The Mezzo Wore Mink (8 page)

“
Got it,” I said. “I’m going down to the coroner’s office. If Kent calls, tell him I’m on my way.”

•••

I found Kent sitting at his desk, clad in the same tweed jacket that had been his uniform, summer and winter, since I met him some twenty years ago. His unlit pipe was clenched between his teeth, and he waved me in as soon as he heard me knock on the jamb of his open door.

“
How’re you doing, Chief?” he asked.

“
Pretty good except for this sad business. We all knew Davis.”

Kent nodded and looked professionally sympathetic.

“
Can you tell me what you found?”

“
Oh, yeah. Sorry.” He flipped open a folder on his desk then looked up.

“
You want a drink?” he asked. “I just got a wonderful bottle of forty-year-old tawny port.”

“
Do I need one?”

Kent shrugged.

I looked at my watch. Almost noon. “Okay then. Small one.”

Kent pulled a large, amber bottle out of his bottom drawer, then used it to push one of the two coffee cups sitting on his desk across the polished veneer, stopping just short of my lap. Then he opened the bottle and poured me a couple fingers. Kent was right. It was delicious.

“
Okay,” he said, after he’d taken a sip of his own. “Let’s get down to brass tacks. We have here a white male, age thirty-two. That was on his driver’s license. He weighed one hundred eighty-two pounds.”

I nodded and took a sip of port. “I would have put him younger than that.”

“
You knew his neck was broken?” asked Kent. I nodded again and he continued. “Between C1 and C2. It’s called the hangman’s break and usually results in functional decapitation.”

“
I don’t get it.”

“
His…broken…neck…killed…him,” Kent said slowly, seeing the puzzled look on my face.

“
Oh, I understand that. But when he came off the ladder, I don’t think he dropped far enough to break his neck, and besides, there was plenty of give in the bell rope.”

“
I thought of that, too,” said Kent. “But here’s the thing. Nancy sent over the photos. Look here.” He laid a photo of the bell tower room on top of the folder and drew a faint line with his pencil. “When he came off the ladder, the bell rope would have given some slack as the bell swung in its first arc. Then, as the bell returned, it would have encountered abrupt resistance from the body moving in the opposite direction. Newton’s First Law of Motion.”

“
And that would have been enough to snap his neck?”

“
Like a twig,” said Kent.

“
If we had gotten there…?”

“
Nope,” said Kent, before I could finish the question. “He was dead the first time his bell was rung. Hey, that’s pretty good!”

“
Cute. I guess suicide is the verdict.”

Kent nodded. “That’s what I’d say. The door was locked from the inside, right?”

“
Yep.”

“
Nancy gave me a heads up that he might be gay. I sent some blood in for an HIV test. The results will be back in a few days. There was one other interesting thing.”

“
I’m all ears.”

“
I took an x-ray to see exactly where the break was and found this.” He flipped to the back of the file and pulled out a color printout. “Look right here.” He spun the picture around and pushed it across the desk.

“
What am I looking at?” I asked.

“
This.” He tapped the picture with a pencil. “Right here in the left parietal lobe. He’s got an embolism. Not a small one, either. This sucker would have eventually caused a massive stroke or killed him straight away.”

“
Elucidize me.”

“
An embolism is caused when an object migrates, via circulation, from one part of the body and causes a blockage of a blood vessel in another part of the body. It’s particularly dangerous if it settles in the lungs, the heart, or the brain. In this case, the occlusion is a blood clot. Just look at the size of this.” He tapped a large dark spot on the picture.”

“
Big?”

“
Huge.”

“
How long before something happened?”

“
Can’t say, but if a doctor had found it, it would have meant a major operation that I’m not sure the patient would have survived.”

“
Maybe Davis already knew about it.”

“
It’s a possibility,” agreed Kent.

•••

I met Nancy and Dave at the Bear and Brew for lunch. It was Nancy’s turn to buy. When I walked in, they were waiting for me, three beers on the table and our pizza already ordered.

“
What’s the conclusion?” asked Nancy.

“
Suicide,” I said, sitting down on one end of the bench, across from Dave. “He had a heck of a blood clot though. There was an embolism in his brain. Kent says he was a walking time-bomb.”

“
Did Davis know?” asked Dave.

I shrugged. “I guess we could ask his doctor, if we knew who his doctor was, if he even had a doctor and if this mythical doctor would tell us if we found him, which I doubt.”

“
You think there’s something else going on?”

I shook my head. “I guess it just caught me by surprise. We all saw Davis on Wednesday at the bookstore. Still, you never know what’s going through someone’s head.”

“
Try this,” said Nancy, pushing a bottle of Redhook Ale across the table. “Beer and pizza always cheer you up.”

“
I’ll need two,” I said, “and most of Dave’s slices.”

“
You can have ‘em,” said Dave. “I had a late breakfast.”

•••

After lunch, Dave headed back to the office to pretend to work. Nancy and I decided that it was time we introduced ourselves to the new business owners in St. Germaine that we hadn’t yet met.

“
Maybe we can shake them down for a little ‘protection’ money,” said Nancy.

“
It’s an idea.”

Our first stop was the Appalachian Music Shoppe, probably one of about ten stores with the same name within a hundred mile radius of St. Germaine. It wasn’t a chain, just a lack of imagination among Appalachian Music Shoppe owners, although Nancy wryly and sarcastically pointed out that the extra “p” and superfluous “e” in ‘Shoppe’ gave it some class that would have otherwise been sorely lacking. Nancy had surmised, when she first heard about the music store, that it would meet her audiophile needs with bins of CDs—everything from Heavy Metal to Rap to Country to all twelve hundred recordings of Pachelbel’s Canon. I figured it for a mountain dulcimer, folk guitar, banjoey type store with some Cherokee flutes on the walls and an expensive handmade hammered dulcimer in the window. We were both wrong.

The Appalachian Music Shoppe was directly across from the Bear and Brew. It was a smallish store. Beaver had moved his chainsaw repair business out of the store and into his garage last winter when the landlord, Russ Stafford, decided to raise his rent. It was a turn-of-the-century storefront; red brick, not complemented much by a plate glass window and a solid oak door painted a greenish brown color that might, at one time, have been a focal point. We swung the door open and walked in to the sound of a trio of shawms playing a Monteverdi canzone on the shop stereo.

“
Yikes,” said Nancy. “What’s that noise?”

“
Shawms, I think. Or maybe zinks.”

“
Sounds like a flock of geese getting their collective necks wrung.”

“
Yeah, it does.”

The store itself was not very big and still smelled faintly of chain oil and gasoline. The old pine floor hadn’t been refinished, but the walls had been outfitted with shelves and some fancy display pegboard. Littering the shelves, pegs, and even the floor, were all manner of strange looking musical instruments.

Nancy walked up to the counter and tapped a couple of times on the bell, trying to announce our presence, but the music all but covered up her efforts.

“
Hey!” Nancy finally yelled. “Anyone here?”

The music suddenly went down several decibel levels, and a very thin man wearing an oversized sweater walked out of the back room and up to the counter. “Sorry about that,” he said. “I was in the back and turned up the music so I could hear it. Can I help you folks with something?”

“
Just came in to say hello,” I said, reaching across the counter to shake his hand. His grip was weak and his handshake suggested a bag full of turkey bones.

“
Glad to meet you,” he said. “You must be Chief Konig. You were pointed out to me last week.”

“
Hayden,” I said. “And this is Nancy.”

Looking at us from behind the counter, the proprietor of the Music Shoppe conjured up the immediate image of Ichabod Crane: a smallish head, flat on top with large ears and a long snipe nose. He smiled, showing several discolored teeth, and gave Nancy a nod of acknowledgement. Of course, it could be argued that I had Ichabod Crane on my mind. I’d decided yesterday night to purchase
The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon
from Hyacinth Turnipseed. I even got the okay from Meg. So I’d been thinking about Ichabod Crane all morning, and now, here he was, in the flesh.

“
That reminds me,” I whispered to Nancy. “I’ve got to go get my Washington Irving book.”

“
You bought it?”

“
Sure,” I said.

“
My name’s Ian Burch,” said the unfortunate-looking man in a freakishly high nasal voice. “May I help you?”

“
Glad to meet you, Mr. Burch,” said Nancy.

“
It’s Doctor,” he corrected. “Dr. Burch. I have a PhD in musicology.”

“
You don’t say,” said Nancy, fighting back an evil grin. “Musicology. How interesting.” Nancy could size up people in about two minutes and she was rarely mistaken. I already knew what she thought of Dr. Burch.

“
Specifically, my work is in late Medieval instrumental music of France and Burgundy,” he sniffed. “I’ve given several papers on the subject.”

“
Are you an academician?” I asked. “Which faculty?”

“
Well,” he hesitated, “I
am
a member of several societies and under consideration for a university position.” He paused, then continued. “But I haven’t heard yet. Until they decide to hire me, I’ve decided to open a shop. I’m going to sell quality reproductions of Medieval and Renaissance instruments, some instruction books which I have written and perhaps a few select recordings.”

“
I have a great recording of the Tuntenhausen Bladder-Pipe Ensemble,” I said, trying to be nice.

Dr. Burch snorted derisively. “I myself do not care for the bladder instruments. My performing instrument in college was the sopranino rauschpfeife.”

“
Wow,” said Nancy. “I’ll bet
that
got you a lot of dates.”