A Measure of Murder

by Leslie Karst

  Eric was frowning, but I couldn’t tell if it was because I’d talked to Steve or because of what he’d told me.

  “So think about it: here’s a tenant of Kyle’s who has only recently been unceremoniously booted out after doing a ton of work on the place for practically nothing—a guy we know was in charge of maintenance at the church, including that rotted window. How’s that for coincidence?”

  Eric held out his hands. “Wait, why would he tell you that about the window if he were the one who’d shoved him out? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Who knows? Maybe he was just trying to throw me off track, to make us think exactly what you just said.” I took a quick sip of sake and went on before Eric could interject. “But that’s not all. There’s all sorts of weird stuff going on in the chorus. Like, I just found out Roxanne got food poisoning right before the last concert.”

  “That doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Lots of people get sick.”

  “Yeah, but other things don’t seem right, either. What about the fact that she and Jill seem to really hate each other? Roxanne even thinks Jill gave her the food poisoning so she could get her solo. And Brian—who I just learned is Roxanne’s boyfriend—seems to have something against Kyle, too. And then Marta tells me the other night at Kalo’s that someone in the chorus is saying she didn’t write that composition that was performed in Chicago? What’s up with that?”

  Eric wiped his hands on his napkin. “Well, I wouldn’t get too worked up over it all. There’s been a high level of drama in pretty much every chorus I’ve ever sung in. When you get that many artistic types, lots with big egos, all together in one room, well . . .”

  “Okay, but don’t you wonder if maybe that rumor about Marta could have anything to do with Kyle’s death? You know, given the timing an’ all?”

  “No, I don’t,” Eric said as he refilled our cups with sake. “But to answer your original question about Kyle—yeah, I did get to know him pretty well last summer when we roomed together. And man, talk about ego. He was a real head case. Made all the worse because he had the voice to back it up.”

  “How was he a head case?”

  “Thought he was God’s gift to women, for one. What a flirt.” Eric shook his head and laughed.

  Takes one to know one. But I kept this reflection to myself.

  “I actually think he may have been cheating on Jill during the tour,” Eric went on, oblivious to the smirk I hid behind a sip of sake. “More drama to add to your list.”

  “Really?”

  He nodded. “There were nights Kyle never came back to the room, and when I’d ask him about it, he’d just wink but wouldn’t say.”

  “Who do you think it was?”

  “Roxanne, actually. She was the only singer who had a single room. And they were together a lot, since they were soloists. I’m not the only one who thinks there was some hanky-panky going on between them, by the way. I heard others cracking jokes about it during the tour. Which would explain why Jill hates her so much, if she found out from someone.”

  And would also explain why Brian hated Kyle, I added to myself.

  Chapter Twelve

  Marta arrived at my place at 9:15 the morning after my sushi date with Eric. “Only fifteen minutes late. Not bad for an Italian,” she’d said with a laugh when she finally cruised up. I was waiting out front, clad in a long-sleeve jersey to ward off the damp chill of the fog that had now returned after the one-day respite.

  “Sweet bike,” I said as she unclipped from her pale-green Bianchi. And expensive-looking, too. But then again, she had just gotten all that money from selling that music she’d found. I squinted at the name written in script across the top tube: “Specialissima. Nice. Does it have the Campy Record groupset?”

  Marta nodded and had the good grace to look slightly embarrassed at being the owner of a bike that I figured had to be worth about ten grand. Her cycling kit looked pricey, too: a lightweight jacket with the blue-and-red Cinzano logo across the front, Castelli shorts, and high-end Sidi shoes.

  “Well, at least when you kick my ass going up the hill, I’ll have a good excuse,” I said, fastening on my helmet. I’d suggested starting with the climb up to UCSC and then a loop around the city and up the coast to Wilder Ranch. “So, you ready to roll?”

  “Certo,” Marta answered, and we set off.

  Weekend mornings are the best time to ride up to the university, when most of the campus offices are closed and the students are sleeping off their late-night parties, and thus traffic is scarce. But you do still have to be on the lookout for all the deer, which are so tame that they’ll just stand there in the middle of the road and stare as you pump past them up the grade.

  I expected Marta to say something about what had happened during the octets the previous day, but she seemed content to simply chat about the weather and cycling, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. She fell silent around the time we reached the entrance to campus, and I was musing as to what the Italian for “elephant in the room” might be (elefante nella stanza?) when she slowed down to come even with me.

  “So I was wondering,” she asked, not sounding the least bit winded from the steep ride up Bay Street, “did you have a chance to find out about the, uh . . . defamation I asked about the other night?”

  “Yeah, actually, I did. I had to look it up online to remember the exact rule for slander, which is what an oral statement is. You know, as opposed to something written or printed, which would be libel.”

  Marta nodded and took a sip from her water bottle.

  “Anyway, the rule is that if the communication is such that it would clearly hurt you in your profession, it’s slander per se. Since that’s obvious in your case—that saying you didn’t write that piece would clearly hurt you in your profession as a musician or composer—then their only defense would be if the statement were true.”

  “Well, it’s not true,” Marta said, stamping on her pedals so that I had to step up my pace to keep up.

  “I’m not saying it is. That’s just what the defense of slander per se is. So if you wanted to take whoever’s been saying that stuff to court, all you’d have to do to win would be to prove it’s not true.” I exhaled deeply a few times to rid myself of the excess CO2 that was building up from my increased RPMs. “Not that I’d recommend that you do file a lawsuit. In my experience, they pretty much always end up making your life miserable. But I suppose you could just threaten to sue the person unless they stop spreading the rumor.”

  Marta thankfully slowed a little at this point but didn’t say anything in answer. Her expression was pensive as she regarded the panorama of rolling hills and ocean that was starting to emerge as we climbed higher and higher. We pedaled without speaking for a couple of minutes, and then, once I’d had a chance to catch my breath, I made my move, upshifting and darting ahead of her.

  “See ya at the top!” I shouted as I sped by.

  “Not if I beat you there!” she responded, getting out of the saddle to try to jump into my slipstream.

  Okay, I’ve gotta come clean here: I know this road intimately—and also know exactly how long I can max out before cracking—and had timed my attack accordingly. I also had the element of surprise, so it took a second or two for Marta to respond. Hence, although I reached the scenic pullout more than a bike-length ahead of her, it was in many ways a hollow victory.

  But it still made me feel damn good.

  We unclipped and stood at the viewpoint panting as we gazed out across the Monterey Bay. During that last steep ascent, we’d emerged from the fog into brilliant sunshine, but the marine layer below us formed a puffy, gray blanket over the Pacific Ocean. Marta stripped off her jacket, revealing a pink Giro d’Italia leader’s jersey underneath, and I wished I’d thought to dress in layers as well, as my long-sleeve jersey now seemed way too warm for the day. But it would no doubt be chilly again once we descended.

  “So I know you’re probably sick of telling the stor
y,” I said, pushing my sleeves up over my elbows, “but I’d love to hear about your finding that Requiem music. I can’t even imagine how excited you must have been.”

  Marta smiled. “Yes, very excited. Though I didn’t know at the time exactly what I had found. I was at a bookstore in Prague, one that specializes in very old books and manuscripts. It is a hobby of mine. I can spend hours looking through old music, trying to guess its age, where it’s from, who might have written it. And in a place like Prague, with all its history? It is amazing the things you can find. So much better than anywhere here in the United States.” She paused to drink from her bottle and then replaced it in its cage.

  “So go on. How’d you discover the Süssmayr music?”

  “I was looking through a tall stack of music in the back of the shop. It was all mescolato—how do you say it in English?”

  “Mixed up?”

  “Sì, the papers were all mixed up, with some very old manuscripts but also some more recent sheet music. American jazz, mostly, from the 1930s and ’40s, and even a few modern rock and roll songs. I don’t know if it was a collection that had just come in and had not yet been organized or if it had been sitting there for years, but it was great fun looking through all the pages, because you had no idea what you would come to next.” Marta removed her sunglasses and cleaned them with a pink bandana she pulled from her jersey pocket.

  “Anyway, as I was going through that stack of papers, I came across a series of older manuscripts from the eighteenth century. You could tell by the feel and color of the paper and the style of musical notation on them. I went through these slowly, one by one. I didn’t recognize any of the music or the names written on some of the pages. But then my eye was caught by one that had the words ‘Dona eis requiem’ and later ‘Amen’ written above the music, and I saw that it was scored for four vocal parts and a figured bass.”

  “Uh-huh . . .” I wasn’t sure exactly what was so exciting about these particular things, but her shining eyes told me it was a big deal.

  Marta grinned and replaced her sunglasses. “So you see, I knew it had to be from a requiem mass. And only someone rather important would be likely to compose a work as complex as a requiem, was my thought. I read through the music very carefully and was astonished to recognize the last part of the Lacrymosa of the Mozart Requiem. But then it went on. It had a much longer—and quite different—ending. And it was then that I realized I might have found something truly important. Could this be a Mozart autograph? I was thinking. You know, a long-lost finished version of the Lacrymosa in his hand but which had somehow gotten separated from his other papers?”

  “Ohmygod,” I said. “You must have been—”

  “Shaking, is what I was,” Marta said with a laugh. “But then I tried to calm myself down. Because it would not do to show too much interest in the manuscript when I went to purchase it. So after going through the rest of the papers in the stack to make sure there weren’t any other interesting things there, I gathered up ten sheets of music all from the same era, with the Lacrymosa sheet in the middle, and took them to the man at the front of the shop to ask how much he wanted for them. He looked through them all, and I was terrified he was going to recognize the value of that one, but he didn’t pay it any more attention than the others. He wanted two thousand crowns for all the music—about ten dollars a sheet—so it wasn’t as if I got them for nothing.”

  “Uh-huh.” I grinned and shook my head in mock disapproval.

  “And I didn’t know if that one sheet was really going to be valuable or not.”

  “So how did you find out it was by Süssmayr?”

  “It took a while, but it had to do with it being the Lacrymosa.” Marta turned from the view to face me. “How much do you know about the history of the Requiem?”

  “Not much,” I said. “Just that it was unfinished when Mozart died and what you’ve told us in rehearsals about Süssmayr finishing it.”

  “Well, we are very fortunate that although Mozart did not finish the work, he did give us the complete choral score for all that he did write. Except for the Lacrymosa, that is. It is the only place where Mozart wrote the beginning of the vocal part but did not finish it. Probably because he was not satisfied enough with his ideas for the ending to put them down on paper before he died.

  “But”—Marta paused dramatically, wagging her eyebrows and holding a forefinger up in the air—“as I mentioned in class last week, there is a famous musical fragment of Mozart’s that is generally thought to be a sketch of an ending fugue for his Lacrymosa. So the first thing I did with the sheet I found in Prague was to compare it with that sketch.”

  “But how could you have access to it to compare them?” I asked. “Wouldn’t the Mozart music be locked up in some museum somewhere?”

  “Oh,” Marta said with a wave of the hand, “that sketch has been reproduced over and over again in books and online. There are even recordings of it now that you can listen to on YouTube. So I was able to do the comparison that same night in my hotel room. But I immediately saw that the styles of penmanship were different and that mine was most likely not by Mozart.”

  “Too bad.”

  “Too bad indeed,” Marta repeated with a thin smile. “Plus, I also realized that evening that the music at the top of my page—the last part of the Lacrymosa that we all know—was of course composed by Süssmayr, not by Mozart. At least as far as anyone knows at this point. So it could not have been a Mozart autograph in any case. However, when I took the time to really study the music itself, I saw that many of the notes in the ending portion were quite similar to the Mozart fugue fragment. Not exactly the same but clearly derived from it. So my next thought was that the manuscript I had could have been written by Süssmayr. Perhaps he had gotten hold of that Mozart fragment and completed the Lacrymosa based on it.”

  I frowned, trying to put this confusing history into some sort of logical order. “But if that were the case, why wouldn’t that version—the one you found in Prague—be what we all know now?”

  Marta shrugged. “Chissà? Perhaps Süssmayr did not obtain the Mozart fragment until after he submitted his finished product, or maybe he did submit it with the rest but for some reason it was lost? It is impossible to know. But then again, that could be said about virtually everything associated with the Requiem.” She shook her head and turned to watch two hikers making their way up one of the trails in the Pogonip, the wooded area directly below us.

  “But I am jumping ahead of myself,” she continued after a moment. “To find out who in fact had written down the music on that paper I discovered, I needed an expert to look at it. Fortunatamente, there is a man up at Stanford University who agreed to examine the manuscript for me. And he seemed pretty certain that I was right, that it is in fact in Süssmayr’s hand.”

  “Wow,” was all I could muster, even though I already knew the outcome of the story.

  “He told me the next step would be to take it to an auction house for authentication, someplace like Christie’s or Sotheby’s. So I did and, well, you know what happened.” Marta grinned and clipped her left foot into her pedal. “Shall we continue with our ride?”

  Side by side, we continued up the last bit of the climb, following the bend in the road around Stevenson College, one of the residential colleges that make up the University of California at Santa Cruz. As we cruised past College Eleven, I remembered Steve, which set me off contemplating Kyle’s death.

  “Sally . . . Sally! Are you listening?”

  “Oh, sorry. I was just thinking about something.”

  “I can’t imagine what could possibly be more interesting than my mother’s endless, complaining telephone calls from Napoli,” Marta said with a laugh. “So what were you thinking about?”

  “Uh . . .”

  And there it was. I’d been trying to decide over the past few days whether to tell Marta about Jill’s theory that Kyle had been murdered. On the one hand, she would surely be interested to
hear about it and could even have information that would shed light on what had happened.

  But on the other hand, I had to wonder if there might be a connection between Kyle’s death and one of the chorus members spreading the rumor that she hadn’t written the piece that had been performed in Chicago. Was there something going on in the chorus that I wasn’t aware of? Some deep-seated antagonism that could have led to Kyle being killed? And if so, and if Marta was somehow connected with his death, wouldn’t it be unwise to discuss it with her?

  Discretion may be the better part of valor, but, as is probably obvious by now, I’m not always super great at that. So I decided to go ahead and talk to her about it and just see what happened.

  “I was thinking about something that has to do with Kyle, actually. Jill’s been telling me she’s not so sure his death was an accident.”

  “Davvero?”

  “Yeah, really. She thinks someone may have done it on purpose. Pushed him out of that window.”

  “No.” Marta’s violent head shake caused her to swerve and almost run into me. “That’s too crazy,” she said, recovering her balance. “Who does she think did it?”

  “She doesn’t know. But that’s what I was thinking about just now. ’Cause she asked me to look into it, and it turns out there’s this guy who was renting Kyle’s house who works up here on campus and who Kyle kicked out—”

  “Did she say why anyone would want to kill him?” Marta asked, interrupting me.

  “No. But I gather there were lots of people he wasn’t too popular with.”

  We came at this point to the T-junction just past Science Hill, and I directed Marta to turn left, which took us rapidly downhill, making any further conversation impossible.

  Once back in town, I led Marta on the rest of my Saturday ride: along the San Lorenzo River levee, dodging the scattered homeless still nestled in their sleeping bags; past the Boardwalk and the volleyball players at Main Beach; up to West Cliff Drive; and then up the coast to Wilder Ranch.