The Ex Who Wouldn't Die (Charley's Ghost Book 1)

by Sally Berneathy

  More silence.

  She glanced at her dad.

  He met her gaze briefly, and in that instant she knew that he knew, but he also understood. “Then that’s what we’ll do,” he said with finality.

  “Emerson!” Beverly exclaimed.

  “Daddy!” Jenny added her disapproval.

  “Would you pass the bread, Beverly?”

  Judge Caulfield had ruled in her favor…this time.

  That evening Amanda settled into the room where she’d grown up. It was cool and dark, the heavy curtains trapping the coolness inside and keeping the heat out. Those curtains also kept out the moonlight and the night sounds and any contact with the outside world. Amanda threw them open and lifted the window then drew in a deep breath of the night air. She’d have to remember to close it in the morning or listen to a speech from her mother about the ills of dust and heat and insects.

  She took her cell phone from her purse. Time for her daily check-in call with Dawson.

  “Everything’s fine,” he assured her. “We got a Honda Gold Wing in for some big time repairs. Looks like it got in a fight with a semi and lost. And I got another custom paint job.” He spoke the last sentence with pride.

  As a part-time college student studying art and computer technology, Dawson Page had seemed an unlikely candidate when he’d applied for the job as her assistant. But he did own a motorcycle and had made minor repairs to his own bike, plus he was the only applicant with no missing teeth and no tobacco tin in his back pocket. She’d hired him, and he’d immediately become invaluable.

  “If I take off a couple more days, are you going to be able to handle it and keep up with your classes?”

  “Of course. You don’t have that much business. I mean...”

  Dawson was blushing. Amanda didn’t have to see him to know that, and the thought made her smile. She rather liked his tendency to say whatever popped into his mind. No filter between brain and mouth. Complete honesty.

  “It’s okay,” she assured him. “I know what you meant.”

  “Take all the time you need. I’ve got everything here under control.”

  “Great. You know where to reach me if you need me.”

  “One thing, Amanda. Some guy called for you, and when I told him you weren’t here, he wanted to know when you’d be back.”

  “Oh? Well, if he calls again, give him my cell number.”

  “I’m not sure that would be a good idea. He blocked his number so I couldn’t see who was calling. I didn’t like the sound of his voice. I think he might be one of Charley’s…um…acquaintances.”

  Even dead, Charley continued to cause problems. “You’re right. Don’t give him my cell phone number.”

  She disconnected the call and lay back with a sigh. Was she never going to be completely rid of Charley? The cops thought she killed him, and somebody, probably somebody he’d conned, was looking for her.

  Who knew those two little words, “I do,” would lead to so many nightmares?

  She slipped into an old T-shirt, settled into bed and was drifting off to sleep when a voice woke her with a start.

  He tried to kill you. He’ll try again. You’re in danger.

  She sat up, wide awake, heart pounding, peering around the room for the speaker.

  Oh, for goodness sake! she chastised herself, lying back down. Nobody’s here. Nobody spoke. It was all in my mind, just like the first time. Charley didn’t say that. And the stranger who called the shop was just somebody trying to get his money back from me now that Charley’s dead.

  But she got up and closed her bedroom window.

  

  Three days in the house where she grew up. Three days of eating good food, relaxing in air-conditioned comfort, sleeping on a plush mattress, and letting her body heal. Three days of listening to her mother and Jenny. Amanda was ready to run away from home.

  When she proclaimed herself completely healed, her father set up her interview with the police for the following day. The thought of being grilled by the cops felt infinitely preferable to being criticized by her mother for everything from her hair style to her unpolished toenails.

  The next day she prepared for her visit with the cops by putting on the dress and heels her mother had sent to the hospital, taming her red curls with a lot of hair goo and even applying on makeup. When she emerged from her bedroom, her mother smiled.

  “You look so pretty. You should wear a dress and do your makeup more often. Why don’t you and Jenny and I go shopping tomorrow?”

  It was, Amanda thought, a nice gesture. Controlling, but nice. “Thanks, Mom, but I have a lot to do at the shop. Dawson needs a day off.” And she needed to find out what the mysterious stranger wanted, the man who’d called anonymously a second time to check on her whereabouts. If it was somebody expecting to get back money Charley had taken from him, she’d tell him where he could go to find that money. “Are we ready, Dad?”

  “Brian should be here any minute.”

  Brian. Her attorney. You have the right to remain silent, you have the right to an attorney…

  Brian arrived, and the three of them drove to the police station. Her father spoke to the receptionist, and they were led immediately to a room which was spectacularly mundane, nothing to suggest an appropriate place for the discussion of murder. The large rectangular space contained a rectangular table and five wooden chairs that echoed the rectangular theme.

  Based on her knowledge of police stations—such knowledge gathered entirely from television crime shows—Amanda assumed the mirrored wall was a one-way mirror through which various detectives would be watching the interrogation, looking for signs of guilt. The room smelled of old wood and stale sweat and gave her the creeps in spite of its ordinary composition.

  Amanda fell into one of the scarred wooden chairs with her father on one side and her lawyer on the other. Protected. Surrounded by her own personal warriors.

  In spite of all that, while sitting in the creepy rectangular room she had an uneasy feeling, as if she were hanging over the side of a cliff with a brutish cop stepping on her fingertips.

  Ridiculous, she chided herself. This wasn’t a television crime show with good cop, bad cop characters trying to bully an innocent person into confessing to something she hadn’t done. This was real life where the cops only wanted to ferret out the facts, discover the truth, find out what really happened.

  The door opened, slammed back against the wall, and the bad cop strode inside.

  Chapter Four

  Amanda flinched.

  So did the man who stood in the doorway. “Sorry,” he said. “Guess somebody finally oiled those hinges.”

  So maybe he wasn’t the bad cop. All Amanda’s knowledge of good cops/bad cops also came from TV crime shows, but she was pretty sure bad cops didn’t apologize for slamming a door.

  This guy didn’t look evil either. He was tall, wore a rumpled shirt with a button missing, no tie and gray slacks that had seen better days. His brown hair was tousled and several days overdue for a visit to the barber. He was a few hours overdue for a shave too. She probably would have liked the man had they met under different circumstances. But these were the only circumstances they had, and she was fairly certain this cop wasn’t her friend.

  As if to negate his apology, he strode forcefully into the room, slapped a file folder on the table, then sat down across from Amanda.

  “Detective Jake Daggett,” he said, his words clipped and no-nonsense.

  “Amanda Randolph.” Brian nodded in her direction. “Her father, Judge Caulfield, and I’m her attorney, Brian Edwards.”

  The detective nodded, pushed a hand through his already mussed hair and opened his folder. “Mrs. Randolph, sorry about your loss.”

  For an instant, Amanda thought he was commiserating with her on the loss of her motorcycle, and for that instant, she liked the man, almost smiled at him.

  Then he continued, “You were in the middle of a divorce, right?”

&
nbsp; Charley. Of course. That’s who they were here to talk about.

  “We—” Amanda started to reply, but Brian cut her off.

  “That is correct.”

  Detective Daggett did not seem to find this act of ventriloquism unusual. “You went to his apartment on the day of his death?”

  “I advise you not to answer that,” Brian said.

  Daggett sighed and leaned back. “You went to his apartment on the day of his death.” This time it was a statement, not a question. “The neighbors identified you. A lot of neighbors. They’d seen you there before. A lot of times.”

  “They were going through a divorce,” Brian said. “Communication was necessary.”

  Amanda met the detective’s gaze and shrugged. She didn’t see any point in denying what was blatantly true. Judging from what she’d seen, most of Charley’s neighbors were as gainfully unemployed as he and as soon as she appeared outside his door, sidled from their apartments, making no attempt to hide their interest in whatever she and Charley said. Cheap entertainment. They probably didn’t have cable.

  “Loud communication,” Daggett emphasized. “The neighbors said the two of you fought a lot, and you had a doozy on the day of Mr. Randolph’s death. What were you fighting about that day?”

  “I advise you not to answer,” Brian said.

  She glanced at her lawyer. His usually benign, boyish features were set in concrete. This was serious business. She could be going down for murder.

  “I didn’t kill Charley!” she blurted.

  Amanda’s father patted her hand. “Nobody’s saying you did, sweetheart.”

  Daggett lifted an eyebrow. “Somebody killed him. Any idea who?”

  Amanda’s head jerked in Brian’s direction as if she expected him to protest her answering the question. He remained silent.

  “Charley had a lot of enemies. He was always scamming somebody,” she said.

  “For instance?”

  Amanda threw up her hands. “You think he shared that information with me? Charley and I haven’t exactly been close lately, and even when we lived together, it’s not like he brought these people home to dinner and introduced me.”

  “Any information you can give us would be appreciated.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it. For instance, Jack Scott. A few months before I left Charley, this guy came to the door in the middle of the night. Charley went outside to talk to him. I could hear enough to know they were arguing about money. Most of the time, it was my money Charley was throwing around, so I went out to join them. Introduced myself. Charley said the man’s name was Jack Scott.”

  Daggett scribbled in his notebook.

  “Same man was there a couple of weeks later. Charley introduced him as Ben Parker.”

  Daggett paused in his writing and looked up.

  “I asked the man if he had a twin named Jack Scott. He didn’t answer. Most of Charley’s acquaintances had no sense of humor.”

  Daggett sighed and leaned back in his chair. “Okay, I get the picture, but we’re going to need every name you can give us, whether it’s a real name or not, descriptions of anybody you met, anything you know about Charley’s business activities, legal or illegal. When you say scams, can you be more specific?”

  Amanda slid her gaze toward her father. He’d worked so hard for so long to hide Charley’s activities from the world, but today he gave her a slight nod.

  So it was okay to have a member of the family involved in nefarious activities if that member was dead.

  She exhaled in a long sigh and prepared to trash Charley. Somehow this didn’t feel as good as when she’d complained to friends, telling them in graphic detail about the outrageous things Charley had done.

  “Nothing huge,” she said. “Nothing you’d ever hear about on the ten o’clock news. But Charley had a certain charisma along with the ability to get into people’s heads and figure out their dream then offer that dream to them.” She was only too familiar with that aspect of his personality.

  “Go on.”

  “He’d meet somebody in a bar and next thing you know, Charley has a new best friend. The two of them are going to buy a boat and go to Alaska fishing for King Crab or travel to South America where Charley, a renowned archeologist, has discovered ancient Mayan treasure. The friend, of course, would make a financial investment in the non-existent boat or the rights to the Mayan treasure or whatever happened to be the victim’s dream.”

  “I see.”

  “Sometimes I think Charley actually believed he was going to do these grandiose things. He was very convincing.”

  She’d believed him when she first met him, throughout their two-month whirlwind courtship and even for a couple of weeks after their marriage. She’d wanted to believe. Her parents had hated Charley immediately, so that had gone a long way toward validating him and ensuring that she’d marry him.

  The motorcycle repair shop he’d promised to help her open had happened, though the “partnership” element had never materialized. He hadn’t produced the financial backing or the clientele, but, to give the devil his due, he had helped her find the courage to do it, to quit her latest default job as a real estate agent.

  Daggett’s left eyebrow lifted again. “So,” he said, “the deceased was a small-time con artist. Did he have a day job?”

  A small-time con artist. “Yes, he was a con artist who never made the big-time,” Amanda admitted. “And no, he didn’t have a day job. He worked at being a con artist twenty-four seven. He was dedicated to his career.”

  The detective made a few notes then directed his stern gaze to her. Apparently there wasn’t going to be a good cop. “Was Charley involved with another woman?”

  Amanda stiffened, but waved a hand as if the matter was of no import, was not totally humiliating. “Women, not woman. Yes, Charley’s charm and lack of morals extended to other women.”

  “Can you give us names?”

  “We were never formally introduced.”

  Daggett’s lips almost curved into a wry smile, but he caught it just in time. Yeah, she might like him under different conditions. “Did you catch him with another woman?”

  “He came home smelling like cheap perfume and wearing his shorts backward. If we went out together, women would come over and flirt with him. A couple of them called to ask me to let him go. One even came by our home. I felt kind of sorry for her. She stood at the door and cried and begged me to let her see Charley. I told her I’d toss his sorry ass out and let her have him but he wasn’t home. He wasn’t home a lot.”

  “Were you jealous of these women?”

  “Of course.” The first time, she’d been insanely jealous, but after that initial betrayal, she’d simply hated—the women, Charley and herself.

  “So you’ve had personal contact with some of these women, but you don’t know their names.”

  Amanda shrugged. “I can give you first names and descriptions. None of them were around for more than a few days. Charley wasn’t into long-term relationships.” Except with her. She was the one who wanted to get away from him, and he didn’t want to let her go. Typical Charley.

  Daggett blew out a long sigh and rubbed his square, stubbly jaw. “You know, you’re not being very helpful. It’s in your best interest to give me another suspect.”

  Amanda opened her mouth to protest, but Brian interrupted her. “May I remind you that our presence here is on a voluntary basis? If you’ve finished questioning my client, we’ll leave now.”

  The cop scowled at Brian then forced a pseudo-smile. “I appreciate your coming in,” he said, his voice dripping with honeyed sarcasm. “And while I don’t want to be a nuisance, I do have a couple more questions, if you don’t mind.”

  Brian gave a curt nod.

  “What did you and the deceased fight about the day he was murdered?”

  “I advise you not to answer that.”

  Daggett dropped his pen on the table and looked frustrated. “We’ve already taken state
ments from the neighbors. It’s not exactly a secret that Mr. and Mrs. Randolph were arguing about their divorce. I’d just like to get a few details so we can find out what happened in that apartment on the day of the murder.”

  Amanda didn’t want to discuss her problems, but she didn’t want to look guilty either. She’d already admitted most of the sordid details. What difference did a few more make?

  She clenched her hands in her lap and ignored her attorney. “That morning we had another court date for the divorce. I thought it was finally going to happen, and I planned a motorcycle trip out of town as a celebration. But his freaking lawyer got another freaking continuance. I decided to take the trip anyway, even though there was nothing to celebrate. Then Charley called and said he needed me to bring him the gun.”

  Daggett’s eyes widened slightly. “The gun?” he repeated.

  “Amanda, I advise you not to say anything else,” Brian said, his tone adamant.

  Amanda looked at him and shook her head. “This is all going to come out. I’m not going to say anything that will make me look guilty because there isn’t anything that could.”

  Brian and her father exchanged worried glances.

  Amanda rolled her eyes then turned her attention back to Daggett. “Charley gave me a gun when we got married. Said it was for my protection. I thought that was a little strange at the time, but it made sense when I realized what he did for a living.”

  “And he wanted you to bring this gun to him?”

  “Yeah. Said he’d sign the divorce papers if I’d bring him the gun. I didn’t believe him. I figured he just wanted to sell it. He persisted.” She frowned. “He sounded funny, kind of tense, stressed. I could tell he really, really wanted that gun, and I thought maybe, if he wanted it badly enough, just maybe he might sign those papers. So I went to his apartment.”

  “You told him you were bringing him a gun?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you didn’t?”

  “No way. If he’d signed those papers, I would have taken it to him. But I know better than to give him what he wants and expect that he’s going to give me what he promised.”