The Bass Wore Scales (The Liturgical Mysteries) Read online

  The Bass Wore Scales

  A Liturgical Mystery

  by Mark Schweizer

  The Bass Wore Scales

  A Liturgical Mystery

  Copyright ©2006 by Mark Schweizer

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published by

  St. James Music Press

  www.sjmpbooks.com

  P.O. Box 249

  Tryon, NC 28782

  ISBN 0-9721211-8-8

  Prelude

  Pie Pelicane, Jesu Domine,

  Me immundum munda tuo sanguine:

  Cujus una stilla salvum facere

  Totum mundum quit ab omni scelere.

  Sixth Quatrain—Adoro Te Devote

  May is a fine month in the Appalachians—cool, green and slightly damp, with clouds hanging so low that you could brush them away from your face if you had a mind to, their smoky essence heavy with the bouquet of fir trees and mountain laurel. Yes, I thought, looking across the blank paper in my typewriter and out the open window, my chin resting in my hand and my elbow planted firmly on the desktop, May is a fine month. I liked March and April as well. June’s okay. July stinks. August, too. It’s way too hot—even up here in St. Germaine. But it was still May, and August was a world away. I took the cigar out of my mouth and looked at it in disgust. It had gone out during my chronological musings. My cigars don’t usually go out when I’m writing. I generally chomp down, light up, and pound furiously at the worn keys of the old Underwood, puffing away like a fat man on a treadmill. Now, here I was contemplating the merits of various months and having to spend valuable writing time re-lighting my stogy. I growled and reached for the matchbox. Like many cigar aficionados, I preferred a wooden match to light my Cubans. I slid the matchbox open, removed one, but paused mid-strike. Meg would be here shortly, and the rule was no cigar smoking when she was in the house. I sighed and tossed the match into the ashtray. The cigar wasn’t helping anyway. I had to face facts. I was up against the most dreaded of the wordsmith’s phobias—writer’s block.

  I heard the screen door in the kitchen bang open and counted myself lucky to have had the cigar go out when it did. It’s not that Meg hates cigars. Well, yes it is. It’s that Meg hates cigars. I, on the other hand, love them. It was Rudyard Kipling who penned the immortal line, “A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.” Rudyard Kipling never met Meg.

  Megan Farthing and I were introduced five years ago—I, in my capacity as police chief of St. Germaine and officer on-duty—Meg in her capacity as wanton criminal motorist. She came zipping past my old Chevy pickup in her late-model Lexus like I wasn’t even there. Everyone in town knows my truck, and even though Meg had only moved to St. Germaine a month earlier, I still find it hard to believe that she didn’t see me. I’ve often accused her of speeding on purpose that evening, knowing that I was on the job and lying in wait for a foolish motorist. I further point out that in the five years since I’ve known her, I’ve never seen her exceed the speed limit. Not even once. She denies everything, of course, and looking into her beautiful blue-gray eyes, I almost believe her. Almost.

  I tore up the ticket, invited Meg back to my place to see my etchings, and the rest is history. Now, we celebrate this anniversary every July 15th pretty much the way we began—listening to Bach on the stereo and eating knockwurst. Meg is fortyish, divorced, and the best looking woman in three counties. Maybe four. She lives in town with her mother. I live about twelve miles farther out on two hundred remote acres.

  “Hayden,” Meg called from the kitchen. “I’ve got dinner.”

  “Great,” I yelled back. “I’ll be there in a second.”

  Rudyard Kipling, although probably never plagued by writer’s block, also never had the pleasure of Meg Farthing’s company. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have made that crack about the cigar. Kipling was good, all right (I thought Gunga Din a minor masterpiece, especially when read aloud with a really bad English accent), but my real literary hero was the mystery writer extraordinaire, Raymond Chandler.

  I opened one of Mssr. Chandler’s books and tried typing one of his famous lines, hoping the gesture would be the impetus that might inspire me to conjure up one of my own.

  She opened a mouth like a firebucket and laughed. That terminated my interest in her. I couldn’t hear the laugh, but the hole in her face when she unzippered her teeth was all I needed.

  I looked at the sentence. It was good. Something that I wished I had written. I tried another one.

  I’m an occasional drinker, the kind of guy who goes out for a beer and wakes up in Singapore with a full beard.

  I sat for a long moment waiting for the muse to interject, but nothing happened. Nothing. The typewriter had never failed me before. I had come to believe that there was magic in the old contraption because these were the actual keys that Chandler had used to write those lines and a multitude of others including some of his greatest works—The Long Goodbye, Farewell My Lovely, The Lady In The Lake, The Little Sister—all of them typed on this very machine—Raymond Chandler’s 1939 Underwood Number 5. I had bought it at auction after I made a few million dollars with a little invention that I sold to the phone company.

  “Hurry up,” called Meg. “The pizza’s getting cold.”

  “Coming.”

  I headed for the kitchen, leaving the unsympathetic, antique typewriter sitting alone in the room.

  “Put on some music, would you?” Meg said, as I wandered dejectedly into the kitchen. Then she noticed my slumping shoulders. “Hey, what’s wrong?”

  “Writer’s block,” I said.

  “So,” quipped Meg, “the eminent Hayden Konig—police chief and word-slinger—has writer’s block. There is a God.”

  “I’ll have you know that my detective stories have been very well received.” I clicked on the Wave stereo, and the piano music of Eric Satie filled the house.

  “And by ‘well-received,’ you mean…?”

  “Umm…well…no one has burned the house down yet.”

  “Not yet,” agreed Meg. “How’s your blog doing? Getting any hits?”

  I had put my first four liturgical detective stories up on a blog entitled The Usual Suspects.

  “Not very many,” I admitted with a sigh.

  “That’s a nice choice of music,” offered Meg, delicately changing the subject and nodding toward the stereo, her hands busy with two beers and an opener.

  “I was listening to it this morning. It’s one of my BMG club selections.” I belonged to several music-of-the-month clubs—just one of the many perks of being frightfully rich. Another perk was that I did not have to work for a living, a perk that I exercised when I gave up my part-time job as organist and choirmaster at St. Barnabas Episcopal Church. Yes, as is not uncommon in churches of any denomination, I’d had quite a rift with some of the parishioners. The priest, Father George, hadn’t helped the situation. So I had quit, but the vestry had chosen to categorize my leaving as an “extended leave of absence.” I kept my other full-time job as police chief because I like it. I like it a lot.

  “This is from the new pizza place in town,” Meg said. “The Bear and Brew. You know—the one going into the old feed store.”

  “I wondered when they were planning to open up and start serving.”

  “Friday. Day after tomorrow. This is from their open house. I dropped by after I took Mother over to Noylene’s to get her hair done.”

  “Why w
asn’t I invited to the open house?”

  “You were, Hayden. I told you yesterday.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said, my chagrin hopefully apparent. “I forgot.”

  “Nancy was there. Pete. Dave. They asked where you were.”

  “I was trying to work up at least one good sentence.”

  “No luck?”

  “No luck.”

  “I shall try to generate some sympathy,” said Meg, putting a piece of artichoke and goat cheese pizza on my plate, “but it will be tough. However, I affirm your pathetic endeavors because I love you.”

  “You’ve always been jealous of my typewriter.”

  “Allow me to point out that your last attempt at a detective story ended with your musical gum-shoe drinking beer at a bar named Buxtehooters.”

  “Brilliant!”

  “Humph,” said Meg. “Hardly brilliant.”

  “I think I have at least one more story to tell. Sometimes literary genius isn’t recognized until long after the author is dead.”

  Meg wiped the corner of her mouth with a napkin. “That’s one theory, sure. Okay, you’ve finished The Alto Wore Tweed, The Baritone Wore Chiffon, The Tenor Wore Tapshoes and The Soprano Wore Falsettos. What’s the title of the new one? The Castrato Wore Lifts? The Mezzo Wore Flannel?”

  “All good suggestions. But I think I’m going with a bass.”

  “That is, if you can somehow find some inspiration.”

  “Maybe you could inspire me,” I said, suggestively arching my eyebrows over a second piece of pizza.

  “Maybe I could,” Meg agreed. “But I have to ask myself, do I really want to have one of those detective stories on my conscience? I’d have to ask for absolution on my deathbed.”

  “I’m sure it would be granted.”

  “Not necessarily. What if the priest has read your work?”

  I ignored the barb. “A true writer is secure in the knowledge of his inevitable success.”

  “And you are secure in this knowledge?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Meg smiled. “Then I’d better do some inspiring.”

  Chapter One

  The Bass Wore Scales

  It was a dark and stormy night--a night just like any other night, except it was a Tuesday, so it was really a night just like 1/7 of any other nights; a night when the air was just as hot, the streets just as mean, and second chances just as likely as a beret-wearing donkey named Wotan tapping out the exact number of Rossini operas with his hoof and taking my last sawbuck. Yeah. It was one of those nights. A Tuesday. I oughta know. I’m a detective. A Liturgical Detective, duly licensed by the Bishop. I needed some answers, some hymns, and a couple of theological insights. What I got were questions. I was thumbing through the Book of Occasional Services, looking for the Liturgy of Revirgination, when I heard a knock at the door.

  Not bad, I thought. I’m back in the groove. Now all I needed was a dame—a looker, a babe, a twist, a chippy, a broad, a dolly, a skirt. I looked down at the typewriter, and there she was.

  My heart jumped into my mouth like a frog into a pond full of fly soup as I looked up at a dish that was flaunting the kind of body that made married men wish they were single, single men wish they were better looking, and every Red Sox fan wish the starting lineup swung their bats the same way she swung her hips as she crossed the threshold of both the doorway and bad taste.

  “My name is Betsy,” she said in a voice so grating it could have scraped the warts off the bottom of my feet and still had enough rasp left to shred a half pound of cabbage. “I need a detective I can trust.”

  “You can trust me, Kitten,” I said, lighting up a stogy, “for two hundred a day plus expenses.” Long before Betsy ever walked through my door, I knew she’d show up--

  and show up just when I was down to my last pair of clean shorts.

  “Two hundred? I’ll give you thirty.” She sashayed flouncily across the carpet toward my desk. I bit my cigar in half.

  “Okay, twenty,” I compromised. “But I get to buy you dinner.”

  “Well…I don’t know.” She was hesitant, but I was ready to close the deal.

  “Look, Toots,” I said, pulling out my wallet. “I can’t pay you more than ten.”

  “I accept your terms,” Betsy purred. “Pick me up at eight.”

  * * *

  Breakfast at the Slab Café has become a tradition for the St. Germaine Police Department and friends. The SGPD is comprised of myself (the chief), Nancy Parsky, and Dave Vance. Friends include Pete Moss, the owner of the Slab and mayor of St. Germaine, Meg, and whoever else happens to pass by and wants to sit for a while.

  “Morning, Hayden,” said Nancy as I pulled up a chair and sat down at our usual table, recently adorned with a cheery red tablecloth and three lovely plastic daffodils. I knew that Nancy had procured our seating arrangements as soon as I walked up to the Slab. I saw her Harley-Davidson parked in front of the building—a present from a grateful and rich police chief after one particularly dark episode involving an insane rector’s wife. Since this bequest, Nancy’s been motorcycle cop—at least when the weather was good.

  “And a beautiful morning it is,” I responded, maybe a bit too cheerfully for the six-o’clock hour. “Anything interesting happening in the world of law enforcement?”

  “Nope,” Nancy said, waving an empty mug toward Collette in hopes of flagging down the busy coffee matron. The Slab was full this morning, and Collette seemed to be the only waitress on duty. “Dave said he’d be here in a minute. He’s checking his e-mail over at the office.”

  St. Germaine is a beautiful little town in the mountains of North Carolina. Our resident population is small, but grows significantly during the summer as the reverse snowbirds come up from Florida and south Georgia to escape the heat. Our other influx of tourists comes during October and November when the leaves start to change color. But those folks are usually only here for a couple of days—the summer residents stay until Labor Day or, in some cases, until the first snowfall. A crime wave in St. Germaine generally consists of some fraternity pledges from Appalachian State coming over and engaging in some nefarious cow tipping, so the three of us can handle the constabulary duties fairly easily.

  “By the way,” Nancy said, as Collette filled her cup with coffee, “I was looking through the job descriptions like you told me to.”

  I nodded. We had to update the personnel records for the city council every five years or so.

  “And it seems that you’re still a lieutenant. And a detective as well.”

  “That’s not what my business card says,” I said. “It says ‘Chief.’ ‘Hayden Konig, Chief of Police’ to be exact. And ‘Detective Extraordinaire.’”

  I had moved to St. Germaine at the behest of my college roommate sixteen years ago when the city was looking for a highly qualified individual to run its Police Department. It turns out that I was that individual despite the fact that my first two college degrees were in music. My third was in criminology, and that was the one that did the trick. My college roommate was none other than Peter Moss, said mayor of the town and owner of the fine eating establishment in which we sat.

  “I’m hereby giving myself a promotion,” I said.

  “How about me?” asked Nancy. “I need a promotion, too.”

  “What does your job description say?”

  “It says ‘officer.’”

  “You want to be a lieutenant?”

  “Sure. Do I get to boss Dave around?”

  “You do that now,” I said, finally sipping some much-needed coffee.

  “Yes, but this would make it official. And I want a new badge.”

  “Speaking of badges, have you seen mine?”

  “Not for years.”

  “Well, I sure don’t know where it is. New badges for everyone,” I said magnanimously, as Collette, who had put down the coffee pot, appeared at the table with her order pad at the ready. “And some country ham biscuits.”

  “We
don’t have no badges,” Collette answered, confusion clouding her face.

  “Just the biscuits then,” I said, “with a side of grits.”

  Collette nodded, wrote down the order and looked timidly at Nancy. Collette had recently become engaged to Officer Dave, and Nancy, being Dave’s former infatuation and a formidable personality in any case, was still very intimidating. It’s not that Nancy was ever interested in Dave. She wasn’t. But it rankled her to no end that Dave’s veneration, however unreciprocated, should have been so easily transferred.

  Nancy’s eyes narrowed, and she gave Collette a wicked grin. “Give me an Adam and Eve with the eyes open, burn the British, bossy on the hoof, a short stack in the alley and some Sweet Alice.”

  I snorted into my coffee and glanced up at Collette. She was writing the order on her pad, seemingly unperturbed.

  “You want me to pin a rose on that bossy?” she asked Nancy. “And maybe grease the British?”

  Nancy looked as though she were trying to decide. “Sure. Pin a rose on it. And the other thing, too.”

  Collette nodded, smiled and made her way back to the kitchen.

  “What was that about?” I asked.

  “Rats,” said Nancy in disgust. “I thought I had her. I’ve been practicing since last night.”

  “Did you really want to pin a rose on bossy?”

  Nancy shrugged. “I have no idea. I hope it tastes good.”

  * * *

  Dave came in a few moments later, walked up to the counter, leaned across and gave Collette a kiss.

  “Oh, puhlease,” growled Nancy under her breath. “Get a room.”

  Dave pulled out the chair opposite Nancy and sat down. “Morning, all,” he chirped.

  “Well, someone’s in a good mood,” I said.

  “Hey Dave,” said Nancy, her voice switching from caw to chirp. “Guess what? We’re all getting promotions and new badges.”