The Countertenor Wore Garlic (The Liturgical Mysteries) (13 page)

"Your beer, sirrah," said Meg. "These came this morning from your Beer-of-the-Month Club." She put a bottle of St. Ambroise Oatmeal Stout onto a coaster sitting on the desk.

"Thanks," I grunted.

"I put them in your beer fridge. Forty-seven and one half degrees Fahrenheit."

"You're the best, Doll-face," I gnarred in my Bogart voice as I watched Meg return to the kitchen. "Hustle your pins back over here and I'll show you why I've never won the Pulitzer Prize."

Meg was used to these flights of fancy and dutifully ignored me.

"This here is Lapke Baklava," said Pedro. "From Romania. He's a lawyer."

"Romanian, eh?"

"Well, we all gotta be something," said Pedro. "I myself am Gaelic."

"Gaelic? With a name like 'Pedro LaFleur'? When did this happen?"

"Last Wednesday," he said. "My life coach took care of it for me. Gaelic is all the rage and she thought it would help my self-esteem. It only cost me five hundred clams and a couple of minutes to fill out the forms."

I stared at him. "You got a lineage transplant?"

"Yep. Scottish-Gaelic," he said. "One hundred percent. Wanna see my furry sporran?"

"No."

"I wouldn't mind," said Tessie.

Our beer-fräulein, a yellow-pigtailed doll named Elsa, skipped up to the table, two sloshing buckets of suds dangling from either side of the yoke slung across her bare shoulders. She had my dinner in one hand and a pistol in the other. The heater didn't scare me. All the waitresses carried 'em. She put down the plate of grub, calmly shot a rat scurrying in the corner, and ladled some beer into my stein. I stuffed a sawbuck down her dirndl, and considered myself lucky.

Lapke blew himself a kiss. I knew the type: as dark and greasy as a deep-fried carnival Twinkie, slimy as a plate of three-day-old escargot, with all the morals of an open-faced liverwurst and spray-cheese sandwich smothered in sauerkraut--and that brought me back to dinner.

"I don't trust him," whispered Tessie, looking up at Lapke like he was a lawyer or something. "Although he is cute..."

"Doesn't matter," said Pedro, tasting a bite of the Twinkie. "We need him. He's vampire-proof."

"Wassa?" said Tessie, bravely summoning a two syllable word, or, at least, one that might pass as such in the world of highly paid weather girls.

"Vampires won't bite a lawyer," I explained, as I dipped a three-inch snail in Béarnaise sauce and slurped it down. "Professional courtesy."

The phone rang and I heard Meg answer it. She stuck her head back into the den a second later and summoned me to the kitchen. "It's Billy Hixon. You'd better come quick."

Two minutes later I was in the truck, our supper on indefinite hold, driving back down the mountain into town.

***

"Fill me in," I said to Nancy. "You know something I don't?"

"I doubt it. Just what Billy told me when I got here."

It was ten o'clock, but felt like midnight, and we were standing in back of St. Barnabas Church. I'd gotten Meg to call Nancy and tell her and Dave to meet me. Billy was about twenty feet away sitting on a lone hay bale and shaking his head. The rest of the seven hundred or so bales had been stacked seven feet high in a maze that covered most of the back garden.

"Billy said he was going through the maze about a half-hour ago. You know, cleaning up trash the kids had left, that sort of thing. He found a scarecrow toward the back in one of the dead-ends."

"Yeah," I said.

"He didn't put a scarecrow in the maze. He went to check it out. It was a body. A woman."

"Jeez," said Dave. "We went almost a year without a body."

"A new record," said Nancy with a solemn nod.

"Let's check it out," I said with a sigh. "But first call the ambulance back out here."

***

We had our flashlights out and followed Billy through twists and turns for three or four minutes.

"Hey, how's your nose?" I asked, as we turned another blind corner. "You're not sniffling as much."

"Fine, now," answered Billy. "I got something from the doc."

"Are you lost?" Nancy asked him.

"Naw. I know where she is," Billy replied. "We could have just pulled down one of the outside walls, but I didn't want to compromise the crime scene. I watch 'CSI,' you know."

"Very astute," I said.

"I don't know the quickest way in the dark, but she's in the southwest corner. We'll get there eventually."

Five full minutes (and a lot of growling by Nancy) later, we turned a corner and found ourselves looking down a dead-end passage. There, sitting up on a hay bale at the end of the hay corridor, was the body, a woman wearing black, low-cut, vampire regalia, dark stockings, and no shoes. As we came closer, more of her feminine features became evident, although we couldn't tell anything by looking at her face since her entire head was encased in a pumpkin—a big pumpkin, complete with a jack-o-lantern face drawn onto the front with paint or magic-marker. The black triangle eyes and the jagged smile danced eerily in our flashlight beams.

"Creepy," said Dave as we drew near to the body.

"How did you know it wasn't a scarecrow?" I asked Billy.

"I knew when I tried to pick her up. She's heavy for one thing. And she's really stiff."

"Killed sometime this afternoon, then," said Nancy, flitting her Maglite across the body and lifting the woman's arm in a quick rigor mortis assessment. "In this temperature, rigor would start to set in after maybe three hours. Full rigor in twelve."

"I went through the whole maze two or three times during the afternoon cleaning stuff up. She wasn't here."

"When was the last time?" I asked.

"I don't remember exactly," said Billy. "It was just before the movie started, though."

"So a little before five?"

"That sounds about right. The carnival was just finishing up."

"You have any latex gloves?" I asked Nancy.

"Of course."

Nancy was nothing if not efficient and a moment later I had donned a pair of gloves.

"Give me some light," I said. "Let's see who this is."

Billy, Nancy, and Dave held their lights steady as I took the pumpkin in both hands and lifted it up over the head of the victim. It came off with a hideous sucking sound. The stringy pulp clung to the girl's features and her short hair was matted with both pumpkin gunk and seeds. Her eyes were closed, but her mouth hung open in slack-jawed accusation. Her tongue was swollen. We looked at her without recognition for several long moments. Then Nancy finally said, "That's Flori Cabbage."

Chapter 9

The ambulance had come and gone, taking Flori Cabbage off to the morgue in Boone where Kent Murphee, the coroner, would do his thing Monday morning. He might then call me if he could hold off on the cocktails until noon or so. I made up my mind to be in his office by ten.

We looked over the crime scene for tracks, scrapes, written confessions, or anything else that might be considered a clue. Nancy checked the back of Flori Cabbage's heels, took a quick picture of the torn heels of her stockings where her feet dragged along the ground, and announced that Flori had been killed elsewhere and hauled into the maze.

"Look at her heels," she said. "All scraped up and stockings shredded. Someone dragged her in here and set her on the hay bale."

"I'll call Dr. Ian Burch, PhD," I said. "I guess he was Flori Cabbage's significant other."

"Was he?" said Dave. "I never saw them together except at the store."

"Yeah?" I said. "An assumption I suppose, now that I think about it." I turned to Nancy. "You went through her pockets?"

"Uh-huh," said Nancy. "Nothing."

"She never carried a purse that I ever saw," I said.

"She wouldn't have," said Nancy. "She was one of those gluten-free, Birkenstock, granola-girls. They don't carry purses. Maybe a fanny-pack."

"Did she have a fanny-pack?" asked Dave.

"Nope," said Nancy.

"How about a cell phone?" I asked.

Nancy shook her head.

"Ian Burch told me right before the zombie-walk started that he'd gotten a text from Flori Cabbage. She would have sent that from her phone, right?"

Nancy shrugged. "Probably, but not necessarily. She could have texted from a messenger account on any computer: MSN, Yahoo Messenger, Skype, AIM, AOL. Or she could have used an iPad, a Blackberry, someone else's phone, a GPS device..."

"What?
" I said.

"I know," said Dave, putting a hand on my shoulder. "It's okay, old guy."

"Well, anyway," I said, "Ian Burch got the text message. He was supposed to meet her and he may have done so. He might have been the last person to see her alive."

"You think he killed her?" asked Nancy.

"I don't think he did, but who knows?" I said. "At the very least, we need to see that message." I pulled out my cell phone and stared at it blankly. "So let's say I want to find Ian Burch's home phone number. How do I call directory assistance on this thing?"

Nancy had punched about six buttons on her own phone and was already holding it up to her ear. "Got it," she said. "I'm dialing now."

***

If Dr. Ian Burch, PhD, was terribly broken up about Flori Cabbage's untimely death, he didn't let it show. We met him outside his shop, walked him across the street to the Beer and Brew, sat him down and ordered him an iced tea. I ordered a beer—a Bell's Cherry Stout that Billy had recommended a couple of days earlier. Dave and Nancy decided to split a pizza. The Beer and Brew was the only thing in St. Germaine that stayed open past ten, even though the one waitress on duty appeared peeved. She was probably looking forward to an early night.

The Bear and Brew had begun its life as an old feed store, and when it first opened as a pizza place, still retained much of its original architecture and decoration, including irregular pine floor boards, old wooden storage bins, and tin signs advertising fertilizer, saddle-soap, cattle feed, windmills, and almost everything else the turn-of-the-century farmer might require. A couple of years ago, the old structure had burned to the ground and had been replaced by a newer restaurant, albeit still in that Appalachian barley barn motif that was so popular in current markets. The old original signs had been replaced both with reproductions and those that could be bought locally from old-timers who weren't shy about telling the insurance company that the sign that they'd found in their tobacco barn was "almost priceless."

"Ian," I said, once we were settled at our table. "I'm glad you got rid of the garlic necklace."

"I didn't need it once the vampires had gone."

"Well, obviously," I agreed. "You still have quite an overwhelming garlic-presence, however."

Ian put his red beak into the air and sniffed, but by the look of mild consternation on his face, he either couldn't smell the residual odor hanging about his person, or didn't much care.

"Luckily, we're in a pizza parlor," said Nancy.

"Tell us about Flori Cabbage," I said.

Ian sighed deeply. "Well, I met her about a year and a half ago. I advertised in the
Democrat
for some part-time help. She was the only one who answered the ad that passed the initial screening process."

"What process was that?" I asked.

"A series of musically historical questions regarding the Burgundian school and the papacy during the Western Schism."

"Oh," I said.

"Other questions had to do with the role of the patron of medieval music, waning use of the Guidonian Hand as a compositional device, the migration of Northern-Franco musical culture, that sort of thing."

Dave and Nancy just stared.