Knock

Black Kite

Not that she believed him, but it was just a gut-feeling. He seemed pretty deceptive as he plodded along his path of whining excuses and feeble justifications.

“Coffee?” she interrupted.

“Ahm… No, thank you,” he replied in a sigh of discontent. “Anyway, as I was saying…”

She looked at her watch. She had a date. Not today though; this was taking longer than expected.

The vague monotone sound of his voice contrasted sharply with the high pitched shrieks of the seagulls outside.

“And then what happened?” she heard her partner ask the man.

“She pushed me, knocked me down. But I didn’t hurt her or anything. I just stood up and looked at her. Like… You know… What are you going to do now, huh? That kindda thing. You know.”

“All I know is she is dead. And you were there.”

She sat back in her chair, crossed her arms and looked at the man.

“Yep, you sure were, plenty of people can account for that.”

The panicky look on his face increased with every word from the detectives.

“But… I didn’t do anything. I swear,” he repeated incessantly.

“Then someone did and you know who,” her partner said. They had been trying to squeeze information from this man for hours. Something was off.

He was silent for a few seconds, looked at her partner, then at her.

“She is at the edge of the forest by the deer sign,” he whispered.

The detectives didn’t quite expect such a sudden change of heart.

“So you did it. You’ve been wasting our time here.”

“I didn’t do it. It was the café owner, Tommy. He lost it when she broke one of his designer chairs, you know, when she knocked me down. He came over from behind the counter and grabbed the broken chair. She didn’t move at all. She was just standing there, you know… And he lifted the chair and knocked her down. There was blood everywhere. It was unbelievable.”

“And no one did anything to stop Tommy?”

He shook his head looking down at the tight handcuffs around his wrists.

“How many people were in the café at that time?”

“I don’t know… Twenty perhaps… Yeah… At least twenty people were there.”

The detectives stood up. They had a dead girl, Tommy the mad owner, twenty witnesses who became accomplices and a whiner, great. It would be an even longer night after all… She picked up her cell to cancel the date.

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