Chance of a Ghost

by E. J. Copperman

  Anyway, written there in the dust were the words, “I KNOW WHERE YOUR FATHER IS.”

  There was no way I could sleep after that, but I also didn’t want to scream my brains out and alarm my daughter, so as quietly as I could, with my heart beating through my chest, I hustled out the bedroom door and ran downstairs to the kitchen. No Paul.

  I said his name out loud in a conversational tone a few times. Often that will get him to show up. Not this time.

  In desperation, I even called out, a little louder I think although it was unintentional, to Maxie. She didn’t show up, either.

  Unfortunately, the one person in the house I really hoped wouldn’t have heard me, did. Morgan Henderson, in pajamas and (open) robe, shambled into the kitchen and looked startled when he saw me standing next to the refrigerator. He moved his lips back and forth on his face, as if trying to determine which side was the least attractive. It was a tie.

  “Your bedroom,” he mumbled, or words to that effect.

  Excuse me? “I beg your pardon?” I asked. It was the best I could do under the circumstances.

  “I thought you were in your bedroom,” he said. “I wouldn’t have come out if I’d known you were here.”

  Oh. I hesitated, possibly because I wasn’t aware Morgan could put that many words together in a row. “It’s okay,” I said. “Do you need something?”

  “Something.” Morgan was back to his usual speech pattern, repeating the last thing he’d heard with a twist of lemon. “Glass of milk. You got?”

  Yes, Tonto. I got. “Sure,” I said. “Help yourself.” I was confident there was milk in the fridge for once, because I’d stocked up for the “blizzard.” Besides, we’d had cookies tonight, and it is, I believe, a law that chocolate chip cookies can’t be eaten without milk. I pointed to the fridge and reached up to get Morgan a glass from the cabinet over my head.

  He nodded when he took it from my hand, as a way to avoid saying “thank you,” I assumed. He got the container of milk from the fridge and poured some for himself.

  I inched my way toward the kitchen door and was about to leave when Morgan said, “What about your dad?”

  I froze again. What was going on here? “What do you mean?” I asked. If he answered, “mean,” I’d have to hit him with a frying pan.

  “Saw your mom. What about your dad?” Morgan asked, apparently thinking that was an explanation.

  “My father passed away five years ago,” I told him. Like it’s your business. No frying pans handy; I wasn’t even close enough to grab a carrot peeler out of the drawer.

  “Oh,” Morgan said. “What happened?”

  I don’t like it when the guests ask personal questions. “Just now?” I asked, knowing full well that wasn’t what he meant.

  “With your father. How’d he die?”

  “He was ill,” I said.

  “I figured,” Morgan said. “What was it?”

  Sometimes such directness takes you by surprise, and you simply answer without the consideration that the questioner has just asked something personal and painful. “Pancreatic cancer,” I said.

  Morgan shook his head. “Cancer,” he said. “Tough.” Then he downed the whole glass of milk in one gulp and walked to the sink to wash out the glass, something I would not have expected.

  He put the glass in the dish drainer and headed toward me. I froze in panic for a second, then realized he was simply walking back to the kitchen door, where I was standing. I stepped out of the way and he swung the door open.

  Then Morgan stopped and turned toward me, shaking his head. “Doesn’t make sense, does it?”

  He shuffled through the door and back toward the downstairs guest room, not waiting for an answer. It was just as well. I didn’t have one.

  Thirteen

  Friday

  “Larry Laurentz was an egomaniac, a prude, a sexist, a snob, a bigot and a bully,” said Tyra Carter. Tyra, the first name on Penny’s list of people who had worked with Lawrence at the Basie, was now working from her studio apartment as a customer service representative for a tire company. She’d agreed to talk to me (once I’d flashed the private-investigator’s license) between calls, but since she was paid by the call, she would not take a break from her work so she was sitting with her headset on.

  “But aside from that, he was nice, right?” I responded, stifling a yawn. Suffice it to say that after the discovery that someone was writing in the dust in my bedroom and the encounter with Morgan in the kitchen, I had not gotten a wink of sleep the night before. Paul had eventually materialized in the game room, and I’d informed him of everything that had gone on. His advice had been to keep pressing on the Laurentz investigation while he searched the house for other ghosts who might have had a hand—or a finger—in the message on my dresser.

  Jeannie had begged off investigating this morning owing to a routine pediatrician appointment for Oliver, so I was alone. I hadn’t loved Paul’s suggestion but had no counterargument, so here I was in Red Bank, talking to Tyra, and apparently being too wry for her to understand. Sometimes my dry humor just goes over people’s heads. This was hard to believe in Tyra’s case, since she had to be six feet tall, but she looked at me and asked, “What?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “You worked in the ticket office with Mr. Laurentz?”

  “Yeah. And it’s not a bad job, but there isn’t a lot to it, you know? You take ticket orders, put them in the computer, sometimes give actual paper tickets to people who don’t print them out at home—most do now because it’s free, no handling charge—and make sure you cross the seats off the seating chart for the right show. You don’t have to…Wait. Hello, this is the Tire Hotline. How may I help you today?”

  About seven minutes of tread discussion ensued, after which Tyra clicked off the call and looked at me again. “What was I saying?” she asked.

  “Not a hard job, the ticket office,” I told her.

  “Yeah. But Larry, my God, that man! You’d think that we were sending out, like, gold in the mail. He had a religious experience every time he sold a seat for Hall and Oates or something. The guy honestly thought he had, like, the most important job in the universe.” Tyra pursed her lips and shook her head.

  “But that’s just an annoyance,” I suggested. “You didn’t hate him or anything?”

  Tyra cocked an eyebrow. “You want some cheese or something?” she asked. “I could…Hello, this is the Tire Hotline.”

  I shook my head about the cheese and listened to some conversation about the merits and disadvantages of an extended warranty on tires. I stood up and looked around the apartment.

  The sofa, which I assumed opened up into a bed, was a little worn, but had a hand-embroidered slipcover that no doubt hid a multitude of sins. The lamp had a fringed shade on it, the rug was a tied rope style in an oval pattern, and the small galley kitchen, to my left, was neat, no dishes stacked in the sink. There was no dishwasher, but a small stove, a refrigerator that could easily have held the tiny amount of food I had in mine at home and a microwave oven. I guessed that neither ticket selling nor talking about tires exactly qualified as wildly lucrative vocations.

  When Tyra ended the rubberized conversation, I sat back down in the kitchen chair she’d pulled over for me when I came in. She smiled and apologized for the interruption, but I waved a hand to declare it irrelevant. I had another question I wanted to ask.

  “Why did you leave the Basie to do this tire work?”

  Tyra scowled, a face that actually made her look a little scary. “Well, that’s where your friend Mr. Laurentz comes in,” she said in low tones. “He got me fired.”

  I tried not to show my reaction to Tyra, but in my head I was picturing my hair standing on end and my legs sticking straight out, like when someone is surprised in an old Daffy Duck cartoon. “Lawrence Laurentz got you fired?” I repeated.

  Tyra nodded. “All I was doing was taking a few tire calls—just a few—while I was working at the box office. I mean, not that
many people call in to the box office anymore; they all buy their tickets online, you know. But when there was a call, I always answered it. Still, I needed a little extra money to pay some old bills, so I took a few calls for the tire company. No biggie. Everybody else who worked there covered for me.”

  A picture was starting to form. “But not Mr. Laurentz,” I said.

  Tyra curled her lip. “No. Not Larry. Man dimed me out to the manager, said I was neglecting my duties at the theater so I could talk about tires and collect two paychecks. Next thing you know, I’m only collecting one, and it’s not the bigger one anymore. Thanks a lot, Larry.”

  What would Paul say? Try to get her to go a little further. “Must have made you mad,” I suggested.

  “Mad! I could have killed him!” Tyra yelled. Then she stopped, put her hand to her mouth and grinned naughtily. “Good thing he died of a heart attack, or I’d have just said something wrong, huh?” She looked at me.

  “Well, it’s possible…” I began.

  Tyra put up a hand to signal I should stop. “Hello, this is the Tire Hotline,” she said.

  “I sort of liked Larry Laurentz,” Frances Walters said. “But I’m not sorry he’s dead.”

  “That seems contradictory,” I told her.

  Frances’s Whispering Lakes town home was the same model as Mom’s, not dissimilar to tens of thousands of other active adult community town homes in central New Jersey, a great many of them near the shore. We not only like to have our own older people live near the beach, we import a lot from New York City and Philadelphia just to be neighborly. In the past twenty-five years, it’s become almost as popular to retire to the Jersey Shore as to move to Florida. You can look it up.

  In this case, however, the similarity was not surprising: Frances lived in the same complex as Mom, and where Lawrence Laurentz (aka Melvin Brookman) had lived. Her place was decorated with too many knickknacks, the sign of someone who had downsized from a much larger home. This, again, is not unusual. People who move here often try to cram all the accumulations of thirty or more years into a new home whose walls and closets can accommodate perhaps ten years of memories. It’s difficult, and it shows.

  “I know,” Frances agreed. “I intended it to sound contradictory. It was for effect.”

  Frances explained how she and her husband had moved here after their children had started families of their own, but then her husband, Phil, had passed away shortly thereafter. Frances, who had danced in the chorus in a couple of Off-Broadway shows, done some summer stock and once had a line in a TV commercial for soup, had left “show business” to marry Phil, and after his death had started doing community theater (“There aren’t a lot of parts for chorines in their sixties”). She took a job at the Basie as—and again, I’m using her terminology—“an usherette.”

  She regarded me closely. “Alison Kerby,” she said. “Are you Loretta Kerby’s daughter? I’ve met her at some condo association meetings.” I admitted that my mother was, indeed, my mother, and she nodded. “You favor her. She’s a lovely woman.”

  I didn’t know where to go with that, so I nodded modestly and plowed ahead. “If you liked Mr. Laurentz, why are you glad he’s dead?” I asked.

  “He seemed so unhappy,” she replied. “He was one of those men who always acted dissatisfied, like life was simply not going along with his plan. And then dying upstairs in his bathroom, all by himself.” Not that dying in your bathroom with someone else seemed much more appealing.

  “But you liked him,” I said.

  Frances stood up from the sofa in front of her coffee table—overstuffed with photographs of her children and grandchildren, but I noticed, none of her late husband—and struck a pose looking out the front window, but just barely touching the drape on the right side. No wonder she liked Lawrence so much; he’d been as big a ham as she was.

  “Yes, I did. It was I who got Larry involved in the New Old Thespians.”

  “The New Old…what?”

  Frances smiled, because I clearly was not very well informed and now she could clue me in. “It’s a group that puts on local productions of very high quality, but everyone participating must be at least fifty-five years old,” she explained. “The group was started here in the condo community three or four years ago, and I got involved right at the beginning. We perform plays and musicals, mostly in other active adult communities, but sometimes in schools and once in a while in small community theaters. We have a performance tomorrow night, in fact. I’ll be at rehearsal all evening. But Larry was clearly very interested in theater, so I told him about the group and brought him to his first meeting.”

  I managed to hold on to the same vapid grin I’d been giving Frances since I first showed up at her door, but internally, I was fuming at Lawrence Laurentz. In all the private-eye movies and books, the one thing the detective always insists on is that the client provide all the necessary information, and here I was discovering that Lawrence had left out a whole group of people who might have wanted to kill him.

  “So he came and was a big hit, I suppose,” I said to Frances. It wasn’t a question, exactly, but it did elicit a response.

  Frances covered her mouth, perhaps to hide a chuckle. “Oh, I’m afraid not,” she said in a coquettish trickle of a voice. “Larry had…opinions about pretty much every aspect of every production and was rather loudly disappointed whenever he wasn’t cast in the lead role.”

  “How often was that?” I asked.

  “Every time,” Frances told me.

  “Was he a bad actor?” Lawrence seemed like such a larger-than-life personality, so it was hard to believe he wouldn’t be a natural on the stage.

  Frances appeared to consider the question, and put a finger to her lips. “I wouldn’t say that, exactly,” she began. “Larry was very good at parts that required large gestures and oversized line delivery. But subtlety was not his forte, I’m afraid, and when we were presenting a musical, well, the fact is that Larry couldn’t sing to save his life.”

  “So he was vocal about his opinion that he should have gotten some leading roles. I imagine that didn’t ingratiate him with the rest of the group very effectively,” I suggested.

  Frances shook her head sadly. “No, I’m afraid not. He just rubbed some people the wrong way. But it was mostly because he did care so much about putting on a really good show. Though not everyone in the group saw it that way.”

  “How much did they not see it that way?” I asked.

  She let out a long sigh and looked at her extremely well-vacuumed rug, the section of it that wasn’t covered with furniture or some rather odd porcelain figures of animals. “It was suggested, after a while, that it might be best if Larry leave the group,” she said.

  Uh-oh. “Who did the suggesting?” I asked.

  “Jerry Rasmussen, the president of New Old Thespians,” Frances said. “He didn’t like Larry, and he was the one who was especially adamant about that. I think everyone else would have tolerated Larry because of me.”

  “Because of you?”

  Frances smiled sadly and looked away, this time out the window again. “I guess Larry had a little crush on me, and they knew it,” she explained. “But that got Jerry especially upset.”

  “Because…”

  Frances’s smile got a little bit broader. I was right. “I think Jerry might have a little crush on me, too,” she said.

  I was starting to sense a pattern in her thinking. “How did Mr. Laurentz take it when he was asked to leave?” I asked.

  She seemed to be searching for her answer in that square foot of pristine wall-to-wall. “Oh, not very well. At the meeting when it was suggested, he accused Jerry of favoritism, told the group they were jealous of his talents and declared quite clearly that they…we could all go rot in hell.”

  “Would you excuse me for just a moment?” I asked Frances. She appeared a little confused at my sudden request but nodded. I walked just out of her view into the hallway to the bathroom, where I pulle
d my cell phone out of my tote bag and texted Mom, “Is Lawrence there?”

  Mom was as quick as she was dependable, and in seconds came the response “yhi.” The only problem here was that I had no idea what that meant, so I came back with, “What?” And almost immediately my phone vibrated. “Yes he is.” If one could put eye-rolling into a text, it would have been in that one. Seriously, couldn’t I get into the twenty-first century?

  I sent Mom a quick message back: “Keep him there. I’m coming.” I walked back into the living room and smiled at Frances, even as I pictured a whole new group of suspects to interview. This investigation was beginning to look like an endeavor that could take months to clear up. It’s rough when pretty much anyone in a twenty-six-mile radius could have committed the crime. If indeed a crime had been committed.

  “The tension with Mr. Laurentz—was it difficult for you? Because you had brought him into the group?” I asked.

  Frances wiped her eye. Either she really was a very good actress, or the conversation was disturbing her severely. “A few people stopped talking to me. Larry was one of them.”

  “That must have been very hard on you. Are you still a member of the group?”

  Frances looked up, startled, as if I’d asked whether she was still a human being. “Of course,” she said. “I wouldn’t let some minor personality conflicts get in the way of the show. I’m a professional.” One who wasn’t getting paid for her work, but then I could certainly empathize with such an arrangement. “In fact,” Frances added, “I was thinking of asking your mother if she would be interested, but I had no idea if she had a theatrical background.” That last bit seemed intended to reinforce the idea that Mom was my mom. Once again, I chose not to respond.

  I’d have to narrow the suspect field a little, however, if I was going to get Paul the information he’d need to figure this puzzle out. Certainly I wasn’t going to get to the bottom of it, especially with the entire state of New Jersey capable of having killed Lawrence. We’re a very densely populated state.