by Don Potter
This book is fictional and a product of the author’s imagination. References to people, places and things are solely to create a sense of authenticity. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. Apart from brief extracts used for reviews, no part of this book may be used or reproduced for any reason without prior written consent of the author.
Copyright 2013: Donald L. Potter
All rights reserved
ISBN
9781623091002
9
MURDER MYSTERIES
Introduction to the Collection
Mysteries are fun and exciting, particularly when they involve murder. Short mystery stories are a great way to take a break from our busy jam-packed lives and escape for a little time from reality into the world of fiction. By their very nature, short stories are single-minded, with fewer characters, and the pace is fast.
Below is a synopsis of each of the 9 stories written for your reading enjoyment:
HOLLYWOOD – Stars get special treatment in “Tinsel Town.” The loss of a son causes a bereaved mother to buck the odds in an effort to payback an uncaring actor.
SNAP – Tired of living under the domination of women causes Bill to takes things into his own hands. The result is briefly liberating, but the consequences are deadly.
GEMINI – Identical twins are reunited when a sister is assigned the task of assassinating the other. A plan is devised to avert one murder, which can end in both their deaths.
WISHES – A stranger offers a born loser a way out of his miserable existence. The man can have whatever he wants, but he does not consider the final outcome.
SCHEME – A body washes up on the South Jersey shore. What appears to be a simple case of murder turns out to be a complex and well orchestrated killing plot
ANGELS – Digging for buried treasure was Kurt Mason’s job. After finding a special piece of antiquity he is thrust into a world-wide adventure that could cost him his life.
SOBER – Selecting the right AA sponsor may produce major changes in an individual’s life. Agreeing to sponsor the wrong person could have deadly results.
WRITERS – Husband and wife authors live in an isolated country home. She comes to believe he is planning to murder her. It could be her imagination or a glimpse of reality.
REDEMPTION – Most people would welcome the opportunity to eliminate poor choices made in the past. But does a death row prisoner deserve a second chance at life?
HOLLYWOOD
A loud thud accompanied by the steering wheel jerking violently to the right snapped Jarrod James out of his blackout. In the twilight he saw something bounce across the hood of his car and hit the windshield before sliding into the gutter. JJ slammed on the brakes and skidded to a stop just in time to keep a twisted bicycle from logging under the frame of his prize Bentley convertible.
“My God, what have I done,” JJ cried as he looked at the lifeless body of a young boy lying on the asphalt. He did not touch the child. Instead he pulled the bike from beneath the front bumper and fled.
In minutes he reached the safety of his home atop the Hollywood hills. Unable to reconstruct what happened, let alone think about what to do next, JJ poured an ample amount of vodka into a glass and stared through the floor to ceiling windows at the twinkling lights of the sprawling city below. He finished half the drink and picked up the phone.
“Ray, it’s me, JJ. Something really bad just went down. I need your help.”
“What happened?”
“I think I killed a kid.”
“You think you killed a kid? Don’t you know for sure?”
“Well, I was coming back from a meeting and a few drinks with Harriet at Dan Tana’s and was coming up the back way to my place. Then bam, I hit this little guy riding a bike.”
“And he’s dead?”
“He looked like he was. Nobody was around, so I took off.”
“Great, a hit-and-run. You’re right, you did something really bad.”
“I’m sorry, Ray. It’s the pills the doc gave me to keep me calm. Guess they don’t mix too well with booze.”
“Looks like you hit the jackpot this time, my boy. Have you talked to anyone else about this fiasco?”
“I was going to call Harriet. After all, she is my agent. Besides, Harriet was with me this afternoon.”
“She’s the last person you want to know about this. If she had as many drinks as you, she’ll be useless too. And if not, she could be a key witness against you.”
“Think I could go to jail?”
“Let’s put it this way, if you don’t do exactly as I tell you, they’ll be fitting you for one of those orange jumpsuits real soon. Got it?”
“Oh no.”
“Oh yeah.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Take a shower. Put on something comfortable. And make a pot of coffee. We may be in for a long night. I’m on my way. Don’t do anything or talk to anyone until I get there.”
Laurie Kingman had been a single mom since her son, Robert, was six months old. It was difficult in those early years, but with the help of family and friends she persevered and made a comfortable life for herself and her son. That was until twelve year old Robby was killed earlier in the evening by a hit-and-run driver. He was riding his bike in a Beverly Hills neighborhood while she, now a personal trainer, was inside working with a client.
“Why? Why?” she cried. “He was such a good boy – my pride and joy. How could someone hit him and drive away leaving him to die on the street?” She sat by his lifeless form in a curtained-off area in the emergency room at Cedars Sinai Hospital in Beverly Hills.
“Come, Laurie,” her sister, Joan, said. “We have to make funeral arrangements for Robby. I have a friend who works for Rose Hills. She can help with everything. In the meantime, until things get sorted out, please come and stay with Jim and me.”
“I don’t want to interfere with your lives.”
“You’re family. And a family takes care of family members when tragedy hits. This is not up for discussion. We’ll go over to your apartment and pack after we meet with the lady at Rose Hills.” Joan had difficulty finding the proper words, but her thoughts seemed to get through.
“Okay,” Ray Seymour said as he barged through the front door thirty minutes later. “Time to provide me with each and every detail of the incident that you can remember.”
“That’s not a very nice way to say ‘hello.’”
“Look, JJ, I’m not your babysitter, your shrink or your agent. Good ole’ Ray is your attorney. I don’t get paid to make you feel good. I’m the one who gets you off the hook every time you screw up. And this time, I’ll earn every bit of my fee and more.”
“With you, Ray, it’s always more. I’m sure your services will cost me plenty.”
“If you ever learn how to stay out of trouble, you’ll save a lot of money.”
“Yeah, but you’d find a way to bill me for something.” JJ enjoyed sparring with his lawyer, but he also believed Ray took advantage of him. He was certain that everyone he employed in someway overcharged, underperformed, or both. JJ chalked this up to the cost of being a star, particularly one of his magnitude.
“Did you make coffee like I asked?”
“I thought a drink would do a better job of calming me down.”
“Stop thinking. I need to be sure you’re sober when we call the police. You can get drunk later but only if you’re at home. No one can see you drinking in public until we get this thing behind us.”
“We don’t even know if I had an accident. It’s just that I can’t remember.”
“Let’s take a look at the car. Which one were you driving?”
“The Bent
ley.”
“Figures. It’s easy to trace since there aren’t many of them around, even here in ‘Tinsel Town.’”
“Damn, the dent in the hood is bigger than I thought,” JJ complained.
“There’s blood too,” Ray observed. “The grill is messed up as well. How fast were you going?”
“Can’t say. I don’t remember anything except seeing something hit my hood and fall off to the side. That’s when I must have hit the brakes.”
“Oh boy. So you hit the kid at full-force, saw that he was dead or gravely injured, and then took off. The media is going to have a field day with this. By the time we go to court, the jury pool will be predisposed to throwing the book at you.”
“It’s up to you to keep me out of court and certainly out of jail. My agent always says we can handle the press, because they love me almost as much as my fans do.”
“Save the reviews for somebody else, and let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I need to hear your story, sketchy though it may be. Then we’ll have Fisher come over and test your blood for alcohol and drugs. If everything’s okay, we’ll call the police.”
“Why? I can get the car repaired and no one will be the wiser.”
“Now that’s a really dumb idea. Someone may have seen you. Or the body shop guys may spill the beans. Or people at Dan Tana’s may come forward. Or, as I said earlier, Harriet may point the finger at you.”
“She wouldn’t do that. I’m her meal ticket.”
“You never know how people react to questioning. Just accept it, because this thing is not going away.”
They walked into the kitchen. Ray poured coffee for both of them, took out his pocket tape recorder as well as his yellow legal pad, and started asking his client questions in rapid-fire.
Satisfied he had all he was going to get by asking the same question in several different ways, Ray was ready to move on to the next steps. First he called the ‘doc,’ as Fisher was known.
“He’ll be here soon,” the attorney announced.
Next Ray made a call to someone inside the police department. JJ could only pick up bits and pieces of one side of the conversation because the attorney walked out of the kitchen for much of the call. After clicking off his cell phone Ray decided to lay out his strategy for the client while they waited for the physician to arrive.
“My source tells me the kid you hit is dead. A neighbor saw the incident from beginning to end, but they did not get the license plate – not even a partial. They could not identify the type of car either. The twilight and the speed in which it all happened are working for you, at least for now.”
“So my idea about fixing the car isn’t so dumb.”
“Not so fast. The woman saw your face in the headlights when you bent over to look at the kid. She’s older and could not identify you - thought the person might be someone that lives in the area. Sooner or later, she’ll see your picture on TV or in a tabloid and you won’t be able to hide anymore.”
“I didn’t see anyone.”
“What you saw doesn’t matter, but what a witness saw does. That’s why we have to get out in front of this wave before we are caught up by its force.”
“And just how do we do that?”
“If doc says your blood work is okay, you call the cops and turn yourself in.”
“How will that help me?”
“I’m going to give you the script. So listen up.
Learn your lines and stick with the story. Don’t deviate or contradict yourself in any way.”
“Aren’t you being a bit dramatic?”
“Yeah, and you better be prepared to deliver the best dramatic performance of your life.”
“You think it’ll go that far?”
“That will depend on what we know, what we should know and what we can find out. For instance, we know that you had too much to drink. How many other people know it and who are they? Were they there the entire time? Did they have too much to drink as well? What can they remember? And how do we think they’ll stand up under testimony?”
“I can tell you how much I had to drink.”
“How much?”
“Too much.” JJ tried to laugh at his attempt to make a joke, but Ray didn’t let him.
“This isn’t funny. You killed a kid and left the scene of a crime. This means a big time jail sentence if witnesses say you were drunk. Harriet saw how much you drank. In fact she probably paid for you to get loaded.”
“She did, but she’s an agent. That’s part of her job.”
“And there will be a record of a credit card transaction.”
“She’ll say she bought other people drinks or come up with some other lie.”
“What makes you think she’ll do that?”
“As I said, she’s an agent. There’s no way Harriet wants to lose me as a client.”
“She will if you’re wearing an orange jumpsuit for the next twenty years.”
“Okay. You made your point. Tell me what you want me to say to make this whole thing go away.”
“It’s not going away, but my hope is to get the situation under control in order to have the least possible damage and manage the outcome in the most favorable way. Is that doc’s car I hear outside?”
“Who else could it be?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“JJ, there’s no way you can pass a field sobriety test right now,” Doc said.
“I was afraid of that,” the attorney chimed in. How long before he’ll be ready?”
“A couple maybe three hours should do it.”
“That could be a problem.”
“I can’t sober him up any faster.”
“Wait a minute.” Ray was ready to offer an instant solution to the time gap. “How about if he had a terrible migraine? He could hardly drive because of it. That’s why he hit the kid. Couldn’t see him. JJ was confused after the accident. He manages to drive home. Puts ice on his head and falls into bed. A few hours later he wakes up, calls me, and I call you. We come over, get the scoop on the accident, you treat JJ for the mother of all headaches, and I call the police. Like a good citizen would.”
“Possibly. I can give him a shot of a drug normally used for migraines. That way it will show up in the toxicology report. But we can’t cover up the fact that he had been drinking.”
“Drinking is not against the law. I need something that makes drinking a secondary issue. This poor baby suffers from sever migraines.” The attorney makes a dramatic courtroom gesture toward his client. “And you’re going to order a bunch of neurological tests to get to the bottom of the problem and find out if he suffers from something even worse than these terrible headaches.”
“Wait a minute. I don’t get headaches and never had a migraine.”
“Now you do,” Ray replied.
“Those tests might hurt. I hate pain.”
“Prison would be a lot more painful.”
The police arrived in the middle of the 11 PM news. Ray Seymour made sure the call was placed before the newscast began. He believed this fact would help when presenting the case to a jury, since this was the first time the story received television coverage. The timing suggests that his client tried to do the right thing as soon as he recovered from the ravages of the migraine.
“You passed the field sobriety test and we have your statement about the accident. However, you must come with us Mr. James. You left the scene of the accident. This is technically a hit-and-run with a death occurrence. It’s a very serious matter,” the officer said.
“Let me call someone to see if we can take him in my car. If he had turned himself in, Mr. James could have walked through the front door of the Hollywood Division without cuffs or a police escort. No reason to give the media a photo op that will surely prejudice the potential jury pool.” Ray flipped open his cell and dialed the number.
He turned his back and walked away after greeting the person on the other end of the phone. In a few minutes he returned and handed the phone
to the officer. The cop got his instructions and handed the phone back to the attorney.
“Okay. We’ll do it the way you requested. Mr. James goes in your car and I follow you. When we get to division go to the back door, I’ll call, and someone will open the door so he can go in unnoticed. Are we ready to go?”
Ray nodded while JJ gave an unknowing shrug.
This was not JJ’s first visit to a police station. He was just twenty-nine but had a history of getting into scrapes from the time he became a star sensation in afterschool movies at fifteen. Drunk driving, drug possession, bar fights and a domestic battle with an ex-girlfriend were among the primary offenses. None of his past exploitations approached the seriousness of this event.
Once inside JJ was treated like anyone else, except the police may have spoken nicer to him than the average person being booked. While he was going through the process Ray was in contact with a friendly judge, JJ’s agent and his publicist in that order.
By the time he was interviewed by detectives, bail had been set and paid. The entire ordeal took less than two hours. JJ was released and went out the back door to Ray’s waiting car and was whisked back to his Hollywood Hills home to meet with agent Harriet and publicist Adam.
“Why didn’t you call me sooner?” Harriet complained. “After all, I am his agent. Maybe I could have helped with JJ’s problem.”
“You may be part of the problem rather than the solution,” Ray fired back.
“Really? I don’t see how you can accuse me of that.”
“You bought him the drinks, my dear.”
“That’s part of my job.”
“And is it part of your job to let your client get drunk in public and let him drive his car on city streets where he could injure himself or someone else?”
“He and I only had three drinks, and I had no problem driving to Santa Monica.”
“Maybe you were just lucky.”
“I went home, freshened up, and met people for dinner at Chinois. I was not drunk and neither was JJ. We only had three drinks each.”