Night of the Living Deed

by E. J. Copperman

  Through the glass, I could see Melissa close one book of past issues and then turn to look in my direction. I’d told her not to come into the office until I gestured, but she was running out of things to be interested in at a newspaper office. I’d better get to the point quickly.

  I bit my lower lip. “Yeah, see, I don’t think they were,” I told her.

  Phyllis raised an eyebrow with interest, not skepticism. I took that as a good sign. “Really,” she said.

  “Yeah. It seems that Maxie Malone—who owned the house then—was getting threatening e-mails telling her to get out of the house before something happened to her. And then something happened to her. You don’t find that suspicious?”

  “First I’m hearing about it,” Phyllis admitted. “Did the police know about the e-mails?”

  “I don’t think so, not until I told them. I found Maxie’s laptop when I was taking the house apart. I don’t think she ever went to the police, but she did hire a private investigator to track down whoever was sending the e-mails. He was the man killed alongside her.”

  “I know who Harrison was, and so do the cops,” Phyllis said. “His brother came down from Canada to identify the body, and he said that Harrison had been depressed before he moved down here. Now, what does that sound like?”

  I didn’t actually know, but I said, “Like a guy looking for a fresh start, not one about to take his own life. It doesn’t make sense these two people who barely knew each other would have an instant suicide pact. And here’s the thing—I’ve started getting e-mails, too.”

  Phyllis looked up, concerned. “Why didn’t you tell me that part?”

  “I was trying to prolong the suspense. What do you think, Phyllis? I’m trying not to think about—”

  Melissa walked over to the door and knocked, ready to have someone to talk to. I hesitated, considering the topic of conversation, but looked at Phyllis, who nodded, and opened the door for her to come in. Phyllis’s mouth twitched from side to side. I guessed she was thinking about the threats I’d been getting, but now we couldn’t talk about them.

  “Come in, honey,” Phyllis said. “You want a hot chocolate? I’m having one.”

  Melissa nodded shyly, and Phyllis started making hot chocolate on a hot plate she had in one corner.

  “Sit quietly for a minute,” I warned Melissa, and pointed to a stool in the far corner, which wasn’t very far at all. Melissa, who hadn’t met Phyllis before, was in her “good behavior” mode and did as I asked.

  “You might have a point, Alison,” Phyllis said. “But I’d have to check back with the police. You said you talked to Detective McElone?”

  “Yes,” I confirmed. “I understand that the original detective, Westmoreland, has retired.”

  Melissa folded her hands in her lap and did her best to look like the best little girl in all the world. Which of course she is.

  Phyllis was quiet for almost a full minute. She was clearly thinking, and every once in a while, she’d nod. “Does Adam Morris factor into your thinking?”

  Man, she was good—I hadn’t even mentioned Morris’s name yet. “He wanted the house,” I said, “and he’s been offering to buy me out. I don’t know him well—is he the type who would kill to get what he wants?” Whoops. Melissa’s eyes widened a little; I’d forgotten myself, and I wouldn’t let it happen again.

  “Not if he could just pay for it,” Phyllis answered. “It’s a reach, I know, but he just rubs me the wrong way. All right. Let me see those e-mails.” Phyllis got a reporter’s notebook from her desk and actually—I swear—licked the end of a pencil.

  I exhaled audibly, and sagged into the other chair. “The cops are holding both laptops,” I said.

  Phyllis didn’t miss a beat. “So what? Don’t you know the passwords? We’ll just sign on from here.” She pointed to her iMac.

  “I don’t know Maxie’s, but I can give you mine. May I?” I pointed to the keyboard, and Phyllis nodded.

  I punched up my e-mail account and signed on. Phyllis printed out the threatening message I’d received for future study. Melissa got up to look, but I glared her back onto the stool. I turned the screen away from her gaze. The less she knew about the threats, the better.

  “How can we trace the sender’s e-mail address?” I asked Phyllis.

  “I’m not sure we can,” she answered. “It’s unlikely someone would go out of their way to send anonymous threats through the Internet through their own personal address.” I hadn’t checked my e-mail since McElone had confiscated my computer, so the slow-loading program kept adding more messages as we worked.

  “Maybe he’s really stupid,” I suggested hopefully.

  “That would be lucky,” Phyllis said. “The stupid ones are easy to catch.” She pointed to the screen. “The address is just a group of numbers—it’s probably from a public place, like a hotel or a Wi-Fi café. The police will probably be able to trace it.”

  She started writing something on the pad in front of her. She looked up only when I gasped.

  “What’s the matter, honey?” Phyllis asked.

  I pointed at the screen. “There’s a new one,” I said.

  The numbers in the address were slightly different this time, but the message was clear and to the point: “Get out or die.”

  “Well,” Phyllis said, “looks like Halloween came a couple of weeks early this year.”

  Thirteen

  I called McElone to tell her about the new message, but she was out. So I drove back to the house, figuring I might as well make it easy for my murderer to find me. I hate waiting.

  Since I’d agreed to help Paul and Maxie in the quest for . . . posthumous closure, the little “pranks” that I’d found in the house each morning had ceased, so I’d actually begun to make progress. The dining room was indeed almost ready to be painted, and then I could move on to the two upstairs bathrooms, which were going to require tiling, grouting, painting and some plumbing (the toilet had to be moved about ten inches to the right in one, I needed to seriously unclog the bathtub drain in the other and I had to move some pipes into the master bedroom, where I planned to add an en suite bathroom). Within the next few days, I’d have to find myself an electrician to upgrade the service in the whole house, because that was the one thing I absolutely wouldn’t do, Dad’s advice notwithstanding. I’m afraid of electricity, and I’m willing to pay someone to be braver than I am.

  That left the furnace, which I’d examined and found mostly sound. So the fact that it was cold in the house was troublesome. I spent a morning bleeding all the radiators, and that didn’t make much difference. The Halloween decorations on everyone’s lawn but mine (I figured I had enough trouble with real ghosts on my lawn) were reminding me that comfortable weather wasn’t here for long, but I hadn’t found a flaw to repair yet, so I decided to press on with things I could fix. I started with the tiling.

  When Paul appeared through the floor, eager for a report on my talk with Phyllis, he was met with questions, rather than answers, and that threw him off.

  “Were you depressed before you died?” I asked. Other people say hello. I have my own style.

  “No, what . . . Who told you that?” he sputtered.

  “Your brother told Phyllis Coates that you were depressed, and he wasn’t surprised that you’d killed yourself.” Phyllis hadn’t actually said that last part, but I felt it was implied.

  Paul frowned. “I was . . . upset for a while before I came here to New Jersey,” he said slowly. “I hadn’t been able to find work in my field. I told my brother I was thinking of giving up. My dream of being a detective, not my life. I think ‘depressed’ would be a pretty serious exaggeration.”

  There was a long silence. I felt a little uncomfortable. Okay, a lot uncomfortable. Paul had a calm demeanor that seemed unshakable; he could get riled up, but instead of getting angry, he’d just become irritated and, in moments of extreme frustration, he’d simply evaporate in front of my eyes, like he’d shattered into a mi
llion pieces too small to see. After about a half hour, he’d be back again, “whole,” and never mention whatever had caused him to disappear.

  “And I didn’t kill myself,” Paul added.

  Another gap in the conversation followed, but he smiled at me as I donned gloves, goggles, heavy work boots and an apron to start removing tiles in the upstairs bathroom.

  “Tell me, why did you buy this place?” Paul asked, I think to break the tension left from my last question. He sat down on, or hovered over, the closed toilet. The sad part was, this was the closest I’d come to a date in over a year. Tiling with a dead guy.

  “I’ve told you. I need a sustainable business to keep me in clothes, food and college fund. I’m getting next to bupkus from The Swine, and I’ve always wanted to run a guesthouse by the shore. I like the idea of creating a place that people could talk about to their friends when they come home from vacation. Is that so hard to understand?” I grabbed a putty knife, a screwdriver and a hammer to start taking down the old tiles, which were, it should be noted, aqua and hideous.

  “No, I understand that part perfectly,” he replied. “But why this house? There must have been a few you could afford.”

  “In this market, there were more than a few,” I admitted. “But this was the only one with seven bedrooms, which means I can accommodate five guest rooms. I need that many to make a profit. And it has three bathrooms, which is about average, but also leaves me able to add more.”

  “Who was your real estate agent?” Paul asked. “Who sold you this house?” His expression was much too interested; I should have seen it coming.

  “Terry Wright,” I told him. “Weren’t you here when she showed me the house?”

  “Oh yes, that’s right. You know, she was the agent who sold the house to Maxie, too,” he answered, stroking what would have been his chin, if he were there.

  “She’s a big real estate broker in Harbor Haven. So?” The great thing about taking stuff down before you rebuild is that you don’t have to care too much about what damage you’re doing—the more damage, the better. So I took a nice, broad screwdriver and drove it into the grout around a tile with a vengeance. Pieces of grout and tile scattered all over.

  It felt great.

  “So,” Paul answered, “the threatening e-mails to Maxie—and now to you—have to be related to the house. Not only is the house the only connection between you and Maxie, but the threats are also explicit in wanting the two of you out of here.”

  “Brilliant, Holmes! But what the hell has that got to do with my real estate agent?” The wall was now almost completely free of the atrocious tiles the Prestons—or their predecessors—had imposed upon it. I could start bringing up boxes of my understated off-white replacements in a few minutes.

  “If the source of your trouble is a car, you talk to a mechanic,” Paul said. “If it’s a dog, you talk to a veterinarian. If it’s a house . . .”

  “You talk to a real estate agent,” I finished for him. “Well, forget it, Kojak. I’m already behind on my work here, and I don’t have time to go off and ask a real estate agent why some anonymous murderer wants me out of the house I’m already making mortgage payments on, despite not being able to rent out the rooms I bought it for. No.”

  “I don’t want you to go see Terry Wright,” Paul said, smiling a damnably cute Cheshire-cat grin.

  “What is this, reverse psychology? You say, ‘Don’t go,’ and I’m supposed to argue with you? How stupid do you think I am, Paul?”

  He actually looked alarmed. “I don’t think you’re stupid.” Paul seemed concerned that he’d hurt my feelings. Ghost-as-puppy.

  I knocked a couple more tiles off the wall. Make him sweat a little. “I meant that figuratively, Paul. But I’m not going off to interrogate Terry.”

  “And I meant it sincerely, Alison. I don’t want you to go see her.” He grinned that grin again. Paul was the most smug-looking specter I’d seen today. Maxie wasn’t around.

  I was starting to think it was a good thing he wasn’t alive.

  “I love what you’ve done with the place,” Terry Wright said, looking over a living room that could have been more attractively decorated by a hand grenade. The hole in the wall had not become any more filled since the night it had been created two weeks earlier. The floor was covered with dust and drop cloths. A sawhorse sat in front of one window, which had a drapery rod hanging down on one side. Pieces of molding were missing from the dining room (about to become the den) entrance.

  “Yeah, it’s a work in progress,” I told her. Real estate agents are salespeople, and as such will never say anything negative about anything for fear of offending a potential customer. And they see all humans as potential customers.

  “But it’s got great potential, doesn’t it, Alison?” Terry had not mentioned she’d be bringing Kerin Murphy with her. I hadn’t even been aware Kerin was working in Terry’s real estate office, but here she was, with the requisite mauve “TWRE” (Teresa Wright Real Estate) blazer, perfectly tailored over her slim-but-athletic shoulders.

  “I certainly hope so,” I told her, wondering how the woman found time to sell real estate while heading up every committee in school and, one imagined, giving blood three times a week.

  “It will be so lovely when it’s done,” Kerin went on. “Who’s your contractor?”

  A chance to show off! “I’m doing the work myself,” I said.

  Her mouth narrowed. “Oh.” It would have been nice to punch her, but I had an interview to conduct and Paul was watching.

  Paul’s theory had been that if Terry came to the house, he could orchestrate her interview. That is, he could tell me what questions to ask, and hear the answers. I would act, for all intents and purposes, as a PA system. Which was fine by me.

  I had asked Terry to come by on the pretense that she might be interested in helping me find full-time tenants for some of the rooms once the renovation was complete. Of course, I had no intention of taking in people on a full-time basis, nor was I even licensed for that, but inviting a real estate agent over to ask about two murders would probably be something of an off-putting experience, we’d decided. (Okay, Paul had decided.)

  “This is all going to be the original hardwood flooring, sanded and re-stained,” I told Terry, doing my best to ignore Kerin. I indicated the den and living room floors, which were now semi-covered in a wall-to-wall carpet that had probably been sold to the original owners by Ali Baba himself. Terry nodded. You could practically see the thought balloon over her head: “Why is this woman showing me around the house I sold to her?”

  “It’s going to be gorgeous,” she responded. Like she’d say if she thought it would be hideous. “I can’t wait to see it.”

  Kerin simply stared, mostly at the enormous hole in the hallway wall. Leave it to her to find my soft underbelly and gape at it.

  “Ask her about the owners before Maxie, the Prescotts,” Paul hissed from the dining room entrance. Maxie, sort of floating over the room, did her best to look bored.

  “The Prestons,” Maxie said. “Get the name right, gumshoe.”

  “All right, the Prestons,” Paul rasped back. “And keep your voice down!”

  “Why?”

  “The people who owned this place before, the Prestons,” I said to Terry, as if there were no conversation going on in the room but ours. “I was wondering about them—I remember when I was growing up they had a lot of children . . .”

  Terry nodded. “Yeah, they had nine kids,” she said. “Why do you ask ?”

  “Their names were on some old documents and letters I found in the kitchen,” I lied. “I thought maybe I should give them back.”

  Terry’s eyes lit up like a Christmas tree. “You found old papers in the kitchen?” she asked.

  “Yeah, a few.” I had, in fact, found nothing in the kitchen, but what could I say—one of the ghosts in the house told me to ask?

  “What are you going to do about this wall?” Kerin asked, poi
nting to the hole. She seemed fascinated by it. I fought the urge to push her in. I’m a professional. I did revel in the look I saw Terry give her and the way Kerin cringed just a little bit when she saw it.

  “Ask Terry why the Prestons sold,” Paul suggested. No, demanded.

  “What were they?” Terry asked before I could get Paul’s question out of my mouth.

  “What were what?”

  “The papers you found in the kitchen.” Terry’s eyebrows were doing the cha-cha on her forehead. I’d clearly struck a nerve.

  “Just letters and some warranties for work on the porch and the roof,” I said. “Nothing really interesting. But I’m curious, why did they sell the house?”

  “The Prestons? I don’t remember.”

  “When was that, Terry?” Kerin asked.

  “Before you started with us,” she answered. “I’m not really sure about the date.”

  A real estate agent who didn’t remember a transaction she had brokered? “I guess they didn’t need all the space when the kids grew up, huh?” I said.

  Paul scowled at me. “Don’t ever give them the answer to a question!” he barked. “Now all she has to say is . . .”

  “Yeah, that was it,” Terry said. I lowered my head in shame. “Something wrong?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing,” I said. “I just have this pain in the neck.” I glared at Paul. “All this work.”

  Kerin strode over from the gaping hole in my pride to join us again. “Do you need the name of an acupuncturist?” she asked, rummaging in her purse. “I think I have a business card.”

  “No. Thanks,” I managed.

  “Find out where the Prestons are now,” Paul said.

  “Where did they move to?” I asked.

  “The Prestons?” How many times would she ask that? No, the Leibowitzes. Who are we talking about?

  “Yeah,” I echoed. “The Prestons.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you want to give them the stuff you found,” Maxie said. “Geez, this woman is slow!” I hadn’t even realized she’d been listening. And I wasn’t sure which one of us she was talking about.