Chasing Can Be Murder (3 page)

Okay, I know. I was jabbering. But how else was I supposed to get my innocence across before we got onto specifics?

“Ms. McKinley.” DI Adams broke in, his voice rock hard. “Tha
is
your name?”

“Yes, but—”

“And you are ringing from?”

“Um—” My gaze slid across my comfy sofa and two chairs and my newly purchased LCD digital television. I frowned. “I’m ringing from my lounge room.”

“Of course. And your address is?”

“My address is...” I bit my lower lip and forced my brain to concentrate. “My address is eighty eight, Downes Road, Two Wells.”

“We’re on our way.”

With that DI Adams hung up.

The wall at our backs, Tanya and I sat and stared at our feet. While my best friend gazed at the red leather straps on her designer shoes, I concentrated on the slimy thing adorning the knuckle of my big toe. Was it a gherkin or a piece of pickle? Could even have been a regurgitated slice of tomato.

Tanya was the first to break the silence. “Who do
you
figure killed Matt?”

“No idea.”

“What about that weasel-faced guy with the long beard and big ears? You know the bloke who punched Matt in the stomach at the track last night.”

“That was Matt’s Dad.”

“Right.” Tanya went back to studying her shoes for a few moments. “Well, what about the big bruiser who lives next door to Matt? What’s his name? Pipsqueak?”

“Peewee.”

“Yeah, that’s the guy. I heard Matt telling one of his mates that Peewee chucked a brick through his window and threatened to do him in if he didn’t stop his noisy freaking dog from keeping him awake at night.”

“They came to an understanding,” I muttered. “Matt talke
me
into training his noisy freaking dog so his neighbors could get some sleep. That was right before I let him come inside my house and he ended up dead in my bed.”

“Riiight.”

3

A thunderous knock rocked the house. I cranked my head carefully around to blink at Tanya.

“Did you lock the front door, Tan?”

She shook her head.

As neither of us had the energy or inclination to leave the comfort of the floor, the police let themselves in.

The first one shouldered his way through the lounge room door and stood regarding us with one of those disparaging for-
this
-I-left-a-warm-bed scowl. He reminded me of that PI character, Columbo, from the eighties television series shown occasionally on Fox Classics. Short. Scruffy. Long, daggy overcoat. Five o’clock shadow worn like a badge of honor.

“Ms. McKinley,” the Columbo-lookalike said bearing down on us with his shuffling gait. “I’m Detective Inspector Adams. Did you ring about a murder?”

“Yes, I did.” I grabbed a deep breath in an effort to focus. “It’s my friend, Matt. We were sort of in bed together and—and—when I woke up—he was dead.” I sniffed, wiped my nose with a scrunched up tissue, before continuing. “He’d been stabbed.”

“And whoever killed your friend Matt didn’t stab you?”

Was this guy seriously blind? I gave him a no otherwise-I-wouldn’t-be-sitting-here-talking-to-you-now, eye roll and shook my head.

“Well, in that case,” he went on, hard black eyes staring into mine so intently they were escalating my headache, “can you explain how an intruder entered your bedroom, stabbed your lover and then escaped? All without waking you?”

I pulled my coat down further over my bare legs and tried to block out the more difficult questions he’d brought up. “Matthew Turner wasn’t my lover.”

“No?”

“He was merely a friend.”

Detective Inspector Adams didn’t comment, just raised his thick dark eyebrows a couple of centimeters.

“And I-I guess I didn’t wake up when it happened because I was tired.”

He just kept that cynical eyebrow thing going. “Oh?”

“If you’d been up since five in the morning training a team of greyhounds and didn’t get to bed ’til midnight you’d be wiped out too.”

“Not too wiped out to hear the person beside me getting stabbed to death.”

Exactly. He’d hit on the piece of the puzzle I couldn’t figure out either. Together with the other stray segment which went something like, how close had I come to being used as a pig-sticker too? In an attempt to clear my befuddled brain I took a deep breath and let it out in one long drawn-out sigh.

And then it struck me.

“You know, whoever killed Matt must have snuck into the bedroom while I was playing Tchaikovsky to the greyhounds.”

His eyes glazed over and I detected a slight tick in his left cheek. “Let me get this straight. You were outside playing an instrument to your dogs while your friend was inside being murdered?”

“It’s not an instrument.” I shook my head. “All I had to do was press the buzzer at the bottom of the stairs.” His eyes remained glazed, so I went on, eager to fill him in on the finer details of the situation. “See, this salesman, George someone or other, who I’d read about on the notice board at the Gawler dog track, set this gizmo up inside the house for me. When my dogs bark, all I do is go downstairs to the landing and press a buzzer. Immediately a Tchaikovsky CD starts playing in the dog-shed.”

“I see,” he said in that tone of voice that’s really saying, yeah-yeah-pull-the-other-one.

“It really works,” I assured him, intent on proving my point to this granite-nosed cop with the hard black eyes. “It definitely stopped my dogs barking when they woke me at around three o’clock this morning.”

“Are you trying to say you weren’t in bed when your friend was murdered?”

“Yeah, I guess that’s the only explanation.”

“So it was only later, when you returned, that you discovered he was dead?”

“That’s right.”
Thank God we’d got that all sorted out.

“Was the bedroom light on when you came back in the room?”

“No.”

“Well how did you know your friend had been stabbed?”

“I was…um…like, feeling around and…um…”

Heat spread across my cheeks and charged down my neck. Okay, I was way past the age of consent but no one likes to have their pathetic sexual exploits laid out on the table and examined in minute detail. While fanning my face, I watched a second plainclothes detective enter the room and walk across to Columbo. They began a whispered conversation in which the only two words I heard clearly were,
naked
and
dead.

The second detective could have been cast as the main character in the next James Bond movie. Poised, good looking and somewhere in his mid-forties, this guy had clearly been born with a magnetism that drew women to him like fish to white bait.

“Good evening, ladies. Or should I say, good morning?”

The vision, dressed in an immaculate silvery grey suit with a pale blue shirt and darker blue tie, smiled. Every gleaming, perfectly aligned tooth sparkled and glinted like an advert for some super-duper, new-age toothpaste.

“I’m Detective Chief Inspector Tad Stevens,” he said, stretching one beautifully manicured hand toward me.

Inhaling his spicy cologne like a wine connoisseur, I reached up to meet the proffered appendage. But before my sweaty fingers could adhere to his cool flesh, Tanya gave a gasping, choking sound, staggered to her feet and snatched the hand out from under my nose.

“Hi, I’m Tanya and I’m divorced.”

I could tell by the way her eyelashes fluttered she was imaging herself and Inspector Gorgeous alone on a desert island together. There’d be a two-man tent, enough coconuts to keep them alive for a couple of years and no mobile phones or rescue boats to spoil the scenery.

Still clutching his hand like she wanted to chop it off at the wrist and stash it in her pocket, Tanya plastered a grin on her face. I don’t know whether it was the grin or the frenetically fluttering eyelashes, but both men reacted as though she’d produced a weapon of mass destruction from her waistband. Columbo whipped out a set of handcuffs while DCI Stevens wrestled his fingers from her grasp and took several hurried steps backwards.

“And
you
are?” Columbo swung the flashing hardware in front of Tanya’s button nose.

“Tanya Ashton” she squeaked, her eyes seemingly hypnotized by the swinging cuffs. “I’m Kat’s friend.”

“And you are here because
?
” This time his supercilious eyebrows almost collided with his hairline.

I scrambled to my feet, propelled myself off the wall.
“
Tanya’s here because I rang and asked her to come.”

“Before you bothered to phone us?”

“Hey, I was scared.”

“All the more reason to ring us first, Ms. McKinley.”

Columbo was starting to irritate me. Big time. Although his boss had paid his respects to the deceased, Short Dark and Scruffy hadn’t moved from the kitchen. “I’m sorry if my actions don’t meet with your approval,” I told him in my best schoolmarm voice. “But I suggest you stop with the verbal assault and go look in the bedroom upstairs.”

“Verbal assault?” He repeated, eyes narrowing to slits.

“Because that’s where you’ll find the victim, Matthew Turner.”

I leant closer, all the better to breathe my vomit-enhanced, vodka-fuelled breath into his disapproving face. “Just don’t expect
him
to answer any of your insinuating questions, either.”

4

After DI Adams returned, Tanya and I were separated for further questioning. Tanya to the comfort of the lounge room—me to the hard, straight-backed wooden chair in the kitchen.

And you guessed it…Tanya won Inspector Gorgeous in the raffle and I ended up with the booby prize...DI Adams, the Columbo lookalike in the daggy long overcoat.

Twenty minutes into questioning, DI Adams produced a crumpled packet of cigarettes. He gazed at them hungrily, then, with something like a snarl, stuffed the packet back into his pocket. I let out a sigh. That’s all I needed. Verbal wrestling with a grumpy nicotine addict in the throes of trying to kick the habit.

As it was, things weren’t going well. Every time I opened my mouth I seemed to dig a bigger hole. I’d find myself popping up in China if this went on much longer. My head drooped, my brain was out to lunch, and if I could dredge up the energy, I’d go hunt up a couple of paper-clips to prop my eyes open. The big question of the moment was:
How could an alleged killer get into the house when there was no sign of a break and entry?

The Inspector leaned closer. I winced as his thick nicotine-stained fingers gripped the tabletop. “Were all the windows and doors locked before you and the deceased went upstairs to bed?”

“Yes, Inspector, I locked up personally, as I do last thing every night. But I’ve already told you this. At least six times.” My fingers, unable to keep still, fastened around the loose button on my suede jacket. Twisting and tugging. Tugging and twisting. I knew, deep down where the scary maggots and worms eat away at your insides, if this relentless inquisition continued for much longer, I’d scream—and somehow, once started, I didn’t think I’d ever be able to stop.

Unaware of how close I was to unraveling, DI Adams leant both elbows on the table and continued to chip away. “And does anyone else have a key to your house?”

I shook my head. Why waste words? The man wasn’t listening. I’d already told him no. Perhaps I should try answering in Pig Latin.
Onay. So
…
ogay umpjay in the akelay.

“Well, what about a spare key? Do you have a spare key that you hide in some obvious place like under the mat or under a pot plant?”

“I hide my spare key inside the gnome’s mouth in the front garden.”

“I see.” DI Adams pushed his face so close to mine I got a whiff of what he’d eaten for supper. Something involving curry...with perhaps a touch of basil. On closer inspection, I even made out the faint coffee moustache from his last caffeine fix. “And why didn’t you advise me of that important fact earlier, Ms. McKinley?”

I shoved my face back at him, almost exchanging nose fluids. “Because I bring the spare key inside before I lock up at night,” I said, enunciating each word with tongue. “I’m not a complete ditz, you know.”

His bushy eyebrows speared downwards somewhere in the vicinity of his slightly crooked nose—probably broken as a baby when he poked it into another toddler’s affairs and got it battered with a rattle.

When he spoke again, his clenched teeth made the words difficult to decipher. “So, let’s get this new information completely clear, Ms. McKinley. Am I right in saying you not only locked up before going to bed last night but you also brought your spare key inside the house?”

My reluctant nod barely registered on the up-and-down meter.

“Which means no one could get into your house. Right?”

Suddenly I didn’t like where this conversation was going.

“And...if no one could get in, that also means you were the only person in the house other than Matthew Turner when he was killed.”

I sagged deeper into the chair. Visions of prison bars, black-and-white striped uniforms and toilets resembling buckets swam through my mind. “No, that’s not right,” I protested, the loose button on my jacket finally coming off in my hand. “Obviously the killer was in the house too.”

“How could he be, Ms. McKinley? There was no sign of a break in. You locked up. You brought the spare key inside.”

Okay, stripes and bucket toilets weren’t my thing. I sat up straighter, grabbed a mouthful of air and jutted my chin forward. Time to climb out of the deep dark hole I’d managed to dig for myself. “For the last time, I did not kill Matt,” I said looking him squarely in the eye. “What if someone stole my spare key while it was in the gnome’s mouth, had a copy made and then replaced it before I could discover it was gone? And last night that someone let himself in the front door while we were sleeping.”

DI Adams surprised me. Instead of hurling my idea out the window like a smelly cigarette butt, he burrowed deep inside his baggy overcoat, finally producing a notebook and silver biro from one of his many pockets. “Right,” he said, flicking the notebook open at a new page. “I need the names of anyone who knew where you kept your spare key during the day.”