The Alto Wore Tweed (The Liturgical Mysteries)

by Mark Schweizer

Meg had brought enough cleaning supplies to purify the entire church. The only time I had seen her more determined, janitorially speaking, is after I shot that rat under the bed. She scrubbed that bedroom from top to bottom.

  In my defense, I actually tried to hit the rat before it made cover, but it kept running up the log walls and I figured, and rightfully so, that a few more bullet holes would only enhance the look of the old timbers. Still, all good things must come to an end and when Mr. Rattus Norvegicus stopped to catch his breath, Mr. Remington was happy to make his acquaintance. Meg was appalled at the entire episode, even after I pointed out that rats were a fact of life in the woods and being shot was a much quicker and more humane death than being poisoned.

  “I don’t see how getting shot is better.”

  “Poison takes longer. And then the rats die in the walls or behind the refrigerator.”

  “What about a trap?”

  “I’ve got some set out back in the shed, but sometimes it takes days ttch them. Perhaps I should go with a ‘live and let live’ policy. Of course you never know where they’ll show up. The shower...the dresser drawer...”

  “No,” she said with an involuntary shiver. “Shoot them.”

  We spent the better part of three hours in the choir loft. I opened the console of the organ, lifted out each key, cleaned it and made sure the mechanics were unaffected. It was mostly superficial cleanup though. Nothing that I could see had gotten into the works.

  Meg cleaned the floor and the chairs—everything that had an actual surface that she could wipe down. When we were finished, we grabbed a couple sandwiches from The Slab and spent a long, lazy Saturday afternoon at the cabin doing not much of anything that I can discuss without being thought of as a cad.

  Around six o’clock Meg took off to her own hacienda to recharge and to check on her mother. I took out a pad and pen and began to take some notes.

  When?

  Willie Boyd was killed on Friday. Late afternoon. JJ had seen him around five. She was the last to see him, other than maybe the killer. Did that make JJ a suspect? Probably. She was the only one in the church that I know about, except for the person who called 911. I’d get a tape of that call from Boone on Monday.

  Who?

  Someone who knew him? Probably.

  Why?

  Willie didn’t have any enemies that I was aware of yet. He kept to himself and did his job. In November and December he also worked at the Grandfather Mountain Tree Farm selling Christmas trees. Herself did make a complaint about Willie to the vestry, claiming sexual harassment about three weeks ago. But how much of that was true? I would check on this next week.

  How?

  I suspected that he was probably poisoned. We’d have the lab report back on Tuesday.

  What?

  What?! Who came up with the five-question rule anyway? It’s a stupid question.

  I felt brilliant.

  • • •

  The Sunday service went surprisingly smoothly after our tragedy and I noticed that Nancy was back in the congregation. Sometimes she shows up when she’s feeling low. When her boyfriend left town, she was at St. Barnabas for five Sundays in a row, joined a Sunday School, got baptized, and started a prayer group. She hadn’t been too regular since then, but she made one or two appearances a month.

  Maybe the murder had taken the edge off Mother Ryan for a few days. Hope springs eternal. The choir sang The Eyes of All by Charles Wood at the offertory and sang it very well. Communion, though, was a bit harried. The wine, which was always brought from the sacristy, was late. In fact, the Agnus Dei had already begun when one of the lay eucharistic ministers finally returned with the cup. I thought it wasbit odd. I expected such shenanigans from Mother Ryan, but I knew the LEMs were trained better than that.

  Agnus Dei, qui tolis peccata mundi,

  miserere nobis.

  Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world,

  Have mercy upon us.

  We finished communion and followed the sacrament with the final hymn. Complete with a stunning harmonization on the last stanza written by yours truly—including a soprano descant.

  The tradition of St. Barnabas was to meet for coffee and donuts in the parish hall right after services. It was a time for the congregation to “meet, greet and eat” as it was advertised in the bulletin. I said hello to Nancy and left her talking to Meg while I pigeonholed Georgia Wester, one of the servers.

  “What was the deal this morning?” I asked her, disgust evident in my voice. Herself usually managed to get something wrong and it was, as I put it, “a constant grain of sand in my otherwise pearl-less oyster.” Meg pointed out that I should be glad of a pearl and the irritation was just part of the process. I replied that it was never the oyster who enjoyed the pearl.

  “It wasn’t her fault this time,” Georgia explained. “It was mine. I was late this morning. I thought Bev had prepared communion. She thought I had. It wouldn’t have been a problem except that when I went back to get it during the offertory, the bottle was gone. I went into the kitchen, looked in the closet for another bottle and the closet was empty. I had to drive down the street and get a couple of bottles from The Slab.”

  “The Slab? For communion wine?”

  Georgia smiled. “You just have to know who to ask.”

  “Let’s look in the wine closet,” I suggested.

  Georgia shrugged. I motioned Nancy over and Georgia led us through the kitchen to the back closet. It was an old door, made of oak panels and probably original to the building. She pulled a set of keys out of her pocket and inserted an old skeleton key into the lock.

  “It always sticks,” she grumbled, giving it a shake or two and trying to get notches of the key to slip into the tumblers. After a moment’s work, the key turned stiffly in the lock and the door swung open. She was right. It was empty.

  She pointed to the vacant shelves. “There should be three cases at least. Twenty-four or twenty-five bottles.”

  “Do we always use two bottles per service?” I asked.

  “We usually have a magnum, so we just need one. But The Slab didn’t have any magnums.”

  “Jeez,” I said, mumbling to myself. “Jeez, the wine—.”

  Meg was chatting with some other choir members and finishing up her coffee. I got her attention.

  “I think it was the communion wine. Let’s go back to t loft.” All four of us, Meg, Nancy, Georgia and I, headed out the kitchen door, back into the church and made our way up into the loft.

  I instructed the troops. “We’re looking for a wine bottle. A big one. Megan, you and Georgia look up around the chairs over by the window. Nancy, let’s you and I look down here by the rail. If you find it, don’t touch it.”

  “Hayden, we already cleaned this place from top to bottom.” Meg offered.

  “We didn’t know what we were looking for.”

  I figured that if the bottle was up here, Willie probably would have hidden it for later consumption. I had a hard time believing that even Willie would have finished an entire magnum bottle in the two hours he was out of sight. He probably had stashed it somewhere.

  • • •

  Nancy was the first to sing out. “Hey boss. There’s a loaded 9mm Glock here under the organ bench.”

  “Don’t worry about it. It’s mine.”

  I looked up at Meg in time to see her roll her eyes and drop her head into her hands. But she was always overreacting.

  Georgia was next. “Hey, there’s an empty flask in the hymnal rack over here.”

  “Nah. That’s Marjorie’s. Keep looking.” Marjorie was known to take a snort or two during services.

  I myself was looking in the organ pipe case on the opposite side of the loft. It had a swing-out door for tuning the instrument and anything hidden inside would be fairly accessible yet easily hidden. I thought for sure that’s where I’d find the bottle. I saved this little hiding place for myself, of course, so I could find the bottle in front of everyone a
nd impress Meg with my deductive prowess.

  It didn’t work. Nancy called out “Got it!” and my plan for self-glorification was toast.

  She had found the offending bottle in the bell tower. Actually there was a small room, which was usually kept locked, directly off the loft. It was this room that held the ladder that led directly up another flight and a half to the church bell. The rest of the stuff in the room was junk. There was an old sound system consisting of some old amps and an 8-track, old 1940 hymnals and 1928 prayer books, some shelves, old paint cans. The usual stuff. I had assumed the door was still locked. It wasn’t, and of course Willie had the key. The bottle was placed just as nicely as you please on one of the shelves. There was a corkscrew, obviously purloined from the kitchen, lying next to the bottle and his half-smoked cigar placed neatly on the shelf, the inch long ash hanging over the edge of the discolored wooden board. Next to the cigar was a green matchbook that was embossed with “Pine Valley Christmas Tree Farm” in bright red letters. I opened it and noticed that there were three matches gone. We were lucky that Willie smoked cheap cigars. An expensive brand would have kept burning and probably ignited the entire church. As it was, Willie’s twenty-five cent cigars had to be puffed on pretty heavily to remain lit. When he set it down to pour his drink and didn’t pick it back up, the cigar—luckily—had burned out. The cork to the wine bottle was halfway out or, if my suspicions were correct, halfway back.

  “Oh man,” I said, suddenly remembering everything I had forgotten to bring with me. “Nancy, did you bring any gloves? Mine are in the truck.”

  “Right here, boss,” she said, producing a box of physician’s disposable latex wear and a baggie from her purse.

  “What a babe!” I said. Then, remembering my PC rules, quickly changed to “I mean, thank you Officer.”

  Nancy snorted in good-natured disgust and handed me the box.

  I pulled out a pair of gloves and snapped them on. Holding the bottle up to the light given off by the single bulb, it was easy to see that Mssr. Willie had taken quite a swig before putting the bottle on the shelf. I handed it to Nancy who had donned gloves of her own. Then I bagged the cigar and dropped it into my pocket along with the matchbook.

  “Voilá!” I said. “As Archimedes so eloquently put it as he ran naked through the streets of Athens, ‘Eureka! Eureka!’”

  “What do you mean, ‘You found it?’ I found it!” Nancy retorted, glaring at me.

  “And I didn’t know you spoke Greek,” I said in surprise.

  “Everyone knows what ‘eureka’ means.”

  “I suppose so. Anyway, you get full credit. Make sure you mention yourself kindly when you type up the report tomorrow.”

  “Gee, thanks, boss.”

  Chapter 4

  “I know you’re not here for your elbow patches.” I laughed and lit a cigar. It was a full-throated laugh and I could see it was driving her crazy.

  Her eyes were smoldering--smoldering as the passion that hung heavy in the room like some gigantic velvet curtain smothering the atmosphere that rose like the thin wisp of smoke from the extinguished match she had just used to light a cigar of her own.

  “That is the worst sentence I ever been involved in,” she said, disgust evident in her voice.

  “Evidently, you’ve never read me before.”

  Yeah, I’ve seen a million of ‘em and they were all alike. Unemployed English majors.

  She was attractive in the sort of way that some heavy women with very short hair and no makeup, wearing a three piece brown-tweed suit with wingtips and smoking a cigar can be called attractive. She reminded me of my Aunt Mable. Or Winston Churchill.

  “All right,” she hissed, leaning over the desk, smoke escaping through her clenched teeth like the angry breath of some ancient pope. “Let’s get to the point.”

  “What’s your hurry?” I said, puffing smoke of my own right back in her face. “We’ve got plenty of time.” It wasn’t easy talking and puffing at the same time, but I had to show her I was every bit the man she was. And she was getting steamed. As steamed as last night’s clams.

  “This chapter’s half over thanks to your insipid metaphors. And if you want any semblance of a plot, not to mention character development, you’d better get moving.”

  She was really ranting now. I could always tell when they were mad. This one was beet-red and her hands were clenching and unclenching the loaded shotgun that I had left sitting on the table. I suddenly realized I had made a tactical error. Still, I had her hooked like a tweed tuna and I had to reel her in. “These ain’t metaphors. Only an idiot would try to use an unlicensed metaphor in a detective story. These what I’m usin’ is similes pure and simple.” I lit a cigar.

  I thought it was ingenious, cloaking my superior knowledge in bad grammar to point up the ridiculousness of her statement. I even smiled as I saw the shotgun come up in slow motion. She was mad as a wet bishop and I had her right where I wanted her. Suddenly there was a knock on the door and Cecil, my sandwich delivery boy, burst in with my lunch.

  • • •

  Monday I slept late. I had given Nancy the bottle we’d found to take down to the lab in Boone so I figured that I had a slow morning coming. The phone started ringing just as I was wandering into the kitchen scratching places that men only scratch if there are no women in the house. I picked up the phone and clicked the ringer to “mute” at the same time I answered.

  “Konig,” I said brusquely.

  “Hayden, it’s almost 10:30. When’re you coming in.”

  I recognized Nancy’s voice through my pre-caffeinated haze. “What’s up?”

  “We’ve been waiting for you. You’ve got to hear this.”

  “What is it?” I asked, now definitely awake. Nancy wouldn’t call unless it was important and now she had definitely stirred my interest.

  “It’s a call that came into the station at 5:10 on Friday. Wanna hear it?”

  “Can you play it over the phone?”

  “You bet. Hang on a second.”

  There was a pause—then Iard Dave’s dulcet baritone. “You’ve reached the St. Germaine Police Department. There is no one here to take your call. If it is an emergency, hang up and dial 911. Your call will be forwarded. Otherwise, please leave a message.”

  I thought it sounded very professional. Just the way I wrote it.

  There was a pause on the tape, then a long beep and then a voice.

  “This here’s Willie Boyd up at St. Barnabas Church. There’s been a break-in. I don’t guess it’s no emergency, but all the wine is missing from the closet in the kitchen. Prob’ly three cases. I done fixed the lock on the closet door already. Thank you for your time.” Click.

  Nancy came back on. “Did you get that?”

  “Well, Casper the Holy Ghost!” I exclaimed. “What time did you say that call came in?”

  “5:10.”

  “So he was still alive at that point. What time was the 911 call?”

  “We just got that from Boone. I sent Dave to get it at seven this morning. He took the bottle and the rest of the stuff down, too.”

  “Have you listened to it?”

  “Yep. It’s just a copy. They wouldn’t give us the real tape. It’s a woman’s voice. It’s familiar but I can’t place it. They record these calls so slowly it’s hard to recognize a particular voice sometimes. The time is 5:17 p.m.”

  “Can you play it for me?”

  “Nope. The answering machine is digital, but this is a cassette and the only cassette player is in your office. I can play it over the phone, but you might as well just come in.”

  “Man.” I paused, doing the math. “That narrows it down to seven minutes.”

  “Yep.” Nancy sounded almost perky. “He drank the poison sometime between 5:10 and 5:17.”

  “Do we know it was poison? Is the lab report back?”

  “Sorry. I was just guessing.”

  “I’ll be there before noon. Hold down the fort.”


  I put some coffee in the drip machine. I have an espresso machine too—one of my nods towards my ever-dwindling stock fortune—but I didn’t have time to fool with it this morning and besides, I needed to think.

  I showered quickly and chose my green flannel shirt and chinos as my ensemble of the day. When you only have one shirt and one pair of pants that are clean, it’s a pretty easy choice. I picked up a load of laundry, threw it in the washing machine and set them happily gyrating as I headed back to the kitchen for my coffee. Then I called Georgia Wester, who had prepared the altar for Sunday’s service. She answered on the second ring.

  “Hi Georgia. Hayden. Listen, did you get the bread and wine ready for communion on Saturday like you usually do?”

  “Nope. I knew I wod be gone on Saturday so I did it on Friday before lunch.”

  “So you had a bottle of wine on the counter in the sacristy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thanks.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all. Bye.”

  I got my list off the refrigerator and checked it over. Basically nothing new here except the time of death and the wine theft. I made some notes and shoved the list in my pocket. Maybe I could recognize the voice on the 911 tape. I had a better ear than Nancy and I knew most of the people in the congregation. I poured a large cup of coffee into a traveling mug and got into my old blue chariot, popping in a Wynton Marsalis Baroque Music for Trumpets CD. I had one stop to make before I got into town. The McCollough’s trailer.

  • • •

  The McCollough’s place was about halfway between my spread and town, up in the hills and hard to find. Ardine McCollough lived with her three children in a 1972 vintage mobile home that was definitely showing its age. I don’t know what happened to Ardine’s husband, PeeDee. According to local legend, he just disappeared one day. I suspect he simply took off, but the rumor whispered around town was that he had been murdered by Ardine and buried somewhere down in the holler. Ardine never filed a missing persons report and I didn’t put any stock in the rumors, so I never bothered to investigate. He’d been gone for five years, leaving when the youngest child was still a baby. PeeDee was a physically abusive son-of-a-bitch with a penchant for drinking coupled with a quick temper. I had been out to their trailer to have a few serious chats with him—once, after Ardine had checked into the emergency room in Boone. I had even locked him up once, but Ardine declined to press charges and he was out in twenty-four hours, sober as a judge and promising never to do it again. I had heard through the town grapevine that he had started taking his frustrations out on Bud, the oldest child, but I hadn’t seen any evidence of it firsthand. All this considered, it was my feeling that if Ardine truly had done what it was rumored she’d done, then I figured she had to live with it.