Haunted Guest House Mystery 03-Old Haunts

by E. J. Copperman

  Luther shook his head. “I can’t even think it. Little Bob is such a sweet guy most of the time. And I think the argument was about Big Bob’s ex, which just wouldn’t have made sense, even then.”

  That stunned me. “They were fighting about Maxie?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure. Her name sure came up a lot that night; that’s all I know. I asked Big Bob about it later, and he said it was just a misunderstanding and that they had both had too much to drink. But the way he said it made me think he might be lying.”

  “Did you ask Little Bob?” I said.

  “Tell you the truth, I wasn’t in much of a hurry to see Little Bob get that mad again,” Luther answered. “I haven’t ever mentioned it, and after Big Bob vanished, it just didn’t seem that important. I had no idea he was dead.”

  There was one more person from the Sprocket to ask about. “What about Rocco?” I said. “Any dark moments I need to know about him?”

  “I don’t know Rocco that well, just sort of a bar kind of thing,” Luther said. “I don’t ride with him. He’s older, you know. I’ll see if I can find anything out.”

  We sat for a while longer without talking. I don’t know what was on Luther’s mind, but I had finished the small bottle of wine and was feeling just a tiny bit tipsy, trying to sort out what I’d just heard and decide what I could do with my new information.

  “We should get back,” Luther said a short while later.

  I was so preoccupied that I didn’t even get antsy about climbing onto the back of Luther’s motorcycle again. Before I had time to think about it, my helmet was on and we were off, heading north. Luther took a more direct route this time, and we were back at the guesthouse in less than an hour. Despite my reservation about being on the bike—not to mention the awkward kiss—I had enjoyed the picnic, and told him so when we reached my front door.

  As I handed Luther back the helmet, Melissa came running out of the house, looking as close to panicked as I’ve ever seen my preternaturally composed daughter appear.

  “You’ve got to come inside!” she huffed. Then she looked at Luther, seemed to remember the rules about what we can and can’t say in front of the uninitiated, and said, “A friend of ours needs help.”

  That couldn’t be good. I looked at Luther. “Go on inside,” he said. “I’ll call you.”

  He got himself back onto the bike, and I headed for the house with Melissa. “What’s up?” I asked as soon as I heard the bike’s engine start up.

  “Maxie’s going crazy,” my daughter told me.

  “That’s it? Maxie goes crazy twice a week.”

  “Phyllis Coates called,” Melissa told me. “She said she couldn’t get you on your cell.”

  “I couldn’t hear it, I guess. What did Phyllis want?”

  We made it to the front room, where Maxie was literally circling the ceiling. She went around and around up by the crown molding with such speed that she seemed to be one incredibly elongated ghost stretching 360 degrees around the room.

  Melissa gave me a significant look. “The Seaside Heights police have arrested Maxie’s mom,” she said.

  My stomach, still in recovery from the transportation I’d been subjected to this afternoon, sank down to somewhere around my knees.

  “What for?” I asked, but I was sure I didn’t want to hear the answer.

  “For murdering Big Bob,” Melissa said.

  I was right; I didn’t want to hear the answer.

  Seventeen

  “I don’t recall agreeing to alert you when we had a suspect.” Detective Martin Ferry of the Seaside Heights Police Department was walking to the chair behind his desk in the dismally lit squad room and turned back to give me the benefit of his smug grin. It was not having the desired effect. Or perhaps it was—if Ferry’s desire was to piss me off.

  “Look at my face, Detective,” I said. “Do I appear amused in any way? You’ve got the wrong suspect behind bars.”

  Ferry sat down in his squeaky chair behind his standard-issue government desk, and his face turned sour. “And you know that because you have tangible evidence proving Katherine O’Malley Malone did not kill Robert Benicio?” he asked.

  “I know the suspect,” I said, ignoring that I hadn’t even known Kitty’s real name was Katherine. I mean, it figured, but I’d never considered it before. “Technically speaking, I bought my house from her. But even if she wanted to kill Big Bob, she couldn’t possibly have done it. She’s not big or strong enough.”

  “My former partner would argue with you about that,” Ferry admonished. “She believed that women could be just as big, strong, and stupid as men. She thought a woman could play major-league baseball, if she wanted to.” He waited, as if expecting me to laugh uproariously at the very notion.

  “We just don’t want to show up the boys and make them cry,” I deadpanned. “So, what makes you think Kitty Malone could even have considered killing her ex-son-in-law?”

  “What reason would I have to tell you the evidence we have against a woman you consider a friend?” he asked, with a growl on his face.

  It was a good question. I’d been relying on the idea that Ferry was going to act like a person and not a cop, but it wasn’t seeming especially likely. “Well, how about the fact that I could inform the press that you’re holding a woman in her fifties on no evidence? A woman who has devoted her life to helping local children with language disabilities?”

  He waved a hand in indifference. “The arrest will be on a police PR release within minutes,” he said. “Do you think we want to hide the fact that we caught a murderer?”

  “How about the fact that you haven’t found the other missing biker?” I asked. “Wilson Meyers might just as well have killed Big Bob—in fact, it’s more likely that he did it than Kitty. Is that going to be in your press release?”

  If I could appeal to Ferry’s ego, he was more likely to tell me something he didn’t want to say. That was my theory, anyway.

  “Wilson Meyers didn’t kill Robert Benicio,” he said with an air of certainty.

  “I think he did.” Challenge what a man like Ferry knows, and he’ll tell you exactly how he knows it.

  “Unlike Mrs. Malone, Wilson Meyers didn’t have a reason to kill Benicio,” he began. How did he know? Ferry had no idea where Wilson was, let alone what his motives might have been. “Wilson Meyers was not heard recently saying that he was glad that Benicio was dead.” I started to protest, and Ferry held up a finger. “And,” he emphasized, “Wilson Meyers did not have the murder weapon stored in his basement.”

  Wait. What?

  “You’re telling me that Kitty Malone had—”

  “A large adjustable wrench whose metal matched the shavings that were found still lodged in Robert Benicio’s skull, yes,” Ferry answered. “A search warrant issued by a judge—which wasn’t even necessary because Malone played the innocent, let us in and didn’t object—turned up the murder weapon in a toolbox in her basement. The tests are conclusive. It’s the same metal.”

  That sent me into a momentary trance. If Kitty had the murder weapon in her house, and she’d said on more than one occasion that she had been mad enough to kill Big Bob, could she really have hit him on the head with a wrench hard enough to murder him?

  “How is that possible, to match the metal from a wrench?” I asked. “Aren’t almost all wrenches made from steel or something like it?”

  Ferry nodded. “But the shavings matched in age and manufacturer as well as type of metal. It’s not as conclusive as the striations on a bullet casing, but it’ll hold up in court. That wrench is the murder weapon.”

  That sounded as plausible as a giant rabbit handing out brightly colored hard-boiled eggs, but I knew I wasn’t convincing Ferry, so I moved on. “What led you to Kitty to begin with?” I asked.

  “I heard that she was making noises about how she was glad Benicio was dead and how she’d have been happy to do it herself.”

  “Yeah, because all brilliant crimi
nals run around screaming to the high heavens about how they should be considered a suspect. Amazing, Holmes!” I said.

  “Not every criminal is brilliant,” Ferry answered. “And a lot of them are so proud of getting away with a crime that they’ll tell anybody who walks in and sits on the next barstool.”

  I was probably better off not talking to him about Kitty anymore right now. “Can I see her?” I asked. “I promise I haven’t baked a file into a cake or anything.”

  Ferry made a “droll” face and stood up. “You can see her,” he said. “But it’s not going to do either of you any good.” Cops love to say stuff like that; it makes them sound tough and authoritative. I let him have his smugness as long as he’d take me to Kitty. If I showed up at home without having seen her, it was possible Maxie would find that adjustable wrench and come after me with it. She was, let’s say, a little high-strung.

  He led me down one corridor to a second, which led to a door, behind which were three holding cells. The only one occupied was Kitty’s. A uniformed officer with a sidearm sat behind a desk opposite the cell.

  “She’ll be arraigned in the morning and then moved to county lockup,” Ferry said, making sure Kitty could hear us. That was below the belt, and I mentally took the detective off my Christmas card list. That would teach him.

  “County?” I asked. “You don’t think she’ll be out on bail in the morning?”

  “On a murder? She’s not going to make the bail the judge will set. Your friend’s going to be in jail for a long time.” He grinned.

  “You’re a regular ray of sunshine, Detective,” I said. “Now could you leave us humans alone to talk?”

  Ferry scrunched up his face into a grimace and left without another word, which was a number of words too late, but better than nothing. The officer behind the desk, whose nameplate read “Montrose,” set a chair down next to the bars and then retreated to his post.

  “I’m not listening to your conversation,” he said. Officer Montrose couldn’t have been more than twenty-two years old, and looked like he should start shaving any day now.

  “Thank you,” Kitty said, and I sat down. “Does Maxie know?” she asked before I could say hello.

  “How do you think I got here?” I asked. “Maxie heard when a reporter called my house and left a voice mail.”

  “Is she all right?” Kitty asked. In context, it didn’t seem odd that a woman would ask if her daughter was handling things well, despite said daughter having been dead for nearly two years.

  “She’s a little…antsy,” I said. “She’s worried about you. What happened?”

  “I honestly don’t know,” Kitty told me. “I was doing some painting when the doorbell rang. Seaside Heights police, and they wanted to come in and talk, they said. Could they look around the house, they said. I didn’t see any reason why not; I hadn’t done anything. Then that detective started asking me about Bob Benicio, and I got a little snarky, I guess.”

  Oh, boy. “What did you say to him, Kitty?” I asked.

  She looked away, pretending to examine the cell, which was not especially noteworthy as cells go. There were walls and a cot. That was about it. This was not the kind of place a prisoner stayed long. “I might have mentioned that I wasn’t sorry that man was dead,” she said softly.

  “You were talking to a cop, Kitty,” I reminded her.

  “I know.” She still wouldn’t look back at me, no doubt out of embarrassment. “It’s just that I get so mad whenever his name comes up.”

  I leaned a little closer to the bars. “What is it about that, Kitty?” I asked. “I realize that he hurt Maxie and that is absolutely inexcusable, but your reaction for just one incident seems a little extreme. What’s going on?”

  Kitty hung her head a little, then took a deep breath and looked at me. “The first time Maxie’s father, Phil, hit me, I thought it was because he’d been drinking,” she said. “The next time, I figured it was my fault, because I’d been on his case about something. Isn’t that funny? I can’t even remember what it was. But then there was a third time, and a fourth. After the fifth time, I had a broken rib. And the next day, I packed Maxie up when he was at work, and we moved here from Chicago.”

  “You never saw him again?” I asked, in a voice that I hoped was gentle.

  Kitty shook her head. “He never even looked for us, and I was glad,” she answered. “I heard he died sometime in the late nineties. Had another wife by then, another kid. I don’t know if he…abused them, too. I always thought I should reach out to his widow, but I never did, and I’m ashamed of that.”

  “I don’t think you need to be ashamed,” I told her. “You did what you had to do to protect your daughter.” I really hated myself for it, but then I asked, “Did you do that again two years ago?”

  Kitty stared at me a moment with a blank expression on her face. Then her eyes widened. “Are you asking me if I killed Big Bob?” she asked me.

  I cringed, because that might have been loud enough for the officer at the desk to hear. He showed no sign of it, working on a computer screen. “I had to ask,” I said to Kitty. “The cops seem so sure.”

  “I understand,” she said in a more normal tone. “No, for the record, I didn’t murder my daughter’s ex-husband. I was mad enough, but it’s just not in my nature. I can’t figure out why they think I did.”

  As quickly as possible, I outlined what Ferry had told me about the reports of threats from Kitty and the adjustable wrench in her toolbox that appeared to be the murder weapon.

  “I don’t even think I own an adjustable wrench that big,” Kitty said. “I don’t remember buying one.”

  “Ferry will say you’re lying. He thinks he’s got you solid,” I told her. “Have you spoken to a lawyer yet?”

  Kitty shook her head. “One’s supposedly on his way. I called the real-estate lawyer who handled the sale of Maxie’s house—you remember, of course—and he got in touch with a friend who does…” She cringed a little. “He does criminal work. When the door opened, I thought you were him.”

  “What’s his name?” I asked. “Maybe I can help.”

  “Alex Hayward,” Kitty said. “And I don’t know how much help you can be, dear.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, somebody had to tell people I had said I would have killed Big Bob myself, and the only person I said that to was you,” Kitty told me.

  Eighteen

  “You put my mother behind bars?” I had decided not to tell Maxie about Kitty’s comment, but when she’d asked about my visit with her mother, it had come spilling out. Maxie, having missed the afternoon spook show (according to Paul and Melissa), was hovering over my bed, onto which I had flung myself in exhaustion, although it was not even dinnertime yet.

  “I didn’t actually put her behind bars,” I said. Well, somebody had to defend me, and since it was just Maxie, Paul and me in the room, there were few appropriate candidates. “I’m relatively sure I didn’t even mention her name in Detective Ferry’s presence before she was arrested. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “She didn’t tell anybody else! You did something to get her thrown in jail!” Maxie’s clothing changed, possibly without her knowledge, from an orange top and khakis to a black T-shirt with no slogan (the first time I think I’d seen that on her) and black leather pants. Her hair spiked out. It was like having an argument with a see-through Pat Benatar.

  I couldn’t see a way to calm her down, and Paul, who might have been helpful if he’d been listening, seemed distracted. His head was down, almost parallel to the floor. In fact, he was hovering almost horizontally, like a man floating facedown on a raft in a swimming pool.

  “What can we do to help Kitty?” I asked him in an attempt to rouse him out of whatever reverie this was, but he just mumbled something and kept floating. It was a little disconcerting, to tell you the truth.

  “Paul!” Maxie yelled. Say what you want about Maxie, she could get a man’s attention. Even a dead man’s.
/>
  Paul looked at her. “What?” he asked.

  “You’re the resident private dick. What do we do to help my mom?”

  I supposed that crack was supposed to be insulting—I do, after all, have a private-investigator’s license—but I was aware that I was a fraud, so she wasn’t saying anything I didn’t already know. I was far more concerned about Kitty.

  “Clearly,” Paul answered, “the best thing to do is to prove that she didn’t kill Big Bob.”

  “Thanks for the news bulletin, Blitzer,” Maxie said. “How do we go about doing that?”

  “Find out who did.” Paul was being as much help as a pack of tissues in a hurricane.

  “Once again, that’s really helpful, Captain Obvious,” I said. “Can you give me some direction here? Where do I take the Big Bob investigation now? The murder weapon was in Kitty’s house. If she didn’t kill him, how is that possible?”

  Paul seemed to wake up a little. “Well, the first thing you’ll have to do is figure out why Detective Ferry wants to make it look like Mrs. Malone might have killed Big Bob. I mean,” and he gave me a significant look, “metal shavings? In a skull? Left by a wrench? I’m not even sure that’s physically possible, but it’s ridiculously unlikely. The detective is trying to sell you a load of goods, Alison, and you’re buying it because you feel guilty.”

  As charged, I thought. “So beyond pointing out that I’m stupid, what do you think our course of action should be?” I asked.

  “You’re going to have to get into the house and look around that basement,” Paul said. “It sounds to me like someone wanted it to look like Mrs. Malone is the killer. That means they had to break into the basement without her knowing and plant the wrench. If you find out how they did it, Alison, that might lead us to who.”

  “Besides that, what?” I asked.

  Maxie, whose clothing had changed once again, this time to a pair of blue jeans and a T-shirt that read “Future Home of Bob’s Dry Cleaners,” seemed to have calmed down, or what passed for calm with Maxie. She was directly over my head, possibly in an effort to intimidate me. It was working.