An Uninvited Ghost (15 page)

Donovan turned back to look, and I stared in their direction. The three cast members held their terrified (Tiffney), terrifying (H-Bomb) and absolutely vacant (Mistah Motion) glares at each other until Ed the director yelled, “Cut!”

Then, I swear to you, there was applause from the crew. Trent Avalon, who apparently had been just out of sight in the kitchen doorway, walked out toward them, clapping his hands as well. “Very nice,” he said. “That’s going to be a real moment for you, H-Bomb.”

But he was still behind his star, and couldn’t see her face. H-Bomb had not relaxed when the lights went out, as the other two had done. She was still staring daggers at Tiffney, until she broke the eye contact, pivoted a full hundred and eighty degrees, and stomped her way out of the room.

As she passed Donovan and me, I could hear H-Bomb mutter, “I’ll kill her.” And she didn’t sound like she was acting. I’d seen her when she was acting. This was a lot more convincing.

 

 

I told Tom Donovan I’d think about taking the case and that I’d call him the next day with my decision. He told me how much he would be willing to pay for a successful conclusion, and that was going to make it more difficult for me to decline.

My mother appeared as soon as Donovan left, which led me to believe that Paul and/or Maxie had been relaying messages up to my bedroom while I was downstairs negotiating. She walked to a cabinet I keep near the front door, reached in and pulled out an honest-to-goodness picnic basket she must have stashed there when she’d arrived.

“Thought you might like some home cooking,” she said.

I defended myself. “I can cook.”

“I know, Ally, and you’re wonderful at it, but you just don’t have the time. So I prepared a little something. I hope you don’t mind.”

She went into the kitchen to heat up whatever it was she’d made, with specific instructions not to make anything smell too delicious until most of the guests were already outside, heading for a restaurant. Meanwhile, I wanted to confer with Paul but was waylaid by Dolores on my way to the stairs.

“Linda Jane says we are not to leave town,” she began. Oops. I knew there was something I’d forgotten to do. “I’m sorry, Dolores. I was looking for you before. You see, the detective investigating Mrs. Crosby’s death—”

But she didn’t let me finish. “I think it’s
marvelous
,” Dolores gushed. “This will give me that much more opportunity to locate the spirits living in your house.”

“Of course it will.”

“Will there be an extra charge if we have to stay past our scheduled departure date?” Dolores wanted to know.

That was a good question; I hadn’t considered it before. “Let’s see how long the extra stay might last, and I’ll reassess,” I told her. This, in the guesthouse business, is called
procrastination
. “I’ll talk to you about it on Tuesday.”

She looked positively tickled as I walked away.

Jim and Warren were heading out the front door, dressed for a night out (their white pants and white shoes were especially festive). Warren, the taller of the two, looked over his shoulder and saw me. He stopped and walked back over.

“Alison,” he said, smiling. “There’s a slight problem with the felt on the pool table.”

“What’s that, Warren?”

“I sort of . . . tore it.” He averted his eyes, apparently worried that I would tell him he had to go to bed without supper.

“And how many beers did you have before you sort of tore it?” I asked him.

“Maybe one or two.” Still not looking at me.

“Well, suppose I take a look, see how bad the damage is, and find out what it’s going to cost to repair. Then we can figure out what to do, okay?”

Warren smiled and looked me in the eye. “That sounds good, Alison. I’m really sorry.”

“It happens,” I said. It especially happens when you have your first beer at eleven in the morning, but it would have been supremely ineffective to mention that. Warren joined Jim and waved as they headed off. I shook my head a little and waved back.

I was going to head into the kitchen to help Mom with dinner, but now I guessed I should check out the damage my first guests had done to the expensive pool table I’d picked up used.

Tony walked into the front room as I went toward the game room. Toolbox in hand, he was getting ready to head home. Just his luck—another few seconds and he would have made it, but I caught sight of him and beckoned him over.

“What’s up?”

“How much do you know about pool tables?” I asked him.

“You usually have to bank your shots,” Tony answered. “And you’re supposed to hit the black ball in last.”

“Come on. We have a repair job to assess.” And I didn’t give him the option of refusing, because I’d already turned and proceeded toward the game room.

The room was empty, of course, since Jim and Warren were the only ones who ever came in, and they were out in search of something to soak up the alcohol in their systems. But they had at least cleaned up after themselves; there were no empties anywhere to be found in the room, and the pool cues were carefully placed back on the rack I’d mounted on the wood-paneled wall. (Maxie had practically thrown a fit over the paneling, but a game room with a pool table made such old school décor a necessity.) The Coca-Cola Tiffany-style lamp over the pool table was still turned on, and the barstools I’d put in for those not currently shooting were scattered to the corners of the room.

“Uh-oh,” Tony said.

He pointed. Sure enough, the green felt covering of the pool table had a very long vertical gash in it, reaching across for at least six inches, with a horizontal tear, only an inch or two, at the bottom of the gash.

“That doesn’t just sew up, does it?” I asked.

Tony snorted a bit and shook his head. “The whole thing needs to be replaced,” he said. “You can’t do this yourself; you don’t have the equipment. You need to get someone to come in.”

“Price?”

“Not cheap.” Tony raised the flap at the bottom of the tear, and then let it drop. “But the table is useless if you don’t get the repair done.”

I moaned, but just a little. There’s a cost to doing business, and if you want to stay in business, you pay it. “Do you know anyone who does that sort of work?” I asked Tony.

He started looking underneath the table. Contractors do stuff like that; even if they’re not going to make the repair themselves, the construction of the piece fascinates them, and they try to figure out how they’d do it if it were indeed their task.

“I don’t, really,” he answered, his voice muffled under the table. “But I can ask around. Hey, what’s this?”

“What’s what?”

Tony’s voice sounded concerned, even though I couldn’t see his face. “You’d better take a look at this,” he said.

I dropped to my knees and looked where Tony was pointing, at the underside of the pool table, in a specific spot, not far from the rail that returns the ball after it drops into the pocket. I had to get very low to the floor to see what he was showing me.

There was something taped to the underside of the slate base of the pool table.

“What’s that?” I asked.

Tony reached into his tool belt and pulled out a small flashlight. He turned it on with his teeth (men are so macho) and pointed the beam at the object attached to the table.

I gasped.

Taped to the bottom of my pool table, with plain cellophane tape that had not yet yellowed, was a small glass vial.

Like the kind that could contain insulin.

“I’m glad you knew enough not to touch it,” Detective McElone said. She didn’t even grunt as she rose up from a low squat under my pool table. On top of everything else that irritated me about her, McElone was in really good shape.

“Of course I knew not to touch it,” I said. “But I doubt whoever left it there was stupid enough not to wipe it off first.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” the detective answered. “They were stupid enough to leave it where it could be found instead of throwing it away or destroying it. You can’t ever tell with criminals. Some of them are really dumb.”

She had already questioned Tony and me about the way we’d discovered the vial and seemed vaguely suspicious of Tony’s explanation of why he was underneath the table to begin with. I believe her comment was “The felt’s on the top part, right?”

“It’s attached underneath,” he’d explained.

“Tony was helping me with the pool table,” I’d told her. “Contractors like to check out every part of a job.”

“Are you fixing the torn felt?” McElone asked Tony.

“No,” he admitted. “I don’t do that kind of work.”

“Uh-huh.”

Now, wearing latex gloves, McElone had gotten back down and was actually lying on the floor under the pool table. Tony remained standing, but I dropped down to watch what she was doing—if I was going to carry an investigator’s license, it couldn’t hurt to watch a professional investigate something.

She carefully removed the tape on one side of the vial and held her hand under it when it dropped. But the tape on the other side held tight, and the vial did not fall off the slate.

“Oh, come on, Detective,” I said. “You don’t really think Tony killed Arlice Crosby. In fact, there’s a whole roomful of people who can testify to the fact that he was all the way on the other side of the room when she collapsed. If the insulin killed her instantly—”

“You’re right,” McElone said, slowly removing the tape on the other side, using a pair of tweezers. “I don’t think Mr. Mandorisi killed Mrs. Crosby.”

“That’s good,” Tony said.

“Then why are you being all suspicious about it?” I demanded.

The tape came loose and McElone pulled the vial free, holding it with the tweezers until she could rest it safely in a plastic evidence bag. “I’m suspicious for a living,” she said as she stood up, considerably more smoothly and quickly than I did. “It’s sort of my job.”

“What about
my
job?” I asked. “Is this now a crime scene? Can I still have guests and exhibitionist TV personalities in my house, or do I have to file for welfare?”

“Relax, you can keep your little hotel going here,” McElone said. She liked to refer to the place as anything but a guesthouse when she was trying to get under my skin, but only because it worked. “But there’s a problem.”

I wasn’t crazy about that pronouncement. “What?”

McElone waved the evidence bag just a little. “This vial couldn’t hold nearly as much insulin as the ME found in Mrs. Crosby’s body,” she said. “So I’m thinking it wasn’t the one that was used to kill her, or at the very least, not the
only
one.”

“That’s your problem,” I told her, exhaling. “Not mine.”

“Well, see, in this case, what’s my problem is also your problem,” the detective said with a less-than-warm smile. “Because I have to assume that this is not the only vial the killer used. And so—”

“Don’t say it.”

She said it. “—now I’m going to have to run a very thorough search of this entire house. To see if I can find any other vials or diabetic supplies that might have been used in the crime.”

There was a deep sound in the back of my throat that I didn’t recognize. “So you and a team of CSI wannabes are going to swarm all over my house and inconvenience my guests, is that it?”

“Not CSI wannabes,” McElone answered. “The real thing. I’m going to call the county’s crime-scene team in on this.”

“Swell. So I can expect a real professional going-over. Can’t wait.”

“Good. Because they’ll be here within an hour.”

She was as good as her word. The crime-scene team, three men dressed only roughly like storm troopers, showed up less than fifty minutes later and immediately dispersed themselves around the house. The sun was going down, and my guests would soon be returning to their vacation home away from home, only to discover people going through their underwear drawers looking for evidence of a murder they’d witnessed the night before.

I didn’t think this was going to play well with Rance’s company. Good-bye future Senior Plus tours.

McElone cleared Tony to leave with an unnecessary warning not to stray too far from home. Tony was an expectant father and had work lined up in Harbor Haven, Lavalette and Seaside Heights over the next few weeks; the probability of him leaving for parts unknown anytime soon was pretty low.

But Mom, who had stuck her head into the game room while McElone was questioning us and been told to go away (all right, so the detective actually asked if Mom would “please wait until I can get a clear picture on this”) was not far from my side anytime thereafter. She had, it turned out, retreated to the kitchen to heat up the massive meal she had brought in her picnic basket.

“You know, my Uncle Nathaniel was a diabetic, and he used to have all sorts of things to, you know, keep his sugar in the right range,” she was telling me as Melissa came into the kitchen (after McElone had spent ten minutes asking her about the “dream” she’d had regarding Linda Jane) and started setting the table, as requested.

“Was that how he died?” I asked, taking Mom’s picnic spread out of the oven.

“No, he was in a three-car pileup on the Cross Bronx Expressway,” Mom told me.

She had brought—no joke—a whole roasted turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, broccoli, cranberry sauce (which I secretly hate, but couldn’t tell her because it would hurt her feelings) and bread stuffing, all in that picnic basket. Well, some of it might have been carried in that backpack Mom wears whenever she goes out, like a sixth-grader.

“Well, hopefully the crime-scene team can get this done quickly, because the three of us are going to have to go through all the guest bedrooms as soon as they’re done and straighten up,” I said. Mom nodded.

Melissa, on the other hand, looked disgusted. “I’m not going through some socks and stuff ”—(with an actual shiver on the word
stuff
)—“from people I don’t even know.”