Night of the Living Deed

by E. J. Copperman

  It was, to say the least, a strange place to be having this meeting on Halloween night. Or perhaps the perfect place.

  My breath was coming in spurts as I approached the main gate. I didn’t see any sign of McElone or any other police officers, and I couldn’t decide if I was alarmed by that or reassured that they’d taken precautions to be so well hidden. I decided on the latter, because the thought of going in here alone was more than I could accept right now.

  I held the box with the deed in it so tightly I was afraid it would shatter in my hands.

  The voice hadn’t specified an area in the cemetery to meet. I checked my watch and saw that Tony had dropped me off about three minutes before the deadline. So I started in and figured I’d head for the center, from where I could get to any spot fairly quickly.

  There was a rustle in some decorative shrubs behind me, but when I turned to look, there was no one there. When I turned back, a figure in a hooded black cloak stood about fifteen feet in front of me, the bright moon behind it obscuring the face. But I could easily tell who it was.

  “You can take off the hood, Bridget,” I said. “I know who you are.”

  Paul had been right: Mayor Bridget Bostero lowered the hood on her cloak. Her eyes weren’t angry, or even very intense. They were like the eyes on a fish—open, seeing, but completely unexpressive.

  “You brought the deed?” she asked, in a tone as conversational as if she were inquiring about the health of my dog. I didn’t have a dog. If Melissa wanted a dog, I’d get her one. Just let her be all right.

  “Where is my daughter?” She could have the stupid deed. I wanted Melissa.

  A laugh escaped from the mayor’s mouth. “I honestly have no idea,” she said. “But when she came trick-or-treating at my house looking so adorable, and said she had to be home by eight-thirty, I pushed up the timetable. I knew that would get you here no matter what.”

  Melissa wasn’t here? She wasn’t being held by people trying to blackmail me? She was safe?

  “You bitch,” I hissed. “Do you have any clue what you’ve put me through?”

  “I did what was necessary, Alison. If you’d cooperated before, I wouldn’t have had to do that tonight. It’s really your fault.” Bridget’s grin was a little less jovial than before.

  “I didn’t have any idea where the deed was until after you called,” I said. “I tore that house apart—literally—looking for it.” Where the hell was McElone, already?

  “Well, then, it served as an effective incentive,” the mayor said. “Now hand over the deed, please.”

  “Just a minute,” I said. “I’m trying to figure this out. You were behind all the threatening e-mails to Maxie and me, the threatening calls to the Prestons and the package to my mother’s house, weren’t you?”

  “That’s right,” Bridget agreed. “But for different reasons. At first, I just wanted that woman out of the house so Adam could bulldoze it, but she talked the planning board out of it. Go figure the little tramp could be eloquent. But with you, well, Adam had cut me off, but I discovered—after all this time—that the story about Washington’s deed was true. I found a copy of the record for the deed in the county clerk’s office when I was there on town business. And I figured you could find it if you were given enough . . . motivation. I need that document.”

  “I know it’s worth about a half million dollars,” I said.

  “Yes, but that’s just part of it,” Bridget responded. “Sure, I could use the money to finance my campaign, but the document itself, a tie to history? That’s worth all sorts of political capital, and it could get me on the national news. The next thing you know, I’m a candidate for the senate.”

  “This was about getting a better position in politics?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “You killed Paul Harrison and Maxie Malone over that?”

  Mayor Bostero shrugged. “A lot of people have died for such causes,” she said. “I simply wandered over to the bar at Café Linguine just in time to add a little something to the drinks going to that table. Honestly, Ms. Malone was the target. The man—and he was adorable, by the way—was collateral damage. I couldn’t be sure which drink would be placed in front of which person, so I had to poison both.”

  “But you had to make it look like suicide, so you went to my house—that’s how you knew what the upstairs looked like—and injected them with Ambien. Only you would have had it handy in liquid form.”

  “I have such trouble sleeping,” Bridget said with a grin.

  “All that so you could get a part-time job in the New Jersey state senate?” I asked, not hiding my contempt. “Serving the people?”

  I took two steps back, hoping the increased volume of our voices would attract someone. The cops were here, right?

  “Are you counting on the police, Alison?” Mayor Bostero asked. “You shouldn’t: I got on their communication system, said I was Detective McElone, and told them that the call to the cemetery was cancelled. They won’t straighten it out until long after we’re done here. So stop stalling. Hand over the deed.”

  Any incentive I had to do as she asked was gone. “No,” I said.

  Bridget’s right hand came up, holding a gun. “Did I forget the magic word?” she asked. “I apologize. Hand over the deed, please.”

  “You’re going to shoot me for it?”

  “That’s the general idea. You can hand it over, or I can pick it up off the ground when you fall. I’d prefer not to risk hitting the deed, but I am a pretty good shot.”

  My voice got louder. Maybe Tony would hear. “I think you’ll shoot me either way,” I told her. “I already know that you killed Paul and Maxie. You can’t let me walk around.”

  The Mayor nodded her head approvingly. “You’re right again, Alison. I am going to kill you. But first, I’d like you to please put the box down.”

  Instead, I held it up vertically, covering the area from my chin to my waist. “If you want to take a chance, feel free,” I shouted from behind the case. “But I’ll be leaving now.”

  I took another two steps back, and Bridget fired the gun just to my left. I could feel the air move as the bullet passed me. She had been telling the truth; she was good with a gun. I kept the case right where it was, figuring she wouldn’t risk a shot into it, and I was right.

  “The next bullet goes into your knee, Alison. And you will drop the box then.”

  Damn.

  I stopped. Perhaps negotiation was the way to go. “Maybe we can work out a deal,” I said. “I’ll stay quiet on the murders in return for your agreement not to shoot me, and a recommendation for the guesthouse by the town’s economic development commission. How’s that? You can keep the money.”

  There was movement in the shrub behind me again.

  Mayor Bostero raised the gun and took aim at the top of my head. “Nice try, Alison,” she said. Before she could fire, a figure lurched out from behind the shrub. A figure the size of a man, wearing a sheet. Tony must have gone for the drop cloth in his truck after all.

  He started walking toward us. Bridget, exposed with the gun in her hand, faltered—her shooting hand wavered between me and the sheet. Tony was going to get himself killed for me, and then I’d get killed on my own.

  “Get out of here,” I hissed at him.

  “Stop,” yelled the mayor. “I’ll fire at you.”

  But Tony kept walking, and Bridget raised the gun, pointed straight at him.

  “Tony, no,” I said louder.

  The mayor fired. The sheet took a hit, never so much as flinched, and kept walking toward her. She fired again, with the same result. And again.

  I screamed, I think. How could I tell Jeannie I’d gotten her husband killed?

  But the figure came close to me, shoulder-to-shoulder, and the familiar voice I heard as it passed—with the sensation of a warm breeze through my right elbow—was not Tony’s.

  “It’s okay,” it said. “I’m right here, baby girl.”

  He walked by me. An
d right at Bridget. She fired once more. Again, it had no effect.

  The figure walked right into the mayor, and when he passed through, I could barely see an outline of him, but the sheet stayed over Bridget Bostero, and she struggled to pull it off.

  That was the only opening I needed. Fueled with the fury of her confession and the pent-up anger over her having threatened my daughter, I dropped the box with the deed, dove onto the mayor and brought her to the ground. The gun fell out of her hand and skittered away.

  I hit her again and again, longer than I needed to, probably, but it felt so good that I kept doing it until I rolled off her unconscious body, covered in a sheet, and started to cry.

  The tears were the problem, I believe. If I had been dry-eyed, I would have seen the hand reach for the gun on the ground.

  But as it was, I didn’t realize what was happening until I was staring up at Adam Morris, holding it casually.

  I almost laughed; I was beyond reason. “What the hell are you doing here?” I asked.

  “You,” he said. “You told the police about me. You found the appointment book. It’s your fault the police are after me.”

  “What?”

  “I knew she”—he pointed at the mayor, still prone and unmoving—“was after you. And that I could follow her and find you. To do this.” He pointed the gun at me.

  “The deed is there,” I said, indicating the spot where I’d dropped the box.

  “What deed?” he asked.

  I didn’t even have time to speak. He pulled back the hammer on Bridget’s revolver and aimed right between my eyes. The shot rang out.

  And immediately Adam Morris fell to his knees, then flat on the ground, facedown. Behind him, Detective Anita McElone was standing, her weapon held straight out in front of her. She ran to Adam and kicked the gun away from his hand.

  “Do you still actually need the right to remain silent?” she asked him.

  “My leg,” he moaned.

  McElone nodded. “I imagine that smarts a bit,” she said. “Be happy that’s all it was.” She looked at me and pointed at the other prone figure. “The mayor?” she asked.

  “My leg,” Adam insisted.

  “Oh, be quiet. I’m calling for an ambulance.”

  Still in a state of diminishing hysterics, I nodded. “Where were you?” I finally managed.

  “After she called off my officers, it took me a while to figure out what had happened,” McElone said. “I’m sorry; I got here as fast as I could.”

  My teeth were chattering. I couldn’t see anything clearly. “I could have died,” I said. I hadn’t been really talking to her. It was just something I said.

  “I am sorry.” I noticed she was breathing heavily; she must have run when she’d heard the gunshots.

  “Did you see my . . .”

  “I just saw the gun, and I heard the shots. Don’t worry. Just let me call in for an ambulance.”

  I had a hard time controlling myself, and found I was crying. McElone actually held me for a few minutes until she had to talk to the EMTs and her backup.

  The next thing I knew, I was back at the house, hugging Melissa so tightly I was probably the biggest threat to her health that day.

  Forty-nine

  “I had Adam Morris being watched,” Detective Anita McElone said. “So when the officer called in and said Morris was tailing the mayor and heading for the cemetery, I realized something was wrong. Then I heard the mayor call in as me and cancel the operation.”

  After my brief but important reunion with Melissa, McElone had insisted I come back to the police station to make a statement, which I thought was fair. But her tone had softened, and even the look of the dreary cop house was not quite as ominous as it had seemed before.

  “Why were you watching Adam Morris?” I asked. “I mean, besides the fifty-two reasons I’d already given you, all of which you’d told me were stupid.”

  “Morris was the last person to see Terry Wright alive,” McElone answered. “His name was on the hard drive and the appointment book Bianca Valessy had.” She shot me a look. “Yes, we knew about Bianca. We had plainclothes officers following Kerin Murphy after you told me about the appointment book, and after we checked Kerin’s cell phone records, we traced her to Bianca. If you hadn’t been meddling, we probably would have gotten there faster. Nice work.”

  I grimaced, then told her about what Bridget Bostero had said in the cemetery, and McElone shook her head in what would have been disbelief had she allowed herself the ability to be surprised.

  “She didn’t tell you anything?” I asked. “She’s not still unconscious, is she? I didn’t hit her that hard.”

  “No, she’s awake and talking, but not about killing anybody. In fact, she tried to press assault charges against you, but I saw the gun in her hand, even though I couldn’t get a clear shot at her, so no lawsuit’s going to happen.”

  “And Adam Morris?” I asked.

  “Morris will have his leg up in traction for a while,” McElone said. “He’s clammed up for the time being. The shooting, like any incident that involves an officer, is under review.”

  “If neither of them are talking . . .” I started.

  “We’re getting a lot of the story from Bianca.” McElone grinned. “She has quite the story to tell, and she has Morris’s appointment calendar and his computer schedule to back it up. She says Morris also hired a guy to break into your house twice, once to plant that one-dollar bill with the nasty note on the wall, and once to bust up the patch in your hallway. We should have him in custody in a couple of hours.”

  “Anyone I know?” I asked.

  “You remember David Preston?” McElone couldn’t hide her grin this time.

  “David Preston? The former owner?” My jaw dropped about a foot.

  “Yeah. He was on Morris’s payroll as, well, I won’t say an enforcer, he’s too old and tired for that, but he does some dirty work. Turns out Preston’s been doing that for decades really, for various shady characters. Did anybody really think he could raise nine kids on a NJ Transit salary? He was the one who sent you and Malone the threatening e-mails, and even called his wife with a disguised voice every once in a while to keep himself looking clean.”

  “Why?” I asked. “What good did that do Adam Morris?”

  “The mayor saw the hole when she came ‘touring’ with the Prestons, the time I got you out of there against your will. I suspected both Prestons at that time, figuring they’d been trying to find this historical whatever and then got mad when they thought you’d succeeded where they’d failed. But it turns out they’d just been digging up their yard for some landscaping plan Madeline Preston couldn’t ever get to work right. The mayor, however, saw the hole in the wall and figured you were looking for the deed. And if that’s where you were looking, that’s where she would look. She could get herself back in Adam Morris’s good graces, and get her campaign going again.”

  I sighed a little. “Not exactly the Albert Einstein of the Jersey Shore, the mayor.”

  “Bostero’s not as dumb as you think,” McElone said. “She chose that cemetery because it’s one of the few public spots in town that doesn’t have some video surveillance nearby, and she almost got you to hand over a half-million-dollar piece of paper.”

  “What about Adam Morris?” I asked. “Did he really kill Terry Wright?”

  “Yeah. They were having a relationship of some sort—it sounds like Morris was quite the ladies’ man—but when he realized he wasn’t getting the house, he called off their affair. Wright threatened to expose him, and he took a page from the mayor’s book. Figured if it had worked for her, it would work for him.”

  “This is one crazy small town,” I told her.

  McElone rolled her eyes a little. “Tell me about it,” she said.

  “It was the cosmetics advice,” Paul said.

  The next morning, with the light of day better illuminating the backyard of my “new” house, we were taking in the morning
on a bench I’d restored near the back shed, near where I was hoping someday to have a greenhouse. Right now, I just wanted to sit.

  I’d gotten back from the police station at about three in the morning, and hadn’t turned on the lights when I went to bed. On the way downstairs this morning, I’d been very careful to look only at the floor. Anything else would have been too depressing.

  “When Mayor Bostero called last night, it was the cosmetics advice she offered, unsolicited, that gave her away,” he went on. I was cold in a light jacket, but Paul was wearing a pair of jeans and a gray t-shirt. Being dead, he didn’t seem to have to worry about the weather too much.

  “That was it? She suggests latex ears, and you expose a killer?”

  “That actually just triggered it. I really got it all at once,” he said. “She’d clearly been in the house before, certainly on the night we died, when she administered the Ambien to cover her tracks. She couldn’t have put that much Ambien in our drinks; we’d have noticed it. But the poison she used was a substance often found in nail polish remover, the kind of thing a beautician would have.”

  I smiled at him. Paul really was a nice guy, and I was sorry I hadn’t known him when he was breathing. “I guess you really were a good detective after all,” I said.

  “I want to talk to you about that.”

  He didn’t get the chance, because Ned Barnes appeared from the back door of the house, and waved as he walked toward us. I checked my watch and, having delivered Melissa—reluctantly, on my part—to school, I knew he should have been there, as well.

  “It’s my off period,” he explained when he reached us, although he thought I was alone. “I only have about ten minutes, but I wanted to talk to you about something in person.”

  “It’s the deed, isn’t it?” I said.

  Ned nodded. “I guess I’ve been pretty obvious with my obsession, haven’t I?”

  “You could say that.”

  “Well, just to put a rest to it, may I ask what you plan to do with the deed?”