Chance of a Ghost (24 page)

She regarded me closely. “Alison Kerby,” she said. “Are you Loretta Kerby’s daughter? I’ve met her at some condo association meetings.” I admitted that my mother was, indeed, my mother, and she nodded. “You favor her. She’s a lovely woman.”

I didn’t know where to go with that, so I nodded modestly and plowed ahead. “If you liked Mr. Laurentz, why are you glad he’s dead?” I asked.

“He seemed so unhappy,” she replied. “He was one of those men who always acted dissatisfied, like life was simply not going along with his plan. And then dying upstairs in his bathroom, all by himself.” Not that dying in your bathroom with someone else seemed much more appealing.

“But you liked him,” I said.

Frances stood up from the sofa in front of her coffee table—overstuffed with photographs of her children and grandchildren, but I noticed, none of her late husband—and struck a pose looking out the front window, but just barely touching the drape on the right side. No wonder she liked Lawrence so much; he’d been as big a ham as she was.

“Yes, I did. It was I who got Larry involved in the New Old Thespians.”

“The New Old…what?”

Frances smiled, because I clearly was not very well informed and now she could clue me in. “It’s a group that puts on local productions of very high quality, but everyone participating must be at least fifty-five years old,” she explained. “The group was started here in the condo community three or four years ago, and I got involved right at the beginning. We perform plays and musicals, mostly in other active adult communities, but sometimes in schools and once in a while in small community theaters. We have a performance tomorrow night, in fact. I’ll be at rehearsal all evening. But Larry was clearly very interested in theater, so I told him about the group and brought him to his first meeting.”

I managed to hold on to the same vapid grin I’d been giving Frances since I first showed up at her door, but internally, I was fuming at Lawrence Laurentz. In all the private-eye movies and books, the one thing the detective always insists on is that the client provide all the necessary information, and here I was discovering that Lawrence had left out a whole group of people who might have wanted to kill him.

“So he came and was a big hit, I suppose,” I said to Frances. It wasn’t a question, exactly, but it did elicit a response.

Frances covered her mouth, perhaps to hide a chuckle. “Oh, I’m afraid not,” she said in a coquettish trickle of a voice. “Larry had…opinions about pretty much every aspect of every production and was rather loudly disappointed whenever he wasn’t cast in the lead role.”

“How often was that?” I asked.

“Every time,” Frances told me.

“Was he a bad actor?” Lawrence seemed like such a larger-than-life personality, so it was hard to believe he wouldn’t be a natural on the stage.

Frances appeared to consider the question, and put a finger to her lips. “I wouldn’t say that, exactly,” she began. “Larry was very good at parts that required large gestures and oversized line delivery. But subtlety was not his forte, I’m afraid, and when we were presenting a musical, well, the fact is that Larry couldn’t sing to save his life.”

“So he was vocal about his opinion that he should have gotten some leading roles. I imagine that didn’t ingratiate him with the rest of the group very effectively,” I suggested.

Frances shook her head sadly. “No, I’m afraid not. He just rubbed some people the wrong way. But it was mostly because he did care so much about putting on a really good show. Though not everyone in the group saw it that way.”

“How much did they not see it that way?” I asked.

She let out a long sigh and looked at her extremely well-vacuumed rug, the section of it that wasn’t covered with furniture or some rather odd porcelain figures of animals. “It was suggested, after a while, that it might be best if Larry leave the group,” she said.

Uh-oh. “Who did the suggesting?” I asked.

“Jerry Rasmussen, the president of New Old Thespians,” Frances said. “He didn’t like Larry, and he was the one who was especially adamant about that. I think everyone else would have tolerated Larry because of me.”

“Because of you?”

Frances smiled sadly and looked away, this time out the window again. “I guess Larry had a little crush on me, and they knew it,” she explained. “But that got Jerry especially upset.”

“Because…”

Frances’s smile got a little bit broader. I was right. “I think Jerry might have a little crush on me, too,” she said.

I was starting to sense a pattern in her thinking. “How did Mr. Laurentz take it when he was asked to leave?” I asked.

She seemed to be searching for her answer in that square
foot of pristine wall-to-wall. “Oh, not very well. At the meeting when it was suggested, he accused Jerry of favoritism, told the group they were jealous of his talents and declared quite clearly that they…
we
could all go rot in hell.”

“Would you excuse me for just a moment?” I asked Frances. She appeared a little confused at my sudden request but nodded. I walked just out of her view into the hallway to the bathroom, where I pulled my cell phone out of my tote bag and texted Mom, “Is Lawrence there?”

Mom was as quick as she was dependable, and in seconds came the response “yhi.” The only problem here was that I had no idea what that meant, so I came back with, “What?” And almost immediately my phone vibrated. “Yes he is.” If one could put eye-rolling into a text, it would have been in that one. Seriously, couldn’t I get into the twenty-first century?

I sent Mom a quick message back: “Keep him there. I’m coming.” I walked back into the living room and smiled at Frances, even as I pictured a whole new group of suspects to interview. This investigation was beginning to look like an endeavor that could take months to clear up. It’s rough when pretty much anyone in a twenty-six-mile radius could have committed the crime. If indeed a crime had been committed.

“The tension with Mr. Laurentz—was it difficult for you? Because you had brought him into the group?” I asked.

Frances wiped her eye. Either she really was a very good actress, or the conversation was disturbing her severely. “A few people stopped talking to me. Larry was one of them.”

“That must have been very hard on you. Are you still a member of the group?”

Frances looked up, startled, as if I’d asked whether she was still a human being. “Of course,” she said. “I wouldn’t let some minor personality conflicts get in the way of the
show. I’m a professional.” One who wasn’t getting paid for her work, but then I could certainly empathize with such an arrangement. “In fact,” Frances added, “I was thinking of asking your mother if she would be interested, but I had no idea if she had a theatrical background.” That last bit seemed intended to reinforce the idea that Mom was my mom. Once again, I chose not to respond.

I’d have to narrow the suspect field a little, however, if I was going to get Paul the information he’d need to figure this puzzle out. Certainly I wasn’t going to get to the bottom of it, especially with the entire state of New Jersey capable of having killed Lawrence. We’re a very densely populated state.

“Were there some people who were especially angry with Mr. Laurentz?” I asked. “Maybe the people who stopped talking to you?”

“Well, Tyra hadn’t been talking to Larry already,” she said casually. “And…”

“Tyra Carter?” How did
she
fit in?

“Yes. Do you know her? Tyra works the stage crew for us. She’s very strong, you know, and she knew Larry and me from the Basie Theatre.” Tyra was now linked to Lawrence both at work and through the theater company, and was leaping to the top of the suspect list, if only because I didn’t have a reason to put anyone else there yet.

“What about you?” I asked.

“A few of the members stopped talking to me, but most of them understood I’d simply wanted Larry to enjoy himself,” Frances said, now able to look me in the eye once more. “But Jerry never really forgave either of us.”

Finally! Someone who never forgave! “Jerry?” I asked, trying not to seem too anxious.

“Yes,” Frances answered. “A few weeks later, Tyra told me that Jerry had considered asking me to leave the Thespians, too.”

This theatrical group was a nest of yentas, as far as I could tell. “Why didn’t he?” I asked. “I mean, according to Tyra, why not?”

Frances looked at me with something approaching pity at my dense brain. “The
crush
,” she said.

Fourteen

It didn’t take long to get from Frances Walters’s town
home to Mom’s, but it was enough time for me to build up a pretty serious head of steam (impressive, given that my prehistoric Volvo wagon had a heater that was more rumor than fact). By the time I was standing in Mom’s living room with Lawrence Laurentz hovering in a sitting position over the easy chair, I probably had steam escaping from my ears, and not just because I was wearing two sweaters, a coat, a scarf, gloves and a knitted wool hat.

“Why didn’t you tell me about the New Old Thespians?” I demanded as soon as I had unwrapped the scarf from around my mouth.

Lawrence didn’t respond right away, so my mother jumped in ahead of him. “The New Old
what
?” she asked.

“Thespians,” Lawrence said. “It means ‘actors.’”

“Oh.” Mom appeared a little disappointed.

“You haven’t answered my question,” I reminded the ghost.

Lawrence had managed to regain his aura of superiority when correcting Mom, so he looked completely urbane when he said, “I did not mention the Thespians because they did not seem to be relevant. We were discussing my murder, not my avocation.”

“You were asked to leave a group of local theater people under what could be described as acrimonious circumstances,” I countered. “You didn’t think that was relevant? One of those people could have been mad enough to kill, if you really were murdered.”

The dapper ghost, looking overdressed in a vest and tuxedo pants, rose a couple of feet toward the ceiling. “Of
course
someone killed me!” he shouted. “I’m dead, aren’t I?”

“You don’t really think Larry had a heart…whatever, do you, Alison?” Mom seemed somehow concerned that I was insulting her guest rather than being—as I would be—ticked off that he was the one speaking to her daughter in such harsh tones.

“All I’m
saying
,” I exhaled, “is that so far we haven’t found any concrete evidence that someone killed you, Mr. Laurentz. All I have is your story. If you’re not going to be forthcoming with me, there is no way I can continue with this investigation.” Nothing would have made me happier than to hear Lawrence release me from that responsibility.

No such luck. “Don’t forget about your father,” he warned me. “I’m still your best link to him.”

I did my best to look misty-eyed. “That’s very cruel of you,” I told Lawrence. “You know that’s an emotional point for my mother and me, and you use it to get me to do what you want. I’m starting to think you’re not very nice,
Larry
, and I don’t think I want to work for you unless I have actual proof you can produce my father the way you say you can.”

“Alison!” Mom was appalled. I’m not sure if it was because I was being rude or because I’d had the audacity to call a man of Lawrence’s age and stature (in her eyes) by his nickname.

I ignored her exclamation of horror at my bad manners and watched Lawrence closely. His eyes narrowed and he watched me without blinking, obviously trying to determine if I was bluffing. Since I really wasn’t, he probably saw something other than what he wanted. He snorted.

“Very well,” he said finally. “You need proof? You shall have it.” And he vanished; one second here, gone the next.

When a ghost does something like that, it has the immediate effect of making the living people in the room feel foolish. You’re standing there staring at nothing for a bit before you realize there’s nothing to stare at. So Mom and I started and then looked at each other.

After a minute or so, we realized that we couldn’t just stand there, so Mom gestured to me to follow her. “No telling when he’ll be back, or even if,” she said. “Let’s go get some coffee.” Mom can solve pretty much any problem as long as she’s within walking distance of a kitchen. So I followed her, and lacking any useful purpose, sat in one of the wicker-back chairs at her kitchen table.

I told her about Frances and Tyra. Tyra had suggested subtly (once off the phone) that I never bother her again, which I understood but did not appreciate, but Frances had actually been so interested in my investigation—she called it “life research for a future role”—that she’d given me her cell phone number and asked me to call if she could help. I didn’t see how she could, but one thing Paul has impressed upon me is to never turn down someone who wants to tell you things about the case you’re working on.

“You know,” Mom said out of the blue, “I read that Dr. Wells passed away a few weeks ago.” Mom reads the obituaries in about seven newspapers online, including the
MetroWest Jewish News
, the
Catholic Spirit of Metuchen
, and for all I knew, a Baha’i newspaper based in Jersey City.