“Once we find out who, we’ll know why,” I answered. If I could focus her on the task at hand, it might be possible to delay the emotional scene I’d prefer to avoid at the moment. “What can you tell me? Why was he at my house last night?”
Sammi dabbed at her eyes, but not in a theatrical way. Her eye makeup was running a little, so she dabbed at it with a tissue from a box on her desk. Investment counselors were like doctors, The Swine used to say. If the news was bad, you wanted to have some Kleenex at the ready. “I don’t know. He was acting all weird even before we met you. Said he’d run into an old friend but he wouldn’t tell me who, and then he canceled rehearsal last night. Said he had to be somewhere.”
“So it seems like he planned to be at my house.”
“No, this was before you showed up,” Sammi pointed out. “He said there was something big going on and he wasn’t going to tell me until it was all done. Bill was like that—he liked the big gesture.” She started to well up again. “He’s really dead?”
Sammi looked so distraught my heart went out to her, but I had to see if there was some information that might help. I told myself finding Bill’s murderer would give her closure. “Who do you think the old friend was?” I asked.
“Oh, man, I don’t know. I mean, it sounded like a music thing the way he was talking. And he could piss people off, you know. But killing him? Who’d want to do that?” Sammi seemed legitimately upset and sniffed back tears a few more times.
“That’s what I’m asking you. What did he tell you about the day Vanessa McTiernan died?” I watched her face for a reaction the way Paul always says I should, and I got one: her lips pursed and curled a little at one side. Sammi was back, and she didn’t like the mention of Bill’s old girlfriend, even if now they were both dead.
“You think this is about Vanessa?”
“She used to be in your band. She used to date Bill. And she died a few months ago. It’s at least possible there’s a connection.” And her dead father the rock star asked me to find out. That’s not weird, right?
“I mean, don’t get me wrong: I’m sorry she’s dead, you know? But I never liked her. Maybe that’s bad to say, but she was weird. She used to stare off into space and talk to people who weren’t there. It freaked out everybody in the band except Bill. Then her brother started coming around and saying he was her manager, and she needed to sing her original songs in the set. We’re a cover band; you can’t do that. So she quit Once Again and went off to record or something. That’s when Bill and her broke up.”
“Did you steal him away from her?” I asked. When Sammi found out that Bill was still seeing Vanessa when she died, she had not looked pleased. I wanted to see if I could get the same reaction now.
“Nobody stole anybody from anybody,” Sammi said, her mouth twitching a little, maybe another attempt to keep from crying. “Vanessa and Bill were a thing. They broke up before she left the band. He and I started up later. Then she died.”
The look on her face had changed and I wasn’t really convinced about this last part, so I pressed the issue. “When he said he’d seen Vanessa the day she died, you looked surprised. Then you got so mad you didn’t talk to him again.”
Sammi let out an involuntary sob. “Yeah. Now I can’t ever talk to him again.” Would it comfort her to know that I might be able to, if he showed up in the right form? She started to cry, not steadily, but not just choking it back, either. I wasn’t sure whether to leave her to herself or if it would be cruel to abandon her when she felt so awful. But Sammi gathered herself and went on. “I was mad at him because he was stupid for going to see her. I don’t remember that day exactly, but I know he wanted her back in the band so we could do some Fleetwood Mac. Vanessa sounded a little like Stevie Nicks.”
“You think he was going there to ask her to come back? What did he tell you about that day?”
“He said he never went,” Sammi’s voice froze over and she put down the tissue, which wasn’t going to be needed now. “Said Vanessa canceled because her mom was in town.”
“Why? Did Vanessa not see her mother often?”
“No, her mom had moved to, like, Ohio or something,” Sammi said. “But she was in town now and wanted to see Vanessa. They’d had some fight about her brother or something; I don’t remember. So her asking to get together was a big deal. But I guess it was all a lie because then Bill told you he was there the day Vanessa died.”
Claudia being around on the day of Vanessa’s death did seem to jibe with Vance’s claim that she had something to do with Bill’s murder . . . I made a mental note to have Maxie look for Claudia Rabinowizes in Ohio.
“Vanessa had a severe allergic reaction to peanuts,” I said, being intentionally misleading. “Can you think of a reason she’d eat peanuts if she knew they could kill her?”
“I hadn’t talked to her in weeks when she died,” Sammi said with a shrug. “So I don’t know what she was upset about. But it wasn’t peanuts; it was soy sauce. She was allergic to soy sauce. She was a big pain about it,” Sammi went on. “Whenever we’d go out for Chinese, she’d make a big deal out of it: ‘Oh, don’t put any soy sauce on it,’ like she was so special. You just wanted . . .”
“To kill her?” I asked.
Sammi didn’t answer. I didn’t want to cause her more grief if she wasn’t the killer or be nice to her if she was, so I got up to leave.
On the way out I passed Lieutenant McElone on her way in. She looked surprised.
“She’s all yours,” I said.
Twenty
“You think Sammi might have been that angry?” Paul Harrison was more transparent than usual, standing in the sun outside my back door. Okay, standing might be an overstatement, but Paul was there, and given the angle of the light, he was sort of hard to see.
“Can you float over to the shade by the deck?” I asked. I was shielding my eyes with my hand to begin with, so Paul’s habit of pacing as he thought was making the whole process more difficult and, frankly, a little painful. Light, dark, light, dark, light . . .
Paul moved to the designated area so I could face the house rather than the ocean and put down my hand. “I think you’re missing the larger point,” Paul said. “Concentrate less on Vanessa’s love life and more on her suddenly promising musical career. Did Bill Mastrovy see her as an ex-girlfriend or an ex-bandmate about to hit it big?”
“Unless you’ve heard from Bill, there’s no way for us to know,” I said. Paul shook his head. “Well then, I think we have to see both love and money as possible motives here.”
“You really have learned,” he marveled. Maybe a little too vehemently. “Very well. I imagine you would argue that if it was the romantic angle that was in play, Sammi is the more logical suspect.”
“I would,” I said. “Nobody else seems to have been involved. The guitarist I saw the night Josh and I went to the Last Resort wasn’t in the band when Vanessa was, Sammi told me. The guy who used to play with them moved to Los Angeles right after Vanessa left.”
“Very well,” Paul said, enjoying his role as proud professor just a little too much. “So if the motive was the money Jeremy said was likely coming Vanessa’s way, who is the beneficiary of her dying? And why kill Bill Mastrovy?”
“That’s a good question,” I said, looking down. “In fact, it’s two good questions. Here’s a third: What’s this about Claudia being in town on the day Vanessa died?”
“An excellent question. If she’s still in the area . . .”
“She could be here in the guesthouse.”
Paul nodded. We were alone in the backyard for the moment. Liss was still at school, Mom and Dad were not coming over today as far as I knew and Josh was at work at Madison Paints. The remaining guests were out enjoying the Jersey Shore in early fall on this lovely September day, and Vance was off doing whatever it is he did during daylight hours. I’d rarely seen hi
m except at night. Morrie had been scarce since the murder; when I asked Vance where his old pal was he shrugged and said something about “Morrie being Morrie.”
“Where’s Maxie?” I asked, realizing it had been a while since our resident poltergeist had made an appearance. “We have a spook show in a couple of hours.”
“She’s in the attic or on the roof, working on some research,” Paul said. “I asked her to find out whatever she could about Claudia Rabinowitz even before you came home with this allegation. She hadn’t gotten much when I saw her, but she was just starting out. You know Maxie.”
“I know Maxie,” I agreed. Maxie is many things, not all of them wonderful, but she is a whiz at Internet research. For someone whose job was creative when she was alive, she had developed into a very accomplished techie.
“Well, how confident were you with what Sammi told you?” Paul asked. “Did she seem credible?”
It was weird, but in a way seeing Sammi in her business guise had somehow made her less credible in my eyes, and I said so to Paul. “I mean, I realize she can’t look like Drummer Sammi when she’s at work, but knowing that she’s able to put on a whole new persona sort of made me trust her less.”
Paul doesn’t have a lot of patience for intuition rather than fact, but he trusts my judgment, which might be a flaw of his. “Did you believe her when she told you that?” he asked again.
“Actually, yeah,” I said. “It’s not even that she wouldn’t have a reason to lie. Maybe she killed Vanessa and Bill; I don’t know. But the look on her face when she heard he was dead . . . I just thought she was telling the truth.”
“Don’t let your emotions cloud your judgment,” he reminded me.
I looked at Paul, which could now be done without squinting, even while wearing sunglasses. “What’s our next move, chief?”
“I think a consultation with Lieutenant McElone is in order,” he said. “I’d be surprised if she doesn’t show up here to follow up on last night’s mayhem anyway.”
That was right, I’d forgotten. After I wowed McElone at Sammi’s office, she’d said she’d be back this afternoon with any further questions for me and the guests. She might wait until after Melissa was due home in case she thought my daughter might have seen something else or been too sleepy to fully report the night before. She didn’t know Melissa that well; my little Nancy Drew had given every detail she could possibly have mustered and offered a few theories on the possible culprits without being asked.
“Until then?” I asked.
He shrugged a little. “Try to find Jeremy Bensinger,” he said.
With the guests gone, my business was mostly to make sure the house was in order. “First I’m going to find a cleaning service for the hallway,” I told him. “Then we can find Maxie for the show, assuming the guests straggle back in. Once that’s over, I can go to Ace Equipment and talk to Jeremy.”
“I’ll do my best raising William Mastrovy, but you know that’s probably a losing proposition at least for a few days,” Paul admitted. “It was so dark in the room, and he was attacked from behind. Even if I could talk to him, it’s possible he wouldn’t know who had killed him.”
“Well, the one person who might be able to confirm this thing with Claudia might be Vance,” I thought out loud. “If you see him, ask him about that.” I started up the steps of the deck to the back doors, then turned back to look at Paul, who was in the sun again. I saw a little blue denim floating toward the basement doors. “Oh, hey. Any luck on Lester?”
“Not yet,” he said. “I found two ghosts named Lester from Topeka, but both dark-haired. One was a Civil War veteran.” He vanished through the basement doors to his favorite hideaway.
I went to my bedroom and accessed my absurdly old laptop to find a cleaning service. It only took about twenty minutes, eighteen of which were engrossed in getting the computer to warm up and find the Wi-Fi signal that any other device in the house could access in seconds. Once I could get to the Internet, I found a service called Master Clean that promised to take care of any problem in one visit. They got the job and said they would send a crew out that evening.
One problem at a time. And by that I mean Maxie was dropping through the ceiling wearing her trench coat, which meant her laptop couldn’t be far behind.
“I’ve got something for you,” she said. It struck me that I was pretty sure nobody had said hello to me at all today. She pulled out her laptop, which was much better than mine despite the fact that Maxie had been dead for three years. “It’s a picture of Claudia Rabinowitz.”
Sure enough, the screen on her computer showed a woman in a short skirt and tight top, hair piled up on top of her head. She was also wearing a wide-brimmed hat, which obscured part of her face. She was not smiling in the picture, which appeared to be from a newspaper article. I could only see part of the headline, but it was about the woman taking Vance McTiernan to court over his “love child.”
“This picture is from 1978,” I told Maxie.
“Do you think I have access to her family vacation pictures? Claudia isn’t on Facebook or Instagram.” Maxie, expecting to be lauded as usual for her incredible ingenuity in finding anything on the Internet, frowned at me. “How much do you think you would have been able to dig up?”
I looked at the woman to see if she bore a resemblance to anyone I could remember being a guest in the house recently. Oddly, she did seem vaguely familiar but I couldn’t place her.
“Do you think she looks like anybody?” I asked Maxie.
She swooped down to where I was holding the laptop and angled herself to get a clean view. Unfortunately that involved sort of pushing herself through me, but you get used to these things after a while. I’m told.
“With different hair, she would look like Taylor Swift,” Maxie said.
Sometimes Maxie causes slow, deep intakes of breath. I finally looked at her and said, “Do you think she looks like anyone who’s been here recently?”
She squinted, I think just to make it look like she was thinking hard about the question. “It’s an old picture. Do you think she looks a little like your mom?”
“Get Paul,” I said. Maxie made a face but she dove down through the floor without saying anything else.
I studied the photograph for a long moment. I can’t say I saw a really strong facial resemblance to anyone I’d seen recently—or to Taylor Swift or Mom—but the picture was almost forty years old and in black and white. These were not the best conditions to evaluate such a thing.
My phone rang while I was waiting for Paul and Maxie to emerge. I checked to make sure the caller wasn’t Jeremy calling back, but it was Phyllis, so I answered.
“I don’t have the ME’s report yet,” she began.
“Thanks for calling. I haven’t actually found a cure for cancer.”
“Woo, cranky! What’s going on, sweetie?” Phyllis has known me since before I started dating. And I started early.
“I lost a couple of guests because of the dead body on my floor last night.”
“Yeah, how about that?” Phyllis sounded offended. “A fresh murder in Harbor Haven, right there in your house, and I’m not your first phone call?”
“No, crazy me, I thought I’d call the cops first. Why are you calling, Phyllis?”
She made an irritated sound that bore some resemblance to a steam engine pulling into a station. “I’m hearing stuff about the guy who turned up dead on your floor last night,” she said.
“Stuff? What kind of stuff?”
“This William Mastrovy, right?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Worked fronting a band around the Shore, but he also had a day job, if you catch my drift.”
“I didn’t even see you throw a drift. What do you mean, a day job?”
Phyllis’s “coy” voice wasn’t terribly attractive. “The kind you don’t get from Monster.com,” she
said.
“Bill Mastrovy was a United States Senator?”
She sighed; I was spoiling all her fun. “Drugs, baby. He was dealing, just a little weed, nothing serious, but the cops knew about him. He wasn’t up for major time, but his name was around.”
It would be inconvenient to walk around all day with my eyes closed, but it felt kind of nice, like I was taking a nap while sitting up on my bed. Maybe I could just stay in this one place all day. But then I heard Paul say, “Who’s on the phone?” I opened my eyes. He and Maxie had obviously materialized during my brief respite and were now hovering about three feet above me, looking concerned as if my simple desire to sit quietly was a sign of some deep psychological disorder, like fatigue.
I knew Paul wanted me to put the call on speaker so he could hear it, but I resisted the urge. For one thing, I’d have to come up with a phony excuse that Phyllis wouldn’t believe for my doing so and for another, I was in a contrary mood and felt like keeping the call, or at least her end of it, to myself.
“See? That’s the kind of thing a real reporter would find out,” I said.
Paul turned toward Maxie and said, “It’s Phyllis Coates.” Maxie looked blankly at him. “The newspaper editor.” Maxie nodded oh, yeah.
“I have sources who say Vanessa’s brother, Jeremy, and Bill were at odds over her.” Phyllis likes nothing better than knowing stuff before other people. It’s what drove her into journalism. “One wanted her to be a big music star and the other wanted her to be his girlfriend and play on weekends. So tell me, what do you know about Vanessa McTiernan’s career?”
“I know she had an album ready and there was a contract from a record company,” I said. “I know it was good, at least to my ears.”
“But do you know Bill was going to Vanessa’s apartment to try to talk her back into his band on the day she OD’d on soy sauce?”
“You know, I often wonder why you call to ask me stuff you already know,” I said.
“It’s called confirmation, sweetie, and you didn’t know, so you can’t provide it. I’ll call you later.” And just like that, she was gone.
Ghost in the Wind Page 20