Night of the Living Deed

by E. J. Copperman

“I read your note saying I should tell you if I knew something about this house,” she said. “I’ve seen you in Adam’s office. You’re not afraid of him.”

  Well, I was afraid of somebody, but I couldn’t be sure it was Adam Morris. “That’s right,” I told her.

  “Well, I do know something. I know a lot.”

  I waited, but she seemed to need some prodding to go on. Luckily, Jeannie was in the room. “So tell us,” she said, a little heatedly.

  “See, here’s the thing,” Bianca said. “Adam wants this house way more than he’s letting on. He came into town all set to take this whole section and make a real big project out of it, you know, beachfront property, lots of condos and big houses to sell to rich people. He’s been working on it for years. And all the other owners of all the other houses sold out to him right away, because he was offering good prices in a bad real estate market.”

  “But the Prestons sold to Maxie before he knew it, and then Kitty Malone wouldn’t sell, right?”

  “Well, not the Prestons—that was just bad luck,” Bianca answered. “Adam’s agent in the area, Ms. Wright? He didn’t contact her until a month after they sold the house to Ms. Malone. Adam dropped the ball on that. But when that owner died, and her estate still wouldn’t sell, he got mad. He stopped seeing Ms. Wright, just cut her off entirely.”

  “Adam Morris was seeing Terry Wright?” It was news to me.

  “Oh yeah. Among . . . others,” she answered. “He’s lucky his wife is back in Nebraska.”

  “His wife?” Tony said. “The guy’s married in Nebraska, and he’s having multiple affairs here in New Jersey?” He blinked a couple of times. Jeannie poked him on the arm, thinking he was expressing admiration for Adam Morris’s accomplishments. “What?” he asked her.

  “Yeah.” Bianca was warming to the attention she was getting. “He was with Ms. Wright for a while, then the mayor for a while . . .”

  “The mayor? Bridget Bostero? Harbor Haven’s mayor?” Jeannie wasn’t aghast—she was thrilled with the treasure trove of gossip she was receiving.

  “Yeah,” Bianca repeated. It appeared to be her favorite word. “He was going to finance her campaign for state assembly, but he got mad when she couldn’t deliver the planning board vote, and that was it. She gets no money and no Adam.”

  My head was spinning. I actually felt like lying down (a concussion never really leaves you), but instead, I sat on the stairs. “Let me see if I’ve got this,” I said. “Adam Morris was having an affair with Terry Wright. But he broke that off because he thought she failed him by not getting this house for his project. So he started seeing the mayor, thinking she could get him the house by influencing the planning board, and enticed her with an offer to put up money for a state assembly campaign.”

  “I’m not sure he was only seeing one of them at a time,” Bianca corrected me. “And they weren’t the only ones. Like the lady who got his appointment book.”

  “Excuse me?” Jeannie looked like she was five and it was Christmas morning. “Adam Morris was having an affair with Kerin Murphy?”

  “Is that her name?” Bianca asked.

  “Oh, this is too good!” Jeannie gushed. I was trying to wrap my mind around it.

  Adam Morris had tried to use his charm on me and, frankly, I’d found him very easy to resist, so it was hard to imagine that he was such catnip to so many women. But this wasn’t getting me any less killed, so I plowed on. “Okay, so all this was fine until Maxie convinced the board to vote against him. Then he withdrew the money and broke it off with Bridget.”

  “Yeah.” Again. “Except he was getting back together with Ms. Wright before she died.”

  “He was?”

  “Yeah. He kept calling her and sending her flowers.”

  “Ask her how he reacted when she died,” Paul suggested, so I repeated the question.

  “It was weird. He didn’t really seem to care that much.” There was a long silence. I know what I was thinking.

  “Why are you telling me all this, Bianca?” I asked.

  She looked from face to face in the room (and missed a couple she didn’t know were there). “I think you need to be careful. He still wants your house, and he knows you won’t sell it to him. He’s tried to get this house before. He got really mad when it didn’t work.”

  “Don’t I know it,” Maxie said. Paul never took his eyes off Bianca.

  “I just . . . I don’t know for sure, but I saw what happened the last time he got this mad, and I thought it would be wrong not to warn you.”

  “What happened the last time?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure. But those two people died here.” Bianca shuddered a little, and Maxie wasn’t touching her. I checked.

  “Do you think Adam Morris killed the people who died here in this house?” I asked. Paul and Maxie were similarly tensed up and leaning forward, and if they’d had breath, they’d have been holding it.

  “I don’t know for sure,” Bianca said. “But I know he was awful mad.”

  That wasn’t enough. Detective McElone would tell me it wasn’t enough. I’d go to her, but she’d tell me it wasn’t enough.

  “Why did you decide to tell me this?” I asked Bianca again.

  Her eyes got watery, and she covered a tear with the back of her hand. “He told me I was the only one,” she said.

  Forty-five

  “It’s not enough,” Detective Anita McElone said.

  I leaned back and put my feet up on her desk, which I’m sure did not please the detective. Jeannie and I had gone directly to police headquarters when Bianca, having recovered from her misty moment of regret, reorganized herself and headed to work so as not to draw any suspicion.

  “I thought you’d say that,” I allowed, “but it should be enough at least to question Adam Morris. That, coupled with what we talked about the last time I was here?”

  “The guy killed probably three people,” Jeannie said, not having to worry too much about the niceties (what the hell, she didn’t live in Harbor Haven). “You’re a cop, right? So what’s the problem?”

  McElone had initially insisted that Jeannie stay out in the waiting room, but Jeannie had inched her way in a little at a time and was now standing next to the chair in which I was sitting. McElone hadn’t looked happy about it, but she hadn’t said anything. Until now.

  “Didn’t I ask you to wait outside?” she asked Jeannie.

  “Yeah, but I decided the answer was no.”

  I decided to put us back on topic. I held up a finger. “One,” I told the detective. “Adam Morris was having an affair with Terry Wright when she was selling my house to Maxie Malone. Two”—second finger. Hey, this was fun!—“Adam Morris was having an affair with Mayor Bostero as well as with Kerin Murphy, and offering to finance Bridget’s campaign, while she was trying to push a condemnation order through the planning board. Three”—next finger—“Morris dumped each woman when she was no longer of any use to him, but, four”—finger again—“he was starting to see Terry again—just before she was killed. Five”—thumb—“he knew the kind of poison used on Terry, even though you hadn’t made that information public. Six—”

  Before I could put up another finger, McElone held up one of her own. “So far, what you’ve given me wouldn’t even stand up on an episode of Perry Mason from nineteen fifty-nine. All the information you say you have comes from a so-called anonymous witness, and is all hearsay, anyway.” It was true; Bianca had insisted that I not tell McElone her name. “Two, you don’t know that any of it is true. Three, even if all that stuff about him sleeping with all those women is true—and I have no reason to think it is—it doesn’t make him a killer, just an adulterer. Four, there’s nothing tying Morris to the killings of Harrison or Malone. Five, get your feet off my desk.”

  I took my feet off her desk.

  “Okay,” I said. “So I don’t have any physical evidence. But you have to admit, the fact that Morris was involved with all these women and that he wa
s so desperate to get my house would at least give him a motive. Isn’t that enough to investigate?”

  “We are investigating,” McElone said. “We’ve been investigating since these incidents happened. I questioned Mr. Morris myself.”

  “And?” I asked.

  “When did you become a police consultant?” the detective asked in return. “I have no reason to tell you anything, but how about this: Adam Morris says that he left the restaurant at least a half hour before Mr. Harrison and Ms. Malone finished their dinner the night of the meeting. Most of the restaurant staff corroborates that account. And the ME says that’s the wrong time frame for him to have poisoned their drinks.”

  I gave her my best oh please face. “He couldn’t be lying, or have gotten someone else, like the bartender or the waiter, to do it?” I hated to cast suspicion on Ralphie, especially since I had no reason to think he had anything to do with the poisonings, but McElone was cornering me.

  “We questioned the entire staff,” she said. “If there’s anything suspicious, we already know about it. And no one has been ruled out as a suspect.”

  “Not even me?” I asked.

  “You?” Jeannie asked. “How can you be suspected of threatening yourself? I thought we’d gotten past this library card thing.”

  “We have,” McElone said wearily. “Ms. Kerby is no longer a suspect in Ms. Wright’s death.” She looked at me. “You didn’t have a motive. And we checked your cell phone records. The call you got came from a disposable cell phone, and even if we could triangulate its location, I guarantee the person who used it has discarded it and gotten another by now.”

  “So, how should I proceed now?” I asked.

  “Until I tell you otherwise, assume you’re still in danger,” McElone said. “But I’m betting I’ll tell you very soon to stop worrying.” She smiled warmly.

  “See? And I thought you didn’t like me.”

  “I don’t,” she said. “But if you’re not in danger, you won’t be bothering me anymore.”

  We turned to leave. “To protect and serve,” Jeannie scoffed as we walked out.

  My cell phone buzzed on the way out, indicating a text message. I opened it, and the message read, “I WANT THE DEED. 2NIGHT.”

  I didn’t even bother to go back and show it to McElone. She’d say it wasn’t enough.

  Forty-six

  “What’s our plan of action?” I asked Paul.

  “We have no choice,” Paul replied. “No matter who the killer is, we have nothing to bargain with if we don’t find that deed.”

  “But we’ve looked everywhere,” I told him. “There’s no place left to explore.”

  Paul composed himself, and I got the impression I wasn’t going to like what he had to say next. I was right. “The Prestons and Mayor Bostero were really fascinated by the hole in that wall.” He pointed, as if I didn’t know where the hole that had been haunting (so to speak) my thoughts was located.

  “Don’t even think it,” I said.

  “Alison, there’s a very strong possibility that the document that can save your life is hidden somewhere behind one of those plaster walls, and the only way we can find out is to let in enough light for Maxie or me to look inside.”

  I shook my head. “That’s a hole in every wall in this house, none of which I’ll know how to repair.”

  “They’d be small holes,” Paul tried.

  “We wouldn’t have time to be neat. We’d have to ruin every wall until we found it.”

  “Weigh that against waking up tomorrow morning,” he said.

  “I’m not afraid of . . . whoever it is,” I lied. “They can’t poison me if I know it’s coming. I won’t eat anything for the rest of the day. I’ll only eat food I cook myself from now on. I’ll save money. I can’t destroy the house—it’s the only way I can make a living, Paul.”

  He did whatever ghosts do that looks like sighing. “Alison, you can’t live scared forever. I firmly believe that the only way to stop this is to find that deed, and the only way to do that is to break holes in each wall in this house until we find it.”

  “I’d rather die,” I said. And at that moment, I meant it. “I will not take down months’ worth of work just because something might be behind one of the walls. When you guys develop X-ray vision and can tell me exactly where the deed is, I’ll think about it.”

  The argument went on for hours: I finished the urethane job, putting up and taking down barriers to keep (live) people from stepping on the floor until it dried. Jeannie made two more curtains for my bedroom, Wendy’s mom gave Melissa a ride home from school, Tony called to say he’d be back after his drywall job was completed, and Maxie was holed up with the laptop doing “research,” but neither Paul nor I had moved from our original positions: Paul thought taking down all the plaster walls, which could never be adequately replaced, would save my life, and I thought the possibility was just a little too iffy to warrant the damage.

  Oh, and Mom called to say she’d call later.

  Melissa was upstairs getting into her Mr. Spock outfit, and we expected the horde of trick-or-treaters, discreetly followed by a few mothers (including Kerin Murphy, much to my chagrin), to arrive at our house for pickup in ten minutes. I called up the stairs.

  “Liss! Come on down! I want to get pictures before you leave!”

  “Just a second!” the tiny voice came back. “I’m finishing up.”

  The typical wave of four- and five-year-olds had already been coming by trick-or-treating from pretty much the minute school let out, each one followed so closely by a parent it was hard to tell who was getting the candy. But that died down fairly quickly, and we were awaiting the second wave, which would include Melissa and her posse, shortly. The teenagers would come after nine, and I’d stiff them. Teenagers trick-or-treating. Really.

  Paul, wearing black jeans and a tight black t-shirt, looked like he should be attending an extremely casual funeral or a reunion of New Yorkers from the Clinton era. But his face was serious. “Alison . . . ,” he started.

  I cut him off. “No more. We’re done.” Once again, I called upstairs. “Melissa! They’ll be here any minute, and I’m going to get pictures whether it mortifies you or not!”

  “One second!” More insistent.

  Paul bit his upper lip and tried a different tactic. “All right, then. If we’re not going to look behind the walls, where else haven’t we tried yet? This is a big house; there has to be some area we haven’t searched thoroughly.”

  “I can’t think of anyplace,” I answered. “There’s no furniture in the house; each room is empty. I’ve been behind the tiles in the bathrooms, checked the mortar and every brick of the fireplaces, and pulled up each and every rug. There isn’t an inch of this house with which I have not become intimate.”

  “There’s something we’re missing.”

  “Of course there is, or we would have found it by now. Melissa!” I ran up the stairs to move my daughter along. “You have to come down now!”

  And I found her in her bedroom, standing in her blue Star Trek shirt with the insignia on the left side. Her hair had been piled up under a store-bought wig that gave her black bangs and a bowl cut with sideburns. She had on the Silly Putty ears, which for the moment actually looked pretty natural (but almost certainly would not by the fourth house).

  Also, her eyebrows were half-shaved, and Maxie was kneeling next to her, applying mascara to extend them up in a diagonal line on each side.

  Melissa gasped. I gasped. Maxie looked up and didn’t so much as blink.

  “We’re not done yet,” she said.

  “I . . . you . . . didn’t I . . . ?” I was at my most articulate.

  “Looks pretty good, huh?” Maxie said.

  Melissa, considerably more savvy to my expressions and the fact that I’d specifically forbidden this activity, didn’t look nearly as confident. “Mom,” she said. “Don’t freak out.”

  “Don’t freak out?” I echoed. “I told you without
any question that you could not do this, and here you are with . . . with her, doing exactly what I said you couldn’t!”

  “Oh, chill,” Maxie said. “They’ll grow back.”

  I advanced on her, and she tried to wield a Gillette Venus safety razor as a weapon. “I don’t want you near my daughter ever again, do you understand?” I bellowed.

  “Never!”

  And I turned on my heel and left the room. Behind me, I heard sobs, but I couldn’t say for sure which one of them was crying.

  When push came to shove, I didn’t have the guts to ground Melissa on Halloween, especially since I arrived downstairs to find at least eight of her friends, in costumes ranging from Captain Kirk to Lieutenant Uhura to Princess Jasmine (Marlee Murphy didn’t get the memo), and four mothers, including Kerin Murphy, standing in my empty living room, eyes round and wide. At first, I thought they were admiring the restored beauty of the old place.

  No such luck.

  “Ready for the SafeOWeen?” Kerin asked, no doubt dredging up skills from a cheerleading past. The kids looked glum.

  “Is your house really haunted?” Wendy, Melissa’s best friend, asked. She hadn’t even asked where Melissa was, and here she was inquiring after the deceased. “Can we see the ghosts?”

  “Yeah!” A little girl named Sandy (I remembered her because she had been trading Melissa Twinkies for apples until I got wind of it) asked. “Where are the ghosts?”

  “Do they wear sheets?” another one asked. The poor kid.

  Melissa appeared at the top of the stairs. Her face registered angry, nervous and a little scared, mostly, I thought, at what vengeance I might take for her disobeying me so blatantly.

  “I’m sorry, girls, there really aren’t any ghosts here,” I told the gathered assemblage, and in that first second, I must report that the mothers were the ones who looked the most disappointed, Kerin perhaps most of all—if I had a haunted house, she could probably put it around that I was a witch. “I know stories have been going around, but they’re just stories. Like Aladdin and Princess Jasmine.” I gestured to Marlee in the Jasmine costume.