Bones Behind the Wheel Read online

  “I don’t suppose you’re interested in telling me his name,” I said.

  “It’s not my first choice, but knowing you I’ll be worn down. And you’re going to find out anyway.” McElone grunted a little in her disapproval of me knowing anything. “His name was …”

  She and Paul spoke at exactly the same time and said exactly the same thing. “Herman Fitzsimmons.”

  Paul looked over at McElone with wide eyes. “Damn,” he said.

  Chapter 20

  “Who was Herman Fitzsimmons?” I asked Maxie.

  Maxie’s head was not in the room. In fact, all that was currently visible was her rear end and her legs. She was hovering on the den side of the bullet-ridden ceiling beam but hadn’t been able to resist sticking her head through the wall to get a better look at the work being done. When she heard my voice she withdrew and brought all of herself back to my side with a look of annoyance. I was getting used to seeing that look from just about everybody.

  “What?”

  “I said, who was Herman Fitzsimmons?”

  McElone had taken her contact lens and gone, having refrained from gloating over knowing exactly what I’d known through the discovery of alternate eyewear. No doubt she thought she’d dodged a bullet in not coming into the house and vowed to herself not to come back if she didn’t have to, but I recognized the pattern of these things and figured I’d be lucky if I didn’t see the lieutenant again before lunch. Which was in roughly two hours.

  Paul, flabbergasted at McElone’s ability to never not know something, recovered nicely from his disappointment and was here in the den with me and whatever percentage of Maxie was present. Lamenting that the rudimentary cell phone I’d given him for texting did not have a function that would allow him to store notes, he was going the old-fashioned way with a reporter’s notebook and a pencil. When you have a child in the sixth grade you have tons of pencils in the house because you used to have a child in the second grade.

  Maxie had been summoned from the roof and had assumed I’d called her to discuss new designs for my kitchen, a subject I preferred to avoid until I was myself a ghost. She’d arrived with her sketchpad under the trench coat and not her laptop. Paul had insisted she go back and get the computer but she’d left the pad while she did. We were going to have The Conversation whether I liked it or not.

  “Herman Fitzsimmons?” When she chooses to think of something else, Maxie is as easily distracted as a moth, assuming there is no flame present, in which case the moth will easily out-attention-span her.

  “The man who died in the car back there,” I said, pointing vaguely toward the back of my house.

  “They pretty much have the beam in place,” she reported, pointing at the kitchen door. “Another couple hours and it’ll be time to start making the place look like something.”

  “Herman Fitzsimmons,” Paul reminded her.

  Maxie emoted a deep sigh. Maxie can be as dramatic as Meryl Streep without the talent. “Fine,” she moaned, and floated down to the side table where her laptop had been placed before she began her reverie involving my ceiling. Her voice became a singsong drone like a second grader being asked to recite the times tables. They do that in second grade, right? “Herman Fitzsimmons was a car dealer in Matawan, but he didn’t sell Lincoln Continentals. He sold Pontiacs. He was born at Beth Israel Hospital in Newark and grew up in Irvington but he moved to West Long Branch after he got out of high school and started selling Pontiacs.”

  “So he was reported as missing around the time we think the car was buried?” Paul asked, trying to get Maxie out of Herman’s early years to the relevant moment.

  She consulted her laptop screen. “Yeah, by his wife Darlene. He married her when he was twenty-three and they stayed together until he vanished at the age of thirty-six. Had a daughter, Theresa, who was only two years old when Herman drove into the ground, so she probably didn’t shoot him.”

  Paul flattened out his lips just a touch to indicate he wasn’t sure Maxie was treating this matter with the gravity it deserved. “Was there any indication he had enemies? Ties to organized crime?”

  “They don’t tend to print that kind of thing in the newspaper, and all I really have on our buddy Herman is what was printed when he disappeared. There never were obituaries for him because nobody knew where he was. They were probably walking all over him at the time and didn’t know it.” Maxie turned toward me, away from her laptop. Her face immediately brightened. “I have some new designs. You want to see them?”

  “Sure. When we’re done with this.” I pointed her back toward her computer.

  Maxie grumbled something under her breath that I chose not to hear and devoted herself again to reciting the intricacies of Herman Fitzsimmons. “So your pal ended up buying the car dealership in Matawan after he only worked there five years.”

  Paul’s eyes seemed to get closer to each other. “How did he manage to finance that?” he asked.

  “Again, not in the newspapers. Remember there wasn’t an internet then so people weren’t posting all over the place about Herman. He won a couple of dealer of the year trophies and he was an up-and-coming name in the local Elks Club and that was about it. Other than that the only mentions are about his marriage to Darlene and the birth of his daughter Theresa. There was an article in the Asbury Park Press about five days after Darlene reported him missing. All it said was that he was about five feet, eleven inches and weighed two hundred pounds. He had brown eyes and hair and a mustache, which I’m sure was extremely attractive given it was nineteen-eighty-two.”

  Paul put up a finger to his chin. I was afraid he would burst into I Am Sixteen Going on Seventeen but instead he asked Maxie, “Was he an officer in the Elks Club, and in what town was the club located?”

  Maxie hit a few keys on her laptop. “It’s actually in Keyport and it’s not a club; it’s a lodge,” she said. “He was, and I am not making this up, listed as a Loyal Knight. There’s also a lecturing knight and a leading knight, so I guess he was maybe fourth on the list. But the head guy was called—get this—the exalted ruler.” Maxie laughed. Paul and I, assiduously not joining in, looked at her. “Man, you guys are no fun at all.”

  Paul ignored her and returned to head-of-the-agency mode. “Print out a list of the officers in the lodge at the time Herman Fitzsimmons vanished,” he said. “Check and see if he had any other relatives beside his wife and daughter. He was still a young man. Did he have parents? Siblings? Anyone else in the area? Were there any allegations that he was unscrupulous in business? Did other dealers resent him?”

  “You’re looking at a guy who’s been dead for more than thirty-five years,” Maxie reminded him. “I’m not going to be able to dredge up every detail of his life and I do have other things I have to pay attention to, you know.” Her eyes darted toward the sketchpad.

  “Please do what you can as soon as possible,” Paul said. “I will be attempting to contact Mr. Fitzsimmons.” Without elaborating he dropped down through the floor. Paul’s Ghosternet sessions are activities he considers better done privately and the basement is his favorite area of retreat.

  Maxie looked at me.

  “I know, I promised,” I said. “Let’s see the new designs for the kitchen.”

  She flew—literally—to the sketchpad and brandished it like a Michelangelo, except that it wasn’t on an easel so much as floating in thin air. The yellow cardboard cover opened and she pushed the pages over until she reached the one she wanted me to see.

  I had braced myself because I know two things: Maxie can be very sensitive to any criticism of her design work, and whatever she did was not going to fit my vision of the kitchen, which frankly would have been to put it back in exactly the same way I’d had it before, only without the bullet damage in the ceiling.

  So my teeth were tightly locked together in anticipation of shouting out something I shouldn’t when I saw Maxie’s latest effort. And I swear, I gave it an honest and thorough examination while trying
not to react.

  “So, what do you think?” Maxie said, with what I heard as a challenge in her voice.

  “The cabinets are on the floor,” I pointed out.

  “Anybody can hang them from the ceiling,” she said. “It’s a statement of originality. You’re being unconventional.”

  “No, I’m trying to avoid tripping over my kitchen cabinets.”

  To her credit, Maxie avoided rolling her eyes but the effort was visible. “So you want them back where everybody has them.”

  “Maxie, it’s not always true, but sometimes when everybody does something it’s because there’s a really good reason.” The hammering from inside the kitchen made it difficult to talk at a normal decibel level, but I didn’t want Maxie to think I was shouting at her so I tried to modulate my tone even as the volume rose. “Look, the problem I think you and I have here is that you’re trying to create a work of art and I want to have a functional kitchen. Now, isn’t there some way we can meet in the middle?”

  I make a lot of wisecracks about Maxie, and most of them are well deserved. But at her core she’s actually a fairly reasonable person who happens to be dead as a result of circumstance. (Try describing any of your friends that way, I dare you!) And she is especially serious about her work.

  She seemed to consider what I’d said, nodding to herself and pursing her lips. Then she looked me straight in the eyes. “No,” she said.

  “No?” Maybe I hadn’t understood, although her whole sentence had only two letters in it. Not easy to misinterpret that.

  “No, I don’t think we can compromise like that,” Maxie said. “You just want to put a coat of paint on the walls and move everything back. You don’t need an interior designer; you need a tray and a roller. How am I supposed to create anything in that space?”

  I closed my eyes. This was the thing I really hadn’t wanted to say. To be honest, I’d hoped that Maxie would get bored with the project and give up, in which case I really could do exactly what she was suggesting I wanted to do. But that clearly wasn’t going to happen now so I had to resort to Plan B, which was really plan A-, since I was making it up at that very moment.

  “What if we work on the plans together?” I suggested. “That way you won’t be expending all this energy putting together something I can’t use, but you’ll be able to see what I need and design around it. I promise I’ll be open to un … conventional ideas. How’s that?”

  This time Maxie didn’t need a moment to mull the idea over. Her face brightened and she snatched the sketchpad up as she rose. Maxie literally gets high when she’s happy. In a moment her head would be, well, through the roof.

  “Let’s do it!” she shouted. She zoomed over to the coffee table and started laying the sketchpad out. “I have the basic dimensions in my head.” Her pencil was already hovering over the pad before I could so much as turn in that direction.

  I needed some time to think this whole plan over (since I had barely considered it until ten seconds earlier) so I was grateful that Paul came rising up from the basement at that very moment. “I have some progress to report,” he said. Everyone has his own way of saying hello.

  “Not now, we’re working,” Maxie said, now lying horizontally, parallel to the floor and facing the table.

  “It’s okay, Maxie,” I said. “We can do both. What’s up, Paul?” No matter what, he was buying me time and that was enough.

  “I have made not made contact with Herman Fitzsimmons,” he said. “I believe we are not on the same plane of existence.”

  That didn’t seem like a reason Phyllis would tear up the front page, although the existence of ghosts would probably be something of a journalistic coup for her. “Okay,” I said.

  Paul smiled. I’d fallen directly into his trap. “But I did manage to reach the woman with whom he was cheating on his wife.”

  Chapter 21

  “Okay,” Josh said in the passenger seat of my Volvo wagon. “Let’s get this straight. Herman Fitzsimmons is the man whose skeleton was found in the car in the backyard, right? So Paul says he was having an affair?”

  “Yes,” Melissa answered, despite not having been there for the conversation I’d had with Paul that set this whole merry-go-round in motion. “The woman’s name was Harriet Adamson and she told Paul she and Mr. Fitzsimmons were together for two years before he disappeared.”

  Melissa knew that because Paul and I had told her when she got home from school. She was telling Josh about it in my Volvo because we were all on the way to Jeannie and Tony’s house for dinner having cancelled the afternoon spook show due to the entire potential audience being out of the house. I had texted all three guests that I would be out for dinner unless anyone had an objection. None of the guests had so much as replied, which I figured gave me the green light to go out.

  Maxie had not been a happy camper when the information Paul had brought took center stage for the rest of the day. I told her we’d work on the kitchen plans tonight.

  “When did Harriet become a ghost?” Josh said. He knows the right parlance for our deceased friends now and almost never says died or dead when they’re around. They weren’t present at the moment, but it had just become habit for him. I still slip up when I forget or am especially on edge, which covers much of the time.

  Melissa looked at me because Paul hadn’t covered this point when she was home. “She died only a couple of years ago at the age of sixty-six,” I informed her and Josh. Paul wasn’t there so I took advantage of the full range of the English language regarding non-living people. “Liver problems.”

  “What did she tell Paul about Fitzsimmons’s disappearance?” Josh asked anybody who would answer him.

  “She remembered it vividly,” I answered. Might as well be me because this part would require a tiny bit of adult supervision. “She said Herman was supposed to meet her for … lunch … at a hotel on Route 35 and he never showed up. Harriet figured she got stood up and got mad. She says now that even if she’d known he had disappeared she couldn’t have called the police at that moment because nobody was supposed to know they were meeting. If she made the call Herman’s wife Darlene would have found out.”

  Melissa, to my disappointment, did not look the least bit confused by what I’d said. Maybe it was that I was looking at her in the rearview mirror, but I doubted it.

  Josh was concentrating on the road, but his face was telling me the case was occupying some of his mind. “Did the police ever find out about Harriet? Did they question her at the time of Herman’s disappearance?”

  “Paul doesn’t know. Harriet faded out on him, but Maxie is supposedly working on finding the police records of the disappearance if she can concentrate on anything except destroying my kitchen.”

  Melissa waved a hand at me dismissively. Teenagers know everything. “You’re underestimating Maxie,” she said.

  “That’s a thought too terrifying for me to consider.”

  Josh chuckled. “I’m sorry I can’t meet Maxie,” he said. “She sounds like a real character.”

  “She’s an entire cast of characters,” I told him. I was glad he’d never actually met Maxie. What if he liked her? What would that say about me?

  “She’s very nice and she cares,” Melissa said. “I don’t see why that’s a bad thing.”

  “If you have to go outside on the deck to use the stove in February, you’ll see why it’s a bad thing,” I suggested.

  “Anyway, about Herman Fitzsimmons,” Josh said, perhaps to keep the conversation away from a disagreement between my daughter and me. “Did Harriet say whether Herman’s wife ever found out about her? That might mean Darlene had a motive to kill him.”

  I had asked Paul that question. “Harriet didn’t think so. Darlene didn’t know her husband was having an affair before he vanished. She was pretty sure of that. Of course in situations like that the mistress is the last to know.” When The Swine had been caught red-handed (as it were) and ended our marriage, I’m sure his pal … I always wa
nt to call her Barbie … had no idea I was wise to her. It’s hard to hear inside a tanning bed.

  Josh pulled the truck into the driveway at Jeannie and Tony’s house in Lavallette, a testament to Tony’s taste and skill as a contractor. He’d worked on pretty much every room in the place and, unlike some home improvement maniacs, actually improved each one. There was no ego in his work. He did not leave a signature stamp. It was just that after Tony was done working on a room, it looked better and probably was more efficient or comfortable than it had been before. When I worked on a room, it was lucky to get out alive.

  I shuddered to think of what Maxie might have done here.

  We came in, when Jeannie opened the front door, to the usual chaos. Jeanne and Tony have two children under four years old and that means there will be no peace, especially before dinner when little kids get antsy because they’re hungry. So tonight was no exception.

  Oliver, Jeannie’s son and her eldest at the advanced age of three-and-change, was ostensibly watching Paw Patrol in a corner of the TV room just off the entrance, but he was really jumping up and down on the sofa, luckily without shoes. Molly, who was still short of 18 months but not by much, was toddling around (as toddlers do) carrying a small stuffed toy that looked to my eye like a banana wearing a vest. A green vest.

  She came up to Melissa first, because she’s an excellent judge of character, and gave her a hug. Liss is crazy about both Jeannie’s kids, but I suspect she has a particular fondness for Molly because she’s never had a brother and assumes it would be awful. “Hello, Molly,” my daughter cooed. “Is that your friend?”

  Molly, whose relationship with words is about equivalent to mine with organic chemistry (a class I took for two whole weeks), said, “Ba.” You may interpret that as you like.

  “She’s very nice.” Liss walked into the TV room and Molly followed her as the acolyte she would no doubt become. Melissa is a charismatic personality.

  I heard the usual hilarity ensue as Oliver saw her walk in and they bonded as well. But I was suddenly engulfed in the arms of my best friend since forever and Jeannie’s hugs can be lethal if you don’t see them coming.