Chance of a Ghost

by E. J. Copperman

  Morgan’s bushy eyebrows were doing the merengue all over his forehead; he was clearly deep in thought. “What would a handyman’s business card be doing in a theater in Red Bank five years after he died?” he asked, and then before anyone could answer (which admittedly would have been a while, since I had no idea), he added, “Did your father ever do any work in the Basie theater?”

  Realizing this wouldn’t do any good since I hadn’t found the card at the Basie, I said, “I’m sure he didn’t. I’d remember. Besides, Penny, the box office manager, gave me a quick tour and told me the theater had been remodeled and upgraded just in the past year or two. It would have been too late.”

  “Interesting,” Morgan said. “We have two situations that seem unrelated, but seems much too big a coincidence to be, you know, coincidental.”

  I needed to steer this back in the direction of the truth if it was going to be any help. “What do you think I should do, Morgan?”

  He still needed a little help from Nan but finally answered, “I think this woman at the theater is the one I’d like the most for the murder. But the first thing you have to do is determine that there was a murder. Can you find the officer who reported Laurentz’s death?”

  I admitted I hadn’t tried to do that yet.

  “That would be first. See if he’s on duty tomorrow. It’s Sunday, but cops don’t care,” Morgan said. His speech was faster and more to the point in this conversation than it had been in the five days he’d stayed in my house. Some men love their work; others need it. Clearly Morgan was one of the latter. “I’ll see if I can drum up some information about what a body looks like when it’s been electrocuted, and we’ll talk after you get back tomorrow.”

  “Back?” I asked. “Back from where?”

  Morgan looked at me with a combination of wonder and pity. “From the Count Basie Theatre. You need to find out from this Penny woman exactly how she explains her presence at Laurentz’s house the night he died.”

  Twenty

  Sunday

  The box office at the Count Basie Theatre didn’t open until noon on Sunday, so there were stops that Morgan suggested I make before I went to talk to Penny. First on the list was the Chronicle office, where Phyllis had texted to say she had some intelligence to convey. Even Phyllis texts these days.

  “That must have been some musical,” she chuckled. “Seven people got arrested, and two of them spent the night behind bars.”

  I almost spit out some of the Dunkin’ Donuts coffee I’d bought for us both on the way over, to fend off her homemade brew. “A night in jail? Over a bunch of sixty-year-olds taking their clothes off for thirty seconds at the end of act one?” I’d done some research into Hair since I’d spoken to her last.

  Phyllis nodded with a raised eyebrow while she sipped from her coffee. Black, of course. “I know it looks extreme, and it was, for the charges. Most of them paid a fine and left. But two”—she referred to notes written on the back of a W. B. Mason receipt—“a Frances Walters and a Jerome Rasmussen, were held overnight. I guess they were more naked than everybody else or something.”

  “Were the charges different for those two?” The two New Old Thespians I already had questions about? Interesting coincidence. Or a disturbing one.

  Phyllis followed the chain of her notes from the office supply receipt to a brown paper bag with a grease stain on the bottom. “Nope. Lewdness, public indecency, disorderly conduct. No resisting arrest, nothing interesting out of context.”

  I chewed on the bagel I’d gotten with the coffee. Dunkin’ Donuts does many things well, but bagels do not happen to fall into that category. This was a kaiser roll with a hole in the middle. “So why did those two have to stay in a cell overnight when the others didn’t?” I wondered aloud.

  “That’s something to ask Officer…Robert P. Warrell,” Phyllis answered, checking a second copy of an advertising invoice.

  “Nothing to do with me. I don’t sentence them,” Officer Robert P. Warrell told me. “I arrest them and book them, and the judge decides who has to stay behind bars.”

  I’d driven directly to Monroe Township from Phyllis’s office, and luckily, Warrell, who had been the arresting officer at the performance of Hair, was indeed on duty this Sunday morning. Even luckier, he wasn’t out on patrol; he was finishing paperwork in the squad room and agreed to talk to me when I told the desk sergeant it was about the arrests at Cedar Crest a number of months ago. Clearly, that particular event has made an impression, since even now, mention of it provoked a decent amount of stifled laughter at police headquarters. But laughs or no, I figured it could be a motive in Lawrence Laurentz’s death, so I was here as the private investigator asking Officer Warrell questions—or as the straight man (straight woman?) in a vaudeville act for which the officer was the unintentional comedian. It was all a question of perspective.

  Officer Warrell, it turned out, was maybe twenty-five on a good day, very tall, very blond, and very serious about his work. He was the only cop in the room who didn’t seem to find the—pardon the expression—bust funny.

  “So they saw a judge?” I asked, doing my best to treat the matter with equal sobriety. “The people you arrested that night were arraigned right away?” I had the recorder on in my tote bag, but I was taking notes on a reporter’s notebook, anyway, just to give the impression that I had an idea of what I was doing. The officer looked me straight in the eye without needing to consult an arrest report.

  “It was a Thursday night. That’s municipal court night. The judge was already here, so the arraignments were held immediately. None of the defendants had hired private counsel; most of them just wanted to go home, so they paid their fines and left.”

  “What alerted you to the…problem, anyway?” I asked. “You had to get there awfully quick to make arrests, no?”

  Officer Warrell’s gaze never wavered. “We had gotten advance warning that there might be an illegal element to the performance that evening,” he said. “So I was positioned outside the clubhouse auditorium in case there was a problem.”

  “A problem,” I echoed. At least Morgan Henderson had an excuse.

  “The law is on the books,” the officer said. “I’m paid to enforce it.”

  “Who gave the advance warning?” I asked. “Who ratted out the New Old Thespians for trying to be hippies?”

  “The tip was anonymous,” Warrell said. “I don’t know who it might have been.”

  “Male or female?”

  “I didn’t take the call,” he answered.

  I was starting to think that it would take a graduate of dental school, some laughing gas and a pair of very strong pliers to get any information out of Officer Warrell, but I could hear Paul’s voice in my conscience telling me not to give up. I backtracked a bit. “So you arrested seven people that night, and five of them paid their fines and left,” I reminded him. “Two of them were detained overnight.”

  “Yes,” he nodded. “Frances Walters and Jerome Rasmussen.” Truly, his ability to recall the incident without so much as a Post-it note reminder was impressive.

  “I don’t understand. Why were some fined but others put in jail overnight?” I asked.

  Officer Warrell did not blink. “As I said, Ms. Kerby, the arresting officer does not decide on the sentence. The judge decided they should be detained, and so they were.”

  “Were you in the courtroom when they were all arraigned?” I asked him. They say lawyers should never ask a question when they don’t know the answer in advance. I would have made a lousy lawyer.

  “Of course,” the officer replied. “I was required in case I had to testify about the circumstances of the arrests.”

  “So did the judge say why he was keeping Ms. Walters and Mr. Rasmussen but not the others?”

  For once, Officer Warrell hesitated before answering. But after a moment, he said, “Yes. He said there had been allegations made that there might be other charges pending against those two, and he did not want them to leave
the county until that matter was resolved.”

  “Other charges?” What the hell did that mean? “What other charges?”

  “The judge said an officer of the court had been advised those two might have had some connection with the distribution of a controlled substance.”

  There was a long moment that passed silently. “Drugs? Someone thought they were dealing drugs?” Retired septuagenarians Frances and Jerry as drug dealers? This thing just kept getting weirder.

  “Prescription drugs. Specifically sildenafil.”

  That was a new one on me. “Sildenafil?” I repeated.

  “Better known as Viagra.”

  “You’re kidding,” I blurted, before I remembered to whom I was talking.

  “No, ma’am,” Officer Warrell responded.

  “And the tip about their dealing came from…”

  “An anonymous source,” he said.

  “It’s very simple,” Penny Fields said. “I really don’t understand what all the fuss is about.”

  I’d spent some time on the phone with Phyllis Coates trying to absorb what I’d just been told, but Phyllis was too busy laughing to be much help. Illegal Viagra? How much weirder was this case going to get? The only thing to do was push on, so I arrived just as the box office at the Count Basie Theatre opened at noon, figuring I’d have just enough time to talk to Penny and crack the case before I had to pick up Melissa at Janine’s house at one. If I hit all the traffic lights.

  That was the plan, anyway.

  “You told me the last time I was here that you didn’t know Lawrence Laurentz very well, that he wasn’t too social and that he was condescending, but you were especially clear that you didn’t know him very well,” I reminded her. “Then I do the tiniest amount of digging and find out that you were the person who called EMS when you discovered his body, in his bathtub, at his house. If that’s what you call not knowing someone, what’s your definition of knowing someone well?”

  (By the way, I had gotten Mom to ask Lawrence about that, and his comment—which I deciphered from one of Mom’s vowel-free texts—was, “How would I know who found my body?” A detective’s dream client.)

  Penny pivoted from her computer screen, which displayed a seating chart for an upcoming Micky Dolenz concert, and gave me her best intimidating glare. It was surprisingly effective for a woman about five inches shorter than I am. She had panache.

  “And you told me you were here about some inheritance issue, that Larry had bequeathed someone here some money in his will,” she pointed out. “Now you’re here asking questions about how I found his body and that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with an inheritance. What’s your definition of the truth?”

  She was good.

  “I’m a private investigator and I’m looking for information about Lawrence Laurentz’s death,” I said. “That’s all true. I’ll show you the license again if you like. Now, please, what were you doing at his home the night he died?”

  “It’s embarrassing,” she said. That I actually believed, based on the somewhat nauseated expression she was affecting. Had she thought she was the mysterious person who was mentioned in his (as far as I knew, nonexistent) will? (Come to think of it, I should ask Lawrence about his will.) Was that why she was so upset?

  “It will be held in the strictest of confidence, assuming I’m not required to give information to the police,” I assured her. I’d have to ask Paul when the law stated I might have to tell the cops something, but I did mean what I’d told Penny.

  She turned back to the computer, ostensibly to check on the sales figures for the former Monkee, but I could see a little tightness around her mouth and she sniffed just a touch as she turned. “I was there to fire him,” she said.

  Well, that certainly wasn’t what I’d expected. “You were firing him? Why?”

  “He was causing problems with the part-time staff,” Penny said, doing her best not to look at me. What was upsetting her so? Shame at having been about to fire a guy who died? Embarrassment over having seen him in the bathtub? Serious concern over Micky Dolenz’s career? “He would…report other box office personnel to me for various infractions. People got nervous when he was around. He was creating a bad atmosphere in the office. I had to let him go.”

  All that was consistent with the mosaic I’d been building of Lawrence in my mind. “Any reason why that night in particular?” I asked.

  “I didn’t want to do it in front of the other employees,” she answered. “And I felt I owed it to him to do it in person. That was the only night that month we were dark, with no show here, so that was the night I went.”

  “You had his address from employee records,” I thought aloud.

  Penny turned back toward me and nodded. “I went up and saw his car parked in the space marked for his unit,” she said. “I rang the bell a few times, and he didn’t answer. I tried calling his cell phone, but he didn’t pick that up, either. I could see there were lights on in the house. So I went around to the back and walked up to the deck to see if he was in the kitchen. The French doors were open. I knocked on the glass, but again there was no answer. And I thought I heard water running.”

  “So you went in,” I guessed.

  “When I saw water dripping down from the kitchen ceiling. And knew that couldn’t be good. So yeah, I went in. I probably should have called the police right away, but, you know, I was just thinking there was a faucet left on or something.” Penny closed her eyes.

  I really wanted to let her avoid the memory of what she found upstairs, but Paul would berate me later for not thinking like a detective and assuming that everything everyone tells you is a lie until you can prove it’s not. So I fought the temptation to cut to the chase and instead said, “So you went inside and…” Sometimes you have to lead the witness into telling you the story.

  She nodded, a little more violently than it seemed she’d intended. “I followed the sound of the water running. I called for Larry a couple of times, but of course there wasn’t any answer.” There would be no point in trying to confirm any of this with Lawrence later on; people don’t become ghosts, at least not conscious, alert ghosts, immediately after they die. Paul has told me—and we’ve confirmed it a few other times—that it takes a few days before memory and cognition kick in. So Lawrence wouldn’t know if Penny’s story was true or not.

  “What did you find?” I asked.

  Penny shot me a look that indicated I was being cruel, and I felt like she was right. “You know perfectly well what I found,” she said.

  I couldn’t apologize; for all I knew, this whole story was a lie and Penny had tossed the toaster in to French-fry Lawrence while he bathed. “Did you call the police immediately?” I asked instead.

  “It was obvious he was…that I couldn’t revive him myself,” she exhaled. “I dialed nine-one-one on my cell phone. It felt like hours, but I’m sure they were there very quickly, really. I did do one thing while I was there, though.”

  My ears perked up. “What?” I asked.

  “I turned off the water.” Penny sniffed another time or two, and took a tissue from a box on her desk. She used it.

  After a few moments of sniffling, I figured I’d exhausted the information I’d get from Penny about that night, so I figured I’d switch lines of question entirely: “How come Tyra Carter thinks you won’t hire her back because of me?” I asked.

  “I have no idea,” Penny said. “Have you talked to Tyra?”

  Does being threatened count? “Sort of,” I said. “Do you want to hire her back?”

  Penny looked like she hadn’t considered the possibility before. “I don’t know,” she said. “Tyra was moonlighting while she worked here.”

  I figured if I could help Tyra’s employment picture, I could get her to stop calling me up and saying unsettling things. “I think she’d really like to come back,” I suggested. “You might want to give it a thought.”

  “Maybe,” Penny agreed. “I’ll call her.”
/>   One less threatening figure to worry about, I thought.

  On the way to pick up Melissa, I placed a call to Murray Feldner, who picked up on the first ring as if he’d been waiting by the phone. “Murray,” was all he said. Clearly, a man of action.

  “Murray, it’s Alison Kerby.” My Bluetooth made it sound like I was driving through a car wash in a convertible with the top down.

  “Hi, Alison,” Murray replied. “Do you need something? Is there gonna be snow tonight?”

  “No. It’s about the bill you sent me.” The car in front of me was doing its best to break the record for slowest miles per hour in the passing lane. Pennsylvania plates. It figured.

  “What about it? Did I add it up wrong?” Murray had not, if I recalled correctly, been an honors student in math. Or anything else, except maybe gym.

  “Sort of,” I told him. “You charged me for plowing my driveway and my walk.”

  This did not seem to make an impression on him. “Uh-huh.”

  Subtlety wasn’t going to be a really powerful tool in this conversation. “It didn’t snow Tuesday night, Murray. There was nothing to plow.”

  “What? What about a cow?” Clearly, the Bluetooth was working just as well on the other end. Terrific. And the slow car in front of me actually got slower.

  “Not cow, Murray. Plow. There was nothing to plow.”

  “When?”

  “Wednesday!” I considered passing on the right, which is not technically kosher, but there was a truck with Oklahoma plates there, big enough to be carrying all of New Jersey back home, and I was boxed in. I flashed my lights at the Pennsylvania car. It slowed down more.

  “I came over to your house on Wednesday, Alison. Remember?” Great. Now Murray thought I was the one who hadn’t been an honors student. Which, technically, I hadn’t, but that wasn’t the point. “Your daughter called me the night before. I have it right here in my book.”

  “I know you were there, Murray. But you didn’t do anything; there was no snow. How can you charge me for plowing when there was no snow?”