Murder in a Hot Flash Read online

  Right, and all they’d want to talk about is the mess the agency’s in.

  Charlie would have to call Bud Harrington and Toby Davenport for progress reports tomorrow night when she got home. Monday’s schedule was too full. They were the only two writers she had on active assignment at the moment. Things had never been this bad for her or Congdon and Morse. Name talent was falling away like dandruff.

  As Richard, the Morse in Congdon and Morse Representation, always warned, “Get a name as a bad luck hotel in this town and you’re shunned. Superstitious bunch in this business.”

  At least Jory would be pitching Willing Hostage at Universal Monday. Charlie was backed up on her reading and Richard was putting the pressure on her to discover some “wonder” project to help get the agency on its feet. Her Toyota was due at the garage for a physical, there was cleaning to be picked up, and the damn cat needed a new flea and tick collar, and … what was Libby doing tonight? Saturday night with Charlie out of town—

  Edwina startled her back to the problems at hand with, “Wonder if there was really anything there when Mitch stopped speaking like that. Always impressed me as pretty levelheaded—for an actor.”

  Mitch had insisted he’d seen only a large patch of sky with no stars in it. Or thought he had.

  They picked their way carefully along a shadowed stretch of road hoping not to turn an ankle in a pothole. Charlie was glad for the illumination the parking lot—style lights around the toilets provided the whole campground.

  Enough for Edwina to see to light the lantern. Charlie held it while her mother split wood into kindling with an ax like Scrag Dickens had pulled out from under the table last night.

  “Why don’t you use charcoal?” she asked as her mother slathered sugary barbecue sauce from a bottle onto chicken pieces.

  “Takes too long. Besides, this is more like it used to taste cooked over the campfire. Remember those days? How good everything was?”

  Charlie remembered everything mostly as cold and tasting charred but didn’t say so.

  They were at the picnic table crunching burned chicken and gritty corn and pinto beans from cans Edwina had opened and set right in the fire, when both film crews began to straggle in. Even Cabot in his Humvee. He paused behind Howard’s Jeep long enough to raise a triumphant middle finger in their direction.

  “Don’t let him bait you, Edwina.” Charlie had been ready to stuff a drumstick in her mother’s mouth to keep her quiet.

  But Edwina remained ominously silent. Maybe because of the sounds of joviality emanating from John B.’s motor home.

  “Damn, I wanted us to go over and talk to him about your little problem tonight.” First thing in the morning I’m outta here. “But it’d be hard to do with all those people around.”

  “My little problem?” Edwina said, every line in her face sagging. “Is that what I am to you, Charlie? Your little problem?”

  “Mom, stop it right now. I’ve had it.” Charlie slammed her spoon down on the plate and slid off the bench seat. “You either tell me what’s really wrong here or I’m changing that tire tonight and heading for the airport in Grand Junction.” She wrung chilled hands over the warm embers of the cooking fire and realized her mother was wearing only a thin shirt. “Are you sure you’re still taking your hormones?”

  “What did you say, Charlie?”

  “Are you sure you’re still taking your—”

  “No, before that.”

  “I’m outta here tonight if you don’t tell me what’s really wrong. It’s not just John B., is it?” I know you. There’s more. And somehow it’s going to add up to a big guilt trip for me.

  “No, before that. You called me Mom.”

  “Well you are.”

  “It’s always been Howard and Edwina. And then just Edwina. Never Mom.”

  “Jesus, what do you want? You want me to call you Mom? I’ll call you Mom. Just tell me what the fuck’s wrong. I have a life, you know. And I have to get back to work.”

  “Edwina will be fine, thank you.” Charlie’s mother picked up the paper plates and slipped them into the grate to burn. “You run on along home and don’t bother with my little problems. I should have known better than to ask such an important person for help.” She slammed the trailer door leaving Charlie alone with her guilt and rage.

  “There is no way to win with her,” Charlie told John B., Tawny, and Mitch Hilsten, who all sat across from her in the built-in booth in the director’s motor home.

  “My mother was just like her,” Tawny commiserated, “before she died.” She managed to drape herself over both men at the same time.

  “What is it with women and their mothers?” Mitch asked.

  “I get along fine with my mom.” John B. Drake shaped a smug face and refilled Charlie’s glass with Beaujolais.

  “Me too,” Earl said. Charlie sat wedged between the cameraman and Sidney Levit.

  “Anyway, I’m leaving first thing in the morning and she’s all yours.”

  “Hey, if she’s really suffering some kind of personality change, this could be serious.” Mitch smeared the edges of the wet rings from his beer bottle around with a fingertip. His makeup was beginning to shed on his collar. “You can’t just walk out on her.”

  “Just watch me.” Charlie pushed the glass of wine away. It was her third and it was wonderful but such closeness to the superstar was causing a warmth between her legs.

  “Well, I’m livid over Gordon’s scaring you two this afternoon with that run-through of the crushed bus scene,” Sidney said. “I hope that didn’t cause trouble between you and your mother. He’s caused nothing but trouble lately, damn him.” The producer was the only member of the enemy crew in the crowded motor home.

  “He didn’t do anything to mess up my shoot tonight, did he?” John B. asked.

  “Couldn’t have. Too busy with his own. Besides, not even Gordon could block out stars.”

  “Mitch is the only one who thought he saw something like that,” their host pointed out.

  He was also probably the only one facing that direction, Charlie thought, but kept still.

  “No, Mitch wasn’t the only one.” Scrag was busy scarfing down leftovers of the cold ham and pasta salad the producer/director had fed his crew. “I saw it too.”

  “Oh yeah?” Earl’s sea-colored eyes turned to Charlie, this time sparking mischief. “So, what do you think caused it, Dickens?”

  Scrag put a hunk of cheese on a hunk of bread and poured himself some wine. “I think it might have been some sort of natural gaseous material,” he said in a voice so deep it had to come from his crotch. “Looked to me kind of submarine-shaped. Soon as you develop the film in Mike’s camera we’ll all know.”

  Mitch, obviously fed up with being teased about this, groaned and stood to leave. Charlie had to nudge Earl to let her out to follow him.

  The cameraman hooted as he slid from the booth. “You mean like swamp gas? On the desert?”

  “Careful.” Drake grinned at Charlie and nodded toward the closing door. “That guy’s dangerous.”

  Mitch stood immobile at the rear of the motor home, half shrugged into his sheepskin, still holding a bottle of beer, peering toward the lighted toilets. “Charlie,” he whispered, “you going to tell me you can just walk off and leave that?”

  Her mother was leaping around the dumpster flaying the air with a butterfly net. She wore dark brown, baggy polyester slacks and thick-soled oxfords.

  Each time she landed, Edwina’s pant legs flew halfway up her calves, exposing rolled anklets, and her glasses bounced off her chest at the end of their cord. Her leg movements none too coordinated, Edwina resembled a clown in a rodeo ring.

  “What’s she doing?”

  “I don’t know, but she’s too old to be doing it.”

  “Wait, don’t tell me—she’s chasing flying rats, right?” Mitch drained his beer and, as one of Edwina’s springs took her out of the way, tossed the bottle unerringly into the dumpster. “
You got a problem, lady.”

  Chapter 7

  Edwina’s final pounce bagged something. She twisted the netting on the catcher and leaned against the white cinder-block wall of the toilets trying to get her breath. Piercing squeaks came from the net and it flopped around as if there were a miniature Tanzanian devil inside.

  “Thought your thing was rats.” Mitch bent down to look in the net.

  “Order Chiroptera. Suborder Microchiroptera,” Edwina said between breaths and started coughing.

  “No,” Mitch told her, “it’s a bat.”

  “Antrozous pallidus,” Charlie’s mother insisted. “Notice how he was darting around nearly knocking into the pole? He did once, stunned himself or I’d never have caught him. Something I’ve never seen before.”

  “There’ve been bats zooming around these lights catching bugs every night since I came here,” Mitch said. “Desert’s full of bats.”

  “That’s your Plecotus townsendii and your Lasionycteris noctivagans. The Antrozous pallidus, or pallid bat, is big and slow, generally a ground feeder, and it doesn’t come out this early.” Edwina reached into the stilled net to withdraw a panting, terrified creature about five inches long. It had creamy-colored fur and large pinkish ears. It had dark bead eyes and a tiny pig snout. It had long pointy teeth to dream about.

  Mitch hunched deeper into his sheepskin. “You wanted to catch him because he got up too early in the night?”

  “I wanted to catch him to see why he couldn’t fly straight, smartass.” Edwina thrust the pallid bat at the superstar and he backed away. “The suborder Microchiroptera orient acoustically by echolocation—bat sonar.”

  “Won’t that thing bite you?” he asked nervously and sent a meaningful glance Charlie’s way.

  Edwina scowled and went on with her lecture. “Bats emit high-frequency pulses of sound and listen to the echoes bouncing off nearby objects to gauge direction, distance, velocity, size, and even the nature of those objects. They produce laryngeal impulses in the ultrasonic range near two hundred thousand cycles per second. You can’t hear them. Rats and a few other rodents can. In other words—bats can see, but they don’t see well. What they do best is listen.”

  “Edwina, get to the point.” At least her mother was acting somewhat normal now, lecturing and stuff.

  “This bat’s not hearing worth a damn is the point, Charlie. Neither is that one.” And something shot out of nowhere to mash itself against the white concrete wall. Something small and brown. It slid to the ground leaving a smear.

  Another dive-bombed Mitch’s ear, missing it by a breath, and plowed into Charlie’s chest where it clung helplessly to her jacket before it too fell to earth. “I don’t know about you two,” Charlie said, “but I’m getting out of here. Edwina, you’re not taking that bat of pallor to the trailer?”

  “Need to examine it and it’s my trailer. Thought you were leaving.”

  Charlie had spent her childhood with the stench of caged animals wafting up from the basement. Mostly rodents, but also some snakes and a few other critters. The university had laboratories full of them for Edwina to play with, but there were always a few she had to bring home. They seemed to live forever under her care and each new arrival added to a burgeoning crowd. And of course thrived, totally against all city codes.

  “Probably get rabies,” the superstar complained. “Have to have needles stuck in our navels.” But he edged into the tent trailer with Charlie as Edwina sat at the table to examine her captive through a magnifying glass. Its wings, which were sort of its arms, and a membrane that connected its back legs were naked of fur and pink. But it was the teeth that drew the eye.

  Edwina mumbled under her breath. Finally, she released the bat outside and followed its erratic flight as long as possible with a flashlight. Then, still mumbling, she wandered off into the bushes with the flashlight aimed at the ground. Charlie and Mitch followed.

  “Now I’m really worried about her,” Mitch whispered.

  “No, this is normal. It’s when she calls you a dickhead and offers to punch your lights out there’s the personality change. This stuff’s her life.”

  “That right? What’s yours?”

  Please don’t whisper in my ear like that. “My work.”

  “Like mother, like daughter then, huh?”

  Well now, there’s a new wrinkle. “Why are you doing this?”

  “Because I like your mother. Her daughter too. Damn shame you two don’t get along better. I thought she was just into rodents. Are bats rodents?”

  “I don’t think so, but all the beasties have a relationship with the environment and therefore each other.”

  “Yeah, even people beasties. You know Edwina’s the first conservative Republican environmentalist I can remember meeting?”

  “Not all Republicans are conservative.” And Edwina chooses sides on issues with predictable unpredictability.

  Charlie chose to ignore as many issues as possible. Her life was too frantic the way it was.

  Moonlight cast long, cold, flat shadows. Mitch Hilsten’s eyes were so light a blue they glowed in the dark. How come he smelled like aftershave, beer, and makeup and she smelled like she needed a shower?

  Keep your distance, Hilsten, I’m warning you. But she said aloud, “What could leave a track like that, a baby rabbit?”

  “Dipodomys ordii, Ord’s kangaroo rat.” Edwina came over to study two long critter prints that narrowed at the heel and had two small round prints between them with a long drag mark behind. “Hind feet are the long ones. Round ones are the front feet. Trail at the back is the tail.”

  She moved ahead and then stopped so short Charlie bumped into her. The flashlight picked out another set of tracks—two small round prints, each with four flared toes, pointing at two larger prints of the same configuration but with an added toe or thumb. “Big ones are the hind feet and the little ones the front. Neotoma lepida.”

  “Desert wood rat,” Charlie explained for Mitch’s benefit. “Better known as a pack rat.”

  Edwina turned to her in astonishment. “Thought you never listened to my jargon.”

  “You used so much of it, some had to rub off.”

  “These rat tracks are too clear for desert sand. As if their owners spent time sitting around instead of scurrying for food and avoiding predators like rats of sound mind should be doing,” Professor Edwina said, seriously back at work now.

  Charlie had to run to keep up with her and the flashlight that guided their way. And once again she bounced off her mother’s back when Edwina stopped too quickly.

  “Oh, oh my, ohmylord,” the older woman said as if strangling.

  Both her mother and Mitch Hilsten tried to pull Charlie back so she couldn’t see what had stopped them all, but too late. And “ohmylord” didn’t begin to describe it. Charlie remembered thinking later that no critter could die as messily as a human.

  Other than the bloody brain splatter on the shirt, the body looked intact. The trouble started at the neck and went ballistic from there up.

  Someone had separated Gordon Cabot’s right brain from his left.

  “What I want to know,” the little sheriff-bully said the next morning, “is if your mother smoked a cigarette at the scene of the crime after you all found the body.”

  “I honestly don’t remember, Sheriff, but the crime-scene puke three bushes to the left is mine. Blackened barbecued chicken, scorched canned corn, and pinto bean ashes.” Charlie wiped the grease off her hand onto her jeans, gave the newly replaced tire a weary kick, and once again stowed the jack and the spare in the Corsica’s trunk.

  She’d driven it down to the paved parking lot of the Visitors’ Center to have a smoother surface to kneel on. Now she and the sheriff faced off under the snapping flags of the United States and Utah. Wind whipped the chain on the flagpole in a steady unnerving clang.

  They’d neither of them had much sleep and the dark pouches under his eyes mirrored her own, reflected in the Corsic
a’s rear window. The weird thing was, when she had caught snatches of sleep, she’d dreamed of her daughter instead of rabid rats and crazy bats or sexy superstars or even split skulls.

  She dreamed Libby, her face garish with makeup under streetlights and stars, walked alone and helpless in her tiny cheerleader skirt and spankies while a dark car pulled up to the curb beside her.

  Charlie dreamed it repeatedly. Charlie had been accused of being psychic several times by unsteady personalities, but she didn’t believe in the power of dreams and didn’t believe people could know bad things had happened to someone far away before the phone rang and somebody on the spot told them so. But she did know she had to get home today.

  “Wasn’t much face left and he went down on it. How’d you know right away it was Mr. Cabot? It was dark and all the three of you had was one flashlight amongst you.”

  “Because of the combat boots.” Probably came with the Humvee. “Look, Sheriff, my plane leaves at three from Grand Junction. This is a rental car to be returned and I’ve answered all your questions the best I can. I’ll come back if you need me, but I have a teenage daughter at home and I never know what she’ll do and it’s very important that I get to work Monday morning. There are various projects that—”

  “You know, Miz Greene, there is nothing so obnoxious as a self-important career woman?”

  “What a thoroughly sexist thing to say.”

  “But thoroughly true.”

  “I’ll have you know,” Charlie said under the tightest control exhaustion would allow, “I’m a single mother and that career is our sole support.”

  “You people going to get your divorces,” Ralph Sumpter said smugly, “you’re going to have to take your consequences.”

  “Sheriff, do you have children?”

  “Five,” he answered and held up a hand with all fingers spread like that pack rat’s footprint last night, “and out of those five, three are daughters. And out of those three, three are teenagers. And my career supports a family of seven, Miz Greene. And my daughters all behave themselves, because if they don’t their mother will whip them and if she don’t I will. And nobody who was in this campground last night is leaving it until I find out who parted Gordon Cabot’s hair darn near down to his brainstem. Do I make myself clear? Miz Greene?”