Murder by Candlelight (21 page)

What he'd been feeling now made sense
to him: the shift in air pressure had been caused by the bedroom
door being opened, then quietly closed. As if ... something ... had
slipped into the bedroom, that same ... something ... now moving
slowly toward him.

Z held his breath. Within ten seconds
... "it" ... would be standing by the bed.

Eight -- seven -- six -- five -- four
....

There was an odor. Not unpleasant, but
...

The bed began to move, ever so
slightly ....

Z tensed his muscles! Ready to spring
off the other side! Ready to race around the bed and out the
door!

"Z." A whispered voice.

Chills shuddered Z's body. The ...
thing ... even knew his name! ....

Wait a minute.

Knew his name?

"Z, it's me."

Jamie Stewart.

Now climbing on top of him.

Jamie Stewart.

Naked.

"You're supposed to be in the
kitchen," Z whispered, knowing at the same time, it was a stupid
thing to say.

"So, I lied," Jamie murmured, nuzzling
his ear.

"But ... this is crazy!" Z
was whispering, also, partly because he didn't dare speak any
louder, partly because his voice was shot. But
mostly
because Jamie -- tightly
packed little sausage that she was -- was cutting off his
air.

"Yeah. But fun, don't you
think?"

Fun? This was Jamie's idea of
fun!?

"I
told
you I'd want something beside
just
seeing
the
bed you and Susan made love in. And don't try to tell me you don't
want me, buster. Not from what I felt under the table
tonight."

She had him there. What had gotten him
into trouble in the first place, was being unable to resist this
girl's charms.

Though he'd hate himself later, he
also knew he'd hate himself less and less as the "solitary" hour
passed.

* * * * *

Z was awakened by a knock and Jamie's
cheerful voice calling through the door that the hour was up, Z
apparently falling into an exhausted asleep, Jamie dressed and
gone.

Snapping on the light, Z pulled on his
clothes. Was relieved to see that he and Jamie hadn't messed up the
room. "Quiet" sex never more essential than at this
moment!

Ready, at last, he opened the door and
joined the others, the four women already in the living
room.

By the time Z arrived --
at least to
his
surprise -- Rachel had announced she'd had the feeling the
poltergeist was with
her
.

The group gathered, Jamie now herded
them into the kitchen, Jamie going alone to the living room to
confront the "spirit." From there, they could hear her mumbling in
words intending, Z assumed, to sound like Latin.

Ten minutes of that and Jamie came
back to them to announce that the spirit had been "exorcized" and
that they could all go home.

The women friends saying their
thank-yous -- for what? -- Rachel and June left, Z hoping Rachel
had sobered up enough to drive.

Though Z tried to wait Jamie out,
Jamie timed her departure so that she left when he did.

In the parking lot, on the dark side
of the dumpster where Jamie had parked her seedy truck, Jamie
insisted on a moonlit kiss, Z too chicken to refuse her.

"How did you ... manage it?" Z asked,
still holding hot little Jamie in his arms. As long as Z was going
to feel bad anyway, he might as well try to find out how Jamie had
done the deed.

"You mean, rigging the poltergeist in
Susan's apartment, or lifting the table?"

"Both. First, getting into
the apartment. I put a
deadbolt
on the door. Even
I
have trouble getting past
those."

"Simple. The apartment manager let me
in."

"What!?"

"Sure. I told her I was a potential
renter. Insisted on seeing a ground floor apartment before giving
her my down payment. Said I wanted to see the view on this side of
that particular building.

"Since Susan works in the daytime, the
manager used her duplicate key to let me into Susan's
apartment."

"The woman should be
fired!"

"Standard procedure," Jamie sniffed.
"She stayed with me the whole time. Made sure I didn't disturb
anything."

"Then how ....?

"I had a 'fainting spell' when we got
back to the manager's office, the nice lady rushing off to get me
some water. Since I'd paid attention to which key on the lady's
pegboard she'd used to let me into Susan's place, while the manager
was gone, I made an impression of the key in a piece of wax I just
happened to have brought along. After that, it wasn't too hard to
cast my own key."

"You made a key to Susan's apartment?"
Z could hardly believe it.

"I don't have it anymore, if that's
what you're worried about."

"No?"

"No. I thought you could always use an
extra key, so I put it in your billfold."

"When?"

"When do you think, dummy?
It's a good thing you don't diddle whores. Falling asleep like
that, they'd pick you clean." To demonstrate, Jamie gave her
own
variation of
"picking him clean."

Getting nowhere, she sighed. Returned
to the topic. "With my own key, I could come and go as I liked. As
for the noises I made, there was nothing to that. I put a few
creaks and groans on a small, battery-operated tape recorder.
Hooked to a timer. Hid the recorder, first in a closet, then in a
drawer where Susan is storing winter sweaters. No way she's going
to open that drawer in the summertime. I set the machine to come on
when Susan was home and to play just a short time so Susan wouldn't
get wise. I moved a few small items. Nothing obvious, but something
any woman would notice."

"And the table?" Z didn't see how she
could have done that. Jamie's knees -- flexible as they were --
were too short to have lifted the card table off the ground. As for
Jamie's hands, he'd seen her hands on the tabletop as the table
rose into the air.

"Simple," Jamie said with a shrug.
"It's just another old spiritualist trick. What you do is get the
edge of the sole of your shoe under the table leg at the corner
nearest to you. Card tables often have rubber 'bumpers' over each
leg, making it easy to get the edge of your shoe under it. By
pressing down with the palms of your hands, if you're strong
enough, you can keep the table steady while you use your foot to
raise the table off the floor."

So,
that
was the trick -- so simple, Z
would never have guessed it. "How did you know Rachel would say the
living room was the 'home' of the ghost?"

"Poltergeist. Ghosts are much more
trouble to produce. True, there are a lot of body cavities
available for storage." It wasn't so dark that Z couldn't see Jamie
shrug in the still, late-night air. "I told you about the trick of
swallowing cheesecloth." Thinking about that, Z gagged. It had been
a rough night.

"Something more solid, can be trouble.
In order to get out of handcuffs, Harry Houdini used to swallow
lock picks. Not all the way, just until they'd lodged at the back
of his throat ..."

"I'll take your word for it," Z said
hurriedly.

"But you asked about the
little drunk? Easy. I
didn't
know she'd hallucinate a poltergeist. It's nice,
though, if you can get others to play along."

"Didn't know?

"No. But I thought it likely. After
all, I put her in the living room."

"Living room ...?"

"Alone with the
wine
. If
she
hadn't 'ratted' on
the poltergeist,
I
would have."

And that was where they left it:
Jamie, whistling as she pulled out in her truck; an overly tired Z,
feeling like the fool he was!

* * * * *

Chapter 12

By the time Z arrived at his office
the next afternoon, the mailman had slipped a letter through the
mail slot in Z's door. Retrieving the letter, sitting back on his
"secretary's" desk, Z looked at the return address; was shocked to
find the letter was from the IRS!

Tearing open the envelope, Z took out
a single crisp piece of letterhead paper announcing that Z was
about to be audited and that he should get his records together for
the last five years.

Records?

One of the "joys" of Z's
barely-above-the-poverty-line job, was that he paid hardly any tax;
what tax he did pay, calculated for him by
Millie-Across-the-Hall.

Audited.

More bad luck. Which, except for
escaping the clutches (in a matter of speaking) of Jamie Stewart
last night, Z had been having a lot of, lately.

And bad dreams.

Again this morning, he'd awakened in
the grip of sweaty shadows that faded into unpleasant oblivion. Z's
best guess was that the business with Howard Kunkle was haunting
him more than any ghost stalked Susan. While Z could tell himself
that Kunkle's death wasn't his fault -- over and over -- he seemed
to be having trouble getting his dream-self to believe
it.

Now this.

Z read the letter again. And then
again. Then a few more times.

It made no sense. As
little as
Z
made,
as little as he paid in taxes, there was no reason for the IRS to
be on his back.

Hating -- like any other man -- to
have to ask for advice, a tap on the shoulder by the IRS was the
exception. Meaning ... Millie.

He knew, of course, that the twenty
dollars he paid Millie every year to do the 2+2 calculation of his
taxes didn't include her accompanying him to tax court. Still, Z
though his twenty bucks (plus what he had to go through when
venturing into Millie's lair,) should include a simple question
about what the Internal Revenue might want.

Screwing up his courage to ask for
help, Z left the "secretarial wing" of his office to cross the
shadowed hall at the back of the Ludlow to the office door labeled
"Millie's Tax Preparation."

First knocking on the badly lettered
door, he pushed it open and stepped inside to find birdie Millie
hunched over her desk, papers spread out around her. Millie's
office was the mirror image of Z's own "two-holer" across the empty
hall, except that her space had wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling file
cabinets. Gun-metal gray. One drawer pulled-out, stuffed with
folders.

What Millie was working on
now -- forms, yellow post-it notes, and receipts surrounding her --
was anybody's guess. If, in late summer, she was still calculating
someone's delinquent taxes, the offender would do better to fire
Millie and hire the slipperiest lawyer he could find. On the other
hand, anyone who had Millie at work on
next
year's tribute, had to be a
tax-phobic basket case.

Millie looked up, her pale eyes
froggy-big behind thick lenses; one of those early-faded women who
could be thirty, but who looked fifty. She wore a plain
long-sleeved blue dress with lace flounces at the wrist. Had gray,
bee-hived hair, some of it her own.

"I'm Bob Zapolska."

Millie blinked once.

"From across the hall."

Blinked twice.

"You do my ...."

"I'm well aware who you are," the
woman said, impatiently, her voice the whine of mosquitoes buzzing
past your ear. "Do you think I don't know my own clients?" Millie
took offense easily. But her price was right.

"Well ... no."

"What do you want? I assume this is
not a social call. If it is, it's been years in coming."

"Ah, no."

"As you can see, I'm busy. I'm a very
busy woman. So much to do and so little time to do it in." She
began to disco-tap her pencil on the desk.

"I got this letter ..."

"What letter? If you'd learn to be
more precise we wouldn't be wasting so much time, would we? No time
to waste. We aren't getting any younger. Time flies, you
know."

"Yes."

"Yes,
what
?"

"This letter. From the
IRS."

"Oh!" It was clear from the sudden
respect in Millie's tone that Z had just trod on sacred
ground.

"They want my records. For five
years."

"I can't think why," she jeered,
hooking off her rimless glasses, staring about blindly while
polishing the shiny lenses on the edge of her lace sleeve. "It's
not as if you've got any business to speak of."