Spouse on Haunted Hill

by E. J. Copperman

  The only murder on my mind right now was not Maurice DuBois’s, but I had to soldier on. I could figure out just how to kill The Swine and get away with it later after I got home. Still, I did note that my teeth did not wish to part when I squeezed “All that aside, why here today?” through them.

  “She’s talking about you,” Maxie reminded me. She was eyeing the racks again and I almost told her to go ahead just to get her out of the way, but the thought of the poor kids working the counter dealing with flying donuts and having to reorganize everything won over my desire to make Maxie go away.

  “Well, I didn’t know at first.” Susannah clearly thought she was telling a fascinating story, natural-born raconteur that she was, but all I wanted was an answer to my question. “But it turned out when I got to the other coffee place that what he wanted was to give me something.”

  I’d bet he wanted to give her something, I thought, but was it something she could bring with her? “What did he give you?” I said. Without wincing. I thought that was something of a triumph.

  “I’m not sure I should tell you.” Susannah was clearly a tease. If she’d really wanted to keep the information between herself and The Swine, she wouldn’t have mentioned this mysterious gift at all. I used the sit-there-and-wait strategy and it paid off as it often did. “But you’re a PI and everything, so I guess it’s all right.” Interesting logic, but who was I to argue?

  She reached down to the floor for her very professional briefcase and pulled it up onto the table. It was a small table—Dunkin’ Donuts is not built for luxury—so I had to do some fancy maneuvers with my hot chocolate to keep it from spilling (mostly drinking all that was left), but I managed.

  Susannah worked the latches on the briefcase and opened it toward herself. That didn’t do much for me, but I assumed she was going to show me what was there. Except she took a long moment to admire it. “Isn’t it a beautiful briefcase?” she asked.

  The briefcase? That was the big surprise? “Um . . . yes, it’s absolutely lovely,” I said. Hardly the gift that says you’re the one, but according to Jeannie, one wasn’t the number The Swine had in mind anyway.

  New text from Jeannie: “He stopped at a movie theater. Can’t go in with the kids. R-rated.”

  “You know,” Susannah went on. “Originally Steven wanted me to throw the briefcase in the Shark River.”

  I was midway through a text to Jeannie asking for a ride home when that registered. “He gave you a briefcase and wanted you to throw it in a river?” Even for The Swine that was weird behavior.

  Susannah laughed. “I know, right? But I convinced him to let me keep it. I just have to throw what’s in the case into the river.”

  It wasn’t a question I really wanted to ask at this point, but Paul would certainly insist. “What’s in the briefcase?”

  Maxie, who had maneuvered herself to a station above Susannah’s head, put her hand to her mouth. “Wow,” she said. It took a lot to impress Maxie to that level of noneloquence.

  Susannah turned the briefcase around and showed me its interior.

  It was a completely standard, ordinary briefcase except for its lining, which appeared to have been stuffed in crudely, perhaps in a hurry. The lining was made of foam rubber and filled the interior of the case from edge to edge, making it impossible for anything to rattle inside when the case was being moved around. At the center of the lining was a cutout, again seemingly done in a hurry, perhaps with a sharp knife. It cradled the real contents of the briefcase snugly, again to prevent any noisy rattling or other accident.

  That was a handgun.

  “Steven said if I threw the gun into the Shark River, I could keep the case,” Susannah said.

  My eyes must have been the size of hubcaps. My voice was suddenly hoarse. “Did you . . .” I cleared my throat. “Did you touch this?”

  “I touched the case. Not the gun. I’m not stupid.”

  That was clearly open for debate, but it simplified matters. I looked Susannah in the eye. “Can you give me a ride?” I asked. “I need to see a friend.”

  Seventeen

  “You didn’t tell me your friend was a cop,” Susannah Nesbit said.

  That was true; I figured if I mentioned a desire to see Lieutenant McElone in the Harbor Haven Police Station, Susannah might decide I didn’t need the ride so much and bolt for the door. Jeannie could have picked me up, but I was certain the lieutenant would want to test the gun and, if it was relevant, talk to Susannah.

  I wasn’t paying much attention because I was texting Jeannie to send me the address of the theater where The Swine had stopped for his curious matinee, and which movie he was seeing. That last part was just for my own amusement.

  Yes, I knew that the gun we’d brought McElone could possibly implicate The Swine in Maurice DuBois’s murder. I also knew that if it was relevant and I helped Susannah lose it in the Shark River, I would be an accomplice to the crime of destroying evidence and besides, The Swine had said I wouldn’t let him see his daughter and he deserved to go to jail just for that.

  “Would you have brought me here if I’d told you that?” I asked.

  “Of course not,” Susannah replied. “It’s just awfully dishonest of you.”

  “Pah!” That was Maxie’s version of a laugh. She was lying on her back in the middle of a heavily trafficked corridor in the police station. Maxie likes to have people walk through her as long as she’s the one coordinating it. When the living, in their blissful ignorance of the ghosts around them, pass through her unexpectedly, she tends to knock hats off heads and untie shoelaces. She looked toward the window. “I’m gonna wait outside,” she said. “Cops scare me.” And she was gone.

  Lieutenant McElone walked out of the bull pen where she worked and looked Susannah and me up and down as if deciding whether we would comfortably fit in the trunk of her police cruiser. “Come in here,” she said, pointing inside. I’d been there a number of times before, so I walked straight to McElone’s cubicle. Susannah followed me.

  But when I sat down, I saw a man behind the desk, looking at me with some consternation. From behind me I heard McElone say, “I don’t work there anymore. Come this way.” She didn’t sound amused, but then, she never does.

  I got up, apologizing to whoever that cop was sitting at McElone’s old desk, and followed Susannah and the lieutenant to a separate office off the bull pen. The door bore the nameplate “Anita McElone, Chief of Detectives.”

  She ushered us into the small office, which held a bookshelf, a desk and two uncomfortable chairs (government issue). She sat behind the desk and Susannah and I dealt with the molded plastic chairs.

  “Chief of detectives!” I said. “Wow!”

  “We have three detectives and I’m one of them,” McElone said as she settled behind her pathologically neat desk. “All it means is that I’m reading two more cops’ paperwork.”

  “Still,” I tried. “Are you a captain now?”

  McElone regarded me with some sharpness. “There is no change in rank with the position,” she said.

  “So you’re a lieutenant?” Susannah, clearly imbued with the ability to read, pointed to the nameplate on McElone’s desk.

  The lieutenant—since she was still that—sighed lightly. “Yes,” she said. “Now, can we please move on to something other than my rank?”

  “I take it you got back a ballistics test on the gun we brought in,” I said.

  McElone shook her head. “Just something very preliminary. A full ballistics workup will take time, but we have concluded that this gun is definitely the same caliber as the one that shot and killed Maurice DuBois outside Hanrahan’s.”

  I didn’t even ask what caliber as Paul had suggested. What was the point?

  “The thing is, the weapon’s serial number has been filed off and there are no fingerprints on it. It’s not traceable at the moment and i
t could take weeks to find out who the registered owner is, and that’s probably not the person who committed the murder because this is likely a stolen gun.”

  That wasn’t terribly unexpected, at least not to me and probably not to McElone. Susannah, on the other hand, appeared stunned. Her nostrils flared.

  “That gun killed somebody?” she coughed.

  McElone seemed confused by her amazement. “Yeah,” she said. “Why did you think he gave you a gun and asked you to throw it in the Shark River?”

  “I thought it was his way of decreasing the number of guns available in New Jersey,” Susannah said. No, really. She said that.

  The lieutenant chose not to respond, which I thought showed the kind of wisdom that had gotten her promoted to chief of detectives. “What exactly did Mr. Rendell tell you when he gave you the gun?” she asked.

  Susannah, perhaps believing there was some implication of complicity in what McElone was asking, sat back and put up her hands, palms out. “He didn’t give me the gun,” she protested. “He gave me the case.”

  “Okay.” McElone could be reasonable, especially when she clearly thought this woman wasn’t sharp enough to be conspiring with a murderer. “When he gave you the case. What did he tell you he was giving it to you for, and why did he ask you to throw it in the river?”

  Susannah put down her hands and took a breath. “Steven said the case was a gift, but he wanted me to throw it in the river because it was made of organic materials and it would nourish the fish.”

  Wow. Was I this gullible when I agreed to marry The Swine? (Don’t answer that.)

  McElone glanced at a form in front of her, which I recognized as the statement I had given her earlier. “But then you said you wanted to keep the case, so he told you to throw the gun into the river, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  McElone looked up into her eyes. “You know the gun’s not made of organic materials, don’t you?”

  “Of course not!” Susannah scoffed. “Guns are made of metal.”

  Give the little girl a lollipop.

  “That’s right,” McElone said with a straight face. “So what was the rationale for throwing it into the river?”

  “Well, like I said, I thought he wanted to keep a gun out of the hands of criminals.” Susannah was actually going to stick to that one, even given a full minute to think of something less ridiculous, like that Steven wanted to see if the gun would shoot fish outside a barrel. Susannah seemed to vacillate between a cutthroat businesswoman type and a complete and utter airhead. It was possible both were true.

  “He could have thrown it in himself,” McElone pointed out. “Why ask you to do it?”

  “It’s the kind of relationship we have,” she answered proudly. “We don’t question each other’s motives. It’s one of the things that drove him from his ex-wife, from what I hear.”

  McElone looked at me briefly and must have read my eyes. “Do you think the ex-wife is someone we should look at for the murder?” she asked. That is McElone being hilarious. She thinks.

  “That jerk isn’t smart enough to kill somebody,” Susannah replied. “Look at the husband she threw away.”

  I don’t have a blood pressure problem, which is good all the time but especially at that moment. “I’m sure she had her reasons,” I said. Like the blonde in the bikini in Malibu.

  “Ha! Don’t get me started on her!” Susannah had “met” my ex-husband four times including today and wanted to offer her dissertation on exactly what a lunatic I must have been, fueled by the information she’d gotten from The Swine himself. I scoured my mind for incriminating evidence I could possibly offer to get him jailed faster.

  “Better if we focus on the murder,” McElone said, no longer being hilarious. “Did he mention the name Maurice DuBois at any time?”

  Susannah made a “thinking” face and actually put the tip of her index finger to her chin. “No, I’d remember that one.”

  “Anyone else he’s been in business with since he got back to Jersey?” McElone asked. “Any other . . . friends he might be visiting?”

  Susannah had caught the implications in that last pause. “He doesn’t have any other friends like me,” she said sharply. That wasn’t true according to Jeannie, but Susannah apparently didn’t know that.

  “Anyone else he mentioned?” the lieutenant asked, not taking the bait.

  “He said he had a cousin Richie he was going to see today in Marlboro, but that’s all I know,” Susannah answered. “I don’t know what that was about.”

  I didn’t know about a cousin Richie, but the movie theater was in Marlboro. I cocked an eyebrow at McElone, who noticed but did not acknowledge it.

  “Why didn’t you question him about the gun?” the lieutenant asked our prime witness. “Why he had it? Why he wanted to get rid of it? Why you had to be the one to do that? Why in the river?”

  “I told you, we have a relationship based on trust.” The kind of trust one can cultivate in four meetings, most of which I was guessing involved little conversation. “I didn’t want to ruin that with a lot of questions.”

  McElone sat back in her chair and regarded Susannah with something resembling a light snarl. “Well, consider this,” she said. “You might very well be an accomplice to a capital crime. A man is dead. It’s not a real stretch to believe he was shot with the gun you were going to dispose of in the Shark River. You didn’t even bother to ask why that might be necessary, which some prosecutors would say indicates you already knew the answer. That could put you into the case before Maurice DuBois was shot, and that makes you an accessory before the fact. You could be looking at conspiracy, possibly manslaughter if not murder charges, unless you give me a reason to believe that you really didn’t have anything to do with the killing and were just trying to do a favor for a friend. So what can you tell me that will do that for you?”

  “Ooh, she has a mean side. I’ve never seen that before.” I hadn’t even seen Maxie come into the room, but there she was to my left, watching McElone with a delighted smile on her face.

  Susannah, who had entered the room either oblivious or confident—it was hard to tell—now looked downright terrified. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get just a little satisfaction out of that. A bit of sympathy, sure, but also just a tad of vindication. Go around talking about me behind my back (just because you didn’t know who I was) and see what’s coming to ya, lady.

  “I don’t know anything,” she said, not quite crying but not quite not crying. “Steven gave me the case and told me to throw it in the river. Honest. That’s all I’ve got. I’m not hiding anything. You’ve gotta let me go.”

  McElone, who I was sure had never intended for one second to hold Susannah in custody, stood up. She is tall and powerfully built and can look very intimidating when she wants to. And right now she wanted to.

  “Give me something I can use,” she said quietly but with authority. “Tell me something that will help me find out who killed Maurice DuBois. If it wasn’t Steven Rendell, who was it?”

  “I never heard of Maurice DuBois!” Susannah had crossed the line into crying and she was doing it with a pent-up vehemence I wouldn’t have expected when she stopped me on the street in Belmar. “How can I tell you who killed a guy I never even met?”

  “What do you know about Steven Rendell’s debts and how he was going to pay them?” McElone said. She leaned a little onto her desk, supporting herself with her fists on the surface. “He owed a lot of money. He didn’t have time to pay it. What did he tell you he was going to do?”

  Susannah brightened because she could answer this question and hoped the teacher would pass her on the test based on what she had. “He was going to get his ex-wife to sell her house and use the money to pay off the guy who was after him,” she said. “He can talk that dope into anything.”

  If Maxie had actual
ly owned a gut, she’d have split it laughing. She couldn’t speak for an actual minute. That’s a long time. Take out your watch and look at the second hand for a whole minute. See?

  McElone, however, just closed her eyes for a moment and pushed up on her closed fists to retake a standing position. “You can go,” she said. “I have your contact information. I’d request that you not leave the state until we get in touch.”

  “I’m not leaving the state,” Susannah said, leaping up and grabbing her purse, her coat and her expensive scarf. She hightailed it out of the office before McElone could change her mind.

  I stood up after her. “That didn’t really yield much,” I said to the lieutenant. “Sorry about that.”

  “It’s not your fault. You did the right thing.” Since I saved her life, sort of, McElone has been almost frighteningly polite with me. I sort of yearned for her scorn like in the old days. “But let me give you a word of advice, okay? And just this one time, maybe you could take it.” That was more like it.

  I was picking up my tote bag as Maxie regained her breath and hovered into a vertical position. “Advice for me?” I asked. Maybe McElone was going to tell me something that would help discover if The Swine was a murderer—which was unlikely, no matter how much I’d have liked to see him behind bars right now—or more specifically, who had shot Maurice DuBois.

  “Yeah.” McElone’s voice dropped to an urgent whisper. “You don’t want to be anywhere near this case right now. For your own good. Just stay away.”

  Maxie’s eyebrows rose almost to the ceiling, but they had a head start. The top of her head was already sticking through the tiles. “For your own good?” she echoed.

  “I’m not sure I can do that,” I told the lieutenant.

  “I’m telling you. You really have to,” she said.

  “Whoa,” Maxie said. “The lady cop never said that to you before.” That was true, but I didn’t actually need Maxie’s reminder. That’s the time you can most count on Maxie, when you don’t really need her.