by June Whyte
I took a step backwards, closer to my front door and escape. “Who the hell are you? What were you doing in my flower bed?”
He offered his hand. “I’m Wayne Jackson, Alice’s fiancé.”
Surprised, I shook his hand, which was cool and free of calluses, suggesting he was not, and never had been, into hard yakka. “You’re Alice’s fiancé?”
And he didn’t even look like a warlock—or whatever it is you call a male witch.
He nodded. “As I said, Alice was in bed with me that night, as she is every night.” I must have looked as though I didn’t believe him because he quickly added. “Didn’t Alice tell you we’re getting married in November?”
“Other than spilling hot coffee in my lap and saying oops, Alice doesn’t have a lot to say to me.”
“I’m sorry we woke you, but Alice has been stressing since two this morning about lying to the police. I couldn’t stand her moaning any longer so I suggested she come over here and apologize to you in person.”
Alice muttered to herself as we spoke. And then she began to yell, like one of those harbingers of doom in a Shakespearean play. “It was the devil, Danielle. Keep away from him or he’ll kill you, too.”
I shook my head, unable to keep up. It was as though she and I were acting in two different theatrical productions.
“Come on Alice, pull yourself together,” I scolded. “You’re not making any sense. Who is the devil? Who am I supposed to keep away from?”
“The murderer,” she said regarding me as though I had an IQ of a six-year-old. “The one I saw in my crystal ball.”
I turned to Wayne who was trying to calm his overwrought fiancé. He had an arm around her shoulders, patting her like a child. “She’s lost me,” I told him. “Are you sure Alice hasn’t been drinking?”
“She hasn’t had her morning medication yet.”
Alice stamped her foot. “Of course I’m not drunk. I drink nothing but herbal tea.”
If herbal tea has this effect on a person, I’m sticking to good old-fashioned red wine.
“Early this morning, I was hot and restless and couldn’t sleep,” Alice went on, her voice high and brittle, her face getting red and blotchy. “So, I took out my crystal ball and began rubbing it—”
“As you do,” I mumbled, rolling my eyes.
“When suddenly I went over all cold. And then he appeared in a vision. He’d tied this poor woman to the bed and was laughing and taunting her. And then he…”
Her face went from red to white and she began to shake uncontrollably. I half-expected her to crumple in a heap on my doorstep. “And then he…”
She stopped again, her eyes pools of dark fear.
“Look, Mr. Jackson, Wayne, I think you’d better take Alice home. She doesn’t look well.” I shuffled my feet, not really keen on inviting a gnarled witch and her maybe-warlock in for breakfast. “I’d ask you in,” I said, “but I have no chamomile tea on hand and coffee would probably frizzle the last of Alice’s brain cells. Why don’t you just take her home and feed her some of those happy pills you mentioned?”
“You’re right.” He gave me a resigned smile that implied this was all in a day’s work for him. Love must be blind. He knew his fiancé was crazy, and yet he still wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. “Sorry to get you out of bed, Ms. Summers,” he went on in his polite upper-class voice. “But Alice was distraught and I didn’t know what else to do.” He tightened his grip on Alice’s arm and began to walk her down the path towards their car. “Come on, darling. Let’s go home and sort you out.”
Alice swiveled her head around as Wayne opened the front gate. “Don’t let his good looks fool you,” she shouted over her shoulder at me. “It’s the devil! He killed that poor woman and now he’s out to get you!”
Shaking my head, I closed the door, reattached the security chain, and with Horace padding along behind me, made my way toward the kitchen and my first caffeine fix of the day.
No way could I go back to sleep now.
As well as a witch, I had a handsome devil with a poker fetish just itching to climb out of his crystal ball and dance his way into my dreams.
8
Wednesday, 9 a.m.
After giving Simon the shortened version of Alice’s spectacular early morning visit, I reached for my Coca-Cola, courtesy of our local McDonald’s restaurant. “So, it looks like our chief suspect isn’t guilty after all,” I said and took a sip of my drink.
Simon bit his bottom lip and frowned. “Not necessarily. First, she had access to both your rubbish bin and your computer. And secondly, the woman disliked you enough to set you up.”
“True, but she has no motive for murdering DF’s wife. Alice has a doting fiancé who’d happily get down and kiss the ground she walks on.” I shuddered at the image this statement evoked. “So your idea of Alice being DF’s blackmailing mistress is merely pie in the sky. Plus she has an alibi for the time of the murder.”
“Dani, my darling, you are so naïve, I sometimes wonder if you still believe in the Tooth Fairy.” He scraped a melted, pumpkin-colored slice of cheese from his Bacon and Egg McMuffin and pushed it to one side of his plate; possibly on the grounds that it looked like it was made of reconstituted plastic and therefore had no relation to any dairy product known to man or beast. Next, his crispy slice of bacon joined the cheese.
“In my experience,” he went on, inspecting the remaining egg by stabbing it several times with a plastic fork, “it’s always dangerous to trust a flake. Alice claims to have seen a vision of the devil in her crystal ball, for God’s sake. To me that screams Wacko. Paranoia. Crazy as a rabid dog with a tin tied to its tail. And as for her alibi— of course her fiancé would say she was with him.”
“Hey!” I flicked my head in the direction of the bacon perched on the side of his plate. “If you don’t want that, give it here. Lovely and crispy—just the way I like it. Why did you order a Bacon and Egg McMuffin if you don’t like cheese and bacon? Why not order something blah, like banana toast?”
Simon picked up the bacon by one greasy corner, dropped it on my plate, and then licking his fingers, peered down his nose at me. “Because I’m allergic to bananas. That’s why. Now, getting back to Alice. I want you to promise me you won’t let your guard down around her for one moment.”
“Alice is harmless,” I said, more to convince myself than him. “She might need her screws tightened periodically, but anyone who gets that upset about wrongly accusing someone of murder, couldn’t commit murder themselves.” I bit down into the slice of bacon. Yum. Crunchy and tangy and chock-full of cholesterol. “By the way, what do you think of Alice’s vision?” I went on, chewing noisily. “What’s your take on the devil with the face of an angel?”
“If I believed her—which I don’t—I would say it’s definitely not the husband. My contact at the station faxed a picture of DF, or Derek Foster, as his real name is, across to me early this morning. Not even the guy’s mother would call him angel-faced. And talking of the husband, after we finish here, I’m off to question the publican of The Fish Inn. That’s the hotel where Derek Foster was supposed to have been at the time of his wife’s murder.”
I drained the last of the Coca-Cola, squashed the cup flat, and dropped it on the tray. “In that case, I’m coming with you.”
Simon looked up from poking at his egg. “You are?”
“I’ve been accused of murder, a psycho is hacking into my computer, and I’ve been ordered not to leave the country. You’d need a black belt in karate to stop me.”
Simon’s lips twitched. “Actually, I do.”
“Do what?”
“Have a black belt in karate.”
“Oh.” I threw a quick glance across the table at the man with egg on his chin and frowned. I thought all karate experts weren’t wire thin, dark haired and dressed in white cotton dressing-gowns.
“However,” he continued, grinning. “No need to worry. I won’t try to stop you.”
“Humph!” Smart ass. “Wouldn’t the police have already interviewed the publican?”
Simon waited until a deluge of kids, all under five, all dressed in party hats and wearing ice-cream birthday cake on various parts of their anatomy, finished galloping invisible horses past our table. “Of course,” he said. “But publicans can be very close-mouthed about their customers when talking to the cops.”
“And what makes you think he’ll talk to you?”
“Because Harry the Hump owes me a couple of favors.”
“Harry the Hump?” I repeated, disbelief giving my voice a shrill edge.
“Harry was a professional wrestler before buying a share of The Fish Inn. Hence the theatrical title,” he explained. “We met on a construction site when I was still in uniform and before Harry became a star act. He was a witness to some dodgy dealing instigated by his boss. We immediately bonded and we’ve been mates ever since.” He took a bite out of his hash brown, hesitated, and then dropped the offending item back on his plate like it was giving him electric shocks.
“Hang on,” I said, frowning at Simon’s colossal waste of food. “Some poor kid in an impoverished country would fight crocodiles for a chance to eat that hash brown. If you don’t want it, toss it over here.”
He lifted one shoulder in a shrug and slid the tray across the table. “Here…knock yourself out.”
“Next time we’ll bring a doggy bag,” I grumbled, thinking of the extra calories. Still, hash browns were made of potatoes and I’d read only the other week how potatoes were the new in thing in diets.
“When Harry first took over the pub eight or nine years ago,” Simon went on, watching me in evident fascination as I ate, “he was having trouble with a local gang of bikies. They brawled in the pub and out on the street—carrying chains and knuckle dusters, breaking furniture, threatening other customers—and for awhile there, it looked like Harry’s new venture might go down the tube. Anyway, between Harry, me and half a dozen of my copper mates, we managed to um…encourage the bikies to leave town.
“And only last year there was this transvestite drug dealer bothering the customers and a persistent burglar who kept getting drunk while stealing the beer and…what else? Oh yes, a troublesome journo threatening to blackmail Harry.”
Simon reached over and picked up a copy of this morning’s Tribute from the next table. “So, don’t worry,” he said flicking over the pages of the newspaper and skimming the headlines. “There’s no way Harry won’t talk to me.”
I thought I knew Simon pretty well. Evidently not. There was more to my friend than a laid-back lifestyle and a red Toyota Echo. “You’re a dark horse, Mr. Templar.”
He winked. “Luckily you don’t know the half of it, Ms. Summers. Now, are you coming with me to The Fish Inn or spending the rest of the morning stuffing your face?”
“Excuse me, buster, but I am not stuffing my face. I’m saving the planet by eating your leftovers. Waste disposal depots around the world are filling up fast. What happens when they all run out of room? Where do we dispose of leftovers then? Hey?”
Simon didn’t answer.
I’d made my point. “I’m with you,” I told him. “But I’d better ring the Tribute first. I’ll let them know I’m not coming in this morning, that I’m spending the morning doing research for my column.”
Eyes twinkling, Simon’s lips twitched as though he was holding back a laugh at my expense. “Actually, you wouldn’t be telling pork pies. My mate, Harry, could provide you with a whole range of juicy tips for your column.”
I frowned. “Excuse me?”
His grin spread like ripples on a lake. “Why do you think the man’s called, Harry the Hump?”
One hand on my forehead, I squeezed my eyes closed. “Oh God.”
“Don’t worry, Dani.” Simon turned to the back page of the Tribute and began to read my column. “You’ll love Harry and his wife, Bettina. They’re my sort of people.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
He gave a loud belly laugh and then dragged the paper closer. A confused frown deepened the lines on his forehead as he glanced across at me. “Dani, why did you suggest using purple sheets to spice up this reader’s sex life?”
“Purple sheets? What are you talking about?”
He slid the newspaper across the table towards me, his right index finger pointing at the answer to the last query in my column. “Well if it wasn’t you—our murderer—or his accomplice has been at work again. He’s laughing in your face.”
With my stomach tying itself in reef knots I read the words on the printed page in front of me.
Dear Dani,
I’ve just found out my husband is cheating on me. What should I do to get him back in my bed?
Just Wondering
Dear JW,
Why don’t you try using purple sheets on your bed? The color purple seems to be a great aphrodisiac.
Dani
“I didn’t write that!”
“Didn’t think so.”
“But…but I don’t understand. What’s so significant about purple sheets?”
“The night DF’s wife was murdered, the sheets on her bed were purple.”
“What?” The last few bites of hash brown threatened to make a spectacular comeback. “How do you know the color of the dead woman’s sheets?”
“Brian, my contact at the station, showed me photos of the body still tied to the bed. The sheets were bright purple.”
“Oh. My. God.”
Fear grabbed me by the throat making it hard to breathe. Why was the murderer using my column like a Post-it note? Why was he involving me at all? I swallowed the lump in my throat and gave a weak smile that didn’t go much farther than a quiver of the lips. “Well, he’s wrong. If I was going to suggest changing the bed linen it would be to black satin sheets. Definitely not purple. Purple creates bad karma.”
Even to me, my voice sounded hysterical and forced.
Simon reached over, took my hand and squeezed. His grip was warm. Made me want to cry. “It’s okay, Dani,” he reassured me. “We’ll sort this between us.”
“But how?” I sniffed.
“First, we have to work out who’s tampering with your column. Logically it has to be someone connected with the paper because they have access to your copy. How easy would it be to slip into the office after or before work and change your column? We all have a key.”
“But what motive would they have?” I asked. “DF is the only one with a motive to kill his wife. I read in a Readers’ Digest that 88% of women victims are killed by someone close to them.”
Simon stood up, letting go of my hand and leaving me feeling strangely bereft. “You could be right, Dani, but when I go home I’m doing an Internet search on all the Tribute staff. See if I can come up with a connection, however slight, to Derek or Mary Foster.” He tore the back page from the newspaper, folded it neatly into four and slipped it inside his coat pocket. “Meanwhile, let’s go see what Harry has to say about Derek Foster. And if Foster doesn’t have a water-tight alibi, we’ll pay him a visit too.”
Placing a hand in the small of my back, Simon guided me through the cramped tables towards the restaurant exit. Once outside he headed for his red Echo. “I suggest we use my car,” he called out over his shoulder. “Less chance of losing a wheel—or a fan belt—or even the motor. I can always drop you back here afterwards so you can pick up your junk-pile.”
“There’s nothing wrong with my car.”
He grinned to take the sting out of his comment. “Except it has a tendency to break down at least once a week and twice over the weekend.”
I had no answer to that one. Instead, I opened the Echo’s passenger side door, slid inside and resigned myself to spending the morning exchanging pleasantries with an ex-wrestler boasting a dubious sexual background, and a potentially murderous husband.
Anything was better than spending time on my own, worrying about what was happening to my co
lumn or calling in to the Tribute and getting my eardrums blasted by my cantankerous brother-in-law.
Wednesday, 10:35 a.m.
As we turned off Commercial Road onto St. Vincent’s Street, the main road breasting the heart of Port Adelaide, the throb of heavy-duty traffic warred with the overpowering smell of diesel. When Simon edged his Echo into a little cobbled side street running straight down to the wooden wharf and parked in front of The Fish Inn, it was like we’d entered another dimension—another era.
From the front steps of the beautifully restored pub, I watched a couple of workmanlike tugs chuff along the Port river, pulling a cargo ship almost ten times their size. Incredible. And there was The River Princess, a leisure boat that ferried tourists on sight-seeing trips up and down the waterway, forever on the look-out for the river’s famed dolphins.
As Simon and I pushed through the slatted wooden front doors, the atmosphere of the old Port Adelaide watering hole settled over me. The interior was done out like a Maritime museum. Old nautical photographs, rusty anchors and relics from long-forgotten boats took pride of place in the bar, together with fishing nets that hung from the high wooden beams. In one corner stood two giant aquariums, complete with a myriad of exotic, forever moving, multicolored fish.
In contrast, the large poster on the wall behind the bar pictured Harry the Hump in nothing but tight-fitting gold lame long-johns and diamond-studded calf-length wrestling boots. Black matted hair covered his massive chest, muscles bulged where I’d never seen muscles bulge before, and his hair, long and thick, fell in curls around his shoulders. With a face that looked like it had been rammed into a cement wall and fists the size of sledgehammers, I bet Harry had scared off many of his opponents in the ring with a mere guttural grunt.
The man behind the bar, busy stacking glasses, had his back to us. His hair was shorn in a buzz cut, but judging by his enormous size and shape, I guessed he must be Harry. Okay, ten years older than the Harry on the wall poster, but The Fish Inn’s illustrious proprietor was still a formidable presence.
