Last Writes (A Ghostwriter Mystery)

by C. A. Larmer

  “Yes, I called her an hour ago. She’s so relieved, of course, but I don’t think she’ll believe I’m alive until she actually sees me for herself.”

  “I know what she means.” Gilda turned to the siblings, hands on her hips. “As for you two! What in the hell did you think you were doing racing up here, acting like the cavalry?”

  Max held a hand up. “Sorry, Gilda, but we didn’t know what else to do.”

  “You could have told me what you were up to, or called the local police, let them take care of it! David could still have been in the house.”

  Caroline spoke up now. “Gilda, to be honest, we thought this was probably a wild goose chase. I honestly didn’t think we’d find her here but we had to try. We couldn’t sit around in Sydney wondering. Besides, there was no way I could explain it to you or the local police. I couldn’t even remember how to get to my old house until we started driving around the suburb. It came back to me then. In fact, we would have arrived earlier if we hadn’t taken one or two wrong turns.” She glared at her brother.

  “Hey, you’re the one who couldn’t remember the street name let alone the number! You only lived here for a year.”

  “Six months, and it was like a decade ago! I just knew it was near a bridge, an old mango tree and within walking distance from a pub. Couldn’t even recall the name of the pub until we drove past it. That was good luck. That’s when we knew we were close.” She laughed. “If I’d had a few beers first we might have found it faster.”

  “Well, scooch along,” Gilda said, sitting down beside Roxy. “Wow, that’s quite a souvenir you got there.”

  She took Roxy’s chin gently in one hand and inspected the damage. The skin below her right eye and cheekbone were a lurid shade of purple now, and there was considerable swelling, but the throbbing had subsided thanks, in part, to painkillers and thanks to the sheer, overwhelming joy of freedom. Once Roxy had caught sight of Max dashing towards her in that dank, old basement, the pain and fear almost dissipated on the spot.

  “Yep, he’s all gentleman, that David Lone,” Roxy replied.

  Gilda growled. “The bastard. He’s lucky I haven’t got my hands on him yet.” She paused. “Look, I know you’ve got a giant story to tell but I won’t make you go over it all again now.”

  “Thank you, my voice is hoarse enough as it is. At least tell me you’ve got the bastard in custody now, please.”

  “Done and dusted. Or fingerprinted to be more precise. He reappeared at his office late this arvo, acting all nonchalant, apparently. Wish I’d seen his face this evening when they told him you’d been found, alive and well. I was already on my way to Yamba. I wanted to question that English teacher who’d seen you last. I thought she held the key. Little did I know the Mopsy Twins here were two steps ahead of me.” She glowered at Max and Caroline, then paused to order an herbal tea from the hovering waitress who knew something big was up but didn’t have the heart to ask what. As she shuffled off, Gilda said, “I just can’t believe Lone didn’t kill you. Like he did the others.”

  Roxy felt a shiver down her back. “Well, his plan was for me to die of fear, and as ridiculous as it sounds, I have to tell you, it was beginning to work. It was terrifying in that old house.”

  Max curled an arm around Roxy’s shoulders and gave her a hug. “You’re okay now,” he said.

  “Okay? I feel like the luckiest woman alive!” She sank down into his warm body.

  “Luck had a little to do with it,” Gilda admitted. “But Lone was getting sloppier with each murder and he just assumed there was no way anyone was going to find you. And when we eventually did, he figured we’d automatically pin it on Oliver. Or maybe even Caroline here. It was her old house.”

  As Caroline’s jaw dropped at the thought, Roxy sat up and said, “Well you coppers were all pointing the finger firmly at poor Oliver.”

  “Not me,” Gilda replied firmly. “I told you that. I didn’t think he did it for one second, but I just couldn’t work out who else did. You were considering suspects like Lorenzo and Erin but they just didn’t stack up, and Frankie, the detective in charge, well, he had to follow the evidence trail and, unfortunately, it kept leading back to Oliver.”

  “No thanks to Mr Lone. So when did you start suspecting David? I mean, he had such a good alibi for Seymour’s death. I thought it put him out of the running.”

  “Not in my book, it didn’t. My colleagues always knew that Seymour had killed himself. That had been so obvious, despite what David was trying to whip up in the press. It was as clear as day. The sleeping pills Seymour had overdosed on were in his name, he’d secured three separate prescriptions a week earlier from three GPs who identified him from photographs, and the wounds to his wrists were clearly self-inflicted. The coroner said it was open and shut. It was only when William Glad showed up dead and then Tina Passion that things started to look shaky. That’s when we decided to look at that case again.”

  “So why did Seymour do it?” asked Roxy. “Why kill himself?”

  “That’s where Lone was almost correct. Silva’s manager, Norman Hicks, was getting fed up of playing second fiddle to his fake writer and had only just told Silva he was going to come out. His new agent had been badgering him to do it for the past month, apparently. Sales for their last book were pretty dismal and she thought this new scandal would reinvigorate the Alien Deliveries series. You know what they say, any publicity is good publicity.”

  “But Seymour wasn’t keen?”

  “’Course not! His whole raison d’être would vanish. Everyone would know he was a fraud and Hicks would start to get the credit for the books, the credit that Silva had been happily living off for years. He knew he couldn’t stop Hicks from revealing the truth, so he decided to teach him a lesson, to at least put his death on his manager’s conscience. If he has one. You have to remember, Silva was a few sheep short of a paddock.”

  “But it played so beautifully into David Lone’s scheme,” said Max, and Gilda shook her head.

  “I don’t think there was a scheme, not at the beginning. Lone just truly believed that Silva’s death was suspicious, would make a great idea for a series of articles, maybe another top-selling book. But when the story died in the water and the coroner declared it a suicide, it must have infuriated him. He had his sights set on another book and he wasn’t going to let anything get in his way. I think that’s when he hatched the plan to kill Mr Glad.”

  “To keep the story rolling,” Roxy said softly, sadly.

  “Yep, supposed murder number two. And as you say, it got him off the suspect list because there was no way he could have done the first ‘murder’. Hundreds of people saw him sitting watching the Supermodel movie at the exact time Silva was dying. Couldn’t have been the illustrious author. All he had to do then was link that death with the next two and he was off the hook. If he couldn’t have killed Seymour Silva, well, he mustn’t be guilty of William’s and Tina’s deaths either.”

  “Plus I gave him that alibi for Tina’s murder,” said Roxy, unable to meet Max’s eyes.

  “He drugged you,” Max said, forcing her to look at him. “If that hadn’t happened, would you have stayed the night?”

  She shook her head vehemently. “No, of course not.”

  He looked relieved. “There you go then.”

  “What I don’t get,” said, Roxy, “what I keep coming back to is the fact that I was up drinking with David until 2:00 a.m. before I passed out. Tina was killed at midnight.”

  “No, David said you were up drinking until two and then freaked out when you saw the time and headed to bed. Even if that was true—and your memory was hardly very reliable—he could easily have changed the clock, put it forward a few hours to deceive you.”

  Roxy groaned. “I was such a fool.”

  “Ahh, don’t beat up on yourself. That alibi never counted anyway,” said Gilda, waving it off. “You being passed out in his apartment counts for nothing. David could have slipped away at any tim
e. Plus, when you told me you’d drunk a bottle of white wine back at his place even though he had plenty of merlot on hand, well, it’s not what you’d call incriminating evidence, wouldn’t stand up in a court of law, but it certainly got me thinking. You asked me when I started suspecting David? That was the moment.”

  “But why did you even consider David in the first place?” asked Max. “When all the evidence was pointing at Oliver? I mean, I thought he was a tosser but that doesn’t make him a killer.”

  Gilda laughed. “I don’t know, it was more than that. He’d just always been a slippery character, you know? I knew he’d sell his mother for a headline.”

  Caroline was nodding her head furiously. “I sensed that side of him when we were going out all those years ago. I tried to warn you about him, Roxy, that day I came to your apartment, but I didn’t know how to say it. I mean, I liked the guy—God help me—but he had a dark side ... I just had no idea how dark.”

  Roxy sighed. “He fooled us all, Caroline.”

  “Not me,” Gilda repeated. “And I kept wondering how the hell he was always one step ahead of us. He had all the information on the crimes, even before we did. I thought maybe he was sleeping with one of the team, but I couldn’t pin that down. Finding the gardening shears in Norm’s car also had me stumped, and we were all looking at someone at the funeral at first until it dawned on me. Duh! David could easily have slipped into the car park while everyone was inside the Crematorium. So that left his alibi open.” She took a sip of her tea. “My biggest stumbling block, to be honest, was the strychnine.”

  “Oh, yes, the poison that killed Tina,” said Roxy, sitting forward. “How did he get hold of that?”

  “One of the new detectives worked it out, actually. Young Milton, he’s going places, that bloke. Milton works out a bit at the Police Boys Club, lifting weights and stuff, well, he reminded me that strychnine is still used in very low doses in performance enhancing drugs. It’s one of the ingredients they look for when testing drug cheats.”

  Roxy sat back with a thud. “Of course, and David had been working on a book about doping and elite athletes.”

  “Got it in one. Milton was in the process of questioning a supplier down at a dodgy gym where David had been doing some of his investigations, when we got the call about you going missing. I don’t know what he found but I’m sure it’ll come in handy for the prosecution.” She glanced at Max. “Jesus, you sent a shiver down my spine when you phoned me and told me Roxy had vanished. Freaked me right out.”

  “Really? I got the impression you thought I was overreacting.”

  She laughed. “Sorry, I was just trying to calm you down and get you to stay right out of it. It clearly didn’t work.” She shook her blonde locks at him. “To be honest we might have got to David days earlier if I could have persuaded Frankie that Oliver was a red herring, but we all kept stumbling on the question of motive. Oliver had motive in spades.” She held a hand up to Roxy’s raised eyebrows. “Sorry, but that’s how Frankie saw it—so I had real trouble persuading him to release some of his team and divert them to David Lone. Eventually he let me have Milton, but in the meantime that’s why I was snooping around. I felt like someone had to consider other options. It was just pinning down a motive that had me second-guessing myself. I just couldn’t get my head around why Lone would do it. I still can’t. Honestly, slaughtering a bunch of people so you can write a bloody book? It’s beyond me.”

  They all looked at Roxy then, as though expecting her to explain it and she shrank back. “Hey, don’t look at me. I clearly don’t have that kind of fierce ambition. I couldn’t kill a fly for a best seller, let alone two innocent human beings.”

  “Nearly three,” said Max softly.

  “I blame Professor Green, in the library,” said Caroline, her eyes defiant and they all turned to stare at her.

  “How you figure?” asked Gilda.

  “Well, he should have spoken up years ago about what a monster David Lone was. I had a teeny weeny inkling of it, but nothing concrete. You just have to wonder if the truth had got out earlier, about how he’d been booted from university and threatened a teacher, I wonder whether he mightn’t have got away with so much.”

  Gilda thought about this. “People forgive a lot of bad behaviour in youth, Caroline. I don’t think that would have counted for much.” She drained her cup dry. “Okay, we should call it a night, you all look bushed, especially you, Ms Parker.”

  Roxy stretched out like a cat, letting the shawl fall away and giving herself a shake. “Yes, well, being tied to an armchair and stalked by killer rats for twenty-four hours will do that to you.”

  “Oh, you’ll survive. You’ve survived worse.”

  Roxy thought about this. Gilda was right. This was the second time in less than two years that her life had been threatened; it was becoming way too familiar for her liking.

  “I’ll accompany you to the Ballina station in the morning,” Gilda was saying, taking care of the bill, “but for now you need a decent night’s sleep. You booked in somewhere yet?”

  Roxy looked from her to Max and smiled. “I’m staying where my knight in shining armour is staying. Just in case my bad track record continues.”

  “Hey, Parker, no one is going to threaten you tonight,” he said, his floppy fringe dropping across one eye, a worried frown settling on his brow. “I won’t be letting you out of my sight. Not for one second, so prepare yourself.”

  “Promises, promises,” she said, feeling ridiculously happy despite it being one of the worst nights of her life.

  Watching the two of them flirt with each other openly across a neon-lit café, Caroline glanced at Gilda and the two women shared a conspiratorial smile.

  Epilogue

  David Lone still looked dapper, even in his prison greens. He had slicked his hair back and was freshly shaven, a sliver of a smile on his lips as Roxy was led towards the cubicle where he was sitting, prison guards loitering close by. As she sat down across from him and peered through the separating glass, she was heartened to see scratches down one side of his face, and the remains of what looked like a fat lip. Good, she decided. He deserved that, and more.

  Her own bruises had long vanished but she was sure her fear of scuttling critters and dark, dank corners would take a lifetime of therapy to overcome.

  “Hey, Roxanne, delightful you could drop in,” he said through thin slits in the glass, his tone light and breezy, as though they were chatting over lattés at Lockie’s.

  She nodded, unable to speak for a few minutes. She could barely meet his eyes. Roxy was still so furious with him, and with herself for falling for his charms so easily just a few months ago. The truth was, she had been seduced by Lone’s success and, more so, by his fascination for death. Roxy had thought, once, that it made him sexier and more compatible, but she realised now that he wasn’t just fascinated with death as she was, he was fixated with it. He didn’t just live for true crime, he killed for it, too, and there was nothing sexy about that.

  Once upon a time she had criticized Max for his disinterest in crime but she knew that he was exactly what she needed—her counterbalance, the one who could snap her out of her morbid moments and bring her back to the land of the living.

  Thank God for Max, she thought. Perhaps if David had had a counterbalance of his own ...

  She shrugged the thought away—it was too late now for what ifs—and looked up into those icy blue eyes. “What do you want, David? You’ve been hassling me for a meeting for months, so here it is. I’ll give you ten minutes, then I’m out of here.”

  He stared at her. “No need for the attitude, Roxanne.”

  “There was no need to kill two innocent people and leave me to rot in an old house either, but that didn’t stop you.” She sighed. “Why have you asked me here? What’s so life and death?”

  “I’m just wondering about the book, that’s all.”

  “The book?”

  “You were writing my ‘tell-a
ll’, remember? I’ve been waiting for it to hit the stands. I mean, there is so much to tell now! But I wait in vain. There is still no book.”

  Her jaw dropped and she shook her head at him. “Arrogant as always, I see. You’re right. There is no book, David. There never will be.”

  He mock gasped. “No book?! But it’s such a terrific story. You could make millions! Surely Oliver has told you that?” He paused, glanced down at his nails, held them out as if inspecting them. “How is Mr Horowitz, anyway? Get over his bad press, did he?”

  “He’s great, David. Fantastic, in fact. Has a stack of new clients. Your little stitch up has made him quite the celebrity. He said to thank you, by the way.”

  That last bit was not true but she couldn’t help herself. This horrendous man had tried to destroy a perfectly innocent, big-hearted human being and she needed him to know that he had not succeeded, in that, at least.

  Her mind went to Tina now, and then to William, the tragic victims of his unchecked ambition and insatiable appetite for a good horror story. Both writers had finally been laid to rest properly, and Oliver was able to attend their funerals with his head held high. Tina’s father, Lorenzo, had sought them both out after the burial, thanking Roxy for her help, and even managing to shake Oliver’s hand, and that was enough for him.

  Oliver and Erin had not published William’s old gardening books, as per his final wishes, but Erin had set up a special, public memorial garden in her father’s name, not far from his house, and his grandchildren helped tend it every weekend. William would have loved that. It was the only legacy he needed.

  David Lone, however, was after so much more.

  “Have you at least done a rough draft?” he was asking and she stared at him aghast. Did his ego know no bounds?

  “I’m not writing your bloody book, David. It’s the last thing I would ever do.”

  “I’m just saying, Roxanne, it would be a best seller for you. People are intrigued by me! I get fan mail, would you believe? Dozens of letters every week, telling me what a genius I am. Had a few offers of marriage even. You could put them in your book. Out there, they think I’m great!”