Movie Palace Cozy Mystery Boxed Set: Books 1-3

by Margaret Dumas

  June looked feverish. Her eyes kept darting back to the prone figure of Cora, who again moaned and moved. June had been a prisoner somewhere in the office when I’d knocked on her door the day before.

  They were both near the hole in the stage that Brandon had fallen through. Dangerously close. And the orange traffic cones I’d place at the four corners of the trap were no protection from its edge.

  “Nora, it’s her!” Trixie said urgently.

  “I know,” I murmured, only half paying attention because I’d just registered that something was out of place. The wrappings for the rental furniture, the ones Brandon had never fetched from the back of the stage before he fell, were now piled next to the trap.

  “Cora was going to burn down the Palace,” June said, frantic. “She was going to leave me in here to die. Thank God I was able to get free and text you. Here, help me tie her up.” She kicked the pile of wrappings toward me. The pile of straps and much-used padded blankets that looked greasy and incredibly flammable.

  “Nora, that’s the real estate lady who went into the balcony with Sam!” Trixie said.

  “I know,” I said, not caring if June heard me. “Don’t worry. I’m going to—”

  “No!” Trixie stepped in front of me as I was about to pick up a strap. “Not her! Her!” She pointed at June. “She’s the one I saw go into the balcony!”

  I froze. June, focused on me, seemed to sense something had changed.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure!” June and Trixie both yelled at the same time.

  Then I saw what June held in her hand. A lighter.

  Cora moaned again and tried to sit up. “Don’t move!” I told her. If she rolled over on her side, she could plummet through the trap.

  I met June’s eyes. She knew I knew.

  Trixie stood between us, her arms stretched out in either direction, as if she could hold us both back. She swiveled her head from June to me. “Nora?” Her voice was uncertain. She didn’t know what to do. I didn’t either.

  “Why did you do it, June? Why did you kill Warren and Sam?”

  She looked at me for a moment, as if trying to make up her mind. Probably about whether to kill me now or kill me later.

  I swallowed. “I thought Cora was the killer. I thought she and McMillan were working together.”

  June barked a laugh. “Cora? Please. She was just doing what Stan and I told her to do.” Her eyes narrowed on me. “You thought he was the big bad mastermind, didn’t you? You thought he was the one buying up the neighborhood. I could tell the minute you met him. You gave him all the credit. Well he wasn’t. I am. I’m the one in charge of the whole thing.”

  “In charge?” I echoed. “You killed two people.”

  “Not because I wanted to!” she shouted. “I didn’t have a choice. Warren never should have been at that bar that night. He never should have seen Cora and Stan together. He had only himself to blame!”

  “Nora,” Trixie whispered. “What should I do?”

  But there was nothing she could do. I shook my head.

  “Warren thought you’d freak out when he told you he saw them,” I said to June. “He thought Cora was going behind your back to work with your competition.”

  “She was just our intermediary,” June said. “Our carrier pigeon. I’m not stupid enough to use texts or emails that could leave a record. So I used her.” She looked down at Cora with disdain. “She hated Stan. All I had to do is tell her I was going to set him up for a fall and she did anything I told her to.”

  “But Warren wouldn’t have,” I said.

  “Warren would have told everyone he’d seen them, which meant someone might start putting things together. I had to contain the situation.”

  “Contain the situation? By killing him?” It came to me suddenly that all the rumors about a burglary gone wrong had come from June. She’d been covering her tracks from the beginning. “What did you do? Did you follow him home that night?”

  “He sent me a video,” she said. “He was disgustingly drunk, and the video showed Stan and Cora together in the bar. I had to get that video, and I had to keep him quiet.” Her face twitched at the memory. “I thought, as drunk as he was, that I’d be able to do something to him on the street. Take his phone and make it look like a mugging or something. Maybe a hit and run.”

  “But Other Girlfriend Ingrid was there,” I said. “She was with him.”

  “What did they all see in him?” she asked, exasperated. And just for a moment she was the woman I’d come to think of as a friend.

  I shook my head. She was not that woman. “So you waited until Ingrid left in the morning.”

  “And then I just knocked on his door,” she said.

  “And killed him.”

  Her face twitched again. “I did what I had to do!”

  “Why you?” I asked. “Why not McMillan?”

  She lifted her head. “Oh, come on. You know any man who swaggers that much is going to be completely useless when it actually comes down to doing something.”

  I got it, but I wasn’t much in the mood to have a sisterly chinwag about useless men. “Does he know?” I asked. “Does he know you did it?”

  “He’s too much of a coward to face the truth,” she said. “When I saw him on Monday, here on this stage, I knew. He couldn’t handle it. He just wanted to prance around and take his big bow.”

  “After you did all the work,” I said. “Sam told me that’s the way it was. You did all the work and he took all the credit.”

  “Yes, well.” She blinked. “I wouldn’t have minded if he took the credit for Warren. And believe me, he’s going to take the credit for this.”

  I shuddered, then something she’d said caught up with me. Something about McMillan prancing around. “You sabotaged the trap door,” I said. “You must have known about it from when you worked here as a teenager. But how did you get in? And when?”

  She smirked. “It wasn’t exactly difficult to slip downstairs during a movie on Sunday.” She looked down at Cora, who seemed to be following the conversation groggily.

  “Nora!” Trixie whispered urgently. “How do I work your thingie?” She pointed to the phone I still clutched in my hand. I’d been writing a message to Jackson when I’d been startled. All I had to do was press Send. But the minute June saw me do that, she could drop her lighter in the pile of furniture pads and shove Cora through the trap.

  But what if I didn’t press Send? What if I just put the phone down? Would Trixie be able to muster her strength and concentrate hard enough to hit the Send button? It was hard enough for her to move a physical thing, could she interact with an electronic one?

  I didn’t see any other option.

  “June. Put the lighter down.” I held up my phone lightly, between two fingers. “I’ll put down my phone. It’s just us here. You put down the lighter.”

  I set the phone gently on the stage. I didn’t expect her to put down the lighter, but now Trixie could do her best with the Send button.

  June watched narrowly. So did Cora. I spoke quickly, urgently, to distract June. “You wanted McMillan to fall through the trap.” I had to keep her full attention. I didn’t want her to notice that Cora was more alert. “You just said it—he liked to prance around the stage when he spoke. You took a chance he’d be the one to fall.”

  “So much for luck being on my side,” June said bitterly. “I would have loved it if Stan fell, but you’d have done just as well. I almost wish it would have been you. Then we wouldn’t all have to be here now.”

  Trixie was kneeling over the phone. I could see the look of concentration on her face as she pressed her finger to the screen. It went straight through.

  I looked away. “Did you set the fire at the café?” I asked June. “How did that fit in?”

  Her face cont
orted. “I thought Stan would get the blame. If he wasn’t going to be helpful, why did I need him anymore? And everyone knew he was buying up that whole side of the street. Who else would try to burn out the only holdout on the block?”

  “Were you in on it?” I asked. “Is that the big secret? That you were partners with him in the redevelopment?”

  “You have no idea.” Her words dripped with distain.

  “So tell me. And tell me how you broke in to the café.”

  “Breaking into a restaurant with no alarm system wasn’t exactly a challenge,” she said, mustering a bit of her usual poise.

  “But you made a mistake,” I said. “You couldn’t leave by the café’s back door after you set the fire, and you had to leave the locks open on the front door.”

  “Which wouldn’t have mattered if you and that gangster hadn’t played the heroes and put the fire out,” she spat.

  What I wouldn’t give for that gangster to show up now. But he’d left after the last show to take Gabriela home. We had plans to meet for breakfast. If I was still alive for breakfast.

  Cora was now fully conscious. She looked from me to June.

  “What about Sam?” I asked June, desperate to keep her attention. “Why did she deserve to die?”

  June’s face became a mask of anger. “She tried to blackmail me! She figured it out because of something you said. Blackmail! Can you imagine? The nerve of some people! She deserved to be pushed off that balcony!”

  Trixie looked up from the phone. “What?”

  “She expected me to pay her to keep her mouth shut?” June railed. “There was no way that was going to happen. I just gave her one good push and—”

  “What?” Trixie yelled. She leapt to her feet. “You pushed her off the balcony!?”

  June didn’t hear a thing. “—Then I ducked back into the shadows and blended in with everyone who came rushing in,” she finished.

  “How DARE you?!” Trixie shouted. I’d only ever seen her that angry once before, and something terrible had happened. “Nobody should get pushed off a balcony!”

  Then everything happened at once. Trixie advanced on June just as Cora thrust out both her legs, swiping June’s feet out from under her. June crashed forward, gripping the lighter and igniting it as she tumbled, screaming, through the trap door.

  The lighter hit the pile of blankets and flames caught with a whoosh, but I was already moving. I had to get to the fire extinguisher before the flames spread.

  I sprinted to the side of the stage, pulled the extinguisher off the wall and turned. I didn’t see a theater in flames. I didn’t see Cora writhing in fiery agony. I saw Trixie, spread eagled over the pile of blankets. She looked over to me, dazed. “Nora?”

  “Trixie!” I dropped the extinguisher and stumbled back to her. Cora was coughing and sitting up, and I didn’t care if she thought I was crazy.

  “Did I put it out?” Trixie asked, sitting up at the edge of the trap and looking at the singed wrappings. She put a hand up to her head to straighten her cap.

  “You did,” I told her. “I don’t know how, but you did.”

  “Gee, I’m glad.” She brushed off her jacket, not that it had any evidence of the fire.

  Cora didn’t seem to notice that I was talking to a ghost. She was looking down into the hole.

  The room below was too dark to see anything, but June made no sound.

  Chapter 37

  “June knew I hated McMillan,” Cora said. “We worked together years ago, and he was a complete pig. I got out of real estate completely for a few years because of him and guys like him. When June asked me to get involved, I agreed because I thought it was all to take him down.”

  We were in the lobby, sitting on a gurney while once again San Francisco’s police, fire, and EMT units went about the business of dealing with something horrible that had happened at the Palace.

  June wasn’t dead, but her fall had been much worse than Brandon’s. The team who’d put her in their ambulance said she’d be lucky to ever walk again. Not that there would be much walking once she was in prison for multiple murders.

  “I thought she was trying to get proof that he was crooked,” Cora went on compulsively. “So she could drum him out of the business.” She closed her eyes. “I didn’t know she was just as bad as he was until it was too late.”

  “She was going to kill us both tonight,” I said.

  “She was right about me being stupid,” Cora said bitterly. “She told me we were going to catch McMillan in the act tonight after the last show. That he planned to set a fire and that we’d get it all on video and expose him for what he is. And I went right along with her, slipping backstage and hiding until everyone left. I didn’t even know she’d knocked me out until I woke up with you talking to her.”

  “She would have burned down the Palace,” I said. “She must have known I’d fight any plans to take it over, so she decided to destroy it and get rid of me along with you. And I’m sure she had a way to implicate McMillan for it all.”

  “I can’t believe I was so stupid,” Cora said.

  There was a lot of that going around.

  “June must have been the one telling the press that the balcony was faulty,” I reasoned.

  “In every interview she gave,” Cora nodded. “And she gave one to anyone who’d listen.”

  I’d thought McMillan wanted to drive the price of the theater down by having it labeled unsafe. I’d had the right plot, but the wrong evil mastermind.

  “What about Sam?” I asked. “I know June pushed her, but she didn’t die from her fall. She died at the hospital. You told me, in the waiting room that day, that June had never left Sam’s side. That she’d brought her flowers.”

  Cora knew what I was asking. “I don’t know.” She looked up at the ceiling. “I don’t know if she did something to Sam in the hospital. All I know is, either way, June killed her.”

  There was a lot more I wanted to ask her, like if June had been behind all the social media rumors about Warren, and what she’d done with his phones. But that would all have to wait. The EMTs were ready to take Cora to the hospital to check out her head wound, and just as they wheeled her away, I heard an unmistakably deep and commanding voice.

  “Hello, Detective,” I said as Jackson approached. “I should probably catch you up.”

  “Oh, Nora! I’m so glad you’re okay! I’m so glad I’m okay! I’m so glad the Palace is okay!”

  Trixie was bursting by the time I met her up in the office later. It was after two in the morning.

  “We’re only okay because you stopped that fire before it got started,” I told her. “How did you do it?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. All I remember is being so mad at that lady that I could have spit. How dare she push someone off the balcony?” She stamped a petite foot.

  “Trixie, you were so brave,” I told her.

  “And angry,” she nodded. “You know something, Nora? I’ve noticed that I’m a lot stronger when I’m angry. Have you noticed that?”

  “I have,” I told her. There was a lesson there, somewhere.

  “I didn’t plan to put out any fires,” she said. “I just wanted to slap that lady so hard, or kick her or something, so I started for her, but then she fell, and I fell, and it just…worked out.” She dimpled.

  “It worked out really well,” I told her. I was supremely grateful that the one physical trait Trixie manifested was her coldness. I’d felt it, Callie’s mother had felt it, and I knew that if not for her chilly presence falling on the lighter just as it hit the flammable pile of wrappings, I might be sifting through the ashes of the Palace right now. Or worse.

  “Gee, it’s late,” Trixie said, looking out the window. She started to shimmer a little, a sure sign that she was exhausted. “Do you think everybody will be gone soon? I thin
k I could use a rest.”

  “Of course you could,” I told her. “You’ve earned it. But don’t stay away too long, okay?”

  She waved a hand. “’Course not. There’s too much going on around this place lately. You need me!” She grinned and faded away.

  Truer words were never spoken by a ghost.

  Jackson gave me a ride home eventually, but I was far too wired to think about sleep. I scrolled through the messages on my phone, marveling at how much could change in a few hours.

  The messages were largely similar, most of them from LA people who had dropped me once Ted left. Now that he’d publicly called me his “best friend”—and I still couldn’t figure that out—I was apparently back on everyone’s call list. I scrolled through them pretty quickly. But one message stood out, both for its length and its subject matter. It was from Otis Hampton.

  Okay, Nora. If you don’t want to talk I’ll just say everything I have to say. First, I want to tell you that I know what Ted did with your money. Beyond that, I think I know how to get it back. And I very much want to get it back because I very much want to thwart any plans Ted Bishop has. I realize it’s petty of me, but there it is. Priya is a woman who requires a very expensive lifestyle, and I want her to realize Ted will not be able to provide it. I won’t lie. I want to win her back. Even if you’ve moved on—and I’m happy for you if you have—surely you still want what you deserve. And surely you’ll understand if I’m not ready to give up on Priya yet. Consider me your ally, and don’t hesitate to let me know if there is anything I can do to make your life easier. If it makes Ted’s life harder, so much the better. I have the kind of resources that can solve a lot of problems.

  Okay. Well. I should probably call him. But not at four in the morning.

  With Café Madeline out of commission, Hector and I had agreed to meet at a diner a few blocks away the next morning. I’d gotten about twenty minutes sleep since confronting a killer and nearly burning to death, but for some reason he wanted to make everything about him.