Losing Your Head (The Charlie Davies Mysteries Book 1)

by Clare Kauter

  Violet had skills in questioning that were not yet mastered by national security organisations. If she wanted to know something, she used the minimum amount of words she could to keep the conversation going, so that the person she was talking to felt like they had to talk more to compensate. And that meant that things just tended to slip out. And so she found out everything.

  Maybe I could use that technique when I was questioning people about McKenzie.

  “So? How was he?”

  “Pretty normal.”

  “Normal?”

  “Well, yeah. He brought up the usual embarrassing stories from my past.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “He was dressed well.” Not that he ever dressed badly. He was one of those annoying people who just seemed to look put together all the time.

  “Yep.”

  “He looked healthy.”

  “How healthy?”

  “Like normal. Maybe a bit tired.”

  “Right.”

  “Didn’t seem too overcome by grief. Not that I think he did it,” I added quickly, catching the anger flaring up in Vi’s face. “I just mean he’s coping well. That’s all. Anyway, we didn’t really see each other for that long so I don’t have much to tell you.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Should I send him a casserole?”

  “No,” said my mother.

  “Why not?” Violet asked, turning the crazy eyes on mum. Phew. I was safe. Sorry, mum, but I don’t think both of us could have made it out unscathed. I’ll always remember your sacrifice.

  “He doesn’t deserve it.” Farewell, Janine. You were a good parent. I’ll miss you. Well, I’ll go to your funeral. You were an OK parent. Definitely in my top two.

  Luckily, Lea stepped in, potentially saving my mother’s life (and saving me from having to write her obituary). “He’s got a housekeeper to look after him. From what I know of her she gets narky when other people cook for him. Thinks it’s an insult,” Lea told us. I wondered how she knew so much about him. Maybe she’d just been playing it cool earlier, and in reality she belonged to my friends’ stalking club.

  Violet sighed. She thought for a moment. “I’ll sleep on it,” she told us finally.

  Only in Gerongate would a mother kick her son out at age 16 and still be cooking his dinner for him when he’s 21.

  Over dinner (one of Violet’s casseroles – delicious), I tried to find out everything Violet could tell me about Frank. I didn’t learn much – she’d hardly known him. She did tell me something interesting, though. I already knew Frank didn’t get along with his family – he’d never had anything to do with his nieces and nephews while they were little. So how had he and James met? When Violet told me she didn’t know, it struck me as more than a little weird for a few reasons. Firstly, James had met his own uncle without his family knowing. What exactly had he been doing, befriending his uncle (who had disowned the family) behind everyone’s backs? That looked bad, like maybe he’d been planning this inheritance thing for a while. James and/or his uncle must have had a specific reason they wanted to meet. I hoped that reason wasn’t so James could kill Frank for his money.

  I was going to have to ask James. I probably wouldn’t have a chance tomorrow – everyone would be trying to question him at the funeral – so I’d just have to do it the first chance I got.

  Violet left at about eleven and I went to bed. I lay there thinking for a long time. A few things I had heard today were worrying me. It wasn’t just what Violet had said about James and Frank. There was something James had said that wasn’t sitting quite right. When he’d driven me to the Martin’s place, I’d told him the address, but not who lived there. Yet straight away he asked why I had wanted to go there and if I had a death wish. There, in one statement, he’d given away two things. Firstly, he knew either Lea or Jeremy well enough to have committed their address to memory (I was going to have to ask her about that), and second, he knew what I’d done when I’d quit my job, or at least knew that Jeremy and I weren’t on great terms.

  None of this meant that he had killed Frank, of course. I didn’t think it did, anyway. Mysteries were a lot more complicated in real life than on television. But I had to solve it, if not for the house, and not for the money, just to piss McKenzie off. Lea and I could do this. If we got desperate, we could always fall back on police information to help us. I had a plan of how to get it (who said TV teaches us nothing?) and I was pretty sure that Lea would help me. She was really getting into this whole ‘amateur detective’ deal. Surely she wouldn’t let a pesky thing like the law stand in our way…

  And by that stage I was at least 50% convinced that she didn’t intend to kill me.

  Chapter Six

  Sunday morning came too soon. I glanced at my bedside table clock. The readout said 10:00 am. Ah. So maybe Sunday hadn’t come so soon after all.

  I definitely wasn’t at my peak in the morning.

  As I stood under the spray of the bathroom shower (feeble pressure, but it got the job done), I contemplated – well, considered momentarily – why they write so many songs about Sunday morning. Nothing great seemed to happen on Sunday mornings. Some people went to church, others slept in. Lots attempted to get over post-Saturday night hangovers. Others woke up thinking that it was Monday and wondering why their alarms hadn’t gone off, ran around the house screaming and fretting about losing their jobs, got caught on three separate speed cameras in the space of the 10 minute drive (which they had condensed into three) to work and then arrived at the office, finding it closed. OK, so that had never happened to anyone I knew, but it could, right?

  So what made it so inspirational? Yes, I admit, generally I was only around to see two hours of it, and perhaps all the miracles happened before 10:00 a.m., but I doubted it.

  I shut off the water and walked back to my room wrapped in a towel. (When I’d first gotten up it had seemed too difficult to make such a massive decision as what clothes to wear for the day.) At the risk of repeating myself, I definitely wasn’t at my peak in the morning.

  When I’d finally decided what to wear and dressed myself in jeans and a black T-shirt bearing the slogan “Rock-Off” (which for some reason had seemed funny when I was 14, although now I wore it ‘ironically’ and definitely not because I had no money to buy new clothes), I descended the stairs. Mum and Lea were sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee.

  Since I’m not much of a fan of bitter, super-caffeinated beverages (or, as my mother puts it, because I’m a wimp) I made myself a cup of green tea. I know, I know, for someone who was about as health conscious as a potato, drinking green tea was kind of weird. The thing is, black tea required sugar. Green tea did not. I drank green tea out of laziness.

  As I sat there drinking my green tea I noticed my mother’s eye was twitching. I glanced at Lea. She was having trouble staying on the seat.

  “How much coffee have you two had?”

  “We started when we woke up.”

  “When was that?”

  “When Mrs Stein threw her husband out this morning.” Mum’s eye started twitching even more frantically.

  Mr Stein was an ex-boxing champion. At one stage he had been the best in Gerongate. Now he was old. His wife, Mrs Stein, was a friendly lady. They lived in the house across and down one from ours. I had a hard time imagining her kicking her husband out.

  “Were they yelling loudly?”

  “No,” Mum answered. “It was the sirens that woke us up.” Whoa! What? Sirens?

  “Sirens? What happened?” My voice was getting a little shrill.

  “I told you,” Mum said irritably. “She threw him out.”

  “Out the second floor window,” Lea chimed in.

  “Whoa,” I said, my voice nearly back to normal. “Let me get this straight. Mrs Stein, frail, dainty, old Mrs Stein, threw her husband out the second storey window?” They’d been together for as long as I could remember, and now, after all this time, sh
e’d gotten angry enough to try to make him take a two-storey free-fall. Wow. I had not seen that coming.

  “I know,” said Mum, shaking her head and twitching her eye. “It’s sad.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I mean,” she continued, “What does this say about the state of boxing in Gerongate?”

  I decided to blame it on the coffee.

  “So when did this happen?”

  “Round about six.”

  “You’ve been drinking coffee for four and a half hours?” Hmm.

  “Yeah,” said Lea and started giggling. Mum joined her.

  Oh, jeez. That was not a good sign.

  “Well,” I told Lea, “At least we know you’ll have plenty of time to work on the case. You certainly won’t be able to sleep for the next week.” She just kept on giggling. “I hope you’ve stopped giggling by the time we get to Frank’s funeral.”

  “That’s at two, isn’t it?” Lea asked me. When I nodded, she glanced at her watch. Suddenly her eyes grew wide. “Oh crap! I’m supposed to meet my lawyer in 10 minutes!”

  “You can borrow the car if you want,” Mum told her. She seemed to be finding this quite amusing. She’d probably be finding everything quite amusing for the next few days. Too much coffee was like alcohol to my mother.

  “No thanks,” said Lea. “I’ll make it. I’m feeling pretty energetic. I’ll jog.”

  She jogged out of the kitchen. I thought I heard her puffing as she reached the front door. At least I wasn’t the only unfit person I knew.

  “I’m feeling pretty energetic, too,” Mum told me. “I might go out and do some gardening.”

  I heard the back door slam and crept over to the window. I saw Mum pick up my old rainbow skipping rope, move over to the cement slab at the back of the garage and start skipping frantically.

  All I needed now was someone to ask me “Does your Mum eat Vita-Weats?”

  I went back to the table and sat down with my tea. I really needed somewhere to start with this case. A clue, a name… Well, I had a name, but I didn’t think it was the right one. I’d known James my whole life, and I knew he wasn’t a murderer. Especially over something as petty as money. Everyone thought he had a motive, but that wasn’t true. Frank adored James. Frank gave James everything he wanted. It wasn’t like James had to kill him if he wanted money – he could have just asked for it.

  So, I’d established who hadn’t done it. Great. It would have been much more helpful if I’d established who had. A name… I needed a name…

  I took out a highlighter and the case file. Names. That’s what I wanted. That’s what I was going to get.

  By the time I finished going through the folder, I had a list of five names. Not terribly impressive, I know, but it was a start. Three that I’d never heard of, one I’d heard a lot about, and one I’d met before.

  Michael Andrews, Peter Emmeret and Derek Patel belonged to Group One. Apparently, Michael Andrews was heading the investigation. He made it pretty clear who he thought had done it. There was a photo of him of with one of the articles, and believe me, if I’d wanted to reassure the people of Gerongate that the murderer was going to be caught I would not have chosen to attach a picture of this guy. He didn’t have the sort of face you associated with clever people. Hell, he didn’t look like he could spell the word ‘fish’ without help. He was one of those men that you could tell had only gotten through university because his Mummy had written all his essays for him.

  Well, this explained why James had hired Sharps. I wouldn’t have trusted Andrews to direct traffic, much less solve a murder mystery. At least this would make it easy to get information out of him. If he had any to give.

  Peter and Derek, two others on the list, were the kids who’d found the body. I was surprised the paper was allowed to print their names. Wasn’t there a law about that? Not that laws made a whole lot of difference in Gerongate, I suppose.

  The guy I’d heard a lot about was Frank’s fellow billionaire. Well, he should have been, but he gambled and drank most of it away. Larry Jones had co-owned a few investments with Frank, and I imagined he had been very jealous of McKenzie’s good fortune. Or rather, his good business sense.

  There was one more person on the list. Sarah Hollis was James’s cop buddy, and also his alibi. I’d met her before a few years back, and she’d seemed pretty nice. Currently, however, she was missing/holidaying in South America – it depended who you asked. She was due back in the country this weekend. If she was still alive.

  I heard the front door open and a red-faced and puffing Lea stumbled into the kitchen. She looked even worse than I did after exercise. It was probably because she had to carry all that extra weight on her chest.

  “Man, I’m unfit,” Lea wheezed. “I only jogged a few blocks.”

  “Don’t feel too guilty about it. I’m pretty unfit as well.”

  “We should probably do something about that.”

  “Probably.”

  And that was all that was said on that topic.

  “How long have we got until the funeral?”

  “It’s only a quarter to twelve now,” Lea answered. “We’ve got heaps of time.” She noticed the papers spread out in front of me. “Have you been going through the file?”

  “Yeah. I was looking for names of people involved other than the McKenzies. I found five. Two police officers, two kids and one possible suspect.”

  “Let me guess. The suspect is Larry Jones.”

  I was intrigued. “How did you know?”

  “Well, I kind of already thought he might have done it, so I asked Alice Grey, my solicitor, but she hadn’t talked to Jeremy’s lawyer yet, so she didn’t have much to tell me. Apparently, though, she was trying to negotiate with Frank and on Larry’s behalf.” Nice confidentiality there. Remind me never to go to Alice Grey with my legal problems. “She couldn’t tell me too much, but I think Larry was trying to buy some of Frank’s property, but he wouldn’t sell. She said Larry had gotten really aggressive and she dropped his case.”

  “What a nice guy.” Yeesh. Yep, suspect number one.

  “Exactly. I think that maybe Larry killed Frank because he thought that James would be easier to negotiate with.”

  Well, I suppose he wasn’t to know, but if that was the case then he certainly was going to be disappointed. I couldn’t see James being any less stubborn than his uncle.

  The back door swung open and Mum entered the room. Her mouth dropped open. “What are you two doing?” she asked. “You have to be at the funeral at two!”

  “But that’s not for ages,” I told her.

  “Surely you are not that thick, Charlie! The whole of Gerongate is going to be there! You’ll never get a seat if you don’t leave soon. Look at you! You’re not dressed, you haven’t had lunch –”

  “How do you know we haven't had lunch?” I asked.

  “You haven’t left a mess.” Fair enough. “Hurry up! Go get changed. How do you expect to get a park if you don’t turn up early? Come on!”

  Lea and I dashed upstairs. Trust me – when mum gets like that, you do what she says. We pulled random black clothes from cupboards, drawers and suitcases (Lea hadn’t unpacked everything yet) and pulled them on.

  Lea settled on a black dress that was a modest length (but had a not-so-modest neckline), black pointy-toed heels, and a tonne of mascara. I admired the way she could pull that look off. If I wore that much make-up, I’d just look like a panda. And if I even tried­ to walk in those shoes…

  Since I wasn’t aiming for the un-co panda effect, I wore a pair of black pants, a black blouse and my old black school shoes. Looking at myself in the mirror, I imagined what my mother would think. I didn’t care. If the guys I’d met were good advocates for their gender, I’d rather stay single. Anyway, I wasn’t going to a funeral to pick up.

  When we were back downstairs, we found that Mum had already made us lunch. And wrapped it in cling-wrap. She took one look at what I was wearing, shook her head in
disgust, thrust the car keys at me and practically shoved us out the door.

  “Wouldn’t want you to be late!” she called out as she slammed the door behind us. I could’ve sworn I heard the lock click behind us.

  “Reckon she wants us to go?”

  When we arrived I was secretly glad that mum had made us leave so early. We were lucky enough to sneak into a park only one block away from the church. That’s what you get when you turn up nearly an hour and a half early for something.

  When we parked, I fell out of the driver’s side of the Nissan and whacked my head on the roof of the car parked next to us. (Yes, I literally fell out.) The car I hit was nice. In kind of a scary way. Normally I don’t notice cars (unless there is obviously something wrong with them – comes from having a mechanic for a father) but this one stood out. It was a brand new Porsche, and it was black.

  Baxter & Co.

  The Porsche provided a huge contrast to the car parked on the other side of us. If you could actually call it a car. It was more like a pile of scrap metal on wheels. How the hell this thing passed its registration was beyond me. Yeesh. I think I preferred the Nissan. And it’s not often I think that.

  When we arrived at the church, it was already packed. And I mean packed. Even arriving as early as we did, we had to squash up in the back, standing. It seemed like half of Gerongate was there. People who arrived at one o’clock had to congregate outside.

  I turned to Lea. “Time to do a bit of detective work,” I whispered. “If you see anyone you know, make a note of them. We might have to talk to them later.”

  Lea started ratting through her snake-skin-print handbag (black, of course – totally funeral appropriate). Finally she found what she was looking for – a notebook and a pen. I was impressed. I’d meant for us to take mental notes, but this was much better.

  “Good thinking, Ninety-Nine,” I said, struggling to see through the crowd. Five ft 3 had its advantages, but seeing through a crowd was not one of them. “OK, have you seen anyone? Oh wait, I can see James McKenzie. Who’s that chick he’s with? I don’t recognise her.” She was a little taller than me with mousy brown hair, but that was about as much as I could see from this distance.