Episode 18 - The Red Car

He shuddered as another blast of Antarctic air cut through his clothes and chilled him to the bone.

Time to move before he froze.

It was about 100 yards and took several minutes before he was beside the car.  He checked the license plate, just to make sure, then looked around.

There were several tall buildings, with a smaller one between them, the name of the owner emblazoned across the doorway.  Outtel Finance Company.  Two stories, modern looking, or renovated modern.

The meter had about 15 minutes left.

He went up the road to a bus stop and sat down to wait.

Someone would either have to come and feed the meter or drive off in the car.  It would be interesting to see whom.  He guessed if the car was out the front, rather than in a parking spot, the person driving it had just called in briefly.

“I thought it was you,” a female voice came from beside him.

So intent on watching the car he had failed to see Felicity arrive.

“What are we looking at, or are you just waiting for the bus?”

He turned.  She was bundled up in fake fur, and for a moment he almost mistook her for a large rabbit.

“The red car at that meter just down the road.”

“Are you thinking of buying one?”

He looked back at the car.  “I’m hoping it will belong to the murderer of Joe Jones.  I saw it driving away from the scene of the crime.”

“That car.  Then we’d better get some photos of the driver, hadn’t we.”  Harry heard her rummaging in her handbag, and then felt rather than saw the camera.  Just the sort he needed but couldn’t afford.  With a telephoto lens.

“Let me know when you see them, that is if you recognize them.”

Ten minutes later they were rewarded.

His newest client, Al, the man who’d been with the red-headed floozy, came out of the building, stopping to light a cigarette before getting into the car.

Behind him, he could hear the clicking of the camera taking multiple photos.

Then Al slammed the door after him and drove off.

“Anyone you know?” she asked, putting the camera away.

“It’s a long story, but yes.”

“Good.  You can buy me lunch and tell me all about it.”

© Charles Heath 2016-2018

Episode 17 - Explanation

“I should charge you with obstructing justice Walthenson.”

Sykes had escorted Harry to an interview room, told him to sit, and then glared at him for a few minutes while he worked out what he was going to say.

Harry knew it would be only a matter of time before the police discovered he had been at the scene of the crime, spoken only minutes before the victim was shot, and was then seen speeding away.

“I was trying to catch up with the red car that a man who came out of the bushes got into.”

Harry had given him the same information about the car as he had to Felicity.

“And there were two people in the car, a man and a woman.”

“It looked like a man who came out of the bushes, but it could have been a woman.”

“Where did the car go?”

“I don’t know.  They suddenly realized I was following them and they got away from me.  I’m not exactly a rally driver, nor is my car a genuine pursuit vehicle.  It was hard enough just to keep up.”

He kept the part about the car belonging to the Outtel Finance Company to himself.  Sykes would find out soon enough, but he wanted a head start before Sykes got there.

Sykes sat opposite him.  This interview was not over.

“What were you doing there.  And don’t try to tell me it was a coincidence.”

Should he tell Sykes about the cases involving the Jones brothers?  Given Sykes mood, he might have.  Perhaps just a part.

“The victim’s brother asked me to investigate if his wife was having an affair with the victim.”  It didn’t sound quite the same out loud as it had in his head.

“Jennifer and Joseph?”  He snorted in derision.  “Those two hate each other.”

“The brothers or Jennifer and Joseph?”

“Both.  If that’s what Al said, then it’s the pot called the kettle black, if you want to know.  I’d walk away from them Harry.  The Jones boys are nothing but trouble.”

“It’s a case, better than chasing lost cats.”

“This’ll get you dead if you start poking around in their business.  Al’s a killer, and Joe, well, he was just downright mean.  Walk away Harry, while you still can.  Go.  I don’t want to see you again.  Understand?”

Harry nodded and stood.

There was no way he was leaving this alone, not now.

Relieved, he stepped out into the fresh air, away from the artificial heat and stuffiness of the interview room.  It wasn’t going to be the last time he would end up in that room.

It was early afternoon, the time of day' when the heat should make itself felt, but it didn’t.  Unseasonably cold, the temperature was hovering around 8 degrees Celsius. 

A sharp gust of wind swept some garbage up the street, and he watched it for a minute until some paper caught on a light post.

Then he saw it.  The red car.

© Charles Heath 2016-2018

Episode 16 - Summoned

Felicity Benoit was a fellow private detective, who had been in the profession not longer than Harry had.  They had met at a convention in New Jersey where he had learned a great deal about being a Private Detective, and Felicity.

She was honest, forthright, and worked for her father, a distinguished man in a profession of sometimes somewhat shady characters.  A lot, he found, were ex-police, as was Jacob Benoit.

She was quite good looking as well.

They had attended a sidebar event, where the participants were given a set of clues, and they had to work out the perpetrator.  Harry was the only one who got it right.

She was curious about him, told him he3 looked nothing like the average PI, but aside from the criticism, they hit it off and had become friends of a sort.  She worked New Jersey and sometimes come the other side of the Hudson, he rarely had cause to go to New Jersey.

Now he needed her help.

After greetings, she said, “Have you got a real case yet?”

It was something of a ritual, she would ask, and he would say, ‘Not yet”, but in this case, he had better news.”

“Yes.”

“Give me the gory details.”

“It’s not that exciting, a woman wants me to catch her husband cheating, and when I had to confront him, told me he wanted evidence of her cheating with his brother.  Then when I was surveilling his bother, the brother was shot and killed.”

“Hell, that’s better than anything I’ve had.  Who shot the brother?”

A man came out of the bushes and jumped in a car.  Got the make and model and two numbers off the plate/.  Think you can help?”

“I can try.  Details.”

He gave her the car make, model, as best he could remember and the two numbers of the registration plate/.

“Thanks, I’ll call you as soon as I can find out anything.”

Harry went back to the office and waited.  This was the part of the case he hated, having to wait for information to come in so he could move onto the next phase.

But it did give he time to think about the latest developments.  He was surprised he had not heard from Jennifer Jones about her brother in law, unless, of course, she had something to do with it, and after confessing Al was bad-tempered, he couldn’t rule him out as the perpetrator.  In the absence of calls from his client, he would have to call her and give her a report. 

It certainly wasn’t going to include the fact Al had asked him to find evidence of her having an affair with his brother.

It irked him he had no idea who his client was, except she said she was married to the brother of the victim.  And the surname, Jones, one of the most common names in the phone book.  He didn't bother looking her up, because there were too many with the same name.

Nor did he have any idea how to contact, or find his second client.

It was a tangled web.

The phone rang, and he jumped.  He'd just nodded off.  It was Felicity.

"The car belongs to the Outtell Finance Company, it’s a company so anyone could have been driving it.  But one thing it was not, and that’s stolen.  So the question is, who was driving it.  I’m in.  What’s the next move?”

He had little time to get over the shock or her inviting herself into his case.  What could he say, she just did him a huge favor.  “Visit the Outtell finance Company.”

“Good.  Text me.”

He was in the middle of searching the internet for information on the Outtel Finance Company when his phone rang again.

He thought it might be Felicity again, and hadn’t looked to see who the caller was.”

“What now?”

“Get your butt down to the station now, Walthenson.  Or I’ll send a car to arrest you.”

Sykes.  More bad-tempered than usual.

“You’ve got an hour.  Don’t keep me waiting.”  The line went dead.

© Charles Heath 2016-2018

Introducing a new character

I did not have a Felicity Benoit in the original story.  The thing is, I wanted the main character, Harry Walthenson, to show some interest in one of the other characters in the story, what you might call 'a bad girl'.

But circumstances in writing the story changed and made it necessary to add someone new, someone in the same profession, preferably female, just to add some more mystery.

Her father, Alexander Benoit is an ex-cop, and she is his only daughter, something of a tomboy, without a mother for so long she had almost forgotten her.

I'm not sure what the circumstances will be about why her mother left, that will play out later.

It also improves the chances of Harry getting something done without having to worm it out of Sykes.

Look for her to appear from Episode 16 onwards.

Episode 15 – Sykes is on the job

Detective Albert Sykes was hoping he was going to get through at least one night shift without having to attend a murder scene.

He was looking forward to going fishing on the weekend, and, with about an hour to go, it was looking possible it might happen.

Until the call, a shooting in a neighborhood near where he had stopped to have a cup of coffee and a donut.  After attending a domestic violence scene where it turned out the wife had mistaken the husband for a burglar and hit him over the head.

A lot of blood, some very angry words, but not deaths to deal with.  Not then maybe.

A patrol car and ambulance had beaten him to the scene, and he arrived as the paramedics were attending to the victim on the lawn and a visibly upset lady.

When he reached the paramedics, he asked, “What happened?”

A policeman standing by them spoke, the paramedics trying to revive the man lying still, a large blood stain about where the heart would be on his track top.

“Apparent gunshot wound though no one heard the shot.  The witness saw the man fall to the ground, when she came out she saw someone run from the bushes and get into a car which, she said, sped off, and another car which left soon after, in the same direction.”

“Two cars?”

“And a man in the bushes, possibly the perp.”

Possibly, Sykes thought, or not.  That would be determined by the crime scene investigators and put in a call.

Sykes looked over to where the woman was being questioned by the officer's partner.  A quick look at the scene on the ground, and the notification from one of the paramedics that the victim was dead, he joined the officer and woman, arriving just as she was saying, “the man in the bushes got into a red car, no I don’t know the make or model, just that it was red, and the other car was blue.  I think it was chasing the red car, but I can’t be sure.”

Sykes asked a question, “Was the man alive when you reached him?”

“I don’t think so, he was very pale.  I never did a first air course, so I didn’t know how to check.  I just called the ambulance to come quickly.”

“Where are the bushes the man jumped out of?”

The woman pointed to a clump of bushes surrounding a tree on the strip between the footpath and the road.  There was one outside each of the houses in the street, and none looked as though they had been maintained.

He walked around the bushes and stopped on the roadside where there were a couple of broken branches, and a space almost big enough for a man, or woman, to hide in.  Like children had hollowed it out so they could play inside hidden from their parents.

Intermingled with the scent of the bushes was another aroma, that of cordite, of a recently fired gun.  But no weapon, or bullet casings.  The shot had come from the bushes.  The man who burst from them and left in the red car most likely the shooter.

He went back to the paramedics who were covering the body.

“Do we know who the victim is?”

“We believe he is Joseph Jones, lives about two houses down from here.  The woman recognized him.  He usually goes out for a morning run about this time.”

People who have regular activities, and a jogger.  If the exercise didn’t kill him, then he made it easy for someone else to do the job.  Someone who knew him well enough to know where he would be and what he was doing.

When Harry saw Sykes purposefully striding towards him he groaned.

The man was perpetually in a bad mood, overweight, usually smoking a cigar, known to drink excessively, a man who hated the world and everyone in it.   In other words, the perfect man for the job.

Harry had crossed Sykes path on another job, where he refused to answer any of Sykes' questions on the grounds of client confidentiality.  It was an attitude Sykes said that was only going to bring him trouble, warned him he should be inclined more towards helping the police, not hindering them.

Harry pretended he didn’t see the detective coming towards him, and waited till Sykes rapped on his car window.

When he wound the window down, Harry said, “Detective Sykes, what are you doing here?”

As if he didn’t know that, which only irritated Sykes more.

“I could ask the same question.  Your car was seen here at the time of the shooting.”

A moments thought, then “Are you sure it was my car?”

“A blue car matching this car’s description.”

“There are a lot of blue cars matching this.”

“Then why are you here now?”

“I was driving past and saw all the lights and cars.  Could be a potential case.”

“This is a homicide scene.   You should be out looking for stray animals.  If I find it was your car that was here, I’ll have you thrown in jail.  Go, and don’t let me see you here again.”

© Charles Heath 2016-2018

Episode 14 - Losing the Suspect

Harry cursed when the car refused to start on the first attempt.

Or the second, but the third, and very nearly not at all.  An older car, it was a little temperamental.

With a short sigh of relief, he slipped into first gear checked before pulling away from the curb, and rapidly accelerated.

The red car was just a small dot in front of him, gaining distance.

Then it slowed and turned left.  Harry was several streets before the turn, watching carefully for side traffic, and oncoming traffic as the street was narrow and he was speeding down the middle of the street.

He turned the corner.

The red car had not gained on him, in fact, had lost some of its distance between them.

He saw why, someone had pulled out of their driveway, and the red car nearly collided with that car.

It scooted around the reversing car, and now only yards behind the red car, Harry could see it was a woman behind the wheel, and it had a passenger?  Was it the driver of the passenger who was the person who came out of the bushes?

A glance at the registration plate partly obscured, gave him two numbers he could be sure of, a one and a seven.

Then the red car braked severely in front of him, the moment he was looking down at the plate, and he had to slam his foot on the brake, almost colliding into the back of the red car.

Harry had come to a complete stop.

By the time he recovered from the shock, the red car had gone, turning left, and then turning again, and was nowhere in sight when Harry turned to corner in the chase.

The driver of the red car had realized Harry was chasing them.

Damn, Harry muttered under his breath.

When Harry returned to the brother’s neighborhood about a half hour later, it was a crime scene with all the trappings, police cars, medical examiners, crime scene investigators, an ambulance, and a familiar face who looked as though he was in charge.

Detective Albert Sykes.

And a woman standing beside him, the same woman who had been kneeling beside the brother, and she was pointing directly at his car.

© Charles Heath 2016-2018

Episode 13 - Shooting on the Streets

Caught by surprise, Harry didn’t have an immediate or reasonable comeback to the brother’s allegation.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said lamely.  He might as well have said ‘guilty as charged’.

The brother shook his head in disapproval.  “You’re just like the rest.  The sooner you realize Al is pulling your chain, the better.  He’s the one you should have under surveillance.”

The brother stood up and looked up and down the street, not warily as if he was expecting trouble, but what might be a precaution.

It was just another quiet street in suburbia early in the morning.  One other jogger, and an old man walking his dog, or perhaps the other way around.

There was no traffic, it was not one of those through streets that everyone used as a shortcut.

“Then, just for the record,” I decided to be bold, “You’re not having an affair with Jennifer Jones?”

“Why would I?  I have my own bundle of trouble to keep happy, and God knows, that’s not an easy job.  I see Jennifer is still trying to prove Al’s a cheater.  Here’s a piece of information for free, Al is not that stupid.  If he was going to have an affair, no one would know about.  No one alive that is.”

Emphasis on the word ‘alive’ which was worrisome.

"Al gets excitable, done time for murder, you know."  He smiled.  "I'd be careful if I were you."

Harry cursed himself for being discovered.  Was he that obvious?

He watched the man cross the road and recommence jogging.  Not the sort of exercise Harry would do himself at that hour of the morning.  What time was it?  His watch told him it was just after 6 am.

He was still watching the brother as he apparently tripped and fell to the ground.  Unusual.  He didn't move.

It was about the same moment Harry realized something was wrong when a person dressed in black burst out of the bushes on the other side of the road, jumped into a red sports car and it sped off.

At the same time, a woman who came out of the house on whose front lawn he was lying, and kneeled beside the man, screamed.

© Charles Heath 2016-2018