Murray sounded honestly confused. “You wanted me to plow even though there was nothing on the ground?” he asked. “That would’ve damaged my plow, Alison.”
“I know! I was the one who told you that!” I honked my horn, but I’m not sure what message I was sending at that point.
“Well, then, what did you want me to do?” Murray said.
“Exactly what you did,” I answered. “You did everything right. Except then you sent me a bill for it, and that’s the part I have a problem with.” The Oklahoma truck had now passed me on the right, so I switched lanes to try to pass the Pennsylvanian.
And the second I moved, it picked up speed like a jackrabbit and disappeared ahead of me. Four more cars passed me on the left while I was stuck between Tom Joad and his load of whatever it is Oklahomans need imported.
“I’m in business, Alison. I always send a bill when I do work for somebody.”
I wondered if this conversation was taking place in some alternate universe where what Murray said made sense and I simply needed to adjust. “You didn’t do any work for me, Murray. You came to my house, didn’t do anything and left. How can you charge me two hundred dollars for that?”
Once there was finally room in the left lane, I switched back. And a guy in a blue Honda Civic immediately started tailgating me. Now I was the car going too slowly in the passing lane. This was the kind of week I was having. And it was only Sunday.
But at least I seemed to be making some headway with Murray. “Ooooooh,” he said. “I see where you’re going. Okay, I can fix that.”
“Great. I knew I could count on you, Murray.” I sped up to the New Jersey speed limit, and so did the Honda tailgating me. On my right, once again, the truck from where the wind comes sweeping down the plain.
“I’ll cut it back to a hundred and fifty and send you a new bill,” Murray said. “Thanks for calling, Alison.” He hung up.
“Great. I…what?” But he was gone.
The only plus was that I was ready to pull off the highway. Of course, so was the truck from Oklahoma.
When I finally reached Janine’s house, Melissa said good-bye to her friends as though they would be separated for years and not just until school began the next morning. Hugs were tight, tears were choked back and promises to call were made that, unlike similar ones in the adult world, would be kept.
Then she got into the car and switched conversational gears with the ease of an Indy 500 driver coasting down a suburban street. “What’s new on the case?” she asked. “Have we found out anything about the ME’s report?”
It was at that moment I decided I wanted my ten-year-old daughter—not my partner in detection—back. “Stop,” I said. “Tell me about the party.”
Melissa looked at me oddly but clearly decided to humor her mother, who was going senile before her very eyes. “Janine got an iPad for her birthday!” she began, and that was just scratching the surface. Apparently Kate, Janine’s mother, was a closet heiress—the showering of gifts Melissa described would have set me back six months on my mortgage.
“That’s some haul,” I told her when she took a breath, no doubt anticipating her chance to describe more presents.
“Well, Janine’s kind of sad,” she answered. “Her grandpa died a few weeks ago.”
“Oh, that’s too bad,” I said, thinking that expensive gifts probably weren’t the best option when dealing with grief—but then again, they’re fun to get. “Want me to go and see if he’s hanging around her house?”
“I could do it myself if I knew where he was,” Liss pointed out. “If he’s a ghost now, that is.” Not everyone who passes away goes through that stage, we’d discovered.
It had never occurred to me before. “Liss, how many of your friends know you can see ghosts?” Melissa’s ability had become evident to some classmates right after we’d moved into the guesthouse, but Liss had some new friends now, and I didn’t know how much of a reputation she’d developed. It could be a potential problem, if a bunch of fifth-graders started telling their parents how my daughter can communicate with the deceased. It’s an icebreaker at PTA meetings, surely, but eventually the conversation would turn awkward.
“Just Wendy,” Melissa said. “And she won’t tell anybody. She likes it being a secret with me and her.” Wendy was trustworthy, I knew, and her mother and father were easygoing. Not so easygoing that they’d understand talking to ghosts, probably, but it made me feel better, anyway.
“Janine said her grandpa knew Grampa,” Liss added.
It was a major effort not to slam on the brakes. “What? He knew my father?” It was possible she was referring to The Swine’s father, who was still alive and disapproving of me somewhere in Atlanta, I thought. We didn’t hear from him much. Why get in touch with your own granddaughter, after all?
“Yeah,” Liss answered casually. “She said he was Grampa’s doctor. Does that make sense?”
“Possibly. He had lots of doctors, especially in the last few months,” I thought out loud. “What kind of doctor was he?”
Melissa shrugged. “I don’t know. A doctor.” Kids think all doctors are the same and can treat anything. That’s because even when they’re ten, nobody stops them from watching House.
We were getting near the house. “What’s Janine’s last name?” I asked.
“Markowitz,” she answered. “Did Grampa have a Dr. Markowitz?”
“I’m not sure, but I’ll ask your grandmother,” I told her. “I don’t remember a Dr. Markowitz.”
“How about Wells?” Liss said. “Her real name is Janine Wells-Markowitz, but she doesn’t really use the part from her mom.”
It took me a second to remember the name. Dr. Wells. My father’s oncologist.
The one who was actually in his hospital room when he died.
Twenty
Sunday
The box office at the Count Basie Theatre didn’t open until noon on Sunday, so there were stops that Morgan suggested I make before I went to talk to Penny. First on the list was the Chronicle office, where Phyllis had texted to say she had some intelligence to convey. Even Phyllis texts these days.
“That must have been some musical,” she chuckled. “Seven people got arrested, and two of them spent the night behind bars.”
I almost spit out some of the Dunkin’ Donuts coffee I’d bought for us both on the way over, to fend off her homemade brew. “A night in jail? Over a bunch of sixty-year-olds taking their clothes off for thirty seconds at the end of act one?” I’d done some research into Hair since I’d spoken to her last.
Phyllis nodded with a raised eyebrow while she sipped from her coffee. Black, of course. “I know it looks extreme, and it was, for the charges. Most of them paid a fine and left. But two”—she referred to notes written on the back of a W. B. Mason receipt—“a Frances Walters and a Jerome Rasmussen, were held overnight. I guess they were more naked than everybody else or something.”
“Were the charges different for those two?” The two New Old Thespians I already had questions about? Interesting coincidence. Or a disturbing one.
Phyllis followed the chain of her notes from the office supply receipt to a brown paper bag with a grease stain on the bottom. “Nope. Lewdness, public indecency, disorderly conduct. No resisting arrest, nothing interesting out of context.”
I chewed on the bagel I’d gotten with the coffee. Dunkin’ Donuts does many things well, but bagels do not happen to fall into that category. This was a kaiser roll with a hole in the middle. “So why did those two have to stay in a cell overnight when the others didn’t?” I wondered aloud.
“That’s something to ask Officer…Robert P. Warrell,” Phyllis answered, checking a second copy of an advertising invoice.
“Nothing to do with me. I don’t sentence them,” Officer Robert P. Warrell told me. “I arrest them and book them, and the judge decides who has to stay behind bars.”
I’d driven directly to Monroe Township from Phyllis’s office, and luckil
y, Warrell, who had been the arresting officer at the performance of Hair, was indeed on duty this Sunday morning. Even luckier, he wasn’t out on patrol; he was finishing paperwork in the squad room and agreed to talk to me when I told the desk sergeant it was about the arrests at Cedar Crest a number of months ago. Clearly, that particular event has made an impression, since even now, mention of it provoked a decent amount of stifled laughter at police headquarters. But laughs or no, I figured it could be a motive in Lawrence Laurentz’s death, so I was here as the private investigator asking Officer Warrell questions—or as the straight man (straight woman?) in a vaudeville act for which the officer was the unintentional comedian. It was all a question of perspective.
Officer Warrell, it turned out, was maybe twenty-five on a good day, very tall, very blond, and very serious about his work. He was the only cop in the room who didn’t seem to find the—pardon the expression—bust funny.
“So they saw a judge?” I asked, doing my best to treat the matter with equal sobriety. “The people you arrested that night were arraigned right away?” I had the recorder on in my tote bag, but I was taking notes on a reporter’s notebook, anyway, just to give the impression that I had an idea of what I was doing. The officer looked me straight in the eye without needing to consult an arrest report.
“It was a Thursday night. That’s municipal court night. The judge was already here, so the arraignments were held immediately. None of the defendants had hired private counsel; most of them just wanted to go home, so they paid their fines and left.”
“What alerted you to the…problem, anyway?” I asked. “You had to get there awfully quick to make arrests, no?”
Officer Warrell’s gaze never wavered. “We had gotten advance warning that there might be an illegal element to the performance that evening,” he said. “So I was positioned outside the clubhouse auditorium in case there was a problem.”
“A problem,” I echoed. At least Morgan Henderson had an excuse.
“The law is on the books,” the officer said. “I’m paid to enforce it.”
“Who gave the advance warning?” I asked. “Who ratted out the New Old Thespians for trying to be hippies?”
“The tip was anonymous,” Warrell said. “I don’t know who it might have been.”
“Male or female?”
“I didn’t take the call,” he answered.
I was starting to think that it would take a graduate of dental school, some laughing gas and a pair of very strong pliers to get any information out of Officer Warrell, but I could hear Paul’s voice in my conscience telling me not to give up. I backtracked a bit. “So you arrested seven people that night, and five of them paid their fines and left,” I reminded him. “Two of them were detained overnight.”
“Yes,” he nodded. “Frances Walters and Jerome Rasmussen.” Truly, his ability to recall the incident without so much as a Post-it note reminder was impressive.
“I don’t understand. Why were some fined but others put in jail overnight?” I asked.
Officer Warrell did not blink. “As I said, Ms. Kerby, the arresting officer does not decide on the sentence. The judge decided they should be detained, and so they were.”
“Were you in the courtroom when they were all arraigned?” I asked him. They say lawyers should never ask a question when they don’t know the answer in advance. I would have made a lousy lawyer.
“Of course,” the officer replied. “I was required in case I had to testify about the circumstances of the arrests.”
“So did the judge say why he was keeping Ms. Walters and Mr. Rasmussen but not the others?”
For once, Officer Warrell hesitated before answering. But after a moment, he said, “Yes. He said there had been allegations made that there might be other charges pending against those two, and he did not want them to leave the county until that matter was resolved.”
“Other charges?” What the hell did that mean? “What other charges?”
“The judge said an officer of the court had been advised those two might have had some connection with the distribution of a controlled substance.”
There was a long moment that passed silently. “Drugs? Someone thought they were dealing drugs?” Retired septuagenarians Frances and Jerry as drug dealers? This thing just kept getting weirder.
“Prescription drugs. Specifically sildenafil.”
That was a new one on me. “Sildenafil?” I repeated.
“Better known as Viagra.”
“You’re kidding,” I blurted, before I remembered to whom I was talking.
“No, ma’am,” Officer Warrell responded.
“And the tip about their dealing came from…”
“An anonymous source,” he said.
“It’s very simple,” Penny Fields said. “I really don’t understand what all the fuss is about.”
I’d spent some time on the phone with Phyllis Coates trying to absorb what I’d just been told, but Phyllis was too busy laughing to be much help. Illegal Viagra? How much weirder was this case going to get? The only thing to do was push on, so I arrived just as the box office at the Count Basie Theatre opened at noon, figuring I’d have just enough time to talk to Penny and crack the case before I had to pick up Melissa at Janine’s house at one. If I hit all the traffic lights.
That was the plan, anyway.
“You told me the last time I was here that you didn’t know Lawrence Laurentz very well, that he wasn’t too social and that he was condescending, but you were especially clear that you didn’t know him very well,” I reminded her. “Then I do the tiniest amount of digging and find out that you were the person who called EMS when you discovered his body, in his bathtub, at his house. If that’s what you call not knowing someone, what’s your definition of knowing someone well?”
(By the way, I had gotten Mom to ask Lawrence about that, and his comment—which I deciphered from one of Mom’s vowel-free texts—was, “How would I know who found my body?” A detective’s dream client.)
Penny pivoted from her computer screen, which displayed a seating chart for an upcoming Micky Dolenz concert, and gave me her best intimidating glare. It was surprisingly effective for a woman about five inches shorter than I am. She had panache.
“And you told me you were here about some inheritance issue, that Larry had bequeathed someone here some money in his will,” she pointed out. “Now you’re here asking questions about how I found his body and that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with an inheritance. What’s your definition of the truth?”
She was good.
“I’m a private investigator and I’m looking for information about Lawrence Laurentz’s death,” I said. “That’s all true. I’ll show you the license again if you like. Now, please, what were you doing at his home the night he died?”
“It’s embarrassing,” she said. That I actually believed, based on the somewhat nauseated expression she was affecting. Had she thought she was the mysterious person who was mentioned in his (as far as I knew, nonexistent) will? (Come to think of it, I should ask Lawrence about his will.) Was that why she was so upset?
“It will be held in the strictest of confidence, assuming I’m not required to give information to the police,” I assured her. I’d have to ask Paul when the law stated I might have to tell the cops something, but I did mean what I’d told Penny.
She turned back to the computer, ostensibly to check on the sales figures for the former Monkee, but I could see a little tightness around her mouth and she sniffed just a touch as she turned. “I was there to fire him,” she said.
Well, that certainly wasn’t what I’d expected. “You were firing him? Why?”
“He was causing problems with the part-time staff,” Penny said, doing her best not to look at me. What was upsetting her so? Shame at having been about to fire a guy who died? Embarrassment over having seen him in the bathtub? Serious concern over Micky Dolenz’s career? “He would…report other box office personnel to me for various infracti
ons. People got nervous when he was around. He was creating a bad atmosphere in the office. I had to let him go.”
All that was consistent with the mosaic I’d been building of Lawrence in my mind. “Any reason why that night in particular?” I asked.
“I didn’t want to do it in front of the other employees,” she answered. “And I felt I owed it to him to do it in person. That was the only night that month we were dark, with no show here, so that was the night I went.”
“You had his address from employee records,” I thought aloud.
Penny turned back toward me and nodded. “I went up and saw his car parked in the space marked for his unit,” she said. “I rang the bell a few times, and he didn’t answer. I tried calling his cell phone, but he didn’t pick that up, either. I could see there were lights on in the house. So I went around to the back and walked up to the deck to see if he was in the kitchen. The French doors were open. I knocked on the glass, but again there was no answer. And I thought I heard water running.”
“So you went in,” I guessed.
“When I saw water dripping down from the kitchen ceiling. And knew that couldn’t be good. So yeah, I went in. I probably should have called the police right away, but, you know, I was just thinking there was a faucet left on or something.” Penny closed her eyes.
I really wanted to let her avoid the memory of what she found upstairs, but Paul would berate me later for not thinking like a detective and assuming that everything everyone tells you is a lie until you can prove it’s not. So I fought the temptation to cut to the chase and instead said, “So you went inside and…” Sometimes you have to lead the witness into telling you the story.
She nodded, a little more violently than it seemed she’d intended. “I followed the sound of the water running. I called for Larry a couple of times, but of course there wasn’t any answer.” There would be no point in trying to confirm any of this with Lawrence later on; people don’t become ghosts, at least not conscious, alert ghosts, immediately after they die. Paul has told me—and we’ve confirmed it a few other times—that it takes a few days before memory and cognition kick in. So Lawrence wouldn’t know if Penny’s story was true or not.
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