Haunted Guest House Mystery 03-Old Haunts

by E. J. Copperman

  It’s the standard police argument—nobody but a cop knows anything about asking people questions or examining a crime scene. And in my case, of course, he had a point. But I’d promised Maxie I’d do what I could, and Luther was an actual client, so I couldn’t let it go at the standard police argument. Although the text from my secret tormentor was a compelling argument to do so. I decided to press on.

  “Detective, I understand your position,” I began. “But I can tread very lightly. I’ll only speak to witnesses you’ve already interviewed, if you like. I have insight from another angle, a more personal one, than you do, so I can look into who Big Bob was and why he might have ended up with a heavy object coming down hard on his head. Why not give me a chance to help you? I’ll be happy to share whatever information I find out, and you can take it from there. I’m not interested in making the bust; in fact, I prefer that you do it. But if you let me, maybe I can make a difference that helps you. What do you say?”

  “Big Bob?” Ferry asked. “The victim was known as Big Bob? He wasn’t that big.”

  Oy. He didn’t even know that? Wasn’t that one of the most basic pieces of information in this case, other than the fact that a male human had died of a cranial injury?

  “Yes, that was his nickname,” I told him, not pointing out that he’d missed a basic fact.

  He looked at his computer screen. “But he was only five eight,” he said.

  “Ironic, isn’t it?”

  “Have you been talking to people I haven’t?” Ferry asked. “You said about sharing what you know.”

  “ ‘Quid pro quo, doctor,’” I replied.

  “Quid pro…what?” Ferry asked.

  “It’s from The Silence of the Lambs,” I pointed out.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “It means, I give, you give,” I explained. “I’ll share if you share. Tell me what the ME’s report said and show me the crime scene, tell me who you’ve talked to, and I’ll tell you what I know. What do you say?”

  You could see the wheels spinning in Ferry’s head. He really didn’t want to cooperate with me, but he knew I had some pieces of information that he’d missed so far. Cops are competitive; they want to be the one to break the case. What he was doing now was figuring the minimum he could give away to get the maximum return.

  “Okay,” Ferry said finally. “You go first.”

  “I give you one thing, you give me one thing,” I countered.

  “Fine. You go first,” he repeated.

  “I already gave you Big Bob’s nickname.”

  “That’s nothing,” he protested. “How does that help me solve the case?”

  “Not my problem. It’s a piece of information. You want more, you give me something.”

  “Nice talking to you, Kerby.”

  “Okay.” I told him about the threatening text, gave him the incoming number and purposely did not tell him McElone had already checked it out, so that he could check it out and find out exactly what I already knew. He wrote down the information and said he’d check on it after we were through.

  “That’s my quid,” I said. “Now you pro quo.”

  Ferry nodded, but he didn’t smile. “All right. The ME said Big Bob died of severe trauma to the back of the head, and by the look of it, just one blow, a tremendous, hard blow. Still metal particles in the skull. Best guess is that the victim got hit with a steel tool, like a wrench or a hammer. Now. Give me something worth continuing.”

  This was going to be something of a conundrum, since I didn’t have very much. But I could vamp with the best of them, or at least, the top 30 percent of them. “Big Bob was married briefly to a woman named Maxie Malone.”

  Ferry was taking notes on a legal pad. “Maxie?”

  “Short for Maxine. They got married in Vegas about two and a half years ago. Sort of a joke. Got it annulled even before they came home. But people tell me that Big Bob was planning on seeking out his ex-wife right before he died. Maybe to try to reconcile with her. Maybe not. Nobody heard from him again after that.”

  “This ex-wife—she available for interview?”

  Well, sort of. I shook my head. “She’s dead,” I told him. “She was poisoned in a real-estate scandal in Harbor Haven about six months after Big Bob ended up with a heavy-metal headache.” I liked speaking Tough Cop. Maybe I could get the Rosetta Stone software for it, and make it my second language.

  Ferry looked up, suddenly interested. “She got murdered, too?” he asked. “Sounds like they could be related.”

  I told him the story of Maxie’s and Paul’s murders, and why it was extremely unlikely they had anything to do with what happened to Big Bob. “Now, that’s a lot of information I just gave you, detective,” I said. “I expect a lot in return.”

  He stood up and reached for his sport coat, a light one for summer weather. “All right, Kerby,” he said. “Let’s go see where Big Bob died.”

  Fourteen

  It wasn’t where you would have thought.

  I had pictured the area where Bob Benicio’s remains had been discovered to be somewhere away from the ocean, in an isolated area where no one would have seen the killer digging the grave, and where the tide would not have had a chance to reveal Big Bob for more than two years. Without any specific information, I’d been picturing it somewhere near one of the abandoned properties on the beach, away from people and their prying eyes.

  The actual site was none of those things.

  Detective Martin Ferry drove us over. It was a stifling July day, but, luckily, the car was air-conditioned. He drove a Crown Victoria, the model once known as an “unmarked car” before the police figured out what everyone else already knew—nobody except police departments ever bought a Crown Vic. They were eventually discontinued by the Ford Motor Company as a consumer-line vehicle for exactly that reason. On the New Jersey Turnpike, where the official speed limit is twenty-five miles above the legal speed limit, everyone slows down to the Jersey version of a “crawl”—only ten miles above the limit—when a Crown Vic is spotted in the left lane, invariably doing at least ninety.

  Ferry had taken us through the chain separating the street from the beach by asking a young officer nearby to unlock the barrier for us, then drove directly down onto the crowded beach. We didn’t get far enough onto the beach to make tourists scramble for their lives, which was considerate of the detective, I thought.

  Then, Ferry made a hard left and drove us down almost to the edge of the boardwalk’s underpinnings. For a second, I wondered if he was going to stop at all, or just ram us into the pilings. But he made sure we had a foot or two to spare.

  I followed him out of the car, and Ferry led me to a spot a good hundred and fifty yards under the boardwalk. Song lyrics aside, I could not almost taste the hot dogs and french fries sold directly above my head.

  “It was just about here,” Ferry told me, indicating a section of the sand between two pylons. A couple of caterpillar earthmovers were parked nearby. “If the county hadn’t decided to do some excavating for some crazy environmental project, we probably never would have found him. Your pal Big Bob was a good eight feet down.”

  “This is a weird place to bury a body,” I said. “The tide comes up here twice a day. He’d have to be that far down just to avoid being washed up in a matter of days.”

  Ferry nodded. “And that’s just the beginning of the stupidity of burying him here. It’s a public beach, so anybody could have been here. There’s no real access unless you happen to know a cop with a key, or you’re driving a dune buggy.”

  “Or a motorcycle,” I thought out loud. “Big Bob was a biker, after all.”

  “Yeah. Or a motorcycle. But a motorcycle bearing a dead body, not to mention the kind of excavation equipment to put a man that far down into the ground, wouldn’t make it down the hill. It would take at least two people to get all that stuff down here.”

  I considered that. “Could have been two people bringing him down.” I said.

 
Ferry did a sort of half nod, half skeptical lean of the head. “Or he could have forced Big Bob to dig his own grave.”

  I shivered, and it was over 90 degrees, even in the shade of the boardwalk.

  The best thing was to try to get away from the emotion of the situation, not think of Big Bob as a person (easy, since I had never met him) and concentrate on the mechanics of the problem. That way I could manage to overlook the yellow crime scene tape still sticking to some parts of the wooden beams beneath the boardwalk.

  “I understand there was no missing-persons report at the time,” I began, “but even after two years, shouldn’t there be a county team investigating a murder? Isn’t that considered a major crime, or is it a low priority because Big Bob was a biker?”

  Ferry curled his lip in derision. “You’re the second person who’s suggested that to me,” he said, “and I’m frankly getting insulted. I don’t care if the guy was a member of the Hitler Youth. Somebody killed him, and I need to find out who.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “Who was the first?”

  “The first what? First murderer? Cain, if you read the Bible.”

  It was my turn to curl my lip. “The first person who said you might be less interested in a biker’s murder,” I said.

  “This other biker guy who came in, uninvited, right after it showed up in the paper that we had identified the remains. Wanted to know what was going on with the investigation, were we following up. Said he figured we wouldn’t care because the victim was a biker.”

  “Let me guess,” I suggested, closing my eyes. “He was a tall, soft-spoken guy with a mustache, and his name is Luther Mason.”

  Ferry’s eyes widened just a little, and then he regained his patented snarl. “So you know Mr. Mason, do you?”

  Luther hadn’t actually asked me to keep his identity a secret, so I said, “He’s my client.”

  “And you think that the county isn’t trying to solve this because the guy rode a hog?” Ferry shot back. “That I’m the B Team?”

  “Hey, somebody missed his meds. Calm down,” I said. You see enough movies, you learn some cop speak. “I’m not saying you’re not good enough. I’m saying I’m not good enough, but I’ll give you anything I can get if you share some information.”

  “Uh-huh.” He’d decided to go with “petulant four-year-old.” It’s a choice.

  I thought I’d get back to the facts and see if I could get Ferry back into a sharing sort of mood. “It would take hours to dig a hole big enough and deep enough,” I said. “Why risk being seen for that long?”

  “I could understand it if this had happened in January or February, when there’s nobody around,” Ferry agreed, seeming to have snapped out of his snit. “Do you know the exact date Benicio vanished?”

  I had asked Luther and Little Bob, and neither of them could come up with a precise answer. I told Ferry that, adding, “They both agreed it was probably in the spring, around April maybe.” Then, I remembered something else they’d told me, and asked Ferry if there had been a missing-persons inquiry filed on Wilson Meyers.

  He didn’t know, but said he’d check when he returned to his office. “If Benicio was killed in March or April, there would have been some people around, but not nearly as many as during the summer,” he said. “If it happened at night, it’s possible they weren’t seen. But this one still doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Is there any way of knowing how far the body had been dragged or transported before it was buried?” I asked Ferry.

  He got a funny look on his face and shook his head. “ME says there were no indications on the bones that the body was dragged or forced here, but after two years, that’s a shot in the dark, really. It’s impossible to know for sure after this amount of decomposition, but there were no bone bruises or breaks, nothing that would seem to indicate Benicio had been badly treated on his way here.”

  “What does that tell us?” I asked.

  Ferry snapped awake from the puzzled feeling he’d been giving off a moment before, and smirked at me. “I don’t know what it tells you,” he said, “but it tells me that Big Bob Benicio was alive when he came down to the beach.”

  The drive back to the municipal complex was quieter than the drive to the beach had been. I know I was thinking about what Ferry had shown me and what we’d discussed, and I assumed he was doing the same.

  The thought of a man being led to the spot where he’d be buried and possibly forced to dig his own grave—especially one that deep—shook me pretty solidly. But I found that instead of scaring me off, the concept was making me angry and increasing my resolve: Now I wanted to find out what happened to Big Bob so that the police could deal with the twisted mind behind it.

  From the look on his face, Detective Ferry might have been thinking the very same thing. Or he might have been wondering what kind of chance the Mets had this year. His face was showing nothing.

  Once we got to Ferry’s parking space in the lot and I opened the door of the Crown Vic to let the heat smack me in the face once again, Ferry squinted over at me (I guess sunglasses are for wimps) and asked, “So, Kerby, you still want in on this investigation?”

  I could match him last name for last name. “You know what, Ferry? I still do. And I still promise to share what I find out with you. Can I count on you to do the same?”

  “Absolutely not. But if I decide there might be some advantage in talking to you, I’ll reach out. How’s that?”

  He didn’t wait for an answer but got out and walked briskly—given the wilting heat—to the police department entrance without looking back.

  The fact is, that’s about as much cooperation as you can expect from most cops, so I considered the visit a success. I didn’t have much more pointing me to a suspect in Big Bob’s murder, but I did know a little bit more than I had when I’d gotten into the car this morning, and that was something.

  So I was reaching for some encouragement. So sue me.

  Driving home, I prioritized the remaining tasks before me. First up, I had to decide on the next step in the Julia MacKenzie search without help from Paul. The address in Gilford Park had turned out to be a dead end; the phone number had been disconnected. McElone wasn’t about to let me see police telephone records.

  Good. That meant I’d have to be devious. I didn’t know yet how I’d be devious, but I liked the idea of it.

  At the same time, it would be necessary to look into Big Bob’s doings just before he disappeared. Luther could help me with some of that on the dreaded (and I mean that literally) motorcycle ride tomorrow. Assuming I survived it.

  But a search for Wilson Meyers seemed just as important. Now that Ferry knew about Wilson, he might begin an investigation, but it was just as likely the county would decide to start digging up the beach, especially the area under the Seaside Heights boardwalk, in a search for Wilson’s assumedly just-as-decomposed body. That was a bad thought on a number of fronts, not the least of which was that it wouldn’t help figure out what had happened to Big Bob. Dead, Wilson would be no help to anybody.

  And last but not least on my agenda: telling my ex-husband he had until the following Tuesday to get out of my house. That would be enjoyable, certainly, but tricky, since I couldn’t let Melissa think I was kicking her father to the curb. But the fact was, with new guests arriving eight days from now, the only other place for Steven to sleep would be in my bed. And that was certainly not going to happen.

  All of this was completely forgotten when I got home to find Maxie having a screaming fight with her mother.

  I could hear it from the backyard, where I parked the Volvo, and it only got louder once I walked through the kitchen door. Some of the pots and pans (sadly underused) hanging over the center island were swinging back and forth. And I knew that although I could hear both Maxie’s and Kitty Malone’s voices, the guests in the house were getting only Kitty’s side of the argument. And since Kitty couldn’t actually see or hear Maxie, the fact that they were managing to have
an argument was something of a wonder in itself.

  Rushing through the kitchen to the den, I pushed open the swinging door and almost hit poor Francie Westen in the face as I did. Francie, looking absolutely rattled, was wringing her hands and biting her lips.

  “I know I signed up for a haunted-house vacation, but this is just unpleasant!” she cried as I apologized for almost clocking her with the door and proceeded toward the library, the room where Kitty and Maxie usually had their visits, and from where the sound was emanating now.

  “You just hated him from the beginning, and you weren’t ever going to change your mind!” Maxie bellowed. “You never liked any of the guys I brought home!” Then there was a long pause. Maxie must have been writing out her end of the dustup.

  Halfway to the library, Don Petrone slowed my frenzied progress with a huge grin on his face. “If I’d known we were getting an extra ghost show today, I would have set up my camcorder,” he said. “Can you post a schedule from now on?”

  “I’ll see about it, Don,” I told him. “Excuse me, won’t you? I’d prefer to cut this off before something gets broken. Or someone.”

  “He abused you,” Kitty shouted. “He hit you for no reason. I was supposed to embrace a man who did that?”

  “You hated him long before that,” I heard Maxie tell her. “You never gave him a chance.” And again, the pause.

  I didn’t hear any crashes or dishes being broken, so I thanked my luck that this appeared to be strictly a verbal confrontation at the moment. I blazed past Don, still enjoying himself immensely, and noted Albert at the door to the library. I didn’t give him a chance to say anything to me, brushing by and into the library. I would have closed the door, but in a fit of stupidity while I was redesigning the house, I’d removed the library door to make it look larger and so that people would always have access to books at any time of the day or night. Another in a series of decisions I had come to regret.