Red Rum: A Rosie Casket Mystery

by R M Wild

  “No, no, you’ve got it all wrong,” Kendall said. He passed the bottle of rum to Caesar and then set the video camera down on an overturned paint bucket and angled it to point at me. “My client always knew you would tenaciously pursue your sister’s whereabouts, regardless of the consequences to yourself. Noble, but stupid. Because of that tenacity, he has wanted to see you removed from the picture ever since you got involved with Phyllis Martin and messed up his plan to take the inn. I, however, have consistently convinced him otherwise. Unfortunately, you had to go snooping around and find dear Caesar here who, having fulfilled his duties, was about to head off to that big fire pit in the ground. Now my client thinks you know too much, and like Caesar, are better off dead. Thankfully, Caesar has graciously agreed to take the blame in exchange for his life.”

  I strained my wrists, hoping for an extra inch to wiggle free, but had no luck. I blew a wet strand of hair out of my face.

  “Dimitri worked for your client, didn’t he?”

  “Yes,” Kendall said. “I need you to know that I fought on your behalf, Rosie. I really did. Every step of the way. I told my client that you were a good person, that you deserved a chance to do the right thing, that all you wanted to do was find your sister. I told him that I could get you to take the money and sign the papers without any bloodshed, but you couldn’t take my offer, could you? It became really clear that even if we sent you off with the money and a brand new car, you would still be a thorn in our sides. As always, my client was right. Elimination is the best strategy.”

  “You killed Matt.”

  “No, not me,” Kendall said. He pointed at Caesar. “He did. He killed Phyllis and Dimitri too. Now he’s going to add a fourth victim to his list. And if he doesn’t, my client will send someone to kill his ex-wife, isn’t that right, my dear Caesar?”

  Caesar stared at his feet.

  “He’s been very loyal. So loyal, that he’ll do anything to keep his family alive. Ever since Mettle arrested him, the poor fellow has been sleepwalking through life. He’s going to burn you. Then he’s going to burn this shack to the ground.”

  “Won’t that anger your client?”

  Kendall laughed. “My client doesn’t care about this place. In fact, this whole property is now in Caesar’s name. He sold off his trailer for the down payment. That was the original deal. I kept him out of jail and he did what my client asked. In exchange, he was supposed to get a nice plot of land and the satisfaction that he saved his family—a family that didn’t even like him.”

  The longer I could keep him talking, the longer I lived. My only hope was to make Caesar turn against him. “Why did you tie up Caesar? He didn’t deserve that.”

  “My client changed his mind. He didn’t want loose ends.”

  “So you reneged on your deal with Caesar. You slime ball. Whatever happened to honor among thugs?”

  “I am no thug. I am a lawyer. A negotiator. I tried to help you, Rosie. And I tried to help this pathetic lump of pond scum, too. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve convinced my client to spare someone’s life. I deserve a medal for my diplomacy. In exchange for killing you, my client has agreed to let Caesar live the rest of his miserable life on this beautiful property. That’s how good I am.”

  Caesar stared at the ground.

  “That’s no life, Caesar. Tell him. You’re a good person. You did what you had to do to save your wife.”

  “Ex-wife,” Kendall corrected. He patted him on the shoulder. “If you don’t like the deal, you’re welcome to kill yourself at any time. We won’t be mad. Of course, if the police ever get any wind of what has happened here, your ex-wife and child will meet the edge of my client’s knife.”

  Caesar snarled and took a deep drink of Red Rum.

  “Whoa, careful with that, buddy. I still need you on your feet for a few more minutes. Now douse her.”

  Dutifully, Caesar dumped the rum all over my lap as if he were dumping gasoline on a pile of garbage. The rum was warm through my wet clothes, yet cooled my skin as it evaporated.

  “It’s 180 proof, highly flammable, and goes up in a flash,” Kendall said. “Hardgrave makes the best.”

  “You used it in the prison?”

  “Yes,” Kendall said. “Caesar wet the jumpsuits in it. The rum evaporates fast enough to make it untraceable, yet lasts long enough to go up in flames with the tiniest of sparks.”

  I closed my eyes, remembering the bundle of clothes that Caesar had handed Mettle when he came to escort him to the visitation room.

  “Show her the other trick,” Kendall said.

  From his back pocket, Caesar took out two small black rods. He stepped back from me, a little wobbly, and scraped them against each other. They gave a spark.

  “Ferrocerium rods,” Kendall explained. “Once upon a time, Caesar was into cosplay and he learned how to make all kinds of medieval gear out of metal. When I learned that, I knew he was the perfect mark. Inspired by an escape at Fort Leavenworth a long time ago, he made the handcuff links out of ferrocerium. Then ,when Mettle got angry and jerked his chains, they sparked and ignited the rum-soaked clothes. Same with the other two lowlifes.”

  I squeezed my eyes.

  “It’s a fitting end for a witch, am I right?” Kendall said. “Burned at the stake.”

  “Is this what you did to my sister? You burned her alive?”

  “I know nothing about your sister,” Kendall said. “That’s God’s honest truth. Was she here? Probably. For years, my client took people here. He tied them up and he made them tell him what he wanted to know and he had Dimitri take pictures. He didn’t burn them, though. That was Caesar’s method.”

  “Is she still alive?”

  “I told you. I don’t know.”

  Tears welled up inside my eyelids. This was the end. Mettle was gone, and now me too. We had come up against an unstoppable force, an evil with too many connections, too much wealth, too much cunning.

  “I signed your papers,” I said. “Let me go. I’ll disappear. I won’t tell anyone.”

  Kendall frowned. He squatted to eye level and put a hand on my knee. “I wish I could do that, Rosie. But it’s too late. I liked you very much. I tried to spare you. But my client insisted. He said we cannot trust you. If I don’t do my job, my life will be next.”

  I stared at Kendall, my eyes fiery with hate. At that moment, I wished I were a witch, I wished I had the power to make him ignite.

  “I hope you burn in hell,” I said. “All that gel in your hair will go up fast.”

  Kendall smiled. He put a hand on my knee, kissed me, then stood, and turned to Caesar. “Spark her.”

  45

  Caesar set the bottle of Red Rum down on the floor and stood over me. He held the ferrocerium rods over my lap and prepared to scrape them together.

  “Do it,” Kendall said. “Don’t waste any more time.” He picked up the video camera and angled it so he could see both Caesar and me. “My client will enjoy watching this. It’ll be very…pure.”

  I looked up at Caesar through my foggy glasses. Some of my tears caught in the rims and the others streamed down my cheeks.

  “I know you don’t want to do this,” I begged. “You’re not the kind of person to do this.”

  “I have no choice,” he said. He readied the rods, about to strike them together.

  “Careful buddy, you’re standing awful close,” Kendall warned.

  Caesar stepped back, but knocked over the bottle of Red Rum. It spilled in a red trail toward my chair legs.

  “I’m sorry,” Caesar whispered. He closed his eyes, held out the rods and then—

  There was a flash of light. Bright white light. From outside.

  Another flash.

  Kendall lowered the camera. “What the—”

  More flashes. Morse Code maybe.

  Even with my limited knowledge, the pattern was obvious.

  MOM.

  I blinked. The pattern flashed again. It couldn’t be. A signal
from beyond the grave.

  Was I conjuring spirits?

  “Do it. Finish the job. I’ll take care of this,” Kendall said. He set the camera down on the bucket and threw open the door. “I’ll be back for that camera.”

  Caesar watched him leave. The lights kept flashing, kept twinkling through the slats in the shack like an army of sprites.

  “Please don’t kill me,” I begged.

  “If I don’t, they will kill my wife,” Caesar said.

  “Did she leave you?”

  “I got arrested. Matt Mettle arrested me.”

  “Because you were having an affair?”

  He straightened up. “No. There was no affair.”

  “With a mistress named Molly?”

  He shrank again. “Maybe.”

  “It’s not too late to change,” I said. “Grow your hair back. Fix your life.”

  “It’s too late. I’ve done horrible things. I made a deal with the devil and I’m going to burn for it. Killing you is the only way to save my family.”

  He raised the two rods again. I stared at him, trying to drill my eyes through him. If I could raise the dead, then maybe I could—

  With one quick motion, Caesar sparked the rods. A tiny spark jumped from the metal and landed on the floor right next to my feet, an inch from the spilled liquid.

  It fizzled on the damp wood and died.

  I exhaled.

  “Please, don’t.”

  Caesar scraped the rods harder. Another large spark escaped, but missed my pant leg. He stepped closer to me, his fists ready to make one last spark.

  “Please, Caesar,” I said. “You don’t have to do this.”

  Then he froze. He stood there, his eyes wide and blank. He stared at me for a long moment and a wheeze escaped his mouth.

  “You—you witch,” he said.

  His face twisted. And then he fell forward, face first. His chest hit my knees and he fell to the side, the ferrocerium rods sparking with the impact and striking the trail of spilled rum.

  The flames ignited instantly and roared and rushed toward me.

  “No, no!”

  I tried to bounce the chair back, but was bound fast to the support column and couldn’t escape.

  The flames groped for my pant legs and I screamed.

  46

  The flames burned my ankles. They reached the hem of my pant leg, fizzled, the fabric still wet from the lake, but then they reached a patch of Red Rum and flamed up my calf.

  A dark figure climbed through the window, fell to the floor, and then scrambled to his feet and ran toward me, full speed. He dove and soared through the air, belly-flop style, the effort throwing a mist over me like a dog shaking out its fur.

  He landed flat on the trail of flames and it sizzled under his wet clothes. Then he wrapped a wet arm around my pant leg and snuffed out the flames.

  “You—you’re—you’re a—you’re a…a ghost—” I stammered.

  “Not yet,” Matt Mettle said, breathing heavy. “Boy, swimming is way harder than it looks. No one ever tells you how fast muscle sinks.”

  He stood and kicked Caesar’s body out of his way. Caesar rolled from his side onto his stomach, Mettle’s Leatherman sticking out of his back. Caesar’s leg twitched, his chest heaving, the knife rising and falling like a lever begging to be pulled.

  I stared at Mettle in disbelief. Under the swinging lantern, his face was red, but not damaged.

  “Kendall,” I said. “We have to get Kendall.”

  Mettle untied me and helped me toward the door. “He’s not going anywhere. I slashed his brand new tires.”

  I pointed to the video camera sitting on the paint bucket. “You might want to grab that.”

  Mettle picked it up, the tally lamp still blinking red. He stared into the lens. “The game’s over.”

  He slipped the camera into his pocket and we stepped out of the shack. The rain had mostly stopped and all around us, the gray fog had turned red and blue.

  “Backup’s here,” Mettle said.

  He waved across the lake. A figure that might very well have been Billy Ganz was standing at the edge of the driveway, a whole platoon of cruisers behind him.

  In the middle of the lake, Kyle Kendall sat alone in the canoe. He threw something into the lake and there was a loud plop. Then he slowly raised his hands in surrender.

  I stepped a foot into the canoe while Mettle held it steady for me. Up the hill, the cops had taken Kendall into custody and read him his Miranda rights. Billy Ganz himself had come down the hill and swum the canoe out to us. Now, soaking, he sat at the bow like an overweight coxswain.

  “Should we go back for Caesar?” I said.

  Ganz glanced into the shack. “Nah. We’ll send a team down to get him. He’s not going anywhere.”

  Mettle pushed us off the bank, his leg trailing the stern in the water, and then he climbed into the canoe and sat directly across from me. He grabbed an oar and with a series of powerful strokes, rowed us back toward the dock.

  “How did you find me?” I asked.

  “Your phone,” Mettle said. “I would have come sooner, but every time I checked, there was no signal.”

  “Yeah, this place is a dead zone.”

  “I don’t mean the cell reception,” Mettle said. “I mean the GPS. We installed that tracking app, remember? It doesn’t need a signal, but you must have had your phone turned off most of the time. When I finally got the signal, I tracked it right away. I pulled up to the driveway, saw the tiny lamp through the fog, and it corresponded with the signal from your phone. I remembered that little trick at the motel with the headlights and figured it might work on Kendall.”

  I reminded myself to grab my phone from under the lounge chair before we left.

  “But what about the funeral? The flames? I saw you die.”

  “No, you saw me go up in flames, but then the guards covered the window with foam so you couldn’t see what was happening.”

  “But you were on fire, Matt.”

  “No, my clothes were on fire. You remember when you saw the burn on my arm? I was doing experiments. I knew the only way I could figure out how Caesar had set those people on fire was to go after him from the inside, so I had Ganz come and arrest me for stealing the cruiser. Thanks to a tip from Charlie Margin at your foster father’s law firm, I had been suspicious of Kendall for a while. Margin had overseen a number of shady real estate transactions, including a strange deal between Roman Caesar and a fictitious holding company, but I didn’t have anything solid. So I called Kendall from prison and asked him to represent me. I knew if he was working with Caesar and they thought I knew too much, they’d try to kill me, just like they did with Phyllis and Dimitri. But I needed Kendall to think that I was dead so I could track him to his hideout.”

  “So you used me as a lure? You put me through abject misery.”

  “I never meant to,” Mettle said. “I would have come to rescue you a lot sooner if only you had left your stupid phone on.”

  “I still don’t understand how you didn’t die.”

  “You’ll have to thank Phyllis Martin for that one. As soon as I was on the inside I asked about the special chowder her cellmate had been brewing. I got the guy down the hall to slip me a bag. It only cost me a few cigs—brokered by the warden himself. I coated myself with the goop as thick as shaving cream. Then I had the warden send you the video.”

  “Is that why you winked at the camera?”

  “I was hoping to clue you in on the game and spare you some emotional distress,” Mettle said.

  “That’s awful presumptuous of you. What made you think I’d be distressed?”

  “I don’t know. Weren’t you?”

  “Maybe a little bit,” I said. “Who paid for the funeral?”

  Mettle stopped rowing and the canoe followed course and drifted toward the dock. We were facing each other, our knees alternating like hinges.

  “The warden. He was willing to do anything to keep the
FBI out of it. He’s got a slush fund.”

  “Was I the only one who wasn’t in on it?”

  Mettle scratched his chin. “Pretty much. We couldn’t risk Kendall figuring it out.”

  At the dock, Ganz climbed out of the canoe. He stood at the end, his boots hanging over the edge, and leaned over the black water and offered me a hand.

  “Give us a minute,” I said.

  Ganz gave Mettle a sly wink. “I’ll see you back at the station for a briefing, Trooper.”

  “Absolutely,” Mettle said.

  Ganz nodded to me and then turned and climbed up the hill toward the congregation of cruisers.

  We sat alone in the canoe, gently rocking, our knees touching.

  “I don’t know about all this, Matt,” I said. “This is hardly by the book.”

  “I’m not a cop, remember. Not for another week. Sometimes, if you wanna cook a crook, you gotta throw the whole darn book in the fire.”

  Was it possible that Matt Mettle was actually a lot smarter than I had ever given him credit for? Was he one of those students who couldn’t bubble a test to save his hide, but had a natural, nonmeasurable intelligence that you knew would either lead to ruin—or to great things, far more impressive than any high GPA.

  “This is all very…clever, Matt. What about the prophecy? Who sent the lines from Macbeth?”

  Mettle sighed. He reached in his pocket and took out a slip of paper. “Okay. Fine. I can’t take full credit. In the interest of full disclosure, I had a little help. Someone sent me this.”

  He handed me the slip of paper.

  I quickly read it.

  What goes scratch, scratch boom?

  Ferrocerium.

  What puts it out?

  Cell-brewed chowder.

  Beware of March 15.

  I lowered the paper. “Who sent you this?”

  “I have no idea. I found it in my mailbox. After we located Caesar’s tent, I put it all together and asked the warden to help. All but that last part. What happens on March 15th?”

  “The Ides of March,” I said. “The day that Julius Caesar was assassinated.”