Night of the Living Deed

by E. J. Copperman

  “It is?” I’d learned in the past two days that George Washington was among the people who had once had designs on my house; that my real estate agent, Terry Wright, was dead from what seemed to be a really coincidental heart attack; and that Kerin Murphy had taken something from Terry’s office and given it to a mysterious woman. I still didn’t know anything about either of my original dilemmas: who had killed Maxie and Paul, and who was leaving me threatening e-mails. “How is what making sense?”

  I interrupted the conversation to take a cell phone call from Jeannie, who wanted to know every possible detail about my date with Ned. I told her I was in the middle of a repair—because I was always in the middle of a repair—and that I’d call her back. Which I intended to do, in a couple of days.

  When I hung up, Paul was engaged in trying to move a quarter, which I’d left on the radiator cover at his request. He had told me it took intense concentration for him to move physical objects (unlike Maxie, who seemed able to move objects with little to no difficulty; your classic bratty poltergeist), and he wanted to become more proficient at it. So his answer came after a long pause, and in gasps.

  “The part about . . . George Washington . . . doesn’t make any sense yet,” he began. “But it does point to the idea that this property is more valuable than you or Maxie might have expected, and that could be a motive for murder. It’s obvious.”

  “To you, maybe.” I wanted to paint a narrow mauve stripe under the white molding on the ceiling, and I had put up blue painter’s masking tape at very careful one-inch parallels to the molding in order to achieve it. I was using a thin brush to get the color where I wanted it and nowhere else.

  “Simple.” Paul flicked at the quarter, but his finger went through the wooden radiator cover and disappeared. “Damn.” The hand came back out. “Someone wants to get their . . . hands on this house, possibly for a reason that has historical . . . implications. . . .” He bit his lower lip and stopped talking. Then, instead of stabbing at the quarter, he moved his finger slowly toward it. “They tried to scare . . . Maxie out, but she wouldn’t go, and so the next . . . tactic was more violent, and I was . . . careless so I . . . paid the price, as well.”

  It was the first time I’d heard him refer to himself so casually in the past tense, and the moment sent a shiver up my spine.

  I decided to lighten the moment. “So tell me,” I asked, changing the subject. “What made you become a private eye?”

  “Private eye?” the dead man asked me. “I was an independent investigator.”

  “Okay, so why? A nice boy like you. You couldn’t be an accountant, like your brother Irving?”

  “Ma,” he said, playing along with the joke, “you always liked Irving better than me. You got him a new bike, and I had to keep the tricycle until I got my driver’s license.”

  His finger made contact with the quarter, and it moved about two inches across the surface of the radiator box. Paul smiled and exhaled. “There.”

  “Nice work,” I said. “If I ever need a quarter moved, I know the guy to call. Now, come on: why an ‘independent investigator’?”

  “I started off as a consultant with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Toronto,” Paul said, once again working on the quarter, this time attempting to pick it up with his thumb and forefinger. “I worked on some profiling—my background was in psychology—and I helped make some arrests. But I wanted to come to America, and I made my way down through New York State until I got here. I talked to the state police about what I’d been doing for the RCMP, but they had no use for it, and I was tired of wandering. I met this sergeant at the state police who suggested getting an investigator’s license, and since it was the only thing I was ever good at, I figured I’d go ahead. Worked for a year at an agency in Camden, and then I moved here to begin on my own. And just when I was getting started . . .” He stopped, sighed, and then looked at me. “Right now, let’s concentrate on figuring out who’s after you, and how to keep you alive.”

  “Could it be Kerin Murphy?” I asked. “I’d really like it to be Kerin Murphy.”

  “Why?”

  “I already don’t like her.”

  “Well, she certainly is involved in something . . .” he said. He made another grab at the quarter and missed.

  “It’s better when you move more slowly,” I told him, pointing at the quarter with my paintbrush. “When you grab at it, you always go through.”

  Paul looked at me a moment, then looked at his hand, as if that was going to tell him something, and nodded. I guess it did tell him something. He turned his attention again to the quarter.

  “Terry Wright might have been the person sending the e-mails to you and Maxie and making threatening phone calls to the Prestons,” he said, moving his hand very slowly toward the coin.

  I needed to move the ladder. “Oh please,” I said. “Terry sold us the property—why would she want us gone? Plus, she was as threatening as a piece of angel food cake.”

  “Kerin Murphy, or someone she knew, was threatened enough to steal Terry’s address book, or appointment calendar.” Paul had a point. Paul always had a damn point, and it always made things more complicated for me. He stared intently at the quarter. “I’ll have to ask some other ghosts about the interaction with objects,” he said to himself.

  “You can talk to other ghosts besides Maxie?” I asked. “How can you do that if you can’t leave the property?”

  Paul stopped and considered. “It’s hard to explain,” he said. “Occasionally, other people who have died are sort of . . . available to us. It’s not just thought projection, but it’s less than talking. You can sort of send out questions, and you get answers, but you don’t always know where they’re coming from.”

  “Sounds like Facebook,” I said. “Wait a minute.” I paused, brush in mid-air. “Doesn’t that mean you can just find and ask Terry what happened to her? Will she be back at the real estate office?”

  “No, everybody’s circumstances seem to be unique to them,” Paul said, not looking at me. “Not all ghosts are tied to one place, and not all people who die appear as ghosts. Terry Wright seems to be one of those; I would know if she was available to talk to. Some ghosts can move around and some can’t. In the same way that Maxie can move things easily, but it’s much more difficult for me. I don’t know why—maybe I’ll know more when I’ve been dead longer.”

  “So how do we proceed from here?” I asked. “Any other dead detectives you can ask on the Ghosternet?”

  “No.” Paul looked annoyed, but he pushed on. “So . . . to make a plan, we need to operate on a theory. And the only one we have now is that Kerin and someone she’s working with are the people trying to scare everybody out of this house. So we assume it’s because they want this house or something in it. Maybe the best way to get them to stop trying to scare you out of the house is to convince them . . .” His hand moved down, into the radiator cover, and then came up through its top, and when it did, the quarter came up with it. He held it aloft. “Aha!”

  “Convince them of what?”

  Paul beamed, looking at the quarter, which he moved from one hand to the next, very slowly. “Convince them that whatever it is they want, you have it.”

  Twenty-seven

  “I didn’t think I’d hear from you again,” Adam Morris said. He walked from the door, where he’d let me in, to his desk, and gestured that I should sit in the low-slung leather chair in front of it. Indeed, I hadn’t expected him to be in his office on a Saturday—I’d expected to get voice mail—but there he was, plotting to take over the world, or at least part of the Jersey Shore.

  I chose the stiffer, but less-cruel-to-animals, fabric-covered seat a few feet away. I pulled it to the desk and sat down. This was the first stop on Paul’s prescribed tour-o-suspects (which meant my reinterviewing everyone, in person this time, including the planning board), so I’d have to pace myself. No sense showing any hostility yet.

  Adam’s assistant, Bianca, (n
o doubt thrilled to be working on the weekend) was the usual woman in her early-to-mid-twenties with the kind of lovely face that looked like you could have seen it on a dozen other lovely women the same day. Adam had shown a less-than-genial side of himself when he hollered at her through the door that he wasn’t taking any visitors without appointments, and then, just like last time over the phone, had changed his mind when he heard I was here to discuss 123 Seafront. My name wouldn’t open any doors in this town, but my address apparently would.

  His office was attractive in an institutional way. There wasn’t anything the least bit personal in it—no photographs of family on the desk, no pictures or diplomas on the walls. A few paintings, mostly of buildings Adam had developed.

  Adam himself was equally attractive, and equally impersonal. He was a handsome, dark-haired man whose face I would be at a loss to describe ten minutes after I left.

  “Well, I said I’d be thinking about your offer on my house,” I told him. “And I’m here to give you my decision. Are you still interested in buying it?”

  “Possibly.” Adam Morris was nothing if not a keen negotiator. “It would depend on the price.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, but I’m not interested in selling at any price,” I said, and waited for the eruption.

  There was none.

  Paul had been emphatic in his advice that I not “play games” with Adam, that I stick to the script Paul had worked out, but seriously, what fun is there in doing something if you know how every part of it will go before you start? Especially if you can irritate a man you instinctively don’t like? The rules were already going by the wayside.

  “I’m sorry to hear it,” Adam answered, showing not one second of disappointment or anger. “I would have liked to include that property in the development, but I guess we’ll have to work around it.”

  “The development would continue anyway, even without my house?”

  Adam nodded. “Oh yes, absolutely,” he said. “We’d always planned on continuing the project either way. It just would have been easier, and more aesthetically pleasing, to include that piece of property. Too bad we can’t.”

  Visions of condos surrounding my quaint little guesthouse—condos whose owners would probably rent them out during the summer months as vacation homes—once again filled my head. I could actually hear my income projections hit the ground and keep tunneling. I pictured Melissa and myself living in a homemade tent on Seafoam Avenue next to a sign reading, “Will See Ghosts for Food.” I could picture all the happy vacationers going by with boogie boards and beach umbrellas toward their rented new-construction condos, while Melissa and I were bundled up in unseasonable overcoats, scarves and hats with earflaps.

  “Are you all right?” he asked. I must have seemed like I was going to pass out. But only because I was.

  “I don’t know. “What . . . how much . . . where is the land you’ve already acquired?” I asked.

  Adam stood up and walked to a floor-to-ceiling wood cabinet. Then he opened the doors and reached in for a tube. He walked back to the desk, watching my face the whole time.

  “This is a plan of the development,” he said, pulling a rolled-up map from the tube. “Normally, I’d show this to you on a screen, but I wasn’t set up for a presentation when my assistant said you were here.” In fact, I’d heard him yell something quite rude to poor Bianca about how she’d better get the A/V system working or she’d be looking for work soon.

  “Sorry for the intrusion,” I said.

  “Not at all.” It was a reflexive reaction; no matter what Adam Morris thought of my busting into his office, he’d be civil about it. You can’t trust people like that. “Now, here’s the section where the townhomes will be built.”

  He pointed to an area on the map where the Atlantic Ocean met Harbor Haven. In other words, where I lived. “There will be two hundred and eighty-seven units built within two years after we break ground this coming March. That’s phase one.”

  I noticed a large open area just a little south of the map’s center. “Is that my property?” I asked.

  “That’s right!” Adam said, sounding as proud as a parent whose child had just recited the alphabet for the first time. He reached up and dropped a transparent plastic overlay on the map. “And this is what we had planned it would look like with your land included in the project.”

  I looked. On my land, which currently held the old Victorian and a tremendous backyard on its two acres, Adam Morris’s master plan had envisioned six new buildings. “What are those?” I asked. “A clubhouse or something for the condos?”

  “No, that’s phase two,” Adam answered, doing everything but puffing out his chest with pride. “Those are six single-family luxury dwellings, including marble floors in the foyers, twenty-foot ceilings in the entrance halls, wet bars in the family rooms, exercise rooms and home theaters.”

  My stomach was starting to move around involuntarily. “And just out of curiosity, what would the price of each of those . . . dwellings be when they’re finished?”

  Adam’s face became serious, as he was about to discuss a matter of sad tidings, indeed. “Well, you understand that the real estate market here in New Jersey has suffered in recent times, just like the rest of the country.” The man spoke in press releases. It must have been exhausting to have to think like that.

  “I understand,” I said. “How much?”

  “Probably about two-seven.”

  Wow—the market had been hit pretty hard if shorefront property like that was going for such prices. “Two hundred seven thousand?” I asked, just to clarify.

  He laughed. “No, Alison—two million, seven hundred thousand dollars.”

  I don’t remember the next few seconds. I imagine I blinked a number of times; I’m prone to blinking uncontrollably when I have to process information that insane. “Two-point-seven million dollars?” I said. “For one-sixth of my property?”

  “That’s right,” Adam answered. “But I’ll tell you what—if we settle for a price on your property now, we might just be able to let you have one of those homes at our cost. And with what we’re willing to pay for what you own now, you could just about live in it for free. What do you say, Alison?”

  It was dizzying—it was almost even attractive. The idea of a brand-new, state-of-the-art (albeit cookie-cutter McMansion) luxury house, in exchange for the toil and marketing nightmare that a guesthouse surrounded by new-construction town houses was going to be—that was pretty enticing. Not having to make mortgage payments. Saving for college. Getting a job back at the HouseCenter and still making ends meet without the headaches of running a full-time business.

  Not worrying about the hole in the plaster wall.

  Adam Morris must have taken my hesitation for a sign of possible interest, because he added, “Perhaps we could discuss it over dinner.” He smiled very pleasantly. Smooth.

  But Paul had told me to make Adam think I had something he wanted, and I was going to see it through, damn it. “I really can’t, Adam,” I said. And then I did my best to smile a cat-post-canary-dinner smile. “I’m afraid I’ve discovered something more valuable in the house as it is.”

  Adam Morris’s head swiveled with a velocity usually reserved for Italian sports cars. “Really!” he said. “And what is that?”

  “I’m not at liberty to tell you,” I told him, leaving out the truth, which was that I had no idea what I was talking about. “But suffice it to say, I’m not in a position to sell the property until I can realize the value of my finding. And I expect that value to be quite high.” Bluff of the century.

  His eyes narrowed to slits, but the smooth nature of his voice never wavered. And he smiled his sharky smile as convincingly as he could.

  “Isn’t that good for you,” Adam said.

  I left his office grinning like the winner of the Power-ball lottery. And as soon as I cleared the doors from Adam Morris’s suites, I made a beeline for the ladies’ room, went inside and threw up.


  I had barely managed to get myself into presentable shape (and into my Volvo station wagon) and make it home before I came under siege from an unexpected front.

  My mother swept into the house without having mentioned she’d be visiting. “It’s coming together so well!” she said. “You’re a genius.”

  “Thanks, Mom. Why are you here?” It wasn’t supposed to come out that fast, but Maxie was changing clothes—literally, different clothing would appear and then be replaced by something else—in the room and otherwise trying to distract me as I polished the brass stair rail.

  “Do I need a reason to see what my little girl has been up to?” my mother asked. Maxie actually guffawed. It was not a pretty sight.

  I love my mother, but Loretta Kerby has always been able to embarrass me more easily and more deeply than any other person on the planet. I make a daily vow not to do that to Melissa, one I regularly break. But at least I’m aware of it.

  “Her little girl,” Maxie crooned. “Oh, that’s wonderful.”

  “I’m not a little girl anymore, Mom,” I said, and to prove it, I put my mask back on and returned to the brass polish. You can’t be too careful.

  “No matter how old you get, you’ll always be my little girl,” she answered. This time I couldn’t blame her; I had left that door far too wide-open for her not to walk through. “But I’m actually here to deliver a package that came to my house addressed to you.”

  “A package?” I hadn’t lived in my mother’s house for more than twelve years. Who would send me a package there? “Why are you getting packages for me?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered. “But it has your name on it.”

  Mom reached into her backpack and pulled out a small box covered in brown paper, like it had been wrapped in a paper grocery bag.

  It was, indeed, addressed to me, in care of my mother.

  Maxie changed from a pair of ripped jeans, thigh-high boots and a t-shirt that read “AC/DC” into a black leather jacket over black tights and a top with black-and-white horizontal stripes. She looked like a French biker mime.