The Ghost Had an Early Check-Out

by The Ghost Had an Early Check-Out (retail) (epub)

  “If it’s no trouble, I would.”

  “No trouble.” She jumped up and vanished through the segmented glass door.

  Nick turned his attention on Duke, but was interrupted by Enzo hurrying up the steps from the courtyard.

  “What’s going on?” Enzo demanded. He sounded out of breath, as though he’d been running. “The place is crawling with cops. What’s happened? What did they find?”

  Nick filled Enzo and Duke in on the events of the morning. Duke looked ready to faint by the time he finished.

  “He slipped? You’re sure that’s what happened?”

  “I can’t be sure, no. But I didn’t see anything to indicate violence.”

  He glanced at Enzo, who seemed to have been struck dumb.

  “No, I mean… Right.” Duke drummed his fingers on the iron tabletop. “How would he even get in?”

  “How is the alligator getting in?” Nick asked. “Maybe they both came in the same way.”

  Enzo came back to life. “This doesn’t have anything to do with Wally!” he burst out.

  Nick eyed him curiously. “I didn’t say it did.”

  Further discussion was interrupted as Ami returned, carrying a metal coffee carafe and another mug. She was pale, her eyes wide with alarm. “There are police officers and people from the coroner’s office inside. Nobody will say what’s happened.” She was looking straight at Nick. “Has someone died? Who?”

  Enzo turned without a word, lumbering down the steps and disappearing into the courtyard.

  “Enzo?” Ami watched him go, her expression bewildered.

  “He’s worried about them taking Wally,” Duke said.

  Ami’s expression altered. She exchanged looks with Duke.

  Nick was about to reassure her that the victim was not a hotel resident, when the glass door opened and Officer Bruce stepped outside. The expression on his ruddy doll’s face did not bode well for a happy Halloween at Angel’s Rest.

  “There you are, Reno. Your client is refusing to speak to us.”

  Nick groaned inwardly. He said, “You want me to—”

  “Nope,” Bruce said with sour satisfaction. “We’ve already called it as a suspicious death. It’s going to be up to the detective bureau to decide what happens next.”

  Ami gasped. “You mean it could be murder?”

  “A suspicious death…” Duke repeated numbly.

  “Thanks for letting me know,” Nick said. He was wondering where Perry was in all this drama. He needed to let him know what was going down on his end, but he didn’t dare leave the storm’s epicenter yet.

  “Whatever Daly is paying, it’s not enough,” Bruce commented. “I’d find another client if I were you.” And on that cheery note, he departed.

  Nick had just finished his coffee and was recounting an abbreviated version of his adventures for the third time when he, Duke, and Ami were joined on the terrace by the Winthrop woman and the rainbow-haired psychic.

  “What on earth is going on?” Winthrop demanded. “There are policemen everywhere. Where’s Horace?”

  “Death has claimed another victim at Angel’s Rest,” announced Gilda, dragging a heavy iron chair across the bricks. The scrape and bump of the chair sort of lessened the portentousness of her pronouncement.

  Nick inquired, “What was your first clue? The coroner’s van parked in the drive?”

  Gilda glared at him. “I can’t see the drive from my room.” She plopped down in the chair.

  Ami, meanwhile, was reassuring Wynne Winthrop that nothing had happened to Horace; that the victim had been one of Horace’s skeleton-clad harassers.

  “Thank God for that at least,” Wynne murmured, and she seemed sincere.

  Nick studied her curiously. Having been married to a woman who did not take kindly to slights to her ego, he’d had some questions ever since Horace’s midnight revelations.

  In Nick’s experience, friendships between men and women were always dicey. Horace’s bisexuality and tendency to turn to Wynne when things weren’t going well between him and Troy would have complicated that relationship. It wouldn’t be surprising if Wynne had some deeply buried resentments—or maybe some not-so-deeply-buried resentments.

  “There is a dark energy at Angel’s Rest,” Gilda said. “A dark presence.”

  “It’s called lousy lighting, darling.” Wynne took a cigarette and lighter out of a small red leather bag. She lit the cigarette, tilted her head back, and blew a stream of smoke into the chilly air like a whale expelling air through a blowhole. “Mice have dined on the wiring in this place for decades.”

  “When was the last time the building passed a safety inspection?” Nick asked.

  The others laughed—which was kind of what he’d figured.

  “Does Angel’s Rest have any secret passages?” Nick did not like secret passages.

  “They wouldn’t be secret, then, would they?” Gilda retorted.

  “It’s not likely.” Duke had been quiet for so long, Nick had almost forgotten he was still present. “This used to be a hotel. It was never a home.”

  “It’s still not a home,” Ami said.

  Wynne gave them a long look. “Nothing’s holding you prisoner here. You can always leave.”

  Ami turned scarlet.

  You can check out anytime you like, but… What was the rest of the line from that Eagles’ song?

  Duke said, “Some of us are on a fixed income.”

  “Darling, that’s pure luxury for those who have to rely on residuals and royalties.” Wynne added, “Which would be you, wouldn’t it? Aren’t you living on your writing?”

  “Well, yes,” Duke said. “But Ami isn’t.”

  Wynne smiled a little maliciously. “Living on your writing? No, not yet.”

  Ami turned red again—and Duke just about matched her shade.

  As interesting as Nick found their group dynamic, he wanted to check in with Perry, who probably needed a break from Horace about now.

  He excused himself and went back inside, where he was stopped by a plainclothes cop who introduced himself as Detective Camarillo.

  Camarillo was tall, dark, and ridiculously handsome. He looked like the traditional Latin lover in old films, or maybe a modern guy with a slew of Grammys to his name. He wore a suit no cop should have been able to afford, and smelled like Old Madrid and new money.

  His partner, Detective Marin, was a stocky, pugnacious-looking blonde in sensible shoes and a suit from Sears, which Nick knew because he owned the same suit.

  As Camarillo briskly took Nick through the whys and wherefores, it became clear to Nick that Camarillo did not like PIs in general or Nick in particular, but then Nick mentioned working for the Tristar Group. Suddenly he had discovered the secret handshake.

  Camarillo stopped eyeing him with that sarcastic little smile, put down his pen, and looked at Marin, who shrugged like, How was I supposed to know? Camarillo turned back to Nick. “You work for Rick and Roscoe?”

  “That’s right. Roscoe and I were in the SEALs together.” Nick rarely pulled the SEALs card, but he had been feeling like he needed an edge with Camarillo, and this looked like it.

  “You’re that Nick Reno?”

  “Well, yeah,” Nick admitted, now self-conscious.

  It turned out Roscoe, Rick, and Camarillo had grown up on the streets of Los Angeles. Tristar Group was the only private-investigations firm Camarillo could tolerate—besides which, the guy who had saved Roscoe Jones’ life in Afghanistan was a great guy in Camarillo’s book.

  “Maybe we could get back to the case?” Marin suggested once the social niceties were out of the way.

  “Sure, sure,” Camarillo said. “So what do you think, Nick? Was it an accident, or are we looking at homicide?”

  His smile was wide and charming, his eyes dark and guileless, and Nick knew whatever he said, Camarillo was going to take it with a grain of salt and make his own mind up. Nick revised his original opinion. He began to like the guy a lot
.

  “I think it’s an accident. But there’s something weird about this setup. I can’t put my finger on it, but something’s not right.”

  “Instinct,” Camarillo agreed. “You’ve got it. I’ve got it. Marin took one look at this place and said hinky. She’s never wrong.”

  Marin sighed.

  “So, I’m not disbelieving you,” Camarillo said. “I think everything points to an accident. But we’ve got to be thorough. Your client had a history with the victim.”

  “I understand,” Nick said. He did.

  “Believe me, I’m no bleeding heart. A man’s home is his castle. In Daly’s case, literally a castle. I think this punk got what he deserved. Terrorizing old folks? Not okay. But we also can’t have senior citizens laying traps for juvenile delinquents.”

  Nick nodded.

  Camarillo seemed to commune silently with Marin.

  He offered Nick another of those gleaming I-just-won-my-twelfth-Grammy smiles. “Marin just had a great idea. Why don’t we do this, maybe kill two birds with one stone? Why don’t you sit in on our interviews? You’ve had a day to observe these people. Your insights could be useful. What do you think?”

  “That would be beyond great,” Nick admitted.

  “That’s what I think,” Camarillo said—and winked.

  Chapter Eleven

  “You told Nick you destroyed these letters.” Perry looked up from the box of yellowed envelopes Horace had set before him on the dining-room table.

  It had been a very long morning.

  Perry had barely managed to get Horace back to his apartment before the police arrived to examine the body in the hall, and he still wasn’t one hundred percent convinced he’d made the right call. Once Horace had been sure the dead man wasn’t Troy, he had been almost gleeful that one of the “assassins” was dead. But that bloodthirsty good cheer gave way to anxiety about what his enemies would attempt next in retaliation. For the first time Perry had felt a flicker of sympathy for the disagreeable Nevins in their thankless role of Horace’s only kin.

  Then the police had knocked on the door and requested a word with Horace, and Horace had referred them—through Perry—to speak to his lawyer.

  That had gone over about as well as one would expect.

  It was just a matter of time before the law was back with reinforcements, but Horace seemed oblivious to his peril. Instead, he had ranted about everything from his previously mentioned lawyer to the difficulty of finding a sweetened cereal called French Toast Crunch on grocery-store shelves. Eventually, he had disappeared into his bedroom and at last returned with a black-and-gray wig box full of letters.

  Now Horace gazed back at Perry defiantly. “Yes.”

  “Why? How can he help if you won’t give him all the facts?”

  “These are not facts. These are…personal.”

  “But Mr. Daly—”

  “Horace, lovey.”

  “Horace—” Perry swallowed the rest of it and shook his head. Arguing with Horace was what his mother used to call “an exercise in futility.” He picked up the first envelope. A felt pen had been used to print the thick block-style characters of Horace’s address. Despite the fact that the writing was print script, they did have a certain individual style. The tiny letters were all uppercase and pressed closely up against each other.

  “Do you recognize the writing on the envelope?” Perry asked.

  “Yes. It’s Troy’s.”

  “Do you have something with Troy’s writing that I could compare this to?”

  Without a word, Horace opened a cabinet drawer and handed over a battered script. There were notations all over it, and the notations did look similar to the print writing on the envelope. To Perry, at least, but he was no handwriting expert. The tops of the Ts and crossbar of the Hs certainly looked identical.

  Perry laid the script aside and studied the envelope again. There was a cancelled stamp on the envelope, and the postmark indicated the letter had been mailed from Hollywood in 2013.

  According to Nick, all mail was now sent to designated mail-processing stations for sorting and distribution to delivery post offices. Had that been true five years ago? If so, the postmark would indicate the local post office the mail had been sent from.

  Perry opened the first letter.

  The note was handwritten, and the writing seemed to match that of the envelope.

  I have not forgotten. This will not be over until you are dead.

  Not a specific threat, but definitely sinister.

  No signature. Not even a Yours truly, Mr. X.

  The next letter was shorter and more to the point.

  You will die a horrible death. SOON.

  And on it went.

  I’m watching you.

  You don’t know who I am, but I never forget you.

  I like planning your death.

  Not particularly imaginative, in all honesty. In fact, they were a bit slogan-ish, kind of like evil taglines. Taste the Rainbow! Just Do It! Die, Witch, Die! Not that they wouldn’t be frightening to receive. They would. Not least because, regardless of the lack of creativity, normal people didn’t operate like this. This was the work of a disturbed mind.

  Perry went through the next letters. More of the same.

  As he shuffled through the stack, he noticed that the writing on a couple of the later envelopes was slightly different. The script wasn’t quite so cramped, and there were a few lowercase letters in the address.

  The content of the letters changed too. At first, they were very brief: a single hateful handwritten line. But about three years in, the letters grew much longer—they became full on diatribes—and they were typewritten.

  Why? What did that change signify?

  You have spent your whole life using people and discarding them. There is no one more selfish and cowardly than you. I used to think maybe you would learn from your mistakes and change, but I see now how foolish that was. You will never change, and you deserve everything that is going to happen to you. When my knife slides between your scrawny ribs, I will have to scrape and scrape to find your miserable, miserly heart. I will stab you and stab you, and there will be nothing but a black hole.

  Perry felt his hair standing straight up.

  There was a lot of that kind of thing.

  It seemed clear that as the years passed, the author of the letters grew more and more angry. The part that didn’t seem to jibe was the decision to start typing them. Using a typewriter seemed less personal. And yet the content of the letters was very personal, very emotional.

  What did it all mean? Perry couldn’t decide. Maybe the switch to a typewriter had been fueled by a practical consideration? Like the writer had arthritis. After all, Troy would be at least in his seventies by now. Or maybe as the letters grew more blatantly threatening (and illegal), a typewriter had seemed to offer more disguise than block print?

  Or maybe someone was faking Troy’s writing and had found it too difficult to fake entire pages?

  Midway toward the bottom of the pile, he picked up an envelope, and his heart seemed to drop a few ribs down his chest.

  There was no stamp.

  No cancellation mark to indicate there had ever been a stamp.

  This letter had not gone through any post office. It been hand-delivered.

  Perry checked the rest of the way through the pile.

  Only one letter was missing a stamp. Only one letter had been hand-delivered.

  But when he checked the typewritten letter inside, the contents were exactly like all the others.

  Meaning?

  Meaning that the same person had authored all the letters, but on one occasion, this person had decided—or circumstances had required them—to hand-deliver their hate mail.

  “How do you get your mail?” Perry asked.

  Horace looked confused. “As anyone does.”

  “No, I mean, does the mail carrier leave it in a box and someone at Angel’s Rest walks down to get it? Or does th
e mail carrier deliver right to the hotel?”

  “They used to deliver, but now there’s a box at the end of the road where we have to go pick it up. Wynne usually walks down to get it.”

  Wynne. Oh no. But it made sense. Horace had admitted the night before that Wynne had reason to feel used and discarded. And—although this was probably sexist—the tone of the letters, or at least the vocabulary and grammar, felt vaguely feminine in a way Perry couldn’t quite define.

  Wynne had motive and opportunity. As far as means, well, how hard was it to get hold of a typewriter?

  Come to think of it, these days? Maybe more difficult than he knew.

  Wait. Was she still using a typewriter? Maybe she was using a computer with a printer now?

  Perry shuffled through the letters again, but no. The most recent letters still seemed to be produced on a typewriter. The lower case o had started out partially filled in, and by the last letter it was almost a solid black dot.

  So Wynne had faked Troy’s handwriting, but as the years went by and the letters had gotten longer and longer, she had resorted to using a typewriter so as not to give herself away? She had even gotten a little less meticulous about the envelopes because, after all, if Horace hadn’t caught on by then, there was a good chance he wasn’t going to.

  “What are you thinking?” Horace asked, snapping Perry out of his reflections.

  “Are these in order, do you know?”

  “Yes.”

  Perry nodded thoughtfully. He studied the envelopes that came before and after the unmarked envelope. “It looks to me like these three arrived last year. Does that seem right to you?”

  “Yes. I think so.”

  “When Wynne picks the mail up, what does she do with it? Does she leave it somewhere for everyone to grab? Or does she actually distribute it?”

  “She brings my mail to me. I have no idea what she does with everyone else’s. Perhaps she leaves it for them in the dining room.”

  Perry was starting to feel a little sick. Bad enough to receive these vicious things from a stranger. But to come from someone Horace knew, someone he liked and trusted? That seemed truly terrible.