Baxter boomed out a few of his basso barks as I drove up, having seen me drive the very same pick-up truck to the house every evening for all of his seven years, but presumably sounding the alarm out of some doggy need to stay in practice in case a real burglar happened to show up. He met me as I got out, tail wagging and with what might be a genuinely happy look on his face. Baxter was getting a little age on him, but he still looked to be in his prime. At ninety pounds, he was a fine watchdog, and his long tricolored coat—mostly black with a white blaze down his muzzle and chest, and patches of rust on his head and legs—marked him as a poster dog for a Burmese Mountain Dog Best-in-Show advertisement. I reached down and scratched his ears for a moment, but he’d already said his hellos and so turned and bounded toward the kitchen door. He stood there, rigidly at attention and waited impatiently for me to let him inside. I knew what was next: I’d open the door, he’d shoot past me almost knocking me over, race across the polished wood floor, put on the brakes, slide under the kitchen table, and silently await whatever scraps happened to fall his way during dinner.
Meg wasn’t in the kitchen, but Baxter didn’t seem to be too disappointed. He could smell something cooking and was happy to lie in wait—he was the crocodile under the table, biding his time in silence, eyes darting to and fro, eyebrows rising and falling, his pink tongue just visible beneath his black nose and muzzle.
I peeked into the pot simmering on the stove. Soup. Creamy tomato and basil soup if I wasn’t mistaken, and I seldom was, as far as soup was concerned. This one was one of Meg’s specialties. I also suspected we’d be having grilled cheese sandwiches. There were several clues that pointed to this deduction including two loaves of homemade bread cooling on the counter, a selection of cheeses on the cutting board and a note saying, “Hayden, we’re having grilled cheese sandwiches. Don’t eat the cheese.” I was, after all, a detective.
Meg and I had been married for two years. Although our anniversary was three days ago by the calendar, we’d decided that we would celebrate each year on Thanksgiving. A moveable feast to be sure, but easy to remember. Yesterday evening (Thanksgiving), Meg and I went over to the Hunters’ Club outside Blowing Rock, the restaurant where I first asked Meg to marry me. Of course, she said “no,” and continued to say “no” for a few years after that, but we still considered the Hunters’ Club to be our own romantic corner. That it was open on Thanksgiving was a bonus. That Meg’s mother, Ruby, had declined our invitation to join us was like double-coupon day at the Piggly Wiggly. We weren’t even required to order turkey. Tradition now dictated that our Thanksgiving dinner include quail, broiled new potatoes, apple-walnut salad, and whatever else looked great on the menu. Dessert and coffee were followed by the presentation of the gifts. This year, I’d gotten Meg a necklace set with garnets, garnets being the second anniversary stone of choice. Meg had gone with tradition as well and chosen cotton for her gift—Turkish cotton, in the form of a monogrammed bathrobe. Nice.
“I’m in the living room. Don’t eat the cheese.”
“I read the note,” I called. “Anyway, Baxter’s guarding it.”
“The soup won’t be ready for about half an hour. Bring me a glass of wine, will you?”
“It would be my pleasure.”
I found an opened bottle of Shiraz on the counter with a stopper protecting the six inches of wine that remained. I looked at the label—another one of Bud’s recommendations—and recognized it from our last foray to our favorite wine shop in Asheville. I poured Meg a glass and found a bottle of Buffalo Bill’s Pumpkin Ale in the fridge. It was Thanksgiving weekend after all.
Meg was relaxing on the sofa with her laptop. A fire was blazing in the hearth and I immediately recognized Mozart coming from the speakers of the stereo system: one of the early symphonies—not number 23, I knew that one—but late teens or early twenties I’d bet. Unmistakably Mozart.
I set Meg’s glass on the coffee table in front of the leather sofa.
“Thanks,” she said and raised her eyebrows. “Aren’t you going to guess?”
“Hmm. Mozart symphony. Third movement obviously since it’s a minuet. An early effort, I’d say.” I cocked my head and listened for a moment. “Interesting. Flutes instead of oboes. He was probably sixteen or seventeen when he wrote it.”
Meg gave me a smirk. “That just shows how wrong you can be.”
“E-flat major. Probably the key of the symphony. I can’t say for sure, but I’ll guess Mozart Symphony Number 18 in E-Flat Major, third movement, written in 1772.”
“Wrong, Mr. Know-it-all. It’s Number 19.”
“Rats. And how old was Mozart when he composed this work?”
Meg picked up the CD case, opened it, pulled out the liner notes, and read for just a second. “Well...you were right about the year, so he was sixteen. But that was easy. It says here he wrote six symphonies when he was sixteen.”
I took a sip of my ale. “Still, I was within one.”
“Yes,” Meg admitted. “You’re very good at this game. I’m going to have to get some CDs of my own. I think you have all these memorized.”
“Hardly. There are six or seven thousand CDs in the stereo closet.”
“Then how do you do it?”
“Styles, keys, periods, who lived when, what instruments were popular at the time. It’s not that difficult.”
“Ah, but one must know how to listen.”
“That’s true,” I said.
“I mean, I can tell Beethoven from Bach, but I couldn’t possibly pick out a Mozart symphony.”
I laughed. “Mozart symphonies are easy. There are only forty-one and Mozart died young. Haydn’s harder. There are a hundred and four of those.”
“And how many are in E-flat?” asked Meg.
I pondered for a moment. “Eleven.”
Meg looked surprised. “Really?”
“I have no idea, but I suspect I’m close. Mathematically, that would be about right considering the instruments of the time.”
Meg typed for a moment on her computer, then looked up, astonished. “Eleven.”
“There you go. See? It’s easy.”
•••
The phone rang and Meg headed for the kitchen to answer it—and, I hoped, to fashion some delicious grilled cheese concoctions. I took the opportunity to sit at Raymond Chandler’s old typewriter, put on his fedora, and let my fingers play over the keys. It was easy enough to let myself pretend to be a writer. My title, looking resolute on the expensive rag paper, was beckoning and calling for even more bad prose. I was happy to oblige.
The Organist Wore Pumps
Chapter 1
It was a dark and stormy night: dark as chocolate, not milk chocolate, or even “dark” milk chocolate which is only slightly darker, but as dark as the dark-dark chocolate guano collected from the caves of the chockobat by the under-dwarves of Kooloobati and savored by Polynesian chiefs during the tempests that battered their tiny islands throughout monsoon season (hence “stormy”), but it wasn’t nearly that bad, just a little breezy.
I sat back in my chair, lit a stogie, and studied the scotch singing love songs to me from the half-empty bottle on my desk. The knock at the door rattled it like an old wooden thing on three hinges with a knob about half-way up and a loose frosted window that told the inside story: EYE ETAVIRP. If you happened to be on the outside, the side that needed to hire a gumshoe, the side that had some ready cash, the sign read “PRIVATE EYE.”
The knob turned, the door creaked, and trouble spilled into the room, trouble spelled with a capital D -- no, not “Drouble,” even though that might make more sense except that “Drouble” isn’t a word, so not really: capital D, small a, small m, small e (a Dame) but, come to think of it, a small d would work just as well since she wasn’t proper at all and didn’t even try to begin a sentence.
The dame that wiggled into my office was a definite thirty-six: as in years old, two out of three measurements, looks on a scale of 1 to 36, number of te
eth, eye-bats per
minute, shoe size in Japan, inches from her lips to mine,
hours it would take me to fall in love, days our relationship would last and, finally, miles I couldn’t come within as per the judge’s restraining order.
“Hiya, Toots,” I said. “What can I do for you?”
She smiled. I might have been wrong about the teeth. “I need someone. Someone I can trust.”
“We all do, Sweetheart. We all do.”
•••
I was feeling more than satisfied. My latest detective serial would find its way into the choir member’s folders. They’d read it, as they had so many others, but this time my literary brilliance would finally be applauded. Well, I thought, not so much “applauded,” as “disparaged with less ferocity than usual.” I didn’t mind. Genius is never recognized in its own time.
“Guess what I just heard?” asked Meg as I walked into the kitchen, smelling the delicious bouquet of fried bread and cheese. Baxter’s tail thumped heavily on the heartpine floor.
“I can’t imagine,” I said. I finished the last of my Pumpkin Ale and set the empty bottle on the counter.
“I just heard from one of my spies that you spent ten thousand dollars on some bottles of wine. Vintage 1998.”
I scratched my head sheepishly. “Well, yes. You might have heard that. Three cases of wine, actually. Thirty-six bottles. I’m told 1998 was a very good year.”
“And you did this because...?”
“Bud told me to.”
“If Bud told you to jump off a bridge...”
I laughed. “I haven’t had a chance to talk to him. He sort of disappeared right after I won the bid.”
“Hmm,” said Meg, her visage narrowing. “I see.”
“There’s every reason to believe that it’s a very good wine.”
“I’m hoping so. Shall we have a bottle with dinner? This Shiraz is almost gone.”
“I see no reason why not,” I said. “I have the wooden boxes in the back of the truck. I’ll go and fetch them.”
“Let’s see,” said Meg. “Three cases, thirty-six bottles. By my reckoning, you spent just over two hundred seventy-five dollars a bottle.”
Meg had always been good at math.
“Or, at three glasses per bottle, about ninety-two dollars a glass.”
“I guess,” I said. “But, in my defense, when I was bidding, I didn’t really think about it in a ‘per-glass’ fashion.”
“Apparently not,” said Meg, with a heavy sigh of resignation. “Well, go out and get it. All I’m saying is, it better be good!”
•••
“Delicious,” I said, finishing my sandwich and polishing off the crumbs on the ends of my fingers. “Just the thing for a cold night.”
“Soup and a sandwich and Mozart and a three hundred dollar bottle of wine.”
“Two seventy-five,” I said.
“Yes. Two seventy-five. What was Old Man Frost doing with three cases of wine, anyway? I thought he was the town’s leading teetotaler.”
“Don’t know,” I said. “The other fellow who was bidding really wanted it, but didn’t have the cash after I took him to ten thousand. He was trying to call someone, but there wasn’t any service out at the Frost place.”
“Did you know him?”
“Never saw him before.”
“Well, I hope Bud knows what he’s talking about.”
Meg, never one to lick her fingers, even at a picnic, demurely wiped the crumbs from her hands, then dabbed the napkin to the corners of her mouth, first one side, then the other. Her black hair was loose and tousled and fell in soft waves to her shoulders, a sharp contrast to my old, light blue UNC sweatshirt she’d taken to wearing, a sweatshirt whose oversized neck-hole constantly dropped off one of her shoulders and slid down one arm. Very sexy. Her grey eyes sparkled. They always sparkled.
“How’s Noylene?” I asked. “I haven’t seen her for a few days.”
“Well, let’s see,” said Meg. “Her baby’s due at the end of December, but I haven’t heard anything new.”
“Do we know who the father is?”
“No, we do not.”
Noylene Fabergé-Dupont, the early-morning waitress at the Slab Café and owner of “Noylene’s Beautifery, an oasis of allurement, Dip-N-Tan by appointment only,” had turned up pregnant last summer. Her husband at the time, as it turned out, was not the father.
Meg stared down at her soup. I knew that look.
“You do know,” I said accusingly. “You know, and you’re not telling.”
“I don’t know for sure,” said Meg. “And anyway, I told Noylene I wouldn’t tell, and I won’t, so don’t even ask.”
“You don’t know for sure because...?”
“Because Noylene doesn’t know for sure.”
“But she’s pretty sure.”
“Yes.”
“Ninety-nine percent sure.”
Meg shrugged. “I suppose so.”
“And you’re not telling.”
“No.”
“Okay,” I said, “but this silence is gonna cost you.”
“Another sandwich?”
“You wish,” I said, with a wink and my best salacious smile.
Meg winked back.
Chapter 4
“I hate him,” said Georgia from behind the counter of Eden Books. “He’s pretentious, bombastic, and arrogant.”
“Not to mention magniloquent,” I added.
“Huh?” said Georgia. “You haven’t even met him.”
“I know. I just like to say ‘magniloquent.’ How many opportunities does one get? Whom, by the way, are we hating? We’re not even a full week into Advent yet.”
Georgia sniffed. “Our new deacon. I just met him yesterday and already I can tell you there’s going to be trouble. His name is Donald.” She pronounced his last name carefully. “Moo-shraht.”
“Moo-shraht? What is he? Pakistani?”
“Not as far as I can tell. He’s a white guy from Winston-Salem. He spells it ‘Mushrat,’ but apparently he’s changed the way it’s pronounced.”
I smiled, picked up a copy of Dan Brown’s latest book and scanned the back cover. “Donald Mushrat?” I didn’t bother with Donald’s preferred pronunciation. Neither, I suspected, would anyone else.
“Moo-shraht,” Georgia corrected. “Gaylen doesn’t like him either.”
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“Oh, I can tell. He wanted us to address him as Father Mushrat, I mean Moo-shraht, but Gaylen said no, he wasn’t a priest yet. So he’s Deacon Mushrat.” Georgia finally dropped the phonemic affectation as well. “He didn’t care for that, but there wasn’t much he could do. She also made him stop smoking his pipe inside the church.”
“Tweed jacket?” I asked.
“Nope. Tan micro-suede sport coat. Sandals with dark socks. Big hair.”
“Even worse,” I said. “We could deal with a tweed guy. Micro-suede...well...I just don’t know. How about the tobacco?”
“Peach flavored.”
“Oh, man...”
•••
Nancy and Dave had already commandeered our table at the back of the Slab Café by the time I walked in. I’d already had breakfast, but a mid-morning snack was not out of the question, so a few of the flapjacks from the stack of buckwheat pancakes in the middle of the table quickly found their way onto my plate.
“Coffee?” grunted Noylene perfunctorily, as she waddled by and filled my cup. Since my mouth was full, I didn’t answer, but managed a nod of appreciation.
“If she gets much bigger,” said Dave, “she won’t be able to fit between the tables.”
“I’ll make the aisles wider,” said Pete Moss, plopping down in the last chair at our table. “I can’t keep a good waitress. They all want to go to nursing school.”
Pete was my old college roommate. Now he was an aging hippie, in looks anyway. His gray ponytail and earring complemented the Hawaiian shirts and
faded jeans that comprised his daily uniform, the season notwithstanding. Of course, in colder weather he added his old fatigue jacket, left over from his time in the Army band. He played a mean jazz sax, or used to. Now he owned the Slab, several other properties in town and until a couple of years ago was mayor of St. Germaine. He’d been dethroned by Cynthia Johnsson, current mayor, waitress, and professional belly dancer. Even so, Pete and Cynthia had been an item since the last election and, bearing in mind Pete’s track record with relationships, i.e., two ex-wives and a string of girlfriends that included almost every single woman in St. Germaine under the age of fifty, this one had gone surprisingly smoothly.
“Isn’t Cynthia working this morning?” asked Nancy.
“She’s at some meeting in Greensboro,” said Pete. “Small town mayor something-or-other.”
Pauli Girl McCollough came by the table and filled Pete’s coffee cup on her way to deliver some country ham and eggs over easy to a four-topper by the window.
“Just Noylene and Pauli Girl this morning,” said Pete. “And Noylene won’t be much good in a couple of weeks. She says she’s going to work up until the baby’s born, but I can’t see it. She’s already as big as a house. I give her ten days.”
“She say who the father is yet?” asked Dave.
Pete shook his head. “Not to me.”
Noylene Fabergé-Dupont’s husband, Wormy Dupont, had been sent to federal prison six months ago for murdering Russ Stafford. There were many reasons for this crime, of course, but the one that Wormy cited in his arraignment was “jealousy.” Noylene was pregnant and Wormy was sterile, thanks to various and sundry medical experiments in the ‘80s for which Wormy was paid by the government a grand total of $134.52. Noylene didn’t know Wormy’s situation, and when she turned up pregnant, well, Wormy had a feeling that Russ Stafford was the fox in the henhouse and acted accordingly. Whether Russ was responsible for the impending Fabergé-Dupont heir or whether he wasn’t, Noylene wouldn’t say. She’d been very closed-lipped on the subject, except for telling Meg, and I wasn’t about to bring that up.
The Organist Wore Pumps (The Liturgical Mysteries) Page 3