Bones Behind the Wheel

by E. J. Copperman

  “Alison!” Jeannie’s mouth was right next to my ear, so there went hearing out of my right side for the rest of the evening. “I’m so glad you’re here!”

  I had seen Jeannie the week before and we talk on the phone every couple of days, so her enthusiasm—which I’m used to—was a little overblown even for her. “Why?” I asked. Out of the corner of my eye, since I could barely move my head, I sensed that Tony was walking over to greet Josh.

  “You can settle a disagreement,” Jeannie said. I’m pretty sure that’s what she said but her greeting was still ringing on that eardrum. “Tony and I have been arguing all day.”

  “You have not,” I pointed out as she mercifully eased up on the clench and let me remember what breathing was like. “Tony was in my house until two hours ago.”

  Tony, who was indeed shaking hands with Josh in a gesture that I considered much more reasonable, looked over at me as they each released and said, “I’m really sorry about the extra day, Alison.”

  I waved a hand idly. “I know you’re doing the job right,” I told him. “I trust you.”

  Jeannie must have been ticked off that I was being friendly with her husband when she wanted me on her side. “Tony wants me to quit my job.”

  Tony looked at the ceiling, apparently for some kind of sign. “No, I don’t want you to quit your job,” he said, his voice fraying just enough to indicate this wasn’t the first time he’d said such a thing today. “I’m perfectly happy with you having your job and the money certainly doesn’t hurt.”

  I knew both of them quite well, so I had a good idea where to get the real information. Jeannie is my best friend, my sounding board and my favorite shoulder—other than Josh’s—to cry on. When I filed for divorce from The Swine she had to get waterproof blouses. But the fact is, she lets her emotions rule her and doesn’t believe she’s doing so. She has seen things in my house that absolutely can’t be explained with anything but the knowledge that ghosts exist there and because that doesn’t enter into her version of reality, she will find any possible (and often impossible) explanation to preserve her worldview. That’s Jeannie.

  So if I wanted the true dope on this supposed argument they were having I could ask Oliver, who would undoubtedly tell me about the latest doings on Thomas the Tank Engine or I could ask Tony. Which would infuriate Jeannie.

  Luckily, I married the right man on my second try. “What’s this all about?” Josh asked Tony. Guy stuff. Jeannie couldn’t get mad at Josh and she knew it. She pouted over a pot of marinara sauce and stirred with a little too much muscle. Luckily she was wearing an apron.

  “I said to Jeannie that I’m getting into a busy time of year and the kids’ daycare was getting expensive,” Tony explained. “Jeannie’s decided that means I want her to be a stay-at-home mom.” He turned toward his wife. “And that’s not what I meant, because we can’t afford it and she likes her work.”

  Ollie broke up the laugh fest by walking in with a plastic stick and pointing at Tony. “Bang, Daddy,” he said.

  Tony looked down at his son. “That’s not a gun, Ollie. That’s a magic wand.”

  “Bang, Daddy.” He pointed again.

  Tony got the message, and even though Ollie was really aiming the wand at his leg, clutched his chest. “Oh!” he shouted, and staggered back toward Jeannie.

  Oliver looked terrified and ran back into the TV room and Melissa.

  Jeannie looked at her husband, who was still playing the part of “wounded man.” “See what you did?” she said.

  Tony looked over and no doubt noticed his son was no longer in the room. “Ollie!” he called. “Ollie, I’m okay!” He walked out toward the TV room, too.

  There was a rather pregnant pause in the kitchen, which was warm just because of all the cooking and I’m pretty sure the oven was on. And as usual, my husband knew how to diffuse an awkward situation.

  “Did Alison tell you I’m working on a case?” he asked.

  Jeannie turned to look at him. There ensued a good deal of explanation, all of which you already know. It transpired that Tony had told Jeannie about the bullets found in the cavity of the ceiling beam and hole and about the car that had until recently been an unseen resident of my backyard, but he hadn’t known about the body in the car and he definitely had not heard the name Herman Fitzsimmons before. Somewhere in the middle of it all Tony came back with the news that Oliver was no longer under the impression he’d shot his dad.

  When we had gotten them up to speed on the situation, two things had changed. First, Jeannie and Tony seemed to forget they’d been disagreeing about Jeannie’s career and second, Melissa had reappeared from the TV room with Molly trailing dutifully after her.

  I’d left out much of the ghost-related material during our recitation although I’d seen Tony nodding a couple of times in silent understanding. Tony gets the whole ghost thing. I think he’s sorry he can’t see them, except that he’s afraid of Maxie. It’s a long story.

  Jeannie had put some pasta in a large pot of boiling water. One of the things Tony had done when he inevitably renovated their kitchen—something I could show Maxie if she wanted to be reasonable—was to install an extra-large stove so she had plenty of burners to work with. “So this Fitzsimmons guy was cheating on his wife but she didn’t know about it?” she asked.

  That was ghost-adjacent so I didn’t divulge my source of information. “We think so but we’re not sure.”

  “Well, if the wife did it she had a lot of help,” Tony said. “I doubt she drove an earth mover into your backyard and dug a ditch deep enough to put in her husband and the competition’s car.”

  Jeannie turned on him. “Why? Because a woman can’t run heavy equipment?”

  “No, because nobody would have been able to do that with just one person and also I don’t think she could have done it without being seen before she called the cops to report her husband missing.” Tony can deflect with the best of them.

  “Besides, Katrina said she’d seen two people moving the car,” Josh pointed out.

  “So if Darlene didn’t do it, who did?” I hadn’t so much as called one suspect on the phone, but that was largely because I didn’t know who the suspects were, let alone their cell numbers. Canvassing all of the Jersey Shore from the nineteen eighties seemed somehow inefficient.

  “Let’s all sit down to dinner,” Jeannie said, which hardly seemed an adequate response to my question. Without waiting for an answer she looked in the direction of the TV room. “Oliver! Supper!” Ollie, who literally knew which side his bread was buttered on, turned off the television and could be heard doing his three-year-old thing in our direction.

  * * *

  While we were walking toward the dining room, which I could be certain Jeannie never used for normal family dinners because Ollie looked confused when we passed the kitchen table, Melissa, who had clearly been doing some thinking, said, “I think it’s important we find out who owned the house back in those days. There might be some connection. I don’t think they just buried the car in our backyard randomly. There’s so much open space on the beach.” That was true, since a beach is pretty much open space by definition.

  “I’ll have to get on that,” I said, meaning I’d get Paul to get Maxie to get on that. “It can’t be hard to get those documents; they’re all public record.” I pulled out my phone and sent the message with the proviso: Don’t text back unless you have to. I would have been able to explain it, or simply tell Jeannie the truth and let her fabricate whatever explanation suited her mindset, but it was much less tiring to do it this way.

  Jeannie knows the three of us well enough that this was hardly a formal dinner. There was sausage and peppers with the pasta and meatballs in the marinara she’d made—jars are not for my friend. And the oven had indeed been in use, since garlic bread accompanied our dinner. I planned to eat again in three days.

  Melissa, who undoubtedly could identify every flavor in every aspect of the meal, politely asked Jeanni
e about the sauce and was given the answer, “Oregano.” She nodded as if enlightened but I saw a glimmer of amusement in her eyes. Find me a marinara that doesn’t have oregano in it.

  “Sounds to me like the most obvious possibility is some business thing,” Tony said. “Other car dealers would have access to tow trucks and certainly could find that sort of earth moving equipment. I bet it was a rival.”

  “To kill a guy?” Josh was skeptical. “If you’re mad at a competitor you might talk him down to customers or other dealers. I mean I wouldn’t do that to another paint store but there are those who might. That’s as far as it would go. Who needs to kill somebody who’s selling more cars than you?”

  There was a time when Jeannie would have found this kind of talk absolutely scandalous in front of her son. But once Molly was born Jeannie’s incredibly immersive style of parenting had eased up considerably. Ollie, for his part, looked downright uninterested in whatever it was these nutty grownups were talking about and was using the marinara to draw a penguin on his plasticized placemat. Jeannie didn’t so much as blink. Before Molly she’d have had the whole room decontaminated and might have considered moving.

  “Maybe the guy had mob connections,” Tony attempted. “I’ve heard about people being buried in obscure locations before.” Jeannie gave him a look. “What? I watch true crime shows.”

  “It’s possible,” I said, “but Lt. McElone seemed to think there was nothing really shady on Fitzsimmons’s record. I don’t know who to look into at all.”

  Given a setup like that, how could my cell phone not have buzzed with a text message from Paul?

  Got the property records. We might have solved this case.

  Chapter 22

  Earlier in my private investigation “career” I might have dropped everything after receiving that kind of message, made an excuse to Jeannie and Tony and made a beeline for the guesthouse to find out what had been discovered. But I knew Paul and he liked to make dramatic statements that would shortly turn out to be a little exaggerated. Like by a factor of thirty.

  So I read the message, made an excuse about getting a text from a guest that didn’t require any immediate action, put the phone back in my pocket and returned to the dinner conversation. By the time we had reached the dessert, a chocolate cream pie Jeannie admitted she had bought, we had identified at least seven possible suspects in the death of Herman Fitzsimmons, although only two of them (Darlene and Harriet, despite the latter denying any involvement posthumously) had names attached. Otherwise they fell into categories: Rival car dealers, Harriet’s husband—if she had one—mob bosses, disgruntled employees and Sting (hey, it was 1983). Okay, so three of them had names. But Sting is not on the guy’s birth certificate.

  I thanked Jeannie again for making dinner, reiterated that it had not been necessary (although a break from bring-in food was welcome), reinforced the fact that the next day would absolutely be the last one Tony and Vic spent on my ceiling beam, and then played a couple of games of something I didn’t recognize with Ollie and Molly (a rhyme that would haunt them the rest of their lives, no doubt to the point that Molly would eventually go by M. Constance Mandorisi) and got the three of us into the truck for the ride home, which aside from some normal post-mortem was uneventful.

  Once we were back at the guesthouse, though, a quick glance at Paul told me he’d been in a state of agitation. “Why didn’t you text me back?” he demanded as soon as we were through the front door. I looked forward to using the back door again tomorrow. In all likelihood. Paul had texted me twice more wondering why I hadn’t responded but I hadn’t even seen those until I was in the truck on the way home. Hey, there was chocolate cream pie.

  “Because there wasn’t anything I could do and you said you solved it anyway,” I told him. “Now let me check on my guests.”

  Maxie, who dropped in from the ceiling with her trench coat and laptop, must have heard what I’d said. “They’re all out,” she informed me. “The two guys went to dinner and I think the woman is on a date again. She was getting all dressed up before she left.”

  I stared at her. “You didn’t go into her room, did you?”

  Maxie gave me her oh please face. “No. She was running back and forth on the second floor between her room and the bathroom and every time she was a little more dolled up. So let’s talk about designs.” She reached into the trench coat again, no doubt for the sketchpad, but Paul stopped her.

  “Case first, Maxie. Show Alison what we found.”

  Maxie stopped in mid-reach and her face showed boredom the way a ten-year-old might. “Okay,” she moaned. “But we’re definitely talking design later.” I resigned myself to that eventuality and moved on, my husband and daughter following me into the den. I plopped down on the sofa with a force I don’t usually have when I don’t eat like a horse at Jeannie’s house. “But we didn’t find anything. I found it.” Maxie claims to disdain the internet research Paul asks her to do, but she’s very good at it and doesn’t like it when she fails to get what she sees as proper credit. Like, all the credit.

  Josh watched as the laptop placed itself on the coffee table and maneuvered to see the screen, which Maxie noted with a look. “He’s getting a little friendly, isn’t he?” she said.

  I gave her a look without saying anything to my husband. He had no idea his head was coinciding with her midsection, and I saw no reason to enlighten him on the subject. “Fine,” Maxie said. I think she found the situation amusing.

  “The key was discovering who had owned the property in the early eighties,” Paul began. The fact that Maxie had done the grunt work wasn’t going to stop him from lecturing us on the process. Paul sees us as a serious investigative agency when in fact we are one woman who is devoted to keeping a pleasant guesthouse and two ghosts who have literally all the time in the world and not much to do with it. “That was easy enough to find and it led to other dominoes falling.”

  I was all in favor of wrapping this affair up as quickly as possible but so far Paul—and by extension Maxie—hadn’t told me anything. “So who did it?” I asked. Cut to the chase; that’s my motto.

  “We don’t know,” Maxie said. She has a similar motto but it’s more about getting the dull stuff out of the way so she can show off her genius. Everyone has an agenda.

  “Not yet,” Paul corrected sternly. “But it is a matter of time, and not much time.”

  Josh looked at the computer screen, then at me. “I’m seeing ownership documents filed with the county,” he said.

  Melissa, who knows not to interrupt the ghosts when they’re really jazzed up about something, also knows that Josh can’t hear them and has everyone’s best interests at heart. “Just a second,” she said. “I’ll make sure you know what’s going on.”

  Maxie was wearing a sour expression and a black t-shirt (now that her trench coat was no longer necessary) bearing the legend, I Can’t Believe It Either. Her tone was drier and less patient when she said, “Pay attention. We found the records. You remember I owned the house before you did and I bought it from the Preston family, who owned it for twenty years.” I saw Liss translating this all for Josh, who kept staring at the screen intently.

  “Thanks for the background, but yeah I do remember that. Are you suggesting that one of the Prestons killed Herman Fitzsimmons and buried him in a Lincoln Continental in the backyard?” That would have been awkward. I went to high school with one of the Prestons’ children. I don’t go to reunions, but still.

  “No.” Paul was taking charge of the symposium once more. “The Prestons bought the house in 1986 from a man named Lincoln O’Hara.”

  “Lincoln? Like in ‘Lincoln Continental?’ ” I asked. It seemed a pretty big coincidence and Paul has always said not to trust coincidences. They happen, but they’re usually suspect.

  “Certainly not a member of that family but the choice of car might have been a signal of some sort,” Paul said. “I am not placing a great deal of significance on it yet.”
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br />   “So what are you placing significance on?” I asked. “Melissa has school tomorrow, Josh has to open the store before the sun comes up and I need to look at sketches with Maxie. Let’s get to the point.” Never let it be said I can’t be abrasive when I’m full.

  “A few things.” Paul can be oblivious to the mood of others when he’s engrossed in work. And sometimes when he’s not so engrossed. “First, there is no direct line between Lincoln O’Hara and Herman Fitzsimmons yet established. But O’Hara did work for a company that rented out earth moving equipment and would have had access to some of the inventory if he’d needed it. He was certified to use many of the larger machines.”

  “So even if he didn’t kill Fitzsimmons,” Maxie said, “he sure could have helped bury the car. And he lived right here so that would explain why he didn’t choose any other place.”

  “Wouldn’t the fact that this was his house incriminate him if the car was found?” Josh asked Paul. “Why leave himself open to that kind of jeopardy?” Melissa showed him where to look to approximate eye contact.

  “It wasn’t discovered until this week,” Paul pointed out. “That’s a pretty good track record. Besides, it’s easier to conceal serious excavation when it’s on your own property. There are no neighbors to either side here who might complain. If it was done during the offseason when there are very few tourists and not many people on the beach, and if it was done at night with minimal lighting, it could be easily concealed. Clearly that happened or there would have been some reports at the time of the incident.” He waited for Melissa to communicate his response to Josh, whom Paul obviously now considered an associate. Great. The last sane member of the family was being inducted into the Paul Harrison Dead Detectives Society.

  I leaned back into the sofa cushions, regretting at least one meatball eaten in haste. I closed my eyes just because it felt good. “So why don’t we tell all this to McElone and she can go arrest this Lincoln O’Hara and I can take it easy on the couch?”