Barbara Silkstone - Wendy Darlin 02 - London Broil

by Barbara Silkstone

  “Kids,” I shrugged. “Where were we?”

  He sighed. The romantic moment had died, hit with a fly swatter. “Here’s what I discovered or what discovered me while you were in Miami. Algy Green is on the hunt. This time the doofus is driven to find the last Lost Boy.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Besides your encounter with him, I’ve been tripping over the rodent everywhere, including the gent’s room. I’m guessing when Algy read the headlines about the ransom Benny was offering, he decided to get in the game. The rat smelled the cheese and is coming after it.”

  “Where are the twelve Shadows we rescued?”

  “In a vault in the basement of the museum. There’s a guard on duty twenty-four hours a day… and wires and cameras and bells and whistles.”

  I tried to pull what I remembered from that last time with Benny. “We were out gambling that night. Maybe someone followed us…”

  “Chill. Wait till we get to Benny’s townhouse, then we’ll put the pieces together.”

  Roger phoned for a taxi while I unpacked my comfortable shoes… a dandy pair of red flats with ankle bows. We dashed downstairs to wait for our driver. I wondered if this caper wasn’t single-handedly turning around the London economy via cab fares.

  We arrived at Benny’s townhouse in just under half an hour. The place gave off an air of foreboding. A shiver ran through me, despite the stifling heat and humidity. My female intuition was screaming at me to run away, but I followed Roger to the front door. He punched in the silent security code and then twisted a key in the lock.

  “How?”

  “I told you I was a special agent. Just remember you didn’t see me do that.”

  “Do what?”

  The house was as quiet as a tomb and smelled awful. I found myself whispering. “The last time I saw Benny, he’d walked me to my bedroom door after…” As I described the hides on the stairs, I shivered again, my knees turning to pudding.

  Chapter 25

  Roger’s brows arched over his nose in a frown. The rug parade did not make any sense, now or then.

  “Benny told Samuel to put the hides in the library for the night.”

  Roger signaled me to follow. We crossed the foyer and nudged open the library door. The room gave off a horrific smell. I gagged. Roger covered his nose. “Not good.”

  My toes curled in my shoes as I got ready to run. Covering my mouth to shield myself from the stench, I followed my Indiana Jones into the room, aware that my chattering teeth sounded like a herd of tap-dancing mice.

  The animal hides were still piled in the center of the room. The lion on top and the others stacked beneath. Roger approached and I followed. We acted as if the animals would jump down and claw us to death.

  “Step back!” Roger put out his arm to protect me. “That’s… Benny’s hand…” He pointed to human fingers showing from two hides down, pinned between the tiger skin and the polar bear.

  “Call the police,” I said trying not to breath in.

  Clunk! Roger passed out cold on the floor. There was a trickle of blood on the white bear skin.

  I ran past the study to the downstairs powder room and lost the contents of my stomach. Once I was able to regain control of the spinning room, I used a tissue to hold down the flusher and turn on the cold water. I splashed my face and stared at the image in the antique mirror. Who had I become since Roger Jolley entered my life? I was no longer a lady brokering mansions in Miami… I was finding dead bodies in all the wrong places. Where had my life taken that turn into surreal?

  Soaking a hand towel in water, I raced back to Roger and patted his pale face.

  Gasping, he came round.

  “Now can we call the police?”

  “Not until we’ve looked around. No one knows we’re here. We’ll hunt for leads on the Lost Boy, and then we’ll call the Met. We won’t disturb any clues. Got it?”

  “Isn’t that illegal?”

  “That’s what investigators do. Illegal things that help them solve crimes.”

  I thought about it for half a second. “I’m really getting sick to my stomach. Let’s do this quickly. Benny might have kept clues in his bedroom, a note from Darcy or a diary.”

  Roger led and I followed, my legs growing weaker with each step. Six flights up and I was resting my hand on his butt for support, not lascivious intentions. The room was exactly as I’d seen it six days ago. I watched as Roger poked through drawers, trinket boxes, and trunks. It felt like a violation to be snooping in Benny’s possessions. We found nothing that would help us.

  Each room got a cursory look, including mine. I took my suitcase from the wardrobe and started to load it up. Roger grabbed my hand. “We can’t alter the crime scene. You didn’t escape with your luggage. Leave it.”

  “But this is a St. John knit…” I held up a black two-piece dress. It costs over a thousand dollars. I forgot to take it.”

  “Drop that knit!”

  “You heartless brut! I can’t afford to be an investigator. It’s too bloody expensive.”

  “Next time bring cheaper clothes.”

  We worked our way down, floor by floor. “Nothing in the house is disturbed. Whoever killed Benny knew the last Lost Boy wasn’t here,” Roger said.

  “Maybe Benny wasn’t murdered because of the Lost Boy,” I said.

  Roger puffed up his cheeks and let out a whoosh of air with a tinge of impatience. “We’re talking a priceless piece of history. Benny had an idea where Darcy hid it, and he was killed because he knew. More than likely, he refused to talk.”

  “Do you think whoever killed Benny killed Dar—”

  Roger snapped, “No! Darcy’s too resourceful. She’s wily, immoral, and strong as bull. She’s still alive. I can feel it.”

  I was slightly jealous of his “feeling” about Darcy. I wondered about their relationship and if they’d been in communication. Was Roger once again keeping secrets?”

  He led the way to the kitchen. The curry pot had congealed into a plaster-like, stinky stew. The bloody footprint had turned brown and the knife lay where I dropped it. The back door was barely pulled shut.

  “I picked up that knife,” I said.

  “Don’t they teach you anything about fingerprints at crime scenes in real estate school?”

  “That class cost extra.”

  “So you shut off the curry?”

  “It might have started a fire… no one was watching it.”

  Roger shook his head. “Enough. It’s time to call my friend Detective Chief Inspector Angus Black.”

  He pulled out his cell and punched in some numbers. “Angus? Jolley here. That friend of mine that went missing. I’ve found him.”

  Chapter 26

  “Let’s stand outside and wait for the Met,” Roger said.

  Reeling from the heat on the front steps, I tugged on his sleeve. “We’ve got a few minutes, let’s go back in and look around a bit more.” I thought about the phone in Benny’s study. The idea of going back into the house terrified me. Someone I knew and liked lay dead inside, but when I get anxious, I have to put that energy somewhere or scream. Screaming didn’t seem like the best choice.

  “Over here,” I motioned to Roger, and he followed me into the study connected to the right side of the foyer. I picked up the phone on Benny’s desk.

  Roger snipped at me. “Don’t touch anything!”

  “Shush! Just let me hit redial. I know what I’m doing. I pressed the button and the last four numbers dialed came up. That had to be Benny’s message retrieval password, since there were only four digits. I pressed the little envelope icon, and a robotic voice asked me to enter the code. I punched in the four numbers. The next prompt brought up his deleted messages. I hit that.

  It was a man’s voice… whispery, his words cut to the bone. “Hannah, I will be at your place just before dawn. You will tell me the location of Thirteen!”

  I dropped the phone and walked into Roger’s arms. “That has to be the
killer’s voice.”

  “The man is brazen or just plain stupid to leave a recorded message,” Roger said as he hugged me.

  My spine turned to a Popsicle. “I need to be doing something until the police get here. I can’t stand still. Let’s check the back door. Perhaps the watch-geese have returned.”

  As we walked into the kitchen, it occurred to me that we hadn’t checked the wine cellar. “You game for the basement?” I asked, hoping he would say no.

  “Hell, I spend half my time underground. Let’s do it.”

  Roger opened the cellar door. There was a second door a few feet in. That barricade was heavy and smelled musty. “This thing is at least two hundred years old…” Roger said, sliding his hands admiringly over the bronze fixings.

  “It’s a door. Open it.” I was getting testy.

  I stepped aside and he pulled on the double handles. It came open easily enough, sliding on the old slate floor. There was a string overhead; he pulled it and two naked bulbs clicked on. The stairway was lit enough for us to make it down without risking life and limb.

  The steps creaked under our weight and the railing wobbled. The basement was an organized jumble. Boxes rested on elevated platforms, a refrigerator stood in one corner, and a freezer sat next to it.

  We looked at each other. “In the movies they always stash the bodies in the freezer,” I said.

  “You’ve been watching too many bad crime shows,” Roger said as I moved toward the dead zone.

  I touched the cold box with shaking hands and opened the lid. Samuel lay folded on his side, his face blue-black and frosty. Somebody screamed, it sounded like me. The lid slammed as I dropped it and ran for the stairs. Roger was close behind me.

  We stood on the front step holding one another as three police cars and a black van pulled to the curb. Detective Inspector Angus Black got out first. He was tall with thinning red hair and bright green eyes. He had a lovely Scottish burr and wore a stylish English-drape suit. He shook Roger’s hand. “Where’s the body?”

  “There are two,” Roger nodded his head toward the front door. “Library is on the left off the foyer. That’s Benny Hannah sandwiched in the animal skin rugs. In the basement… freezer… his houseman, Samuel.”

  Chapter 27

  We covered our noses as we walked behind Detective Inspector Angus and two CIDs into the library. I gritted my teeth to stop my stomach from backing up. The three detectives pulled on plastic evidence gloves.

  Angus lifted the corner of the tiger skin rug with his pen. “This gives new meaning to hiding a body.”

  Roger looked pained. “Blackie, this man was a dear friend. Don’t make light of his death.”

  “Quite right. Graveyard humor is not appropriate. How did you two get in?”

  “Hannah gave me a key for emergencies.”

  “Do you think he expected his killer? Was that one of his possible emergencies?”

  Roger shook his head, but from the look in his eyes, I could tell the answer was more like a yes.

  “Did you touch anything?”

  “You’ll find my prints and Wendy’s throughout the house. Benny was fond of giving tours, showing his antiquities. And Wendy was a recent house guest.” He avoided answering Angus’ question.

  Two uniforms accompanied a doctor-type who was wearing a white lab coat over black trousers and a white shirt. I guessed him to be the coroner. He was followed by a flurry of people with SOCO printed in small letters on their jackets.

  “The second victim is in the cellar off the kitchen,” Angus directed the rest of his team. Three SOCO detectives waited in the foyer. “Let’s talk after we visit that second crime scene. I don’t want to cross-contaminate the murder sites. Scene of Crime Operations will collect the evidence.” He motioned to two plain-clothes detectives. “Conner, Duncan, this way.”

  We led Angus and his men to the kitchen and then on down the cellar stairs. I stood at the bottom step unable to move any further. “He’s in there. His name is Samuel. He was Benny Hannah’s bodyguard.” Roger wrapped his arms around me as we both shivered.

  Angus lifted the freezer lid. He nodded as if it were a common sight… seeing a man folded in two in a meat locker. “Conner, tell Krista and Robert to join me down here.” The shorter detective ran up the steps as if on leave from hell.

  I keeled over leaning on Roger my legs unable to support me.

  “You two can go upstairs. I’ll meet you in the kitchen in a few minutes. Don’t touch anything.”

  Roger and I sat at the table. I put my head down and started to sob. It came from a place deep inside where I locked all my saddest feelings. The loss of a human being who had endured so much was a horrible tragedy. And now Benny’s body was being poked and prodded by strangers. I hoped his soul was at peace with his brothers.

  I thought of Samuel and his goose dance, now frozen blue-black and solid, and I sobbed some more.

  In ten minutes, Angus came up the stairs. The sport of crime scene investigating seemed to add a bounce to his step. He was hyped and made no effort to hide his exhilaration. “Now all we need is a murder weapon,” he said.

  Roger and I looked at each other. “The knife on the floor… in front of the stove. It was bloody the day I picked it up. I kinda got my fingerprints on it.”

  “Barmy bird!” Angus swore.

  I licked my lips and blotted the sweat from my forehead. “My prints will be on the burner knob, also. I shut off the curry. It would have burned.”

  Angus passed me that look of veiled tolerance that Brits reserve for Yanks. The one that includes eye-rolling and superior sniffs.

  I screwed up my face trying to out-tough him. It didn’t work.

  The coroner walked in as Angus was about to sit at the table with Roger and me. “I can give you a quick appraisal of how the victim was killed,” the medical examiner said. “I’ll confirm it once I’ve performed an autopsy. It appears Mr. Hannah was stabbed directly through the heart. One perfect blow. Weapon unknown.”

  “Have a look. See that kitchen knife on the floor? Could that have done the job?” Angus asked.

  The coroner walked over, crouched down, and peered at the knife. “I can’t touch it. Not with these gloves. I’ll contaminate it. But just looking at it, that’s not the murder weapon, least not for the victim in the library. This blade’s too wide.” He stood with a knee-cracking sound.

  His eyes were battle-weary. “I’ll send Churchill in to handle this.”

  Angus raised his eyebrows, “Hmm… Get back with me.” He dismissed the coroner, pulled out a pen and notebook, and took down our stories. When I got to the bit about retrieving the voice mail from Benny’s phone, he slammed his notebook on the table. “You did what?” He looked at Roger. “You were a party to this?”

  Roger shrugged. “She’s hard to stop when she gets something between her teeth.”

  “Be right back. Don’t move and don’t touch anything!” Angus ran down the hall shouting orders to his crime scene team. It sounded like instructions on capturing the phone messages.

  “You’ve made me look like a perfect fool,” Roger said.

  “There is nothing perfect about you, Dr. Jolley. What if they’d missed that voice mail trick?”

  “I’m trained not to blunder into things. Archaeologists deal in crime scenes if you think about it. Mostly everything interesting we discover has been left to us through death. We know not to be ham-handed around evidence.”

  “Screw you! There was nothing ham-handed in finding out the last person to call Benny.”

  The cranky detective returned. He pulled up a chair, elbows on the table. “What gets up my nose is that you could have lost that bloody call. Our guys were able to capture it. We can run it through voice analysis. If we get lucky, we might be able to get a match.”

  The flashes of cameras and the comments from the crime scene operatives kept throwing me off as I filled in the details of Benny’s last night. By the time I’d gotten to the bit abou
t dropping on Algy Green’s head, the coroner’s people were carrying Samuel’s body from the cellar. It finally got to be too much. I couldn’t breathe. Dashing out the back door, I ran into the sweltering garden escaping the smell of death.

  “Stop!” Angus yelled after me.

  The dizziness passed. I wandered to the garden bench where I’d sat with Benny only a few days earlier. And now he was dead. Was my archaeologist next on the killer’s list? I noticed two goose-size shapes huddled beside the gardener’s shed. Hildy and Holly must be terrified.

  Chapter 28

  Roger came down the path, a deep furrow between his brows. He sat next to me and put his arm around my shoulders. “It’s going to be okay.”

  “How can it be okay? Every place we go death follows us… in the Caribbean and here in London. I’m worried about you. You’re a walking murder magnet.”

  He looked at me as if I were a student failing to understand. “These murders haven’t been my fault. Like most Egyptian antiquities, the Lost Boys come with a curse.”

  “Lovely. Brilliant. Perfect. Write it all off to a curse.”

  “Some people are more prone to the suggestion of a curse.” He ran his tongue over his teeth as he squinted. Either he needed to brush or he was deep in thought.

  I waited to see if he was going to open up.

  Roger scratched his chin, “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you. Maybe we could have saved him.”

  I patted his hand. “It was already too late when I found you. Benny was dead that morning.”

  “Dead because he knew where the Lost Boy is. I’m stumped. I have no idea where Darcy hid Thirteen. ‘Out in the open where the public can see it.’ What the Charles Dickens did she mean?” He hugged me tighter. It felt uncomfortable. There was too much death around us for me to enjoy his touch.

  “We have to find the thirteenth Boy for Benny,” he said. “But I’m not a big fan of nursery rhymes. Can’t really recollect if the cow jumped over the moon or the moon slipped under the cow. Where’s the clue in Darcy’s riddle?”