Night of the Living Deed

by E. J. Copperman

  The voice didn’t have any inflection, and wouldn’t rise enough to be identifiable. Not to mention, it cut me off. This was one rude murderer. “You have until midnight tomorrow to deliver it.”

  “Deliver what where?” I asked at Paul’s instruction. “And when you say, ‘midnight,’ do you mean twelve a.m. early Friday or late Thursday?” That last question was all on my own.

  “You’ll be given instructions at the proper time,” the voice said. I still couldn’t tell if it was male or female. And the line went dead.

  “Well,” Paul said, “that wasn’t much help at all. Now. Who’s Ralphie?”

  I called Detective McElone, and she said she’d try to track my cell phone records to see if she could trace the call I’d just received. But she wasn’t promising anything, and reminded me that I was still technically a suspect in Terry Wright’s murder. The woman had a reassuring manner, to be sure.

  Once I’d dropped Melissa at school, I drove to Phyllis’s office. She reassured me that the cops didn’t have any hard evidence on me, but had little to add. We moved on to other topics, and discussed frequency of advertising once the guesthouse opened (assuming I lived to see it) and I told her I thought the house renovations would be mostly completed by the weekend, although we still wouldn’t have any furniture until at least a week later.

  At lunchtime, I walked over to Café Linguine and asked for Rudolfo.

  “I didn’t see anything,” Ralphie protested when I started asking him questions about Paul and Maxie on the night they were killed. His skinny little body was all atremble, and his face, just now recovering from the acne that no doubt plagued his high school years, was pinched. “I swear, I didn’t see anything. Can I go back to work now?”

  “You’re sure you remember the night I’m talking about?” I asked him. I felt bad for the kid; I’d taken him out of his lunch shift (which, to be fair, wasn’t exactly bustling) and wasn’t even ordering a cup of coffee. But the answers to these questions might save my life, so I saw a certain urgency in them.

  “I remember. The cops asked me about it then, and they asked me about again last week,” the waiter said. “A bunch of people came in after some board meeting or something. The mayor was here. She and her group were all over there . . .” He pointed at the corner away from the bar, not so close to the exposed ovens and grills that it would be uncomfortably hot. “At a big table. They were all laughing and drinking wine.”

  “But they’d just had a tremendous argument at the meeting,” I protested, trying to prove to Ralphie that he was wrong, and surely someone must have been in a separate corner, sulking, licking his or her wounds.

  The kid shook his head. “They don’t care,” he said. “I’ve seen it a hundred times after meetings. No matter what, they all hang out here afterward and drink and laugh with each other. I guess none of it’s personal.”

  Well, there went the theory that Paul and Maxie had been killed over a political grudge.

  The fact was, it was looking more and more likely that my two houseguests had been murdered over the Washington deed, if only because the other motives weren’t bearing any fruit in the investigation.

  “Who else was here?” I asked Ralphie. If he mentioned a brooding history teacher with a dimple in his chin, I was officially going to spend the rest of the day in a bad mood. On the other hand, if Kerin Murphy was on Ralphie’s list, I’d probably buy extra Halloween candy for the celebration of her arrest. You have to have priorities.

  “There were lots of people here,” he said, lips twisted downward. “I can’t remember everybody.”

  “Do you remember who was hanging out near the bar?” The poison had probably been administered between the bar and the table.

  “Just Lisa Pawley.” He grinned.

  “Who’s Lisa Pawley?”

  “She was in my junior year chemistry class,” Ralphie said, eyes far away. “She’s smokin’ hot.”

  I didn’t care who was hot, if they weren’t hot for the father of our country. “How about this,” I asked the kid. “Do you remember whether you got the two glasses of red wine that the people in the table by the window were drinking?” Paul had told me exactly which table he and Maxie had occupied, and I pointed at it for Ralphie.

  “Probably. That’s my station, so I would’ve gotten their drinks from the bar.”

  I rolled my right hand in a continue motion, but Ralphie just stared at it, as if it were an especially shiny object and he were an unusually stupid cocker spaniel. “What about the drinks?” I asked finally.

  “What about them?” He seemed genuinely puzzled.

  “Did anybody touch them? Anyone stop you on the way to the table? Is there any way that those drinks might have been tampered with between the time you picked them up and the time you delivered them to the table?”

  “Look, the cops asked me all this at the time, and that lady cop already asked me the same stuff a few days ago,” Ralphie said. “I told her: I don’t remember anything happening with the drinks, and if they’d gotten spilled or anything, I’d have had to get other ones from the bar.”

  “I’m not worried about them spilling,” I said. “I’m asking if anyone could have put something in the glasses before you got them to the table.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like poison,” I answered.

  Ralphie’s eyes opened to the size of hubcaps. “You think I poisoned their wine?” he asked. “I didn’t do anything. . . .”

  “No, I don’t think you poisoned their wine,” I assured him. “But I think someone else might have.”

  “Who?” There was a reason this kid hadn’t gone to Harvard after he’d graduated from Harbor Haven High.

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

  “Nothing happened to the drinks after I picked them up from the bar,” he said. “Honest.”

  “Could anything have happened before you picked them up from the bar?” What the hell; it was worth a shot.

  The kid thought for a second or two. “Maybe,” he said. “I didn’t see Francois—that’s the bartender—pour the wine, and I’m pretty sure I had to wait for it until he got glasses from the kitchen. Because I asked him if the glasses were hot from the dishwasher, and if that would mess up the wine, and he told me to go away.”

  The plot, and my blood, thickened.

  “You remember a lot for something that happened a year ago,” I told him.

  “I just got asked about it a couple of days ago by the cops,” he said. “I had time to think.”

  I nodded. “The glasses for those two people came out of the kitchen, and not from the ones he had behind the bar?” I asked.

  “I think that’s right,” Ralphie said. “Sometimes Francois runs out of glasses and he has to go into the kitchen for the ones right out of the dishwasher.”

  “Who was in the kitchen?” I asked him, maybe a little too thickly. “Who could have been in the kitchen that night?”

  “I don’t know; just the chef, Pietro, and his staff, usually.” Did they make every employee take on one of these stupid names? “The only other ones who go back there are the owners.”

  The owners.

  “Did the mayor go back there that night?” I asked, trying hard not to gasp for breath. “Did Bridget Bostero make a trip to the kitchen before you brought out those two glasses of wine?”

  “No,” Ralphie said. “But I think Mr. Morris was back there.”

  “Mr. Morris?”

  “Adam Morris. The developer guy? He’s the main owner of the place.”

  “Did you tell the detective this?” I said when I caught my breath.

  Ralphie’s head nodded so hard I was afraid it might fall off. “Oh yeah,” he said. “She knows everything I’m telling you.”

  I pulled a twenty out of my purse and handed it to the kid. “Thanks, Ralphie,” I told him. “You’ve been very helpful.”

  He grinned, pleased with himself like Melissa is wh
en she can help me with a problem, and turned to leave. Then he stopped and turned back toward me.

  “How’d you know my name is Ralphie?” he asked.

  Forty-one

  I was going to call Adam Morris’s office to make an appointment, but decided that with less than thirty-six hours left to live, I wasn’t bound by the laws of propriety. I barged into his office, barreling past Bianca, his decorative blonde (and no doubt very efficient) secretary. She still looked familiar. But now I remembered why.

  Adam Morris, while startled, did not try to throw me out.

  Bianca, trying desperately not to be blamed for letting the intruder past the door, asked, “Should I call the police?”

  Adam’s face contorted. He rolled his eyes with exasperation and hollered, “No, don’t call the police! Just get your skinny ass out there and answer the phones!” You’ve gotta love a guy who knows how to treat his employees.

  Bianca blanched and closed the door. I thought I saw her shoot me a look of respect as she left. She probably wasn’t used to people barging in on her boss and getting away with it. I nodded back my respect for her, as well (sisterhood and all that), and she seemed pleased. Of course, I could have been projecting.

  Morris shifted smoothly into charming mode, and gestured toward the low-slung chair again, but this time I stood in front of his desk.

  “It’s a charming surprise, Alison, but I have to say it’s a little inconvenient for me right now. Can we schedule this for another time?”

  “I don’t know if I’ll have another time, Adam,” I said. “Someone is threatening my life, and I’m here to find out if it’s you.”

  Adam appeared more amused than concerned. His smile, if anything, got warmer. He put his palms flat on his desk and leaned over to face me with less distance between us. “Why would I threaten your life?” he asked.

  “Because you want my house and what’s in it,” I answered. I was going out on a limb with that last part, since I had no idea if Adam even knew about the Washington deed, but it was worth a shot, anyway.

  “There’s something in your house? You mean besides you?” he asked. Okay, so maybe it wasn’t worth a shot.

  “Something worth about half a million dollars,” I said, inflating the price for effect.

  “Don’t sell yourself short,” he said, leaning closer.

  “Does this sort of line usually work for you?” I asked.

  “Actually, it does,” Adam said, straightening up.

  “I’m talking about an . . . artifact. Something that could be turned into quite a hefty profit.”

  Adam laughed. “Five hundred thousand?” he asked. “In this state, that’ll buy you a medium-sized home in Somerset County. How much did you pay for the Preston place?”

  I looked at my shoes for a moment. They were scuffed. I was still in my work clothes.

  “That’s what I thought,” he said. “Now, why don’t you tell me why you’re really here?”

  “That is why I’m really here,” I said, a little deflated. “Somebody wants me to get out of my house, or they say I’ll die.”

  “And you immediately thought of me? I’m insulted.” Adam walked around his desk and stood next to me. “I didn’t think I was all that menacing a figure.” He seemed genuinely hurt.

  “You’re not. Or maybe you are. I don’t know.” I wasn’t comfortable with him that close.

  Then he leaned in closer. “What do you really want here, Alison?” he crooned.

  Adam Morris just wasn’t going to get off that tactic, but I wasn’t buying. “I’m here because two people died in my house before I bought it. They were probably poisoned—on the night the planning board voted against your proposal, and in a restaurant of which you are the principal owner.”

  I got the desired effect—he backed off. “And you think I poisoned them so I could buy the house?” He laughed. “How’d that work out?”

  “I know why you couldn’t buy the house after Maxie died,” I told him, regaining some of my bravado. “But I’m not sure how angry you were before she died. Angry enough to kill her?”

  Adam shook his head and walked back behind his desk. If seduction wasn’t going to work, the conversation no longer appeared to hold any interest for him. “Believe what you want to believe, Alison,” he said. “A couple of people in a restaurant drink some eye drops with their dinner, and I’m supposed to be responsible because I have a financial interest in the building? That’s a very long stretch. I’m sorry if someone’s threatening you, but it’s not me. Now, please stop interrupting my day.”

  I dropped my head again, did my best to look defeated, and then slunk out of the office, dragging my feet behind me. I dropped a piece of paper on Bianca’s desk on my way out.

  And the instant I made it outside, I called Detective McElone.

  Forty-two

  “He said eye drops,” I told Detective McElone. Again.

  “I heard you. I understand the point.” She sat back in her chair and didn’t move.

  I couldn’t comprehend her lack of excitement. “You never told Adam Morris that the poison used on Terry Wright was eye drops, did you?” I asked.

  McElone shook her head. “You’re the only person outside the department I told, and I’m not really sure why I did that,” she said.

  Still not so much as a blink on her part. “Well, I didn’t tell him, so that means he knew what killed Terry, and assumed it was the same poison that killed Paul and Maxie. And it wasn’t. It was acetone in their wine that killed them.”

  “I know,” McElone said. “But there are so many holes in your logic that I can’t begin to tell you.”

  “Holes? The man slipped up! He said something that only the killer could have known!”

  McElone sighed. Having to deal with an amateur like me was a drain on her energy. She held up the ubiquitous finger to begin her count. “One: He said what he said, if he said it, to you, a civilian, and another suspect in the case. Two: You didn’t have a recorder on at the time, so there’s no record of what he said or didn’t say, and no proof. Three: If he said that, he’d be implicating himself in the murder of Terry Wright, not Maxine Malone or Paul Harrison, and we have no evidence at all of him being involved with Terry Wright. Four—”

  I couldn’t stand another finger. “Enough. I get it. Are you still looking for the appointment calendar Kerin Murphy took from Terry’s office?”

  “Remember that badge I asked you for last time?” The one I don’t have.

  “Detective, Adam Morris might very well be threatening my life. Whether or not I have a badge . . .”

  “Mr. Morris has been questioned and will be questioned again. Believe me, I don’t sit around all day and wait for you to come in with clues—we’ve been investigating.” McElone stood up in an effort to get me ready to leave. “So please, just go home, stay out of trouble, and let us do our job. Okay?”

  “There are times I get the feeling you don’t like me, Detective.”

  “Trust those feelings,” she said.

  “This isn’t getting us anywhere,” Paul said.

  The strangest council of war ever convened was gathered in my barren front room. Besides Paul and me, Maxie was pouting unconvincingly in one corner, while the more extant members of the brain trust—Tony, Melissa and Mom—were arranged around the room in lawn chairs. Of course, Tony couldn’t communicate with Paul or Maxie, but between Melissa, Mom and myself, we worked it out. Jeannie had outright refused to participate in “this crap about ghosts in the house,” and was upstairs, sewing new curtains for Melissa’s bedroom.

  “I’m waiting for a suggestion,” I said. “We’re no closer to figuring out who’s behind all the threats, and the clock is ticking.”

  “What should we be doing now?” Tony asked. “I mean, shouldn’t we be concentrating on finding that Washington thing?”

  “I’m not talking to him,” Maxie said, and crossed her arms severely over her chest.

  “That’s a good idea,” I
told Tony, ignoring Maxie. “Shouldn’t the first order of business now be to find the deed? It seems to me it must be outside somewhere.”

  “Why?” Melissa asked. “Because we didn’t find it in the house yet? Maybe it’s in the basement or something.”

  “Or maybe it was discarded or destroyed years ago, and nobody knows it,” Mom added. “It’s even possible that there never was a deed, so there’s no chance we’ll find it.”

  “Wow,” Melissa said. “You are harshin’ my mellow, Grandma.” She’d picked that one up from her friend Wendy.

  Let’s just say the vibe in the room wasn’t exactly buoyant.

  “All right.” Paul, at least, was trying. “You haven’t discovered the deed in all the renovations you’ve done, so the obvious places are clearly of no use to us.”

  “And you and Maxie couldn’t find it by cruising around the place,” I said, just to prove that I wasn’t the only incompetent in the room. “I don’t suppose George Washington is one of the ghosts you can contact on your Ghosternet, is he?”

  “His Ghoster-what?” Melissa asked.

  “Sometimes, I can get in touch with other . . . displaced spirits,” Paul explained. He looked at Maxie, who harrumphed, and I took it that while Paul could communicate with other spirits, Maxie couldn’t. Then he turned to me, and with a certain edge, said, “No, President Washington is not on my speed dial. Any other ideas?”

  “Do you think it could be hidden in the walls?” Tony asked. He was scared, I could tell. Which scared me.

  “In the walls?” I asked.

  “Yeah. You said it was probably hidden while this house was being built. The owners knew it would increase in value, let’s say, and didn’t want anyone to come looking for it. Could they have closed it up inside a wall somewhere?”

  I looked at Paul. “Wouldn’t you have seen it, flying through walls the way you do?”

  “I’ve told you, Alison: Dark is dark for us, too. And we can’t carry solid objects, like flashlights, through walls.”