Synopsis

Teddie (nicknamed “Ducky”) and Herman (“Drakey”) are friends with benefits, but they aren’t spending much time, lately, billing and cooing. Teddie has been cast as Lady Macbeth in the local community theater troupe; and she and her husband George have to practice to stay competitive in their tennis club. Herman has been drawn into pursuing a decades-old cold case; but his wife Sylvia needs his help fighting off a challenge to her professional life.

The spouses, who long ago gave up sex, are willing to tolerate the arrangement, as long as it doesn’t become public knowledge. But that’s a big risk, since Ducky and Drakey have flown into mysteries before, uncovering murder and mayhem in Grand Lake City. Fortunately, police homicide detective Sarah Larson has, by the summer of 2019, come to accept their help and to help them in return.

The cold case revolves around an urban legend that somewhere in the city there is a warehouse of vintage motorcycles that were stolen from the factory—still in their shipping crates—back in 1948. Felix Long, an aspiring writer, brings this story to Herman, who is a retired magazine editor, hoping that, together, they can write a book about it. That would mean locating the con man Don Reynolds who, in 1986, claimed to have found those stolen bikes. He sold them, then ran off with the money, never having produced any bike but the one he drove around town.

Sylvia’s need for Herman’s help is more pressing. She chairs the local college’s School of Forestry and runs its research lab about 100 miles away in the mountains. The owners of the acreage just uphill from the lab are a 93-year-old man named Homer Gilley and a corporation called Harvest Gold, LLC. They are asking the state’s Department of Land Management to issue a logging permit.

At a public hearing, Gilley says he wants to sell the timber to give a nest-egg to his daughter Agnes, who’s in her 70s.

Logging would wreak havoc on the forest land around the lab. To prioritize Sylvia’s dilemma, Herman sidelines Felix by introducing him to Irwin Duteriane, who has a local true-crime podcast; and to Shirley McKenzie, who writes a local true-crime blog. Each of them promises to help Felix, but after a week Irwin disappears; and two weeks later Shirley disappears too. So Herman feels he has to pick up the ball again.

Teddie is being whipsawed between the theater troupe’s more experienced leading ladies: Susie Warriner and Margo Boyd. Both are trying hard to be Teddie’s new best friend, even though each of them wanted—expected—to play Lady Macbeth herself, until Teddie came along. And her shoulder is giving her trouble, so she might not be able to compete in the tennis club’s upcoming tournament.

But what seems like separate threads are actually woven into a tapestry of deception, poison and murder. If Ducky and Drakey try to unravel it, they could zero out their benefits and—if they don’t watch their backs—wind up dead.

The Two Birds is the third mystery in the Friends With Benefits series, which includes The Nest and The Office Wife.

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Excerpt

The motorcycle was by the garage. The key was in the ignition.

Herman leapt onto the kickstarter. The bike throbbed to life. He swung his leg and flopped into the saddle.

“Here comes Backseat Betty!” I yelled, as I straddled the tiny cushion behind him.

I pushed the gearshift into first, let out the clutch and throttled up the engine. The bike lurched forward. I almost lost my grip on the handlebars. Teddie squeezed her arms around me. We were off, almost out of the clearing, when the shotgun went off.

A dozen hornets stung me all over. My head. My shoulder. Up and down my back.

Buckshot knocked my right foot off the brake. The bike wobbled. I stiff-armed the handlebars to keep us from lurching into the trees. Got us going straight ahead again just as we left the clearing and hit the muddy road.

I clunked the bike into second gear and brought us up to 25 on the speedometer. But it felt like 100 on a juddering rocket. The road was a wet washboard. No shoulders. Trees close in on both sides.

My right leg was wobbling. I couldn’t feel it.

Hold it in! Don’t scream! Don’t let Drakey know how much it hurts, or he’ll stop and we’ll be shot again.

Something metallic up ahead. The chain across the road. No way around it!

I couldn’t take one hand off the bars to downshift. So I made us stop the only way I could.

“I’m laying the bike down!”

I released the throttle, pushed my throbbing leg down on the footbrake, squeezed the handbrake, and leaned all the way over to the right. The wheels froze up. Five hundred fifty pounds of vintage motorcycle skidded and tipped over.

Just as it slid out from under us Teddie leapt off the back seat, and I launched myself out of the saddle.

We were breaking the helmet law, but there’s no breaking the law of inertia. However fast the bike was going, that’s how fast we hit the ground.

Luckily it wasn’t our heads but our backsides and hips that struck first, ploughing up clods of red-brown mud and raking ourselves over sharp rocks.

Buckshot plus scratches and scrapes. But adrenalin started working overtime. I couldn’t feel a thing.

We tumbled to a stop a few feet apart. I crawled over and took her hands. “Are you okay, Ducky?”

“I don’t think anything’s broken. Are you all right?”

Later, I’d tell her my right leg had gone numb. “We can’t let Phillip catch up with us.”

Quiet all around. Where was he? How far behind? Why wasn’t he shooting?

We held hands and clutched each other. With my sleeve I wiped the mud from his mouth and mine, and gave him a smooch.

“I’ll get up first, Ducky, and help you up.” He got to his knees, then to his feet, and extended both hands to me. I stood up. I was shaking. I needed his arm to get my balance. I kept hold of it as we started toward the fallen bike.

“Isn’t it ro-mantic!” he said, theatrically. “Ducky and Drakey strolling along the boulevard arm in arm!”

But he wasn’t strolling. He was hopping on his left foot, and leaning on me, like a crutch, so he could hold his right foot off the ground.

The bike had come to rest with its wheels just a foot or two shy of the chain across the road.

“Stop!”

We turned. Phillip was sighting down the barrels to finish us off.

I sat down hard, pulling Drakey down with me. I squeezed my eyes tight. If this was it, at least I’d have gone out with my lover.

About the Author

Although the Friends with Benefits series takes place in the modern age, much of Hal Glatzer’s mystery fiction has been set in the past. His Katy Green novels—Too Dead to Swing, A Fugue in Hell’s Kitchen, and The Last Full Measure—are set in musical milieux in the years just before World War II. And his illustrated bildungsroman, Dead In His Tracks, chronicles the rise and fall of a family-owned streetcar line.

In the 1970s, Glatzer worked as a reporter and bureau chief for newspapers and TV news stations; but in 1978 he began to cover the emerging high-tech industries of Silicon Valley. He contributed to and/or edited several “computer magazines” for general readers, and had three non-fiction books published about computers and telecommunications.

He debuted as a mystery novelist in 1986 with The Trapdoor, about a hacker who gets in trouble with organized crime. He is a longtime member of Sisters In Crime; and of Mystery Writers of America, currently serving as vice-president of MWA’s New York chapter.

Glatzer also writes Sherlock Holmes pastiches, set authentically in the Victorian and Edwardian era, which have been published in U.K. and U.S. anthologies, and reprinted in his own anthology: The Sign of Five. He is active in several “scion societies.” And every year, he produces a Sherlock Holmes play in New York, performed in old-time-radio style.

When he is not working as an author, he’s working as a musician, playing guitar and singing the “Great American Songbook” from Tin Pan Alley and Broadway.

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