I’m working on a novella which may boringly be called “Motive, Means and Opportunity” where I will present a chunk of information from which you if you want to, can become the armchair detective.

This might give some clues to the players, and the events.

…

So, the question is, how did I find myself in such a situation.

It came down to choices, as it always does.

And, from the very moment I met Wendy Mauson, I knew life with her, if it came to pass, would be interesting.

She was a popular girl; one of the cheer squad that made their presence felt at most sports.  Her usual boyfriend was Garry Frobish, star quarterback and mainstay of the football team.  I played basketball, after a fashion, because I had not had the necessary growth spurt in those vital teen years, I found myself relegated to guard, of which there were many.

How did we meet?  By accident.  Garry, Wendy, and I were all at the same party, Garry made a mistake, they had a huge fight, and I was there.  It was not one of those right time right-place events, she just picked me as the most level-headed of those on offer that night.  But, I had no illusions, and whilst it was on again and off again over the next year, her real interest, and love of her life was Garry.

So, how did I finish up with Wendy?  Wendy and Garry came together as a couple at the prom, and it looked like it was a perfect match.  Until he got her pregnant, she wouldn’t get rid of the baby and he dumped her.  Who was next, me.  Did I know she was pregnant?  No.  That I discovered much later, at a hospital in tragic circumstances.

But, blissfully ignorant, and universally loved by her family, we were married.  And not long after a son, Dale, was born.

I should have recognised the signs in the few months after the birth, where she was rather self-absorbed for a time.  Had I investigated it, I would have discovered that she had been seeing Garry again, but that, too, wasn’t discovered until much later too.

But despite the ups and downs, we managed to get along as a family once she settled into the idea of being a mother until Dale was old enough to go to school.  Then she went back to work, in the office of the company that was owned by Garry’s parents.

I thought it a coincidence, but, like I said, she managed to keep it all under a shroud of secrecy for many years.

Until the unlikely happened, as it always does.  Secrets are not secrets if more than one person knows about it, and if there are more, well, it doesn’t take long for it to become common knowledge.

One of Dale’s friends told him, under the category of ‘can you keep a secret’, that my wife and Garry were ‘old’ friends, and that it had been going on for years.  How this ‘friend’ knew about it was never explained, but it turned out to be true.

I spoke to her about it, and she assured me that, yes, they did meet, but it was not like ‘that’.  I gave her the benefit of the doubt but followed her a few times observing them together, and it seemed to be as she said.

Then Dale was killed.  It was a senseless accident that in any other situation would have seen him walk away with just a few scratches.   He was rushed to the hospital and since he was a rare blood type, they tested me, and his mother.  Neither of us was a match, which seemed odd.  But even when they found a donor, in actual fact Garry, though I didn’t know it at the time, it was too late.  In fact, when I identified the body, there was not a mark on him.  He had sustained a slight bump to the head which activated an aneurysm.

A week after, when we had the funeral, and everyone came, commiserated, and left, the doctor remained.  An old basketball friend, he gave me a piece of paper and told me to read it later.  I did.  DNA proved that Dale was Garry and Wendy’s son, not mine.

Even then, I was willing to let it go.  Wendy had taken Dale’s death hard and decided the only way she could recover was to go away for a while.  And not with me.  Not a surprise, because we had been arguing a lot, over money, and the way she spent it like it was water, and I thought she had found someone else, and that was who she was going away with.

But, taking her sister was supposed to throw me off the scent.

I guess if you were going to try and continue hiding a secret relationship, you would take steps to prevent the other from finding out.  Perhaps her grief had got in the way and clouded her thinking, or she was just in a hurry to leave.

Three weeks later, a phone bill arrived at home, for a phone I certainly didn’t have, so it had to be hers.  On it were calls and texts to two numbers, one was Garry’s, the other to a man who was simply a code name.  Whilst she had left me numbers of the places she was staying, and with instructions only to call if someone was dying, I did try once, and a man answered.

I put two and two together.

And kept it to myself.  Along with all of the evidence, which consisted of a number of accounts, one from a hotel, several from car rental companies and a rental agreement for a flat, one that cost a considerable amount each month, and, when I checked through the finances, which I left her in charge of, I discovered large discrepancies in what she said we had, and what was there.

And, with all the accounts from her recovery ‘holiday’ put on the ‘no limit’ credit card which had to be paid, it took what was left.  I was left with the choice of going bankrupt or selling assets.  I did the latter, first the condominium in Bermuda, and then the lakeside holiday shack by the lake up country.  We rarely used either, so I took the gamble she wouldn’t find out.

Then she came back, I handed the accounts back to her and said nothing.  As far as she was aware, the main accounts had sufficient funds to pay the bills, and any money I’d earned in her absence had been squirrelled away.

Perhaps, by that time, I could see the end was nigh.

As it was when Garry was found murdered and set off the chain of events that saw me being implicated in his murder, by Wendy, but for reasons she thought I didn’t know about.

That was about to change when I was summoned to a meeting at her lawyer’s office.  I didn’t know she personally had one.  Then, there was a lot about Wendy I knew nothing about.

…

© Charles Heath 2019-2023

This case has everything, red herrings, jealous brothers, femme fatales, and at the heart of it all, greed.

See below for an excerpt from the book…

Coming soon!

An excerpt from the book:

When Harry took the time to consider his position, a rather uncomfortable position at that, he concluded that he was somehow involved in another case that meant very little to him.

Not that it wasn’t important in some way he was yet to determine, it was just that his curiosity had got the better of him, and it had led to this: sitting in a chair, securely bound, waiting for someone one of his captors had called Doug.

It was not the name that worried him so much, it was the evil laugh that had come after the name was spoken.

Doug what? Doug the ‘destroyer’, Doug the ‘dangerous’, Doug the ‘deadly’; there was any number of sinister connotations, and perhaps that was the point of the laugh, to make it more frightening than it was.

But there was no doubt about one thing in his mind right then: he’d made a mistake. A very big. and costly, mistake. Just how big the cost, no doubt he would soon find out.

His mother, and his grandmother, the wisest person he had ever known, had once told him never to eavesdrop.

At the time he couldn’t help himself and instead of minding his own business, listening to a one-sided conversation which ended with a time and a place. The very nature of the person receiving the call was, at the very least, sinister, and, because of the cryptic conversation, there appeared to be, or at least to Harry, criminal activity involved.

For several days he had wrestled with the thought of whether he should go. Stay on the fringe, keep out of sight, observe and report to the police if it was a crime. Instead, he had willingly gone down the rabbit hole.

Now, sitting in an uncomfortable chair, several heat lamps hanging over his head, he was perspiring, and if perspiration could be used as a measure of fear, then Harry’s fear was at the highest level.

Another runnel of sweat rolled into his left eye, and, having his hands tied, literally, it made it impossible to clear it. The burning sensation momentarily took his mind off his predicament. He cursed and then shook his head trying to prevent a re-occurrence. It was to no avail.

Let the stinging sensation be a reminder of what was right and what was wrong.

It was obvious that it was the right place and the right time, but in considering his current perilous situation, it definitely was the wrong place to be, at the worst possible time.

It was meant to be his escape, an escape from the generations of lawyers, what were to Harry, dry, dusty men who had been in business since George Washington said to the first Walthenson to step foot on American soil, ‘Why don’t you become a lawyer?” when asked what he could do for the great man.

Or so it was handed down as lore, though Harry didn’t think Washington meant it literally, the Walthenson’s, then as now, were not shy of taking advice.

Except, of course, when it came to Harry.

He was, Harry’s father was prone to saying, the exception to every rule. Harry guessed his father was referring to the fact his son wanted to be a Private Detective rather than a dry, dusty lawyer. Just the clothes were enough to turn Harry off the profession.

So, with a little of the money Harry inherited from one of his aunts, he leased an office in Gramercy Park and had it renovated to look like the Sam Spade detective agency, you know the one, Spade and Archer, and The Maltese Falcon.

There’s a movie and a book by Dashiell Hammett if you’re interested.

So, there it was, painted on the opaque glass inset of the front door, ‘Harold Walthenson, Private Detective’.

There was enough money to hire an assistant, and it took a week before the right person came along, or, more to the point, didn’t just see his business plan as something sinister. Ellen, a tall cool woman in a long black dress, or so the words of a song in his head told him, fitted in perfectly.

She’d seen the movie, but she said with a grin, Harry was no Humphrey Bogart.

Of course not, he said, he didn’t smoke.

Three months on the job, and it had been a few calls, no ‘real’ cases, nothing but missing animals, and other miscellaneous items. What he really wanted was a missing person. Or perhaps a beguiling, sophisticated woman who was as deadly as she was charming, looking for an errant husband, perhaps one that she had already ‘dispatched’.

Or for a tall, dark and handsome foreigner who spoke in riddles and in heavily accented English, a spy, or perhaps an assassin, in town to take out the mayor. The man was such an imbecile Harry had considered doing it himself.

Now, in a back room of a disused warehouse, that wishful thinking might be just about to come to a very abrupt end, with none of the romanticized trappings of the business befalling him. No beguiling women, no sinister criminals, no stupid policemen.

Just a nasty little man whose only concern was how quickly or how slowly Harry’s end was going to be.

© Charles Heath 2019

…

The Jaded Detective

…

The victim was found just after dawn by a man walking his dog.

Detective Louis Bryson was just about to call it a day, or in this case since he was on the graveyard shift, call it a morning, when the call came in.

Why was it, he thought, that victims were always discovered by someone walking a dog.  Maybe the dog was walking them, because at that hour of the morning, if he owned a dog, he would be on autopilot.

And that was because Detective Louis Bryson was not a morning person.

He hated mornings, he hated traffic, and he hated people, especially in the morning peak hours.  Everyone always seemed angry and irritable.  It was bad enough going home, against the flow.  Worse when he had to drive out to a crime scene.

Like now.  The only thing saving his sanity was classical music.

The crime scene was a car parked in a designated parking area of the Queens Botanical Gardens.  How the car got there, who the victim was, and why the victim was there were questions he was going to ask.

He was stopped at the gate by an officer assigned to keep people out.  He showed his shield and the officer let him pass.

Crime scene investigators and the medical examiner were already on the scene, as was another detective, Sam Worthey, who was usually assigned to work with him.  Bryson was a hard man to work with, but Worthey had become used to his eccentricities.

Worthey had started walking towards the car the moment he saw Bryson pass the cordon and was at the door when Bryson stepped out.

Bryson had seen the lone car sitting off the roadway, back in rather than driven in, telling him the killer knew he had the time to do what he had to and that it was not a quick or opportunistic killing.  At first glance, this looked to be deliberate and planned.

A quick look around showed that it was unlikely there would be any witnesses who could identify the possible killer from the buildings, or the roadway that bordered the park.  He saw the man, and the dog sitting obediently by his side, who discovered the victim.

Worthey followed his eyes and when it stopped on the man he said, “The man who discovered the victim, Jack Bentine.  The dog’s name is Freddie, believe it or not, and they were going for a walk starting shortly after 7 am from a residence three streets away, on their usual early morning exercise in the park, for the dog that is, and found the deceased at approximately 7:15.  Not the best start to the day.”

“Do I need to talk to him?”

“No.  Got the details, and asked him to come to the station to sign a statement.  Pretty shaken up.”

“Then tell him to go.”

Bryson watched Worthey go over to the man, have a brief word, and then come back. 

Bentine shook his head and left with the reluctant dog.  He was going to miss out on his morning exercise.

Bryson walked towards the car and stopped about 20 feet short.  He looked closely at the ground, moving slowly towards the side of the car.  No footprints.  The surface was rough but very hard.  Pity, it hadn’t snowed overnight and left behind some very clear footprints.

He asked the investigators in and around the car to give him a few minutes, and he waited until they moved out of the way.

The door was open.  A closer look showed the man had been shot in the side of the head, blood spatter stretching to the other side of the car.

The victim was still in the driver’s seat.  The driver’s side window hadn’t been wound down, and the bullet had been shot through the glass.

So, had the killer been waiting, either in the parking space or somewhere near?  He looked around.  Nowhere to really hide.  So, was it possible the killer was waiting for the victim to arrive, which could mean the victim knew his killer?  It didn’t seem to fit the facts.  The scene seemed to Bryson to be a little off.

Another look inside the car showed the key to the car was in the driver’s hand, so that meant the victim had arrived, took the key out of the ignition, and was about to get out of the car.  Would he do that if the killer was standing in the spot?  Possibly not.  Bryson thought in the same position, he would just wind the window down, and not get out of the car.

Last night was very, very cold.

So that would mean the killer wasn’t visible to the victim when he arrived.

The victim was dressed in a suit, tie still on, so he had come from somewhere requiring formal clothing, work, a meeting, or dinner?

He took a couple of steps backward where Worthey was waiting.  He motioned the investigators to return.

“Do we know who he is?”

Worthey was holding an evidence bag with a wallet in it.  “Yes.  James Burgman, 45, currently single, but recently exiting from a very nasty divorce, in which his ex-wife is very angry.”

“And you know this because?”

“I read the newspapers.  It’s been in the news.  I didn’t need the wallet to identify him.”

“Approximate time of death?”

“Josie thinks sometime between midnight and two am.  She’ll know more when she gets the body.”

Josie was a good pathologist and was rarely wrong in her first estimation.”

“CCTV?” He had to ask just in case he missed something.

“One camera covering the carpark.” 

Worthey pointed to a spot where there were tree branches and, if he looked carefully, the metal of a pole.  Not easy to see it for the branches.

“And the bad news?”  He could detect the disappointment in Worthey’s tone.

“Casing only.  The unit has been in the repair shop for over a month waiting for a new board.  The fancier they are, the easier for them to fail.”

Or had it been sabotaged by a well-informed or well-prepared killer?  Whoever it was, this wasn’t a crime of opportunity.

“Was there a mobile phone or anything else?”

“We haven’t found one yet.”

Perhaps the killer took it to cover the fact he may have called him or left a message to come to this park.   It might be a break if Burgman had a mobile phone account.

“Right.  I’ll tackle the wife, and let her know what’s happened.  You see if you can track down a mobile phone or account, where he worked, and if possible, what he was supposed to be doing last night.”

Worthey groaned inwardly.  There was another case he was working on, but it looked like it would have to wait.  “On it.”

…

© Charles Heath 2023