The Hostess With the Ghostess

by E. J. Copperman

  Paul looked stumped, the question clearly never having raised itself in his mind. “The window was so much more convenient,” he said. “It never occurred to me you would stay out there. I just needed to find the right office and get inside.”

  “And here I thought I’d missed you. Did you find anything useful?” I got into the car and watched Paul drop through the roof and into a position approximating sitting in the front seat.

  “Not very much,” he admitted. “It’s very possible much of what Richard was working on was confiscated by the police, and that could very well be a factor in the delay in Cassidy Van Doren’s trial.”

  “The receptionist said that’s what happened and that it’s now with the Middlesex county prosecutor,” I told him. “And I’m not doing this show in their offices, so don’t ask me. It would take weeks to wade through all the files there, and I don’t want to stand at a reception desk for weeks.”

  “I will not point out again that you need not have stayed at the reception desk,” Paul said.

  “You just did point it out again.”

  He plowed on through, which was probably the right decision. I pulled the car out of the parking lot to head back to the Garden State Parkway. “I believe you are right about the prosecutor’s office. There’s no quick and simple path through there.”

  “What about asking Richard to access his files through Maxie’s laptop?” I suggested.

  Paul didn’t answer immediately, which meant my idea might have some semblance of merit. But then he shook his head. “I’ll ask him, but I’d be surprised if his account is still active,” he said. “And someone signing on to a dead man’s account might seem odd and be detected by the site’s Webmaster.”

  “So they’ll trace it back to a dead woman’s computer,” I said. “That’ll keep them up nights.” My world is so much different than that of most people. I often envy most people. There was a silence of a few seconds in the car as we each retreated to our own thoughts. “You and Richard weren’t very close, were you?” I asked Paul.

  “Not especially, but we harbor no animosity toward each other. At least I don’t toward him,” Paul said. “How is that relevant to his murder?”

  “It’s not,” I answered. “I don’t think you killed him.”

  “Then why did you ask?” Paul said.

  “I wanted to understand. I never had a sibling. Neither does Melissa, and she’s not getting one. So it’s always interesting to me to see the dynamics in families with more than one child.”

  Paul folded his hands in his lap, and the expression on his face told me he was trying to be tactful. “It would probably be best to keep your focus on the case, Alison.”

  “I can multitask.”

  He sighed a little. There’s just no getting rid of a girl like me. “Richard was the older brother in a family with a single mother,” he said, staring out through the windshield. “My father left when I was very young, and Richard is twelve years older than I, or was twelve years old than I was, anyway. He became a surrogate parent. We are less like brothers than most. It was as if Richard were my guardian for much of my life.” He leaned back a little and melted into the passenger seat.

  “That must have been rough,” I said after a moment.

  “I came through it all right,” Paul said, eyes closed.

  “I meant for Richard.”

  Paul seemed as if he were falling asleep, which was odd. Ghosts don’t exactly sleep. They do recharge, more or less, mostly at night or in the early morning hours, but they don’t have the need for sleep that we living folks do. I took it as a sign that Paul didn’t want to discuss the subject any further, which at this point was fine with me.

  But when I switched on the turn signal to move into the on-ramp for the Parkway, he sat bolt upright and said, “Where are you going?”

  “Home. Why?”

  “Don’t get on the highway. Keep going straight.” Paul pointed so I’d know which way straight was.

  I turned off the signal and kept going, which did not stop the guy behind me from honking his horn in exasperation. It’s New Jersey. That’s literally how we roll. “You know a better way back to Harbor Haven now that you’ve been out in the world?” I asked Paul.

  “What? No. You should be continuing on to the Garden State Parkway, I believe.”

  “That’s what I was doing.”

  “But you were going south when we need to head north,” Paul corrected me. He thought.

  “Paul, I realize you’re originally from Canada, but north isn’t always the way home. I need to head south.”

  He shook his head. “We’re not going home yet,” he said. “We’re going to Montclair.”

  That made no sense. “Montclair! That’s like forty minutes out of the way! Why are we going there?”

  “Because that’s where Richard lived, and that is where his wife lives now.”

  I moaned. “Miriam?” I thought he’d promised that if I was good about going to the office, I wouldn’t have to go to the house.

  “Miriam,” Paul agreed. I guessed I was wrong.

  Chapter 10

  I had seven very good reasons not to drive to Montclair today to talk with Richard Harrison’s widow, Miriam. Four of them involved the inconvenience to my day, and the other three were about not wanting to confront a woman who might have known her husband was in love with someone else and was at least technically suspected of hitting him with a blunt object until he became transparent and showed up at a haunted guesthouse.

  Paul, being afflicted with a very specific type of crime-related tunnel vision, refused to hear any of my very good reasons. Of course, it could be said that I was driving the car and therefore could have taken us back to Harbor Haven, where even if my life wasn’t normal, it was at least familiar. But if you’ve ever had an argument with a single-minded ghost, you’ll know the prospects of winning aren’t great.

  I drove to Montclair, given the address Paul managed to program into my GPS.

  We pulled up, eventually, to a very sprawling colonial-style home that was desperate for everyone to see it. Clearly the paint job was fresh and probably redone every year. Every shrub was trimmed within an inch of its life, and the lawn was so mowed, the people who invented AstroTurf (who were from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, if you’re asked) had probably used this grass as a model.

  The windows were recently washed. The Infiniti Q50 parked in the immaculate driveway shone so bright, my sunglasses practically begged for relief. Honest to goodness, the front doorknob looked like it had been polished that day.

  I considered calling the Ocean County Board of Health and recommending that my own house, which I keep up nicely, be condemned.

  “This is Richard’s house?” I asked Paul.

  “Yes. Richard said it was easy to get to his job in Manhattan and that Miriam liked the layout of the property.” Well, that explained it. Surely you spend millions (easily) on a well-laid-out property.

  I put the car in park and looked at Paul. “What do I need to know about Miriam before I ring that doorbell?” I asked.

  He did not, thankfully, pretend not to know what I meant. “She is a short-tempered woman who bristles whenever anyone suggests anything she believes or desires might not be correct.”

  “I imagine you and she had few disagreements in your day,” I said.

  He didn’t move a facial muscle, assuming he still had any. “There were some . . . spirited discussions,” he said.

  “You ever think of haunting her? Just for kicks?”

  “That’s what we’re going to do now,” Paul said. “Are you ready?”

  I didn’t think I was, but that wasn’t going to slow Paul down, so I didn’t answer and got out of the car. We each got to the front door in our own way. Paul looked at me, then at the doorbell. That’s Paul being subtle.

  Well, I hadn’t come all this way not to ring the doorbell, I supposed. That didn’t make it any less ominous, but it did have logic behind i
t, which is a plus. I pushed the incredibly clean button and heard the chimes ring inside.

  “I don’t suppose just running away at this point would be enough retribution for you,” I said to Paul.

  “We are not here for retribution. We are here for information.” I made a mental note to invite Paul to my next party; he’s a fun guy.

  There was no time to answer because that was the moment the door opened. A woman in her late forties, tall and imperial, looked down her considerable nose at me and asked, “May I help you?”

  “Mrs. Harrison,” I began. Paul shook his head.

  The woman twitched an eyebrow and asked, “Who shall I say is calling?”

  “That’s her assistant, Joan,” Paul told me. Miriam had an assistant? In her house?

  “My name is Alison Kerby,” I said, because it was. “I’m a licensed private investigator.” Also technically true, as I had renewed my license online before leaving this morning. “I have a few questions to ask Mrs. Harrison.” I was willing to bet there would be more than a few questions, especially since Paul was there to ask them through me.

  “Regarding what?” Joan deigned to ask.

  “Mr. Harrison,” I said.

  “Mr. Harrison is deceased.”

  “That’s why I’m here. Can I talk to her?” This was getting tiresome, and I tend to react to people who look down on me by punching up.

  “I will ask,” Joan said, then closed the door in my face.

  I looked toward Paul, who was pretending to notice something in the doorway above our heads. “I realized Richard was doing well at the law firm, but I didn’t realize he was this rich,” I said.

  “Much of the money is from Miriam’s family,” he told me without looking me in the eye. “They own a very large soft drink company in Canada.”

  “This place comes from sodas?”

  The door opened again, and this time the woman behind it was in her late forties, short and imperial. It wasn’t much of a change.

  “I am Miriam Harrison,” she said with an affected accent that was for sure not from Saskatchewan. “And you are?”

  “You know all that from your assistant,” I reminded her. “You know who I am and you know why I’m here. May I come in?”

  Miriam clearly wasn’t used to having people talk to her like that, which I enjoyed. She pursed her lips as if to speak and then didn’t. Instead she took a step back and to the side and gestured with her right arm for me to enter. So I did. Paul phased through the door as Miriam closed it and followed us into a room to the left.

  The entrance foyer was impressive in itself, with a very high ceiling and a rail that ran around the room halfway up the walls. “This room was modeled after the entrance hall at Monticello,” Miriam said as I stared upward. I wasn’t sure why, but she seemed to want to impress me.

  But we were out of there before I could answer and into a room lined from floor to (again) high ceiling with bookshelves, crammed to the last inch with books. They looked like they had not been taken out to be read in years.

  “What was this room modeled after?” I asked.

  “It’s a library,” Miriam said with some superiority, which appeared to be the only way she knew how to talk. She gestured me into an overstuffed easy chair and did not offer her brother-in-law a seat because she knew he had died five years before and for some reason didn’t imagine he was in the room now. “What is it you are investigating, Ms. Kerby?” she asked as she sat in a chair opposite mine.

  “I’m looking into the case your husband was defending when he died,” I said at Paul’s prompting. “I have some questions that his records could help answer. Can you tell me where he might have left a computer file or hard copies?”

  “I have no idea.”

  That seemed unlikely. “Didn’t you receive his effects after his body was discovered?” I asked. If Miriam didn’t want to be sentimental, I saw no reason to be.

  “I got his personal things, but the work things were confiscated by the police.” Miriam wasn’t explaining; she was lecturing on the workings of the New Jersey criminal justice system. “They are considered evidence.”

  Paul prompted me to ask, “What about the trial he was working on? Wouldn’t the notes and other records he had be needed for that?”

  “I imagine so. I don’t get involved—didn’t get involved—in Richard’s cases.”

  “But I would guess there would be backups, copies, things like that,” I said. “Where did he keep those?”

  Miriam stood up with an air of impatience. It was barely discernible from her air of superiority, which was her go-to air. “I told you, I have no idea,” she said. “Now if you don’t mind, I have things I need to do.” She turned toward the door. Paul even started floating in that direction. If Miriam had decided I was leaving, clearly I was leaving.

  Except I didn’t care what Miriam had decided. “I don’t believe you,” I said quietly.

  “Alison,” Paul said.

  Miriam, halfway to the doorway, turned back with an expression similar to that if I’d told her we were now living on Mercury. “I beg your pardon?” she said.

  “I said I don’t believe you. You don’t strike me as the kind of woman who would so easily disconnect from so important an aspect of her husband’s life. I think you would have been very interested and involved. So when you tell me that he was working on a case at the time he was murdered and you haven’t so much as lifted a finger to find his remaining records, I think you’re hiding something.”

  Paul, who is transparent, looked pale. I didn’t think that was possible.

  Miriam regarded me carefully, something she had not done before. Until I’d defied her authority, I was not worthy of her attention. Now she needed to size me up more completely. She took her time, which I thought was excessive. A person’s appearance can’t actually tell you who she is, and she needed to know who I was if she was going to prevail. For people like Miriam, everything is a competition.

  “I underestimated you,” she said. “I won’t do that again.”

  “Now, about Richard’s case files,” I said, not acknowledging what I’m sure she saw as a compliment.

  “Richard’s laptop computer and his case files are with the county prosecutor’s major crimes division,” Miriam answered. “I told you the truth about that.”

  “But there are copies somewhere, aren’t there?”

  Paul was floating, eyes wide, watching the scene as if he couldn’t believe such a thing was happening. His right hand actually covered his mouth like he was afraid he’d say something that would betray him. I’d be the only one to hear it.

  “There are. His firm saves everything on the cloud, and there are more hard copies than you can imagine. The law is one of the last areas that actually still relies heavily on paper.”

  “Where can I find those?” I asked her.

  “I’m not sure I want to tell you,” Miriam said. “The fact that you wouldn’t take no for an answer isn’t enough to give you everything you want.”

  I stood and faced her. Since the idea of my leaving immediately was off the table, giving up the chair wasn’t a retreat. I needed to look her in the eye to retain her respect. “What do you need in return?” I asked. “Because I’m telling you right off the top, a pound of flesh is not a possibility for me.” Not that I couldn’t afford to drop a pound or two, but I wouldn’t much care for Miriam’s method of removal, I was pretty sure.

  “It’s not a barter situation,” Miriam said, taking a few steps toward me. “You don’t have anything I could possibly want.” That was a point.

  I toyed with the idea of telling her I could easily get in touch with Richard and talk to him for her, but I doubted she’d much want that, and she certainly wouldn’t have believed me anyway. “There’s the idea of finding out who killed your husband,” I said.

  “After you tell me who bludgeoned Richard to death, will he be any less dead?” Miriam said. “I’m not much for revenge.”

 
; “You weren’t angry when you discovered Richard was falling in love with his client?” I asked. Paul audibly gasped; Richard had told us he wasn’t sure Miriam had known about that. I might have been letting the family cat out of the family bag.

  “Alison,” he repeated. It seemed to be the only thing he could bring himself to say in this room.

  “I was irritated,” Miriam said. “I think angry would be an overstatement. Richard and I hadn’t been a typical married couple for quite some time, so his interest in a younger woman wasn’t exactly unexpected. It happens to middle-aged men all the time. At least he didn’t buy himself a red sports car.”

  “How did you find out?” I asked.

  “Richard made a few offhand remarks,” she said. “He didn’t exactly tell me so much as he didn’t try very hard to conceal his feelings. I wasn’t as worried about the betrayal as I was about his rather atrocious taste. A woman on trial for murder, after all. We didn’t even know her father when he was alive.”

  “Did you talk to him about it?”

  Miriam waved a hand to declare the subject irrelevant. “What you’re after are his work records,” she reminded me. “And this line of questioning isn’t making me feel more inclined to give them to you.”

  “I could ask a judge for a warrant,” I noted.

  “You’re not a cop,” Miriam reminded me. “I’m not even sure you’re a real private investigator.”

  I resisted the impulse to flash my state license. Instead Paul leaned over to me (as if proximity would make a difference to Miriam) and said, “Find a way that it benefits her and she will do anything to help you.”

  I’ve never taken an improv class, but here I was on my feet trying to make up a scenario without even any help from the audience. It was about motivation. I had to understand Miriam as a character. What would she want that I could promise her? What would matter to her?

  “You’re right,” I said. That’s the first thing someone like Miriam wants to hear. “I’m not a cop. I’m not attached to any police department at all. And that’s lucky for you.”

  “I don’t see how,” she sniffed. “The police are investigating Richard’s murder. I don’t even know who your client is or why you’re at all interested in the incident.” The incident. Her husband is beaten to death and she calls it the incident. That’s a new level of cold.