Chance of a Ghost (40 page)

Officer Warrell, it turned out, was maybe twenty-five on a good day, very tall, very blond, and
very
serious about his work. He was the only cop in the room who didn’t seem to find the—pardon the expression—bust funny.

“So they saw a judge?” I asked, doing my best to treat the matter with equal sobriety. “The people you arrested that night were arraigned right away?” I had the recorder on in my tote bag, but I was taking notes on a reporter’s notebook, anyway, just to give the impression that I had an idea of what I was doing. The officer looked me straight in the eye without needing to consult an arrest report.

“It was a Thursday night. That’s municipal court night. The judge was already here, so the arraignments were held immediately. None of the defendants had hired private counsel; most of them just wanted to go home, so they paid their fines and left.”

“What alerted you to the…problem, anyway?” I asked. “You had to get there awfully quick to make arrests, no?”

Officer Warrell’s gaze never wavered. “We had gotten advance warning that there might be an illegal element to the performance that evening,” he said. “So I was positioned outside the clubhouse auditorium in case there was a problem.”

“A problem,” I echoed. At least Morgan Henderson had an excuse.

“The law is on the books,” the officer said. “I’m paid to enforce it.”

“Who gave the advance warning?” I asked. “Who ratted out the New Old Thespians for trying to be hippies?”

“The tip was anonymous,” Warrell said. “I don’t know who it might have been.”

“Male or female?”

“I didn’t take the call,” he answered.

I was starting to think that it would take a graduate of dental school, some laughing gas and a pair of very strong pliers to get any information out of Officer Warrell, but I could hear Paul’s voice in my conscience telling me not to give up. I backtracked a bit. “So you arrested seven people that night, and five of them paid their fines and left,” I reminded him. “Two of them were detained overnight.”

“Yes,” he nodded. “Frances Walters and Jerome Rasmussen.” Truly, his ability to recall the incident without so much as a Post-it note reminder was impressive.

“I don’t understand. Why were some fined but others put in jail overnight?” I asked.

Officer Warrell did not blink. “As I said, Ms. Kerby, the arresting officer does not decide on the sentence. The judge decided they should be detained, and so they were.”

“Were you in the courtroom when they were all arraigned?” I asked him. They say lawyers should never ask a question when they don’t know the answer in advance. I would have made a lousy lawyer.

“Of course,” the officer replied. “I was required in case I had to testify about the circumstances of the arrests.”

“So did the judge say why he was keeping Ms. Walters and Mr. Rasmussen but not the others?”

For once, Officer Warrell hesitated before answering. But after a moment, he said, “Yes. He said there had been allegations made that there might be other charges pending against those two, and he did not want them to leave the county until that matter was resolved.”

“Other charges?” What the hell did that mean? “What other charges?”

“The judge said an officer of the court had been advised those two might have had some connection with the distribution of a controlled substance.”

There was a long moment that passed silently. “Drugs? Someone thought they were dealing drugs?” Retired septuagenarians Frances and Jerry as drug dealers? This thing just kept getting weirder.

“Prescription drugs. Specifically sildenafil.”

That was a new one on me. “Sildenafil?” I repeated.

“Better known as Viagra.”

“You’re kidding,” I blurted, before I remembered to whom I was talking.

“No, ma’am,” Officer Warrell responded.

“And the tip about their dealing came from…”

“An anonymous source,” he said.

“It’s very simple,” Penny Fields said. “I really don’t understand
what all the fuss is about.”

I’d spent some time on the phone with Phyllis Coates trying to absorb what I’d just been told, but Phyllis was too busy laughing to be much help. Illegal Viagra? How much weirder was this case going to get? The only thing to do was push on, so I arrived just as the box office at the Count Basie Theatre opened at noon, figuring I’d have just enough time to talk to Penny and crack the case before I had to pick up Melissa at Janine’s house at one. If I hit all the traffic lights.

That was the plan, anyway.

“You told me the last time I was here that you didn’t know Lawrence Laurentz very well, that he wasn’t too social and that he was condescending, but you were especially clear that you didn’t know him very well,” I reminded her. “Then I do the tiniest amount of digging and find out that
you
were the person who called EMS when
you
discovered his body, in his
bathtub
, at his
house
. If that’s what you call not knowing someone, what’s your definition of knowing someone well?”

(By the way, I had gotten Mom to ask Lawrence about that, and his comment—which I deciphered from one of
Mom’s vowel-free texts—was, “How would I know who found my body?” A detective’s dream client.)

Penny pivoted from her computer screen, which displayed a seating chart for an upcoming Micky Dolenz concert, and gave me her best intimidating glare. It was surprisingly effective for a woman about five inches shorter than I am. She had panache.

“And
you
told
me
you were here about some inheritance issue, that Larry had bequeathed someone here some money in his will,” she pointed out. “Now you’re here asking questions about how I found his body and that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with an inheritance. What’s
your
definition of the truth?”

She was good.

“I’m a private investigator and I’m looking for information about Lawrence Laurentz’s death,” I said. “That’s all true. I’ll show you the license again if you like. Now, please, what were you doing at his home the night he died?”

“It’s embarrassing,” she said. That I actually believed, based on the somewhat nauseated expression she was affecting. Had she thought she was the mysterious person who was mentioned in his (as far as I knew, nonexistent) will? (Come to think of it, I should ask Lawrence about his will.) Was that why she was so upset?

“It will be held in the strictest of confidence, assuming I’m not required to give information to the police,” I assured her. I’d have to ask Paul when the law stated I might have to tell the cops something, but I did mean what I’d told Penny.

She turned back to the computer, ostensibly to check on the sales figures for the former Monkee, but I could see a little tightness around her mouth and she sniffed just a touch as she turned. “I was there to fire him,” she said.

Well, that certainly wasn’t what I’d expected. “You were firing him? Why?”

“He was causing problems with the part-time staff,” Penny said, doing her best not to look at me. What was
upsetting her so? Shame at having been about to fire a guy who died? Embarrassment over having seen him in the bathtub? Serious concern over Micky Dolenz’s career? “He would…report other box office personnel to me for various infractions. People got nervous when he was around. He was creating a bad atmosphere in the office. I had to let him go.”

All that was consistent with the mosaic I’d been building of Lawrence in my mind. “Any reason why that night in particular?” I asked.

“I didn’t want to do it in front of the other employees,” she answered. “And I felt I owed it to him to do it in person. That was the only night that month we were dark, with no show here, so that was the night I went.”

“You had his address from employee records,” I thought aloud.

Penny turned back toward me and nodded. “I went up and saw his car parked in the space marked for his unit,” she said. “I rang the bell a few times, and he didn’t answer. I tried calling his cell phone, but he didn’t pick that up, either. I could see there were lights on in the house. So I went around to the back and walked up to the deck to see if he was in the kitchen. The French doors were open. I knocked on the glass, but again there was no answer. And I thought I heard water running.”

“So you went in,” I guessed.

“When I saw water dripping down from the kitchen ceiling. And knew that couldn’t be good. So yeah, I went in. I probably should have called the police right away, but, you know, I was just thinking there was a faucet left on or something.” Penny closed her eyes.

I really wanted to let her avoid the memory of what she found upstairs, but Paul would berate me later for not thinking like a detective and assuming that everything everyone tells you is a lie until you can prove it’s not. So I fought the temptation to cut to the chase and instead said, “So you
went inside and…” Sometimes you have to lead the witness into telling you the story.

She nodded, a little more violently than it seemed she’d intended. “I followed the sound of the water running. I called for Larry a couple of times, but of course there wasn’t any answer.” There would be no point in trying to confirm any of this with Lawrence later on; people don’t become ghosts, at least not conscious, alert ghosts, immediately after they die. Paul has told me—and we’ve confirmed it a few other times—that it takes a few days before memory and cognition kick in. So Lawrence wouldn’t know if Penny’s story was true or not.

“What did you find?” I asked.

Penny shot me a look that indicated I was being cruel, and I felt like she was right. “You know perfectly well what I
found
,” she said.

I couldn’t apologize; for all I knew, this whole story was a lie and Penny had tossed the toaster in to French-fry Lawrence while he bathed. “Did you call the police immediately?” I asked instead.

“It was obvious he was…that I couldn’t revive him myself,” she exhaled. “I dialed nine-one-one on my cell phone. It felt like hours, but I’m sure they were there very quickly, really. I did do one thing while I was there, though.”

My ears perked up. “What?” I asked.

“I turned off the water.” Penny sniffed another time or two, and took a tissue from a box on her desk. She used it.

After a few moments of sniffling, I figured I’d exhausted the information I’d get from Penny about that night, so I figured I’d switch lines of question entirely: “How come Tyra Carter thinks you won’t hire her back because of me?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” Penny said. “Have you talked to Tyra?”

Does being threatened count?
“Sort of,” I said. “Do you want to hire her back?”

Penny looked like she hadn’t considered the possibility
before. “I don’t know,” she said. “Tyra was moonlighting while she worked here.”

I figured if I could help Tyra’s employment picture, I could get her to stop calling me up and saying unsettling things. “I think she’d really like to come back,” I suggested. “You might want to give it a thought.”

“Maybe,” Penny agreed. “I’ll call her.”

One less threatening figure to worry about,
I thought.

On the way to pick up Melissa, I placed a call to Murray
Feldner, who picked up on the first ring as if he’d been waiting by the phone. “Murray,” was all he said. Clearly, a man of action.

“Murray, it’s Alison Kerby.” My Bluetooth made it sound like I was driving through a car wash in a convertible with the top down.

“Hi, Alison,” Murray replied. “Do you need something? Is there gonna be snow tonight?”

“No. It’s about the bill you sent me.” The car in front of me was doing its best to break the record for slowest miles per hour in the passing lane. Pennsylvania plates. It figured.

“What about it? Did I add it up wrong?” Murray had not, if I recalled correctly, been an honors student in math. Or anything else, except maybe gym.

“Sort of,” I told him. “You charged me for plowing my driveway and my walk.”

This did not seem to make an impression on him. “Uh-huh.”

Subtlety wasn’t going to be a really powerful tool in this conversation. “It didn’t snow Tuesday night, Murray. There was nothing to plow.”

“What? What about a cow?” Clearly, the Bluetooth was working just as well on the other end. Terrific. And the slow car in front of me actually got slower.

“Not cow, Murray.
Plow
. There was nothing to
plow
.”

“When?”

“Wednesday!” I considered passing on the right, which is not technically kosher, but there was a truck with Oklahoma plates there, big enough to be carrying all of New Jersey back home, and I was boxed in. I flashed my lights at the Pennsylvania car. It slowed down more.

“I came over to your house on Wednesday, Alison. Remember?” Great. Now Murray thought I was the one who hadn’t been an honors student. Which, technically, I hadn’t, but that wasn’t the point. “Your daughter called me the night before. I have it right here in my book.”

“I know you were there, Murray. But you didn’t do anything; there was no snow. How can you charge me for plowing when there was no snow?”

Murray sounded honestly confused. “You wanted me to plow even though there was nothing on the ground?” he asked. “That would’ve damaged my plow, Alison.”

“I know! I was the one who told you that!” I honked my horn, but I’m not sure what message I was sending at that point.

“Well, then, what did you want me to do?” Murray said.

“Exactly what you did,” I answered. “You did everything right. Except then you sent me a bill for it, and that’s the part I have a problem with.” The Oklahoma truck had now passed me on the right, so I switched lanes to try to pass the Pennsylvanian.

And the second I moved, it picked up speed like a jackrabbit and disappeared ahead of me. Four more cars passed me on the left while I was stuck between Tom Joad and his load of whatever it is Oklahomans need imported.

“I’m in business, Alison. I always send a bill when I do work for somebody.”

I wondered if this conversation was taking place in some alternate universe where what Murray said made sense and
I simply needed to adjust. “You
didn’t
do any work for me, Murray. You came to my house, didn’t do anything and left. How can you charge me two hundred dollars for that?”