Better Off Dead

"Do you still think that Benny is the main suspect?"

"Yep. Your ex-partner, in response to a little pressure has agreed to sing. He has told us of getting instructions from Benny telling him to drive to a location where there would be a package waiting for pick-up. He has given us the pick-up point, a warehouse owned by guess who?"

"Benny the Bookie."

"Correct, where the package was waiting for him along with an envelope with the agreed fee and instructions as to where to dispose of the package. He didn't look to see what was in the package but he did tell us that it was large and when pressed he admitted that it could have been the body of the late lamented Andy Jones."

"It's still pretty flimsy evidence and who's to say that Tony won't change his tune at Benny's trial?"

"What we're hoping will happen is that Benny, knowing that we have taken an interest in Tony, will want to make sure that he does change his mind, and in his usual subtle manner that will mean handing him over to Nigel. If Tony survives that chances are that he won't be able to talk. We will have Tony watched at all times and when the move is made we'll be there with the cavalry to arrest him."

"And Tony let you do this?" I personally couldn't see him doing that.

"Oh, he doesn't know about it, if he did do you think that still be in town?"

He left me deep in thought. Did I hate Tony enough to hope that the cavalry arrives too late to stop Nigel doing a pas de cheval on his face, or do I take pity on him and warn him of his impending doom? Pas de cheval won out, I found that I couldn't muster up enough affection for the miserable bastard to intervene.

Lucy had sat through all of this in silence which I found unusual. "What are we going to do? Are we going to warn Tony?"

"What do you think? I think that we should go see your mother to see how she's coping with her grief."

"Are you suggestion that Mother is going to lose sleep over the news, she's probably serving free beer to the crowd."

It wasn't quite like that but there were a lot of commiserations being thrown around the bar. "Hi you two, you've obviously heard the good news. Have a drink on the house." She poured both of us a hefty slug of the good stuff. "Lucy could you look after the bar for a while, I want to have a chat to Gerry."

Lucy went behind the bar and started refilling glasses. Laura Lee and I went out the back door to the storeroom cum office.

"Gerry, it looks as if Andy isn't coming back any time soon so I suppose that your work is finished and you want your payment."

"Not so fast. We should wait for the Coroner to finish his report before we go off and spend our money, you get your insurance payout and me my fee. There's something bothering me, a few things that don't ring true about this whole case."

"What do you mean? Surely you don't think that he's still alive do you?"

"Nah, nothing like that, I just have this feeling that all isn't as it seems but I can't put my finger on it."

"Whatever, but thank you for what you've done, I appreciate it." By way of showing her appreciation her hand looped behind my head and drew my face to hers, her lips covering mine and her tongue searching for mine. Mother was a better kisser than daughter, maybe she had more experience at it. She moved her lips from mine and whispered to me, "Lucy isn't staying at the 'Y' is she?" Her hand grabbing my balls prevented me from lying to her.

"No, she's been staying with me, to save money."

"Is that the only reason?" Her grip tightened.

"No." I managed to tell her in an almost falsetto voice.

"I should rip these off, but I won't if you make me a promise."

"Which is?"

"That you don't hurt my baby girl, ever."

"I hate to tell you this but she hasn't been a baby for a long time." Her grip tightened even more and if I didn't give her the answer she wanted and soon I would be no use to any woman. "Okay I promise." The relief was amazing, this was one tough lady.

"Come on lover, we'd better be getting back to the bar or she'll be thinking that you've been raping me, not that the prospect doesn't hold some attraction." This woman was making it obvious that her interest in me wasn't purely commercial and I suppose that I could do worse.

Much later I was sitting on my bed when Lucy emerged from the bathroom. Her surprise was a see through negligee with matching see through panties that left nothing to the imagination. While I appreciated the vision this wasn't to be the evening that I'd anticipated. It should have been a night of carnal bliss but she had become somewhat subdued in bed, she seemed almost reluctant to let me make love to her although she did let herself go late in the process. "What's bothering you? You haven't been yourself all evening."

"I. . . . Oh Darling. . . I have to go back to college soon, too soon, tomorrow in fact. I spoke to my professor while you and Mother were out back, talking, last night." The way that she emphasized the word 'talking' meant that she was sure that we were doing more than that. "And he told that if I don't return very soon I'll be too far behind in my course work."

"Well if you have to go, you have to go. I won't stop you even though it will leave a huge hole in my heart." If I was an actor I would have shed a couple of tears about now just to make her feel bad about walking out on me.

"But I'll be back at the end of the semester and we can take up where we left off, that is if you want that."

I held her face in my hands and whispered to her. 'I want nothing more than that."

It was with sadness that we blew kisses to each other over the ever widening gap between us as the Greyhound pulled away from the bus station. Through the sadness that uneasy feeling returned and I had work to do.

Callaway was putting the finishing touches to his report to the Coroner when I emerged from the gauntlet of wisecracks from the cops. "Hi Lou, how is the case going?"

"Just about got it wrapped up. We got your friend Nigel for playing bongos on Tony's skull and Benny was sitting there watching and pleading with your ex to stop screaming, He's pleading innocence of course, he claims that he accompanied Nigel on a visit to his cousin who, he would have us believe was your former partner one Tony Goode. It would seem that Tony was not in a talking mood and tried to push Nigel out of his apartment. Nigel was showing his affection when we rolled up. When we told Benny that Nigel doesn't have a cousin let alone one living in the same apartment building as Tony he was astonished that Nigel, who he had come to trust totally, should have lied to him. Anyway his lawyer posted bail for the both of them while they try to arrange the usual alibi. Tony's in hospital and will be for some time, we were sadly a little tardy in coming to the rescue and we feel awful about that. By the way, where's your new assistant?"

"She had to go back to college. I think I might drive down on the weekend to visit her."

"You sound as if you've fallen for her."

"You could say that." I wasn't about to tell him or anyone else that the visit was more than me missing Lucy, it was my gut telling me that I needed to see her but I couldn't explain why.

I went back to my office via the track. "Tell me Sophie, the other day you told me that if I was in Andy's position Mexico held a certain attraction, could it be that instead of him owing the bookies money the opposite was the case and that they owed him money and they suspect that he was doing something not entirely legal?"

"You're not just a dumb shamus are you Gerry? The word is that he has devised a system to beat the odds and has become too successful for his own good, not to mention for their financial livelihood, so there seems to be some sort of contest to see who gets to him first. It would seem as if Bennie has won." I didn't mention to her that I had a feeling that all wasn't as it seemed.

A bleary eyed brunette leaned against the dorm room door. "Who are you and what do you want?"

"My name is Gerry and I've come to talk to Lucy Jones, is she here?"

"You're about two months too late. She dropped out of college around then and moved out." If I was the dumb shamus that people expected this should have been my first shock, along with finding that Lucy had lied about having to return to college to catch up on her course work, then to find that she had dropped out of college some weeks ago and that she was no longer living in the dorm. Her former room-mate told me where she was living now and that led me to the crashing sound of the next piece of the puzzle falling into place.

I was sitting in a cab that was parked in a leafy suburban street opposite one of those picture postcard cottages you see in real estate brochures when she walked out of the front door and turned into the arms of a man. Her kiss was that of a lover and the position of her hand at the front of his trousers confirmed that it was in no way platonic. She left carrying a small hold-all and the door closed behind her. I caught a brief glimpse of the man and the puzzle was now complete so I told the cabbie to wait and walked up to the door and leant on the bell push. The door opened a crack and I shoved my foot in the crack. "Hi Andy, you're looking very sprightly for a dead man."

Chapter 5

"Who are you and what do you want?"

"I'm Gerry Pretty, the poor schmuck that your wife hired to find you, dead or alive she didn't much care which. I guess that I've found you."

"What do you want?"

"You already asked that. What I want is some answers, like whose idea was it for Lucy to latch onto me to make sure that I looked in the right places for clues and made sure that I didn't get too close, was it yours?"

"No it was Lucy's."

"What is she to you and don't try to tell me that she's just your daughter, the kiss in parting I witnessed just now tells me otherwise."

"You're right, she isn't just my daughter, in fact she isn't my daughter at all, I'm just someone who Laura Lee married to legitimize Lucy's birth. It was an inconvenient marriage of convenience and there was never any love between us."

"She seemed to have been upset that you were spreading it around."

"I think I just embarrassed her because it looked like she couldn't hold her man."

"Then why did you do it?"

"It was all part of the plan."

"What plan?"

"I guess that I'd better explain everything. Lucy has used her Math skills and turned it to betting on the horses and before you say that it's a mugs game that no-one can win, she has turned it into the science of probability theory. It involves calculating odds and working out which horses will make a reasonable pay out whether it's a win or show result. Sometimes the odds are such that we don't bet on a race while at other times we will back more than one horse."

"Does this theory take into account that horses are sometimes pulled or that their performance is chemically altered?"

"Sure. We study the form and the track work figures, if we see that a horse has run better in track work than recent race results would indicate, we reason that it's being held back to win big in a big race, and if the odds on a horse are better than indicated by training track performance, and there is money on it at the track then we know that its race performance will be boosted."

My mind went back to the day at the track with Lucy and how she seemed to know so little about what went on. "Then, tell me why did you have to go through this whole charade about you going missing and the convenient discovery of your body?"

"I couldn't just disappear, for this to work I had to turn up dead."

"Whose body was it by the way?"

"Some bum from Skid Row who got beaten to death for stealing a bottle of hooch from another bum. When the bum and his friends had finished with him he was perfect for what we needed, so we wrapped him up and dumped him in Benny's old warehouse. We then contacted your former partner and told him that Benny wanted him to pick it up and dispose of it in the river, we had asked around and knew that he would be so desperate for money that he wouldn't ask any questions, and then we spread the word so that Benny would hear that I had been disposed of and by whom. Lucy suggested to Laura Lee that she should hire you to look for me."

"I take it she hoped that I'd fail?"

"Yes it was, it was our plan that you'd fail, but in the process of failing you would make enough noise and point the police in the right direction so that they would find the body, it's just that the body they found wasn't mine."

"So Lucy was right when she told me that she thought that Benny could have been taking credit for the hit to improve his image, because she had already worked that out."

"Yeah, she's one smart cookie, I would be proud of her if she really was my daughter."

"How long have you been lovers?"

"Over a year now. I think that she figured it out that I wasn't her real father and she was feeling sorry for the way that I had to jump to Laura Lee's every whim. What are you going to do now that you know that I'm still alive?"

"Nothing. I suppose that you could say that I'm an old softy at heart, but I see no reason to stir up a can of worms now that everyone seems to have gotten what they deserve."

"Except you maybe?"

"Forget about me, I don't count. You and Lucy have managed to beat the system so I guess you deserve what success you make of this, Lucy and Laura Lee both benefit from your insurance policy so they're a winner there. Benny deserves everything that he gets, hopefully, from the cops while Tony has already gotten his just reward. As for me I think that I can still come out on top. One word of advice before I leave the two of you to enjoy each other and that is get out of town, out of the country would be better, and soon, before Benny hears that your could be still alive and tries to find you. Officially you're dead and believe me, you're better off dead."

"We were planning to leave soon anyway, we hear that there are races every day in England."

"Okay, I'm off to break the amended version of what has happened to Laura Lee. Give my love to Lucy."

"I will. I hope that you enjoyed her." I had nothing polite to say to that. I had the answers I was looking for and all that remained was to pass the message on.

Chapter 6

The wind blustered through the man made canyons of the city driving the morose rain before it, soaking the cuffs of my trousers. The reflection of the sad street light struggled out of a muddy puddle in the road. As I trudged this soggy street the same bedraggled cat hissed at my feet from the soggy pile of cardboard that still littered the sidewalk. This was Fifth Street not Fifth Avenue, and two in the morning isn't a good time to be here unless. . . .

In the distance a trumpet wailed its sorrow into the night. I didn't need the note to tell me to follow that sound. I turned right into an even more depressing laneway and the trumpet was joined by a bass, drums, guitar and piano. What I could hear of the notes that fought their way to my ears through the other night sounds, the band wasn't half bad.

A flickering red neon led me to a bar at the very end of the lane. Pushing the door open I entered a world of smoke, of beer smells and the sounds of despair. The trumpet player lay down his instrument and began to sing in a voice that told of too many cigarettes, too much bad whisky and too much sadness, the raw emotion rode through his music like the freight train that he rode away from the hard times in New Orleans or Chicago and the small crowd sat in rapt silence while he sang.

I sat at the bar and Laura Lee reached under it for a bottle of her special whisky, poured a generous one for each of us and came over to me.

"What news have you got for me?"

"I have either good news or bad news, you decide." I couldn't think of a gentle way to break the news to her so I came straight out with it. "What does it feel like to be a widow?"

"You mean?"

"That's right Babe he's very dead. I know who did it and the police will probably even have enough to convict Benny over it."

"That's great! I know this sounds callous but I'm not sad that he's dead. He was a worthless bastard living so he can't be any more worthless dead. I had a look at his insurance policy and there's a large amount of money coming my way, enough to pay off what's owing on this joint, leaving me with a little funny money just for myself, I might even be able to hire someone to look after the joint while I take a vacation."

"Well it seems like a satisfactory result and I guess I have another satisfied customer."

"Are you? Satisfied I mean."

"As satisfied as I can be under the circumstances."

"Stick around, I would like to pay you tonight."

I stuck around. We were in her office. She gave me a wad of notes that was more than I was going to charge her. "Now I'll give you your bonus." She came into my arms and kissed me hard on the lips, her mouth opened and her tongue snaked forward meeting mine. The meeting of tongues was with a hunger that scared me, I hadn't realized that I needed this sex so bad. Lucy was good but she didn't match the strength and urgency of her mother and that had me wanting Laura Lee more than I ever imagined.

My hand went to her breast, I could feel her hard nipple through her blouse and bra. She moaned and pushed herself against my hand, her hips pushed forward and ground against my hard cock. One of her hands released itself from my neck and she reached between us and undid my trousers, it pushed under the waistband of my shorts and grabbed hold of my cock. "I want this inside me now." There was an urgency in her voice that told me that she was as hungry for sex as I was.

I swept aside the papers on her desk and picked her up, laying her down I took off her skirt and blouse leaving her with only black lace panties and bra. From my angle she looked very inviting so I slipped her panties down over her hips and she opened her legs revealing her dripping wet pussy, even more inviting. I lifted her legs up over my shoulders and pushed my cock inside her. She was tighter than I'd expected, I had thought that by her looks she had been around the block a few times but her pussy was squeezing my cock as it went in and out.

"Oh this is so good, you are much bigger than my bastard of a husband, not that I got that much from him, he was too busy spreading it around." Her eyes closed and her breath was coming in short gasps "Oh God this is good, I'm coming, quick, harder, harder." I was an obedient kind of guy so I fucked her harder and we both came in a fireworks display that was equal to any Fourth of July.

I took my cock out of her, bent down and licked her pussy clean. So of course she reciprocated, licking the juices from my cock and balls. We adjourned to her apartment over the bar and were side by side on her bed. I looked at her closely for the first time under a decent light, she must have been something of a beauty not that long ago because she wasn't as hard looking as she appeared under the lighting of the bar, in fact she was still good looking and I could get used to this. I kissed her softly on the lips and she rolled over onto her front and lifted her hips into the air. Moving behind her I mounted her and fucked her until we both came again.

Laying back and enjoying a post fuck Camel, she rested her head on my shoulder and exhaled a cloud of smoke towards the ceiling. "Here I was thinking that I would give you a bonus by letting you fuck me, but it was me that got the bonus. We, Stud, are going to have to keep this up until you catch up to me."

Like I said I'm and obedient kind of guy so I agreed with her that we should keep this going. It was some vacation we had and Laura Lee tells me that I still haven't caught up. I've closed my old office and opened a new one in the storeroom in back of the bar and we've got one of those gizmos with switches set up behind the bar that Laura Lee flicks when a client comes in or when she's not busy and just wants to talk sexy to me.