Death of a Batty Genius (Stormy Day Mystery #3) (25 page)

“If I had better news on the road situation, I wouldn’t be asking you to start an investigation on my behalf.”

“An investigation?” I swallowed hard. Franco’s death wasn’t a simple research job like the ones I’d been doing for Logan. If I accepted the case, my work would be scrutinized by everyone at the Misty Falls Police Department. If I screwed up, nobody would let me forget it. And if I did a great job, that could be even worse.

I mumbled, “I suppose… but then again…”

“You sound like a woman trying to talk herself into something and out of it at the same time, like me, when my friends were all playing cops and robbers with their grandchildren, and I decided my late-in-life calling was playing cops and robbers for real.”

“Peggy, I want to help, but you should know I don’t have my license, or even half the hours.”

“I can’t think of a better way for you to get your hours.”

“Then I’m on the case. I’ll start working on a timeline. The last person to see him was Della. What’s she saying?”

“That you’re a real mean five-letter-word who blocked in her car and got what she had coming.” Peggy snorted. “Don’t worry. I didn’t believe her about that. But I do believe her when she says she has no idea what happened to Franco after she left the room yesterday morning.”

“Poor girl.”

“Don’t you worry about Della. I’ll keep an eye on her. As for your investigation, let’s keep this between us for now. Find out anything and everything you can, within reason.”

“Anything and everything,” I repeated. “Within reason.”

She ended the call before I could clarify what she meant by
within reason
.

Butch and Christopher would be back soon with the body, and Peggy had mentioned her suspicions about it having been compromised.

I pulled out my laptop to review the notes from my online course in the basics of forensic pathology.

Sometimes it’s better to beg forgiveness than ask permission.

Chapter 27
 

Everyone’s got secrets,
big or small. Some secrets lurk beneath the human heart, some are written in password-protected computer diaries, and others are kept in plastic canisters inside the bathroom medicine cabinet.

I tapped on the door to Benji’s room. “How are things going in there?”

No answer.

I knocked again, harder. “Benji, I’m worried about you. It’s okay if you don’t feel like talking, but could you make a noise to let me know you’re alive? Give me one of your now-famous rooster noises.”

The door opened. Benji hadn’t changed his clothes since breakfast, and smelled of body odor. His glasses were so smudged by fingerprints, I was surprised he could see through them.

With no trace of humor, he said, “I don’t usually go around making rooster noises.”

He didn’t invite me in, but I went in anyway, coughing and pointing at my throat. “Water,” I croaked.

He stood aside and let me into his washroom. Still coughing, I closed the door and turned on the taps.

I’d made some notes before dropping in, and my first goal was to see if he was taking any medications that would explain his mood swings. Just like a bad party guest, I rifled through his things. Benji’s shaving bag contained a razor, products for sensitive skin, vitamin D, a crinkled and empty tube of foot cream, but no prescription medicine.

I left the washroom holding a full glass of water. He was trying to tidy the room, stuffing clothes into a suitcase.

“Don’t clean on my account,” I said. “Jessica’s getting tired of my company, so I thought I’d kill some time by checking in on you.” Uninvited, I took a seat on the room’s chair, positioned with its back to the patio door.

He shot me a wary look and continued packing. I fought the urge to confiscate his smudged glasses and clean them for him.

“You must be shaken up,” I said. “Seeing a body is shocking, and it can play tricks on your head. I’ve been through it a couple of times myself.”

“My head’s okay,” he said. “I wanted to pack anyway, so I can leave the minute I’m able.”

“Did you drive up? Which car is yours?”

He slowly folded a shirt while staring at my mouth instead of my eyes. Benji wasn’t an eye-contact sort of guy, so that wasn’t out of the ordinary for him.

“You’re asking a lot of questions,” he said. “Just like that cop. She’
s acting like this is a murder. Now you
’
re in here asking me things. You must be after something.”

“I want the same thing everyone does.” I sipped my water slowly, giving the impression I had all day. “I want to understand what happened. What possesses a man to throw a lamp through a sliding glass door, and then wander into the forest alone? Franco must have had a reason for going out there. You’re his friend. What do you think happened? Did he have a fight with Della, or did someone call and tell him something upsetting?”

Benji kept staring at my mouth. “I couldn’t possibly know what happened,” he said. “I wasn’t there. We were all at breakfast.”

“How about later in the day? You didn’t see Franco when you were on your way back from snowshoeing with me and Jessica?”

“No.” He turned his focus up to my eyes briefly, then down to the floor.

“You’re a smart guy. Do you have any theories about what happened?”

He met my gaze and held it, his eyes piercing behind the smudged lenses. “No.”

“Was it always just the four of you who were best friends? Was there anyone else? Someone who didn’t get invited to the reunion?”

He whipped his head and looked out at the patio. “Someone else could be up here. They could have done everything.” His voice betrayed his excitement about this new idea. “It wasn’t one of us.”

“Who’s out there, Benji? Who popped into your head just now?”

“Nobody.” His posture crumpled. He sat on the edge of the bed, looking down at his feet, at the hole in one of his socks. “For a second, I had a person in mind, but it was vague, like the scary killer in a slasher movie. There’s nobody out there. Nobody with a name.”

“The gang was always just the four of you. Like the four tree frogs on your Rainforest Delight.”

“We weren’t exactly popular.”

“I bet you guys had some fun together.”

“We did. We were so young when we built that treehouse.” Benji smiled at the memory.

With patience, I asked him about those early days.

He told me how Marie’s parents had supplied the lumber, and he’d drawn up a blueprint for the treehouse, but Dion and Franco had been too busy clowning around to follow the plans. They were more interested in banging nails into things than getting wood cut to the right length.

The treehouse was between their four homes, and they met up constantly, without having to call each other. “You showed up whenever you wanted to be alone, or have some company, and it always worked out,” he said wistfully. “We kept a bunch of our books in there, and sometimes other kids went inside, but they didn’t wreck anything because they were afraid of Franco.”

“Franco used to intimidate other kids? Like a bully?”

Benji abruptly got to his feet. “Thanks again for stopping in.” He reached for the two books on his nightstand. He chucked the sci-fi paperback into his suitcase, then handed me the other one—the thick book about criminal code that I’d loaned him. “Thanks for the book. I found it very interesting. I read some chapters during the power outage. I’ll finish packing, and maybe I’ll meet you and Jessica in the recreation room to play a board game later.”

I accepted the book, but wasn’t ready to go. Buying time, I flipped it open to the middle page.

The book let out a very loud, very telltale crack.

Benji flinched.

“That was the spine cracking,” I said. “This book has never been opened, which means you just told me a lie.” I crossed my legs and my arms.

He got flustered immediately. Nobody likes being called on their lies, especially not people who desperately want to be adored by others.

Rubbing his forehead, he hyperventilated, seemingly on the verge of swearing, then spat out, “Franco was trying to blackmail me.”

“Was he after one of your chemical formulas?”

“No. Money.”

A moment of silence passed. “Did Franco have something on you? Some crime from your youth? Is that why you were interested in the criminal code book? To see how bad whatever you did was?”

By Benji’s stunned expression, I knew I was on the right track.

His voice cracking, Benji said, “I didn’t look in the book. I decided to pay him, even though I didn’t do anything wrong. I’m innocent. If people would listen to me, they’d know.”

I uncrossed my legs. “I’m right here, and I don’t have anywhere else to go. I promise to listen with an open mind.”

I relaxed my posture, leaned back, and nodded to let him know he could unburden himself without interruption.

He took a deep breath. “Franco was wrong, but he still thought he could get some money before it was all gone. He said he knew about my old car, the Plymouth. He came to my room on the first night, not long before your cat wandered in.”

He stopped talking, so I gently asked, “What happened with the car? At dinner, the story was that you’d smashed it into the wall of your garage while parking. Is there more to the accident?”

“What happened wasn’t what Franco thought, I swear. But he might have told someone else.” He paused and pushed his smudged glasses up his nose. “What do you charge for investigations?”

“I’m not taking new cases at the moment.”

“I just need to know one thing. What happened to Butch last night? He says it was no big deal, but he has that lump on his head. He’s hiding something, or he knows something. Someone tried to get rid of him.”

“He’s too tough to get rid of easily. What did you see outside yesterday evening, during the storm?”

“Nothing. I was right here in my room. All night. I have proof.” He pulled his laptop out of his suitcase, tapped away for a moment, then turned it to show me a video of himself. The sound was off, but he appeared to be alone, talking to his laptop.

“Here’s my alibi,” he said. “I started making a video, but then I got distracted when the power went out. The laptop switched to battery backup, and the recording ran for hours. If somebody was outside last night, knocking out Butch, this proves it wasn’t me.”

He fast-forwarded through a couple of hours of himself sitting on the bed reading a paperback sci-fi novel, using his phone as a flashlight. He slowed the video to regular speed and zoomed in on the narrow gap between the curtains covering the patio door. A face appeared in the darkness. My face. It was me, knocking on doors the night before, after the mudslide.

“I’m your alibi,” I said. “That’s pretty solid. It’s too bad you were hiding in here and didn’t answer the door. We might have stopped whoever it was before they whacked Butch and got to Franco.”

Benji hung his head. “I know. I feel terrible.”

“Della was already gone by that point, so that clears her, unless she hit Butch on the back of the head before she left, maybe suspecting that he told Franco about the two of them kissing.” I shook my head. No, that wasn’t likely. She’d left in the late afternoon, so it would have been a long time for someone to be knocked out in the storm, even a tough guy like Butch.

Benji said, “Marie hates her husband right now.”

“Sure, but Butch also could have been fighting with Franco, or even Dion.”

“Or Christopher.”

“My Christopher? He was with me in the car, then we checked the caves…” And then he went out to the generator by himself. But why would Christopher hit Butch? It made no sense. A good investigator keeps an open mind, but that was just too far open.

“How does this work?” Benji asked. “Do I pay you by the hour, or by the day? Name your fee. Someone should get a piece of Biggs Foods before the lawyers rip it apart.”

“Let me think about it.” I got up to leave.

“I need you,” Benji pleaded. “You and that cop both think someone murdered Franco. You’re already investigating me as a suspect, so let me pay you to look wider.”

I pursed my lips and cursed myself for being so obvious. Benji was a genius, after all. “How did you know?”

“You’re good, but I heard the click of the medicine cabinet when you were in my bathroom. Before that, I heard the high-pitched ring of your phone through the wall, right after I finished my video call with the police. It was Peggy Wiggles phoning you, right?”

I moved closer to the door.

Benji pleaded, “Help me.”

“I don’t know if I
can
help you.”

“You can’t make things worse. Please. I’m not good at asking for help, but here I am, asking.”

Time passed. I heard my father in my head.
Stormy, it never hurts to have one more friend.
He typically used it as his excuse for flirting with every woman he encountered, but it was still good advice.

Benji’s eyes looked so sad behind his smudged glasses.

“Sure,” I said with a long exhale. “But you can’t tell anyone I’m working for you, and I don’t guarantee results.”

He rummaged through his suitcase for his checkbook, then wrote me a check with no dollar amount. I accepted the check with no intention of cashing it. I was already working for Peggy, and I would only pretend to be working with Benji to ensure his cooperation.