Murder in a Hot Flash (18 page)

As if summoned, Earl, Tawny, John B., and Scrag suddenly clustered around her table. They'd decided Scrag would drive Howard's Jeep and pull the tent trailer into Moab, after Tawny and Earl helped her pack it up and fold it down. They all wanted to get into town for Sid's big power station scene.

Charlie limped beside Rita Latham through Moab's darkening streets. They passed commercial structures with such names as the Energy Building, the Uranium Building, the Atomic Motel, and the Yellow Cake Bar and Grill, which spoke of Moab's vanished glory days of uranium prospecting and mining.

Frame houses and double-wides mingled on their own full lots. All had square “swamp” coolers on their roofs, the larger ones had two. The coolers sent up a mantralike hum to replace the absent background noise of traffic.

Charlie's feet hurt and she wished she could have driven but city police and sheriff department flyers had been stuck on every windshield, motel room door, and store window in town pleading there be no driving during the evening except for emergency vehicles. Schoolkids had raced around on bikes distributing the flyers that afternoon.

Above the treetops on a rise at the end of the side street ahead of them, where the canyon wall swung around to stop the town, lights flashed and dimmed, arced and snapped already. Mighty Hollywood flexing its muscles. People walked in quiet groups up to the electrical substation to watch the show that would make the show.

The town's power would be shut down selectively and accidents could happen because streetlights and stoplights would be going out for brief periods. Everyone was invited to view the shoot but asked to walk to the site, to stay behind the barricades, and to keep quiet. A civil defense siren would announce when the shoot was over for those who did not attend.

There was a good crowd when they reached the barricades but Rita took Charlie's wrist and wound their way through one end of it to a spot up front with taller men behind. Charlie could see only one TV reporter working the crowd, flanked by his faithful midget cam, lighting, and makeup lackeys.

Charlie had reported her lack of investigative success to the attorney and now she added, “Could we be looking at this from the wrong angle? Could Edwina have been the intended victim? I know it sounds savage, but could someone have been trying to get even with Edwina by killing Cabot and laying the blame on her?”

Rita Latham stared long and hard into Charlie's face, her own expression serious for once. “Murder is savage, Charlie. An ax murder, violently savage. We are faced with, as I see it now, four choices. Someone hated Gordon Cabot enough to do this thing, using your mother's ax because it was handy. Someone hated him enough to do this thing but used your mother's ax to protect himself and to implicate her. Someone hated Edwina enough to kill Cabot with her ax so that she would be tried and sentenced for murder and Cabot merely used to ensure her humiliation.”

The crowd was respectfully quiet. But the hum and buzz of transformers inside the fenced compound drowned out the sound of Moab's swamp coolers. A sudden lightning streak above the transformers haloed Rita's hair. “But if someone hated Edwina Greene that much,” the lawyer said, “why wouldn't he have axed her instead of Cabot?”

“That's only three choices.” Charlie didn't really want to hear the fourth.

“The state serologist has found chips of dried blood in your mother's car.”

“We went into Moab for groceries Saturday. I know there was raw chicken, could have been some ground beef—probably leaked out of the bags.”

“My sources say the preliminary lab reports suggest human blood. If they test out to be Gordon Cabot's …”

“But the body and the weapon were found at the scene. And believe me, that was the murder scene. I was one of the first to see it. Nothing was moved. There was no car involved.”

“That was a messy murder, Charlie. It's unlikely the murderer came away from it clean. No bloodied clothes have been found. They could have been transported out by car.”

And of course it was Edwina's car they searched. The killer probably dumped the clothes down a hole in the concrete toilets. Maybe the sheriff had thought of that too. Charlie remembered the truck roaring next to them this afternoon.

“The fourth choice, Charlie, is that your mother axed Gordon Cabot and if I'm to be of any help to either of you, you are going to face that possibility. Either help me prove that wrong or prove her insanity. I'm not God.”

Chapter
20

A patch of white lightning jagged along a metal beam of the substation's open superstructure high above the transformers. The red cliff wall behind it glowed and darkened, shadows dancing across it to disappear in deeper shadow.

A used condom glowed too, but dully, on the barbed-wire baffle that topped the chain-link fence under a security light.

John B., Scrag, Earl, and Mitch Hilsten hunched close in a protective covey not far from Charlie and her mother's lawyer. All but Earl turned their backs when any of the roving lights threatened to expose them. He trained a tiny camcorder or mini/micro camera of some kind on the second-unit crew working under the substation's lights.

Sidney Levit and Stan Lowenthall conferred with a city policeman beside a patrol car.

Tawny and the heroic Dean Goodacre talked earnestly at the other end of the crowd behind the barricades.

Charlie wondered what the pilot had been doing up in the helicopter last night. God, was it only last night? That feathery sensation in the sudden crater of her interior merely at the memory—Charlie switched thought scenes fast.

Tawny caught her eye, waved, smiled. She'd ridden in from Dead Horse Point with Charlie in the Corsica. One of those beautiful women other women love to hate, but she'd tried hard to lighten Charlie's mood, to lend a sympathetic ear. Charlie felt guilty now for having been so single-minded.

Of course Edwina hadn't killed Gordon Cabot with an ax, Tawny assured Charlie. “Earl and John B. and Scrag think it's highly likely but they're guys. You know, the almighty law can't be wrong stuff.”

She and John B. were breaking up. Remembering the director's randy handiness last Sunday in the motel room with the shower, Charlie wasn't that surprised. But she had the good grace to ask why.

Tawny sighed. “Too much water under the bridge, I guess. We kind of slipped into a relationship we shouldn't have. Been friends for years. This will probably kill even that.”

They'd met through. Tawny's husband, the architect partner who'd taken his own life when the land deal fell flat. “I was only fifteen when I married Ben. John B. helped me finish school and got me interested in modeling and makeup and here I am. He's forty something and sort of going through a change of life. I can't deal with it. Life's too short.”

Sidney Levit crawled onto the platform of a crane with a camera operator and they rose grandly into the air. Another cameraman on the ground moved into position with a steadycam on a body frame. Second-unit crew members made last-minute adjustments and backed out of camera range. A camera on a tripod in the bed of a truck was trained on the town in the opposite direction. Assistants fanned out to hush the crowd, who were, in fact, an inordinately orderly bunch.

Charlie didn't know all that much about the technical side of the business but even she could tell there was a lot of expensive equipment here. The crane would have cost a bundle to ship to location. No wonder Cabot and his producers had squared off. Or perhaps so much science fiction was filmed in this alien countryside one was kept here to rent out.

Sid spoke into his headset and motioned to his first AD on the ground. It could have been the funny lighting on the crane, but he looked strangely jubilant.

In Hollywood, everybody wants to be a director. Sometimes even producers. It's considered the highest form of artistry in the business. Worth chopping up somebody with an ax?

“Why does this look like a civil trial attorney's dream?” Rita whispered.

“Most of it's smoke and mirrors.” But this setup was asking for trouble. It would have been no use to try to keep people away. Better to invite them and try to control them. And Moab was pathetically eager to cooperate.

Why couldn't this be done by miniature in a studio as Sid had wanted Gordon Cabot to do with some of the helicopter scenes? Or even a mockup? Maybe Sid too was going for “verisimilitude” instead of common sense. Was he now feeling a surge of power, of ultimate control?

The sky was clear of clouds and suspicious shadow-shapes, the moon and stars not yet showing. Standing around and waiting took up most of the time on any shoot, especially on location. Charlie was absently watching the condom, trying not to think of Mitch Hilsten, when the globed security light above the flaccid rubber sheath exploded with a pop.

Street- and houselights in the town below blacked out in sections. But the substation grew brighter. Balls of fire bounced from ceramic knobs to wires to the
DANGER! KEEP OUT!
signs. One by one the rest of the globes on the security lights exploded. Lightning fingers traced every wire of the chain link. Sparks showered into the night.

It was like fireworks, only in black and white.

Charlie's clothes grew stiff and abrasive. Her skin pricked and tingled. Her hair felt like it wanted to stand on end. The smell of sulfur saturated the air.

Two figures writhed and staggered between transformer bases, aflame with Hollywood magic. The air filled so full of smoke Charlie could no longer see the movie-in-the-making. But between the cracks, and pips, and zings and spits of explosive she assumed it was still playing to a camera somewhere.

She'd even lost Rita Latham, who had to be within reach. But it was odd what Charlie
could
see. A lot of stage smoke swirling up from the ground. Mitch Hilsten's head and shoulders in a less dense patch of it appeared to be floating away by themselves around a corner of the fence. She looked for other familiar faces, beginning to feel isolated and anxious.

“Jesus, this whole place is charged.” Scrag's unmistakable voice in her ear, no attempt to be quiet on the set. An arm encircled her waist. “You okay, darlin'?”

Charlie coughed in the acrid smoke. Above it the long lean form of Sidney Levit raised a fist toward the sky as his crane chariot descended from the heights, his white head glowing godlike.

Charlie, this is show biz, let's not get carried away here.

One of the pips or pops became a boom. And the milling crowd was growing restless and noisy.

But the fireballs finally began to fizzle. Charlie squirmed out of Scrag's hold and lost him in the smoke. The spark showers dried up. The light show faded. Charlie's hair relaxed and her clothes settled more comfortably. Over the coughing and increasingly perturbed voices around her, calling out names like lost souls, she heard the sirens of emergency vehicles. Headlights rushing up from the street looked like floodlights bouncing through the stage smoke.

An odd smell on that smoke, like burning rubber maybe or garbage? Charlie knew something had gone wrong but wasn't that worried until Mitch grabbed her and pulled her back against the fender of the camera truck to make room for the flashing lights swimming on the smoke. Her eyes were tearing so, she couldn't tell if she'd washed out a lens or not.

She wanted to make some snide remark about heroism to Mitch but was coughing too hard to speak.

He fought their way through a ganglion of milling bodies until the air freshened enough to breathe. But her lungs and throat and eyes felt seared.

As they joined a group at the crest of the hill, lights popped up in batches all over the town below, stoplights blinked red on the main thoroughfare. Rita was there, hovering over John B. He sat with head in hands and bent over his knees. Dean Goodacre and Earl Seabaugh stood against a yellow triangular
YIELD
sign, crying smoke tears. Mitch deposited Charlie next to John B. and plowed back into the vapor and fumes. Heroically.

It wasn't all stage smoke either.

No stuntwoman had been suited up for that shoot.

The unusual odor over the stage smoke was just plain Tawny.

Chapter
21

Mitch, John B., and Earl decided not to cancel their river trip the next morning. Even Sid and his helicopter pilot, Dean, were going along.

“They might as well,” Rita Latham said. “The paparazzi will be back in full force.
Death stalks tragedy-prone movie!
Or some such. Nobody's going to get much done in this town. Including, I'm afraid, you and me. Think I'll head back to Salt Lake for a day or two.”

“Rita, Mitch is still speaking to you, right? Think you could get me invited along on that little jaunt?”

The attorney tilted her head back on a long neck and turned it to squint at Charlie. “Wouldn't you rather spend the day with your mother?”

“She's not talking to me either. I need to go down the river.”

“Charlie, I'll have to admit I'm confused here. I'm usually a pretty good judge of people. But Mitch will make up his own mind about any commitment to a relationship with you whether you're there or not. You seem so altogether, certainly not the type to chase a man this way.” The woman's disappointment with Charlie was palpable.

It's degrading as hell, but I'll seem like whatever I have to, to get in that boat. Time is running out for Edwina and that boat's going to be full of possible ax murderers planning to leave Utah the day after tomorrow.

And what if Tawny's horrible accident hadn't been an accident?

For once both of Charlie's inner voices agreed.

As it turned out, Scrag Dickens invited himself along on the river trip too.

“Damn it, now we can't tell guy jokes and piss over the side of the boat,” Earl complained when he saw Charlie, but made a place for her on the seat beside him. Those green eyes weren't laughing this morning.