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  Maggie took Betty’s mail over to her and Charlie forgot and answered her phone. It was Ed Esterhazie. Officer Mason of the LBPD had been for a visit. Ed was on his way over.

  The Esterhazie mansion wasn’t that far away, but Charlie was still surprised at how soon the doorbell rang. She opened the front door and then the security grate to the president of Esterhazie Concrete just in time to surprise two young things laying wrapped flowers up against the front gate of the compound. When she called to them, they turned and ran.

  “Wait.” Charlie ran after them, leaving poor Ed to hold the grate open. When she returned moments later, one of the floral offerings exploded, and just the percussion knocked Charlie to the sidewalk. Seconds later another explosion sent pieces of the iron driveway gate flying. One twisted bar embedded itself in the front of Maggie’s house. And if Charlie had thought the world a strangely quiet place when the compound filled with emergency and official officials to investigate the murder of Jeremy Fiedler, it was totally without sound now. She couldn’t hear herself swallow, or the sound of her shoes as she staggered to her feet and wove her way toward Ed, who lay sprawled across her front step.

  He’d let go of the security grate and it had slammed shut, but it didn’t matter because the front gate was open to all now. Permanently. Charlie giggled and couldn’t hear it either, her ears should be ringing. Panic at the thought of a permanent disability seeped into her consciousness with an odd and horrid tingling.

  “Ed,” she felt her mouth and tongue and vocal cords say.

  His eyes were open and blinking. Blood on his forehead trickled off into the inverted V of his hairline to one side of his widow’s peak. Charlie collapsed to a sitting position next to him and blinked back.

  Just around the corner, the girls had jumped into a waiting car which had no discernable license plate and whose driver laid rubber for a block getting them out of the neighborhood. Now she knew why.

  Ed was talking to her, struggling to pull a cell phone the size of a thin billfold out of his shirt pocket. Pretty soon you’d be able to make a phone call on a pinky ring.

  “I can’t hear you,” she told him, and couldn’t hear herself. Was she making sound?

  Maggie and Mrs. Beesom appeared as one out of the void and Ed handed Maggie the cellular billfold. Ed was a good-looking fiftyish, in a prosperous way—

  That doesn’t make sense, Charlie.

  I know. At least I can hear myself think.

  Ed sat up with Betty’s help and gave Charlie a pitying look. What, her nose had been blown off, too? She was almost blind without her contact lenses, couldn’t hear, no nose—what else? Well, she could smell. She could smell blood.

  And Charlie could feel. She could feel herself tipping over where she sat.

  * * *

  Jeremy Fiedler sprawled on the lounge on Charlie’s patio stroking Tuxedo and Jennifer. One of them purred. Jennifer sat alongside him and Tuxedo on his lap. He stroked the nubile on the head just like the cat. Jennifer hadn’t grown into her nose, her hair was untidy, and her eyes red, but her legs were well shaped.

  “What do you see in girls young enough to be your granddaughter?” Charlie asked him.

  “Their acute intelligence,” Jeremy said and Tuxedo grinned and Jennifer smiled with her reddened eyes and her whole face. She looked triumphant and transformed. And suddenly lovely.

  Charlie sat in a morning grid on the 405 talking to Joe Putnam at Pitman’s in New York about Keegan Monroe’s novel. “So, what do you think?”

  “Keegan Monroe can’t write novels, Charlie, you know that. But I love the films he pens.”

  “You have read the manuscript—”

  “I don’t have to. The buzz is screenwriters can’t write novels. You know that. He could always do a novelization, but he’s too famous. Call me back when—”

  Charlie was halfway into her pantyhose when traffic started up again. She almost spilled her coffee. And people used to obsess over being taken to the hospital in dirty underpants. Her shoes on the seat beside her, the foot on the gas wearing one side of the pantyhose to the knee, the one on the brake side bare, coffee cup in one hand and steering wheel in the other, and the cell phone in her pinky ring rang and she spilled coffee down her front to answer it but it was the wrong hand and how the hell was she supposed to show up at the Universal meeting in a ruined suit and she switched to the hand that held the wheel to answer her other pinky and Jeremy said, “Jesus, Charlie, watch out—” and there was this semi headed for her windshield and the driver lopping a wrapped floral arrangement at her and Jeremy saying out of the car radio which she was pretty sure she hadn’t turned on, “Charlie, don’t keep all your money in the stock market. Keep some in cash.”

  “Cash doesn’t earn dividends and it doesn’t drip,” she told the radio just as the world exploded when she and the Toyota rolled right up over the bumper, the mile-high grill, along the hood, and through the windshield into the cab with Jeremy and Tuxedo and Hairy Granger, too. They were all grinning.

  CHAPTER 10

  CHARLIE GREENE COULDN’T even hear in heaven. And the bright light touted by people who die but live to tell about it? It wasn’t at the end of any tunnel. Figures, information being so screwed up these days.

  No, the light came from above.

  Charlie waited for the Anglo-Saxon, blue-eyed guy with the white beard to stare down from the light and point an accusing forefinger at her.

  Maybe heaven didn’t have any sound. Maybe that’s what made it peaceful.

  But it wasn’t just one head that came between her and the heavenly light. There were lots of guys, and she knew them all. Lovely Larry looked ready to cry.

  Don’t cry, Larry.

  Richard Morse just kept shaking his head. Maybe Charlie was still in her coffin and the light was a ceiling light in the mortuary.

  Damn sight more likely than your going to heaven.

  Oh shut up. Shit, her inner voice wouldn’t let her be—even when she was dead. Oh, please don’t let Libby’s head appear in that circle above. I couldn’t stand it, especially if she looked sad and especially if she didn’t. Oh God, and not Mitch Hilsten either, please, please. He’d try to resuscitate me even after my blood was drained and I’d been formaldehyded.

  Ed Esterhazie was up there too, leaning over her. She had an insane desire to sit up very slowly and moan or something, but of course she couldn’t. Could she?

  The three men were so very different in their looks and reactions—she’d never noticed that before. Charlie knew she tended to lump all guys into sort of a separate grouping that held few individual qualities, kind of a guy profile. It made it easier to avoid personal relationships.

  Her boss at Congdon & Morse, Richard Morse, his nose looking more bulbous from this angle, his short, clipped, curly hair kept carefully dark except at the temples, dressed pretty spiffy for a Hollywood agent. They were known for wearing pink or yellow shirts with brown suits and like that.

  Richard was known around the office and behind his back as Richard the Lionhearted. He’d had his eyes done several times but the bags were forming underneath again. He had protruding eyeballs and could make a blink stick halfway down and still not look like a wink. But the eye jobs were gradually reinventing the term wide-eyed, even for him. He was short but dapper, savvy in so many ways, seriously clueless in just as many others. An enigma, as were they all, really.

  Larry Mann, her assistant (secretary) at Congdon & Morse turned heads wherever he went, and made a fun escort because of that. Trouble was, he turned heads of both women and men, and his own preference was for the latter. Which made him a safe as well as fun escort. He was also, next to Maggie Stutzman, probably her best friend. Which made him a comforting and dependable date. He worked at Congdon & Morse solely as a way to make contacts in his chosen profession as an actor. Which was true of a fourth of the residents of Southern California. Another fourth were writing screenplays and novels. Which left the other half of the populatio
n of the area to work at real jobs to support them and the general economy.

  Larry Mann was known at the office as Larry the Kid because he’d landed a part in a beer commercial as a cowboy and made the mistake of returning to the office in costume after a shoot. He had caramel-colored hair that swept across his forehead, and an incredibly expressive face. He had a carefully maintained and muscular body but a relaxed, lazylike posture and flowing movement that, along with the sardonic expression, mocked your expectations.

  Charlie would miss them both, bless them.

  She didn’t know the president of Esterhazie Concrete well, but his expression was a combination of concern and anger. Which made sense. Because of Charlie’s family, his had become involved in a murder. His son was infatuated with her daughter. Libby had once schemed to get them married because Ed belonged to the yacht club and she wanted entrance to the teenage social set and activities available there.

  But Ed had been about to marry for the second time—Doug’s mother having moved to Florida with his sister and a new husband. Dorothy and the second marriage lasted about a year. And Edward Esterhazie was once again an available millionaire or billionaire or whatever the rich did now. Wealth was so relative these days.

  Ed’s handsome was a more responsible one than Larry Mann’s. A white bandage around his head, the craggy face of a sea-going yachtsman, the latent good humor of a man who’d made it.

  The mortician must have left her contacts in because she could see them so well.

  Hey, hold on here. How come you see when you’re dead but not hear?

  And then a sharp pain in one ear as if God had grown impatient and hit her up the side of the head. And then far away and barely discernable, Maggie Stutzman said, “Hey, Greene, you going to loll around all day?”

  And her stupid pale face with the snapping blue eyes joined the guy faces above Charlie. Next was Libby, who said nothing but did look like she cared, and who still sported three healthy zits.

  “I’m not dead,” Charlie heard herself say but as though through several feet of cotton.

  * * *

  Charlie sat upright in a hospital bed trying to convince Maggie and Larry that the compound had to be watched tonight because somebody blew the gate apart to get entrance to Jeremy’s house to steal tons of cash he must have stored there in order not to have to write checks for things. He could take cash in to a bank and get a money order for big stuff, pay the rest in cash. Probably what he was murdered for. That’s why he wired the compound. Her hearing may be almost destroyed but her mind was working pretty damn good, and she was dizzy with relief to not have been formaldehyded. Charlie knew she was babbling while slurping down clear broth, Jell-O, tasteless tea, and buttered toast.

  Charlie was being held for observation and without bail at Community Hospital. She’d been scanned and X rayed and probed and prodded, all bodily fluids microscoped, her eyes and ears and nose tested by instruments of torture too numerous to remember. Nobody would give her an opinion on anything. But the layer of cotton lurking between Charlie and the world of sound seemed to grow thicker. She could hear herself now, but when Maggie and Larry talked it was distant, muffled, impenetrable.

  “Wait, can somebody lend me some money?” Her purse had accompanied her, probably because it contained her identity and insurance card, which here was the same thing. But her cash, which was minimal, had been removed to a safe somewhere to be returned to her upon her release to protect the hospital from responsibility. Her credit cards were still there, though. Maggie handed her ten and Larry a twenty.

  Charlie knew the denominations only because she held the bills an inch away from her eyeballs. Maggie had thought to bring her lens case and solution and her eyes were soaking. Her contacts had been in too long with her eyes closed and needed it.

  She knew her two best friends watched her, slid glances at each other, and were talking, but she couldn’t determine if they were talking to her or to each other about her on the other side of the yards-thick cotton. She couldn’t understand a word. Had they understood a thing she’d babbled? The panic tingles were so much worse now that she couldn’t really see, either. She feared they’d stop her breathing next. She tried to keep the panic out of her voice so she could convince them of the urgency here.

  “No, you see, you, Maggie, Mrs. Beesom, and Libby are in grave danger if these twits come looking for the cash tonight. And why wouldn’t they? The LBPD is going to come to the same conclusion I have and the perps will have to act fast.”

  The aid who came to take her tray seemed delighted to find a resident who could eat that sludge and put her beaming face into Charlie’s and nodded when her patient ordered scrambled eggs, coffee, and more toast for dessert. This hearing-impaired Hollywood literary agent and mother would need all the strength she could muster.

  “I mean if these people are capable of using explosives, they’re capable of blowing up the whole compound to find what they want—or do it out of spite because they can’t. They could hold the neighbors hostage, even torture them if they suspect they know anything about the cash.”

  Her friends mumbled meaningless sounds, patted her hands to make any kind of contact, while she gobbled down another dinner.

  “They could be Asian gangs who steal from, torture, and murder their own because they know these fellow Cambodians, Humongs or whoever keep so much cash in their houses because they don’t trust governments or banks. If they’ve heard about Jeremy’s cash supply.”

  But her friends rose and Larry patted her on the head like Jeremy did Jessica and Tuxedo. Maggie wrote in large letters on a hospital note pad, We’ll come back tomorrow. I’ll bring your glasses. Stop worrying. Everything’s going to be fine. Get some sleep.

  Yeah, right.

  Charlie slid the bills under her pillow and stuffed the pills a nurse gave her into her cheek.

  The minute she was alone in the dark, she spit out the pills, grabbed the cash and her sweatpants, T-shirt, and Keds out of the metal locker and her lens case off the nightstand, and closed herself in the bathroom.

  Her best friends hadn’t believed her. There was only one thing to do.

  CHAPTER 11

  NOW THAT SHE was one, Charlemagne Catherine Greene would never make fun of a handicapped person again. The whole trip sneaking out of the hospital was terrifying without enough sound to gauge boundaries, to hear if someone followed.

  At least she could hear a little, she kept telling herself the whole way, tears of self-pity trying to wash out her contact lenses, making her stupid nose run—at least it was still on her face. She’d had time during her escape to check out her face and everything seemed to be pretty much there. She still had Hairy Granger’s scratch on her cheek and a bruise on her forehead where she’d hit the sidewalk. Nothing permanent there, at least.

  Her body worked fine now that she knew she was alive, even after two dinners of hospital sludge. How could anybody wreck scrambled eggs? Nothing bled there that she could find. It was just the almost absence of sound—more tantalizing maybe than no sound at all because you did hear a trifle bit that suggested the part you didn’t hear was what made sense of life.

  First things first, Charlie babe. Get yourself home in one piece.

  She walked boldly into the reception area and asked the guy at the desk to call her a cab, expecting some orderly thug to overtake her at any moment while she waited. But when the cab arrived she could give the cabby her address, had cash to pay him, could see him talking and gesturing to the windshield, but she didn’t have a clue what he was saying.

  Charlie worked up the courage to tell him, “I’m deaf and I haven’t learned to lip-read yet.” It was so final, so awful to admit out loud. Made her want to throw up. That was another thing—she had an incipient ulcer to contend with, too, and no, antibiotics didn’t touch it. It wasn’t viral, it was caused by living. She just knew it would love being hearing-impaired and she started crying again.

  The cab driver might find her
so helpless he wouldn’t take her home—just rob her and rape her and leave her at the side of some road. She actually could not believe she was still in the same body with the tough, worldwise, old Charlie Greene she’d been last night at this time.

  I won’t be able to hear the stupid cat fights, the mourning doves in the morning, hear when Libby sneaks in after curfew at night. Do they let deaf people drive? Jeeze.

  No way she could travel the 405 to Beverly Hills, go to screenings and important party events with Luscious Larry on her arm, even talk to New York on the cellular before its three-hour premature lunch hour. What would she do to support herself and her kid?

  Charlie was actually surprised when the cab pulled up in front of her fortress compound where Larry Mann, Detective J. S. Amuller, and Officer Mary Maggie Mason stood guard at the blown-away gate.

  All these people were talking at her and she didn’t know what to do. She’d returned home in a panic because she knew no one would be guarding her fortress and her child, and here they all were. Maggie Stutzman, Mrs. Beesom, and Libby Abigail Greene with a disgusted-looking Tuxedo over her shoulder appeared out of nowhere, too. That’s what it’s like when you can’t hear people coming. They’re just there.

  But it was when Officer Mary Maggie said out of the blue, “Boy, do you look better than the last time I saw you. All tipped over on the sidewalk with your nose bleeding your guts out,” that Charlie lost all semblance of control. She grabbed the startled officer in a hug of relief.

  “I heard you. My nose was bleeding my guts out, you said.” Charlie knew she was wigging, as Libby used to say before the language changed again. But for someone whose hearing had been so acute it was at times painful, this was an emotional experience.

  “Mom can hear again, Tux. Say meow.” Libby stuck her cat in Charlie’s face and Tuxedo Greene hissed and spat. But Charlie did hear it.