Murder of the Maestro Read online

  “Yep!” Jack replied. “Is there room for us to squeeze by on those stairs without disturbing your work or do we need to get to the house some other way?” Hank took a quick look.

  “If you’re careful.” Tony let out a puff of air as if he had something to say.

  “What? It’s dirt, for crying out loud! We’ll take a sample in case the lab rats can use it to figure out where the heck it came from, but otherwise we’re not going to get much from it. I’m planning on having you sweep it onto the ground to clear the steps once we’ve made sure there aren’t any more paper shreds.”

  Jack moved quickly up those steps, perhaps wanting to get to the top before Hank changed his mind. I hustled as fast as I could, too. As I passed Hank, I heard him muttering to himself about dirt and rocks and litter. We only had a few more steps to go when a noise from above caused us all to freeze in place.

  8 Dave’s Devoted Fan

  “Hank,” a voice cried out. “We’ve picked up a guy in a hoodie and sweats. You want to send those folks up here…” He stopped mid-sentence when he stepped into view at the top of the stairs and spotted us on our way up. My heart thumped from the exertion but had also revved up at the prospect of coming face-to-face with our attacker.

  “Where is he, Murray?” Hank hollered from below.

  “At the maestro’s house on the lower level deck. Mike Benson’s holding him. That Personal Assistant came running out when she heard us shouting at the guy. We told her what was going on, and she said Detective Wheeler and the Shaw woman were on their way to the house.”

  “And so, we are,” Jack said, hustling up the stairs. I scrambled up behind him hoping that our attacker and Dave Rollins’ killer might be in the hands of the police. That hope dimmed the moment I caught sight of the wisp of a man Mike Benson had seated at a table on the maestro’s veranda.

  His clothes were soiled enough to believe he’d filled a five-gallon bucket with dirt and rocks. Still, he was so scrawny there was no way he could lift forty pounds, much less dump it on us. His weathered skin and the worn-out expression in his eyes had me convinced, at first, that he was my age, or close to it. As he spoke, and I took a closer look at Charlie Daniels, I guessed he was more likely in his thirties.

  “It wasn’t me! You’ve got the wrong guy.”

  “The wrong guy for what?” Jack asked.

  “I don’t know. Whatever you think I done that someone else done that wasn’t me because I haven’t done nothing I shouldn’t a done.” Charlie twitched as he spoke, growing more anxious, and more aggravated too if I was reading him right.

  “How do you explain the oversized dirty gloves you have on and the signed picture of Dave Rollins?” That was Murray posing the questions—Officer Murray Oates as we’d learned once we’d made our way through the back gate and onto the maestro’s sprawling patio.

  “The wolfman gave ‘em to me back there on the Bu cliff trail.” I opened my mouth to speak. Bu’s a term some locals use for Malibu, so that term didn’t surprise me.

  “Wolfman?” I burst out, speaking the word as if it were a question. “You’re not serious, are you?” In the next instant, a stream of Marvelous Marley World characters sprang to mind, one after the other. Could someone in a character costume have been roaming around out there on the trail or had the jerk who’d attacked us put one on in his effort to escape? “You don’t mean Wee Wily Wolf, do you?”

  All eyes were upon me. Puzzled expressions in them, although Jack couldn’t hide a twinkle of amusement in his. Charlie was incredulous, but at least he knew to whom I was referring.

  “You think I don’t know enough to tell you if it was Wee Wily Wolf and not a man?” He shook his head. “The guy who gave me the gloves and the picture had on running clothes with a shirt under his jacket that said wolfman. Or something like that. I might a seen him someplace before, but he wasn’t Wee Wily Wolf. Now you’ve got me confused.”

  At that moment, I heard voices from inside Dave’s house. Pat and Adam came to the back door. They both joined us on the veranda.

  “Charlie, what are you doing out there?” Adam asked. Charlie stared at Adam Middlemarch, his eyes widened as though wary at first.

  “You know this gentleman?” Jack asked.

  “Oh, yes. He’s a devoted fan of the maestro’s,” Adam replied smiling at Charlie. Dave’s devoted fan relaxed. “He knows every song Dave Rollins ever wrote—by heart! Dave and I have both heard him sing some of them. Charlie has given me a hand a time or two when he was hanging around out front on the street singing, and we invited him in.”

  “That’s where we found him—on the street in front of the house,” Mike Benson offered. “He wasn’t singing.”

  “I will if you want me to, but I don’t feel like it. Dave told me he liked my singing. I’m sad he’s dead.” Charlie’s furrowed brow and downturned mouth reflected the sentiment expressed by those words.

  “We’re sad, too,” I said in a soft tone. I was not only sad about Dave’s death, but the fact that his killer was still out on the loose. “Where did you meet up with the wolfman?”

  “At the overlook about an hour ago,” Charlie responded, pointing in the direction we’d come from when we climbed those stairs, although the overlook was a little past the point where the stairs met the trail. “Maybe it wasn’t even an hour. I don’t wear a watch.” A little shiver rolled down my spine. The timing was about right. Surprising though. If I’d just unloaded a bucket of rocks on a couple of people, I’d have run for it.

  “What did the wolfman look like?” I asked, hoping Charlie’s response wouldn’t have anything to do with “big and hairy with sharp teeth,” or I figured our conversation would be over.

  “Ordinary. About as tall as me, but bigger—especially in the belly. Too much beer,” Charlie said patting his own flat, almost concave, abdomen.

  His notion of what was a big belly might be a whole lot different than mine, I thought.

  “Thanks,” Jack said. “Anything else you can remember, like the color of his hair or eyes. Did he have a scar or a tattoo or any marks on him like that?”

  “He had real dark sunglasses on and his hood was up. I could only see a little hair—it was white.” A word Jack had used when we were still down on the beach ricocheted through my mind—Unabomber. Charlie’s description fit.

  “Blond, like Officer Benson here?” Murray asked. Charlie scowled at the officer, shook his head and rolled his eyes upward.

  “I said white, not blond. White like Santa Claus, you know?” Another surge of disappointment hit me. I doubted the rock thrower was a senior citizen with a beer belly. My hope dimmed that Charlie had in fact seen the man who’d sent us that message in the form of a bucket of rocks, but I kept at it.

  “Are you saying he was an older man?” I prodded.

  “Older than me, but not as old as him.” Charlie pointed to Jack when he said that. “It is strange he had white hair, huh? Okay, so maybe not ordinary.”

  “Do you remember what color clothes he had on?” Murray posed that question.

  “Dark. More blue than black like the gloves he gave me because he said I looked cold. I thought he was being nice. Now I wish he’d left me alone. The top part had a zipper that was mostly unzipped. That’s how I saw the wolfman shirt. It was red with this fancy writing on it.”

  “How about the picture? Where did that come from?” Murray asked.

  “He gave it to me; only what he wanted to do was give it to me in pieces.”

  “What?” I asked thinking about the shreds on the beach.

  “Yeah, crazy, huh? He was getting ready to throw it away. It fell onto the ground when he was cleaning out his backpack. I told him I wanted it and that’s when he said, ‘request it in pieces’ or somethin’ like that. I told him that was stupid. I wanted the whole thing or nothing. It’s a signed picture! Dave already gave me one just like it, but somebody else will buy this one. I can use a few bucks.” Charlie shrugged.

  “How come
you let it get dirty if you planned to sell it?” Murray asked.

  “I didn’t do that. It was already dirty. The backpack he had with him was full of trash. He must have been digging down on the beach with the shovel he had and got everything dirty like his gloves. The guy had one of those cool metal detectors in there, too.”

  “Small enough to fit in his backpack?” Jack asked, sounding skeptical. Charlie nodded.

  “Yes.”

  We’d watched some guy on the beach in Crystal Cove beachcombing recently. The device the man had used folded up, maybe small enough that it could have fit into a backpack. It was certainly much smaller than the ones that had intrigued me when I was a child. I’m not sure what difference it made in determining whether the wolfman was our rock thrower. The shovel fit if that’s what he’d used to load the bucket.

  “Um, okay. Officer Benson’s going to take your statement, for the record. Start at the beginning. Tell him when you ran into the wolfman, and exactly where you were, too.” Then Jack turned and spoke to the officer.

  “Mike, before you take that statement from him, why don’t you have Charlie show you where the guy dumped the trash. Let’s get the CSIs to come and collect the garbage and maybe it’ll help us identify the wolfman.” Now Mike was the one who wore a skeptical expression.

  “Hey, it’s not likely, but it’s worth a shot. I don’t think that guy was a beachcomber looking for lost wedding rings, do you?” Jack asked.

  “He wouldn’t have filled the bucket on the beach and hauled it up all those stairs,” I added. Mike looked at me for a moment and then nodded.

  “On our way to the overlook, we’ll see if we can find a place where he might have filled it. He can’t have hauled it far from where he stood at the top of those stairs, either. He wasn’t very smart if he was just standing around chatting with Charlie after what he did to you two.” It’s as if Mike had read my earlier thoughts. Charlie’s eyes widened.

  “Did he try to get you to request it in pieces, too?” Charlie asked looking at me and then at Jack. “That’s not against the law, is it?”

  I shook my head no, wondering once again why the guy would have asked Charlie such a thing. One lost soul trying to connect with another, perhaps, and babbling incoherently. Or Charlie had it wrong which seemed more likely.

  “Don’t worry about it, Charlie. Let’s go. Who knows how long it will take for the county to get someone out here to go through the garbage.” Charlie was not going to argue with that order from Mike. He was on his feet, still hanging onto that picture.

  “You can take Charlie’s statement while you’re waiting,” Jack suggested. “We’re going to need that picture, though.”

  Charlie objected to that and held it close to his chest. Someone needed to end this so Mike and Charlie could get back to that garbage can before someone could empty it. I dug out my wallet, hoping I had some cash.

  “Charlie, I’m going to buy it from you, okay? How much do you want for it?”

  “Five bucks,” Charlie replied hastily, holding that photo out for me.

  “All I have is a ten—how about you take that as payment for those gloves, too?”

  “Deal!” Charlie grabbed the money, grinning. That smile made him appear much younger. I hoped he wouldn’t do anything stupid with that ten dollars. He could use a decent meal.

  Jack put on another pair of latex gloves he had in his jacket pocket and carefully placed the picture into an evidence bag. The gloves went into another one.

  “Murray, will you take these to Hank, please, and let him log them in?”

  “Sure.”

  “That was quick thinking, Georgie. I doubt we’ll get a fingerprint from that picture even if the guy who gave it to Charlie handed it to him after removing his gloves, but who knows?”

  “Those CSI guys are wizards. Maybe there’s something on the inside of the gloves. What do we do with Charlie?” Mike Benson asked.

  “Charlie are you willing to let the CSIs take a DNA sample?”

  “To rule me out, right? Like on those TV shows?”

  “Right!” I responded without thinking. Charlie wasn’t as far gone as he’d seemed. “He’s got that right, doesn’t he, Jack?”

  “Yes. Charlie, tell Officer Benson how we can get in touch with you again, okay?”

  “Like for a lineup so I can pick out the wolfman? That would be cool!”

  “Maybe something like that,” Jack replied. Then he spoke to Mike. “When he’s taken you to that dump site and given the CSIs that sample, let him go. I don’t see a reason to hold him.”

  “That’s good to hear. Charlie’s okay.” Jack and I both turned around to see Adam standing near the glass sliding doors that lead into the kitchen. In the excitement, I’d forgotten all about him and the fact that we’d originally come here to check on his whereabouts at the time we’d been accosted on the stairs. That seemed less important if our nemesis was a white-haired, wolfman with a paunch. Adam was indeed big enough to have done the dirty deed, but no white hair and no paunch.

  “Where’s Pat?” Jack asked. “We’d like to speak to the two of you.”

  “Pat wants to talk to you, too. Come on in and have a seat. She’ll be here as soon as the insurance adjuster has left. Help yourself to some bottled water from the fridge if you’re thirsty. Watch where you walk or sit. The place is still a wreck although I tried to clean up the food that was starting to stink.”

  “Thanks, Adam.” I said as he headed from the kitchen into the great room.” I slipped into a chair in the morning room where Pat and I had sat the day before.

  “I could use some water. You want some?” Jack asked.

  “Yes,” I replied realizing that the dust and exercise had left my throat dry. That might also have been related to anxious thoughts that had occurred to me once I sat down and had a moment to catch my breath. “A wolfman with white hair, a potbelly, and dressed like the Unabomber,” I harrumphed.

  “So much for a pleasant Sunday stroll,” Jack commented as he handed me a bottle of water and joined me at the table. “That’ll teach us to change our plans.”

  “What I want to know is how the wolfman knew where we were going to be today to issue that invitation to go away?”

  “I was wondering the same thing. Did you tell Pat we were planning to join her at the house using those stairs?”

  “Not directly. When she said she was going to be busy with the claims adjustor a while longer, I’m sure I told her not to worry about it since we’d park in the beach lot and walk over to the house from there.”

  “Do you have any idea who was with her at the time?”

  “No, but let’s ask Pat.”

  “Ask me what?” At the sound of Pat’s voice, I nearly jumped out of my skin. “I’m sorry, Georgie. You two have had a rough day, haven’t you? I wasn’t trying to sneak up on you.”

  “We were preoccupied, trying to figure out how someone knew enough about where we’d be to load up a bucket of rocks and dump it on us as we climbed up those stairs.”

  “Hmm, that’s odd, isn’t it?” As she asked that question, she went to the fridge for a bottle of water and then dropped into the chair next to me.

  “I know you weren’t alone when I called. Was anyone within earshot when I told you we were on our way?”

  “Roger Winters came with an army. He and his crew were standing around. They could all have heard me tell Adam you were on your way to join us after your walk on the beach.”

  “Where’s your assistant now?” Jack asked.

  “He’s helping load art and collectibles into a van. Apparently, in addition to Roger’s team, Jennifer asked a packing and storage crew to show up, too. I wasn’t sure why she hadn’t told me in advance, so I called and discussed it with her. She argued those items shouldn’t remain in the house while the cleaning and restoration work gets done, especially since we don’t know how an intruder got into Dave’s house. Some items will get distributed to other people once the will has
been read, so preparing them to be moved or shipped needed to happen sooner or later. Anyway, Adam always gets roped into helping when there’s heavy lifting to be done.”

  “Did they ask for his assistance earlier in the day?” Pat’s brow furrowed as she pondered Jack’s question.

  “Yes. They put him to work, off and on, moving furniture so they could take photos of the damage or asked for his help to locate items to be packed from the list Jennifer had given them. Most of the time he was with Roger Winters and me, but not the entire time.”

  “How much do you know about Adam?”

  “Dave hired him, not me. I took him on as a helper at Dave’s request. Adam worked at Marvelous Marley World in park maintenance and asked Dave for help moving into the performance side of the company. I can’t tell you how that came about. Maybe they met at one of the open auditions the company offers every so often. According to Dave, Adam has a nice singing voice, but needs more professional training in music and performance. He’s enrolled in a community college and taking voice lessons but quit his job at Marvelous Marley World.”

  “Does that mean he wasn’t able to make the switch into the Entertainment Division?” Carol could find out easily enough, but I wanted to hear what Pat had to say.

  “Yes. Dave told me he tried to talk Adam into staying put. He left in good standing and told Dave he’d try again once he’s made more progress with his singing lessons.”

  “How’s he making a living if he quit his job?” Jack asked.

  “He parlayed his handyman work for Dave into jobs elsewhere. Adam gave me a few Middlemarch Home Maintenance business cards he had printed up to give to anyone looking for a handyman. He’s not a very talkative guy, but flexible, dependable, and stays on task. I’ve never felt the need to get to know him better, personally, so I can’t tell you much more about him.”

  “Okay. That’s helpful. Thanks,” Jack said. “Adam said you had something you wanted to tell us. What is it?”