Inspector Specter, page 20
* * *
Everett, in fatigues, was already waiting when we reached the Fuel Pit, which had closed for the evening. In fact, he was a little farther away from the gas pumps (and the restroom) than I’d ever seen him before. I commented on that when I got out of the car—and Dad just sort of floated out—to talk.
“A little bit more each day,” Everett confirmed. “I’ve gotten quite far lately.” He stood tall and straight, not at all like he had when he was homeless and mentally ill. “As I said, I am no longer confined just to this property. This afternoon, I got as far as the Stud Muffin, where, as you’ll recall, we first met.”
“You don’t mind being there?” Dad asked. “It’s not a painful memory?” Dad doesn’t always know when he’s picking at a scab, but he always wants to help.
“It is barely a memory at all,” Everett told him. “Much of my time . . . in that state . . . is a blur to me now. I remember myself in this form, which might be why I appear this way now.” He turned to me. “I wanted to let you know I’ve seen Buster Hockney. At the bakery this morning, I noted a man about six feet three inches tall, with a narrow build and a shaved head. The man was complaining because they would not take his credit card to pay for one cup of coffee. The card bore the name Barnett Hockney. I can only assume his nickname is Buster.” In fact, that was true: Paul had noted it when reading McElone’s files on Buster.
You’d think this all would be good news. I had asked Everett for information on Buster, and here he was with a description. That should have been a positive. But one of my best defenses against having to meet Buster was that I had no idea how to find him and didn’t even know what he looked like. Apparently, that was about to change.
“That’s . . . great, Everett,” I said. “You’ve been a very big help.”
“Thank you, ma’am. But let me finish my description: The man has a goatee, which he dyes blond, clearly not his original hair color. Is that helpful?”
“Very,” I said, resignedly. “You’re an excellent reconnaissance officer, Everett.”
“One last thing: He did not seem like a gentleman, Ghost Lady. Be careful of him.”
“She will,” Dad said.
* * *
“It’s that one,” Dad said, pointing. It’s possible his arm went directly through my head, because I didn’t see his hand. I prefer not to think about it. “The blue one on the left.” He pointed at the house, which he was saying bore the number of Lieutenant McElone’s bungalow. I already had a knot in my stomach.
There was a space three houses down, so I parked. “Okay,” I told Dad. “If you could go inside and unlock the front door, I’d appreciate it.” He nodded and turned toward the car door to slip out. “Dad.” He stopped and looked at me. The words tumbled out. “If it’s really bad in there, don’t let me in, okay?”
He gave me his best reassuring look and would have hugged me if he could, I’m sure. “I won’t, baby girl.” He was out of the car before I could think about it.
In fact, Dad moved so quickly—something he really couldn’t do his last few years alive—he was almost inside the house before I’d even motivated myself out of the car and started down the street. All I could see of him were his feet entering through the side of the building. Of course, it was almost dark by this point, and Dad wasn’t exactly easy to see under the best of circumstances.
I’ll admit that I didn’t rush to the door; I wanted to give my father plenty of time to peruse the situation inside and decide, as he did when I was little, if it was appropriate fare for me to view. It’s funny how in times of stress you fall back on the things that you really resented when you were a child.
So when I got to the front door, I waited. A click in the lock would mean there was nothing to fear and I could walk in. No click would, in theory, mean that something had gone horribly wrong and Dad would be floating out shortly to alert me, and then we’d call the police.
There was no click.
In that second, I contemplated my relationship with Lieutenant McElone. I had great respect for her, believed her to be a very good detective and felt that no matter what, she would have my back if I needed her to do so. Were we friends? Despite what Malcolm seemed to think, I couldn’t say I felt that we were; she always seemed annoyed whenever she saw me approaching. And yes, some of that was a game we played with each other—I took the role of the irritating amateur trying to keep up, and she was the crusty veteran who had better things to do with her time than school some pretender playing over her head. But the game was an exaggeration of the way we operated, not a substitute.
So why was I so devastated not to hear a click in the lock?
Dad startled me almost into convulsions when he stuck his head through the door and said, “What are you waiting for? I unlocked the door two minutes ago.”
Heaving a sigh of relief (and struggling successfully to keep it from becoming a tearful sob), I turned the knob on the door. Sure enough, it opened. “So there’s nothing gruesome awaiting me in there?”
“Nothing gruesome,” Dad answered. “But it’s worth a look.”
I walked inside with a little trepidation, but no longer a sense of dread. “Thanks for coming, Dad,” I said as soon as the door closed behind me. “You have no idea how much help that was just now.”
“No charge, baby girl.”
“You did a quick search,” I said. I turned on the light in the main room, which was most of the bungalow. They’re meant to be little more than cabanas, small structures to use when spending some time at the beach. This one had a main room with a large easy chair that had obviously come from someone’s college apartment and a small galley kitchen (just a mini fridge and a microwave, along with a sink). Off to the right side was the door to a small bathroom. There was a futon to the left, against the wall. The back wall was dominated by glass doors that led to a tiny deck, and no doubt access to the beach beyond that. It was too dark to tell right now. “Is there somewhere in particular I should be looking?”
“I’m not sure,” my father told me. “But there is something I think might be important.”
“Where?”
“The kitchen. Look in the refrigerator.”
That made as much sense as anything that had happened to me in the past few years, so I asked no questions and walked into the kitchen, which was only a couple of steps away. The fridge was tiny, mounted under the countertop, so I reached down and opened it.
“There’s nothing in here but a quart of milk,” I told Dad.
“Exactly. Take it out.”
Hey, if he wanted to play a fun game, I could play a fun game. I removed the quart of milk—2%, in case you were wondering—and looked at it. “Yeah?”
“Smell it,” Dad said.
Well, that didn’t bode well. “Do I have to?” I asked my father.
“Go ahead.”
I’d never had a reason not to trust Dad, so I did as he instructed, but I wasn’t happy about it. I sniffed. “It doesn’t smell like anything,” I said.
“Exactly,” he said again.
“Okay, Buddha, let’s have it. What are you getting at?”
“Baby girl. The milk is in the fridge. It’s cold and it’s fresh. What does that tell you?”
It took a second, but I actually did catch up with the rest of humanity then. “She was here, and not very long ago,” I said. “Wait. How did you know? Can you smell it?” Ghosts can’t detect odors, as far as I know.
“No, but the sell-by date hasn’t passed yet. I took a shot it wasn’t from last year.”
I decided to walk around the main room very slowly and examine everything. I started at the door and turned right immediately; the idea was to walk the perimeter. I had already seen the center of the room, and it wasn’t much to look at. This wouldn’t take very long; it was a fairly large room, but a sparsely furnished one.
“We’re not far from where Harry the Fish is,” I said to Dad. “Maybe you should go out and ask him if he’s remembered anything else.”
It wasn’t that I didn’t want my father around while I looked over the house. It was more that I wasn’t afraid of being in the house anymore, because I hadn’t found anything there that was upsetting and was unlikely to now. But Harry the Fish scared me even when he was dead. Dad could talk to anybody; he’d been a self-employed handyman.
“How will I know him?” Dad asked.
“He’s the ghost in the business suit who’s out at the end of the pier in the ocean with fish swimming through him,” I said. “He’s hard to miss.”
Dad looked uncertain, but he almost never turns down a request I make (and never turns down a request Melissa makes; it’s like he was born to be a grandfather and, thanks to the miracle of ghost technology, is finally getting the chance to fulfill his true destiny). He headed out through the back wall, saying that he’d be back shortly.
The walls in the room were wood-paneled veneer, like the ones in my movie room back at the guesthouse. But these were dark and uninteresting. The floor was the same, but real wood planks instead of veneer. There was a picture on the right wall, just before the kitchen entrance, of a marlin rising out of the ocean with a line running out of its mouth. The fisherman and the boat that must have been involved were not in the photo. I felt bad for the fish; he should have at least gotten the chance to face his attacker.
The kitchen, aside from the valuable information contained in the milk carton, was unrevealing. There was a box of Special K in the cabinet, for which the milk had no doubt been intended. It was open, and there was a clip on the bag inside the box. McElone might have had a problem with insects in the cabinets. That wasn’t terribly revealing either, but it was sort of gross. There was also a large pot in a dish drainer inhabiting almost all the counter space next to the sink.
I inched my way around the main room, stopping to look into the very small bathroom, really a powder room with a shower. The basics in a house not meant to be a home. There was nothing in the medicine chest but sunblock and first-aid items.
The back wall was mostly made of the glass sliding doors that led out to the darkness. A light switch on the left side of the doors turned on the outside light, and I could see a small yard with a chain-link fence around it; beyond that, judging from the sound of the surf, was the beach. The house had sustained no damage from Sandy that I could see. It was probably on blocks, raised above the level of the beach, and there might have been man-made dunes protecting it, as my house had been protected.
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.”
Twenty-five
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.”
