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Andrews UK - Dan Andriacco

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120 pages

English

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There's no holiday from homicide for amateur sleuth Sebastian McCabe and his long-suffering brother-in-law, Jeff Cody. Murderers' Row, their second casebook of shorter stories, collects three adventures connected with what should have been happy occasions.When Meg Russert's destination wedding on the tropical island of Barbados becomes A Destination Murder, Mac is a fish out of water dealing with a local police inspector less than impressed by his qualifications as a detective. But, as usual, Mac special help from a friend in high places. But will it be enough?Erin's annual Independence Day parade takes a stunning turn when a controversial activist looking on from the sidelines turns up Dead on the Fourth of July. Jeff, who was watching the victim the entire time, swears that only a magician could have committed this impossible crime!When the estranged husband of an Erin Eagles supporter is shot to death outside the team stadium, Mac and Jeff find themselves involved in the offbeat world of independent minor league baseball. By the end of the case, Jeff solves a different mystery and loses blood.

Informations

Publié par	Andrews UK
Date de parution	08 septembre 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781787056077
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

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 Donata?” 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’