Mark Schweizer - Liturgical 12 - The Cantor Wore Crinolines Read online

  Not that we couldn’t afford it. Before I’d met Meg, I’d had the good fortune to come up with an invention that I’d sold to the phone company for a large amount of cash. Then Meg came along and doubled my money. Then tripled it. Then lost some, but that was to be expected. Then made it back, plus a bunch. I didn’t worry about it. Meg didn’t much worry about it either. She was too good.

  I kept my job as Police Chief in St. Germaine because I loved it. I loved my part-time job as organist and choir director of St. Barnabas Episcopal church as well. Usually. But St. Barnabas had been going through a rough patch concerning the clergy. A couple of the priests in the last few years had been good — excellent, in fact — but some … well … not so much. Part of the problem was that the good ones had moved on to higher callings. That wasn’t the only reason though, and it certainly wasn’t the reason that I didn’t have any fuzzy feelings for the recently retired priest of St. Barnabas, Dr. Rosemary Pepperpot-Cohosh.

  The thing with Pandora Radio was that you could program your own stations, then Pandora would find other stuff you’d like. Using my iPad, I clicked on one that Meg had discovered: French Café Radio. Sounds of a jazz trio accompanied by a French singer filled the house.

  “That’s more like it,” Meg called from the kitchen.

  I turned my attention to the typewriter in front of me.

  * * *

  The Cantor Wore Crinolines

  It was a dark and stormy night, the kind of night where wishful girls without prom dates ovulated pointlessly while dreaming of seven-minutes-in-heaven under the bleachers where chaperones dare not tread: a night as dark as the intentions of every adolescent male wearing a $39 rented tux from Big Bob’s Land o’ Tuxedos out on Highway 34 (cummerbund not included); as stormy as that song about being caught in the rain – the only song any of the boys will dance to because it’s a “slow” song – the very song that Ginny Mapletoft (president of the Student Council) picked as the “Prom Theme” after Jake McDreamy asked her to go steady during homeroom, not that it bothered Cassandra Rollins, head cheerleader and Jake’s old girlfriend, she didn’t care one whit! That skank! Whatever! – that kind of night.

  I took a puff on my stogy, skimmed the daily rag, and contemplated the hard ecclesiastical questions of our time. It’s what I did. I’m a detective, a gumshoe, a shamus: a Licensed Liturgy Detective (LLD), with buzzer, a roscoe, a chasuble, one of those silly hats with the pompoms, and a get-into-heaven free card. The badge and the shooter came from the local pawn shop, the chasuble and the hat from Vestments-R-Us, and the card from the Presiding Bishop that time she was giving them away at Applebee’s on the feast day of St. Yogi the Unbearable. I didn’t know if the card was any good, but I wasn’t taking chances. Maybe she’s got some juice at the pearly gates, maybe she doesn’t, but if I know one thing, I know it doesn’t pay to poke the bear. And St. Yogi’s Day at Applebee’s is always a good deal. Two meals and doctrinal absolution for twenty bucks including appetizer? It’s a deal I’ll take all day. Still, I don’t have much use for bishops. There’s a reason they’re called primates.

  * * *

  “Here you go, Hayden.” Meg appeared next to me with a beer in her hand, then set it down on the desk next to the typewriter and read over my shoulder.

  I was happy to lean back, affording her a fine view of my latest literary effort, and pick up the bottle of Cold Mountain Winter Ale. I was currently on a North Carolina beer kick.

  “You can’t say ‘skank.’ It’s not polite. Take it out.”

  “I think it’s the future participle form of skink,” I said.

  “You know it’s not. It’s a descriptive noun and you can’t use it.”

  “Skink, skank, skunk,” I said, conjugating morphemes like the true professional I was. “Skinketh, beskanked, done skunked.”

  “Use that in a sentence. I dare you.”

  “Easy,” I said. “You done skunked up that potato salad.”

  Meg wrinkled up her nose, thought for a moment, then said, “I think we’ve lived in the hills too long, my dear. You’re beginning to make sense.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Now take it out.”

  “Oh, man,” I grumbled, pulling the paper out of the typewriter. “I’ll have to retype the whole page. I don’t see why …”

  “Hayden Konig, you love it,” Meg said, and gave me a kiss full on the mouth. All of a sudden I couldn’t remember what I was going to say, but it was probably going to be a brilliant rejoinder of some sort. I watched her walk back to the kitchen, enjoying the view and noticing a little more sway than usual. She stopped at the door and turned back.

  “What are you looking at, big boy?” she said in her best Katherine Turner voice. “If you want something, just ask.”

  “Well, now that you mention it …”

  “Later,” she laughed. “We have people coming over.”

  * * *

  Bratwurst Night was something special. Hot German potato salad was a necessity. Fresh rolls from Bun in the Oven, the new bakery in town. Caramelized onions, baked apples, and sauerkraut. The sauerkraut was an old family recipe, consisting of a jar of good kraut with a couple spoonfuls of red currant jam mixed in to sweeten it, bacon crumbles, caraway seeds, and a dollop of goose fat. The bratwursts had to be the best — hand stuffed into natural casings by Bavarian virgins, salted with their tears, and steamed in beer before grilling. I prefer a heavy, dark beer for steaming. Black Raven is perfect.

  We never had to dress up for Bratwurst Night. That was another plus. The only person that would not be in something extremely comfortable was Kent Murphee, chiefly because he didn’t own anything comfortable. I had never seen Kent when he hadn’t been wearing his old tweed jacket and vest, corduroy pants, and a tie stained with whatever he happened to be working on. Since he was the Watauga County Medical Examiner, no one ever bothered to ask what those stains might be. Jennifer, the good doctor’s wife, Jennifer, was not inclined to follow his example of quasi-formality. She was happy to dress down for the event and join the rest of us in our sweatshirts and jeans.

  The Murphees were the first to arrive, then Pete and Cynthia. Bev Greene and Nancy Parsky drove together and arrived as everyone else was deciding which of the colorful beers to try first.

  “Or wine,” Meg said to Bev, as she took her coat. “We have wine as well.”

  “Can we have some of that horrifically expensive stuff that Hayden and Bud bought?” asked Bev.

  “No,” said Meg.

  Bev laughed. “A glass of Pinot Noir then.”

  “These are all North Carolina beers,” said Pete, as he perused the selection.

  “I’m embracing our mutual heritage,” I answered. “Here, try this Duck-Rabbit.”

  “I’ll have one of those Black Ravens,” Kent said. “If you don’t need them all to steam the brats.”

  “Help yourself.”

  “Heck of a thing about that Pepperpot woman,” said Kent, popping off the cap. “You know it made the paper in Boone.”

  “No doubt,” I growled.

  “Well, she’s gone now,” said Meg.

  “I guess the thing that made us the maddest,” said Bev, “was that she thought she could get away with it. I mean, what priest in their right mind would try to funnel a hundred thousand dollars into their discretionary fund and use it to take a trip to Nicaragua?”

  “It was a mission trip,” Meg said. “She was on a mission.”

  “She sure was,” said Bev. “She and that personal trainer — which, by the way, the church also paid for.”

  It might be said by some that Bev Greene was bitter, since she had been fired by the Reverend Dr. Rosemary Pepperpot-Cohosh from her position as church administrator within a couple months of the new priest’s arrival. And that now she took a certain pleasure in seeing her fall from grace.

  “It’s not that I’m bitter and that I take any satisfaction in seeing Mother P’s fall from grace,” Bev said, then offered us all a
big smile. “Well, I take that back. I do. Does that make me a terrible person?”

  “Yep,” said Cynthia. “It really does. But I’ll pray for you.”

  “Well, we got most of the money back,” said Meg. “Except what she gave that Nicaraguan gigolo.

  “She’s back working at Walmart,” added Bev, “or so I’ve heard.”

  I nodded. “I think that’s right. Herb left and took a campus ministry position back in Iowa. I think Rosemary is up in Roanoke.”

  “Did Enrique go with her?” asked Nancy. “I noticed that his workout studio is closed up.”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “I doubt it though. A dumpy, middle-aged, ex-Lutheran, Episcopal priest from Iowa now working as a sales associate at Walmart might not be the catch that a young, fit, attractive … “

  “Highly attractive,” interrupted Jennifer.

  “Highly,” agreed Nancy.

  “… Highly attractive personal trainer with an expiring green card might want.”

  “She was quite smitten,” said Meg. “It was true love. Agape love. She told me so right before she left.”

  “I’m sure it was,” said Bev with a smile. “The trip to Nicaragua in October was to begin building her new church. She was sure Bishop O’Connell was going to give her the blessing of the diocese. What was she thinking?”

  “She took the money down there with her?” asked Kent.

  “A hundred thousand dollars in cash,” said Bev. “Enrique had arranged for her to make a downpayment to the builder. She was stopped when she tried to enter the country. Customs called the feds in and she was sent back to the states immediately.”

  Kent nodded and sipped his beer. “And Enrique?”

  “He came back with her on the same plane. I guess he thought he could still make the deal work out, but once the customs officials got involved, the church was contacted immediately.”

  “How did she get all that cash?” asked Jennifer.

  Meg shrugged. “It was easy, actually, and our fault. You know that St. Barnabas has a trust fund that Gaylen set up when we got the settlement from the bank?”

  “Sure,” said Jennifer. “Several million bucks.”

  “Right,” said Meg. “Well, it’s set up in several accounts, one of them being a discretionary account that the priest can use. We went to computer banking a few years ago when the bank started offering on-line services. What we didn’t realize, or even think about, was that since Rosemary was listed as a signer on her discretionary account, was that she could also transfer funds between any of the accounts. We don’t know when she discovered that she could do that, or even if Señor Enrique figured it out during pillow talk after one of their ‘training sessions’, but she transferred the money, withdrew the cash, and took off for Central America all within twenty-four hours. Of course, they’d been planning it for a while.”

  “Wow,” said Pete.

  “We plugged that hole pretty quickly, I can tell you,” said Meg. “It won’t be happening again. The clergy will have no access to anything but their own account and even then our accountant will monitor it.”

  “On the upside,” said Bev. “Our full-time interim priest arrived in town this afternoon. He’ll be taking the service tomorrow morning.” She turned to me and said sweetly, “Will you be attending, Hayden?”

  “As you know,” I answered, “I’m on sabbatical from St. Barnabas.”

  I had decided, after Christmas, that it was time for me to take a few months off. I’d been going to church mad, leaving church mad, and finding myself fuming every time I walked in the doors. I called my friend Edna Terra-Pocks over in Lenoir and she was happy to sub for me during January. The music committee hadn’t found anyone for February through June, but they were still looking. I, myself, wasn’t looking. I was on sabbatical.

  “It’s only called a sabbatical when you take time off to achieve something,” Bev pointed out. “Otherwise, it’s called a leave of absence.”

  “Not really, no,” I said. “Technically a sabbatical is a rest from work. A hiatus. The origin probably comes from the book of Leviticus where there is a commandment to desist from working the fields in the seventh year. In the strictest sense, a sabbatical should last an entire a year. I’m only taking six months. It’s only in recent times that a sabbatical has been used to fulfill some goal — like traveling for research or doing some sort of continuing education.”

  “Do you have a goal?” asked Cynthia.

  “You bet,” I said. “I’m working on my detective story.”

  This announcement was greeted with a resounding chorus of groans.

  * * *

  I looked across my desk at Pedro LaFleur, my right hand man, a loogan, a bruno, a button, a bindle stiff with a palooka face gone to seed. He slumped heartbrokenly in his chair like a sad sack of spuds slung over the shoulder of some broken-down Idaho wharfie who’d seen too many night shifts in a city where the only second chances were left to those who managed to get out of this burghal of Unitarian Churches, Bible colleges, and unaccredited law schools.

  He had a drink in his hand and a hole in his heart, a hole big enough to drive a 2013 Honda Odyssey minivan (with satellite linked navigation and a multi-angle rearview camera) down the anterior vena cava, execute a three-point-turn at the atrioventicular valve (thanks to the rearview camera), then exit the pulmonary artery without ever once scraping the Celestial Blue Metallic finish that comes standard on the EX-L. This hole was courtesy of Claire Annette Reed, the ex-girlfriend who squeaked that they should just be friends

  Pedro could sing, sing like a seraphim on angel dust – the sweet stuff, not that junk that you get from those stinkin’ cherubs down on 43rd, that junk will make your wings fall off and your halo burst into flames. He was a countertenor with high C’s to burn and if you wanted the Allegri “Miserere” in this town, you’d better call Pedro or you’d be pushing up daisies by Easter. It was part of his deal with the Family. Da Capo Nostra.

  I took a slug of hooch, cheap hooch, snapped the paper open, and looked at the clock on the wall, watching that thing hanging underneath it swing back and forth like a pendulum. Page two. Obituaries.

  Suddenly there was a knock at the door. Marilyn? Nah. Marilyn was in Vegas for the week at the National Literary Device Convention.

  “Come in,” I called, and the door swung open.

  * * *

  Supper was delicious. As we ate our way through the brats and kraut, potato salad, and all the fixings, our conversation turned from St. Barnabas to other things; Cynthia’s auction; Bud’s purchase and our plan for the new wine shop; Pete’s idea for renting out the Portia the Truffle Pig to trufflers for Saturday excursions; and all the reasons why Kent and Nancy found Bones to be the stupidest show on television.

  “Really?” said Kent, waving his hands in the air. “They expect us to believe that the Smithsonian, or Jeffersonian as it’s obliquely called, has a multimillion dollar crime lab that can do 3-D holographic reconstructive modeling by tapping a couple of times on the screen of an iPad, and employs five highly trained über-scientists who are free to utilize all the resources of the government and the FBI — all to figure out the identity of a homeless guy found in a dumpster? Really?”

  “Hang on,” said Nancy. “I’ll just collect some DNA from this tapeworm I found in the portable toilet and run it through our mega-database. Make sure you get a close up of the tapeworm crawling around the bottom of the crapper. Then I’ll check it against all the known DNA in the entire world, and have an answer for you in a couple minutes. I’m sure we’ll find a match.”

  “How about some dessert?” asked Meg. “We have bread pudding.”

  * * *

  After supper, Pete and I went outside on the back deck to enjoy our cigars. Kent joined us, but eschewed our cheroots in favor of his pipe. This separating of the sexes after supper is a time-honored tradition in North Carolina. So, we were rather surprised when the door opened and Nancy joined us.

 
; “You can’t come out here,” said Pete. “Men only. We’re smoking.”

  “I brought my own cigar,” said Nancy, then flipped open a lighter with one hand while she rolled the end of the Cuban inside her pursed lips, wetting it.

  “How does this jibe with your health coaching?” Pete asked.

  “I’m a health coach, not a nut,” said Nancy. “I’ve already eaten two brats, German potato salad, and enough bread pudding to feed an African village for a week. Besides, I’ve got a gun.”

  “Fair enough,” I said, then looked at the cigar band. “You stole that one from my desk, right?”

  “Of course I did,” said Nancy, lighting the cigar and taking a puff. “But what’re you gonna do? These Cubans are illegal in every state in the union.”

  The door opened again and Meg stuck her head out. “It’s freezing out here,” she said.

  “Can’t be helped,” I answered. “Unless you want to let us back in the house.”

  “Nope,” said Meg. “You’ll be fine.” She handed me my cell phone. “Here you go. It’s Dave.”

  “Hi, Dave,” I said into the phone. “What’s up?”

  “You know that house that you and Bud bought?” said Dave.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, Bud was in there looking around after his shift finished at the Piggly Wiggly. The electricity was off, so he brought a flashlight. He had a key to the place.”

  “Right,” I said. “Cynthia gave it to him right after the auction.”

  “So he called the station and, well, since I’m the cop-on-call tonight it was forwarded to my cell.”

  “Yeah?”

  “The thing is,” said Dave with a heavy sigh, “Bud found a dead body in the bedroom closet.”