Ioli, having guessed right, opened the door to her right. She knelt down and searched the cabinet below the sink. Satisfied with her find, she came out of the guest room toilet with a smirk. She lifted the spray can into the air and soon, the scent of roses masked the miasma that lingered in the skin-piercing, wintry air.
‘Sorry,’ she said, placing the spray on the floor. ‘Since I gave birth, my sense of smell has been off the charts.’
I stood above the late millionaire. ‘I see no signs of a struggle. No wounds other than what the rats seem to have done...’
My eyes travelled around his body. His nails and knuckles were clean, his navy blue, checkered robe wasn’t ripped, and everything in the room seemed to be in place. ‘He is quite old. Could be natural causes...’ I mumbled, mostly talking to myself, listing my first thoughts. ‘The autopsy will shed some light.’
‘Toxicology test, too.’
I looked up at Ioli. ‘Tox?’
‘Rich people kill in sophisticated ways. Un-messy ways. Poison and so on,’ she said and lowered herself to study the old man’s bitten face. ‘Nasty rottens.’
I rubbed my lower back and straightened my posture. A living room in probably his fifth country home and it occupied more square meters than any house I had ever lived in. Yet, there he was. Dead, bloody, and with empty eye sockets; his eyeballs had become a juicy feast for the rat king and queen. The number of bodies I have seen in my thirty years of doing this ghastly job was likely a three digit number. Though, with every body, my mind always thought of the pointlessness of our short existence. Money, family, love, travel, friendship, a good meal, a good night out. Ephemeral pleasures. Especially now, with the Greek economic crisis making it harder, impossible even, to enjoy the so-called ‘good life’, I wondered if there was meaning to our lives. Thankfully, these strange thoughts were also ephemeral. Peculiar, worried thoughts that vanished with Tracy’s warm hugs, Ioli’s laughter and Yiannis’ honey-glazed spare ribs.
Suddenly, screeching from what I presumed was a door, echoed to our right. We both looked at each other, and our hands pulled out our guns in silence. Ioli’s hand signalled towards the kitchen and gestured to back her up as she checked it out. In stealth mode, we reached the indoor kitchen entrance. We stood each to a side of the door. Ioli placed her hand on the door-knob and looked into my eyes. She mouthed the numbers backwards from three. Footsteps could be heard in the room. Ioli pushed the wooden door back and entered the room with her firearm raised high. ‘Freeze! Police!’ she shouted in a steady voice. I stood by the door, also with my weapon drawn at eye level, ready to shoot.
The elderly woman with a dirty apron and her hair in a net, unleashed a shrill cry as she jumped back and raised her hands in the air.
‘Holy Mary! Please, don’t shoot. I... I am... the neighbor. Vasiliki is my name. Oh, dear lord, please, please. You said you are police, right?’ she said, her shaking voice slowly descending the decibel scale.
‘Yes, you may lower your hands, ma’am,’ Ioli said as she lowered her gun.
Mrs. Vasiliki let out a deep sigh and placed her hands on her heart.
‘Are you okay?’ I asked, having secured my firearm back in its holster.
‘I’ll be fine. My old eyes have witnessed much in this world. No fright will take out Vasiliki. I tell you that much. May I sit?’ she asked, as breathless as a marathon runner, and grabbed a carved, wooden chair before I could reply. I nodded with a smile as she sat down and wiped her forehead. Uneven pieces of parsley and onion were stuck to her calloused, wrinkled hands.
‘Let me guess. Meatballs?’
Her bright, blue eyes looked up at me. ‘Huh? Oh, yes, yes. My specialty,’ she replied, beaming. A proud, Greek cook just like every grandma in this heavenly-made land. ‘I was just about to start frying them when I saw the lights over here.’
She paused, unsure of her next words. ‘Err, what are you doing here, if I may ask?’ Has this got to do with poor Mr. Thanasis’ disappearance?’
Ioli cleared her throat and sat down opposite Mrs. Vasiliki.
‘When was the last time you saw Mr. Thanasi?’
‘Must be over a year now,’ she replied, wiping her hands upon her apron.
‘And do you always enter without knocking when you see his lights on?’ I asked, standing behind Ioli.
Her jaw journeyed downwards and even trembled for a second before she worked up the courage to reply. ‘Now, listen here, young man. I am an honest woman and my relationship with Mr, Thanasis is purely platonic...’
‘I am not implying otherwise. I am just wondering why you did not knock on the front door.’
‘Weird things have been going on and...’
‘Weird things?’ Ioli asked, anxious to end the old lady’s prolonged pause.
‘You see, whenever Mr. Thanasis is going to arrive, he sends me a voice message a few days in advance to come and clean the house. Let some fresh air in and bring some groceries. He keeps a key to the kitchen door under that... breast-revealing Aphrodite statue by his cactus garden.’
Again, another long pause. I began to wonder if Mrs. Vasiliki was as my grandma used to say ‘all there’. Most of my grandma’s friends had problems remembering, yet she remained sharp to the very end of her ninety-two-year-old stay on Earth. This random fact, unfortunately, gave her the ‘wrong’ right to comment on her friends’ well-being.
‘Mrs. Vasiliki?’ I asked, looking at her fazed-out stare.
‘Oh, yes, dear. Where was I? So, a couple of months ago, I hear a car. My house is not near the road,’ she said and coughed to clear her dry throat. ‘I went to the window, but all I saw was a cloud of dirt drifting along the driveway.’
‘Can I get you a glass of water?’ Ioli asked, hearing the lady’s scratchy voice.
‘Oh, no, honey,’ she replied, waving her hand to signal no. Gestures and words lived side by side, here in Greece.
‘You see, I am not as fast as I used to be,’ she continued and rolled her eyes. ‘So, I didn’t catch the car, but surely someone drove up to the house. I am not your typical nosy, old Greek grandma so I did not come knocking. Even, when the following night I saw a faint light coming from the kitchen. It was only for a minute or two and not the main light. More like a lamp.’
‘Were any curtains drawn or any windows open?’ I asked, finally sitting down beside Ioli. My knees were working their usual number on me, and I could not decide if they had enough of sitting on the ferry and car or if they had enough of carrying my weight and needed a rest.
Mrs. Vasiliki shook her head. ‘Everything was locked and sealed. It was the next morning that I heard down in the village that Mr. Thanasis had gone missing. That is when I decided to come up here. I knocked and peaked in every window, but saw or heard nothing. I did not dare to open the house without his permission. The only reason I opened now was that I was sure someone was here.’
Ioli stopped pinching the top of her fine Greek nose, and her frown died as quickly as it was born. A migraine mixed with over-thinking made quite a ferocious attack on the brain.
‘Any lights, sounds, anything since then? It’s been weeks...’
‘Nothing, until now.’
Ioli turned and looked at me, puzzled; her eyes asking for the next step.
I stood up and thanked Mrs. Vasiliki for all her help. ‘Need a ride to your house?’ I asked, part kindness, part getting rid of her.
‘Oh, no,’ she said and giggled. ‘The body and brain might be falling apart, yet these feet are my soldiers. Been working these fields since I was twelve years old. I have muscles in my legs you young ones will never have. You and your cross fit, yoga and Paleo diets.’
Laughing a thick, heavy laughter, she placed her wrinkled hands upon the table and lifted herself up. ‘As I tell my eight grandkids, nothing will work miracles on your bodies like digging the land,’ she continued, ambling to the door. With a wave of her hand, she tottered down the gravelled path, back to her home and her frying.
Ioli pushed back her chair and sprang up. ‘I love the proud way grandmothers announce the number of their offspring.’
‘If I stood up so fast, I’d probably faint from vertigo or something.’
‘Stop acting older than you are, boss,’ she said and began to walk back to the nibbled-away body that sat in the living room. ‘Why didn’t we tell her that he is dead? I mean, she will see the coroner’s van and the investigation team. It will all be over the news, too,’ she continued, stopping by the arched doorway.
‘And leave eight grandkids without meatballs? That would be so un-Greek of me,’ I replied with a smile and walked past her. ‘I’m going to the car to get my gloves. Can you call HQ? Get the team out here?’
‘Sure thing.’
Outside, the temperature had taken a dive. I shivered in the cold breeze and inhaled the fresh air with hints of fireplace wood. Though on the job, I felt peculiarly relaxed, even carefree. Normally, as with the hundreds of cases under my belt, my mind would be drawing out scenarios and theories of what may have happened. Whose car did the neighbor hear? Who benefited from his death? What dark pages from his past are missing? And so on. Now, I was hoping for the most logical explanation of death due to natural causes. What I like to refer to as a simple case. Little did I know, how far more complicated our billionaire’s death would come to be.
Chapter 8
Any hopes to guess their destination came to an end with the drowning of the last sun rays. The radiate winter light was swallowed by the Greek sea, and gloom devoured the ferry. The lingering clouds in the night sky occluded the star-light and diminished Apollo’s hopes of guessing the island.
‘If I could see the stars, I would navigate my way around. My father, a fisherman, taught me everything about the stars. No need for compasses back in the day.’
‘I’m pretty sure we are heading East,’ Maximos, the jean-wearing farmer, said while scratching his index nail.
‘There are more directions than just the plain four taught in school,’ Diana commented, placing her right leg upon her bare left; her dress stopping only an inch before revealing more than just flesh. Noticing Maximos’s curious gaze, she put away her mirror and turned to his direction. ‘I mean, we could be heading North East or South East, and God knows at what angle or degrees or whatever they call it.’
‘Now, there’s who knows our destination. God,’ Bishop Arsenios said and shook his wife’s knee with his huge hand. Her petite figure shook from head to toe and she forced a flat smile; her eyes remained expressionless, though Valentina was sure that Salome checked to see if her mountain of a husband had his eyes on the provocative, sexy, cliché-blonde, bright-red-lipstick wearing lady. Diana was no young dove, but hid her real age well by drawing attention to her ‘other assets’.
Valentina concluded that their destination was not a mystery for her mind to get wound up about. Her inner mind mechanisms were laid to rest by Alexandro’s rough hands that were caressing her hair; naughty fingers escaping their task and playing with her ear lobe. With her head upon his leg, she felt every wild wave that the ferry conquered as it sliced into the sea, destination unknown. Her beady eyes took a voyage around the ship’s ceiling. It was flawless. Valentina, as a true islander, had seen her fair share of boats. All with signs of time’s attack and the mighty sun’s invasion. There were no spider-web cracks in the paint to be seen.
Could this be the ferry’s maiden journey? she thought and pondered about how much money was put into the new mysterious venture, I’d hate to receive a price tag at the end of all this.
The rest of their large group was the focus of Alexandro’s eyes. The upper-class group, busy reading their envelopes and getting to know each other intrigued him. Born and raised by a family of limited means –he hated the word poor- Alexandro began work in the police force just as the crisis hatched out of Pandora’s egg and unleashed its evils upon the once-proud nation of Greece. He never saw a pay rise; only cuts. His first salary was the largest he received, and it all went downhill from there. A river running down a steep slope, dragging Alexandro’s hopes of a better life and flooding his changes of living an unworried –money-wise at least- life. Just like the majority of young, passionate Greeks with a job, he envied those he presumed were better-off than him.
Maximos excluded, the people standing before him easily fell into his ‘jealous list’. Brand clothes, expensive jewelry, a posh manner of speaking, cell phones that cost twice his monthly wage - he noticed it all. Most of all, his inner green monster despised the group of three siblings that sat carefree in the corner to his right. The two brothers were showing their introverted sister an array of humorous videos on their phones causing tumultuous laughter to escape her pearly teeth. Alexandro felt and knew well that these thoughts of his were, simply put, wrong. Thus, he never shared them with Valentina. He needed no lecture about how he should cherish everything he had, - love, food, a roof over his head. How he made ends meet compared to millions of unemployed compatriots. He knew all this. Yet, these three rich kids caused an eruption of thoughts and daydreams about winning the lottery or having been born into a billionaire’s home.
Suddenly, all thoughts were interrupted as conversations died instantly and voices turned into short-lived shrieks. All light vanished at once, leaving them in darkness.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, please direct your attention to the marvelous island of...’
Eyes turned to the direction of the speakers, eagerly awaiting Platonas’ next word.
‘... Hotel Murder!’
‘Wait. What?’ the slim gentleman in the navy blue suit said, rising from his seat. Eugene had spent the entire journey with his nose buried in his novel, yet anticipating greatly on the revelation of the island. A real ladies’ man, the mystery weekend left him indifferent. He accepted the invitation with the only goal of adding to his ‘subjugation list.’ Women were a mere sexual object to him. As a political campaign manager who wrote speeches for successful members of parliament, Eugene always had the right words to lure women to his bachelor’s den. In combination with his smooth voice and manly, handsome facial features, Eugene’s list was now in the hundreds. Disappointment hit him hard when he realized his options. Ladies over fifty, a girl with her brothers, others with their men and not a single ‘looker’ among the staff. The island will be loaded with pussy, was his comforting thought. So, he ducked down to page 243 of Life Of Pi and waited to hear the town of lucky ladies.
His displeasure grew upon hearing the conversation beside him.
‘Well, what do you see?’ Hope asked. ‘Is it Mykonos?’
Galatea giggled and stroked her blind friend’s cold cheek. ‘You wish! All I can see is a rock in the sea with lights on a wooden pier.’
‘A rock?’
‘Hope, it doesn’t look bigger than a few acres. I cannot see any buildings on it, that’s for sure...’
‘Me neither,’ her blind friend interrupted her, bringing a warm smile upon Galatea’s face. Their friendship began when their ages were a single digit, and Galatea had taken a while to reach a point of enjoying Hope’s witty remarks- as sarcastic, self-mocking, sexist, racist, or blasphemous as they sometimes were.
‘A dark piece of land? That’s it?’ Jocasta asked, standing up and staring outwards. Taller than the rest, she spoke without looking at anyone in particular. Her eyes remained focused ahead; only when on the phone, did her head bobble up and down as she waved her hands, pacing around like a hound dog in search of a rabbit hole and mysteriously avoiding getting tangled up in the wires escaping her flashy-covered phone. Valentina loathed people who –while not driving- spoke on a hands-free headset. Just stick the damn thing to your ear, woman.
Alexandro’s voice captured her attention away from Jocasta. ‘Wait, look,’ he said and pointed out the window. Valentina was not sure if ‘window’ was the right term for the cavity on the side of the ferry. She would have to look it up, later. I hope they have WiFi, she thought. Yes, it wa
s a romantic weekend away, but after love making, Alexandro took either of two paths. Hefty sleep or lousy, trashy TV. Valentina took the same course of action either way. She snuggled up to his warm body and scrolled through her favorite sites of weird and fascinating articles from around the world.
Why do large women enjoy sex more?
Thirty ways to use your old milk bottles around the house.
Famous singer caught with a hooker in a parking lot.
Anaconda in the Amazon committed suicide by swallowing itself.
Make your monsters obey! Tips for young parents.
Hours could sway by, and in the darkness of the bedroom, her cell’s light shone brightly upon her face. Alexandro’s snoring –heavy breathing, according to him- would echo around the room, reminding her of the dawn approaching and another day at work, where she would zombie around, due to a lack of healthy sleep.
Valentina felt the boat tilt slightly below her feet as she stood up and approached Alexandro. The ferry turned and their view changed. A dazzlingly lit pier broke the black panorama before them. A firefly alone in the dark. All guests stood in silence, their eyes on the dock with red carpet unfolded upon it; a teasing, red tongue inviting them into the mouth of the small island. The engines quietened down, and the ferry relaxed, drifting to dock.
Just then, two bangs were heard from above, and fireworks colored the sky. Suddenly, more lights came to life, revealing a road heading uphill. A second wave of light divulged a three-story mansion occupying the flat top of the little, lone hill.
Though brand new –or perhaps newly renovated- the building gave out a medieval, gothic vibe. Monstrous gargoyles were strategically placed above lights giving them an unworldly feel, the front door resembled that of a castle from eras long past, and iron bars stood solidly in front of the tongue-shaped windows. Cracks were painted upon the grey, rock-like bricks and Poison Ivies were placed and spread around the walls. Both with a mission to give the mansion an ‘old feel’ to it.
Hotel Murder: The most gripping, page-turning mystery of the year (Greek Island Mysteries Book 5) Page 4
