An Uninvited Ghost

by E. J. Copperman

  Trent pushed the door open. He let the camera crew in first, but he was hot on their heels. “Tiffney!” he said on his way in. “You scared the migraine out of us!”

  I stayed outside the room. For one thing, even if there was “evidence” inside, I had no idea what I’d do about it. For another, I really had no interest in seeing what was going on in the room. I already felt a little queasy.

  In a few moments, the tumult died down, and I could hear some kind of grumbling noise in between Trent’s questions. I was mentally thanking my lucky stars when he called out to me, “Alison! Would you come in here, please?”

  After considering the answer no, I exhaled and walked into the room.

  It was small and dark, as the room-darkening drapes had been drawn, but even so I could tell this was not the Waldorf-Astoria. The room consisted of a bed and a bed stand with an analog alarm clock that had no radio. At the far end was a door to the bathroom I was hoping I’d never have to look at.

  And sitting on the bed, naked from the waist up, blanket covering the areas I was least interested in seeing, was a very dirty looking, middle-aged, bearded, overweight man. He looked annoyed, confused and guilty.

  Tiffney was nowhere to be seen. And as I mentioned, I was not about to look into the bathroom.

  “I don’t know nuthin’,” he was saying as I forced myself through the door. “I don’t know nuthin’.”

  “Oh, you know something,” Trent said. Facing me, he added, “Alison, can you question this man for us?”

  “Question him? Question him about what?”

  “If it were me, I’d start with why he’s in Tiffney’s motel room, and why Tiffney isn’t.” Trent looked at the camera operator, who pointed the camera directly at me.

  I didn’t want to look like I was on a perp walk, so I didn’t put my hand over the lens, but I did tell Trent, in no uncertain terms, “I’m not questioning anyone about anything until I’m no longer on camera.”

  Trent nodded, and the camera was pointed back at our less hygienic friend.

  Questioning . . . questioning . . . What would Paul ask?

  “All right,” I began. “What’s your name?”

  “Darryl,” the man said. “I’m Darryl.”

  “Okay, Darryl.” I wanted to make him feel safer, but the last thing I wanted to do was sit down on that bed or touch anything he had touched. “Tell me how you happened to be in this room.”

  Trying to focus seemed to calm Darryl. Well, that and the two empty bottles of Johnnie Walker Red that my pupils were now dilated enough to notice on the shag-carpeted floor. “I just came in to get out of the sun,” he said. “I burn awful easy.”

  Sure. “You’re not in any trouble, Darryl,” I breathed at him, talking as much like a TV therapist as I could imagine. “We’re not here to bother you or anything. We’re not the police.”

  “This isn’t COPS?” he asked. I started to wonder if any of the Down the Shore crew worked on that show and were unusually memorable.

  “No,” I assured him. “It’s a show called Down the Shore. And they’re looking for a girl who is on that show. Now, she’s supposed to be in this room.”

  “Ain’t no girls here,” Darryl protested. “I don’t do that kind of thing.”

  “I’m sure you don’t,” I told him. “I’m positive of it.” In fact, the only thing I was certain of was that this was the kind of thing Paul would say to him. “But here’s the thing: That girl’s credit card paid for this room here at the motel. Now, how do you figure that?”

  Trent was directly over my left shoulder; I could feel him there, leaning in. I wasn’t sure what the camera operator was focusing on, but I was willing to bet he was going in for a close-up on Darryl. At this point, as long as he wasn’t taking my picture, I had no problem. Darryl would probably sign a waiver form later in exchange for another bottle of Johnnie Walker.

  He licked his lips now, possibly thinking about that. “Skinny little girl? Blonde hair?” he asked. “Great big . . .” He made a gesture, probably trying to think of an acceptable word to use.

  “Yes,” I said, trying to head him off before he came up with one. “That’s her. Do you know her?”

  “No,” Darryl shook his head with conviction, which was probably something he’d had once or twice before. “I just met her the one time.”

  Trent couldn’t bear it anymore. “One time?” he asked. “What time did you meet Tiffney?”

  Darryl blinked, confused by the change in questioner. “Why, the time she gave me the credit card,” he said.

  Darryl’s story was simple: He’d been living on the streets in Sea Bright, a town that doesn’t really take kindly to people living on its streets. And earlier that day, he’d run into this “skinny blonde girl” who had come up and spoken to him, not the other way around. He’d figured she was a prostitute, based on the way she was dressed, but he’d never seen a working girl in this town before, so when she explained that she just wanted to help him, he accepted the gesture in the altruistic spirit in which it was offered.

  Or words to that effect.

  The girl had suggested he needed a shower and a long nap, and pointed out the Sandy Side, a mere half-block away. When Darryl had protested that he had no money for such luxurious digs, the skinny girl (whom he identified as Tiffney from a photograph Trent carried with him of the Down the Shore cast) had helpfully handed over a credit card. She had kissed him on the cheek, he said, and then hopped into a car, whose make and model he could not identify, and driven away.

  So after a quick trip to the Liquor Mart, he’d booked himself a swanky room at the motel the girl had so graciously pointed out, had himself a drink or thirty, and passed out cold on the bed. Cut to Trent pretty much breaking the door down, and we had the whole complex narrative completed.

  Trent took back the credit card, but assured Darryl he could spend the rest of the week at the motel. I’m relatively sure a certain amount of cash changed hands as well, since Darryl stopped asking if he could also go back to the Liquor Mart. And we headed back down to the waiting van and my Volvo wagon.

  “Well, at least we know she’s still alive,” Trent said as he hopped into the passenger seat of the Volvo, never even considering driving back with his crew.

  “We know nothing of the sort,” I told him. Hell, if he wanted a professional investigator, I could pretend to be one.

  “What do you mean? Darryl identified Tiff from the picture of the cast I showed him.” Trent seemed personally offended that I would question the credibility of a homeless man with two quarts of whiskey flowing through his veins.

  “Did you see him clearly? Or, for that matter, smell him clearly?” I asked. “He would have identified her if you’d shown him a picture of Mary, Queen of Scots. All we know is a blonde girl with large breasts talked to him on the street and gave him Tiffney’s credit card. Assuming he’s even telling us that much of the truth. I’ve never seen such a blatant setup in my life. Someone wanted us here. I only hope it’s not because they wanted us away from the house.”

  I drove a little faster on the way back home. Trent didn’t say much.

  Twenty-four

  Paul found the whole motel gambit fascinating, as I knew he would, and agreed with me that it was meant to attract Trent’s attention and lead him (and, by extension, me) to the motel. But he was dismayed by the fact that we hadn’t found anything there other than evidence that someone wanted us to go to the motel.

  “And you let the guy go?” he continued. “How do you know he didn’t kill Tiffney and just tell you some crazy story?”

  “There was no body,” I countered, though it sounded lame even to me.

  “You need to alert the police in Sea Bright, at the very least,” he scolded. “Since we discovered that mannequin, Lieutenant McElone is treating this seriously. She thinks Tiffney might really be a suspect in Arlice Crosby’s murder. Let McElone know about this, and she can act upon it.”

  I hate it when he’s rig
ht.

  We didn’t have time to argue the point, however. Since I’d left, things around the house had gotten a little bit more interesting. Maxie, at no one’s suggestion, had followed Linda Jane around the house all afternoon, and had reported no suspicious behavior of any kind. That in and of itself was not interesting.

  But it had left Paul to his own devices, and he had been busy. He’d been floating through every room of the house, stopping to listen to conversations when he could, and checking in on the filming going on in the backyard. Among his reports were that Jim and Warren appeared to have had a falling out (to the point that Warren had been packing his bags at one point) and were drinking beer in separate rooms, but they had recently reconciled; H-Bomb was “going ballistic” over Trent’s absence while he was searching for Tiffney in Sea Bright, complaining that she never got that kind of attention and maybe she should disappear, too, just to show Trent what going without a star was really like; Mr. and Mrs. Jones had still not been seen outside their room, although a pizza delivery boy did show up at their door at one point, and money changed hands.

  But most enticing of all, Paul told me with a crooked grin, was that Bernice Antwerp had been spending the afternoon complaining about the babbling coming from Linda Jane and Dolores’s room.

  “What’s so interesting about that?” I asked. “Bernice would complain about air if she didn’t have to suck some in to complain with.”

  “Linda Jane wasn’t in her room when Bernice was doing the complaining,” Maxie said. “I was with her out on the front porch.”

  I stared for a moment. “I’m not getting it.”

  “Dolores was in the room by herself,” Paul said. “I went in to look. She was sitting on the bed, chanting, for an hour by herself. And she had surrounded herself with . . . objects.”

  “Objects?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

  “Objects,” Maxie said. “Paul made me come up and see for myself. She had, like, every little metal triangular thing on the face of the planet, all laid out on the bed around where she was sitting.”

  Little metal triangular things . . . My fingers instinctively went to the amulet around my neck. “Like this?” I asked.

  Paul beamed. “Exactly. Dolores was having some kind of spiritual experience, as far as I could tell, with one of those little ghost detector devices going off right next to her bed, and her attention was so focused she didn’t even notice it.”

  “What the heck was that all about?” I asked. “Dolores tried to take the amulet from me the other night, and she was fascinated with it the night—”

  “The night the old lady died,” Maxie said.

  I held the little silver triangle up in front of my face. “What the hell is this thing, anyway?” I thought aloud.

  “That’s what we need to find out,” Paul said. “Maxie, fire up Alison’s laptop. We need some more research.”

  Maxie did less grumbling than usual, although she insisted that we start discussing the purchase of a new MacBook if she was “going to have to keep doing this high school homework.” I had to agree with her—the laptop was old and slow—in every way but the one that counted: financially. I gave her the amulet to use as a reference in her work, and she put it in the pocket of her jeans. Somehow, putting objects in their clothing seemed to make the things less material for the ghosts, and the items could then travel through walls and such. I’d seen Scott McFarlane do that with his bandana when he left the house.

  She vanished up to her attic lair, which I really had to talk to Tony about. I was starting to feel bad about taking Maxie out of the place she seemed to love so much, but I was going to need the money it would bring at some point.

  “You know, it’s her birthday Wednesday,” I said to Paul after Maxie had ascended.

  He looked up, perhaps thrown off by the segue. “What?”

  “Wednesday. It’s Maxie’s birthday. She would have been thirty.”

  “No kidding. Well, I think presents would be somehow inappropriate.” Paul was thinking about the case, and could seem a little unfeeling when he was engaged like that. “Why would Dolores be praying to triangles?”

  “How would I know?” I asked him back. “None of this business makes sense. I knew Arlice Crosby for half a day while she was alive, and now I know her real name was Alice Smith and she died in my house, and she had a sister named Jane Smith who may or may not be the same Linda Jane Smith currently staying at my guesthouse, and I still have to repair the felt on the pool table.”

  “What’s the felt on the pool table got to do with anything?” Paul asked.

  “Nothing. I just happened to remember it. It’s on my list of things to do. So, you’re the experienced private eye. You tell me what you make of all this.”

  Paul’s ego, when stroked, could grow to the size of the battleship Missouri. “Let’s go over the facts,” he said, playing with his goatee as he hovered over the floor. “We have a very wealthy woman, who no doubt is leaving behind a large estate but is giving most of it to charities. She has a sister—estranged, perhaps—who does not seem to be stepping forward to claim her inheritance. And she left you with an amulet that doesn’t seem to be very valuable in monetary terms, but which apparently has some significance for Dolores Santiago.”

  “There’s one thing we’re forgetting,” I said.

  “Just one?” Paul looked amused.

  “Remember, Linda Jane told us there is another diabetic in the house, one of the guests, and that person would have to have had access to enough insulin to have killed Arlice. But if that person used all the insulin to send Arlice into an instant diabetic coma that killed her . . .”

  “Then that person, being a type 1 diabetic, would need to replenish the supply of insulin for their own use,” Paul said. “That’s right. How could we have missed that?”

  “I kept hoping McElone would solve the case, and I wouldn’t have to think about it,” I admitted.

  “She still might. I think we need to give her a call.”

  “What’s this ‘we’ stuff, kemosabe?” I grumbled. “She won’t be mad at you. What am I asking her now?”

  “Have there been any deliveries made to the house since Arlice’s death, something in a package for one of the guests, probably a refrigerated package?” Paul asked.

  “No,” I shook my head. “I’d have had to sign for it if it came here, and I certainly would have heard about it from one of the regular delivery services. There hasn’t been anything.”

  “In that case,” Paul said, “you need to ask Lieutenant McElone about where she found vials of insulin in the house.”

  “We know where,” I reminded him. “She found some in every room.”

  “She found empty vials in every room,” Paul corrected me. “We need to know where she found full vials.”

  I’d had enough that night, so I didn’t call Detective Lieutenant Anita McElone until the next morning. She’d had enough, too—of me, she said—but she agreed to meet me at the Dunkin’ Donuts in town before I dropped Melissa off at school.

  “You know perfectly well I’m not going to discuss private medical records with you,” McElone said, looking down at me over an iced coffee with coconut flavoring in it.

  “I’m not asking you to divulge anything you got from medical records,” I said, parroting what Paul had instructed me to say. “I’m asking you to tell me about information you got from your search of my house, which you’ll recall I agreed to without a warrant.”

  If a face can look sarcastic, McElone’s managed it in that moment. “Nice try,” she said. “But I had more than probable cause, I was already inside the house, and even if what you said were true, I’d owe you a grand total of nothing.”

  I told her what I was thinking about the vials of insulin. What the hell, maybe playing it straight would work. “If I can figure out who the other diabetic in the house is, that person would leap to the head of the suspect list, no? It had to be someone who had quick access to a large suppl
y of insulin. Now, who would have that much? Even a diabetic away for ten days, the longest any of my guests is staying, wouldn’t carry that many vials. Who’s going to have a large enough supply to inject Arlice with that much insulin?”

  “You’re thinking out loud,” McElone said. She watched as Melissa, working seriously on a Vanilla Kreme doughnut with a Nesquik chaser, sat at the next table, reading an Amelia Bedelia book. “You’re trying to work it out all on your own. It’s not bad to ask yourself questions, but if you don’t have the answers, that means you don’t have enough information.”

  I looked at my daughter, who, by the “sugar high” theory, should have been bouncing off the walls, but was calmly reading a book. I must have been doing something right with that girl.

  “I don’t have enough information because you won’t tell me what I need to know,” I pointed out to the detective.

  “No, you don’t have enough information because you haven’t been doing this long enough, and you don’t know what you should be looking for.” McElone took a sip of her iced coffee and grimaced a little. “The coconut never lasts to the bottom,” she lamented. She stood up and put the cup into a trash bin, and she didn’t sit back down. “You have some instincts. I wouldn’t have said that before, but I’m starting to see it. But the bottom line is: I’m a cop, you’re not, and I don’t have to tell you anything. It’s better for both of us if I don’t. I’m sorry.”

  And she kept walking until she was out the door. I didn’t even try to stop her.

  I looked over at Melissa. “Paul’s going to be mad at me,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  Melissa put a bookmark at the page she’d been reading—she’d never dog-ear a page—and stood up, sliding her arms into her jacket. “She’s right, you know,” my daughter said.