by Edie Claire
“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 w
as 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.”
“You know of any link between this woman and Andrew Marconi?”
Leigh shook her head. “No, but she could have been involved in his purchasing the building.”
“Or possibly the zoning battle,” Maura added.
“Case closed!” Leigh said cheerfully. “Good. I never liked that woman.” She thought again of Sonia Crane’s overexuberant greeting of Warren, and it occurred to her that she had completely forgotten to question him later about how they knew each other. Damned mushy brain!
“It could be a woman,” Maura mused, thinking out loud. “Carrying dead weight up a ladder and shoving it through a trap door wouldn’t be easy for most, but Marconi was a little guy. Just five feet five and a hundred and ten pounds. A strong woman could do it.”
“Sonia’s no bigger than Lenna,” Leigh admitted. “But she could have had an accomplice.”
“I’ll check her out, Koslow,” Maura promised. “In the meantime, don’t talk to her. Don’t talk to anyone else about her, either. It will be interesting to see how the news about Marconi affects her desire to buy the property.”
Leigh couldn’t help but smile. Generally, when she found bodies, the killer ended up being some obscure player she never suspected until the last possible moment, usually after she had somehow gotten herself thoroughly embroiled in the mess, unwittingly endangering herself and possibly even getting arrested. But this time was different. This time she had the obvious answer right out of the gate and no reason whatsoever to be any more personally involved. She could merely sit back, relax, and watch the professionals get their woman.
What could possibly go wrong with that?
Chapter 9
“By the way,” Leigh said later that night as Warren got ready for bed, “you never did tell me how you know Sonia Crane.”
Her husband threw her a guarded look. “Didn’t I?”
“Um… no,” Leigh responded, stroking the black Persian cat that lay purring on her stomach as she reclined. Mao Tse was as old as the hills and barely weighed enough to be a paperweight, but in her few waking hours, the cat still had spark. “Obviously, you met when you were chairing the County Council. My guess is she wanted something from you.”
Warren had the nerve to smirk.
“Stop that!” Leigh said irritably. “You know what I mean. Now tell me what happened with her. And why you didn’t tell me before.”
“I did tell you before,” he said calmly. “I told you about it when it happened, four years ago. Remember the huge flap over that condominium development on the North Side? Sonia’s firm stood to make a lot of money if the project got approved, but there was strong opposition from some local interests, as well as competition from a rival development company out of state. The woman drove me and everyone else on the council absolutely crazy with her lobbying. She would show up outside every meeting with these crazy-high heels on and start handing out plastic pens with dollar signs on them. We would go to the parking garage to find our cars mysteriously washed and polished with another pen stuck under the wiper blade. Fruit baskets appeared outside office doors — casseroles at people’s houses. The day of the vote, a skywriter spelled out “Say yes to progress!” over Point State Park. Never mind what was ethical, the woman skirted on the absolute edge of what was legal — and probably crossed it a few times, though she never did so blatantly enough where we could prove it.”
Leigh started to sit up, but when Mao Tse unsheathed her claws to hang on, Leigh quickly lay back down again. “Wait… I do remember. That was when I found the carton of baked ziti on our doorstep and some weird pen stuck behind the mailbox flag. Right? But I thought the lawyer doing all that was a man!”
Warren tried, but failed, to conceal another smirk. “Did you? I don’t know why you would. I’m quite sure I never mentioned a gender one way or the other.”
Leigh growled under her breath. “You are…” Then a thought struck. “Wait a minute. You approved that development!”
“As it turns out, yes.”
“You let her get away with it!”
Warren frowned. “I didn’t let her get away with anything. There were very sound reasons to approve the project. The joke was on her, actually, because her efforts were a complete waste. I knew from the beginning the proposal was almost certain to pass.”
“But you didn’t tell her that?”
“Why would I?”
“Gee, I don’t know, maybe so she’d keep her clothes on?”
Warren sighed and sat down on the bed. Mao Tse lifted her head toward him and spit-hissed.
“Good kitty,” Leigh responded, stroking her lovingly. There really was something magical about having a cat that worshipped you and hated the entire rest of the world. “You should have told me it was a woman at the time,” she said sulkily.
“Leigh,” Warren began patiently, “being pestered by lobbyists was always a part of my job when I was in politics. You know that. You also know I could handle it. Was it so wrong for me to shield you from some of the more unpleasant details about some of the more unpleasant people I had to deal with? There was no benefit to your knowing — it would only upset you.”
Leigh growled under her breath again. “So what you’re telling me is, to this day, Sonia Crane thinks her efforts to schmooze you were successful. That’s why she was fawning all over you when she saw you at the building.”
He shrugged. “Possibly. I don’t care what she thinks.”
“Even if she murdered Andrew Marconi?”
Warren made a face. “What?”
Leigh summarized her conversation with Maura that afternoon, confident that “don’t tell anyone” didn’t include Warren. “So,” she finished, “if Sonia’s enthusiasm for buying the building suddenly cools now that word about Marconi is out, we’ll have our woman.”
Warren looked skeptical. “Not buying it.”
“Why not?” Leigh questioned, annoyed. “It makes perfect sense!”
“No, it doesn’t,” he argued. “If she had managed to buy the building, what would she do with the body then? Who says she could dispose of it any better the second time? And if she didn’t, she’d be the obvious suspect — much more obvious than if she’d left the whole thing alone. You just said that before now, she wasn’t a suspect at all.”
Leigh considered. She gnashed her teeth. “I still think she did it. Which is a good reason to keep the Pack out of there.”
“We’ve been over this,” he countered. “The Pack made a very eloquent case earlier for why they should be allowed to finish their jobs in the basement. There is absolutely no reason that a murder committed nearly a decade ago should pose any risk to anyone working in the building today. Maura agreed. You agreed.”
“Under duress, and against my better judgment,” Leigh maintained. “There are some things kids shouldn’t be exposed to.”
“I agree, but the fact remains that they’ve already been exposed, and unavoidably so. Under the circumstances, I think it’s healthier for them to go back and work through it than avoid the place forever. They said so themselves. You should give them more credit.” His brown eyes turned suddenly resentful. “You should give me more credit.”
Leigh didn’t pretend not to know what he was talking about. “Warren,” she began apologetically, “I told you, my first instinct was to tell you about the body; I would have told you as soon as I could talk, but we got distracted.”
“You had plenty of time before I left,” he insisted. “You could have taken me aside where the Pack couldn’t hear.”
Leigh felt terrible. Then she got inspired. “Was it so wrong for me to shield you from some of the more unpleasant details of my career as a corpse magnet?” she posed. “There was no benefit to your seeing the body — it would only upset you.”
Now Warren’s teeth clenched. His brown eyes, however, betray
ed a sparkle. “Fine. I’ll let it go. No more guilt trip. But you have to promise the same. No more questions about me and my ancient history with Sonia Crane — or any other female lobbyist, for that matter. Deal?”
Leigh considered. “Deal.”
Warren smiled at her and leaned in for a kiss, but Leigh suddenly drew back. “Wait! Just one more question. Sonia didn’t really ever take her clothes off, did she?”
His eyes twinkled with amusement. “No. She did not.”
“Okay, then,” Leigh said, sitting up a bit to finish the kiss without crushing the cat on her abdomen. “We have a deal.”
Mao Tse spit-hissed again. But this time, neither of them paid attention.
***
The message Leigh received from her corgi was clear. I can do this all day, you know. I’ve got nothing but time. For the last half hour she had been pacing restlessly from one side of her house to the other, staring out the windows at nothing and doing a U-turn around the kitchen table. With every step Chewie had been attached to her heels, hoping against hope that this time, when she got to the kitchen, she would reach into the bin on the counter and give him a treat. He had hit the jackpot twice already.
“You’ve had enough to eat today, Chewie,” Leigh announced, stopping a moment. “Why don’t you go lie down and relax?”
The dog stopped when she stopped. Then he sat politely and stared up at her with the same intense, eternally hopeful expression with which he looked at anyone who ever said anything to him at any time.
Feed me.
“You need to get out of the house, boy,” Leigh declared, stooping to scratch behind his giant perked ears. “We both do. All this peaceful silence is driving me bonkers.”
If she thought she would enjoy a day of restful solitude in an empty house without kids or husband, she was wrong. Ordinarily, it would sound like heaven. But she had taken a week off work at her advertising agency, not knowing how things would go with Allison’s surgery, and even if she chose to renege now, she had nothing at home to work on. Warren was busy with meetings in town and virtually the entire rest of her family was there. Cara had insisted on supervising the Pack herself today, removing any need for Leigh to return. And Bess had both Frances and Lydie busy there today as well. Tonight was the first real rehearsal, and Bess was in a tizzy over having lost an entire day from her renovation schedule due to what she dismissively referred to as “the unpleasantness.”
