The Haunting Ballad (31 page)

“Of course, two or more of those could be the same person,” I reasoned.

“They could be, but they are not,” my partner said. “We know now that we're speaking of three separate individuals. It's already been revealed that the note writer was Anthony Mazzo. As for last night's gunman, Detective Wilton can address that issue. When I called him earlier to request his presence here, he shared the welcomed news that the assailant had been captured.”

“Captured?” Audrey sounded both shocked and relieved (as was I). “The awful bastard who shot Lee and Byron?”

Audrey wasn't one for profanity, but at the moment she seemed well within her rights to let loose. She reached over and gave my hand a quick squeeze.

Mr. O'Nelligan gestured toward Wilton. “Detective, will you illuminate us?”

“It's about time,” Smack grumbled. “Yeah, he's behind bars. Seems that some passersby saw him racing from the scene of the crime last night. Our guys picked him up a couple hours ago, and I was there when he got hauled in. Seedy little twerp by the name of Loomis Lent.”

“Loomis! Sweet Jesus!” Patch Doonan pushed himself away from the wall. “I always knew he was a wrong one. Why'd he do it?”

“Yeah, why?” I pictured the small rumpled man with the rumpled mustache and rumpled ideas. “Was it because he killed Lorraine and thought I'd picked up his trail?”

“It was the opposite,” Mr. O'Nelligan said. “He was attempting to avenge Miss Cobble. If I understand Detective Wilton correctly, you were not the intended target, Lee.”

“That's right, kid,” Smack agreed. “Lent was gunning for Byron Spires. You just got in the way.”

Audrey caught her breath. “Why Byron? Is
he
the one who pushed Lorraine off the roof?”

“He is not,” Mr. O'Nelligan said. “Although Loomis believed he was.”

“But why?” I asked.

Smack answered that. “Seems Lent saw you Saturday night when you were shaking Spires down. He heard you telling Spires how you knew about what he did to Lorraine Cobble.”

“What Spires did? But I never—” I flashed on the young musician pinned against the outer wall of the Mercutio, with me shouting in his face
I know what you did to her
;
I know what you did
just as Loomis stepped out onto the sidewalk. “Wait, I wasn't talking about Lorraine then. I was referring to—” I glanced over at Audrey. “Someone else.”

“Well, that's not how Lent took it,” Smack said. “He thought you were accusing Spires of killing the Cobble dame, who I gathered he took a shine to. Next day, he figured you'd have arrested the guy, but when he heard on the street that Spires was still free, he concocted his little plan. He waited last night outside the coffeehouse—him and a Smith and Wesson—figuring Spires might show up, which he did. Lent didn't shoot at first, on account of Spires having some doll on his arm.”

Beside me, Audrey stiffened slightly. Byron Spires' goatish leanings were no doubt becoming clear to her.

Smack kept going. “According to Lent, Spires went inside but came right out again, this time with both the girl and you, Lee. She went back in immediately, but you were still standing close to Spires. Not wanting to kill more guys than he had to, he waited for Spires to walk away from you. Didn't matter. Lent's shooting was so sloppy, he ended up creasing you anyway. And that's the scoop. By the way, looks like Spires is going to pull through. The docs dug a slug out of his chest and sewed him up proper.”

Audrey sighed softly, and so did I. After all, it was because of me—or at least Lent's misconstruing of my words—that Spires had gotten shot.

I attempted to summarize. “All right, we have Mazzo as the note writer and Loomis as the gunman. And for Lorraine's killer…” I looked at my partner, my eyebrows raised in good old-fashioned bewilderment.

Mr. O'Nelligan again extracted his pocket watch, studied it for a moment, and nodded to himself. “It's almost time. The person in question should be here any minute.” He looked over at Mrs. Pattinshell. “I trust you conveyed my instructions precisely, madam?”

Our ghost chanter, who had maintained a low-grade scowl throughout the proceedings, now broke her silence. “I fulfilled your request as specified.”

“Hold everything!” Audrey, judging by her own raised eyebrows, had contracted my case of bewilderment. “Are you saying Lorraine Cobble's murderer is coming here now?”

“Yes,” Mr. O'Nelligan said simply.

If the topic hadn't been homicide, the punctuality of the knock on the door would have been almost comical. Again I played the doorman, but this time my heartbeat was in overdrive.

Staring at the person in the hallway, I can say that I truly wished it was someone other than who it was. Almost anyone else—Mazzo or Hector or Ruby or even Spires, risen miraculously from his hospital bed. Or maybe a man I'd never seen before, with incriminating bright red hair.

Sadly, you don't always get what you wish for.

 

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

 

Kimla Thorpe looked at me with wide, startled eyes. Maybe as startled as my own.

“Mr. Plunkett? Why are you—?” Then she noticed the roomful of people behind me. “Oh God…”

For a moment, it seemed that she might turn and flee, but Mr. O'Nelligan came forward and took her by the arm. “Come in, Miss Thorpe. We've been waiting for you.”

He led her inside, and I closed the door. All three Doonans were now standing, though the youngest seemed unsteady on his feet.

“Kimla!” Tim had gone ashen. “What are you doing here?”

Patch didn't look much better. “Ludicrous! O'Nelligan, you can't mean this.”

My partner released Kimla and offered her a chair. Refusing it, she moved past the Doonans to stand near the wall at the spot that Patch had vacated. Beneath the ghostly painting, she wrapped her arms tightly around herself and stared forward blankly, avoiding everyone's eyes—most notably Tim's.

Smack Wilton, who like our hostess had remained seated, looked Kimla over and frowned. “So this is your murderer, O'Nelligan? This stick of a girl?”

“Unfortunately, yes,” my partner said softly.

“Deny it, Kimla!” Tim cried out. “For God's sake, deny this nonsense!”

Kimla said nothing, denied nothing.

Tim turned to Mr. O'Nelligan. “It's plain to see you've intimidated her. I don't know how you pressured her into coming here, but obviously you've blundered in a big way. Kimla's a quiet lass. A fine, peaceful young lady.” He spun back toward his girl. “Jesus, Kimla, why don't you say something? C'mon! You never touched Lorraine, did you now?”

Kimla remained silent, her jaw clenched and her eyes unfocused, but a single tear traced its way down her cheek. It seemed like an answer.

“Aw, no.” Tim thrust a hand through his dark hair. “No, no, no, no…” He staggered a little, and Neil eased him back into his chair.

Mrs. Pattinshell now rose. “All right, you have her. I've fulfilled my part of the bargain. Now take her away and return my home to me.”

“In due course, madam,” Mr. O'Nelligan said. “But it's important that everyone here understand what came to pass.”

Smack grunted. “You bet it is. If you expect me to slap the cuffs on somebody, I'm gonna need more convincing.”

Mrs. Pattinshell, seeing that her wishes were to be ignored, moaned and slid back into her chair.

Mr. O'Nelligan continued. “I should explain that our hostess was instructed to call Miss Thorpe and tell her to arrive at precisely this time. Miss Thorpe was expecting to find no one here but Mrs. Pattinshell. All has gone according to plan.”

“Okay, but why here?” Smack asked. “We could have done this down at the station.”

“To address that and other points, I'll explain now how we identified Miss Thorpe as Lorraine's killer.”

“Yeah, how
did
we identify her?” I wondered aloud.

“Earlier this afternoon, I took a fine long walk.” Mr. O'Nelligan's answers were nothing if not roundabout. “This allowed me to ponder and prioritize the facts that we've gathered these last few days. In the course of our quest for truth, while various threads played themselves out, one lingering problem could not be ignored—Cornelius Boyle's claim that he spoke with Hector Escobar near the time of Lorraine's death.”

“Coupled with Hector's counterclaim that he wasn't there,” I put in.

“Indeed. Apparently, one of them had to be lying. And yet, after repeated interviews, it became apparent that neither was.”

Audrey joined in now. “Hector swore on his grandmother's cross that he wasn't there. He seemed in earnest.”

“He did,” my partner agreed. “Mr. Boyle seemed equally sincere in his own assertions. Of course, his eyes and ears, though a source of pride for him, bear over a century of usage. Then, this morning, we heard from Tony Mazzo that when he himself had been in Lorraine's empty apartment, he heard the exchange between Cornelius and another person. What Cornelius saw that night was a slender individual of dark complexion, at a bit of a distance and obscured in shadow. Based on who he had seen earlier that day, he guessed it to be Hector the grocery boy. Cornelius called out—first in English, then in Spanish—and that individual answered, briefly but convincingly. Thinking no more of it, Cornelius returned to his apartment. Sometimes one sees what he believes to be true, even if the reality is false.”

“But it was never Hector, was it?” Audrey asked.

“I came to believe that it was not,” Mr. O'Nelligan said. “Especially after our encounter with the lad today. The question now arose, if this figure in the shadows wasn't the grocery boy, then who could it be? If it was a stranger, then of course, there was no way to guess. But what if he was one of the men in Lorraine's circle? Who of those we'd met resembled him? Going over the possibilities, no one seemed a likely match. Perhaps the closest was young Tim Doonan.”

“What
now
?” Patch barked. “So it's Tim you're accusing?”

“I am not. Tim is fair-skinned and more solidly built than Hector. Additionally, Cornelius' youth spoke Spanish, a skill I wasn't sure Tim possessed. I added up our hallway lurker's known traits—the slenderness, the complexion, the ability to speak Spanish—and an unexpected possibility arose. Miss Kimla Thorpe. True, she was the wrong sex, but with her thinness and her husky voice, perhaps disguised, she could quite possibly be mistaken for a teenaged male. Especially by ancient eyes in a shadowy hall. As for the Spanish, I recalled that when we heard her perform Friday evening, she sang one of her songs partially in that tongue. A love ballad from Madrid. While that did not necessarily indicate fluency, it did suggest that she knew enough of the language to toss out a few words to Cornelius.”

Neil Doonan cut in. “Surely, though, that's not enough to be certain it was her.”

“There was, in fact, more to go on,” Mr. O'Nelligan said. “I'd been reflecting on Mrs. Pattinshell's latest ghost song. While I'm very open to the world's metaphysical possibilities, I was not convinced that the song presented to us genuinely came from Lorraine's spirit. Obviously, we were being steered toward believing that Cardinal Meriam was her murderer. Earlier, Lee here had suggested the possibility that Mrs. Pattinshell herself created the song. Surely that would be the simplest explanation. After all, having read Cardinal's letter to Lorraine, Mrs. Pattinshell was aware of its threatening tone and could infuse those sentiments into the lyrics. Conversely, it could also be that another party had written the ghost song and somehow coerced Mrs. Pattinshell into saying that it came from the late Lorraine. In reviewing the lyrics of the ghost ballad, one line echoed for me—
none can brave the storm
. I realized that I'd heard it recently in a different song, again one from Miss Thorpe's repertoire.”

I looked over at Kimla. She was still hugging herself tightly, staring off at nothing at all. I thought I saw her lips silently forming the words “brave the storm.”

My colleague went on. “Although not a completely unique phrase, it was distinctive enough to be taken note of. As I've mentioned, I was already considering Kimla to be that person in the hallway, and the echoed lyric further elevated her as a suspect.”

I tossed in my two cents. “Also, she was one of the few people we showed Cardinal's letter to at the Mercutio.”

“Meaning she was privy to its menacing tenor,” Mr. O'Nelligan said. “Taking in all these things together, Kimla Thorpe seemed a valid choice. The question was how to confirm it. I devised a plan to confront our hostess about Lorraine's ghost song. Arriving here an hour ago, I secured her admission that she'd lied to us regarding the song and, in fact, had been paid to do so.” He addressed Mrs. Pattinshell. “It might be best, madam, if this portion was given in your own words.”

She glared bullets at him but, after a moment, obeyed his request in her clipped, formal manner. “Yesterday morning I awoke to find that an envelope had been slipped under my door. The unsigned letter within had been penned in a strained hand, as if the writer were attempting to disguise his or her identity. The letter consisted of two sheets, the first being the lyrics to a song, and the second being a set of instructions. Additionally, some cash had been included, not an ungenerous amount. The instructions told me to call up Plunkett and O'Nelligan, inform them that I'd received the song from Lorraine's spirit, and sing it to them in whatever tune I fancied. If I complied with this, more money would be forthcoming. As it turned out, the investigators insisted on coming here to hear the song, so I was forced to memorize the lyrics. That is all.” She turned now to Smack Wilton. “As you see, Detective, I've done nothing illegal. Unorthodox perhaps, but not illegal.”