Towhee Get Your Gun

by J. R. Ripley

  Lou raised the rifle at us. “Now look what you’ve made me do!”

  I did the only thing I could think of. I kicked the candle and shoved the actress back inside her makeshift cell. The gun exploded and the bullet pinged as it shattered the cement block a foot from me. I dropped to the floor as Lou spun in fury. Two more shots ricocheted around the basement like angry hummingbirds.

  On hands and knees, I scurried madly, my shoulder brushing the wall, in a desperate attempt to reach the second candle. Another bullet exploded above me, and bits of debris hit me in the face.

  I launched myself forward and blew out a breath like I was blowing out the biggest birthday candle the world had ever seen.

  If this didn’t work and I couldn’t find a way out of this mess, it would be the last candle I ever blew out!

  Moving as quietly as possible, I turned myself around. I couldn’t see a thing. Then again, neither could Lou. Not a peep came from Ava Turner. I hoped she kept quiet. It was probably the only thing keeping her alive.

  “Miss Turner,” Lou said, plaintively, “please don’t be alarmed. I would never do anything to hurt you. I love you. You must know I love you!”

  What on earth? Lou had lost his mind!

  I scurried across the hard surface, my hands searching blindly, desperately for something I could use as a weapon. “Is that how you show somebody you love them?” I yelled at the top of my lungs. “By locking them in a basement closet?” Please, please let there be somebody up above who heard us.

  “Quiet!” screamed Lou. He fired blindly. “It was for her own protection. It was for your own protection, Ava!”

  “Who’s going to protect her from you, Lou?” I shouted.

  “Not you!” He fired again.

  “Careful,” I taunted. “You might hit your love, Ava!” Was I as crazy as Lou? I’d gotten him so worked up he was shooting blindly. Ava and I were both at risk of being shot and killed.

  “No!” Lou bellowed with rage. “Miss Turner, are you all right? Please, talk to me. Tell me that you love me and I can make everything right for you.” His breath came out in ragged snatches. “I will take care of you!”

  I had worked myself up close now. I could sense Lou’s legs right in front of me and, from the sound of his voice, I knew he had his back to me.

  I swallowed purposefully and extended my arms. If I could get him to lose his balance, maybe he’d drop the rifle and Ava and I could run for help.

  I threw myself at Lou’s knees, grabbed his calves and yanked.

  Lou screamed in surprise. But things didn’t turn out the way I’d planned. Lou fell on top of me. I heard the rifle clatter to the ground.

  I reached for it in the dark. I felt Lou’s hand instead, gripping the barrel. I climbed over his belly and grabbed the barrel too.

  Lou pulled and I pulled back. I didn’t know how long I could keep up this lopsided wrestling match. The theater manager was bigger and stronger than me.

  The lights came on suddenly. We both winced as the bulbs overhead illuminated our battle. Lou started to sit up and I slammed my free elbow into his flabby chin. He dropped his hold on the rifle and wrapped both hands around my exposed neck.

  My heart froze in fear as his fingers pressed into my soft flesh. Everything was looking blurry and dark.

  I heard steps running. Hands snatched the rifle from my fingers as if it were a toy.

  “Let her go.”

  Lou’s grip fell from my neck. As my vision cleared, I saw Cash Calderon standing to one side of Lou. The barrel of the rifle was pressed against his skull.

  31

  “Thanks for bringing the kids, Derek.” I snapped the lid back on the potato salad and returned it to the picnic basket. I half-heartedly shooed a fly away from my tuna sandwich and took a bite.

  “My pleasure.” Derek was stretched out on the red and orange checked picnic blanket, propped up on his elbows. He looked decidedly un-lawyer-like but no less handsome in a navy-blue T-shirt, khaki shorts, and sneakers.

  “Hey, what are you putting that potato salad away for?” growled Karl. “I could use seconds.”

  “Of course,” I said. I plopped a generous scoop of Mom’s potato salad onto Karl’s paper plate, though I knew full well the ex-chief of police had passed seconds several servings ago.

  “Me, too,” said Floyd. “Please,” he added. He was looking at his friend when he said it. Floyd held out his plate as I filled it.

  “More lemonade?” Both men nodded.

  “Any for you?” I said, turning my attention to Derek.

  “Nope.” He patted his flat belly. “All full up.”

  Derek’s daughter, Maeve, and her friend Will sat with their legs crossed on the grass. The small cage containing the now-recuperated towhee rested between them.

  I noticed Ms. Bryant with a T looking at us from behind a holly bush. I waved for her to come join us, and she took off in the other direction.

  “Well, I suppose it’s about time, kids.”

  “Can I do it?” asked Maeve, blue eyes wide with hope and anticipation.

  “It’s okay with me if it’s okay with Will,” I replied.

  “I’ll hold the cage,” Will said.

  Smiling wide, Derek’s daughter spoke softly to the towhee. “Okay, Sammy. You are all better. So you go fly free. Find your family or find a new one to adopt you.” The little towhee hopped toward the open door. She waved her finger at him. “And please try not to get hurt again.”

  The towhee cocked his eye at her. Sammy hesitated at the door, his claws grasping the lip. Suddenly, he fluttered his wings and flew upward.

  Maeve and Will were jumping up and down, shouting words of encouragement. We watched as Sammy circled the lawn several times then landed on the bird feeder, the one that I’d brought from Floyd’s old house. He snatched a sunflower and carried it over to a nearby pine, where he worked the nut free.

  I noticed tears pooling up in Floyd’s eyes, but I wasn’t going to say anything. Karl saw them too and even he kept his mouth shut. Quite a feat for the garrulous old man.

  I sighed wistfully.

  “Everything okay?” asked Derek, sitting up beside me, his shoulder brushing mine.

  “Huh?” I blushed. “Oh, sure.” What was I going to say? That I suddenly wondered when I would be a wife and mother? Watching children of my own play on the lawn? Going on picnics? I forced a smile. “Hey, how about some blueberry crumb pie? You’ve got to have room for some of my Aunt Betty’s blueberry pie.”

  “That definitely sounds too good to pass up.” He rubbed his hands in anticipation.

  “Me, too!” said Karl, scooting closer, even as he wolfed down the rest of his potato salad.

  I chuckled and cut slices for all of us. I gave Will and Maeve generous slices.

  “Thanks again for everything, Amy,” Floyd said between mouthfuls, his lips and tongue a pleasant purple. “The residents love the feeders.”

  “Yeah,” said Karl, who had already wiped his plate clean, “even the administration has decided it’s a good thing.”

  “They’ve added a bird identification book to the center’s library.” Floyd’s eyes were on the feeder as he ran his fingers through his beard.

  I patted his other hand lovingly. “I’m happy for you.”

  “What about you?” asked Floyd. “What’s going to happen to Birds and Bees?”

  I sighed heavily. “I’m not sure.” I’d done what I could. Hopefully, the townspeople would rally around the idea of keeping the old house at the corner and not allowing the redevelopment that a handful of others so desperately were pushing for.

  “I’d hate to see you lose the place,” added Derek. “But I’m not sure what more we can do.” He explained how he’d searched through all the town rules and regulations and even dug through the building records going back a hundred years.

  “If it’s any consolation,” he said, “if they do demolish your house, your ex-boyfriend and his partner will lose a portion
of their outdoor patio.”

  My back stiffened. “They will?” I noticed my hand was clutched around his forearm. Since he wasn’t complaining, I didn’t remove it. “How come?”

  “Their business sits a couple of feet over on your property. The previous owners of both your property and the brew pub signed an agreement years ago granting the business use of your land. That outdoor space had been undeveloped land before the garden center began operating business there. That agreement ended when Gertrude Hammer sold the property to you.”

  I squeezed his arm tighter. “Are you sure?”

  Derek shrugged. “As sure as can be. Why? It’s not exactly good news.”

  I smiled and kissed him on the cheek. “I wonder . . .”

  Floyd rose and dusted off the crumbs off his trousers.

  “Where are you going?” demanded Karl.

  “The feeders are getting low.”

  “Sit back down. I want to hear what happened when you nabbed those killers, Amy. You and your boyfriend can play kissy-face later.”

  My face heated up and I released Derek’s hand.

  Derek chuckled. “I wouldn’t mind hearing myself. I’ve only heard bits and snatches. And even those bits came from Dad, who got his information from Chief Kennedy.”

  “Well,” I began, warming to my subject, replaying the events in my mind like I was reliving a Broadway show, “at first I was certain that Patsy Klein had been murdered by mistake.”

  “In the wrong place at the wrong time,” interjected Floyd. “I remember you saying that.”

  I nodded. “But I couldn’t figure out why. Then, the more I talked to people, the more I learned, the more confused I got. I couldn’t come up with any reason that anyone would want to murder Ava Turner.

  “Then, when I learned that Patsy had been blackmailing August Mantooth, I started wondering if I had been wrong about my original theory.”

  “You started thinking that Patsy had been killed on purpose,” said Karl, “by this August Mantooth fellow.”

  “Or somebody else,” suggested Derek. “From what you and Dad have told me, plenty of people Miss Klein worked with disliked her immensely. Including your cousin Rhonda.”

  “She’d made a fool out of Eli Wallace and tangled with Nathan Longfellow just to name two,” Karl said. “Right, Amy?”

  “That’s right. She seemed to be a real troublemaker. Chief Kennedy told me they’d found several of the missing items from the theater in her room afterward.”

  “I’ll bet she was responsible for all those accidents around the theater,” said Karl. “I’ve seen my share of loonies, I’ll have you know.”

  “Be quiet and let Amy tell it,” complained Floyd.

  “You’re right, Karl,” I said in response to his earlier remarks. “I did suspect August. When I confronted him, he said he had been on the phone with his agent the entire time. He couldn’t have murdered Patsy.”

  “Was he telling the truth?” asked Derek.

  “According to Chief Kennedy, yes. August Mantooth had been on the phone with his agent in New York the entire time. The agent swears to it. Besides, we know now that Lou Ferris had murdered Patsy after all.”

  “I still don’t get why,” Floyd said, scratching his head. “She didn’t mean anything to him.”

  “No,” I agreed. “But Ava Turner did. Lou was completely smitten with her.” I explained that police had found his home overflowing with memorabilia related to the actress and her career.

  “Dad said Lou Ferris was on the board of trustees of the Ava Turner Museum.”

  I nodded. “Not only that, he was the driving force behind getting the museum set up in the first place.”

  “All for the love of a woman,” sighed Floyd.

  “Sick obsession, more like it.” I looked at Floyd out of the corner of my eye. Was the dear man missing his wife?

  “She is a real beauty,” Karl said with a wink.

  “I don’t know if Lou figured out who Patsy Klein really was—the stepdaughter of the actor Miss Turner shot and killed twenty years ago.

  “But he confessed to Ava, when he had her under lock and key, that he’d discovered that it was Patsy who was causing all the trouble at TOTS. First it was little things, like disrupting the show and some petty thievery. Then it escalated to sabotage and attempted murder.”

  “Like the rigged curtain rod that fell on LaChance and that Sampson woman,” Karl interrupted once more.

  “That’s right. Lou told Ava that he’d seen Patsy descending from the catwalk above the stage moments after the incident. That’s when he said he knew he had to get rid of her for good. And remember, witnesses say it fell only a foot from where Miss Turner was standing.”

  “So obviously it was intended for her.” Derek waved to his daughter, who was doing cartwheels on the grass. “A blow on the head from that height could have been lethal.”

  I concurred. “Lou couldn’t let it go on. He decided that the only way to save the show and, more importantly, Ava Turner, was to murder Patsy before she succeeded in doing away with Ava.”

  “Why didn’t Lou tell the police what was going on?” asked Karl, the ex-cop.

  “Who knows?” I answered. “Maybe he was afraid that without any evidence, the police wouldn’t take him seriously. Ava might have been killed before Chief Kennedy took any real action.”

  “I still don’t understand how he did it, Amy,” Floyd said. “You said it was a locked dressing room.”

  “It was,” I explained. “But there was a trapdoor under the wardrobe that led down to the basement. Having been at TOTs forever, Lou knew every inch of the place. And, as I discovered, there’s an entrance to the basement from Lou’s office.” That explained why Lou had refused to let Cash go down in the basement to work on the HVAC system.

  Floyd expressed surprise. “Trapdoor?”

  I nodded. “With one of those folding stairs attached.”

  “I know what you mean,” said Floyd. “We had one of those going up to our attic.”

  “Before it was a dressing room,” I explained, “the room had been part of a larger storeroom with access to the basement for convenience. We didn’t see the trapdoor earlier because of the Persian rug and wardrobe on top of it.” Lou had maneuvered the big, wheeled wardrobe over the trapdoor some days after the murder in an effort to keep its existence secret. “The way the rug was positioned, it simply flopped back into place once he’d stabbed Patsy and used the trapdoor to make his escape.”

  “No one would think to look for a murderer under a rug,” quipped Karl.

  “And all Lou had to do was go from his office, through the basement—” began Derek.

  “And up into Ava Turner’s locked dressing room!” finished Karl.

  Floyd pulled a face. “What about the gun?”

  I shrugged. “Lou admitted that he’d fired the gun. He wanted everyone to go to the dressing room. And he wanted to provide himself with an alibi. He was seen coming from his office.”

  “Clever,” admitted Floyd. “Lou stabbed Patsy Klein to death to keep her from harming Miss Turner. . . .” Floyd plucked at a blade of grass and stuck it between his lips.

  “He had taken Ava’s phone himself,” I said.

  Karl asked, “So Lou was the one who sent that text from Ava’s phone saying how she was going to kill herself?”

  “Yep,” I replied. “You have to hand it to Lou. He was pretty adept at creating confusion. He could have killed Patsy anytime, anywhere. But he chose to create an intriguing scene.”

  “All those years in show business must have rubbed off on him,” suggested Karl. “Man thought he was staging a show.”

  I nodded. “Instead, he was staging a murder.”

  “And, don’t forget,” said Derek after we were all silent for a moment, “he planted the murder weapon in the dressing room locker days after.”

  “And he went around taking potshots at Miss Turner!” Floyd said quickly, beating Karl to the punch.
/>   I nodded. “Again, clever. When he saw that folks thought that Ava Turner was the intended victim, he milked it for all it was worth. Instead of looking for motives for Patsy Klein’s murder, we were looking for someone trying, still trying, to murder Ava.”

  “That’s why he took shots at her out in her garden and she didn’t get hurt.”

  “Yep. He was even following her the night she came by my apartment. He shot my window after she’d left.” Lou, despite his harmless-looking appearance, had once been in the Navy and was an expert shot. That explained the tattoo swallow I’d first noticed on his wrist. He’d had it done in the Navy. The swallow is supposed to be good luck for sailors. Lou was going to need all the luck he could get now. “In the end, Lou decided the only way to really protect Ava was to lock her up. He locked her in the basement at TOTS and was planning to take her back to his house that night. He left her there with nothing but a couple of candles burning so nobody would notice the lights, a bottle of water, and a box of crackers.”

  “Talk about crackers,” quipped Karl. “Lou Ferris is as cracked as it gets.”

  “Maybe that will be his defense,” suggested Derek.

  “What about when Miss Turner got smacked in the head with that board with the nail in it?” asked Karl. “Patsy did that?”

  I shook my head. “Actually, Ava admitted that she’d done that herself.”

  “She did?” There was disbelief in Derek’s voice. “Why?”

  I arched my brow. “According to her, she did it to create drama.” I formed air quotes with my fingers.

  “Actresses.” Floyd chuckled. “That explains why she didn’t really get hurt. Only the very tiniest of knots on her skull.”

  “If you ask me, a man’s got to be unhinged to do all the things Lou Ferris did for a woman.” Karl wiggled his cane.

  “I don’t know about that,” replied Derek. “Not that I’m suggesting anything so extreme as murder, but for the right woman, there are a lot of things a man might consider.”