Never Thwart a Thespian: Volume 8 (Leigh Koslow Mystery Series) Read online

  Sonia suddenly straightened up and lightened her tone. “Well, that’s what I hear, you know. From other people. Gotta go!” In a flash of navy blue — and with another burst of cigarette odor — she whirled away and hopped into a car parked nearby.

  “Why were you humoring her like that?” Cara asked with annoyance.

  “That sniveling little piranha!” Bess thundered, hurrying out from the door to the annex as Sonia drove out of the lot. “What does she think she’s doing here? On my property?!”

  Leigh declined to point out that the property did not, technically, belong to Bess. It was more interesting to speculate on why the mere sight of her aunt in the doorway had sent the brassy attorney scuttling away. “Aunt Bess,” Leigh queried. “What exactly did you do to that woman at the sheriff’s sale?”

  Bess’s lips drew into the subtlest of smirks, even as her eyebrows lifted with false innocence. “Me? Why I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about. Now, what exactly did she say to you? And what the devil was she doing with that camera?”

  “All done, Ms. Bess,” Ned called from the roof. He had finished his task and was standing near the roof’s edge. “You want anything else? There’s some leaves and junk up here that need cleaned out.”

  “That would be lovely, Ned, thank you,” Bess replied pleasantly. She turned to the women and lowered her voice. “Not the brightest bulb in the factory, that one, but he’s a good worker. The lady at Community Outreach said—”

  “Aunt Bess,” Cara broke in, uncharacteristically exasperated. “How do you know Sonia Crane?”

  “Oh, we’ve met,” Bess said dismissively. “What I’d like to know is what on earth she wanted with the two of you?”

  “My guess would be to scare us out of doing publicity work for the project,” Leigh offered. “She was probably also hoping we would spread the word that the building is unsafe. Or haunted. Or occupied by squatting devil worshippers. I don’t think she cared which, really.”

  “She’s obviously trying to convince Gordon Applegate that the theater can’t possibly succeed,” Cara added bitterly. “And if there’s money in it for her, she’ll stop at nothing to do it. I’d be wary of any photographs she happens to put in that ‘file’ of hers, for sure. She’ll manipulate them to show whatever she wants him to see. Cracks in the foundation, water leaks, mold — I wouldn’t put anything past her.”

  Both Leigh and Bess turned to stare at Cara. “You know her already?” Leigh asked.

  Cara’s eyes narrowed menacingly. “Oh, I know her all right. We went to college together.”

  “But,” Leigh protested, “she didn’t recognize you!”

  Cara gave an unladylike snort. “If you knew her like I did, you wouldn’t find that surprising. She’s one of the most self-absorbed individuals I’ve ever had the displeasure to come across. You could walk up to her again two hours from now and she wouldn’t recognize you, either.”

  “She certainly knew Aunt Bess,” Leigh remarked.

  Bess gave her salon-styled “big hair” a fluff with both hands. “Must be the doo,” she said, her eyes twinkling with mischief. “Never mind. I’ll have the men keep an eye out for her. But if she thinks she can fool a man like Gordon with a bunch of trumped-up nonsense, she’s got another think coming.”

  With that, Bess turned with a flourish and hurried back into the building.

  Cara looked after Bess quizzically. “She never did answer your question, did she? About why Sonia would get so spooked by the sight of her?”

  “Nope,” Leigh agreed. “And something tells me she’s not going to. Which, knowing Aunt Bess, means you and I are almost certainly better off not knowing.”

  Cara murmured something unintelligible under her breath, then raised her camera and snapped another picture. Scattered raindrops began to pelt down again.

  “You know,’” Leigh asked, her voice thoughtful. “It isn’t all just ‘trumped up nonsense.’ A lot of bad stuff really did happen here, and the building’s hardly in mint condition. What if this is one hare-brained scheme of Aunt Bess’s that really doesn’t turn out for the best?”

  Cara’s gaze whipped from the LED screen on her camera to the portion of the building she’d just photographed. “Where the—”

  “What is it?” Leigh asked.

  Cara tilted the camera screen her direction, shielding it from the rain with an outstretched arm. “Look. See him there?”

  Leigh squinted at the image. Just visible at the edge of the flat roof, not far from where they stood, was a pale, disembodied head with wild gray hair. “Don’t show me crap like that!” she protested, recoiling from the camera. “Like I need something else to creep me out today?”

  “It’s just a trick of the angle,” Cara explained, studying the photograph more closely. “But still, it’s odd. He must have been lying perfectly flat on the roof with his head stretched out. Yet when I looked up just a few seconds later, he was gone.”

  “Most people clean out gutters with their hands, not their chins,” Leigh said darkly. “I think he’s just plain weird, Cara. Which makes him fit right in around here.” She gave an exaggerated shudder. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going back downstairs to hover over the Pack like a worried hen for the rest of the day.”

  “Sounds good,” Cara said distractedly, still staring at her camera. “I’ll see you later.”

  Leigh turned and walked toward the door with a grumble. Not that she was paranoid. Or superstitious. Or anything. It was just that, all things considered, there were places she would rather be right now than inside this particular building.

  Like, say, inside a barrel at the top of Niagara Falls.

  With six cats and a Rottweiler.

  Chapter 5

  Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how one looked at it, the Pack did not share Leigh’s uneasiness with their employment venue. Rather, they were enjoying themselves immensely. They were also making concrete progress on the assigned task.

  Leigh looked around the basement to see a good portion of the menagerie pulled from the jumble in the center of the room and sorted into neat piles by the stairs to the annex. The contents of the trash pile were being continuously gathered and hauled up the stairs to the dumpster by Gerardo, while Chaz whittled away at the props pile, commenting at length on various items in it and — occasionally — taking a handful of them off into the annex for placement in one of Bess’s designated storage closets.

  There was also, Leigh noted with chagrin, a pile for “keepers,” which consisted of items the Pack wished to permanently adopt, and which Bess assured them they could, pending the almost-certain approval of Gordon Applegate. These included a dirty blender (which definitely would not be coming to Leigh’s house), a dog bed (which her father’s clinic probably could use), a fake horse harness covered with sleigh bells (say what?), a giant framed painting of a man with holes where his eyes should be (also hopefully bound for Cara’s house), and an oversized plastic machete painted with fake blood (ditto).

  “Why did the Young Businessmen’s Chamber leave so much of their haunted house stuff here?” Leigh asked, frowning with disgust at a collection of fake rats with bloody fangs that Mathias was in the process of moving to the “keepers” pile.

  “We always left everything here,” Chaz piped in cheerfully. “We didn’t know from year to year if the building would be available again, and we didn’t have anyplace else to store it anyway. When the borough finally got ready to sell, they gave the President notice to come and get it, but he was a do-nothing jerk and it all just got left. And that was before last Halloween — the organization’s disbanded now so there’s nobody to do anything with it anyway.”

  “Very intriguing,” Bess chirped, examining a leather case presented to her by Ethan that appeared to hold dental instruments. Instruments that were — like a disturbingly high proportion of items in the room — coated with some sort of fake blood. “We might be able to use this. I’ve always had a hankering
to produce Little Shop of Horrors.” She zipped up the instrument case and handed it back to Ethan. “Props pile, please!”

  “Mom?” came Allison’s small voice. “I think you should see this.”

  Leigh looked down to find her daughter standing quietly at her elbow, her nose twitching as she adjusted her heavy eyeglasses. The twitching was a subconscious gesture Allison shared with her grandfather Randall. But it was also a tell. They both twitched more when they were excited or alarmed, and it was often the only sign they gave of such emotion.

  “What is it?” Leigh asked, her own alarm obvious.

  Allison held up a man’s leather briefcase, once stylish and probably expensive, but now scorched and blackened along half its width as if it had been tossed sideways into a barbecue pit. Leigh took the case from her daughter’s hands, opened the various pouches, and looked inside.

  “It’s empty,” Allison said simply.

  “I see,” Leigh replied, noting that all the zippers still worked. The charring was only superficial. Still, it would hardly be of much use to anyone in a professional capacity — unless they wanted to hear wisecracks about tripping into an open flame. “What about it?” she asked finally. “Do you want to keep it?”

  Allison shook her head. “You didn’t feel it. Here, right above the latch. See?”

  Leigh moved her fingers to the area Allison pointed out. The scorching had made the lettering difficult to see, but the debossed monogram was still intact. Leigh traced the letters with her index finger. “A. J. M?”

  Allison’s eyebrows rose meaningfully. “Now you get it, Mom?”

  Leigh’s breath caught. Andrew J. Marconi?

  But how could Allison know about —

  She broke off the thought. The question of how Allison knew anything was, as always, rhetorical.

  “I think it’s strange that the police wouldn’t have removed it from the building when they searched,” Allison said calmly, twitching her nose again. “Don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Leigh said uncertainly. “That is strange.” Not that the monogram alone would be proof positive that the case belonged to Marconi — but it was certainly too good a possibility to ignore. “Maybe the case wasn’t here when the police searched. Maybe it got tossed into the pile later. Where did you find it?”

  Allison pointed to the same area of haunted house paraphernalia in which Ethan and Mathias were still digging. “It was tucked under the electric chair,” she replied.

  “The electric—” Leigh looked over to see a monstrosity that did indeed resemble an electric chair. She hadn’t noticed it earlier, but that wasn’t surprising, given that the boys were still in the process of unearthing it.

  “This is so cool!” Mathias crowed. “Hey, Aunt Leigh, do you think my mom would—”

  “Not a chance,” Leigh said quickly.

  “Ooh!” Chaz cried out, practically leaping across the room to reach them. “It is still here! That was my favorite room ever. The ‘execution room!’” He plopped down in the seat and placed his arms in the fake straps, smiling from ear to ear. “See, what happened was, we had the whole thing set up just like an execution room in a prison. And when the people first walked in, it was really dim, and they could just see the chair. For a moment, nothing happened. They were just standing there in the dark. But then the chair started to spark and sizzle! And then — this is the really cool part — we had a plant going through with the group, see. He was one of us, but he was dressed up like a businessman who just got off work, with a briefcase and everything. And the people thought he was one of them. But in this room, he all of a sudden jumps the ropes and says, ‘This is so bogus! That’s not a real electric chair! Look, here’s the switch!’ And he goes over to the wall and reaches up and grabs this big switch, see, and then poof!”

  Chaz yelled so loudly, the boys beside him both jumped. He cracked up laughing. “It went totally dark then, you see, and nobody could see anything. But when the light came on again, it was a red light, and a strobe, and there was heat and smoke and steam everywhere, and right where the dude had been standing, there was a charred corpse! Still holding his briefcase!”

  Chaz dissolved into laughter again. “Scared the crap out of people, that did. They didn’t realize until then that he was a plant, you see. But we had a swinging panel in the wall, and Josh, he just slipped out and went back to meet up with the next group at the front of the house again.”

  Leigh looked down at the briefcase. “So this was the prop you used?”

  Chaz nodded. “Yeah, that was the burned one we stuck to the skeleton’s hand. Josh had another one he kept with him.”

  “How did you make the smoke?” Mathias asked.

  “It was just a fog machine,” Chaz replied, “but we had red lights and space heaters, and a guy on a ladder behind the wall would toss ashes down over the corpse, so it looked and even smelled like smoke!”

  “That is too cool,” Mathias said with admiration.

  “Do you remember where you got this briefcase?” Allison asked Chaz seriously.

  “Oh, no, I never thought about it,” he answered. “Probably somebody brought an old one.” His eyes sparkled with sudden enthusiasm. “I remember burning it, though! We built a little bonfire out in the parking lot, and we tossed in the case and the extra suit and shoes. Not the corpse, though. It was plastic, so we just had to smear ash on it. But the other stuff we let burn for a while, and then we sprayed the hose on it. The guys wanted to burn other stuff too, so we made a second bonfire, but then some guy threw his lighter in it, and a neighbor wound up calling the police, and then the fire department—”

  Chaz’s trip down memory lane was interrupted by a string of Spanish words flung at him by an unhappy Gerardo. Leigh couldn’t understand a word of it, and neither, she suspected, could Chaz. But Gerardo’s caustic tone left no mystery as to his meaning.

  Chaz stood up from the chair, his expression sulky. “Fine! I’m getting back to it!” Then he grumbled just loud enough for the kids and women to hear him. “Sheesh, what a slave driver!”

  Chaz moved away, picked up an armload of props, and slowly began walking toward the stairs. Gerardo stood still at the bottom of the stairway, glaring at him. Chaz stuck out his tongue, then bolted up the steps. Gerardo shook his head with disgust and got back to work on the trash pile.

  Bess leaned over to whisper in Leigh’s ear. “I offered them all a significant bonus if the work gets done on time. But either they all get it, or no one does.” She chuckled. “I don’t have to say a word.”

  Leigh’s gaze returned to the case in her hands. It was possible that a member of the Young Businessmen’s Chamber could have donated the case to the cause. But she doubted it. The initials would be an unlikely coincidence; furthermore, the briefcase was real leather, well made, and in good shape before the pyromaniacs got hold of it. Why would its owner give it up? It made more sense that the case had actually belonged to Andrew Marconi, but that the police search had missed it somehow.

  Leigh tried hard to think of a plausible, non-alarming reason why the man might have left his briefcase not at his home or his office or at one of his other established businesses, but in a vacant building. She failed.

  “Mom?” Allison asked quietly, breaking into Leigh’s distinctly unpleasant thoughts. “Do you think we should show it to Aunt Mo? Just in case?”

  Leigh suppressed a sigh. “Yes,” she answered bleakly. “I do.”

  ***

  “Chew Man!” Maura cried gleefully as “Chewie,” Leigh’s corgi, barreled into the detective’s bedroom in a frenzy of bouncing, sniffing and surveying. Within seconds he had zoned in on an area of intense interest underneath the bed, and his front half disappeared from view.

  “Found that flax seed cracker, did you?” Maura chuckled warmly. “I was wondering where that went.”

  After a few seconds, Chewie wiggled his elongated body back out, licked his lips, and jumped up to put his front paws on the side of Maura’s mat
tress. “Come on up, boy!” she invited.

  “I don’t think he needs—” Leigh protested, but she was too late. Allison had already lifted up the dog’s back end and propelled him onto the mattress, where he hustled toward Maura’s head and cuddled obligingly beneath her arm.

  “Dog therapy,” Maura announced with a smile. “Perfect. Lowers the blood pressure, I hear.”

  “I thought you might like to see him,” Allison said with a smile.

  “You were right,” Maura praised. “And I’m glad you came too, Allie. Let’s see that eye… Sheesh, that’s nothing! I look worse than that after an all-night stake out. You feeling all right?”

  Once Allison assured that she was feeling fine, Maura’s gaze moved to Leigh. “Did I miss the memo? Are we having a meeting? Discussing methods of arson, maybe?”

  Leigh looked down at the scorched briefcase in her hands. Maura always did take note of details.

  “We found it at Aunt Bess’s theater building,” Allison explained, hopping up onto the foot of the bed. “The people who ran the haunted houses burned it on purpose, but nobody knows how it got there.” She held out her hands for the briefcase, then passed it up the bed to Maura. “Look at the monogram, Aunt Mo!”

  Maura turned the case over carefully, examining the zippers and peering into all the pockets as Leigh had done. When her fingers moved over the debossed monogram, the trace of a smile curved her lips. “Allie,” she said smoothly, “hand me that file marked ‘Marconi,’ would you?”

  Allison quickly located the manila folder on the card table and handed it to the detective, who was wedged between the dog on one side and the case on the other.