A Measure of Murder

by Leslie Karst

  All the people in the hall, whose numbers were starting to increase as folks arrived for regular rehearsal, clapped, and our little quartet smiled and made cursory bows. As I headed back to my seat, I glanced over at Marta, who returned my look with a subtle inclination of the head.

  Only one more group followed us with the Recordare, with a new alto and soprano but the same tenor and bass who had sung with me. I focused on the alto, the gal who’d told me during rehearsal that she’d be trying out for this movement, and decided that although she knew her part well, her voice was weak and difficult to hear, sandwiched between the other stronger singers. But I wasn’t going to make any assumptions at this point. Marta could choose either of us, and it would be fine. Right?

  After a couple run-throughs of the short, twelve-bar quartet in the Domine Jesu movement, it was time for the Benedictus, the one Allison was trying out for. Jill was once again one of the sopranos, and there were three other altos vying for the part. But Allison nailed it, as far as I was concerned. And from her cat-who-ate-the-canary grin afterward, I’d say she felt the same way.

  Eric finally showed up during the last movement (a soprano solo, for which Jill and Roxanne were once again competing). I pulled him outside so we could talk without disturbing the singers. “So, too chicken to try out for anything, eh?” I asked him.

  “No. Just too busy.”

  “As if I’m not?”

  Eric removed his horn-rimmed glasses and wiped off the condensation with his O’Neill T-shirt. “Well, I guess I just value my surfing time more than I feel the need for an ego-boosting solo.”

  “Too chicken, in other words.”

  “Yeah,” Eric conceded with a grin, “that pretty much sums it up. So how’d yours go, anyway?”

  “I think I did pretty okay, but we’ll see. Oops, is that Marta calling everyone in?”

  Eric and I headed back inside and took our places for rehearsal. After thanking those who’d auditioned, Marta told us she would announce her decision at Monday’s practice.

  “Bene,” the director said, climbing onto the podium. “We have only three more meetings before our dress rehearsal next Thursday, which will be at the usual location. For those who are new, that is the United Methodist Church on Soquel Avenue, the same place the concert will be the following night. I want everyone at dress rehearsal on the risers by a quarter to seven, so the orchestra doesn’t have to wait while we get ourselves arranged.”

  “There’s going to be an orchestra?” I whispered to Allison.

  “Yes, Sally,” Marta said, “there will be an orchestra.”

  I’m sure my cheeks flushed as red as Dad’s marinara sauce, but the director didn’t show any sign of minding this instance of someone talking to their neighbor. “It will be an orchestra as scored by Mozart,” she went on. “Though with modern clarinets rather than the basset horns of his era, and no organ.”

  “What’s a basset horn?” asked a young tenor with two-tone (purple-and-fire-engine-red) hair.

  “It’s similar to a clarinet,” Marta answered, “but with a curved bell, and it’s slightly deeper in tone.”

  “We saw one with all those other period instruments at that manor house outside Berlin,” Roxanne interjected. “Remember? The place where the owner gave us a private tour and let you play one of his antique violas. Schloss . . . Was-ist-der-Name.”

  Marta chuckled, as did others who’d been on the Europe trip last summer. “Okay, let’s get started,” she said, raising her arm to conduct. “We’ll take it from the top.”

  Halfway through the first movement, she stopped us to work with the tenors on their melismas, which, she said, sounded as weak and confused as Napoleon’s army on its retreat from Moscow. “Concentrate on your breathing,” the director instructed. “You must open your mouth wide like a cave and let the bats fly in.”

  But as she worked with the men, I was thinking back to what Eric had told me during our sushi dinner, about the places they’d visited during the concert tour the previous summer. Hadn’t he mentioned seeing a collection of old music manuscripts?

  When Marta excused us for break, I followed Eric to the dessert table. He was piling fresh strawberries and slices of pound cake onto a paper napkin. “Here,” he said, handing me the overloaded napkin. “Hold this a sec while I get some coffee, will ya?”

  I waited while he stirred two packets of sugar and a healthy glug of half-and-half into the cup and then followed him outside, still clutching his booty-filled napkin.

  “Ah, sun!” Eric set his cup down on the walkway, yanked off his T-shirt, and draped it and his sinewy surfer body over the metal railing. “Gotta work on my tan, which is severely subpar this year ’cause of all the fog we’ve been having. Thanks.” He took back his treats and ate half a slice of cake in one bite.

  “Remember when you told me about those stately homes you visited on the chorus trip?” I asked him.

  “Uh-huh,” he answered, mouth full. “Like the one Roxanne was talking about.”

  “Right. You said you also saw some old music manuscripts at one of the places?”

  Eric nodded yes as he bent for his coffee cup and was about to take a sip but then stopped and looked me in the eyes. “Okay, Sal, where’s this going?”

  “Do you remember if any of those manuscripts were from the Classical era? Say, late 1700s, by any chance?”

  Eric frowned and finally sipped from his cup. “Yeah,” he said after a moment. “There was one place, I remember. Near Leipzig, I think. It belonged to this old lady whose husband had collected the music. Marta knew the husband, who’d died a few years back, but the lady still let us come visit.”

  “Do you remember anything else? Like what the music was or if Marta had any particular interest in it? Or if Kyle did?”

  “Hmm . . .” Eric chewed a strawberry and stared out at the parking lot where the same two tenors as before were having their cigarette break. “I don’t remember exactly what the music was. Just that it was several hundred years old and was in this locked case. But the lady opened it and was leafing through the pages, showing them to us. I got bored after a while, but I do remember Marta—and Kyle, now that I think about it—staying there a long time, talking to the woman about the music.”

  “Really? Kyle, too? You’re sure?”

  “I think so.” Eric did that thing where you look up and to the left, but you’re not really focusing on anything external; you’re doing a search of your memory. “Yeah, I’m sure,” he finally said. “Kyle was definitely with her.”

  “Whoa.”

  “What?” Eric jettisoned his sticky napkin and leaned toward me, his voice now lowered. “You think it has something to do with his death?”

  “Maybe.” I led Eric farther down the walkway, past the bathrooms. “Okay, what if Marta didn’t discover that Lacrymosa music after all. What if she stole it from that lady?”

  “And if Kyle knew about it? Or was even involved?” Eric glanced back toward the rehearsal hall. “Shit, Sal. If that’s true . . .”

  “Yeah. It certainly provides a motive for her later wanting to shut him up.”

  We headed back inside, neither speaking. But really, what was there to say? I had no way of proving—or disproving—the theory.

  As I studied Marta, leaning over the piano and discussing a section of music with Nadia, I remembered that I was going to be spending tomorrow morning with the director. We’d made plans to ride up the coast, with a stop in Davenport for breakfast. I could try to wheedle more information from her then. But what if I was right about my theory? Was that a wise course of action?

  Because it would be a long, isolated ride back to town, afterward.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The headwind coursing down Highway 1 the next morning was vicious. As soon as Marta and I had left the shelter of town and hit the unprotected coastline, I’d had to downshift, and though I was pedaling like crazy, it felt as if I were almost standing still. The bike lane along this st
retch is fairly wide, but Marta and I rode single file. With traffic barreling past at sixty miles an hour and sudden gusts of wind liable to send a lightweight carbon fiber bicycle careening into the roadway, it seemed like a good idea.

  Conversation was thus pretty much impossible, so as I slogged northward, I attempted to focus on my surroundings as opposed to the burning sensation in my legs. It was, indeed, a glorious day. The vicious wind, which I was now inwardly cursing in language that would make a line cook blush, had swept the marine layer far out to sea, and the colors of the landscape and sky seemed supersaturated in the bright, morning sunlight.

  After about five miles, we stopped for a respite from the headwind and walked our bikes across the highway to admire the view of the Pacific Ocean. Marta laid her beautiful Bianchi down on the scrubby, brown grass and went to stand at the edge of the cliff. I followed after her, and as we drank from our water bottles, we admired a trio of brown pelicans soaring lazily down the coast, borne by the same strong wind currents we’d been battling as we traveled the other direction.

  Below us, the waves were crashing onto a rock-strewn beach. I leaned over to get a better look and realized that the promontory on which we perched had been severely undercut by erosion of the soft limestone below. Stepping back, I pointed this out to Marta, who merely laughed. “It has been here this long—I don’t think it is going to pick this instant to collapse,” she said, then moved a few paces even closer to the edge. Like the figurehead on a grand sailing vessel, she leaned out into the wind with a defiant smile, as if tempting the gods above to do their will.

  Suit yourself, I thought. But just seeing her in such a precarious position made me anxious, and I took another couple steps back, as if my mere proximity might somehow cause her to fall.

  Marta, however, had no such qualms. She continued to lean into the onshore wind, now with arms outstretched like Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic, and began singing the Dies irae from the Requiem, which translates roughly as “The day of wrath, day of anger, will dissolve the world in ashes . . .”

  As I watched, unsure whether to shout out a warning or simply drag her back to safety, a vision came to me of Marta standing before the tall, arched window up in that church storage room, gazing down at Kyle’s limp, broken body on the cement below.

  Marta—the real one, there on the cliff—turned to me at that moment and laughed once more. All thoughts of pulling her back to safety disappeared. Taking several more steps back, away from the cliff—and from her—I said, “Uh, you wanna maybe head on up the road?”

  * * *

  By the time we arrived at the Davenport bakery, I was in need of some reenergizing sustenance in the form of both calories and caffeine. We found a table outside, in a sunny spot protected from the wind where we could keep an eye on our bikes during the meal, and scanned the menu.

  “The salmon omelet looks good,” Marta said. “I think I’ll have that.”

  I read the description for the dish: salmon, feta, pesto, spinach, bell pepper, and onion. “Oh yeah, that does look yummy. But so do the eggs Florentine. I have a hard time resisting anything with a hollandaise sauce.”

  While I agonized over my breakfast choice, Marta got up to use the restroom, and by the time she returned, I’d decided on something entirely different: the challah French toast with whipped cream and fresh berries. “Yeah, well,” I said in response to her chuckle, “about the only thing I like even more than hollandaise is whipped cream. And after that windblown ride up the coast, I think I’ve earned it.”

  The waitress came to take our order and poured coffee into the old-school diner mugs sitting on the table. “Watch out for the gulls,” she said, returning with glasses of water. “They’re having a field day today with people’s food. This wind must have them all riled up.”

  “Ah, sì! Look there!” Marta exclaimed, pointing to a table behind me.

  The waitress darted across the patio and swatted at the bird—a large male with a gleaming white chest—who’d landed on the chrome table and was helping himself to the remnants of a departed customer’s breakfast. “Shoo!” she yelled, and the gull flapped off, a slice of wheat toast dangling from its beak.

  Marta started telling me about a sea gull she’d seen back home in Naples that had been trained to bump a tiny soccer ball into a net with its head. I smiled and nodded at her story as I sipped my coffee but was only half listening. Should I ask her about Kyle? And about that medal and the Elixier wrapper?

  She must have noticed my distracted state, because after finishing her narrative, she fell silent, studying the cuticle of her left thumb. I was trying to come up with a way to broach the subject of Kyle, but the more I thought about it, the more nervous the whole thing made me. Some investigator you are, I chided myself. Miss Marple would just ask her, point blank, “So, dear, what was your relationship with Kyle, anyway?” But then again, unlike me, the spinster sleuth wasn’t conflict averse. And besides, she was fictional.

  Marta was still not talking, and the lull in conversation was beginning to feel awkward. I was about to chicken out with a question about her hometown of Napoli when she looked up from her nail and said, “Oh, I’ve been meaning to ask. Have you learned anything more about Kyle’s death?”

  It was a good thing I’d just set down my mug or I might have ended up with coffee all down the front of my cycling jersey. But the fact that I’d just taken a drink gave me a moment under cover of swallowing to decide what to say.

  “Uh, actually, it’s funny you ask. Because I went up to that storage room last week during break to look for clues . . .” My mouth felt suddenly parched, and I sipped from my water glass while Marta waited with furrowed brows. C’mon, Sal. Don’t be a wimp. Tell her. “And, well, I found something up there that I think might be yours.”

  “What?” She leaned across the table, and the intensity of her gaze was unnerving.

  “A St. Christopher medal. It’s silver with a turquoise-blue enamel center, about the size of a quarter.”

  Her reaction took me completely by surprise. Leaning back in her chair, Marta smiled broadly and clapped her hands together as would a small child on being presented with a brightly wrapped package. “Oh, you found it! I am so glad.”

  “What? It is yours?”

  “Why, of course. But it went missing a week or so ago, and I was heartbroken. You see, my grandfather had given it to me for good luck when I first moved to America from Italy, and it is the only thing I still have to remind me of him.” Marta held out her hand eagerly. “Do you have it?”

  “No. The police do.”

  “The police?” Jerking back her arm, her entire body went rigid. “But why?” she asked, eyes wide.

  “Because of where I found it: in a hole in the rotted wood that was exposed after the window frame came loose when Kyle fell out. But that’s not the only thing I discovered up in that room. I found this, too.” I reached into the back pocket of my cycling jersey for the Elixier wrapper I’d brought along in order to show Marta. “I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, but I happen to know you use the same kind of throat lozenge.”

  Taking the wrapper from me, she squinted at the writing on it and then laughed—a short, harsh “ha!”

  “What?”

  Marta gave it back and stood up. “That is not the kind I buy.” She strode to her bike, rummaged around in the bag tucked under its saddle, and came up with a wrapped lozenge that looked just like an Elixier. “Here,” she said, walking back and handing it across the table. “Open it.” I untwisted the wrapper and smoothed the paper out on the table. “Now look what it says there in blue,” she said, “below the word ‘Elixier.’”

  “Sugar-free,” I read aloud.

  “Now look at the one you found.”

  “Elixier Herb. Kräuterzucker.”

  “See?” Marta leaned back with a satisfied smile and crossed her arms. “The one you found in that room is not sugar-free—it is the herb kind with sugar. That is what Kräuterzuc
ker means: herb-sugar. But I only ever buy the sugar-free variety. Because I already have so many problems with my teeth, my dentist has told me I should never eat the sugar candies.”

  Seeing the waitress approach with our food, I leaned back to allow her to set down my cardiac arrest fest of a breakfast. Once Marta had been presented with her plate piled high with a puffy omelet, crispy cottage potatoes, and sliced strawberries and cantaloupe, the gal stepped back, hands clasped in front of her denim apron. “Is there anything else I can get you?” she asked.

  “No, thanks,” I said. “This looks great.” On Marta’s nod of approval, the server left us to go attend to another table.

  Marta cut off a corner of her omelet but then put the fork back down. “So the police, do they think I pushed Kyle out of that window?” And then she looked at me. “Do you think that? Is that why you gave them the, how do you say it, medaglia of St. Christopher?”

  “No,” I said, evading the middle question. “It was only after I gave the medal to the police that it occurred to me it might be yours. And I don’t know if they suspect you or not. But they did say they’d run a fingerprint test on the medal so . . .”

  Marta sucked in her breath. “But it will of course have mine on it.”

  I nodded.

  “Dio mio.” She stared down at her uneaten omelet. “You must believe me when I say I did not kill him. I will admit that I was in that room during break that morning, before he died. I told that to the police when they interviewed me afterward. But that is not when I lost the . . .”

  “Medal.”

  “Yes, the medal. I know I had it after that, because I use it like those beads some people carry, and I was rubbing it like crazy after they found Kyle dead like that. You know, since I had been in the storage room right beforehand. It was a few days later that I noticed it was missing.”