Death of the Office Witch

by Marlys Millhiser

  “She didn’t even call her kids to let them know.” Keegan didn’t find Charlie’s solution reassuring. “She’s a devoted mommy, too, remember, and grandmommy. The husband’s up in Canada fishing.”

  “That’s probably where she went. I don’t know why everyone is jumping to the conclusion something happened to her.”

  “Because, Charlie, she had a connection to Gloria Tuschman. And Gloria was murdered.” He studied the glass of milk she was nursing. “Ulcer acting up again?”

  “I do not have an ulcer. Merely an easily upset stomach. Indigestion. Okay?”

  Today he wore a bolo tie with a big piece of turquoise and silver holding it together. His mustache looked weedier than usual with cioppino spots dotting the light hairs.

  She figured one of the reasons he was so successful was that he was nonthreatening. Which was not an asset that normally played well in the industry, but somehow worked for him. Maybe it was the clear, dead-center sort of thinking his eyes persuaded you he was always doing. The wire-rimmed eyeglasses with deceptively expensive tinting suggested honesty, dependability, keenness.

  Most of Charlie’s writers lived from hand to mouth, had mates with honest work, or shagged part-time jobs wherever they could. She figured that’s how valet parking came to be invented. She even represented one who worked nights as an armed security guard. But a handful like Keegan had hit it hot early and remained consistent. And he had a good head for a writer. Lived well but not lavishly, didn’t spend a lot on his women, had few illusions about the industry. However, lighting a fire under him, as her boss asked her to do, was not an easy job.

  “You’re a workaholic,” he said. “You know that.”

  “And you’re not, I suppose?”

  “I’m dedicated. That’s different.”

  “You don’t want the Alpine Tunnel script?”

  “No, but I need it. And you know that, too. Someday, oh Siren of the Checkbook, I will write the screenplay of my own published novel, and I might even let you run the deal. But don’t count on it.”

  “I promised I’d send your novel out for you when you finished it, didn’t I? How far along is it now?”

  “I’ve started over. It got too long.”

  “I told you to just finish it and then go back and cut and shape. You have room to explore and invent, surprise yourself and me. You’re not under contract, you can do what you want.”

  “I will. This is the last start-over. I promise.”

  “Too many adverbs, right?”

  He always had great concepts for novels, but somehow they got lost in the mechanics. He rewrote all the freshness out of them, worried them to death, often never completed them. Charlie loved writers, made her living off them, but would never understand them.

  While they waited for the parking valet to walk five feet to collect Charlie’s Toyota (there was no avoiding the ransom here) they watched Guy Matell, the executive director of the Writers Guild, pull in in his new Jaguar.

  “Must be slumming,” Charlie muttered.

  “He has to deal with money and power for the rights of some seventeen hundred writers,” Keegan whispered through his teeth—not an easy thing to do. The Guild provided the Jag. A new one every year. One of the perks of the privileged. “He’s not going to cut much green in a Chevy.”

  While they waited to pull out into traffic, Keegan said in that reasonable, innocent manner of his, “I assume we’re heading for the print shop.”

  “Print shop?” Charlie had planned to hurry him back to Coldwater Canyon and then herself to Wilshire and the agency to find out any new developments in the Alpine Tunnel-Ursa Major deal and to try to make another dent in her phone log. “What print shop?”

  The Kwick Kinky Kopy Shoppe was in Pasadena. It sat in a dying shopping center—two newer, more upscale malls were nearby—weeds sprouting in the outlying concrete cracks of the parking lot, the shop windows on either side of it empty but for “For Lease” signs. There was a “Closed” sign next to the one announcing that Kwick Kinky Kopy was open eight days a week, twenty-five hours a day.

  Keegan got out to read the small hand-lettered card taped to the glass door and returned to the Toyota. “Closed for Gloria Tuschman’s Memorial Séance and Dance.”

  “Maybe we can talk to Roger next week. Right now—”

  “We go to Gloria Tuschman’s Memorial Séance and Dance.”

  “Keegan—”

  “Sign says it’s in Happy Valley Canyon, 1132 Honeah Place. Number 568. I never heard of Happy Valley Canyon.” He started pawing through the glove compartment. “You got a Thomas Brothers Guide?’”

  Happy Valley Canyon was all the way back the way they’d come and then a good forty minutes north and west. 1132 Honeah Place backed onto a commercial grove of orange trees now in bloom. Electric voltage hummed through multilayered wires overhead, and down below bees by the zillions hummed around the trees. The air was almost too sweet to breathe. The clingy dripping fragrance of orange blossoms always reminded Charlie of gardenia. Gardenias always reminded Charlie of a drink at Trader Vic’s. She took off her suit jacket and threw it in the back of the Toyota.

  She stood on the paved parking lot behind an old stucco apartment-turned-condo complex that appeared to be its own community. It spread to either side as far as the curvature of the earth allowed, and you could tell it was old because the stucco had metallic glitter flakes in it. The orange grove was planted in straight lines like a field, with irrigation pipes set to dump water in tidy trenches carefully maintained between them.

  Heat roiled off car roofs. Most of the condo dwellers were down in the city at work this time of the day, and the lot was more than half empty. But a familiar forest-green sedan was parked next to the fence. It looked a lot like the unmarked one Lieutenant Dalrymple had been driving that morning in Coldwater Canyon.

  “Here to study the suspects?” Keegan asked, following the direction of her gaze and her thoughts. There was another note taped to the window on the back door of Number 568. “Through the gate and into the woods.” Charlie and Keegan followed the fence line to the nearest street, where half of a vehicle gate stood open, posted with “No Trespassing” signs and warnings that the fence was wired with electricity.

  The road beyond the fence was dirt, with an assortment of shoe prints snaking along in the dust. The skin under Charlie’s pantyhose and bra itched as if demented fire ants were dancing on her body before she and Keegan came to the end of the shoe tracks. A lone drop of sweat tickled between her breasts down to her navel.

  No one danced. The road was one lane wide and blocked completely by a circle of people sitting close together on webbed lawn chairs and folding stools. Lieutenant David Dalrymple knelt on one knee between two elderly ladies. He alone was watching their arrival. The rest had their eyes clenched tightly as they gripped the hands to either side of them.

  A man sitting next to Gloria’s husband, Roger, looked as if he were undergoing a helium enema—face puffed scarlet with purple highlights and body arched.

  Everyone dripped sweat and chanted, “Glor-e-ah, Glor-e-ah.”

  Bees droned and high-voltage wires hummed backup. It could have been church.

  Another man stood away from the group over in the shade of an orange tree, a suit coat hooked over his shoulder by an index finger, his other hand shooshing bees with his handkerchief. His hair was cut in the old astronaut crew. His expression was plenty fed up. He looked a lot more like a cop than David Dalrymple.

  The man who appeared about to explode relaxed a little, and, opening his eyes, said, “Wait, I think I’m getting something finally.” He looked up into Charlie’s cynical gaze. “Gloria?”

  “My name’s Charlie.”

  He was a large man with lots of hair and eyebrows and muscle and belly, maybe in his mid-fifties. Hair bristled in his ears and over the top of a V-neck T-shirt and on the back of his arms and hands. He wore tan work pants and hiking boots. Charlie had expected the person in charge of t
he séance would be a woman in, say, a long skirt, sandals, beads, graying hair dyed to pink—an old granola girl. This guy looked more like an ill-used stunt man.

  “Won’t you join our circle, Charlie?” His color was calming down, but his breath still came in gasps. “Gloria needs help.”

  “Talk about your understatement.” Charlie grunted when Keegan Monroe stabbed an elbow in her ribs.

  They all stared at her now, and the circle of aluminum chair bottoms were scooted apart to include her.

  The man under the bees and blossoms curled a stick of chewing gum into his mouth and, cranking up one cheek and both eyebrows, grinned at her discomfort. Keegan gave her back a gentle prod. David Dalrymple, from across the circle pleaded, “Please, Miss Greene?”

  Charlie plugged into the hands on either side, but she’d be damned if she’d kneel in the dirt or close her eyes.

  Roger Tuschman didn’t close his eyes, either. They were puffy with exhaustion. It was obvious he had not expected her to be here, and interesting that no one at the agency had been notified of this ceremony. Charlie had met him maybe four or five times, once at a Christmas office party Richard Morse swore he would never throw again. It had been at his house, and Gloria had soaked up some mood-altering substance and pushed Roger in the pool. Which was a boring and passé thing to do, but Roger had felt the loss of dignity out of all proportion and left without Gloria.

  The sun hammered on Charlie’s head, setting up her own buzz to match the bees and the wires. It made her slightly dizzy. The man on her one hand was young, his grip hurt as he got back into the spirit of things. The lady on her other was past middle age and into early seniordom. Her clasp trembled. She looked more like a medium than the big guy in charge. Both hands were sweaty. Charlie’s stomach was not a bit happy with this whole scene and her feet hurt. Damn it, Gloria, speak up and let’s get this over with. I haven’t got all day.

  “I think that’s a great idea,” the big hairy leader said and stood. Everyone dropped hands and began to gather themselves and assorted seating.

  “Charlie, are you okay?” Keegan put an arm around her waist and started walking her back down the dirt road.

  “What’s a great idea?” she asked him and Dalrymple, who came to flank her other side.

  “Don’t you remember?” the lieutenant stopped, and the other cop left the shade to join them, really leering now.

  “You don’t remember, do you?” Dalrymple turned her to face him. “Or are you just toying with us?”

  Keegan said quietly behind her, “You told the medium what to do, Charlie.”

  “I just told Gloria to hurry up so I could get out of here.” But Charlie could swear she hadn’t said that aloud. “What did I tell the medium?”

  “You said, ‘touch my things,’” Keegan answered. “I can’t believe you don’t know.”

  “Oh my God. Did he?”

  “Did he what?”

  “Touch my—”

  “No, no,” Dalrymple hurried her along now, and the other cop guffawed, “not you. Gloria. She spoke through you.”

  11

  A set of Gloria’s acrylic fingernails, complete with jewel strips, and a red dress, much like the one she’d worn to die in, lay spread across the dining room table in Number 568. Lieutenant Dalrymple added a ladies’ wristwatch, a pair of white earrings with red polka dots, and the red stiletto-heeled shoes.

  Marvin Grunion, the spiritualist, sat, and everyone else stood. He placed all the bright red acrylics on the dress, and they blended so well that if you didn’t look closely all you saw were the tiny fake jewels. He hummed a soft monotone like he missed having the bees as backup and added the earrings and watch, then the shoes. He bunched the dress around the assortment. A stiff white shoulder pad popped out of the neckline so suddenly someone squeaked a choked-off scream. More people were arriving, but fell silent once they entered the room.

  Charlie had a low tolerance for weird people. Too many at one time was threatening. After all, she had never been that comfortable around even just Gloria, and this was a real assortment of all ages and dress and styles. But no one in particular you’d look twice at walking down the street. Then again, it was southern California.

  Marvin Grunion rearranged the dress and stuffed the shoulder pad out of sight. He circled the earrings and the watch with the acrylics and looked puzzled about what to do with the shoes. The wall behind him was covered from floor to ceiling with shelves of different heights and widths, some small enough to feature pewter miniatures, two large enough to hold ornate candle holders, and all sizes in-between. One of the candle holders was empty, the other held four white candles with a red one in the middle.

  One shelf sported what appeared to be a lemon with nails driven through it at odd angles. Another held the sort of thick chalice actors in medieval movies spilled wine from while gnawing turkey drumsticks and leering at actresses’ cleavage. A metal cross sat upright with a chain dangling from a ring at its top like a necklace for a giant. An assortment of bells, the statue of a unicorn, strung beads falling out of a little treasure chest. None of the odds and ends looked valuable. Some looked like what you’d use to decorate the bottom of a fish tank.

  The reason Charlie paid so much attention to these knickknacks was her embarrassment at the antics of old bristle-haired Marvin. He was passing his hands over Gloria’s things in slow-motion swishing gestures as if he were treading water, all the while murmuring in tongues. She stood right across the table from him like the guest of honor (or the main sacrifice), unable to back away or move to either side because of the press of bodies.

  The sweet smell of orange blossoms couldn’t get through the crowd, either. Charlie could smell herself and other overheated, excited bodies. And maybe she could smell a hint of something else. Something that suggested these weren’t just clothes yanked from Gloria’s closet for the memorial séance and dance in her dead honor, but the exact same clothes Gloria had lain in in the bush tops for a sunny day and then a whole night.…

  If I don’t beat rush hour getting Keegan back to Coldwater Canyon and me back to the office, this is another day blown to hell, and me with deals happening.

  Charlie, a woman has been murdered.

  And I can’t help her now. That’s work for the police and Marvin the Shaman here. If I’d been murdered I wouldn’t expect Gloria to turn off the phones and door buzzer and quit work.

  Marvin picked up Gloria’s skirt and wept into it.

  Oh Jesus.

  “What’s happening, Mr. Grunion?” Lieutenant David Dalrymple whispered as if they were in church.

  “I’m Gloria Tuschman and I’m dead,” Grunion answered.

  “What’s happening, Gloria?” Dalrymple asked with a straight face. He might have been ordering pizza with mushrooms. He was definitely some kind of nut who had infiltrated the Beverly Hills Police Department. “Gloria, it’s important. Tell me what you’re doing right now.”

  “I’m talkingeh to Charlie Greene. She’s caught in traffic on the 405, she says. But she’s got this kid she can’t really handle, and she’s not always reliable.”

  “Where are you?”

  “In the office. I usually am first thing in the morningeh. But she’s always late. I don’t know why Mr. Morse puts up with it. I mean, she knows she’s got a kid when she takes the job. The agency shouldn’t be responsible.” This all coming from a weepy middle-aged man with sweat stains spreading all over his shirt. But the inflection, the nasal whine, the wheedling, the irritation sure did bring to mind Gloria Tuschman. “I am much more important around here than most people think, know what I mean?” There was a sly threat to this last pronouncement. That was like Gloria, too.

  “Gloria, is that really you?” Poor Roger Tuschman looked near collapse. He was short and slightly beefy, wore a striped shirt open at the neck and lots of jewelry. A gold chain, a small loop earring in one ear, a lavish watch band, and three rings. And one sideburn was much longer than the other. Perhaps h
e’d accidentally shaved one off this morning. “What can I do?”

  “You, I’ll talk to later,” the shaman snapped back at the poor man, but in Gloria’s accent.

  “Why are you dead, Gloria?” Dalrymple persisted.

  “Because that Charlie won’t help me. I’m in the trash can.”

  That did it. Charlie, who had promised herself not to validate this charade by speaking up, lost it right there. “You are not. You’re in the morgue. How can you be a ghost if you don’t even know where you are?”

  “You never did like me, did you Charlie?”

  “Did Charlie Greene murder you, Gloria?” Roger Tuschman started pushing at people to get around the table to Charlie. The other cop, Detective Gordon, stepped in to stop him before he got there.

  David Dalrymple said calmly, “Tell us who came in the office after everyone left, Gloria, came in while you were alone. Tell us who did this to you.”

  But Marvin Grunion rolled his eyes up under his eyelids and passed out.

  When Charlie finally made it back to the agency, it was closed for the weekend and dark except for her office, where the cleaning lady was getting an early start. No one had left any exciting word on the Alpine Tunnel deal. If there had been any, Charlie had missed out on it. Thanks to Gloria. How could anybody be even more irritating dead than alive?