Ghost of a Chance

“I wonder if Danny would like to be a partner in a private detective agency?” he asked his reflection as he waited for the hot water.

He didn’t need his reflection to answer, he already knew. Danny would hate it.

Alex decided he would have to work extra hard not to get his best friend fired.

* * *

Fifteen minutes later, Alex was showered, shaved, and dressed. Iggy had gone out again, leaving him a note saying he’d gone back to the museum to talk to Dr. Hargrave, the linguist, about the glyph runes. Since Iggy usually made breakfast, and coffee, it was irritating to have him gone two days in a row, but there was no helping it. If Danny couldn’t make the police listen, the glyphs were the only lead Alex had left.

He was about to head out the door and try to grab a cup of coffee from a dog wagon somewhere near the Central Office when the house phone rang.

“Glad I caught you,” Leslie’s voice chided him when he picked up. “You all right?” she prodded when Alex mumbled a barely intelligible greeting at her.

“Tell you later,” he said. He didn’t want to go into it and he really didn’t have the time. “I’m on my way over to the Central Office. I think I know how to find Leroy, but I’m going to need the cops’ help to do it.”

There was a long pause.

“Okay,” she said finally.

Alex knew that meant she was worried. She would make jokes and try to bully him if she thought everything was okay.

“Don’t worry,” Alex said, trying to sound more confident than he felt. “Danny’s with me on this one.”

“Do not get that nice boy in trouble,” she said.

Alex smiled at her bullying remarks. He’d said the right thing to calm her fears.

“What did you need?” he pressed. “I need to get going.”

“One thing,” she said. “Randall looked up Martha Gibbons like you wanted. She owned that land for years, but she fell behind in the taxes.”

“What happened?”

“She died and the land was passed to a relative named Duane King.”

“Okay,” Alex said, taking out his notebook and writing King’s name down. “I’ll try to look him up at the Hall of Records after I’m done with the cops.”

It wasn’t much, but he felt like he was one step closer to figuring out why David Watson was killed.

“There’s more,” Leslie said with a sly grin Alex could hear. “When Randall looked into it, he found that the land was sold at a tax sale.”

Alex had no idea what that meant.

“What’s a tax sale?”

“Apparently, if you don’t pay the taxes on your land for five years, the state will sell your land at auction to cover them.”

“Didn’t Mr. King have the money to pay the taxes?” he asked.

“Randall didn’t know. All he could find out from the report was that the land value had gone down in the year before it sold.”

“That doesn’t sound right. I thought land on the North Shore was valuable.”

“That was before the big push for millionaires to build houses in the Hamptons,” Leslie said. “Randall said that land does lose value sometimes. He figures King didn’t want to pay the taxes on land that wasn’t worth that much to begin with.”

“Well if this is all so normal, why did Randall bother telling it to you?” Alex was starting to get irritated. He knew very well why Randall would want to keep Leslie on the phone but why would she pass useless information on to him?

“There might have been a detail he found interesting,” Leslie said. Alex could tell from the teasing shift in her voice that she was annoyed that he’d gotten short with her.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “What did Mr. Wonderful find so interesting?”

“The tax sale for that land was moved to a new location on the day of the sale,” she said. “Randall said that tax sales are announced to the public in advance. Moving it would make it hard for people to find.”

Alex nodded, starting to see where this was going.

“Do you know who won that auction?” he asked.

“North Shore Development.”

“Well that’s not suspicious at all,” Alex said, making quick notes in his book. If Seth Kowalski or someone in his office changed the auction’s location to make sure North Shore got the land, then maybe one of the losers was the ghost.

That’s a long time to wait to take revenge for a bad land deal, his logical brain reminded him.

It wasn’t a concrete motive, but it wasn’t nothing. Alex needed to find Duane King.

“Thanks, doll,” he said, tucking his notebook back in his pocket. “Call your beau back and see if he’s got an address for Mr. King. I’ll run the rest of this down as soon as I’m done with the police.”

“If I haven’t heard from you by dinner, I’ll come by with bail money,” she promised, then wished him luck and hung up.

* * *

Thanks to his call with Leslie, it was nine-fifty when Alex got off at the crawler station across from the Central Office. At the corner of the block there was a vendor selling hot dogs and sandwiches. Alex noticed the bullet shape of a coffee percolator and he headed that way instead of crossing the street.