Read Appeal Denied: A Cliff Hardy Novel for Free Online

authorities for a mate in the sex-slave business, and a publisher with a couple of current best-seller nonfiction books on his list, but no royalties paid to the writers or wages to his staff or the printers, and the publisher nowhere to be found.
    I scratched the last one as being of interest only to the chattering classes and unlikely to involve the police, whose interest in literature is limited to say the least. The other two stories had distinct possibilities of a police connection. I scrolled through them, making notes on the dates, initials and financial details. Lily had told me that she used initials in the early stages of her investigations, partly for security purposes, partly because it amused her. She also said that she reversed and scrambled the initials which could be unscrambled by a key known only to herself. I’d laughed at her and told her she was bullshitting. She hadn’t contradicted me, but she’d winked and called me a naive gumshoe.
    So I was left with two investigations of serious crimes and a jumble of initials which might relate directly to the people involved or might not. Probably not. The image of Lily winking came back to me in full force. She’d meant it. I dealt mostly with the obvious, she plumbed some dodgy depths. I copied the notes and the two files onto a disk and tried to see if Lily had accessed any emails via my computer. I knew her address and logged on. Nothing . Careful Lily , I thought, but you protected your work better than yourself, and I wasn’t there …
    I’d drunk three cups of strong black coffee and was a bit wired. I took the disk out of the computer and put it on the desk with the thumb drive. I was buzzing, connecting, jumping ahead of myself. There was an obvious way to flush out Lily’s killer, if it had anything to do with what she’d been working on—it had to have, didn’t it?—and that was to let whoever was interested know that I had the incriminating material. Was I up for that? Yes, I was, but how to do it?
    Lily hadn’t neglected security. She’d installed a sophisticated alarm system in her house which had either been bypassed or she’d forgotten to activate it. Not unknown. Whoever I was up against now was good at whatever he, or she, or they, did. But so was I.

6
    I phoned Daphne Rowley to ask her if the cops had checked on my alibi for the early part of the night of Lily’s death.
    ‘Just now,’ she said.
    ‘How d’you mean?’
    ‘This D got me on the phone and then came around. Had a policewoman with him.’ She gave an amused snort. ‘For protection, I guess.’
    ‘That’d be Gregory, would it?’
    ‘No. Hang on, I’ve got his card here … hard-nut wog named Kristos.’
    Nothing politically correct about Daphne. ‘Came on strong, did he?’
    ‘I’ll say. He wanted to know the exact time you arrived and when you left. How many games we played, how long we held the table. The lot.’
    ‘What did you tell him?’
    ‘What I could remember. Who keeps track of time when the balls are clicking, if you’ll excuse the expression, and the schooners’re going down?’
    ‘Right. Did he take notes?’
    ‘You kidding? He left that to the sheila and her Palm Pilot—Constable What’s-her-face.’
    ‘Farrow?’
    ‘That’s it. She seemed okay, for a copper.’
    I thanked her and rang off. Here was a new player and a new level of interest, and I wondered why. I got the answer within a few minutes when Tony Truscott appeared at my door. He was wearing sweats and said he’d been doing some jogging.
    ‘From Hunters Hill?’
    ‘Fuck, no. Around your Jubilee Park here. Lily … told me about it. Jogging’s so fucking boring you need to have something to look at. I like the water and the birds and the trees and the bridge, you know.’
    ‘Yeah. Coming in, Tony?’
    ‘No, mate, I have to be at the gym in half an hour. It was a good bash for Lily, wasn’t it?’
    ‘Sure was. So …?’
    Like most boxers, Tony had trouble keeping