Haunted Guest House Mystery 03-Old Haunts (34 page)

“You don’t have to be sorry. Really. Just don’t do this.” Was that movement I saw behind him?

“I have to,” Luther said. And he let go of my left arm with his right hand, and raised the tire iron. But he held me so tightly with his left that I couldn’t duck. I tried to block with my arm, but it wasn’t going to work. There just wasn’t time.

I was about to close my eyes so I wouldn’t see it coming, but before I could, I saw something swing through the air behind Luther, and suddenly he fell backward as his legs gave out from under him. In his place was a pool cue, which seemed to dance in the air by itself until I saw Maxie’s hand turn into the light. She brought the cue down on the prone Luther three more times.

“You killed Big Bob!” she screamed. “And you’re trying to kill my friend!”

By that point, however, I don’t think Luther could hear her anymore. To be fair, he never really could.

“My goodness,” Francie said. “There really
is
a ghost.” She turned toward the front room, shouting, “Arthur! A ghost!”

I looked at Maxie, holding the now-broken pool cue in her hand. She wasn’t breathing hard, for obvious reasons, but she still looked like she had exerted herself pretty mightily.

“ ‘Your friend’?” I asked.

Her attention turned to me. “Don’t let it go to your head,” she said.

“I wish I could give you a hug,” I told her.

Maxie grinned. “You’re running on adrenaline. In a few minutes, you’ll go back to hating me.”

“I’ve never hated you.”

She took her eyes away in an apparent determined effort to avoid any sticky sentiment. “What are we going to do with him?” she asked.

“If you wouldn’t mind going to my bedroom for my cell phone, we’re going to hand him over to the police,” I said.

“You want this?” Maxie asked, extending the cue. “In case he wakes up.”

“I doubt that’ll happen, but thanks,” I said, taking it. Regarding Luther, I told her, “We should tell the cops that it was your mom and not mine who was in Pennsylvania with me today.”

She had already turned to go, but looked back. “Why?”

I pointed to Luther, lying on the floor. “He’ll lose the money he put up for bail.” Maxie was still laughing when she disappeared into the ceiling.

Thirty-one

Detective Lieutenant Anita McElone arrived even ahead of my mother, which is a real feat if you know my mother. Of course I hadn’t called Mom (although you’d think her “Mom Radar” would have kicked in, but no), so McElone had time to cuff Luther behind his back before he completely regained consciousness, and had taken my statement, which indicated that I had knocked him out with a pool cue after he’d tried to kill me with a tire iron.

Tony had gotten there first, of course, apologizing because he’d been listening to his iPod and had headphones on when I was executing my brilliant karaoke gambit that had almost gotten me killed.

“Something pulled off my headphones and pushed me really hard, a couple of times, toward the stairs,” he reported. “Must have been one of your…friends.”

He was standing quietly to one side now as McElone and two uniformed officers had taken charge. He looked downright embarrassed that he hadn’t been there to rescue me “like a man should.” Please.

“Exactly why did you have a pool cue in this room when the pool table is all the way on the other side of the house?” McElone asked. She had actually seen the game room a few months earlier, so I was impressed she remembered where it was located in my floor plan.

“I guess someone just left it there,” I told her. “Lucky for me, I guess, huh?”

McElone’s eyes indicated that she didn’t believe me. “I guess.”

From the entrance, though, Francie Westen was still braying, “It was a ghost! She didn’t hit him with the pool stick! The
ghost
did it!”

Maxie and Paul both appeared near the ceiling, but said nothing. Maxie was intent on Luther, and looked like she wanted to hit him again. Paul, at about a 45-degree angle, was more cerebral, staring at the detective to see how she would handle the moment. Tony was on his cell phone, no doubt informing Jeannie of the developments.

McElone, who is not fond of my house or the unusual things she’s seen happen in it, shuddered a little and looked at me. “A ghost?” she asked.

“Some of the guests take the brochures a little too literally,” I whispered.

Two uniformed officers were leading an understandably groggy Luther out of the house. He was alert enough to murmur, “You can’t prove anything. You don’t have any proof.”

“He confessed,” Francie argued. “I heard him.”

“He can be charged with attempted murder and assault, if nothing else,” McElone said. “I assume you’ll testify?”

“Try and stop me,” I said.

“There’s something else,” came a voice from the front room. Detective Martin Ferry of the Seaside Heights police walked in wearing a short-sleeved shirt with a pocket and a tie that was very undone. He regarded Luther for a moment, and gestured to the uniformed officers to stop for a moment, so they stood there while Ferry regarded some more.

“See, we never really suspected Katherine Malone in this homicide,” Ferry said, looking at Luther but talking to McElone and me. “Mr. Mason here was way too clumsy in his frame job. I mean seriously, Luther. Did you really think we’d believe that Mrs. Malone held onto that wrench for two years and then left it out for us to find? That all those anonymous tips were from a concerned citizen with no ax of his own to grind? And a gentleman biker coming to the cops to complain we weren’t doing enough? Please. We could smell this one a mile away. We suspected you the whole time.”

“How does that become another piece of evidence against our pal here?” McElone asked him. I assumed she had called Ferry as a courtesy, since Luther’s arrest was for a crime (trying to kill me) that took place in Harbor Haven.

“Did you think we didn’t know about the drug deal, Luther?” Ferry went on. “We knew. The FBI had a guy on the inside, and we knew every move you were going to make, but we didn’t have your name. And then you changed the plan at the last minute. Bad move, Luther. You got the Feds mad at you. And if you think they haven’t been looking into this case the whole time, you are dead wrong.”

“You’ve got no evidence,” Luther mumbled. I’m not sure Ferry heard him. “I didn’t kill Big Bob.”

“We have enough,” Ferry told him. Then he turned toward McElone. “The real kicker came when he bailed out a woman he didn’t even know with a hundred grand he just happened to have lying around. So we did some research into Mr. Mason’s financial records, and waddaya know, he managed to buy his business, knock it to the ground and rebuild it to the tune of two million bucks
right after
the coke deal went down and Bob Benicio got killed. Pretty big coincidence, huh, Luther?”

“I didn’t kill Big Bob,” Luther repeated, a little more fervently.

“Well, how about this,” Ferry countered, turning to me. “You wanted to find someone to take the fall for the crime after the bones were found. But you’d only met Mrs. Malone a couple of times. How could you make her the perfect patsy?” He turned toward me. “Who did you tell about Mrs. Malone saying she’d like to have killed Benicio?” he asked.

“I didn’t tell any…Wait! I told Luther,” I said. “The night we went to the Sprocket for the first time, because I was so shaken by what Kitty had said. You’re right—but he’s the only one I told. And Kitty didn’t say she wanted to kill Big Bob. She said she wished she could have done it herself.”

Luther’s eyes got meaner, as he must have seen the trap springing around him. And he was looking at me when he spoke, slowly.

“I. Didn’t. Kill. Big. Bob.”

Ferry, meanwhile, was going on with his taunting, circling around Luther as he spoke. “So the night the drug deal was supposed to go down, the two of you went to Seaside Heights. At first, we thought you made him dig his own grave, but that wasn’t it, was it? Under the boardwalk was where you had buried the cocaine. That’s what the two of you dug up, right?”

Luther remained silent.

“Then what happened? Your pal backed out? Or you just got greedy? One way or another, you already had the big, heavy wrench with you. And for whatever reason, you decided to bash his head in, right?”

Again, there was no response from Luther. But he kept glaring at me.

“Did he fall into the hole after you’d gotten the drugs out, or did you kick him in?”

Maxie reached for the pool cue, but Paul held her back, shaking his head.

“What’s the matter, Luther? You don’t want to brag about your brilliant plan?” Ferry shook his head in Luther’s direction in a disapproving gesture. “A shame, really.”

“You have no evidence,” Luther repeated, louder this time. “You have a crazy old lady who thinks she saw a
ghost
hit me with a pool cue, and some connect-the-dots circumstantial stuff. I’ll be out in ten minutes. I didn’t kill Big Bob, so you can’t prove that I did.” He looked nastily at me when he said that last part.

“You’ve got a little something else,” I told Ferry. I walked to the karaoke machine. “You’ve got this.” I pushed the playback button, and got exactly the section I was hoping for, as “Time in a Bottle” played in the background.

“It’s not a profession you pick up,” Luther’s recorded voice said. “I hit a guy with a heavy wrench, and I killed him. I’m glad I did it, but I’d never done it before, or since. Until now.”

“The machine has a record feature,” I said to Luther. “You were never in better voice.”

“I want to talk to my lawyer,” Luther said.

Cops hate hearing those words because it means they’ll get no more from the people they arrest, and there will be no formal confession, at least until the attorney is involved. But in this case, Ferry and McElone were grinning pretty broadly.

“Get him out of here and let him call his lawyer, for all the good it’ll do him,” Ferry told the uniforms, and Luther was led out of the house. As he walked out, he looked at me, and I’m not sure if his expression was one of menace or regret.

“I didn’t kill Big Bob,” he told me. “And you know it.”

And suddenly, I wasn’t so sure. But by then, Luther was out the door.

“We’ll have to confiscate that karaoke machine,” Ferry told me. “That confession will play beautifully in court.”

“Will I get it back?” I asked. “It’s gotten very popular around here.” Just the previous night, I’d heard Mrs. Spassky doing her best version of “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.”

“We’ll buy you a new one,” Ferry assured me. Then the detective got a smug look on his face. “You thought I was a monster, didn’t you? Locking up some little old lady who probably couldn’t have even lifted that wrench high enough to kill that guy? Just a mean, stupid cop I was, huh? Steel shavings in his head.” He laughed at my stupidity.

All right, maybe I deserved a little of that, but I’d just barely missed getting killed myself, so I wasn’t in an especially charitable mood. “Kitty’s not that old,” I told him. But that just sounded silly. “You could have let me know,” I suggested.

“How could I know you were legit? You were hired by the guy who turned out to be the killer.”

I was about to answer, but McElone beat me to it. “You could have asked me,” she said to Ferry. Then she nodded in my direction and added, “She’s a pain in the butt sometimes, but she’s not crooked.”

That was a nice gesture, in an odd sort of way, but I was just coming to grips with what had happened. “We need to get in touch with Kitty Malone and tell her she’s off the hook,” I said.

“Her lawyer already knows,” Ferry said. “I’m sure she’s been informed, or will be shortly.” I glanced up at Maxie, who smiled. She did not actually say thank you, but then, this was Maxie.

“Can my statement wait until tomorrow, detective?” I asked Ferry. “It’s been kind of a long day.”

He looked a little concerned with the wait, but nodded. He took another look around the room, but any crime that took place here would be the property of McElone, for which I was oddly grateful. He walked over to her and took her hand.

“Good working with you again, Anita,” Ferry said.

McElone smiled. “Always fun, Martin,” she responded. Ferry let go of her hand and left the house.

“You?” I asked. “You’re Ferry’s ex-partner? The one he never stops talking about?”

McElone actually looked a little embarrassed. She nodded. “Before I came to work in Harbor Haven, I was with the Seaside Heights department. Martin and I worked together there.”

“It figures,” I said.

“Don’t underestimate us cops,” McElone told me. “Some of us actually know what we’re doing.”

She left soon after, and perhaps five minutes later, guests started wandering back into the house. Tony didn’t want to leave me unprotected again, but I convinced him that the danger was in handcuffs, and he should go home to his pregnant wife.

The sun was just beginning to go down, and Francie Westen was regaling Don Petrone, Mrs. Spassky and Mrs. Fischer with the remarkable story of how she had seen the ghost (my involvement became completely peripheral in her version) when the front door opened, and in walked Melissa, followed by The Swine