Murder in a Hot Flash Page 7

  “You can forget your dreams about the Peace Corps or being an actress or whatever the last one was,” Edwina had said. Charlie never told her mother the last one was to be a cheerleader.

  Edwina paid for Charlie’s degree in English at Smith and for Libby’s day care and nursery school. “You can be a teacher. You won’t be rich but you won’t be a drag on the economy either.”

  But Charlie never became a teacher. Two days before graduation she was offered a job as editorial assistant to a small Washington, D.C., book publisher. Editorial assistants were secretaries given a more prestigious title and more responsibility but not more pay. Edwina still provided half their support when Charlie and Libby moved to a junior editorial position in Boston and then on to Wesson Bradly, a literary agency in New York.

  John B. crunched on the last of his cone as they came to the closed uranium mill site just after crossing the Colorado River. The mill looked tan, dusty, deserted. There were a few broken windows. The siren pulsated suddenly behind them.

  “Think you’re real clever, do you?” Sheriff Sumpter said. John B.’s truck was a big Detroit four wheel and the sheriff had to stretch up to see in at them.

  “Had to get out and grab a shower and some ice cream, Sheriff. Got this terrible urge,” Drake said in his best good-old-boy persona.

  The sheriff slapped the door in emphasis. “There is a serious murder investigation going on here, mister, and both of you are suspects.”

  “Would you say that man was a cliché,” John B. asked Charlie as they drove with an official escort back to Dead Horse Point, “or a stereotype?”

  “Yes.”

  Charlie spent most of the next day pacing and fuming at the waste of her precious time.

  “You’re getting old enough to learn to control your impatience and if you can’t, go for a walk,” Edwina told her sharply and bent back to some tome filled with line drawings of animal parts. Wasn’t this the mother who had complained that Charlie never came to see her?

  The sheriff’s department was much in evidence, questioning everyone a second time. It didn’t seem that either film crew was accomplishing much else. There were several card games going and Scrag had dragged out his guitar. He, Mitch, and Earl sang ancient songs, some of which Charlie remembered from her Scouting days. Sounded pretty awful back then too.

  But by late that afternoon most of the officers had left the Point and Drake asked Mitch and Charlie to go for the dinner. Edwina was assigned to scare up some night critters for the camera and everyone else was needed for various associated duties. Only Charlie and Mitch were superfluous to this night’s shoot.

  “Why can’t we eat what the sheriff brought out?” Charlie asked him. “Be great for your budget.”

  “I can’t feed my crew Campbell’s soup and Velveeta cheese two nights in a row,” John B. said. “What kind of an outfit do you think this is?”

  So Charlie accompanied Mitch on the circuitous route around the back of the Visitors’ Center. The gates were closed on the road coming into the campground. The sheriff’s deputy and a ranger leaned against them talking low.

  “I’m not walking clear to Moab,” Charlie said. Campbell’s and Velveeta could taste pretty good if you were hungry.

  “Bronco’s parked out in the bush there … somewhere,” Mitch whispered, but down the back of her neck instead of in her ear. “You cold already?”

  “They’re going to be watching everybody like hawks after finding Drake and me in Moab yesterday. And they must know we’ve discovered the back road by now.” They reached the first shelter of bushes and crouched behind them to peek out at the officers standing guard at the gate. They were still talking and not acting very hawklike.

  “Too many of us. The place is too big.”

  “Don’t you think they know that?” Charlie said. “This is their home ground.”

  “Yeah, but they think of us as city dudes who don’t know our way around a wilderness. Stereotypes die hard.”

  They were out of sight of the gate and able to stand straight in minutes. No one hailed them from behind. It was uncanny how quickly you could get lost out here.

  “What makes you think they won’t miss two people?” Charlie asked.

  “Word has it that since you and I aren’t needed on the shoot we’re doing embarrassing things in John B.’s motor home because all I have is a tent and that we shouldn’t be disturbed.”

  “Great. The sheriff’s department already has a wonderful opinion of me. This ought to enhance it no end.”

  Mitch was clearly as relieved as she was when they finally bumped into the Bronco. He patted its hood and gave a sigh.

  “Bunch of little boys playing out fantasies in the big outdoors,” Charlie groused. Her eyes were about level with his earlobe and she concentrated on his earlobe. “There’s an ax murderer loose around here, you know.”

  “Could be me. Could be you. Could be John B., but I notice you went off to Moab with him yesterday.”

  Then it had been broad daylight and all she could think of was that shower he’d promised her. Only to discover upon her return a line of film crew people waiting in front of the rangers’ quarters with towels over their arms. Extra water had been hauled in for those stuck at the Point by the murder investigation.

  Charlie strapped herself into the Bronco, still feeling like a fool.

  “That guy’s the greatest con man ever born,” Mitch said as if he’d heard her thoughts. “The world is lucky he decided to do this instead of banking or politics.”

  “And he says you are dangerous.”

  Mitch gave his sexy laugh, the scoffing one, the one the entire world knew about. “He sees too many movies.”

  Here Charlie was in the middle of nowhere with the world’s most wanted man and they were talking Hollywood. You couldn’t even find reality in the middle of Utah.

  “Why is it,” she asked, “you’re driving a dented Bronco and John B. a brand-new whatever-it-is?”

  “Camouflage. People say, ‘Jeez, that guy looks just like Mitch Hilsten.’ And then they say, ‘Naaa, Mitch Hilsten wouldn’t be driving a beat-up Bronco. He’d be driving a Jag or something.’”

  “Do you enjoy being Mitch Hilsten, the famous movie star?”

  “Depends oh the mood I’m in.”

  They came out on the road that led to the precipice she’d traveled the day before. “Why don’t they have a roadblock here? It’s obviously the way you people are getting in and out.”

  “They don’t have to. They have us all corralled in the campground. They’re guarding the road. No city slicker’s going to take off on foot. I told you, stereotypes die hard.”

  He didn’t insist she keep watch for boulders, so Charlie kept her eyes closed on this second trip down to the arid benchland. When they reached it the sun was lower and what it had washed out in morning light it lent a golden glow this evening. Mitch turned the wrong way on the ribbon road.

  “Aren’t we going to Moab?”

  “We’re going to meet a man named Lew.”

  They traveled through a Star Trek war zone of rocks heaped and piled and stacked and upended. Some looked like empty clam shells discarded after a giants’ banquet. Spikes and knobs and turrets and spires—some the size of small buildings—made Charlie think of ruined mosques. Tilted ledges, humongous mushrooms, phallic columns with foreskin or circumcision bulbs—

  Mitch said suddenly, “A dollar for your thoughts.”

  “Umm? Oh … uh, that I’d like to get back to my daughter and my job.”

  He heard it seconds before Charlie did. He had almost stopped by the time she realized there was a roaring sound coming up behind them. It shook the Bronco and vibrated in her ears. Her first thought was that it was an earthquake. She had a quick vision of all those tortured rocks falling off their pedestals and crushing the Bronco.

  Charlie cringed and watched a bulb, not twenty feet away, teeter and then topple off its stalk. It landed in a mushrooming cloud of dust.
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  Chapter 10

  “That’s military,” Mitch said. “Cabot had this all set for shooting, but I can’t believe they’d do that low a fly-over in unstable country like this.” He and Charlie stood next to the Bronco, watching the triangular silver object roar off in a curve to buzz the mesa where Edwina was supposed to scare up critters for the camera when darkness came.

  “Maybe you have to if you’re looking for spaceships full of giant rats that dump on innocent senior citizens,” Charlie offered. “And it’s not the first time the military has performed for film.”

  “Yeah, and another reason for Sheriff Sumpter to allow shooting to go on as if murder hadn’t happened.”

  “According to John B. most of the Sumpter family is on the Animal Aliens payroll and the Moab Film Commission’s a powerful force in the county, other sources of employment having dried up. Like, all that’s left is show biz and tourists.”

  Mitch nodded. “The effects of overgrazing hit the ranching industry hard. Uranium mining went on the skids years ago.”

  The circumcision bulb had exploded into pieces when it hit and dust lingered above the crash site. Hanging puffs of dust from unstable rocking rocks hovered almost everywhere Charlie looked. She could taste it.

  They counted three silver triangles, military jets coming from different directions to skim the same mesa top.

  Charlie had assumed Mitch’s hairstyle was carefully sprayed to look carefully disheveled. But he ran his hand through it now and it fell right back into place. “Come on, we’re going to be late.”

  “What if more rock falls up ahead?” She pointed toward the debris smoking dust into lowering sun rays.

  “Just as liable to do it behind us.” They circumvented fallen rock, Mitch gearing down to buck over what he couldn’t get around. The old Bronco rattled up off the benchland on another hideous road to what he called the white rim and arrived eventually at a crumbling runway with a small plane at one edge.

  The AEC, Atomic Energy Commission, had built airstrips in this no man’s land during the years of uranium exploration. They were currently more likely to be used by drug runners, according to Mitch. But this one happened to be John B. Drake’s umbilical cord to his film lab in Los Angeles and a source of supplies from the outside world. Now that the sheriff had cut him off from the small legal airport about twenty miles out of Moab in a different direction.

  “Drake works out of Phoenix to avoid the unions, but he’s hooked on this lab in L.A.”

  Lew leaned against his airplane, arms folded, an overweight man in faded denim pants and a T-shirt with the sleeves cut out to expose purple and red puckered lips tattooed up and down his arms. He looked like he should be riding motorcycles instead of flying airplanes.

  His expression when looking at Mitch denoted pride in the male half of the human race. The two guys spent a long boring twenty minutes verbally showing off what they knew about airplanes and aviation that Charlie didn’t.

  This apparently undistinguished little aircraft was in fact a “Piper Malibu single engine” and its pilot informed Mitch that it had delivered him here in under two and a half hours and could carry a thousand pounds of fuel.

  Sufficiently awed, Charlie helped the two men transfer boxes of supplies and the dailies to the Bronco. Lew’d watched the Air Force jets buzz the mesa and was much impressed. “Tell Drake the news wires and networks are humming with Cabot’s murder.”

  Mitch handed him a list of needs for the next run. Charlie longed to climb in the plane and escape back to L.A. with Lew but instead dutifully sealed herself back in the Bronco. There were worse fates than riding through the rosy haze of sundown with Mitch Hilsten.

  She knew he had two daughters who lived in New Hampshire with his ex-wife. They must be in their late teens about now. “Do you ever see your girls?”

  “Used to get them at Christmas and in the summers if I wasn’t working, but they’re at the ages where they want to lead their own lives. I had Marla this last Christmas but Jena spent the holidays on a ski trip in Switzerland with her new boyfriend. He’s not good enough for her, of course.”

  Mitch was forty-five. Must be awful to have your birthday and age announced yearly over entertainment-news programs. Must be heaven to have whole months of respite from the exhaustion of child-rearing.

  “So, who do you think offed Cabot?” Mitch steered the conversation away from his private life. Charlie couldn’t blame him. There was so little of it he could keep private.

  “Well, I know it wasn’t you or me.”

  “Just how do you figure that?”

  “We were together in one way or another the whole time. Gordon Cabot went by and gave us the bird while Edwina and I were eating dinner and you and the others came to John B.’s shortly thereafter.”

  “Did you see us arrive together?”

  “You were all there when I got there.” And in the meantime, I was very involved in an argument with Edwina. And I saw you and John B. and Sid Levit square off at Cabot that morning. Come to think of it, you and Edwina seemed the angriest and Edwina wouldn’t murder anyone. Well, she might irritate them to death.

  Now Charlie decided to change the subject. “Is this all legal—I mean keeping us at the campground? Can a sheriff do that without charging us with something?”

  “I don’t know, but I doubt he can keep it up for long. And what do you think is making the bats and rats and your mother act so strange? Is it just the filming at Dead Horse Point?”

  Dust coated the dashboard. Charlie could see her handprints in it. She was suddenly too tired to even try to come up with an answer. Mitch was acting normal, friendly, nice. Of course acting natural was his acting style. His ex probably never knew when to trust him either. She just shook her head.

  And he withdrew. Hard to explain how, but he did. Like he had in After Hours with Carly Shepherd, before he got out of bed and blew away the spy hiding in the shower stall. Or with Sally London in Bloody Promises, before he got out of bed to go off to be slaughtered in the trenches in World War I.

  Sun flamed the upper reaches of the mesa cliffs in orange-red and yellow. But it was shadow-dark down here where the Bronco bumped over rocks and washouts. On the next level down, the river looked like ink sludge. Charlie knew she was vulnerable anywhere, but she felt it more in the middle of such spectacular nothing. Harsh and huge and empty, this whole place reminded her of another planet.

  And Edwina sapped Charlie’s vitality and self-confidence. She was stymied by her mother’s presumption of control and by her own guilt. Richard Morse, her boss, laughed at her dread of going home. “Who would have thought it?” he said once. “Classy chick like you? Didn’t know anybody felt guilty about that stuff these days. Unwed motherhood’s all the rage.”

  But Larry Mann, her assistant, understood. Larry was gay. He knew about guilt trips from childhood. And that, no matter what an enlightened world professed to believe, things were different when you went home to face the people you’d hurt.

  It was dark by the time they reached an informal parking place outside the campground. Charlie expected the men guarding the gates to hear the engine, but no one challenged them as, loaded down with boxes and cartons, they made several trips between the Bronco and the big motor home, sneaking around behind the Visitors’ Center.

  By the time a tired film crew trailed in, she and Mitch had the charcoal glowing under five grates and they broiled the lavish T-bones Lew had brought. John B. sent everyone back to their own camps with sizzling steaks, coleslaw, and potato salad. Everyone except Mitch, Charlie, Edwina, Tawny, and the two cameramen, who were invited to eat with him.

  Drake was jubilant but Edwina was strangely sullen, considering the director’s high praise of her.

  “We got rats, we got bats, we even got a fox eating a rat. A bat eating a moth.” He gestured wildly with his fork. Excitement animated his entire rangy length. “We’d been trying to find critters for days and all we came up with were ground squirrels a
nd lizards. Edwina’s worth her weight in gold.”

  “I’m her agent and I heard that,” Charlie reminded him. The steaks were just right—scorched, salty, and crunchy on the outside, red, juicy, and tender on the inside. Of course they had cooked over charcoal briquettes and not wood, but she refrained from pointing that out to Edwina.

  John B. uncorked several bottles of good red zinfandel, which didn’t detract from the meal either.

  Charlie was glad to see her mother eating heartily, even though so obviously angry about something. Edwina tended to eat from cans since she’d been living alone, too busy with her work to take much of an interest in cooking.

  “And, for your entertainment pleasure, with our pie and coffee we will view some smuggled dailies,” their host announced. “The ones from the film Mike wasted on that something that wasn’t there but that ruined so much of our take night before last.”

  He set up a video on a small TV and they all sat too close to it and too close to each other.

  Charlie was wedged thigh to thigh beside John B. on a booth seat. She’d eaten only half her steak and a few bites of the pecan pie but felt bloated and stuffed. The odd combination of coleslaw and wine lingered on her tongue.

  Drake lifted his arms to ease the sardine-fit of his neighbors, but then brought one arm down to rest around Charlie’s shoulders, the other around Tawny’s. The dual gesture was not lost on the assembled.

  The air reeked of coffee and too many bodies in too small a space. Someone turned off the last light and the glow from the little screen reflected harsh and flat on the faces around Charlie, lending them the look of performers in a rock video. Everybody turned back to stare at the screen except Mitch Hilsten. He stared at her.

  A silent moving picture, just John B. clearing his throat. About the only thing that moved on the film was Charlie’s unruly hair blowing in the wind and the branches of a pinyon in the distance. Then Mike had moved the camera higher to a patch of sky with only the top of the generator truck showing. Daylight had almost vanished, the light was murky. The few stars out that early barely showed up.