Liturgical Mysteries 02 The Baritone Wore Chiffon

The Baritone Wore Chiffon

A Liturgical Mystery

Copyright ©2004 by Mark Schweizer

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by

St. James Music Press

Box 249 - Tryon, NC 28782

ISBN 0-9721211-3-7

Acknowledgements

Richard Shephard, John Schrecker, Sandy Cavanah

Kristen Linduff, Drs. Karen and Ken Dougherty

All the many anonymous writers of bad similes that

never failed to inspire and of which I borrowed more than a few.

Prelude

I sat down and looked lovingly at the typewriter sitting on the desk, running my fingers across the worn keys and remembering when I first saw it offered in an on-line auction. Raymond Chandler’s 1939 Underwood No. 5. The very typewriter that had been used to write
The High Window, Trouble Is My Business, Goldfish,
and a host of other hard-boiled detective stories in the 40's and 50's. I put a piece of paper into the carriage and, with a feeling of reverence, clicked the return until the edge of the paper appeared behind the hammers and inched across the roller. Just to see what it felt like, I opened a copy of
Trouble Is My Business
and copied a passage onto the bright, new piece of bond.

I called him from a phone booth. The voice that answered was fat. It wheezed softly, like the voice of a man who had just won a pie-eating contest.

I chuckled with delight, knowing that I had typed the same words on the same machine as Raymond Chandler had some forty years before. I indulged myself a second time, this time from memory.

From thirty feet away, she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away, she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away.

I had finished my first work,
The Alto Wore Tweed,
before Christmas and was ready to begin my second opus. As an organist and choir director, I was pretty good; as a detective, I was excellent; but as an author, I was without peer. Or so said many of my friends. Those are the exact words. "Without peer."

I put a new piece of paper into the typewriter, rolled it forward and, with slightly trembling fingers, typed

The Baritone Wore Chiffon

Chapter One

I walked over to the kitchen and collected my beer and sandwich. Then, with the ghost of Philip Marlowe, Chandler's hard driving private-eye, looking over my shoulder, I started typing.

It was a dark and stormy night: dark, because the sun had just set like a giant flaming hen squatting upon her unkempt nest that was the gritty urban streets; stormy, because the weather had rolled in like an angry fat man driving his Rascal into a Ryan's Steak House and then finding out that the "all you can eat" dessert bar had an out-of-order frozen yogurt machine. Suddenly, a shot rang out, as shots are wont to do. No, I decided. Not a shot. Just the backfire of a too old car with bad gas, a problem that I could easily identify with.

I sat in my chair, my feet up on the desk, the rain from my shoes dripping onto the blotter, mixing with the dried ink and swirling into what looked like the "naked trapeze girl with a top hat" on the Rorschach test--a test which, at this point in time, I'm not sure I could have passed with a C minus. I had a drink. Then another. If I had put away the second the way I had the first, I probably wouldn't have heard the rap on the door. "C'mon in," I grumbled. It had been a bad day.

She came in like a centipede with 98 missing legs. Attractive? Sure. But though I wasn't interested, a sawbuck is a sawbuck, and that's what it'd cost her to bend my ear. I lit up a cigar in anticipation.

"I'm Kit," she said. She had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a few days. "I'm looking for a job. I'm a Girl-Friday."

"Come back tomorrow," I said. "I'm as beat as two-day old meringue."

•••

"Have you no shame?" Meg asked, shaking her head and dropping my prose onto the desk with disdain. "This is quite possibly the worst thing ever written. And I'm including your past efforts. I'm embarrassed for you."

"I am secure in my literary prowess. I am a fine writer."

"You are mistaken. You are bad. Truly bad. And I may have to stop you."

I read back over the uneven text. For me, style and content were of secondary importance. The old-fashioned look of the type, the clatter of the well-worn keys and the way the paper curled over the platen were reason enough to write. Good or bad. Okay. Bad. Still, I thought that Megan Farthing at least, being my significant other, should stick up for my hackneyed efforts. I could use a little positive reinforcement.

"You are positively terrible. Please stop now, before I do something which I may regret but for which the literary world will have cause to thank me."

I admit it. I'm an incurable Chandler fan. I put
Trouble Is My Business
back on the shelf and thumbed open
The Long Good-bye
, my current re-read.

Then her hands dropped and jerked at something and the robe she was wearing came open and underneath it she was as naked as September Morn but a darn sight less coy.

As they say up here in the hills, "Man, that's real good writin'."

Chapter 1

"Hayden, supper's almost ready," Meg called. She had been in the kitchen for an hour or so, making a trip into the den every once in a while to bring me a beer and to check up on how I was coming with my new masterpiece. Seeing as Lent was four days away and I was trying to garner some piety, I was listening to the
St. Luke Passion
of Penderecki. It's not an easy piece to listen to, but if you can get through all ninety minutes, you'll be more than ready for Lent. In fact, Lent will be a piece of cake. It's the musical equivalent of having your wisdom teeth pulled without Novocain. The fact that I was giving up beer for forty days also had a bearing on my selection. I wanted Meg to suffer as much as I. She was giving up needlepoint. I pointed out that this was hardly a challenge.

"You're missing the spirit of Lent, Hayden. You give up something so that when you'd be working at that activity, you can meditate or do some reading instead. Something that enriches your life and your spiritual existence."

"Nope. Lent is about suffering. And the quicker you accept it, the easier it'll be. It's all about suffering and guilt," I said smugly, turning up the volume on the stereo and feeling my fillings give way.

The den was actually an old log cabin, measuring twenty by twenty, complete with a loft that I had incorporated into the overall design of the house. My house suited me very well and fit snugly into the two hundred acres in the middle of the Blue Ridge Mountains that I called home. The kitchen, in contrast with the rest of the house, and due to Meg's insistence, was totally modern, the only nod toward rusticity being the stone fireplace and the exposed beams which held up the second floor. The entire building cost a pretty penny, but pretty pennies were what I had. A whole lot of them.

"Do we have to listen to that god-awful wailing?" Meg asked, her face slightly askew.

"Yes, dear. Lent is upon us. And the Passion is a twentieth century masterpiece."

"What about Bach? Or some medieval chant or maybe a cantata? Even Albinoni? This is just painful."

"All in good time, my pretty. Ash Wednesday is four days away. We haven't even begun to suffer."

I am, by vocation, a police detective, by avocation, a church musician, but my fortune was made with the phone company thanks to a little invention that paid off handsomely and which Meg, also my investment counselor, has brokered into quite a tidy sum. I actually don't
have
to work, but I enjoy it, so every day I make my way into St. Germaine, a quaint little town up in the mountains of North Carolina, where I am the Chief Police Detective, and straight to my table at The Slab Cafe. At least for my morning coffee.

On Sundays it's off to the downtown square and St. Barnabas Episcopal Church where I am the resident organist and choirmaster. It's a nice job and one I would probably treat a bit more reverently if I actually needed the salary. As it is, I put the money back into the music fund. And it's a fair use of my first two college degrees. It was my third that got me into police work.

"Well, you've chased the boys outside. I doubt they'll be back for a while."

"The boys" Meg was referring to were Baxter and Archimedes, who usually have the run of the house. Baxter is a Burmese Mountain Dog, not even six months old and already huge. I had given him to Meg for a Christmas present, but he'd ended up living out here. Meg, who lived in town with her mother, didn't have the room, and Baxter had the makings of a terrific watchdog – even at his tender age.

Archimedes is an owl. He showed up about five months ago on my windowsill. I fed him for a few weeks, and he gradually became reasonably tame. We feed him, but he's a wild owl and we don't pick him up. I tried letting him step onto my hand, but his talons went right to the bone and I still have the scars. He has a window with an automatic opener which he learned to activate without much trouble, and now he comes and goes as he pleases, knowing there's always a dead mouse or squirrel waiting for him in the kitchen. I buy the frozen rodents by the case from Kent Murphee, the coroner in Boone. Where he gets them, I have no idea, and I don't ask.

The sopranos hit a particularly high and harsh note.

"If Lent is going to be like this, you can kiss me good-bye till Easter." Meg was getting a bit perturbed. And she was beginning to develop a twitch in her left eye.

"OK. I'll turn it off for now, but just know that I'll be listening to the rest of it later on. It's no good suffering unless someone knows it. You have to have an audience."

"Oh brother!"

"And, by the way, giving up needlepoint for Lent is hardly a sacrifice. You don't even needlepoint any more. What's your real plan? To give up watching your mother needlepoint?"

"Oops, I've got to go," Meg said, suddenly looking at her watch and racing for the door. "I forgot that I have to pick Mother up at her book club."

"What about supper?"

"Put it in the fridge. I'll be back in an hour and I expect some decent dinner music. Till then, have a miserable Lent."

"Yes, that's the idea," I called after her.

•••

Kit was waiting in my office when I came in.

"I need a job. I need a job bad."

Her grammar wasn't great, but then grammar never is. I really didn't need a Girl-Friday, but I figured that if I could get the client to cover the cost, I'd be that much ahead.