The Thrill of the Haunt

by E. J. Copperman

  “Wow?” I figured I’d ask.

  Paul seemed to remember there were other people in the room. “Maxie has found something about our client.”

  I felt a rush of excitement. “Kerin Murphy?”

  “Helen Boffice,” Paul answered. Damn. “It seems David is not her first husband.”

  That was interesting, given that she had not listed a first husband on her intake form. But it was hardly amazing. “So she was married before,” I said. The obvious question So what went unspoken.

  Until Mom said, “So what?”

  “It’s more than that,” Maxie said. “Helen’s first husband died.”

  Hmmm . . . “A questionable death?” I asked.

  Paul shook his head. “Cancer. But there’s something Helen didn’t tell us. Apparently, her first husband was a very successful man in the food-service business. He ran concessions in many of the area’s arenas and stadiums.”

  It was starting to sink in for me, but Mom got it sooner. “He left her money?” she asked.

  “Four million dollars,” Maxie said.

  “I think I have a new first question to ask her,” I said.

  Twenty-one

  Helen Boffice suggested we meet at the Stud Muffin the next morning, which actually was somewhat convenient for me. After I saw her, I was going to see Phyllis, then McElone, and if I had time after that, I’d meet Jeannie for lunch before going back to the Fuel Pit to install the new window before heading back to the guesthouse for the afternoon spook show. I got to the Stud Muffin a few minutes early and almost overlooked Helen when she came in punching something or another up on her iPad—I’d forgotten how small she was; at first glance, she looked like a very businesslike teenager. Paul, Maxie, Mom and I had spent some hours trying to digest the idea that Helen Boffice was a widow with four million dollars in her bank account. Helen and Dave didn’t live extravagantly; my house was probably worth more than theirs. Neither of them had a luxury car. But the records on file indicated she had plenty of money. It was decided (by Paul, pretty much all by himself) that I shouldn’t ask her about the money, since it didn’t seem to have an immediate connection to the case and needed “further research.” “Wait until we know what we want to ask,” he said.

  “Sorry,” Helen apologized when she finally looked up from her iPad. “I’m backed up on a week’s worth of orders, and now there’s this thing with Joyce Kinsler.” Honestly, that’s what she said: “This thing with Joyce Kinsler.”

  “Yeah, about that,” I replied. “I need to know whether you think Joyce was seeing anyone other than your husband.” Paul had suggested more delicate wording, but Helen’s lack of regard for a dead woman, whether she’d been cheating with Dave or not, rubbed me the wrong way. I’m not sure there was a right way to rub me in regard to that particular subject.

  Helen looked momentarily surprised. “Other men?” she said, I think rhetorically. “I guess it’s possible. I hadn’t really thought about it before. Why do you ask?”

  Now I was the surprised one. “Because if Dave didn’t kill Joyce Kinsler, I have to wonder if there was someone else who might have been involved with her and have something of a beef.” I was talking fast; normally I would have come up with something better than “a beef.”

  “Oh, you’re wrong. Dave killed Joyce, all right.” Helen took a dainty sip of her latte.

  I sat there and stared. Suddenly, the pumpkin muffin in front of me didn’t seem quite as appetizing. After word-shaped thoughts started back in my brain, I said, “You’re certain?”

  “Oh, completely. He was just putting on a show for your benefit. He probably strung her up hours before he led you there.” She might as well have been explaining how Dave had used Drano to unclog the upstairs bathroom sink.

  “Did he tell you he’d done that?” I asked, moving the tote bag to my lap so Paul would be able to hear this conversation better when I got home. “He said that he’d killed Joyce Kinsler?” I could let Detective Sprayne know, too, but maybe I’d let McElone call him.

  “No, of course not,” Helen said, still as proper as a schoolmarm. One who was drinking a latte and explaining how her husband had murdered his mistress. One who could have quit her job and moved to Aruba if she’d wanted to. You have to watch those schoolmarms. “He would never admit that to me. It would give me the upper hand. Dave couldn’t possibly allow that.”

  My eyes started to hurt. That was the explanation for why I had to squint so hard. “If he didn’t tell you, how can you be so sure he killed her?” I asked.

  “Oh, he had to,” Helen said, waving her hand in a “don’t be so naïve” gesture. “See, I got an e-mail from old Joycie early that morning, confessing about their affair. Once Dave knew the cat was out of the bag, he couldn’t possibly let her live. That would give me—”

  “The upper hand.”

  “Precisely. He knew I’d be able to hold that over him for the rest of our lives. With Joyce gone, he could deny everything, say she’d committed suicide because she was crazy, that the e-mail was a sign of her craziness, and then I couldn’t possibly get an advantage.” She dusted a crumb from my muffin, which I hadn’t touched recently, off the table. No doubt it was trying to get the upper hand on her.

  “Do you have a marriage or a poker game?” I’m fairly sure I hadn’t expected that to actually come out of my mouth.

  Helen raised her eyebrows and shrugged. “Our marriage is a competition,” she said. “I’m not ashamed of that. When two successful people come home from work, they can’t simply turn off their personalities at night. We remain who we are, and we are very competitive people. This is how we live.”

  If you call that living, I thought. “So you’re just guessing that Dave murdered Joyce Kinsler to . . . get some leverage on you?”

  Helen shook her head just a tiny bit. “I can prove it. His right hand has a mark on it, right across the palm, the kind of mark you’d get if you had to pull really hard on an extension cord for more than a couple of seconds. Looks painful.” She seemed pleased about that. She kept her own left hand covering her right, just to drive home the idea of control.

  “Did you tell the police about it?” I asked.

  “I told them. They didn’t seem to care about the mark on his hand.”

  “Where does Dave say he got that?” I asked.

  She snorted, daintily. “He says it’s a burn mark. That he had to open the hood of his car and check the radiator, and he leaned on the edge of the hood too hard, says he burned it.”

  “You don’t think that’s true?”

  “I don’t think Dave knows how to open the hood of his car,” Helen sneered. “I practically have to show him how to open the gas cap every time we pull into the station. And he thinks he can convince me he was making a repair on the engine? Please.”

  Mentally I cut out the call to McElone, as this evidence was so circumstantial Judge Reinhold would throw it out of court. But if there was a visible mark on Dave’s palm . . . “Did the police detective notice the mark on Dave’s hand when he was questioned?” I asked Helen.

  “Oh, Dave hasn’t been questioned in Joyce’s death,” Helen said, as if explaining that the Earth is indeed round. “They think it was a suicide, or that the wife might be involved. They always look for the easiest answers.”

  I knew that neither of those things was true but couldn’t imagine why Helen thought it necessary to lie to me about it. “Really,” I said. “I’m surprised. That’s lucky for Dave, I guess.”

  “Not so lucky. I’m going to make sure he knows I’m on to him.” Helen looked like a chess master who had just figured out how to end the game sixteen moves from now. “Threaten to call the cops. Teach him to underestimate me. I’ll show him who has—”

  “Don’t say it,” I said.

  • • •

  “Well, you’re having a week, aren’t you?” Phyllis Coates said.

  We were standing in Phyllis’s “office,” a cluttered room filled with paper, abo
ut four percent of which Phyllis actually needed or, if she were being honest, could identify even after reading it. There was a hot plate with a pot of horrendous coffee sitting next to a pile of old bills, notes, outgoing invoices and for all I know, laundry lists, just waiting to start a fire that would take down three city blocks. This, to Phyllis, was the way you ran a newspaper.

  “A week,” I echoed.

  “You’ve got two dead bodies and a whole truckload of questions.” Phyllis made that sound like the best time a girl could wish for. Clearly, we were of different sensibilities. But I loved her like a crazy old aunt, and she saw something in me that probably wasn’t there. “So this Boffice woman says her husband killed his girlfriend because he wouldn’t let her have the satisfaction of catching him playing around?” She reached into a drawer in her “desk,” which was a large cabinet that had a chair next to it, and pulled out a pair of half-glasses on a chain, which she put around her neck.

  “Since when do you need those?” I asked. Phyllis’s eyesight had always been sharp as a razor.

  “I only need them when I wear contact lenses for distance,” she answered, with some shortness in her voice.

  “Contact lenses?”

  “Do you want to talk about the story, or what?” Phyllis doesn’t care much for getting older. She says the only thing that’s worse is not getting older.

  “The story, of course. So Helen Boffice has millions of dollars that she doesn’t seem to be spending. Is it possible she paid somebody to kill Joyce?”

  Phyllis, perhaps still smarting from my talk of her eyewear, had a sour expression and waved a hand. “Possible. Anything’s possible. The question is what can we prove.” Phyllis seems to believe I’m a member of her staff, which is doubly astounding because she doesn’t have a staff. “I’m going to find out what I can about her finances, but a lot of that stuff isn’t public. Still, if she made a million-dollar withdrawal from her bank account, it should send ripples out somewhere.” I didn’t tell her Maxie was running an online search in the same area.

  “That’s the only reason I can think of that she wouldn’t tell me about the money,” I said.

  “Why? Does everyone who sees you on the street give you a full financial disclosure?”

  I decided to change the subject. “Sorry. So did Marv get arrested today?” I asked.

  I’m not sure if it was the contact lenses, but there was a twinkle in Phyllis’s eye. She waved a hand. “Marv’s not getting arrested,” she said.

  Huh? “Then what was that frantic phone call about last night?”

  She chuckled. “I thought you needed a kick in the pants on this one, so I made sure you got out there to do the interview.” She looked at me. “It worked, didn’t it?”

  I thought of the conversation I could have had with Josh, the one that was currently causing me digestive distress because I still had to have it, and moaned. “You have no idea what you did to me,” I told Phyllis. But there was no changing her; to be Phyllis’s friend, you signed up for Phyllis. It was usually worth it.

  She seemed to find that amusing. “Helen Boffice,” she insisted. “She says her husband Dave strung up this Kinsler woman?”

  “That’s about the size of it,” I said. I start talking like I’m in the middle of the newsroom at the Daily Planet and it’s 1952 when I go to see Phyllis at the Chronicle office. I sort of love it.

  I was thinking of eras past because the ghost hovering over Phyllis’s head, visible only from the chest up through the ceiling, bore a very striking resemblance to Cary Grant. I was wondering where Cary Grant died, although I was sure it was not in Harbor Haven. Of course, he would have had plenty of time to get here. I started to wonder if Cary Grant was a fan of the Jersey Shore. I wondered if the current rebuilding efforts would satisfy him.

  “Do you buy it?” Phyllis asked, snapping me out of my Cary Grant reverie.

  I considered pouring myself a cup of coffee, then looked at the decades-old coffee pot and the washed-once-this-month mug sitting next to it, and decided to give up coffee for the rest of my life. Eating, too. “I don’t know,” I told her. “She seems positively sure about it, but she has absolutely no actual evidence. Their marriage might be bizarre enough that she’d set him up as a suspect just so she could claim some kind of advantage over him. I wonder if they have a scoreboard in their bedroom, to keep track of who’s in the lead.”

  “Do you think it’s possible Helen killed Joyce Kinsler?” Phyllis asked me.

  Unlike Helen, I don’t like accusing people of things until I have clear, tangible evidence that I can say absolutely proves that person did whatever is being discussed. It’s an ironclad rule with me. “I’d be surprised if she didn’t do it,” I said. Perhaps ironclad was overstating it.

  “And on what are you basing that?” Phyllis wanted to know. As a reporter, she really does have to wait until there’s proof before saying something.

  “I get a vibe,” I said.

  “A vibe,” Phyllis repeated, bringing me back on topic. If the ghost said anything, I’d know for sure if he was Cary Grant. Have you ever noticed how you can’t say Cary or Grant separately? It has to be Cary Grant.

  “I think Helen is scary.” Cary Grant, because I decided I would tell Mom and Melissa that’s who it was, looked a little stunned. I shook my head just a tiny bit, which Phyllis must have thought was a comment on Helen Boffice, and Cary Grant clearly saw as something of a disappointment. He rose up into the ceiling, silently. My loss.

  “I don’t think that’s a lot to go on,” Phyllis lamented. “Luckily, I have a little bit more.” Reporters get into the business not for the wealth and glory (I’ll insert a space for guffaws) but because they are, to a person, the biggest gossips on the planet. There’s nothing a reporter likes better than knowing something before everyone else.

  I could play along. “Like what, Mata Hari?” I said. “Spill.”

  “The cops talked to Dave Boffice, but they’re not looking too hard at him.”

  “You have sources with the Eatontown police?” I asked.

  She fixed me with a look. “You think there are places I don’t have sources?” Touché.

  “What about Everett? Did the ME issue a report yet?” I asked.

  Phyllis grabbed a reporter’s notebook off the tumult going on atop her desk. She flipped to a page. “Not formally. They’re not exactly authorizing overtime for the death of a homeless guy in a gas station men’s room.”

  “A homeless veteran,” I reminded her. “You’d think they’d have a little more respect.”

  “Wouldn’t you.” Phyllis consulted her notes again. “Unofficially, Everett died of blood loss brought on by forty-seven small stab wounds to his chest, arms and neck.”

  “Forty-seven?” I gasped.

  Phyllis took off her reading glasses and nodded. “Apparently someone had a very small knife and a lot of time on their hands.”

  “What about the knife?” I asked.

  “What about it?”

  “They didn’t find it, but the door to the men’s room was locked from the inside. What do they think happened to the knife?”

  Phyllis regarded me for a moment. “The medical examiner doesn’t really deal with questions like that, but if you ask Lieutenant McElone . . .”

  “My very next stop,” I assured her.

  “Excellent.” Phyllis snapped her notebook closed. “Then you don’t need me to duplicate the information.”

  I waited, but she seemed determined not to tell me anything else about Everett’s death. I waited some more. That didn’t work any better. “This is about the glasses thing, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “Only partially,” Phyllis said. “Go talk to McElone.”

  It suddenly occurred to me that lately I had been treating the people close to me pretty badly. I didn’t know why that was the case, but I had a feeling it had something to do with the tension between my idea of my relationship with Josh and the fact that I live with two dead people.
Ghosts, more than anything else, are inconvenient when one is trying to find romance.

  I went and talked to McElone.

  • • •

  “Why am I talking to you?” Now, that was more like it. I could always count on Lieutenant Anita McElone to be consistent. No matter what the situation, I would be an annoyance to her. There’s something comforting in that kind of reliability.

  “How many times are we going to do this dance?” I answered back. “You’re going to complain about me gumming up the works for the police, I’m going to tell you that I have a client and besides, I’m only trying to help, and eventually, you’re going to be grumpy but admit that I’m not a total screwup and tell me what I need to know. So can we jump to that part now?”

  McElone never—ever—cracks a smile in my presence, and she wasn’t disappointing now, either. “You had me up to the point where you weren’t a total screwup,” she said.

  “Everett Sandheim,” I reminded her.

  McElone made a low noise in her throat and punched her computer keyboard for a moment. She looked at the screen, which she insisted on keeping turned away from me. The fact that I was in the chair in front of her desk, and she would have only been able to show me the screen by turning it completely around and away from her view, was a likely excuse.

  “The ME report hasn’t come back yet,” she said. I waited, but that was it.

  “I know,” I told her. “I’m going to go with loss of blood from forty-seven stab wounds made with a small knife.”

  The lieutenant didn’t even have the decency to look surprised. “You talking to Phyllis Coates again?” she asked.

  “I’m not at liberty to reveal my sources,” I answered. Then I realized that was something I’d overheard only Phyllis say, so McElone had gotten her answer. Time to shift the focus away from how smart she was and back to how smart I was. “What happened to the knife?” I asked.

  “I’m thinking it entered Everett’s body forty-seven times,” she said. “What else do you want to happen to it?”