Killing in C Sharp Read online

  “Of course.”

  “Did you ever meet Bernard and wonder what motivated him?”

  “Batard. That was no mystery. Greed and self-interest were the only things that creature cared for.”

  “You did know him, then. In the sense of met, encountered, had dealings with?”

  Sylvie hesitated. “Well, yes, once or twice. In Paris.”

  Gethsemane pressed her hand to her chest and fluttered her eyelashes. “Paris. I adore Paris. But who doesn’t adore Paris? Did you meet Bernard at the opera?”

  “That philistine knows nothing about l’opera. Gilbert and Sullivan are too deep for him, he said. I don’t know why he’s here to review this one. He should stick to write-ups of food trucks.”

  Food trucks? “You lost me. Bernard wrote music reviews.”

  Sylvie snorted. “If that’s what you want to call them. He wouldn’t have gotten his first assignment if not for me. I introduced him to the editor of La Musique. And what did it get me? Phfft.”

  “You introduced Bernard to the editor of La Musique?” Gethsemane knew the magazine. Not large, but once-upon-a-time a topnotch publication in the classical music world. And very particular about who they hired. Winning a Pulitzer Prize was rumored to be easier than getting a meeting with an editor if a writer didn’t have connections. Subscriptions had dropped off ever since a scandal over reviewers receiving improper compensation for reviews, however, and financial trouble plagued the magazine. “You must have met him more than once if you helped his career. Or are you just that nice of a person?”

  “Bah. No one is that nice,” Sylvie said. “Perhaps I did meet Bernard more often. We may have had, how you say—”

  “A fling? A hookup?”

  “L’affaire. Y’all Americans make everything sound tawdry.”

  “How’d you two meet?”

  “At a restaurant. Josephine’s. Bernard was writing a review for the opening. It was not a very good restaurant. Much hype, little substance. Bernard seemed unimpressed. I was equally unimpressed. We bonded over our mutual dislike. Later, after we got to know each other better, he complained of wanting to get out of the restaurant review world. That is why I introduced him to my friend, the music magazine editor.”

  “What happened?”

  “Bernard abandoned me as soon as my friend hired him as a, how you say, freelancer? Then, of course, he abandoned her once he’d used her connections to land a job as a staff writer at a rival music magazine, Classical Music Today. Un chien. Good riddance.”

  The garda leaned closer.

  “Just to reassure the young man,” Gethsemane jerked her head toward the officer, “where were you when, you know…” She glanced at the orchestra pit.

  “How can I say?” Sylvie shrugged. “I do not know exactly when Bernard got what he deserved. I was on stage singing, then I was,” she shrugged again, “around.” She stood. “Now, I will go. I have cooperated, and these,” she waved a dismissive hand at the garda, “will not keep Mademoiselle Babin when she does not wish to be kept. I must go and rest my voice.”

  “One question. What do you think of us here in Dunmullach as far as our appreciation of opera?”

  Sylvie looked blank.

  “Are we rustics? Hopeless rubes? Sophisticates? Ripe with potential?”

  “Y’all have le potentiel.”

  There it was again. Y’all. Sylvie had Frenchified her speech but the tell-tale y’all hung on. You could take the girl out of the southern United States, but you couldn’t take the south out of the girl. Not completely.

  “Dunmullach is far from New York or Paris, but your youth shows promise.” Sylvie gestured to the boys. “I do hope they feel better. The promise of youth is hope for the future. Au revoir.” She swept from the stage.

  “Good luck with that one,” Gethsemane said to the garda as he slipped his notebook away.

  “So—” Eamon materialized beside her. “It seems Mademoiselle is more of a Miz. What other secrets is she hiding?”

  “A motive for her killing Bernard isn’t so secret. He seduced her and used her, then threw her over for his next conquest.” The same way he’d treated Venus.

  “She may have wanted him dead, may even be glad he’s dead. But did she have time to run from the stage to the pit, stab him, then come back upstairs?”

  “As she, herself, pointed out, we don’t know exactly when Bernard was stabbed. I don’t suppose you caught that?”

  “Sorry,” Eamon said. “I was paying attention to our girl.” He pointed at Maja. She hovered in the rear of the auditorium, distinct—and angry—facial features visible.

  “She’s getting stronger, isn’t she?”

  “And the fellas are getting sicker. She’s feeding off them.”

  “Got any idea how to stop her?”

  “We could ask Poe. She seems to be the resident Maja expert.”

  “Poe wouldn’t tell us if she knew. I’m pretty sure she’s on Maja’s side. She doesn’t seem to be too good with humans.” Did she hate humans enough to shove a trowel into one’s back?

  “I’ll do some digging, see what I can come up with.”

  “Digging?”

  “You’re not the only one who can conduct an investigation.” He vanished. His head reappeared. “Sissy.” He vanished again.

  She didn’t get the chance to remind him what she thought of him for calling her Sissy. A garda ran up to the homicide inspector who’d questioned her earlier. She held a camera. Gethsemane recognized it as one of the tech crew’s.

  “Sir, I think you’ll want to see this.” She turned the camera’s view screen so her superior could see it.

  He watched silently for a moment, then turned the camera off. “Where is he?” He scanned the room then nodded toward Aed. The two guards closest to Aed moved to stand on either side of him.

  “Aed Devlin?” the inspector asked as he approached the composer.

  “You know I am.”

  “Aed Devlin, you’re under arrest for the murder of Bernard Stoltz. You do not have to say anything.” He advised Aed of his remaining rights.

  Venus grabbed Aed’s arm and tried to pull him away from the officer putting cuffs on him. “Murder? No, he wouldn’t. You can’t.” She looked about the auditorium. “Somebody stop them.”

  “You have some evidence, Inspector?” Gethsemane asked.

  He frowned at her. “Niall may let you poke your nose in his business—”

  “It’s just a question. What’s on the camera?”

  “A crystal-clear shot of your man Devlin pulling a trowel out of a bucket of stones.”

  Ten

  Gethsemane stared at Headmaster Riordan’s office door. All the boys and Frankie had been transported back to St Brennan’s and the sick sorted from the well. Now she wondered how to explain to the headmaster why one teacher and a couple dozen students looked like plague victims and his old friend faced a murder charge.

  She didn’t have to explain. Riordan almost ran her down as he rushed from his office.

  “Excuse me.” He stopped an inch short of her foot. “I’m in a terrible hurry. A cadre of panicked parents has descended on the school campus. I have to head them off before they reach the infirmary.”

  “The infirmary? You had to put boys in the infirmary?” True, the students had looked bad, but bad enough to be put in sick bed…

  “Grennan, too. Ward’s full. We called in extra duty nurses. Transferred one boy to the hospital. You were at the theater. Do you have any idea what’s happened? How to explain this? What’s caused this, this,” he searched for a word, “epidemic?”

  Not any ideas she could share with a skeptical administrator about to have his head handed to him by angry, frightened parents. “Some of the boys complained of smelling an odd scent in the auditorium. Pepper and grease. Frank—Mr. Grennan sm
elled it, too. And Inspector O’Reilly.”

  “An odd smell. And you say the adults, as well as the boys, smelled it? Not their imaginations, then. A gas? A fungus? Did you smell anything?”

  “Only the ones who got sick smelled it.”

  “Thank you for that.” Riordan consulted his watch. “I have time to grab the chemistry teacher. Maybe he can come up with a story to mollify the parents. Allay their fears, I mean, at least until we have some official word. The health department investigators are already here.”

  “I wish I could help more.” She would help, just not in any way she could talk about. “And I’m sorry about Aed.”

  “There is something you can do. Go to the garda station for me.” He fished in a pocket and pulled out a business card. “Tell Aed I’ve got a solicitor coming from Cork and not to say anything until she gets here.”

  “You want me to go now? Not that I mind, but class starts in ten minutes. Introduction to Western Music.”

  “No, class doesn’t start. I’ve canceled all classes until further notice. Activities, too. I don’t want this thing to spread any further than it already has. St. Brennan’s is under quarantine.”

  Gethsemane approached the information desk at the garda station and laid Niall’s car key on the countertop. “Excuse me, I’m returning Inspector O’Reilly’s car.”

  The officer at the desk didn’t look up from her computer. “Leave the key.”

  “May I speak to the inspector?”

  The guard still didn’t look up. “He’s not here.”

  Gethsemane’s throat tightened. Workaholic Niall must be bad off to miss work. “Where is he?” The officer ignored her. Gethsemane raised her voice and repeated the question.

  “Home sick.” The officer answered without looking at her.

  Gethsemane took a deep breath and remembered Riordan’s request. “I’d like to see Aed Devlin. Please.” She’d give him the information about the lawyer then go check on Niall.

  The officer tapped at her keyboard. “I’d like to win Eurovision.”

  Gethsemane closed her eyes, counted to five, and willed the snark away. “Let’s try this again. My name is—”

  “Gethsemane Brown.” The officer’s eyes remained on her screen. “The American living up at that old cottage on Carrick Point, the one who keeps finding dead bodies and interfering with official investigations.”

  Had they written a standard response and inserted it in the police instruction manuals? “Be that as it may, I’d like to see Aed Devlin.”

  “Well, you can’t.”

  Gethsemane held the solicitor’s business card in front of the garda’s computer screen. The guard tried to look around it, but Gethsemane moved the card where she couldn’t avoid it. “I’d like to tell Aed Devlin that his lawyer’s on the way. If you prefer, I can stay here, right by your desk, until his lawyer arrives and explain how you tried to deny Mr. Devlin access to counsel.”

  “I never did.”

  Gethsemane waggled the card.

  The garda huffed. “Fine.” She pushed a buzzer and another officer appeared.

  “Not her again,” he said when he saw Gethsemane.

  “Take her to see Devlin.”

  They passed through security screening and into the visiting room, where she waited for guards to escort Devlin to her booth. He dropped heavily onto the seat opposite. His age appeared to have caught up with him all at once. He registered surprise at seeing her.

  “Headmaster Riordan sent me. He’s hired a lawyer—a solicitor—who’ll be here from Cork soon. He gave me her card but they,” she indicated the guards, “wouldn’t let me give it to you.”

  “Rick’s my only man. Tell him fair play when you see him. Have you seen Venus?”

  “Not since the theater. Getting the boys back to school preoccupied me.”

  “The poor fellas. I can’t understand what happened to them. We worked in that theater for a couple of weeks building the set, breathing in paint and glue and dust, and no one took ill.”

  “Had anyone sung Maja’s aria before this afternoon?”

  “No. Not all the way through, anyway. I just finished writing it a few days ago. Why?”

  “Its power hasn’t diminished. I’m still awed. Did you adapt the words or are they completely original?”

  “I adapted them from a Hungarian text I found in a cathedral library.”

  “And Sylvie’s voice—wow. Is she a native French speaker?”

  “As far as I know. You do ask odd questions.”

  “Habit. How are you holding up? Headmaster will want to know.”

  “They’re not beating me or starving me. That’s about the best I can say for this place. Tell Rick I didn’t kill Bernard.”

  “I’m sure he doesn’t believe you did.” She chewed the inside of her cheek for a moment. “Did you?”

  “I just said—”

  “You said tell headmaster you didn’t kill him. That’s not quite the same as denying you did it.”

  “I’m not a murderer. I didn’t kill Bernard. I hated him, yes. I wanted to rub his nose in my renewed success. I did not want to rub him out.”

  “Did you invite him to come see the performance?”

  “No. I’d never stoop to asking him to review me. I assumed he was freelancing and came on his own. Or that he seduced some bure into hiring him.”

  “I’ll concede you didn’t kill him.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Any idea who did?”

  “Anybody else at the theater. Excluding the kids.”

  “Can you narrow that?”

  Aed shook his head. “Bernard was a nasty piece of work. To know him was to loathe him. Whoever did it might have killed him on general principle. Even you.”

  “I didn’t do it. I have an alibi witness.” An ill alibi witness. “I assume you’d have noticed a body under the piano during the ritornello.”

  “Of course.”

  “Then he must have been killed during the confusion after Saoirse screamed. Which also doesn’t narrow it down. Why did you move the trowel from the bucket?”

  “A lighting tech told me there was glare from the metal. I set it down behind the castle.”

  “Where anyone could have lifted it.”

  “You sound like a detective.”

  “I’m not. I just have a way of getting drawn into situations that seem wrong on the surface. I ask questions to sort things out. Wrongness activates my social justice warrior tendencies. Wrongs should be righted. I feel compelled to right them.”

  Aed leaned closer to the divider. “If you believe that, please keep asking questions. I swear I’ve killed no one.”

  A guard approached. “You have to go now.”

  “Can’t she stay another minute?”

  The guard stepped closer.

  “That means no,” Gethsemane said. “I have to leave, anyway. I need to check on Inspector O’Reilly.”

  “The guard who got sick? Tell him I wish him well. He seems like a decent fella.”

  “He is.”

  Eleven

  Gethsemane halted her bike on a street corner in the quiet residential area south of the library. The Eurovision-wannabe officer had refused to give her Niall’s address, but Murphy—the barman knew where almost everyone lived in the village—had obliged. She walked her bike and scanned the row of neat brick townhouses. Third from the end. Manicured topiaries in planters at the foot of the front steps gave the entrance a stately air. Drawn curtains with no lights on behind them gave her pause.

  She rang the bell. When no one answered after half a minute, she knocked. Still no answer. She balled up her fist and pounded.

  “Meow.” A black cat’s face appeared in a front window. She’d forgotten Niall had a cat. Nero, after Rex Stout’s detective.

/>   She tapped on the window. “Hey, kitty, go wake up your person.”

  The cat yowled and jumped away.

  She pounded on the door again and shouted. “Niall! Inspector!”

  “Are you puttin’ on a holy show,” a voice said behind her. Gethsemane spun. An elderly lady with a shopping cart stood on the sidewalk. “Where’s the fire?”

  “Niall, Inspector O’Reilly, took ill earlier today.”

  The woman put a hand to her throat. “Not that dose that’s going round the school?”

  “That one. It started at the Athaneum. Niall was there and he caught it, too. He said he was going home to rest, but he won’t answer the door.”

  “Maybe because he’s resting.”

  “He looked awful, ma’am. I just want to make sure he’s—” She couldn’t say it.

  “Don’t break the door down. Or break your hand.” The woman dug into a coat pocket. “I’ve got a key.” She pulled out a ring full of keys and hunted. “I live down the way. I look after Nero and the plants when Niall’s out of town. Do as much for most of the neighbors.” She found the key she wanted. “Neighbors hardly look out for each other anymore these days.”

  Gethsemane tuned out the story of how neighbors used to be neighborly. She pushed past the woman as soon as the door swung open. She met Niall coming down the stairs.

  His cat clung to his shoulder. He pulled Nero free and held him out to Gethsemane. “Look after the cat for me?”

  Before she could answer, he collapsed.

  “Jimmy Binden, two-ninety-six; George Britt, five hundred; Ameal Brooks, three-sixty-two; Ray Brown, two hundred.” Gethsemane recited Negro League batting averages as she counted Niall’s respirations. She tapped rhythm with her finger on the arm of the hard plastic chair next to his hospital bed. He looked almost as pale as his sheets. She’d reached the end of the 1933 Homestead Grays roster by the time he woke up.

  She had to lean close to hear him, his baritone just above a whisper. “What happened?”

  “You fainted.”

  “I’ve never fainted in my life.”