The Haunting Ballad

by Michael Nethercott

  My monosyllabic query seemed to throw Audrey. She narrowed her eyes and parted her lips in an unspoken question.

  I realized I needed to expand on my sentence. “How could you do this to me?”

  My words seemed to hit Audrey like a belly punch, and she actually drew her hands to her stomach. Her face reddened as tears rose in her eyes. “Lee.” She had become monosyllabic herself.

  My thinking process had slowed to Neanderthal level. I didn’t know whether to scream out in primitive torment or gather Audrey up in an embrace of comfort. I opted for simply standing there and waiting to see if she could summon more words.

  She could, but not before gulping for air for several seconds. “Lee, I never ever meant to hurt you.”

  “Never ever…” I repeated the phrase mechanically. It seemed to be something out of a fairy tale—an ugly, hapless one with a lousy ending: And they never ever were happy again.

  Audrey pulled a handkerchief from her purse and dragged it over her face. There was nothing ladylike or genteel about the gesture. Clearly, the floral-patterned cloth had ceased to be a hankie and was now more like the sop rag that a cornerman would use to wipe his boxer’s bloodied face. Once she’d tucked the handkerchief away, I studied her features. The button nose, full lips, hazel eyes, and short, sassy brown hairdo were all there, but they somehow couldn’t come together in the pretty, perky way they usually did. Right now, Audrey did have the look of someone who’d just been pummeled. Not outside but within, where it really hurt.

  She cleared her throat. “I’ll tell it from the beginning.”

  I didn’t want to hear the tale chronologically. I wanted to hear the most dreadful part first. “Are you sleeping with Byron Spires?”

  “No!” The firmness in her voice gave me hope, a hope that was further fortified when actual resentment crept into her tone. “Is that what you think of me?”

  I tried to get out my own “No!” as quickly and firmly she’d gotten hers out.

  Audrey drew herself up. “Just because I’m down in bohemia doesn’t mean I’ve become a bohemian girl. Not in that way.”

  “In what way, then?”

  She sighed. “A few days after you and I went to the Café Mercutio, you were out of town working on a case, and I decided I wanted to go back. It seemed like such an interesting place.”

  “Meaning Byron Spires seemed like such an interesting guy.”

  “Yes,” she said very softly, “but it wasn’t just him. It was the whole scene.”

  “So you went down alone.”

  “Like I say, you were out of town, and I knew I could spend the night with Aunt Beth in Yonkers. It was a little adventure for me.”

  “An adventure,” I parroted. “Of course, Spires remembered you from our earlier visit. I’m sure he was pleased to have you in his den again.”

  Audrey drew in a deep breath, as if filling her sails for a difficult voyage. “Yes, he was performing that night. I was sitting alone, so he joined me after his set, and we talked and had a little wine—not too much—and he told me about his travels and his music. It was … nice.”

  Nice. Again, a previously harmless word had suddenly become odious.

  She continued. “He struck me as such a different kind of person than I’m used to. So are all the people down there, really. Of course, the Village itself is so very different from Thelmont. I mean, if you took the people who live in the Village and dropped them right here, it would seem like some sort of crazy carnival, wouldn’t it?”

  I was in no mood to speculate on cross-pollination. “So you kept going down without telling me.”

  “You weren’t here. You’d flown out to California to help your sister.”

  “You and I spoke by phone a couple of times, though, and you sure didn’t mention it then.”

  “We pretty much just talked about Marjorie’s health, didn’t we?”

  “Sure, but you could have slipped in a passing reference to your new boyfriend.”

  Audrey shut her eyes and exhaled deeply. I was past trying to guess which particular emotions were gripping her now. I sure didn’t have a clue as to what my own were. They were raw and ragged, that much I could tell you.

  Audrey reopened her eyes and fixed them on my own. “Byron’s not my boyfriend.”

  “Don’t tell me he’s your new fiancé.” I said it in spite, but once the words had hit the air, I wondered, for a quick illogical moment, if I’d stumbled on the truth.

  Audrey seemed to have regained some of her composure. “Of course he’s not my fiancé. And he’s not my boyfriend. I really don’t know what he is. To be honest, I don’t know what I am, either.”

  “What the hell’s that mean?”

  “It means I’m looking at myself these days, and I’m not sure what I’m seeing. I’m closing in on twenty-nine, Lee. Most of the girls I went to school with are married and have kids. A century ago, I’d have been known as Old Lady Valish and people would make up stories about me being some loopy old witch.”

  In better times, that would have dragged a laugh out of me. Presently, I was well inoculated against all mirth and merriment. At that very moment, as if responding to some onstage cue, three little children came bounding across the green in a giggling, gangly sprint. Somewhere there must have been a script that read, Enter stage right: The Kids You Never Had. We watched the little frolickers vanish into the day, then turned to face each other once more.

  “I’ve barely been out of Thelmont,” Audrey said earnestly. “You at least got to travel a few years back. You saw something of the country … journeyed out west.”

  “Are you blaming me for that?”

  “No, I’m just—”

  “Because that was before you and I were really together.”

  “I know, Lee. It’s just that maybe I need some little escapades myself.”

  Escapades? That sounded worse than journeys or adventures.

  Audrey continued. “For me, the Mercutio is like entering some wild realm. The people down there see life in a very different way than people do here. Not every guy there worries about cash and a career, and not every girl wants a husband and babies.”

  I was getting even more confused, if that was possible. “So which is it? You want to be a wife and a mother or you don’t?”

  “I want…” She tilted her head back slightly, her eyes fixing themselves on the clouds above. Was the answer somewhere up there in the ether?

  “You want what?”

  “I want…” she repeated hazily.

  Realizing that nothing else was forthcoming, I returned to a more concrete line of questioning. “Have you kissed Spires?”

  That yanked Audrey back down from the clouds. “Just once, last weekend,” she said softly, but directly, “and only for about half a minute.”

  Only half a minute? Breaking through my shock, my mind did some rapid-fire calculations: a lot of wanton, passionate kissing could be squeezed into thirty seconds.

  “I was the one who pulled back,” she continued.

  “Did he force himself on you?”

  “No, not at all.”

  I wasn’t sure what answer I’d hoped for there. Probably, under the circumstances, no reply could be satisfactory.

  “Since we’ve been together, I’ve always been faithful,” I told her truthfully.

  “This is the only time that, well…” She changed course midstream. “I left so abruptly last night because I was stunned and disoriented. For a moment, I wondered if you’d tracked me down there. Though afterward, I realized that since Mr. O’Nelligan was with you, you were probably on a case—maybe something to do with Lorraine Cobble’s death. I’d gotten your message earlier that you were out on a job. Is that why you were there?”

  “Yes, it was.”

  Audrey nodded thoughtfully. “When I was mulling it over later, it occurred to me how remarkable it all was.”

  “Remarkable?” That struck me as an odd choice of words.

  “I mean t
hat it almost felt like fate that your work should bring you down to the Café Mercutio just—”

  I cut her off. “Just in time to catch you in the act.”

  “Listen, Lee, I went down to the Village last night because I’d already told Byron I’d meet him. I’d set that up before I knew you’d be home from California. Once I found out you were back, I was going to call him to cancel, but then I got your message. I figured that since you’d be working anyway, I might as well stick to my plans. I thought it would be a chance to, well … to make things clear to Byron.”

  “What about making things clear to me?”

  “Lee, I do want to be your wife.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. I know we keep putting things off, and that we’ve sort of cast you as the culprit in that, but, well, maybe I’m the culprit. Maybe it’s always been me. Oh, I don’t know…”

  “You can’t have a fiancé and a … a…” I settled on an O’Nelligan-ish word: “Dalliance.”

  “I know that. If I tell you I won’t see Byron again, will you believe me?”

  I took me a long time to answer. “To tell you the truth, I’m not sure.”

  I’m not certain what I expected Audrey’s response to be—a renewal of tears or a steely protest or a huff of indignation. It was none of these. Instead, she smiled in a sad, contemplative way and sighed again.

  “That’s an honest answer, Lee.” She reached over and squeezed my hand. “I appreciate that. I need to get over to the five-and-dime now. I’ll be late for work.”

  Then she released me, turned, and headed off across the green. I stood there in the shadow of the large lonely oak—though, in reality, I had no idea exactly where I stood.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Mr. O’Nelligan’s home always felt to me like some secret library. His living room was lined with about a billion books crammed onto shelves that reached to the ceiling. Allowing only for windows, doors, and a fireplace, this arrangement no doubt saved him a bundle on interior paint since very little wall space peeked out. There were a few amenities—a couple easy chairs, a sofa, one or two small tables, a phonograph—but the chief decoration came in the form of the books themselves, their spines creating a rainbow of clothbound color.

  I’d come straight over from my encounter with Audrey, and my mood wasn’t what you’d call bubbly. To add salt to the wound, I entered to the sound of Elvis Presley posing the musical question “How’s the World Treating You?” Yes, Elvis the Pelvis—via the phonograph—was crooning on about hopeless tomorrows and shattered dreams. Just swell. It wasn’t unusual for Mr. O’Nelligan to be listening to a Presley record. After first seeing the gyrating rock-and-roller on The Ed Sullivan Show back in the fall, my sexagenarian colleague had become an ardent fan. Somehow this fit his quirky personality. For a person whose enthusiasms ran from Tolstoy to Superboy, it wasn’t surprising that Elvis held as much appeal for him as, say, Mozart or Beethoven.

  My friend gestured me into one of his easy chairs, lifted the needle off the record, and settled into the other chair. “I find that starting off with my Tennessean troubadour helps ease me into the day. That and a poem or two.” He reached over and patted a leather-bound volume resting on the adjacent end table.

  “Yeats?” I guessed.

  “No, this morning it’s something different. You’re familiar with the works of Blake?”

  I was feeling perverse. “You mean Amanda Blake? The one who plays Kitty the saloon girl on Gunsmoke? I didn’t know she wrote poetry.”

  Mr. O’Nelligan narrowed his eyes. “Do you imagine, Lee Plunkett, that I don’t see through your teasing? I refer, of course, to William Blake, master poet and printmaker. The title of his grand work, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, might strike a chord for one in the detective trade, wouldn’t you say? Speaking thereof, I see you’ve come to propel us toward an early start on today’s tasks.”

  “No, the opposite.” I removed my glasses for a moment to massage my eyes, feeling suddenly very fatigued. “I’m thinking of calling Sally Joan to tell her we’ve hit a brick wall and are withdrawing from the case.”

  “What?” Mr. O’Nelligan sat upright. “We’re just getting our sea legs with this one.”

  “This isn’t whale hunting with Ahab, you know. This is an investigation—and one that seems fairly futile.”

  “I disagree! Where you see a brick wall, I see an open vista. Yesterday’s view revealed to us numerous colorful characters and intriguing tales.”

  “Again, that’s all fine and dandy if we’re talking about a novel or movie. Not nearly so dandy when it’s a case that needs solving. To level with you, I’m not sure there’s even anything to solve here.”

  “How can you be so convinced of that? I feel that we’ve just begun to scratch the surface of this mystery.”

  “That’s because you’re a romantic. The notion of some shadowy fiend throwing damsels off rooftops appeals to you.”

  Mr. O’Nelligan suddenly looked wounded, and his tone hardened. “Is that truly what you think, Lee Plunkett? That I derive some romantic satisfaction out of this tragedy? That I would view a woman’s death as some poetic amusement? Do you find me that cavalier?”

  His distress shamed me. “Of course not. I’m sorry. I know you take this all very seriously.”

  My friend gave a noncommittal nod, then reached over to the nearby end table and plucked up his mahogany pipe. He stuffed it, applied a match, and sat puffing silently for a minute or two. This was out of the norm, for he usually reserved his smoking for evening time, and not every evening at that. Moderation in all things—that was Mr. O’Nelligan’s motto. It was clear that my insensitivity had disrupted his routine.

  I tried to make further amends. “No one would ever doubt your good intentions. After all, you’re O’Nelligan the Noble Knight. I should know—I’m your squire.”

  This earned a mild chuckle from my Irishman. “Squire, is it? Certainly it’s the other way ’round. You lead and I, in a sense, merely bear your shield.”

  “We both know that’s not true, but it’s nice of you to lie.”

  Mr. O’Nelligan blew out a ribbon of smoke. “Before you make your final decision regarding the case, can we take a minute to review what we know about Lorraine Cobble?”

  “Yeah, why not.”

  “So, what we have here is a rather driven woman. An individual of noted enthusiasm dedicated to her area of interest.”

  I made an effort to join in. “Though that enthusiasm doesn’t necessarily extend to her fellow humans.”

  “So accounts suggest. Although Lorraine did seem to bear affection for her young cousin. Also, there’s evidence that she reached out the hand of charity to such individuals as Mrs. Pattinshell and the ancient drummer boy. The latter, by the way, I believe we should make our next visit.”

  “Next visit? Don’t forget, I’m talking about dropping this case.”

  “Oh, I’ve not forgotten,” my friend said dismissively. “I’m merely being speculative.”

  “As for her kindness toward Mrs. Pattinshell, remember, Old Widow Spooky-Tunes had something that Lorraine wanted.”

  “The ghost songs…”

  “Yeah, if such things be. So it wasn’t exactly unbridled charity at play there. Maybe it’s the same deal with the old veteran. Maybe Lorraine kept him around to drum ‘John Brown’s Body’ for her whenever she needed her mood sweetened.”

  “Perhaps. So, to continue, what we have is a woman whom everyone knows, whom everyone has opinions about…”

  “Usually unfavorable opinions…”

  “A woman whom no one recalls seeing in the days leading up to her death.”

  “That last part’s not too surprising, is it? After all, she wasn’t married, had no family nearby, and seemed to keep to herself when she wasn’t pursuing her musical interests. Plus, she lived in Manhattan, and it’s easy to get lost in the city.”

  “True, though one might argue that Greenwich Village is like a sm
all town unto itself.” Mr. O’Nelligan took a last draw of his pipe and set it aside. “Now, regarding Lorraine’s demise, no one we’ve spoken to can propose a reason why she would take her own life. In fact, she’s not perceived as a likely candidate for suicide.”

  “That happens a lot, doesn’t it? Someone kills themself and afterward everyone says, ‘Boy oh boy, I never would’ve expected it of them.’”

  Mr. O’Nelligan nodded. “Certainly that happens. Conversely, it also often happens that, following a murder, people declare their astonishment that anyone would want to kill that particular person.”

  “Though, in the case of someone as prickly and provoking as Lorraine Cobble, maybe it doesn’t come as such a shock that she’d be the object of foul play.”

  My colleague folded his hands across his stomach and smiled subtly. “As you say, Lee. Perhaps someone did indeed desire Lorraine’s death.”

  “Hey, hold on now!” I suddenly realized that Mr. O’Nelligan had played the old switcheroo on me—now I was the one arguing for homicide. “I’m in no way implying—”

  “Your proposal is a worthy one, lad.”

  I wagged a finger at him. “Don’t try to trick me, you wicked old leprechaun! I know what you’re doing.”

  “I’m merely echoing your own sentiments.”

  “I have no sentiments. All I have is facts. Or, in this case, the lack of them. You can speculate all you want to, but when it comes down to it, there’s not a single thing here that screams murder.”

  “You’re absolutely correct,” Mr. O’Nelligan said. “Nothing screams. But perhaps, just perhaps, there is something that compellingly whispers.”

  “Wait a minute! You’ve got an intuition, don’t you? One of your annoying, unreasonable, infallible damned intuitions.” I sank in my chair. “God, I hate those.”

  “Is intuition really that undesirable an attribute?”

  “It is if you’re a private eye being paid to deliver no-nonsense, rock-solid information.”