Norm was buzzing around the hotel room where the suspects—or rather witnesses—of the murder of the prince were being interviewed. He wondered if he should have taken on the assignment or not. He wanted to help his friends, of course, but as he had told Max and Dooley, he had his own problems to deal with, in the form of some marital strife. Then again, maybe a murder inquiry was exactly what he needed to take his mind off those problems. As he buzzed on, he had a hard time keeping his eyes—all one-thousand-five-hundred facets of them—from taking in that abomination the murderers—or witnesses—had created. Whatever they thought, it looked nothing like a real fly at all. On the contrary, it was a caricature of a fly. What humans thought flies looked like. In other words: it was an insult. A mockery. A travesty! But then what can you expect from people whose life’s work it is to murder flies like him.

Bug spray salespeople, Max had called them. No wonder they had finally snapped. It all starts innocently enough, with the odd ant that gets burned under a magnifying glass, then these miscreants move on to pulling off the wings of a fly and finally graduate to creating bug sprays and committing mass murder. Bug genocide, in other words. And when that doesn’t satiate their bloodlust, they start killing their own. It was exactly what must have happened here, but since Max was such a big fan of humans, Norm hadn’t wanted to give his friend the benefit of his suspicions. Instead, he’d go through the motions and conduct his investigation. It all seemed like a big waste of time, but then of course Max was just like his humans: they all wanted evidence. Well, he’d give them evidence. He’d give them irrefutable evidence!

And so he buzzed from the room and across the corridor, where men and women dressed in white were packing up the body of the dead man and placing him on a stretcher, to be carted off to a place they called the morgue, where a man with frizzy hair would conduct certain experiments and try to determine what made him dead in the first place. Another big waste of time according to Norm, for it was obvious what killed the fella: there were holes in his chest that shouldn’t have been there. You can’t drill holes in a man’s chest and expect him to live.

Humans are fragile, after all, and they don’t take holes drilled into the various parts of their anatomy well. In other words: not a very hardy species at all!

He settled on the wall near the crime scene and watched as they packed up the man in a body bag and placed him on the stretcher. He wondered where he would find potential witnesses so he studied the room. As far as he could tell, there were no other flies present, which was a pity, for they could have provided him with the evidence he needed. But as he looked closer, he detected a friendly face poking its head out from under the bed. So he immediately flew down from his perch on the wall and took up position next to his old friend Bill.

“Hey, buddy,” he said, happy to meet another friend. After Max and Dooley, this was the third friend he’d met in a short time and it lifted his troubled heart. “How are things?”

“Can’t complain,” said Bill, giving him the kind of hangdog look that was a hallmark of his personality. Being a cockroach, Bill had witnessed his fair share of crime scenes over the course of a long life, and had taken part in the removal of plenty of corpses, so Norm sincerely hoped that he could help him out by providing him with a blow-by-blow account of what had gone down.

“You wouldn’t happen to have seen what went down here, would you? It’s just that I’ve been asked to look into this murder business by a couple of good friends of mine, and anything you could tell me would be much appreciated.”

Bill hardly seemed interested in what Norm had to say, for he barely looked up at his request. “Hm?” he finally said. “What was that you said, Norm?”

“I said, did you see what happened here? With the dead guy and all?”

“Dead guy?” said Bill, perking up a little. “What dead guy?” Death and decay are very much part of a cockroach’s life, and so the fact that he hadn’t noticed the presence of a dead body was an oversight that spoke of Bill’s preoccupation with other things.

“Is everything all right with you, buddy?” asked Norm. “You look a little peaky.”

“It’s all right,” said Bill. Even his antennae were at half-mast, indicating he had his own cross to bear, not unlike Norm himself. “Trouble with the missus,” he explained.

“You don’t say,” Norm said, marveling at the coincidence.

Bill nodded sadly. “It’s her sister Susan, you see. She just lost her husband, and so Melinda insisted she move in with us for the time being. Only me and Susan have never gotten along all that great. And so I told Melinda that I didn’t think her sister moving in with us was such a good idea. And so now she’s mad at me. Accusing me of bearing a grudge against her family, when it’s the other way around. It’s Melinda’s family who have never taken to me.” He sighed deeply. “Never marry, Norm. It’s the death by a thousand cuts.”

“I am married,” said Norm. “Though the wife and I are going through a rough patch at the moment.” And so he told his friend about Norma’s desire to start a family and his reluctance.

“Don’t do it,” said Bill urgently. “Don’t give in, Norm. The moment you have kids, there’s no way back.”

“No, I guess there isn’t,” he agreed. “Why, do you have kids?”

“Do I have kids?” said Bill. “Talk about the bane of my existence. All one hundred of them.”

Norm swallowed with difficulty. He was glad now that he had met an old friend who had been through the exact same thing he was going through. “But… what do I do?” he asked.

Bill gave him a mournful look. “Just say no, buddy.”

Just say no. Was it really that simple? Probably not. If he refused to give Norma what she wanted, she might decide that a divorce was in order. After all, hadn’t he promised her to start a family as soon as they were comfortably settled? Only at the time he’d been so over the moon that a gorgeous gal like Norma would be interested in a mere housefly like himself, that he would have promised her the moon and the sky and everything in between.

He gave Bill a grateful look. “Thanks for the advice, buddy,” he said, which is when he remembered why he had accosted the cockroach in the first place. “So you didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary? One human murdering another by shooting him with a gun?”

Bill sighed unhappily. “Can’t say I did. But then I must confess I’ve been pretty tired these last couple of weeks. That’s the problem with having kids, you know. You’re so exhausted all the time that life passes you by.” He glanced in the direction of the chalk outline on the floor, where the victim had fallen. “I do seem to remember I heard the sound of raised voices a little while ago. People fighting, you know. I didn’t pay them any mind, of course, since humans do that sort of thing all the time. And anyway, who’s interested in a couple of humans, unless of course they drop some nice chunk of their breakfast on the carpet, the way this fella did.”

“He dropped his breakfast on the floor?”

“He did, yeah. And I can tell you exactly what it was. A tasty piece of buttered toast, with the buttered side hitting the carpet, as it always does, and a piece of pork sausage. Pretty yummy, I have to admit, and always welcome.” He slumped a little. “Though it did remind me of Melinda, and how I should probably save some for her, but even if I did, she wouldn’t appreciate the gesture, furious as she is over my so-called beef with Susan.”

“Susan?”

“The sister. Try to keep up, buddy.”

“I’m sorry. Susan, of course. So you were saying the victim dropped his breakfast on the carpet. Anything else that might shed some light on who shot him?”

Bill shook his head slowly. “The strange thing is that I didn’t even notice he was dead. I just figured he was taking a nap. Humans do get tired so easily, don’t you find? And they can sleep for hours. Really weird.”

“I know, right?” said Norm. Then he decided to play his trump card. Since he already knew the killer, he didn’t see this as leading the witness. And besides, they weren’t in a court of law and he wasn’t a prosecutor. Merely an independent investigator brought in by Max and Dooley to assist them so whatever rules they adhered to didn’t apply to him. “Look, I know who did it. There’s this couple in the room across the corridor, see, and they’ve developed a bug spray.”

“A bug spray?”

“Yeah, to kill all of us bugs.”

Bill made a face. “That’s not good.”

“No, it sure isn’t. They were meeting with the victim. Something about getting him on board as a client. Only there must have been some bad blood between them, because it’s my firm belief they are the ones who killed him. I mean, if they’re capable of murdering innocent bugs like us, why wouldn’t they go the whole hog and murder their fellow man also, right?”

“Absolutely,” said Bill. “I like your thinking, Norm.”

“So?” he said.

Bill gave him a questioning look. “So what?”

“So did you see them? Shoot the guy, I mean?”

Bill grimaced. “I wish I could say I did, buddy. But like I said, I was so preoccupied with Melinda and her sister that I didn’t pay much attention to the guy. I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right.” And so he said his goodbyes to his one and only witness—who hadn’t seen anything—and wished him well in his marital strife, and flew off. At least now he knew what the victim had for breakfast. Not that it mattered, but then maybe it did. Max was an ace detective, and so maybe he could deduce from the way the guy buttered his toast, his entire life story and also the way he met his maker.

As he was zooming back to the other room to report back to Max, he was almost swatted by an irate-looking police officer who stood guarding the door. It was a narrow escape, and he was reminded once again what horrible creatures humans are. To try and murder an innocent fly who hasn’t done them any harm whatsoever, just because they can. Gah!

CHAPTER 6

Norm had only just flown off, thoroughly excited about the mission we had given him, when there was some kind of altercation on the street below. People were screaming, and when we hurried over to the window to take a look, we saw that the throng of shoppers was heading in the direction of a side street, in anticipation of something that must have taken place there.

“Could be a sale,” Harriet suggested. She and Brutus had returned, to announce that they had discovered nothing. “People are always reacting like this when there’s a big sale going.”

“Or it could be a show,” Brutus said. “A busker putting on a great performance.”

“Or a celebrity?” Dooley said. “Maybe George Clooney is in town and people are all trying to take a selfie with the man?”

But then Chase’s phone rang and it wasn’t long before the mystery was solved. “There’s been a shooting,” he informed Odelia in a low voice, so as not to alarm Carlos and Mindy, who were still seated on the couch, with Mindy still looking very pale and undone.

“A shooting?” asked Odelia. “Here in Hampton Cove?”