Night of the Living Deed

by E. J. Copperman

  “Now, you,” Paul said, turning his attention to me. “You have more interviews to do.”

  Before I could protest once again that I didn’t see the investigation going anywhere, my cell phone rang, and the incoming number was one I didn’t recognize. I took in a deep breath, and opened it.

  “It’s Phyllis Coates,” the voice said before I could ask. “I’m at the Chronicle office, and you need to come down here before the police come looking for you.”

  That was a lot of information to get in the first two sentences of a phone call. “Why would the police come looking for me?” I asked.

  “I just got a call from my friend in the coroner’s office,” Phyllis said. “Turns out Terry Wright was murdered.”

  Thirty-two

  Phyllis brought me a cup of coffee in a mug that read, “New York’s Hometown Paper,” as the cell phone in my jeans pocket vibrated for the fifth time in the last half hour. The caller ID confirmed it—the police were looking for me.

  “Originally, they thought she died of natural causes,” Phyllis said. “But the preliminary report from the ME showed a trace of pilocarpine eye drops, something someone with glaucoma might have in the house. Put enough of it in a drink, a glass of wine or something, and it’s deadly.”

  “She had a cup of coffee in her hand,” I said. My mind hadn’t really wrapped itself around this idea yet.

  “That would mask it well enough, I’d think. What about the two people who died in your house?”

  I snapped to attention. “Paul Harrison and Maxie Malone? You think the same person killed them?”

  “I don’t know what I think yet. I’m asking what you think.”

  Wait a minute . . . “Is this conversation on the record?”

  Phyllis smirked just a little; I’d figured her out. “You tell me what you know, and I’ll tell you what I know,” she offered.

  “I’ll tell you everything I know: nothing.”

  “I’ll bet you know more than you think,” she said.

  “Anything’s possible. Okay. I saw Terry on the floor and the coffee spilled on the rug. She looked like she was asleep, only with her eyes open. It was weird.”

  “Who would want her dead?”

  “I really didn’t know her. That’s it. Now, what do you know?”

  “Not so fast. If you weren’t the last person to see her alive, who was?”

  “How the hell would I know?” I asked. “All I know is that I’m the first person who saw her dead, and if Kerin Murphy hadn’t come in and scared me . . .”

  Wait. Kerin Murphy!

  Suddenly Phyllis was all attention. “Kerin Murphy was there?” It figured she’d know Kerin; Phyllis knows everybody in Harbor Haven.

  “Yeah, but Terry was already dead.”

  “But it’s something to follow up on,” Phyllis said, already making a note on one of the myriad pieces of scrap paper on her desk. “Why didn’t you tell me before that she was there?”

  “I thought she’d get mad,” I told her. “You can’t let Kerin know I said she was there.”

  Phyllis waved a hand. “Your name will never be mentioned.”

  “That’s it, Flash. I’ve told you what I know. Now what do you know?”

  Reporters get into their field to share information, and I could tell Phyllis had been dying to answer the question. “First of all, regarding Harrison and Malone, turns out that death wasn’t brought on by the Ambien in their systems. In fact, according to the new ME report, it seems that the Ambien was injected into them after they were dead, probably to distract the doctor from looking for what else was there.”

  My brain was starting to hurt. “Then why didn’t the cops start a murder investigation right away?”

  Phyllis smiled and nodded; yes, she’d anticipated that question. “Because the needle marks were hidden behind their heads, which a normal autopsy might not reveal—they couldn’t very well inject themselves in a spot where they couldn’t reach. The ME didn’t catch them the first time, and didn’t go back and look at all the pictures and slides they’d taken until I started asking questions. You don’t find poisons unless you look for them. Besides, like I said, Westmoreland wasn’t the most industrious of detectives. McElone’s trying harder. She’s been here less than a year; she’s trying to make a name for herself.”

  “Poison,” I said, my (okay, Paul’s) suspicions confirmed.

  “That’s right. Something called”—she referred to notes on her desk—“acetone. Common in a number of products, like paint, automobile coatings, nail polish remover and some inks. But put it into drinks in the right dosage and you end up with two dead people.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Is it strange that the killer used two different kinds of poison?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe he couldn’t get his hands on the same stuff again. But now we’ve got to concern ourselves with your problem.”

  My . . . oh yeah! “Do the police really think I killed Terry?” I asked.

  “Probably not,” she said. “But McElone isn’t going to cut you any breaks.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Is she the detective on the case?”

  Phyllis nodded. “It’s a small town. We’re not flush with detectives. But what you really have to concern yourself with is receiving threats from someone who may have killed three people already.”

  “I’ll try to remember not to eat anything I haven’t cooked myself,” I said, more thinking aloud than talking to Phyllis. But who was I kidding—I never cooked.

  “You need a plan of action,” she said, bringing me back to the conversation. “What are you going to do?”

  I exhaled. Putting this off wasn’t going to do me any good. There were probably police cars outside my house right now. Melissa couldn’t come home to that. If I hurried, maybe the questioning could be done by the time I had to go get her, or Mom could pick her up.

  “I’ll answer the phone the next time it vibrates,” I said.

  “Good plan.” Phyllis nodded in approval. “Go see Anita McElone. And give me a call when you get out.”

  “In five to ten years,” I said. “Will you wait for me?”

  “Faithfully,” Phyllis agreed.

  Thirty-three

  “You really are a bonehead,” Detective Anita McElone said after the uniformed officer ushered me into the interrogation room, which was barely big enough for the two of us. “The police are looking for you, and you duck the calls. Who do you think you are—Bonnie Parker?”

  I gave her my best weary look. “You thought I broke into her office. . . .”

  “You did break into her office,” McElone insisted. “And you found her body. But now, the evidence points to a murder, and you are the last person we can put in a room with the victim.”

  “Oh, come off it, Detective,” I said. “You don’t think for one second that I killed Terry Wright, any more than you thought I was sending myself threatening e-mails. So what am I doing here?” McElone struck me as someone who was trying hard to be accepted in a new job, and I respected that. But if she was trying to gain respect by making me a sacrificial lamb, my respect was a little less, um, respectful.

  It was McElone’s turn to look weary. She hung her head for a moment, as if she couldn’t bear to deal with an idiot like me for one more second. “First of all, I have not yet formed an opinion about whether you killed Ms. Wright. Until I know that you didn’t, you’re a suspect. But you are here,” she said very slowly, “because you are somehow connected to these two cases. You are here because you bought a house which two people died in a year ago.” She pointed a finger to the sky. “You are here because those people and the one whose body you ‘found’ appear to have been poisoned.” Another finger went up.

  “You don’t think . . .”

  “Don’t interrupt me. You’re here because you made a complaint about someone sending you threatening messages, which you claimed were similar to ones sent to the woman who was poisoned in the house you now own.” McEl
one was counting my criminal connections on her hand, and she was up to three.

  “What do you mean, ‘claimed’?”

  She ignored me, but smiled in a malevolent fashion. A fourth finger went up. “You’re here because the real estate agent involved in the sale of that house was found lying dead in the office you broke into.” McElone put her hands down on her desk and used them to push herself up to a standing position. “Don’t you think that’s enough?”

  I stuck out my lips a little. “Not really,” I said.

  “Well, I do.” McElone actually looked like she wanted to put her feet up on her desk, but settled for threading her fingers behind her head and leaning back in her chair. “You see, even if I don’t think that you killed Ms. Wright—and I’m not saying I don’t—I still want to know how you’re involved in everything that’s been going on around her, because maybe that would lead to an arrest.”

  “Of me?”

  “Only if the gods are truly smiling upon me.” She grinned.

  “I can only tell you what I know,” I said. “I saw the original e-mails. I’ve gotten e-mails. I was worried, and all I wanted was to find out about the history of my house.”

  McElone’s face perked up.

  “I went to Terry’s office to find out about the transaction before mine, the one in which she sold the house to Maxine Malone, because I thought something about it might have led to the threatening e-mails to Maxie and to me.” I didn’t wait for her to answer. “The only other thing I can tell you is that, just before I discovered Terry’s body, I saw Kerin Murphy in the office, but she works there.”

  “Yes, and she took something out of the desk,” McElone reminded me.

  I decided to also tell the detective about the young blonde woman in Oceanside Park whom I saw Kerin give the book to, and McElone’s eyes got wide and angry. “What were you doing running around following people?”

  “I was curious,” I said. “But I couldn’t see the blonde well enough to identify her.”

  “Trust me: The last person to see Ms. Wright alive was not your blonde woman.”

  We stayed there for another hour, McElone asking me the same questions and me giving the same answers, me asking her questions and she giving me no answers. She finally threw up her hands and let me go with the warning that “I’ll find out what’s going on, and if you’re involved, you’ll get no special treatment from me.”

  Which I actually found sort of reassuring.

  I picked Melissa up from school just in time and drove back to the house. Melissa couldn’t understand why I was being so quiet, but she respected my feelings, mostly because she knew that not doing so was going to get her into an area where she didn’t want to go.

  But she wouldn’t leave the room when Paul insisted on hearing about my interview with McElone, not even when Maxie offered to watch the second season of Friends with her on the laptop. Melissa wasn’t budging.

  “What do you think you’re going to say that will be so bad for me?” she asked. “I already know Ms. Wright is dead. Somebody killed her, didn’t they? Like they killed you two.” She pointed at Paul and Maxie.

  Paul nodded. “Probably, Melissa,” he said.

  “So I already know that.” Not a glimmer of fear in my daughter’s eyes. Mine, on the other hand, were filling with tears. “So go ahead and have your talk. You’re not going to get rid of me.” If she hadn’t had that squeaky little voice, she would have been truly intimidating. She sat down on the kitchen floor and adopted her “just try to move me” face. The one she’d put on the night The Swine left for California.

  Paul looked at me, shaking his head just a little. “The women in your family are really something,” he said, and I’m not sure it was meant to be complimentary.

  “My great-grandmother pulled a plow,” I said.

  “We need to take some action,” Paul went on, hand to his chin as it usually was when he was thinking. “We can’t just wait for things to happen anymore.”

  “Sure,” I told him sarcastically. “Let’s pi—Let’s get them angry. What have you got to lose?”

  Paul, as had become his custom, went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “If we rattle the cage a little bit, something’s bound to happen that we can work with.”

  “Something already has happened,” I reminded him. “Terry’s dead.”

  “And since McElone held on to the evidence, you never got a good look at that file you were . . . borrowing,” Paul reminded me. “That might have told us why Maxie’s estate sold the house to you and not to Adam Morris.”

  I stole a glance at Maxie, who was pretending not to listen but was looking at me out of the corner of her eye. “Who would have represented your estate, Maxie?”

  She scowled. “Probably my mother,” she said.

  “Well, that makes things simple.” Paul brightened up.

  “Oh no,” Maxie said. “Absolutely not.”

  “I’ll let you pick out the colors for the upstairs bathrooms,” I offered.

  She considered, then shook her head. “No. It’s not worth it.”

  “And you can choose the border paper in the kitchen.”

  “Border paper!” Maxie was appalled. “What is this, nineteen seventy-seven? You have to go for decorative tile backsplashes in the kitchen. Have a little fun.”

  I played it coy. “I don’t know . . .”

  But Maxie caught on right away. “This is blackmail,” she said.

  Melissa’s head had been toggling back and forth between Maxie and me. She was watching the tennis match with supreme interest.

  “You can say what you want, but I have the working body,” I told Maxie. “It’ll be border paper.”

  “Fine! Go ahead! Call my mother. But you have to do exactly what I say in the bathrooms and the kitchen!”

  Maxie didn’t stick around for a response. She knew I’d agree.

  Melissa looked up at me. “Nice work, Mom,” she said.

  Thirty-four

  Maxie’s mother, who told me to call her “Kitty,” couldn’t have been older than fifty. She must have had Maxie when she was very young.

  But today, placing a hot cup of coffee in front of me in her kitchen, Kitty Malone looked at least ten years older. The strain of losing her only daughter had clearly taken a very heavy toll.

  That surprised me, since Maxie had insisted that her mother had considered her a disappointment, a failure as a child and a woman. But that certainly wasn’t the tale Kitty was telling me today, and I was starting to believe her.

  “Maxie was the funniest little girl,” she said, her eyes staring dreamily off into the past. “She asked me one time why there was the color white. She thought it was a waste of space where there could be other colors.” Kitty chuckled a little to herself. I’m not sure if she was aware of my presence in the room right then.

  “That’s lovely,” I said, in spite of myself. I had told Kitty I knew Maxie from a time when we both worked at an establishment called the Club Sandwich, a business about which Maxie would tell me nothing other than it “wasn’t a place you’d go to look for a hero.” She probably was laughing hysterically to herself back at the house. “That’s not the Maxie I knew, but at the same time, it is.”

  Kitty smiled. “I’m glad you two were friends,” she said, and I saw no need to contradict her. “And now you’re living in that house.” The way she said “that house,” I could tell she wasn’t crazy about the place.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s not really a coincidence. Maxie had told me about the place, and when I saw it, I thought it really fit the plans I had for a guesthouse in the area.” I’d been very carefully coached—after Paul had somehow convinced a reluctant Maxie to help—to cover any and all possible topics of conversation. “I don’t want to be insensitive, and I hope you don’t mind my asking, but would you like to come and see what I’ve done with it?”

  “No,” Kitty said immediately. “I don’t want to see it. Maxie and I had a . . . falling-out over that hous
e. I thought she was getting in over her head, and she wanted to borrow money for a down payment that, frankly, I didn’t have. We only spoke a few times in the months after she bought it, and things were never the same again. So no, I don’t want to see it, thank you.”

  “Of course,” I answered. “You inherited the house from Maxie. I saw your name on the documents I had to sign when I closed on the house.”

  “Yes, and I wanted to get rid of it as soon as I possibly could. Do you have any children, Ms. Kerby?”

  “I have a daughter named Melissa. She’s nine.”

  “Then I don’t think I have to say any more,” Kitty answered. “I didn’t want to own that house for one second longer than I had to, and so I guess you got a pretty good deal.”

  I had, in fact.

  “I told that Realtor to sell the place for what was left on the mortgage and the real estate costs,” Kitty went on. “I paid off the debt and made sure I didn’t clear a dime of the blood money from my daughter.”

  “I appreciate the gesture. But I don’t understand,” I said to Kitty. “If you wanted to get rid of the house as soon as you could, wasn’t there someone else who wanted to buy it before I made an offer?”

  Kitty came back to the present, and scowled. “You mean that developer guy?” she said, in a tone that indicated she was not Adam Morris’s biggest fan. “I knew about his plans for the house, and Maxie had told me how hard she was fighting to keep him from bulldozing the place. I couldn’t let that jerk touch a blade of grass on the lawn. Maxie wouldn’t have wanted it, and it was Maxie’s house. End of story.”

  “You really loved her,” I said, about 80 percent unaware it was coming out of my mouth.

  Kitty turned sharply toward me and gave me a stare that could peel the paint off a wall. “Of course I loved her,” she said. “She was my daughter. But the part that gets me, that really gets me now . . .”

  “Did you not get to tell her you loved her?” That was what happened all the time in the movies.