Chance of a Ghost (29 page)

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.

Paul and Maxie exchanged the same glance they always pass between each other when a “civilian” enters the room, a reminder that they could say whatever they wanted, but they should not be expecting direct communication from Melissa or me. The fact of the matter was that I could have
had an ongoing conversation with either of them with Jeannie there—and had done so in the past—and my friend would simply refuse to believe there was anything the least bit unusual going on. And in my house, she’d be right.

“What did Lieutenant McElone say?” I asked Melissa.

Melissa shed the backpack and her down jacket, as well as a scarf, a hat, a pair of gloves and her shoes. “Well, first of all, she said that next time you should come down to her yourself and not send your daughter with a line of hooey about a school project,” she began.

“Did you mention it was your idea and not mine?” I asked.

“Yes, but she said it was just because you’re afraid of her.”

I made a sour face. “I’m so afraid of her that I’m in her office about every two weeks?” I pointed out.

“She said that was because you’re a bad detective and need help from the police,” Melissa replied. “And she also said that if you had shown up, she probably wouldn’t have told you anything, anyway.”

Paul put a hand up over his nose and mouth as if stifling a sneeze. Like he could have a cold.

“So far, this has been a real treat for me,” I told my daughter. “Do you have anything in the way of information that
doesn’t
contain an insult to me from the lieutenant?”

Paul made a sudden turn away from the right-hand corner of the room, almost in a panic, and I looked to see that Jeannie was sitting down to nurse Oliver. Men. I’m not nuts about watching, but seriously; it was just a mother feeding her child, quite literally the most natural thing in the world.

“Don’t let Melissa fool you,” Jeannie piped up. “She got more than that. I was watching from across the street in the car so Oliver could sleep in his car seat, and even from there I could see Melissa was great. She ran into the lieutenant outside the station, and I couldn’t hear, but when she seemed to be having some trouble getting help, Melissa even
pretended to tear up at one point, so the lieutenant brought her inside and gave her whatever information she could.”

I looked at my daughter. “You teared up?” I asked.

“Not really,” Liss said. “I just sort of sniffed a little when she said she didn’t have time for this and looked around like I couldn’t figure out what to do. So Lieutenant McElone asked me if I needed a tissue, and I said I didn’t have one.”

“Which no doubt made her think I’m a bad mother,” I suggested.

“You’re missing the point,” Jeannie interrupted. “Melissa needed to talk to the lieutenant, and she got to talk to the lieutenant.”‘

I
had
been missing the point. I knelt down, although not as much as I used to, and looked my daughter in the eye. “Jeannie’s right,” I said. “I haven’t been giving you enough credit. You did great.”

“How do you know?” Melissa, who could make Jack Bauer talk if necessary, smirked at me. “You haven’t heard what I found out.”

“Speak.”

She actually reached into her backpack and pulled out a notebook, which had “Language Arts” scrawled on the cover. She opened it to a page and read from notes she’d taken when talking to McElone. “First of all, Lawrence Laurentz has no criminal record. Neither does Melvin Brookman.”

“That is a relief,” Paul said to me.

I nodded. “Yes,” I said.

“Yes, what?” Jeannie asked.

Melissa’s eyes were flashing me a warning I no longer needed. I spun on my heel. “Yes, that makes sense, don’t you think?”

Jeannie shrugged as best she could while involved in her current activity. “I dunno,” she said. She was changing sides, so Paul was staring at the ceiling and probably would have stuck his head up through it if he hadn’t wanted to hear what was being said.

Maxie laughed loudly. Of course, Jeannie didn’t hear that.

“What else did Lieutenant McElone say?” I asked Melissa, if only to change the subject.

“This is the interesting part,” she told me, grinning. “I didn’t even have anything to ask her after the question about Mr. Laurentz, and I was going to say thank you and go home, like you told me to do.”

Jeannie nodded her approval. “She’s a very good girl,” she said. Melissa and I exchanged a look in which we noted that she was in fact not a four-year-old and that Jeannie should know that.

“But…” I prompted my daughter.

“
But
the lieutenant said she’d followed up on the medical examiner’s report on Mr. Laurentz because you had made her curious,” Melissa continued. I noticed Paul going immediately into his Sherlock Holmes stance, standing straight up and cocking an eyebrow in anticipation. “And she said there had been something odd about the report but not the one from the doctor.”

“There was another report?” I asked. Paul nodded; he’d been expecting that there would have been.

“Because Mr. Laurentz died alone, the police had to come and take him away, and that’s why there was an autopsy,” Melissa said, seeming to recite the words by rote but closely checking her notebook for accuracy. “So the officer who came to his house wrote a report and filed it.”

“And…?” There had to be more to it than that. A burned-out toaster in the bathtub, perhaps? The smell of scorched toast in the air?

“He didn’t find anything unusual,” Melissa said.

I waited. “That’s it?” I asked. “What did the lieutenant say was odd about the report?”

“The fact that it was filed at all,” Liss answered. “It was…” She struggled to remember the grown-up term. “Standard procedure, she said, but there was a lot more
detail, like the officer filing it thought there was something to report. But Lieutenant McElone read the whole thing, she said, and it all pointed to Mr. Laurentz dying of…natural causes.”

That wasn’t much. “That’s really good, honey,” I told my daughter. “You did a terrific job.”

Melissa looked disappointed. She knows when an adult is patronizing her.

“Wait!” she insisted. “You didn’t let me finish. There was no toaster in the kitchen.”

Okay. That could mean something, but it was weird. “The cops checked for a toaster? Why would they do that?”

“An officer noticed crumbs on the countertop and a space where a toaster would be,” she said. “But there was no toaster.”

“Excellent work,” Paul said.

I agreed and gave Melissa a hug before pivoting toward Jeannie. “What did
you
find out?” I asked her. She looked up from her task—which really required more work from Oliver—and her eyes went up and to the left. Thinking.

“Not a lot. I talked to Patricia McVale,” Jeannie answered. “Goes by ‘Patty.’ She said she knew and worked with Larry at the Basie, but thought he was kind of a pain, didn’t talk to him much. Didn’t even know he was dead; thought he’d just been fired.” Jeannie saw that Oliver had fallen asleep and started to clean up.

“So not much we can use,” I thought aloud.

Jeannie shrugged. “Patty said she heard from someone she worked with that Lawrence was a snitch who got people fired, and she had thought he’d just been gotten back.”

I considered. “Maybe he had,” I said. “It’s secondhand information, anyway.”

Paul said, “Melissa, I’m going to have your mom ask you whether Lieutenant McElone told her who the report said had called the police about Mr. Laurentz’s death. Who discovered the body?”

I relayed the question for Jeannie’s sake. “I have it here,” Melissa answered, rifling through her notes. “I know the lieutenant said to tell you…Here!”

“Who was it?” I asked.

“Somebody named Penny Fields,” Melissa answered. “Did Mr. Laurentz have a girlfriend?”

Sixteen

All that gave us a lot to discuss, but as I drew breath to
reply, Nan Henderson called from the front room, “Alison?” Her voice was tentative, as if wondering whether she wanted me to respond or not.

I gave Jeannie and Melissa a look that warned against any further murder-related conversation right now, and I called back, “Right here, Nan. I’ll be there in a second.”

Jeannie stayed to change Oliver’s diaper, but Melissa followed me into the front room, where Nan and Morgan were unbundling from the biting temperatures outside. There was enough outerwear being tossed onto my couch to start a consignment shop. Paul dropped through the floor; he rarely interacts with the guests when he doesn’t have to.

“Is there something I can do for you?” I asked when I got there. Melissa, in her (unofficial) role as assistant manager, stood behind me, by virtue of her youth keeping the guests from looking at me like I was a dangerous felon on the loose.

Nan gave Melissa a glance, then looked at me almost timidly. “Yes,” she said finally. “I know we’re scheduled to stay until Tuesday, but…”

That kind of sentence rarely ended well. “Do you need to cut your vacation short?” I asked. “I hope there’s no emergency at home.”