“Deal with the harassment, I suppose. Or what she imagined to be harassment.”
We chatted for a few minutes while I tried to remember anything of relevance that Elise had said. Then I thought of something else. “I should check my messages. I don’t think I checked them after I returned from dinner last night.”
“In spite of the fact that you might have a message from Mark?”
“I meant to check them. But you know how absent-minded us old folks are.”
“Speak for yourself, Lil.”
I went to the telephone and punched in the code for my messages. A female voice told me I had one message, which had been received last night at 6:17 p.m. I had been eating dinner in the dining room at that time. The voice said that the message was from an unknown number, which meant that it was from outside Silver Acres. It must be from Mark. I felt relieved and played the message.
“Mrs. Morgan, this is Elise Hoffman. I want you to know that I am dropping the charges I made against Dr. Pappas. Please tell him that. When I see him I’ll tell him myself. I hope that I can undo the damage I’ve done to him. I wanted you to know about my decision right away because you helped me make up my mind.”
The message ended. I played it again to make sure I had heard it correctly. Then I hung up the phone.
“Lil, you look as if you’d seen a ghost.”
“I just heard a ghost.” My hands were shaking. I told Tess about the message.
“How did she get your telephone number?”
“I gave it to her…that is she asked for it. I wasn’t sure why. She said she wanted it in case she needed to get in touch with me.”
“She must have been thinking about dropping the charges even while you were still there. We have to save that for the police.”
“The police, right. And I want Ms. Priscilla Estavez to hear it.”
The police arrived sometime after lunch, or I should say one policeman in the person of Detective Julius Johnson. Detective Johnson wore civilian clothes-a suit and tie-but he did have an authentic-looking badge so I let him in. He was fairly small in stature and his dark skin probably helped to make him look more authoritative than if he had been white. He was young, without any hair to speak of. They used to call that a buzz-cut.
I escorted him inside and introduced him to Tess, who had kept me company through the morning and through lunch while we waited in vain for word from Mark. I offered him a seat on the roomy sofa, beside Tess, but he remained standing so I did, too.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name,” he said to me.
Instead of a southern accent, he had what I would call a universal accent, as exemplified by many of the residents of California.
“Lillian Morgan.”
“Good. You’re the owner of this apartment, right?”
I acknowledged that fact.
“And Mark Pappas has been staying with you?”
“For the last few days, yes.”
“Where is he now?”
I had to admit that I didn’t know. He asked me when I had seen him last and the other usual questions. After he had determined beyond the shadow of a doubt that I didn’t know where Mark was, he said, “Do you know what this is in regard to?” “The murder of Elise Hoffman.” “What do you know about Elise Hoffman’s murder?”
“What I read in the paper. But I may have some additional information for you because I talked to Elise yesterday afternoon.”
“You did?” Detective Johnson’s eye twitched. “I certainly do want to talk to you.” “And Tess can verify what time that was because she was in the car with me. But she didn’t actually see Elise.” “What kind of a car were you driving?” Detective Johnson asked.
“An old Mercedes, 1986. Blue.”
Detective Johnson flipped back a couple of pages in his spiral notebook. “You were the ladies that Elise’s roommate saw.”
“Donna? We saw her but we didn’t speak to her.”
“Okay, I need to sort all this out.”
He looked tired. I wondered if he had been up since midnight. He asked several questions of Tess, and then realizing that he had exhausted her fund of information, he turned back to me and said, “You’re the one I need to talk to. But I want to talk to you alone.”
“I have some chores to do, anyway,” Tess said. She got up, painfully, as her feet hurt her when she stood after she had been sitting for a while. Then she hobbled out the door.
I invited Detective Johnson to sit down again, and this time he did. I asked him if he wanted a drink. He said he drank coke. Fortunately, I had bought some cokes for Mark so I got him a can along with a glass with ice in it. Then I sat down on the other end of the sofa. Detective Johnson looked young and I suspected his experience was limited so I decided to help him as much as I could.
“Do you want me to tell you about my whole day, yesterday?” I asked. “It all has some connection to Elise.”
He agreed with that approach. I started by telling him that Tess and I had gone to Eric Hoffman’s home.
“Why did you want to talk to Mr. Hoffman?” he asked.
“It’s complicated to explain,” I said, “so bear with me.” First I told him about Mr. Hoffman’s website. He acted as if he hadn’t known about it before and he scribbled notes as I talked. Then I said, “I assume you know that Elise had filed a charge of sexual harassment against Mark Pappas. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be looking for Mark.”
Detective Johnson nodded and I continued, “I think that Elise may have been working as a stripper nights at Club Cavalier.”
“You just told me her father posted license plate numbers on the Internet for Club Cavalier, as well as other strip joints.”
“I know.” I told him about the tip I had received from Donna on the Shooting Star and how Albert and I had gone to see her. He took copious notes. “I thought if I could prove that Elise was the Shooting Star, that fact would help Mark’s case, somehow. So I hoped that Mr. Hoffman had connected one of the license plates to somebody who could be connected to Elise. Because, you see, I didn’t know at the time I went to see Mr. Hoffman that he was Elise’s father. In fact, I didn’t even know her name.”
It took us ten minutes to sort that out. It became more and more obvious and Detective Johnson was suffering from sleep deprivation and was having trouble comprehending what I told him. His eye twitched on a regular basis. To help him out I took Tess’ pad-she had left it on the table-and on a blank sheet of paper I made a timeline showing what I had known when. After a while I think he got it.
“All right,” he said, finally, “I understand why you went to see Mr. Hoffman. When you discovered that Elise was his daughter, did you discuss the harassment case with him?”
“No, because I wasn’t sure he knew about it.”
Detective Johnson thought for a minute. “Of course, he was all broken up about Elise’s murder, but when I mentioned the harassment charge to him and his wife after Donna told me about it, they seemed puzzled. I’ll bet they didn’t know about it. Did you mention the Shooting Star to him?”
“Heavens, no. I’m sure he hadn’t heard about that.”
“Yeah. It appears that Elise hid a few things from her folks. So why did he give you Elise’s address?”
“I’m afraid I lied to him.” I told the detective about the organization to save girls from becoming strippers. I hoped he didn’t think that because I had lied about one thing I would lie about others.
He didn’t interrupt and after taking some more notes he said, “So after you left Mr. Hoffman’s house you went to Elise’s apartment.”
“We ate lunch first. And when we got to the apartment nobody was there.”
“How long did you wait?”
