Chance of a Ghost

by E. J. Copperman

  “You were asked to leave a group of local theater people under what could be described as acrimonious circumstances,” I countered. “You didn’t think that was relevant? One of those people could have been mad enough to kill, if you really were murdered.”

  The dapper ghost, looking overdressed in a vest and tuxedo pants, rose a couple of feet toward the ceiling. “Of course someone killed me!” he shouted. “I’m dead, aren’t I?”

  “You don’t really think Larry had a heart…whatever, do you, Alison?” Mom seemed somehow concerned that I was insulting her guest rather than being—as I would be—ticked off that he was the one speaking to her daughter in such harsh tones.

  “All I’m saying,” I exhaled, “is that so far we haven’t found any concrete evidence that someone killed you, Mr. Laurentz. All I have is your story. If you’re not going to be forthcoming with me, there is no way I can continue with this investigation.” Nothing would have made me happier than to hear Lawrence release me from that responsibility.

  No such luck. “Don’t forget about your father,” he warned me. “I’m still your best link to him.”

  I did my best to look misty-eyed. “That’s very cruel of you,” I told Lawrence. “You know that’s an emotional point for my mother and me, and you use it to get me to do what you want. I’m starting to think you’re not very nice, Larry, and I don’t think I want to work for you unless I have actual proof you can produce my father the way you say you can.”

  “Alison!” Mom was appalled. I’m not sure if it was because I was being rude or because I’d had the audacity to call a man of Lawrence’s age and stature (in her eyes) by his nickname.

  I ignored her exclamation of horror at my bad manners and watched Lawrence closely. His eyes narrowed and he watched me without blinking, obviously trying to determine if I was bluffing. Since I really wasn’t, he probably saw something other than what he wanted. He snorted.

  “Very well,” he said finally. “You need proof? You shall have it.” And he vanished; one second here, gone the next.

  When a ghost does something like that, it has the immediate effect of making the living people in the room feel foolish. You’re standing there staring at nothing for a bit before you realize there’s nothing to stare at. So Mom and I started and then looked at each other.

  After a minute or so, we realized that we couldn’t just stand there, so Mom gestured to me to follow her. “No telling when he’ll be back, or even if,” she said. “Let’s go get some coffee.” Mom can solve pretty much any problem as long as she’s within walking distance of a kitchen. So I followed her, and lacking any useful purpose, sat in one of the wicker-back chairs at her kitchen table.

  I told her about Frances and Tyra. Tyra had suggested subtly (once off the phone) that I never bother her again, which I understood but did not appreciate, but Frances had actually been so interested in my investigation—she called it “life research for a future role”—that she’d given me her cell phone number and asked me to call if she could help. I didn’t see how she could, but one thing Paul has impressed upon me is to never turn down someone who wants to tell you things about the case you’re working on.

  “You know,” Mom said out of the blue, “I read that Dr. Wells passed away a few weeks ago.” Mom reads the obituaries in about seven newspapers online, including the MetroWest Jewish News, the Catholic Spirit of Metuchen, and for all I knew, a Baha’i newspaper based in Jersey City.

  “Dr. Wells? Which one was Dr. Wells?” All the doctors who’d worked on my dad—the oncologists, surgeons and radiation specialists whom Dad had called “the White Coat Brigade”—had eventually blended together in my memory.

  “The oncologist,” Mom said. “The one who was there at the end.”

  I remembered now—he had been in the room with Dad during his last moments and had signed my father’s death certificate. “What did he die of?” I asked, just to fill the conversation.

  “Not cancer,” Mom answered. “Heart attack, I think.” We were silent for a while; Mom got coffee out of a cabinet and started putting some into the basket in her coffeemaker.

  “I’ve been thinking about Dad a lot lately,” she said, as if we’d been discussing the subject for hours.

  “So have I,” I said. “Sometimes I feel like he just died. Sometimes I feel like he never did. Sometimes I’m sad and other times I’m just angry at him.”

  I thought that would throw Mom—she never seemed to be angry at Dad or me, or especially Melissa—but she nodded. “I know. I get mad at him for dying, too. I know I shouldn’t. I’ve still be able to see him, but…” Mom took a breath. “He’s not alive. It’s not the same thing.”

  I shook my head. “I’m not mad at him for dying, I’m mad because I feel like he could have gotten in touch with me, now, like he did with you, and he’s choosing not to. It feels like he’s freezing Melissa and me out, and I can’t come up with any explanation for why he’d do that.”

  Mom sniffed a little, and I saw her stop her coffee preparation to dab at her nose with a tissue, very quickly, as if I wasn’t supposed to see. “There isn’t one,” she answered. “I know your father wouldn’t ever abandon you like that if he had the choice, so he must not have a choice.”

  I didn’t get a chance to answer because there was a noise from the living room that sounded like flapping wings, as if a bird had gotten into the house and was trying to fly its way out. “Where has everyone gone?” Lawrence Laurentz shouted. “I have arrived with your proof!”

  Mom, having set the coffeemaker up to brew, headed toward the living room and I followed her. There, sure enough, floated Lawrence Laurentz, having changed (I assumed for traveling) into—I’m not kidding—a cape. He looked like he’d been cast in the lead of Zorro, as performed by the National Yiddish Theater.

  “You wanted to see evidence that I’ve been in touch with your father?” he insisted before either Mom or I could utter a word. “Fine! Here is your evidence!”

  Lawrence reached into an inside pocket, and retrieved a small white business card. He slapped it down on Mom’s coffee table. “You see?” he chortled. “There!”

  A business card? “That’s your proof?” I asked. “What does it say, ‘Lawrence Laurentz: Friend of Alison’s Dad’?”

  “Look at it,” Mom said in a hollow voice.

  I stopped and looked. Sure enough, it displayed a small logo of a paintbrush and a handsaw, and the imprint read, “Jack Kerby: Handyman.” Underneath, the slogan, “No Job Too Small—Reasonable Prices!”

  I’d seen it a thousand times as a kid. Dad used to hand them out wherever he went, and he and I played a game with them when I was little. He’d mark one with a little blue dot and then stash it in a stack that held at least a hundred. We’d see how many tries it took for me to find the one with the dot.

  This one had a little blue dot on the top right-hand corner.

  “Now what do you think?” Lawrence demanded.

  My voice was a little weaker than I’d expected it to be. “There’s still a little time before Melissa gets home from school,” I said. “I think you’re going to tell me all I need to know about Jerry Rasmussen.”

  Lawrence curled his lip. “That worm,” he said.

  Jeannie met me at Mom’s, and despite Lawrence’s fuming away about Jerry Rasmussen and the unfairness of it all, Mom and I ignored him and ate lunch with Jeannie. We made small talk and had a very nice Cobb salad. Then Jeannie bundled up Oliver (who had helpfully slept through the whole thing, though he’d stirred slightly when Lawrence became especially emphatic) and we got into Jeannie’s new minivan (with extra childproof locks) for the thirty-second drive to Jerry Rasmussen’s place. I wanted Jeannie there for this interview—and had wanted her there for the others, but she had given me a lecture on how important frequent visits to the pediatrician are, even if you had a wellness visit just last week.

  After listening to Lawrence’s description of Jerry Rasmussen, which included the words simperin
g, blithering and IQ in the negative numbers, it was something of a surprise to find the man actually quite accommodating and concerned upon hearing that I was an investigator looking into the circumstances of Lawrence’s death.

  Mr. Rasmussen, who asked us to call him “Jerry,” had done everything to belie the image Lawrence had painted of him short of sweeping me off my feet and asking me to marry him, which was just as well. I’d only been asked once before and had foolishly consented. Besides, Jerry was almost forty years older than I was and in yet another cookie-cutter active adult town home.

  It had gotten to a point where every one of these homes I saw was running together in my mind. Even with all the problems and challenges that my Victorian guesthouse at 123 Seafront provided—and they were abundant—I was more glad than ever that I’d bought the old barn to live in for hopefully the rest of my life, assuming I could generate enough income to keep the place running.

  Jerry’s town home was no exception: There were the high ceilings (with a ceiling fan in each room), the skylights, the extremely beige walls, the entrance hallway with the tile floor, the wall-to-wall carpet in the living room (a different shade of beige), the pass-through to the kitchen…Stop me if you’ve heard this before.

  “Is there some insurance question or something like that?” Jerry asked. Oddly, he was the first of today’s interview subjects to question me on my motives for investigating the death—apparently of natural causes—of an older man more than six months earlier.

  “Something like that,” I said.

  “Not allowed to say, huh?” he asked, smiling. “Okay, I won’t ask anymore questions. How can I help?” He gestured me toward a chair facing his sofa, and he took the nearer cushion on the couch.

  I’d clued Jeannie in on my previous conversations with Tyra and Frances, but she still opened by asking Jerry, “Did you know Lawrence Laurentz?”

  We’d already established that Jerry did in fact know Lawrence, so the question was pointless, but Jeannie grinned and bounced Oliver on her knee, seemingly thrilled with her participation in the process. Jerry admitted he knew Lawrence—again—and I jumped in before Jeannie could ask him if his name was Jerry Rasmussen.

  “I’m told you knew Mr. Laurentz from his involvement with the New Old Thespians; is that right?” Paul had instructed me to let the “witness” expound on the question, so to make the first one relatively simple and broad. Paul had also reminded me on numerous occasions that anyone who commits a violent crime is by definition capable of violence, no matter how pleasant and accommodating he might seem. Which is really reassuring every time I ring a doorbell with that voice recorder in my tote bag.

  Jerry nodded. “Yes, Lawrence was a member of the troupe for a while.” He folded his hands in his lap and looked at me, smiling with a bland expression, awaiting the next question. He might have been a very well trained golden retriever.

  “And he left because the troupe asked him to leave?” I said, watching Jerry’s eyes.

  Not a flicker. “Yes, I’m afraid so, and he did not take it all that well. He thought we were kicking him out because we were jealous of his talent.” I thought he might stumble a bit on the word talent, but again, there was not the tiniest sign of amusement or contempt.

  “Was that not the case?” I asked.

  Jerry shook his head and looked, of all things, sad. “I’m afraid Lawrence’s talents were not, shall we say, as generously supplied as he might have believed them to be.”

  “He was a ham,” Jeannie suggested. Then she looked at Oliver and said into his face, “Ham. Ham, ham. Are you a ham? Are you?” Oliver seemed fairly sure he was not a ham but did not answer. I was waiting for Jerry’s response.

  This time, Jerry did allow a smile but one with regret in it. Wow. If this guy was lying, he was very, very good at it. “That would be one way to put it. But normally, we wouldn’t have asked a member who…emotes a little too much to leave. We’re here to bring the arts to senior citizens, but going over the top is to be expected sometimes.”

  “So why in Mr. Laurentz’s case?” I asked. “If you don’t mind a little hamming it up, what made him more of a problem?”

  Jerry raised his left eyebrow. “I wouldn’t say a problem,” he began. “Lawrence turned everything into a situation. He wouldn’t take direction. He was critical of the other actors’ performances. He had an opinion on everything, and he voiced it loudly and bluntly, during each rehearsal and in presence of the entire cast and crew. It became…a distraction. Members were complaining. I’m the president of the troupe, so they came to me with their grievances. I finally had to act on it, and when it became obvious that Lawrence would not change his behavior, we had to ask him to stop coming to meetings and rehearsals.”

  I couldn’t honestly say the scenario Jerry had described was anything but what I’d expected. From what I’d personally observed of him, I could easily believe that Lawrence would have acted that way, the “professional among amateurs” in the theater group, just because he really believed he knew more than everyone else and that he should let them know it. But Jeannie had never met Lawrence (and wasn’t likely to), and I wanted her to have an idea of his personality. Telling her I had observed him myself—other than the fiction that he’d been a friend of mom’s—was out of the question.

  “I imagine he reacted badly,” I said to Jerry.

  He stifled a mild snort and looked to the ceiling fan for an instant. “You could say that,” he said. “Lawrence accused us—me, mostly—of ‘conspiring to demean him’ in the eyes of the group, to make him look foolish and feel unwanted. He said it was ‘a blatant manifestation of jealousy’; those were his exact words. He left that night, saying none of us would ever see him alive again. And the fact is, none of us did, as far as I know. A few went to his funeral. The poor man. So sudden.”

  “Did you go? To his funeral?” Jeannie asked, wiping some drool from Oliver’s mouth.

  Jerry didn’t make eye contact. “No. I felt that Lawrence would have preferred I stay away.” Then he looked at me, and his gaze narrowed. “But what does this have to do with insurance? Why are you asking about the New Old Thespians in relation to Lawrence Laurentz’s death?” Uh-oh; he’d caught on.

  “I’m not here on an insurance matter,” I told him. “I’m here to clear up some of the circumstances about Mr. Laurentz’s death.”

  Jerry’s voice took on a slightly scratchy quality. “So you came to talk to me? Why? Lawrence died of a heart attack, didn’t he?”

  In my head, I heard Melissa’s voice: “Awwwkwaaard…”

  I gave him the prepared answer Paul and I had worked out: “There are some questions about what happened, and my client is asking me to see what I can find out.” I figured that was vague enough to be true but not so vague that it would simply frustrate Jerry.

  Or so I thought.

  “So you think that something else happened?” he asked, his voice rising about a half octave. “You think he did himself in? Or…” His face took on a delighted quality that only world-class gossips can achieve. “Do you think that someone might have killed him? How can that happen? How can somebody give you a heart attack?”

  “I’m not saying anything happened just yet,” I said, trying to maintain a soothing voice rather than hear his escalate to castrati levels. “I’m trying to determine exactly what might have caused Mr. Laurentz’s death.”

  “Nobody sends out a private detective unless they think something sinister has happened,” Jerry said. While I was still marveling at his use of the word sinister, he went on, “And if you believe that someone did kill Lawrence, your first stop is at my door?” Jerry’s voice was reaching pitches that only a dog would be able to hear and alas, I had no dog handy.

  “You weren’t our first stop…” I began, before realizing how stupid that sounded.

  But Jerry wasn’t listening, anyway. “How dare you even consider the idea that I would want any harm to come to another human being, even Lawrence Laurentz
!” he ranted. “I’ll have you know, I’ve been a vegetarian since 1986, before it was fashionable! I don’t even kill insects I find in my bathroom—I remove them to the backyard! What could possibly make you think I would…would…” And with that, he put his fingers up to his brow, shielding his eyes.

  It was a good show, but I watched. Not one tear fell down Jerry Rasmussen’s cheeks, no matter how hard he shook with his feigned sobs. “This is interfering with my process,” he managed. “I have to…prepare for a dress rehearsal tonight. And my emotional state needs to be…restored. I’d prefer it if you two would leave.”

  The man could act; I’ll give him that. He’d almost had me convinced.

  Jeannie snorted. “We three,” she said, but she was already packing Oliver into his snowsuit.

  Fifteen

  On our way back to Mom’s, Jeannie and I compared notes on Jerry, whom she’d found cold. “He never so much as chucked Oliver’s chin!” She dropped me back at my car, and we split up so that she could go talk to another of Lawrence’s remaining co-workers and then pick Melissa up from school. Since Liss wanted to go and pull her “school project” gambit on Lieutenant McElone, and the conceit of her trying to do something behind my back would be lost if I was spotted dropping her off, it made more sense for Jeannie to do it. My daughter had tried to lobby for permission to walk to the police station from school, but I wasn’t about to let a ten-year-old (“I’m almost eleven, Mom!”) walk for more than a mile to the police station in freezing temperatures all by herself. Call me crazy.

  That left me time to check in with Paul before Liss got home. I picked up the mail—which sure enough included a bill from Murray Feldner for not plowing my walk—and went in search of Paul so I could play him the audio of the conversations with Tyra, Frances and Jerry.

  Paul listened carefully, doing some serious goatee stroking, his eyes at half-mast and his brows coming close to meeting in the middle. He nodded a few times, especially during the Jerry playback, and when all the recordings had been played, he looked at me and did something very odd indeed.