Chance of a Ghost

by E. J. Copperman

  “Actually, yes,” he answered with a twinkle in his eye.

  Clearly, he wanted someone to ask, so it was lucky that Mom filled the void. “Which one?” she said.

  It was all Morgan could do to avoid breaking out in a grin that would undoubtedly meet at the back of his head.

  “The place where Lawrence Laurentz died,” he said. “And I think it’s reasonably certain he didn’t die from an electric shock in the bathtub.”

  Twenty-two

  As you might expect, the reaction to Morgan’s extraordinary statement was twofold: First, the idea that he and Nan had gone to Lawrence’s town house was a little disconcerting and then the statement that our victim had in fact not been killed by a toaster thrown at him by an invisible assailant—outrageous though it was, that had been the working theory until now—was indeed a game changer. So at least three of us were barking questions, including Melissa and Paul, though the latter’s contribution was not heard by the person at whom it was directed.

  Jeannie was showing Oliver his own reflection in a plastic mirror shaped like a daisy.

  “Easy, easy,” Morgan said with a chuckle. The din from Melissa (and, I realized, me) died down. Tony stood in the doorway with a look on his face that indicated he’d reach for a ball-peen hammer if Morgan turned out to be dangerous. Tony is a good man but sometimes a tad overprotective of Melissa and me.

  Once I could reclaim the floor, I asked, “How did you get into Lawrence Laurentz’s town house?”

  It was Nan, who had actually heard the question first, who answered with a grin. “It was so easy. There’s still a ‘For Sale’ sign in front of the place. We just called the real estate agent and told her we might be interested in an active adult community in the area and had been driving by. She was there in fifteen minutes with a key.”

  “Nobody else had moved in yet?” Melissa asked. “It’s been a long time since Mr. Laurentz died, hasn’t it?”

  “Actually, in today’s real estate market, it’s not unusual for something to be unsold for that long,” Mom said. “And since Larry didn’t have any family to come clean the place out, I guess it took some time to sort out all the details.”

  “But I want to know,” I said, turning to Nan, who was clearly going to be the go-between for Morgan, “what makes Morgan so sure Lawrence didn’t die the way he…the way our client suggested.”

  “I’ll get to that,” Morgan answered when Nan had relayed the message. “But first, let me tell you that the place is being offered furnished unless the new owner wants the stuff removed. I guess Laurentz’s estate isn’t interested in the town house or the furniture too much. Do you know who would benefit from the sale?”

  “As far as I know,” Mom said, “there isn’t much money in his estate, and no relatives. I believe Larry willed everything after his burial expenses to the Count Basie Theatre. Even then, it won’t be much after the mortgage is paid off and the real estate agents make their money.” (She had no doubt gotten much of that information from the source himself; he was rarely anywhere but in her house now.)

  “You’re probably right,” Morgan said. “Regardless, everything was still in place today, even though it had been cleaned up. Nan kept the agent busy while I checked out the scene of the crime in the bathroom. And that’s how I found out he couldn’t have died from electrocution in that bathtub. At least not the way you said, with a toaster thrown in.”

  “Why not?” I asked, although I saw Tony nodding as if he’d figured out the answer ahead of time.

  Morgan raised his index finger like a professor who has been asked an especially precocious question. “Ah!” he said. “Because Laurentz’s bathroom had GFCI outlets. The building is fairly new, and today’s construction code mandates that all electrical outlets in bathrooms and kitchens—anywhere potentially near water—must only have outlets with GFCI, ground fault circuit interrupters. If water gets anywhere near electricity in those rooms, the built-in circuit breakers automatically prevent electrocution.”

  I should have realized that. I’d installed GFCI outlets myself, when I’d redone the bathrooms and kitchen. I reserved time later, when I was alone, for kicking myself.

  “Also,” Morgan said, “I checked with a medical examiner I know. He said the type of electrocution you’re describing might leave burn marks, but it might not, either. A heart problem definitely wouldn’t.”

  “That’s really weird,” I said, looking at Mom, who appeared to be equally confused. “Does this mean that Lawrence really did die of natural causes?”

  Morgan thought about that as Paul stroked his goatee. “I wouldn’t say it’s definite,” he said. “From what you told me, a lot of people didn’t like this guy. If there’s a question, you still have to proceed on the assumption that one of them didn’t like him enough to kill him. Just because we don’t know how doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Maybe he was electrocuted somewhere else and the body was then moved to the tub.”

  That theory didn’t fit with what Lawrence had told us, but then the ghost had told us a lot of things that turned out to be, let’s say, questionable.

  “Excuse me,” Tony said. “Just because there were GFCIs in the bathroom doesn’t mean he wasn’t electrocuted there.”

  At first the ex–police chief seemed taken aback that a building contractor was suggesting he was wrong, but it became clear that he just hadn’t heard what Tony said. After Nan conferred Tony’s statement, Morgan looked at him and put his fingertips to his lips in a sort of pyramid shape. “How?” he asked simply.

  “It’s the simplest thing possible,” Tony said. “An extension cord. All the killer had to do was plug in the toaster or whatever through a wall outlet, maybe in the hallway, where there would be no GFCI, then attach it to an extension long enough to reach the bathtub. The charge wouldn’t last quite as long, but if the guy had previous heart problems, it might be enough.”

  Morgan thought about that and nodded, then pointed at Tony. “Very good, young man,” he said. Then he turned to me. “I think we have a lot of questions to answer.”

  “I wish I could at least get some of the suspects all in the same room,” I said, sort of to myself. “All this driving around in a Volvo with an iffy heater is wearing me down.”

  “You can,” Maxie said. I looked up at her, and I’m sure Nan and Morgan were wondering why I was staring at a spot just under one of the exposed beams near the ceiling. “At least some of the people you want to talk to will all be in a room together tomorrow night. I saw online that the New Old Thespians are giving a performance in Ocean Grove.”

  That was right. Jerry and Frances had both mentioned it. “So I’m going to the New Old Thespians performance tomorrow night in Ocean Grove,” I said. I got a few odd looks, but no one said anything about my behavior. Just as well. “Maybe I’ll be able to answer some of those questions.” I looked at the clock. “But I’m not answering them now,” I told the gathered assembly. “I have a date.”

  “Finally,” Mom said. “Priorities.”

  * * *

  “I can’t believe you don’t remember Color Quiz,” Josh Kaplan said.

  We had agreed that we needed to be able to talk at our dinner, but we didn’t want it to be terribly expensive or fancy—that ups the tension for such a “dinner”—so we’d decided on Louie Ziana’s, a Cajun restaurant in Avon-by-the-Sea, the most hyphenated town in the Garden State.

  There was the usual Zydeco music playing, but not terribly loudly, and since I have an absolute aversion to seafood, I’d checked the menu online ahead of time to ensure there would be cuisine I could enjoy. No sense sweating over entrée choices when there was an attractive guy across the table. He was dressed a little less casually than at the paint store. That is, the clothes he had on were free of splats, bits of Spackle, and dust. Which was a nice improvement.

  “What the heck is Color Quiz?” I asked.

  He looked up at the ceiling and harrumphed, but smiling. “When we were kids and your dad and
my grandfather used to spend all their time in the back of the store, you and I would go up front where the color cards were and we’d play a game we called Color Quiz. You don’t remember? We’d pull out a color card and pretend each row was a different category. Then…”

  It was rushing back into my head. “You’d ask me some crazy question that had nothing to do with paint at all!” I said. I started laughing. “You’d ask me about school or TV or something.”

  “That’s right.” Josh seemed either relieved, amused or both at my recollection. “And when you got a question right, I picked a color and you asked me a question. But yours were always about baseball or carpentry or something.”

  “I was sort of a tomboy,” I said.

  He looked into my eyes a little bit more deeply than was entirely comfortable. “Not now,” he said. “I’m glad to see it.”

  “Don’t kid yourself,” I answered. “I still spend a lot of days with cordless drills and ball-peen hammers.” Honesty. The best policy. Assuming you want guys to think of you wearing overalls and spitting a lot.

  “A holdover from your misspent youth,” Josh commented.

  “Depends on how you look at it. My dad taught me a lot of things that have proven to be very helpful now that I’m legally an adult.”

  The waiter came to take our order (Josh got the blackened catfish, which put a serious crimp in his chances of getting kissed later, and I ordered the basil chicken). When the waiter retreated to the kitchen, Josh looked at me with a less playful expression. “Your dad,” he said.

  Oh, yeah. The pretense for this evening was that I wanted to hear stories about Dad. Not that I minded Josh telling me what he remembered about my father, but it wasn’t necessarily the story line I was aiming at anymore.

  “My dad,” I parroted back. It sounded soulful without actually offering any information. “I have to tell you—I was lying about the memoir.”

  Josh looked surprised but amused. “Really,” he said. “You were really just in the store for a gallon of semigloss?”

  I could feel myself blush. I’m not proud of it. “No. I want to talk about my dad, but it’s connected to a case I’m working on.”

  Surprised seemed to overtake amused, but just for a quick moment. “A case?” Josh said.

  Other men—most of them my ex-husband—have reacted strangely to the news I was going to impart. “Besides running the guesthouse, I also have a private-investigator’s license,” I told him. Then I waited.

  Josh broke into a broad smile. “Really? A private investigator? That’s amazing!”

  “It is?” Okay, he caught me by surprise.

  “Yeah. Don’t you think so?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “So tell me, how can I help with your…case?”

  “It’s just”—I thought about how best to phrase this—“I have some suspicions about the way my father died. And knowing more about him from the people who knew him well can help me zone in.”

  Josh looked concerned. “You think there was something weird about the way your father died?”

  “Well, I don’t know. Not really. I’m not suggesting a crime was committed.” I couldn’t suggest that a grumpy ghost in Josh’s store had made me suspicious or that my dad was now a ghost who was missing. When I thought about the grumpy ghost, something clenched in my stomach. I shook my head a bit to banish the thought and refocused. That kind of thing would have to at least wait until the second date. “I’m just sort of…practicing. I want to fill in some gaps, and I thought your grandfather—and you—could help.”

  Josh leaned back in his chair a little bit, never taking his eyes off me, though he managed to maintain eye contact without making it seem creepy. “It’s just as well, since most of the things I remember are about you, not your dad,” he said finally. “Mostly Color Quiz. But there were plenty of times in later years, when I was going to Rutgers and helping out in the store on weekends, that your dad would come in and we’d talk.”

  It wasn’t going to help me find Dad or discover what had happened to Lawrence Laurentz, but I did want to hear the details. “What did you talk about?”

  Josh grinned a little guiltily. “Mostly about you.”

  “Me! That couldn’t have taken very long.” The waiter came by with a pitcher of water and two bottles of beer. I grabbed mine and took a cold swig.

  “You’d be surprised.” Josh actually poured his beer into a glass—something I’ve always thought just made it warm when you drank it—but didn’t drink any. “He could go on and on about you, how you were in college, what you were studying, how you were fixing up your dorm room until it was in better condition than when you moved in.” He looked amused.

  “I can’t help it if the place needed spackling and painting,” I mumbled.

  “I thought that was great. Then once I was out of college and in the store part-time while I was getting the MBA, I heard all about you. When you dropped out of college, he was not happy.”

  I knew about that. Dad wasn’t one to keep his feelings, good or bad, to himself. “He must have been just tickled to death when I got married,” I said sarcastically. My dad had seen The Swine’s true colors long before I had.

  Josh, in the act of taking a sip of beer, almost lost it through his nose when he snorted a laugh. I chuckled as he mopped himself up. “That’s your fault,” he said. “I think the happiest I ever saw your father was the day he told me you were getting divorced.”

  I put a lot of attention into not rolling my eyes. “I’ll bet. But not happier than when my daughter was born, I’ll bet.”

  Josh shook his head. “No. Not happier than then. He was crazy about his granddaughter.”

  “And she was crazy about him.” Liss was five when Dad died, and just old enough to understand what it meant. I remembered how, when I broke the news to her that morning, she looked angry and said, “I don’t like this at all.” That’s all she said that whole day.

  Out of nowhere, Josh got a funny look in his eye and said, “You know, there are days—and I wouldn’t say this to anyone else—when I’m in the back of the store, and I’d swear I still could hear your father kibitzing with my grandfather and the other regulars by the coffeemaker.”

  That’s just what I was hoping, I thought. My expression must have given something away, because Josh suddenly looked at me with concern. “Really?” I covered out loud. “You thought you heard him?”

  “No, not really,” he answered. “It’s an expression, Alison. I mean, sometimes it just feels like he should be there, you know?”

  Apparently it doesn’t take long to blacken a catfish, because the server soon appeared by our tableside with the entrées, and conversation was once again interrupted while we ogled our dinners and tucked in just a bit—I’d realized I had barely eaten all day, and the chicken was wonderful.

  When Josh and I came up for air, I had decided the best thing to do was downplay my previous lapse of control when he’d mentioned my father’s presence—or perceived presence—in the paint store. Didn’t want to alarm Josh, especially if he later had the good sense to eat a mint or four following that catfish.

  “I sort of feel like Dad’s around sometimes myself,” I began, not getting into my desire to see him more often. “It’s sort of a comfort mechanism, I guess.”

  “He was so alive when he was alive,” Josh said. “I loved talking to him. But mostly, he loved talking about you, and I was happy to listen.”

  We gazed rather stupidly at each other for a few seconds. “You’re not wealthy, are you?” I asked finally. “Because then you’d be too perfect, and that would ruin everything.”

  Josh smiled with the left side of his mouth. It approached adorable. I might have to push a couple of mints on him of my own volition. “I half own a paint store, Alison,” he said. “The word ‘wealthy’ isn’t even in my vocabulary. But I would like to see this guesthouse of yours. Sounds like you’ve made quite an investment there.”

  “Tell you what,” I said. “What tim
e do you close the store tomorrow?”

  “Mondays we close at five.”

  “Perfect,” I said. “I’ll give you my address. Come pick me up at six thirty.”

  He looked quite pleased. “Where are we going?” he asked.

  “To watch a bunch of senior citizens perform Peter Pan,” I said.

  Twenty-two

  As you might expect, the reaction to Morgan’s extraordinary statement was twofold: First, the idea that he and Nan had gone to Lawrence’s town house was a little disconcerting and then the statement that our victim had in fact not been killed by a toaster thrown at him by an invisible assailant—outrageous though it was, that had been the working theory until now—was indeed a game changer. So at least three of us were barking questions, including Melissa and Paul, though the latter’s contribution was not heard by the person at whom it was directed.

  Jeannie was showing Oliver his own reflection in a plastic mirror shaped like a daisy.

  “Easy, easy,” Morgan said with a chuckle. The din from Melissa (and, I realized, me) died down. Tony stood in the doorway with a look on his face that indicated he’d reach for a ball-peen hammer if Morgan turned out to be dangerous. Tony is a good man but sometimes a tad overprotective of Melissa and me.

  Once I could reclaim the floor, I asked, “How did you get into Lawrence Laurentz’s town house?”

  It was Nan, who had actually heard the question first, who answered with a grin. “It was so easy. There’s still a ‘For Sale’ sign in front of the place. We just called the real estate agent and told her we might be interested in an active adult community in the area and had been driving by. She was there in fifteen minutes with a key.”

  “Nobody else had moved in yet?” Melissa asked. “It’s been a long time since Mr. Laurentz died, hasn’t it?”

  “Actually, in today’s real estate market, it’s not unusual for something to be unsold for that long,” Mom said. “And since Larry didn’t have any family to come clean the place out, I guess it took some time to sort out all the details.”