Ghost in the Wind (22 page)

“Picture first. Phyllis later.”

Paul gave me a puzzled look but floated down to examine the newspaper photograph on the screen. He scrutinized it carefully from three different angles and looked over at me. “No.”

“No?”

“No. I don't recognize her. It's a grainy picture scanned from a newspaper's archives of four decades ago. That could be a picture of my own mother and I wouldn't necessarily recognize it. Now, tell me what Phyllis said.”

I gave him the edited recap and the goatee stroking started right up on cue. “Interesting,” he said. “You said that Mastrovy made a quick exit from the dressing room as soon as you said that someone might have killed Vanessa. And he admitted to being in the room the day Vanessa died.”

Maxie lay on her back, pretending to sleep. “We know this already,” she said in a dreamy voice.

“But we didn't know then that Mastrovy was selling drugs and might have been worried about police entanglements. This information makes it more likely that he at least knew something about her death.”

“We're going in circles,” I complained. “We keep coming back to the same facts, but we don't have a reason anybody would want Vanessa or Bill dead.”

Paul frowned as Maxie, still frustrated that she wasn't being showered with praise for finding an unidentifiable picture of Claudia, grabbed the laptop out of my hands and started tapping away at it furiously. Sometimes a lack of attention is all it takes to motivate Maxie.

“I think you're right,” Paul said. “Motive is the key to this case.”

“And?”

“And we're ignoring the notion that Vance sensed Claudia Rabinowitz in this house. How does she fit in?”

“Maybe she came to town to buy her daughter some lo mein and things didn't go well,” I said. The whole eyes-closed thing was feeling attractive again.

“The medical examiner's report didn't show any definitive signs of defensive wounds on Vanessa, so it's unlikely the person who gave her the soy sauce had to force it down her throat,” Paul said. “How do you get someone to drink straight soy sauce?”

“By putting it in something else?” I suggested.

Paul shook his head. “Diluting it wouldn't have the same concentration as the autopsy found. She drank it as soy sauce. It leads to the conclusion that the cause of Vanessa's death was taken intentionally.”

“What about the knife sticking out of Mastrovy's neck?” I said. “
That
wasn't suicide.”

There was a knock at the door, and I started. Guests very rarely come looking for me in my room, although they're certainly welcome to do so if they need me. I walked to the door and opened it to find Tessa and Jesse standing there.

“I hope we're not interrupting,” Tessa said. “It sounded like you were talking to someone in here.”

“It's that kind of house,” I told her. “How can I help?”

“We're wondering,” Jesse said, “if after the whole hoo-hah yesterday, is there going to be a ghost show this afternoon?”

I'd asked Tessa this morning what her preference might be in this area, but that seemed to have been forgotten. “That's up to you guys. If nobody is too upset, we'll do the show. And of course, anybody who
is
too upset certainly has the right to avoid it if they choose.”

“Cool,” Jesse said. “I really like the tunes.” Berthe was the only bona fide surfer I'd ever had stay at the guesthouse, yet Jesse's speech patterns fit the stereotype so much better.

Um . . . I had no idea if Vance was going to be present or not; Vance was not “under contract” to perform, at least not the way Paul and Maxie were. He showed up when it suited him, and only for the past couple of days. “Well, that was a special event we've been lucky enough to have this past weekend,” I said. “It's only going to happen if our resident musician is here at the time. I don't really have control over that.” Better to warn the guests than to disappoint them.

Jesse's face sort of froze. He wasn't exactly the sharpest scissor in the drawer, so it was possible he wasn't following me. “Bummer,” he said.

“Well, he might be there. I just don't know yet. So stick around to find out.”

Tessa, who had not looked as enthusiastic as Jesse to begin with, nodded. “We'll see,” she said. “I might want to pick up some souvenirs on the boardwalk.” She waved a hand as if she were going far away. “See you later.”

She led Jesse away by the hand like one does a small
child. I hadn't had to do that with Liss for at least four years. Probably five, but I hadn't been taking any chances.

“They make such a cute couple,” Maxie said. “The proud mother and her son.”

“Oh, cut it out,” I said after I closed the door again. “They're entitled to whatever it is they want.”

“The case,” Paul reminded us. “We have to make some plans.”

“Don't tell me; let me guess,” I said. “Jeremy Bensinger?”

Paul didn't even grin a little. “You read my mind,” he said.

Before I could go see Jeremy, we had to get through the spook show. It would have been better if we hadn't.

Vance McTiernan did not materialize, so there was no special musical performance to cap off the festivities. But that was only the icing on a very unappetizing cake.

Maureen, Berthe and Jesse all came to the show. Jesse said that Tessa was off shopping for mementos on the boardwalk, which might even have been true. But without the Levines or Tessa, the den—the largest room in the house, so a bad choice for this event—seemed especially empty. And because Paul and Maxie were sensitive to the possibility of frightening the guests (yes, even Maxie), the performance was . . . let's call it lackluster.

Boring is such a strong word.

Paul moved some random objects around the room. Maxie just juggled a little fruit, mussed Jesse's hair (he
complained about the assault on his “do” and asked whether we'd hear any “hot tunes”) and sort of called it a day.

Then Lieutenant McElone walked in, reminding everyone of the crime scene the night before, and the group just generally dispersed without a smile on anyone's face. I couldn't blame them.

“I have a few follow-up questions,” McElone said.

“And here I thought this was a social visit,” I said. An awkward moment passed between the two of us as McElone just looked at me. “What with the murder last night and everything.”

It was as if she'd been reanimated—she just stopped being still and nodded her understanding. Being closer had actually made McElone and me more uncomfortable around each other.

“We've run as many checks on Roberta and Stanley Levine as were possible, because they cut out of here pretty fast after the crime. The Maplewood police did some interviewing on our behalf this morning,” McElone said. “They came up without any connections to William Mastrovy or Vanessa McTiernan.”

Swell. I couldn't wait to hear from Senior Tours after the Levines got through telling them how humiliated they were being questioned by the cops just because they'd decided to see some ghosts on their vacation down the shore.

“So you're assuming the two deaths are connected,” I said, not a question.

“That's right. It's way too big a coincidence, even though McTiernan's death has not been ruled a homicide. It was an allergic reaction. But the Levines didn't seem to have ever heard of either one of the dead people before last night.”

“How can I help, Lieutenant?” I wanted to be through with this by the time Melissa got home from school and I still had questions of my own to ask.

“Do you have any paperwork on the guests that you got
from the service that books them for you?” McElone asked. “It would be helpful to see what their backgrounds are, so I know if there are questions I should be asking.”

This led to an ethical question for me. I assumed McElone did not have a warrant for such information or she'd just have handed it to me. So I had to decide if my guests' privacy was more important than finding out whether one of them was a cold-blooded killer, living (albeit temporarily) under the same roof as my eleven-year-old daughter.

On second thought, it wasn't that much of an ethical question. “I keep the records in my bedroom,” I told McElone.

“Would you please get them?”

On my way up the stairs, McElone directly behind me (presumably so I couldn't destroy any evidence, although possibly out of fear of being left alone with the ghosts), I noticed that the higher up I walked, the more I felt the urge to sneeze and the more my throat itched. And this was with allergy medicine in my bloodstream.

Something in the house was irritating me, and for once it wasn't just Maxie.

We got to my bedroom and I unlocked the door. With strangers constantly in the house, I keep it locked all the time. I tried to say, “Come on in, Lieutenant,” but with my throat reddening and tightening by the second, the best I could manage was, “In.”

Just my luck, Vance McTiernan—having learned absolutely no rules of etiquette since arriving—was hovering in my bedroom, directly over the dresser. My first thought was to check and make sure all the drawers were closed; they were. My second thought was:
Where the heck were you when we needed you at the spook show
?

“Oh, there you are, love,” Vance said when I walked in, McElone just behind me. “I have an idea about identifying Claudia that might work.”

I suppose I
could
have responded to Vance even with the
lieutenant in the room, but she was still freaked out enough about ghosts and frankly, I didn't feel like having a conversation with him at the moment. So instead I looked at McElone and said, “Did you find out anything more about Claudia Rabinowitz, Lieutenant?”

“Ooh, gossip,” Vance said, and assumed a sitting position in midair.

“What do you know about her?” McElone answered. It was a classic police trick, answering a question with a question, but I didn't mind sharing information. If she caught the murderer, I could concentrate on my upcoming lawsuit and subsequent bankruptcy.

“From what I hear, she was in her early twenties when she met Vance McTiernan. They spent one night together when the Jingles were playing the Arts Center in Holmdel. What do you know, nine months later Vanessa is born, there are court proceedings verifying Vance's paternity, and not much contact afterward.”

“Now, that's just not true,” Vance protested, but under the circumstances, I got to control what McElone got to hear. “I saw Nessa whenever I could.”

“There appeared to be no love lost between Claudia and Vance,” I concluded.

I went to the little table I use as a desk and opened the top drawer, where the guest information I printed out each week is kept. I riffled through it and remembered that Maureen Beckman's paperwork was not there. “There's one missing because Maureen was a last-minute addition,” I told McElone. “I have the information in a file on my laptop, but it'll take until your next birthday for that to boot up. Do you need it?”

“Yes, but not now. What else do you know about Claudia?” McElone seemed to be scrutinizing me closely, and I believed it was a test—had I found out about Claudia's extracurricular activities? Would this be an opportunity for me to shine in the lieutenant's eyes?

Wait. “What do
you
know?” I asked. “I asked you first.”

McElone sighed a little; it was the cost of doing business with someone like me. “She married Neil Rabinowitz when Vanessa was born, then he died and she married a Randolph Bensinger and had a son, Jeremy, three years after Vanessa. Divorced Bensinger and tried to make a living in the music business as a publicist for local bands on the boardwalk when Asbury Park was the place to be. Didn't do too well, so she got a job for a company that rents construction equipment. Did very well at that, to the point that she ended up president of the business ten years ago and employed her son, Jeremy, as its general manager five years ago. Almost immediately after that she retired to Davenport, Iowa, of all places. And then about two years ago she vanished. All traces vanish. No credit card bills, no rent, no nothing. Nobody ever found any evidence of foul play, or evidence of anything else. I'm asking the Davenport police for all records they have of her and that should come through any minute.”

“She spent all that time looking for a replacement for me,” Vance said dreamily. “It's kind of touching.”

I jumped in to answer both of them. “I hear that Claudia was in town around the time Vanessa died and had made contact with her,” I said.

McElone looked like she wanted to say something, then stopped herself.

Vance stood up, which would have hurt a normal man since the top of his head went through the ceiling. “What?” he croaked.

I couldn't help but look up at him, and that was when I realized McElone hadn't been studying me so much as trying to see where I might be looking. “Who's there?” she asked me quietly (but not so quietly that Vance couldn't hear).

“It's Vanessa's father,” I said. “Vance McTiernan.”

“How did he react?”

“How did I react?” Vance echoed. “How does she
think
I reacted?”

“He's surprised,” I told the lieutenant. I am nothing if not a master of the understatement.

She looked serious and continued to stare in Vance's direction, which I knew was doing her no good at all.

“I knew Claud could be cold because Nessa would tell me that,” Vance went on, talking mostly to me, which was logical. “Claud always sort of blamed her for being my daughter. But she raised that girl mostly alone. I wasn't there.” Vance looked seriously shaken.

I relayed most of that to McElone, who made eye contact with me when I was talking. She didn't bother to look up at an empty space in the air again and told me to ask Vance whether Vanessa had, to his knowledge, had a history of depression. I didn't say anything to Vance, since he was perfectly capable of hearing McElone, who seemed embarrassed to be pursuing the line of questioning with someone she would have bet money wasn't there.

“I didn't know anything about that,” Vance said. “She wasn't happy with all that went down when she joined us on the tour, but depressed? I'd say no.”

I didn't point out that he'd barely kept in touch with his daughter and had never actually filed for custody, according to what Maxie had unearthed. What was the point of getting the man upset eight years after he died? Besides, I needed him to be in a cooperative state of mind for McElone, and reminding him of his parental failings wouldn't have been the best prescription for that.

“The half brother, Jeremy Bensinger,” McElone said after I'd relayed Vance's message. “Do you know whether he had anything to do with the deal that was supposedly coming between Vanessa and Vinyl Records?”

I'd met Jeremy and told McElone so. “He said he was the
one acting more or less as Vanessa's agent with the label.” I looked at Vance but he just shrugged; he'd been dead for years and on another continent when all this happened.

“That doesn't mean it's true,” McElone responded, again searching the air for Vance and getting fairly close to his actual location. There was something she wasn't saying that she might have said if she didn't know Vance was there. “People tend to exaggerate their importance after someone else is gone and can't argue.”

“I don't know the boy well,” Vance said. “His dad was some artist relations guy or something at a music label and she divorced him about fifteen minutes after the boy was born, Nessa told me later. Claud wanted to be a music publicist and then the husband didn't want her to work. She left.”

If McElone had been using a notebook, she would have flipped it shut at that moment. Instead, relying on her memory, she nodded in Vance's general direction and thanked him. “Are there any other dead people in the house that might know something?” she asked me.

“Just the regulars.”

“If they tell you anything I can use let me know. But nothing I hear from you that you didn't see yourself isn't evidence anyway, because no sane judge on the planet would allow it. So we'll keep this quiet, okay?”

I'd been doing that for years, so it wasn't difficult to agree to keep doing it. “Sure.”

“There is one thing,” said Vance, holding up a finger as McElone and I were turning to leave the room.

I twisted back to face him. McElone, noticing only my movement, stopped. “What?” I asked Vance.

“Like I said, I think I can find Claudia so your copper friend there can question her,” he said.

I chose to wait for Vance's brilliant plan before informing McElone of his claim. “Let's hear it,” I said.

“Hear what?” the lieutenant asked.

“Maybe ‘let's' wasn't the right word,” I told her. “Vance?”

“I told you, I can feel her presence,” he said, looking smug. “All I have to do is fly through everyone in the house and then tell you which one she is.”

“What did he say?” McElone asked. I realized I'd been standing there looking blankly at him for too long a moment.

“Nothing,” I told her. “Nothing at all.”

“What do you mean, nothing?” Vance demanded. “I can solve the whole thing right now.”

I looked at the lieutenant. “He's suggesting we use an arbitrary method to find Claudia that would involve something you definitely couldn't use in court and I absolutely couldn't confirm for you.”

“Of
course
you could confirm it, love,” Vance insisted. “I'd tell you the very first. You could just pass the information along.”

“You don't think this . . . guy is a reliable source of information?” McElone asked me, perhaps forgetting that Vance was present.

Now, you have to understand. I've said that Vance McTiernan and the Jingles had gotten me through some rough times when I was an adolescent, and I mean
rough
times. I'd had some problems with rebellion then, my parents were at their wits' end and I had not handled it well. I sat in my room and listened to the Jingles instead of doing something really, really stupid. So it hurt—badly—when I had to look at Vance, then turn to McElone.