Never Thwart a Thespian: Volume 8 (Leigh Koslow Mystery Series) (12 page)

Andrew J. Marconi.

Chapter 8

Leigh stood at the bottom of the ladder. Warren closed the trapdoor behind them, descended the ladder himself, and turned to look at her. “You aren’t in shock, are you?” he asked with concern.

Here, in the relative normalcy of the adequately lighted, reasonably tidy corridor, her voice at last returned to her. “No,” she managed. “I’ll be fine. I just need to catch my breath.”

His brown eyes studied her. He did not seem convinced. “Well, I hope you’re not in shock,” he replied. “Because I’d like to reserve that right for myself, thank you very much.”

She returned a weak smile. “I’m afraid you’ll have to wait a bit. It’s going to get worse before it—” She broke off abruptly as a large bat careened wildly down the corridor, narrowly shot past them, then disappeared into the room where Bess had found the bulbs. They both realized, in that moment, that the noises that previously hadn’t registered in their shell-shocked brains were
not
coming from a nearby television, nor from a crowd out on the street. The boyish shouting, girlish shrieking, pounding footsteps, banging doors, and inexplicable strains of a soprano aria were echoing up the stairway from the building below their feet.

“Bats,” Warren said simply.

Leigh nodded.

They hurried down the steps to find Ethan and Mathias sprinting toward them from the annex with a burlap bag and a broom. Warren stretched out a hand to stop them, and a few paces behind came Allison, breathing heavily, her small face bright red with agitation. “Leave those bats
alone!”
she ordered. “You’re going to hurt them!”

Her brother turned. “We’re not going to hurt them, Allie!” he insisted. “We’re just going to help them get back outside!”

Allison stomped her foot. “You will too hurt them, and they don’t
need
your help!” she raged.

“Your sister’s right,” Warren interjected, relieving the disappointed boys of the bag and broom. “Leave the bats alone. They’ll find their own way outside. Nobody needs to get bit.”

Allison’s small shoulders slumped with relief. “They won’t bite unless they’re cornered, Dad,” she informed, her color subsiding a bit. “And less than 1% carry rabies. They’re really just misunderstood. Did you know that—”

Bess burst into the hallway. “Done!” she proclaimed, breathing nearly as heavily as Allison. “I’ve got every door propped open and every window raised that I could raise. There’s a nice breeze coming in and I’ve seen at least three fly out already.” She turned an appraising look on Leigh and Warren. “Are you two all right?”

“We’ll survive, I think,” Warren answered. “Where’s Lenna?”

“Incoming!” Mathias shouted as another brown shape winged its way through the hall. They ducked in unison and the bat flapped over their heads and off toward the staircase.

A high soprano note shrilled through the air. The noise seemed to be coming from the other side of a door near Leigh, and she quickly stepped over and opened it. There, in the back of a small, otherwise empty closet, Lenna huddled under the protective arm of Camille. “Aunt Leigh!” Lenna shrieked, looking up at her with frightened eyes. “Are they gone yet?”

“Not quite,” Leigh answered honestly. Her gaze turned to Camille, who stopped singing just long enough to smile at her pleasantly.

“Verdi,” the woman said with a wink, as if the one word explained all.

Leigh heard Ethan shout behind her, and her peripheral vision caught another pair of beating wings moving along the hallway behind her.

“Ooh!” Lenna whined, “Shut the door, Aunt Leigh! Shut the door! But she did not wait for Leigh to shut the door — Lenna reached forward herself, grabbed the knob, jerked the door forcefully from her aunt’s grasp, and slammed it back upon the two of them.

Camille started singing again.

“We all need to get out of here,” Warren said sensibly. “There’ll be no practice tonight.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Bess said with disappointment. “I’ll text the cast. Though some of them are probably already on their way.”

Leigh felt suddenly sick. The fact that it took her a moment to realize why, she could only credit to the increasingly mushy neurons in her forty-something brain.

Or maybe she really was in shock.

“Warren,” she said calmly, “Can you take the Pack home? I’ll follow you later.”

He looked at her suspiciously. She felt a stab of guilt at delaying his education, but
someone
had to get the Pack out of here, and Bess, unfortunately, would need to be present when the police arrived. “Please?” she begged, her eyes heavy with meaning.
I can’t talk in front of the Pack, but I’ll fill you in later. I promise.

Warren’s eyes narrowed back at her, but with a gruff exhale, he relented.
You’d better.
“Are you a hundred percent sure you didn’t get scratched or bitten?” he asked again. “Maybe we should take you to urgent care and get you checked out.”

“I’m positive,” Leigh assured. “None of them touched me.”

“Bats don’t fly into things accidentally, Dad,” Allison informed calmly. “They have amazing precision in the air — if they didn’t they’d never be able to catch moving insects.”

Warren cleared his throat. “I’m sure.” With one last, skeptical look at Leigh, he withdrew his car keys from his pocket. “Let’s get out of here, guys.” He opened the door to the closet. “Come on, Lenna,” he soothed. “I’ll take you home.”

Lenna burst from the interior of the closet and attached herself to her uncle’s waist like a suction cup. “Can we run?” she whimpered.

Warren cast a look at Camille, who seemed content to stay where she was.
“Il trovatore?”
he asked.

Camille’s pretty face beamed.
“Stride la vampa,”
she answered.

Warren nodded in approval. “Carry on.”

Camille smiled at him, closed the door on herself, and complied.

Bess let out a frustrated groan.

As soon as Leigh was certain that Warren, the Pack, and Camille were all safely out of the building — the last being accomplished only after Bess insisted she had seen a bat flying
into
the closet — Leigh herded her aunt into the relative safety of the high-ceilinged sanctuary and sat her down in a folding chair.

“Aunt Bess,” she said tiredly, dropping down into a chair beside her. “There’s something I need to—”

“We’ll have to call the police, I suppose,” Bess said with annoyance.

Leigh blinked. “Excuse me?” Her aunt could not possibly know.

Bess swiveled to face her. “Well, we’ll never get all the bats out if we don’t leave the doors and windows open, but we can’t just go off and leave the place like this, either. If I explain everything to the police, do you think they’d be willing to drive by and keep an eye on the building overnight?”

If Leigh hadn’t wanted so badly to either scream or cry, she would have found herself laughing. “You know,” she said obliquely, resting her head on the back of the chair and staring up at the ceiling. “I think they just might.”

***

Twenty-one seemingly endless hours later, Leigh flung her upper body flat on the foot of a bed and stared up at another ceiling. She exhaled loudly.

“I really wasn’t serious, you know,” Maura insisted.

“You cursed me,” Leigh accused.

“Don’t be so superstitious,” Maura said blithely. “It could have happened to anybody.”

Leigh sat up and stared at her. “Who
are
you, and what have you done with the real Detective Polanski? You know — the short-tempered, foul-mouthed one whose mantra for the last two decades has been ‘blame Leigh first and asks questions later?’”

Maura merely shrugged. “She may turn up again someday. Right now, I’m just not feeling it.”

Leigh lifted one eyebrow suspiciously. “Well, when she comes back, can you make sure she blows off some cumulative steam before she runs into me again?”

Maura chuckled. “No promises.”

Leigh flung herself back on the mattress. “Have you heard anything yet?”

“Yep. About a half hour ago.”

Leigh turned to face her friend, but didn’t lift her head. “Well?”

“Andrew J. Marconi.”

Idle curse words rattled around inside Leigh’s brain. “I knew it.”

“Well, I should hope so,” Maura said matter-of-factly. “Unless maybe you were expecting someone else?”

Leigh shuddered. “One is enough, thanks. Actually it’s
two
now for that wretched building! And Bess is determined to continue with her plans, of course.”

“Of course.”

Leigh rolled over and propped herself up on one elbow. “Don’t the police need to keep the building roped off with yellow tape or something, like, forever?”

Maura smiled patiently. “The techs have done their job. The detectives, too, although there’s not much they can do. Whatever happened to Andrew Marconi happened nearly a decade ago, and literally hundreds of people have tromped through the building since then. If there’s any evidence left to gather, it will come from Marconi’s remains, not from your Aunt Bess’s auditorium.”

Leigh’s stomach lurched. It had been doing that a lot since last night. “They identified him awfully quickly,” she commented.

“It’s easier when they’re fully dressed with their wallets still on them,” Maura quipped. “But in his case, we had all the info we needed lined up in the file and ready to go. The autopsy results will take a while longer, but as far as his identity goes, the dental evidence was conclusive. Open and shut.”

Leigh blew out another breath. “So he was murdered in his own building, and the killer didn’t want his body found. I have to say, it was a pretty darn good hiding place.”

“Maybe,” Maura said thoughtfully. “Since the building was unoccupied at the time, and the body wasn’t visible, even to someone changing the light bulbs. But a thorough police search
should
have found it. Clearly, that’s not what happened. Detective Doomas didn’t even find the damned briefcase, and it had to have been there all along. Between you and me, I’m not convinced he searched the building at all, despite his report. He for sure never bothered to pop open the attic door. There would have been a hefty smell up there, at least in the first—”

“Spare me, please!” Leigh interrupted. “I get the picture.”

Maura considered a moment. “Sorry. I keep forgetting you’re not used to the shop talk. Which reminds me, how’s the Pack taking it? And Warren?”

“About like you’d imagine,” Leigh answered. “Lenna screamed for fifteen minutes when she found out, even though she was never anywhere near the attic. Mathias was upset that,
as an adult,
he wasn’t informed immediately. Ethan was upset because Lenna was so upset. And Allison just sat there and stared at me with her nose twitching. God only knows what she was thinking.”

“What about Warren? I still can’t believe you didn’t show him what you’d found, when he was right there with you.”

Leigh’s lips pursed. “Yes, well, that didn’t go over so well with him, either. I tried to tell him, right after we came down, but then all hell broke loose downstairs, and I just wanted to get the Pack home.”

“Understandable,” Maura replied. “But it’s going to bug him anyway.”

“Yeah, I know,” Leigh said glumly. Maura’s perceptiveness where Warren was concerned was no surprise. The three of them had been friends since college; next to Leigh, Maura was as close to Warren as anybody. “And he did such a nice job of keeping me from falling through the ceiling, too,” Leigh admitted. “Very knight in shining armor-ish.”

“So what happens now?” Maura asked. “With the show preparations, I mean.”

Leigh grumbled.

“Wait!” Maura interjected. “Don’t tell me. I got this. Not only is your Aunt Bess bound and determined that ‘the show must go on,’ but the Pack wants to keep helping, too. Even Lenna.”

Leigh’s eyebrows perked. “How’d you guess that?”

Maura smiled. “Lenna is braver than she lets on; she just likes the attention. There’s a lion biding its time inside that mouse, you wait and see. The rest of them were born fearless. Not to mention stubborn as their moms.”

Leigh frowned and was silent a moment. “Do you think we should let the Pack go back? Aside from the obvious macabre aspects of it, do you really think the building is a 100% safe place for them to be?”

“Koslow,” Maura answered heavily. “No place is 100% safe for a bunch of curious, high-energy preteens and one thirteen year old who thinks he’s an adult. No place is 100% safe for you or me, either. But the risk of future foul play in that building is no greater than in any other building or street or park bench where any other crime occurred once upon a time — which is a whole hell of a lot of places. If anything, the risk of whoever killed Andrew Marconi returning to the scene to cause more mayhem is
less
than it was before you found him. Theoretically, the guilty party could have tried to prevent his body from being found. Now, it’s a moot point.”

A sudden idea shot through Leigh’s muddled brain. She pulled herself up with a jerk. “That sneaky she-devil of a lawyer!” she bellowed.

Maura looked back at her with a wry expression. “You mean Katharine Bower?”

Leigh’s jaws clenched. She could be celebrating her fiftieth wedding anniversary and hearing the name of Warren’s sexy, redheaded ex-girlfriend would still make her body temperature rise. “No!” she corrected. “And I’ll thank you never to speak that name in my presence again. I’m talking about a real estate attorney. Sonia Crane.”

Maura shook her head. “Never heard of her.”

“She’s been desperate to buy the building ever since she failed to nab it at the sheriff’s sale,” Leigh explained hastily. “Just this week she upped her offer! What if she’s the one who put Marconi in that attic? Maybe she saw how thoroughly Bess was rehabbing the building and started to get nervous!”

Maura considered. She grabbed a notepad beside her and scribbled something down. “Worth checking into,” she agreed. “You say she got outbid at the sheriff’s sale?”

Leigh bit her lip. She really should start a family emergency fund for bail money. Her Aunt Bess was bound to need it sooner or later. “What I heard,” she said carefully, “is that Sonia intended to bid, but didn’t get there in time for some reason.”