But it was nothing. As patiently as I could, I waited.
Finally, I couldn’t stand it any longer. “Larry?” I whispered in a voice so shaky and rough it sounded as though I were recovering from a bad case of tonsillitis.
The word hung in the air, vibrating, moving. I could see it shiver toward the window, twanging like a harp string; and it began to take shape until it became the ghost I had seen here before.
His back was to me as he leaned against the glass door, his forehead pressing against the glass. Who did he remind me of? Who had I seen in that same position in the same place?
Stephanie Harmon! Of course! The way she had stood at the door after she’d seen Frank Devane’s body.
But the ghost … what was he doing with his right hand? Opening, then locking the latch on the sliding glass door!
“Stephanie did that, didn’t she?” My words were loud in my ears, but I had to communicate with this ghost. “The glass door was unlocked, and she locked it while she stood there. When the policeman checked, he said both doors were locked. But this one hadn’t been, had it, because Stephanie had gone through it to reach the unlocked door to her bedroom? It was open until Stephanie locked it!”
As it all came together, the ghost began to turn toward me, and I lowered my eyes to stare down at his feet. “I know now that I’m not supposed to look into your eyes,” I said, “so I won’t make that mistake again. But I had to come and thank you for your help. I got your message about the telephone, even if you did scare me to death giving it to me. And I understand now how Stephanie got into and out of the room.”
The ghost moved closer, but I stood up and didn’t flinch. Maybe even when ghosts were trying to be helpful they still had to frighten people. It probably wasn’t his fault at all.
I tried to stop shivering as I hugged my shoulders and rubbed my cold arms. “Larry,” I said, “I know your name, and I know that you don’t need to stay here any longer.” He stopped a few feet away from me and sort of floated in space, so I went on. “I think you’re still here because you don’t know what happened, so I’m going to tell you. Linda was tried and convicted of voluntary manslaughter, and she’s serving time right now in a women’s correctional institution near Digby. In case you want to visit her, it’s just north of Houston.”
There was a terrible stir of air, which almost took my breath away, and Larry vanished. It was not only a lot more comfortable without a ghost in the room, but I felt good about releasing him. He’d done a favor for me, and I’d been able to do one for him in return. I just wished he’d taken his cold air with him. Or maybe the freezing temperature in this suite really was the fault of the air conditioner.
While I was smiling to myself, pleased about the way things were turning out, there was a sharp rap on the glass door, and I saw the uniformed sleeve belonging to Officer Maria Estavez.
Darn!
Well, it didn’t matter now. I’d accomplished what I’d wanted, and I could tell Detective Jarvis exactly how the murder had taken place.
I hurried over to the glass door, unlocked it and slid it open. “Officer Estavez,” I began, but the woman who quickly slipped into the room was not Estavez. It was Stephanie Harmon, who was wearing the policewoman’s jacket.
She pushed into the room, forcing me to back up. “Sorry I can’t stay,” I said, but I slammed into the dining-room table and bounced off it, landing in one of the side chairs.
Stephanie stood over me, a strange look on her face. “You shouldn’t have been so nosy about the phone calls,” she said.
I realized what that second click had been when I’d talked to Estavez. “You listened in, didn’t you?”
She just smiled and moved closer. I tried to rise from the chair, but Stephanie planted herself directly in my way. It didn’t take much imagination to know that I was in trouble and wasn’t going to get out of this very easily.
But I tried. “Officer Estavez is going to come looking for her jacket,” I told her.
Stephanie shook her head. “She doesn’t even know it’s missing, and as far as she’s concerned, I’m sound asleep in my bedroom.”
“That’s what she thought Friday night, wasn’t it? You heard Mrs. Duffy say the lock to this room was taped open, so you said you were going to rest, then unlocked the sliding glass door in your bedroom.”
I paused, and she laughed. “So?” she asked. “What does that prove?”
I didn’t like being laughed at, so angrily I snapped, “I’m not finished. You waited until Officer Estavez was in the bathroom. Then you sneaked out of your bedroom and left your suite through the door into the hallway. After you came into this suite and unlocked the glass door you called Frank Devane’s room and asked him to meet you here. The operator remembered a woman calling from this suite.”
“A woman? Is that all she told you?” Stephanie smiled again. “Then she didn’t know who made the call.”
Creepy fingers tickled up and down my backbone. I’d said too much. I knew that now. Why had I blabbed everything? I needed Detective Jarvis right this minute!
Once again I tried to rise, but Stephanie was on guard and shoved me back into the chair.
My big mouth had got me into this fix, but maybe it could help get me out. “You know they’re going to discover everything,” I said. “About the telephone call to your bank in the Cayman Islands, and—”
She gasped. “How did you learn about that?”
I would have enjoyed knowing that I had guessed right, but I was too frightened. “On the last day of the month people call their banks in Grand Cayman to find out the balances in their accounts,” I said. “The phone number you called is in the hotel’s computer records. It will be easy to learn the name of your bank.”
Stephanie’s forehead wrinkled, and I said, “When you screamed and yelled, ‘He’s after me!’ it was pretty obvious that you knew Frank Devane. You weren’t in danger because you were a witness in the trial. You were in danger because you’d been double-crossing Devane, and he’d found out before you got away with it. The money’s in your Cayman Islands bank account, isn’t it?”
“You have no proof that I killed him,” she said.
“Because you didn’t,” I told her.
Stephanie was so surprised, she stepped backward, and that gave me my chance to shoot out of my chair and get the table between us. She circled, but I circled too. My back was to the glass door, but once I reached the other end of the table I could make a run for the door to the hallway. Once out there I could yell for Officer Estavez, and I hoped she’d hear me and come running.
Stephanie’s eyes glittered, and she breathed quickly, panting a little. She was scared too. “You don’t know who killed Frank,” she said.
“I didn’t until just a little while ago,” I told her, “and then I figured it out. I’d heard Al Ransome say that he’d worked with Devane on everything, and it was obvious that Devane was no longer sure he could trust him. If you’d been cheating Devane, then you’d have been cheating Ransome, as well. But you weren’t afraid of Ransome, the way you were with Devane, so I think the two of you worked together to double-cross Frank Devane, and when he began to discover what was happening, you decided to do away with him. You telephoned Al Ransome and told him how easy it would be. Then you invited Devane to come to this room, knowing you could sneak back to your own room and no one would even suspect you’d been here. Ransome committed the murder, but you’re every bit as guilty, because you planned it.”
Stephanie tried to sound haughty, but her voice wobbled. “Al and I have alibis,” she said.
“You took the tape off the door so it would look as though the murderer had a key to the room. But you wanted the body to be found by the maid, who would come by for bed turn-downs around nine, so you propped the door ajar. If the door weren’t open, she wouldn’t have bothered with the room, because she knew no one was sleeping in it. You had a great alibi in Officer Estavez, who thought you were in your room asleep, and Ranso
me thought he was setting up an alibi by insisting he’d been in the bar since seven, but both alibis can be broken.”
A familiar voice spoke behind me. “We’ll have to get rid of her too,” Al Ransome said.
The walls of the suite were probably pretty thick, and the sleuths wouldn’t be on this floor until after they’d eaten, but hoping that Estavez … anyone … could hear me, at the top of my lungs I yelled, “Help! Somebody, help me!”
I honestly don’t know what happened next. Later, Mrs. Duffy had me go over and over it, but that didn’t help a bit. All I know is that the room exploded with a blast of music that could have been heard a block away. The big vase in the center of the table rose in the air, and I made a grab for it, but missed, and it came down on Al Ransome’s head. Detective Jarvis burst through the hallway door at the same time, and he insisted he saw me swoop up that vase and clobber Ransome. But I couldn’t have. I distinctly remember turning to run after Stephanie.
Officer Estavez, who’d been talking in the hallway with Detective Jarvis when the music nearly knocked them off their feet, came barreling into the room right behind him, and she said she saw me floor Stephanie with a right hook.
I wasn’t even sure what a right hook was, but I wasn’t going to argue with them or anyone else about what saved me. I just quietly whispered, “Thanks, Larry, for sticking around just a few minutes longer than you had to.”
I think he heard me before he left. The others were too busy to notice the swirl and swoosh of cold air as it swept the room, then completely vanished.
Later, when Fran and I got together, I told him about Larry, and all Fran said was, “I wonder if he went to visit his wife in Digby.”
That’s what I liked so much about Fran. He was really a great guy, and even if he never grew tall enough to catch up with me, and even if my low self-esteem really was all mixed up in dating a short boyfriend, I decided I didn’t care.
Down in the lobby Eileen took me aside and said, “Since you’re officially one of our actors, you’ll sit with us at the brunch tomorrow morning.”
“Wow!” I said. “You mean I’ll get real food?” But then I shook my head.
“We’ll include Fran too,” she said, misunderstanding my reason for hesitating.
“I’d better not come to the brunch,” I insisted. “I told you, I’m pretty klutzy. What if I spill something and embarrass everybody?”
“Today at lunch I spilled my iced tea,” she said.
“You?” I asked.
Eileen smiled. “Just between you and me, there was salad dressing on Sherlock Holmes’s shirt, and one of the sleuths dropped her cheesecake into her lap. Everybody spills things.”
“Low self-esteem,” I said. “Tina explained it to me.”
“Tina’s wrong,” Eileen said. She walked me over to a mirror, holding my shoulders. “Take a good look at yourself.”
“I’d rather not,” I said. “Not on an empty stomach.” But I sneaked a look anyway and saw Eileen’s reflection. “I wish I looked like you,” I said. “You’re glamorous and poised and graceful, and you … well, you look as if you like yourself.”
“That’s the secret,” Eileen said, “to like yourself the way you are. I’ve heard you saying you’re klutzy and you’re stupid. You keep insulting yourself. You wouldn’t do that to a good friend, would you?”
“Of course not,” I said.
“Then treat yourself just as nicely as you’d treat your good friend. Be a good friend to yourself. You’ll find that when you learn to be at ease with yourself, the poise, the grace, and the charm follow.”
“That won’t help me look like you.”
With both hands she swept up my hair and swirled it up and over the top of my head. I suddenly looked older and more sophisticated. “When I was your age,” she said, “I had bangs and braces. But I learned to play with new hairstyles and makeup. You’ve got plenty of time ahead to try it too.”
She let my hair drop, but I picked it up myself and held it this way and that. Maybe … just maybe she was right. I couldn’t help feeling just a little bit excited.
Eileen said, “It’s going to take time to develop your new self-image, Liz. Just promise me that you’ll keep working on it.”
“I will,” I said, but I had another thought. “I’ve got a question about low self-esteem and a short boyfriend.”
“No relation at all,” Eileen answered. “Your boyfriend, for example. He’s really a neat guy. He’s got a lot more going for him than some of those tall hunks who are more interested in their own muscles than anything else.”
I saw Fran charging across the lobby toward me, so I left Eileen and ran to meet him. In spite of the mystery-weekend people roaming around the lobby, I gave Fran a big hug.
“Is this part of the script?” he asked, hugging me back.
“No,” I said.
“Then let’s write our own,” he suggested.
“With no murders in it,” I said.
We started laughing, but Sherlock Holmes interrupted by tapping me on the shoulder.
“I want a straight answer,” he said. “Did you have anything to do with the murder?”
“Whose?” I asked.
Sherlock rolled his eyes in exasperation. “What do you mean, whose? We’ve spent all weekend talking about Edgar Albert Pitts. Now, don’t be evasive. Give me an answer.”
I looked him right in the eyes and said, “I had nothing to do with his murder.”
He studied me. “Of course, if you did, you wouldn’t come out and say so. You’d lie. Are you lying?”
“No.”
“How do I know that?”
“Because I told you.”
“A murderer would lie.”
“That’s right, but I’m not a murderer.”
He paused, never taking his eyes from mine. Finally, he shrugged and said, “You look honest, which probably means you aren’t.”
He walked away, but both Fran and I were questioned until close to the midnight deadline, when the teams who hadn’t yet turned in their answer cards huddled together to come up with the solution, writing as fast as they could.
This had been one of the most exhausting days of my life, so I said good night to Fran and dragged myself up to my room, where I found the message light blinking insistently.
The operator told me that Mom wanted me to call, no matter how late, so I did.
As soon as I said “Mom,” she interrupted.
“On the ten o’clock news they reported arresting the murderers of that savings-and-loan man. You just don’t know how relieved I was to hear it.”
“Me too,” I said.
“Are you having fun, sweetheart?” she asked.
“A blast,” I told her.
“I know the weekend’s exciting, but are you sure you’re getting enough sleep?”
“I’d be sleeping right now, Mom, except I got the message to call you.”
“That’s different,” she said. “Tell me, are you eating well, dear?”
“Mom—”
“I mean, you’re not just living on pizza are you?” she asked quickly.
“We don’t get pizza around here. On a scale of one to ten, the employee cafeteria is a minus five,” I said. I remembered what the morning would bring and felt a lot happier about the food situation. “Guess what, though. Tomorrow I get to eat brunch with the mystery-weekend group.”
“Oh, lovely!” Mom said. “That should be fun.” Her voice became more serious as she added, “Just remember, dear, that if the brunch is a buffet, there will be plenty of salad greens and fresh vegetables to choose from.”
“And lots and lots of desserts,” I added.
She didn’t react, which was just as well. For some reason—maybe because of Eileen and what she said, or maybe because I’d helped solve the real murder and was feeling good about what I’d done—I said, “Mom, I wish you and Dad had been here. Some of the people who came to the mystery weekend are crazy, but they’re all
having an awfully good time. When I get home, I’ll tell you all about it.”
“I’ll love that,” Mom said. She suddenly gasped and added, “My goodness! Look at the time! You belong in bed, young lady. It’s way past your bedtime!”
I said good night and grinned to myself. Life at the hotel was pretty exciting, but life at home hadn’t changed a bit. Good old Mom.
The brunch was fantastic. There was so much food, I could only manage to eat three desserts. Everyone, except Fran and me, was excited and a little nervous, each team eager for the arrest to take place, so they’d know the winners. I did drop a buttered roll in my lap and began to say, “Oh, that was stupid of me,” but I changed in mid-thought and—smiling at Mrs. Bandini, who was seated across from me—I said, “Thank goodness these rolls are light. I could have broken a leg.”
Everyone close by laughed as though I’d made a great joke, and the man in the FBI sunglasses said, “She has a good sense of humor. She couldn’t be the murderer.”
I beamed at him, happy to note that a tiny bit of strawberry jam had slid down the front of his shirt.
Detective Sharp took the microphone and called the suspects up to the small stage at one end of the room. She went down the list, eliminating them one by one, while the teams cheered and clapped, or groaned because they’d made the wrong choice. When it came down to the last two, we all held our breaths. Then—surprise, surprise—the murderer turned out to be the desperate actress, Crystal Crane.
The members of Sherlock’s team leaped to their feet, yelling and screeching and hugging each other. “I knew she did it!” Sherlock shouted.
The winners were awarded bottles of champagne, and Detective Sharp read a few of the entries. Except for Randolph, every other suspect had been guessed at least once. One team thought Detective Sharp committed the crime, and two of them guessed that I was the murderer.
“I was pretty sure it was you too,” Fran murmured in my ear and squeezed my hand.
The Weekend Was Murder Page 14