Inspector Specter (3 page)

Contrary to my expectations, Wendy's mom, Barbara, dropped Melissa off at home just a few minutes later. Turned out Barbara and Cliff, Wendy's dad, had plans for the evening, so instead of Melissa spending the night at their place, I offered to provide a roof over Wendy's head so they could cancel their babysitter for the night.

It was a shame from my point of view, though. As soon as they showed up, the girls headed up to Liss's room to “hang out” (kids don't “play” anymore), depriving me of my daughter's input when Lieutenant McElone told Paul and me (one intentionally) the details of Martin Ferry's death. She may be only eleven, but I value Melissa's perspective on the investigations Paul makes me take on; she has a really good sense of people and a way of cutting to the logic of a point that helps.

Instead, she said hello to McElone, gave Paul and me a look that said she wanted an explanation when it was possible and led Wendy up the stairs to the dumbwaiter/elevator that leads to her room. She loves that thing.

Turning back to McElone once the girls were gone, I asked (at Paul's prompting), “Why do you need to investigate the case? Isn't Detective Ferry's own department doing everything they can to solve it?”

McElone, standing now and ignoring the excellent lemonade (I was on my second glass), held up her hands, palms out, to indicate that she didn't want to misspeak.

“They did everything they thought they should do,” she answered. “Between the boardwalk fire and how Hurricane Sandy messed up the town, the Seaside Heights department has had more to deal with than they should've. But that's not the issue—it's that Martin's death was ruled an accident. From the trajectory of the bullet and the way the room looked, they determined that his weapon accidentally discharged as he was removing it. They said there was no sign there was anyone else in the room with him. There were no signs of forced entry. There were no prints on the weapon except Martin's. They truly believe it was an accident.”

“Then why don't you believe it?” I asked, without Paul's help that time.

McElone did not pause to organize her thoughts. “Because I knew Martin, and that is not a possible scenario. He was so careful with his weapon—and I never once saw him draw it—that the idea he'd just idly toss it on the table and let it shoot him is outside the area of plausibility.”

“Ask if his current partner would agree with her assessment,” Paul suggested. “Perhaps his behavior has changed in the years since he and the lieutenant worked together.”

I passed the suggestion along, but McElone shook her head. “Martin hasn't had a partner since I left,” she said. “He wasn't always the . . . easiest guy to get along with.”

“No kidding,” I said. My memories of Detective Ferry were that he'd had a somewhat condescending and irritable manner, which I'd attributed to the usual disdain cops feel for private investigators. I gave him the benefit of the doubt that it wasn't run-of-the-mill misogyny.

She gave me a warning look. “He was my partner, and he was my friend.”

“Okay,” I answered. “So what do you want me to do?”

The ice in my lemonade had melted, so now I had lemon-flavored cool water. But I took a sip anyway while McElone gathered her thoughts. Paul was watching attentively.

And then Maxie appeared from overhead, like a vulture. Maxie is sometimes a little thoughtless, I think, in the way she flaunts her ability to travel outside my property, particularly in front of Paul, who is frustrated that he can't. She floated down from above my roof wearing a pair of jeans and a black T-shirt whose legend read, “Seriously?”

“What's the lady cop doing here?” she asked with her usual high level of tact. “Somebody get iced?”

“As a matter of fact, someone did,” Paul told her. “Be quiet for a minute.” He was all attention on McElone.

“You don't get to tell me—”

“I need you to try to get in touch with Martin's . . . spirit,” McElone said, practically trembling with the weight of her embarrassment. “I want you to ask him what happened, and how I can find the person who did that to him.”

Involuntarily, I looked at Paul, my conduit to other ghosts. “Ask her,” he said.

“What are you looking at?” McElone asked me.

I dodged the question. “How long ago did this happen to Detective Ferry?” I said.

“It happened Sunday.”

Paul raised his eyebrows and shrugged.

“Two days ago,” I said. “That might not be enough time.”

The lieutenant squinted at me as if I were far away and speaking Finnish. “Enough time for what?”

“People don't become conscious ghosts right away,” I explained. “The ghosts that I know—”

“Please,” she said. “I'm not ready for that yet.”

Despite her protest, I continued. “In my experience, it can take a few days before a ghost even knows where he or she is, and a while after that to figure out they aren't alive anymore.” McElone was a cop and a good one, and she needed the facts in order to function at her best. “So it might be another day or two—or more—before Detective Ferry can be contacted.”

McElone's eyes were serious and focused now. She was on a case and getting the information she required. “That's doable,” she said.

“Yeah, if it works,” Maxie snorted.

Paul nodded at me. “She has a point. Tell the lieutenant.”

“There's something else you need to be prepared for,” I told her.

She looked concerned. “He won't know me if he sees me?” she asked.

“It's not that. What you have to prepare for is that not every person who . . . passes away”—I try to be sensitive and avoid using the words
die
or
dead
in front of Paul and Maxie—“becomes a ghost.”

“You mean it might
never
be possible to contact Martin about this?” McElone said. The disappointment in her voice was thick; she'd clearly enlisted me as a last resort, and now I was telling her even that could fail her.

“I'm not saying that for certain,” I said. “There's no rhyme or reason to it. The rules seem to be different for everybody. Paul says the afterlife comes without a handbook.”

“Who's Paul?”

That was a conversation for another day. “Don't worry about it,” I told the lieutenant. “What I'm saying is that it might be a few days until I can give you a definitive answer, okay? I promise we'll—
I'll
—do everything I can.”

McElone stood up straight. “Thank you for doing this,” she said.

“Not at all. I know it wasn't easy for you to ask.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You have no idea,” she said, then simply nodded, as if dismissing an inferior officer, squared her shoulders and walked to her personal car (she'd never drive the department-issue vehicle on what she considered to be personal business), got in and drove off.

So she probably didn't see me turn toward Paul and ask, “What did we just sign up for?”

“From your standpoint, I would think it's a dream case,” he answered. “All you have to do is tell the lieutenant what I tell you. You should be thrilled.”

My lip curled a little bit; I didn't agree with his assessment. “I knew Detective Ferry a little, Paul. He wasn't my favorite person on the planet, but I'm not happy he's dead.” I walked back inside to the air-conditioning.

Paul scowled, following. He doesn't like it when I call him out on things, especially when I'm right. “That wasn't what I was saying,” he said.

Now
I
scowled, and for the same reasons. “Well, let's move on,” I said magnanimously. “Can you get on the Ghosternet and look for the detective?”

“He's not gonna be there,” Maxie kicked in. I hadn't even realized she'd come inside with us—
she
doesn't care if it's a hundred degrees out. “Like you told the police lady, he hasn't been dead long enough.” Maxie doesn't mind the word
dead
as long as it's not being applied to her.

“Nothing is uniform,” Paul told her. “We don't know that I can't find him. It's all I can do, anyway. I'll get on it immediately. I will let you know if I get a message back.” (That's what he calls the communication he gets from other users of the Ghosternet.) Without another word, Paul sank through the floor of my front room to the basement, which is where he prefers to commune telepathically with those of his own kind.

Knowing my guests would likely be coming back from the beach shortly, I decided to go clean up the game room, where I'd been working, since there wouldn't be enough time now to finish stripping the white paint off the paneling. Maxie followed me, which wasn't astonishing but is unusual. She doesn't often seek out my company and relishes time she can spend on the roof, by herself.

I walked into the movie room (as I'd decided to call it) and assessed its condition. The room was a long rectangle with windows on two sides and hadn't seen much use as a game room. Maxie had suggested turning it into a home theater, while Paul actually thought we should turn it into a “consulting room” for the detective business (I shot that down in a hurry), so obstinately I'd decided to make it a fitness center for the guests—until I asked a few and discovered they had no interest, combined with the high cost of the equipment I'd need to buy. And my father, a former handyman, agreed with Maxie.

As usual, I realized that Maxie, who'd been an interior designer when she was alive, had actually had the best idea first, and subjected myself to her endless crowing when I announced my change in plans. I sold the pool table on Craigslist, and now the space was becoming a movie room.

First step: Strip off the white paint I'd used to cover the paneling because it made the room too bright for viewing movies, especially during the day. And because it was just ironic enough to fit my life. Paint on, paint off. Maybe the first movie we'd show would be
The Karate Kid
.

Maxie stopped at the door and considered. “How dark are you going to go on the stain?” she asked.

“Light,” I said. “Just not a real high-gloss finish, because I don't want glare and I don't want it to be reflective.” I started to clean up the site, first removing the can of paint thinner. It was extra hot in this room because I had some windows open to reduce the fumes.

“Probably a good idea,” she agreed. Ah, so I was going to get the reasonable Maxie this afternoon. Reasonable Maxie was a rare sight, and disturbing in her own way.

I put the lid back on the can of thinner, placed the morning's front section of the
Asbury Park Press
on the lid and stood on it. That way you know the can is closed properly. But there's not much to do when you're standing on a paint can, so I looked at Maxie. “How's your mom?” I asked.

“Fine! She's fine! Can't I do
anything
without being questioned like a criminal?” She flew up into the ceiling and kept going.

I got down off the can of thinner. The reasonable Maxie had left the building.

With Paul downstairs, Melissa upstairs with Wendy and Maxie's whereabouts anyone's guess, I didn't have much time to consider why a young female ghost would fly (literally) off the handle (figuratively) at the mention of her mother.

What I
did
have to do was clean up the movie room, or more specifically, the construction area. I put the paint thinner, stepladder and other tools in a utility closet handily located in the room and did a little quick sweep-up, and the room was presentable again.

I, however, was not, so I went upstairs to shower and change before any of my guests returned from the beach or the town.

I'd barely gotten myself into a presentable pair of cargo shorts and a blue top before my cell phone rang. The Caller ID indicated the call was coming from Jeannie Rogers, my closest friend.

“Hey, Jeannie.”

“Heeeeellllloooooo.” The mournful elongation of Jeannie's greeting indicated either that the world had just come to an end and it was left to Jeannie to break the news to me, or that her one-year-old (pardon me,
eleven-month-old
) son, Oliver, was already tracking below the necessary requirements for a terrific preschool he wouldn't be able to attend for at least two years. Equally unmitigated disasters in Jeannie's world.

“What's wrong, Jean?”

A sigh that could have driven a hyena to Xanax emanated from my phone, but I've known Jeannie for a while, so I was expecting it. “Nora broke her leg,” she moaned. “She fell down the basement stairs going for a suitcase.”

Nora? Who was Nora? Oh, yeah: “Tony's mother broke her leg? Oh, that's too bad.” Tony Mandorisi, my friend and home improvement guru, is also Jeannie's husband.

“It's beyond bad,” she went on, intimating that I had clearly missed the tragic implications of her—Jeannie's—misfortune. “She and Jimmy were due in tomorrow morning.”

This rang a vaguely familiar bell, but I couldn't quite remember what it was that bore significance here. “Well, I'm sure Tony's parents can visit after her leg is better.”

Now Jeannie's voice took on a decided edge, since I had not picked up on her deep and lasting misery. “You don't understand. Tony and I are leaving on the cruise tomorrow afternoon. Nora and Jimmy were going to watch Oliver for five days.”

Oh, yeah. It had been surprising enough that Jeannie—who defines the term
helicopter mom
to the point that she should be decorated by the Air Force—would agree to leave her young son for five full days, but Tony had insisted that they celebrate their wedding anniversary with their first solo trip since Oliver's birth. So Jeannie had reluctantly agreed to go on a romantic cruise to Bermuda with her husband.

Now that idyll was being threatened by a freak accident suffered by a woman trying to accommodate them, which Jeannie, of course, saw as the queen mother of inconveniences. I probably would have seen it as a dark omen indicating I should stay off the cruise ship at all costs, and that is the difference in our personalities.

Another is the fact that Jeannie absolutely won't believe there are ghosts in my house. She's known me for a very long time but still will not admit to the possibility that Paul and Maxie are real. She thinks I'm a master con woman, taking in gullible tourists who want to see spooky things go on, and that all the evidence of Paul and Maxie (which include flying objects, conversations that seem to have only one side and the occasional hole in one of my walls—it's a long story) is just prestidigitation on my part. Her husband, Tony, however, has taken to the idea of the ghosts, and occasionally even tries to communicate with Paul. He's a little afraid of Maxie.

“Well, there must be someone else who can take care of Ollie,” I said, slipping as I used the nickname that Tony used for their son but Jeannie disdained (“It makes him sound like he should be hanging around with a guy named Stan and getting into fine messes”). “It's just a few days, right?”

“It's five days, tomorrow through Sunday,” Jeannie answered. “And it's impossible. My brother can't get here from Omaha in time. And none of our friends have children.”

That irked me a little. “Hey,
I
have a daughter, you know.”

And even before Jeannie responded, I knew I had done something very, very stupid. I had walked into the middle of the highway as the tractor-trailer came barreling down from the mountain with its brake line cut. I had stood in front of the wall during the firing squad's daily target practice. I had seen the funnel cloud and gone driving toward the tornado.

“Really? You wouldn't mind?” Jeannie squealed. “Oh, Alison, I can't thank you enough—you're saving my marriage!” Jeannie is, among other things, given to hyperbole; as far as I knew, there was no trouble between her and Tony.

But that wasn't the point. I had inadvertently just volunteered to bring Oliver to my house and care for him while his parents were on a ship at sea. Now don't get me wrong: I adore Ollie and think he's the sweetest baby on the planet since Melissa, but Jeannie is, let's say, a little exacting about his care. She had interviewed seven different day care centers before deciding on a private babysitter, who had undergone every possible vetting mechanism short of a polygraph test. That was canceled only because Jeannie couldn't find a qualified technician. And even after all that, Jeannie wouldn't trust poor Katie the babysitter with her son for five whole days.

“Whoa, hold on there, Jeannie.” This required a moment. I'd volunteered, sort of, and I did want my friends to have a good time. Tony, especially, needed the break (mostly from watching Jeannie hover over their son). I wasn't going to renege on what she saw as a promise, despite its stemming simply from my mention of having a daughter. “I'm happy to help you out, but I want to get a few ground rules straight before we start.”

I could hear her eyes narrow. “Ground rules?” she asked.

“Yeah. You need to understand that Liss and I are crazy about Oliver”—I avoided using his nickname so that this time Jeannie could concentrate on what I was saying—“and we're happy to have him visit for a few days.”

Jeannie's audible eyes were down to slits now. “But . . . ?”

“
But
, we're not going to be able to do
everything
exactly the way that you do. He's going to be on vacation, too. You have to be prepared for the idea that some things in Oliver's day might be just a little bit different than normal.”

“How different?” Jeannie asked.

“Well, for example, I'll try to stick to the foods he eats already, but if I have to make substitutions based on what we have in the house or what my mom might bring one night, I'll do so. Carefully.”

Jeannie made something approaching a chewing sound, which indicated that she was rotating her jaw, something she does when confronted with an idea she had not considered before. “
How
carefully?” she asked.

“I'm a gift horse, Jeannie. You want to look me in the mouth?”

There was a long pause while Jeannie undoubtedly considered her options. She had none. “Okay, you're hired,” she said.

“Try not to sound too grateful,” I told her. “You don't want me to get a swelled head.”

“Oh, come on, you know I love you, and I'm thrilled you're taking Oliver! But . . .”

I smiled, but she couldn't see it. “But you've never left him alone this long before, and you're nervous. I get that.”

Jeannie had the nerve to sound amazed. “How did you know?”

“I told you. I have a child.”

We arranged for Tony and Jeannie to drop Oliver off at noon the next day. I started mentally calculating how much I'd have to pay Melissa to help me out with the baby whenever I couldn't care for him myself but was interrupted by two of my Senior Plus guests, Don Coburn and his “better half,” Tammy, returning from their day at the incredibly hot beach.

In addition to the Coburns, I had another couple and two single guests at the moment, and while six people are plenty to deal with, at the height of the season, having any guest rooms vacant was not a great sign. We were still struggling to get back to normal after the Sandy damage, no matter what the TV commercials told us about being “Stronger Than the Storm.” I wasn't worried about making the mortgage payments, but the knowledge that college tuition was just seven years away could send me into a cold sweat at night.

Red as beets, walking slowly with fatigued legs, the Coburns nevertheless appeared to be the two happiest people on the planet. Tammy was from Grinnell, Iowa, she had told me, and she was getting a look at the ocean for the first time in her life. Don, who'd moved to Iowa and met Tammy forty years earlier but had grown up in Avon-by-the-Sea, not far from Harbor Haven, just seemed tickled that she was so pleased.

They agreed that the Shore was the best ever (although Tammy really didn't have a basis for comparison) and went up to their room to shower and change before heading out to dinner. A lot down the Shore is different since the storm, but sand still gets into your clothes and hair.

Paul rose up from the basement at that moment—it was clear I just wasn't going to get much cleaning done this afternoon—with a puzzled look on his face. “I tried to contact Detective Ferry, and as we suspected, he is not yet in contact, if he ever will be,” he reported. “It would be much easier if everyone evolved the same way.”

“The lack of rules really bothers you, doesn't it?” I asked him.

“A lot of things bother me,” he said. That was unexpected. Paul usually didn't do the passive-aggressive thing; that was Maxie's territory. And sometimes my mother's.

“What do you mean?”

He waved a hand. “Nothing,” he said. “I am a little concerned, however.”

“Why?” I decided to go into the kitchen in case any more guests arrived. The Senior Plus tourists are used to my conversing with people who aren't there, and since I'd publicly declared the guesthouse to be haunted, I'd been getting fewer “civilian” guests. Still, it can be unnerving to see your hostess talking to the ceiling or the wall, so I try to keep the kitchen a guest-free zone and conduct conversations with Paul and Maxie there.

Besides, since I don't cook, the guesthouse is not a bed-and-breakfast—no breakfast—so the kitchen is usually unoccupied.

Paul followed me. “After trying to contact Detective Ferry and failing to find him, I sent out a general message asking about him. I got a number of responses from people who had some interaction with the detective while he was alive.”

I looked into the freezer, pretending I might actually cook something if I could find the right kind of food there. This was really just a ruse; I knew perfectly well that with Wendy in the house, we'd be ordering pizza. Luckily, Mom would be over tomorrow to help Melissa cook dinner, when I'd have Oliver around. “So people knew Ferry,” I said to Paul. “Is there something suspicious about that?”

“Not on the face of it.” Paul, when he's thinking hard, doesn't pay much attention to his positioning, so he drifts. He was about halfway in the air to the ceiling fan now, stroking his goatee. “You would expect that a detective would have interacted with a number of people who are somewhat unsavory, criminals and such. There was one who said the detective had solved his murder.”

“I imagine that guy's pretty grateful. Does he have any information that might help McElone?” I asked.

“No,” Paul answered, looking uncomfortable. “His information was not specific to the detective's death.”

Something about Paul's tone was disturbing. I turned to face him. Paul's head was an inch from the ceiling fan, and I suppressed the urge to tell him to look out, because there was nothing the fan could possibly do to him. “I don't like the way you sound,” I said.

“You shouldn't. The man who contacted me said that Detective Ferry was a corrupt officer, and that even his investigation into the man's death was motivated by a chance to help the people who were, as he put it, ‘running' the detective.”

“You're saying—”

“
I'm
not saying anything,” Paul said. “The man who says Detective Ferry solved his murder is claiming the detective was involved with a local mob.”