by Larry Karp
“Relax, Thomas. The ladies’ll be gone for at least three hours. We’ll have plenty of time to start organizing the music.”
Tom let the discussion rest until they had a washing machine running. “Okay, but why did you bring my textbooks? There’s gotta be something more useful I could be doing, isn’t there?”
“More useful than keeping your grandmother happy?”
“Uh…When you put it that way…” He settled down with his Social Studies textbook.
“Thomas?”
“Yeah, Alan?”
“Not a word about this detour to Miriam. Got it?”
“Got it.”
***
In the Bothwell parking lot, Tom hoisted the laundry, the duffel bag, and their newly acquired office supplies, then headed for the hotel door.
Alan slammed the trunk closed, revealing Detective Parks, standing on the passenger side of the car.
“Good morning, Mr. Chandler.”
Alan jumped, but composed himself quickly. “Mr. Parks. I doubt any morning that includes washing clothes is a good one.” He put his hands on his hips. “Thanks for making the morning perfect. What can I do for you?”
“Oh, nothing. Just came by to make sure you hadn’t accidentally snuck out of town again. If that happened too often, I might start thinking you lacked respect for the law.”
Alan frowned. “Believe me, Sir, if I go anywhere, it won’t be by accident. But as you can see, I’m here. Being a good boy.”
“Glad to hear it, Mr. Chandler.” The detective started to lean against the side of the car, hastily straightening when Alan thumbed the alarm button. “Since you’re being such a good boy, perhaps you can help me out a bit. I heard something interesting while I was looking for that soggy piano. Care to guess what that might have been?”
“I wouldn’t dare.”
“No? Oh, well. Seems you spent some time at the store of one Sylvester Maggione, a man who is now violently dead. Unpleasant deaths are following you around, Mr. Chandler.”
Alan raised an eyebrow. “All deaths are unpleasant. And I’m sure many people have visited Mr. Maggione’s shop.”
Parks snorted. “You saw the place and you say that?”
Alan shrugged, conceding the point.
“And what was your business with Mr. Maggione?”
“Looking for the music, of course. He’s not the only antiques dealer I talked to. Won’t be the last, either.”
“And?”
“He didn’t have it.”
The detective sighed. “I figured as much.” He tapped the brim of his hat. “Keep in touch, Mr. Chandler.”
Alan watched him leave, then turned toward the hotel, pleased to see that Tom hadn’t waited around. Wouldn’t have done anybody any good if Parks had seen the duffel bag.
Tom was waiting at the elevator. On the way up, Alan filled the boy in about the latest police visit. Tom tried a theatrical wipe of his forehead, but with his hands full of bags, it was a lost cause. “I didn’t even notice you weren’t with me until I got into the lobby. Good thing I didn’t go back.”
“We got lucky. If he saw the duffel at all, he probably figured it was more laundry. Can’t count on that happening again. We’ll have to be more careful.”
“He’s making progress.”
“Not much. It’s a long sideways jump from Maggione to the Nowlins.”
Once inside the room, they shoved the clean clothes into drawers, pulled archival gloves from Alan’s suitcase, and turned to the music.
Tom scratched his head. “The table isn’t going to be big enough. How do you want to do this so nothing hits the floor?”
“Hmm. Sort it into stacks on the bed. Four piles, I think. Printed sheet music, full manuscripts, individual manuscript sheets with no corrections, and everything else—all the scrap paper and drafts.”
“Okay. What about the stuff that isn’t by Joplin? We saw some when we were at Mickey’s.”
“Don’t sweat it for now. We’ll do that on a second pass.”
They worked in silence for a few minutes before Tom laughed. “Got a copy of ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’ here. If Mr. Joplin knew, he’d choke.”
“Maybe it was his copy. He would have had to have one to decide if he should sue Berlin.”
“Not this one. It’s got a photo of some girl group. The Star Sisters? Who the heck are they?”
Alan laughed. “They were in the eighties—nineteen eighties, that is. Wonder how that got in the bag. Well, put it on the sheet music pile and we’ll figure it out later.”
***
“What have we got?”
“Four big piles of paper.”
“Cute.” Alan gently bopped the top of Tom’s head. “You know, if even a quarter of this is new Joplin, it really is the biggest musical find of the century.”
“And it’s all yours.”
“There are a few people who would argue otherwise.” Alan pursed his lips. “Now that I see it spread out like this, it’s starting to sink in just how big it is. Much bigger than it felt, leafing through a few sheets at a time at Mickey’s. No wonder there are so many people chasing it. Amazing that the Nowlins sat on it for so long.”
Tom nodded and stretched.
Alan caught the motions and realized his own back was protesting about the amount of time he had spent bent over the bed. “I better stretch out for a bit. Why don’t you start sorting the printed music: Joplin, other rags, and everything else? Wake me up when you’re done with that.”
“Sure, Alan. Need any meds?”
“Nah. Just need to give my body and brain some downtime.”
***
Tom glanced at the clock.
Only fifteen minutes. Hardly enough of a rest. I’ll give him another ten or fifteen. I’m pretty sure he’s not going to care about any of the sheet music. The Joplin titles are well-known, and the rest are crap—hell, more than half of it has copyright dates after 1950. He set his piles on the table and started to sort the handwritten manuscripts.
***
After Alan woke, he went right to the scraps while Tom continued through the complete manuscripts and single pages. A little over an hour later, Alan paused to look at the neat piles Tom had made of the manuscripts and clean single sheets, then at his own untidy, half-sorted piles of scraps, ideas, and heavily annotated pages.
“You’re making much better time than I am.”
Tom shrugged. “Some of these have names on ’em. Makes it easy to tell what’s who’s. And Joplin’s handwriting is pretty recognizable. I can’t match up most of the separate sheets—but I did find another page of the piece with that card theme. I think we’ve got the entire second half of it now.”
Alan picked up the pile. “How much is in here?”
“Close to two dozen complete, including the piano concerto. And I only recognized maybe five or six of them. The single sheets, I think they come from maybe a dozen pieces. None of them are complete, but they’re all new.”
“More than two dozen new Joplins?” Alan’s jaw was nearly resting on his knees. “Holy shit!”
Tom’s grin threatened to wrap around the back of his head. “Even if I’m wrong about them all being new, it’s one hell of a haul. Add in the bits and pieces you’ve got, and holy shit doesn’t even begin to cover it.”
Alan took a deep breath and carefully set down the pile of manuscripts. “And most of the bits and pieces look to be Joplin as well.” He shook his head in amazement and his eye fell on the non-Joplin manuscripts. “Anything interesting in those?”
“Well, there’re four or five manuscripts signed ‘Wilbur Sweatman.’ You said the duffel bag used to be his?”
“Possibly. If his music’s in there, that makes it more likely. Ought to help establish the chain of ownership. What else?”
Tom squinted in thought. “A bunch of one-offs, mostly by people I’ve never heard of. You’ll have to take a look. Oh, and a couple from ‘A. No-land’.” He pronounced it Betty-style.
“Who?” Alan said with a straight face. After a second, they both grinned conspiratorially before Alan’s lip curled into an involuntary sneer. “Two by Angeline? God help us.”
Tom flipped through the pile of manuscripts and shuffled pages out of the middle. “‘Will’s Way’ and, uh, ‘The Queen of Calico Rag’.”
“‘Queen of Calico’? Let me see that!” Alan grabbed the pages and studied them for a moment. He laughed and held them out to Tom. “You’ve seen this piece before, only with a different name.”
“I have?” Tom studied the manuscript for a moment before a lightbulb came on over his head. He pulled out his phone and swiped through the photo roll. “It’s exactly the same as ‘Lowdown Rag’—that piece in Abigail’s shrine!”
Alan rubbed the side of his nose. “Why would Joplin have kept a copy of Angeline’s music all those years? His own drafts, sure. But this other stuff?”
Alan’s gaze fell on the pile of non-ragtime music and he slapped his forehead. “Idiot! He didn’t keep it—he never had it. God only knows where half this stuff came from. Sweatman, some of it, sure, but I bet we’ve got generations of additions here. Sweatman’s daughter, maybe, or whoever had the bag before Charles Blackstone’s father bought it. The Nowlins, for whatever stupid reasons they had. We’re lucky there’s anything of Joplin’s left, let alone a bonanza like this! And maybe because it’s such a mishmash is part of the reason why the Nowlins could never get together on it. They probably didn’t know which pieces were Joplin’s, and which weren’t.”
Alan waved “Will’s Way” at Tom. “We’ve probably got Ms. Abigail Nowlin to thank for inflicting this on us.” He eyed the title suspiciously. “Named for Angeline’s son with Lathan, I suppose. I wonder if she wrote it before or after they split up.”
Curiosity battled briefly with sense and emerged victorious; Alan played the song in his head. “It’s not actually that bad. More of a unified piece than ‘Queen of Calico,’ and some decent musical ideas. Nothing to distinguish it from the herd, but it might have made her a few dollars if she had published it.”
Alan waved at Tom’s piles of music. “The ladies could be back any time and I’m getting too wrapped up in these bits and pieces. Better I should leave them for later, when it won’t matter how much I get lost in the music. Let’s start making lists of what you’ve found.”
He pulled out his notebook and settled carefully against the headboard. “You call ’em off, I’ll write ’em down. Then pack ’em up: each piece into an envelope, handful of envelopes in a folder, stack ’em in the duffel.”
***
Miriam moved quickly and quietly through the small house, sliding drawers open, pushing them shut. Nothing in the living room, or the dining room, or the TV-music den. In the bedroom, she made a point of looking carefully through the underwear drawer, but all she found there was underwear.
Best she could tell, there was no accessible attic or basement, so she was spared decades of cobwebs, but the amount of dust everywhere except the bedroom made her wish for a face mask. Jarvis’ housekeeping was a little better in the improvised little office off his bedroom: the floor needed a good vacuuming, but the working surfaces weren’t an immediate hazard to anyone’s lungs.
The big find was in the top right drawer of the computer desk. Seven yellowed music manuscript sheets, filled with music. Miriam had picked up a smattering of musical terminology—it would have taken a determined effort not to learn something in the decades she had been exposed to Alan’s influence—but reading a handwritten manuscript was far beyond her capabilities. These weren’t even clean copies. They were filled with scratched out passages and ink blots, and the notation had the sloppy look of something intended as a memory aid for the writer. Given what Alan and Tom had been searching for, Miriam was confident she had just made a significant find. She tapped the sheets even, then slipped them into her clipboard, behind the few pages of note paper that had been there when JJ gave it to her.
A sepiatone photograph of two men, one white, one black, shaking hands, had been under the music. Miriam was already pushing the drawer closed when it hit her. Squinting, she read in faded blue ink, “To Scott Joplin, of whom I expect great accomplishments. Alfred Ernst.”
She had no idea who Alfred Ernst was, but if Scott Joplin was in the photo, it was going to Alan. Miriam slid it under the music sheets.
The computer desk yielded no further treasures. Miriam looked around the room, decided she’d done as well as she was going to. She walked briskly back into the living room and through it toward the front hall…just in time to see a large black man push the outside door open and walk inside.
The two stood for a moment, staring at each other. Miriam took the initiative. “Mr. Nowlin?”
Jarvis held a half-empty bottle of Royal Emblem Scotch in his right hand. With his left hand, he scratched at his head. “Yeah, you got me there, Lady.” A loud hiccup. “Now, who the hell are you…and what the hell you doin’ inside my house, huh?”
“They didn’t tell you I was coming out?” Miriam shook her head sadly. “They get worse and worse.” She tucked the clipboard under her left arm, then extended her right hand to shake Jarvis’ hand. “I’m Miriam Broaca, Domestic Violence Unit. I need to have a talk with you about what happened last night. Routine.”
Thank goodness, she’d kept her maiden name for professional purposes. If he asked for I.D., she could wave a card past his face, too quickly for him to see it was from her investment business in Seattle.
But he only shook his head slowly back and forth, and wavered slightly in place. He clearly was exhausted, at least a little drunk, and just wanted to get this stuff done, whatever it was. “No, nobody tell me you was comin’. And they sure’s hell didn’t tell me you was gonna be inside a my house.”
“Oh, I understand, and I’m very sorry. I expected you to be here. The door wasn’t quite latched, but I rang the bell anyway. When you didn’t answer, I thought you might have dozed off, so I pushed the door open and came inside to look for you. I suppose the police didn’t lock up properly.” She gestured at the bottle in his hand. “It looks like you’d have been here if you’d come straight from the courthouse, and hadn’t made that stop.”
Jarvis shrugged, then put the bottle down, not gently, onto a little side table. He sighed. “Okay, Lady, you say you gotta talk to me, let’s talk. My head still hurt like hell from last night. I jus’ wanna get this shit…’scuse me…over and done.”
“That would be fine with me.”
Miriam settled into a small padded chair; Jarvis plopped onto one end of the sofa opposite her. “Okay, shoot. What you want to know?”
Miriam pulled a mechanical pencil out of her purse, giving the bump key and knife a little shove to the very bottom. Then she picked up the clipboard. “Tell me what happened last night, and why.”
“I already told the cops that, ten different times. Why I gotta do it again?”
“It’s what I said, routine. I’m a social worker, not a cop, and it just might be I’ll make sense out of something that sails right past their thick heads.”
She didn’t miss Jarvis’ smile.
“Okay, Lady, here it is. That bitch, Abigail, she and me’re sorta cousins. Her daddy and my granddaddy was brothers. But you could say we don’t ’zactly see eye to eye. We’ve had troubles in our families, goin’ all the way back to 1899, it’s got to do with my great-great gramma and a composer named Scott Joplin. You ever hear of him?”
Miriam put on a thoughtful look. “Yes. ‘The Sting,’ right?”
“Yeah, right. Well, he wrote a bunch of music besides what was in that movie, and some of it, most people don’t even know it exists. It’s been
in and outa our family for most all these years and we can’t get together on what to do with it. It’s worth a little fortune if we sell it, which is what makes a ton a sense to me and some of the others. But my cousin Abigail, she’s just damn crazy. She thinks that Great-great got screwed on the music by Joplin, and she wants to publish the stuff and give Great-great the credit for writin’ it. When she was a li’l girl, Great-great made her promise to do that one day. ’Course if that happens, there’s no money in it for nobody. The whole family’s been fighting about what to do since we found out about the music.
“So Cousin Abigail gets ahold of the music and one day she has herself a yard sale. Some scumbag antique dealer walk away with all the music. Shouldn’t a never happened. He sells it to an old piano player in Sedalia, Mickey Potash, ’cause he thinks maybe Mickey’ll help him make a fortune on it.
“When I find that out, I go and talk to Mickey. I tells him, ‘Let’s you and me work together, get the music copyrighted as Joplin’s, we’ll get the most for it that way.’ He said that sounded pretty good. Meanwhile, this antique dealer, Maggione, he’s like a leech on your skin, wanted to make sure he got a good cut, and if he didn’t, he was gonna queer the whole deal by tellin’ people the music was really not by Joplin. We’d have to get experts to say Maggione’s fulla shit, and that’d take forever and cost a bunch of money, so I figured we should just stonewall him. We’d be fine, get the music out, copyrighted, then what could he do? And then he ends up dead in his shop.”
Miriam squeezed her stiff fingers. “Do you have any idea about how that happened?”
Jarvis waved his hands before his face. “Nope, no idea at all. I ain’t gonna tell you I was sorry to see we had one less problem, but I had nothin’ to do with it. The cops asked me that too, and like I told them, I was clean as a whistle. When he got whacked, I was at a jazz concert downtown, ended up reviewing it. Hundreds of people saw me there.”
“Good. I’m glad to hear it. But what happened then? What I really need to know is why you ended up crashing into your cousin’s house and beating the hell out of her. Domestic violence…?”