Liturgical Mysteries 01 The Alto Wore Tweed Page 8

  So when he took charge, his first order of business was to replace the choir. Oh, they were given a chance all right. A chance to sight-read from the 1524 “Geystliche gesang Buchleyn.” This whole setup smelled like last week’s halibut.

  I walked across the street and into an alley beside the bar, the wind whipping across my shoulders like the flagellation of some unseen monk. It was cold and turning colder. What was I doing? I didn’t have time for this. I had hymns to pick. Then I remembered the money. Two hundred a day would buy a lot of stogies. I lit one up in anticipation.

  “You know,” Meg commented, lounging in front of a roaring fire and reading my masterpiece over a glass of Black Opal Merlot, “your story doesn’t really have a plot. I mean you have five installments and absolutely nothing has happened.”

  “I was hoping no one would notice. I’m a writer. I can’t be concerned with a plot. And I think you’ll find that after one more glass of wine, the plot won’t matter nearly as much.”

  “In that case, pour.”

  • • •

  After getting the report on Willie’s demise, we decided to go ahead and bury him on the following Wednesday—almost two weeks after he’d been killed. He had a nice service in the church—although not very well attended—and then a burial that St. Barnabas paid for. We couldn’t find any next of kin. Mother Ryan had declined to perform the burial rites so I had called Father Tim from a couple of parishes away and he was happy to oblige. Meg and I kept scouring the skies for another airborne visitor but our efforts were unrewarded.

  Our choir rehearsal that evening went very well. The choir was rehearsing the Missa Brevis St. Johannis de Deo for All Saints Sunday, just two weeks away. It was a lovely little Haydn mass and one of the choir’s favorites. We rehearsed in the choir room as we always did and then went up to the loft to go over it once with the organ and the two violinists who had come up from Appalachian State to accompany us.

  I was the last into the choir loft, having stopped in the choir room for the pertinent scores and parts for the violinists. Nancy met me at the top of the stairs.

  “Hi there, Nancy. Can I talk you into joining the choir?”

  “I don’t think so. I have a lousy voice. I did enjoy my one class in music appreciation though.”

  “Yeah? How did you do?” I asked. I myself had taught music appreciation on several occasions.

  “I made a C,” she confessed. “I had an A going into the final but on the exam I said that ‘parallel organum’ was a method of musical gratification frowned on by early church fathers. I won’t even tell you my definition of a faggott. I thought it was pretty funny, but the prof was not amused. He was sort of an early music freak.”

  “Yep, you do have to be careful,” I said, making my way over to the organ, Nancy following closely. “They do not suffer nonbelievers gladly.” The rest of the choir was still trying to find their seats.

  “Anyway,” Nancy said leaning over the console and lowering her voice, “we found the rest of the wine.”

  “Really? Let me guess. Willie Boyd’s house.”

  “Nope. In the trunk of his car. Dave and I thought we’d wait for you before we searched his house. How’d you know he had it?”

  I handed the violin parts over to the players.

  “I didn’t really. Just a hunch. Who else would have taken it? Bud? He didn’t want it. He really has better taste in wine. Then I remembered the lock on the closet that Willie supposedly ‘fixed.’ It was the same old rusted mechanism. There was never anything wrong with it. Remember? The key stuck in the lock just like it always did. So when Willie called in to the station, he was just covering his tracks.”

  “Well, aren’t you something?” said Nancy in what I took to be an adming tone.

  “Stick with me kid. That’s why I get paid the big bucks. You want to hang around and listen to this?” I asked pointing to the violinists. “You’ll like it.”

  “Well, my social calendar is rather full, this being a Wednesday evening and all. But thank you. I believe I will.”

  As I sat down and fired up the Beast—the choir’s term of endearment for the organ—I saw, perched conspicuously on the music rack, a piece of paper neatly folded in half. A note from Herself, I figured, as I picked it up and unfolded it.

  I saw who did it. It’s Him. It’s Matthew.

  O hark the herald angels sing;

  The boy’s descent which lifted up the world.

  I put it back on the rack as carefully as I could, covered it with a book of chorale preludes and called Nancy over to the console.

  “Don’t leave until rehearsal is over. We need to talk.” She nodded.

  The problem with reading something like that note right before you are called on to play the Haydn Little Organ Mass and direct the choir and the violins all at the same time, is that it makes it incredibly difficult to concentrate on the task at hand. I knew that I wasn’t at my best, but when Marjorie put her flask back into her hymnal rack, reached over, patted me on the arm and said, “What’s wrong Hayden? You’re playing like a pig,” I realized my mind wasn’t multitasking like I thought it was. I snapped back to the job at hand and finished the rehearsal with a flash of majestic flourishes worthy of any police detective. The choir was vocally appreciative.

  I thanked the cheering throng and the somewhat stunned violinists for their efforts and sent them home beseeching them to practice hard, knowing in my heart that they wouldn’t look at the music again until Sunday. Still, it was my job to entreat them just as it was their job to ignore my counsel. It was a delicate balance of natural laws that could not be disrupted for fear of reprisals on a cosmic scale. As the choir made their way back to the choir room downstairs to put their music away, Nancy sidled up to the organ.

  “What’s up?”

  I picked the note up by the edges and laid it gently on a music stand which I had tipped to the horizontal position. “I doubt if there are any prints, but let’s send it to the lab anyway.”

  Nancy read the note. “What is this? A confession? A clue? A joke?”

  “It would be hard to say just yet.”

  “Who is Matthew? Do you know him?”

  I thought for a moment. “No Matthews in the choir. There’s a Matthew Aaron in the congregation. He’s a real estate attorney. Matthew Siegenthaler works in a nursery. Those are the only two I know in town.”

  “What about last names?” Nancy asked.

  “I’ll get Dave to check them.”

  I saw who did it. It’s Him. It’s Matthew.

  “If someone saw who did it, why leave a note? Why not just tell us?” Nancy asked, thinking out loud. I’m afraid she was picking up quite a few of my bad habits. I wondered if she had started smoking cigars. It was only a matter of time.

  “Well now, that’s the question, isn’t it?” I pulled my list out of my pocket and smoothed it out on the top of the organ.

  “What’s that?” said Nancy with a derisive snort.

  “It’s my check-list.”

  “You’re kidding, of course. No one has a check-list.”

  I ignored her rude comments and went through the litany for her benefit as well as my own.

  When?

  Willie Boyd was still killed on Friday afternoon. 5:12 p.m.—give or take. JJ was the last to see him, other than the witness—if is there was one—and maybe the killer. He pilfered the wine earlier that afternoon and drank from one of the bottles. It wasn’t poisoned, however.

  Who?

  Don’t know. But apparently we have a witness and a clue (if that’s what it is). Who is Matthew?

  Why?

  I still didn’t know of any enemies that Willie might have had. Mother Ryan was acting very suspicious about the sexual harassment charge. I suspected that most of the charges were trumped up, but why? And why did Willie admit to them? Maybe he had some dirt on the priestess and she wanted him gone. Fired maybe, but killed? I doubted it. Still, I had the feeling that Loraine Ryan was the key.


  How?

  This we knew. Oleander poisoning. But it wasn’t found in Willie’s stomach. The poison entered his system through his mouth, absorbed though the membranes, but was not swallowed.

  What?

  What? Still a stupid question.

  • • •

  The next morning Nancy, Dave and I sat in The Slab over a pot of coffee and a plate of assorted doughnuts and looked at a photocopy of the note. We sent the original to the lab to scan it for prints but I wasn’t hopeful.

  “OK, Dave, did you check the phone listings?”

  Dave checked his notes. “Yeah, boss. I used our CD-ROM directory. There are three Matthews in town. The two you mentioned plus Matthew Blake, a retired building contractor from Tampa. There are nine others further out in the county. Two last-name Matthews. One Mathews with one ‘t.’ I’ll check on them all this afternoon.”

  “It’s probably not them, but check anyway,” I said and picked up the note, holding it up to look at it. “It was a laser printer I think. A common font. Maybe New York or something in that family.”

  Nancy nodded. “But what about the second two lines?”

  O hark the herald angels sing;

  The boy’s descent which lifted up the world.

  “It’s a hymn, isn’t it?”

  “Sort of. The first line is almost ‘Hark the herald angels sing,’ but not quite.”

  “Is it in our hymnal?” Nancy asked.

  “Yeah, in the Christmas section.”

  “I still don’t understand,” said Dave, breaking in, “why someone would leave you some sort of cryptic note. Why not just tell you? And why all the mystery?”

  I put the note back on the table and picked up a cruller, dunking it into my coffee before downing half the pastry in one majestic munch. I did however take time to swallow. I’m not a total Neanderthal.

  “Well, we have a couple of choices. It could be that the murderer thinks he’s so much smarter than us that he wants to test our intellects by leaving obtuse clues.”

  Dave was staying with me, doughnut for doughnut. “You think that’s it?”

  “Nope. I think someone saw the murder or at least knows who did it. They can’t or don’t want to tell us directly. I don’t know why yet.”

  Nancy interrupted, “So you think it’s actually a clue to the murderer?”

  “I do. Mostly because it’s all we have right now. And someone had to know about the killing besides the murderer. It’s very rare that there’s only one person who’s involved. Yep,” I said, polishing off the other half of the cruller and washing it down with a gulp of coffee, “it’s a puzzle all right.”

  • • •

  That afternoon, Dave and I went over to Willie Boyd’s apartment. The landlord was waiting at the door for us.

  “Can I move his stuff outta there?”

  “Let us look around. We’ll let you know.”

  Willie’s apartment consisted of one sixteen-by-sixteen room and a small bathroom. His furniture included a single bed, pushed against the wall, a kitchen table of sorts with one chair, and an old television set with rabbit ears sitting on a couple of concrete blocks. There was a beat-up microwave on the table and an old fabric-covered extension cord that had to be close to forty years old connecting it to an outlet. The kitchen, what there was of it, consisted of a sink and a small refrigerator, vintage early 60’s. The bed had no sheets or blankets, but rather was covered with an old sleeping bag that had been unzipped, opened up and spread across the mattress. The one pillow had no case and was covered in grease stains, presumably from Willie’s unwashed hair. There was a stack of newspapers piled to the side of the bed, the most recent from August—almost three months ago. Almost all of them were unread judging from their unopened condition.

  “Doesn’ook like there’s anything here, boss,” said Dave. “Hardly any clothes, no personal effects.”

  “Hmmm.” I was looking toward the counter in the kitchenette where there were two bottles of unopened wine. I went over, picked them up and looked at the labels. Quinta do Crasto and Quinta do Valle do Dora Maria, both 1999 vintages from Portugal.

  “Now where do you suppose Willie would have gotten these?” I muttered to no one in particular.

  Dave scratched his head.

  “Well there haven’t been any reports of any wine thefts lately. Maybe he bought them.”

  “I don’t think so. I’ll bet we find that these go for about twenty bucks a bottle. That’s more than Willie would spend on two week’s worth of hooch.”

  We checked the rest of Willie’s room and, finding nothing we considered case-breaking, gave the landlord permission to clean it out. Of course, the wine went with us.

  Chapter 8

  Dear Choir:

  I think that it is time that we approach with reverent awe that celebration which makes us truly Protestant. I’m speaking of Reformation Day—the day on which, in 1517, Martin Luther set us free from the control of the Roman Church by nailing his ninety-five theses to the door of the church at Wittenberg proclaiming his dissatisfaction with certain papal decrees. It is fitting and proper therefore, that we should celebrate the foremost contribution by Martin Luther to the Protestant cause. No, not throwing the yoke of Catholic oppression off our shoulders, but something far, far more consequential.

  As we head full-steam into the holiday season, we need only to turn to our history books to find that Martin Luther offers us a surefire way to lose 15 pounds before Thanksgiving. Yes, I’m talking about the DIET OF WURMS.

  “My darling," Meg said, rather too sarcastically, I thought, as she read through my current choir newsletter. "I fear your current offering may be a bit too theologically obscure for the average chorister. How many, do you suppose, have even heard of the Diet of Wurms?”

  By now you are saying to yourselves, “Well, I’ve heard of the Diet of Wurms, of course. Every scholar of comparative religion has—but does it really work?” I can assure you it does. By all accounts, Brother Martin lost about fifteen pounds from November 1 to November 8, 1521 and we have just obtained from an unnamed monk in upstate New York the actual manuscript of this famous diet.

  “I cannot and I will not recant anything. Here I stand. I can do no other.”

  “Yes, Dr. Luther, Very funny. Are you running out of steam on The Alto Wore Tweed?” Megan wondered aloud as she finished reading my latest missive. “At least we understood some of that.”

  hI just thought that Reformation Day needed a little punching up. It’s not one of our more well-known feast days. I’ll get back to the story in a bit.”

  “So what do we actually do for Reformation Day? I don’t seem to remember any kind of mention of it in the service.”

  “Well, usually we all dress up as monks, walk barefoot in procession down Main Street and nail our complaints to the mayor’s door. Then we find a hotdog vendor and say ‘Make us one with everything.’ But we haven’t done it for a few years. Actually the last time was right before you moved here.”

  She nodded thoughtfully. “This is a tradition I think we should resurrect. Do you still have your monk suit?”

  “Of course I have my monk suit. Is it always your habit to be so inquisitive?” I added, smirking poignantly. I had a lot of monk jokes.

  “Oh, haha,” Meg replied mirthlessly. “Your puns garner you no lady’s favors, sirrah. And what’s this stuff about the International Congress of Church Musicians? I haven’t ever heard of them.”

  “It’s a secret society and I must advise you to pretend you never asked that question.”

  Meg looked up at me from below arched eyebrows.

  “Many people have made that same inquiry in various forms and were never heard from again.”

  “Do tell,” she said.

  “Sometimes they’d ask nicely and say, ‘Just what is the purpose and mission of the ICCM?’ and sometimes they’d just yell, ‘It’s three o’clock in the morning! Why don’t you idiots shut up and get that damn go
at off my lawn?’ Then the cops would come and we’d have a heck of a time explaining sixteen men in raccoon hats, a goat and a five-gallon container of spaghetti sauce.”

  “I see. So that’s what you’re up to all hours of the night.”

  “I have no comment at this time.”

  “You need to have your blood sugar checked. I think you may be a couple of bubbles out of plumb. Now, let’s see that clue you were talking about.”

  I pulled a Xerox of the clue out of my shirt pocket, unfolded it, put it on the kitchen table and smoothed it out. Meg spun it around slowly so she could read it and sat down at the table.

  “Hmmm,” she hummed, deep in thought.

  “Any ideas?” I rested my elbows on the table and propped my chin in my hands.

  “OK,” she said. “Let’s assume for the moment that this is a real clue. That someone saw who did it and is trying to get you to guess who it is—for whatever reason.”

  “Fair enough.”

  I saw who did it. It’s Him. It’s Matthew.

  She continued. “It’s obviously not Matthew, right?”

  I nodded. “All Matthews are currently alibied.”

  “Then what could ‘Matthew’ mean? Her fingers were tapping on the table.

  “The Gospel of Matthew?” I offered.

  “Right,” she said decisively. “But where in the gospel? That’s the question.”

  I was content to let her keep going. I had a feeling Meg was going to make me look good.

  “Hmmm,” she hummed again, this time at a slightly higher pitch.

  “Got it!” she sang out suddenly. “Get me a hymnal and a Bible!”

  “An Episcopal hymnal?”

  “Of course, silly. It’s so obvious. It has to be an Episcopal hymnal and whatever translation of the Bible we use at the church. You’re so cute when you’re playing detective,” she called after me as I went into the library to fetch her books.