Ladies Lunch Club Murders

by David Bishop

  “Yeah. So? You didn’t have to get dirty.” She ran the fingernails of one hand down her cleavage. “All you had to do was go along and that’s all you need to do now.”

  CC was now punctuating everything he said by pointing his gun. “Out at the waterfowl reserve, I had checked the woman’s purse before you got there. When I saw you coming, instinct told me to keep that to myself. Later, you found the icepick in her handbag. I didn’t say anything, but that’s when I knew your work for Walker and Greene went far enough to include accessory to murder.”

  “No. It was the other guy you mentioned. He left the pick in my car so I could plant it in her bag to make the weapon a dead end.”

  “I was once proud of being a solid cop, but you destroyed that. I know things that need to come out. Your worthless attempts to manipulate me won’t work anymore.”

  “Continue, Sergeant Wilmer.” Jack’s voice brought CC’s attention back to him. “You just said you knew who killed Carter and that it was done at Ann’s direction.”

  “I don’t know his name. I found him by accident, not by guile. When I was in my be-jealous-of-Jack period, I started following you to catch you two together. While I was doing that, I noticed I wasn’t the only one following her. After you and I talked in the lot of your hotel, I switched over and began following him. He was watching you some, her some, but never his back trail. Like I said, I don’t know his name. When I took a couple of sick days, I followed him to the governor’s office. I followed him the day he murdered Carter Phelps, although I had no clue he was there to kill that young man until he’d done it. I almost arrested him right then but he was just a trigger man. I wanted to learn more.”

  CC again faced Ann. “I started imagining wrapping up my career with a blockbuster case in which I proved that the governor of Florida was complicit in several murders. I wanted to go out with a bang. That’d maybe include a book deal or a movie. Either way I’d be able to afford you.”

  CC angled his head back toward Jack. “Those tapes,” he gestured toward the floor, “include several conversations between her and this other guy. Conversations that clearly establish he helped sweet cheeks here knock off the women in the ladies’ lunch club. He did the deeds. She was the mastermind. Of course she promised him all kinds of benefits when she was Mrs. Governor or maybe Mrs. President. She promised to spend the rest of her life teasing and titillating him. Our little sweetheart here has kept as busy as a Venus Fly Trap. She was running the same game on him as she ran on me, and tried to run on you. As for the governor, with what he potentially offered, she appears to have played him relatively straight.”

  38

  Ann brought one hand to her mouth. “Someone came in my back door.” She put her hand on the arm of the couch and started to get up. CC glared and pointed his gun. She sat back, and used her hands to jamb her robe tight enough to be a second skin. She spoke low. “I’m telling you … that door makes this low sound. Somebody came in.”

  Jack’s left hand clenched the top of the overstuffed arm of the chair he sat on in the corner. He raised his voice. “Come on in, Mack. Join the party.”

  Mack walked into the room and, without saying a word, shot CC twice in the chest before the sergeant could turn fully toward him.

  CC dropped to his knees, upright, and released the gun he held with his fingers around its housing. He slumped there, probably dead, in an odd full body squat.

  Mack stepped closer, pointed his silencer at CC’s hairline, and shot almost straight down through the top of his head with a slight front to back angle.

  The force of it tilted CC back, his legs uncomfortably bent under him—he didn’t feel it.

  Mack looked at Ann. “Necessary darling. You had him so twisted up he’s completely unpredictable.”

  Jack slowly put his right hand out toward Mack. He made a fist and extended his thumb and index finger only. He slowly lifted his gun free of its belt holster and tossed it over near CC’s gun. “Oscar MacHugh, I presume.”

  Mack picked up Jack’s gun and stuffed it beneath the waistband at the back of his pants. Next, he picked up CC’s handgun and held it in his other hand. He glanced toward Ann.

  “You shouldn’t have told Jack that you knew who killed Carter Phelps. Of course, it was no shock that you’d give me up to save your own lovely ass. I’d have done the same thing, so no hard feelings.” He lifted CC’s bag of eavesdropping tapes and used the strap to let it dangle behind his shoulder.

  “Come on, Mack.” Ann uncrossed her arms and nested her palms on her thighs. “You know how this goes. Just like we were trained in MI6, an operative improvises and adapts. We’re still on solid ground. After you did Phelps, I gave the TV station the memo from the supposed killer. That tied her death in with the other dead women. When I had you leave the comic book at the scene of Carter Phelps that hooked him in too. It’s all bundled up as one odd, unsolved case. No one knows you’re even involved.”

  Mack swung his gun around and pointed it at Jack.

  “He knows.”

  “Okay. Jack knows. CC no longer needs his two million so that increases your split. “Except for Jack here, you’re a complete spook on this. I’m the state cop investigating the case. The local sheriff is a dipshit. As for the governor, I can handle him. We’ll be in the clear.”

  “You’re right, Annie. It’s time to clean up the loose ends.” Mack raised his hand that held CC’s gun. “Ladies first.”

  The bullet tore into Ann’s chest. Her hand slid off her lap. The collapse of her body was stopped by the arm of the couch.

  Ann didn’t look up while she muttered. “I have sinned. ‘Turn back to God so your sins may be wiped awa—’”

  Her plea for forgiveness was aborted by Mack’s second shot.

  Jack reacted as if startled by the second shot. His head and shoulders jerked and he inched his left hand down the far side of the overstuffed chair.

  From that position, he pulled his hidden gun free of the Velcro, jerked it up, and fired three times in rapid succession—two to the heart and one to the head.

  Mack looked shocked, then blank, then fell dead.

  Jack stooped next to the dead Sergeant Wilmer. “Goodbye my friend. The most valuable thing in the world, life, often ends up being discarded like the cheapest.”

  Jack held his hand on CC’s shoulder for another moment, then called Sheriff Jackson.

  While he waited for the sheriff and medical examiner to arrive, Jack called Nora’s room. Max was there. She put the phone on speaker. He talked his two detectives through how it all went down in the condo the county rented for Lieutenant Ann Reynolds of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

  When he finished, Nora said, “You’ve had quite a night. What put you onto this Mack fella?”

  “I couldn’t shake the thought we had a missing player. That there was someone else. One day the sheriff casually mentioned that the night the woman was hanged, CC was having dinner at the sheriff’s home. That eliminated CC as the hangman.

  “A day or two later, after his sister was found dead, Governor Lennox ordered Ann to come here to assist the county. It remained possible Ann could’ve sneaked over here from Tallahassee to commit these murders, but it was unlikely. Ann admitted to me, on the night the governor’s sister was killed, that she had driven in from Tallahassee to have dinner with CC. He told me the same thing the night in the parking lot. When Carter Phelps was gunned, Ann was in the governor’s bed. I didn’t confirm that, but I doubt the governor would lie to give Ann an alibi for when she was murdering his nephew. With the serial killer theory discredited, the question kept coming up, then who?”

  “Ann and CC, for that matter Ann and the governor, could’ve been in it together.” Nora offered.

  “Too klutzy,” Max said. “The governor would not be involved hands on. If it was Ann and CC, he would be the logical one to hang the woman. His alibi for that night fails only if Sheriff Jackson was a third co-conspirator in the murders. That smell
s of being a forced solution, supported by nothing beyond a desire to force a solution.”

  Jack agreed. “Ann fits because she plans to marry Governor Lennox. Killing Phelps and her son, Carter, would clear the governor’s path to his sister’s millions.”

  “So,” Max said, “that led you to the idea that Ann needed a helper—like the Lone Ranger needed Tonto.”

  Nora cleared her throat. “The dots from Ann to Mack connect because they were both discredited British agents for MI6, although she was allowed to retire honorably.”

  “That’s it,” Jack said. “Ann’s the only person who connected up all the way around.”

  “All the pieces were there. You put them together. Good job, Boss.”

  “Hey, I went to Ann’s that night to try to nudge the pieces in place. In the end, she was manipulating too many men. While I was there, two of them showed up to confront her.”

  Nora said, “Eventually, we’d have put it together, somehow.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Ann and this Mack fella had Governor Lennox sandwiched.”

  Nora hooked a comment onto the end of what Max said. “And to think that might have continued right into the White House, if Lennox made it that far.”

  “Well, it’s over. We need to go through the paces with Sheriff Jackson and drive up to give the governor a full report. After that, we’ll go home.”

  “May the saints preserve us. It’ll be good to get back to DC.”

  Jack McCall Mystery

  David Bishop, author

  The stories in the Jack McCall Mystery series are:

  The Third Coincidence

  The Blackmail Club

  Game of Masks

  Ladies Lunch Club Murders

  Matt Kile Mystery Series

  For a special sneak peek of David Bishop’s first Novel in the Matt Kile Mystery Series, turn the page.

  Prologue

  It’s funny the way a kiss stays with you. How it lingers. How you can feel it long after it ends. I understand what amputees mean when they speak of phantom limbs. It’s there, but it isn’t. You know it isn’t. But you feel it’s still with you. While I was in prison, my wife divorced me; I thought she was with me, but she wasn’t. She said I destroyed our marriage in a moment of rage in a search for some kind of perverted justice. I didn’t think it was perverted, but I didn’t blame her for the divorce.

  But enough sad stuff. Yesterday I left the smells and perversions of men, and, wearing the same clothes I had worn the last day of my trial, reentered the world of three-dimensional women and meals you choose for yourself; things I used to take for granted, but don’t any longer. My old suit fit looser and had a musty smell, but nothing could be bad on a con’s first day of freedom. I tilted my head back and inhaled. Free air smelled different, felt different tossing my hair and puffing my shirt.

  I had no excuses. I had been guilty. I knew that. The jury knew that. The city knew that. The whole damn country knew. I had shot the guy in front of the TV cameras, emptied my gun into him. He had raped and killed a woman, then killed her three children for having walked in during his deed. The homicide team of Kile and Fidgery had found the evidence that linked the man I killed to the crime. Sergeant Matthew Kile, that was me, still is me, only now there’s no Sergeant in front of my name, and my then partner, Detective Terrence Fidgery. We arrested the scum, and he readily confessed.

  The judge ruled our search illegal and all that followed bad fruit, which included the thug’s confession. Cute words for giving a rapist-killer a get-out-of-jail-free card. In chambers the judge had wrung his hands while saying, “I have to let him walk.” Judges talk about their rules of evidence as though they had replaced the rules about right and wrong. Justice isn’t about guilt and innocence, not anymore. Over time, criminal trials had become a game for wins and losses between district attorneys and the mouthpieces for the accused. Heavy wins get defense attorneys bigger fees. For district attorneys, wins mean advancement into higher office and maybe even a political career. They should take the robes away from the judges and make them wear striped shirts like referees in other sports.

  On the courthouse steps, the news hounds had surrounded the rapist-killer like he was a movie star. Fame or infamy can make you a celebrity, and America treats celebrity like virtue.

  I still see the woman’s husband, the father of the dead children, stepping out from the crowd, standing there looking at the man who had murdered his family, palpable fury filling his eyes. His body pulsing from the strain of controlled rage that was fraying around the edges, ready to explode. The justice system had failed him, and because we all rely on it, failed us all. Because I had been the arresting officer, I had also failed him.

  The thug spit on the father and punched him, knocking him down onto the dirty-white marble stairs; he rolled all the way to the bottom, stopping on the sidewalk. The police arrested the man we all knew to be a murderer, charging him with assault and battery.

  The thug laughed. “I’ll plead to assault,” he boasted. “Is this a great country or what?”

  At that moment, without a conscious decision to do so, I drew my service revolver and fired until my gun emptied. The lowlife went down. The sentence he deserved, delivered.

  The district attorney tried me for murder-two. The same judge who had let the thug walk gave me seven years. Three months after my incarceration, the surviving husband and father, a wealthy business owner, funded a public opinion poll that showed more than eighty percent of the people felt the judge was wrong, with an excess of two-thirds thinking I did right. All I knew was the world was better off without that piece of shit, and people who would have been damaged in the future had this guy lived, would now be safe. That was enough; it had to be.

  A big reward offered by the husband/father eventually found a witness who had bought a woman’s Rolex from the man I killed. The Rolex had belonged to the murdered woman. Eventually, the father convinced the governor to grant me what is technically known in California as a Certificate of Rehabilitation and Pardon. My time served, four years.

  While in prison I had started writing mysteries, something I had always wanted to do, I finally had the time to do. During my second year inside, I secured a literary agent and a publisher. I guessed, they figured that stories written by a former homicide cop and convicted murderer would sell.

  My literary agent had wanted to meet me at the gate, but I said no. After walking far enough to put the prison out of sight, I paid a cabbie part of the modest advance on my first novel to drive me to Long Beach, California. I told the hack not to talk to me during the drive. He probably thought that a bit odd, but that was his concern, not mine. If I had wanted to gab, I would have let my literary agent meet me. This trip was about looking out a window without bars, about being able to close my eyes without first checking to see who was nearby. In short, I wanted to quietly absorb the subtleties of freedom regained.

  To continue reading, purchase on Amazon

  https://amzn.to/2WCRE4m

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR: David Bishop enjoyed a varied career as an entrepreneur during which he wrote many technical articles for financial and legal journals, as well as a nonfiction business book published in three languages. Eventually, he began using his abilities as an analyst to craft the twists and turns and salting of clues so essential to fine mystery writing. David has, as of now, twenty stories of the mystery, suspense and thriller genres available for your pleasure reading. For more information on David and his writings please visit his website. He would appreciate hearing your thoughts on this mystery or any of his stories. Email contact is especially appreciated.

  www.davidbishopbooks.com

  david@davidbishopbooks.com

 

 

 
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