Digging Too Deep (15 page)

MacAulay didn’t reply for a few moments. Finally, he said, “No change.”

The brevity of the statement discouraged further discussion, and Delano took the hint. Thatch was grateful for Dan’s understanding. He knew he shouldn’t be ashamed of the situation with Christine, but he’d been in denial for so long it had taken an effort to accept it. The men moved on to discussing the upcoming baseball season and golf until they left the restaurant.

“We’ve struck pay dirt, Tosca. Call me back. “

Thatch’s triumphant message left on her iPhone gave Tosca pause. Had this man with the broken nose solved the crime?
A-barth am Jowl!
Damn! This was her case, not his. She’d found the fingers in the rock. She’d talked to the neighbors. She’d tackled the professor in his den. She’d discovered a possible clue. And to top it all off, she’d driven all over those frightening eight-lane freeways to research Schoenberg and his music. Okay, it was true that Thatch was getting the rock tested, but that was his sole contribution so far.

“How dare he solve this without me,” she said to J.J. as her daughter prepared to bake salmon fillets for them both. “
Gast! Kawgh ki!
I’m as mad as a boiled owl.”

“Mother, stop swearing. He probably hasn’t solved it. Calm down. There you go again, jumping to conclusions. Why don’t you hear what he has to say before you get so upset? And watch that knife.”

“I am not upset,” said Tosca, scattering red peppers over the counter and onto the floor as the pace of her chopping increased. “I am merely saying that if Thatch is going to interfere, then…”

“What? You’ll force-feed him that godawful mead?” J.J. and Tosca laughed as the tension lifted. “You and Thatch make a good team, and he seems to have amazingly great contacts in law enforcement. You couldn’t ask for a better buddy.”

“Buddy? Really, J.J., your language is truly going downhill. Too much hanging around those race car drivers. Still, I must admit they are a lot of fun, especially the NASCAR types. I’m amazed it’s such a big business here. You’d never see that in England, of course.”

“No, you certainly wouldn’t. Instead, the UK glories in its violent soccer hooligans.”

“Yes, I have to admit you’re right. As a matter of fact, I’m tossing most of my preconceived ideas about America out the window. Anyway, let’s have dinner, then I’ll return Thatch’s call.”

An hour later Tosca took her phone out of her purse, mounted the spiral staircase to the roof deck and dialed. He answered his phone before it finished ringing its first few notes.

“Hi, Tosca. I assume you got my message. I have some very interesting news for you. How about a drink down your way if it’s not too late?”

“Yes, Thatch, that would be very nice.” Tosca kept her voice deliberately soft and quiet. No sense letting him know she was
serrys,
though most of her annoyance had already dissipated.
“
I’ll meet you at the ferry. There’s a bar on the peninsula that intrigues me. How about eight o’clock?”

“Great,” said Thatch.

If he noticed the coolness in her tone, he didn’t remark on it
.
Probably too excited about his great find, whatever it was, or maybe, Tosca reflected, his hearing was off
.
She hadn’t observed any cauliflower ear or similar deformity, but he looked like he’d hold his own in the boxing ring. He seemed the type to have been in plenty of scrapes in his lifetime and always come out the victor. Ha! Not this time. I’m going to take charge here, she decided, and let him know just whose criminal case this is.

Thatch arrived at the ferry all smiles. “Where’s this mysterious bar you’ve picked out? I can’t think of a single one over there that would be suitable for you. Are you sure you don’t want to go to the Ritz in Newport Center?”

Tosca said nothing, smiled politely and allowed him to pay the fare. After disembarking, she led the way just one block from the dock and stood outside The Dirty Dozen Saloon, which occupied the corner lot. Loud rock music poured through its doors. The windows were fogged with smoke, and two of the panes were broken.

Thatch laughed. “This is it? One of my favorites, but are you sure you want to go inside?”

“Of course. I like these kinds of bars. Back home I found some of my best gossip at a grungy pub like this near Buckingham Palace. It was frequented by many of the queen’s kitchen staff. Don’t forget I’m supposed to be writing my impressions of America for my new column, and this is one of the perfect places to observe Americans at play. Mind if we sit at the bar?”

They took seats on torn, vinyl-covered stools at the long, scarred wooden bar and ordered beers, a half pint of bitter for Tosca and a Lone Star for Thatch.

He turned to her and said, “Okay, here’s the skinny. Dan Delano confirms your theory. The bones are human, probably a young man or woman. Could be one of Orange County’s missing students. One or two disappear every year.”

“Do you think the bones could be tied in to the other case, the killing of the ferry boat kid?” said Tosca.

“Who knows? But please, stay out of it. The Newport police are going to reopen their missing persons cold case files, so now we can relax. No more sleuthing, Tosca.”

Seated at one of the Newport Beach Library’s microfiche machines with a stack of boxes holding rolls of film at her elbow, Tosca studied the
Orange County Register
files dated five and six years earlier. As she scrolled, Thatch’s words still rankled. No more sleuthing, indeed. Cheeky devil.

Halting the microfilm frequently to read various headlines, and surprised to see so much international reporting while appreciating the newspaper’s worldwide coverage, Tosca grudgingly admitted to herself that American journalists weren’t so bad after all.

They could certainly write, and while the spelling annoyed her, she admired the factual approach they brought to their stories. Though I don’t think much of the tabloids here, she muttered. Not a single full frontal. That
National Enquirer
is a pallid echo of the British scandal sheets. Ours are far more salacious and insulting. We can make a recipe for pea soup sound porno-sexy.

Following the train of thought, Tosca’s mind inevitably strayed to the reason for her banishment to “the colonies.” The image of what she had discovered at the palace refused to leave her mind until she forced her eyes back to the monitor in front of her. As she read, she began whistling, her signal to herself to stop dwelling on the past.

An outraged hiss from the person at the next machine brought Tosca’s lips together in a straight line. She whispered “Sorry,” and continued to scroll through the film. She stopped the wheel at one point to peer closer to the screen to read the article, a short piece on a missing Asian student. She pressed the print button and then kept going, searching for the names of other missing students over the past several years.

By the end of three hours she had printed out copies of reports of six missing students in the area who had disappeared during the time frame in which she was interested. Stiff from sitting so long, Tosca stretched, gathered up the pile of printouts, paid for them at the information desk and walked down the short hill to a café to order coffee.

While she waited she decided to call Thatch, unable to resist sharing her news. At his mumbled “Hello?” she said, “Oh, did I catch you at a bad time?”

“No. I’m pleased to hear from you. What’s going on?”

“Guess what I’ve found? A treasure trove of missing people. Oh, don’t be so cranky. I do feel sorry for them. It’s really and truly sad, but there’s still this awful Professor Whittaker walking around. I am positive he killed one of them and cut off his or her hands.”

“Tosca, you are unbelievably impulsive. How can you shoot from the hip like that? There are all kinds of scenarios to explain the rock. Don’t move. I’m coming over.”

She grinned. Guess that’s one way to get attention from a special chap, she reflected, and this one is very, very special. Could be a keeper.

“I’m at the coffee shop down the hill from the library,” she said.

“Be there in five.”

What delicious phrases Americans come up with, she thought. Brief. Decisive. We do seem to stretch things out back home with excessive politeness and unnecessary words. “Be there in five.” How explicit. If it were me, I would have replied, “The coffee shop? How very nice of you to suggest getting together. It’s a perfect place to meet. I do believe I can be there in, let’s say, five minutes or as close as possible to that time. Does that suit you? Are you quite sure? Not too late?”

When she saw Thatch striding through the door, she felt a rush, a thrill, and waved a tiny lace-edged handkerchief. She waited for his reaction, but he ignored the fanciful gesture and sat down opposite her. She figured that, despite his displeasure at her interference with criminal matters, he was intrigued with the crime. Maybe that geology stuff is getting boring for him, she thought. Perhaps he even regrets retiring. She showed him the newspaper articles of the missing persons she’d printed out at the library.

“Three were Asians studying science at UCI,” she said. “Two were from China and one from Korea. The fourth missing person was Persian, studying jazz at Saddleback College, but he’s really Iranian since it’s all one country.”

“Never let the Persians hear you say that,” interjected Thatch, “but go on.”

“The sixth was from Eugene, Oregon.” Tosca sat back in the booth, grinning.

Thatch acknowledged her words with a nod and said, “I suppose this sixth student, Paul Holloway, was studying piano and composition with Professor Haiden Whittaker, right?”

“
Mal!
You’ve been talking to your son.”

Thatch laughed. “I guess that’s Cornish for damn. Well, yes, Andy’s keen on delving into cold cases, which this one was until you shook things up. But I told you, it’s a police matter now.”

“Tell me more. Fill me in. Can I see the Holloway file?”

“Of course not, but I can tell you this. A thorough investigation at the time turned up zip on Holloway. Several students, friends and his landlord were questioned, but the police hit a dead end, if you’ll forgive the pun. The professor was just back from attending a music event at the Grosses Festspielhaus in Salzburg, Austria, where, incidentally, my favorite beer is brewed. The cops talked to him, and he said he had no idea what might have happened to his student. So he’s not a suspect. He’s highly regarded, you know.”

“I hear you can buy bottles of brandy in Salzburg with Mozart’s face on the label,” said Tosca. “Do you think if they did that with Beethoven’s face on a whiskey bottle, it could be called Beethoven’s Fifth?”

Thatch laughed. “That joke’s so old it has gray hair.” He quickly became serious, going on to describe how the police had tried to contact the youth’s only relative, the grandfather who had raised him.

“Unfortunately, Paul’s grandfather died a year earlier. Seems they were poor farm people, but the kid was incredibly talented. Neighbors said he was a child prodigy. Tall and broad shouldered, he had huge hands that could stretch over nine keys on the piano, according to his fellow students. Not the kind of guy I myself would expect to be a musician. Did you know this interesting trivia, that Russian peasants were excellent violinists because of their strong, muscular hands? I had a girlfriend in college who told me that. She was a music student.”

“So Paul, the farmer’s son, put his strong hands to good use on the piano,” Tosca said.

“We also know,” Thatch continued, “that Holloway was the professor’s favorite because of his talent, and Whittaker gave him private lessons at his home. They both shared a passion for Arnold Schoenberg.”

“I wonder why Holloway didn’t study at The Juilliard School in New York? Surely he would have won a scholarship there,” said Tosca.

“Refused to leave the West Coast, we’re told. His granddad was in bad health, and the kid didn’t want to be clear across the country if something happened.”

“Schoenberg,” mused Tosca. “There’s that bar of Schoenberg music that Whittaker had on his wall. As soon as I left I saw him taking it down, I think I told you that. I’m positive it has significance, seeing that both the teacher and the student were admirers of the composer. Are you a musician, too?” She lifted his right hand and studied the calluses. “Are these from picking a guitar?”

“A ukulele.”

“So you do have a musical bent.”

“No, not really,” he said. “I can only play a three-note scale. My buddy in Dana Point, Dick Ribble, has been trying to teach me for years, and he’s great on the uke, but I guess I just don’t have the talent. He kept telling me it only took three minutes to learn, but we were laughing at my efforts so much, I didn’t get far.”

“Well, I definitely think Schoenberg plays a role here. I am positive there’s a connection, some kind of code in that piece of music.”

“Uh oh, I’m beginning to recognize that smug smile of yours. What?”

Tosca explained how she’d written the notes and numbers down, as far as she could remember them. “The numbers were easy to recall, but to make sure I copied down the musical notes correctly, I still need to find the original score.”

They parted, Thatch dropping Tosca off on Isabel Island after telling her he had some business to attend to. The mysterious Christine, she wondered? Who was this woman?

Back home, Tosca rummaged through her by-now burgeoning files of research. She’d been living in America only a few weeks, she realized, and was already investigating a murder, or perhaps two. She was convinced there was a body belonging to the hand somewhere, so it was fair game to pursue the murderer—who, she just knew, was the professor. As for the ferry boat killing, she’d get to that all in good time. She felt a personal interest in both murders because she’d found two of the most important clues, the rock and the silver aegina
.
Solving either crime could be her ticket home.

The next day, an hour after J.J. left on a four-day trip to Ohio for her next car race, the land phone in the kitchen rang. Still puzzling over the sheet music, Tosca picked up the receiver and spoke into it.