Losing Your Head (The Charlie Davies Mysteries Book 1)

by Clare Kauter

  “Arsehole,” I said, knowing very well who I meant that time.

  Chapter Five

  “Where to?” asked James.

  When I told him the address he turned to me and said, “The Martins’ house? Are you insane? Do you have a death wish? Oh wait, I’m talking to the girl who once broke fourteen bones in two weeks. I forgot you were such a masochist.”

  “Lea’s moving in with me, not that it’s any of your business. She’s a good friend of mine.” Cough. “And why are you helping me? Not trying to suck up, are you?”

  “Don’t flatter yourself. I want to get my car out of here and I can’t do it with you blocking all exits.”

  When we pulled up out the front of the Ferret Cage (Jeremy Martin’s lair), I asked James how he was planning to get back to his car.

  “I’ll just jog,” he answered. “It’s not that far.” Not that far? If I ran that distance it would probably be enough to send me into cardiac arrest.

  He left and I walked up to the front door. It was thrown open before I even got there and Lea came bounding out. “Is it OK? Am I allowed to come?”

  I laughed at her enthusiasm. “Yeah, sure. Calm down!”

  She hugged me for the second time that day. Both her and McKenzie were being nice to me – nicer than I would expect, anyway. What was this? International Befriend The Enemy Day or something?

  Lea and I carried her stuff out to the Nissan. For the first time since, um, ever, I was glad it was such a big car. Lea’s luggage never would have fitted in, for example, Dad’s vintage Jaguar. Then again, I never would have been allowed to drive Dad’s vintage Jaguar. Even Mum wasn’t allowed to. It didn’t have a bull bar like the Nissan and I guess he didn’t want to risk mum’s safety. Or, more likely, he didn’t want to risk getting dints on it. It wasn’t just mum and me – Dad didn’t let anyone drive his car. He kept it locked at all times, even when he was inside it. Mum had to park her car in the driveway so dad’s Jag could have the garage. I suppose that made sense. No one in their right mind would steal a Nissan Patrol. They would most likely consider taking a Jag. I know I would. But I guess that could be because I have always been a little inclined towards criminal activities. Just minor stuff, you know – it’s not like I use illegal guns on people.

  Very often.

  When we finished putting her suitcases and duffel bags in the car, I looked over at Lea. She was pretty, with wild, shoulder length, reddish-brown hair (blonde highlights) that made her blue eyes really stand out. Actually, it was probably more the masses of mascara that made her eyes stand out rather than her hair, but I’m sure the hair helped. She had so much going for her. How did she ever end up marrying Jeremy? I suppose, we all make mistakes. She seemed a lot happier now.

  “Um, Lea,” I began awkwardly, “You wouldn’t mind driving the car back to Elm Avenue, would you? That’s where I live.”

  “OK,” she said. She frowned. “Um… Why do I have to drive? Where are you going?”

  “With you.” I paused, thinking of what to tell her. I didn’t want to come across as an idiot. (I don’t know why I cared – she’d already seen me fall down the stairs today. How much more stupid could I make myself seem?) Still, if I was her, knowing how clumsy I am, I’d probably rather be driving. I told her the truth. “I just prefer being a passenger in this car.”

  Basically the truth.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Don’t ask.”

  Mum and I helped Lea bring in her luggage. When she went upstairs to unpack, I was left alone in the kitchen with mum. The argument started straight away. I think it was possibly the first time I’d ever had an entire argument in whispers.

  “I thought you said it wasn’t Lea Martin!” she hissed at me. “I asked specifically, and you said ‘NO’. Am I correct here? Or am I remembering this wrong?”

  “Well, you’re right, but –”

  “No buts! You lied to me!”

  “Well, I didn’t really –”

  “You said you didn’t know her last name!”

  “I don’t! She’s getting divorced, Mum, and I don’t know her maiden name. And don’t look at me like that. I think I’m being the mature adult in this situation.”

  “You? Mature? Get real! And how could you possibly forget her last name? You still call her mother ‘Mrs Walsh’ every time you see her. I mean come on, that is just dumb. Even dumber than you not being able to walk in high heels.”

  “At least I don’t resort to cheap insults like that. That is immature.”

  “Oh, la-di-da. Look who’s just become Little Miss Stuck Up.”

  “Ha ha. I can hardly breathe for fits of laughter.” She had reminded me I had news, so I changed the subject. “Oh, and speaking of people who are stuck up, Mum, I saw James McKenzie today.”

  “Did you talk to him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is he still alive?” she asked.

  “Mum,” I warned.

  “I’m sorry. Please continue.”

  “Anyway, I saw him and –”

  “Just casually clipped him with the bulbar? Sorry, I’m doing it again, aren’t I?”

  I sighed.

  “Sorry,” Mum said again. “Go on. What happened?”

  “Well, I was talking to him and –”

  “Please don’t tell me you fell in love with him.”

  I gave her a horrified look. “Mum!”

  “Sorry,” she said for the third time in, like, a minute. “He is very good looking. I support your decision to run away with my best friend’s murderous son wholeheartedly. Has he asked you to live with him?”

  “Mum! No!” I thought about it. Well, actually he had offered me a house. “I made a bet with him.”

  “What does he want from you if he wins?”

  Um, nothing… as far as I was aware.

  “He won’t win.”

  “What’s the bet?” she asked. Simple question, but saying the answer aloud I was going to feel like a fool.

  I took a deep breath and bit the bullet. “That I can find out who killed Frank before anyone else.”

  Mum just looked at me.

  “He’ll give me twenty grand.”

  More looking.

  “And a house.”

  A look-filled pause and then:

  “Are you serious?”

  She didn’t look overly enthusiastic.

  “Yes.”

  Nothing.

  “I will not be deterred by your apathy,” I told her.

  “Guess you won’t want to find a house with me anymore, then,” came Lea’s voice from the doorway, sounding kind of put out. I hadn’t even known she was standing there – what was with all the people sneaking up on me these days?

  “Well,” I said, “We won’t have to find a house anymore. We’ve got one. We just need to find out who killed Frank so I can win the bet.”

  “We?” she squealed excitedly. “You mean I can help? That is so cool! I’ve always thought I’d make a good detective! When do we start?”

  Wow. That sudden enthusiasm was a little unexpected.

  “Um, right away, I guess.”

  I glanced at Mum. She was looking a tad sceptical.

  She spoke. “You didn’t tell me what James gets if he wins.” She started to look worried. “Please tell me he doesn’t get this house.”

  “No, Mum,” I laughed. “He doesn’t get the house. Like he needs another one. I don’t know what he gets. Probably just a laugh at my expense.”

  “Alright,” she said. “He’s pretty much guaranteed that.”

  Mum left to go and see Violet. And probably compare her Nissan’s latest off-road top speed with the Prado’s.

  I was starting to get a bit hungry. I glanced at the clock on the wall. Holy crap – it was twenty to four! I suppose, I had finished breakfast at half past one. Guess it was probably time for lunch.

  “You hungry?” I asked Lea.

  “Starving.”

  I found some leftover mushroom
pasta and reheated a plate for each of us. I did an OK job (apart from the edges getting a bit crunchy), but the microwave made them a bit too hot and I had to wipe the film of pasta sauce from its interior afterwards.

  When we finished our carbs and fungi, we decided to start work on the murder case. But deciding that was about as far as we got.

  “Um, how about we… Um…” That was Lea’s very helpful suggestion.

  “Well, we could, yeah…” And that was mine, of pretty much the same amount of usefulness.

  Doing well. At this rate, the bet was sure to end in our favour. We thought for a moment longer.

  “I’ve got an idea,” Lea said a little reluctantly. “It’s pretty stupid, though.”

  “Hey, it’s gotta be better than doing nothing.”

  “I’m not so sure about that.”

  “It’s better than anything I’ve got.”

  “We could watch crime shows on TV to give us an idea of what we’re supposed to do. I told you it was a bad idea.”

  I shrugged. “And people say that TV teaches us nothing.”

  She flicked through the TV guide to see if there were any shows on. “There’s one in an hour that doesn’t sound completely tacky. What are we going to do in the meantime?”

  “Maybe we could start a file of all the newspaper articles and stuff. And then we can add other info we find out as we go along.”

  “Why didn’t you say that before? That could actually be useful. It’s heaps better than my idea. Like watching TV’s going to help us.”

  “My idea came from a TV show.”

  I went and got a manila folder out of my room. It was one that Jo had given me once to try and encourage me to spend more time with her on weekends. Unsurprisingly, it had never been used. There was writing in the middle, which read:

  Snapshots of James McKenzie

  <3 <3 <3

  Yes. Disturbing.

  I took it back downstairs with me. I picked up a pen and was about to cross it out, but hesitated. There probably were going to be snapshots of James McKenzie in here by the end of this. Instead of scribbling over current heading, I wrote another up the top.

  Frank McKenzie’s Murder

  OK, so it was a slightly boring title. Oh well. That was what was actually going in the file. Lea glanced at the folder.

  “What’s with the love hearts?”

  “Jo Riley gave it to me.”

  Everyone at school had known about Jo’s crush on McKenzie. You couldn’t miss it. She spent all her spare time following him, including lunch and recess and any classes she could possibly sneak out of. She even met Oswald while she was in the middle of a stalk session. Guess he must have been kind of a smooth talker if he managed to get her attention while her darling James was around. I can’t really imagine Os trying to hit on a girl, but Jo did say it was love at first sight, so maybe it really was.

  “You mean Joanna ‘Oh-my-god-do-you-think-he-saw-me-while-I-was-in-his-back-yard-trying-to-catch-a-glimpse-of-him-without-his-clothes-on’ Riley? That explains it, then. But why do you have it?”

  “She used to try and get me to come with her on stake-outs. It was supposed to tempt me into falling in love with him, give us more hobbies in common, you know.” Not likely.

  “So you never had a crush on McKenzie? You must be the only girl ever to be immune.”

  “You had a crush on him too?” What was this guy, the plague?

  “Oh, yeah. Have you ever met any girl that didn’t want to marry him back in the day?”

  “His sisters?”

  “Very funny.”

  “Anyway, we better get to work.” Lea looked at me, noticing the abrupt change of topic, but she said nothing. I handed her a newspaper.

  We went through all the newspapers we had in the house (including the old ones we found in the garage which should have been thrown out before I was born) and cut out everything that had to do with Frank. By the time our detective show came on, we had a lot of clippings.

  “We’ll have to take it in turns to read this,” Lea said as she flipped through the file during an ad break. “Or we could both read bits of it at the same time to try and get through it quicker.”

  “Maybe we should just go through it when we run out of things to do,” I said. It didn’t seem like the most riveting task. “Like, we shouldn’t read it now, because we’re watching a show and we could get confused. Maybe if we’ve got some time after Frank’s funeral. When is it, again?”

  She flipped through until she found the notice.

  “Tomorrow,” she said.

  “Right.”

  “What are we actually going to do at the funeral?” she asked.

  Good question, Lea. I possibly should have given it some thought before now.

  “We’re going to go and scope it out,” I answered, rather vaguely.

  “What do you mean?”

  What did I mean? I don’t know. I wasn’t a detective.

  “You know, see how people are behaving and all that. If we see anyone acting suspiciously, we’ll know to put them on the suspect list.” Crime-fighting pro tip right there. See a suspect? Suspect them. “There’ll probably be some fancy suits there, since Frank made all his money through investing. Maybe he was involved in something dodgy. If nothing else, it will give us some background on Frank. It would just be nice to get some sort of lead.”

  The show came back on then and we stopped talking. It was more useful than I thought it was going to be. It gave me a few ideas, but I decided not to tell Lea for the moment, just in case she freaked out. They were not totally legal ideas. (Nothing to do with guns or murdering or anything – just a bit of borrowing-without-permission… From the police.)

  When the show ended it was six. I looked out the window. The sun was still up thanks to daylight savings, and as we were nearing the end of spring in Gerongate, the room was getting a bit stuffy. I got up to open the window and I saw that mum had brought Violet McKenzie home with her (it must have killed her to be a passenger in the Nissan) for dinner. Probably not literally ‘for dinner’ – unless mum was losing the racing competition to Team Prado.

  Good. This would give me an opportunity to quiz Violet about the case.

  “Lea,” I whispered, “James McKenzie’s Mum is coming for dinner. We should ask her some questions about the case. But try to make it sound natural. We don’t want her to know anything’s up.”

  “Sure,” Lea whispered back. “This is like we’re going undercover – cool!”

  I heard the door open and Mum and Violet’s voices carried through to the lounge room.

  “No, you should NOT make him a casserole. Violet, listen to me,” said Mum. “He’s 21 – he doesn’t need you to look after him. He has a housekeeper to do that. And anyway, there was a reason you kicked him out, remember? Why do you even think you have any responsibility towards him? Remember what you found in his room?”

  “Yes, his brother’s drugs! James had no idea that they were there. It wasn’t his fault.”

  Here we go, I thought. Let’s go over the whole drama again.

  (Don’t worry if you’re not keeping up with this next part – even I have to refer to my notes about this stuff sometimes.)

  James McKenzie, his older brother William McKenzie, my older brother Topher (not short for Christopher – that was his whole name) and I were best mates when we were little. Inseparable. That was, until we hit school, when James told his friends he didn’t like me, and they told me he didn’t like me, and James and I kind of became enemies. But that’s getting off the topic.

  Will was two years older than Topher and James, and I came two years later. When I was in Year 9 (Topher and James were in Year 11, and Will had already left school), James was kicked out by his mother when she found drugs in his room. They were, in fact, Will’s, but when Will first told Violet that, she just thought he was trying to stick up for his baby brother. James moved in with Uncle Frank and refused to talk to Will at all.

 
Soon after, my brother disappeared. Most people thought that Topher had run away because he didn’t want to have to deal with his two best friends fighting, but I disagreed (as usual). Frankly, that was a pathetic reason to run away. It was much more Topher’s style to just lock them in a room together until they’d figured things out. My family was not prone to avoiding confrontation, a trait you may have noticed that I also possess.

  A few days after Topher disappeared, Will overdosed. Straight out of hospital he went into rehabilitation, paid for by his parents. As you could imagine, that pissed James off quite a bit. His parents were willing to kick him out for having drugs, but they did everything they could to help his brother. He hasn’t spoken to, nor been in the same house with, Will since ‘the accident’.

  I know. It’s all rather dramatic.

  TL; DR – We had a shitty couple of weeks, after which James was living with his rich uncle, Topher was gone, and Will and I were the only two who were still friends.

  Since I was a bit sick of hearing this story being constantly repeated (I know I sound insensitive, but really, after 5 years you kind of get over it), I headed out into the hallway and cut off their conversation.

  “Hi Violet!” I said in fake surprise. “I didn’t know you were coming for dinner. It’s nice to see you.”

  “You too, Charlie.” She paused. “Janine was just telling me that you’re interested in Frank’s murder.”

  OK, so I supposed we didn’t have to worry about acting casual? “Um, yeah, I guess,” I said, responding more to my own question than to Violet’s.

  “Got any suspects?”

  Lea came out of the lounge room then and joined in with, “I thought maybe it was Frank’s business partner.”

  “It could be,” said Violet. “I didn’t really know Frank that well. Never met his partner.” She turned to me. I gulped. Vi had a little bit of the Ol’ Crazy Eye going on. “I hear you saw James today.”

  “Yes,” I said. “The Nissan broke down and he had to start it for me.”

  “And?”

  “Oh, nothing serious. I think I just flooded it a bit.”

  “I was talking about James.”

  “Oh.” Here came the interrogation.