Concerto in dead flat, p.1
Concerto in Dead Flat, page 1
Concerto in Dead Flat
A Chris Klick Mystery
Ridley Pearson
Concerto in Dead Flat
Copyright © 1990 by Ridley Pearson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Electronic edition published 2015 by RosettaBooks
Cover design by David Ter-Avanesyan/Ter33Design
ISBN e-Pub edition: 9780795346507
www.RosettaBooks.com
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
England
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Idaho
Chapter 56
Author’s Note
In the late 1980s I wrote the first two Chris Klick novels, in part to exorcise the demons left behind by losing John D. MacDonald to a Chicago hospital, in part because of a failed music career and a desire to get something back for all those years on the road.
My late, great literary agent, Franklin Heller, had read a news profile about a two-man company that returned lost royalties still owed composers and performers: one, an attorney; the other, an ex-musician like myself. Dead Aim was born on a clear Idaho summer when the fishing was slow and the tourist season off. Bands were in less demand. I wrote on a CPM computer and saved the files to a cassette tape recorder that only operated if I had a Q-tip placed properly into the record button. Aim for the Heart followed. (Three years later a jet went off the far end of the runway and nearly crossed the highway to strike the gas station, as dramatized in that novel. No mention of the book in the news story!)
Encouraged by the Idaho Council on the Arts, I submitted a published novel to the Fulbright Foundation and eight months later, to my very great surprise, was awarded the Raymond Chandler Fulbright to spend a year at Wadham College, Oxford, in England. That fabulous and unique experience, perhaps the best year of my life, was chronicled in a memoir, Dining with the Dons, that may or may not someday see the light of a publisher’s ink. One day, back home in America, I sat down with a cup of tea—a new habit—or was it port?—an old habit—and reread Dining, only to realize another Chris Klick lay therein. The fishing was slow—what can I tell you? Concerto in Dead Flat was begun. Oddly enough, the novel took me eight years to complete (not that it’s any great literature, it’s just that the fishing improved).
Thank you, dear reader—those few of you who may recall the earlier novels—for staying with me after a long absence. It’s difficult to encapsulate such a magical year as the one I spent at Wadham. I leave behind life-long friends, bike rides home over rivers and down footpaths through the fog and rain, but most of all memories that I shall treasure forever. Some of those memories are recounted herein.
—Wendell McCall
February 1999
Chapter 1
“Put your lips together like this,” she said. But my lips would never go together like that and we both knew it. Hers were a youthful pink. Pouty. The oversized, sensual lips of a French woman in her early twenties. Placed tightly together—as they were now—they resembled a budding red rose. When parted, they were the exploding morning flower, hungry for the heat of the sun.
My passport lay open on the bed. It showed a man approaching forty with sandy hair and strong features. A head shot, it didn’t show my six foot four inches, or my two hundred and ten pounds; and in the cheap photo, my eyes looked more blue than the gray green they actually were. Nowhere did it mention that I was a self-employed, former professional musician who spent his time chasing down recording artists owed back royalties typically “mistakenly” misplaced by creative corporate accounts. On the plane over to Italy I had listed my visit as tourism, but this was in fact a small white lie. I was in Paris on business, and business wasn’t looking so good.
Because of an acute lack of space in my Parisian hotel room—room 31, Hotel de Grande École—my tutor, Sylvie, had taken to the bed where she now sat cross-legged, her books and papers chaotically spread before her, her cotton skirt tossed over her ankles, her lips bunched tightly and pointing at me as if inviting a kiss. My mind was not fully on the French language as it should have been.
“It has been twenty years since I’ve done this,” I reminded her. It felt like about that long since my last kiss as well.
“You can do it,” she encouraged in her delightful French-scented English. “Think of all the money you are paying me.”
That encouraged another try with my lips. Later, when I reviewed our conversation in my head, I realized how the content could have been so easily misunderstood, especially when muffled by a wall and overheard by the hotel guest occupying the room next door. It seems this hotel guest was out on her room’s half-balcony during this brief exchange in my tutorial. Believing Sylvie and I were discussing sexual acts for hire, she had promptly complained to management. So the next morning there I was, with my horrible French, trying to explain myself and to defend Sylvie’s honor and my own. I apparently did a rather poor job of it: I was denied any more female “guests” in my room by the seventy-some-year-old matron who owned the hotel. It was this family atmosphere I liked so much about the hotel, so I made no attempt to change her mind. My French was so limited at the time, it would have done no good anyway.
I deserved as much for having French lessons at eleven on a Saturday night, but with my days consumed by looking for maestro Stephan Shultz and my attention preoccupied by the distractions of a city I truly adored, there remained few hours for language tutorials. Sylvie’s employer, a French language agency, had left the working out of details to tutor and student, and so now, given the objections of my hotelier, either other arrangements would have to be made or I would need to smuggle Sylvie up the fire stairs.
At nine-thirty that Sunday morning, I took a run along the tow path of the Seine under a penetrating September sun. Like wings, or insect legs, Notre Dame’s flying buttresses caught and carved this light into a matrix of shadows. Sight of the cathedral stole my breath away, despite its familiarity. An imposing structure, stained by centuries of city smog, witness to a dozen wars and God-only-knows how many millions of pilgrims, it loomed ominously, majestically, triumphantly. Though by nature I was not as religious as spiritual, I nonetheless felt a moment of communion with God. In this, of all places.
Construction on the tow path forced me up stone stairs climbed by a thousand sailors, a thousand times that many lovers, by writers and painters too numerous to name, film makers, politicians and ladies of the night. A sense of that which had gone before—of history—oozed out of every crack in every stone, filled the branches of every tree that lined the boulevards, occupied a chair at every café.
Parisians carried baguettes like New Yorkers carried briefcases, only without the handle: secured beneath an elbow outstretched like a lance, gripped like a tennis racquet, or brandished like a cane.
I marveled at the tempo of this city, which, on God’s day, seemed more like a sleepy village than one of the world’s premiere urban centers.
***
My appointment that Sunday noon with a former colleague of Stephan Shultz, one Adrian Pascale, professor of music at the university, took place in his cramped, viewless apartment, a walk-up with just enough space in the living room for a Yamaha grand piano, a four-track tape recorder and a CD collection that would have made even my dear friend Lyel envious. Pascale, a surprisingly young-looking man, had dark expressive eyebrows, long hair pulled back in a pony tail, and powerful, inquisitive green eyes. I already knew from having talked with him on the phone that he spoke exceptional English, which came as a great relief. I was scheduled to visit Sylvie at her place at ten that evening—my French was barely beyond ordering bread and butter. Without his English, I would have been lost.
While he brewed me a cup of espresso I looked through his library of CDs and we discussed at a distance several re-recordings of which I was unaware. The rest of the room’s décor amounted to a terra cotta urn containing a dusty bouquet of dried flowers, a mirror alongside the piano bench—either to frame the narcissistic or to check and correct posture—and a framed page of a hand-scribed musical score that bore his signature as well as an embossed star with the number one in its center.
“It was a competition I won,” he said, delivering the demitasse. “It’s how all this got started,” he continued, taking a seat on the piano bench and offering me the room’s only chair. Pupil and teacher. I was immediately uncomfortable, both because they still haven’t made a chair for six-foot-four and because I didn’t want him too complacent about who was running things. When you need answers from people, it’s best to have them out of their element.
“Competition?” I inquired politely, not really interested.
“I was sixteen at the time. The assignment, it was to fill the gap in a Bach sonata. We were given the page three and the page five. We were to compose the page four, connecting these two. I won. This page, it won,” he said pointing. “At the time, I have the visions of being the next Mozart. Instead,” he said sweeping his arm, but his face revealing disappointment, “a somewhat obscure chair in musical history at the university.” In the blink of an eye, he checked himself in the mirror. “And you, Mr. Klick. You are a liar, which is why it is I have invited you here to my home. I am fascinated by liars. As an academic, I rub elbows with them daily.”
I sipped the bitter coffee, drank in his bitter words, and wondered if the heat I felt in my cheeks could be seen on my face.
He informed me, “The media calls him Steven Shultz, just as you did over the phone when we spoke. However, if you know the man—and you do not, despite your claim to the contrary—then you know it is actually Ste-ph-an.” He raised his finger at me, as teachers tend to do. Then he lit a non-filter Gauloise without offering me one. I took that as a compliment. “Curiosity is a funny thing. I was immediately curious about you.”
“My business with Mr. Shultz is confidential,” I said.
“You’re working for his wife,” he stated flatly. I had no idea what he was talking about. I tried not to show it.
He sucked on the cigarette, collapsing his cheeks. When he next spoke, gray exhaust chased his words. “She should relax. These things have a way of blowing over.” I forced a smile. Shultz was owed a considerable sum of money in back royalty payments withheld from him by a former recording company. My interest and that of my partner, Bruce Warren, was in the finder’s fee for putting him in touch with this money.
Adrian Pascale flirted with the mirror again and gassed himself up with a chest full of smoke.
“Last week I was in Italy,” I explained dryly, mention of the wife clicking into place. “The maestro was recently seen at a cocktail party outside of Todi. An area called Beverly Hills after Beverly Pepper, the artist, who has installed a good many close friends in the area. I was left with the understanding that the maestro was currently visiting here in Paris. Moi aussi!” I attempted. “Me too.”
He asked incredulously, “You are suggesting the wife did not send you?”
“Perhaps you’ve read about a certain Japanese company which is in the process of acquiring a major Hollywood studio, complete with that company’s recording division? An audit of the recording side of things revealed an accounting ‘error’ in Mr. Shultz’s favor. My partner and I make our living matching people like Mr. Shultz with lost property and misappropriated funds, including royalty money.”
His expression changing, he said, “I think I read about you.” He killed the cigarette with a twist.
“That would have been my partner, Bruce Warren. He’s the attorney side of the team.” I forced another smile. “He gets all the press.”
“So you are not working for the wife.”
“I thought we had already established that.” I said hastily, “I heard about the fireworks between Shultz and the cello player. It was suggested that he followed her here. Is that where the wife comes in?” As the question passed my lips it seemed rhetorical.
A knock on the door interrupted any possibility of a reply. He rose and answered the door. What followed was a volley of expletives, in French, as four men—my size or better—barged into the apartment and headed straight for the piano.
Beside himself Adrian Pascale danced around the room wildly, hollering at them in French as they disassembled the Yamaha grand. From the hall, one of them grabbed a dolly, a quilted pad, and some straps. What little of the conversation I understood had to do with Adrian Pascale’s astonishment that they would do this on a Sunday. He was appalled that they had tricked him in this way. “Dimanche?” he kept shouting, moving from one corner of the tiny room to the other, but not interfering with their work.
The repo boys paid him no mind. They were numb to such complaints. In a matter of a very few minutes the piano, and its legs, had been wrapped, placed onto a dolly, and moved out to the landing. Adrian Pascale attempted to shut the door in disgust when one of them returned for the bench. Pascale finally slammed the door shut.
I stood and offered Adrian his only chair. He glared at me and lit another cigarette. “On a Sunday!” he exclaimed in French. “Two months is all I owe. It’s nothing! But now, how am I supposed to tutor? My God, I have a student tomorrow night! They came on a Sunday!” he added hysterically.
Bruce and I were not above paying for information—when needed. I considered cutting Mr. Pascale a deal, but I wasn’t sure how much he could help, and I feared his hysterics and present concerns would force him into inventing information for me, solely to save his piano. Again I offered him the chair. This time he accepted.
“What is the cellist’s name?” I asked, towering over him as he fueled the ember of his cigarette with a disgusting inhale.
He seemed to have forgotten about me.
“Stephan Shultz’s woman friend,” I reminded.
“Woman? She’s not much more than a girl, that one.”
“Her name,” I repeated.
“Allison Star.”
“She’s here in Paris?”
Numbed by his loss, he mumbled, “Julia is putting her up at her flat. Julia’s number is in… hand me that small directory, there… yes.” It was a photocopy of a listing of the music department students.
A minute later I crossed the hole in the room previously occupied by the piano, and reached the door. I had lost him for the time being.
“Who was to expect such trouble on a Sunday?” he asked.
I left him still sitting in that chair, struggling with his cigarette pack, tearing it, giving up on it, and tossing it across the room. He was staring at himself in the mirror. In another minute or two, he would be crying.
Chapter 2
The Parisian subway system—the Metro—proved as pleasant as my memories of it. Though old, the rubber-wheeled cars were quiet, the ride smooth, and the spider-webbed network of tracks covered the city like a blanket. Around every corner there seemed to be another Metro stop. The music of street musicians filled the access tunnels. An army of humanity marched past them indifferently. I tossed a few francs into an open violin case.
I had arranged a rendezvous with Allison Star’s roommate, Julia, in the gardens of Palais du Luxembourg only a dozen blocks off the fashionable Boulevard Ste. Germaine. Late, I was in a hurry.
We met at the center of the garden, but only after I had sat on a bench for five minutes. Julia had seen too many spy movies.
She explained, “I wanted to make sure you were who you said you were.” She was American with curly blonde hair, a pinched chin, and plucked eyebrows. She had the longest fingers I had ever seen on a woman.
“Piano?” I asked.
“Violin. I called your partner as you suggested. I woke him up because of the time difference.”
“Bruce is used to it.”
“He said you were moderately handsome, very big, and occasionally impatient.”
“He’s not at his best when he first wakes up.”
“The impatience I saw—the way you were tapping your foot.”
“That wasn’t nerves,” I corrected. “That was Brubeck.”
“Brubeck?”
“Never mind.” I had probably lived enough years to live her life twice.
“There are two others,” she said as if it explained something.
“Giving you a hard time?”
