“Would you like something to drink? Orange juice on the rocks?”
“You wouldn’t have a cup of coffee, would you?”
“Sure.” She started the pot and set out a couple of mugs. When she returned to the living room, she found Andrew and Fred head to head.
“What did I miss?”
“He wouldn’t tell me anything, Mom,” Andrew complained. “He said we had to wait for you.”
“You deserve to hear it all,” Fred said. “If it hadn’t been for you, we might never have figured it out.”
“Me?” The grin spreading across her face felt foolish even from behind. She was glad she couldn’t see it. He grinned back.
“Sure, you. First you sent Yoichi to the police.”
“No,” she said in horror. “I sent him to Sam. If I hadn’t, George would have been the only person to die. You do still think Wanda died because … because Sam was afraid of something she might say?”
“Probably,” he said gently. “Especially if he told her Daniel wanted him to pick up the oboe, and she already knew that Daniel was on his way over to do it himself. But Sam wouldn’t have stopped with George. And it didn’t make any difference that he heard it first. He had access to all the police reports anyway. It was good we found out when we did. The first murder was so near to a perfect crime that we wouldn’t have caught it if Yoichi hadn’t told us about the poison. And then, when you found the reeds, you saw how easy it would be to poison an oboe player with something like TTX. If we’d identified the poison in the reeds sooner, we’d have asked Wanda where the oboe was. And that would have led us straight to Sam if she’d been alive to tell it.”
“I should have found them sooner.”
The bottle had been right there the whole time she had fought Donna Diana. Now the viola line pounded through her head in maddening perfection, as she had never yet been able to play it. She sank to the sofa, resisting with difficulty the feeling that if she covered her ears, everything would be all right again.
“You didn’t,” Fred said. “I wish I didn’t know how you feel. It happens.”
She nodded, unable to speak.
“But you did figure out what killed her, you know.”
“The reed knife? Was it really?” She found it scant comfort.
“Not the one you thought. Sam used his own. When I asked him to show me what one looked like, he pulled it out of his pocket. Seems it didn’t fit in his case and so he carried it in his pants most of the time. It’s a handy blade and sturdy. He couldn’t very well say no when I borrowed it to ask Dr. Henshaw whether George’s reed knife could have been the weapon used on Wanda. I didn’t happen to mention to Henshaw whose knife it was.
“On Tuesday he reported to me that he’d found blood of Wanda’s type inside the handle. There’s quite a good-sized opening on either side of the blade where it fits into the handle.”
“So that’s what made you think Wade did it?” Andrew asked.
“No, as a matter of fact, by the time I heard that, I was already sure. It will come in mighty handy in court, though.”
“What did, then?”
“Well, son, your mother came to see me the other night to show me a bottle of reeds she’d found. Several oboe reeds and one big bassoon reed, all soaking in what looked like plain water. I came up with a theory that Elmer Rush, the man who played bassoon behind Petris, had killed him.
“First thing, I went to Professor Werner’s laboratory to make sure the liquid in the bottle was full of his poison. To make a long story short, it was. And Rush had the opportunity to poison the bottle when he and Petris were making reeds. So did Petris, of course, but we knew by that time we were dealing with murder, not suicide. My theory was that Rush had recognized Petris from about twenty years ago, as the lifeguard who let his granddaughter almost drown. She’s been in bad shape ever since.”
“Why would he wait until now?” Andrew asked.
“Good question. I didn’t ask it. About that time I wasn’t thinking too clearly. Wade had persuaded my chief of detectives that I was wasting valuable departmental time and making a general fool of myself. I had orders to stick to my knitting and forget about the Petris business. It was supposed to be a figment of Yoichi Nakamura’s imagination.” He shook his head.
“I was about ready to forget about police business altogether. Now I know he was trying to make sure no one investigated that murder too carefully. He succeeded. I spun my wheels a lot.” He shook his head again, slowly. “I just didn’t care anymore.”
“I was worried about you, Fred,” Joan said. “What changed? I hardly knew you last night.”
“What changed was that I found out who the lifeguard really was and I knew I’d been had.”
“Sam?” asked Joan. “Not George?”
“Sam.”
“How did you find out?”
“Martha Lambert, Elmer’s daughter, didn’t know him as Sam, but she hadn’t forgotten his name. She said the lifeguard was a kid from the Bible Belt by the name of Gideon. She didn’t think she’d ever forget that. It took her a while to remember the Wade part. Wade—from Fish Creek—that’s how she remembered. She didn’t know how close that was to Oliver. Never crossed her mind when they moved here.”
“Nancy told me they called him Giddy before he left home. He went out west to train for the Olympic swim team.”
“That’s right. The only people back here who knew what had happened were his parents. They went out to California to see him through and take custody of him. Then they made him enlist in the marines. Mrs. Lambert knew that much. That’s the last she remembered hearing about him.”
“You said Wanda’s killer probably had military training,” Joan reminded him.
“Did I?”
“Mmm. Fred, how come this made you sure Sam was the killer? You’d already figured out that Elmer had recognized the lifeguard.”
His blue eyes laughed.
“This was different. If Elmer had meant to kill Sam, then he wouldn’t have poisoned George’s reed bottle.”
“If all this was between Elmer and Sam, then how did George get into it at all?” Joan was lost.
“Maybe partly because you fell down. I didn’t know about that until last night, but I suspected something of the sort. Look, I had it all backwards. Elmer didn’t recognize Sam. I’ve seen pictures of Sam in college and law school. You’d need a lot of imagination to pick that fellow out of a crowd today. He doesn’t have any physical peculiarities. This year he doesn’t even have a suntan. His hair is going gray and it’s brushed back over his ears. Elmer would remember a kid in a crew cut.”
“I get it!” Andrew fairly shouted. “It was the old guy who didn’t change. You know, Mom, how much Grandpa looks like the pictures of him with me when I was little? But I’ve changed a lot.”
“That’s it, Andrew,” said Fred. “Sam Wade recognized Elmer Rush, not the other way around.”
“But why would Wade want revenge?” Andrew asked. “It didn’t mess his life up all that much.”
“Oh,” said Joan, seeing Evelyn’s face clearly. “He didn’t. All Sam wanted was his wife, and all she wanted was a political career—second-hand, through him. If the word had leaked out about his criminal youth, she’d have thrown him over about as fast as I gather she has. He wasn’t just careless, Andrew. He was drinking on the job and underage, too. Julie nearly died. As it is, she’ll probably never tie her own shoes, much less read a book. He had to hide it.”
“You’d think someone would have found out by now,” Andrew said.
“His parents died before he went into politics,” Fred said. “The legal records are sealed because of his age at the time. They may even have been purged by now. It wasn’t likely to come up.”
“Oh, but it was,” said Joan. “Nancy told me Evelyn made him use all three names when he campaigned. That’s how it was on the orchestra list, too. Elmer would have spotted Gideon Samuel Wade. The only reason we didn’t hand those lists out a w
eek ago was that George died and shook us up.”
“I’m guessing that he managed to forget the whole sorry episode until he saw Julie’s grandfather in the orchestra,” Fred said. “And I’m not sure that Sam was quite as ambitious as Evelyn. He could probably have been elected to Congress with no problem on that score—and reelected, if the local folks liked him.”
“What was that about Mom falling down?” Andrew asked.
“Now I’m really speculating,” Fred answered. “Last night I asked the people to imitate what they did in the last few minutes before George Petris collapsed. I was hoping that Sam would make one last attempt on Elmer Rush and that, because we were expecting it, we’d be able to keep it from happening and catch him in the act. That’s pretty much how it turned out.
“He came prepared with an ordinary white envelope. In one corner, nearly invisible, there was enough TTX to kill off most of the woodwinds. Probably from Werner’s lab, though there’s no way to tell. I don’t know if he would have tried using it with me there, but when I offered him what looked like George’s bottle of reeds, he passed it right back to Elmer and pointed out the one bassoon reed in it. When we stopped that and called him on it, he tried to get rid of the envelope of TTX by passing it to his wife with a note on it. Now we have that, too.”
“You were going to tell me about how Mom fell,” Andrew reminded him.
“Sort of,” Joan said. “I faked it.”
“She knocked over the plastic cup Elmer was using last night to soak his reeds,” Fred said. “Last week, the thing she knocked over when she fell was the prescription bottle she took home after the rehearsal. A bassoon reed hid the oboe reeds in it. When she picked things up after she fell, she saw the bassoon reed in it and put it back by Elmer’s chair.”
“That could be,” Joan said slowly. “There was a lid on it, and I couldn’t see inside all that well. I didn’t even read the label with George’s name on it until I found it at home, much later. I was rushing, because he was yelling at me for falling all over his music stand.”
Does that make it my fault or his that he was killed? she wondered.
“That was the bottle Sam poisoned,” Fred said. “He was after Elmer, not George. But George found his reeds in the wrong place and took one out to use. He died because Sam didn’t see the oboe reeds when he dropped the TTX into the bottle.”
“That seems odd,” Joan said. “Sam sat right there all through the break. Why would he wait until we all came back to do what he could have done while no one was around? I’ll bet he’d already poisoned the reeds by then. After all, the bottle must have been back near Elmer while they were working on the reeds, if he put his bassoon reed into it.”
She felt better.
“Maybe,” Fred said. “Either way, Sam was trying to kill Elmer, not the other way around.” He didn’t seem threatened by her arguing. “And he had to do it before Elmer saw his name on that personnel list.”
“Seems to me you should have known all along that Mr. Rush didn’t do it,” Andrew said.
“How’s that?” Fred asked.
“I don’t see how he’d know about the poison. They say everybody in town knew it, but Mom and I didn’t. We weren’t here last spring when the newspaper ran that big feature about the lab. Wasn’t he new in town, too?”
Joan hugged him. “Andrew, I wish I had let you in on this the other night. I could have spared myself a lot of grief. I couldn’t bear to think that Elmer had killed someone.”
He wouldn’t have, she thought. And I wouldn’t have. Humming, she got up to pour the coffee.
“I wonder what would have happened if the first murder had turned out the way it was supposed to,” Andrew mused. “Do you think Wade would have gone after the rest of the family?”
“I’m sure he thought they were still in California,” said Fred. “The kids didn’t know about him at all—but how could he be sure of that? You might be right, Andrew.”
“We still don’t know what happened to George’s oboe—or his reed knife,” said Joan.
“Didn’t I tell you? The janitor picked up his knife the next day, figured some kid had brought it to school, and gave it to the principal.” Fred shook his head. “Something in this morning’s paper finally made him think it over again and call us.”
“And the oboe?”
“It’s gone. I imagine Sam dumped it in some abandoned quarry. He could have carried it anywhere, for that matter, and no one would have thought a thing about it. It looked just like his. I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure, unless he decides to confess.”
“Do you think that’s likely?” Joan thought Sam might have very little reason to hold back now.
“Not really. It will all depend on his lawyer. Sam doesn’t seem to be making any decisions on his own. I don’t think he cares.”
He took a sip of his coffee and sat staring into the mug.
“It’s hard to believe that just last week he had me completely buffaloed. He raked me and young Pruitt over the coals for having the gall to question his secretary about his movements on Saturday. I believed him for a long time, too. It seemed that he could have had less than ten minutes to arrive, kill Wanda, clean up, and walk back to the office.
“Then you figured out that he could have killed her before starting the washer, but the times were still too tight. For a while, I thought Evelyn Wade did it. Miss Hobbs said a light blue Seville drove past at about the right time. That’s her car.”
“Oh, no,” Joan said. “Evelyn spent the whole day on foot, shoe shopping. I’m sure the clerks all over town could give you a shoe-by-shoe account. She had to walk because Sam’s car was in the shop. That means he was using hers.”
“You mean he drove,” Andrew said. “That’s how he got there and back so fast.”
“You two,” Fred said. “We could use you both.”
“You’re doing the hiring these days?” Joan asked.
“Not quite, but my stock has gone up a little. Not that that’s saying much, when you realize that Sam asked for me on the Petris case. He must have thought, ‘Now which man can I trust not to get it right?’ That’s what really lit a fire under me when I heard Martha Lambert say his name.”
“Oh, Fred.”
“Don’t ‘oh, Fred’ me. Captain Altschuler patted me on the back and made a little speech today. I’ll know he means it if I move up from bicycles and lost dogs to stolen cars and missing persons. Next year’s an election year. I can wait.”
They sat in comfortable silence. Joan refilled the mugs.
“Fred,” she said after a while. “I still have one question.”
“What’s that?”
“Could you really have played the oboe solo on that sax?”
About the Author
Sara Hoskinson Frommer, a veteran of the Bloomington Symphony Orchestra’s viola section, lives with her husband in Bloomington, Indiana. They have two adult sons.
Her seventh Joan Spencer mystery, Her Brother’s Keeper, will be published in April 2013 by Perseverance Press http://www.danielpublishing.com/perseverance
Visit her website: www.sff.net/people/SaraHoskinsonFrommer
With special thanks to Gabe, to Marcia, and to Captain Charles Brown of the Bloomington Police Department
Other books by Sara Hoskinson Frommer
Murder in C Major
Buried in Quilts
Murder & Sullivan
The Vanishing Violinist
Witness in Bishop Hill
Death Climbs a Tree
Reviews
'Ironing for a corpse wasn't Joan Spencer's idea of fun.' With an opening sentence like that, you surely have to read on. You won't be sorry. Murder in C Major is a virtuoso debut by a new writer.--Washington Post Book World
A fine first novel about a middle-age widow who joins the local symphony as a viola player just in time for the first oboe to turn up his toes in what seems to be a heart attack. It turns out to be murder--and so does the death of the flu
tist.--Henry Kisor, Book Editor, Chicago Sun-Times
A chatty, easygoing and conventional first novel....Why C major? Because Schubert's Ninth Symphony, with its great oboe solo in the second movement, is integral to the story.--New York Times Book Review
Murder in C Major is a thoroughly nice mystery with an amiable pair of detectives. It is recommended for those who enjoy a comfortable read on a long winter's night.--Wilson Library Bulletin
Cover art courtesy of Poisoned Pen Press
Cover design Susan J. Kroupa
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