Ghost Wanted

by Carolyn Hart

  Smith’s chair creaked. “Hey, Weitz.” His voice was conciliatory. “How come you knew those keys had this pink thingamajig before we got Sykes’s report?”

  They looked at each other.

  Smith broke an uneasy silence. “Somebody shoved me into the tripod. You were on the other side of the table. Everything on the table got knocked on the floor. I didn’t do that. The door opened, then the door closed. You didn’t open it. I didn’t open it. I blundered over to the door and yanked it open. I went into the hall. There was nobody there.”

  She studied him, apparently decided a truce had been called, because she too spoke in a conciliatory tone. “The keys were there before the light went off. When you turned the light back on, I picked up everything from the floor. No keys.”

  Smith rubbed knuckles along his chin. “The keys were in the car.”

  “Yeah.” Weitz stared at him. “The keys and no driver.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  Weitz’s eyes narrowed. “Sykes searched the car, found nothing of interest.”

  Smith frowned. “How did the car get where it got? I mean, she came here to report a crime. Figures she drove here, right? We interrogated her. She’s in a cell.”

  Weitz’s thin shoulders lifted and fell. “Makes no sense. If anybody was with her, you’d think they’d have come in to find out what was going on. But somebody drove that car over to Wheeler.”

  I left them gnawing at their puzzle. They say puzzles are healthy for the brain.

  Upstairs in the chief’s office, I turned on the light. The computer monitor glowed. I opened the center drawer of his desk. The chief had not changed his habits. I found a list of scratched-out words. At the bottom of the list, not scratched out, was puppy7. The list wasn’t entitled Password, but I figured that’s what it had to be. And it was. I settled in his chair, my hands hovering over the keyboard. After a moment’s thought, I e-mailed Detectives Weitz and Smith:

  Re: Library theft, subsequent shooting of night watchman.

  New evidence confirms Michelle Hoyt’s report of abduction. She is no longer a suspect in the theft of the rare book or the shooting of the night watchman. Her immediate release is authorized. ASAP, conduct a search of the basement area of the home at 928 Montague Street where she was held. Fingerprint and take into evidence the frozen food packages. Respond to this directive with e-mail reports. I will not be in the office but will be picking up e-mails throughout the weekend. Acting Chief.

  I leaned back in the chief’s chair, pleased with myself, though, of course, modesty prevented me from erupting with an Oklahoma yee-hah.

  I sat at the counter at Lulu’s facing the mirrored wall. Behind me were several tables and five red leather booths. Lulu’s was jammed, mostly men gathering with cronies for the Saturday morning equivalent of a coffee klatch, deep voices rumbling, occasional bursts of hearty laughter.

  It would take at least a half hour for Michelle to be released. Likely Joe Cooper would have arrived by then. I expected she would at once wish to return to her apartment. I was glad I had arranged for her freedom, but I needed to come up with a clever plan for Michelle and Joe and for me. I needed a sustaining breakfast and time to think. I ordered a rasher of bacon, cheese grits, two eggs over easy, and two biscuits with cream gravy—an Oklahoma breakfast for sure. I felt I’d earned every morsel. I took a reviving swallow of coffee strong enough to kick a horse.

  A harrumph to my right froze my mug in midair. I slid a sideways glance.

  Wiggins sat on the next stool, burly in a blue work shirt and khaki trousers. It was odd not to see him in his stiff white shirt, suspenders, heavy black wool trousers, and laced high-top black leather shoes. Obviously he understood that emissaries must appear in ordinary clothing. I smoothed one of my embroidered sleeves and felt liberated as a fashionista. He had not, however, changed his thick muttonchop whiskers and walrus mustache.

  Wiggins ordered a short stack and link sausage. As the waitress turned away, he gave me a somewhat abashed smile.

  “Wig—”

  He raised a reddish eyebrow.

  Remembering how Mama always said, “Bailey Ruth, honey, dance with a toss of your head when you don’t know the steps,” I started again. “I’m glad to see you.” With only the tiniest emphasis on the infinitive.

  He had the grace to blush. After all, how many times had he repeated the refrain Do not appear?

  Another harrumph. “When in Rome . . . Possibly I have been too rigid about the matter. When on earth, it may occasionally be necessary to experience the moment. Briefly.”

  I almost teased him at his about-face, but an inner cherub gave me a psychic kick: He’s only here because he wants to know about Lorraine. Heaven knows I understand that love prompts many about-faces in life (and beyond). “Lorraine saved Ben Douglas’s life. She told me about the field hospital.”

  His brown eyes were suddenly somber. He stared toward the front plate glass window of Lulu’s, but his vision wasn’t here. “Thinking of Lorraine kept me going. Desolation. That is what I remember, desolation. Trees twisted and blackened, leaves all blown away, cratered ground, trenches with men standing in cold water, rot and pain and suffering and shells whistling. I’d think of Lorraine and the way the sun touched her hair.”

  “She wrote you.”

  Head back, chin up, he looked determined, vigorous, confident. “She wrote that a young captain whom she’d met once or twice in Paris came by the hospital and had only a few minutes to spare. He told her he’d fallen in love with her the first time he saw her and if she’d promise to marry him, he knew he’d make it back from the front. What would a girl do, especially a girl like Lorraine who knew how easy it was to die at the front? Why, just what Lorraine did. She promised, and then she had to write me. Tears smudged the words. She said”—and his voice was hushed—“‘Dear Paul, we never spoke of love, but I must tell you how much I love you, since I now know we can never be together.’ We’d never put it into words; we both knew we loved each other.” Wiggins’s grin was robust. “I didn’t blame him.” His tone was forgiving. “Anyone who saw Lorraine would love her. Anyway, I was going to get to the hospital the next day, tell her she could be engaged to him until the war was over, and then the best man would win.”

  He looked at me, his gaze earnest. “Don’t you think that was fair enough? I didn’t have a doubt in my mind that I would win out. I guess”—and he sounded a little bemused—“I always had the feeling I would win, no matter what I did. That last evening during the shelling, I heard there was a boy hurt in the trench near some woods, and I knew I had to get to him fast, anyone bleeding that bad. I ran and swerved and reached the trench and jumped down and then a shell hit us.” He tugged on one end of his mustache. “I fought leaving the earth. I wanted to stay. Lorraine and I . . . But then I understood. My time there was over. I had a new station, a new purpose. And”—there was a twinkle in his brown eyes—“running the Department of Good Intentions gave me a bit of a window on the world. I confess I took advantage of it to keep an eye on Lorraine. That captain? Charles Hiram Marlow. I was glad when she married Charles. He was a good man. He cherished her. When she died, I thought she stayed on earth to be near him.” Wiggins was perplexed. “But when Charles died, she remained in Adelaide. There must be some other reason.” He sighed. “She still resists coming to Heaven. I don’t understand why.”

  I didn’t want to make him any sadder, but I felt he was right. Lorraine was determined not to leave Adelaide.

  The waitress served our plates. Oh my, what lovely grits. As they say in Oklahoma, I was in hog heaven, which is not as grand as Heaven but quite nice on an earthly scale.

  Wiggins speared a link sausage, waggled it at me. “Not that we should make appearing a habit, but I know how fond you are of Lulu’s, and I wanted to say”—his spaniel brown eyes were admiring—“your assumption that the troubles at the
library revolve around the theft of Susannah Fairlee’s diary may be correct and should be investigated. Unfortunately, the acting chief erased the information you left on the blackboard in Chief Cobb’s office. The official conclusion is that Michelle Hoyt committed all the crimes at the library. I trust your instinct—and Lorraine’s—that such is not the case.”

  I had no doubt Lorraine’s championing of Michelle weighed a lot heavier on the scale than mine.

  “Therefore, it would be premature to consider your assignment at an end. Find out the truth of the matter and help these young lovers.” His face softened.

  I knew he recalled other young lovers from long ago.

  “Bring the guilty party to justice.” He looked concerned. “This is a daunting task, since you have no means of gaining support from the proper authorities.” His brown eyes bored into mine. “I am confident you will not fail.”

  A twenty-one-gun salute could not have thrilled me more than Wiggins’s confidence in me.

  “I had hoped to obtain information that would resolve the matter.” He shook his head. “I have it on good authority”—Wiggins, of course, had access to Heavenly files not open to such as I—“that Susannah Fairlee was struck down.”

  I sat stone still. “Struck down?”

  His face was grave. “In early evening as she gardened.”

  Like rapidly fluttered still photographs, I remembered the black-clad figure opening the box of Susannah Fairlee’s papers, grabbing a diary, the overhead light blazing, the thief wheeling and firing at Ben Douglas. Oh yes, there might be a very good reason to steal that diary, which must contain knowledge dangerous enough to a killer that it needed to be obtained no matter the cost.

  “Who killed Susannah?”

  “She was struck down from behind and didn’t see her assailant.”

  I understood. God knows every human heart, but Wiggins and those who serve the department aren’t privy to all knowledge.

  I’d scarcely taken in the implications of Susannah’s murder when I realized the seat beside me was empty. Wiggins was gone. A bill lay atop his check and mine on the counter. Always the gentleman, he was paying for my breakfast.

  Struck down . . .

  I recalled a sentence in Joe Cooper’s story about Michelle Hoyt in the Bugle: Fairlee passed away September 17 at the age of seventy-three. If Susannah’s death had been a homicide, he would have included that fact. Obviously, her death must have appeared to be an accident.

  I sipped coffee and considered what difference it made if Susannah Fairlee was murdered. Nothing out of the ordinary occurred at Goddard Library until the story appeared in the Bugle that Susannah’s diaries had been given to the library and they would be read. After the story, odd events occurred at the library, Michelle was decoyed and held, a rare journal was stolen and planted in her apartment. The result? Michelle did not begin her research into Susannah’s diaries Friday morning. By the time, if ever, that Michelle was cleared or anyone got around to thinking about the Fairlee project, the last diary would be long gone. Since the contents list was also taken, the diary’s disappearance might not be noted.

  The intruder skipped Thursday night to let a quiet evening reassure the authorities that illicit activities at the library had ended with the theft of the rare book. The intruder knew Michelle was safely out of the way and wouldn’t be at the library Friday morning, so the last act could wait. But Ben Douglas thought there had been an unauthorized entry into the library Thursday evening because he heard me exclaim on the landing. He searched the library, found nothing out of the way. But he didn’t assume the disturbances at the library were over, so he varied his routine Friday night and was alert for a late-night visitor. He was shot for his vigilance.

  Someone was desperate to prevent anyone from reading Susannah Fairlee’s current diary, desperate enough to break and enter, kidnap, steal, and shoot an elderly guard. In her diary, if Susannah was like most people, she confided her thoughts and concerns and uncertainties and fears.

  Now Wiggins informed me that Susannah Fairlee did not know who struck her down.

  Chief Cobb’s office was dim. I turned on all the lights. I like light, though earth’s lights, even at their brightest, can’t compare to the glow of Heaven. The light in Heaven . . . Oh yes, Precept Seven: “Information about Heaven is not yours to impart. Simply smile and say, ‘Time will tell.’”

  I looked at the blackboard and pressed my lips together. The erasure of my comments had been sloppily done, and now the board was a smear of chalk with occasional letters remaining. There was no point in re-creating the text or adding to it, since Chief Cobb was gone.

  My eyes flicked around the silent office, empty except for me. The chief’s bumptious substitute was taking the weekend off. I smiled as I strolled to the chief’s desk, settled in his chair, and turned to the computer. It took a little while, but I found a file for Susannah Fairlee. I remembered the brash ME Jacob Brandt. He had submitted the autopsy report to Chief Cobb, since all unexplained deaths are investigated.

  Brandt’s e-mail was brisk:

  Autopsy file attached. No need to worry your pretty head. Short version: cause of death drowning. Takes bad luck to drown in a goldfish pond. Maybe she felt dizzy, in her seventies. Anyway, she apparently fell forward, cracked her head against one of the decorative boulders, slid into the water facedown, and that’s all she wrote. Time of death estimated (you know the parameters, 30 to 45 minutes either way) at six thirty p.m.

  I started to tap into the chief’s e-mail directory, then noticed an old-fashioned Rolodex on the desk. In an instant, I had Jacob Brandt’s cell number. I picked up the chief’s phone, dialed.

  “Yo, Sam. Thought you and your lady were lapping up piña coladas on the beach in the moonlight.” There was more than a hint of envy in his tone. “Or does the Galvez run more to tea and cookies at bedtime? Went there once with my grandmother. Old and stately—the hotel, not Gram; she’s a pistol—but maybe you can see the Gulf from your windows.”

  I made my voice chummy. “We can almost hear the surf from here. But the chief’s always in touch. I’m Officer Luhsoo”—I mumbled—“and he’s got me working on a file that may turn out to be a cold case. You did the autopsy on Susannah Fairlee in mid-September. We got a squeal”—I hoped my lingo was not too 1940s, but people, bless them, are very uncritical, especially young men when addressed by a woman’s husky voice—“that somebody bashed Fairlee, put her in the water. The chief said you are bright, very bright, and if anybody could figure out how it was done, it would be you.”

  I remembered the brash, tousle-haired, wiry ME clearly: young, irreverent, but very bright eyes and a quick mind.

  “Never knew Sam thought so highly of me.” The tone was flip, but there was an undercurrent of pleasure in his voice. “Okay. Let me think back to the scene. No preconceptions. Floodlights rigged when I came. Body of white female lying next to a goldfish pond. Livid bruise right temporal lobe, evident drowning victim, confirmed by autopsy. Cops on-site figured she either tripped and took a header into a decorative boulder or felt faint, ditto. Could it have happened another way? Sure. Her garden trowel was right there by this clump of orange flowers. Say she was kneeling, doing whatever the hell gardeners do, and her attacker comes up behind her with a brick—tippy-toe very likely, though it was soft grass, no reason to make noise if he tried to be quiet. Yeah, I can see it in my mind: brick in a gloved hand, bend forward, full-force swing, catch the right temple. Sure as hell she’d be stunned. A shove against the decorative boulder leaving an artistic blood smear, then face in the water, knee on the back, over pretty quick. Take the brick and toss it in a lake somewhere. Better tell Sam it will be hell to prove.”

  “Many thanks. We’ll let you know what happens.”

  I hung up, turned back to the computer. In an instant I had the website for the Hotel Galvez. I studied the telephone number long enou
gh to commit it to memory, then I clicked and pulled up the Gazette story about Susannah Fairlee’s “accident.”

  Civic Leader Dies in Pond

  Susannah Fairlee, 73, longtime Adelaide civic leader, was found dead in her garden yesterday evening by next-door neighbor Judith Eastman, 327 Arnold Street. Police Detective Sergeant Hal Price said the death appears to be accidental, pending an autopsy.

  Officers arriving at the scene found Mrs. Fairlee unresponsive, partially submerged in a goldfish pond. Police said Mrs. Eastman discovered Mrs. Fairlee facedown in the water at a quarter to eight and pulled her to the bank, then called 911.

  A tearful Mrs. Eastman told authorities she felt dreadful that she hadn’t checked on her neighbor sooner. “I knew something was wrong when her kitchen light didn’t come on around seven, because her car was in the drive and that meant she was home and should have been fixing her supper. I called before I went over, but finally it got real dark and still there wasn’t any light, so I got my flashlight and walked over. I saw her legs on the bank and I knew something was awfully wrong. I ran to the pond and pulled and pulled until I got her out of the water, but she was cold as ice. I was too late, and her head was all bruised so bad.”

  Mrs. Fairlee was known for her . . .

  I was familiar with Susannah’s background, thanks to Joe Cooper’s story on Michelle, with Susannah’s public service on the city council and the many other organizations with which she served. According to the Bugle story, Michelle intended to scan the last two diaries, covering the period of time after Susannah’s retirement, and return those to her daughter, then begin an exhaustive study of the diaries pertaining to Susannah’s years when she was on the city council.

  I believed that particular piece of information was the trip wire that resulted in the theft at the library, Ben Douglas’s injury, and Michelle Hoyt’s peril. Did I know enough to call Chief Cobb? Slowly I shook my head. Not yet.