Murderers' Row Read online

  Murderers Row

  Dan Andriacco

  First published in 2020 by

  MX Publishing

  335 Princess Park Manor

  Royal Drive, London, N11 3GX

  www.mxpublishing.com

  Digital edition converted and distributed by

  Andrews UK Limited

  www.andrewsuk.com

  Copyright © 2020 Dan Andriacco

  The right of Dan Andriacco to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without express prior written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted except with express prior written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damage.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Cover design Brian Belanger

  I happily dedicate this book (especially “Dead on the Fourth of July”) to my Sherlockian friends:

  Patty Bertsch

  Ridgely Hunt

  Marc Lehmann

  S. Brent Morris

  Bob Sharfman

  Al Shaw

  Daniel Stashower

  ...and to the memory of Professor Ben Sterling

  —magicians all

  Introduction

  Dear Reader,

  Welcome back! Or, if you are a newcomer to these precincts, welcome aboard!

  Especially for the benefit of those making a return visit, Lynda, my better three-quarters, wanted me to clarify something upfront:

  Up to now, I’ve been able to present these chronicles of Sebastian McCabe in the order in which they happened. The current volume, however, includes what I think of as “in-fill.” The cases here recorded as “A Destination Murder” and “Dead on the Fourth of July” both happened before the events of the most recent book, Too Many Clues. To see when the primary action of each installment of the series takes place, please consult the chronology at the back of this book. I may need to consult it myself as memory fades.

  By the way, all the Barbados locations mentioned in “A Destination Murder” are real, although in some cases the names are not.

  Why the delay in publishing the following cases? They were less complicated than most of Mac’s exploits, and therefore shorter to tell. So, as with the first Sebastian McCabe-Jeff Cody case book, Rogues Gallery, I waited until I had several such shorter accounts to put them together between the covers of a book. I hope you’ll agree they were worth the wait.

  —Jeff Cody

  A Destination Murder

  I

  Murder and matrimony shouldn’t mix, but nobody planned it that way—not even the murderer.

  The news that our friends Maureen “Mo” Russert and Jonathan Hawes planned to end their long engagement by tying the proverbial knot in Barbados—and on St. Valentine’s Day, no less—elicited only mild interest on my part when Lynda broke the news over breakfast one morning. At first, I didn’t even look up from the Saturday Wall Street Journal.

  The S&P 500 Index had gone crazy that fall in the aftermath of the just-concluded 2016 election. Even for a long-term investor like me, that caused a few stomach-flutters. But by the beginning of December, when this conversation took place, the S&P stood at two-and-a-half times where it was at the Great Recession low point in 2008. The only people losing money in the market were the short sellers, speculators who bet on stocks to go down. All this was going through my head when Lynda followed her initial announcement about the nuptials with:

  “A destination wedding on a Caribbean island paradise. Don’t you think that’s just so romantic?”

  Assuming she was talking to me, not our infant daughter in the high-chair, I responded.

  “Uh-huh.” Maybe I should rebalance our asset allocation now instead of waiting until the end of the quarter.

  “I’ll need to buy a new outfit, of course, something bright and island-y.”

  “Uh-huh.” But the end of the quarter is only—wait a minute! I put down the WSJ. “What are you talking about, Lyn?”

  “The wedding. Barbados. St. Valentine’s Day. Pay attention, darling.” Lynda Teal Cody, my wife and the love of my life, pouted prettily. So, I paid attention. Oval face, olive skin, gold-flecked brown eyes, cutely crooked nose, a head of honey blond curls—suddenly I was having romantic thoughts that had nothing to do with somebody else’s wedding. With some effort, I dragged the Cody concentration back to the subject at hand.

  “I was listening.” You had me at “buy.” “But I think you skipped a few of the dots. What does the Russert-Hawes wedding have to do with you?”

  “I’m Mo’s matron of honor. Didn’t I tell you that?”

  “No!”

  “Really? I thought sure I did. Well, I am. I was honored to be asked. And Mac’s the best man.”

  “What? Why him?”

  “Well, he does have experience at that particular gig. Remember our wedding?”

  “Vividly.” Meaning I recalled Lynda’s mother, and the horrors of her pre-wedding antics[1] as well as the fun parts, like seeing Mac in a tux and dancing with Lynda to the songs of Sinatra.

  “Besides, he’s Mo’s business partner,” Lynda added. My brother-in-law and Mo own Mo’s Mysteries & Marvels bookstore together, with Mac as the supposedly silent partner. Jonathan, for his part, owns Hawes & Holder, Erin, Ohio’s premier funeral home. “And it all works out perfectly because Mac has a good friend in Barbados. Some Sherlockian muckety muck.” No surprise there; Sebastian McCabe has friends everywhere, many of them sharing his childish passion for the character they often call the Great Detective or simply the Master.

  A suspicion dawned on me. “Was Barbados your idea?” I asked.

  What I knew about the island was restricted to a few beautiful images from the James Bond movie Dragonfly, which the movie star Heather O’Toole was filming during the murder of her super-rich husband.[2] And HO’T, as the tabloids invariably called her, and my beloved spouse had become friends of sorts during our time in London.

  “Don’t be silly. That was Mo’s brainstorm.”

  “But February’s just around the corner. Weddings are usually planned months in advance. Why the rush? She isn’t—”

  “No, she isn’t. I don’t think. She just decided it’s time. And it’s going to be a very small wedding, just us chickens, so the planning is no big deal.”

  Mo is a good egg, a real sweetheart who got a raw deal when her stuffy first husband, one Arthur Bancroft Russert, left her and their two daughters for another woman. He paid his alimony and child support on time and was dutiful to the girls, though, according to Mo. That made the break-up relatively easy—except for a hole it left in Mo’s heart. The couple of times I took her out in my bachelor days, during a four-week period in which Lynda and I were on pause in our relationship, made it clear I wasn’t the man to fill that hole. That turned out to be Jonathan’s role.

  “This destination wedding thing is all very well for the bride and groom, but it sounds expensive,” I objected. “That will still be the high season in the Caribbean. And what do we do with Dona
ta?” I wasn’t worried about my two McCabe nieces and their brother. Being in their teens and extraordinarily responsible, they could fend for themselves for a few days, with occasional help. But our daughter wasn’t quite fourteen months old. She looked up from her Cheerios at the mention of her name, seemingly puzzled, but no more so than me. The day had just begun, and I was already losing control. As usual.

  Lynda left Donata’s side, came up behind me, and put her arms around me. The scent of Cleopatra VII perfume lingered on her from the night before.

  “Mac’s mom said she’d be happy to move in for a few days. Let’s take advantage of that while we can. She may not be so eager when we have more kiddos.” We would, in fact, have two more less than a year later, but we didn’t know it at the time. “Think of this as a second honeymoon, tesoro mio.” The suggestion was whispered in my ear in a way that gave me goose bumps. Lynda’s throaty voice was at its throaty-est. But Jeff Cody is not that easily distracted in mid-grump.

  “Second honeymoon, eh?” I said. “You do remember that there was a murder during our first honeymoon, don’t you?”

  “And that’s a great reason for a do-over! I mean, nothing like that’s going to happen this time, right?”

  II

  A couple of months later, on Friday, February 10, we stepped off a Jet Blue plane at Grantley Adams International Airport in Bridgetown, the capital of Barbados. The temperature was in the mid-eighties, more than thirty degrees higher than what we left behind in Ohio.

  “Who turned on the heat in this country?” my sister Kate asked. A week earlier, she’d been griping about the cold and asking if winter would never end.

  Fortunately, we were all dressed for the islands. Even Mac had clothed his immense girth in a short-sleeved shirt with a palm tree design, worn with the shirt tail out. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

  Barbadians, I learned from Frommer’s, are commonly called Bajans. Mac’s Bajan friend, who met us at the gate, was a tall, distinguished-looking black gent with white hair. I found out later he was eighty-one, but with baby-smooth skin he looked more than a decade younger.

  “Mac, old friend!” he exclaimed, making a futile attempt to put his arms around the big guy. He spoke with an accent that sounded to me more Scottish than the English variety you hear in Jamaica. I won’t attempt to convey it phonetically here.

  “Sir Owen, it has been far too long,” Mac said.

  The Bajan hastily introduced himself to the rest of us: “Owen Cumberbatch, at your service.”

  “Cumberbatch?” Lynda blurted.

  Sir Owen smiled broadly. “It’s the most common surname on the island. There are even some whites named Cumberbatch up north. Forgive my lack of originality.”

  “Lynda is quite the fan of a certain Sherlockian actor of that name,” Mac informed him. I was staying out of it.

  “Many young women are, I understand. Benedict Cumberbatch is that gentleman’s real name from birth. His ancestors were pioneering plantation owners here going back to the seventeenth century. They had many slaves, which is why the name is so widespread.”

  The four of us—Mo and Jonathan had arrived the day before but didn’t come to the airport to greet us—piled into Sir Owen’s red Honda CRV.

  “They call us Little England, you know,” he said as we tooled through the capital city.

  “Is that why you have that statue of Lord Nelson, like the one in Trafalgar Square?” I pointed.

  “Actually, ours came first—by almost thirty years.”

  Oh.

  “And the square it dominates here was also called Trafalgar, but the name was changed almost twenty years ago to National Heroes Square.”

  Sir Owen drove fast through the narrow streets (and on the wrong side), but so did everybody else. I was all eyes as he sped us to our hotel on the Atlantic Ocean side of the 166-square-mile island. The flowers were so full and waxy they looked artificial. Women dressed to the nines in colorful dresses walked along the side of the road—there were no sidewalks—carrying umbrellas against the heat of the sun. Men played dominos, sitting at little tables outside of shack-like buildings decorated with signs for Banks beer, Mount Gay Rum, or even Guinness.

  “The fabled rum shops, are they not?” Mac rumbled.

  “Oh, yes,” Sir Owen confirmed. “And when the patrons get drunk, they sing Anglican hymns. I hope you don’t mind that I took the liberty of buying you tickets to the Hazel Carter concert tomorrow night.”

  “Here?” I won’t say that Lynda shrieked like a teenager. But she did. Hazel Carter had just exploded onto the pop music scene the year before, quickly attracting an international fandom known as Hazelnuts. She was the most famous Bajan entertainer since Rihanna.

  Sir Owen nodded. “It’s a big charity event for babies born addicted to drugs. Half the residents of the island will be there, and just about all the tourists. Hazelnuts are coming from all over the map. I jumped on the tickets as soon as they became available.”

  “I suspect that Sir Owen pulled some strings,” Mac, riding shotgun, told Kate with a knowing wink.

  “Thank you, Sir Owen,” she said. “How incredibly thoughtful.”

  Lynda leaned forward from the back seat. “So, what line of work are you in, Sir Owen?”

  “Oh, I’m a retired dabbler. I was an economics professor at the University of the West Indies, and a business consultant, which got me on the boards of a few companies. And then I did a bit of writing for the Nation, our biggest newspaper. Then, finally, I reached my level of incompetency by falling into a government job.”

  “To be specific,” Mac said, “Sir Owen was until recently the Governor-General of Barbados, meaning he was the official representative of Her Majesty the Queen. The position comes with a title and a residence called Government House.” Not too shabby. “However, that pales next to Sir Owen’s accomplishments as a scholar of detective fiction, particularly that of the Golden Age and all things Sherlock Holmes.”

  I filed that assessment of relative importance under Mac’s Peculiar Perspectives.

  “Wow. Is there anything you haven’t done?” Lynda exclaimed.

  Sir Owen thought a moment. “Omelets. I tried once, but my breakfast cooking skills are sadly deficient. Also, I am sad to say I have never solved a murder, unlike our distinguished friend here.” Mac preened, although he probably thought he was looking modest. “I must admit that’s a secret ambition of mine, solving a murder—although I doubt that will ever happen.”

  Also, it’s no longer a secret.

  I went back to looking at the scenery.

  “What’s with all those small wooden houses?” I asked. There were a lot of them dotting the landscape when we got out of Bridgetown, many in bad shape.

  “They’re called chattel houses, and they date back to plantation days in Barbados. What makes them distinctive is that they are made of wood, not concrete block, and they have no nails so that they can be easily disassembled and moved to another property. Working-class people owned them, but they didn’t own the land. So, if they had a dispute with the landlord, usually the owner of the plantation where they worked, they could pick up the house and move it. Even though many have fallen apart, the island still has thousands. Some have been added to over the years to be much bigger than they began.”

  Housing always interests me, so I asked why so many of the newer concrete block houses were unpainted or only partially painted.

  Sir Owen smiled. “If they aren’t painted, they aren’t finished. And if they aren’t finished, the property taxes on them are lower.”

  Clever, these Bajans!

  “I noticed a lot of men in dreadlocks,” Kate said. “Are they all Rastafarians?”

  The old man sobered up. “Not necessarily. That hairstyle is now generally popular. But we do still have our share of Rastas. You may associ
ate them with smoking cannabis, and rightly so, but they are not entirely responsible for the regrettable amount of drug smuggling on the island—especially weed, but also cocaine.”

  In far less time than it took us to drive from Erin to the airport in Cleveland for our Jet Blue flight, we were on the other side of the island—the east coast. Sir Owen dropped us off at our destination of Naniki in the parish of St. Joseph. (The island is divided into eleven parishes, or counties, each of which has an Anglican church of that name.) Naniki is a complex that includes a wellness center (with ozone therapy!) and a restaurant as well as our cottages. The happy couple were also staying at Naniki, and already in residence a few cottages away from the adjoining Cody and McCabe abodes.

  Not wanting to crash in on the lovebirds, and in need of a nap herself after a long day of travel, Lynda called Mo’s cell from Sir Owen’s car. She arranged for us to meet up with the bride-to-be and Jonathan for dinner. Sir Owen recommended the fish fry at Oistins Bay Gardens, well-known to both visitors and locals.

  We arrived at Oistins, a fishing town on the south coast, at about 5:45 that evening. The four of us strolled along the pier, two couples holding hands, and watched a spectacular sunset. Lynda put her head on my shoulder.

  “Worth it?” she asked me.

  “Absolutely.” You can’t buy a sunset.

  Oistins Bay Gardens is a bit on the rustic side, with open-air dining at long tables and old-timers playing dominos. All manner of fish, grilled or fried depending on the vendor you chose, was cooked on the spot.

  “Utterly charming,” Mac proclaimed it.

  I choked back a knee-jerk dissenting view because, in truth, he was right. Not only that, the place was real, not just a tourist production, although there were plenty of tourists among the natives. As we walked around, I caught snippets of the locals speaking Bajan creole, sounding not at all like Sir Owen:

  “Wuna eat de fish?”