The Weekend Was Murder (14 page)

“Tired?” I asked, and the poor guy looked even droopier.

“All of you are working so hard, trying to solve the mystery.” I remembered what Mrs. Duffy had said and told him, “The detective’s called a meeting that’s going to start in about six or seven minutes. You’d better get down there with your team or you’re going to miss all the new information.”

He slowly raised his head and began to turn toward me.

“You’re not supposed to be in here, you know,” I warned him. “And don’t expect me to give you any special information, because I won’t.”

He picked up the telephone, which seemed to detach itself from its cord, and stared right at me with eyes like dark, hollow tunnels. Even though I was terrified, I couldn’t look away. A horrible, cold wind wrapped around me, shaking me violently, then freezing me into an ice cube that couldn’t move.

I knew without a doubt that this man was the ghost!
Someone should have warned me that the ghost was not a woman wearing a flowing gown and carrying a candle, but a man in torment. I struggled to scream, but my voice twisted into a hard lump, blocking my throat, so I wasn’t able to make a sound; and as the man stood and slowly moved toward me, the tunnels in his eyes grew into a black, swirling pit. The pit stretched wider and deeper, and I knew I was going to be sucked inside.

His lips moved, and the whisper came, swirling around inside my head: “Don’t leave me.”

My head began to pound, and I instinctively clapped my hands over my ears. To my amazement I realized that I could move again, and the ghost had disappeared. The pounding continued, but it was only someone knocking at the door.

“Liz? Are you there?”

Grateful to hear Fran’s voice, I ran, stumbling and banging into the furniture and walls, until I reached the door and threw it open. I flung my arms around Fran with such force, I knocked us both off our feet.

“I know you’re glad to see me, but greetings like this are hard on my back,” Fran mumbled from beneath me.

“Oh, Fran,” I cried as I rolled to one side, whacking my elbow in the process, “I saw the ghost!” I sat there shivering and rubbing my aching funny bone while Fran struggled to a sitting position and jerked his rumpled room-service coat back into place.

“A ghost?” Fran tried not to smile as he asked, “What did the ghost do? Moan and rattle chains?”

“I’m not kidding,” I told him. “The ghost was a man with pale hair and horrible, terrible, deep black eyes.”

“Are you sure it wasn’t my math teacher?”

“Be serious,” I said. “You can’t imagine how awful it was being frozen by a ghost who came at me with a telephone. His eyes grew bigger and bigger until—”

Fran struggled to keep a straight face. “What was he going to do when he reached you? Ask you to make a long-distance call for him?”

“No,” I answered, hurt that he wouldn’t believe me. “I think he was going to swallow me.”

Fran burst out laughing, which really made me angry. “You’ve got to stop watching Saturday morning cartoons on television,” he said.

“Don’t be a nerd! It isn’t funny!” I snapped. I tried to stay cool, but the memory of that ghost haunted me, and I shuddered right down to my toes.

Fran studied me for a moment, then began to look serious. “You’re really scared, aren’t you, Liz?” he asked.

“I’m petrified!”

“You actually think you saw someone in that room.”

“I
know
I saw someone.”

He got to his feet and helped me to get up. “Well, you’re not the only one who thinks that room is haunted,” he said, “so the best thing to do is stay away from it. Come on. Let’s go down to the employees’ cafeteria and see if they’ve got anything edible. We’ll have an early lunch.”

Fran didn’t know it, but what he’d just said had given me a good idea. The ghost was still in my mind, and I
had to get help from someone who also believed in him. “First, I want to find Tina,” I said. “I need to ask her something.”

Fran is a really special person. Even though his stomach was rumbling with hunger loudly enough for me to hear it, he nodded agreement and said, “Tina was in the lobby a few minutes ago. I’ll help you find her, and we’ll eat later.”

We took the elevator down to the first level and had to pass the ballroom. The doors were wide open, and I could hear Detective Sharp quizzing Randolph, who seemed a little nervous. Of course, being Randolph, a murder suspect, he was supposed to be. Fran and I paused to listen in.

“Why did you write that threatening letter to Mr. Pitts?” Detective Sharp asked.

“I had to write,” Randolph said. “I kept getting a busy signal when I tried to call him.”

“How did Pitts respond when he read the letter?”

“Rudely. He crumpled it into a ball and threw it at me, so I left.”

“There’s something I don’t understand. Why did you walk away and leave that incriminating letter on the floor? Why didn’t you pick it up and take it with you?”

Randolph looked puzzled. “I didn’t need to,” he said. “I already read it.”

As the audience laughed, I looked around the room. My attention was suddenly caught by a seedy-looking bum in tattered clothing and a dirty knit cap who was seated near the door, his glance darting from one side to the other.

I grabbed Fran’s arm and whispered, “Fran! I think that’s a hit man.”

“Uh-uh,” Fran whispered back. “That’s the plainclothes cop. I saw him showing his badge to Lamar. They must have pulled him in from a stakeout in a downtown alley before he had time to change.”

Near the officer sat a woman wrapped in a black cape with dark mascara circles under her eyes, a kid wearing wire spring antennas with revolving eyes on the ends, and the guy in the Sherlock Holmes hat who was chewing on his empty pipe. The cop didn’t look any weirder than some of the sleuths.

We walked on, across the lobby, and found Tina near the front desk. She grinned at me and teased, “We all know your fingerprints were on the weapon. It looks pretty bad for you, Liz.”

“Forget that mystery-weekend stuff,” I said. “Can you come with us to the health club for a minute? I need your help.”

“Sure,” she said. She gave her location to someone on the other end of her walkie-talkie and followed Fran and me down the hallway. We picked out a table in the far corner, away from the pool, and as soon as we were seated I begged, “Tina, you’ve got to tell me everything you know about ghosts.”

Tina looked so startled that Fran explained, “Liz saw the ghost in room nineteen twenty-seven, and she’s kind of shaken up.”

“You really
saw
the ghost?” Tina clasped her hands together and her eyes shone. “People have complained
about the noise and about the cold in the room, and a few people have heard a kind of whisper—”

“Like us,” I said.

Tina looked a little embarrassed. She ignored my remark and finished her sentence. “But nobody’s ever really seen the ghost. Tell me about her. Everything.”

“It’s not a her, it’s a him,” I said and went on to describe everything that had happened.

“Wonderful,” Tina said. “A true manifestation. It can’t happen to just anybody, you know.”

“It can’t?”

“No. Only to those with a certain kind of mind.”

“If you’re going to say—”

“Receptive,” she interrupted. “I was going to say
receptive
.”

“What I need to know is, why did the ghost appear to me? What did he want me to do? And why was he carrying a telephone?”

Tina raised her chin so that she was looking down her nose, which gave her an all-knowing look. She probably practiced that look in front of a mirror. “The telephone is an obvious symbol,” she said. “It stands for communication. He was telling you that he wanted to communicate with you.”

“Why? He can talk. Wouldn’t that be easier?”

“That depends. Did you speak to him?”

“Not after I found out he was a ghost. I was too frightened. Besides, he froze me, so I couldn’t move or talk.”

“Hmmm,” Tina said aloud to herself. “He froze you. I wonder what his purpose was.”

“To swallow me?” I suggested.

“An interesting interpretation, but I doubt that it’s valid,” she said. “Let’s forget about the telephone. Let’s try to analyze this fixation of yours that the ghost wanted to swallow you.”

“It’s not a fixation,” Fran said helpfully. “It comes from watching too many Saturday morning cartoons.”

Tina ignored him. “The fixation stems from a lack of self-worth,” she said. “Let’s take it step by step. What happens to someone who is swallowed?”

“Well,” I said, “she’d fall down a throat and through an esophagus, and end up in a stomach full of acid, and then—”

“Oh, yuck!” Tina said, and looked as though she were going to gag. “That’s not what I meant. I’m talking about disappearing. A person who is swallowed would disappear.”

“To other people,” Fran said. “Not to the person who is swallowed.”

“That’s beside the point,” Tina said. “We’re talking about swallowing equaling disappearing equaling a total lack of self-worth.”

“Are you saying I
want
to disappear?” I asked her.

“It’s my guess,” she said, “but tell you what—after I get my degree in psychology, I’ll give you a definite answer.”

“I can’t wait that long,” I complained.

The door to the health club opened, and Eileen and Detective Jarvis came into the room. They kept their eyes on each other as they chose a table nearest to the door, so they didn’t see us. Eileen glided into a chair
and leaned toward Jarvis in a graceful arch, her hair falling gently around her shoulders. Even in that trench coat and fedora she looked like she was posing for a cosmetics ad. Why couldn’t I move the way she did?

Detective Jarvis leaned toward her too. Their faces were so close that they could have been discussing top-secret information, but I didn’t think that was it.

I wondered if I could rest gracefully in my chair the way Eileen did in hers. If I shifted my legs to the right, crossing one thigh over the other, then leaned forward …

Out of balance I grabbed at the table and nearly took it over, too, as my chair went down.

“What happened?” Tina asked, but Fran simply reached down and helped me to my feet.

“I’m clumsy, okay?” I muttered.

Detective Jarvis and Eileen had turned to see what the noise was all about. My face was hot with embarrassment, but I remembered to thank Tina for her help, grabbed Fran’s hand, and practically ran out of the health club, not looking at or speaking to anyone else.

“Tina wasn’t much help,” Fran said, once we had reached the lobby. He added hopefully, “The sleuths are eating lunch. Are you getting hungry yet?”

“I’m starving,” I told him. “Do you think the employees’ cafeteria has pizza?”

“We can hope,” Fran told me.

We weren’t in luck. The cook must have been talking to my mother, because there were lots of salads and vegetables—some of them green but undefinable—and the entree was a choice of fried fish, macaroni and
cheese, or a brown goop with chunks of things sticking out of it.

“This place makes our school cafeteria look good,” Fran said as we took the dishes that seemed most edible and found a table in the crowded room.

He took a large bite of fruit cocktail and told me, “Don’t pay any attention to what Tina said. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. You don’t want to disappear.”

Fran had a neat way of making me feel better, and I was awfully glad I was with him. “Not when I’m with you,” I said, and gave him a smile.

He smiled back, which wasn’t such a good idea, because he’d just taken a bite of the brown goop.

I glanced down at my plate, and remembering my less than graceful attempt to imitate Eileen Duffy, said, “Tina may have been sort of right about my lack of self-esteem, but she doesn’t know enough about ghosts. I need to talk to someone who really knows a lot about them.”

“Why?” Fran asked.

“Because,” I said, and I felt kind of scared putting my thoughts into words, “yesterday a man was murdered in that room, and—think about it, Fran—there was probably only one eyewitness to the crime.”

Fran stopped eating. “Who?” he asked.

“The ghost,” I said.

Fran took another slow bite. “In that case, you could talk to Mrs. Duffy. A lot of her stories have ghosts in them.”

“But Mrs. Duffy doesn’t believe in ghosts.”

“That doesn’t matter. She said she does research on everything she puts into her books, so that means she must do research on the ghosts she puts into them too.”

“Maybe you’re right.” I began to get excited. “I’ll talk to Mrs. Duffy as soon as I get a chance.”

I found that if I ate fast, I didn’t mind the taste so much, so I was through with lunch and eager to go before Fran had finished, and he was very nice about it when I kept telling him to hurry.

A few minutes later we left the cafeteria and went to the house phones, which were near the operator’s station in the room behind the desk. As someone walked through the door I heard an operator say, “I’m sorry, sir, we can’t give out room numbers, but I’ll be happy to connect you with Mr. Jones’s room.”

I didn’t know Mrs. Duffy’s room number, but I’d just learned that operators wouldn’t give them out, so when I picked up the house phone and an operator answered, I said, “Will you please connect me with Mrs. Roberta Kingston Duffy’s room?”