Coda

CODA

by David A. Crossman

Smashwords Edition

What critics say:

The Albert Mysteries

Albert is one of my all-time favorite sleuths. 
New York Times bestselling author Tess Gerritsen"

(The Albert Mysteries)…shine with comic brilliance. Crossman has a gift for creating characters . . . who should show up in further adventures of Albert. And there should be more." 
Chicago Sun-Times"

If you have ever aspired to be a private detective, here is some hilarious inspiration. Crossman’s delightfully offbeat tale of wacky academic politics contains a host of bizarre characters and an inexplicable homicide. Albert is indeed a unique, likable operative. I certainly look forward to an encore." 
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

The (novels are) an exercise in the comic style, defying disbelief. To his credit, Crossman brings it off nicely. Albert is clearly a survivor, likely to be heard from again. 
Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Crossman…creates an offbeat, sympathetic sleuth who meanders innocently through this tale like a lamb through a pack of wolves. Bravo. Encore! 
Publishers Weekly

The Winston Crisp Mysteries

Crossman is a skilled mystery writer with a knack for suspense, clues, local color, and a flowing story. His creation, venerable Winston Crisp, is a compelling and likable old fellow whose reappearance in future stories will be warmly received. 
Times Record

The writing is fast-paced and full of enough twists and turns to engage the most avid of mystery readers. Crisp is a delightful, plausible sleuth. I look forward to more Crisp books. 
Maine Sunday Telegram"

As clever as (this) premise is, as satisfactory as the complex plot may be to the mystery buff…it is the peripheral characters that make this book shine. Let’s hope Mr. Crisp and his pals survive the mayhem and entertain us again." 
Ellsworth Weekly

The Shroud Collector (formerly Dead of Winter)

Crossman has created a delightfully unique detective in Winston Crisp, who uses his brains, not his brawn. With the help of a charming cast of supporting characters, both author and sleuth triumph with panache. 
Tess Gerritsen, New York Times best-selling author.

It is the author’s intimate portraits of life on a Maine island that pull this book together and give it character. Neither Nero Wolfe, nor Columbo, nor most of the rest of the thousands of storybook sleuths ever came close. 
Brunswick Sun Journal

"David Crossman is a wizard. The Shroud Collector is a charmingly crafted, magically airy book, not to be mistaken for a lightweight." Kennebec Sunday Journal

The Bean and Ab Mysteries

These well-structured tales never loses momentum. Bean and Ab are likable characters who move through the stories, unearthing clues that take them closer to solving mysteries past and present. Their youthful enthusiasm, investigative prowess, and endearing friendship make for interesting characterization. The carefully orchestrated chapters and the fast pace will hold children’s attention throughout. 
School Library Journal

Impossible-to-put-down Maine mystery. Suspense builds neatly from chapter to chapter, and the ending is richly satisfying. 
Bangor Daily News, Sunday

"Crossman’s Secret of the Missing Grave is a gripping and well-imagined adventure mystery." 
The Horn Book (Boston Globe)

Be warned…you’ll find this suspenseful volume as fascinating as your youngster will. 
Portland Press Herald

Copyright 2015 David Crossman

Published by Alibi Folio Publishers

Nashville, TN

Printed in the United States of America

First edition

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012918592

All rights reserved. With the exception of brief quotations for the purpose of review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form without prior written permission of the author.

ISBN 978-1-4800-3539-3

Other than those individuals familiar to history, the characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to folks living or dead is entirely coincidental, but not surprising, given that their characteristics are common to us all.

Cover Design: CiA

Coda

by

David Crossman

Alibi-Folio Publishers

Nashville, TN, U.S.A.

Dedication

To W.C.,

for the spark

Chapter One

The Courtauld Gallery, London—1986

The distinction between a mausoleum and a museum was too fine for Albert to grasp. To him, they were both places for storing dead things. Yet the people in charge of his life—those who picked him up at airports in limousines and took him to hotels, and made him meet people he didn’t want to meet, and talk to reporters he didn’t want to talk to, and gave him medals and ribbons for which he had no room in his life—always seemed to assume he had an insatiable need to see whatever museum was the pride and joy of their particular city. Albert knew what to do; stand in front of whatever work of art they were trying to get him excited about and tilt his head this way and that, and nod at it. Smile. Nod some more and say something like, ‘oh,’ or ‘ah’, to make it seem like he got it.

But Albert didn’t get it. In fact, apart from music, he didn’t get much of anything. The horrible events of recent memory had only made him realize how much he didn’t get. His ignorance of people—their motivations, the things that compelled them to do, what to him, were inexplicable things—turned out to be far more profound than he’d ever imagined; mostly because he’d never thought about it, but partly because, when events finally forced themselves upon his consciousness, they were completely alien to him.

Alien. From another planet, like Clark Kent—living in constant anxiety lest the Earthlings find him out. That was Albert. Of course, that was stretching the comparison. If push came to shove, Clark Kent could always turn into Superman and fly away, or melt something with his eyes.

At least he knew what planet he was from.

Albert didn’t.

His mother and sister were from Maine. He probably was, too. Maybe Maine was another planet. That would explain a lot.

Maybe he shouldn’t tell people where he was from.

This is my favorite, said the lady with hoops hanging from her ears, who had been escorting him since lunch. Why she was escorting him, he didn’t know. Maybe there had been a drawing and she’d lost.

That was probably it.

No one had told him to follow her after the media event that afternoon at the BBC, everyone seemed to assume that he would, so he did.

They were very big hoops. Albert had seen something similar in a birdcage once, and wondered what the lady would look like with a parakeet hanging from each ear. That would make her more interesting to look at. She was holding a purse in both hands and kind of shaking it in the direction of a painting. Jackson Pollack.

Albert looked at the thing in the frame, beside which was a little black card that said, in white print, ‘Yellow Island.’ This time, he tilted his head in earnest, but tilt as he might he couldn’t find the naked lady, which is what most of the art in that particular museum was about. Nor, apart from obvious little mistakes in yellow, could he see an island.

A Pollock was a fish. Maybe there was a fish in all that mess somewhere.

He tilted the other way. No. No fish.

One of your own, of course, said the lady.

Why did people say things like that? She seemed to think he should know what she was talking about. What did it mean? One of his own what? Whatever it was, he didn’t have one, at least not as far as he knew.

Especially if it was a naked lady.

He thought of Miss Bjork, the only real-live female—apart from his sister—he’d ever seen naked. Well, he hadn’t actually seen her. He’d been in her apartment once when she was naked—in the shower—while he was in the living room. But he could hear the water running, and he imagined what she must look like. What he imagined, actually, was the Venus de Milo in the rain, but with arms. That’s about as far as his experience of naked ladies extended. Not that there weren’t examples all around him; magazines and things, you know. He’d just never been interested. Naked ladies weren’t music.

Until Miss Bjork. He tingled unexpectedly.

She was dead now.

Albert stopped tingling and squinted at the picture. Once upon a time, before Mrs. Gibson arrived to take over housekeeping chores in his apartment, he might have had something like this—under a carpet, or lost among his laundry or wrapping, something that was giving off an offensive odor—but he didn’t think so. In any case, if Mrs. Gibson had unearthed such a thing in her excavations, it wouldn’t have stood a chance.

American, said the lady, who’s name was Lady something-or-other. That made it easy to remember. She was accompanied by a man who seemed to be dressed in something too tight, whose name, like that of a lot of Englishmen, was Sir. That, too, was convenient. Albert had been called ‘sir’ during his recent sojourn in Tryon, North Carolina. He’d also been called ‘honey’, ‘sweetheart,’ ‘sugar,’ and ‘pissant,’ but he didn’t think any of those would apply to this man, who seemed happy with just the one name. Sir.

Sir didn’t say much. He nodded at paintings, too. And quite often looked at the silver watch that hung from a chain on his vest pocket.

Albert liked that watch and chain. If someone gave him one, he’d have to go to the vest store, so he’d have something to hang it from.

Yes, said Albert, recalling that Lady had asked if he was American. From Maine. He hadn’t meant to say that; now she’d know.

Maine? said Lady. Wyoming, surely.

Who was she talking about? Albert didn’t know anyone from Wyoming, though he knew where it was, and that the capitol of Wyoming was Cheyenne. He’d never thought about the people who lived there. Someone must, else they wouldn’t need a capitol. Let her think what she wanted, he was off the hook. Okay.

Lady looked at him much the same way he’d looked at the picture and tilted her head.

It was a Familiar Look.

Albert squirmed a little and pretended to study the painting. His sister had gotten into the cans of paints on the handyman’s workbench and done something similar on the floor of the barn once, when she was five or six, and Mother had sent her to her room. He suspected a similar fate had befallen the person who did this. How it got into a frame, and how the frame got into a museum, and why people would stop and look at it were all part of Life’s Great Mystery.

Like everything else.

Unless it was a Morality Tale. A kind of visual nursery rhyme. Albert could imagine mothers dragging their children to the Museum and—planting them in front of this painting—threatening them with whatever fate befell the perpetrator of this particular crime. Perhaps his had been a Famous Consequence that everyone but Albert knew about.

It almost makes me want to weep, said Lady.

Yes, said Albert, pleased, at last, to find something they could agree on. Me, too.

Sir—seeming to read something into Albert’s reply that escaped Lady—looked at him sideways and, making a kind of constricted giggle at the back of his throat, if a man of such Imposing Dignity could be said to giggle, smiled. It was a nice smile. Albert liked him.

Did you say something, Lawrence? said Lady, though her attention seemed fixed on whatever it was about the painting that made her want to weep.

Lawrence, Albert said aloud. He couldn’t recall ever having said the word before.

Yes? said Sir. Maybe that was his last name. Sir Lawrence.

Albert shook his head dismissively. I was just listening to it.

It was Sir’s turn to tilt his head. Listening? To what?

Lawrence, said Albert, whose attention was drawn to an adjacent room by the sound of a man saying: Ladies and gentlemen, the museum will close in five minutes.

To Albert it was as if Satan had said, ladies and gentlemen, Hell is closing. You may make your way to the exit.

Please make your way to the entrance hall and be sure to collect your belongings, said the disembodied voice.

Albert should have brought some belongings to collect. Nobody told him.

We have to go, he said, hopefully, wondering why they were being directed to the entrance hall if they were supposed to be exiting, and wishing he’d brought Jeremy Ash with him to explain things like that.

Jeremy Ash knew everything Albert didn’t, primarily, as far as Albert could ascertain, from having spent much of his life locked in a closet under the stairs and watching television through a crack in the door. But Jeremy had had a bad afternoon and had to stay at the hotel. They’d had to amputate his other leg, too, and what was left hurt. He never said as much, but he made faces that made Albert think it probably did.

As far as Albert was concerned, the Good and Evil of legs pretty much balanced one another out: they were the Twin Judases who had brought him here, they were the Angels of Deliverance that would carry him away.

Oh, that’s not for us, said Lady. Lawrence is on the Board.

Albert looked at Lawrence but couldn’t see a board. Maybe it was on his back, under his jacket, which would explain the way he was standing—and why his clothes seemed so tight.

For someone of Your Stature, the Museum is always open.

Always open. Like hell. Albert felt the urge to run for the exit, but what if he got there and the doors were nailed shut, or had disappeared altogether? He imagined eternity in the Museum, wandering from room to room while Sir cleared his throat and Lady wept and made Albert look at the paintings that seemed to scream Don’t tell Mother I did this! He choked back the panic that rose to his throat.

He looked toward the adjoining room. There were pictures of people in there. Real people with one eye on either side of their nose, and buttons, and hats and fluffy white collars. What’s in there? he said, trying to sound casual, but wishing desperately to escape the vortex of swirls in Lady’s Favorite Painting that seemed to be trying to suck him in to that haunted dimension in which such swirls were art.

Ah! said Lady, detaching her retinas from the vortex. The Masters! She chortled, but the subject of the chortle was, apparently, personal and secret. Sir didn’t ask. Neither did Albert.

Albert had recently heard or read or seen the phrase she swept from the room. The image that came to mind at the time was, quite naturally, of a woman, broom in hand, sweeping her way toward the door. But for some reason, the term applied to what Lady was doing at the moment, and it had nothing to do with a broom. Probably it was a metaphor, which was another thing Albert never got, unless this was one, in which case he did. Lady was sweeping from the Room of Meaningless Dribbles toward the Room of Discernible Faces, and he and Sir were being dragged along like puppies on invisible leashes.

Albert was glad to go. He cast a quick backward glance to make sure the Vortex wasn’t following. In Hell, you could never be sure. That’s why they called it Hell.

Lady was speaking. That’s Reubens on the far wall. So is that, she said, pointing to the portrait of a lady whose head seemed to be trying to escape from a giant cupcake wrapper.

They were both Reuben’s? Did that mean they were brother and sister? One was clearly a man—though he seemed to have been dressed by someone who wasn’t sure; he had a beard anyway—and the cupcake picture was clearly a lady; all the bumps and things. Or did they both belong to Reubens? Or did they possess some inner quality that made them Reubens? Like a ham sandwich which, whatever kind of bread it was made with, was always a ham sandwich.

Which reminded Albert that he was hungry.

And this portrait will, of course, be of especial interest to you.

Why ‘of course?’ People were always saying that. What did it mean? Albert flushed. He hated flushing. He hated not knowing what everyone else knew—even if what they knew had nothing to do with music or Miss Bjork and, therefore, didn’t really matter.

Why ‘of course?’

Was looking at this painting of a man, apparently in his pajamas—blue pajamas—supposed to remind him of something? Was he supposed to know something about him? Recognize him? Albert didn’t know any Englishmen that he could recall. That is, he’d shaken hands with a few thousand English men and women who stood in line in the rain—which was the only weather they had in England—for the purpose of looking at him in that strange way people looked at him, perhaps guessing that he was an alien, and telling them how much they’d loved his music.

That’s what the Queen said when she’d given him that pointy coaster that made him a KBE, whatever that was. He didn’t feel any different. He’d met her husband then, and wondered why he was only a Prince and not a King.

He must have done something wrong. You never knew with Queens, sometimes they turned people into frogs or, when in a particularly bad mood, lopped off their heads.

He’d met Princelings, and Princelettes and Lords and Dames, but he didn’t know them like he’d know a picture of George Washington or Abraham Lincoln, and looking at the picture, none came to mind.

Maybe he should have paid attention.

Why ‘of course’?

Lord Tiptoft said Lady. On loan from Oxburgh Hall. That’s where you’re staying the weekend, to rest up after your engagement.

The mention rang a bell. Something Huffy, his agent at William Morris, had said when discussing the itinerary for the European Tour. Oxburgh, yes, Albert echoed in the way that made people think he was listening. Near King’s Lynn. He wanted to be convivial, and place-names touched upon one of his only areas of knowledge apart from music: geography. Maps had always held a particular fascination for him, and he knew where Norfolk, England was without even looking. And will he be ther? he said, nodding at the painting with a different nod than the one he’d employed looking at the painting in the other room.

Sir made that ruptured giggle noise again, and smiled in a friendly way. He’ll, ah, well, not exactly. This portrait was painted long ago by a chap name of Lossburgh. He waggled the stem of his pipe at a smudge in the corner of the painting. "The man in the painting is Lord Robert Tiptoft. This is the original, it says here, though there’s a copy in the National Gallery.

Long dead now, of course, old Tiptoft.

There it was again. How was Albert to know Lord Robert Tiptoft, much less that he was dead? Nobody told him. Or, if they did, he hadn’t been listening. He didn’t read newspapers.

President Lincoln was dead, of course, and John Kennedy was dead, and his brother, what’s-his-name. And Martin Luther King. Probably there had been others. And now Lord Robert Tiptoft.

I’m sorry, said Albert, with as much sincerity as he could muster. That’s what you said when somebody told you that somebody else had died, and he wondered what the friends of the man had called him when he was a boy. ‘Lord?’ Probably Lordy. Kids abbreviate names. He remembered having been called ‘Al,’ but not by anyone who knew he played the piano. It made a difference, apparently. Huffy called him Al sometimes. But no one else. Jeremy Ash called him ‘A’. It would be hard to abbreviate that any further.

Great mystery about this painting, said Sir, who seemed to infer from noises his wife had made that he had permission to speak. About a treasure of some kind.

Treasure? said Albert, to whom treasures were things that were buried. Tewksbury would be interested. He was an archaeologist and they enjoyed digging things up, and a treasure at the bottom of a hole might make such a tiresome chore seem worthwhile.

But Tewksbury was dead, too. A treasure himself, waiting to be dug up.

And murder, said Sir.

Albert turned his gaze from the portrait and stood looking at Sir as if he’d been cudgeled on the back of the skull.

I say, said Sir. Are you quite all right?

Of all the terms that could be used to describe Albert at that moment, ‘all right,’ was not among them. A cavernous void was rushing at him from all directions. He was dizzy, spiraling downward, nauseous, and groping for the edge of the well into which he was falling.

Murder had found him again.

Chapter Two

Everyone has an opinion of England’s National Health Service: every two-year old on the street who was brought into the world at government expense; every pensioner who lives in the hope that the System’s bankruptcy and his demise will be concurrent events; every Hyde Park anarchist, every dole-recipient of dubious national extraction; every member of the privileged class who is able to afford real doctors rather than NHS pill-pushers. No doubt the Queen and would-be kings in descending order all had an opinion. Whatever those opinions might be, however varied, one thing was unanimously agreed, the Sisters, which, for reasons Albert couldn’t ascertain, is what they call their nurses, were generally efficient, terse, and expected to be obeyed without question.

This particular nurse, who was currently doing things of a highly personal nature to Albert, exemplified each of these characteristics without compromising the other. Albert watched her with interest and listened to the lilt of her accent as she talked, which she did without ceasing as if her next breath depended upon it. Most of the monologue was addressed to the various electronic or mechanical components that monitored or supported his person in some way, and her observations and remarks were not always flattering. In the course of several minutes, she had condemned the manufacturer of the IV bag to an untimely demise, preferably ‘by drowning after having been hung, eviscerated, and drawn-and-quartered." This opprobrium was delivered with some emphasis as she slammed the second of two faulty plastic bags into a bedside bin. By the time she got around to asking a question to which he might he expected to respond, Albert had mentally traced her accent to Northern Ireland.

Accents were the second and terminating item on the list of Albert’s extra-musical interests. They involved sound and, to him, that meant they more-or-less belonged under the same heading as music. He could parse their vibrations as easily as a food critic from a prominent newspaper could enumerate the ingredients in the most famous dish of a trembling chef, and upon whose verdict hung the receipt or withdrawal of a coveted Michelin Star.

The Sister bustled, and while she bustled, Albert studied her—practicing those skills of observation that unwonted experience of recent memory had awakened in him.

A white plastic tab on her chest proved helpful insofar as it stated her name: Edna. Information beyond that it was reticent to divulge. So, her name was Edna, and she was from the Lake District, which meant that, like himself, she was not native to London. What else? She was about his height which meant that, when he stood up, he would have someone with whom he could see eye-to-eye.

He snickered. Albert had made a private joke. At forty-three he had lost his comical virginity.

You alright, then love? said the Sister in response.

Yes.

She did some other things to him in areas that seemed, in his untrained medical opinion, to have little to do with the fainting spell that had landed him in her care. Her hands were cold. That was something Albert had observed about nurses, and he wondered if they kept their hands in ice until they were needed. Probably something to do with freezing blood flow.

She was plumpish, he supposed, with a bit more than necessary of everything that made her female. Her blue dress was crisp, though it might be a kind of green. Or olive. Or beige. Albert wasn’t sure about colors. He knew that if you shined light on them in a certain way, they changed, and there was a point at which one color became another. Apparently no one else minded, so he generally ignored subtle distinctions. Now though, with time on his hands, he decided to pursue the problem and resolved that it was the color of the little round disc at the bottom of the urinal.

Well, he’d narrow it down some more later.

He learned, in the course of her commentary, that she had a brother, Poor Benny, who had ‘gone to Hell with the IRA.’ Albert pictured a male version of Edna in the Museum, staring eternally at the wall of blotches and swirls. His plastic name tag read: Poor Benny.

So, you’re a piano player, said Edna. That was a question he could answer.

Yes.

"My Aunt Mimi played piano at my wedding. Come Thou Font of Every Blessing. Lovely, that."

Albert was willing to be conversational. Is that a song?

Edna shot him a skeptical glance, as if ignorance of the composition cast doubt upon both his claim to be a piano player and his theology. ‘course it is. She’d stopped arranging him for a moment and gave him a quick visual examination. American, she said.

Albert, unable to determine by the tone in which it was delivered whether the diagnosis was a question, an observation, or condemnation, bobbled his head about in a non-committal way. Whatever he guessed would be wrong, so non-committal was the best way to go in situations like this.

Ah, well, she said, and began to fold a sheet that she seemed to have summoned from thin air. "Aunt Mimi was a real piano player. The implication was clear, though lost on Albert. Church music, My Wild Irish Rose, Jenny O’ the Islands, The Charleston. You name it, she could play it. Even Rhapsody in Blue." She started to hum something that could be part of any of these, for all he knew—titles were as obtuse to him as the Dorabella Cipher—and danced around his bed with a pillow tucked under her chin as she struggled to wrestle it into a pillowcase.

There were very few musical pieces Albert knew by name. He’d had occasion to learn The Volga Boatmen and My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean, recently. Beyond that, his memory for song titles was a bit iffy.

More than a bit.

Almost completely iffy.

If Iffy were the name of a song, he might know it. But probably not.

Titles were like your appendix, something that could be removed without anyone really noticing. His sister had had her appendix out, and he had watched carefully to see if she looked different, or walked oddly, or leaked, or did anything that she didn’t normally do, but she didn’t. Not that he noticed. Of course, she was always doing odd things, but they were ordinary odd things. She was a female.

Why titles, anyway? Humming was a language that made sense, and from which he could extrapolate the composition in question.

Titles were for books.

Miss Bjork would laugh to hear him say things like that. He wasn’t sure why. But that was okay. He’d liked the sound of her laugh, especially if he’d been the one to make her do it.

That was music.

Some people could do that on purpose . . . make people laugh. He’d seen them in the teacher’s lounge at the School. Someone would say something, and everyone else would laugh. This baffled Albert. He had pretty good hearing. Exceptional, in fact. He could hear every single syllable that came out of the mouth of whoever was telling the joke, but could never hear whatever it was about whatever was said that made it funny. Somewhere in the sounds was a Hidden Meaning. That’s what he didn’t get.

He’d wished he could have made Miss Bjork laugh on purpose. She’d have laughed at that one about seeing eye-to-eye with Edna. But that wasn’t something funny Albert had thought of on purpose. It just came to him from somewhere, as if he’d managed to read it on a bubblegum wrapper as it blew by in the street.

He wished she wasn’t dead. He wished that so hard that his heart bled.

Dead. Death. Murder. That’s why he was here. Someone had said something about murder and everything had just gone blank. It was Sir, talking about the man in the blue pajamas. Lord Something or Other. Had someone murdered him? He looked healthy enough in the picture, but it was probably painted before he was killed.

For most of his life, Albert had been kept in a bubble because, he was told, he was special. He was nine when some people convinced his mother he was so special that he should go to Julliard, which is where he met Rudolf Firkušný, the only person who had ever seemed to understand him, or at least to understand that he couldn’t be understood. After three weeks, he’d called Albert’s mother and told her to come collect him. Albert had found the letter explaining the whole bizarre episode on his mother’s nightstand the night she and his sister had brought him home from South Station in Boston.

Dated Monday, October 17th, 1949, it began politely with her first and last name, then, without preamble, addressed The Problem. ‘In all my experience, ma’am,’ it said, ‘and among all the gifted people I have known, Albert stands alone. Unique.’

Albert had looked up the word. It was just another way of saying ‘special.’ He might have known. People had always called him that. The same way they described Marky Lindquist who came to church in a wheelchair . . . whose head bobbed and dropped and rolled as he played an imaginary instrument in the air, and laughed and guffawed at all the wrong times, and drooled on the bib he wore around his neck. Marky, who Albert wanted to heal with an embrace, as Christ would have.

He knew then what people thought of him, of both he and Marky. They were special. Except Marky was happy. He possessed some deep knowledge that eluded Albert.

Maybe it was Albert who needed healing.

‘I have known many gifted composers and performers, Madam.’ Albert could hear the professor’s gravelly voice, his thick Czech accent. ‘Your son’s gift is beyond any of these. It is supernatural. I have sat on the bench beside him for hours on end as music poured fourth. Music? Not just music—the language of Heaven, Ma’am! Those