Chance of a Ghost (27 page)

“I imagine he reacted badly,” I said to Jerry.

He stifled a mild snort and looked to the ceiling fan for an instant. “You could say that,” he said. “Lawrence accused us—me, mostly—of ‘conspiring to demean him’ in the eyes of the group, to make him look foolish and feel unwanted. He said it was ‘a blatant manifestation of jealousy’; those were his exact words. He left that night, saying none of us would ever see him alive again. And the fact is, none of us did, as far as I know. A few went to his funeral. The poor man. So sudden.”

“Did you go? To his funeral?” Jeannie asked, wiping some drool from Oliver’s mouth.

Jerry didn’t make eye contact. “No. I felt that Lawrence would have preferred I stay away.” Then he looked at me, and his gaze narrowed. “But what does this have to do with insurance? Why are you asking about the New Old Thespians in relation to Lawrence Laurentz’s death?” Uh-oh; he’d caught on.

“I’m not here on an insurance matter,” I told him. “I’m here to clear up some of the circumstances about Mr. Laurentz’s death.”

Jerry’s voice took on a slightly scratchy quality. “So you came to talk to me? Why? Lawrence died of a heart attack, didn’t he?”

In my head, I heard Melissa’s voice: “Awwwkwaaard…”

I gave him the prepared answer Paul and I had worked out: “There are some questions about what happened, and
my client is asking me to see what I can find out.” I figured that was vague enough to be true but not so vague that it would simply frustrate Jerry.

Or so I thought.

“So you think that something else happened?” he asked, his voice rising about a half octave. “You think he did himself in? Or…” His face took on a delighted quality that only world-class gossips can achieve. “Do you think that someone might have killed him? How can that happen? How can somebody give you a heart attack?”

“I’m not saying anything happened just yet,” I said, trying to maintain a soothing voice rather than hear his escalate to castrati levels. “I’m trying to determine exactly what might have caused Mr. Laurentz’s death.”

“Nobody sends out a private detective unless they think something sinister has happened,” Jerry said. While I was still marveling at his use of the word
sinister
, he went on, “And if you believe that someone did kill Lawrence, your first stop is at
my
door?” Jerry’s voice was reaching pitches that only a dog would be able to hear and alas, I had no dog handy.

“You weren’t our
first
stop…” I began, before realizing how stupid that sounded.

But Jerry wasn’t listening, anyway. “How dare you even consider the idea that I would want any harm to come to another human being, even Lawrence Laurentz!” he ranted. “I’ll have you know, I’ve been a vegetarian since 1986, before it was fashionable! I don’t even kill insects I find in my bathroom—I remove them to the backyard! What could possibly make you think I would…would…” And with that, he put his fingers up to his brow, shielding his eyes.

It was a good show, but I watched. Not one tear fell down Jerry Rasmussen’s cheeks, no matter how hard he shook with his feigned sobs. “This is interfering with my
process,” he managed. “I have to…prepare for a dress rehearsal tonight. And my emotional state needs to be…restored. I’d prefer it if you two would leave.”

The man could act; I’ll give him that. He’d almost had me convinced.

Jeannie snorted. “We
three
,” she said, but she was already packing Oliver into his snowsuit.

Fifteen

On our way back to Mom’s, Jeannie and I compared notes
on Jerry, whom she’d found cold. “He never so much as chucked Oliver’s chin!” She dropped me back at my car, and we split up so that she could go talk to another of Lawrence’s remaining co-workers and then pick Melissa up from school. Since Liss wanted to go and pull her “school project” gambit on Lieutenant McElone, and the conceit of her trying to do something behind my back would be lost if I was spotted dropping her off, it made more sense for Jeannie to do it. My daughter had tried to lobby for permission to walk to the police station from school, but I wasn’t about to let a ten-year-old (“I’m almost
eleven
, Mom!”) walk for more than a mile to the police station in freezing temperatures all by herself. Call me crazy.

That left me time to check in with Paul before Liss got home. I picked up the mail—which sure enough included a bill from Murray Feldner for
not
plowing my walk—and
went in search of Paul so I could play him the audio of the conversations with Tyra, Frances and Jerry.

Paul listened carefully, doing some serious goatee stroking, his eyes at half-mast and his brows coming close to meeting in the middle. He nodded a few times, especially during the Jerry playback, and when all the recordings had been played, he looked at me and did something very odd indeed.

He smiled.

“You’re really progressing, Alison,” he said, every inch the proud parent. “There was barely a question left unasked, and you reacted to everything they said with an eye toward the investigation and not the emotion of the moment. I’m very proud of you.”

It’s important to point out that I don’t take compliments well. I’ve never really examined this impulse, not even when I was seeing a therapist after The Swine walked out to seek sun and extreme blondeness in California. But suffice it to say that at this moment, I looked away and focused on how the Tiffany lamp over the pool table really needed dusting.

“Thank you,” I mumbled. “Now, what does it all mean?”

“An excellent question.” Paul “stood up,” which gave the impression of an expectant father in the 1950s pacing in the waiting room while his wife gave birth—two feet off the ground. “We haven’t established anything definitively, but it is significant that both the woman from the Count Basie and the man from the theater group admitted they didn’t much care for Mr. Laurentz and did not try to hide it.”

“Does that make you suspect Frances more, because she claimed that she liked Lawrence?”
Give me another gold star, teacher! I shined these patent-leather shoes just for you and had my mother braid my pigtails!

But Paul shook his head. “No, I think it would be extremely premature to start prioritizing suspects at this point. For one thing, we don’t have Jeannie’s report on the
people she’s interviewing, and there were several others in the theater group, at least, who probably held a grudge.”

“Yeah, but that’s such a lousy motive,” I argued. “The guy was a bad actor, so they decided to kill him? Even if Lawrence was especially obnoxious on his way out—and I’d bet cash money he was—they had already kicked him out of the group. His behavior was cause for a flaming bag of dog poop on his doorstep, not a toaster in his bathtub.” And yes, it felt just as ridiculous to say that as it must be to hear it.

“I agree,” Paul said. “There must be something more to it than that. Generally speaking, people kill for three reasons: money, sex or revenge. None of those seem to apply in this case.”

“I got a creepy feeling from Jerry Rasmussen,” I said. “Does that count for anything?”

Paul considered. “Instinct is a factor,” he said, pacing. “You would still have to prove anything that would tie him to a criminal act, but you were in the room with the man and I wasn’t. If your feelings about him were accurate, what do you think his next move will be?”

Jerry’s next move? I was lucky I knew what my
last
move was! Still wanting to impress my mentor, I thought hard, and my stomach froze a little. “You think he might get violent with me?” I asked.

Paul quickly shook his head. “No, no. The next thing he’ll do, if he’s as calculating as you think, is call you to apologize for his behavior. Expect the call within a day.”

“I did leave him a business card. You really think he’ll call?”

“If you were right about him. You’re a pretty good judge of human nature. I’d bet on it.” That was encouraging. Sort of.

“Did you get the feeling Lawrence was telling us everything?” I asked. “He’s left out important details before, like the whole experience with the theater club.”

Paul smiled at me. “You really are progressing. No, I
don’t think he’s telling us all there is to know, and it makes me wonder why more than what. He’s already dead; what does he have to lose?”

Maxie slid down through the ceiling wearing a trench coat, which is highly unusual for her; she usually favors the tightest clothing possible, as if she were still trying to attract shallow men three years after her death.

“I’ve got something,” she said, and opened the coat to produce my decrepit MacBook from inside the coat. That explained it; the ghosts can carry pretty much any object smaller than a Subaru undetected as long as they conceal it in their clothing. So Maxie could fly directly from the attic through my bedroom and into the game room without having to take human routes. We’d also had some past arguments about uninitiated guests seeing a flying laptop computer on the stairs, so Maxie was actually being considerate. But as soon as she reached her hovering spot, the trench coat disappeared, leaving her clad in some sprayed-on blue jeans and a black T-shirt bearing the slogan, “You Won’t Like Me When I’m Angry.” Truer words were never silk-screened.

Paul watched her float down. “What?” he asked.

“This New Old Thespians group,” she said. “You asked me to look it up.” Paul had indeed requested Maxie do some online research on the troupe, and it hadn’t taken her long to get whatever information she was talking about.

“Wow—there’s really something notable there?” I asked. Frankly, I’d thought anything Maxie could pull up on the Internet about a group of senior citizens putting on the occasional musical would be tame at best.

“You’re gonna love this,” she crowed. “They got busted six months ago.”

“What?”
Paul and I said at about the same time.

Maxie held out the laptop for us to see. “Believe it. They were doing a performance at some old people’s development—”

“Active adult community,” I corrected.

Maxie shook her head to declare it irrelevant. “Whatever. Anyway, so they’re putting on this show, and halfway through it the cops burst in and start arresting everybody.”

“Why?” Paul wanted to know. Maxie was waving the laptop around with such enthusiasm that one, it was impossible to read the article on the screen, and two, I was worried about buying a new laptop if she dropped it.

Maxie smiled her naughtiest, most self-satisfied smile. “Public nudity,” she said in a long drawl.

“Public…public…
what
?” I managed. So I’m not erudite when taken by surprise. No, shock.

“You heard me,” the ghost answered. I’d never seen her look quite so happy. “The performance apparently included a bunch of the cast stripping down to nothing, and there are laws against such things if you don’t have the proper permits ahead of time.”

I grabbed the laptop out of curiosity and a sense of self-preservation. “Let me see that thing,” I said. “That can’t be right.”

Maxie’s mouth flattened out. “Oh, it’s true all right,” she said. “Do you think I make this stuff up?”

“Oh, stop,” I countered. “Believe it or not, sometimes it actually isn’t about you.” I started reading the article, from the
Home News Tribune
, dated almost seven months earlier. Sure enough, there had been eleven arrests for public indecency, lewd behavior and resisting arrest, at an active adult community called Cedar Crest during a Sunday night performance of…

“
Hair
?” Paul asked. “A bunch of people over fifty-five put on
Hair
?”

I shrugged. “They were there the first time, I guess,” I said. “But the nudity in
Hair
is only a few seconds. How could the cops know when to show up?”

Paul raised an eyebrow.

“Someone must have alerted them,” he suggested. “Someone like—”

“A disgraced former member of the troupe who had been unceremoniously kicked out?” I asked.

Paul shook his head. “We’re getting way ahead of ourselves here,” he said. “We have no proof. We don’t even know exactly when Mr. Laurentz was asked to leave the theater company. For all we can say, this incident could have happened before that or after he died.”

Maxie chewed her upper lip. “I don’t know,” she said. “Larry did die in the bathtub six months ago. The timing fits.”

I felt my eyebrows meet in the middle. Something was a little bit off here. “Since when are you interested in these investigations?” I asked Maxie. “You usually complain about having to do the research.”

“This one’s funny,” she said.

“Funny? A man dies, is maybe murdered, and you think it’s funny?”

Maxie shrugged. “I have a different perspective,” she said.

“Yeah. You should be more sympathetic.”

Maxie started to answer but was distracted by a noise at the game room door. Melissa swooped into the room at top speed, backpack bobbing behind her, with footsteps that would have awakened the dead, if they hadn’t already been part of the conversation.

“Mom!” my daughter shouted out eagerly. “I just talked to the lieutenant!” Liss stopped to catch her breath. As she did, Jeannie appeared behind her in the doorway, grinning proudly at my little girl. Jeannie was pushing the stroller, and Oliver appeared to be inside it, but with all the snowsuits, it was hard to tell.