A Body In My Office (The Charles Bentley Mysteries Book 1)

by Glen Ebisch

  “So you would actually have killed me. I thought . . .”

  “That I loved you?

  “Well, you were always around the house when Barbara was alive. I thought I was your friend.”

  “Barbara was my friend, and more than that.”

  Charles felt a hand squeeze his heart. “What do you mean?”

  “I didn’t come around to see both of you. I came around for Barbara. We were lovers. Surely your didn’t think the little bit of affection you had left over after a day with the books was enough for her. We loved each other with a passion. And just so you won’t go to your death with any mysteries, the reason Barbara was on the road so late that night is that we were together. We’d met right after work and gone back to a little apartment we rented in Burlington. I asked her not to leave that night in that terrible snowstorm, but she insisted that she had to get back to you. So in a way, her death is all your fault.”

  Charles shook his head stubbornly. “I don’t believe you. She loved me.”

  “She loved Amy and she loved me. I think for you, Charles, she felt only a sense of responsibility. The kind of responsibility you might feel for someone you once loved.”

  Charles didn’t move, his head hanging low.

  “Are you going to shoot me now?” he finally asked.

  “No, we’ll go into your office, and we’ll make it look like a suicide. That will be quite believable. After all, you’ve just lost your job of thirty-five years, your girlfriend’s been shot, and your last words to your daughter could reasonably be interpreted as a sign of despair. And we both know that after my revelation about Barbara, you really have a good reason to want it all to be over.”

  She ordered Charles to stand up. Slowly he did so, and she marched him out of her office and down the hall to his own. Although Charles looked around, hopeful that someone might come down the hall, it didn’t happen. She carefully closed the office door behind him.

  “Now you’re going to sit at your desk and write your last piece of prose: an eloquent suicide note.”

  “It will never work. Someone will figure it out.”

  “Lieutenant Thorndike, maybe.” She laughed. “I like my chances, Charles.”

  Her voice was calm now, secure with a sense of victory. Her plans were about to be complete. Somewhere beneath the numbness and despair, Charles found a small hard core of resistance. He was ready to refuse to write the note. To demand that she shoot him without a note and thus leave open the possibility of his death being seen as another murder. But suddenly a thought occurred to him. It was a chance—a slender one—but yet a chance.

  “You put that rat in my car, knowing that it was one of my greatest fears.”

  “Sorry, Charles, you had to be stopped. I tried to prevent you from continuing without it coming to this.”

  “I understand. I have to go in my desk to get a pen and paper.”

  She nodded.

  Charles slid open the centre drawer of his desk and glanced down to see that the rubber snake was still there. He picked it up with his right hand and half-rising flung it forcefully in the direction of Andrea.

  Fortunately it was very realistic and in the shadowy office appeared to be the real thing. Her phobia took control. She gave a high-pitched scream and leapt backward. By then Charles had come around the desk, and by the time Andrea began to recognize that the snake was not real, Charles had seized the hand with the gun. She fired, sending a shot through the ceiling of the office. Then she began to twist her wrist, hoping to angle the barrel at Charles’ head. He freed his right arm and hit her in the jaw with a short, hard punch. Her eyes rolled back in her head, and the gun fell from her hand.

  He had just picked the gun up from the floor when the door opened and the Lieutenant charged inside. In a second she took in the scene.

  “Good work, Charles,” she said, taking a pair of cuffs off her belt. “Looks like your daughter needn’t have been worried when she called me, you took care of things yourself.”

  The door opened again and Ernest Ritter stood there looking enraged.

  “Someone fired a bullet through the floor of my office.” He saw the gun in Charles’ hand. “Arrest that man,” he said to the Lieutenant, “he tried to kill me.”

  Charles pointed the gun in the little man’s general direction.

  “It’s been a hard day, Ritter, don’t tempt me.”

  Chapter Forty

  Charles was back in the police station. Five days had passed since Andrea was arrested for the murder of Underwood, his wife, and Deborah Gould. He had called Amy and given her a brief rundown on what had happened. She had been shocked and saddened by the idea of Andrea being a murderer. Although Charles hadn’t mentioned anything about Barbara’s relationship with Andrea, he felt that on some level Amy would have been less shocked than he had been. Perhaps she had sensed that the relationship between the two of them was not that of a surrogate mother and daughter. That might have been behind her dislike of Andrea. He had been oblivious to so much in his own home with his closest family. She must have been aware of more than he.

  He was in the police station to give his account of what had happened between Andrea and himself that day. A smiling young woman who appeared to be a civilian had given him a clean white pad and a pen and asked him to write. Although the arthritis in his fingers bothered him a bit as he wrote his story out in longhand, he found that an account of the day flowed easily and naturally. However this account, too, left out the revelation about Barbara. Charles felt safe doing this because somehow he doubted that Andrea would mention it. When he was done and the girl had taken away his composition, he was told to wait, and that the Lieutenant would see him soon.

  He had been out running each of the five days since the arrest, the last two accompanied by Greg. The exercise helped clear his mind and filled him with at least temporary optimism. He had spent much of his non-running time trying to absorb the events of the past few days, especially what he had learned about Andrea and Barbara. Each morning as he awakened the shock seemed a shade less. He found that, although on a superficial level he had been surprised by Barbara’s relationship with Andrea, on a deeper level it served to confirm a feeling he’d had for several years before her death that she was slipping away from him. At the time he’d only half thought about it, being focused more on his research. And when her preoccupation with other things did come to the centre of his attention, he had easily dismissed it as being due to Barbara’s interest in her work. So they had drifted into a late middle-aged routine of two people living separate but parallel lives. He had assumed she’d been as satisfied with this life as he had been. Now he knew that he had been wrong. She had wanted more from life, and had found it. Perhaps he should have wanted more as well.

  Now he did, with urgency that he hadn’t felt since he was a young man anxious to make his mark. He had accomplished what he could as a scholar. Now was the time to take up a new way of life. What would he do? He knew that the answer to that question wouldn’t come all at once. He would keep running, working in the soup kitchen, and stay on the alert for new opportunities to expand the horizons of his life. One thing was certain. He had spent a lifetime trying to understand the life and thought of others. Now was the time to begin understanding himself.

  Lieutenant Thorndike entered the room and took the chair across from Charles. She smiled with a mixture of joy and relief.

  “Thanks for coming in and giving your statement. Everything you said corresponds with the statement Andrea has given to us. She made a complete confession to everything.”

  “The three murders.”

  “And the three actually four attempts on your life.”

  “She had a good reason for killing Underwood. He was a monster.”

  “Yes, a jury would have been sympathetic to that, but it’s harder to justify killing Sylvia and Deborah. That was just ruthlessly tying up loose ends. I’m afraid it’s going to be a long time, if ever, before Andrea gets out of pris
on.”

  Charles nodded sombrely. “I’m sorry to hear that because I thought of her as a friend. But I can understand how justice would require it.”

  “Well, let’s get you out of here and back to normal life,” Thorndike said cheerfully.

  They exited the room and headed up the hall to the entrance to the police station. Suddenly, Charles had an idea on how to expand his horizons. He didn’t even think before speaking because he knew that thought could kill intentions.

  “Lieutenant, if I’m not even a marginal suspect anymore, would you like to go out to dinner with me sometime? I know I may seem a bit dull. I’m not a man of action like most of the men you know.”

  “I spend my day surrounded by men who act without thinking. In my off hours I prefer to spend my time with a man who thinks more than he acts. Of course, I’ll go to dinner with you. When?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “That would be nice. One thing, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You’ve got to stop calling me Lieutenant, unless you’re really getting off on the uniform.”

  “What should I call you?”

  “The men I work with call me Thorndike, but it would be nice to hear a man call me Joanna.”

  “Joanna it is, then,” Charles said cheerfully. Then he recalled how he had gotten off on the wrong foot with Karen by not asking enough about her past.

  “Did you go to college?”

  She eyed him suspiciously. “Why? Is that a requirement for going out with me?”

  “Not at all. I just wanted to know more about you, and that’s the kind of thing we former college teachers ask.”

  She thought about that for a moment, and then nodded.

  “Where did you go?”

  “Westfield State.”

  “Did you major in criminal justice?”

  “No, philosophy. I originally intended to go to law school.”

  “What changed your mind?”

  “I decided I wanted to spend my life helping people, not reading dry books.” Suddenly she appeared stricken. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  “Not at all,” Charles said slowly. “Actually, I’m coming around to that way of thinking myself.”