Dying Words (A Ghostwriter Mystery)

by C. A. Larmer

  “Come on,” Roxy said. “It’ll do you wonders.”

  She took her by the arm, leading her back through the car park and towards a small street-side café she’d noticed earlier. She helped Betty into a seat, then ordered two pots of English Breakfast tea and sat down to join her.

  “They said he had your newspaper with him,” Betty said and Roxy nodded.

  “He asked me for it when I saw him. Wanted something decent to read.”

  “He always was a voracious reader.” Her eyes brimmed with tears.

  “Betty, I’m so sorry. I feel so responsible.”

  Betty stared at her aghast. “But why, my dear?”

  “Well, it’s just that he was perfectly fine until I showed up. I just wonder if I’d left him alone, if—”

  “He fell down a flight of stairs, Roxy, it had nothing to do with you. Nothing! As Brian says, he could have fallen at any time. He was getting old ... I’m just glad that you got to see him before he died. That he got to hear that we were well and thinking of him. Besides, the police told me he had no identification on him. They may never have worked out who it was, or at least not for some time, if it wasn’t for your newspaper.” She shook her head firmly. “Oh no, no, my dear you mustn’t blame yourself. I don’t know what happened last night or why, but Gordon was lost many years ago. He gave up on life long before now, and if anyone’s to blame for that, it’s me.” The tears spilled over now and she brought a crumpled hankie to her nose and gave it a long blow.

  “Betty,” Roxy began and she shook her head.

  “Don’t try to tell me it’s not my fault. It’s all my fault. He was happy until we ... until I ... It was one night! One night. But it destroyed him. And it destroyed me, and it destroyed my son.”

  Roxy thought about this. “It didn’t need to, you know? I’m sorry, I don’t mean to sound harsh, but affairs happen every day, most people pull themselves together and dust themselves off, they get on—”

  “Affair?” Betty said, staring at her as though she were speaking in tongues.

  “Yes, you and Berny ...?”

  Betty held her palms out. “Me and Berny? There was no ‘me and Berny’.”

  The tea arrived and Roxy took it as an opportunity to collect her thoughts. She didn’t think she could be any more confused, but clearly she was wrong.

  “I ... I thought you had an affair with Berny at the Congress.”

  Betty was just starting to pour her tea when she clunked the pot back down and looked at Roxy, stunned. “Berny Tiles? And me? No, dear, not at all.”

  “So who ...?”

  Betty looked away but Roxy could see she had started her frantic blinking again and she decided she was not going to let that stop her this time. She took one of Betty’s hands and gave it a reassuring squeeze.

  “Please, Betty. It’s time to tell the truth. If you weren’t with Berny that night, then who were you with?”

  After a long, agonising pause, Betty whispered the word, “Wolfgang.” Then began to sob quietly into her hankie, her head buckled over.

  Roxy was stunned. She’d read that one completely wrong. She reached across and tried to console the weeping woman. “I’m sorry, Betty, I seem to have everything completely muddled up. I thought you and Berny had had an affair.”

  Betty pulled off her glasses and wiped her eyes. “No, dear, Berny wasn’t my type at all. A lovely chap, but far too dull for me, I’m afraid.” She sighed, placing her glasses back on. “Back then, I preferred them wild, like ...”

  She trailed off and Roxy said, “Like Wolfgang.”

  She nodded. “I was such a fool.”

  So was I, thought Roxy. Wolfgang was the sleaziest man she’d ever met, Berny one of the most boring. It seemed so obvious now. “So how long did you and Wolfgang ...?”

  “Oh, just the once.” Betty glanced up at her and there was pain in every crevice of her face. She no longer looked youthful. She looked old and a little haggard, her bright green glasses doing little to cheer up her now glum face. “It wasn’t an affair, Roxy. It was ... a mistake. A very stupid, brutal mistake, and Gordon never got over it.” She picked her cup back up with shaking hands and took a sip, her eyelids continuing to blink away. “Gordon just couldn’t get past it. And I don’t blame him, I don’t. It killed Indonesia for us, we moved to Sydney soon after, Mr Henry gave us the jobs ... well, you know the rest.”

  Roxy gave her hand another squeeze. “Did you ever see Wolfgang again?”

  “God no, never!” She looked horrified by the thought.

  “And Berny?”

  The blinking stopped. “From time to time. I was better friends with his wife, Deandra, to be honest, but even then we were never best chums. You know how it is when expatriates are thrown together in foreign lands? Once we all returned home, we drifted apart. Berny and Dee kept in touch occasionally, Christmas cards every other year, that kind of thing, but I hadn’t seen either of them until Dee’s funeral a few years ago. Only had a few words with Berny. He was still so fond of Wolfgang, you see, so admiring of him ... I ... well, I couldn’t relate.” She sipped her tea quietly as though lost now in a long, distant past.

  Roxy tried to get her thoughts together. She realised she had made a terrible assumption. She had thrown out the idea of the affair and Betty had agreed, Gordon had agreed, even Wolfgang had not disputed this, and so she had connected the wrong dots. There had been an affair but it wasn’t between Betty and Berny.

  And yet Wolfgang had let her believe that.

  “Then why did Berny write your name on the back of that photo?” she asked. “Why was that photo so special to him?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Roxy explained about the original picture, and finding those words scrawled in faded pencil on the back.

  The blinking had subsided and Betty shrugged. “It’s all very flattering but ... Oh hang on, did he write Beautiful Betty or bet?”

  “Beautiful Bett.”

  She waved her palms in the air. “Then he wasn’t referring to me, my dear.”

  “Really? Who was he referring to?”

  “The bet, of course.”

  “Bet?”

  “Yes, I’d say he was talking about the beautiful bet he made that night with Wolfgang, except, of course, it didn’t turn out so beautiful in the end.”

  “But he wrote the word ‘bett’ with a double T. Unless ...”

  Roxy thought about the faded scrawl on the back of the photograph and realised she had made another stupid assumption. The second T could easily be an exclamation mark as Oliver had suggested. She’d been so intent on her theory she’d ignored the bleeding obvious. He had written Beautiful Bet!

  Roxy chided herself silently. She had been so successful over the past few years, solving several brutal murders that had seemed unsolvable, that she had let ego get in the way of evidence this time. She had not listened properly and she had jumped to foolish conclusions.

  She sighed heavily, pushed her teacup away and said, “Okay, I’m now well and truly confused. You’re going to have to start at the beginning and tell me exactly what happened that night of the Congress.”

  And so Betty did. Between sips of tea and the occasional wistful tear, Betty took Roxy back to 1975 when the whole sorry saga began.

  It was Jakarta, August 24, and the annual Indonesia Survey Congress was in full swing. Cocktails had been drunk in copious quantities, dinner had been served and largely ignored, and the weary wives had made their way back to their hotels, some of them to their sleeping children.

  “Although I wasn’t smart enough for that,” Betty told Roxy, her voice loaded with regret. “I hung around at the bar waiting for the poker game to finish.”

  “Poker game?”

  “Yes, several of the men—the ones in your photo actually—all sat down to a game of poker in the hotel bar. All except for Gordon, of course, he’d already drunk far too much and was passed out in a corner somewhere. I wasn’t surprised. That was st
andard procedure for my husband in those days. I found it so dull, and I guess he was. More interested in his bottle than me.” There was no bitterness in her tone as she spoke, just a resigned sadness. “Anyway, the poker game dragged on and Wolfgang was losing, apparently. I don’t know the details as I had left the room by then, I was out by the swimming pool waiting ...” She blinked a few times. “I heard about it the next day, I heard that Wolfgang was losing badly and had bet an old mine of his which he then lost to Berny Tiles.”

  “Really?” Roxy said.

  “Yes, apparently Wolfgang had run out of cash and had said something like, you can have $5,000 cash next week or you can have the deeds to the mine now. So, completely out of character for Berny, he took the mine. But the joke was on him, because it was a dud. The mine hadn’t produced anything of value for two or three years, I believe. The other men at the table knew that, but obviously Berny didn’t. Or if he did he thought it would come good one day. Berny, bless him, wasn’t very business savvy. He made the wrong choice. I don’t think Dee ever forgave him, and as far as I can tell they never mentioned it again, at least not to me. We were all pretty broke in those days, especially when we returned to Australia and the work dried up. Five grand would have been very useful. Oh well ...” She took a gulp of her tea. “I can’t believe Wolfgang didn’t tell you about all this for the book you’ve just written. I thought it’d make a very interesting chapter.”

  Roxy wasn’t surprised. Wolfgang’s whole spiel had been about what a winner he was, about all the successful gambles he’d taken in his life. Why tell her about a poker game that he lost? Even if the mine was a dud.

  “Of course I’m not at all sure how legitimate it all was. Whether he ever signed a proper deed. The whole thing kind of got forgotten after that, so ...”

  “What was this mine called, can you remember?”

  Betty sat back and considered this. “Oh, it’s all very rusty now ... um, Bellu or Boyo or something—”

  “Byou?”

  “Oh yes, that was it. Buy you. The men all teased Berny the next day, said, he bought you, that’s for sure.”

  Roxy’s skin prickled suddenly. “Was it a gold mine?”

  She shook her head. “Don’t think so. I think it was copper, something like that. I remember it wasn’t very glamorous and I just wondered why he accepted the bet. Anyway ...”

  Roxy recognised the name Byou, but she had a feeling it was related to gold, not copper, and couldn’t think where she’d heard of it. Perhaps Wolfgang had mentioned it in the book. If he had, he certainly hadn’t said anything about losing it in a poker game. She’d remember that. Roxy made a mental note to look up the transcripts again. All she recalled was Wolfgang waxing lyrical about what a brilliant businessman he had been. Yet that wasn’t exactly good business—betting away your copper mine, even one as defunct as Byou.

  Chapter 25

  “The Byou mine’s not defunct,” Caroline stated a few hours later and Roxy was so surprised she nearly drove into a median strip, swerving at the last minute, her heart racing a million miles per second as she straightened the vehicle and refocused on the road.

  Earlier, she had returned Betty safely back to her car, the older woman still looking a little stunned, and had then done a mad dash home to shower and change before collecting Caroline at Darlinghurst. They were en route to Sydney’s domestic airport to collect Max from his Melbourne flight, and she had been filling Caroline in on her latest “adventure”. It was Caroline’s word, not Roxy’s, and it was typical of Max’s sister. She made everything out to be a game, a lark, a barrel of laughs, but Roxy wasn’t laughing. Not today. The memory of Gordon Reilly was still so fresh in her mind, and she still felt somehow complicit in his death, especially when she considered the silly assumptions she had made.

  She shook the thought away and stared at the road ahead. After a few settling minutes, she asked, “What do you mean it’s not defunct? Betty says it was a depleted copper mine, and that Berny got ripped off.”

  “Well, I don’t know anything about that, but there’s been a lot of buzz lately about one of Wolfgang Bergman’s gold mines up in Irian Jaya that’s just come good and I’m sure it’s called Byou. It’s been all over the news for the past three weeks. Haven’t you noticed anything?”

  “Yes, I remember reading something about a gold mine, but Betty says the Byou is a copper mine. Besides, crime’s more my shtick, you know that. I don’t really retain financial info.”

  “Hence your poverty level,” Caroline replied, eyeing her old car pointedly.

  “Oi, it beats the bus which is what you’d be taking if it wasn’t for my beautiful V-dub.” Roxy caressed the steering well as though soothing the vehicle’s feelings. “So what’s the story with this gold mine, then?”

  “Oh, the story is fabulous!” Caroline curled her long legs up underneath her and turned to face Roxy. “They found gold up near Bergman’s old mine a few months ago, he reported it to the stock exchange about a month back. Stocks in Wolfgang’s Indonesian operations have gone through the roof. I’ve even put some money on it for my stock market course. So the mighty Sir Wolfgang didn’t mention anything to you, not even for the book?”

  Roxy shook her head. “We did finish up the interviews several months ago, so maybe it all happened after that.”

  “Still, you’d think he’d want to add an extra chapter on that. He’s set to make a fortune!”

  “Yes, except if Betty’s story is true, that mine’s not strictly Wolfgang’s mine, he lost it in a bet with Berny, back in 1975.”

  The women caught each other’s eyes and gasped in unison.

  “My God,” said Roxy. “No wonder Wolfgang didn’t mention it, and no wonder Berny wanted that picture back. That was the night he won that mine.”

  “And no wonder he got run over,” added Caroline. “A gold mine is definitely worth killing for.”

  An hour later, the two women were seated with Max at his favourite Indian restaurant at Taylor Square and Roxy was still having difficulty focussing, this time on her returned boyfriend, now that she had just stumbled on a genuine motive for murder. It was a tricky balancing act, and she knew from Max’s clenched jaw and occasional sighs that she was not pulling it off. Unfortunately, Caroline was not reading the signals, nor was she making it any easier, and kept steering the conversation back to Wolfgang and his mine. Her interest, however, was mostly self-motivated.

  “So let me get this straight,” Caroline said, shoving a thin slice of lime into her bottle of Corona. “If Wolfman doesn’t strictly own that mine,” she paused to lick her fingers, “if he did sign it over to Berny Tiles all those years ago, then me investing in Wolfgang’s mining company isn’t exactly going to reap rewards. It’s not his mine.”

  “Boo-hoo for you,” Max said, pouring red wine into a glass for Roxy.

  She thanked him and said, “But do we know if Wolfman really did sign it over to Berny? I mean, according to Betty he signed over a copper mine, not a gold mine.”

  “Could be the same thing,” Max said and they both stared at him. “What!? Didn’t you guys do Geology in high school? They often find gold deposits in copper mines. The two go together.”

  Roxy gave him a light tap on the shoulder. “That makes a little more sense then.” She quickly added, “So how did your trip go?”

  His jaw loosened a little. “Really good, actually. In fact, I wanted to talk to you about something—”

  “And how dodgy is that?” Caroline interrupted. “I mean, if he really did sign it over to someone, why is his name still connected to it and isn’t that fraud?!”

  Max glared at his sister, wishing she hadn’t come along. Roxy gave his knee a squeeze under the table. “What did you want to say, Max?”

  “Nothing, it’ll keep.” He flashed his sister another scowl.

  “Oh, you’ll get her all to yourself soon enough, chill out, Grumpy Bum. So is there any actual proof that Wolfgang gave the mine away? I mean, doe
s a drunken poker game back in 1975 count for anything?”

  Roxy shrugged. “I guess if there are witnesses to it.”

  “But didn’t you say all the witnesses are dead?”

  She felt a small shiver run down her back. Caroline was right. If Betty’s recall was correct, every single person who was present during that poker game was now dead. Except for Wolfgang Bergman.

  “It has to be Wolfgang,” she said. “He’s the only one who’s left and he’s the only one who stands to lose if the truth about that bet ever came to light. Although ...” She shook her head. “I still don’t get why he had to kill Gordon.”

  “Because he was there,” said Caroline.

  “Well, yes, but according to Betty he was passed out in a corner during the whole thing. So he’s hardly a viable witness. Besides, I don’t think Gordon knew that this mine had come good.” She took a sip of her wine. “He told me Berny was a loser, had been scammed by Wolfgang, why would he say that if he knew about the gold find?”

  Caroline scoffed. “It was all over the papers yesterday. How could he not know? I mean, really, it was front page news.”

  “Yeah, but life gets pretty small when you’re living hand to mouth—” She stopped. “Oh God.”

  “What?” said Caroline as Max sighed impatiently again.

  “My newspaper! That’s it. He must have read about it in the paper I gave him. Maybe he then contacted Wolfgang and ...”

  “And Wolfgang got rid of the final witness?” Caroline said, her own lips wide.

  Max groaned. “Could you guys just take a chill pill for one second and tell me what you want to order?” He waved the menu in front of them.

  “You can do the ordering, Max. I always seem to get it wrong at this place.”

  “Yeah, I’ll have what you’re having,” Caroline concurred, turning back to Roxy. “So where does all this leave that Betty woman? The one Wolfgang had the affair with?”

  “It wasn’t much of an affair, more like a really bad one night stand from the sound of it. Anyway, she says she wasn’t in the room at the time, only heard about the bet second hand; so that would be hearsay. Her word against Wolfman’s and I know what he’s like. She wouldn’t stand a chance up against him.”