Poe's First Law: A Murder on Maui Mystery

think you already know the answer to that question.
By the time I parked my car in front of his house, I still didn’t know what I was going to say. I climbed out of my car and walked up the driveway to his covered porch, which ran across most of the front of the house. I hoped along the way that a brilliant idea would come to me. It didn’t. I knocked on the door anyway, and a moment later, Bret Hardy answered.
Bret is a tall man, maybe just an inch or two shorter than me. I guessed his weight at around two-thirty, which gave him a decent weight advantage on me. He has short, dirty-blonde hair, blue eyes, and tanned skin. He looked like a former surfer who’d turned to golf and gambling and had gotten a bit puffy around the mid-section as a result.
“You! What the hell are you doing here?” he asked.
“Mr. Hardy, my name is Edgar Rutherford. I’m–”
“I know exactly who you are,” he said, cutting me off. He stepped onto the porch. “You’re responsible for getting Lucy killed.”
“How do you–”
Before I could finish my question, Bret threw a punch at me. In hindsight, I should have seen it coming, but I suppose that my brain was so preoccupied with finding some reason for him to talk it never occurred to me that he’d actually assault me.
Fortunately, he was not an accomplished fighter. Most guys aren’t. By the time they hit forty, the age I guessed Bret Hardy was, they probably hadn’t been in a fistfight for twenty-five years or more. Bottom line, they’re out of practice, even though they still think they can take most guys in the room. Blame male arrogance for that overconfidence.
One of the benefits to getting beaten up as much as I have during these investigations is that it makes you more alert to physical attacks. My response time has improved over the years, and I was able to move my head back, and at the same time, put a hand up to deflect Bret’s wide and slow swing.
He’d left his midsection wide-open for a counter punch, but I didn’t take it. Bret was too enraged to notice my act of kindness, and he took a second swing. This one was more of a lunge combined with a punch. Sorry if that doesn’t make much sense, but it was such an off-balanced attack that I wasn’t sure what he was doing.
I shifted my weight again, but instead of deflecting the blow as before, I grabbed his wrist and used his own momentum to toss him to the ground. It wasn’t the most graceful move on my part, but it did the trick. He tumbled off the front porch and landed belly-first onto the grass.
“Stay down, Bret. I just want to talk.”
As I am often a naïve fellow, I assumed that would be the end of his physical assault. It wasn’t. I failed to mention this earlier, but there was a portable workbench in the yard with a stack of wood placed on top. There was also a DeWalt circular saw and a rolled-up orange extension cord.
Bret grabbed one of the two-by-fours and walked toward me. I stepped back toward the front door and positioned my body close to one of the wooden columns that supported the roof of the porch. Bret swung the piece of lumber at my head. I jumped back and the wood banged against the column. Before he could take another swing, I moved forward and kicked Bret between the legs. I heard a loud, “Ooff,” and he dropped to his knees.
I could give a more detailed account of the positioning of my foot during the kick, but there’s no reason to cause phantom pains with male readers. I will mention this for clarification. I played soccer growing up and I could kick a ball well past the mid-point of a sports field. If anything, my leg strength had improved with all of the jogging I’d done while on Maui.
The point of all of this is to say that my kick to Bret’s you-know-what was devastating, and it also explained how the man almost lost consciousness. After resting on his knees for a few seconds, he fell forward and rolled onto his back. He instinctively pulled his legs up toward his midsection in an attempt to protect himself from another kick. He needn’t have bothered. I wasn’t going to hurt him a second time.
His discomfort (yes, I know, that’s not nearly a strong enough word for it) gave me more than enough time to grab the orange extension cord from the workbench and tie Bret to one of the front porch columns. I wrapped the cord around his torso several times, then secured it with a triple knot in the back. There was no way he was going anywhere.
It took Bret several minutes to regain some level of composure. I felt a little guilty for the damage I’d done, but the man had tried to bash my head in with a piece of wood. I mean, what would you have done if you were in my position?
“You good to talk now?” I asked.
“You’ll pay for this,” he said, but he struggled to get the words out.
“Hardly. I record all of my interviews. I had the record app on my phone running when I knocked on your door. It captured you assaulting me. It was a completely unprovoked attack, I might add. If anything, you’re going to jail.”
You may be wondering if I was making that up. I was, but Bret didn’t know that.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“Just a few questions and then I’ll be out of your hair. Whose idea was it to pretend to steal the diamond necklace and bracelet?”
“Hers.”
“You told her about your money problems, and she volunteered to help you out?”
“Something like that,” he said.
“What do you mean ‘something like that?’ It either was or it wasn’t.”
“Lucy didn’t have any money. The only thing