Ghost in the Wind (15 page)

“Knock it off,” she snarled. “You're both dead.”

Mom nodded her approval up to Maxie, who put the frying pans back on their hooks. I marveled at the fact that she could do that, and also considered that the pans probably hadn't been used at all for a while, since Mom insists on bringing her own cookware when she's making dinner at my house. It doesn't make any sense, but that's Mom.

Paul was stroking his goatee fervently, watching Vance very closely.

“This isn't over, McTiernan,” Morrie Chrichton said. He let go of Vance's triceps and flew out the side wall into the night.

“You're damn right it isn't,” Vance said. Then he looked
down at me. “Now, then. What lies has that louse been telling you?”

My head felt overcrowded. I'd begun this enterprise because I believed in Vance, defended him to Paul; then Morrie had made me question my loyalty, and now Vance was asking me what lies Morrie had told me about him. I looked up, auditioning responses rapidly in my head, and finally said, “I have to get Melissa to bed. She's been up late playing poker.”

And I turned and walked out of the kitchen. I'm pretty sure I got a glimpse of Mom beaming proudly at me as I left.

There was no more discussion that night. I did indeed break up the poker game, as it was after midnight and my daughter was in fact eleven. The rest of the guests went to bed almost immediately, as none of them was close to eleven and all were considerably more tired than Melissa. This is the logic of parenting.

Mom, realizing that I wanted no more talk about murder, music or old wounds, packed up her backpack, beckoned to my father and hit the road in her Dodge Viper. At the rate of speed she drives at night, the fifteen-minute trip to her house wouldn't take much longer than a half hour.

I went upstairs when Melissa did and holed up in my bedroom. Vance was hopefully aware by now that barging in uninvited would be a serious problem for me, and Paul and Maxie certainly knew better.

Nobody dropped in on me and after some initial tossing and turning, fatigue won out, so I slept fairly well, except for
the itching in the back of my throat. In the morning I'd definitely pick up that allergy medicine.

The next morning, I woke, got myself presentable, did some tidying for the guests and was ready for an assault-by-ghost just as Paul arrived in the kitchen; early, even for him. Maxie was a late sleeper and Vance, having been a rock star when he was alive, I figured could be counted on to stay out of circulation until noon at least.

“We should consider our position in this investigation,” Paul began.

I was getting urns of coffee and hot water for tea ready for the guests (I don't serve meals, but I consider providing caffeine in the morning a basic nutrient), and looked up to see him tilting slightly to the left—Paul lists a little when he's thinking hard—while floating half inside the fridge. Luckily, there was nothing in the fridge but some batteries, milk, a little cheese and assorted vegetables I'd have to assess for freshness (or the lack thereof) shortly.

“You're not backing out on me again, are you?” I said as I braced myself to carry the coffee urn into the den and place it on the side table, the one where Paul does
not
attempt the tablecloth trick.

The urn was heavy, but I do this every morning and I'm used to it. I lugged it into the den, hovered it over the table and dropped it from an altitude of about an inch. It landed with a rather unsettling sound. Maybe “used to it” was overstating things.

“No, of course not. I'm saying that we need to evaluate where we are and what we should be doing.” The goatee wasn't being stroked yet, but you knew it was only because he was holding himself back for later. One had to time one's goatee stroking for maximum effect.

“So, where are we and what should we be doing?” There was something very soothing about letting Paul take the reins in the investigation. It would have been soothing,
frankly, to let
anyone
other than me take the reins. Sherlock Holmes, Jessica Fletcher, Gilbert Gottfried. It didn't matter. But Paul was an especially comfortable caretaker.

He also likes nothing more than to recap. “We have a victim of about forty who might or might not have known she was ingesting something that could be lethal to her, so one of our priorities should be to discover if she was alone when she died. We know she was alone when the police found her body, but that proves nothing.”

He was just getting warmed up. “We have Vanessa's ex-boyfriend William Mastrovy, who apparently told his current lover that he'd had no further contact with Vanessa but suddenly admits to being present on the day she died, a claim which might or might not be true. However, you said that he seemed legitimately surprised by the possibility she might have been killed. That would seem to place some question on his viability as a suspect, but as a witness, he is invaluable. He should be interviewed again as soon as possible.”

“I don't know where he lives,” I told him. “That's why I had to go find him at the bar.”

“That is something Lieutenant McElone might be able to clear up for us,” Paul said. His right hand moved toward his chin, but—no.

Talking to McElone again wasn't my favorite plan but it was far from a deal breaker. “What else?” I asked. I can prompt with the best of them.

“Ah. There's Vanessa's mother, Claudia Rabinowitz, and her half brother, Jeremy Bensinger. We have almost no information about either of them, so we can't include or exclude them from a list of possible suspects. We should contact them very soon, as well. Your plan to go to Marlboro today is a good one. Find Jeremy and ask about his mother, among other things.”

No goatee stroking yet. I went back into the kitchen to get
the urn of hot water, which is lighter because it's empty when I bring it into the den, then fill it with water from a pitcher.

I hardly grunted at all carrying this urn. Why didn't I put coffee in the pitcher and then fill that urn the same way? Sometimes I scared myself with my own inability to see the obvious. To cover, I chided Paul. “I love how whenever you say, ‘We should contact them,' or ‘We need to interview him,' you mean that
I
should do it.”

Paul has perfected his dry look and sent it now in my direction. “I have certain drawbacks which prevent me from doing the legwork,” he said. “I don't think you'd like to change places with me.”

“No, but going out to talk to murder suspects might just increase the possibility that I could be joining you sooner, and that's not something I'm crazy about.”

“Neither am I. So let's make sure
we
take precautions.” That usually meant bringing someone with me to serve as security/backup, and since Maxie is the ghost who can move around outside my property line, she is the one who usually fills that role. Spending a day with Maxie might also increase my chances of dying sooner but I'm not prone to suicidal thoughts. “Meet him outdoors where there are people around. You won't need backup on a first meeting.”

“Yes, chief. What else is on the agenda?”

Paul stopped, meaning his drifting slowed to an almost imperceptible rate and he appeared to be “standing” still. “You might want to talk to this Sammi woman about Bill Mastrovy. Angry lovers make excellent sources of information.”

“You're not giving me any assignments I actually want to do,” I said.

“Do I ever?” The wry sense of humor surfaced again. How endearing it would be if only it were funny.

I went into the kitchen for the large pitcher of water for the tea urn. I started to fill it in the sink. “That's a riot, truly, but is it possible Maxie might chip in here with some
Internet research? Something that can fill in the holes while I'm out asking a bunch of strangers whether they killed Vance McTiernan's daughter?”

“That is one thing you need to do,” Paul said. “You have to train yourself to stop thinking of Vanessa as Vance McTiernan's daughter.”

“Um . . . she
was
Vance McTiernan's daughter.”

“No, she was Vanessa McTiernan. She was an adult who had a life that might have been taken from her. You are her advocate. You can't think about her only in relation to him. Are you only Jack Kerby's daughter?”

Now, that was hitting below the belt. “No, but Vanessa had a famous father, and it's inevitable that people would think of her that way, especially since she used his name.”

“And how do you think she felt about that?”

“What am I, her therapist?” I picked up the full pitcher to take into the den and remembered why I didn't do this with the coffee urn, too—it wasn't
that
much easier. A cart. That's what I needed. “How do I know how she felt about it?'

“That's exactly my point,” Paul said with his annoyingly calm tone. “You
don't
know how she felt about it, so limiting your thinking to one segment of her life, one that might have been relatively unimportant, inhibits your ability to see the whole picture. That can be a hindrance to this investigation.”

“So what am I missing?” I asked Paul. “Don't the facts remain facts, no matter if Vanessa was Vance's daughter or Bill's girlfriend or Jeremy Bensinger's half sister?” Paul was big on facts, so this was my way of showing him I had indeed paid attention when we'd talked in the past.

“Yes, but you might be missing a connection when you limit your perspective.”

“This thing's heavy,” I said, grunting as I lifted the last pitcher to fill the urn. That's when it hit me: It wasn't a cart I needed. It was a way to get Paul to carry the pitchers from now on.

Nothing. Not even a goatee stroke.

“The point I'm making—”

“I understand the point you're making,” I told Paul. “You don't seem to understand the point
I'm
making—these pitchers and the urns are heavy. I could use some help in the mornings.”

“Why not get a cart?” Melissa, awake uncharacteristically early for a Sunday, had appeared while I was dealing with the water. “You could just roll it out in the morning after the urns were ready and then roll it back when we're done with the coffee and tea in the morning.”

She started pouring herself what we've decided to call a latte—about two-thirds milk to one-third coffee. I decided to look for an inexpensive cart in town after I visited Jeremy Bensinger today.

Sometimes you just can't fight the tide.

*   *   *

“Nessa was my sister,” Jeremy Bensinger said. “There wasn't anything ‘half' about it.”

We were standing in one of the parking lots in Jeremy's apartment complex, which had seven “villages” (the names were so cute, too; he lived in “Londontown,” which looked exactly like “Villa Paris,” “Chalet Moritz” and “Piazza Tuscanne”), each of which was simply a quad of garden apartment buildings. Finding Jeremy had been a stroke of luck—I hadn't been able to find his number before I came but had located the unit with his name on the door, which he'd been coincidentally walking out of when I'd arrived. I'd asked if he knew Jeremy Bensinger (since I had no idea what the man looked like) and he'd confessed to being one and the same.

Since I wasn't going to walk into his apartment, discovering him outside was even better, and there were, as Paul had anticipated, people around.

I'd told Jeremy that I was investigating his sister's death
on behalf of an insurance company representing the apartment complex where she died. It didn't make any sense, but people tend not to question that much when you show them a license.

Jeremy wasn't averse to talking about Vanessa McTiernan, but he was going out for the day—I didn't ask to where because it felt like prying (yes, we've established that I'm a bad detective)—and had only a little time. We talked by his car, a current model Hyundai Sonata.

“You had different fathers,” I pointed out. “And different last names.” I don't know what significance that last fact was supposed to have, but it was important, Paul always said, to have areas of conversation and see where the subject went with them.

In this case, Jeremy went with a light scowl. He wasn't an unpleasant guy, in his mid-thirties and in shape although not ostentatiously so, but he clearly didn't like the suggestion that his connection to Vanessa was anything less than a full sibling relationship. Which was fine with me, as it kept him talking.

“We had different fathers,” he said. “So do lots of brothers and sisters. There isn't just one definition of a family anymore, you know.”

I knew. My ex-husband lives in Southern California. Somewhere. It's hard to keep track.

“As for our last names,” Jeremy went on, “Mine is from my father. Nessa had Mom's, but then changed it for professional reasons. I guess ‘Vanessa Rabinowitz' didn't sound like a rock star to her.”

“She was serious about her music,” I said. It was a question in statement form. I wouldn't be a great contestant on
Jeopardy!

“Music was her whole life,” he said, breaking eye contact with me. He seemed to be staring off into space so he could look especially contemplative, and it was working fairly well. “She thought it was in her genes or something. Maybe
she felt it was a way to connect to her father, but as far as I know she only heard from him every couple of years or so.”

That statement, at least, was becoming consistent. Vance had not been a fabulous, hands-on type of dad. Yes, he'd usually been thousands of miles away and yes, his daughter would have preferred more contact with her father, but . . . were we talking about Vance's daughter or my own?

“Was she any good?” I asked Jeremy. Lots of people can play a little and many try to make it a career, but quite often they persist because no one has the heart to point out that they're not especially talented.

“Of course,” Jeremy said. “I had just made her a deal with Vinyl Records to release her first album and it was gathering steam. The album's still coming out in about six months, so people will hear what a great talent was lost.”