The Hostess With the Ghostess

by E. J. Copperman

  I put down the phone and glared at Paul. “You just made me turn down twenty thousand dollars,” I said.

  “Twenty thousand dollars?” Melissa had just walked in and was approaching. She has great timing, that kid.

  “You knew you weren’t going to take that money,” Paul said.

  “I didn’t know.”

  “What twenty thousand dollars?” Liss asked.

  I explained what had just happened and got her up to speed on the other developments—such as they were—in the investigation(s). Melissa, usually eager to immerse herself in a case, seemed less engaged than usual, staring off at the walls and nodding as if she were just waiting for me to stop talking.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  She blinked a couple of times and then looked at me. “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? I just told you about two murder cases and you looked like I was trying to explain the conjugation of Latin verbs.” That was something I actually studied in high school, and although I think the ancient Romans were way cool, I remember not one word of their language. How often do you run into an ancient Roman and have to strike up a conversation?

  “It’s nothing, Mom.” Liss walked toward the kitchen, so Paul and I naturally followed her. “It’s just, I only have one day left of school for the year and I’m thinking about that.”

  “Is this Jared related?” I asked. Melissa had a crush on a guy in her class named Jared not long ago, but it had come to naught by mutual agreement. Spring, however, brings out the crush-ready impulses in many a girl.

  “What? No! We’re friends. You know that. So tell me again about this Adrian Johnson and how she wants to give you twenty thousand dollars to not do anything.”

  Her mood was clearly a subject we’d have to table for future discussion. “It’s very simple,” Paul said, grateful to have the discussion focusing again on his area of expertise and not human emotion, which he does not process like other people alive or dead. “We have clearly struck a nerve, and Ms. Johnson is afraid we’re getting too close to some truth she’d prefer we not discover.”

  “You get a lot out of a simple bribe offer,” I told Paul.

  “There is no other scenario that fits the facts.”

  “What if she really just doesn’t want her family to be upset?” Melissa asked. “I know it doesn’t sound like that’s the reason just because she said so, but it’s possible.” I could hear my mother in my mind’s ear saying how smart my daughter is and how she’ll no doubt be a Supreme Court justice one day. Who was I to argue with the mother in my mind’s ear?

  “I consider that possibility to be extremely unlikely,” Paul told Liss. “Mrs. Johnson had not exhibited any special concern over her family members before this phone call.”

  “I’m not saying it’s what happened,” Melissa said, doing her best—which wasn’t good enough—to hide a small smile. “I’m saying it’s possible.”

  Paul, smiling only on the left side, nodded. “Possible.”

  “For the time being, let’s assume Paul is right,” I told Melissa as we walked into the kitchen. Liss went to the fridge to get some orange juice. I looked at Paul, who was floating in place near—partially inside—the stove. “What does Adrian’s offer tell us, and what can we expect now that I’ve turned it down?”

  “Ah.” Paul loves this kind of thing. His eyebrows closed just over his nose, and his mouth turned downward in a cerebral frown. I’d never seen him look happier. “What we can determine is that there’s likely something Adrian doesn’t want us to find that she thinks we’re close to finding. It’s probably best, if we can, to bring Richard back in on that part of it.” He looked around, as if just having thought of it. “Have you seen him?”

  I was about to say, “Not recently,” but my daughter beat me to it.

  “Yeah,” she said as she put the glass of orange juice down after a long gulp. “I saw him when I was coming in. Richard was flying in and out of the movie room like he couldn’t decide if he wanted to be inside or out.”

  That was different. “Did he say anything?” Paul asked.

  “I didn’t want to get that close. He looked mad.”

  My cell phone buzzed, and there was a text message from Madame Lorraine: Bring Paul Harrison here. I can help. Madame Lorraine didn’t know when to quit.

  I looked at Paul. “Are you in great pain?” I asked.

  He squinted at me because apparently I was blurry. Maybe I was an old VHS copy of me. “You know I don’t really feel,” he said.

  “So you’re not in great pain, right?”

  Now even Melissa was looking at me as if trying to size me for a straitjacket. “No. I’m not,” Paul said.

  “Good enough.” I put the phone back in my pocket.

  “I should be the one to broach the subject of more research with Richard,” Paul said, shaking off my weirdness. “He’s more likely to listen to me.”

  Actually, in my experience, Richard was less likely to listen to Paul and more likely to listen to himself telling Paul what to do. “I don’t think so,” I said. “I think there’s someone who could do it better.”

  Paul’s eyebrows, which had returned to their traditional position, rose. “Really.”

  “Yes. Liss, would you see if Maxie is up in your room, and if she is, ask her to come down here?”

  Melissa put her glass in the sink and walked toward the kitchen door. “I was going up to change anyway,” she said. She smiled privately. “One more day.” And she was gone.

  Paul regarded me carefully. “Maxie?” he asked.

  “Best possible solution. She’s not related to Richard, she has no feelings about him in any direction, and he’s seen that she’s good with research, so she’ll be asking him on a professional basis. The trick is going to be selling it to her.”

  Paul stayed very still for a moment, which I know is not easy for him to do; the ghosts are sort of ethereal, not really ever being solidly in one place or position. Then he held up a hand, palm out. “Very solid reasoning,” he said.

  Maxie, wearing the trench coat that indicated she had her laptop with her—nobody was getting that thing away from her now—dropped down through the ceiling and landed in the middle of the center island. I was just glad she hadn’t ended up in the middle of food. “Melissa says you were looking for me,” she said. The trench coat vanished, and sure enough the laptop was there with her jeans and black “I Know You Are, but What Am I?” T-shirt.

  “Yes,” Paul began, but I thought it was important to cut him off before he tried convincing Maxie of something on adult terms. As an experienced mother, I had some inkling of how to talk to a person of Maxie’s emotional maturity level.

  “We’re glad to see the laptop is still with you,” I said. “You should make sure it stays with you at all times until we find out what happened.”

  “I know.” Maxie seemed a trifle suspicious because I don’t often start by telling her something she was doing for selfish reasons was a good idea. “I haven’t let it out of my sight since I got it back, and I’m not going to start now.” I wondered what Melissa might have let on about the work we wanted Richard to do.

  “Good,” I said. “But since you have it with you—”

  “I knew it!” Maxie had been primed to go off and needed only the slightest spark. “You’re going to get this thing stolen again!”

  “I am definitely not going to do that,” I told her in my calmest tone. I’d been running this conversation mentally for the past few minutes and knew not to react emotionally. “But I do want to ask you to do some research since you have it with you. We need to know more about what happened with Keith Johnson’s murder that might have gotten Richard killed.”

  Maxie, not entirely finished with her bout of suspicion, looked at me for a prolonged moment. “What do you need to know?” she asked.

  “Our theory is that Richard was getting close to information that would prove Cassidy Van Doren was not the murderer,” Paul said. I was
grateful that once I had established the tone, he picked up on the conversation; it would have alerted Maxie if he’d stayed silent the whole time. “We think that the person who did kill Keith Johnson also murdered Richard to keep that information from surfacing.”

  “Aha.” Maxie was taking some comfort in the fact that Paul was on board with the plan. She trusts him more than she trusts me, even after all we’ve been through together. I managed not to tear up. “So you want me to find out what Richard was working on.”

  It was so tempting to lead her in the direction we wanted her to go, but I believe both Paul and I exhibited remarkable restraint in not embellishing the story. Let Maxie get to the conclusion herself. “That’s right,” I said. I didn’t even add a “very good,” because she’s not stupid and would know I was patronizing her.

  “Isn’t it just easier to ask Richard?” she said. Perfect.

  “Well, yes, but he hasn’t been like us for very long,” Paul said. “He might not remember exactly what he was doing at the time.”

  “Well, that’s what the laptop is for!” Maxie wanted Paul to know how much smarter she was than he. “He can look at the files we have left because the ones that were taken were about this Johnson guy’s money. The rest of the stuff about him being killed is still on here, I think.” She gestured toward her laptop. “Richard might be able to find whatever he was working on again.”

  “Good thinking!” I almost believed I was astounded by Maxie’s amazing deductions. “Why not find Richard and ask him to help?” I didn’t think that was overplaying the hand, but I did look at Maxie a little too long.

  But she didn’t flinch. She loves it when she gets credit for doing something well and is especially proud of her Internet research skills because she’s developed them since becoming a ghost. “I’m on it!” she shouted. The trench coat reappeared, the laptop went inside it, and Maxie was through the roof, literally. Well, the ceiling, anyway. What happened after that was a matter of conjecture.

  I would have high-fived Paul if I could have. Instead I grinned at him. “Nice work,” I said.

  “Yes, but only the first phase of our new plans.” Paul is a lot of fun at parties. I’m guessing. He came to my wedding and was so exciting, I didn’t even know he was there until afterward. “It’s also necessary for us to concentrate more completely on Richard’s murder. We have the idea of someone bringing a separate steam iron into the room and hitting him with it when there was one in the hotel room closet. What does that tell us?”

  “That it was certainly premeditated,” I said. “Nobody uses an iron in a crime of passion, and even if they did, they wouldn’t bring one from home.”

  Paul snapped his fingers, which made a slightly squishy sound that didn’t resonate throughout the whole room. “That’s the key, I think,” he said. “Nobody brings an iron from home. The odds are it was discovered in one of the housekeeping carts or a supply closet in the hotel. We need to know the make and model of the iron and whether it matches the ones that are supplied in the guest rooms.”

  “So you think it’s possible Kobielski was right and it was one of the hotel maids who killed Richard?” That seemed awfully implausible. What motive would a maid have to kill a guest? He couldn’t have been that rude. I’ve had plenty of unpleasant guests in my house, and the urge to brain one with a steam iron had never once leapt to mind.

  “I doubt it,” Paul answered. “But I think whoever came into the hotel with the idea of killing him might have decided somewhere along the way that a hotel iron would make a good weapon. We also need to know if there were any markings at all on the iron. I’m sure if there were fingerprints, they’d have long since been discovered and the culprit caught, but there might have been blood spatter or some other traces that would give us a direction.”

  Melissa walked through the swinging kitchen door having changed into her “civilian” clothes, in this case shorts and a plain purple T-shirt. Her feet were bare. “What are we talking about?” she asked.

  “Fingerprints, blood spatter, and a stolen steam iron,” I told her.

  “Great. So I haven’t missed anything.” She sat on one of the barstools I keep next to the center island.

  “I’d say you missed some,” I said. “We got Maxie to find Richard and start working on his research again.”

  “Well, we got Maxie to try to find Richard,” Paul pointed out. “The last we heard from you, Melissa, he was fairly upset and possibly unwilling to cooperate with us on the investigation of his own murder or Keith Johnson’s.”

  “She must have found him,” Liss said. “I was going to tell you, I heard his voice when I was coming downstairs. I think they’re in one of the unrented guest rooms on the second floor.”

  “Good. So that is beginning. Now we need to get a better understanding of the police findings and the medical examiner’s report on Richard’s murder.” Paul was doing his “pace” floating back and forth in front of the refrigerator. It makes getting the orange juice really sort of creepy because he doesn’t bother to get out of the way. I decided I didn’t need a drink right away.

  But that was just distracting me from what Paul had just said. “We have to get the police and the medical examiner . . .” I felt the trap spring around me as it had so many times before. “Where are we going to get that information, I wonder?”

  “I think you know,” Paul said.

  “Paul,” I was already moaning, “I don’t wanna . . .”

  Josh walked in through the back door. “So, what did I miss?” he asked.

  But at that moment, Richard came bursting (for Richard) through the wall, gesticulating wildly (for Richard) with his hands. “It’s not the files that are missing,” he said. “It’s the reason the files are missing.”

  I was about to suggest he switch to decaf, but I realized that would not be appropriate. “The reason?” I said.

  “It’s the pattern, really.” Richard seemed to get a hold of his emotions. “The key has never been which files from the Johnson case are missing; I was looking for the wrong things. What’s important is how they’ve been redacted.”

  Paul was in full Sherlock mode, left hand holding the right elbow as he stroked his goatee. “Redacted? Not simply deleted?”

  Richard gave him a superior grin, which was the only kind Richard could generate. “Precisely. The files might have been removed by whoever took the laptop, but the pattern of the removal is clear. Keith Johnson—or more specifically, his business—was being investigated by a government agency, in my view for some sort of misuse of funds or illegal compilation of funds, perhaps a Ponzi scheme.”

  That was finally something, but I didn’t know what. “So where does that leave us?” I asked.

  Paul was already pacing. “With a host of new motives for various suspects,” he said.

  Chapter 22

  “So this guy gets hit in the head with an iron and you want to know who made the iron?” Detective Lieutenant McElone (think “macaroni”) looked positively amused, sitting behind the desk in her relatively new office, which replaced her not-that-new cubicle.

  Amused for McElone, of course, meant that she had the slightest hint of a smile and not the least bit of humor in her eyes, which were brown, large, and intimidating.

  “That’s among the things I need to know, yes.” I sat across the desk from McElone and braced myself for the inevitable comments about having to work with an amateur detective when she had real crimes to investigate and my equally unavoidable comebacks about saving cats stuck up trees. “It’s also important to find out if there was any, you know, debris on the iron when it was found and how much it weighs.”

  McElone and I have something of a history. I first met her during the Paul-and-Maxie investigation, when I was not a licensed investigator and therefore was more of an annoyance to the working police than I should be now. In theory, I am now a lay investigator with a license from the state who has had some training and some experience and will know how not to get
in the way of the municipal officers.

  In theory.

  I had left Paul and Richard at the house working on various angles, including researching the investigation of Keith Barent Johnson’s firm, which Richard assured us was governmental but would not show up on public records because it was not yet completed.

  “How much it weighs.” It wasn’t a question. It was a judgment. McElone surely believed she had better things to do, and I would have been at a loss to change her mind. “And since the ME’s report and the police report are both matters of public record that you could look up online in about six seconds, you’re here to bother me because why?”

  I was glad Paul had decided to sit this trip out. Normally he adores anything that involves police officers because he thinks he can pick up tips on how to operate by watching the sworn professionals at their jobs. But in this case he was more concerned with “staking out” the house for the person who must have “borrowed” Maxie’s laptop with the hope that more information about the shady business dealings might ensue. It was Paul’s belief that the thief had surely been in the employ of Keith Johnson’s murderer or someone hired by the killer to cover up the crime. Either way, he said, it was worth laying a trap and seeing what happened at the guesthouse.

  Toward that end, he had instructed Maxie—and by extension Richard—to be very obvious about moving the laptop around the house. And Melissa, home for the rest of the day, was to ask loud questions about the amazing discoveries they were in the course of making. Then Maxie would lay the laptop down on a flat surface like a table in the den, where the person (Paul didn’t say he suspected my guests, but there were few other suspects) who had done the wipe job on the hard drive—his words, not mine—would think it was being left alone. Then they’d wait and see who came to steal the machinery again.

  The upshot of all that was that, for the moment, I was on my own in McElone’s office, and it was something of a relief. I liked having Paul in on the interviews of suspects because I always felt like he was more competent than me and therefore would keep me from missing the obvious questions I’d otherwise forget. But this felt more natural and easier than having the schoolmaster looking over my shoulder while I worked.