From Herring to Eternity (15 page)

We were still laughing when Luke arrived. He, too, wisely scooted into the back as Thom and I went about our dining-room prep.

Chapter 15

It was a who’s who of “Hey—let’s return to the scene of the crime!”

I’m sure it was coincidental, but five of the seven diners who we all remembered being there the morning Lippy was murdered were back. They were all regulars, and maybe the stars had aligned this way before; it’s just that I’d never noticed it.

There was our mail carrier Nicolette Hopkins, who was just starting her route, bus driver Jackie and her grease monkey gal-pal, Leigh—Thom tried hard
not
to make a face when they arrived holding hands—Ron Plummer of Plum-Tree advertising, and recording mogul Fly Saucer, who was always trying to find new ways of getting Raylene to notice him.

And there was one thing more to bring that tragic morning back. Lippy’s trumpet case.

Nicolette found it in a big brown paper bag stuffed in her wheelie mail-sack thing, which she left parked outside by the door. She noticed it when she was paying, brought it back inside, and left it on an empty table for two. I took it into my office to call Grant while Nicolette sat at the end of the counter to wait. Resting on the flattened bag, the case sat there like a thing alive, latent with mystery like the monolith in
2001
. I could swear I heard it hissling, like Lippy.

I made the call, then looked the case over. I looked around the side of the lid, didn’t see any wires or anything. It
could
have been booby-trapped to explode or release a toxin or something. I took a letter opener from the pencil holder, put the point under the lid, and raised it slowly. Nothing happened. I lifted it completely. The brass hinges made a slight squeaky whine like air being let out from the end of a balloon. I lowered my desk lamp and looked inside.

It was a crappy case, all right. The felt was worn where the trumpet had rested and frayed where it met the wooden boards of the case. I noticed, then, a faint, familiar smell.

The slightly warped top of the case was lined with paper—wallpaper, it looked like and I sniffed around the lid. The smell was strongest in one corner and I felt it; the surface was a little lumpy. I used the letter opener to pick at it. The corner did not yield so I dug harder. It came away, dropping tiny particles of white into the case.

Paste. That was what I had smelled, hidden under the odor of old grapefruit juice. Cheap, five-and-dime white paste. The kind Lippy would buy—if he had bothered to repair the flap. Given the rips and hanging threads elsewhere in the case, I couldn’t see why he would have. I looked closer at the underlying wood, which was covered with clumps of paste. I used the letter opener to chip it away. It wasn’t old and dry like one of those kindergarten projects with colored paper and macaroni. It still had a waxy quality. Someone had repaired it, and recently. I took a safety pin from my desk drawer and opened it. I used the pin point to gently stab the chunks of paste and remove them. I didn’t want to damage the underlying wood in case anything was there. If there was any evidence in the paste itself, like hair or skin, it would still be in the case somewhere when the police lab went over the contents. It just wouldn’t be under the flap. I was curious, I had a right to do this, and if Grant didn’t like it—well, once again, Uncle Oskar said it best:
Meshuga zol er vern un arumloyfn iber di gasn.
He should go nuts and run through the streets.

I removed a flat, ivory-colored chunk, like a stepped-on piece of feta, and froze. It wasn’t on the wood that I found something. It was on the
tuchas
end of one of the paste chunks. Two smudgy blue markings—handwriting, in ink? They looked like “pp.” It could have been part of Lippy or Tippi. A letter for his sister? My mind jumped to words like “happening” and “apparently.” Did this have something to do with the treasure he told Tippi about? I looked again at the smear. It could also have been an “rr” that ran. For Barron? I took a picture with my cell phone.

I set the safety pin and the chunk on the felt and looked at the corresponding piece of wood. I couldn’t see anything there so I took the magnifying glass from the desk drawer—the one Uncle Murray had used to read fine print. Between safety pins, the magnifying glass, a deck of cards, and a silver dollar, that drawer was more diverse than Batman’s utility belt.

There was a very faint indentation in the wood of the lid. I knew at once what it must be and, marking the spot, I closed the lid slowly. That was where the rim of the trumpet bell had pressed up against the lid, which was inwardly warped because its owner was always leaning on it—to eat, to write, to sleep. Maybe Lippy had tucked a piece of paper into what was once a torn-down flap. When the instrument had pressed on it, a trace of wet ink—probably from a felt-tipped pen—had soaked into the porous wood.

Aware that Grant was on the way, I quickly looked up school paste online. The ingredients of cheap paste were water, corn syrup, white vinegar— “White vinegar?” I said, looking down at the dan-druffy felt. I use it to clean stains from the coffee maker. It also cleans grease . . . and newsprint, when that stuff used to get on everything you touched. My great-grandfather Benny bet the horses and read a half-dozen tabloids when New York still had them. The old Frigidaire was always covered with fingerprints.

The vinegar in the paste had picked up the impression of writing that had been crushed into the wood, like Silly Putty picking up a comic-strip picture. Switching on the small scanner I rarely used that was buried under catalogues for clothes and accessories I would never buy, I picked up the pin, gently set the bottom of the paste chunk on the scanner, and made a copy. Then I put it back in the case and removed the pin. If the lab guys noticed the hole—then they noticed the hole. Good for them. Another puzzle to solve.

I used the letter opener to lower the lid so there were no additional fingerprints, then went back to the dining room—just as Grant was entering casually, furtively, so as not to alarm the clientele—if a man holding purple rubber gloves and looking like an OB-GYN on a mission can be called furtive. He acknowledged me with a nod and went to my office. I noticed that neither Leigh nor Fly Saucer was looking at him. Mr. Saucer was focused on his iPad and Leigh was enviously eyeing a vintage Mustang that was parked in the street.

I followed him into the office as soon as I was finished chopping onions.

“Worst evidence locker on earth,” he said, bending and looking the case over like a vet examining a sick puppy.

“What do you mean?”

“Any smells that might be on the case are drowned by everything else,” he said. “I’ll have to take this back to the lab ASAP—check for prints, ascertain that it was even his.”

I leaned forward, sniffed. “It was.”

“Oh?”

“Lippy spilled grapefruit juice on the case the morning he was killed,” I told him. “I know rotten fruit when I smell it.”

Grant raised the lid, looked inside, touched the lining here and there. It was badly faded crushed red velvet. “The juice could be how the toxin was introduced. We’ll know when we’ve tested the case. There’s a hard spot here,” he said, jabbing a spot.

“Meaning?”

“Possibly glued, repaired.”

“It’s an old case,” I said. “He could have done that himself. I’m guessing there are no cameras where the mail bag was left.”

Grant grinned crookedly. “This isn’t exactly New York, Gwen. We don’t have a Ring of Steel.”

The detective was referring to the combination of public surveillance cameras, private security systems, and radiation detectors that effectively watched every foot of Lower Manhattan for roughly a half-mile in all directions from the Financial District.

“So Nicolette could have had it there already—or someone could have put it there,” I said.

He glanced at me. “Your eyes are red,” he said, awkwardly—okay, painfully—looking for a way to show concern.

“It’s the onions,” I said truthfully—okay, dismissively.

“I’m going to get an evidence bag,” he said. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

“Okay. I’ll be in the kitchen if you need anything else.”

“I don’t,” he answered honestly. Okay, bitterly.

I left, then he left; only the tension remained, the only thing we seemed to have in common. Was this another way hate got itself birthed—not from the axe-chop of a divorce but by the blossoming petals of resentment?

Apparently. That was a new one for me, and even more unpleasant because it was so insidious. It was like the slow, awful awareness of, “Hey—that’s not indigestion. It’s my
farshtunken
heart!”

I decided to make myself useful; I went to the dining room to see who else might have poisoned Lippy Montgomery.

I picked Fly Saucer because I didn’t feel like dealing with the two ladies. I was sufficiently fed up with men that I was afraid I might hit on them. Not really—but maybe. Then again, thinking about the complex relationship I had with Thom, I wondered if I could actually handle another woman’s issues.

Fly was sitting there in his trademark yellow button-down and white slacks, all bald, five-foot-eight of him. He wore Chamber sunglasses with dark ale lenses and a Rolex Deepsea. I have no idea whether he had ever gone diving in his life; but the watch was big and ostentatious, probably so it could compete with the money-green Jesus face and rosary chain he wore tight around his neck. The Christ had tiny diamonds for eyes and lips made of rubies. He seemed to be smiling. Fly had his iPad and was pecking away as he ate.

At least the music mogul made the ice breaking easy. As I walked over with my all-access coffeepot, offering refills, he smiled through his goatee and asked, “What’s all the commotion?”

“You mean the police?” I asked, then added my own lame attempt at mock bonding, “The fuzz?”

He grinned after a brief hesitation, then slurred in his best blaxploitation drug dealer voice, “Yeah—
de fuzz
, baby. You so urban.”

I meant it as a joke; he was biting back. I guess sarcasm doesn’t always work across ethnic lines.

“I was teasing,” I said.

He put a fist to his chest, over his heart. “And brotha Fred Williamson and sista Pam Grier be smiling because they are still-hip jargonauts.”

I didn’t need this. I wasn’t even sure what he’d just said.

I started to leave but Fly grabbed my left wrist with four big rings that happened to be wearing fingers. “Hold on,” he said. “That was my turn to be tease-alicious.”

I’ve always had a soft spot for neologists, going back to when my great-relatives from Eastern Europe mangled the local tongue. At least these words had a kind of vitality and ingenuity. Not like the boobs who sent me e-mails about the deli saying our ads had “peaked” their interest or that my food is “kewl.”

“Okay,” I said.

“So what’s up?” he asked, switching on what apparently was meant to be charm.

“Something belonging to Lippy Montgomery just showed up,” I told him.

“Is that good? Is there a break in the case?”

For a moment, I thought he was referring to the trumpet case. “I don’t know,” I said. “I hope so.”

“Why? Fuzz-heat on ya?”

He was being sarcastic. “No. I had a soft spot for Lippy.”

Fly resumed what he was doing—writing music, it seemed. “He was a damn good horn player. I got him a few sessions—sometimes at the studio, sometimes at The Oatmeal Stallion, but he always did himself in.”

The Oatmeal Stallion was the hot jazz club on Union Street. I didn’t realize Lippy had ever played that upscale. “How so?”

“He had the soul of a musician, man,” he told me. “In the middle of a vocal, he would go off in his own jazz riff world. I understood it, and he was always trying to make something better, but that’s not what he was hired to do.” There was anger—frustration?—in Fly’s voice.

“Did anyone ever get mad at him in those sessions?”

Eerily on cue, Mad Ozenne walked in when I invoked her name. She drifted to the empty table she had occupied the morning of the murder. Her eyes locked on me and stayed with me as she circled wide around the dining room, almost like the moon orbiting the earth. Her expression was equally stony, now that I thought of it. Not angry, just frozen in a blank mask.

“You couldn’t get mad at Lippy,” Fly said. “Nobody could. He was so sincere and, like I said, it was never about him, about trying to call attention to himself. It was always about the music.” He touched his iPad as I topped off his cup. “I read he got poisoned.” He raised his tablet slightly. “They find out where or how?”

“Not sure,” I said.

“What about his sister?”

“Don’t know,” I said, unsure whether rat poison had been mentioned in any of the news coverage.

He shook his head slowly. “It’s a serious crime.”

“Well, yeah. Murder,” I said.

“No, man. I mean the way folks just ignored his ass.”

“What do you mean?”

“Yo, dude be playing his heart out, nobody giving him a listen. I don’t think he cared, ’cause he was out there for himself. But it just wasn’t right.”

“Why didn’t you sign him? If you don’t mind my asking.”

“’Cause the other thing about Lippy—he had zero charisma. You got to have that if you’re gonna record, because you also gotta get out there and support your efforts. Y’know? County fairs, local TV, football halftimes. He had no showmanship. You look at the great trumpeters, like Al Hirt, Doc Severinsen—you want to watch them as much as you want to listen to them.”

I saw his point. Lippy was like a herring without the egg and onion. He lacked a certain zest.

“Sad,” I said. I leaned in a little. “His sister told me he had some kind of treasure. You ever hear anything about that?”

Fly’s mouth pinched like he was rolling coffee grounds from his tongue. “Lippy? Treasure? That boy was so naive he would’ve tried to return a gold doubloon to Cortez.”

That was an unexpectedly literate allusion, I was pleased to note. Maybe the bling boss act was just that.

Before I could say anything more, Leigh waved me over and pointed at her cup. The grease monkey needed more lube. I smiled at Fly and wished him a good day, not sure if there was anything else I could find out from him about Lippy.