A Measure of Murder Page 22

  Marta mounted the podium. In her left hand was a sheet of paper, which she placed on the black music stand before her. The room hushed as everyone took their seats and waited for her announcement.

  “I want to say first of all that everyone who auditioned did a wonderful job, and I thank you all very much. Without your hard work and, yes, courage to get up here in front of a room full of other singers, we would not be able to perform such a glorious work as the Mozart Requiem. Okay, bene.” She picked up the paper, and the tension level in the room increased several notches.

  “For the first movement, the soprano solo, it will be Roxanne.”

  I swiveled in my chair to see how Jill was taking this news. Not well. Whereas all the other sopranos were clapping and congratulating Roxanne, Jill was staring down at her lap, her face scrunched up in a scowl.

  Next up was the Tuba mirum, and it was no surprise that the only tenor who had auditioned was given the part—plus Wendy and a soprano and bass I barely knew. I turned to give Wendy a high five but then stiffened when Marta said, “The Recordare.”

  “For this one, our quartet will be Paul for the bass, John for the tenor, and . . . George and Ringo,” she finished with a laugh. Everyone in the room cracked up along with her. Everyone except me, that is. I was way too nervous.

  “Sorry,” Marta said. “I could not resist.” She raised the paper once more to study the names. “Okay, so the soprano for the Recordare will be Cheryl, and the alto will be Sally.”

  Allison clapped me on the back, and I finally let out the breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. “Way to go!” she shouted. “I knew you’d get it.”

  It was hard to concentrate on the rest of the solo announcements, but I did manage to pay enough attention to hear when Allison was awarded the alto part for the Benedictus and to give her a congratulatory hug.

  Jill, I also noted, had gotten the soprano part for the Benedictus, but the solo in the last movement had gone to Roxanne. Which meant that both times the two sopranos had vied for a part, Roxanne had been the victor. Jill would not be happy about that.

  “Okay, everybody,” Marta said, “now back to the full chorus parts. I want to review the ‘quam olim Abrahae’ fugue, which some of you seem to still be having problems with. Let’s start at letter O,” she said to Nadia and raised her hands to conduct. After only eight measures, however, she cut us off.

  “Remember, this is a sort of call-and-response,” she said. “Think the style of Handel, especially his Messiah. So I need shaped phrases all through this part, like little waves in the music. Write it down on your music. Now,” she added when some of us failed to take up our pencils. “Little—how do you call them?” She made Vs with her fingers, pointing the pairs at each other.

  “Hairpins,” someone called out.

  “Sì. I want you to draw a pair of hairpins above each short phrase in this section, so you will not forget again.”

  While we dutifully scribbled our dynamic phrasing all through the fugue, Marta continued to talk. “It might interest you to learn,” she said, “that most people who study such things believe that the very last musical notation Mozart made before his death was regarding this section of the Requiem. He wrote the words ‘quam olim Da Capo’ at the end of the Hostias movement, instructing that the fugue was to be repeated at that point. From there to the end of the mass was left unfinished—blank pages, niente—to be subsequently composed by Franz Xaver Süssmayr.”

  She paused a moment as we finished up our notations, clucking softly in a manner that struck me as peculiarly Italian. “Such a pity. If only he could have lived to have completed his masterpiece.”

  * * *

  As soon as break was announced, I wandered over to the dessert table. On arriving at the church hall that evening, I’d spied a platter piled with slices of poppy seed pound cake, which had been calling to me throughout rehearsal.

  Neither Brian nor Carol were at the table yet, but a group of hungry singers had already lined up and were helping themselves to cake and cookies. As I finally made it to the front of the line, Brian came hurrying over and set a stack of insulated paper cups down on the table. “Sorry,” he said. “I had to dash out to my car to get these.”

  “Oh, good,” said one of the tenors, taking a cup and helping himself to hot coffee from the stainless steel urn. “I was wondering where they were. Oh, and is there sugar somewhere?”

  Brian looked around the table, but the basket of sugar and fake creamer was nowhere to be seen. “Damn,” he said. “I’ll have to go upstairs and get it.”

  “I’ll do it,” I said. “No worries.” And before he could answer, I turned and headed for the doorway to the office building. I’d been wanting to take another look around the storage room, and this time I’d be able to turn on the light and really see the place, actually having a reason to be up there.

  The room was once again dimly lit, since they had yet to replace the old window and it was still boarded up. I felt along the walls on either side of the door until I found the light switch and flipped it on. There, on the table next to the choir robes, was the basket of sugar and creamer, along with another basket of tea bags, which Brian probably also needed.

  Glancing at the floor and checking on top of the other tables for clues as I went, I walked across the room. Nothing. Just the same tools, cleaning supplies, and boxes of music I’d seen before. Oh well. It wasn’t as if I’d really expected to find anything new. I grabbed a basket in each hand and turned to head back out the door but then stopped. What was that behind the rack of robes? It looked as if someone had dumped a pile of clothes on the floor.

  Setting the baskets back down, I rolled the rack away from the wall. I was right: a pair of jeans, a striped shirt, and a pair of shoes lay on the floor. Now why . . . ? And then a jolt shot through my body like an electric shock as I realized what I was looking at. It was Carol, the alto who helped with the desserts.

  And she looked very dead.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  My first instinct—after suppressing the urge to let out a scream worthy of a horror film starlet—was to flee the scene as fast as I could. What if her killer was still about? I could be the next one lying dead on the floor, my lifeless eyes staring blankly at a rack of powder-blue choir robes.

  But this highly rational train of thought was immediately overtaken by the compulsion to know what had happened. If I were a cat, it’s a sure thing my curiosity would have long since taken all nine of my lives.

  Leaning over Carol’s body, I did my best to curb the nausea that was rapidly overtaking me and examined the red line around her neck. It looked, to my inexpert eye, as if she’d been strangled with something thin. So thin that the cord had cut into the front of her neck, where a trickle of blood now seeped from the laceration. But there wasn’t any bruising as far as I could tell.

  I looked around for the cord or whatever had been used to kill her but saw nothing near the body.

  It had to have just happened, I realized. Carol must have come up here at the beginning of break to fetch the baskets of sugar and tea. So her killer very likely was still close by.

  And at that thought, my good sense finally kicked in. I took off down the stairs, calling 9-1-1 as I went.

  The cops arrived almost immediately. I’d barely made it back into the rehearsal hall and was blathering on in what was I’m sure a nearly incoherent manner when the squad cars screamed into the parking lot and several police officers came running into the hall.

  Eric, who’d managed to decipher my story, once again took control and led two of the cops upstairs to the storage room. The other officer held the fort until more backup arrived, telling everyone to stay put and not leave the building.

  Allison steered me back to our chairs in the alto section, where she sat with her arm about my shoulders, much like she would have done if Eleanor had just suffered some sort of trauma, no doubt.

  Detective Vargas arrived a few minutes later with ano
ther plainclothes cop. After conferring briefly with the other detective, who then headed upstairs to the crime scene in the storage room, Vargas came over to where I was sitting.

  “I need to talk to Ms. Solari alone for a moment, if I may,” he said, and Allison relinquished her seat to him.

  “Well, it’s starting to look like your theory about Kyle Copman being murdered may be right after all,” the detective said, settling his beefy body onto the brown metal folding chair.

  I nodded as a wave of fury mixed with helplessness washed over me. Why did it have to take another death in the chorus for him to finally come to this conclusion? Could I have somehow been more persuasive? Done anything else that would have possibly convinced him to believe me earlier?

  Leaning forward, I lay my head on my arms and continued to berate myself for not taking whatever actions might have helped to save Carol’s life. After a moment, Vargas put a hand gently on my shoulder. “It’s not your fault, Sally. It’s the killer’s fault. And if you have any information that might help catch him—or her—you should tell me.”

  I sat back up and took a few deep breaths. He was right. I needed to get it together, right now.

  Vargas listened and took notes as I recounted what I’d learned. Some of it I’d already told him, but this time he seemed truly interested in everything I had to say. First, I talked about Brian: how someone that looked like him had followed me up to the storage room that night; how the cook had seen the list of suspects I’d made; how I suspected that he’d started the Gauguin fire and how he’d given me a strange look right after the fire; and finally, how he and the dead woman had been in charge of the desserts together.

  As I spoke, I watched Brian, who was sitting with some of his fellow basses. But unlike the others in his section, he was silent, staring at the floor, his body unmoving.

  Next, I repeated what I knew about Lydia, as well as the maintenance man/ex-tenant, Steve, and the detective nodded and wrote it all down.

  “Is that everybody on this list you made?” he asked after I’d finished.

  “Well, I also have two sopranos from the chorus on it—Roxanne and Jill,” I said and explained my reasons for including them.

  “Uh-huh. So that’s everyone?”

  I paused. “No . . . There’s one more person, actually. You know that St. Christopher medal I gave you? Well, I found out that it belongs to Marta, our choral director.”

  “Okay, that’s good to know.”

  I watched as Vargas added her name to his notes, knowing damn well I should also tell him what I’d learned about the theft of the Lacrymosa manuscript.

  But I didn’t.

  * * *

  It was raining hard in southwest France, and I held my breath as the Tour de France peloton came flying around a tight corner at the end of the day’s stage. Sure enough, a rider went down on the narrow, slick road, causing a massive pileup less than a kilometer from the finish. Waiting to make sure that no one was seriously hurt, I watched the competitors disentangle their crumpled bikes and limp to the line and then pointed the remote at the TV and switched it off. No way would I want to be a competitive cyclist; it was a brutal profession. But it made for a terrific spectator sport.

  I turned my attention back to the papers scattered across the living room coffee table. Javier and I had finally decided on a general concept for our fall menu, and I’d promised him the preliminary food costing numbers by tonight. I’d been trying to finish up my calculations as I fast-forwarded through the bike race, but the attempt at multitasking had not been too successful. It’s not easy to operate both a DVR remote and a handheld calculator at the same time.

  For the next hour, I concentrated on mains and sides, portion sizes, and the price per pound of whole Pekin ducks, pumpkin, brussels sprouts, Gorgonzola cheese, and Beurré Superfin pears. But I found it difficult to maintain my focus. The image of Carol, with those blank eyes staring up at me, kept invading my thoughts.

  As did the memory of Brian and the look of scorn—or whatever it had been—that he’d given me after the fire. I couldn’t get past the idea that he was the one who’d strangled Carol. The fact that they’d both done the desserts together seemed like too much of a coincidence. And he had been late to the table at break last night. Just because he said he’d gone to his car for the coffee cups didn’t mean anything. You’d be forced to come up with an alibi like that if you had in fact just killed someone.

  But why would he have done so? Did Carol witness something that could have pinned Kyle’s murder on him?

  And then I had a truly frightening thought: Did Brian think I had evidence that could incriminate him? Was I in danger of suffering the same fate as Carol?

  Wresting my brain from such thoughts, I forced myself to concentrate instead on my menu planning. Finally, at four fifteen, I completed my calculations, gathered up my papers, and clipped them together. Javier should be happy, since I’d managed to get the food cost average down to thirty-one percent. Not bad when you took into account the fact that our meat and poultry were now all grass fed and pastured.

  After taking Buster for a quick walk, I changed into my work clothes—black chef’s pants and an old T-shirt to wear under my white chef’s jacket—and headed for Gauguin. Javier was up in the office, reviewing the corrections I’d made to the menu descriptions for our fall dishes. Although he’d come up with the general wording, I’d been tasked with checking his grammar and spelling.

  “Is there supposed to be one of those little line things here, for the seared duck breasts?” he asked when I walked into the room.

  I leaned over and looked where he was pointing. “A hyphen. Yeah, it’s supposed to be there. Or we could say ‘balsamic and fig,’ if you prefer, but I think ‘balsamic-fig glaze’ sounds better. Here. I finished the food costing calculations and got it down to thirty-one.”

  He took the papers from me, flipped to the last page, and grinned. “Way to go. How’d you get the rib eye for so cheap?” he asked, turning back a page.

  “I guess it was some new customer deal, ’cause they knocked two bucks a pound off their regular price for switching from Quality Meats over to them. Let’s hope they don’t raise it in a few months, but for now I can’t complain.”

  “Nice.” Javier dropped the papers on the desk and pushed back his chair. “Time to head downstairs, I guess.”

  Brian arrived about twenty minutes later. Kris and I were setting up the mise en place for the line when the cook banged through the swinging door, a scowl on his face.

  “Why the sour look?” Kris said, swatting him with a side towel. “You have a fight with your girlfriend or something?”

  This sort of razzing in a restaurant kitchen is totally normal, but given the circumstances, Kris’s comment made me flinch. I had no idea how Brian would react and was afraid he might do something unpredictable—and scary.

  But instead, he merely grabbed the towel from her hands, wadded it up, and threw it back at her. “I wish it were that. I was just at the police station, where they spent like three hours giving me the third degree. For some bizarre reason, they seem to think I might have something to do with Carol’s murder,” he added, shooting me a hard look.

  Uh-oh. I said nothing, turning away to occupy myself with organizing the containers of dry seasonings for the hot line.

  “Well,” Kris went on, oblivious to the tension building between Brian and me, “if they really thought you’d done it, they wouldn’t have let you go. You’d be in jail right now.”

  Javier came into the kitchen from the garde manger at this moment, and we all shut up. Jail was a sore subject with the head chef. I wasn’t sure if he truly hadn’t heard the previous discussion or whether he was just acting as if he hadn’t, but he didn’t say anything about it. Instead, he asked us to gather around to hear the assignments for the night.

  I was much relieved when he instructed me to work the charbroiler again. Since Brian was on the line, this meant I’d be able to pret
ty much avoid him for the night. The last thing I wanted right now was to work in close proximity with someone who very possibly had it in for me. Especially when that work involved open flames and razor-sharp knives.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Wednesday was our last run-through of the Requiem before the dress rehearsal the following night, and everyone was on edge, still reeling from Carol’s murder two nights earlier. The heat didn’t help. It had been a warm afternoon—in the mid-eighties, which practically counts as a heat wave in temperate Santa Cruz—and the poorly insulated church hall felt oppressive and hot.

  But then again, I thought as I stripped down to my yellow tank top, it could just be another pesky hot flash. Mine were often triggered by stress, and I had that in spades right about now. I’d spent a good deal of the afternoon practicing the Recordare, but it hadn’t succeeded in chasing away the low-key dread I’d experienced since learning I’d gotten the alto part in the quartet.

  And, of course, I had another reason to be antsy: although he hadn’t said anything or given me any more meaningful looks, it seemed as if Brian was doing his best to avoid talking to me. He’d steered clear of me during the entire shift at Gauguin last night, and this evening when I’d crossed the hall to the alto section, he turned away to speak to another bass as I passed by.

  The basses and tenors had already been here for an hour. Marta had canceled today’s women’s sectional, asking the men to come in again instead, since they needed more work than we did. So I guess both altos and sopranos rock. Sometimes, anyway.

  I was relieved to see Marta at rehearsal. I’d been worried that the cops might have arrested her, based on that St. Christopher medal of hers I’d found at the crime scene. Or at least kept her for questioning. But she wasn’t acting like someone who was frightened or who’d just been through a grilling with the police. And, I have to admit, it also made me feel a little less foolish for trusting her, myself.