Frank wanted to live in Chinook where there were young high school and college girls walking around to gape at, but Georgette wanted to study under Brother Dennis. Cycling is one of his methods of achieving cosmic consciousness. Now Frank just walks. Good days, he walks the beach clear into Chinook to watch the girls go by. I believe he’s a year older than Georgette. But he wouldn’t give Brother Dennis the time of day. So who’s to say why they were so chipper a couple?”

  “He walks fifteen miles—that would be thirty both ways—and he’s seventy-nine? Come on, Jack.”

  “When the tide’s out you can walk the beach and it’s not even five miles. There’s a rush hour bus to bring him home.” He checked his watch. “I’ve got to shower and get to the celebration. Could you watch the store for me? I was going to close but I probably won’t be more than an hour. It’s being a slow day.”

  “What celebration?”

  “Georgette’s. I’d invite you to come along but you’re in kind of a strange position around here. Not that I believe for a moment you shot her.”

  “You’re celebrating a woman’s murder?”

  “She has finally attained the highest consciousness possible.”

  Chapter 5

  LIFE FORCE VITAMINS!, Charlie read on the label, were not only organically grown, but naturally grown too. They were FULLY ABSORBABLE! They were unrefined whole food vitamin and mineral concentrates that were grown by nature and not laboratory chemicals and they were 1000 TIMES MORE POTENT! They were also extremely expensive. But then they provided the buyer with shinier hair, stronger nails, fewer colds, nicer complexion, an end to PMS, and more energy. Not to mention a REJUVENATED SEX LIFE!

  Although everything was pretty dusty there was something homey about the clutter. Bumper stickers, T-shirts, coffee mugs, pot holders, outdoor cooking aprons, trivets with messages ranging from one word to crowded paragraphs. WHOLENESS or HOLNESS or HOLENESS—three different spellin
gs on three different mugs. MIND, BODY, SPIRIT instead of God, Son, and Holy Ghost, ALTERNATIVE REALITIES instead of Jesus loves you—still the place did remind Charlie of a religious novelty shop.

  There were tapes and books and videos. If you just wanted a lazy browse you could read the quotes on the sample T-shirts stapled to corkboard high on one wall—

  “It is necessary; therefore it is possible.”—Borgese.

  “We are living at a time when history is holding its breath.”—Arthur Clarke.

  “What we are looking for is what is looking.”—Saint Francis of Assisi.

  “We have to move into the unknown; the known has failed us too completely.”—Marilyn Ferguson.

  “Marilyn Ferguson?” Charlie was asking the air when footsteps sounded on the wooden porch outside.

  A woman entered the Earth Spirit, smiling dimples into plump cheeks when she saw Charlie. She tucked waist-length hair behind her ears and introduced herself as Paige Magill. “Jack told me he’d left his agent in charge of the store and asked me to stop by to see how things were going.”

  “I haven’t had any customers. Jack said he’d be back an hour ago.”

  “The celebration for Georgie’s getting out of hand. I think you and I better close up shop. I doubt Jack’ll be back any time soon.” Paige’s cheeks were plump because of youth, her thighs plump in tight jeans because of just plain plump. Still, she was the type Frank Glick would cop a feel on every chance he got. Charlie couldn’t fit her into the guideline of resident types set down by Sheriff Wes.

  Paige produced a key from behind the To the blind all things are sudden sign above the door and locked it as they stepped out onto the porch. She hid it in a carved slot under the top stair. All signs of Georgette Glick had been rinsed from the road. But her calico cat sat on the hood of the station wagon that had replaced Wes’s Bronco. It had suitcases strapped to its top. Two boys of late grade school age sat morosely on a bench swing on the patio. Georgette’s family was arriving.