Bantam of the Opera

by Mary Daheim

  Tolvang took off his painter’s cap and moved closer to the dilapidated toolshed. The rain was coming down quite heavily, the temperature had dropped into the low forties, and the wind had picked up again during the night. Despite the inclement weather, Tolvang wore only a light cotton long-sleeved coverall, its creases dark with the stains of hard work. He wore the same outfit in the summer. Tolvang seemed impervious to the elements.

  “Okay,” he was saying as he walked into the toolshed and took out a metal tape measure. “You got a floor, you got no I beam. You sure as hell got no roof, py golly. You vant extension?”

  “To within a yard or so of the birdbath,” answered Judith who’d already done some calculating. “Five, six feet, maybe?”

  Tolvang was wielding his tape measure, but didn’t bother to write anything down. He led the way outside, still measuring. “Five feet, seven and three-quarter inches. Let’s call it five and a half.” He jabbed at the two-foot width of garden area between the toolshed and the grass. “What you got, wild dogs? Or raccoons?”

  Judith followed his gesture. The garden area in front of the toolshed did indeed show evidence of recent digging. “Damn,” breathed Judith. “That’s where I was going to put most of my spring bulbs, along with my lilies of the valley and some ranunculus. The squirrels must have found the daffodils and tulips from last year.”

  Tolvang shook his head. “Them ain’t no squirrels. Squirrels are cunning, tidy little sonsuvitches. Raccoons, I’m a-telling you, come all the way from the gully.”

  Judith frowned. She didn’t think so. The gully was over a mile away, on the northeast side of the Hill, three blocks from Renie and Bill’s house. Renie was both amused and annoyed by the raccoon families that traipsed through their yard, looking for snacks, wreaking havoc—and posing for would-be benefactor-victims in the most appealing wide-eyed manner.

  “A dog, I’d guess,” said Judith. “Probably Dooleys’.”

  Tolvang was digging about in the dirt. “Pipes,” he muttered. “Ve got to see vere to dig for the plumbing. A dog, you say? Vere’s that goddamn cat?”

  “My cat’s gone,” Judith replied. “Sweetums is living with Mother.” But, Judith realized, the Return of Gertrude would also mean Sweetums Revisited. Would the dreadful cat be satisfied living in the revamped toolshed or insist upon having the run of the house? For that matter, would Gretrude? Judith couldn’t cope with that problem just yet. She looked up through the falling rain at what was left of the toolshed roof. “I don’t suppose we could raise the ceiling to allow for storage?”

  “Storage?” Tolvang’s blue eyes raked over Judith. “You got four stories in that house of yours and you vant storage? Why don’t you clean? You got enough yunk for an army.”

  Tolvang was right. Judith still clung to family belongings that dated back more than a century. But his timing was unfortunate. Phyliss Rackley stood on the back porch, shaking out a dust mop.

  “Clean?” she screeched. “Listen, Mr. Tolvang, there’s nobody on Heraldsgate Hill who cleans better than I do, if I do say so myself! It’s a gift from the Lord! If you and your demented Lutheran ways think I don’t know how to keep a house clean, you’d better think again!” She gave the dust mop a menacing shake.

  It was not the first time Phyliss Rackley and Skjoval Tolvang had butted heads. Judith remembered their wrangling all too well from the months that the carpenter had worked on the B&B’s original renovations and subsequent improvements. Judith moved to nip their latest quarrel in the bud.

  “He was talking about me, Phyliss,” Judith said with a lame little laugh. “You know I’m a bit of a pack rat.”

  Phyliss paid no heed. “Wax,” she declared. “He said I should wax.” The cleaning woman spoke from the porch, like a whistle-stop candidate for public office. Her manner ignored Tolvang’s presence. “Now I ask you, in a house with a poor old crippled woman on a walker, who would wax the floors? It’d be criminal, that’s what. And not very Christian, either.” Phyliss gave the dust mop another shake, shivered dramatically, and stomped back inside. Judith resumed conferring with the carpenter.

  Five minutes later, Skjoval Tolvang had given his estimate, $7500, materials included. Judith hemmed and hawed. She knew it was a fair price, but she didn’t want to move ahead until she’d talked to Joe.

  “Well?” demanded Tolvang. “You vant your mother back home or a-scrapping and a-snapping with her sister-in-law? Make up your mind, I have three other projects to do between now and Thanksgiving.”

  Judith swallowed hard. “Don’t I need a permit?”

  Tolvang’s eyes narrowed. “For a toolshed? If anyone asks, remember, it’s a doghouse. You don’t need no permit for Fido.”

  Judith gave a faint nod. “When could you start?”

  “This afternoon. At least I could get some of the lumber.” He had replaced his hat and looked down at Judith with his sharp blue eyes. “Vell?”

  “What about next week? You see, my husband is in New Orleans at a…”

  But Tolvang was shaking his head. “I tell you, I’ve got other jobs. Next veek, I do Donahues. This veek, I can do you. But you gotta tell me now, py golly.”

  With a sinking feeling, Judith surrendered. If she didn’t commit herself now, there was no hope of getting Gertrude home before the holidays. It was an arbitrary deadline, but she had fixed it in her mind. Some time in the New Year sounded too vague. Judith wanted to be able to promise her mother an early return. At Gertrude’s age, three or four months could sound like a lifetime—or at least the rest of it.

  “Okay,” said Judith in a uncharacteristically feeble voice. “Go ahead.”

  Tolvang gave a single nod. “Ya, sure, youbetcha.” He climbed into the cab of his truck, started the engine, reversed, and ran over his implements. Judith yelled after him, but he kept right on going, out into the cul-de-sac and down toward the corner. With a sigh, Judith trudged through the rain to move the dented pail, the bent saw, and the crushed metal box. Typical, she thought, of Skjoval Tolvang’s single-mindedness. She had started again for the garage when Tippy de Caro called out from the back door.

  “Mrs. Flynn! You’re wanted on the phone!”

  Judith waved an arm. “I’ll call back. I’ve got to get to the store.”

  But Tippy shook her head, red curls bobbing from side to side. “It’s urgent. This guy says it’s a matter of life and death.”

  Woody, thought Judith, hurrying back to the house. Or Joe, in an accident on the levee. Gertrude, even, finally decked once and for all by Aunt Deb. She snatched the phone from Phyliss Rackley who had somehow managed to comandeer the instrument.

  “Yes?” gasped Judith in a breathless voice.

  “Hi, Mom,” said Mike. “Can you send me a new VCR? Mine broke.”

  Judith gritted her teeth. There were times when she almost understood the urge to kill.

  NINE

  ONE HOUR AND ninety-five dollars later, Judith was home from Falstaff’s, unloading groceries. She had made a quick stop at Aunt Deb’s apartment, but had not been able to tell her mother about the plans for the toolshed. Mr. and Mrs. Ringo, eucharistic ministers and fellow SOTS, as members of Our Lady, Star of the Sea were known, had brought holy communion to the shutins. Judith couldn’t interrupt the informal little service. Nor did she want to upset the brief truce that always occurred between Gertrude and Deb when the Ringos made their weekly visit with the sacrament.

  Phyliss, who was working on her third load of laundry, informed Judith that in her absence there had been two calls for reservations, both from in-state. With a flip of her striped housedress and sagging slip, the cleaning woman headed upstairs to start in on the guest rooms.

  Schutzendorf, Plunkett, and Tippy had all gone out, presumably to attend to business matters. Judith was relieved. It was almost noon, and she’d been afraid she’d have to prepare lunch if they stayed around the house. As it was, she’d have to check on Mrs. Pacetti’s needs. The widow had not been awake yet when Judith had
left for Falstaff’s.

  After putting the groceries away, Judith returned the two reservation calls, then dialed the number of her appliance man. She had been very firm in telling Mike he could not get a new VCR. It was a luxury, especially for a student who was supposedly studying far into the night. Mike had argued that that was the very reason he so desperately needed the equipment—how could he watch informative PBS programs in prime time when he was hitting the books? But if he could tape them and replay them at a more convenient time, say between 4:00 and 5:00 A.M. while he ate his sparse breakfast of burned toast and thin gruel, he could even rewind and repeat the most vital pieces of information. On the slight chance that he might not really be watching reruns of “The Beverly Hillbillies,” Judith called Rex at Bluff TV to find out if they were having a sale. They weren’t.

  “Honest to God, I’m going broke,” Judith said to Renie over the phone. “Seventy-five hundred bucks for the remodeling job, three hundred for Mike’s VCR, and this gang of gluttons is eating me out of house and home. I’m going to have to start selling my body parts to break even.”

  “Try selling your body first,” responded Renie. “Even at our age, we ought to get fifty bucks a trick. More, if we could still move fast.”

  Judith smiled weakly, but didn’t have a chance to make a retort. Renie was off on another subject. “I called the opera house ticket office a few minutes ago. They’ve rescheduled the Saturday performance for Wednesday. Can you go with me?”

  Judith debated with herself. “Gee, coz, I’d better not. I really couldn’t leave the B&B with Mrs. Pacetti recuperating and Skjoval Tolvang whanging away at the toolshed. As you may recall, once he gets started, he works all hours of the day and night.” She did not mention her greatest concern, which was the possibility of leaving a murderer on the loose at Hillside Manor.

  Renie, however, understood. In that unique form of un-spoken communication that made the cousins more like sisters, she was well aware of Judith’s worries. “That’s okay. I’ll call Madge Navarre and see if I can pry her loose from the insurance company for an evening. Honestly, that woman puts in twelve-hour days, six days a week. I don’t get it.”

  “She likes it,” said Judith, referring to their longtime mutual friend and sometime traveling companion. “She can afford to work like that. She doesn’t have kids. She can probably even afford luxuries, like shoes.” Judith’s voice had turned into a little bleat.

  “Say,” said Renie, ignoring her cousin’s whimper, “could you get free for lunch tomorrow with Melissa Bargroom? I forgot until I looked at my calendar this morning that we have a date at Randall’s Cove.”

  “I’ll see,” temporized Judith. “Maybe by then Schutzendorf will have left.”

  There was a brief pause at Renie’s end of the line. “You mean you haven’t heard from Woody?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Hmmm. How long does it take to do an autopsy?”

  “Yuck, I don’t know. If they have to analyze…stuff, it probably takes several hours. Maybe I won’t hear anything until this evening, or not till tomorrow.”

  “Well, think about your own stomach contents, as in lunch. Noon, straight up. I’m anxious to hear what Melissa makes of all this. She’s pretty savvy. Maybe she’ll have some dirt for us,” said Renie, sweetening the pot.

  Judith was tempted, but she made no promises. After all, there was no official pronouncement on whether Mario Pacetti had been murdered. Maybe, if the Fates were kind, the poor man had died of natural causes. Judith consoled herself with the fact that a lot of people did.

  The schoolhouse clock indicated it was after twelve-thirty. Judith hurried upstairs to inquire after Mrs. Pacetti’s breakfast and/or lunch requests. Phyliss was still on the second floor, no doubt cleaning like crazy. She had, after all, been up there for over half an hour.

  But Phyliss hadn’t so much as lifted a dustcloth. She was standing at the door of Mrs. Pacetti’s room, engaging Edna Fiske in earnest conversation.

  “…For my cuticles. Now you might think that was a small thing, but as a nurse, you know how one little part of the body can show that something’s wrong with the whole system. In this case—that was late ’83 as I recall—it turned out to be my thyroid. Then, in early ’84, the second week of January…”

  Judith glanced at Edna Fiske, whose eyes had glazed over. “Phyliss!” called Judith. Her voice had the effect of snapping Edna out of her trance and temporarily halting Phyliss’s spate of symptoms. “Aren’t you overdue for your lunch?”

  Phyliss looked at her watch which had a face the size of a Spanish doubloon. “You’re right!” She practically curtsied to Edna Fiske. “Excuse me, Nurse, I have to get going. If I don’t eat on time, it plays havoc with my digestion. I always bring my own food, not that I’m criticizing Mrs. Flynn here, but I have to be careful. This is my week for beets.” Sausage curls flying, Phyliss scurried downstairs. Judith got no farther than opening her mouth before the doorbell rang.

  “Tall woman with a fur,” shouted Phyliss, apparently unwilling to detour from her kitchen-bound route.

  Judith sighed. “Let me know what Mrs. Pacetti—and you—would like for lunch,” she said to Edna Fiske, heading back for the staircase.

  Inez Garcia-Green appeared to be admiring the cornstalks and pumpkins as Judith opened the front door. The famed soprano was wearing a coffee brown cashmere coat with a black fox neckpiece. Her head was covered with an ugly plastic rain hat, which she removed as soon as she saw Judith.

  “I have come to call on Señora Pacetti,” she announced, giving Judith a smile that somehow mingled graciousness with sorrow. “My respects, as it were, to the bereaved. Is she receiving visitors?”

  Given Amina Pacetti’s earlier caustic remarks about Inez, Judith thought not. But it wasn’t her place to say so. “Let me check,” she temporized, ushering Inez inside. “Have a seat. Please.” Judith indicated the small settee next to the staircase. Inez sat down with a graceful motion.

  Edna Fiske was coming downstairs. “The patient feels like a steak,” she announced.

  Judith suppressed an urge to say that the patient looked more like a pork chop. “There are some in the freezer,” Judith said in passing. “You can thaw one in the microwave.”

  “Two,” Edna threw back over her shoulder. “She wants to regain her strength.”

  Amina Pacetti was sitting up, wearing yet another beautiful peignoir, in deep pink with black lace trim. She was flipping through an Italian fashion magazine and had applied cosmetics moderately. Her golden hair was also combed, pulled back into a French roll. Judith gauged that she was fit to welcome callers.

  “Inez Garcia-Green is here,” said Judith, with a hand on the doorknob.

  Amina looked up from the pages of her magazine, eyes slightly narrowed. “Inez? Tchaah!” Her gaze returned to the periodical.

  “Is that a no?” inquired Judith.

  “It is a comment only.” Amina gave a nod. “Send her up.”

  Judith did, leading the way for the soprano. Discreetly, she closed the door, then slipped next door into Tippy’s room. It wouldn’t hurt to start cleaning, since Phyliss hadn’t yet begun. And it certainly wouldn’t seem strange if she started with the adjoining bathroom. Judith leaned against the door that led into Amina’s bedroom.

  At first, she could hear nothing except the murmur of female voices. Then, they both began to shout, Amina in Italian, Inez in Spanish. Judith was lost. She knew virtually no Italian, and even if her Spanish hadn’t been so rusty, Inez’s rapid-fire delivery was too much for Judith. But she knew fury in any language—and the two women were definitely irate. Judith decided to scrub the sink and worry about translations later.

  She was flushing cleanser down the drain when she heard the door slam. A final burst from Amina floated into the bathroom. Judith grabbed a towel, wiping her hands as she hurried into the hallway.

  “Madame Garcia?” Judith said, uncertain as to how to address the soprano’s retreat
ing form. “May I…uh…”

  Inez paused, her hand on the balustrade. She turned to look up at Judith on the landing. “Ah! Muchas gracias, I appreciate your kindly hospitality. I leave Señora Pacetti feeling comforted. Pobre mujer, she suffers so! Treat her well, for the days ahead will be dark. Adios.”

  Poor woman indeed, thought Judith as Inez Garcia-Green escaped through the front door. Inez and Amina had sounded as if they were coming to blows. There was no love lost between them, that was for sure. But why, Judith wondered as she watched Inez pull away in a sleek beige limo. Had a rivalry between Mario Pacetti and Inez Garcia-Green carried beyond the grave? If so, why had Inez bothered to call on Pacetti’s widow? Inez had already accompanied Justin Kerr and his bouquet to Hillside Manor.

  Edna Fiske was broiling steak while Phyliss Rackley resumed her litany of health problems. “It was right around Easter of ’86 that I first noticed the fungus between my toes,” Phyliss was saying over a half-eaten plate of beet greens.

  Judith interrupted. “Ms. Fiske, your patient sounds distressed. You might want to check on her.”

  Edna gave Judith a dubious look. “Well…if you’d be so kind as to watch the meat. Mrs. Pacetti would like it medium rare, but that’s nonsense, of course. Undercooked beef isn’t suitable for a person in her condition. I’ve also prepared a small salad.” She pointed to a plate of lettuce, tomatoes, and cucumber on the counter.

  As soon as Edna left the kitchen, Judith picked up the phone. “Hey, coz,” she said as Renie answered at the other end of the line, “count me in tomorrow with Melissa. I’ve got a few questions for her.”

  “Great,” said Renie. “What changed your mind?”

  “Inez Garcia-Green,” replied Judith, as she heard a crash and a clatter in the driveway. “I’ll explain later. Skjoval Tolvang has arrived.”

  Bruno Schutzendorf returned around 5:00 P.M. with an airline ticket to New Haven. He was scheduled to leave the following morning and Judith uttered a sigh of relief. Winston Plunkett and Tippy de Caro arrived at Hillside Manor a few minutes later. Plunkett hastened to Amina Pacetti’s bedside while Tippy lingered in the kitchen. Judith, who had just waved Phyliss Rackley off for the day, was making hors d’oeuvres but had held firm in her resolve not to fix another dinner, except for the patient and her nurse.