Inspector Specter (22 page)

On the left wall was a futon sofa that could clearly be converted into something on which a person could sleep. Above it was another framed picture, this one an “art print” of a dolphin wearing an academic mortar cap, “stroking its snout” with its right flipper. Quite the classy place, where the lieutenant came to think.

There was no sign of work being done in the room; the center featured a coffee table and the easy chair. No pens, no papers on the table. It was starting to look like this sweep of the place would turn up nothing.

Success, such as it was, came when I reached the front door again, this time from the left side of the room, the side into which the door swung when opened. There, behind the door and clearly having been overlooked, were two items: a length of rubber hose about two feet long and what, on close examination, turned out to be a guitar pick decorated like an American flag. They both screamed “CLUE!” at me, but I was damned if I could figure out what they meant. I texted Paul a photo and waited for a reply.

Dad floated in just about that time, shaking himself despite having no moisture clinging to him; I guess it's just force of habit. “Your pal Harry the Fish is a really tight-lipped guy,” he said.

“No pal of mine,” I answered. “He didn't tell you anything?”

Dad grinned; how little I knew. “He said he remembers seeing Lieutenant McElone on the day he died, but he still doesn't remember much else.”

“Where did he see her?”

“Here. In this house.”

“Did he talk to her?”

Dad shrugged. “He thinks so, but he's not sure. His memory's not great, he says.”

Okay, that was unexpected. “Why was
he
here?” I asked Dad.

“He said they used it for meeting sometimes, just to be funny. It was a cop's house, but she was rarely there and Lay-Z was good with locks.”

I took a moment to digest that information. It was completely outside my realm of comprehension, but it was interesting. “What I could use right now,” I told Dad, “is a detective.”

He regarded me, floating a foot off the floor, holding his right hand to his chin. “Really. And here I thought you were the detective on this case.”

“I'm a placeholder,” I said. “What I need is a professional, but the only actual cop alive who will talk to me is missing at the moment.”

“That's a problem,” he agreed. “So what do we do?”

“We go see a cop who'll talk to me but isn't alive.”

Martin Ferry was actually “sitting” on the front stoop of his apartment building when we got there about twenty minutes later.

“I see you've learned to get past the door of your apartment,” I said. Nobody on the street looked up as they passed, mostly because there wasn't anyone on the street. But I also wear a Bluetooth headset when I'm walking around with ghosts so that it looks like I'm on the phone. Technology is a grand cover when you communicate with the dead.

Ferry looked at me and scowled. Scowling was apparently his default expression. “I willed myself to do it,” he said. “They're getting ready to rent out my place. All my stuff—what's left of it, anyway—will be gone in a couple of days and then there'll be people living there. A young couple with a baby.” He rolled his eyes and then looked at me. “You'd be right at home.”

I got him up to date with what Dad and I had found out from Harry the Fish and from his old pal Lay-Z. Ferry shook his head when the young man's name came up.

“That kid's gonna get himself killed by being stupid,” he said. “Watch it happen.”

“What about what Harry Monroe told my father?” I asked. Dad, bobbing up and down with his feet about an inch into the pavement, watched without commenting as I dealt with Ferry. “How he said he'd seen Lieutenant McElone at her bungalow just before he died. How do you figure that?”

“There are two reasons a guy like Harry the Fish goes to see a cop of his own volition,” Ferry said, chewing over a mouthful of nothing by way of pondering. “Either he was an informant for her, or he was going to kill her.”

I liked one of those options a lot better than the other, but I hadn't considered either one before. “An informant? You think Harry ‘the Fish' Monroe was giving Lieutenant McElone information? Wasn't he pretty high up for that?”

Ferry shrugged. “There were few higher in his end of the business. But hey, Whitey Bulger ran the mob in Boston while talking to the FBI for decades. Go figure.”

I didn't want to ask, but my father, who is the captain of the Olympic just-dive-in team, had no such qualms: “Do
you
think he went there to kill Lieutenant McElone?” he asked from his perch next to me.

Ferry got a grin that only cops, EMTs and other first responders can get, a gallows-humor sort of face. “Harry ended up dead,” he pointed out. “If he went to kill Anita—and I doubt he did, because that's the kind of thing he'd send someone to do—he clearly didn't come out of it so well.” Ferry turned and looked at me. “Besides, you said he died the same day as me. We both saw Anita alive after that.” He had a point.

I reached into my tote bag and pulled out the length of rubber hose I'd found at McElone's place. The guitar pick took a little more digging, but I managed to extract it, too. “I found these things at the bungalow,” I told Ferry. “You think they mean anything?”

“Somebody likes to play guitar and irrigate crops?” he said. Cops are not funny. They just think they are.

“Detective,” I said. “Your friend is still missing. If these objects can help us find her—”

He put on a “you're not a cop so you don't get it” expression, but answered, “You're right. Let me see the hose.” I held it out for him just as a young couple, hand in hand, turned the corner and walked toward me. I got two very odd stares, but they kept walking.

Ferry looked over the hose, and I turned it so he could see the object from various angles. “You said Harry drowned, right?”

“Yeah, part fresh water and part salt water,” I reminded him. “Why?”

“Was there a bathtub in the bungalow?”

“No, actually. There was a shower stall, but that was it. I'll ask again: Why?”

Dad gave me a look that said he thought I was being disrespectful to the officer trying to do his job. I believe you have to give cops a little attitude or they don't respect you, but I didn't have a look for that, so I turned my attention back to Ferry.

“Because you can drown someone in a bathtub, but you can't in a shower,” Ferry said. “If they started to drown him at the bungalow and then took him out to the ocean to finish the job, they might use the hose to keep feeding in water while they carried him. But they couldn't do that because there was no bathtub in the bungalow.”

“Wait,” Dad said. “Think about the kitchen.”

Think about the kitchen?
“The great bird flies over the mountaintop,” I answered nonsensically. “What do you mean, ‘Think about the kitchen'?”

Ferry turned his attention to Dad with the trained concentration of an investigator.

“The kitchen in the lieutenant's bungalow,” Dad explained. “All she had there was a mini fridge and a microwave oven.”

I felt like I was getting the idea, but I didn't know what it was. “So?”

“So what else was there?”

I knew better than to be a smartass now; give me credit. I closed my eyes. “A couple of cabinets, a box of cereal, a few dishes. A sink. A small countertop with a dish drainer.”

I opened my eyes and saw Dad grinning. I was getting close. “And in the dish drainer?” he asked.

“A big pasta pot.”

Dad pointed at me. “Right. So what does that tell you?”

Ferry, predictably, got there before I did. “No stove? No cooktop?” he asked. Dad shook his head. “So why a pasta pot when there was no place to cook pasta? It's not like you could use it in the microwave.”

“What am I missing?” I asked. “What does the pot tell us?”

“That maybe there was another way to drown a guy.” Ferry was already “up on his feet,” pacing back and forth over the front steps to the building. “Maybe they did start drowning him at Anita's place and then dragged him out to the ocean.”

“They?” I asked.

Ferry glanced sideways. “Seems like it would take more than one person.”

“Why do that?” Dad asked. “If you're going to drown him, drown him. Why do it in two places?”

Ferry scratched his head. He looked like he should have been wearing a hat. “Maybe just because they
wanted
it to be confusing. A mixture of salt and fresh water in his lungs? Maybe they wanted it to last longer, really make Harry suffer. I don't know.”

“They found Harry the Fish in his car, in a dry suit,” I reminded both men. “But he's still out in the ocean, and he hates it. He hated the water when he was alive.”

Ferry wandered a bit too far, and I saw his foot freeze in midair. That's what happens when a ghost who's tethered to a spot tries to go too far. They simply can't move beyond whatever barrier is fencing them in. “Damn,” he said absently. He shook it off. “Okay, so let's say Harry the Fish was snitching for Anita. Some of his friends find out about it and they decide they disapprove. They lure him to Anita's bungalow, maybe find out how she contacted him. And once he's there, they show their disapproval by filling a pot with water and sticking his head in it. Then, just to be mean, they finish the job in the ocean. Once he's dead, they bring him back to shore, dry him off, put him in dry clothes and stick him behind the wheel of his car to be discovered.”

“It fits the facts,” I said. “There's one problem.”

“What's that?” Dad and Ferry chorused at once.

“Who does that? How crazy do you have to be to go to all that trouble?”

“Pretty crazy,” Ferry said. “There's only one guy I know batty enough to make it plausible, and that's Buster Hockney. What we just described would be one of Buster's more subdued days.”

A shiver went up my shoulders into my neck.

“Did you find anything that indicated Buster and Harry's grandson Vinnie the Goldfish were working together?” I asked Ferry. “I couldn't tell whether they were friends or enemies.”

“I could never find out,” the detective admitted. “They spent a lot of time together toward the end—my end, and Harry's—but I couldn't get close enough to figure whether Vinnie was trying to undercut his grandfather or get enough inside dope, if you'll pardon the expression, to help Harry put Buster out of business.”

“What kind of guy is Vinnie?” That question was from Dad.

“Like Buster, but without the creativity,” Ferry said. “He's mean and violent, but not what you'd call the sharpest tool in the shed.”

“So what do I do now?” I asked Ferry.

“If it was me, I'd squeeze Lay-Z a little more,” Ferry said. “The kid knows more about Buster than he's saying, and he might be able to put Buster in the bungalow the night Harry died.”

I didn't relish the idea of going back to the custard stand, especially if it was going to get me closer to Buster Hockney. “What about you?” I said. “We seem to be concentrating on what happened to Harry Monroe, but we're not getting any closer to finding out who shot you, Detective. What can I do that I haven't done yet?”

He avoided my eyes. “You've done what you can do,” he said. “Let it go.”

That was not the Martin Ferry I . . . honestly didn't know very well. “You're being evasive. Have you remembered something? Is this about the thirty thousand dollars?”

This time Ferry did turn toward me, his eyes flashing with anger for a second. He forced himself to relax. “No,” he said. “I haven't remembered anything about that night. And no, the thirty thousand has nothing to do with it. That money . . . well, that money came to me legally, is all I'm going to say.”

Dad looked at him skeptically. “Detective, if we're going to help you—”

Ferry didn't get a chance to temper himself this time; he just turned and shouted. “You're NOT going to help me!” he yelled. “You can't help me! I'm dead! There's nothing left that can be done for me, okay?” And then he wasn't there anymore.

Like I said before, it takes some ghosts more time to adjust than others, and the ones who died violently are especially likely to be angry. Even Paul, who otherwise had a very mild demeanor, bristled when his killer was mentioned in his presence. Luckily, the subject rarely came up.

“That went well,” I said.

*   *   *

It turned out I got back to the house at a reasonable hour, mostly because there wasn't a chance in hell I was going to look for Buster Hockney at night, even if I'd known where to look (oddly, Ferry had vanished without leaving an address lying around on a cocktail napkin for me to use). Besides, Jeannie and Tony would be back late the next afternoon, and I wanted to at least be able to say I'd checked in on Oliver the last night he stayed at my house.

He was, unexpectedly, still awake when Dad and I returned with a few quarts of Jersey Freeze ice cream in tow (I'd have brought Kohr's frozen custard, but you can't really transport Kohr's when it's hot out—the stuff is partially melted when you get it, and besides, you absolutely need the cone). I handed the quarts off to Mom for quick storage in the freezer. The ice cream would stabilize from the trip, and maybe I could get Oliver to fall asleep in the meantime. But first, I needed to know why he was awake at this hour.

“He was asleep for a while, but then he needed a diaper change,” Melissa reported. “So he cried and I went in to help him, and then he was awake. We figured he could burn off a little energy with the folks.”

Indeed, all six guests were in the den, and the karaoke machine was still warm, indicating they'd been having quite the time. Even Rita, who had been wearing anxiety on her face in place of sunscreen, finally seemed relaxed and happy. Maybe I should stay away from the guesthouse more often.

“You should have heard Joe singing ‘Piano Man'!” Bonnie Claeson told me as soon as I walked in the door. “He sounded just like Billy Joel!”

Joe smiled but looked away. “I didn't.”

Bonnie hooked her arm through Joe's, which was a surprise to me but apparently not to anyone else in the room. It was dawning on me that I hadn't been around much for the past few days.

Stephanie gave me a look that indicated Bonnie might be exaggerating things a tad, but she grinned nonetheless. “I did ‘You've Got a Friend,'” she announced proudly.

“I wish I had heard it,” I said. I almost believed me, I was so convincing.

The two ghosts in the room (besides Dad, whom I don't always count as a ghost) were not concerned with ice cream, babies or karaoke: Maxie was complaining that Melissa wouldn't simply surrender her laptop permanently, and Paul was asking for an update beyond what I'd texted him after Martin Ferry had evaporated.

“I'll be right there,” I said, ostensibly to Mom but really to Paul. “I have to see about my pal Ollie.” I dropped down on my knees. “Hello, Ollie. Hello, Ollie. What's the boy doing up so late? Huh? What?”

“He's not a puppy,” Maxie said. “He's sort of a human.”

Oliver wisely ignored Maxie, perhaps taking his cue from me. Tammy and Don were sitting on the floor next to Ollie, rolling a toy train back and forth in front of him, giving him no incentive at all to go back to bed. You had to admire their enthusiasm, if not their grasp of the larger situation.