Haunted Guest House Mystery 03-Old Haunts (18 page)

“Oh, I don’t know,” Steven butted in. “Melissa’s an awfully mature ten-year-old. Don’t you think—”

“No.” If The Swine thought he was going to ingratiate himself with me by trying to play “good parent” to my “prison guard,” he was sadly mistaken.

“It’s okay, Daddy,” Liss told her father. “I don’t care that much.” My daughter, the peacemaker.

“Okay, baby,” he answered. Honestly, their mutual admiration was enough to nauseate you. Well, me, anyway.

“The two of you are going to have to cut this out,” I said.

Both jaws dropped, as if rehearsed. “Cut what out?” they each said, almost simultaneously.

“This perfect-family act you’re putting on to convince me that things should go back to the way they used to be,” I answered. I looked at my daughter. “Liss, honey, you have to understand. Daddy and I are divorced. That’s final. We’re not going to get back together, and it’s not just my decision, but that’s the way it’s being made to look. I’m sorry, baby, but things are going to stay the way they’ve been once Daddy goes back to California.”

Melissa and Steven looked at each other; his expression was smug, and hers was slightly surprised. “You haven’t told her?” Melissa asked her father.

My voice dropped an octave. “Haven’t told me
what
?” I asked.

“I’m not going back to L.A.,” Steven said after giving Melissa another look. “I want to come back here and live in Harbor Haven.”

Oh, boy.

“You’re not serious,” I said. It was clear he
was
serious, but I was hoping to give him an easy way out. The last thing I needed was The Swine in my neighborhood, doing his charming thing and turning my daughter into his campaign manager. Not to mention, it had become very tiring trying to keep him from noticing that quite often Melissa, my mother and I were looking at dead people he couldn’t see, and it would only get worse if he stayed long-term.

“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking,” Steven said. “You were right about a lot of the things you said about me. I did lose my way somewhere along the line. I discovered how to make money and forgot that there’s more to it than that. I started out wanting to use the financial system to help people who needed it, and I ended up screwing those people—cover your ears, Melissa—out of their savings.”

“I’m not six,” my daughter interjected.

“So what’s your plan?” I asked. With Steven, there was always a plan.

His face lit up; this was always the part he’d enjoyed the best—selling his dreams. “Remember how I was going to create a fund for people with very little money to invest? How I was going to build that into something they could use as a nest egg or a retirement fund, or for college tuition?”

“I remember,” I assured him. If I didn’t remember, we might not have gotten divorced. Oh wait, there’d been Amee. Yeah, we’d still be divorced.

“Well, that plan might have worked in another economy. Now, people are going to be afraid to invest their money in stocks or mutual funds. So I’m going to create my own fund, find investors who’ll put up the money, and guarantee an interest rate above prime for investments of as little as ten dollars a month.” He grinned at me, clearly convinced he had laid out the blueprint for the most brilliant design since the Sistine Chapel.

“Okay,” I said after it was clear he was finished talking. “Could you repeat that in Lithuanian? Because I think I might understand it better if you did.”

Steven smiled. “Sorry about the jargon,” he said. “Let me see if I can explain.”

“Dad’s going to be like a bank,” Melissa said. “He’s going to put up money for poor people, let them invest really small amounts, and make sure that no matter what, they’ll get more money back when they’re done. The more they put in, the more they’ll get out, but they’ll never lose anything.”

Now
that
I understood. “So it’s a Ponzi scheme,” I said.

Melissa rolled her eyes, and Steven smiled his “you just don’t get it” smile. “No it’s
not
a Ponzi scheme,” he said. “The money we pay out doesn’t come from the contributors. I’ll have outside investors who will get their piece of the profits as well. It hinges on me knowing how to invest wisely.”

I thought about how he was leveraged out on three credit cards that I knew of yet still bought a karaoke machine to use for one night. “Uh-huh,” I said.

“You’re not convinced,” Steven said.

“I’m not deciding now,” I told him, and then saw Eric, the server, who had been approaching our table, put his pad back in his pocket. I tried to flag him down, but he was off to the kitchen for another table’s order.

Both Steven and Melissa looked so glum that I needed a way to perk up the gathering. So I fell back on one of the things that my ex-husband was always best at—he loved to give advice, mostly to me.

“Steven, suppose there was someone you were trying to find and the usual avenues weren’t helping,” I said. “Her phone number is disconnected, and she’s not living at the last address you have available. What do you do?”

Immediately, Steven brightened up. He got a sly smile on his face and asked, “Is this a private eye thing?”

“I’m a private investigator, Steven. Get over it. Now, do you want to help me or make fun of me?”

Immediately, he took on a serious expression. Had to show support in front of Melissa, especially. And making himself look smart was possibly his most abundant asset. “This is a business matter?” he asked. I nodded. Sure, it was a business matter. Paul couldn’t pay me money for my services, but we had a business arrangement. Sort of. Close enough.

My ex made a show of thinking about the complex problem with which I had entrusted him. He looked down at his unopened menu and nodded slightly. He probably had his lips pursed, too, but I couldn’t see from my angle. That is his classic “thinking” face, so I can only assume he’d gone full-tilt with it.

Melissa watched her father with a terrific concentration. He was, even after a few days, still something of a new experience for her again, and she wasn’t yet used to all of his moods and what I considered his “tricks.” She was a smart ten-year-old, but a ten-year-old nonetheless.

Steven raised his head, having received the wisdom he sought from on high. “If it’s someone who’s not paying a previous invoice, your best bet is to get in touch with a collection agency,” he said. “They have access to records that you can’t, like credit-card receipts and things like that.”

That would be what The Swine would come up with—a collection agency. First of all, neither Julia MacKenzie nor Wilson Meyers owed me any money. Besides, I’d have to pay a collection agency a fee, and that wasn’t going to fit my budget even when there was a full contingent of guests in my house. And what could a collection agency do, anyway? Find old credit-card receipts, utility bills, addresses, cell-phone numbers…Hey, wait a minute.

“Actually,” I told Steven, “that’s exactly what I should do.”

Eric appeared at my left shoulder. “Everybody ready?” he asked.

Sixteen

I was startled to see a small boy, perhaps seven years old, walking by himself out of the building as I entered the nondescript office complex in Eatontown Wednesday morning. It wasn’t until I was almost upon him that I realized he was dressed in nineteen-twenties’ fashion, and that he was transparent.

That seemed terribly sad, but the boy didn’t look the least bit unhappy, and was in fact moving with a little skip in his step. He went directly into the arms of a smiling woman in her mid-sixties, whom I heard him address as “Granny.” I guess after almost a hundred years, you can get used to pretty much anything. The woman took the boy’s hand, and they floated up above the diner across the street and into the morning sky.

This ghost-seeing thing could be creepy or beautiful, and often was both at the same time.

I made my way to the second floor of the building and down a hallway without noticing any other see-through individuals. On door 213 was a sign reading “AAAAAAble Collection Service.” I aaaaaadmired the determination of the owners to be first in the Yellow Pages listing for collection agencies, and wondered whether that made any difference in this digital age. I opened the door and walked inside.

The office consisted of two cubicles and a reception desk. There was no one at the reception desk.

“Can someone help me?” I called into the small office.

“I can,” a man’s voice came from inside one of the cubicles. “Come on around.”

I walked around the reception desk and the false wall that had been erected behind it, toward the sound of the man’s voice. And sitting at a desk with nothing more than a telephone, a computer, and a dusty plastic fern, was a small, balding man of about fifty, wearing a sport coat so loud he had to shout to be heard over it.

“What can I do for you?” the man asked. A small engraved sign on his desk identified him as Timothy Feldner. He gestured toward a steel-and-cloth chair to one side of his desk, and I sat down.

I identified myself and told him about my guesthouse business, and then being careful with my words, said, “I’m trying to track someone down who might owe some money, and I figured this was the place to ask about something like that.” Hey, I didn’t know that Julia and Wilson
didn’t
owe anyone money. So it wasn’t a lie, Melissa.

“That’s what we do,” Feldner exhaled. Every word out of his mouth sounded like it had been forced out through a bellows. Everything he did seemed to take enormous effort. He looked like a basset hound, only sadder. Chasing after delinquent payers must have been a remarkably demoralizing job. “What’s the person’s name?” he asked.

“It’s actually two people,” I told him. “The first is a woman named Julia MacKenzie, who lived in Gilford Park a little over two years ago. I checked her previous address. And her phone number from then has been disconnected.”

Feldner pondered that a moment and asked, “You got a birth date?” I gave him the one Paul had told me, and he dutifully punched the keyboard for a while, positioning his screen so that I couldn’t see it—don’t give away the merchandise for nothing, after all. He shook his head. “Nah. I don’t have anything with that date. Possible she was lying about her age?”

“Not by too much,” I told him. Probably not, anyway. What if Paul was a lousy judge of women’s ages?

“Okay,” Feldner said. “Tell you what. I’ll get on it, and we’ll get you back your money.” He reached into his desk and pulled out a piece of paper already on a clipboard that had a pen attached to it with a rubber band. “Fill out this form, and we’ll call you in a few days.”

It’s not that I hadn’t anticipated that response, but I’d been hoping to avoid it. I took the clipboard, but didn’t start filling out the form. Instead, I gave Feldner my best smile, the one I hadn’t used in a while but was hoping to have saved for a more enjoyable occasion, like after I got off Luther’s motorcycle later today, assuming I was still alive.

“I’m really in a hurry on this,” I said, my voice dropping to what I’d hoped would be a purr but what sounded more like a seriously sore throat in need of chicken soup
stat
. “Isn’t there a way we can speed this process up a little?”

Feldner wasn’t buying the voice or the smile. “Lady, it’s summer, and our business is slow,” he said. “We’re only open four days a week, and, frankly, it’s mostly to do paperwork. We don’t get a lot of walk-in business. So level with me: You’re not really interested in this as a collections matter at all, are you? You lost track of this Julia person, and you don’t know where to find her, so you want me to push a few buttons and furnish you with an address, right?”

Busted. I dropped the smile and moved into a grimace. “A phone number would do,” I suggested.

“We don’t work like that. Find yourself a private investigator.” Feldner took the clipboard from my hand and put it back in his desk drawer.

“I
am
a private investigator,” I told him. I took the license out of my tote bag and showed it to him. “I have a client who wants to find Julia MacKenzie, and the cops won’t help me out. I don’t have a source in the records bureau. You can take five lousy minutes and punch up her information, can’t you? I’ll make it worth your while.” I pulled a twenty-dollar bill from my wallet and held it between my fingers.

He wheezed out a laugh. “Twenty bucks?” He coughed. “You want me to risk losing my license for
twenty bucks
? You must be really desperate. Not to mention cheap.”

“I’m both those things,” I assured him, then thought about it. “I don’t know that
cheap
is the word I would use…”

“Sorry, lady,” he said. “I’m not able to help you.”

“It’s for a really good cause,” I tried.

“I gave at the office.”

I stood up, defeated. “I really don’t know what else to do,” I said. I’m not even sure I was speaking to Feldner.

“So now you’re doing pathetic?” he said. “You think I don’t see pathetic every day and hear pathetic on the phone about once an hour? That’s the best you can do?”

I put my hand on my hip and faced him. “I don’t have money,” I told him. “I’m really not interested in offering you sex.”