The Weekend Was Murder (18 page)

“I talked to a Mr. I. B. Topps, Miss Crystal Crane’s agent,” Detective Sharp told the audience. “I understand that Mr. Pitts refused to release Miss Crane from her contract with him, which meant she’d miss out on a very good part in a television situation comedy. However, Mr. Topps told me that Miss Crane telephoned him Friday afternoon and told him she’d be able to audition for that part and would soon be free from her contract with Mr. Pitts.”

Crystal gasped and actually looked pale. “I could have talked him into releasing me,” she cried. “I know I could! So don’t ask me if I killed him, because I didn’t!”

Detective Sharp consulted her notes and continued. “We checked Mr. Randolph Hamilton’s work record, and it seems that over the years he has made more money as a dishwasher than as an actor.”

“All right!” Randolph exploded. “I admit Pitts fired me, and we had quite an argument about it, and I lost my temper.” He paused and cried out, “Don’t look at me like that! I didn’t hit him! I didn’t kill Edgar Albert Pitts!”

Calmly, Detective Sharp turned a page in her notebook, studied her notes, and said, “Martin Jones, over the years you’ve asked your uncle for some sizable loans, which he’s given you, but apparently, on Friday you asked him to lend you a large amount of money, and he refused, even though you were overheard telling him that you were desperate.”

“All right! I was desperate!” Martin shouted. “But that doesn’t mean I’d kill my uncle Edgar! I didn’t do it!”

Detective Sharp turned to the audience and said, “I think we can examine the evidence we’ve got and soon come up with the answers. If you think about what you’ve seen, what you’ve heard, and what you’ve learned through interviewing the suspects, you’ll have all the clues you’ll need to arrive at the solution of this case. Pay particular attention to everything found at the scene of the crime. What was important and what was not? As sleuths, it’s up to you to determine what has a bearing on this case.

“It’s time for dinner in ballroom B right now, but later you’ll still have time to question any of the suspects again or to make another visit to the scene of the crime. Then get together with your team members for a final conference. Make your decision as to who killed Edgar Albert Pitts and why. Turn your cards in to the front desk any time before midnight. They’ll be time-stamped, so in case of a tie, the first team to reach the solution will win. Our next meeting will be in ballroom B, tomorrow morning following brunch at nine-thirty, and I hope at that time to be able to make an arrest.”

I glimpsed Detective Jarvis at the back of the room, and he didn’t look as though he were trying to solve Devane’s murder. He had a kind of silly smile on his face as he kept his eyes on Eileen Duffy.

The sleuths slowly got up from their folding chairs and made their way out of ballroom A into ballroom B, talking faster than they were walking. Some of them
were so wrapped up in solving the mystery, I think they would have willingly skipped dinner, although the food they were being served was the Ridley chef’s finest. As I left the room I caught a fragrant whiff of roast prime rib in its rich, herb-flavored juices, and became so hungry that I nearly postponed what I had to do; but I reminded myself that the employee cafeteria food was not prepared by a chef, and I’d get only macaroni and cheese or some of that brown stuff, and that thought kept me on track.

As I approached the elevators Mrs. Bandini and Mrs. Larabee caught up with me. “Can you come to dinner with us?” Mrs. Bandini asked. “We can grill you while we eat.”

I smiled. “You already know everything I know, and I’m not allowed to eat with the mystery-weekend people. I have to eat my meals in the employees’ cafeteria.”

“Is that where you’re going now?” Mrs. Larabee asked.

“Not exactly,” I answered. I saw Fran heading toward the ballroom, looking for me. Fortunately, an elevator door opened, and I ducked inside. It was all I could do to keep my courage up. I suspected that Fran might decide to talk me out of visiting the ghost alone, and—as I’d told him—I couldn’t allow him to go in the room with me, because I was sure then that the ghost wouldn’t appear.

I’d intended a number of times to give back the key to room nineteen twenty-nine, and something had always distracted me, so I still had it in my possession. Maybe it
was an omen. Maybe it was supposed to be this way, because now I’d have no problem opening the door.

The nineteenth-floor hallway was quiet as I stepped out of the elevator, and only my double determination kept me from turning around and taking that elevator back downstairs. I was unable to tolerate the heavy silence that pressed against my ears like thick wads of cotton, so I hummed a little to myself as I walked to the door of nineteen twenty-seven, and I deliberately made noise with the key in the lock as I opened the door.

From the corner of my eye I saw the door to room nineteen twenty-nine open just a little. I didn’t want to argue with Officer Estavez about whether or not I should be up here, so I quickly went inside nineteen twenty-seven and shut the door tightly behind me.

I didn’t turn on the main light switch. The sky was gold with summer’s evening sun, and there was enough light through the glass wall in the dining room to illuminate the room. I didn’t want to scare away the ghost—Larry—with too much brightness. Having one of us scared to death was enough. My breath came in little gasps, and I wasn’t sure my knees would hold me up as I walked into the living room, step by step, and flopped into the nearest chair.

I waited, listening, hoping, watching for some sign of the ghost, but nothing happened. The room was silent and cold—very cold—and once I jumped and cried out as I felt a flutter of air near my right shoulder.

But it was nothing. As patiently as I could, I waited.

Finally, I couldn’t stand it any longer. “Larry?” I
whispered in a voice so shaky and rough it sounded as though I were recovering from a bad case of tonsillitis.

The word hung in the air, vibrating, moving. I could see it shiver toward the window, twanging like a harp string; and it began to take shape until it became the ghost I had seen here before.

His back was to me as he leaned against the glass door, his forehead pressing against the glass. Who did he remind me of? Who had I seen in that same position in the same place?

Stephanie Harmon! Of course! The way she had stood at the door after she’d seen Frank Devane’s body.

But the ghost … what was he doing with his right hand? Opening, then locking the latch on the sliding glass door!

“Stephanie did that, didn’t she?” My words were loud in my ears, but I had to communicate with this ghost. “The glass door was unlocked, and she locked it while she stood there. When the policeman checked, he said both doors were locked. But this one hadn’t been, had it, because Stephanie had gone through it to reach the unlocked door to her bedroom? It was open until Stephanie locked it!”

As it all came together, the ghost began to turn toward me, and I lowered my eyes to stare down at his feet. “I know now that I’m not supposed to look into your eyes,” I said, “so I won’t make that mistake again. But I had to come and thank you for your help. I got your message about the telephone, even if you did scare me to death giving it to me. And I understand now how Stephanie got into and out of the room.”

The ghost moved closer, but I stood up and didn’t flinch. Maybe even when ghosts were trying to be helpful they still had to frighten people. It probably wasn’t his fault at all.

I tried to stop shivering as I hugged my shoulders and rubbed my cold arms. “Larry,” I said, “I know your name, and I know that you don’t need to stay here any longer.” He stopped a few feet away from me and sort of floated in space, so I went on. “I think you’re still here because you don’t know what happened, so I’m going to tell you. Linda was tried and convicted of voluntary manslaughter, and she’s serving time right now in a women’s correctional institution near Digby. In case you want to visit her, it’s just north of Houston.”

There was a terrible stir of air, which almost took my breath away, and Larry vanished. It was not only a lot more comfortable without a ghost in the room, but I felt good about releasing him. He’d done a favor for me, and I’d been able to do one for him in return. I just wished he’d taken his cold air with him. Or maybe the freezing temperature in this suite really was the fault of the air conditioner.

While I was smiling to myself, pleased about the way things were turning out, there was a sharp rap on the glass door, and I saw the uniformed sleeve belonging to Officer Maria Estavez.

Darn!

Well, it didn’t matter now. I’d accomplished what I’d wanted, and I could tell Detective Jarvis exactly how the murder had taken place.

I hurried over to the glass door, unlocked it and slid it
open. “Officer Estavez,” I began, but the woman who quickly slipped into the room was not Estavez. It was Stephanie Harmon, who was wearing the policewoman’s jacket.

She pushed into the room, forcing me to back up. “Sorry I can’t stay,” I said, but I slammed into the dining-room table and bounced off it, landing in one of the side chairs.

Stephanie stood over me, a strange look on her face. “You shouldn’t have been so nosy about the phone calls,” she said.

I realized what that second click had been when I’d talked to Estavez. “You listened in, didn’t you?”

She just smiled and moved closer. I tried to rise from the chair, but Stephanie planted herself directly in my way. It didn’t take much imagination to know that I was in trouble and wasn’t going to get out of this very easily.

But I tried. “Officer Estavez is going to come looking for her jacket,” I told her.

Stephanie shook her head. “She doesn’t even know it’s missing, and as far as she’s concerned, I’m sound asleep in my bedroom.”

“That’s what she thought Friday night, wasn’t it? You heard Mrs. Duffy say the lock to this room was taped open, so you said you were going to rest, then unlocked the sliding glass door in your bedroom.”

I paused, and she laughed. “So?” she asked. “What does that prove?”

I didn’t like being laughed at, so angrily I snapped, “I’m not finished. You waited until Officer Estavez was in the bathroom. Then you sneaked out of your bedroom
and left your suite through the door into the hallway. After you came into this suite and unlocked the glass door you called Frank Devane’s room and asked him to meet you here. The operator remembered a woman calling from this suite.”

“A woman? Is that all she told you?” Stephanie smiled again. “Then she didn’t know who made the call.”

Creepy fingers tickled up and down my backbone. I’d said too much. I knew that now. Why had I blabbed everything? I needed Detective Jarvis right this minute!

Once again I tried to rise, but Stephanie was on guard and shoved me back into the chair.

My big mouth had got me into this fix, but maybe it could help get me out. “You know they’re going to discover everything,” I said. “About the telephone call to your bank in the Cayman Islands, and—”

She gasped. “How did you learn about that?”

I would have enjoyed knowing that I had guessed right, but I was too frightened. “On the last day of the month people call their banks in Grand Cayman to find out the balances in their accounts,” I said. “The phone number you called is in the hotel’s computer records. It will be easy to learn the name of your bank.”

Stephanie’s forehead wrinkled, and I said, “When you screamed and yelled, ‘He’s after me!’ it was pretty obvious that you knew Frank Devane. You weren’t in danger because you were a witness in the trial. You were in danger because you’d been double-crossing Devane, and he’d found out before you got away with it. The
money’s in your Cayman Islands bank account, isn’t it?”

“You have no proof that I killed him,” she said.

“Because you didn’t,” I told her.

Stephanie was so surprised, she stepped backward, and that gave me my chance to shoot out of my chair and get the table between us. She circled, but I circled too. My back was to the glass door, but once I reached the other end of the table I could make a run for the door to the hallway. Once out there I could yell for Officer Estavez, and I hoped she’d hear me and come running.

Stephanie’s eyes glittered, and she breathed quickly, panting a little. She was scared too. “You don’t know who killed Frank,” she said.

“I didn’t until just a little while ago,” I told her, “and then I figured it out. I’d heard Al Ransome say that he’d worked with Devane on everything, and it was obvious that Devane was no longer sure he could trust him. If you’d been cheating Devane, then you’d have been cheating Ransome, as well. But you weren’t afraid of Ransome, the way you were with Devane, so I think the two of you worked together to double-cross Frank Devane, and when he began to discover what was happening, you decided to do away with him. You telephoned Al Ransome and told him how easy it would be. Then you invited Devane to come to this room, knowing you could sneak back to your own room and no one would even suspect you’d been here. Ransome committed the murder, but you’re every bit as guilty, because you planned it.”

Stephanie tried to sound haughty, but her voice wobbled. “Al and I have alibis,” she said.

“You took the tape off the door so it would look as though the murderer had a key to the room. But you wanted the body to be found by the maid, who would come by for bed turn-downs around nine, so you propped the door ajar. If the door weren’t open, she wouldn’t have bothered with the room, because she knew no one was sleeping in it. You had a great alibi in Officer Estavez, who thought you were in your room asleep, and Ransome thought he was setting up an alibi by insisting he’d been in the bar since seven, but both alibis can be broken.”

A familiar voice spoke behind me. “We’ll have to get rid of her too,” Al Ransome said.

The walls of the suite were probably pretty thick, and the sleuths wouldn’t be on this floor until after they’d eaten, but hoping that Estavez … anyone … could hear me, at the top of my lungs I yelled, “Help! Somebody, help me!”