Never Thwart a Thespian: Volume 8 (Leigh Koslow Mystery Series) (30 page)

At least, the Pack was partly right.

“You think of it as your building, don’t you Ned?” Leigh asked softly.

No response. Probably more nodding.

“Have you taken care of it for a long time, now?”

“Ever since I was ten,” he said proudly. “I know this place better than anybody!”

Ten years old?
Leigh did some quick math in her head. Ned’s age was hard to guess, but he appeared to be younger than Leigh’s mother and aunts. In 1961, he would have been a young teenager or tween.

Survived by a wife and two stepchildren.

Leigh felt a clammy wave of cold pass through her body. “You worked here with your stepdad?” she squeaked.

“I don’t want to talk about him!” Ned practically shouted.

“I’m sorry,” Leigh said quickly. “I didn’t mean to—”

“He was a bad man and he did terrible things!” Ned went on. “He made me do them, too!”

“We won’t talk about him anymore,” Leigh said hurriedly. Where the hell were the police? For all Ned’s mild mannerisms most of the time, he was obviously on a hair-trigger. She paused a second to regroup, forcing herself to acknowledge that although it felt like she had been trapped in complete blackness with two nutjobs and an unconscious person for at least seven hours — in reality, only a few short minutes had passed.

“Leigh?” Camille called pleasantly from inside the closet.

“Yes?”

“You’re okay out there with Ned, aren’t you?”

“Just peachy,” she answered, feeling like a psych nurse. “How about you?”

“I’m a little cramped, but it can’t be much longer now. Don’t worry about me!”

“Okay, I won’t,” Leigh lied. Did Camille even realize what had happened to Gerardo? If he had entered the kitchen without calling out first, she might not. A dull thud, his body slumping to the floor — neither sound would be recognizable through the closed pantry door, especially with Camille’s own voice rattling around her skull.

Which would explain why she didn’t seem overly concerned about Leigh’s coming in.

“I’m thinking…
Tosca,”
Camille mused.

Footsteps sounded in the basement outside, and Leigh sensed, rather than heard, Ned’s body tense. A shuffling noise made her certain he was retreating farther behind the door.

Getting into position?

She pushed back a swell of panic. Why Ned hadn’t hit her when she walked in, she didn’t know, but Gerardo’s unconscious presence was more than enough evidence that the next person to try it was taking their life into their hands. She didn’t know what Ned had hit Gerardo with, but the swelling on his skull was massive… and Ned apparently had plenty of practice in the art. If Camille started singing again, anyone could be the next victim. It could even be Warren, leaving early to check on her…

“No, Camille!” Leigh whispered sharply. “You can’t sing anymore! We have to stay quiet!”

“Why is that, dear?”

“Because…” Leigh’s mind turned somersaults. The footsteps had gone away — probably one of the actors racing to make another entrance. But eventually, Bess herself would come downstairs. Not until the police were with her, though,
if
Bess kept her promise to Leigh. How much longer could it possibly take?

“Just stay in the closet and be quiet, okay?” Leigh called.

Gerardo groaned. Leigh heard Ned move forward a step, then stop. If he went all the way to Gerardo, she might be able to make a break for the door. She placed herself carefully on the opposite side of the island.

“He’s not dead,” Ned said without emotion.

“No, he’s not,” Leigh agreed. “That’s a good thing, don’t you think?”

“No,” he answered. “He could tell somebody.”

“I’m sure he won’t,” Leigh said quickly. “He doesn’t speak English.”

Crap, that was lame!

“I don’t trust him,” Ned drawled. “He works for Mr. Applegate. He wants to sell the building to that Crane woman.”

“Gordon won’t sell the building,” Leigh assured. “He teases and threatens, but he won’t. I’m sure of it.”

“I’m not. I wish you hadn’t come in here, Ms. Leigh.”

More laughter from above. Would this infernal act never be over? And was she hearing other footsteps outside, or was it just her imagination?

“I have to finish him now, or he’ll tell everybody. Then I gotta put him somewhere.”

Leigh had no response to that. Her pulse was pounding in her ears. Ned had taken another step closer to the figure on the floor. A part of her itched to start moving away — to escape. If she ran, would he come after her — or would he stay and finish off Gerardo?

“I don’t like bodies.”

You and me both, Nedster.

“I wish you hadn’t come in here, Ms. Leigh.” Ned repeated. He stopped moving directly across the island from her. She could smell something garlicky on his breath.

Screams and shrieks sounded from above, along with a cascade of heavy thuds. Leigh’s whole body tensed, even as she remembered, with sudden clarity, exactly what the sound represented.

The cast was pretending that the stage had collapsed. It was the end of the second act.

“Uh oh,” Ned said worriedly. “I’d better do it quick.”

Leigh heard a rustle of cloth — an arm rising in the air? — and screamed at the top of her lungs. “No, Ned!
Stop!”

The kitchen door flew open; beams from multiple flashlights flooded in. Two uniformed police officers burst through the doorway and had Ned under control almost instantly. Leigh looked across at him, and her heart fell into her shoes.

He had been holding a broken brick.

She skirted the island and dropped down to Gerardo. His head and face were covered with blood, but as she checked his pulse again, his eyelids fluttered.

He muttered one of the exact same words she’d used earlier.

“You are such a fraud!” she teased, nearly laughing with relief. “No one swears in their
second
language!”

Another officer stepped forward to tend to Gerardo, and Leigh stood up just as Bess rushed over to meet her, with Gordon close behind.

Her aunt wrapped her in a bear hug, her eyes brimming with tears. “Oh, thank God, thank God,” Bess gushed. “We knew you had to be in here, but they wouldn’t let us—”

“I know, Aunt Bess,” she exclaimed. “I’m all right.”

“Is this yours, Ma’am?” an officer asked, extending Leigh’s phone. Ned had already been led out of the kitchen; he had not said a word.

“Yes, thank you,” Leigh took the phone in a trembling hand and looked at the text from Maura.

It’s Ned. Stay the hell away from him!

Leigh knew it wasn’t funny, but she must have been near hysterical, because she couldn’t stop chuckling. Upstairs, above her head, the audience roared with applause.

“Better not be at all than not be noble!” shouted the forgotten Camille, bursting from the closet with a flourish. “It’s
intermission!”

Chapter 22

“We
told
you it was Ned,” Ethan repeated for the fortieth time. “We told everybody!”

“Yes, but you were only guessing,” Allison protested, moving away from her brother and toward the box of puppies on the floor beside Maura.

The puppies, fortuitously, had been instrumental in keeping the detective reasonably calm in the tense moments after her husband relayed his critical information and before Leigh had answered her phone. As soon as Gerry returned to Avalon, Maura had moved to the couch in her living room and demanded the Harmon family stop by on their way home from the theater. Though Stroth had been keeping her updated as best he could, she still had a million questions. And so did Leigh, whom Stroth had told absolutely nothing.

“We
knew,”
Ethan insisted, uncharacteristically holding his ground. “No dude that weird isn’t hiding something. He was old enough to have been around for the first murders, he lived close enough to the building to walk there every day, and he totally had the hots for Aunt Bess. It was—”

“Ethan!” Leigh chastised.

“Sorry, mom,” he apologized, his reddened cheeks nearly matching his hair. “But it was
so
obvious. He would have done anything for her! And he was twisted enough to believe he was helping her, you know? I’m just saying, it was
obvious.”

Allison’s eyes rolled. Leigh wished he would stop using that particular word, herself.

“It’s true that he didn’t cover his tracks particularly well,” Maura offered. “He barely covered them at all. It’s just that until recently, no one had any reason to connect the dots, much less connect them to him.”

“Has he lived in West View his whole life?” Leigh asked.

Maura shook her head. “Actually, no. When his mother remarried she moved the kids with her into the city, and then he got drafted and sent to Vietnam. He was discharged after ten months for nebulous reasons — in retrospect, probably pre-existing mental health issues — and he moved around the country a while, working minimum wage jobs and spending a fair amount of time in homeless shelters. By the time he was thirty, he had no family; his mother died of cancer and his younger sister had committed suicide. Eventually he came back to West View and started taking janitorial jobs wherever he could get them.”

“And nobody who hired him ever connected him with Bill Stokes?” Leigh asked.

“No reason to,” Maura explained. “He was just a kid when he left, and his last name wasn’t Stokes. He kept to himself and didn’t talk about his background. There just wasn’t anything there.”

“But didn’t the people who owned the building think it was weird how he always wanted to work at that building?” Ethan asked.

Maura shrugged. “They might if they knew the whole story. But the owners didn’t talk to each other; they came and went. And Ned worked at a lot of other buildings, too, which masked his obsession with the one. It’s not like he carried around a written resume, you know. He would approach a business and give them the last place he worked as a reference. His references were always good because he kept his head down, did competent work for very little money, and didn’t complain.”

“You’d think Merle and Earl would have seen him coming and going over the years,” Leigh protested.

“Not if he was slipping in and out the fire exit in the back at night,” Maura pointed out. “Which he could easily do, by the way. He often had keys, but even when he didn’t, he knew exactly where the building was vulnerable, and he was handy with locks. But as far as his being seen, when he was reporting to work he would have walked around the back to the parking lot entrance, which wasn’t visible from Merle and Earl’s porch. Even if they did see him outside the building now and then, there was nothing in particular to be suspicious of.”

“Oh yes, there was!” Ethan argued.

Allison exhaled loudly. “Looking creepy is
not
what made him guilty!” She turned to Maura. “He killed his stepfather, didn’t he? After Bill killed Clyde Adams.”

Maura’s expression didn’t change, but her eyes twinkled with admiration. “A very reasonable theory. In fact, that
might
be exactly what Ned himself told Detective Stroth just a short while ago. Ironically enough, for a man who doesn’t talk much, Ned is surprisingly willing to answer direct questions, as long as he’s asked politely.”

Allison stopped caressing the puppies in the box and straightened. “Here’s what I think happened. Ned hated Bill Stokes because he grew up being abused by him, and because Bill beat up on his mother, too. But Ned really liked Clyde Adams. Maybe Clyde liked Ned’s mother and was nice to Ned because of it, or maybe Clyde was just nice, period. But when Bill Stokes killed Clyde, in a jealous rage or whatever, I bet Ned was there and saw it happen. Maybe Bill even made Ned help him brick up Clyde’s body in the coal chute. A couple weeks later, Ned snapped, and he hit his stepfather over the head and killed him.”

“It does fit,” Leigh agreed, squirming with discomfort to hear her daughter talking of murder
again.
Tomorrow, they would have to bake cookies. Or make a craft. Or some girly thing. She sighed loudly, then put forth her own theory. “Ned was young at the time, so it makes sense that he couldn’t have fought Bill outright. But he was big enough to swing a rock from behind. I can picture him deciding to heave the body up onto the altar, making a show of “good” conquering over evil. It was like he was making a sacrifice, for his mother and sister, maybe even for Clyde. He probably wasn’t even thinking about what would happen to him afterward. It was all about ‘justice’ for his stepfather.”

Maura nodded. “My thoughts, exactly. Why Ned wasn’t suspected at the time, though, I couldn’t tell you. Maybe he was, off the record, but there was no proof. Or maybe the investigators were familiar with Bill’s abuse and decided to look the other way. It happens.”

“And he was never convicted of anything else, either?” Warren questioned, an edge to his voice. He had been none too pleased to look for his wife at intermission and run into an ambulance and a bevy of police officers instead. Leigh had reassured him as soon as she could, but he was obviously still smarting. “He had no criminal record?”

Maura shook her head. “None. Bess had no reason to suspect he was up to anything, and neither did anyone else.”

“Yes she did! It was ob—”

“Ethan!” Leigh and Warren chastised simultaneously.

The boy folded his arms over his chest, refusing to be cowed. “I’m just saying.”

“When Ned came back to the building after all those years, it probably set him off again somehow,” Allison continued to theorize. “He got possessive of it and everything. He had ideas about what it should and shouldn’t be used for, and when he felt like it was threatened,
he
felt threatened.”

“Again,” Maura praised. “A very reasonable theory. From all we know, I’d say Ned’s understanding of the world seems to be fairly black and white, with a morality of his own invention. He also takes nearly everything he hears literally, and when you start doing that, it’s easy to feel threatened.”

Leigh remembered Gordon’s shouted words of the morning before — that if
one more unpleasant finding
occurred at the building, he would
unload this box of bricks.
Ned had been listening then. No wonder he had chosen that night to try and remove Clyde Adams’ bones from the coal chute. And no wonder he’d been so upset to find out he’d left some behind. He had caused the very problem he was trying to avoid.