Liturgical Mysteries 01 The Alto Wore Tweed (5 page)

I grabbed a beer and I sat back down at the typewriter, hoping that a little imaginative prose would help clear my thoughts.

• • •

“
I heard about the hymn selection last Sunday.”

Her voice was low as she stood in front of me, filling out a brown tweed suit the way Reggie White filled out the Packers
’
front line. Usually I didn
’
t care for tweed on women. I was more of a chiffon and lace kind of guy. And this was that rough kind of tweed that you could strike a match on. So I did. She didn
’
t flinch.

“
Just for the record,” she growled, “I don
’
t think you did it. You just don
’
t look like the kind of guy who would schedule
‘
Just As I Am
’
as a processional.”

You know, I didn
’
t like her attitude. She was taking far more for granted than I thought she should. I lit my cigar.

“
Maybe I did pick it. Maybe I really think that
‘
Just As I Am
’
has a regal majesty combined with just a hint of pietism that makes it the perfect processional hymn for the Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost.”
i>

Laughter escaped her lips as she picked up an open hymnal lying on the desk. I had left it open to “Hyfrydol” with the date penciled in beside the title. Rats.

“
OK,” I said, grabbing the book from her hand and throwing it back into the corner with all the other denominational hymnals. “Just what is it you want?”

Pulling up a chair, she sat down gracefully, crossing her tweed-covered legs with an elegance belying the sound of tweed-on-tweed, a sound not unlike forty Amish farmers shucking corn. “I heard you were good with altos and I need some advice. My name is Denver. Denver Tweed.”

They were always coming to me for advice. I had gotten a reputation over the years. A reputation as a tough but understanding guy. It was a reputation I didn
’
t deserve. I was in it for the money.

“
It
’
ll cost you.”

I could tell she wasn
’
t put off a bit as she dropped two C-notes on the desk in front of me and pulled a meerschaum pipe from her pocket. Somehow I wasn
’
t surprised. Tweed and meerschaum. What next?

“
Someone stole my elbow patches.”

Like I said before, I wasn
’
t surprised.

• • •

On Saturday morning, Meg and I trucked our way back to St. Barnabas to meet with my two cohorts and clean up the choir loft. Nancy, Dave and I scraped some more samples indicative of Willie’s demise, bagged them, and looked around again for any obvious clues. Finding none, Dave and Nancy left Megan and me to the arduous task of making the church presentable.

Meg had brought enough cleaning supplies to purify the entire church. The only time I had seen her more determined, janitorially speaking, is after I shot that rat under the bed. She scrubbed that bedroom from top to bottom.

In my defense, I actually tried to hit the rat before it made cover, but it kept running up the log walls and I figured, and rightfully so, that a few more bullet holes would only enhance the look of the old timbers. Still, all good things must come to an end and when Mr. Rattus Norvegicus stopped to catch his breath, Mr. Remington was happy to make his acquaintance. Meg was appalled at the entire episode, even after I pointed out that rats were a fact of life in the woods and being shot was a much quicker and more humane death than being poisoned.

“I don’t see how getting shot is better.”

“Poison takes longer. And then the rats die in the walls or behind the refrigerator.”

“What about a trap?”

“I’ve got some set out back in the shed, but sometimes it takes days ttch them. Perhaps I should go with a ‘live and let live’ policy. Of course you never know where they’ll show up. The shower...the dresser drawer...”

“No,” she said with an involuntary shiver. “Shoot them.”

We spent the better part of three hours in the choir loft. I opened the console of the organ, lifted out each key, cleaned it and made sure the mechanics were unaffected. It was mostly superficial cleanup though. Nothing that I could see had gotten into the works.

Meg cleaned the floor and the chairs—everything that had an actual surface that she could wipe down. When we were finished, we grabbed a couple sandwiches from The Slab and spent a long, lazy Saturday afternoon at the cabin doing not much of anything that I can discuss without being thought of as a cad.

Around six o’clock Meg took off to her own hacienda to recharge and to check on her mother. I took out a pad and pen and began to take some notes.

When?

Willie Boyd was killed on Friday. Late afternoon. JJ had seen him around five. She was the last to see him, other than maybe the killer. Did that make JJ a suspect? Probably. She was the only one in the church that I know about, except for the person who called 911. I’d get a tape of that call from Boone on Monday.

Who?

Someone who knew him? Probably.

Why?

Willie didn’t have any enemies that I was aware of yet. He kept to himself and did his job. In November and December he also worked at the Grandfather Mountain Tree Farm selling Christmas trees. Herself did make a complaint about Willie to the vestry, claiming sexual harassment about three weeks ago. But how much of that was true? I would check on this next week.

How?

I suspected that he was probably poisoned. We’d have the lab report back on Tuesday.

What?

What?! Who came up with the five-question rule anyway? It’s a stupid question.

I felt brilliant.

• • •

The Sunday service went surprisingly smoothly after our tragedy and I noticed that Nancy was back in the congregation. Sometimes she shows up when she’s feeling low. When her boyfriend left town, she was at St. Barnabas for five Sundays in a row, joined a Sunday School, got baptized, and started a prayer group. She hadn’t been too regular since then, but she made one or two appearances a month.

Maybe the murder had taken the edge off Mother Ryan for a few days. Hope springs eternal. The choir sang
The Eyes of All
by Charles Wood at the offertory and sang it very well. Communion, though, was a bit harried. The wine, which was always brought from the sacristy, was late. In fact, the
Agnus Dei
had already begun when one of the lay eucharistic ministers finally returned with the cup. I thought it wasbit odd. I expected such shenanigans from Mother Ryan, but I knew the LEMs were trained better than that.

Agnus Dei, qui tolis peccata mundi,

miserere nobis.

Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world,

Have mercy upon us.

We finished communion and followed the sacrament with the final hymn. Complete with a stunning harmonization on the last stanza written by yours truly—including a soprano descant.

The tradition of St. Barnabas was to meet for coffee and donuts in the parish hall right after services. It was a time for the congregation to “meet, greet and eat” as it was advertised in the bulletin. I said hello to Nancy and left her talking to Meg while I pigeonholed Georgia Wester, one of the servers.

“What was the deal this morning?” I asked her, disgust evident in my voice. Herself usually managed to get something wrong and it was, as I put it, “a constant grain of sand in my otherwise pearl-less oyster.” Meg pointed out that I should be glad of a pearl and the irritation was just part of the process. I replied that it was never the oyster who enjoyed the pearl.

“It wasn’t her fault this time,” Georgia explained. “It was mine. I was late this morning. I thought Bev had prepared communion. She thought I had. It wouldn’t have been a problem except that when I went back to get it during the offertory, the bottle was gone. I went into the kitchen, looked in the closet for another bottle and the
closet
was empty. I had to drive down the street and get a couple of bottles from The Slab.”

“The Slab? For communion wine?”

Georgia smiled. “You just have to know who to ask.”

“Let’s look in the wine closet,” I suggested.

Georgia shrugged. I motioned Nancy over and Georgia led us through the kitchen to the back closet. It was an old door, made of oak panels and probably original to the building. She pulled a set of keys out of her pocket and inserted an old skeleton key into the lock.

“It always sticks,” she grumbled, giving it a shake or two and trying to get notches of the key to slip into the tumblers. After a moment’s work, the key turned stiffly in the lock and the door swung open. She was right. It was empty.

She pointed to the vacant shelves. “There should be three cases at least. Twenty-four or twenty-five bottles.”

“Do we always use two bottles per service?” I asked.

“We usually have a magnum, so we just need one. But The Slab didn’t have any magnums.”

“Jeez,” I said, mumbling to myself. “Jeez, the wine—.”

Meg was chatting with some other choir members and finishing up her coffee. I got her attention.

“I think it was the communion wine. Let’s go back to t loft.” All four of us, Meg, Nancy, Georgia and I, headed out the kitchen door, back into the church and made our way up into the loft.

I instructed the troops. “We’re looking for a wine bottle. A big one. Megan, you and Georgia look up around the chairs over by the window. Nancy, let’s you and I look down here by the rail. If you find it, don’t touch it.”

“Hayden, we already cleaned this place from top to bottom.” Meg offered.

“We didn’t know what we were looking for.”

I figured that if the bottle was up here, Willie probably would have hidden it for later consumption. I had a hard time believing that even Willie would have finished an entire magnum bottle in the two hours he was out of sight. He probably had stashed it somewhere.

• • •

Nancy was the first to sing out. “Hey boss. There’s a loaded 9mm Glock here under the organ bench.”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s mine.”

I looked up at Meg in time to see her roll her eyes and drop her head into her hands. But she was always overreacting.

Georgia was next. “Hey, there’s an empty flask in the hymnal rack over here.”

“Nah. That’s Marjorie’s. Keep looking.” Marjorie was known to take a snort or two during services.

I myself was looking in the organ pipe case on the opposite side of the loft. It had a swing-out door for tuning the instrument and anything hidden inside would be fairly accessible yet easily hidden. I thought for sure that’s where I’d find the bottle. I saved this little hiding place for myself, of course, so I could find the bottle in front of everyone and impress Meg with my deductive prowess.

It didn’t work. Nancy called out “Got it!” and my plan for self-glorification was toast.

She had found the offending bottle in the bell tower. Actually there was a small room, which was usually kept locked, directly off the loft. It was this room that held the ladder that led directly up another flight and a half to the church bell. The rest of the stuff in the room was junk. There was an old sound system consisting of some old amps and an 8-track, old 1940 hymnals and 1928 prayer books, some shelves, old paint cans. The usual stuff. I had assumed the door was still locked. It wasn’t, and of course Willie had the key. The bottle was placed just as nicely as you please on one of the shelves. There was a corkscrew, obviously purloined from the kitchen, lying next to the bottle and his half-smoked cigar placed neatly on the shelf, the inch long ash hanging over the edge of the discolored wooden board. Next to the cigar was a green matchbook that was embossed with “Pine Valley Christmas Tree Farm” in bright red letters. I opened it and noticed that there were three matches gone. We were lucky that Willie smoked cheap cigars. An expensive brand would have kept burning and probably ignited the entire church. As it was, Willie’s twenty-five cent cigars had to be puffed on pretty heavily to remain lit. When he set it down to pour his drink and didn’t pick it back up, the cigar—luckily—had burned out. The cork to the wine bottle was halfway out or, if my suspicions were correct, halfway back.

“Oh man,” I said, suddenly remembering everything I had forgotten to bring with me. “Nancy, did you bring any gloves? Mine are in the truck.”