The Soprano Wore Falsettos (The Liturgical Mysteries)

by Mark Schweizer

  I went behind the counter, took the coffee pot off its warmer and poured myself a cup. Pete must have heard me come in because he came out of the kitchen a half-beat later.

  “Did you see this?” I handed him the flyer.

  “Noylene’s Beautifery?”

  “I’m hoping she’s ordered a neon sign,” I said. “Something in reds and yellows.”

  “Noylene’s Beautifery?”

  “Look, Pete. It’s her shop. She can call it what she wants.”

  “I’m the mayor. We have tourists. She cannot call it Noylene’s Beautifery!”

  “I believe that she’s already incorporated and has her business license with the state.”

  “Arrrgh!” said Pete.

  “Look on the bright side,” I said. “With a name like Noylene’s Beautifery, she’ll either go out of business in two months, or it’ll become a bizarro, cutting-edge, cult-like, styling salon that people will flock to. Noylene will be charging four hundred dollars a haircut. Either way, it’s win-win.”

  Pete nodded. “Yeah. It might just work. That’s really, really clever. Hey, wait a minute. Do you think she’s that smart?”

  “Could be,” I said, sipping my coffee.

  “Have you heard from Rhiza? Who’d have thought one of us would win something like that?” Pete was referring to the three of us, he and I and Rhiza Walker née Golden, who were in the music department together at Chapel Hill. “The rich get richer, I suppose.”

  “I suppose,” I said. “Now, let’s see.” I held up three fingers. “I’m rich, Rhiza’s richer, and you’re…”

  “Hush your mouth and stand up for a second,” said Pete.

  “What for?” I asked.

  “Just stand up.”

  I stood up, an impish grin spreading across my face.

  “Are those?” Pete grabbed hold of my waistband. “Yep…I knew it!” he laughed. “Expando-pants! You got yourself a pair!”

  “Let’s just keep this between us,” I said, feeling like the kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “No need to spread this around.”

  He lowered his voice conspiratorially. “It’s just between us. But how do you like them?”

  “You were right,” I said. “I’m never going back.”

  • • •

  Nancy was brushing the snow off the windshield of her car as I walked up to the station. It was still coming down and the temperature was dropping.

  “Did you get a chance to talk to the soloist?” I asked. “Renee Tatton?”

  “Nope. She didn’t answer the phone, and I can’t find her. I talked to Meg, though. She said that she thought that Ms. Tatton would be at choir practice tonight. Maybe you can ask her a few questions after practice. Or send her down here tomorrow.”

  “I’ll do one or the other,” I said.

  “That’s something about Russ Stafford, isn’t it,” said Nancy, as she got into the Nissan. I had filled her in on Meg and Ruby’s exposé this morning. “By the way, I also got a call from the state police. They want to know if we need any help. Do you think we poor mountain folk can figure this one out?”

  “Yassum,” I said, in my best hillbilly-ese. “But, what we sorely needs, Mizz Parsky, is some clues.”

  Chapter 13

  I was on my way to see Memphis. I didn’t tell Francine. Not that she would have minded. No, I was sure she wouldn’t, I told myself. But I was lying like a Welsh shepherd at an ASPCA inquiry.

  Memphis lived in midtown. A penthouse suite. Apparently the Presiding Bishop had extended his influence into the real estate market. The name on the building was Bishop Towers. A nice address. An address you could hang a shingle on and say you made it or a couple of million of them if they were a buck apiece.

  The doorman was only a Right Reverend. I had expected a Very Reverend at the least--maybe an Extremely Reverend. Still, once the epaulets had been sown on the cassock, you had to kiss the ring.

  “I’m the Right Reverend Sherman,” he said with Anglican snoot dripping from every pore. “Do you have an appoint-ment?”

  “You bet I do, bub,” I said. “Tell Memphis I’m here, will ya?” I lit a stogy.

  “I’ll call Miss Belle, and there’s no smoking,” he said, flipping his purple cassock as he executed a perfect ecclesiastical pirouette and headed toward the concierge desk.

  I lit two more cigars just for spite and looked around. The lobby was as opulent and obvious as a Southern Baptist’s gold eyetooth. There were fountains, jabats, torchieres, pedestals, swags, cornices, sconces, tassels, finials and a whole bunch of other decorations that I could only guess at. It was worth a fortune, or I wasn’t smoking out of all three sides of my mouth. In a moment, the Right Reverend called me over and pointed to the elevator.

  “Top floor,” he said with obvious disdain. “See if you can manage to find it.” I could feel my ire starting to swell like week-old roadkill on hot asphalt in the Texas sun, but then I remembered that Dr. Phil said that it wasn’t good to keep anger bottled up, so I walked over and slapped the priest in the head with a fermenting mackerel I kept in my coat for just such an occasion.

  “Pay attention, Padre,” I said, slipping the fish back into my trench. “I ain’t sayin’ this twice. Next time I see you, you’d better have read The Confession of St. Ambrose. Especially the part about humility. Capice?”

  He nodded and wiped a loose fin from his hair.

  “Now beat it,” I said, punching the button for the penthouse.

  • • •

  Meg and I walked up to the choir loft together. We turned the corner at the top of the stairs and entered the loft to see a person in every chair and three basses sitting on the steps. Twenty-three people, several of them actual singers.

  “Welcome back,” they called, as I walked down to the organ. I felt guilty, but not that guilty.

  “I’m not back,” I groused in my best curmudgeonly intonation. “I’m just subbing for myself until Easter.”

  “Huh?” said Rebecca. “How can you sub for yourself?”

  “Never mind,” I said. “Now tell me what you guys are working on.”

  “Didn’t you pick something out for us?” asked Georgia.

  “No. I’m just subbing. I’m playing tomorrow night for the Maundy Thursday service and Sunday Morning for Easter. Then I’m off to Morganton the next Sunday and maybe Hickory the week after that.”

  “I heard you were playing for a Pirate Eucharist,” said Randy. “I think we all might take a road trip. It’s Low Sunday anyway.”

  “What’s a Pirate Eucharist?” asked Marjorie.

  “It’s like a Clown Eucharist, except with pirates,” said Christina.

  “That sounds great,” said Rebecca. “Arrrgh. Let’s plan on it.”

  “Arrrgh,” said the rest of the choir in unison. All except Meg, who closed her eyes in silent prayer.

  I struggled to regain control. Control that I’d never had, as I recalled — not in all the years I had been choir director.

  “I don’t know what you’re singing tomorrow night and Sunday,” I said, “but you must have been rehearsing something.”

  “Here’s our folder,” said Fred. “This is what we were practicing. By the way, did you bring your latest detective story? I’m really looking forward to it.” Fred was one of the four choir members who stuck it out when Agnes took over. I opened the folder and flipped through the music. There was a piece entitled Love Grew Where The Blood Fell, a two-part arrangement of Beethoven’s Hallelujah from Christ on the Mount of Olives, and something called Feel The Nails.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t bring it,” I said, flipping through the three pieces. “But I’ll have some copies tomorrow night.”

  “He’s not getting any better,” Meg whispered to Fred, just loud enough for me to hear.

  “Can’t we just sing what we sang last year?” Christina said. “No one’s going to remember what we did. We still know it, and most of us have never rehearsed this other stuff.”
r />   “Good point,” I said. “What did we sing? Anyone remember?”

  “We did the Shephard Tenebrae service on Thursday,” said Mark Wells, “but we had a couple of pieces for Palm Sunday we didn’t do last year.”

  “I remember,” I said. “The Shephard piece is too long for the service this year. We could do Casals’ O Vos Omnes tomorrow night if a couple of the sopranos can still sing the high notes, and some Messiah choruses on Easter. Would that be okay with everyone?”

  No one was used to me asking their opinion about the choir’s repertoire, and they were too surprised to do anything but nod.

  Elaine, Rebecca and Fred went down to the choir room to get the Messiah scores and O Vos Omnes while the rest of the choir chatted. The console had been cleaned, and I took the time to change most of the presets on the organ. We had managed to make it through most of the anthem when Renee Tatton made her entrance in a whirl of angora, capri pants, and high heels, carrying a snifter of white wine.

  “Sorry. Sorry I’m late,” she announced loudly as she came into the loft, drowning out the choir’s attempts at pronouncing “attendite et videte.” The rehearsal ground to a halt as most of the choir encountered Ms. Tatton, up close and personal, for the first time. She swooped down to the front row, her arms arched in semi-graceful dance movements, her snifter pointing her way.

  “Lovely to see you, dear,” she said to Rebecca and the other altos by default, as she floated by the section. “So good of you to join the choir.” I could actually feel Rebecca bristle from three chairs and an organ bench away.

  It was Raymond Chandler who wrote, “From thirty feet away, she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away, she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away.” He might well have been talking about Renee Tatton. I would have guessed that she was in her early fifties, but looked, from a distance, to be about thirty — the key words being “from a distance.” From closer, however, her liberally applied makeup couldn’t hide the tightness around her eyes, the face that might be riding a very fast motorcycle or the plumped lips that could have once belonged to a duck. But her most astounding attribute was her chest, hoisted proudly aloft like a photo finish in a dirigible race.

  “Holy cow,” whispered Steve from the bass section. “How does she stand up?”

  “And why would she want to?” muttered Mark, with a leer. I could tell that the bass section was on a roll. “Hey,” he said, “did you guys hear about Rhiza?” Everyone grunted in the affirmative.

  “What are we singing?” Renee asked, taking a sip of her wine and picking up the Casals anthem. “Oooo, I love this one.”

  “Great,” I said. “Then let’s get back to it, shall we? Measure sixteen, please.”

  • • •

  Renee Tatton was on the front row, and, since she’d already made enemies of the entire soprano and alto sections, I was ready to make myself a hero and call her down for an overactive warble that I suspected was skulking behind the facade of youth. But alas, it was not to be. Renee, it turned out, had quite a lovely choral singing voice. There was a bit of age to be sure, but nothing like I had expected from a woman in her sixth decade, especially an opera diva. When we switched to the Handel choruses, she managed the moving lines with ease and flexibility. I’d never heard anything like it — certainly not from a woman pushing sixty. I was shocked. The sopranos actually sounded pretty good. I looked over at Meg. She was glowering. I made a few pointless suggestions to flex my choir director muscles and decided to call it a night.

  “Do you know what’s going on tomorrow night?” asked Elaine. “During the service, I mean.”

  “No, I don’t,” I said, suddenly remembering Marilyn’s warning. “Regular service music, I guess, and the anthem. We’ll figure it out when I see the bulletin tomorrow.”

  “There’s a foot-washing,” said Elaine. “Are we singing any foot-washing anthems?”

  “Nope. I’ll just play something.”

  “Then we’ll be going down to the front and nailing our sins to the cross,” Elaine continued.

  “Excuse me?” I growled, amid laughter from the choir. Then I regained my composure and said calmly, “I shall have to play some ‘nailing’ music for that as well. I’m just the substitute. By the way,” I added, “is there anything…umm…out of the ordinary for Easter?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Elaine. “But you never know.”

  Chapter 14

  The door to Memphis Belle’s penthouse suite was ajar which struck me as odd because the rest of the penthouse, from what I could see through the glass, reminded me more of a carafe or perhaps a decanter. The door was definitely ajar--a big No. 25 pickle jar or one of those Mason jars, the kind with the wide mouths like that joke about the wide-mouth frog everyone keeps telling even though it isn’t funny. I screwed off the lid and went in.

  It didn’t take long to locate Memphis. I had suspected that she was a swinger, and now she was proving me right, hanging from the balcony of the second story landing, swaying back and forth like a metronome set on andante or maybe molto allargando or even piu lento if the killer happened to be Mozart which I was pretty sure it wasn’t because Mozart had already been dead for over two-hundred years, murdered himself by someone as nasty as the person who killed Memphis Belle. I was convinced it was a homicide because no woman I knew would be caught dead in a lime green pants-suit ensemble after Labor Day. It was one of those things called a clue, and I was, after all, a trained detective. I shook my head in time with the beat. This was going to be a long weekend.

  • • •

  I answered the phone on the second ring on what turned out to be a snowy Maundy Thursday morning. I’d already been up for a couple of hours and had done some good work on my detective story.

  “Hayden,” said a familiar voice on the other end of the line. “It’s Rhiza. Mind if I stop by?”

  “Not at all. I was hoping you’d call.”

  “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  “I’ll start breakfast.”

  I had a couple of omelets almost ready when Rhiza came in the front door. She didn’t knock, but then, she never did.

  I had known Rhiza for over twenty years. We’d met at UNC Chapel Hill. She was a good pianist, but not a great pianist, and she knew her academic and professional path lay in history and research rather than performance. Our romance lasted a couple of years, until I graduated and moved on to my next career in criminology. She and Pete were the reason I came to St. Germaine in the first place. They teamed up and talked me into taking the job as Chief of Police.

  Rhiza and I kept our sometime romance going, strictly off the books, until she’d decided to marry Malcolm Walker. She was his trophy bride, his arm candy, and she played the part well, even dyeing her hair blond and raising her voice a diminished fourth to a decidedly Betty Boopish pitch. She was a gal who knew what she wanted, and Malcolm was it.

  “Hi, Babe” she said, her voice back down to her normal contralto. “Man, what a week!” She flopped down into a chair at the kitchen table.

  “Yes, I heard. It’s all everyone in town is talking about. Well, that and Agnes Day’s recent demise.”

  “I couldn’t believe it,” said Rhiza, ignoring my mention of the murder. “It was absolutely amazing. I stopped to get gas on my way home from Kingsport, bought a five-dollar ticket and forgot about it. Then when I heard that the winner bought their ticket in Elk Mills, I checked my ticket on the Internet. It was the winning ticket. I couldn’t believe it.”

  “So, where have you been?”

  “Well, I told Malcolm, of course. He set up a corporation and did a bunch of legal stuff before he’d even let me go claim the ticket. Then we called the Lottery headquarters, took a limo down to Nashville, and got the check.”

  “The check?”

  “It wasn’t a real check. Just one of those giant checks you see on TV. They deposited the money straight into the corporation checking account.”

&n
bsp; “How much was it? A hundred and twenty million?”

  “Nothing like that,” Rhiza said. “I took the cash option. With that and federal taxes, it came out to a little over thirty-four million.”

  “You still have to pay North Carolina taxes as well.”

  “They already got it. You think the state government’s going to miss a chance like that?”

  “Still, that’s a pretty nice payday.”

  “Yep,” she said. “Now hand over that omelet and get me some coffee, will you?”

  “Coming up.”

  • • •

  “Did you ever tell Meg about us?” Rhiza asked, finishing up the last piece of toast.

  “No, I did not,” I said. “She never asked about any past girlfriends, and I never offered any information.”

  “Did you ever ask her about her pre-Konig flings?”

  “Nope.”

  “You just…” She paused before she continued. “Trust each other?”

  “Yep.”

  “That’d be something,” she said, wistfully. “Trusting each other.”

  “Trouble in paradise?” I asked.

  “He’s having another affair.” Rhiza shrugged and took a sip of her coffee. I looked at her. She was, for lack of a better word, stunning: ash blonde hair, with the face of an angel and a body to match. If there was anyone as pretty as Meg in St. Germaine, it was Rhiza.

  “How do you know?”

  “A girl knows. First of all, he’s after me to have some plastic surgery done.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “Nope. Breasts, chin, tummy tuck…the works.”

  “Is he crazy? You’re absolutely…” I hesitated, suddenly aware that I sounded like a kid with a schoolboy crush.

  “Go ahead and say it,” Rhiza laughed. “I’m beautiful. I admit it.”