Death of the Office Witch (18 page)

“I don't understand. You said you and Stew were solid. Like an old married couple.” I never worried about you because I thought you were monogamous.

“We are, mostly.”

Homemade chicken soup with thick homemade noodles and little spicy green things floating in it really was comforting, restorative. It gave Charlie the strength to ask, “Why do I have the feeling I haven't heard it all yet? I admit I'm no detective and no psychic. But even though I'm an insensitive workaholic bitch, I'd like to think I'm your friend. I'm missing something here and I just can't track it. I don't see why any of this, as awful as it is, makes you worry about your alibi for the time Gloria was murdered.”

“Oh, didn't I mention it?” Larry pulled a thread of melted cheese into his mouth with his tongue, reminding Charlie of Tweety doing the same with a string of caramel the day before. “Our Gloria took the call from the stupid nurse at the clinic, reporting I'd tested negative but that it was so soon after the possible exposure it would take another test in six months to validate my health and humanity.”

If it got around the office that Larry and Stew had been ordered to be tested, the insurance company that covered Congdon and Morse, albeit marginally, might threaten to drop the agency. Larry Mann would find himself without a job. And that could just be the beginning. Even if he was still negative in six months. All in all a pretty good motive for murder.

18

The way her day was going, Charlie wasn't surprised to find Lieutenant Dalrymple waiting for her when she returned to her office. She settled him on the couch with a cup of coffee, told Larry to hold all but life-threatening calls, closed the door, and waited for another Laurel and Hardy piano.

He studied her, the coffee, the dried flower arrangement on the coffee table, and seemed to be waiting, too.

“So,” she said finally, hugging her middle and the comfort of the chicken soup for courage, “have you found Mary Ann yet?”

“No,” he said thoughtfully and watched her.

“Well, that's a relief.”

“You're relieved she's still missing?”

“I'm relieved you didn't find her in her car underwater. I honest to God don't know what made me say that.”

“Oh, I think you do.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“What I came to discuss …” he said slowly and reached into the vase. “Are you aware that your flowers are wired, Miss Greene?”

She looked at the tiny buttonlike thing in his palm, the comfort of the chicken soup slowly draining away. “That's not a wire.”

“We'll call it a bug, if you like, but it is a listening device. Have you any idea who might want to keep track of your conversations?”

Yeah, you. “No.”

“May I use your phone?” But he already was.

David Dalrymple took Charlie into the back VIP hall while two cohorts scoured the agency for the device that listened to, and perhaps recorded, what the bug picked up in Charlie's office. All Charlie could think of was the conversation she'd had in that office just before lunch with Larry Mann. She hugged her middle even tighter, but the comfort was gone.

“What I really came here to discuss with you is what you might have learned in your informal, insider investigation into Gloria Tuschman's murder and Mrs. Leffler's disappearance—which we might assume are related until we learn otherwise. Apparently, I'm not the only one interested.”

“I haven't learned much. How could I? I don't know alibis, times, motives—I don't even know what Gloria was hit with. And are you sure she actually died here?” They stood at the end of the hall by the tinted window. From up here the bushes and their red flowers flouncing on top of the white brick wall looked undisturbed by murder. “I mean it would be awfully hard to get her down there unnoticed.”

“Gloria didn't tell you?”

“Now she thinks she's in the closet,” Charlie heard herself say, but this time knowing why she said it. Anything to keep from talking about Larry's secret. Anything to keep from thinking about who might have overheard it.

“Closet?”

Charlie pointed to the door of the janitor's closet. “She's a dip, always was. Lieutenant, we all know she's been cremated but Gloria. It's typical.”

He turned his back on her and did something fancy, because, without Luella Ridgeway's nail file, he had that door open in no time. The inside of the closet and the inside of the canvas trash bag looked about the same as when Charlie had broken in.

“So, she gets knocked out by something, dumped in that bag, carried out to the wall and the bushes—by who?”

“Whom.”

“Past the security guard and the parking valet guys, and we're talking in the morning—busy time. It just doesn't play, Lieutenant. But say I killed her up here. How would I get her down there? I couldn't.”

“Not in those shoes,” Dalrymple agreed with only a hint of the sardonic behind the owlish glasses.

“The only way would be to push her through the office in that trolley and out into the public hall and down in the elevator, halfway across the parking garage, past security and valet people, to the alley—at that time of day there could be people in the halls, the elevator, everywhere. And if you're dressed for the office you're going to look pretty silly pushing one of those things around. And somebody's going to remember it.”

And somebody bugged my office. How long has that device been there? Did someone want to overhear what I said about business instead of about Gloria's murder? Could it be another agency? Or another agent in this one?

It all seemed farfetched, but Charlie suddenly felt threatened around here by more than just Gloria. And it dawned on her how odd it was that she hadn't felt afraid before. Here in the place murder had happened. It had simply not occurred to her that it could happen again. And since she didn't know why it had in the first place, she couldn't know the casting requirements for a future victim.

She did know it must seem odd to the man standing next to her that no one at Congdon and Morse had shown much fear at the terrible, sick thing that had happened in their daily lives. Was everyone really that remote, estranged from Gloria? That busy and self-centered? That jaded by the violence everywhere around them? Or were they all so sure it wasn't one of them who had done it, that it was someone in Gloria's life outside the office, the motive unconnected to them?

“Murdering your receptionist is one thing,” Dalrymple said softly, “but someone bugging your flowers does rather get your attention, doesn't it? Let's try your idea.” He pulled the cart out into the hall. “How often do you see someone pushing these around during the day?”

“Now and then, I guess. Most of the cleaning is done at night when the offices are empty, but I suppose there'd have to be someone around during the day. I assume the janitorial work is privately contracted, but I don't know that, either. Haven't you questioned whoever manages these things? Let's try what idea?”

David Dalrymple heaved a leg over the side and crawled into the canvas bag. “Let's continue to pretend you murdered Gloria. I am Gloria and you want to take me out to the alley.”

“Why would I do that? Why wouldn't I just leave you in there and in the closet and pretend someone else did it? I mean, when we were looking all over for Gloria, we didn't look in that closet.”

“Good point. But let's try this, and maybe something will occur to us.” He had scrunched down so far in the bag that he was only that soft voice.

Charlie felt silly, but she pushed the cleaning trolley along the hallway to the agency door, surprised at how easily, smoothly, and quietly it rolled with a whole man in there. The cart had handles on each end, and the agency door opened inward. All she had to do was open the door and pull it through.

“How we doing?” came the disembodied voice from the canvas trash bag.

“Piece of cake.” She went back to pushing. Past Tweety's cubicle. Her workstation was slanted to see people coming the other way. Charlie looked over her shoulder but Tracy Dewitt was calling in a caller into one of her agents' offices and was looking over her shoulder, too. Next, the little utility niche with sink, coffee pot, copier, fax, and small refrigerator, but no one to see Charlie pushing a cleaning cart. Down at the end of this hall, Irma Vance's door was open, but only a corner of her desk showed. There was no assistant in the cubbyhole shielding Maurice's office to see her. She turned into the reception area, where Larry sat with his back to her in the semicircle of Gloria's desk.

“Don't ask,” was all she said when he looked up as she passed. It didn't take any release switch from Gloria's desk to get out of the agency, and they were soon in the public hall.

“What's this?” Dalrymple asked when she threw a manila envelope in on top of him. It had been leaning against the door. “Don't you people ever open these things?”

“If we did we'd be mobbed. It's probably a video demo and stills, or a screenplay or book proposal, that kind of thing.” He suspected her of murdering Gloria, or they wouldn't be going through this. Wouldn't you know? The highest point of her career and she had Dalrymple, an ulcer, and Jesus Garcia to contend with.

“How do you know there isn't another
Gone With the Wind
in one of these things, or the next Mitch Hilsten working out in the buff?” the bag asked as she pushed the trolley into the elevator.

“If it is, they need to learn about marketing. And if they still need to learn, they aren't ready for us.”

“Isn't that a bit pompous?”

“Look, you start your own agency and run it your way. We have eighty percent more talent than we can keep working now. Product is not our problem, and we cannot afford to hire someone to weed out all the unagented stuff thrown our way.”

“Why not?”

“Because anybody capable of doing that has their own agency.” Charlie pushed the trolley and the cop out into the first floor hall of the First Federal United Central Wilshire Bank of the Pacific. “And once we open these unsolicited envelopes we can be royally sued for stealing someone else's work and giving it to our contracted writers.”

“I just opened this one. In fact we've opened many, in hopes someone was offering evidence anonymously.”

“We've made it from the fifth floor back hall to the first level parking, and Larry was the only person who noticed us.”

“Stop talking and look natural. Don't make any more eye contact than you need to, to see if you're being noticed.”

A valet glanced at her to see if she wanted a car brought up, must have decided the cleaning cart wouldn't fit in one, and glanced away. He said something about the Oilers to the security guard, who laughed derisively, his eyes skimming over Charlie to something beyond her. She heard a car engine and stepped up her pace. If the guard had thought there was anything odd about her pushing a cleaning cart outside the building and in a dress and heels, he didn't let his expression show it.

The drive-in area for the building was covered by part of the second story. At the outside edge of that was reserved parking for bank VIPs and then a high protective concrete wall. Charlie pushed the trolley to the alley, rounded that end wall, passed the dumpster and the parking indentation for the first residence behind the bank building, and then the wall dividing it from Mrs. Humphrys' parking area and garage. She stopped and leaned over to look in the canvas bag. “Do you want me to throw you up in the bushes now?”

Having received permission to leave the trolley in the care of Dalrymple, who was studying the bushes, Charlie hurried back to the office, thinking one day could hold no more surprises for her and her stomach than this one had already. She was wrong.

Larry held up one of Gloria's phones as she stepped through the public door. “It's your mother.”

“Oh shit.”

“Thought you gave up swearing because of Libby.”

“I'll take it at my desk.”

“Libby says you're sick enough to vomit blood,” Charlie's mother bellowed from Boulder. A smoker's voice like Mary Ann Leffler's. “Libby says you're going to a party with some jerk named Ed. How can you get to be over thirty and not learn any better than that?”

“Edwina, what do you two do, call each other every day after school?”

“She calls collect only when she needs me. You never call at all.”

“Where are you? Are you home from the University already?” Charlie's mother was a professor of biology at the University of Colorado.

“Down with the flu. Didn't go in today.”

“Well, see?” Charlie said. “You get sick, too.”

“I'm
not
vomiting blood. I'm
not
at work. And I'm
not
going to party tonight.”

The conversation went downhill from there, with Edwina ordering her daughter to stay away from coffee and booze until she'd seen Dr. Williams the next day, and left her with the usual guilt load.

She'd no more than slipped out of her pumps and queried Mom and Pop's homemade chicken noodle soup for forthcoming opinions than Maurice startled her by knocking on the doorjamb.

“Hi, sweetie, how're you feeling?”

“Oh Maurice.” Charlie was soon in tears, snuggled against him on the office couch, telling him all about her stomach cancer. And she, a single mother. And Libby would have to go live with Edwina, who never understood a teenager sixteen years ago let alone now. “Teenagers have come a long ways since then. Maurice, did you ever throw up blood? When you thought you might have an ulcer?”

“I vomited something dark once I could have sworn was blood because I hadn't eaten anything dark. But it turned out I wasn't bleeding, so—Dr. Williams is good, Charlie, trust me and trust him. Just stay away from diet soda, chili peppers, raw veggies, coffee, and booze until after you've talked to him.”