An Uninvited Ghost

by E. J. Copperman

  The crew, union members all, were gone in the blink of an eye, but the cast seemed puzzled and (of course) annoyed at the sudden interruption. “What the migraine was that?” H-Bomb wanted to know. “I’ve been, like, getting my volleyball skills ready all morning.” If by volleyball skills, she meant greasing up the area in and around her pectoral muscles, she was being entirely accurate.

  They stomped off, no doubt in search of fattening foods that would mysteriously never make so much as a tiny bulge on any of their waists, while Phyllis and I exchanged confused looks. I stopped Trent as he tried to motor on by me by grabbing his arm and holding on for dear life. He had strong arm muscles, I noticed.

  “What’s going on?” I asked. “You looked like you were just about to shoot.”

  “We were,” he said. “Something came up.”

  “Something’s always coming up,” I pointed out. “This must have been a big something.”

  He looked grim as he nodded. “Tiffney is missing.”

  Eighteen

  Trent Avalon, having heard that in addition to operating a guesthouse I was also a licensed PI, immediately asked me to look into Tiffney’s disappearance. He seemed quite disappointed when I told him I was already in the middle of another investigation (having made the spontaneous decision to take Tom Donovan’s offer instead) and would not be able to conduct both. As I later told Paul, I was more comfortable taking a case that I knew McElone could solve ahead of me, and besides, I really had no idea how to track down a missing person. And the truth of the matter was, in the back of my mind, I really wasn’t all that sorry that Tiffney was gone.

  Besides, she’d been gone—what, two hours? That’s not a disappearance; in Tiffney’s world, that’s a bathroom break. But Trent was acting like she’d vanished off the face of the earth two weeks before. I was not interested in getting involved in his craziness.

  Worse than that, I was secretly afraid Helen DiSpasio had done something to her rival, and the last thing I wanted was an angry H-Bomb living on my property and looking for me.

  Trent said Tiffney had retreated to her trailer after yet another heated encounter with H-Bomb, something to do with his letting Tiffney wear a blue thong bikini when H-Bomb insisted that was her color. It was like a gang war fought with silicone. After a reasonable cooling-off period, H-Bomb had told Trent she’d go see Tiffney and smooth things over, and no one had seen Tiffney since.

  H-Bomb, of course, insisted that she’d left the trailer after having patched things up with her hated rival, about whom she was now sobbing in a corner of my den, wailing that she’d lost her “closest friend, like, ever.”

  And saying it all directly into the camera while making sure her eye makeup was running just the tiniest bit. Enough to show the depth of her torment, but not so much that she looked like a circus clown. It’s an art.

  “But I need someone who knows the way the show operates, who knows Tiff,” he said. “And I need someone who can keep it quiet.”

  “That’s going to be hard to do,” I told him. “You knew that the editor of the local paper was here to write a feature on the show shooting here.”

  He blanched and looked back through the glass doors to where Phyllis was taking pictures of the two male cast members and Ed, all the while asking them questions that they didn’t realize at the time would end up in her report on Tiffney’s disappearance. “That’s her?” he said.

  Trent didn’t wait for an answer, which was just as well, since I’d already provided it. He strode to the French doors, opened them and shouted, “No more press! That’s it, gentlemen! This set is under a news quarantine!”

  Even from this distance, I could see Phyllis grinning as she mouthed the words news quarantine.

  “What’s the problem, Trent?” I asked. “I’d think you’d want publicity for something like this. If someone sees Tiffney, you want them to contact the police, don’t you?”

  “The police!” he practically exploded. “Nobody’s calling the police!”

  “You’re right,” I said. “There’s no need for the cops. You have a missing cast member who probably just went to an afternoon movie. Why are you so wound up?”

  Trent made a visible effort to bring his behavior to normal-human-discourse level. He even—I’m not making this up—put a finger to his neck, trying to take his own pulse and force himself into a calmer state through sheer willpower. “You don’t understand,” he told me. “This can’t get out. For one thing”—now he was breathing more normally—“the police wouldn’t consider Tiff a missing person until at least twenty-four hours have gone by. But she’d never miss a chance to be in front of the camera. Never. Something must be wrong.”

  Trent went into another litany, pleading with me to investigate Tiffney’s vanishing, and I told him I’d take a look in her trailer, but that was all. Paul, hovering just over my left shoulder, followed me outside as Trent offered his rather embarrassed thanks. Trent led me to Tiffney’s trailer and started to follow me inside. I turned and pointed at him.

  “Stay here,” I told him. “I can’t do anything with you breathing down my neck.” The truth was, I wanted to be able to ask Paul questions, and I couldn’t do that if Trent were nearby. Instead, I left him outside with Phyllis, who as we walked away was asking him for a correct spelling of Tiffney’s last name. Trent looked like he might be sick.

  The crew was striking the volleyball set as I walked into the trailer. No one in the crew besides Trent seemed terribly concerned about Tiffney’s whereabouts, and they were working with the usual combination of resignation and good-natured kidding among themselves. Of course, the crew guys never seemed to get upset about anything; it was always Trent or the cast who were apoplectic. No one was paying any attention to me, anyway, which was exactly what I wanted.

  “What am I looking for?” I asked Paul.

  “I’ll know it when we see it,” he said. “Keep your eyes open and don’t make up your mind about anything. Going in with preconceived notions about what you’ll find means you’ll only find what you’re looking for, and not what’s actually there.”

  The trailer, luckily, had been left unlocked after Trent had gone searching for Tiffney and come up lacking. I opened it and walked inside, and Paul just hovered in through the wall, rising off the ground to meet the proper eye level. Sometimes the grace with which the ghosts moved made me feel like being dead had its advantages.

  But not that many.

  The trailer, as big as the average Manhattan apartment, was luxurious and tasteful, two things I wouldn’t have expected from Tiffney. It had a very lovely sleeping area, unadorned by the kind of tackiness I might have expected. There was a kitchenette with a mini-fridge, a microwave oven and an actual stove, which I was willing to bet had never been used. Of course, I’d been living in my house for six months and had turned on the stove eight times, six to heat water for hot chocolate. So I might not be one to judge.

  There was also a bathroom area with a shower and a toilet and enough room for Tiffney to have spread out cosmetics on every surface, but either she hadn’t done so, or she’d meticulously cleaned up after herself. I tended to believe the former option was more likely.

  Then I remembered that there was another whole trailer devoted to makeup, so Tiffney probably didn’t need all that much in here.

  “It looks like a hotel room after housekeeping has been through,” Paul said. He was standing, sort of, in the middle of the space, taking it all in. “What does it smell like?”

  “Smell?” I asked.

  “Yes. I can’t smell anything anymore.”

  I hadn’t thought about it. I took a deep sniff. “It smells clean,” I said. “Like you said, a hotel after the maid’s been in.”

  “Interesting,” he said.

  “Do you think someone cleaned up after Tiffney and H-Bomb had their brouhaha?” I asked.

  “Like I said, don’t make assumptions,” Paul scolded. “Another possibility is that Tiffney herself never reall
y lived here.”

  “Aha, the plot thickens,” I said in a theatrical voice. “Suppose she was shacking up with one of the hunky guys, and H-Bomb found out.”

  Paul shook his head and sighed, the teacher having to repeat the lesson for a student with, let’s say, limited learning capacity. “Or the other hunky guy found out and was jealous. Or Tiffney and H-Bomb were really lovers and one of the guys they’d been flirting with found out. There are hundreds of possibilities, and very few of them end in violence. The only thing we know for sure is that Tiffney isn’t here right now.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “We don’t even know if it’s because she wanted to leave, or if someone forced her to.”

  “Now you’re getting it. Don’t make any assumptions. Just take a look and see what you can—”

  “Hey!” I shouted, cutting off his lecture on the Basics of Detecting for Idiots. “Look at that!” I pointed at a spot on the carpeted floor in the bedroom area.

  “What?” Paul asked, but he was already lowering himself down through the trailer’s floor so he could get a very close look at the area I was indicating. “Now, don’t jump to conclusions, Alison.”

  On just a few fibers of carpet, right next to Tiffney’s bed, was a dried spot of liquid.

  Red liquid.

  “It’s blood!” I said. “Something happened here between Tiffney and H-Bomb, and the show knows, so they covered it up! Tiffney’s not missing, she’s—”

  “Good thing you’re not jumping to conclusions,” Paul said. “You know, blood dries brown, not red.”

  “It does?” But of course I knew that. Any mother who does laundry knows that.

  “Yes, it does. My best guess is that this is nail polish.”

  Men. “I’ve never seen Tiffney wear red nail polish,” I said. “She favors black for a shock effect or, for some reason, green at other times. Never red. Look at a woman’s hands once in a while, just for a change of pace, will you?”

  “Focus on the task, Alison.” Yeah, yeah.

  I dropped down to the carpet and performed the same task I had when he’d asked about the air in the trailer—I sniffed. “It doesn’t smell like nail polish,” I told Paul. “It’s dry. It doesn’t really smell like anything.”

  “It could be anything. They might have been having meatball subs and it’s some marinara sauce.” Paul was already looking around the trailer for another clue.

  “It’s paint,” I told him. “I recognize the texture. It’s latex paint.”

  Paul’s head turned toward me. “Really!”

  “I’ve painted every room in a seventeen-room house, Paul. If there’s one thing I recognize, it’s cheap latex.”

  He dropped down and took a better look. “You’re right. I wonder what they were painting in here.”

  “I have no idea.” I stood up again, my knees cracking, and walked to the far end of the trailer, where the bathroom door was closed. “The one thing we haven’t seen is a closet,” I said. “There’s got to be one.”

  “There are pantry cabinets in the kitchen,” Paul pointed out. “Look for the bifold doors, like those, only larger.”

  And sure enough, I found the doors, between the sleeping area and a small table with chairs (bolted to the floor, of course), where Tiffney could . . . entertain? I opened the doors and looked inside.

  “I think we can rule out marinara sauce,” I choked out when I got my breath back.

  Paul streaked over and looked. “Yes, I suppose we can.”

  Inside the closet, sitting in a folding director’s chair whose cross-canvas read “TIFFNEY” was a full-size mannequin wearing a cheap blonde wig, a pair of torn skinny jeans, and a sweatshirt from the University of Florida, which I guessed was Tiffney’s alma mater, assuming she’d gotten someone to take the SATs for her.

  The mannequin’s neck was painted all the way around with red paint, sloppily, and some had dripped onto the sweatshirt, the chair, the jeans and the floor. And on the dummy’s forehead was written, in red, the word skank.

  I broke away from the sight, closed the closet door and walked straight to the trailer door. Once outside the trailer, not bothering to see whether Paul was with me or not, I marched directly to the kitchen of my house, where Trent was looking over some paperwork with Ed the director.

  “Call the police,” I told him. “This case is much too tough for me.”

  Nineteen

  I left the house before Detective Anita McElone could arrive. I knew it was the wrong thing to do, and it was cowardly, but the scene in the trailer was as much as I could handle, and another grilling from the lieutenant was more than I was willing to bear.

  Instead, I went to the office of Thomas Donovan, attorney-at-law. And even in the polished-oak environment there, I was admitted without question once the receptionist in the main office let her boss know Ms. Kerby was present. Because it was a Saturday, I’d called ahead and discovered Arlice Crosby’s lawyer working in his office, even on the weekend. If the receptionist was annoyed about being there, I certainly couldn’t tell through her “welcome to Walt Disney World” smile. Within seconds, I was sitting in a very comfortable, overstuffed chair in front of Mr. Donovan’s desk, which was roughly the size of a coffin and just as shiny.

  “I’m so glad you’ve decided to take on the investigation,” Donovan said when I informed him of my decision. He didn’t know I was taking it for two reasons: First, he was paying me a very fair amount of money, and second, it was a way to avoid taking Trent Avalon’s offer to investigate Tiffney’s disappearance, which was looking much kinkier and more involved than poor Arlice’s dose of insulin.

  In short, I didn’t know who killed Arlice, but I knew for a fact that I was afraid of H-Bomb. Never was a girl more aptly nicknamed.

  “I just want to be very clear,” I answered him. “I’m a new investigator, and I’ve never taken on a homicide case before.” (Not professionally, anyway.) “I still recommend that you rely on the police to discover what happened to Mrs. Crosby, and why.”

  Donovan nodded. “I appreciate your candor,” he said. “But Arlice believed in you, and that means I believe in you. According to the police, someone murdered her, and I don’t think she would want us to sit on our hands and wait for someone else to discover what happened.”

  “All right, then,” I said. “Let’s not.”

  He blinked. “Let’s not what?”

  “Sit on our hands. Let’s go to the Ocean Wharf Hotel, and you can walk me through what happened on the day you went there with Mrs. Crosby.”

  Tom Donovan did the last thing I would have expected to do. He stood up and headed for his office door.

  “Yes,” he said. “Let’s.”

  The Ocean Wharf, a hulking structure standing right on the beach about a mile and a half from my house, was everything you’d expect out of an abandoned hotel—that is, it was a hotel, and it had been abandoned.

  At one time, it had probably been one of the more imposing and luxurious buildings on the shore in this area. As art deco as they come, I could imagine its stucco facade painted pink, its glass-brick windows polished and gleaming, and its neon sign shining aqua over the bar on the veranda and, by extension, much of the Jersey shore.

  Now, however, it was another great big piece of the past that had been left on its own for too long and had lost any relevance it once had. Donovan drove his Lexus up to the building through overgrown vines and plants. When we arrived at what had surely been a magnificent entrance portico decades before, we found a pair of glass doors that had clearly been boarded shut but which had since been broken with bricks, rocks or just negligence over the course of many harsh winters and inactive summers.

  “Arlice insisted, or I would have driven right back to her house,” Donovan said as we got out of the car. “I was amazed the doors weren’t locked, but then I realized the locks had been forced out of the doors years ago.”

  He reached over and opened one of the doors for me, ever the gentleman. The
board that had been holding the two together swung open along with it, its usefulness long since gone. I stepped over some broken glass and a couple of discarded beer bottles as I walked inside.

  “This is prime real estate, even in a bad market,” I said. “I’m amazed no one ever bought the property, even if just to knock this place down and build some condos or something.”

  “I know,” Donovan agreed. “I looked into the ownership for a client once and discovered such a tangle of legal documents that even I couldn’t unravel the whole thing before the client decided to move on. The land alone must be worth millions.”

  The entranceway was enormous but dusty and utterly empty. Donovan pointed toward the right and said, “This way.” I followed him toward a pair of dark wooden doors with metal pulls in the shape of an O and a W. He opened the left door, and we walked through.

  “This is where we found the ‘ghost’ Arlice was looking for,” Donovan continued.

  “What was this fascination with ghosts?” I asked. “What made Mrs. Crosby so curious?”

  Donovan shrugged, which seemed incongruous from a man in such a well-pressed suit. “She had developed this interest only in recent years,” he said. “Maybe it was a way of dealing with advancing age, the idea that there’s another existence after death. People get a lot of very odd ideas when they have to face their own ends.”

  Yeah, I thought, I’ll be sure to mention that to the two ghosts hanging out in my house when I get back.

  The room was enormous, surely a ballroom in the hotel’s heyday. It was totally empty, except for a rather large rocking chair with rounded armrests and a high back sitting almost perfectly in the center of the room. The chair had seen better times, but was definitely not in keeping with the rest of the building.

  “This chair was brought in from somewhere else,” I thought aloud. “It’s the least art deco–looking piece of furniture I’ve ever seen.”