A Pleasure to do Death With You

by Paul Charles

  “Okay, let’s get back to your girlfriend,” Scott said with a new degree of enthusiasm. “How long from when she dumped you until you ended up in bed with your osteopath?”

  Kennedy then explained the long on/off relationship with ann rea.

  Scott seemed impressed by Kennedy’s conviction that ann rea had been the perfect girl for him.

  “It’s brilliant when you meet someone and you know they’re the one,” she said, and then looked at Kennedy for agreement before adding, “Yep, I suppose it’s much easier though when both parties have that feeling.”

  Something about the look of sadness creeping over her face betrayed she was thinking of her perfect partner. Obviously, due to her current emotional state and her name change from Donohue to Scott, she’d very recently split up with her husband.

  “The first moment I saw Steve, I just knew he could be the perfect man for me. I started to wonder about him, and his likes and dislikes, and if it would be possible for us to be compatible. No matter the packaging, you just don’t know, do you?”

  “Yeah, but it’s good discovering.”

  She went on to tell Kennedy how she had met and married her husband, Steve Scott, another officer in the Half Moon Bay Police Department.

  She told Kennedy they had clicked immediately, discovering they shared a lot of each other’s interests, and were married within six months. On their first wedding anniversary, they were making plans about when she would retire to concentrate on their planned family.

  “Then on the 13th of April this year, on the eve of our second wedding anniversary, his body was discovered by the side of Pilarcitos Creek…”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “…and just under the bridge at Main Street,” she continued totally ignoring him.

  “I’m so sorry,” Kennedy said quietly.

  “And then,” she continued very shakily, trying to catch her breath enough to allow her to get her words out, “it was like my life was over too. It was like the person I waited my entire life for, the person I was convinced was out there and looking for me at the same time was gone, stolen from me, and this thing that I had, this hook I had on the meaning of life, my life, Steve and my life, was gone, not only gone, but, by its absence, mocking me. It was as if someone had wanted to show me just how perfect it could be, like… that it could be better than I’d ever dreamed it could be, and then, like a thief in the night, he was stolen right out from under my eyes… It was like…I was being forced to grieve my own death.”

  Then Grace Scott broke down and started to sob again, the wail of complete and utter loss and emptiness. Tears were streaming down her face now, her nose was running, and she turned to look at him, her eyes beseeching him to do something, anything, to help her.

  Kennedy moved slowly across to her and he awkwardly, self-consciously, started to put his arm around her shoulder. She snuggled into him, and he raised his other hand to secure her in a grasp. They sat there gently rocking back and forth in silence for nearly half an hour. At one point, he felt she drifted off to sleep, but then from out of nowhere she whispered, “I’ve never been able to talk to anyone about this.”

  She sat up in the sofa, disentangling herself from Kennedy’s arms, but still remaining close by his side. Once again she used her hands to clean her face and nose.

  “We’ve only just met, and you’re most likely jet-lagging out of your brains, and here I am dumping on you.”

  “Actually, to be fair, you know, I think I started to dump on you first.”

  They both tilted back into the sofa.

  She finished off her wine. So did Kennedy, but at a much slower speed.

  “Okay, that’s as much as I can allow myself,” she said, slapping both her cheeks with her hands. “I need to get to bed, and so do you. Good night, Inspector.”

  She replaced the fireguard and staggered off to her corner of the cabin.

  Kennedy returned to his bed. It was five o’clock in the morning, and he imagined he wouldn’t get to sleep again before daylight arrived.

  Half an hour later he was lying in bed still wide awake when there was a knock on his door. He didn’t answer. He didn’t know what to say. She opened the door anyway.

  “Are you still awake?” she asked

  “Yes,” Kennedy replied, wondering why he was whispering.

  “If I lay beside you, could you just hold me, please?”

  “Of course,” Kennedy replied, and held open the covers for her.

  She hopped in beside him. He lay on his back with her head resting in the crook of his arm, and she snuggled up close to him. They lay in silence for about twenty-minutes until the morning light started to invade the room.

  Kennedy turned his head slightly to study her face. He hadn’t realised how naturally beautiful she looked. As if realising he was looking at her, she said in a voice not much above a whisper, “You know, when you cuddled me out on the sofa, I definitely started to feel a little better, a bit safer, and then when I went into my bedroom I started to feel bad again, but now, like this, I feel safe again.”

  Grace Scott stuck her thumb in her mouth, and within a few minutes he could hear she’d drifted off to sleep.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  When Kennedy woke up sometime later, the sun was up and Grace Scott was gone. The indent her head had made on the opposite pillowcase and her lingering scent were the only proof that he hadn’t been dreaming. He could hear music in the living area and he could smell food. He was trying to decide what to do when his door swung open and there she stood, ready to bang two tins together. She looked a million dollars and not at all like a woman who’d been up most of the night crying.

  Grace Scott was wearing a knee-length, high-neck, loose fitting, royal blue dress and a pair of ornate cowboy boots. In the daylight, her copper hair looked a more vibrant ginger, and Kennedy could now see her stunning features clearly for the first time. The light shining through her dress betrayed a fine figure of a woman. Very fine, Kennedy thought, managing to avert his eyes before being discovered.

  “Morning, Inspector,” she said. “How’s your head?”

  “I’m fine, thanks, and yours?”

  “I’m feeling good,” she replied, and then dropped to a quieter voice, “the best I’ve felt for some time. Fancy some breakfast?”

  “Time for a shower?” Kennedy asked.

  “You already smell good, Inspector,” she said as she turned on her heels. “Come on out here before it gets cold.”

  Kennedy made a quick pit stop in the bathroom. He cleaned his teeth, washed his face and pulled on his light-coloured Chinos and a clean Jackson Browne T-shirt from his wheelie suitcase, while the smell of food led him by the nose into the main room.

  In the daylight, he could see how majestic the main room of the “log cabin” really was. The cabin, the size of a small gym, boasted a high vaulted roof supported by dramatic wooden beams. Apart from the four bedrooms and en suite bathrooms along one side, the remainder of the space was open plan, with the bedroom block creating a landing for the library cum study above.

  The matching rich-coloured wood on the floor, doors, doorframes, and skirting boards gave the room a very warm American Arts and Crafts look. The main room was generously peppered with antiques and artifacts from the Wild West, with lots of Fredrick Remington prints and sculptures of cowboys on horses. There was even an old saddle, restored, heavily polished, and placed on what looked like a small section of a varnished wooden fence.

  “Come on,” she ordered impatiently, “you can check out the crib later.”

  Kennedy checked the spread on the dining table. It was still only seven-twenty. Grace Scott must have been up at least an hour getting this all together, meaning she couldn’t have slept for more than an hour.

  Kennedy helped himself to a large glass of freshly squeezed orange juice, which was a revelation to drink compared to the insipid coloured wallpaper paste that passed for orange juice back in Camden Town.

&nbs
p; “Jackson’s the man,” she declared as she broke two eggs into the pan. “How do you like your eggs?”

  “Not too runny, not too hard,” Kennedy replied, as he wondered aloud about the Jackson statement.

  “Okay, just so you know, and because I’m not going to do this every day for you, when you’re in a diner, your order would be eggs over medium.”

  “Right,” Kennedy replied.

  “That’s one of my favourite albums of all time,” she continued, referring to the cover of Jackson Brown’s amazing first album on the front of his T-shirt, which ann rea had bought him. She returned to the table with her pan and served his eggs and several rashers of bacon, cooked crispy, exactly the way Kennedy liked them. Then it got even better: Grace took a tray of hash brown potatoes from the oven and carefully placed them on the table in front of him. The only thing missing for the perfect breakfast were some baked beans by the eggs over medium.

  They then settled into enjoying their breakfast and discussing their preferences in music. She was into Jackson Browne; Neil Young, who lived very near by; Van Morrison, who used to live not too far away in Mill Valley; Bonnie Raitt; Karen Carpenter; Alison Krauss; Crosby, Stills, & Nash; Huey Lewis and the News; Tom Waits; and Leonard Cohen, whom she’d seen quite recently. It had been the last concert she and her husband had attended together, in fact. Her favourite movies were Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; The Paper Chase; Dances with Wolves; Frankie and Johnnie; All The Presidents Men; Gran Torino; and anything staring Clint Eastwood, Kevin Costner, Al Pacino, or Michelle Pfeiffer. She didn’t read a lot of books, and when she did find the time, they were always biographies or true crime books.

  Kennedy stuck to the OJ, and Grace drank her coffee. She tried to pour him a cup and then seemed to remember something. “Oh yes, Ed said you’d most likely be a tea man.”

  Kennedy was amused that his visit had been discussed to some degree in advance.

  Kennedy insisted on filling the dishwasher with their breakfast dishes as they continued their conversation. He was surprised by how incredibly comfortable they seemed with each other. He was very happy that there didn’t appear to be any hints of anything other than friendship from either side.

  “Okay, Inspector,” she began, when he’d finished packing the dishwasher and she’d showed him how to start it, “I’ve got a proposal I want to suggest to you.”

  “Right,” Kennedy smiled, wondering how long her thoughts had been brewing.

  “I admit I thought breakfast would be a good meal to present this to you over. So, as I said, don’t think you’re going to get the works every morning.” She paused to smile­ - to check, he supposed, that she hadn’t lost him with her admission. She took a large breath. “Okay, you need help with your investigation, and I’ll admit I’ve been ordered to give it to you. But I’ve also got my case…”

  “Your husband?”

  “Yes,” she replied, “and I’d like to suggest that we work together on both cases. I mean, if we manage to get Sharenna Chada and Ed allows us to arrest her, then there’s going to be a good chunk of time before the extradition paperwork is finalised.”

  Kennedy thought about it.

  “Look, Inspector, it’s true I’ve hit a wall on my investigation into Steve’s murder. Ed thinks it was a simple case of Steve being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and because of this there was no motive, so we’re only going to find the guilty party by happenstance. Conviction of the same would be even more difficult.”

  “Have you any leads at all, any suspicions?” Kennedy asked.

  “I’m sorry to say, I don’t. I mean I have a few thoughts, but I don’t want you to think that I’ve any real leads or anything. As my father keeps saying, it’s one of those cases that doesn’t hold the heat.”

  “Sorry?” Kennedy said.

  “Well, you know, you can get pans or whatever, and no matter how much you put it on the fire or on the stove, it just never retains the heat. You have to keep warming it up. Well, Chief Donohue reckons cases are the same. Some cases, he claims, hold the heat. You can progress from one point to another logically and work it out. But, with a case like my husband’s… well, the chief would claim you have to go back to it each day and heat it up again and start from scratch.”

  “Right,” Kennedy agreed, amused by the comparison. “Have you got a case file, or whatever you call it here?”

  “You mean a murder book?” she said through a smile.

  “Is that really what they call it?”

  “Only in the movies,” she replied, disappearing into her room and shouting back through to him, “apart from which, the file I have is barely thick enough to be a dust-jacket.”

  She reappeared with a foolscap manila file, which she handed over to him. She continued to look at it once it was in his hands. There was something very protective about her, as if she were not sure whether or not to trust him with something so precious to her. This file contained her last memories and notes on her late husband’s life.

  As Kennedy studied the contents, she wandered around him nervously. He kept reading; she kept pacing.

  Basically, her thirty-eight-year-old husband, Officer Steve Scott, had been found face down in a local creek. There were traces of chloroform found in his blood, and he had suffered a massive head trauma. The resultant indentation on the back of his head could have been made by some smooth object, such as a baseball bat. There was no evidence found on the bank of the creek. The water had been very high, so if there had been evidence by the body it could have been washed away. However, the lack of evidence around the body led the author of the report to believe Officer Steve Scott had been thrown off the bridge and perhaps banged his head on the way down. This was listed as an alternate to the baseball bat theory. Subsequent investigations into Officer Scott, his life, and the cases he’d worked on produced no suspects

  “I think I’m up to speed,” he said eventually, thinking that from the file, at least, this case certainly held no heat, “so what should we do next?”

  She gave a little jump in the air, waving both her arms furiously and then became a little self-conscious.

  “You mean… you’ll do it? You mean you’ll help me?” she said, appearing very emotional, perhaps even close to tears.

  Kennedy nodded.

  “Well, smack my mamma,” she declared and rushed over to Kennedy. “Oops, sorry…” she said as she pulled herself up short, “hugging moment. Would you mind if I hugged you?”

  Kennedy opened his arms. Her body felt good through her light dress.

  “Okay, now the difficult part,” she said as she disentangled herself in a more businesslike manner. “Now I have to go and see if I can get my dad’s blessing.”

  “Do you want me to go along with you?” Kennedy asked.

  “Would you mind?” Grace replied, a split second too quickly.

  Five minutes later they were on the way back to the cabin, her spirits still high. “That was too easy,” she said when they were out of earshot of the main house.

  Kennedy was too distracted by the beauty of the landscape to be paying proper attention to Grace. It was nothing short of spectacular, with the sun maybe bleeding out a wee bit too much light from the colour of this picture postcard scene. He fully expected the Cartwrghts of Bonanza fame to ride out of the trees in the distance and right up to them. To the right of their cabin, the land sloped down towards a large meadow, which flattened out into a corral busy with frisky horses. Grace kept muttering. Kennedy kept drinking in the rich scenes right under his own nose.

  “That was so easy,” she repeated, “that if I was cynical, I’d say that he had planned this from the beginning.”

  “Really?” Kennedy said, desperate to wander down towards the horses.

  “Yeah, like even up to the part where he said, ‘It’s probably better if I take MacCormac off this,’’’ Grace said, her green eyes semi-closed as she recalled her father’s words.

  “Were you and Mactoo ever
involved?”

  She crunched her face into a horrible contortion, mortified at the suggestion, “Nooo way, José!”

  “He close to the chief?”

  “Not particularly. He was Steve’s partner occasionally though,” she said. “Okay, so what’s our plan?”

  “First off, I’d like to have a shower, and then I’d like to go and visit the scene of the crime.”

  “But we’re talking over two months old here, Inspector. There’s cold, and then there’s freezing, and then there’s this.”

  “Christy, please.”

  “Okay, Inspector, whichever you prefer,” she said. “I’ll meet you out in front of the cabin in ten minutes.” She sauntered off in the direction of her father’s grand house, her cowgirl boots crunching their way through the dry, stony, rock-hard earth.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Half Moon Bay on a Saturday morning felt, to Kennedy, like a throwback to the good old days when cowboys would have ridden into town, scattering the tumbleweed to the four winds, tied their horses to the hitching posts outside one of the grand Spanish-style buildings, and nipped into the bar for a wake-u-up special. Unbelievably there was such a bar, San Benito House, or at least it appeared so from the outside. The shops were colourful, maybe a wee bit too touristy. The sidewalks were filled with a mixed aroma of brewing coffee and baked breads very recently drawn from the oven. Kennedy reckoned the majority of people on the sun-drenched streets were outta-towners getting the first tick marked off on their daylong list of things to do and see.

  Grace Scott dropped Kennedy off on the corner of Main Street and Kelly Avenue. Pointing Kennedy in the direction of the bridge under which her husband had been found, she said she had some things she needed to attend to down at the station. Perhaps she preferred to find something to do rather than revisit the site that had pretty much ended life as she knew it.

  Kennedy nipped into Moon News, the bookstore on the right just before the bridge, to look for a book on the area. The storeowner, a slim sophisticated hippie in her late forties, chatted freely to Kennedy for ten minutes solid, stopping only to sell customers, mostly tourists, newspapers.