Laying Ghosts (Dolly Games)

by Derek Murphy

  “Yes, Michelle. It does. Maybe. Thank you for your help.”

  “WestPac Cellular is always ready and willing to assist our customers in any way that we can, Mr. Tanner. Don’t hesitate to call us if there is anything else we can do for you.”

  “Thank you, Michelle. I’ll do that. Goodbye.”

  Carl glanced at his watch, saw that it was almost six in the evening and estimated the time in Johannesburg. Almost four in the morning there. He knew that Jan was a late riser, rarely showing up at his office until ten in the morning. Jan wouldn’t thank him for waking him up. Rising, he went to his computer and began writing an email to his new friend. Once he included the information that Michelle with WestPac had given him, he asked Jan to check on his contact in the hospital.

  Carl barely dared to think that Marta might still be alive and in possession of all her faculties. But these calls, the first originating from across the street from her hospital, and the second from a hotel in another country altogether, suggesting that she might be trying to get to him, led him to hope. His hopes had been crushed so recently and now to believe that she might be alive was simply mind-blowing. All his instincts told him to fly to Cairo, to find her, but he knew that if she was moving fast enough to get to Cairo from Port Elizabeth in two days’ time, he would be too late. She would already be somewhere else. He didn’t understand why she hadn’t taken a direct flight from South Africa to the States, though. One would have been as quick as the other. Perhaps she was being pursued and was attempting to lose her pursuers.

  He finished the email with a request to check to see if all the younger members of Marta’s family were accounted for, and clicked on the ‘Send’ icon. It irked him that this was the full extent of what he could do. If she had only stayed on the line long enough to actually talk to him, he would have told her to stay where she was until he got to her. But maybe if she was pursued, she had to move fast and couldn’t afford to talk for any length of time.

  Rising from his desk, he went back to his dinner and picked up the fork again and stared at his shaking hand. Was he that nervous? Must be the pent-up emotion. He felt like a racehorse at the gate with the mechanism stuck; ready to go and restrained from doing so.

  He found that he was too antsy to eat and closed all the containers, putting them into the fridge. Maybe if he got back to work on the Nelson case? Maybe he needed to be busy right now; lose himself in his work until he had a definite lead on her. Hell! For all he knew, it was one of her relatives pulling a cruel prank on him. He wouldn’t put it past them; they had made no show of hiding how they felt about him while he was in Johannesburg. Jan had advised him to stay away from Port Elizabeth because of the court actions they had initiated against him to keep him away from her.

  Carl knew his apartment was too far from the receiver at the marina to make a connection, but tried it anyway, frowning as the connection made the ‘handshake’, then failed. Yes, he was at least five miles from the marina and the specs on the receiver stated plainly that the optimum range was no more than two miles. Frustrated and distracted by the situation involving the possibility of Marta being alive, he shut down his computer, feeling as restless as though he had ants crawling under his skin.

  Rising, he glanced out the window toward the bay and saw a cloudbank shouldering in from the northwest. Yeah, early September. Time for the weather to begin changing a little. It would be cooler, and with more rain, though the snow and ice would fall in the mountains to the East of the city. Turning his head to look out the window on the North side of his living room, he gazed in lonely longing at the headland that contained Harborview Heights. Marta’s house was up there. Shuttered when he drove past it the day he arrived back in town; and with a ‘For Sale’ sign out front by the gatehouse. His thought at the time was that her family wasn’t wasting any time in cashing out her assets. He knew they were trying to run the company from Johannesburg, but Vandivort’s company had been centered around the American assets and he knew it would be difficult for them to run from a distance. Just in the past year, the stock price had dropped over fifty percent and the stockholders were forcing a special stockholder’s meeting to deal with the problems presented by absentee management. The newspapers had been full of it the past two days and he wondered if there was a possibility that Marta’s death had been the family’s avenue toward divesting themselves of a headache. It didn’t really make much sense, though; killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.

  Disgusted with the thoughts that sprang unbidden to his mind; he shrugged into his jacket and left his apartment. Maybe he could get all this off his mind if he spent some time in surveillance of Chip Nelson. Erica hadn’t called, but he thought that if Chip left the house tonight, he might be able to get a jump on shadowing him. Besides, it would give him a chance to drive out to Marta’s house and gaze wistfully toward it, remembering the good times there.

  * * *

  Dinnertime and Lottie’s was booming. The Sunday Supplement in the newspaper had run an article on Lottie’s that summer and the upper crust was still coming in, rubbing shoulders with the longshoremen and other working class folks that made up the bulk of Lottie’s clientele. Here, an exquisitely made up society maven was jostled by a sweaty stevedore, there, a mechanic argued briefly with a business-suited stockbroker over a bottle of ketchup. Though the place was small, it was so crowded that no less than four waitresses were kept busy this evening, carrying four to six plates spread across their forearms, balancing them carefully so that none of them fell.

  Julie had just managed to snag a table as one of the waitresses cleared it, wagging her finger at a trio of teenagers who were too slow to get to the table before she sat. As she looked up toward the door, Harry entered, frowning at the crowd for a few moments before he saw her and sidled through the jumble of people standing at the entrance. He paused as an older couple rose, the old man assisting his wife to rise and catching hold of the purse she had forgotten on the seat behind her. As they passed him, he turned sideways and continued on his way to the seat across from her.

  “No such thing as an intimate dinner here, Julie.”

  Smiling evilly, she said, “What made you think I wanted an intimate dinner, Harry?”

  Grimacing sourly, he said, “I was hoping.”

  “No, Harry. Strictly business tonight.”

  He sighed and surrendered. “Okay. Let’s get to it, then.”

  A tall waitress, no more than forty, but with the beehive hairdo popular before she was born, stopped beside them with a pair of water glasses and utensils rolled in paper napkins. As she placed them before the two, she slid a pair of small menus from a large pocket in her apron and laid them on the table.

  “I’ll be back in a minute to take your orders.”

  Julie said, “We already know what we want.”

  Sighing, the waitress removed her pad from the apron and took the pen from behind her ear, poised to write, thinking that the couple at table four would just have to wait for their dessert.

  Harry glanced up and said, “Bowl of chili with chips and a beer. Whatever brand you’ve got on tap will do just fine.”

  Julie smiled and said, “I’ll have the same, but let me have some crackers instead of chips.”

  Writing quickly, the waitress hurried off. Julie watched the woman’s back disappear in the crowd and turned back to look at Harry.

  “Got your pad, Harry? I’ll give you my statement about what happened at Webster’s house today.”

  Removing a recorder from his pocket, Michaelson placed it on the table between them and pressed the ‘record’ button.

  “Got it covered.”

  Julie flipped a hand at the crowd around them and asked, “Won’t all the noise make it hard to transcribe?”

  “Not my problem. That’s what secretaries are for.”

  Pointing a finger at him, she said, “You don’t have a secretary.”

  “No, but the Captain does. She does stuff like that for me and
I…do things for her.”

  She quirked one side of her mouth up, saying, “You mean you ‘plow her furrow’ for her.”

  Julie knew that what she had said was crude, but wanted to wipe the self-satisfied smirk off his handsome face. It succeeded.

  As he appeared to puff up, ready to explode, she said, “See? This is why I don’t want anything deeper than a one-night-stand with you, Harry. You’d go right on doing ‘favors’ for other women while we were supposed to be together. I won’t have a relationship like that. No attachments equals no drama.”

  Realizing that his adolescent attempt to make her jealous had backfired on him, Harry said, “Okay. You got me. I don’t do anything of the sort for her. I helped her ditch an abusive boyfriend last year and she thinks she owes me.”

  He stopped the recording, erased it and started over. “Okay, Julie, tell me what happened at Martin Webster’s house today.”

  She began with her arrival at the house, leaving nothing out and finished a few minutes later, just as the waitress brought their bowls of chili. Crackers, chips, ketchup, and ramekins of chopped onion came a minute later. Bottles of hot sauce and vinegar were already on the table and the waitress slapped the check on the table beside them as they started to eat.

  Julie asked, “So, what are you going to do about what happened today?”

  Chewing a moment, he swallowed and answered, “I’ve got Forensics over there now. I doubt they’ll find anything. For that matter, now that the culprit knows that we know he’s up to something, he probably won’t bother Webster anymore. How’s Ike doing now?”

  “DeeDee was going to take him home and make him rest. He’ll be ready to go back to work tomorrow.”

  “Good. I like Ike. He’s easier to deal with than Carl.”

  She cocked her head to one side.

  “How so?”

  He stuck his spoon in his chili, stirred it around a bit, staring down at it for a moment before he looked up at her.

  “Carl’s got that whole Indian deadpan expression going for him. You can’t tell what he’s thinking. There’s no way to play him. I’m glad he’s not working this case. It makes life easier for me.”

  Defensively, she said, “Carl’s got other things on his mind, Harry. He just got back from Johannesburg only to hear that Marta died just after he left.”

  “Sorry. For him, not for what I said. It’s true. Carl is difficult to work with. Don’t get me wrong; I like Carl, it’s just that he doesn’t give anything away. If he had told us everything about the Dolly Dagger case last year, maybe she wouldn’t have gotten hurt.”

  Hotly, she said, “Don’t you try to say that any of that was his fault, Harry! No one could have seen that coming!”

  Harry grinned at her. “Ohh, I see! You’ve got a thing for the boss and he doesn’t know you’re alive! That’s why you only do one-night-stands!”

  With her chili less than half-eaten, she rummaged in her purse for her wallet and dropped enough money to pay for their meal on the table. Rising, her voice was icy as she said, “You can get the tip.”

  Harry watched her walk out, her back ramrod stiff as she negotiated the crowd. The closer on the heavy, glass door of the restaurant was the only thing that kept it from slamming behind her. Cursing silently to himself, he stabbed his spoon into his chili as he wondered if he was ever going to learn to keep his big mouth shut. He wanted to get to know Julie better and at this rate, he would be lucky if she ever spoke to him again. Well, he supposed she would still speak to him; he was one of her few avenues to acquire information from the department. She would speak; she just wouldn’t be open to spending time with him except as it regarded her job.

  * * *

  With his car parked in the drive just before the gate, Carl walked toward the gatehouse and nodded imperceptibly. Marta’s family still had a caretaker living in the gatehouse, keeping an eye on things. Stopping at the pylon that held the electronic mechanism that controlled the gate, he lifted his head as the front door of the gatehouse opened, revealing a medium-sized man with a stocky build and a shock of straw-colored hair. The man walked toward him and waved, smiling.

  Drawing closer, the man’s voice held an indeterminate, British-sounding accent as he said, “It’s you! I thought I recognized you, Mr. Tanner!”

  Carl stared impassively at the man, not really recognizing him, but feeling as though the man looked familiar.

  “Have we met?”

  Reaching the gate, the man rested a hand on the top of the pylon and answered, “My brother and I were Miss Vandivort’s gardeners. When the family closed the house, they sent Jack, my brother, to the house in Aspen and I stayed here.”

  One side of the man’s mouth quirked in a rueful expression as he added, “Makes it hard to care for the gardens; only one of us.”

  Carl nodded, understanding what the man meant. He said, “Yes, Marta liked the gardens. She thought that you and your brother worked too hard on them, though.”

  “Well, they took a lot of care if they were going to look their best, you know.”

  Nodding again, Carl said, “She just didn’t want anyone working themselves to death, is all. Marta cared about the people who worked for her.”

  The man said, “She did, at that.”

  As the silence between them lengthened, growing more awkward by the second, the man said, “Not like her sister, though. That woman had a way of staring right through a man.”

  Realizing who he was talking about and the crimes that she had committed against men, the caretaker tried to cover up the sense of foreboding that thoughts of Stacey Vandivort, aka, Dolly Dagger, engendered in him by saying, “It’s difficult to think of Miss Vandivort as Marta, you know? I mean, Marta was the maid, but she was actually the girl who was supposed to have been killed.”

  Also realizing who he was talking to, he said, “Well, but you know that.”

  Feeling that the discussion was growing more awkward by the second, Carl asked, “Does any of the family ever come here?”

  Shaking his head, the man said, “No, sir. It’s like they want to forget the place. And the happy times she had here. My salary is generous, but they skimp on the money for the upkeep of the place. And that ends at the end of the month. They’re turning the upkeep over to a property management company.”

  “Have they had any offers on the place?”

  “No, sir. I was talking to the realtor just the other day and he says that people are staying away in droves. Something about feeling it’s an unlucky place; what with everything that happened to the family, you know.”

  Carl nodded. “I can see where some folks might feel that way about it. Even though Stacey actually died on one of the Bay Islands, they probably expect her ghost to wander the halls.”

  The caretaker grinned and shook his head. “If I ever see anything suspicious up there, you can bet I’ll call the police and never step foot in it again.”

  Carl turned to return to his truck and stopped with a sudden thought. He faced the man again and said, “Call me first. Make the police your second call.”

  Puzzled, the caretaker said, “Yes, sir. You can count on it.”

  Sliding into his truck again, Carl gazed through the intervening trees at the main house playing peek-a-boo through the fluttering leaves. He wondered if the swimming pool was still lit at night.

  Chapter Five

  Though Webster had sent his staff home with orders to take a week off while the police investigated the puzzling vandalism case, Julie found the first one she interviewed still in her uniform. It wasn’t so very different from the uniforms worn by the housekeepers at The Merton/Pacific Trader Hotel; the most expensive in the city. The Merton family had resisted all attempts at buy-outs by the big hotel chains and still managed to keep its five-star designation in the guidebooks. Despite the pressures to downgrade and become little better than the other hotels in the city, The Merton had always been and would continue to be, a cut above. The uniforms worn by the staf
f were impeccably tailored and made of the finest linen and silk.

  Ms. Avery Merriam, Head Housekeeper at Webster’s home, was dressed as finely as any of the staff at The Merton. Of dove-grey, with accents of black and white, the uniform fit her so well that Julie was sure Webster had the uniforms tailored for his staff. The woman sat primly on the edge of her own divan, knees together and hands clasped together on them, waiting for Julie’s next question.

  Julie guessed her to be somewhere in her mid-forties but wasn’t sure. Despite her name, the woman appeared to be Asian; possibly Japanese or Korean. And like many people of those nationalities, it was difficult to judge her age accurately by appearance alone. When she spoke again, there was no trace of an accent. Either the woman had spent a lot of money with a voice coach to eradicate it, or she was American born and raised.

  “I’m not absolutely sure where I was two nights ago, Miss Shepherd. You see, a friend of mine is getting married and several of us threw her a bachelorette party. I’m afraid to say that we were very drunk. We awakened in the hotel room we rented for the party with a very drunk and naked, male stripper passed out in the middle of the floor. I don’t think I should say anymore about that. Mr. Webster has a very strict policy regarding employee behavior, even in our off-hours.”

  Seeing an opening, Julie asked, “How do you feel about that policy, Ms. Merriam?”

  Nodding, Merriam said, “It is restrictive, but the pay is very good. The only family in Port Morgan that pays better is the Rundgrens. Any of us would kill to work for them. They not only offer full Medical and Dental, but also a 401K that is very liberal.”

  “And Mr. Webster doesn’t offer those things?”

  One of Merriam’s hands slipped free to flip lightly in the air before her other hand recaptured it, indicating that she was a little ill at ease as she said, “Oh, Mr. Webster offers us Medical and Dental, and the 401K is very good; it’s just not as good as the one the Rundgrens offer their employees. Of course, the Rundgrens have a very restrictive non-disclosure clause.”