“It’s really rather amusing,” she said, “now that I look back on it. A grown man wearing a sheet and moaning and groaning like Casper with a tummy ache.”
“You’re sure it was a man?”
“Oh yes. Definitely a man.”
“You didn’t recognize his voice?”
“Well, he didn’t speak. Just moaned and groaned.”
“Did you say anything to him?”
“I believe I asked what he thought he was doing in my bedroom. Yes, and I said that he’d better not have harmed Spike. It was Spike crying that woke me, you see.”
“Not the intruder coming into your bedroom?”
“No. Spike yowling as if he’d been hurt. He must have heard the man come into the house and gone to investigate and the man stepped on him or kicked him. Poor Spike. You’ve been through so much, haven’t you, dear?”
Spike opened one eye and yawned.
I said, “Then what happened, Mrs. Abbott? After you woke up.”
“Well, I saw a flickery sort of light in the hallway. At first I couldn’t imagine what it was.”
“Flashlight,” Mrs. Alvarez said.
“Yes. It came closer, into the doorway, then switched off and the man walked right up to the foot of my bed and began moaning and groaning and jumping around.” She smiled wanly. “Really, it was rather funny.”
“How long did he keep up his act?”
“Not long. Just until I spoke sternly to him.”
“Then he ran out?”
“Still moaning and groaning, yes. I suppose he wanted me to think he was the spirit of my late husband. As if I wouldn’t know a living man from a dead one. Or Carl, in or out of a sheet.”
Charley Doyle, I was thinking. A stupid ghost stunt was just the sort a pea-brain like him would come up with. He’d deny it, of course. And probably claim he’d spent all of last night with darlin’ Melanie, not that that was a stand-up alibi; she would lie for him just as readily as she drank and slept with him. But I’d have a talk with him just the same. Maybe, if I handled him right, I could rattle his cage enough to make him incriminate himself.
I called Dependable Glass Service. Doyle was out on a job, due back this time before noon and not scheduled to go out again until after the lunch hour. Okay. It was a little after ten now. That gave me time to swing by the agency.
Tamara was busy when I got there, simultaneously talking on the phone and thumping on her computer keyboard. I waited until she finished with the call before I went into her office.
“Got something for you to do when you have time,” I said.
She said, “Doesn’t everybody,” but she didn’t sound grouchy today. Tired and a little distracted but in a reasonably good mood.
“Run a check for me. Whitney Middle School’s enrollment. See if you can find out who belongs to the initials Z.U.”
“What case is that for?”
“No case. Personal.”
She made a note of what I’d asked for. Then, “Whitney Middle School? Isn’t that the one Emily goes to?”
“Yes.”
“Something to do with her?”
“I’d rather not discuss it right now. Any more than you want to discuss what’s been bothering you lately.”
“Uh-huh,” she said. “How important?”
“Pretty important. But you don’t have to drop everything else to do it. Sometime today.”
“No problem. If I come up with a name for Z.U., you want a full package on whoever it is?”
“As much as you can get. Address, parentage, school record, ever in trouble of any kind.”
She nodded and went back to tapping on the keyboard. The printer on her workstation thumped and began to ratchet a printout.
Dismissed.
Charley Doyle was not happy to see me. He was sitting in his pickup in Dependable’s side yard, eating a sandwich that had both mayonnaise and mustard in it; I knew that because of the yellow-white smear on one side of his mouth. He scowled at me through the open driver’s window.
“You again,” he said.
“Me again.”
“Now what you want? I told you last time—”
“There was another incident at your aunt’s last night.”
“Incident? What the hell you mean, incident?”
“Another home invasion. Intruder at three a.m. dressed up in a sheet and making noises like a ghost.”
“. . . You kidding me?”
“Do I sound like I’m kidding?”
“She okay? Auntie?”
“Fine. She scared him off.”
“Scared him? How?”
“She’s a tough old lady. She doesn’t really believe in ghosts.” Doyle grunted, looked at his sandwich, took another bite out of it; the bite and the way he chewed indicated he was angry, whether at me, his aunt, or the home invasion I couldn’t tell.