by June Whyte
“What’s wrong with Horace?”
“Horace is a dog.”
“So?”
“So…it’s not the same thing. The mind boggles with what you’re suggesting here.”
“I’m only saying you’re not coming home to an empty house. Horace is always there for you. Just like Garbage Guts is for me.”
“I have a dog waiting for me and you have a cockatoo. Do you realize how pathetic we sound, Simon? How pathetic our lives are?”
“Speak for yourself. I’m happy exactly the way I am. However, if you’re looking for company in your old age, I know a guy who might suit you. He’s a bookie at the greyhound track. Wears sharpish suits, likes animals, and goes to Bali once a year on holiday. Name’s Gavin. What say I line you up a date with him?”
God, I was starting to sound like a slave on the auction block. Next I’d have dirty fingers in my mouth examining my teeth.
Dejected, I slumped back in my seat. The thought of Simon offering to find a prospective husband for me made me sad and angry at the same time.
“Thanks, but no thanks, Simon. I’m not keen on blokes called Gavin. I had a bad experience with a Gavin way back in primary school. The little fart dobbed me into the teacher for selling handwritten punishment lines on the black market. I’d even given the little creep my favorite red sparkly ballpoint pen as a bribe, and he still squealed on me.”
“If you want my opinion, I don’t think you should have anything to do with this Edward Granger guy. He sounds decidedly dodgy to me. And what was that about the Mafia?”
“A joke, old buddy. A joke. Now what number are we looking for?”
“One forty-five.”
I checked out the number on the closest letter-box. “Right, it’ll be on this side of the street. That’s number ninety-nine.”
“It used to be my job to get the truth out of bozos like Derek Foster, so leave the talking to me.”
“Okay, but remember you’re not on the force any more. This guy doesn’t have to talk to either of us if he doesn’t feel like it.”
“I’ll make sure he does feel like it.”
“While you’re doing that, I’ll check out his hands.”
“Why?”
“I have my reasons.”
Simon nosed the Echo into the curb in front of number 145, a red brick house with landscaped gardens leading from a traditional white picket fence to an ivy clad veranda. As we crunched up the driveway, I noticed about forty garden gnomes placed in various locations. The statues had been cast in the act of jumping, dancing, playing musical instruments and even kissing. A lump settled in my throat. I imagined Mary Foster collecting these little fellows over the years, washing them down, talking to them as she pulled weeds from her lovely garden—never dreaming of a night of terror when a madman would walk through her front door and proceed to tear her throat out with a fiery poker.
“No one’s home.” Simon stepped back from the door after repeatedly banging on it with his fist, while I bent to examine a gnome so ugly it would make a cane toad squirm.
“I guess we should have phoned first.”
“And given the perp time to abscond?”
“Duh.” I replied sounding like a thirteen-year-old pressing a point. “He’s not here anyway, is he?”
At that moment, a tall thin man dressed in a grey tracksuit came jogging along the street. He reached the gate, slid his hand onto the latch, and then noticed Simon and me. Instantly his jaw clenched. “What are you doing here? Who are you? Cops or blood-sucking journos?
“We’re here to talk to Derek Foster,” said Simon, evading the question.
“Well Derek Foster doesn’t want to talk to you,” the man yelled. “Why can’t you piranhas leave him alone?”
Undeterred, Simon went straight into cop mode. “Who rang you at the pub on the night of your wife’s murder, Derek?”
“Up yours!”
“Where did you go after the phone call, Derek?”
“Jump in the lake!”
“Did you come back here and heat a poker in the fire so you could poke it down Mary’s throat?”
“Leave the memory of my sainted wife out of this.”
“What did it feel like watching her choke to death, Derek?”
“Pig!” His face a blaze of red, Derek wiped sweat from his eyes and took off up the street again.
So much for leaving the talking to Simon.
I whipped through the gate and quickly caught up to the thin, tracksuited man. If he was guilty, surely handling a red hot poker would leave blisters on his hands.
“Hi Derek,” I said, jogging along beside him and casting my eyes downwards. Damn. Damn. Damn. Today his hands were encased in thick woolen gloves.
I could hear Simon’s footsteps pounding the footpath behind us. “Hang on, mate!” he called out. “We only want to talk to you. We’re on your side, you know.”
Derek put on a spurt. “Could have fooled me.”
“Um…aren’t you hot, Derek?” I gasped, cursing the fact that I’d given up on my gym membership six months ago—all due to that one twig-thin woman in the class sniggering at the way my tummy roll jiggled when I bounced on the mini-trampoline. “Come on, Derek,” I cajoled placing a hand on his arm as I ran. “Why don’t you dump those hot gloves?”
“Fuck off!” he snarled. Giving me a dig in the ribs with a pencil sharp elbow that had me momentarily struggling for breath, he cut across in front of me and dived off the footpath onto the road.
As I followed him, I saw in my peripheral vision, a dark-colored Subaru 4WD pulling out from the curb on the opposite side of the street. Tinted windows, coal black exterior….
The car behind us on the bridge?
Dread lodged deep in my chest, threatening to rip it open. What was that car doing here? Had it followed us? Or was I just paranoid?
As it came closer, the 4WD weaved across the road and began to speed up.
Terror sent shock waves roaring through my body. This was no coincidence. This was the stuff nightmares were made of. Lengthening my stride, I reached Derek and grabbed a fistful of his tracksuit top. Then, before I could gasp out a warning or drag him out of the way, the Subaru’s tires bit into the bitumen, let out a teeth-grinding squeal, and headed straight at us.
The squeal of tires assaulted my ears, seeped into my brain, and turned my legs to string. One second Derek was yelling at me to fuck the hell off, the next we both hit the gutter with Simon sprawled on top of us. At least Derek’s bony body on the bottom of the pile stopped me from slamming face first into the roadway.
Groaning, I lifted my head just in time to see the back end of the Subaru as it hurtled around the corner and disappeared from sight.
An elbow to the stomach took away my last gasp of air as Derek flailed around in an unsuccessful attempt to scramble out from the bottom of the pile.
“Simon,” I wheezed. “I know you just saved my life, but could you please get your great carcass off me? I. Can’t. Breathe.”
“Sorry, darlin’.” He grunted, then rolled over and sat gingerly on the gutter beside us. “Everyone okay? No broken bones?”
I flexed my sore right shoulder, testing it for breakages. “Thanks to you, I’m alive. I think,” I added wincing as pain shot down my right arm.
Derek—his face a sickly shade of white—wriggled out from under me while I dragged my bruised body to the edge of the gutter and lowered my rear end gingerly onto the cement next to Simon. My shoulder was on fire. My head ached. And if I couldn’t manage to settle the contents of my stomach within the next thirty seconds, I would be in dire need of a bathroom.
“Simon,” I said putting one arm around his broad shoulders and giving him a quick hug. “If you hadn’t knocked us out of the way, Derek and I would be road-kill right now. The maniac in that car wanted us dead.”
“Maybe he was aiming at Derek, and you just happened to be in the way.” Simon frowned at Derek, a few meters away, on his knees, tossing his
cookies noisily on the side of the road. “Any idea who’d want to run you down, mate?”
As Derek was otherwise engaged and didn’t answer, Simon turned back to me, his brow furrowed. “This whole incident was planned, Dani. Did you notice there were no number plates on the car? The mongrel must have removed them before parking in this street.”
“But how did he know we’d be here at this time of the day?” I mused pushing my hair from my eyes and leaning back against Simon’s warm bulk. “Unless he followed us to The Fish Inn. I noticed that car behind us on the bridge in the Port.”
“Hmm…maybe a coincidence. If Derek was his intended victim, the killer was probably on his way here and got caught by the bridge opening, like we did.”
I nodded, digesting this theory and feeling a lot better for it. The thought of someone out there hating me enough to frame me through my column was bad enough. But to kill me?
“Did you manage to catch sight of the driver?”
“The car windows were tinted.” Using Simon as a prop, I pushed myself out of the gutter and staggered across to see if I could do anything for Derek. He seemed beyond help, so I bent and picked up my tote bag, which had fallen on the side of the road. Digging around inside, I found two small hairy squares of barley sugar in the corner and handed the sweets to Derek.
“Any point ringing the police?”
“Not much to go on, is there?” Simon lifted one shoulder. “We have no number for the car. No visual of the driver. No idea where he is now. Still, I guess you’d better ring. Can’t have a maniac driving around the streets using his car as a weapon, can we?”
“No police!” gasped Derek clambering unsteadily to his feet.
“Excuse me?”
“No police,” Derek repeated taking a shaky step towards us. Being upwind, the smell of vomit almost curled my hair. He stammered. “If we bring in the police, it m-might make the driver a-angry.”
“Jesus, Derek,” I said trying not to breathe in the fumes. “If that wasn’t being angry, I’d hate to be around when the guy means business.” The thought of being questioned by the police twice in one day didn’t sit well with me either, but that was another matter. “He was aiming to kill you, Derek. If it hadn’t been for Simon, you’d be with the Angels now.” And maybe I’d be playing a celestial harp too—or warming my hands at a very large bonfire. “Just out of curiosity,” I went on. “As it’s not every day someone attempts to run me down…do you have any idea who was driving that car?”
“None whatsoever, I—” Derek gulped and his face turned the color of cream cheese. He clutched his stomach with both hands and slowly sank to his knees.
Holding my breath, I bent over him. “You alright, Derek?”
“Yeah. Just give me a minute….”
With breakfast and lunch plastered on the front of his tracksuit and over his Nikes, Derek looked anything but okay. Blood trickled from a gash on his head, one leg of his pants was torn and bloody at the knee, and there was a graze the size of a small country on his left cheek. Being on the bottom of our triple pile-up, Derek had taken the full brunt of Simon’s rugby tackle.
Still, he was lucky not to be a statistic.
“Come on, mate,” Simon persisted, his cop colors showing again. “You must have some idea of what’s going on. First your wife is murdered, and now you come close to buying a plot in the graveyard next to her. If you’re innocent—who’s the guilty party?”
Derek bit his bottom lip and closed his eyes as though trying to blot out the memory of everything that had happened in the last two days. “I told you,” he whispered. “I don’t know a thing.”
The sound of “Three Blind Mice” trilled from the other side of the road. My mobile must have skittered from my bag in our recent dash with death.
After checking caller ID, I growled deep in my throat and squeezed my eyes shut.
“Mum, not now,” I pleaded, my hand shaking as I held the phone to my ear. “I’ll ring you back later. I’m not exactly in a position to chat at the moment.”
“Oh, that’s all right, dear,” she yelled in her normal china-cracking voice. “Except by then I will probably be on a plane heading for Vegas. I might even win myself enough money on the crap tables for a nose job, as well as a boob job.”
Oh God, why me?
“Okay, Mum, what’s happened?”
Her sigh was like air being let out of a tire. “I’m having man trouble, Dani. Henry’s got the sulks because that new resident, Johnny wants me to brush his hair. And Tug took me aside at lunch today to show me how he frisks victims before he tops them. Says that’s what he used to do back when he was driving getaway cars for the Mob, fifty years ago. My problem is that I’m just too much of a guy magnet.”
A guy magnet? Where did my mother get hold of these expressions? “Mum, please stay where you are. I’ll buy Henry’s skateboard later today and bring it to the Home tomorrow. We’ll discuss your man problems then. Okay? I’m sorry, but I really can’t talk now.”
“Oh, isn’t that sweet? Henry has stopped sulking and now he’s offering me his afternoon-tea biscuit. It’s a chocolate Tim Tam, too.”
I sighed. Other people’s elderly mothers grew frail and incontinent and went to sleep in front of television watching soaps and reality shows. My mother was a guy magnet.
Simon laughed as I tossed the phone into my bag. “Your mother’s having man problems and you’ve offered to fix them for her?”
Ignoring Simon I turned back to Derek. “I think it’s time you told us everything you know.”
“Dani’s right,” put in Simon, taking hold of Derek’s arm and helping him to his feet. “The guy in the car was lying in wait for you. He wanted you dead.”
“I have no idea who would want to kill me—or Mary.”
A perplexing thought crept into my head. If the guy was after Derek, why didn’t he run him down while he was out jogging? Why wait until we arrived on the scene? I shook my head in an attempt to clear these stomach-clenching thoughts that were sneaking in and making me feel like joining Derek at the gutter. “Could it be that whoever was driving that car didn’t want Derek to talk to us?”
“I don’t know anything to talk to you about.”
“Could be,” answered Simon, disregarding Derek’s pathetic bleating. “Maybe the killer thought we were getting too close, becoming a nuisance, so decided it might be a good idea to do try a three-for-one and get rid of all of us at the same time.”
My throat dry, I gulped, letting this scary piece of conjecture seep slowly into my already overloaded brain cells, swirl around in terrified jerks, and finally take root.
And then I began to shake.
10
Wednesday, 12:45 p.m.
Taking advantage of Derek’s reluctant hospitality, I perched on a high stool in his kitchen, a supersized mug of steaming coffee warming my hands while Simon was busy on the phone networking with his sources. Our battered host, after boiling a kettle and warning us to stay put, was safely installed in the shower—presumably shampooing blood, dirt and vomit from his hair.
I glanced around the kitchen. Shouldn’t I be doing more than sit and consume caffeine until my eyes bugged? This was my third cup. The pummeling sounds of fast-running water bouncing off the bathroom tiles meant Derek was still otherwise engaged. So I stood up, dumped the unfinished caffeine in the sink, and wandered into the hallway. For some perverse reason I wanted to see Mary’s room. And although coffee sloshed and heaved in my stomach at the thought of what Mary must have suffered in that room, it was too good an opportunity to miss. Maybe I’d pick up on the dead woman’s vibes, even find a clue as to who murdered her.
I’d grudgingly scrubbed Derek off my list of suspects. Reason one—whoever killed Mary had also attempted to turn her husband into road kill. Reason two—Derek’s hands were blister free.
Simon argued that any killer with half a brain would use fireproof gloves to handle a red hot poker, and the run-in with the Subaru m
ight not have been related to Mary’s death. It could have been a disgruntled player who Derek had forced out of this week’s football team. The enraged husband of some woman Derek was busy bonking. Or even a drug dealer he owed money to.
Whatever. Derek knew more than he was telling us.
I nudged open a door at the end of the hallway and peeped inside. A room with a single bed. How the heck did Derek and his wife expect their love life to be a wild fantasy while balancing two humping bodies on the confines of a single bed?
With browns and grays predominating, the décor definitely spelt male. Dozens of wooden-framed photos—all depicting athletic young men dressed in the Port Adelaide Football club’s colors of black and white, kicking, leaping or running after a cylindrical ball. A 42-inch plasma television with surround sound. The latest Mac desktop computer. And going by the graphic pictures in the magazines open on his bedside table, Derek hadn’t been lying when he said he was “distinctly frustrated.”
Water blasting from the shower alcove in the ensuite bathroom adjoining Derek’s bedroom, suddenly slowed and stopped. I froze…then quickly shut the door and scuttled across the hall to the other bedroom.
Mary’s room.
An icy shiver skittered up my spine, snagged on my heart, and took up residence in the right ventricle. Did I really want to go inside? Mary’s vibes had already left the room. All that remained was a bed devoid of mattress and coverings, empty drawers pulled out to their maximum, and a deadly chill in the air that was like a force field warning me to get out.
The stone fireplace held me like a hypnotist’s eyes. Cold dead ashes spilling out onto the hearth. Blackened brush and dustpan set. Antique fire screen with etchings of golden angels dancing across the front.
Ignoring the horror that held my breath prisoner, I took one step into the room, eyes focused on the large stone fireplace. No poker. Of course the killer’s instrument of death would be bagged and labeled at the police station together with the blood-stained mattress and purple sheets.
I sniffed. Was that a hint of Poison? Mary and Megan preferred the same perfume. Must be the ad on television showing the rich and famous doused in the revolting stuff that made it so popular. Give me Body Shop Vanilla any day.
