Setting the Stage for Murder

by Robert W. Gregg

  CHAPTER 32

  While the sheriff was talking with the parties to the ambiguous Carpenter-Merriman relationship, Kevin was sitting on his deck feeling restless and just a bit sorry for himself. He could, of course, offer Carol advice, both solicited and unsolicited, regarding the Gerlach case, but he was much too close to the members of the late opera company to be playing a conspicuous role in the investigation, a role which might imply suspicion that they had had something to do with Harley’s untimely demise.

  It was too early in the day to open a bottle of beer and not quite close enough to the Labor Day weekend to start packing for his return to the city and the academic year at Madison College. So Kevin decided to take a drive. It was a beautiful August day, a bit cooler than usual with a bright blue sky above, so he opted for a trip over the nearby hills to Bari, a small hub town some twenty-five miles west of Crooked Lake. It was a drive he always enjoyed, and the trip might restore his sagging spirits.

  He turned off West Lake Road at the West Branch intersection and headed up the hill, the first of a series of hills that made a roller coaster of the secondary road between West Branch and Bari. As he drove, he found himself wondering at the origin of the town’s name. Bari. Had it originally been settled by immigrants from the Italian city on the Adriatic coast? Perhaps a prominent early resident had given the town its name. Kevin himself knew no one named Bari. Barry, of course, but not Bari.

  As he drove westward, his mind drifted, inevitably, back to the Gerlach case and the sad ending to the Brae Loch opera adventure. He still found time to admire the countryside, especially the miles of state forest preserve that flanked the road for much of the way. And the rows of small, white cumulus clouds that dotted the afternoon sky invited speculation as to what or whom they looked like. As usual, once he had formed an opinion about a particular cloud—Abraham Lincoln’s profile or an oversized ice cream cone—the prevailing currents would destroy the illusion and create a new challenge for his imagination.

  But it was Harley Gerlach’s murder that was the focus of most of his thinking. The murder and the people he had gotten to know over the summer who might be the murderer.

  Their names and faces popped into his mind in no particular order. Not alphabetical. Not based on their importance to the production of Gianni Schicchi. Certainly not in any ordering from least to most likely suspect, because Kevin had formed no opinion on that. Indeed, he found it hard to think of any of the company members as a murderer. As someone who had not simply killed Gerlach in a moment of anger, but had taken a length of piano wire and deliberately strangled him while he slept off too much liquor or beer in the big bed on the Wayne Hall stage.

  There was Paolo Rosetti. A man whose ego was arguably as big as Gerlach’s. If he was a suspect, it was presumably because he had coveted the leading role in the opera, the role that had gone to Gerlach. He had made it abundantly clear that he would make the best Schicchi. He’d told Kevin that on the day they had met, and he had never missed an opportunity to make the same claim during the weeks when the opera was in rehearsal. Moreover, he had sought Kevin out shortly after Gerlach’s death to argue that the opera should go on as scheduled and that he should take over the lead. He hadn’t said so in so many words, but he obviously believed that in the end, however unfortunate Gerlach’s death may have been, Brae Loch would now have the Schicchi it deserved.

  But how could the fact that Gerlach, not Rosetti, had been chosen to play the lead in the opera have been a motive for murder? Improbable? Absolutely. Inconceivable? That might be something else. Kevin didn’t pretend to know what made Rosetti tick. And even if the man had wanted Gerlach dead, could he have killed him? He claimed to have been fishing that afternoon, something he almost never did, something no one had seen him doing. And Carol seemed to be convinced that he had left his boat at a marina within walking distance of the college on that fateful Tuesday. If so, he could have killed Gerlach. Kevin was skeptical. There were too many ifs.

  He had come to a place where the road dipped sharply into a depression between two hills. There were no cars in sight, no houses, no barns, no sign of life, just a long ribbon of road unspooling down into the valley below. High above there were six, eight, maybe more buzzards circling lazily in the sky. As they soared on the afternoon’s thermals, they rocked back and forth in the manner characteristic of their species. Kevin slowed the car, the better to watch them for a moment, then refocused his eyes on the road and his mind on the Gerlach case.

  If not Rosetti, then perhaps Arthur Conklin. His motive, at least to most men, would presumably be more compelling than Rosetti’s. His wife, by his own admission, had had an affair with Gerlach. And Conklin had apparently reacted angrily to what had happened. Why else would the Geneva police have been suspicious of Conklin when his wife died? Helen Conklin commits adultery, Conklin finds out about it, she dies an unnatural death, and nothing comes of the effort to implicate Conklin in his wife’s death. Still.

  And then who should come into his life but the man who had seduced his wife. Both of them together on an almost daily basis during the summer, a constant reminder of Helen’s betrayal and Gerlach’s role in it. Had the result been a rekindling of strong emotions, culminating in murder? Of course Conklin had an alibi or claimed that he did. He had been checking up on his string of nurseries. But to the best of Kevin’s knowledge Conklin’s presence at the nurseries had not been confirmed, and it was unlikely that every minute of those crucial hours could be accounted for in any event. In view of the proximity of the nurseries to the lake and the college, the alibi looked thin.

  Kevin’s thoughts turned to Janet Myers. He wanted to drop her from the short list that was taking shape in his mind, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. Unlike Rosetti and Conklin, whose quarrels with Gerlach were of recent vintage, hers went back quite a few years. If she had felt a need to avenge herself for his philandering, why hadn’t she done it when the wound was new, before the scar tissue of time and a second marriage had grown over it?

  Kevin was trying to imagine Myers as a killer when a fox emerged suddenly from the thick stand of trees on the right side of the road and darted across his path. Had he taken his eyes off the road at that moment he would have contributed to the seasonal toll of roadkill that littered the highways and byways of Cumberland County. He didn’t much care for foxes, which had been making a much commented on comeback in the area. But they were handsome animals, and he breathed a sigh of relief that he had missed this one.

  He was now close to the fork in the road that gave him a choice between Bari and Centerville. The turn made, he started thinking about Janet Myers again. Her divorce from Gerlach may have been, relatively speaking, ancient history, but that she still harbored a strong dislike for the man had been demonstrated on at least two occasions over the summer. The first had taken place back in June when she had demanded that he be dropped from the cast of Gianni Schicchi. The second had been much more recent, only days before his death, when she had exploded in anger in what Kevin remembered as the ugly bed episode. Even had he been willing to dismiss these outbursts as the venting of a volatile woman, her behavior on the afternoon of Gerlach’s murder was enough to keep her on his list of suspects. She had been seen at her ex-husband’s house, and had otherwise driven around aimlessly, leaving nobody to vouch for where she was or what she was doing. She could easily have stopped at the college. Rosetti’s and Conklin’s alibis were weak. Hers was essentially nonexistent.

  Kevin had no business to conduct in Bari. He was just out for the ride, and it was now time to turn around and head home, this time with the sun at his back. He fully expected to see the buzzards again, perhaps even more of them. There would be carrion in the woods, drawing a crowd of scavengers. He usually spotted two or three hawks, often perched in dead trees along the roadside. He had seen none on the drive over, but it was the rare trip over this little-traveled road that he didn’t make at least one sighting. Unlike buzzards, they were b
eautiful birds, much more impressive in flight. He hoped to see one on the way home.

  Kevin had largely exhausted his list of suspects in Gerlach’s murder. He had asked Carol to be the one to interview Myers, Conklin, and Rosetti the evening after the discovery of Gerlach’s body. He had done so because these three were the company members who seemed to know Gerlach best or had had the most contentious relationship with him during rehearsals. There had also been a fourth, Sean Carpenter. He had been on the list for Carol because he had been conspicuously angry with Gerlach for his treatment of Heather Merriman. Now, on reflection, he wasn’t sure Carpenter should be thought of as a suspect. His motive, if it could be called that, was much weaker than those of the others. Moreover, he insisted that he had been in Rochester all afternoon the day Gerlach was killed. Carol was going to talk with him today—she might even be doing so at that very moment. Unless she learned something that changed the picture dramatically, Kevin was inclined to drop to the bottom of his list this middle-aged man who seemed to have a thing for the opera’s much younger Lauretta.

  As he crested the last hill and headed back down the road into West Branch, Kevin gave a minute’s thought to Lauren Helman. Perhaps it should be Lauren and Linda, two local women, one now identified, the other still unknown, who had been singled out by Gerlach for seduction and a privileged page in his photo album. It was useless to speculate about X, but he knew that Mrs. Helman had a husband who, unlike Arthur Conklin, did not know of his wife’s affair with Harley Gerlach. Quite understandably, she didn’t want him to know. How far would she go to prevent him from discovering this secret in her recent past? Kevin couldn’t imagine that she would have killed Gerlach to protect her secret. Besides, she hadn’t even know about the incriminating photo in the harem album until Kevin showed it to her, and that was after Gerlach’s death. And if she thought Gerlach posed a threat to her marriage, why wait until a Tuesday afternoon in August to silence him? No, Kevin thought, I think I’ll cross her off my list.

  When he pulled into the drive behind his cottage, Kevin was glad he had taken the drive but still unhappy to be a marginal player in the search for the person who had spoiled his opera. Puccini’s opera. Nor was his effort to put the candidates for Gerlach’s killer into a more logical order very successful. If he were to be completely honest with himself, he knew no more at the end of the day than he had the day of the murder. But at least he had finally seen a red-shouldered hawk. It hadn’t made his day, but it had briefly buoyed his spirits.

  CHAPTER 33

  Not having gone to Rochester for her meeting with Carpenter, Carol was free for the evening earlier than she had expected to be. She had changed out of her uniform and traded the official vehicle for her old Buick. It was a quarter of six when she let herself into the cottage.

  “Hi, anybody home?”

  Of course Kevin was there, as she knew he would be. He was dicing vegetables at a kitchen counter.

  “Just me and that pork loin roast. You don’t look nearly as harassed as you did this morning. Must have been a good day.”

  “Not bad. I’d like to tell you about it. How about the canoe?”

  There hadn’t been that many opportunities for the canoe rides which had become their favorite form of recreation. But it was early, dinner would keep, and Kevin was only too happy to say yes to Carol’s proposal.

  “Let me get into my shorts,” he said.

  Carol followed him into the bedroom, where she sat on the bed and watched as he changed.

  “I remember when you were more modest,” she said. “Like I’d arrest you for indecent exposure.”

  “That was back in the day, Carol. Way back. Let’s go.”

  He slid into his sandals, and they headed for the beach.

  As was their habit, Carol sat in the bow facing him, the better to carry on a conversation. She enjoyed paddling as much as Kevin did, but not when they had something they wanted to talk about. Today she had quite a bit that she wanted to talk about.

  “You go first,” Carol said, as they turned south toward Mallard Cove.

  “There isn’t much to tell,” Kevin said. “All I did was go looking for hawks and buzzards.”

  “Hawks and buzzards?”

  “That’s about it. I gave some thought to who might have killed Gerlach, but there weren’t any eureka moments. Let’s say I had an uneventful day. But I want to hear about what you did. I’ve got a hunch you learned something important.”

  “Not sure how important, but there’s one thing in particular you’ll be interested in.”

  Carol proceeded to fill Kevin in on what Merriman and Carpenter had told her, with emphasis on their reluctant admission that he had been at Brae Loch during the afternoon of Gerlach’s murder, much as Chris Ellis had said he was. They discussed how the two of them, especially Carpenter, had handled the sheriff’s questions. And they spent several minutes expressing their interest in and frustration with the mounting evidence that too many of the opera company’s members had trouble with their explanations of what they were doing—and where they were doing it—the day Gerlach was strangled.

  But it was Carol’s report that Carpenter had tried out unsuccessfully for the Metropolitan Opera chorus that really caught Kevin’s attention. As she knew it would. She hadn’t pursued the matter with Carpenter, having decided it would be prudent to approach the subject armed with hard data. Such as whether the Met kept records of who had auditioned and when, and who was on the auditions’ panel when they did.

  Kevin was visibly excited. He could once again be playing an active role in Carol’s investigation of Gerlach’s murder. Just that afternoon he had been downplaying Sean Carpenter as a suspect. Now it looked to be possible that he might have a real motive for murder.

  “Let’s not get carried away, Kevin,” Carol said. “We don’t know that Gerlach blackballed Carpenter. And if he did, we don’t know that Carpenter knew it.”

  “I know,” Kevin said, making an effort to rein in his newfound enthusiasm. “But it shouldn’t take much to get an answer to your first question. And if Gerlach was on the panel that rejected Carpenter, I can’t believe he wouldn’t have jumped at the chance to rub it in when he came face to face with him again this summer.”

  “When was Gerlach participating in those auditions?”

  “The woman who works in the Met archives said it was from 1997 to 2001.”

  “Let’s assume that we can find out that Carpenter auditioned sometime during those years. Do you think he’d have remembered Gerlach after that long a time? Or if he did, that he’d know it was Gerlach who cost him the job? Or turn it around. Do you think Gerlach would have remembered Carpenter? I don’t know how many people audition for that chorus in a year, but I’d imagine it’s quite a few. And Gerlach would have seen Carpenter just that once before this summer. I don’t know about you, but I doubt that I’d recall a face in those circumstances.”

  “Not just a face, Carol. The voice, too. Anyway, it’s possible Carpenter mentioned to Gerlach that he’d auditioned, and that could have got Harley to thinking. Then he remembers. And being the kind of guy he is, he can’t resist telling Carpenter that he’s the one that did it to him.”

  “Okay, like you say, it’s possible. Why don’t you talk to that woman you saw at the Met, see if there’s any reason to pursue this. You wouldn’t have to go down to the city again, would you?”

  “I doubt it. I’ll try Mrs. DeAngelo—she’s the archivist. I might even call some of the choristers whose names she gave me. I’ll do it tomorrow.”

  It was going on seven o’clock when they beached the canoe. Kevin busied himself with dinner while Carol leafed through a recent issue of Opera News on the living room couch, wondering if she would ever be a real opera fan. Probably, if Kevin had his way, although her feelings on the subject were mixed at the moment.

  The phone rang. It was Kevin who answered.

  “It’s for you,” he said, leaning into the living room. “Want to take
it in the study?”

  Who, Carol asked silently, her mouth framing the word.

  “Sam Bridges,” he said, not bothering to cup his hand over the phone.

  If she had to go out to deal with some emergency, it was too late where the roast was concerned. It would be ready in about fifteen minutes. Fortunately for both their evening and the roast, Carol did not have to leave until morning.

  “I can’t do anything until tomorrow,” she said as she returned from Kevin’s study, “but Mercedes Redman is dead.”

  Kevin nearly dropped the pot in which he had been steaming vegetables.

  “Mercedes? My God, I can’t believe it. What happened?”

  Dinner no longer seemed very important. Kevin turned off the oven and the flame under the pot on the stove top and joined Carol in the living room.

  “There was a call from Doug Owens, the police chief over in Ithaca. Sam was in the office, talked with him briefly. They don’t know much yet, but Redman is definitely dead. In her apartment. Owens says the call reporting this came from a woman named Kane, who apparently shares the apartment with Redman. She told Owens that she got home from work around five and found Mercedes lying on the bedroom floor. Tried to revive her but it was way too late. She had no idea what happened to her, said she’d been fine when she said good-bye to her in the morning.”

  “I can’t believe this,” Kevin said. “She was so full of energy, a real take-charge person. And now she’s dead.”

  Two members of his little company, dead in a matter of just nine days. One of them unmourned by his peers, the other much respected, even loved by them. Then the obvious question struck him.

  “Why did the police chief call you?”

  “I was getting around to that. Owens and his people looked around the apartment, of course, and it seems they found a piece of paper with a note on it. Short note. All it said was ‘Leave her alone! Remember Gerlach!’ The roommate found it on Mercedes’ music stand in what was apparently the room where she gave violin lessons.”