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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.”
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  “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.”

  “Kneecap.” Jack’s eyes followed Buddha’s nose down to Charlie’s eyes.

  “Can I have some more coffee?”

  “The Morton and Fish?” He poured wine into her WHOLENESS mug, but his energy rage had dropped by half.

  “You’ll have to travel. This kind of book needs author promotion.”

  “Promotion.”

  “I think you’d be good at it if you didn’t swear too much.”

  “They want my book? They want me to promote it?”

  “I’ve been here over an hour, Jack. Didn’t you once ask yourself why I came all this way? Where is it you live? I can almost understand how you write books in your head instead of on a computer, but is that where you live too?”

  “You drove all the way up here from Los Angeles to deliver a book contract, Charlie Greene the agent?”

  “I don’t have the contract, I had to talk to you first. But the terms sound great to me for an author with no track record. Keegan would have come but he’s in a cast. He broke his leg jogging on a bike path. I mean some bikes broke his … this all happened about the time this offer came from Morton and Fish. And I have some vacation time and my mother arrived to take care of my daughter while I was away and I always want to get away from my mother and … you see, Jack, Shelly Hummer didn’t forget your book. She loved it. It’s just she got an offer for a better job at—”

  “Morton and Fish.”

  “No. Field and Stream. They don’t do books. But she passed the word along to a friend at Morton and Fish—Susan Talbot. And Susan asked me for a copy of the proposal and we got a deal if I can get you to okay it. But I couldn’t get in touch because you ripped out your phone.” Charlie took a gulp of merlot from her coffee mug and wondered why reasonable, dependable, ordinary, workable people didn’t write books she could sell.

  “Morton and Fish.”

  “Writer’s Digest doesn’t have all the answers, Jack, trust me. And your agent’s got mostly questions. Like, I’ve got reservations for a cabin at a place called Hide-a-bye. Is it near here, I hope? And can I have some more wine?”

  Jack Monroe was staring off into nirvana with the Buddha and pouring Charlie more coffee when the door burst in with a gust of fog and heightened warning from the buoy and a man in a beard and yellow slicker over knobby knees and hiking boots.

  “Jack,” he shouted and swept the slicker into swirls of plastic crackling mayhem, “who is it drove that Toyota to your doorstep?”

  “Frank?” Jack Monroe, the best-selling author, came back from the Oprah Winfrey Show.

  “My Georgette, she’s under that Toyota. She’s dead, damnit.” He spied Charlie peering out from under Buddha’s nose. “You’re the one. Run her over in the fog. And then have the nerve to stay around and visit. Why’d you do it for? She never hurt no one. Her bike’s a mess too.”

  “I couldn’t have,” Charlie said helplessly as the fury in the yellow slicker advanced on her.

  Chapter 2

  Not even the emergency lights on the sheriff’s car and the ambulance could penetrate more than a few feet of the fog that night.

  “Don’t know why they sent an ambulance,” Frank of the yellow slicker confided to Charlie. “Told them she was dead.”

  Charlie had heard rumors about the Oregon coast. Those in the know would wink as though it were the best-kept secret in tourism. Charlie had yet to see the Oregon coast. All she knew of it was the violent sound of the Pacific against its shore and the haunting groan of a warning buoy. And now the body of a dead woman.

  Georgette had worn a shocked gape when Jack Monroe first shone a flashlight on her face. Broken wire-rimmed eyeglasses hung by one earpiece in thin gray hair.

  “Not that she was worth looking at anymore, but what’d you want to kill her for?” the poor woman’s husband asked. “Rode her bicycle to keep from getting porky, raised the children till they was fine on their own. Not like she’d never done a thing.”

  Charlie was about to explain that although the road into Moot Point had been bumpy she’d had no idea she’d run over anyone in the thick fog, when two things happened almost simultaneously to still her tongue. The twisted bike swung through the beam of a headlight on an emergency vehicle as the investigators moved it—somehow more poignant than the broken body of the dead woman herself. And Frank cupped a hand around one of Charlie’s buns.

  Charlie sat curled up in a comfortably sprung chair and considered the possibility of losing the scrambled tofu and merlot. Between the ambiguous sickness and flashbacks of the mangled bike trailing fog webs as it was handed across headlight beams, a voice in her mind kept repeating—like the lyrics to a television commercial you want to forget but can’t—“Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

  Perhaps it was because Frank and Georgette’s living room was heavily accented with embroidered signs similar to those in Jack’s store. A calico cat lounged on top of a darkened television set, staring hatred at Charlie.

  “Ms. Greene, I’ll admit this fog is heavy even for us, but I can’t believe you didn’t see a thing in front of your headlights when you struck Mrs. Glick and her bike. Particularly since you were pulling to a stop at the Earth Spirit at the time. I can’t believe you didn’t feel a bump or hear any sound of impact.”

  “I can’t either,” Charlie told Sheriff Bennett, trying to avoid the accusation in the cat’s stare. She’d read that cats won’t look you directly in the eye for long but this cat hadn’t heard about that.

  Sheriff Bennett sat on a coffee table facing her. Jack Monroe and Frank Glick perched on the edge of a leather couch peering around him to watch Charlie. Frank wore a safari outfit—shirt and shorts and hiking boots. His stick legs had no shape except bulges for knees. A neighbor stood behind the couch fussing around him. Another offered coffee and some kind of sliced nutty/fruity bread on a tray, setting her lips in grim disapproval when nobody took any.

&nbs
p; This was one of those double trailer homes you’d never want to move, set on a concrete foundation with a patio and porch. It sat next to Jack’s store.

  “Wes,” Jack touched the sheriff’s shoulder, “could Georgette have ridden by Charlie’s car when it was parked and slid underneath it?”

  “Hard to see how that would crimp up her bike that way and how it would kill her.” The sheriff shifted slightly and Charlie waited for the coffee table’s legs to buckle. “We’ll have to wait for the coroner’s report.”

  One of the women bent over to whisper in Frank’s ear and he brushed her away like a mosquito. “Don’t want no doctor, no hot milk, no sedatives. I do want to hear what it is this young lady has to say for herself. Now you old bats just get on home and leave me alone. My wife that was killed.”

  The women retreated toward the door, but didn’t leave. The one with the refreshment tray asked, “Shouldn’t you call the family, Frank?”

  He sat up and rubbed at his beard. Without the slicker he was skeletal. “Hadn’t thought of that yet. Would you do that for me, Martha?”

  “Mary.”

  “Mary. Oh, and tell them to make reservations someplace else cause I can’t house ’em all here, that’s for sure.”

  Sheriff Wes of Moot County drove Charlie to her cabin at the Hide-a-bye instead of to the jail because her car was impounded for the investigation and because it seemed clear that she hadn’t run over Georgette Glick on purpose, nor had she fled the scene of the accident. They stopped at the main lodge on the road to pick up the key and allow the sleepy girl at the desk to imprint Charlie’s American Express card, and then parked at one of a series of cottages presumably overlooking the ocean. That’s what the brochure had said, that’s what the sound on the fog sounded like.

  Sheriff Wes followed Charlie into the cottage carrying her suitcase, briefcase, and garment bag. First door to the right opened to the bedroom—old knotty pine furniture and paneling that reminded her of Frank’s knees. To the left was the bathroom. A short hall opened to one room divided into carpeted living room and tiled kitchen areas.