Chance of a Ghost

by E. J. Copperman

  That last question was aimed at Maxie, who was hovering near the library ceiling in a horizontal position like Cleopatra on her barge. For all my reluctance to puff up her ego, Maxie had been an emerging interior designer when she died, and she’s got a talent for it. She likes to consult on any changes I make in the house, and I’ve given up being annoyed when her ideas are better than mine; it’s inefficient.

  She put her hand to her chin in a (literally) transparent overdone dramatic gesture of thought. “It would open up the room,” she said, “but you don’t have a lot of space on either side. How about making the window larger instead? That would add light.”

  Paul, trying hard to be the resident gumshoe, frowned at the turn the conversation was taking. “Then why would he have a stage name?” he asked, ignoring the topic Maxie and I had begun.

  “I haven’t a clue. You have my notes—I couldn’t record him; you know that. He seems to have a view of himself that’s, let’s say, a little overinflated. He was probably an aspiring actor who lives with the fantasy.”

  “Exists with the fantasy,” Paul corrected. He stroked his goatee, which he thinks is a sign that he’s deep in thought but which actually makes him look a little pretentious in a cute way, like a little boy who pretends to be a grown-up.

  He looked up at Maxie. “What was your impression?” he asked.

  Maxie looked surprised to be asked. “The guy’s hilarious,” she said. We waited, but that was it.

  Paul turned his attention back to me, shaking his head slightly. “From your description, he sounds flamboyant but not delusional, as far as I can tell. There’s probably another explanation.”

  I mulled a few thoughts over and turned toward Maxie. “The problem with putting in a larger window is that it would require outside work on the siding, which I don’t want to do in the winter, and this is supposed to be my winter project while I don’t have many guests. Besides, a bigger window cuts down on wall space, and in a library full of books, wall space is especially important.”

  Maxie considered and nodded. “It would definitely require work outside and might be expensive,” she agreed. “Maybe better overhead lighting in the room itself? Recessed or track?”

  Paul sighed loudly. It was a day, it seemed, for theatrical gestures from dead people. “Are you even paying attention?” he asked me. “We’re trying to investigate a murder here.”

  “No,” I answered. “We’re investigating a death. There’s no evidence yet that this guy was actually murdered.” I turned back toward Maxie. “Yeah, but the room still feels a little tight and claustrophobic. I can’t move the walls, but I can widen the entrance. I’m going to ask Tony about it.”

  Maxie scowled. “Do you have to?” she asked. Maxie doesn’t really get along with Tony Mandorisi, Jeannie’s husband and my contractor guru. It’s because Maxie first thought Tony was cute and flirted with him in a manner that seriously creeped Tony out. With good reason, I might add.

  “I want to make sure I do it right, and the only other reliable contractor I know is my father,” I answered. Going again from ghost to ghost, I looked over at Paul. “I don’t suppose you’ve been able to raise my dad on the Ghosternet, have you?” I asked.

  “Oh, am I still part of the conversation?” Paul pouted. Honestly, men. Don’t pay attention to them for six seconds and they think you’ve forgotten they exist. “No, I’ve tried to contact your father frequently since we met with your mother last night, and I’ve gotten no response. But that doesn’t really mean much. As you know, I’ve tried to get in touch with him before, and I’ve never really been able to establish a connection. My ability to communicate with other people like Maxie and me is still evolving, I suppose.”

  “Well, keep trying. I need to know if this Laurentz guy is telling the truth about Dad.”

  “Give me a day or two to think about it,” Maxie said, gesturing at the library door. “Maybe I can come up with something else.” I nodded, and Maxie vanished through the ceiling.

  Paul cocked an eyebrow and considered me. “Can we go back to discussing the case now that your interior design seminar is over?” he asked.

  “Don’t get snippy,” I told him. “It’s your fault I’m in this investigation business to begin with.”

  “Some would see that as a good thing,” he answered. “But nonetheless. Given the interview you did with Lawrence and the information we have that he changed his name from Melvin Brookman, I think we have to consider another possibility.”

  “It’s a stage name. The guy’s a kook,” I said. “Why do we need another possibility?”

  Paul floated down to eye level to emphasize his point. “Melvin Brookman wasn’t an actor; he had no need for a stage name. Why does a person change his name?” he asked. I hate it when he asks a question in an effort to educate me. What I really hate about it is that he’s always right.

  “Why does a person ask questions when he already knows the answer?” I countered.

  “Alison.” Paul forced eye contact. “Why does a person change his name? Think.”

  “Because he doesn’t like the old one,” I suggested. We’d known someone named Alice who’d changed her name to Arlice simply to be more exotic.

  “Perhaps,” Paul said, clearly thinking that was not the reason in Melvin Brookman’s case. “What else?”

  “For professional reasons?” That was an outright guess.

  “Lawrence was, as you put it, a ticket taker in Red Bank, New Jersey. No one he worked with would even ask his name. What else?”

  One of my tricks when trying to solve a problem was to think of something else, so I considered how long I had before I needed to go pick Melissa up from school. (If you’re interested, I had three hours and fifteen minutes.)

  “Because he doesn’t want someone to know who he is,” I said. I have no idea where that came from.

  Paul smiled, the successful teacher with a somewhat dim pupil who was finally grasping the concept. “And why would a man not want people to know his real name?” he rephrased.

  I didn’t like the answer I was about to give. “Because he might have a criminal record,” I said.

  “Excellent,” Paul beamed.

  “Not really,” I answered. “That criminal is a ghost who spends a lot of time in my mother’s house.”

  Nine

  The prudent thing to do would have been to call McElone to ask if either Lawrence Laurentz or Melvin Brookman had criminal records. But that would have required my talking to McElone again and asking her for another favor, and quite frankly, that was more than I was willing to do just at the moment.

  Instead, I cleaned a few rooms in the house and then picked Melissa up from school, and her first words on getting into the admittedly frigid Volvo (the heater is nominal at best) were, “So where are we in the Laurentz case?”

  This was not the conversation I’d been prepared to have with my ten-year-old, but have it we did, as Melissa is a force of nature and not to be ignored or defied when she gets up a head of steam. I filled her in on what I’d found out, which was not much.

  We drove to Jeannie and Tony’s house in Lavallette so I could ask Tony about the library door, and because we hadn’t seen baby Oliver in at least a week. The doorway was a small project I thought might not require Tony’s in-person inspection, just a short conversation, and Liss likes visiting the baby, too.

  Once we arrived, and after the shedding of coats and the inevitable showing off of more baby pictures (while the actual baby was right there on his mother’s lap, making the procedure seem somehow redundant), Liss sat on the floor with Oliver while Jeannie watched her shake rattles in front of him and Tony and I moved to the dining room so I could explain my construction issue and get his advice.

  I described the doorway—which Tony had seen many times before—and what I wanted to accomplish in the library, but Tony’s eyes were looking into the living room, watching Melissa on the floor with his son.

  “Are you listening?” I as
ked him.

  He turned to me and his face had an expression of desperation I’d never seen on it before. “You’ve got to get her out of here,” he whispered.

  Okay, there are protective parents and then there are people insulting to my daughter. “Why can’t Melissa play with the baby?” I asked quietly, so my completely blame-free daughter wouldn’t overhear.

  “Melissa? What are you talking about?” Tony’s brow furrowed.

  “You just told me to get Melissa out of here,” I reminded him. The lack of sleep must have been eroding his brain.

  “No, no,” Tony insisted. “Not Melissa. Jeannie. You’ve got to get Jeannie out of here!”

  One of us was speaking a foreign language, and I was beginning to suspect it was me. “Jeannie lives here. You want me to get rid of your wife?” I asked. Forget that Jeannie was my friend long before I met Tony and that I’d actually introduced them. This was a really inappropriate time to suggest they shouldn’t live together anymore.

  “You don’t understand,” he pleaded. “It’s been four months and she won’t do anything except watch the baby.”

  “I thought Jeannie was going back to her job after three months,” I said. The one time I’d asked Jeannie about it, she’d ignored me and asked if I thought Oliver’s toenails needed clipping.

  “I thought so, too,” Tony answered. “But she says she can’t bear the thought. They call her and she keeps putting it off. She gets up four times a night with him. She won’t let me get him back to sleep at night. She won’t let me feed him in the morning. She won’t let me play unsupervised with my own son. Alison, she needs to get out and remember she has a life!”

  “She won’t let you do anything?” I asked. “She won’t let you change diapers?”

  He huffed. “No, that she occasionally manages to delegate. But I get out of the house every day, I get to go around and see people and fix things and be something other than Ollie’s dad every once in a while. Jeannie won’t leave.”

  “Easy, Tony.” I was once again following Paul’s advice about avoiding the words calm down. “I realize Jeannie’s been a little obsessive since Oliver was born, but—”

  “A little?” Tony’s Adam’s apple was the size of a grapefruit; I watched it rise and fall. “Alison, please. You’re her best friend. Look at her.”

  I glanced over as Jeannie subtly picked up the rattle Melissa had been waving in front of Oliver’s face. She wiped it off with a cloth diaper (after considerable agonizing, Jeannie had decided on cloth diapers for in the house, and disposables only when traveling) despite its not having touched anything except Liss’s fingers. Then she set it back down on the immaculate play mat while Liss rocked the baby in her arms. But that wasn’t good enough for Jeannie. She picked the rattle back up, took a baby wipe from a dispenser, ran it over the rattle, then reached into a drawer, pulled out a bottle of hand disinfectant, wiped the rattle again and set it down.

  While doing all this, Jeannie said, “Make sure you support his head,” to Melissa, who was supporting Oliver’s head with both hands, despite the baby’s best efforts to shake his head free. Oliver was four months old, after all, not four days. Despite his mother’s protests, he could raise his head whenever he wanted.

  “Okay,” I told Tony. “I get your point. But what can I do?”

  “Get her out of here,” he repeated. “What are you doing this afternoon?”

  “Visiting you. Then I’m taking Liss back home and I have a quick errand to run on an investigation I’m doing.”

  “Perfect!” Tony shouted—well, breathed with enthusiasm. “Take Jeannie with you on the investigation! She loves when you ask her to help with that stuff!”

  “It’s late already,” I protested. “I might not even do it today. I have guests…”

  “Alison,” he said in a voice weighted down by weariness and desperation. “If you don’t take Jeannie out of here, she’s going to spend the night taking Ollie’s temperature.”

  That didn’t sound good. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Nothing! That’s the point!”

  “Okay.” There was no sense fighting it. “Let me see what I can do. But you’re going to help me with my library doorway.”

  Tony’s face looked so relieved I felt like I’d helped starving orphans get adopted by billionaires. “I’ll do the library door for nothing!” he said. “Thank you, Alison!”

  “What’re you talking about?” Jeannie called from the living room, where she was rechecking the baby-proofing on one of the socket plugs that the baby couldn’t reach. “What are you two plotting?”

  “I’m just giving Alison a little carpentry advice,” Tony said, and even though that was technically true, his tone was so forced that even I didn’t believe him.

  I took Tony by the arm, giving him a look that indicated I should do the talking and marched him into the living room. Melissa was nuzzling Oliver’s belly, which produced the desired effect of making him laugh. Jeannie was watching and visibly stopping herself from reaching for a box of aloe-enhanced tissues on the table next to her seat on the couch.

  “I was telling Tony about the case I’ve agreed to investigate,” I told Jeannie. “It looks like it’s going to be a bear.” Melissa looked up, her expression puzzled. I sent a “go with it” look her way, and she smiled and went back to making Oliver laugh.

  “You’re taking a case? Voluntarily?” Jeannie knew I wasn’t that keen on the whole investigation thing, but since she refuses to believe in Paul and Maxie, I’ve given up trying to explain to her the truth about my motivations for getting the private-investigator’s license.

  “It’s the off-season, and I could use a little extra cash,” I told her instead. “I didn’t think this one would be a big deal, but it’s proving to be more puzzling than I thought.” I turned away from her at that point because I wasn’t sure I could sell that line of crap without breaking into a ridiculous grin.

  “Oh, really?” Jeannie said. I’d have expected to need more of a lure than that, but she took the bait eagerly. “What’s the case about?”

  It seemed safe to turn back and face her. Melissa grinned at me from out of Jeannie’s line of sight, and started to play with Oliver’s feet, which were currently snug in a blue woolly-looking sleeper. He giggled.

  All I had to do now was reel Jeannie in.

  “It seemed like it was going to be a simple case, just confirming that a man in my mother’s residential community had died of natural causes, but now it seems like maybe he didn’t,” I told her. “His sister called Mom to ask for my help, and now I can’t figure out what to do next.”

  “Is this what all the intrigue with your mother and her mysterious visitor was about yesterday?” Jeannie asked. Um…sure! I nodded. “What have you done so far?” Jeannie asked.

  “I checked the medical examiner’s report. There’s nothing unusual there, but even if there were elements that would point to a crime, they probably weren’t found since it’s obvious they weren’t looking for anything unusual.” Indeed, the report McElone had given me was incredibly routine and superficial.

  “So what makes you think there was anything to find?” Jeannie wanted to know. It was a good question, especially given the fact that telling her I’d heard it from the corpse himself seemed just a little bit pointless.

  “This was a man whose heart problems were under control,” I said, which was true, according to Laurentz/Brookman. “He’d had some prior heart issues, but nothing major. He wasn’t under stress at the time and he’d had a completely clean medical checkup three days before he died.”

  Jeannie shrugged. “It happens,” she said.

  “Yeah, but his sister thinks it didn’t just happen. She told Mom she thinks somebody electrocuted him.”

  “Please don’t speak of such things in front of…” Jeannie cocked her head toward Melissa, sitting on the floor.

  “Liss knows about the case,” I told her.

  “I meant Oliver,” Jeannie
corrected me. Of course.

  “Sorry,” I told her, despite the fact that it would be a miracle if Oliver even knew his own name yet. “But I’m so stumped, I’m not thinking straight.” Was that too over the top?

  “It’s all right, but I really don’t want him exposed to violence this early in his life,” Jeannie said, apparently in earnest. Nah, the top was so high Shaquille O’Neal couldn’t get over it with a trampoline.

  “What do you think I should do? In the case?” I said, before she could lecture me further on the proper way to speak in front of a four-month-old baby.

  Jeannie pursed her lips and nodded. This was her “thinking” face. I’d seen it applied to everything from whether she should have the chocolate chip muffin to whether she should marry Tony. (She’d ultimately decided yes to both.)

  “The obvious thing would be to find out whether this man had any enemies,” she said. “See if there was anyone with a reason to want to, you know, not be nice to him.” Her gaze was at her son, who had fallen asleep on the baby mat.

  “That’s brilliant!” I said, not loudly enough to wake Oliver, as that would undoubtedly break the mood. “Exactly what I should have been thinking.” Normally, I’d have thought “brilliant” was a bit much, but Jeannie was on a roll.

  “Glad I could help,” Jeannie said, beaming.

  I walked over to her and took her hand. “What would I do without you?” I asked. Then I turned away and saw Tony’s alarmed expression as I did. I gave my head a small shake to indicate he shouldn’t worry. And I waited three seconds.

  Jeannie said, “Hmmm…”

  I had her.

  “Do you really need help on this case?” she asked in a very quiet voice, no doubt intending not to disturb her baby’s slumber. “Is it really a tough one?”

  I kept my back to her and struggled to control my grin. “Toughest I’ve ever taken on,” I said.