Day 6 – Writing exercise

Writing exercise

You’ve got a habit of being in the wrong place, don’t you, Sam? But this time…

…

Everyone was busy.  

The morning meeting, where the boss sat at the head of a long table, and the writing staff sat, waiting for either a bollocking or an assignment, had travelled along the usual path.

The boss was the typical editor, loud, opinionated, and acerbic.  Very few could remember him being complimentary.

I sat at the end of the table, the opposite end, and as far away from him as I could get.  He hated me more than any other.

I looked around.

Whether or not they liked their assignments or the request for a rewrite, it was hard to tell.  No one wanted to be seen shirking.

Yes, he called it shirking if you were not pounding the keyboard, working on tomorrow’s news today.

And because he hated me, I was last, got the full-on death stare and then in those oily words dispensed with forced amiability, “Jacobs, you got the dead guy, what’s his name, Rickard, Richard…”

“Ricardo,” a mousey voice called out, his current ‘favourite’.

“That dead guy.  A thousand scintillating words.”

Then the expansive glare around the table, “Well, what are you lot waiting for?”

Al, just up from me, muttered, under his breath, “A written invitation.”  As he did in every meeting.

Another obituary.  Another nobody that needed life breathed into the corpse. 

A gopher dropped a file on my desk as he went past, not stopping.  Not worth the five minutes of hell from the boss about wasting time on idle chatter.

A single page, a name, and an address.  Several notes that highlighted a nothing life.  Too young to have a life.  Too young to die.  Too young for scintillating words.

Cause of death?  Heart failure.

His photo belied the notion that he had anything remotely wrong with his heart.  Adonis himself would be jealous.

Coroner’s report?  Heart failure, cause unknown.

Not obese, not too thin, none of the danger signs that he was heart attack material, I knew my way around a medical report and this one?

Something was not right.  Was the boss testing me, see if I could see if there was anything more?

Of course, I’d been down this path before and come a cropper.  No, the boss took anything I requested with a grain of salt.

“Just report the facts.  Don’t embellish, don’t add your suspicions, ten times out of ten you’re going to be wrong.”

And infurioratingly he was right.

Which meant I had to get creative.
…

The name Freddie Ricardo brought up 100,000 plus hits on the search engine, but I found one entry that pointed to an Instagram page that loaded, then disappeared.

Like completely disappeared, returning a 404 error when I tried to reload it.  Someone had deleted it just after I found it.

Why?

Who would care?

From the fleeting look I got of it, it was just a guy’s page that had photos of him and friends guzzling beer and either hunting, fishing or acting stupid.

Very unaccountant-like. 

Next step, go to the address.

A suburban street, quiet, an old house, run down and in need of repair, garden overgrown.  Two car wrecks in the front yard, and an antique car in the driveway.

I sat outside the house for an hour, not a creature stirred, not even a mouse.  The car suggested someone was inside, but they didn’t look out the windows, and they didn’t turn any lights on.

At the end of the hour, I got out of the car and walked over to the front door.  The fence was falling over, the gate off its hinges, held up by the weeds and growth around it.

The door had peeling paint, but the lock and handle were new.  The verandah boards were rotting and in places broken.  They creaked as I walked on them.

I knocked.  No answer. 

I checked the car in the driveway.  A fine film of dust covered it, telling me it hadn’t moved in days, maybe a week.

One of the neighbours came out and looked over.

“Who are you?”  It wasn’t a polite question.

“Does Freddie Ricardo live here?”

“Did.  Who wants to know?”

“I’m from the newspaper, asked to do a small piece on him.”

“No need.  He wouldn’t want it.”

“Anyone else live here?”

“His sister.  She ain’t here at the moment.  I’m keeping an eye on the place.  Now, I suggest you leave.”

A sister.  Rather a large omission in the briefing paper provided.  Research was slipping.

“Fair enough.”

A last look, I went back to the car.  I waited, but the neighbour didn’t leave his porch.  When he reached for his cell phone, I left.

…

Before going back to the office, I went to the city administration building and met up with an acquaintance who got me a copy of the deed for the house.

It had belonged to the parents, then was handed down to the elder daughter, Bethany.  There were only two of them, Bethany and Freddie.  He didn’t have a stake in the house.

I ran Bethany’s name in the search engine, and it brought back a few thousand hits, the first with a picture of a brother and sister on the front porch.

The second was a photo of her in a gondola in Venice with a man, Italian perhaps.  She didn’t look happy.

From what I could see, the brother and sister were not similar, so maybe step-siblings. 

Bethany also had titles to three other houses in the city.  Perhaps she lived at one of those addresses and let her little brother stay at the address I called on.

Another acquaintance looked up the car registrations, and for the other cars the siblings had, of which there were four, including one for Freddie.

It was not mentioned in the police report at the crime scene, nor was it at the house, so it might still be somewhere else.

I had another five pieces of paper to go with the photo of the victim and the coroner’s report.  It didn’t amount to much.

…

I thought about inventing a thousand words and making him a traitor, but the boss would see through it.

The alternative wasn’t much better; tell him I had nothing, well, suspicions.

I knocked on the door, and he growled something unintelligible.  Not a good day.

“What have you got?”  He didn’t look up.

“Missing car, expensive.  Job belies the income to have it.   Looks belie the cause of death.”

“And you infer?”

“Drugs, using, selling.  Has a sister in Italy, or not?  Needs a deep dive.”

“Is that it?”

“Been to the house.  Looks like a mess, but I checked the values.  It’s a gold mine for someone.”

“No one home?”

“Not for a week.”

“Talk to your police friends, see if they’ve got a rap sheet.  Police miss the car?”

“Not in their report, not where he died.”

He looked up.  “Find it, find the sister, talk to the neighbours.  Go.”

No third degree, so sarcasm, just barked orders.  But I wasn’t going to count the chickens just yet.

…

3am was always the best time to surprise people.  My father once said that the best time to get answers was when people were unprepared.

He had been a policeman and kicked doors in at or just before dawn.  Disorientation, gear, terror at dawn.  Worked a treat.

I wasn’t kicking the door in.  I was visiting.

And hopefully the house was still empty.

The back window was unlocked and opened easily.  I was able to get to the back because of a quirk in the planning of the estate.  The house had a narrow walkway behind it, a public thoroughfare.

At 3 a.m., no one would be about.

I hope.

There wasn’t.  The back fence was as bad as the front, with a gap wide enough to squeeze through.  The back yard was worse than the front, three cars hidden by undergrowth.

Tripped once and crashed into a car.  It hurt

It took a few minutes to get inside.  It smelled badly of wet paper and damp.  The floorboards creaked.  Several pilot lights were giving off just enough light to see by, once my eyes adjusted.

Signs of recent habitation.  Fast food wrappers, health drinks, cigarette butts, and beer cans.  Half-eaten food with mould.  A week, perhaps longer, since anyone was there.

Upstairs.

The reason for the bad smell.

A body, not the sister, but a woman. 

No sign of a bag.  Dead, checked while trying not to be sick, downstairs, found the bag, wallet, ID.  Jessie Walker.  This was the residential address; her car was outside.

Long enough to find nothing else.  If the place had been tossed, it was done by a professional.

I left.

Found a phone booth and called the police to report the body.

I got back to my car to find two men waiting.  There wasn’t much use in running.

“At it again, Sam?”

The two cops that my father had asked to keep me on the straight and narrow.

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t insult us, Sam.  You know what we’re talking about.  You can’t be poking around crime scenes.”

How did they know where I’d been?  I’d only just called it in.

They knew.  I’d known my father had not exactly been clean, not as clean as he said he was, and besides, clean cops were not murdered in a mob hit. No, these were two acolytes.

“How do you…”

Lance, the more senior of the two, shook his head. “Tsk, task, Sam.  Wrong place, wrong time.  Don’t make a habit of it now, will you, son?”

I shook my head in that obedient fashion they liked.

“Good boy.”  Borg patted me on the head like I was a good boy.  I was anything but.  A chip off the old block.

“Good lad.  Leave this one alone.”

A parting pat on the back, and they left.  Was I going to heed good advice?  No.  I waited for an hour, and then I started searching for details on the internet.

Jessie Walker was famous.  Over a million hits in the search engine, and fascinating in death as much as she was in life.  For a police commissioner’s wife of three weeks.

She looked so much more interesting alive when splashed all over the front page of the city daily.  In death, she would barely rate a second glance.

And what did she have to do with Freddie and Bethany Riccardo?  Tomorrow was not going to be a good day.

…

©  Charles Heath  2025