“The ghosts are missing?” Francie piped up. “How can a ghost be missing?”
“I wouldn’t say missing,” I told her. “I’m guessing she’s just a little late, to tell the truth. Sometimes people on the Other Side lose track of time a little, you know?”
Paul rolled his eyes at that one. It looks odd upside down, in case you were wondering.
Melissa ran back into the house, and I met her at the library doorway, where we could whisper to each other. “She’s not there,” she told me. “I ran all the way around the house, and I didn’t see her anywhere.”
“Try the basement.” It was a long shot, but if Maxie really didn’t want to be found, she might go to an area of the house where she didn’t normally spend much time. Melissa nodded, and was gone before I could turn around.
Inside, the mob was getting a little restless (except Don, of course, who was drinking an iced decaf with Splenda and having what appeared to be a jovial conversation with Mrs. Spassky). I clapped my hands and smiled my most ingratiating smile.
“While we search for our missing friend,” I said, without grimacing—I think—“why don’t we start with some questions for the spirit who is actually in the room at the moment?”
I looked up. Paul was, indeed, still in the room, responsible soul that he was, but hanging from the ceiling, about a third of him visible from the chest up, or down, depending on how you wanted to think about it.
“How do we know where he is?” Mrs. Fischer asked. “I’d hate to be asking a question to the wall.”
“I’ll tell you what,” I said. “We’ll see to it that our friend up there writes his answers out for you; then you can not only see where he is, but that I’m not tricking you in any way. Paul really is up there.”
But he was looking somewhat panicky.
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea, Alison,” he told me. “I’m not sure I can write like this.”
“Like what?” I asked. A couple of the guests looked confused, then nodded, oh yes, I was talking to the ghost.
“In my current state. I get a little queasy trying to concentrate on things that are over my head, or in this case, under my head.”
“How can you get queasy? You haven’t eaten in two years.” This get-together with the ghosts was starting to look a little lame to the guests, I was sure.
“Don’t ask me how it can happen; I’m just telling you the facts,” Paul said, looking profoundly unhappy. “There must be some other way I can verify my presence with these people.”
Melissa stuck her head in just far enough to say, “Not in the basement. Trying the attic.”
Before I could say “Paul would have told us if she was in the attic,” my daughter was gone up the stairs. There was nothing to do but face the increasingly disappointed-looking faces of my guests.
“I’m afraid it’s difficult for Paul to write anything at the moment,” I told them. “Let’s try to think of another way we can convince you he’s here.”
They stared at me for what seemed like an hour. I started trying to form a new sentence in my mind, but was coming up completely blank. You might just have well asked me to recite the lyrics to “Roundabout,” by Yes. Which, I’m pretty sure, has lyrics.
“We could just take your word for it,” Don Petrone said, smiling as usual. His teeth were so white I found myself trying to determine if they were natural or not. “I trust you, Alison.”
“I don’t think this is an issue of trust,” Francie sniffed. “We’re paying extra for this vacation in a house that has ghosts in it. Now, I’ve seen things flying around the room, and I’ve heard some spooky noises that I think were probably recorded, and the whole thing has been about as real as the haunted house at Disneyland. Then there was a woman here yelling up at a ‘ghost’ who just threw books around, just like before. So when we were supposed to have this one-on-one meeting with the ghosts, I thought this would be the chance to prove it. And now all I’m hearing is excuses.”
I wanted to be annoyed with Francie, since hers was exactly the reaction I’d been dreading, but the fact was that she had a point. So I looked at her and said, “I understand just why you feel that way. And I’d like to ask you if there’s anything that could happen right now that would convince you there is the spirit of a man in the room who has in fact passed on. What can we do to prove it to you, Francie? Name anything.”
Melissa, from the library door: “Not in the attic. Trying farther into the backyard.” And gone again.
“Why not pour some ink or paint or something on his hand and let us see him?” Mrs. Spassky tried. “Then we’d know there was someone there.”
I groaned inwardly. “I’m afraid it doesn’t work like that, Mrs. Spassky,” I said. “Paul’s not invisible; he’s dead.” I looked up to him for some sign of a solution; Paul was usually so good about helping out when he could. Now, he looked helpless, and unable to straighten himself out, literally.
“Give me the pad and pen,” he finally pushed out through clenched teeth. “Tell them I’ll answer one question, and that’s all I can do on paper.”
I passed the suggestion on to the group, and they agreed this would be sufficient to convince them of Paul’s existence. So I picked up the legal pad and felt-tipped pen I had ready for the session, and reached up toward Paul, who was quite near the ceiling and faced away from me. “Here,” I said.
Paul reached down with his right arm, and the space between the pad and his hand was about two feet. I stood on my toes, and asked him to lower himself a bit, something that under normal circumstances wouldn’t have been in the least difficult for him.
“I don’t think I can,” he said. “I’m feeling really weak.”
Noting the fabulous timing for that announcement, I looked at my one loyal friend in the crowd. “Don,” I said, “may I borrow your chair for just a moment?”
Don looked startled, but as usual, nodded and smiled. He stood and pushed the chair he’d been sitting on toward me.
I positioned it under the area where Paul was suspended, and stepped up onto the seat. That bridged the gap between our hands, and I pushed the pad into Paul’s hand.
And he dropped it.
Mrs. Spassky looked at the pad on the floor, frowned, and stood. She walked out of the room without saying another word. Mrs. Fischer was not far behind her.
“Just one minute,” I said, stepping off the chair to gather the pad off the floor.
“I’m sorry, Alison,” Paul said. And he vanished.
I stood there, feeling shocked and alone. There was nothing left to do but tell the group that we’d have to reschedule this event—but when I turned around, I saw that each and every one of them was already leaving the library. I didn’t even bother to make the announcement.
Melissa walked in just as Don Petrone, the last holdout, turned to me, shrugged, and left the room silently. She sat down next to me and put her hand in mine.
“Having a bad day?” she asked.
“I’ve had better. Where’s Maxie?”
Melissa shook her head. “I can’t find her anywhere, and that’s weird,” she said. “I know she hides from you sometimes, but I can always find her.”
“She’s lucky she’s dead,” I said. “Because after this, I’d kill her when I saw her.”
“You don’t mean that,” Melissa admonished me.
“Not literally, no.”
“Why couldn’t Paul do the show?” Melissa asked.
I didn’t want to worry her—she already knew Paul was upside down; telling her he was weak would have alarmed her—so I said, “The upside-down thing. He kept dropping stuff and it looked like he wasn’t there.” Which was pretty much true. And before Liss could ask why he couldn’t do other stuff, my cell phone buzzed, indicating I’d gotten a text message. My heart leapt a little, but I exhaled when I took a look.
The message was from Phyllis Coates at the Chronicle. And it read, simply, “GET OVER HERE. SOMETHING’S FISHY WITH THE ARREST.”
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Twenty-five
“Since when are you interested in a murder in Seaside Heights?” I asked Phyllis.
Her office, overstuffed with paper and never roomy to begin with, was looking especially wilted today. It might have had something to do with the two table fans she had running and the lack of air-conditioning.
“I told you, it’s a slow news cycle for us except for the borough boards making sound and fury signifying nothing. Even if stuff was happening here, the borough would want me to shut up about it because it would hurt the tourist business.” Phyllis, who gave up smoking roughly around the time I was born, still liked to have a pen dangling out of her mouth where a cigarette once lived.
“Would you shut up about it?” I asked.
Phyllis snorted. “Of course not. But there really isn’t anything going on, and now a woman from the area’s been arrested for the Seaside Heights murder, so that makes it sort of interesting to my readership. But when I saw the report from the ME, it was beyond clear that someone is railroading this Katherine Malone faster than Amtrak could do it. Something really is rotten in the state of Seaside Heights.”
“What about the medical examiner’s report smelled bad?” I asked. It hadn’t occurred to me that the obvious frame job someone was working on Kitty would extend that far.
“Fragments of metal in the skull? Any implement made of steel, like that wrench, would be ten times too hard to leave that kind of residue. A match made by examining those fragments against the weapon? Come on. You know how many wrenches are made with that kind of steel? And the idea that it’s still there, waiting to be picked up and put into an evidence bag, after two years? I’m miles away from the county prosecutor’s office, and I can smell the crap from here.”
That was pretty much what Paul had been saying, but sometimes the idea that another person has reached the same conclusion independently can make you feel more confident about what you’ve already heard. “Your source in the ME’s office might know something,” I suggested.
But this time, she shook her head. “He won’t talk about this one, no matter how I try to persuade him,” she said, adding a little extra juice to the word persuade. “And believe me, I’ve tried.”
“Do me a favor and don’t tell me more,” I suggested.
Phyllis chortled. “Anyway, it’s clear that somebody is setting up this Malone woman as the killer, and for reasons I can’t begin to fathom, the cops are going for it,” she said. “I’ve done a little digging, and I really don’t think this Detective Martin Ferry in Seaside Heights is a bad cop. Maybe not too much initiative. He seems honest enough, and his record of clearing cases was really good until he lost his partner.”
“Yeah, all he does is talk about his ex-partner,” I told her. “Was she killed in the line of duty or something?”
Phyllis cocked an eyebrow. “You don’t know?” she asked with a tone so incredulous it occurred to me that I’d be diminished in her eyes if I told the truth. So I grinned with what I thought was a wiseguy expression.
“Of course I know,” I said. “I was just having some fun with you.”
“Good. Anyway, I only called you here because you showed some interest in this murder the day we went to Veg Out, and I wouldn’t want to think a professional investigator would miss that detail.”
“Don’t be silly,” I said. Mostly, I meant that referring to me as a “professional investigator” was silly, but there was no reason to tell Phyllis that. Now all I had to do was find out about Ferry’s ex-partner.
“Anyway,” Phyllis went on, letting me off the hook for the time being, “Ferry was doing well until he was on his own, and even now, he’s not doing badly. But cops are competitive, and maybe he feels like he needs to clear this two-year-old homicide to keep his reputation alive; I don’t know. I’m grasping at straws because this thing doesn’t make a lick of sense on the surface.”
It still didn’t explain why she’d texted me so urgently. “I haven’t found out anything you don’t already know,” I pointed out.
Phyllis picked up the thread. “You know something I don’t. What’s the motive? Why do the cops think Katherine Malone wanted to kill this biker guy? Was it the drugs?”
The drugs? “Big Bob was married, very briefly, to Kitty Malone’s daughter,” I told her. “And she really didn’t like him. Supposedly, she thought he was trying to rekindle the relationship, although I think that’s a crock.” Then, even risking Phyllis’s diminished opinion of me, I asked, “What drugs?”
She didn’t even blink. “I’m told that there was some speculation ‘Big Bob’ was involved in a cocaine deal of epic proportions that never really seemed to take off,” she said. “The cops say he was supposed to deliver a massive amount of blow to a buyer one night, but he never showed up.”
That was, to say the least, news to me—everyone at the Sprocket had been adamant that Big Bob never abused anything but the occasional beer. I shook my head to get my thoughts straight. “Big Bob was a drug dealer?” I said aloud, but not necessarily to Phyllis.
“Not before that night, no,” she answered. “That’s the weird part. But the narcotics cops I spoke to swear they got wind of some mammoth coke deal that was about to happen, and then it didn’t, and nobody knew who the supplier was, but Bob Benicio was supposed to do the deal. He didn’t show up, and nobody ever heard from him again until his bones showed up under the beach in Seaside Heights.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” I told her. “If the cops thought Big Bob was in on some big drug deal, why didn’t they look for him after he disappeared? Nobody seems to have given a damn about him until they found his body, two years later.”
Phyllis, as always sifting through papers that probably had significance in some other story she was preparing to write, seemed to find what she was looking for in a stack and took the pen out of her mouth to underline something. “That’s not entirely true,” she said. “There was actually a pretty massive search for Benicio by the county cops at the time, but, of course, they never found him. They just kept it quiet because they didn’t want his buyers to know the cops knew who they were. It all went nowhere because Big Bob was several feet under the boardwalk.”
This turn in the investigation was really throwing me for a loop. It completely shattered the image Maxie and Luther had given me of Big Bob, and seemed to bolster the one that Kitty had apparently held. Big Bob was Bad News.
“I’ve got to go,” I told Phyllis. “I’ll let you know if I find out anything.”
“Where are you going?” she asked, a slight smile on her face. This was what she’d wanted after all—to get me working on this investigation so she could ask me about it later.
“To someone who might know something,” I said.
* * *
Shore Cycle of Lakewood, Luther Mason’s “bike shop,” was not what I had expected. I’d pictured a small store with a garage in the back, where Luther and an assistant would provide advice for motorcycle enthusiasts while standing around a hot wood-burning stove during the winter. So I was not exactly prepared for what I found.
The place was enormous, taking up the better part of a half acre (I could judge in comparison to my own backyard). The parking lot alone was bigger than I’d pictured the entire operation, and there were at least thirty motorcycles, serious-looking ones, parked there.
The big glass-enclosed showroom, more reminiscent of an upscale car dealership, was so spotless I considered asking Luther the name of his cleaning lady. Four salespeople—yes, there was even one woman selling hogs—patrolled the floors. Business appeared to be brisk. Luther was nowhere to be found, but when I asked a salesman (whose name was Dan and whose jeans were pressed) where to locate him, I was given directions to “the top floor.” To be fair, there were only two levels, but it sounded good.
I found the proprietor in his “office,” which was really an enclosed cubicle made of glass that overlooked the sales floor. No doubt when a prospective customer was getting he
sitant about the outlay of cash, the rep on the floor would bring him up to “see the manager,” and Luther would close the sale.
“I’m impressed,” I told him when he welcomed me into the “room.” It was quite spacious inside, and the view of the much larger space around it added the illusion of greater depth. “You didn’t let on it was this large an operation. A bike shop, indeed.”
“Well, it sort of started that way,” Luther said. “When I bought the original place, it was about half this size and looked like a garage with an auto parts store in front of it. But I knew what real bikers wanted to be treated like, so I took every dime I ever had and turned it into this. It’s working out pretty well.”
“I’ll say.”
“So how come I haven’t heard from you?” Luther asked, hurriedly adding, “What’s going on with the investigation?” in case I thought he meant anything else. He seemed determined not to mention our venture into lip-locking—after all, it was just one kiss—and I was in a business state of mind as well, so I didn’t disagree.
“I need more of your insight,” I told him. “There’s some suggestion now that Big Bob might have been involved in some very large drug deal around the time he died, and that could be why he was killed. Did you know anything about that?”
But the look in Luther’s eyes had already given me the answer: He was shocked. “Big Bob?” he asked. “I never saw that guy venture beyond a couple of beers. I can’t imagine he was involved in drugs.”
“Apparently a lot.”
Luther shook his head. “Couldn’t be. I would have known, or one of the other guys. And it’s just so outside Big Bob’s character. He wasn’t even all that concerned about money. As long as he was making a living wage at the grill during the season and picking up maybe some construction work with Wilson when he got some during the off-season, he was content. A lot of guys have these big dreams, you know, where they’re gonna win the lottery and go live on some island in the Caribbean. Not Big Bob. He was happy with his life the way it was. I can’t see him getting involved in something like that.”
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