Inspector Specter (19 page)

The last time I'd seen Harry the Fish, he was thirty feet out in the ocean and couldn't move back far enough to reach land. And since ghosts usually start where they died, Harry
must
have been killed in the ocean. Probably. How could the water inside his lungs be from somewhere else?

“This is confusing,” I said aloud, to no one in particular.

“It sure is,” Phyllis agreed. “The cops are baffled. They say there's no evidence Harry had seriously annoyed anybody in his business recently. They think maybe this was personal.”

“Personal? As opposed to what? Impersonal?”

“Personal,” Phyllis repeated. “Like not business. They think maybe it was something like his wife, Teresa, was mad at him. In that family, you probably know a few people who would not have ethical concerns if you approached them the right way about filling a guy's lungs with fresh water. Tap water, probably.”

Great. So we had the enlightening information that Harry the Fish wasn't drowned in Evian water. “Why would Teresa be mad at him?”

“Why is anyone's wife mad at them? I'm guessing Harry was fishing in uncharted waters.”

Paul moved a little closer (as if he could be heard over the phone, or by Phyllis at all) and said, “Ask her about Vinnie.”

“What about his grandson, Vinnie the Goldfish?” I asked. Sometimes it's fun to trip Phyllis up.

“Vinnie's a possibility,” Phyllis answered. She's not so easy to trip. “Some of the cops say there was friction between the two of them, and Vinnie might have been looking for someone else to fund some of his . . . activities.”

I only had one name left to use. “Buster Hockney?” I asked.

“Maybe. Buster wouldn't mind tweaking Harry the Fish a little. They were competing in some territories.”

Phyllis has a good deal of experience reporting crime stories. “How do you approach a guy like Buster?” I asked, not commenting on how big a “tweak” drowning was.

“From very far away.” And then she hung up; that's Phyllis. The last piece of advice wasn't a lot of help. I would have been glad Dad wasn't there to hear her say it, but my mother is a big snitch and would tell him at her earliest convenience anyway.

“There are two places to go next, assuming you are staying away from Buster,” Paul said without being asked. Melissa looked up from tickling Oliver, who was lying on the kitchen floor specifically for that purpose. When she stopped, he looked annoyed. Who was interrupting his tickling? But Liss looked worried.

“I'm not going anywhere near Buster Hockney,” I assured everyone. “What are the options?” I asked Paul.

“You can go see Vinnie the Goldfish, if you can find him.”

“Option two, please.” I wanted to see Vinnie about four percent more than I wanted to see Buster.

“Something Phyllis said struck a chord,” Paul said, goatee a-stroking. “Something about thinking that Harry the Fish's wife might have had a personal motive, that it wasn't business.”

“You want me to find Harry's wife?” We were increasing my willingness, but not that much.

“No. I think perhaps we should consider that approach when it comes to the murder of Detective Ferry. But start with his daughter.”

I'm not huge on interviewing grieving people. I feel like an intruder, an annoyance, someone who would be better off, say, hosting a spook show at her haunted guesthouse. But that's just me.

I had indeed been present for the Saturday morning ghost-a-thon. Rita and Stephanie had not attended (I think Rita was still rethinking the whole hanging-with-ghosts thing), but Joe had come and Bonnie, of all people, had risen early to watch as Paul had attempted the pull-out-the-tablecloth trick on my den's side table (he fails miserably whenever he tries, which is why I never put anything the least bit breakable on a table I bought at a yard sale for $10) and Maxie—who had shown up in the morning and I'll have more on that in a minute—had “walked” a pair of shoes up Joe's shirt with her hands. Her big special trick was still not in evidence, and I was starting to believe it did not really exist at all.

Don and Tammy attended their first ghost show that morning, as they'd been far too busy touring the area and acting like newlyweds the whole time they'd been in the house to do so until now. They oohed and aahed at the proper moments, giggled with delight at the shoes going up Joe and then hit the road once again for Ocean Grove, where they'd heard there was good antiquing.

I'd gotten another non-update from Malcolm Kidder, who informed me that his children were starting to ask questions, and he didn't know how much longer he could hold them off. Personally, I think it's usually the best thing to tell kids the truth, but the last thing that man needed right now was to hear my parenting philosophy. He said there had been no further reports from either police department, and he was going to visit with an old friend of McElone's, who might have an idea of where she'd go if things got really hairy. He'd call back later, he said.

My father had returned from his Maxie-veillance the night before with little to report. “She rushed out to the beach, went up and down about a mile in either direction and then headed toward town. I followed to about Route 35, but she was too fast for me, and I lost her.” He apologized a few hundred times. Paul, Mom, Liss and I got tired of forgiving him after a while and he stopped.

So my tasks for today were to talk to Martin Ferry's daughter, Natasha, and find out more about her mother, because ex-wives make really good suspects in murder cases, something I was certain to keep in mind in the event that my ex, The Swine, ever found himself more dead than he would prefer. I'd already established a really good alibi for myself by living three thousand miles from Steven and having as little to do with him as possible.

Natasha lived with her boyfriend, Rolfe, in an apartment in Highland Park over Ruthie's, a bagel shop and café. Although Natasha was to start college in Boston the next month, Rolfe was about to be a junior at Rutgers, which was just over the Raritan River in New Brunswick. It was about to become a long-distance relationship, she said, and that would be difficult.

For an eighteen-year-old recent high school graduate, Natasha Ferry seemed very much like a twenty-four-year-old recent grad student about to begin her career in either astrophysics or public relations. She was a very self-possessed young woman, someone her father was no doubt quite proud of when he was alive, and even after.

Then I remembered she was barely seven years older than Melissa, living with her boyfriend and sporting a shoulder tattoo of a rose, and I decided on the spot to homeschool Liss for the rest of her life, possibly adding a moat to my front yard and assigning a ghost guardian to her for the rest of her life. Not Maxie.

I'd told Natasha that I was a friend of Lieutenant McElone's (which was true, if you believed Malcolm) and that I'd known her father (which was true, if having met him twice before he'd died and three times after counted as having “known” him) and that I was trying to piece together the circumstances of his death. That part was true no matter what.

“My dad and mom got divorced five years ago,” Natasha was telling me. She'd offered me a cup of tea, but I figured I could go downstairs to Ruthie's if I got peckish and opted to pass. “I guess I knew things weren't good, but I was only thirteen, and I didn't want to understand. You know how it is.” Unfortunately, I did. Melissa had cried a lot when Steven and I told her about the divorce, and it took about six months of talking with me and a therapist to convince her she had no blame in our marriage ending. I was still working on convincing her I didn't have any blame either, but that was more difficult, because even I didn't completely believe it.

“How harsh was it?” I asked, sounding like I was setting up a joke on an especially bad late-night TV show. Trying to smooth over my clumsy language, I quickly added, “I mean, did they ever learn to get along?” Better, but not much.

Natasha brushed at her eye for a moment but still looked very composed. “Not really,” she said. “I lived with my mother most of the time through high school. That was part of their settlement; I don't think Dad liked it, but he knew that being a cop made it harder for him to be a single parent. Then in the last year or so, Mom started to complain about the child support checks. They were supposed to continue until I was out of college,” she said. “That was part of the agreement, too. But Dad said his finances were tight, or at least that's what Mom told me he said. When I asked him, he told me he was sending the checks like he always had and didn't know what she was talking about.”

Since I knew there was at least one pretty hefty deposit in Martin Ferry's bank account, his claims of poverty were a little suspect. I would ask him about that when I saw him again. Or if I had any luck at all, I'd get McElone to ask him. I'd decided now that she'd put me through so much by disappearing, I was no longer feeling so charitable as to spare her the suspicions about her ex-partner.

“Was your mother really angry?” I asked.

Natasha absorbed that for a beat, and then her eyes narrowed to slits—the way her father's had when I'd suggested something he found absurd. “Are you asking me whether I think my mother
killed
my father?”

That's exactly what I was doing. “No, of course not,” I said. “I'm wondering about his level of stress, whether he felt pressure from her about the money.” Nice recovery, huh?

Natasha didn't think so. “I see, so you're asking me whether I think she drove him to suicide.” This interview wasn't going as well as I'd hoped, and I'd come in with pretty low expectations.

“No.” This time, I really hadn't been suggesting that. “It's just not coming out right. I do think someone murdered your father, but given his line of work, the law of averages says it's probably more related to his job than his personal life. So I'm sorry if it sounded like I was making accusations; I wasn't.”

Her face had changed into that of a little girl, and a sad one. “My father was murdered? The police said it was a gun accident.”

“Did you believe that?”

She looked away from me. “I wanted to. But I didn't. He never was careless with his weapon, not ever. There's no way he'd ever leave it loaded or not secure it before he put it away. I knew. I just didn't want to know.”

“So let's try to figure out who killed him,” I suggested. “Did he tell you much about his work?”

Natasha stood up and started tidying up the room. Her avoidance tactics could mean that she was thinking, or that she was hiding something. I chose to believe the former. “He didn't really talk about his job that way to me, you know? He took me to Take Your Daughter to Work Day and things like that, but he wouldn't tell me the scary parts; he didn't . . . he didn't want me to be worried about him.”

“So you don't know what he was working on when he died?”

She shook her head. “Not specifically. Every once in a while he'd get a phone call when I was spending the weekend at his apartment, but he never told me who it was, just business, he said.”

“How did he act after those calls?” I asked. It was a Paul-type question, although we hadn't discussed this possibility precisely, because we didn't know the scenario would come up. It was the kind of thing he'd want me to ask.

“Like himself. He sounded, I don't know, almost mad when he was on the phone with whoever it was, but once he got off, he went back to being Dad. I really didn't think that much about it.” There hadn't been that much untidy about the room to begin with, so Natasha had to stop straightening now. “You sure you don't want a tea? I could put it over ice.” The apartment was not air-conditioned.

“Why don't we go downstairs and get something?” I countered. I felt like I should be buying Natasha a cold drink.

We went down to Ruthie's and ordered an iced tea for Natasha and an iced coffee for me. I got an everything bagel, too, because this was a new bagel place to me, and it's my sworn duty as a connoisseur to pass judgment on every unfamiliar establishment I encounter. (The bagel was very good, for the record.) We sat down at a table, and I asked her, because I was now officially out of ideas, if she knew much about Lieutenant McElone.

“Anita?” Everybody seemed to be on a first-name basis with the lieutenant but me, unless you asked her husband. “She was my dad's partner for a few years. Now she works in Harbor Haven, I think. She came by after Dad died, just to visit, you know. I think she asked some questions, but I wasn't really hearing anything just then.” She stared down into her glass of iced tea.

“Did she say anything about investigating what happened to your dad?”

Natasha shrugged. “Maybe. If she did, it wasn't registering. I was in denial.”

*   *   *

Elise Cranston Ferry lived in a single family house in Rumson. It was one of the smaller homes on the street, but considering that people like Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen (the patron saint of New Jersey) have owned places in Rumson, being one of the less ornate places in the neighborhood was hardly a serious problem.

By Bruce's or Billy's standards, Elise's house was a shack. By mine, it was a very comfortable size for most normal people and maintained within an inch of its life. The paint job was fresh, the shutters sparkled, the windows were gorgeously clean, the roof probably wouldn't need replacement until Melissa was leaving medical school (a mother can dream) and the landscaping was downright impeccable.

I started to dislike and mistrust Elise immediately.

Still, after Natasha had called her to vouch for me, Elise had agreed to talk to me and ushered (
welcomed
would have been overstating it) me into her home once I identified myself at the front door. I'd walked up to the most adorable porch in history and been careful not to get the freshly painted floor planks dirty. We peasants have such unkempt feet.

“You have a lovely home,” I began, which was code for
How the hell can you afford this, and why would you need child support from your ex-husband the cop?
Code is helpful, but it's not always completely pertinent to your intentions.

“Thank you,” Elise said, indicating I should sit on the very tasteful sofa in her living room. I chose a side chair instead, as sofas are a little too “company” for someone asking questions about someone's murder. Or at least this one was.

She didn't say anything else and seemed to be awaiting my first question. She sat down on the sofa herself, as if to show off how much better it was than the chair. It did look very comfortable, but the chair wasn't bad, either. “Did you move here immediately after your divorce?” I asked, keeping up with the “lovely home” theme.

“Oh no!” Elise seemed to think that suggestion was hilarious. “I couldn't possibly have afforded a house in Rumson on Martin's salary, and he was one of those old-fashioned types who think it's a bad reflection on a man if his wife is working. No, I moved to an apartment in Belmar, third-floor walk-up, after we split up. It took me two and a half years to get here.”

“How did you manage it?” That seemed like a fair question, and Elise, who wasn't the least bit condescending (to my disappointment), took no offense as far as I could tell.

“I started my own business with some of the money from the divorce settlement,” she answered. “We sold the house we were living in, and I took my half of the money to start up a soup delivery service.”

“A soup delivery service?”

Elise smiled. “That was the reaction I got from banks when I tried to get a loan. Yes. I thought it was the kind of thing that could work. It's a cold winter night, you get home from work, you don't feel like cooking, but boy, wouldn't a nice hot bowl of soup be perfect? So you get on the phone or online, order it up, and it shows up piping hot at your door in the time it takes to change your clothes and set the table. Not bad, huh?”

In this air-conditioned room, it sounded great. Outside in the summer heat, I was betting the lure of steaming soup wouldn't be quite as strong. But mostly, I was shocked that there was a food delivery service—apparently a successful one—I'd never heard about. I was clearly slipping. It was a negative result of all this home cooking Melissa had been doing lately.