by Mary Bowers
“Everybody ready?” Taylor said, exhaling heavily. “We may as well go downstairs and talk to the cops now.”
Startled, they froze and stared at her.
“The cops?” Ed asked.
“I wondered if you saw them,” Michael said with a slow smile.
“They were out there watching us while we were on the lanai,” Taylor said. “Probably heard every word. Our friend Bruno will probably materialize once all the Pizzarros and their hangers-on leave the house.”
“I see, I see,” Ed told her. “So that’s why you moved the séance back into the house.”
“No.”
“Then why?”
“Mark was done,” she told him. “He couldn’t go on. It was a mistake, dragging him into this.”
“Mark?” Michael asked.
“You know – Mark Smeaton. My imaginary troubadour. Only I imagined him so well, I felt like I could see him. He was the spirit guide I decided to invent, remember?”
“I thought his name was Julian.”
“I did too, only his name was Mark. It just was. He turned out to be a fragile soul. I decided not to push him too hard. I needed to get everybody away from him before he broke down.”
Michael was watching her doubtfully. “Are you sure you’re all right, Taylor?”
“Fine.”
Michael decided to play it off as a joke. “Nice of you to take pity on the imaginary Mark, then. Come on, let’s get downstairs. I have a fiduciary responsibility as an officer of the court to keep Alan Pissarro’s wine collection intact until the estate is settled. They’re probably down there raiding the assets while we speak.”
Taylor grinned. “Officer of the court, are you? All right, let’s go protect the assets while there are still a few bottles left for us.”
Confused about how to get downstairs again, Taylor paused and let Michael pass her to show her the way. The main stairs brought them back down to the main floor, between the foyer and the hallway to the kitchen. Earlier, she had led the way upstairs via the hidden stairs behind the kitchen, but Michael didn’t make a point of mentioning it.
Once on the main floor again, Taylor turned and walked down the hall toward the kitchen. The TV crew had followed them down, but at the bottom of the stairs they mumbled a few good-byes and quickly headed the other way, toward the front door, taking Porter with them.
Taylor, Michael and Ed moved toward the back of the house, trying to see through windows to the lanai. As she passed the kitchen, Taylor took a look over the breakfast bar and nodded. Judging from the chewed-open garbage bag on the hardwood floor and the scattering of used k-cups, napkins and candy wrappers, Elliott had been right about why Porter had skipped the séance.
Then she turned her attention to the lanai. The police had come out of the bushes and were relaxing at the glass-topped table, waiting for them. Through the wall of windows overlooking the lanai, Detective Bruno gave Taylor a “toodles” finger-roll by way of greeting, and she strode forward looking grim.
Chapter 21
Taylor opened the door to the lanai and ducked her head as the door alarm gave its three sharp peeps. “I’d never be able to get used to something like that in my own house,” she muttered, stepping outside.
She hesitated, guardedly looked around before going forward and sitting down in the chair at the head of the table, from which she’d conducted the first part of the séance.
Bruno was there, along with Stetson, his partner, and beyond the screen enclosure, she thought she saw the figure of a uniformed cop, maybe two.
“Need me to arrest anybody?” Bruno asked mildly.
“Is that what you were hoping for?” Taylor said.
Instead of answering, Bruno gave her an up-and-down look, and said, “Nice dress. That’s a new look for you, isn’t it?”
“You can cut the comedy, officer,” Taylor said. “I’ve got two checks made out to Orphans of the Storm in my bra – strictly charitable donations, so don’t bother calling out the bunko squad. For this kind of money, I’d dress up like Barky the Seal.”
Without missing a beat, he told her, “We had to drop the bunko squad for lack of funding. Care to make a donation?”
“Detective, I must protest,” Ed said from the shadows at the other end of the table. “There has been no crime committed here, and our investigation tonight was strictly according to my own tight protocols. It was pure science. I would never condone any illegal activity and you know it.”
“Oh, I trust you, Dr. Darby-Deaver,” Bruno said. “It’s the company you’ve been keeping lately that I’m wondering about.”
For the first time, Taylor noticed that Dobbs hadn’t followed them out – not that that surprised her. There was a party going on somewhere, and the man was young and restless. Also, he’d had enough of Detective Bruno, she was sure. She, Michael and Ed were the only ones to come onto the lanai, and she strongly suspected that the crew and remaining cast of Haunt or Hoax? had coordinated their exit by the front door to coincide with her opening the door to the lanai, so there wouldn’t be a second 3-peep alarm to attract attention. They were all probably halfway to the party at The Oasis by now.
She glanced at her watch to confirm that it was still, in fact, Halloween and saw that it wasn’t. Not that the party was going to stop just because it wasn’t Halloween anymore.
All of a sudden she was tired, fed up, and suffocating in the polyester of her long black dress.
“If you don’t have any specific questions for us,” she said to Bruno, “I’m going home.”
“In that case, I’ll get right to the point. Security is pretty tight here. Guards, cameras on the street corners and even on some houses, really good street lighting, except where it would confuse the turtle hatchlings. Jessamine and Alan Pissarro were alone in their house that night; nobody else could have gotten in or out. She says they struggled over the gun when he tried to commit suicide in front of her, and he was fatally shot. Now she’s dead, too. And we think she was murdered.”
“You do?” Taylor was surprised into forgetting her itchy dress. She could sense reactions from Michael and Ed, too.
“Oh, it was staged brilliantly, but bruising has come up on her body that shows she was manhandled into the water and held under until she drowned. I don’t believe in coincidences. First he dies, then she’s murdered. What do you think? Still believe he died in a struggle for the gun, which would have been an accident, technically, or do you think he was murdered too?”
Before Taylor could answer, Ed said, “Someone who believed she had murdered her husband could have killed her for revenge.”
“You say manhandled,” Taylor said. “Meaning a man? Could a woman have done it?”
“Possibly,” Bruno answered. “Jessamine Pissarro was drunk, and either she’d taken painkillers or she was intentionally drugged. We had tests done on the bottle that washed up. It was hers, all right, but spending a night in the ocean washed away any evidence that the vodka had been spiked.”
“Or the killer carefully washed it out in the ocean,” Michael said.
“Or that,” Bruno said. “So we’re back to the night Alan Pissarro died. According to her, she walks into the bedroom and finds him standing just outside his dressing room with a gun to his head. She runs across the room and tries to grab the gun; they struggle and it goes off. If it wasn’t suicide, the killer could only have been her; nobody else was there. This development has the tightest security system in the county. Nobody came into Paradise Island; nobody left. Had to be her. Either she murdered him, or it went down just like she said. What do you think?”
“You’re asking me?” Taylor said.
He smiled disarmingly. “According to what I heard of your séance, you had a little chat with her tonight. I’ve come to trust your opinion. Humor me. I’d sincerely like to know. Did she kill him?”
“No,” Taylor said. “I don’t think so. Jessamine got the things she wanted without violence. She was a seductress, a mani
pulator, not a thug. It doesn’t add up. If he was murdered, somebody else did it, and Jessamine must have known who. After all, she was in the house at the time. And that could explain why she was killed. She was dangerous to the killer.”
Stetson shifted in his seat and deliberately looked away.
“What happened when you dragged them all inside, after you started your séance out here?” Bruno asked. “Not very civic-minded of you, by the way. You knew we were out here, didn’t you?”
“I don’t put anything past you,” she dead-panned. “For the record, I didn’t care if you were here or not, but I figured you would be. And I’m a little hazy about what happened in the media room. I was in a trance, you know,” she added, batting her eyes. “Drifting on the astral plane while the spirits communicated through my body.”
“Is that how it works?” Bruno asked broadly. “My my.”
“Hence the term ‘medium,’” Ed said, taking the lead, now that the conversation had wandered onto his turf. “She stands between the worlds of the living and the dead, a medium for the liberated spirit to inhabit temporarily, as watercolor paint is drawn into the artist’s brush, through the medium of water. Then the paint communicates itself to paper – i.e. the séance participants – after which it releases the water – i.e. the medium – letting it evaporate and re-condense into its original state – i.e. water. Water being, of course, the medium’s body, under her own control once more. Or his control, if the medium happens to be male.”
There was a brief silence as the detectives sorted their way through this. Detective Stetson opened his mouth once, changed his mind and closed it again, and finally blinked a few times and turned his head to stare at the fountain.
“Not a perfect simile, but instructive, I think,” Ed continued. “Ideally, the spirit does not permanently adhere to the séance participants as paint permanently adheres to paper, but I’m sure you gentlemen understand the point of my illustration. It has been widely quoted since I used it in my book, Visions of Ancient Egypt.”
Stetson turned his head dreamily toward his partner, then swiveled it slowly back again.
Bruno nodded a few times, regarding Ed intently, then he said, “And before Miz Verone, here, evaporated, what happened between you-all at Séance 2.0?”
Ed looked at Taylor and she said, “You tell him. I was wandering the astral plane, remember?”
Ed settled himself to begin, but first he corrected Detective Bruno on a technical point.
“It was not Séance 2.0. It was Séance 1-b. Same séance, second half.”
Bruno generously acknowledged his mistake, and then Ed, an excellent observer, repeated every word and facial expression from the séance verbatim.
* * * * *
“So Roy Angers took the lead,” Bruno said. “That’s interesting.”
“He was the client, after all,” Taylor said. “He called the séance in the first place.”
“Big believer in the Great Beyond, is he?”
Taylor gave Bruno a look. “Must be.”
Bruno guffawed. “You don’t think so either. So you agree with me. I’ve thought from the beginning it must have been that business partner of his. He lives here, right next door. With all this security, nobody else could have gotten into the development, much less the house, but all Roy Angers had to do was walk over and do the deed and walk back home again. Jessamine had to have been in on it with him or she wouldn’t have protected him. What I want to know is why. She didn’t inherit the restaurant, Mr. Pissarro’s kids did, and because of the terms of the divorce settlement, they also inherited most of his other assets except for this house. In fact, now that she’s dead, they get everything. They’re the only ones who benefitted financially, but they weren’t here. And why would Mrs. Pissarro have protected Tiffany and Kent, anyway? Even if the three of them were working together to kill Alan Pissarro, for reasons I can’t imagine, nobody else was here. We even looked for a safe room where somebody could have been hiding. There isn’t one. So you tell me: how would an accomplice, somebody Jessamine Pissarro cared enough about to protect them from a charge of murder, have even gotten in?”
“I can think of five or six ways,” Taylor said. “Disguised as a pizza man, a florist or a handyman,”
“We checked all that with the guard,” Bruno said, but he was leaning forward, interested. “There weren’t any that are unaccounted for.”
“Okay, how about this: In the trunk of somebody’s car. You think Jessamine must have been in on it so she could have brought them in herself, if she didn’t have the stomach for murder. Wendy suggested at Séance 1.b that Alan was about to leave Jessamine, so maybe she hired a hitman and got him in and out herself that night. Or there could have been some misdirection at the front gate, Jessamine distracting the guard while somebody snuck in on foot.”
“Security cameras at the pillbox,” Bruno said. “Nada.”
“Are there security cameras on the river?” she asked. “On the backside of the development, where there are no roads leading in, and nobody ever comes or goes except by boat?”
Bruno gazed at her and his eyes began to gleam.
“No? Not even on somebody’s house?”
Silently and slowly, he shook his head.
Getting up, she said, “Kayak. Good night, Detectives. And Happy Halloween.”
Chapter 22
After the detectives left and Taylor, Ed and Michael went back into the house, (being startled by the door alarm all over again), Taylor surprised Michael by settling down at the breakfast bar instead of finding Bastet so they could leave.
He took a quick look up around the ceiling. “Still communing with the spirits?” he asked gently.
“No. Waiting for something flesh-and-blood to get back here.” She turned to Ed, who had gone into the kitchen and was working off his nervous energy by cleaning up Porter’s mess. “That guy Dobbs is living in the house for now, right? He’ll be back here after the Halloween party down the road?”
“He’ll be back here when I tell him to,” Ed said, leaning the broom he’d been using against the lower cabinets. He’d swept the mess out of the way, but apparently he intended to leave it there for Dobbs to pick up. “He’s my apprentice, for better or worse. Want me to summon him?” He snapped his fingers airily, as if he could do it by magic.
“Yes. I want to talk to him.”
“Why? It’s getting so I appreciate these restful moments away from him. I feel responsible for him, so I make it my duty to watch him, but it’s exhausting. Still, I brought him into the investigation. When he gets out of line, I feel it’s up to me to discipline him. I still resent it, though,” he added, ratcheting up, “I am not a nanny.”
“Why is he still living here?” Michael asked. “Isn’t the investigation over?”
“Not quite yet,” Ed said. “We still have to make our final report to the client. At least until we finish up, Dobbs is staying put.”
“Considering Dobbs’s other options, that’s probably a good thing,” Taylor said. “If he doesn’t stay here, he has to stay in your guest room or go back to Chattanooga, where there are no pretty heiresses wanting to hire him.”
Ed was nodding. “He’ll take advantage being able to live in a mansion rent-free until Tiffany and Kent kick him out, I’m afraid. The production company is done with the house, so they won’t be back, thank God. But the investigation Dobbs and I are conducting isn’t quite over, no matter what Teddy says about the house being clear now. Kent Pissarro wants assurance that his father is at rest, and he wants a written report. I haven’t assimilated what we learned here tonight into my notes yet. Also,” he added pointedly, looking at Taylor, “I’ve drawn no conclusions. We have quite an array of evidence to sort through now.”
“Yes,” Taylor said, “including what you didn’t tell us about the Haunt or Hoax? shoot you did the other night. You made it sound like you got no results at all. Teddy was talking about lights and music going on and off. Which is it?”
“I was embarrassed to admit what went on that night,” Ed said slowly. “I’m afraid my costar is sailing very close to the wind these days. Our ratings are beginning to slip. I’ve seen the numbers and it doesn’t look like much of a drop to me, but according to Carly, who’s much more media-savvy than I am, it’s a bad sign. Everybody wants zombies. We don’t have any of those, although I’m bracing myself. Teddy’s bound to suggest it, and when he does, I intend to put my foot down. We are not incorporating zombies, giant reptiles or radioactive insects into our investigations. We do not look to comic books and tabloid newspapers for inspiration!”
He was working himself into a snit, and Taylor waved the zombies and giant reptiles away. “Tell me what happened Sunday night, but before you do that, call Dobbs. He’s the one I really want to talk to.”
“Why him?” Michael asked.
“Because he was here Sunday night, and he’s under the age of thirty. I’m pretty sure that would have made a difference in the kinds of things he noticed during the shoot.”
Ed gave her a wise look, then made the call and enjoyed being mysterious with his subordinate, refusing to tell him why he wanted him.
“What kind of information are you looking for?” Ed asked, stashing his cellphone back in his workbag and stowing it under the breakfast bar.
“I’m fishing,” Taylor said vaguely. “Is there anything to eat in this house? Anything to drink, besides wine?”
“There are some ice cream bars in the freezer,” Ed told her. He scrounged around and found that Carly had stocked the pantry with minimal rations, mostly junk food.
While they waited for Dobbs, they sat at the counter and noshed on potato chips, granola bars, tiny cinnamon rolls, juice boxes and coffee, while Ed talked about the ghost hunt he and Teddy had conducted on Sunday night.
* * * * *
“I was startled at the results we were getting myself, until I realized that Teddy was manipulating things,” Ed began. “You figured that out too, didn’t you? That’s why you want Dobbs back here, so you can interrogate him about it. Well, you were right to suspect Dobbs, Taylor, but it was Teddy; I’m sure of it. Normally during a shoot, he’s focused on the video camera and doing a running narrative of what’s going on. But two or three times, I caught him hunched over, trying to hide something. I finally realized it was his cellphone. Every time he had it out, something would happen. The lights would come on or go off; music would suddenly blare out and then go off again. I began to concentrate on Teddy to see if he was controlling things from his cellphone somehow, and I suspect . . . I know . . . that he was.”