The Organist Wore Pumps (The Liturgical Mysteries) (25 page)

“
What am I listening to?” asked Meg. Her bites were more delicate, but she was catching up.

“
The lesson,” I answered, swallowing quickly to avoid the don’t-talk-with-your-mouth-full glare. “I’ll tell you when.”

Mushrat went on with his lesson. “Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse,” he intoned, “that there may be food in my house. It is imperative, therefore, that you attend the offering and barter the purchase if your property is to be preserved.”

“
There!” I said. “Right there!” I pushed the pause button on the CD player.

Meg shrugged. “I don’t get it.”

“
I didn’t either, but Marjorie caught it right away. We thought she was just irked at Mushrat for ignoring the lectionary but she heard what we all missed.”

Meg looked hopelessly confused. “What’d we miss?”

“
You know, most of us just tune out the scripture lessons. I must have heard that scripture in church a hundred times growing up. Every time a stewardship campaign would kick off, we’d get a sermon on tithing.”

“
Okay,” said Meg. “But I still don’t understand.”

I went over to the bookshelf, found a Bible and handed it to her.

“
Malachi 3:10 and 11.”

Meg looked it up, read it to herself and looked up at me blankly.

“
Follow along,” I said, backing the track up about thirty seconds.

“
Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse that there may be food in my house. It is imperative therefore that you attend the offering and barter the purchase if your property is to be preserved.”

I paused the CD again.

Meg’s eyes grew wide. “
That’s
not verse ten!”

“
No, it’s not.”

“
Play the rest!”

I pushed the play button again. Donald Mushrat’s voice came out over the speakers.

“‘
Test me in this, says the LORD Almighty, and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that you will not have room enough for it. The mark is set. Twenty thousand is the price. I will prevent pests from devouring your crops, and the vines in your fields will not cast their fruit,’ says the LORD Almighty.”

Meg was now busy taking notes on one of Nancy’s legal pads. “Play it one more time,” she said. “I want to make sure I have it word for word.”

I played it again. Meg compared Mushrat’s words to the text in Malachi, furiously scribbling when the two didn’t correspond.

“
One more time, please,” Meg said.

I obliged.

“
Got it?” I asked.

“
Got it! Mushrat said, ‘It is imperative therefore that you attend the offering and barter the purchase if your property is to be preserved.’ Then he said, ‘The mark is set. Twenty thousand is the price.’ None of that is in Malachi. But if he was reading from the Bible, why would he put that into the lesson?”

“
He wasn’t reading from the Bible, remember? He was reading from his notes. He kept shaking them at the congregation.”

“
Oh, ho,” said Meg. “A clue!”

“
A clue indeed. Mushrat wasn’t the sort to add his own spin to the scriptures. He copied those sentences into the Malachi reading by mistake.”

Chapter 26

“
When’s the funeral?” asked Georgia.

I was in Eden Books doing some Christmas shopping: a new graphic novel called
Crogan’s March
for Moosey, a Dan Brown thriller for Dave, and about a hundred other assorted titles that I’d ordered throughout the year, thinking that I’d save a bunch of time at Christmas. Now I was looking at spending a whole day wrapping a hundred-plus books with one good hand.

“
No funeral for us,” I said. “It’s Christmas. Donald Mushrat’s body will be shipped back to Winston-Salem from whence he came, where he will be buried with full ecclesiastical honors.”

“
Ecclesiastical honors, eh?” said Georgia. “And what might those be?”

“
Hmm. Twenty-one acolyte salute and a donkey-drawn hearse. Hey, would you mind wrapping those books for me?”

“
I already did,” said Georgia. “I started as soon as I heard you’d broken your arm. They’re all wrapped and numbered. Here’s the list with the corresponding titles so you don’t give the wrong books to the wrong folks. Why don’t you decide who gets what, and I’ll put the tags on for you.”

“
Wow! Thanks!”

“
See anything else you’d like? You still have a couple of days left.”

“
Lemme look.”

“
Take your time. Hey, I heard about the Epiphany service. Is the king still coming?”

“
That sounds like the title of a bad Christmas cantata. But, yes, the king is coming.”

“
Which king is it?”

“
We don’t really know. You see, here’s the deal...”

“
I hope it’s Balthasar. I love Balthasar. He’s the cool king—hip, tough, black. He’s like the Denzel Washington of dead kings.”

I had to agree.

•••

Pizza was the specialty of the house at the Bear and Brew. They had a number of signature dishes, but Nancy and I preferred the “Black Bear Attack” pizza with the stuffed garlic crust. Dave didn’t care what we ordered. He was just happy to be included.

We divided the pitcher of Barn Burner Red, a local brew, and I filled Nancy and Dave in on what Meg and I had discovered the night before.

“
So you think Mushrat was killed because he read some stuff that wasn’t in the Bible?” asked Dave.

“
Not exactly,” I said. “I think that Mushrat got into something he wasn’t supposed to. He copied it into his sermon by mistake, and whoever it belonged to found out about it.”

I pulled a piece of paper from my inside jacket pocket and read it aloud.

“‘
It is imperative, therefore, that you attend the offering and barter the purchase if your property is to be preserved.’ That’s the first sentence that Mushrat read that isn’t included in the scripture. Later on he said, ‘The mark is set. Twenty thousand is the price.’”

“
Okay,” said Nancy. “Let’s start at the beginning.” She took a new legal pad out of her briefcase, then took a pen out of the breast pocket of her uniform and wrote across the top of the page.

“
Let’s go back to the auction,” I said.

“
The auction?” Dave said.

“
We have two dead bodies,” I said. “Salvator LaGrassa and Donald Mushrat. What do they have in common?”

“
Nothing,” said Nancy.

“
Sure they do. They were both shot by the same gun and therefore by the same person.”

“
Your
gun,” whispered Dave.

“
My gun,” I agreed. “The gun that was locked under the back seat in the pickup.”

“
It was locked up for the second shooting,” observed Nancy. “Not the first.”

“
Right. And the first time we saw Sal LaGrassa, he was bidding on wine at the auction at Old Man Frost’s.”

Nancy reached across the table, took hold of my scribbled notes and read them again.

“
It is imperative, therefore, that you attend the offering and barter the purchase if your property is to be preserved,” she read. She looked up at me. “Someone’s talking about the auction.”

“
I believe so,” I said. “That’s why LaGrassa was at the auction in the first place. There was no reason for him to be there otherwise. And, if he had stumbled across the auction, as we originally surmised, there certainly was no reason for him to show up with thousands of dollars in cash.”

“
So something happened at the auction that caused LaGrassa to get killed?” asked Dave.

“
Yep. I bought the wine. The wine that he wanted.”

“
You think there’s something in the wine?” asked Nancy. “He was a killer, you know. Maybe the wine is poisoned?”

“
I don’t think so,” I said. “Meg and I drank four of the bottles. Random bottles. If it had
all
been poisoned, we’d be dead. If a few bottles contain poison, what’s the point in that? LaGrassa was a professional killer. He’s not going to use poisoned wine. He’ll shoot you in the head. No, I’m thinking that LaGrassa’s interest was strictly monetary.”

“
Ten thousand dollars isn’t that much money,” said Dave. “Not in the big scheme of things.”

“
That’s what I bought the wine for. That’s not what it’s worth. Bud told me that I could sell it for maybe a quarter million.”

“
What?!”
exclaimed Nancy, then lowered her voice.
“A quarter million dollars?”

“
Yeah,” I said. “In a couple of years when it reaches maturity. Bud and I will sell it then. But here’s the thing. The sentence says ‘It is imperative that you barter the purchase if
your
property is to be preserved.’
Your
property. That implies that the wine was LaGrassa’s property in the first place. Or at least that he thought it was.”

“
Huh,” said Nancy. She refilled her beer glass from the pitcher on the table. “Old Man Frost’s place was foreclosed on, wasn’t it?”

Yeah,” I said. “The bank came in and slapped padlocks on everything in sight. What if LaGrassa was storing the wine at the Frost farm and it got locked up before he could get it?”

“
But why wouldn’t he have it stored at his own house?” asked Dave.

“
Hang on,” said Nancy, pulling out her iPhone. “I read something about this. He lived in Montana, right?”

“
Yeah,” I said.

The Black Bear Attack pizza arrived at our table, delivered by our waiter, a skinny, college-aged kid who identified himself as Jared.

“
Y’all want another pitcher?” he asked, as he set plates down in front of each of us.

“
Yes, please,” said Nancy, still tapping information into her iPhone.

Dave and I took a moment to savor the first couple of bites, then Nancy held up her phone and announced her internet discovery.

“
In Montana, residents have to apply for a ‘connoisseur’s license’ before he or she can have wine shipped over the state line. You have to be registered and have a valid and up-to-date license. And apparently the state of Montana and the postal service take this very seriously. I’m pretty sure Sal LaGrassa wasn’t about to register with the government for a connoisseur’s license.”

“
And he wouldn’t have wanted to chance shipping a quarter million dollars’ worth of wine,” said Dave. “What if it had been discovered? Even by mistake? It would have been confiscated.”