Chance of a Ghost

by E. J. Copperman

  He smiled.

  “You’re really progressing, Alison,” he said, every inch the proud parent. “There was barely a question left unasked, and you reacted to everything they said with an eye toward the investigation and not the emotion of the moment. I’m very proud of you.”

  It’s important to point out that I don’t take compliments well. I’ve never really examined this impulse, not even when I was seeing a therapist after The Swine walked out to seek sun and extreme blondeness in California. But suffice it to say that at this moment, I looked away and focused on how the Tiffany lamp over the pool table really needed dusting.

  “Thank you,” I mumbled. “Now, what does it all mean?”

  “An excellent question.” Paul “stood up,” which gave the impression of an expectant father in the 1950s pacing in the waiting room while his wife gave birth—two feet off the ground. “We haven’t established anything definitively, but it is significant that both the woman from the Count Basie and the man from the theater group admitted they didn’t much care for Mr. Laurentz and did not try to hide it.”

  “Does that make you suspect Frances more, because she claimed that she liked Lawrence?” Give me another gold star, teacher! I shined these patent-leather shoes just for you and had my mother braid my pigtails!

  But Paul shook his head. “No, I think it would be extremely premature to start prioritizing suspects at this point. For one thing, we don’t have Jeannie’s report on the people she’s interviewing, and there were several others in the theater group, at least, who probably held a grudge.”

  “Yeah, but that’s such a lousy motive,” I argued. “The guy was a bad actor, so they decided to kill him? Even if Lawrence was especially obnoxious on his way out—and I’d bet cash money he was—they had already kicked him out of the group. His behavior was cause for a flaming bag of dog poop on his doorstep, not a toaster in his bathtub.” And yes, it felt just as ridiculous to say that as it must be to hear it.

  “I agree,” Paul said. “There must be something more to it than that. Generally speaking, people kill for three reasons: money, sex or revenge. None of those seem to apply in this case.”

  “I got a creepy feeling from Jerry Rasmussen,” I said. “Does that count for anything?”

  Paul considered. “Instinct is a factor,” he said, pacing. “You would still have to prove anything that would tie him to a criminal act, but you were in the room with the man and I wasn’t. If your feelings about him were accurate, what do you think his next move will be?”

  Jerry’s next move? I was lucky I knew what my last move was! Still wanting to impress my mentor, I thought hard, and my stomach froze a little. “You think he might get violent with me?” I asked.

  Paul quickly shook his head. “No, no. The next thing he’ll do, if he’s as calculating as you think, is call you to apologize for his behavior. Expect the call within a day.”

  “I did leave him a business card. You really think he’ll call?”

  “If you were right about him. You’re a pretty good judge of human nature. I’d bet on it.” That was encouraging. Sort of.

  “Did you get the feeling Lawrence was telling us everything?” I asked. “He’s left out important details before, like the whole experience with the theater club.”

  Paul smiled at me. “You really are progressing. No, I don’t think he’s telling us all there is to know, and it makes me wonder why more than what. He’s already dead; what does he have to lose?”

  Maxie slid down through the ceiling wearing a trench coat, which is highly unusual for her; she usually favors the tightest clothing possible, as if she were still trying to attract shallow men three years after her death.

  “I’ve got something,” she said, and opened the coat to produce my decrepit MacBook from inside the coat. That explained it; the ghosts can carry pretty much any object smaller than a Subaru undetected as long as they conceal it in their clothing. So Maxie could fly directly from the attic through my bedroom and into the game room without having to take human routes. We’d also had some past arguments about uninitiated guests seeing a flying laptop computer on the stairs, so Maxie was actually being considerate. But as soon as she reached her hovering spot, the trench coat disappeared, leaving her clad in some sprayed-on blue jeans and a black T-shirt bearing the slogan, “You Won’t Like Me When I’m Angry.” Truer words were never silk-screened.

  Paul watched her float down. “What?” he asked.

  “This New Old Thespians group,” she said. “You asked me to look it up.” Paul had indeed requested Maxie do some online research on the troupe, and it hadn’t taken her long to get whatever information she was talking about.

  “Wow—there’s really something notable there?” I asked. Frankly, I’d thought anything Maxie could pull up on the Internet about a group of senior citizens putting on the occasional musical would be tame at best.

  “You’re gonna love this,” she crowed. “They got busted six months ago.”

  “What?” Paul and I said at about the same time.

  Maxie held out the laptop for us to see. “Believe it. They were doing a performance at some old people’s development—”

  “Active adult community,” I corrected.

  Maxie shook her head to declare it irrelevant. “Whatever. Anyway, so they’re putting on this show, and halfway through it the cops burst in and start arresting everybody.”

  “Why?” Paul wanted to know. Maxie was waving the laptop around with such enthusiasm that one, it was impossible to read the article on the screen, and two, I was worried about buying a new laptop if she dropped it.

  Maxie smiled her naughtiest, most self-satisfied smile. “Public nudity,” she said in a long drawl.

  “Public…public…what?” I managed. So I’m not erudite when taken by surprise. No, shock.

  “You heard me,” the ghost answered. I’d never seen her look quite so happy. “The performance apparently included a bunch of the cast stripping down to nothing, and there are laws against such things if you don’t have the proper permits ahead of time.”

  I grabbed the laptop out of curiosity and a sense of self-preservation. “Let me see that thing,” I said. “That can’t be right.”

  Maxie’s mouth flattened out. “Oh, it’s true all right,” she said. “Do you think I make this stuff up?”

  “Oh, stop,” I countered. “Believe it or not, sometimes it actually isn’t about you.” I started reading the article, from the Home News Tribune, dated almost seven months earlier. Sure enough, there had been eleven arrests for public indecency, lewd behavior and resisting arrest, at an active adult community called Cedar Crest during a Sunday night performance of…

  “Hair?” Paul asked. “A bunch of people over fifty-five put on Hair?”

  I shrugged. “They were there the first time, I guess,” I said. “But the nudity in Hair is only a few seconds. How could the cops know when to show up?”

  Paul raised an eyebrow.

  “Someone must have alerted them,” he suggested. “Someone like—”

  “A disgraced former member of the troupe who had been unceremoniously kicked out?” I asked.

  Paul shook his head. “We’re getting way ahead of ourselves here,” he said. “We have no proof. We don’t even know exactly when Mr. Laurentz was asked to leave the theater company. For all we can say, this incident could have happened before that or after he died.”

  Maxie chewed her upper lip. “I don’t know,” she said. “Larry did die in the bathtub six months ago. The timing fits.”

  I felt my eyebrows meet in the middle. Something was a little bit off here. “Since when are you interested in these investigations?” I asked Maxie. “You usually complain about having to do the research.”

  “This one’s funny,” she said.

  “Funny? A man dies, is maybe murdered, and you think it’s funny?”

  Maxie shrugged. “I have a different perspective,” she said.

  “Yeah. You should b
e more sympathetic.”

  Maxie started to answer but was distracted by a noise at the game room door. Melissa swooped into the room at top speed, backpack bobbing behind her, with footsteps that would have awakened the dead, if they hadn’t already been part of the conversation.

  “Mom!” my daughter shouted out eagerly. “I just talked to the lieutenant!” Liss stopped to catch her breath. As she did, Jeannie appeared behind her in the doorway, grinning proudly at my little girl. Jeannie was pushing the stroller, and Oliver appeared to be inside it, but with all the snowsuits, it was hard to tell.

  Paul and Maxie exchanged the same glance they always pass between each other when a “civilian” enters the room, a reminder that they could say whatever they wanted, but they should not be expecting direct communication from Melissa or me. The fact of the matter was that I could have had an ongoing conversation with either of them with Jeannie there—and had done so in the past—and my friend would simply refuse to believe there was anything the least bit unusual going on. And in my house, she’d be right.

  “What did Lieutenant McElone say?” I asked Melissa.

  Melissa shed the backpack and her down jacket, as well as a scarf, a hat, a pair of gloves and her shoes. “Well, first of all, she said that next time you should come down to her yourself and not send your daughter with a line of hooey about a school project,” she began.

  “Did you mention it was your idea and not mine?” I asked.

  “Yes, but she said it was just because you’re afraid of her.”

  I made a sour face. “I’m so afraid of her that I’m in her office about every two weeks?” I pointed out.

  “She said that was because you’re a bad detective and need help from the police,” Melissa replied. “And she also said that if you had shown up, she probably wouldn’t have told you anything, anyway.”

  Paul put a hand up over his nose and mouth as if stifling a sneeze. Like he could have a cold.

  “So far, this has been a real treat for me,” I told my daughter. “Do you have anything in the way of information that doesn’t contain an insult to me from the lieutenant?”

  Paul made a sudden turn away from the right-hand corner of the room, almost in a panic, and I looked to see that Jeannie was sitting down to nurse Oliver. Men. I’m not nuts about watching, but seriously; it was just a mother feeding her child, quite literally the most natural thing in the world.

  “Don’t let Melissa fool you,” Jeannie piped up. “She got more than that. I was watching from across the street in the car so Oliver could sleep in his car seat, and even from there I could see Melissa was great. She ran into the lieutenant outside the station, and I couldn’t hear, but when she seemed to be having some trouble getting help, Melissa even pretended to tear up at one point, so the lieutenant brought her inside and gave her whatever information she could.”

  I looked at my daughter. “You teared up?” I asked.

  “Not really,” Liss said. “I just sort of sniffed a little when she said she didn’t have time for this and looked around like I couldn’t figure out what to do. So Lieutenant McElone asked me if I needed a tissue, and I said I didn’t have one.”

  “Which no doubt made her think I’m a bad mother,” I suggested.

  “You’re missing the point,” Jeannie interrupted. “Melissa needed to talk to the lieutenant, and she got to talk to the lieutenant.”‘

  I had been missing the point. I knelt down, although not as much as I used to, and looked my daughter in the eye. “Jeannie’s right,” I said. “I haven’t been giving you enough credit. You did great.”

  “How do you know?” Melissa, who could make Jack Bauer talk if necessary, smirked at me. “You haven’t heard what I found out.”

  “Speak.”

  She actually reached into her backpack and pulled out a notebook, which had “Language Arts” scrawled on the cover. She opened it to a page and read from notes she’d taken when talking to McElone. “First of all, Lawrence Laurentz has no criminal record. Neither does Melvin Brookman.”

  “That is a relief,” Paul said to me.

  I nodded. “Yes,” I said.

  “Yes, what?” Jeannie asked.

  Melissa’s eyes were flashing me a warning I no longer needed. I spun on my heel. “Yes, that makes sense, don’t you think?”

  Jeannie shrugged as best she could while involved in her current activity. “I dunno,” she said. She was changing sides, so Paul was staring at the ceiling and probably would have stuck his head up through it if he hadn’t wanted to hear what was being said.

  Maxie laughed loudly. Of course, Jeannie didn’t hear that.

  “What else did Lieutenant McElone say?” I asked Melissa, if only to change the subject.

  “This is the interesting part,” she told me, grinning. “I didn’t even have anything to ask her after the question about Mr. Laurentz, and I was going to say thank you and go home, like you told me to do.”

  Jeannie nodded her approval. “She’s a very good girl,” she said. Melissa and I exchanged a look in which we noted that she was in fact not a four-year-old and that Jeannie should know that.

  “But…” I prompted my daughter.

  “But the lieutenant said she’d followed up on the medical examiner’s report on Mr. Laurentz because you had made her curious,” Melissa continued. I noticed Paul going immediately into his Sherlock Holmes stance, standing straight up and cocking an eyebrow in anticipation. “And she said there had been something odd about the report but not the one from the doctor.”

  “There was another report?” I asked. Paul nodded; he’d been expecting that there would have been.

  “Because Mr. Laurentz died alone, the police had to come and take him away, and that’s why there was an autopsy,” Melissa said, seeming to recite the words by rote but closely checking her notebook for accuracy. “So the officer who came to his house wrote a report and filed it.”

  “And…?” There had to be more to it than that. A burned-out toaster in the bathtub, perhaps? The smell of scorched toast in the air?

  “He didn’t find anything unusual,” Melissa said.

  I waited. “That’s it?” I asked. “What did the lieutenant say was odd about the report?”

  “The fact that it was filed at all,” Liss answered. “It was…” She struggled to remember the grown-up term. “Standard procedure, she said, but there was a lot more detail, like the officer filing it thought there was something to report. But Lieutenant McElone read the whole thing, she said, and it all pointed to Mr. Laurentz dying of…natural causes.”

  That wasn’t much. “That’s really good, honey,” I told my daughter. “You did a terrific job.”

  Melissa looked disappointed. She knows when an adult is patronizing her.

  “Wait!” she insisted. “You didn’t let me finish. There was no toaster in the kitchen.”

  Okay. That could mean something, but it was weird. “The cops checked for a toaster? Why would they do that?”

  “An officer noticed crumbs on the countertop and a space where a toaster would be,” she said. “But there was no toaster.”

  “Excellent work,” Paul said.

  I agreed and gave Melissa a hug before pivoting toward Jeannie. “What did you find out?” I asked her. She looked up from her task—which really required more work from Oliver—and her eyes went up and to the left. Thinking.

  “Not a lot. I talked to Patricia McVale,” Jeannie answered. “Goes by ‘Patty.’ She said she knew and worked with Larry at the Basie, but thought he was kind of a pain, didn’t talk to him much. Didn’t even know he was dead; thought he’d just been fired.” Jeannie saw that Oliver had fallen asleep and started to clean up.

  “So not much we can use,” I thought aloud.

  Jeannie shrugged. “Patty said she heard from someone she worked with that Lawrence was a snitch who got people fired, and she had thought he’d just been gotten back.”

  I considered. “Maybe he had,” I said. “It�
��s secondhand information, anyway.”

  Paul said, “Melissa, I’m going to have your mom ask you whether Lieutenant McElone told her who the report said had called the police about Mr. Laurentz’s death. Who discovered the body?”

  I relayed the question for Jeannie’s sake. “I have it here,” Melissa answered, rifling through her notes. “I know the lieutenant said to tell you…Here!”

  “Who was it?” I asked.

  “Somebody named Penny Fields,” Melissa answered. “Did Mr. Laurentz have a girlfriend?”

  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.

  He smiled.

  “You’re really progressing, Alison,” he said, every inch the proud parent. “There was barely a question left unasked, and you reacted to everything they said with an eye toward the investigation and not the emotion of the moment. I’m very proud of you.”