Bones Behind the Wheel

by E. J. Copperman

  “Because Lincoln O’Hara died in 2007,” Maxie said. “And so far Paul hasn’t been able to reach him with his Jedi mind powers.” She rotated a finger pointed at her temple to indicate Paul was not totally sane. Because as they say, it takes one to know one.

  I opened my eyes because it would have been rude to fall asleep, but I’d considered it. Besides, antacids were definitely in my future. Paul looked at me sheepishly. “You understand, Alison. Not everyone who leaves life ends up like Maxie and I did, and some move on after this stage. Lincoln O’Hara appears to have either skipped this level of existence or evolved past it.”

  “So we still don’t really have a list of suspects,” Josh said after being brought up to date. He sounded like he’d been promised a new fire engine for Christmas and was now being told the toy store had sold out of that model. I patted him on the hand and he looked at me questioningly, but smiled.

  “On the contrary, I believe we have a very good start,” Paul said. “We can speak to Herman Fitzsimmons’s wife Darlene. Even if she is not a suspect she will know who her husband’s enemies or business rivals might have been. I think we should find out from Lt. McElone the name of the detective assigned to the case at the time and question that person. We can get the file from the police department even if the lieutenant is not in a cooperative mood; it is a matter of public record. But the really interesting question is whether anyone in the area has rented excavation equipment lately, because that Continental was moved out and then back on consecutive nights.”

  “You don’t think they used the equipment that was already in the yard?” Melissa asked. “It was just sitting there; you’d think they’d take advantage of it.”

  “Yes,” Paul agreed. “But the thing is, like any piece of equipment or vehicle, a key is necessary to operate it, and no responsible construction worker would ever leave the machine sitting there overnight with the key still available.”

  Josh listened to Melissa’s repeat of Paul’s answer. “So I guess we can’t rule out Bill Harrelson and his crew,” he suggested.

  “No, I think they should definitely be within our focus.” Paul was pacing but refrained from goatee stroking. He wasn’t sifting evidence so much as he was strategizing, and that required him to pace. Which is an interesting thing to watch when it’s taking place two feet above the floor. “But if we can find any records of such equipment being rented in the area on the nights in question, that would lead us toward the conclusion that they were not involved. Maxie?”

  Maxie was shading in a sketch on her pad with a charcoal pencil she must have had in her pocket. “What?” she said without any hint of interest.

  Everett, wearing fatigues, phased through the wall just as Paul was snapping his fingers in front of Maxie’s face in a gesture intended to get her attention. Everett being Everett, he simply floated back and watched. He knew no action was necessary and he was no doubt aware of his wife’s attention issues. Maxie would concentrate on her own priorities at the expensive of pretty much everything else.

  “Maxie!” Paul shouted.

  She looked up after a moment. “Yeah.” She glanced back at the sketch.

  “We need to find records of equipment rentals for the nights the car was removed and brought back,” Paul said again, or to Maxie’s point of view, for the first time.

  “I did that already. Look at the laptop.”

  Josh was closest to Maxie’s computer and he reached for it as soon as Melissa told him permission had been granted. “She has a tab open for one heavy equipment rental company,” he reported. He scanned the screen carefully. “There’s one excavator out both of the nights we’re talking about.”

  Paul’s eyes showed interest. “To whom was it rented?” Even when he’s excited his grammar is impeccable.

  “Someone named James Constantine,” Josh read off the screen.

  Paul looked at me. “Do we know of a James Constantine?” he asked.

  I started to shake my head but stopped, which was a distinct annoyance to the left side of my neck. “Maybe,” I said. “Bill has a guy named Jim working with him.”

  “Oh yeah,” Josh said. “Jim … somebody.”

  There was a short moment when nobody spoke, but Maxie can’t possibly exist in such a circumstance. “So,” she said, “are you ready to start working up some new kitchen designs?”

  Chapter 23

  “Jim Constantine?” Bill Harrelson looked bemused. “You think Jim had something to do with the car moving around like that?”

  We were standing on my back deck despite it being a slightly damp and chilly November morning in New Jersey. I could see my breath, and while that gave me an advantage over Paul (who was hovering nearby) as Tony and Vic were inside doing what they could to get my kitchen back to an operational state.

  I’d come out to catch Bill before he could ride off in his Bob the Builder dune buggy and start moving sand around on another area of the beach. Paul was very interested in how this interview would go, but he would have been present even if he’d thought the whole thing would probably yield no information. Paul is a very hands-on kind of ghost.

  “I’m not saying that,” I assured Bill. “I’m saying I don’t know anything about Jim and you do, so whatever you can tell me about him would help me determine if he might have had a reason to pull the Continental out and then move it around like a Matchbox car for two days.”

  “I don’t know much about the guy either,” Bill said, staring off into the sea like Captain Ahab wondering where his pal Moby might have wandered off to. “This is the first job I’ve worked with him, you know.”

  “Did your client foist him off on you?” I asked.

  “That’s not the way I’d have put it,” Paul said, scowling a bit. Paul doesn’t care for a snarky attitude, which makes his move from Canada to New Jersey all the more baffling.

  “No, that’s not how it works,” Bill answered. “The state hires my company but they don’t dictate which crew members we use. I was sent out with these guys by my supervisor for the duration of the job, so I’ve been working with him about two weeks. I don’t ask how they choose. Jim must be new to the company because I’d never met him before.”

  Paul hovered over closer. I don’t know why he thinks he has to keep his voice low when he talks to me, but I guess it’s a hard habit to break even when you’re dead. “Two weeks is long enough,” he noted. “Bill must have some impression of him.”

  That made sense and besides, Paul was the investigator and I was the innkeeper so I tend to defer to his judgment on such matters. When a big accommodations industry case comes our way—well, first I’m hoping it doesn’t—I will be the resident expert. Until then, I mostly do as I’m told.

  Bill scratched his head while thinking, which I didn’t think anybody did outside of cartoons. “He’s a little sloppy,” he said. “He brings his own lunch. The other guys seem to like him well enough. I haven’t had any reason to think anything bad about him so far.”

  “He was behind the controls when they found the car, right?” I asked.

  Bill nodded. “Yeah, there was some crazy bet going on that they were going to find buried treasure or something. I didn’t think it was possible, but there was that car down there. So I guess those divining rods or whatever actually work, huh?”

  At Paul’s prompting, although I would have wondered myself, I asked, “Is that typical on a job like this? That you would just start digging an enormous hole in somebody’s backyard because your crew is playing with the idea of buried treasure? Was that Jim’s idea?” The last part of the question was Paul reminding me what we were actually asking about.

  “I mean, the guys always get into little things,” Bill said. “But it’s just in good fun, a way to take your mind off the job. This is a big thing to do, getting the shore back in shape. If you think of it all at once it can seem impossible. But if they have little side bets and stuff it makes the thing easier to deal with on a day-to-day basis. Jim? He was here
pretty much by himself at the time, so I guess he took the initiative himself.”

  “That’s a lot of initiative,” I said without any prompting at all. “If he hadn’t found a car down there I’d be pretty annoyed that there was this huge crater in my property for no reason.”

  Bill looked at me a moment, more seeming like he was trying to figure out how to keep his company and the state of New Jersey from being sued. Which was a wise thing for him to do. “If he hadn’t found the car the hole wouldn’t have been anywhere near as large,” he explained. “He started with just a shovel and then hit something that was obviously a lot bigger.”

  I chose not to debate the point for the moment and keep my legal options open. “Why did they think there was buried treasure here of all places?”

  “Excellent question,” Paul said. It’s the little things.

  “There was some legend, one of the guys knew about it. Supposedly a pirate ship in the 1770s was in this area and took on a cannonball or something and couldn’t make it home. The idea was they buried a load of jewels and stuff here to come back and get it later, and then they got discovered by the British troops here before the Revolution and got sent to jail or hanged. Nobody ever came for the treasure but word got out.”

  I looked at Paul and he nodded; he’d have Maxie look into this goofy story. After having spent an hour and twenty minutes the night before looking over and trying to negotiate new kitchen designs, she needed to contribute to the case in order to alleviate my crankiness, which was a reversal in our usual pattern.

  “Who in your company told this story?” I asked Bill. That was Paul’s question. There’s give-and-take in this relationship.

  “Ernie Waskow,” Bill said. “But I know Ernie and I’ve worked with him for eight years. There’s no way he came and moved the car around for two nights in a row.”

  “No way?”

  “His wife would never let him.”

  Better to ignore that. “We’ll talk to him later. But as you understand it, Ernie came up with the idea but Jim dug the hole, right?”

  Bill nodded enthusiastically. “That’s how I got it. They thought they were going to find emeralds, apparently.”

  My head snapped up from the view of my phone, which I had removed from my pocket to check the time. “Emeralds?” Finally, a connection to something else in this strange affair. “They said emeralds specifically?” And in addition to everything else, I immediately forgot what time it was.

  “Yeah. Ernie said these pirates had come back from Colombia and they were loaded down with emeralds they’d stolen from some other ship that was bringing back a load of emeralds that had been mined there. I guess Colombia has a lot of emeralds, or did back then, anyway.”

  Now all we had to do was figure out how at least one of them had gotten into a product of the Ford Motor Company that had ended up interred in my backyard. And why at least one person had died as a result.

  “But they didn’t find any emeralds.” It was sort of a question, I guess, but I figured Bill would have probably mentioned if that kind of thing had occurred on his watch.

  “No.” He sounded amused. “They found a car that looks like it was on Starsky and Hutch.”

  “With a dead person in it.” Definitely not a question. I just wanted Bill to understand the reason I was spending this much time asking him about it.

  He stopped looking amused. “Yeah.”

  “Bill, what would it take to move that car off the beach and not be heard in the night, and then bring it back the next night the same way?” He was the expert, sort of. He’d moved things around with machines more than I had.

  He considered. “It really wouldn’t make that much noise,” he said. “You’ve probably had cars towed in front of your house and didn’t even know it. It’s more about the chains than the machinery. If it was me I’d be more worried about the lights, I would think. It’s pitch black out there at night without the house lights on, so they’d have to bring their own lights and that would be visible from the house. There wasn’t a moon either night, so they couldn’t count on that. But if they were careful with the chains and less worried about speed than quiet, it could be done without anybody hearing, especially if they were asleep.”

  There was a short pause while Paul fed me the next question. “Would they have to bring especially bright lights? Could they do it with small flashlights aimed at specific areas, do you think?”

  He raised an eyebrow and tilted his head a little to the right. “It would have to be somebody who’s done it a lot, but yeah, they could do it if they were worried about shining spots on the house and waking people up. What I can’t figure is why they’d bring the car back after they had taken it away and not gotten caught. Why risk that a second time in order to return what they’d stolen?”

  “Good question. Bill, who in your crew would be good enough to do all that work with flashlights and not make a lot of noise with chains?”

  Bill looked uncomfortable. “I don’t want to name anybody and get them in trouble, Alison. I don’t know anything about who moved that car around.”

  I held up my hands in a defensive posture. “I’m not asking you to incriminate. Who wouldn’t be able to do it?”

  He looked sheepish, torn between worry and pride. “Frankly, anybody in my crew could have pulled this off without a hitch,” he said.

  Swell. “Okay, thanks,” I said. “I won’t keep you any longer. And hey. I hear you and Katrina might have hit it off. Good for you, huh?” I don’t know why but people always talk to adults who are starting relationships like they’re kids who just started mastering the multiplication tables.

  But Bill didn’t seem the least bit embarrassed by what I’d said. No, the expression that crossed his face was something more like total puzzlement. “Katrina?” he said.

  I know some people like to play their romantic sides close to the vest, but this was pushing things a little far, in my opinion. “Yeah. Come on, Bill. It’s okay. Katrina seems very happy and I’m glad for you guys. I’m not making a bigger thing out of it than a nice time during a vacation.” Maybe he thought I was suggesting they were headed for a Christmas wedding, which would require serious planning this close to Thanksgiving.

  “Katrina?” he said again. His eyes were staring off into space trying to focus on something that seemed very far away.

  “That’s odd,” Paul said.

  Okay, this wasn’t just a commitment issue. “Katrina Breslin,” I reminded him.

  Bill looked at me and shook his head. “Nope. Sorry.”

  “Bill, I introduced you here on this very spot not three days ago.” I pointed to the ground in case he didn’t know where this very spot was.

  The foreman looked at me very carefully. In retrospect I think it’s possible he was trying to determine if I was in need of very intense psychological counseling. And I was starting to think he had a point. Then he widened his eyes a bit and took in a deep breath, remembering.

  “Oh, yeah,” Bill said, and I relaxed a little, although it was still weird. “I remember her. No. Alison, I never asked out Katrina Breslin. Don’t know where you got that idea.”

  I looked at Paul, which probably threw Bill off, and Paul looked just as stunned as I must have. Looked. “That’s surprising,” he said. Paul has a gift for understatement.

  It didn’t make sense. I looked back at Bill. “You sure?” It made more sense at the time.

  He laughed. “Trust me. I’d know if I was dating one of your guests.”

  “Surprising indeed,” Paul said.

  Chapter 24

  “Oh, the pirate thing is definitely real.” Ernie Waskow said. He brushed the hair out of his eyes. The wind was picking up.

  We were standing on the beach about two hundred yards south of my property, where Ernie was taking a break from moving sand around for no discernible reason. I’m a layperson and don’t actually get the whole dune-restoration business. I was glad I’d worn a jacket and Ernie was probably r
egretting his unfortunate lack of a hat. That hair, which was not as thick around the middle as Ernie would have liked me to believe, was doing some serious dance moves every time the breeze decided to change direction.

  “These pirates buried a trove of emeralds in the sand behind my house?” Of all the places to choose, that seemed the least likely other than in midtown Manhattan. Except that at least has a diamond district.

  “Well, your house wasn’t there then,” Ernie said, probably wondering how someone this ignorant could get an innkeeper’s license. It was a good question. “They had to do something with the gems because their ship was badly damaged and eventually sunk.”

  “And this was in the 1770s?” I just wanted to get him talking, which did not seem like it would be a problem.

  Ernie was a short, solid little man somewhere between twenty-eight and ninety years old. The stubble on his chin was just barely flecked with gray but his eyes were clear and alert. Once I’d asked him about pirates he’d perked up. Before that he seemed to think I was complaining about the noise outside my house, which was interesting because that had more or less ceased once the Lincoln had resurrected itself.

  I know; you’re wondering what Paul and I decided to do about Bill’s statement that he had never so much as asked Katrina Breslin out on a date. After some discussion we’d decided mostly that we’d have to put a pin in that and get back to it later because we had these construction guys to talk to. Translation: Neither of us had an idea and I didn’t want to upset Katrina.

  “Yeah, the 1770s, probably about 1773,” Ernie answered. “The Revolution hadn’t really gotten going yet and the coast was guarded by British soldiers who were more concerned with pirates than rebels. When they saw the ship they fired on it and the crew had to take their cargo here to hide it until they got back. But they never got back.”

  “Did they leave a map or something?” I asked. Pirates who bury treasure make maps, don’t they?