Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries And Impossible Crimes

Sally Fitzgerald was hardly more informative.

“You’ve worked for Mr Harrison for how long?” Slog work – no smart questions, no special insights, simple Q and A.

“Fifteen years-” A moment of thought. “Closer to sixteen.”

“And you’re-?”

A flash of… what?

“Thirty-eight.”

Which made her twenty-two when she started. Not impossible but… a little young for a secretary. Maybe she’d been hired as something else. “Paid companion” as the tabloids might say. Harrison would have been in his late sixties, just becoming aware that life and love and lust were passing him by. By the time the arrangement had devolved to the hand-holding stage, she had become his secretary. On-the-job training.

And I could be doing her a deep injustice and have it all wrong. She was smart for her years, she’d gone to secretarial school, he was in the middle of acquisitions and mergers and she was just what the entrepreneur in him had ordered.

Curse me for being a dirty-minded, middle-aged man.

“He was a generous employer?”

“I never had any complaints.” Very cool.

“He was a fucking old miser,” Breall broke in, angry.

Sally glanced at him with just a trace of contempt. Very, very cool.

I raised an eyebrow and Breall said, “He only cared about money. It’s all the old bastard ever talked about.”

“What should he have talked about?”

Breall wasn’t about to forget his grudge. “I once asked him for an advance. My folks needed a loan, hospital stuff. He wouldn’t even listen to me.”

“And you’d worked for him for how long?”

Sally answered for him, a little acidly. “Six months.”

I kept my eyes on Breall. “I take it Mr Harrison wasn’t much of a sportsman – never talked about baseball or world soccer or anything like that.”

He gave me a fishy look – I was putting him on – then shrugged. I could have told him that the only game left for Harrison in his old age had been stocks and bonds and buyouts and they’re not something you can chat about with twenty-five-year-old chauffeurs. But the antagonism was pretty standard. Harrison had a lot of money and Breall had very little, if any.

Unfair.

I asked a few more questions, then gave them the same instructions I’d given the cook. Stay in touch and stick around.

What was important was not what they’d said but what they hadn’t. Breall was probably right. All Harrison had cared about was money. No hobbies had been mentioned, no parties, no guests, no friends, no relatives dropping by. An old man counting his coins and hoping he got to God knows how many millions before life foreclosed on him.

As for Sally, she had shed no tears, had looked neither bereaved nor distraught nor even unhappy at the loss of her employer of almost sixteen years.

I started for the door and Breall pointed to the couch. “You forgot your paper.”

I said “Thanks,” retrieved it and watched them as they walked out the door and down the walk. They weren’t holding hands but it almost seemed as if they were in lockstep. I stared until they disappeared around the corner of the house and wondered if they were going to his rooms or hers.

O’Brien had been waiting by his car. He was staring after them, too. “Quite a pair, aren’t they?”

“Why do you say ‘pair’?”

“For the same reasons you’re thinking,” he wheezed. “And I think we’re both wrong. No knives, no guns, no struggle and I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts Harrison didn’t eat anything that fatally disagreed with him. Somewhere between nine and eleven he bought the Big One.”

He suddenly frowned. “Look, Sam, trust me. He was alone that morning, nobody else was around, and there are no signs anybody hit him, stabbed him, shot him or strangled him. He died of old age – some people do, you know.”

“They pay me to be suspicious,” I said. “You find out anything different, you let me know.”

“You’ll be the first, Sam.” Then, curious: “What are you going to do?”

“Wait until they leave, then take out the garbage.”

It was an hour until Breall left in his Honda, Sally beside him. I’d spent the time sitting in my own car around the corner, reading the paper.

I was going to have to buy one, after all. The Local News section was missing.

Bummer.

I saw O’Brien three days later in his office. He had his feet up, his hands across his paunch, staring out the window at a pleasantly green and sunny spring day. His eyes were at half mast; I’d interrupted the start of his afternoon siesta.

“On your way out, tell Coral not to let you back in without notifying me first.”

“It’s always nice to feel welcome,” I said. I helped myself to a cup of lukewarm coffee from the Mr Coffee on the filing cabinet, then made myself comfortable in the battered easy chair facing his desk.

“I thought you were going to let me know all about Harrison, from his broken heart to the tattoo on his heinie.”

He yawned and opened his eyes wide for a moment, then swivelled around to face me.

“No tattoo and nothing to tell you about his heart that you don’t already know.”

“I made a guess,” I said. “I didn’t say I knew for a fact.”

“Sudden heart failure, Sam – I’ll send over an official report in the morning. Somewhere around ten in the morning the old pump decided to give up the ghost and it was all over in a second or two. Don’t think he felt a thing. Maybe a brief warning and ping , that was it. Doc Sturdevant was surprised he lasted as long as he did. Didn’t eat right, never got out, pressure of business… After eighty or so, it’s all borrowed time anyway. He lived life the way we all do, which is never the right way. Hell, when I was in private practice I never followed the advice I gave my patients. You might live longer but who the hell would want to?”

I picked a newspaper out of his wastebasket and started leafing through it professionally, starting with the comics first.

O’Brien looked at me over the top of his glasses. “Don’t you have an office of your own you can waste time in? Or did you drop by to tell me something?”

I hesitated, struck by a headline, but not exactly sure of why I had hesitated.

“The saga of the secretary and the chauffeur,” I said. “Or, to be more accurate, the tale of the secretary – no pun intended.”

O’Brien leaned forward, suddenly interested.

“And?”

“Harrison had no relatives, no deep philanthropic interests, he hadn’t contributed a dime to his Alma Mater in years so it was unlikely he remembered it in his will. And as a matter of fact, he didn’t. Guess who his ‘great and good friend’ was who inherits?”

“Our gal Sal.”

I nodded.

“Very sharp; those afternoon naps help. His attorney let me see his Living Trust. Sally doesn’t have to wait for probate, she can cash in right away.”

“What happened to attorney – client privilege?”

I yawned; the chair was too damned comfortable. “Come on, it’s a small town, everybody knows where the bodies are buried and besides, he owed me a favour.”

O’Brien looked thoughtful.

“So she had motive.”

“She didn’t seem heartbroken that Harrison had shuffled off.” I looked expectant. “I was hoping you could tell me how.”

“How she did it? She didn’t. Nobody did. God pulled the rug out from under him and that was that. Judging from the smile on his face, it wasn’t all that bad.”

I stood up and started to drop the newspaper back in the basket beneath his desk, then stopped and stared at the headlines. Damn. Our modern society. If they recycled the news every few days, nobody would ever notice. I’d been hitting on three-day-old headlines.