Never Thwart a Thespian: Volume 8 (Leigh Koslow Mystery Series) (21 page)

“Oh,” Bess said, sounding disappointed. “I thought you and the kids were coming back this morning.”

“No, you didn’t.”

Bess clucked her tongue. “Well, I
hoped
you would. I’ve run into a bit of a problem, you see. The men are AWOL.”

“What?” Leigh replied, distressed. “You mean
all
of them?”

“Well, none of them are here,” Bess said anxiously. “And there’s so much work to be done today!”

“Like what?” Leigh asked, aware of a giant sucking sensation even as she asked. “Did they say they would come in today?”

“Of course!” Bess insisted. “The basement floor needs to be polished; Francie is going to supervise that right after lunch. But now that the weather’s finally dried out a bit, I wanted them to spruce up the grounds — everything is so terribly overgrown, you know. And it needs to look nice, especially around the parking lot and the front entrance!”

Leigh bit her lip. Why would the men not come to work? That Ned would fail to show was not surprising, given how freaked out he had been by Stroth’s interview yesterday. But Gerardo still seemed to have something to prove, and Chaz — well, who else could Chaz talk to all day? His boas?

“I just don’t know what to do!” Bess fretted.

Leigh sighed. Her aunt was playing her, and she knew it. Bess could easily hire a lawn company on her own dime to take care of the grounds, and Frances could polish the floor herself in less time than it would take to supervise the men to do it “properly.” But those facts only begged the question of why Bess really wanted Leigh there. Could it be that, despite Bess’s seemingly limitless bravado, she was less than comfortable working in the building alone?

If so, she would never admit it.

The giant sucking sensation concluded with a pop. “All right,” Leigh capitulated. “I’ll swing by on my way home. Maybe the men are just running late this morning.”

When she reached the theater eight minutes later, her aunt met her in the parking lot. If Bess had not, Leigh might very well have circled the lot and headed right back out, seeing as how Ned, Chaz, and Gerardo were all plainly visible mowing grass, pulling weeds, and trimming shrubs, respectively.

“We had a little miscommunication,” Bess said cheerily, opening Leigh’s car door for her. “They thought I said an hour later than I thought I said! They all got here just as I hung up the phone with you. How funny is that?”

“Hilarious,” Leigh said without humor. She considered not getting out of the car, but ultimately she relented. There was a reason Bess wanted her here, and she knew her aunt would come out with it sooner or later.

It had better be sooner.

“Since you’re here,” Bess prattled, noticeably more nervous than usual, “why don’t we sit down in the annex kitchen and have some tea? I brought some of that huckleberry flavor you like so much.”

Bess continued to talk of nothing until they were both seated with steaming cups in their hands. Then her gaze drifted suddenly into space, and her worry lines deepened.

“Aunt Bess,” Leigh prompted gently. “What is it?”

Bess’s lips pursed. “That Detective Stroth came by here again this morning.”

Leigh set down her tea. “Oh?”

Bess nodded. “Sonia Crane has regained consciousness.”

Leigh felt her own worry lines deepen. No wonder Maura had avoided the question. Stroth would want to witness Bess’s reaction to the news firsthand; Maura couldn’t take a chance on Leigh or Allison tipping Bess off. How awkward.

“What is Sonia saying?” Leigh asked hesitantly.

Bess made a growling noise low in her throat. “She’s not completely with it, yet. She’s just sort of babbling… like she’s delirious. But according to Stroth, there are two things she keeps saying over and over.”

Leigh took a sip of tea and waited for it, her heart thudding in her chest.

“
My
name,” Bess said heavily, “and
black magic.”

The tea spewed. “Sorry,” Leigh apologized, wiping up the drops with a paper napkin. “I wasn’t expecting… I mean…
what?”

Bess let out a long, dramatic sigh. “Little known fact about Sonia Crane, kiddo. She may look all tough and businesslike, but underneath that lizard skin, she’s as superstitious as they come. I heard it first from a lawyer friend of mine who used to work with her at a firm downtown. But Cara said the same thing just a couple days ago. Even back in college, Sonia was reading tarot cards and running séances, pretending to be a medium… and a wiccan, and a voodoo priestess, and a psychic. Lord only knows what else. You name it, if it’s not provable by science and a little bit twisted, Sonia Crane is into it.”

Leigh recalled with sudden clarity how Sonia had tried to warn her and Cara away from the building the first day they met. She had mentioned the human sacrifice rumors, and she had blamed it all on
black magic.

“Oh, my,” Leigh murmured. She looked her aunt square in the eye. “Sonia Crane is scared to death of you.”

Bess’s shoulders lifted with the tiniest of shrugs. “It would seem so, wouldn’t it?”

Leigh gasped with sudden understanding. “The bathroom at the sheriff’s sale! Aunt Bess, what did you do to her?”

Bess hid her face behind her teacup. “A little harmless opposition research, that’s all. I knew she was determined to outbid Gordon. I found out she had a thing about the occult. And what can I say? One can order just about anything on Amazon. Is it my fault that the woman had an unnaturally strong reaction to ten dollars’ worth of cardboard pentagrams and a bloody rubber rooster?”

Leigh banged her forehead on the tabletop. “Aunt Bess!”

“Well?” Bess defended hotly. “It worked, didn’t it? She took off out of that building like her pants were on fire! And as I said before, I never touched her. She did connect me with the incident somehow, however.”

“Clearly,” Leigh said heavily, lifting her head. “And what you’re telling me is that now, for whatever reason, Sonia’s delirious brain has decided that
you
were to blame for the assault as well?”

Bess’s lips pursed again. “That would be about the size of it. Me and my ‘black magic.’”

Leigh exhaled roughly. “Then she didn’t see who actually assaulted her.”

“Evidently not.”

“Did you tell Stroth the truth? About everything?”

Bess threw her chest out indignantly. “Of course I did! You know I never lie unless it’s absolutely necessary!”

Leigh decided not to go there. “Do you think he believed you?”

“I don’t know,” she said uncertainly. “But your friend Maura will. Won’t she?”

Leigh considered. “I think that under the circumstances, your past history with Detective Polanski will weigh in your favor.”
As a relatively harmless crackpot,
she refrained from adding.

Bess’s smile, for the first time that morning, seemed genuine. “Well, that’s a relief. Thanks, kiddo. I knew you could cheer me up.”

Leigh smiled back. “No problem.”

Chapter 15

Leigh was on her way back to her van when she caught a glimpse of Gerardo carrying a pair of pruning shears around the rear of the building. Bess had said she didn’t completely trust him, yet she had made no move to fire him. Nor, as far as Leigh knew, had Bess specifically confronted him about the language question. On the surface, that seemed odd. But with Bess, odd behavior was relative. If Leigh had to guess why her aunt continued to tolerate Gerardo’s presence in the building, she would say that Bess still believed Allison’s theory that he was a spy for Gordon, and she was keeping him around to play with him like a cat with a mouse.

In fact, Leigh was sure of it. And she was feeling rather feline herself at the moment.

She put her keys back into her pocket and walked across the lot and around to the rear of the building. The annex had been built to within ten feet of the property line, leaving a narrow alleyway of grass between the building and a neighbor’s overgrown hedge and detached garage. Leigh walked past a concrete stairwell that led down to a metal fire door and window on the lower floor of the annex. She paused a moment. The metal door was scratched up and dented; the window was an opaque casement type that had clearly seen better days. She walked down the steps for a closer look.

The fact that the building had been easy to break into at various points in its history was a foregone conclusion. Churches and fraternal orders always had numerous keys floating about. The banquet halls and dance studio might have kept a tighter grip, but there were double-hung windows on the second floor of the annex that would be vulnerable to anyone with a short ladder who could pick a lock. The first floor, which was half underground at its rear because of the upward slope of the block, had only casement windows. Also easily picked, but inherently safer because the opening would be too small for an adult to crawl through.

Leigh studied the metal door. It had a new one-way locking mechanism, with no knob on the outside. She knew that it also had a sliding deadbolt on the inside, because she had checked it herself a few times when they were working in the evenings. According to Bess, Gordon had hired a company to replace all the locks as soon as he bought the building, and the only keys at the moment belonged to her and to him. The double-hung windows within easy reach had also had been outfitted with sash pins, so the building certainly
should
be secure now, even without the expensive monitoring system Bess hoped to purchase for the theater down the road.

Of course, no building was ever 100% secure. Glass and doors could be broken; bombs could explode. But there were no obvious holes in the building’s current armor, either.

Feeling slightly mollified, Leigh climbed back up the steps and walked around the other rear corner of the building to the side opposite the parking lot. Here, the building fronted a narrow secondary street which ran uphill into a residential neighborhood. Between the crumbling sidewalk and the brick wall were a few small trees and any number of seriously overgrown bushes and shrubs, one of which Gerardo was now pruning with a vengeance.

Inspiration struck.

“What are you doing?!” Leigh cried with alarm, running toward him. “That’s a
diffelostra,
for crying out loud!” He stopped in surprise, and when she reached him she pretended great interest in what was left of the bush. “You have to cut them back in the fall, not the spring! If you cut them back in the spring, they won’t bloom all season, possibly two! Everybody knows you can’t prune
diffelostra
in the spring!” She faced him straight on, her tone and eyes accusing. “Most especially
professional
gardeners!”

He stared back at her, calculating and a little defiant.

She stared straight back.

“Give it up, Gerardo,” she cajoled. “You know you want to.”

They stood staring at each other for another long moment before his brown eyes suddenly twinkled.

“I do
not
want to,” he responded, with no trace of any accent besides well-educated middle-American. “But it doesn’t look like I have any choice. I underestimated you and those kids from the beginning.”

“Uh huh,” Leigh agreed. “But don’t feel bad. It’s a common error.”

He dropped the pruning shears at his feet and wiped the sheen of sweat off his brow with a sleeve.

“The question is,” Leigh pressed, “Why?”

Gerardo’s dark eyes flashed with sudden insight, making Leigh all but certain she was about to be lied to.

“Mr. Applegate is worried about his investment here. He wants somebody on the inside, watching how Bess is handling things, making sure all is well. I’ve been working for him for years, basically as a glorified gofer, so he put me on it. The no-English thing was his idea. He figured I could find out more that way — that people would leave their guards down around me.”

“A very smart and devious man, that Mr. Applegate.”

A grin played at his lips. “You have no idea.”

Leigh’s bravado faltered suddenly. And what, exactly, was she going to do now? She was not afraid of Gerardo, although rationally speaking, she should be. All ancient-history murders aside,
somebody
had knocked Sonia Crane unconscious, and she couldn’t be sure that somebody wasn’t him. She couldn’t be sure of anything.

He surprised her by addressing her next question before she asked it. “If you’re feeling obligated to go spill everything to Detective Stroth, be my guest. Mr. Applegate and I spoke with him together last night. He’s fully aware of my… employment situation.”

Leigh frowned. “But Bess is not.”

Gerardo shook his head. “Oh, I wouldn’t say that. She knows I can speak English, even though she pretends she doesn’t. She knows I work for Mr. Applegate. She could fire me anytime she wanted to. Why she doesn’t — what she guesses his motives to be, I have no idea.” His eyes caught Leigh’s with another flash of insight, but this time Leigh construed his words as genuine. “I’m not convinced even Mr. Applegate knows exactly why he put me here. But whatever reasons he gives
her
are his business. I can promise you I’m not here to make trouble, just feed information to a very rich, inquisitive, and libidinous old man with too much time and money on his hands. I hope you can believe that. And if it ever gets back to him that I said those last few words, I will deny it with my dying breath, which it definitely would be.”

Leigh considered. “And if I tell Bess—”

“Tell her anything you want — aside from the libidinous part. Mr. Applegate won’t be shocked that you’ve found me out. But I have a feeling not much will change. Those two seem to like playing games with each other, if you haven’t noticed.”

Leigh chuckled. “Oh, I’ve noticed.”

“I do have one request,” he began tentatively, “One plea.”

Leigh took in his expression, which was notably more distressed than at any other point in their conversation, and her mouth curved into a smirk. “You don’t want Chaz to know you speak English?”

“God, no,” he said heavily. “I’d lose my mind. I have no idea how long Bess will want to keep us on after the opening, or how long Mr. Applegate will want to keep his charade up. Have mercy, please?”