Chance of a Ghost (43 page)

The second she saw me, she said, “You’ve got to do something about this thing with Larry, Alison! That man is driving me crazy! I could kill him!”

“Who’s Larry?” Jeannie asked while she changed Oliver into a new onesie. The woman never just let that baby be.

“The client,” I jumped in.

“Funny. She has the same name as her brother, the victim.” Honestly, I could ask Paul to float over and cut Jeannie’s hair off—he’d never do it, but still—and she wouldn’t allow that a ghost might be in the room.

“You don’t miss a trick, Jeannie,” Mom said. Jeannie was seated with her back to Mom, who exchanged an amused look with me, then chucked the baby under the chin and cooed at him a bit. Melissa, used to being the apple of her grandmother’s eye, narrowed her own in a rare display of jealousy. It reminded me never to give her a sibling. “She called me because I’d told her my daughter is a detective.”

“Oh. Sure.” Jeannie had just wanted to hear Mom say I was a detective again. She loves that. And she loves watching other people be enthralled with her son.

But Melissa was not to be denied. “Come on up to my room, Grandma,” she suggested. “I have a book I want you to see.”

Mom hesitated. A trip to Melissa’s attic lair meant either a creaky flight of pull-down stairs or a ride in the dumbwaiter Tony built to get there, which Mom will do but not happily because it makes her tired. “Why don’t you get it and bring it back down here?” she suggested. “That’s a lot of stairs for me today, honey.”

Melissa glanced almost imperceptibly at the baby, her competition, and sighed just a touch. “Okay,” she said, and headed for the stairs.

“What book does she want to show me?” my mother asked when she was gone.

“I’m sure she’ll think of something,” I said. “Just don’t read it to Oliver, whatever you do.”

Mom laughed. “Little green-eyed monster. She’s so smart!” My mother could watch Melissa drop a priceless vase off a second-story landing and would comment on her granddaughter’s good taste; that thing was so ugly. “Now, fill me in on the investigation.” I told her all I knew, and she listened carefully throughout. “I think one of our main problems is that your pal Larry isn’t telling us everything. There’s something being held back, maybe a lot, and that’s slowing us down,” I finished.

Jeannie didn’t look up. “If your client isn’t telling you what you need to know, the only thing you have left to do is threaten to pull out of the case,” she said.

“I’ve done that. She has…something I want, and if I stop investigating, I won’t get it.”

Jeannie picked Oliver up and tickled his belly, then started putting things back into her diaper bag. “If you need the money that badly, Alison, Tony and I can help you out for a little while.”

How to explain this? “It’s not money, Jean,” I said. “It’s more in the area of information.”

Tony rescued me by walking in from the hallway. “So what do we do?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I’m stuck.”

Just then Melissa came downstairs carrying a book called
Riley Mack and the Other Known Troublemakers
. I’m sure she’d taken it down off her bed stand because it was the one she was currently reading.

At the same moment, Nan and Morgan Henderson walked in the front door, bringing the inevitable frigid breeze with them. They were practically giddy; Morgan helped Nan off with her coat and hung it carefully on the antique coatrack
I have by the front door. It was without question the most affectionate I’d seen him act toward her.

He gave Nan a tiny peck on the cheek at something she’d said and they wandered into the den, where every eye (except Jeannie’s, since Oliver still held all her attention) fixed on them. “Oh, hello!” Morgan baritoned into the room. “Nice to see everyone.” Now that he was wearing effective hearing aids and able to converse normally, he was the very soul of conviviality.

Introductions to Mom, Tony and Jeannie (and Oliver) were made. Paul and Maxie both looked on, amused in characteristic ways: Paul had a wry expression on his face, and Maxie seemed like she’d just had her first beer and still thought burps were funny.

“Visit another famous New Jersey crime scene today?” I asked Morgan. You always have to show enthusiasm for the guest’s interests, no matter how odd. I knew Paul loved the mental challenge of crime investigation, but Morgan seemed to revel more in being able to pass through the crime scene tape and take in the atmosphere without anyone stopping him.

“Actually, yes,” he answered with a twinkle in his eye.

Clearly, he wanted someone to ask, so it was lucky that Mom filled the void. “Which one?” she said.

It was all Morgan could do to avoid breaking out in a grin that would undoubtedly meet at the back of his head.

“The place where Lawrence Laurentz died,” he said. “And I think it’s reasonably certain he didn’t die from an electric shock in the bathtub.”

Twenty-two

As you might expect, the reaction to Morgan’s extraordinary
statement was twofold: First, the idea that he and Nan had gone to Lawrence’s town house was a little disconcerting and then the statement that our victim had in fact not been killed by a toaster thrown at him by an invisible assailant—outrageous though it was, that had been the working theory until now—was indeed a game changer. So at least three of us were barking questions, including Melissa and Paul, though the latter’s contribution was not heard by the person at whom it was directed.

Jeannie was showing Oliver his own reflection in a plastic mirror shaped like a daisy.

“Easy, easy,” Morgan said with a chuckle. The din from Melissa (and, I realized, me) died down. Tony stood in the doorway with a look on his face that indicated he’d reach for a ball-peen hammer if Morgan turned out to be dangerous. Tony is a good man but sometimes a tad overprotective of Melissa and me.

Once I could reclaim the floor, I asked, “How did you get into Lawrence Laurentz’s town house?”

It was Nan, who had actually heard the question first, who answered with a grin. “It was so easy. There’s still a ‘For Sale’ sign in front of the place. We just called the real estate agent and told her we might be interested in an active adult community in the area and had been driving by. She was there in fifteen minutes with a key.”

“Nobody else had moved in yet?” Melissa asked. “It’s been a long time since Mr. Laurentz died, hasn’t it?”

“Actually, in today’s real estate market, it’s not unusual for something to be unsold for that long,” Mom said. “And since Larry didn’t have any family to come clean the place out, I guess it took some time to sort out all the details.”

“But I want to know,” I said, turning to Nan, who was clearly going to be the go-between for Morgan, “what makes Morgan so sure Lawrence didn’t die the way he…the way our client suggested.”

“I’ll get to that,” Morgan answered when Nan had relayed the message. “But first, let me tell you that the place is being offered furnished unless the new owner wants the stuff removed. I guess Laurentz’s estate isn’t interested in the town house or the furniture too much. Do you know who would benefit from the sale?”

“As far as I know,” Mom said, “there isn’t much money in his estate, and no relatives. I believe Larry willed everything after his burial expenses to the Count Basie Theatre. Even then, it won’t be much after the mortgage is paid off and the real estate agents make their money.” (She had no doubt gotten much of that information from the source himself; he was rarely anywhere but in her house now.)

“You’re probably right,” Morgan said. “Regardless, everything was still in place today, even though it had been cleaned up. Nan kept the agent busy while I checked out the scene of the crime in the bathroom. And that’s how I found
out he couldn’t have died from electrocution in that bathtub. At least not the way you said, with a toaster thrown in.”

“Why not?” I asked, although I saw Tony nodding as if he’d figured out the answer ahead of time.

Morgan raised his index finger like a professor who has been asked an especially precocious question. “Ah!” he said. “Because Laurentz’s bathroom had GFCI outlets. The building is fairly new, and today’s construction code mandates that all electrical outlets in bathrooms and kitchens—anywhere potentially near water—must only have outlets with GFCI, ground fault circuit interrupters. If water gets anywhere near electricity in those rooms, the built-in circuit breakers automatically prevent electrocution.”

I should have realized that. I’d installed GFCI outlets myself, when I’d redone the bathrooms and kitchen. I reserved time later, when I was alone, for kicking myself.

“Also,” Morgan said, “I checked with a medical examiner I know. He said the type of electrocution you’re describing might leave burn marks, but it might not, either. A heart problem definitely wouldn’t.”

“That’s really weird,” I said, looking at Mom, who appeared to be equally confused. “Does this mean that Lawrence really did die of natural causes?”

Morgan thought about that as Paul stroked his goatee. “I wouldn’t say it’s definite,” he said. “From what you told me, a lot of people didn’t like this guy. If there’s a question, you still have to proceed on the assumption that one of them didn’t like him enough to kill him. Just because we don’t know how doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Maybe he was electrocuted somewhere else and the body was then moved to the tub.”

That theory didn’t fit with what Lawrence had told us, but then the ghost had told us a lot of things that turned out to be, let’s say, questionable.

“Excuse me,” Tony said. “Just because there were GFCIs
in the bathroom doesn’t mean he wasn’t electrocuted there.”

At first the ex–police chief seemed taken aback that a building contractor was suggesting he was wrong, but it became clear that he just hadn’t heard what Tony said. After Nan conferred Tony’s statement, Morgan looked at him and put his fingertips to his lips in a sort of pyramid shape. “How?” he asked simply.

“It’s the simplest thing possible,” Tony said. “An extension cord. All the killer had to do was plug in the toaster or whatever through a wall outlet, maybe in the hallway, where there would be no GFCI, then attach it to an extension long enough to reach the bathtub. The charge wouldn’t last quite as long, but if the guy had previous heart problems, it might be enough.”

Morgan thought about that and nodded, then pointed at Tony. “Very good, young man,” he said. Then he turned to me. “I think we have a lot of questions to answer.”

“I wish I could at least get some of the suspects all in the same room,” I said, sort of to myself. “All this driving around in a Volvo with an iffy heater is wearing me down.”

“You can,” Maxie said. I looked up at her, and I’m sure Nan and Morgan were wondering why I was staring at a spot just under one of the exposed beams near the ceiling. “At least some of the people you want to talk to will all be in a room together tomorrow night. I saw online that the New Old Thespians are giving a performance in Ocean Grove.”

That was right. Jerry and Frances had both mentioned it. “So I’m going to the New Old Thespians performance tomorrow night in Ocean Grove,” I said. I got a few odd looks, but no one said anything about my behavior. Just as well. “Maybe I’ll be able to answer some of those questions.” I looked at the clock. “But I’m not answering them now,” I told the gathered assembly. “I have a date.”

“Finally,” Mom said. “Priorities.”

*   *   *

“I can’t believe you don’t remember Color Quiz,” Josh Kaplan said.

We had agreed that we needed to be able to talk at our dinner, but we didn’t want it to be terribly expensive or fancy—that ups the tension for such a “dinner”—so we’d decided on Louie Ziana’s, a Cajun restaurant in Avon-by-the-Sea, the most hyphenated town in the Garden State.

There was the usual Zydeco music playing, but not terribly loudly, and since I have an absolute aversion to seafood, I’d checked the menu online ahead of time to ensure there would be cuisine I could enjoy. No sense sweating over entrée choices when there was an attractive guy across the table. He was dressed a little less casually than at the paint store. That is, the clothes he had on were free of splats, bits of Spackle, and dust. Which was a nice improvement.

“What the heck is Color Quiz?” I asked.

He looked up at the ceiling and harrumphed, but smiling. “When we were kids and your dad and my grandfather used to spend all their time in the back of the store, you and I would go up front where the color cards were and we’d play a game we called Color Quiz. You don’t remember? We’d pull out a color card and pretend each row was a different category. Then…”

It was rushing back into my head. “You’d ask me some crazy question that had nothing to do with paint at all!” I said. I started laughing. “You’d ask me about school or TV or something.”

“That’s right.” Josh seemed either relieved, amused or both at my recollection. “And when you got a question right, I picked a color and you asked
me
a question. But yours were always about baseball or carpentry or something.”

“I was sort of a tomboy,” I said.

He looked into my eyes a little bit more deeply than was entirely comfortable. “Not now,” he said. “I’m glad to see it.”