Broomed For Success

by Morgana Best

  “That’s very kind of you,” he said, although he was frowning. I’m sure he couldn’t figure out why we felt it necessary to tell him in person.

  I couldn’t think of a good reason either, but that hadn’t prevented Athanasius from following through with this plan. I hoped Charlie wouldn’t ask us how we had discovered his address.

  I added, “So Angus Burns went to East Bucklebury to Ben Parrish’s house, and was shot there.”

  “I wonder how Angus Burns found out where the house was?” Charlie said.

  “There was a big article in the Sydney paper about a month ago,” I told him. “It had a big photo of Ben Parrish back in the day and his name was captioned with the photo. Obviously, his son Doug gave the photo to the paper.”

  “Why would he do that?” Charlie said.

  “I have no idea, but Doug is selling the house. He looked for his father’s gold but wasn’t able to find it,” I said. “He dug up some of his back yard. It’s covered with mounds. He thinks the missing gold is a selling point for the house.”

  “So wait—Doug never found his father’s gold?”

  I shook my head. “His father passed away suddenly and never told him where it was.”

  Charlie tapped his chin. “Then it seems quite silly of Doug to let the newspaper have that photo. That would have alerted the last survivors, Angus and Laurence, to where he lived.”

  “But why would Doug care?” I said. “He couldn’t find the gold so he didn’t need to keep the location a secret. He has bought elsewhere, and he just wants to sell the place.”

  While we were talking, I looked around his house. There were large bi-fold doors into his back yard, which was resplendent with a sparkling swimming pool and a hot tub. Sure, most Gold Coast houses had a swimming pool, but here the landscaping was lavish. It was clear he had not spared any expense. His living room was filled with high-priced antiques. I recognised some of the artists of the original paintings hanging on the walls. The paintings would be worth a small fortune.

  It dawned on me that Charlie Coleman was a clever man. He had clearly spent his father’s money in a way which would escape the notice of the tax department and any police still looking for the gold. I’m sure he paid cash for the artwork and no doubt the antiques as well. He hadn’t left a trail.

  The whole house interior screamed opulence, but from the outside the house looked rather unkempt. A giant flatscreen TV covered most of one wall and from the music coming from his sound system, I figured that it was an awfully expensive sound system. In fact, it seemed he had the best that money could buy.

  I turned to Oleander. “Are you feeling better?”

  She stood up. “Yes, I’ll make it back to the car now.” She reached out and took Charlie’s hand. “So sorry to intrude on you like this,” she said.

  We all thanked him and left. He still looked perplexed.

  Could he be the murderer? I had no idea.

  Chapter 15

  I thought our plan for investigating Charlie Coleman was bad, but Athanasius’s plan for investigating Melissa Fowl was even worse. That might have been because it involved me.

  I was sitting on the edge of the table in the retirement home’s physiotherapy room. “I don’t know why I’m giving you free treatment,” Melissa Fowl grumbled.

  Fowl by name, foul by nature, I said silently to myself. Aloud I said, “The head nurse said I could because I volunteer here with the therapy wombat.”

  “Therapy wombat, my fat *^&R!,” she snapped.

  I trembled. I hope she didn’t break anything. An unpleasant woman, Melissa Fowl had volunteered to do free treatments on the residents, so why she was complaining about doing a free treatment on me was beyond me. More and more, I was coming to the conclusion she was the murderer. It was entirely suspicious that she had arrived in town just after the article in the Sydney paper. It was obvious to me she was in town for the gold.

  “What seems to be the trouble?” she asked me.

  “I tripped over Persnickle—he’s my wombat—and hurt my knee. Ever since then my right ankle has felt weak. It helps if I turn it out to the right when I walk, but sometimes it just collapses on me.” I remembered someone once saying a good liar is someone who sticks as close as they can to the truth. I had injured my leg in Melbourne some years ago and those were the symptoms I’d suffered back then.

  Melissa took another look at me, and her face changed. “Yes, you’re Goldie Bloom, the real estate agent, aren’t you?”

  I nodded.

  She plastered a sickly sweet smile on her face, one which I was sure was entirely fake. “Do you have any good houses for sale at the moment? I like living here.”

  “Well, I only moved from Melbourne recently and just started my business,” I told her. “I do have one house for sale. It’s a three bedroom, one bathroom, single level house on the outskirts of town.”

  “It sounds good,” she said.

  She wasn’t fooling me. I knew she was interested in the house because she thought the gold was buried there. Still, I knew she couldn’t be sure whether Doug had already found his father’s gold.

  I didn’t know what to say, so I simply smiled and nodded. After an interval, I said, “I’m happy to show you the house if you’d like. It does need redecorating. It also needs a new kitchen and a new bathroom.”

  “I’m not afraid of hard work,” she snapped as she cracked her knuckles. “I just need you in your underwear, bra and undies please.”

  I pulled my dress over my head and threw it at the chair against the wall. I missed and it fell on the floor.

  She pointed to the table. “Lie down. I’m going to put pieces of tape on your bad spots so I’ll know how to treat you.”

  She poked me in my ribs and I burst out laughing. “Hold still, will you?”

  I opened my eyes to see Melissa bending over me, holding a roll of white tape in her hands. She ripped off a piece with her teeth and stuck it on my ribs. I burst into a fresh bout of laughter. “I’m sorry, I’m ticklish,” I said.

  Soon I was covered with little bits of tape. “Do I really have that many bad spots?” I asked her.

  “Yes, you need a lot of alignment,” she spat. “Roll over and I’ll check your spine.”

  I did as she asked, and soon I felt her stubby fingers poking into my back. “Ouch,” I said repeatedly, punctuated by her asking if it hurt.

  “I’ll just put bits of tape on the rest of your bad spots,” she said. She proceeded to stick about fifty pieces of tape all over my back. “You need extensive therapy.”

  “You’re telling me!” I said.

  She shook her head. “I mean physical therapy.”

  “Oh. Well, is there anything you can do for me today?”

  “I can help you a little, but I need to give you exercises to do and you’ll need to see a physiotherapist on a regular basis. One you pay for,” she added with narrowed eyes.

  Clearly she couldn’t maintain her nice act for long.

  I hoped Oleander would hurry with the second part of the plan.

  “So when would you like to see the house?” I asked her.

  “I’ll call you. Do you have a card?”

  I sat up. “It’s in my handbag. Should I get it for you?”

  She signalled that I could. I hopped off the table and walked to my purse. I fished out a card and handed it to her.

  She turned it over in her hands. “Why is the owner selling?”

  “He’s bought elsewhere,” I told her. “He told me he was looking for something there and couldn’t find it, so he just gave up.” I shrugged, hoping she would believe my story. “Maybe he was talking about a sense of community or something like that. He’s also a coffee addict and it’s illegal to own or drink coffee in this town.”

  Melissa slammed the card down on her desk with a thud. “Ridiculous!” she snapped. “Who’s ever heard of such a stupid thing!” She thudded over to me in huge strides. “Okay, now we’re going to do an exercise for
your knee. It’s all in the same muscle chain, you understand.”

  I didn’t understand at all, but I wasn’t about to say so. I smiled and nodded.

  “Now, I want you to push your knee forward as I continue to push it back.”

  I had no idea it would be so painful. “Ouch!” I screamed. “This is torture!”

  “It will make you better,” she said. “No pain, no gain.”

  Just then, a nurse burst into the room. I breathed a huge sigh of relief. “Quick, Ms Fowl, you have to come with me. One of the residents has fallen down and can’t move. It’s an emergency!”

  “Call for an ambulance,” Melissa snapped.

  The nurse shook her head. “No, she specifically asked me not to. She says it happens on a regular basis. Her spine locks up and a physiotherapist can release her. Hurry, it looks bad. She’s in terrible pain.”

  Melissa grunted. To me, she said, “Okay, out of my room! I need to lock my door.”

  I clutched my knee and rolled back on the table. “Ouch. Cramp! I can’t move.”

  “Come on, I’ll help you.” She tried to drag me off the table, but I clutched it with both hands.

  “Ouch! The pain is too much. Help me!” I said to the nurse.

  The nurse, who clearly didn’t like Melissa Fowl, said to her, “Leave Goldie there. We know her well and she won’t steal anything! Come on, you have to come now.” She grabbed Melissa’s arm and pulled her out the door.

  I sat there for a few moments and then hurried over to the door. I opened it just a crack and peeped out. There was no sign of Melissa. I ran to the window and peeked around the curtains. To my delight, Melissa was halfway to Oleander’s apartment.

  I jumped off the table and looked inside Melissa’s handbag. She had some change, her smart phone, a reward card for a pizza franchise, and not much else. Nothing incriminating, anyway.

  I hurried to her laptop. Thankfully it was already on. I looked through her email. I couldn’t see anything incriminating there either. Her search history was more interesting. She had both the major Aussie real estate websites open and had been searching houses in East Bucklebury. Another search tab showed she had been googling every member of the Great Bank Robbery of 1955 gang. Still, I knew she was Martin Deakin’s daughter so that wasn’t surprising.

  If she was the murderer, what would I expect to see? I hadn’t thought of that before, and it was hard to think under pressure. Maybe I had been hoping for something simply to turn up. I looked through her emails again. Most were complaints about being double charged for internet virus subscriptions, and requests for extensions on her phone and electricity bills, along with several complaints to online delivery supermarkets. One email complained that her organic Dutch Cream potatoes had arrived green, and they were over five dollars a kilogram. The supermarket refused to refund them because she complained five weeks after she bought them.

  I decided to give up the laptop and instead hurried through the rest of her office looking for any clues. I was clutching my phone in one hand because Oleander was going to call as soon as Melissa left. I looked again at my phone just as the call came through. “Quick, she’s on her way back!” Oleander said.

  I hurried back to make sure the laptop was open to the same place, made sure her handbag was sitting where it had been, and sat back on the table.

  I sat on the edge of the table and rubbed my knee to make it look realistic when Melissa burst back into the room. After some time sitting on the table and rubbing my knee, I wondered why Melissa hadn’t returned.

  I went to pull on my dress when I heard a siren and people yelling.

  Forgetting for a second I was in my underwear, I opened the door and ran out into the reception room outside.

  A pair of strong hands gripped my arms.

  Chapter 16

  “Goldie!”

  Max stepped back and looked me up and down, his jaw hanging open.

  I tried to cover myself with my hands, but that was difficult.

  Max whipped off his coat and put it around me. “What are you doing with your clothes off?”

  I gasped. Surely he didn’t think I was having a secret assignation?

  “Melissa Fowl was torturing me,” I said. “She was supposed to be fixing my bad knee.”

  “Why are there bits of tape stuck all over you?”

  “It’s what they do when they find your muscles out of alignment, I think.”

  Max was already hurrying me out of the building. “It’s a fire alarm,” he said.

  All the residents and the nurses standing outside stared at me as Max led me past them. Some of them were giggling.

  “I want my clothes,” I protested.

  “You can get them later,” Max said.

  “Then take me to Oleander’s apartment. Quick!”

  Max guided me across the other side of the complex.

  “Is there a fire?” Oleander said as she opened the door. “Nice legs!”

  “Yes, they’re evacuating that building and I was in my underwear because that woman was torturing me,” I said. “I need clothes!”

  I looked at Athanasius. He was standing there, frozen to the spot, holding out a lemon tart.

  Oleander hurried me past him into her bedroom. “Put my bathrobe on,” she said. I threw on the bathrobe, thankful it was floor length. I tied it really tightly. “Now you can give Max his coat back,” she added.

  I was somewhat reluctant to give Max his coat back. I had liked wearing it and it smelt of him, all wood smoke and pineapples.

  “Thanks for that, Max,” I said. “I was in a bit of a panic.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “What exactly were you doing there? You weren’t investigating, were you?”

  I leant forward and grabbed my right knee. “I twisted it,” I said. “The dreadful woman said my back was out of alignment, and she stuck little bits of tape on me.”

  “I wondered what those were,” Oleander said. “We should have taken them all off you.”

  I waved one hand at her in dismissal. “It doesn’t matter now. I wonder what the fire was about?”

  “Athanasius and I will go and see,” Oleander said.

  Athanasius was halfway through eating a lemon tart. “You go,” he said to Oleander.

  Oleander seized his elbow. “It needs the two of us.”

  Athanasius got up, still grumbling, and followed Oleander to the door.

  “I was coming here to tell you something,” Max said.

  I sat on the nearest couch and Max sat opposite me. I looked at him, waiting for him to continue. “Goldie, I’m only telling you this so you’ll be careful. I’m not telling you this to help your investigation.” He held one finger in the air. “I know you’ll deny investigating, but you keep forgetting—I am a detective and I know you are investigating.”

  I pouted. “What are you here to tell me then?”

  “Two things. First, I’ve had word that Power thinks you’re the murderer. I’m surprised he hasn’t brought you in for questioning again.”

  The vinegar bottle must be working. “And what’s the second thing?”

  “I’m going to tell you to be careful of Doug Greer.”

  I pulled the bathrobe around me more tightly. “You’re kidding! Is he the murderer?”

  Max shrugged one shoulder. “Power is questioning him right now. I must say it is looking suspicious. The police found he has a criminal record.”

  “What for?” I said.

  “Armed robbery and aggravated assault.” He held up both hands, palms to the sky. “I don’t know the ins and outs of it. I just know what I’ve been told, but Power made Doug open his shed.”

  “Was the gold in there?” I said.

  Max shook his head. “No. He opened it for them and there wasn’t much in there.”

  “Doug said he lost that key.”

  “Apparently he has it now.”

  My spirits fell. “I still can’t figure out why Angus went to Doug’s house. It doesn’t mak
e sense. Do you think Doug lured him there to murder him?”

  “I don’t think so, Goldie,” Max said. “Surely, if Doug was the murderer, he wouldn’t have invited Angus to his house. He would have met him somewhere else, somewhere neutral, not at his own house where he would be implicated in the murder.”

  I slapped myself on the side of the head. “Oh well, that’s why you’re the detective I suppose.”

  Max chuckled. “Still, Goldie, I want you to be very careful with Doug.”

  “I can’t avoid Doug though, Max,” I said. “His is the only listing I’ve got and I do need to sell that house.”

  “I know. I just want you to be careful. And Goldie, there’s something else I’ve been wanting to tell you…”

  Just then, in horribly bad timing, Oleander burst back through the door. “The emergency is over now. The new apprentice caused a fire in the kitchen. And Goldie, I got your dress.” She handed it to me and I stood up.

  “I’m glad the fire wasn’t anything bad,” I said.

  Max stood up too. “Well, I had better be going. Be careful, Goldie.” With that he left, leaving me staring after his departing back.

  What on earth had he been going to tell me? Whatever it was, it seemed to have made him nervous. It was certainly strange.

  “What did Max tell you?” Athanasius asked me.

  “I’ll go and put my clothes on and then I’ll fill you in,” I said.

  I changed rapidly and pulled all the little pieces of tape off me. Luckily, they didn’t hurt coming off. I walked back out with a handful of them. “Where’s the garbage bin, Oleander?”

  Soon I was sitting back on the couch. I told Oleander and Athanasius everything Max had said.

  “Goldie, go and question the ghost again. Athanasius and I will mind the office.”

  “Good idea.”

  “Are you missing a key?” I asked the ghost of Angus Burns as he materialised in the bedroom of Doug’s horrible house.

  The ghost patted himself down. “A key?”