Troubles in the Brasses (24 page)

“Yes, Frieda,” Madoc said, “I think you’re going to be all right. Did you grind up castor beans and feed them to Wilhelm Ochs?”

“Of course I didn’t! She’s lying about my picking the beans. I wouldn’t have touched the things, and I certainly wouldn’t have had them in my kitchen. For heaven’s sake, there are all kinds of ways to get hold of plant poisons, if I wanted any. Lucy herself keeps a great big croton plant in her flat. Croton oil is horrible stuff.”

“But Wilhelm Ochs was not killed by croton oil.”

This was the first time in the session that Jacques-Marie Houdon had said a word, and he surprised everybody by speaking now. “I agree with Sir Emlyn that we must not ourselves beguile with irrelevancies. If in fact the poison that caused Wilhelm Ochs’s death has been abstracted from my garden, I demand to know who has so grievously abused my hospitality.”

He waited for an answer, got none, and shrugged. “All the same, it is logic there, what Loye has said. With her knowledge of plants, why should she have risked at a public gathering to acquire that which she could so easily have obtained in private?”

“A further question.” Now that her lover had spoken out, Madame Bellini was emboldened to add her bit. “If Madame Loye is indeed a maniac as Madame Shadd alleges, how had she not the ability to complete the strangling? In the
roman d’horreur,
always the maniac displays superhuman strength.”

“But I haven’t said Frieda was a maniac,” Lucy protested. “All I meant was that she’s—”

“Kind of a weirdo like me?” David Gabriel finished for her. “This is the biggest load of crap I’ve ever heard in my life. Flautists don’t stab people with icepicks, for God’s sake! But any man who can stand there laughing while his buddy burns up somebody else’s reeds fifteen minutes before a performance would do anything. Why in hell don’t you arrest that punk, Madoc, and get this crazy farce over with? Jason’s the guy, you know he is. He’s got to be.”

Lucy began to protest, but Gabriel cut her short. “Knock it off, Lucy. You’re only trying to make Frieda look bad because Jason’s one of your pals from the brasses. You said yourself it’s usually the likeliest person, didn’t you? So how about Cedric’s roommate, eh? Go ahead, Jason. Admit you killed him so we can get down there and meet our plane. If we have to stay here another day, we’ll all be nuts.”

“Gabriel has a point,” said Madoc. “What about it, Jasper? Are you going to confess? Or shall we do this the hard way?”

“What do you mean the hard way?” Jasper was not a happy man.

“It starts with my arresting someone and goes on from there. Lawyers, inquest, arraignment, trial, all that.”

“And the press everywhere you turn,” Sir Emlyn added with understandable rancor.

“Oh, definitely the press,” Madoc agreed. “This will be meat to them now that the Wagstaffe is already on the news.”

“Oh my God! You can’t do this. What about my family? I’ve got kids growing up, for God’s sake. My wife—Madoc, I swear to God I never killed anybody. I never meant to get mixed up with it in the first place.”

“That’s a lie, and you know it,” shrilled Frieda. “You were all for it, more than anybody else.”

“But I thought it was a joke! I never thought it was real!”

“What wasn’t real?” Madoc prodded. “Come on, Jasper, let’s step out into the woodshed so you can take a look at your pal with that icepick rammed into his neck. That may help you understand how real this is.”

“No! Oh God, I’d die if I had to look at him. You can’t make me go. It’s against the law.”

“Right now, I’m the law. Talk, Jasper. What did you get yourselves into? Some kind of tontine?”

Jason Jasper shied back like a spooked horse. His face was pale chartreuse, streaked with rivulets of sweat. He looked about the way Wilhelm Ochs had looked just before he collapsed. “How did you know?” he croaked.

“I’m a clever man, Jasper,” Madoc replied sweetly.

“I’m not.” Now that David Gabriel had discovered he could talk, he evidently intended to keep on doing so. “What’s a tontine?”

“Strictly speaking, a tontine is an annuity arrangement,” Madoc explained. “Each member of a group contributes to a common fund, then receives a yearly payment out of the earnings. As each member dies, the shares of the others are increased until finally one person obtains control of the whole amount. They haven’t always been very safe investments. Nowadays the term is sometimes used to refer to an object that’s owned in common by several people until the last one alive takes possession of it. What sort is yours, Jasper?”

The trumpeter shook his head. Either he was refusing to talk or else he was physically unable. Madoc turned to Mrs. Loye.

“Then you tell us, Frieda.”

“I—I—all right, I’ll tell. I don’t care what happens to me, I can’t stand this any longer. It started when Samson Flogger was—you know.”

“No, I don’t know. Unless Flogger would be that member of the Wagstaffe Orchestra who was caught some years ago with a trombone full of—cocaine, wasn’t it?”

“Heroin. It was ghastly. We were just going into rehearsal and all of a sudden there were police coming out of the woodwork. Samson ran into the conductor’s room and shot himself. We were all right there. We saw them carry his body out.”

“That must have been dreadful for you. But this situation now is even worse. Am I right, Frieda?”

She ran her tongue over her lips. “Could I have some water?”

“I’ll get it!” Lucy Shadd sprang up, but Madoc restrained her.

“Please stay where you are. We may need you. Mother, would you mind?”

“Of course not, dear.”

Puzzled but game, Lady Rhys went to the kitchen. The rest of them waited. Madoc could see Lucy trying to catch Frieda’s eye, and Frieda taking pains not to let her. Everyone else seemed to be holding his or her breath. He himself felt quite ridiculously relieved when his mother came back with a tumblerful of water.

“It’s tepid, I’m afraid. I had to get it out of the kettle; that pump is quite beyond me.”

“That’s all right.” Frieda gulped at the water as if it were lifesaving plasma. “You’re right about the tontine, Madoc. I didn’t want to do it, but I had to. I was there, you see.”

“We quite understand, Frieda,” said Lady Rhys. “Or rather, we don’t, but we’re prepared to. Do go on. You’ll feel much better once you’ve got it all out to air.”

“Do you honestly believe that, Lady Rhys?”

“Does that matter, Frieda? It has to be done anyway, hasn’t it? This sort of thing can’t be allowed to go on, you know. Corliss, would you mind letting me sit there?”

“Not at all,” Corliss replied in some surprise.

Lady Rhys took the seat next to Frieda and held the obviously terrified flautist’s hands for a moment in both of hers. “Now you see you’re quite safe, Frieda. I shan’t let anything dreadful happen to you. Trust me.”

“Yes, Lady Rhys.” Frieda Loye was like a child at the dentist’s, not really believing it wasn’t going to hurt, but knowing she wasn’t going to get out of the ordeal. She straightened her thin shoulders, wiped her eyes and nose with the tissue Lady Rhys handed her, and began.

“You see, Samson and I had been—well, we’d been living together. What they call nowadays a relationship. At least that’s what it started out as. Or so I thought at the time. Am I making any sense?”

“You’re doing just fine, Frieda. Please go on.”

“The reason I was afraid to marry him was that Samson gambled. I don’t mean a few dollars playing poker with the fellows, I mean real gambling. He’d go to a casino and drop ten thousand dollars at roulette in one night. Or else he’d win a few thousand and come back all excited, and then go back the next night and blow it all. He had this mania about big money, he wanted to be filthy rich. I never could figure out why. He was really a good trombonist, he had a safe gig with the Wagstaffe. He was making a good living, or would have been if he’d been able to hang on to his salary, but that wasn’t enough. It drove me crazy, seeing him always in hot water, having bookies calling to threaten him for not paying the debts he ran up. I knew he wasn’t going to change, but I—well, I suppose I loved him. I’ve never had much luck with men.” She dabbed at her eyes again.

“I’m so sorry, Frieda.” Lady Rhys handed her a fresh tissue. “Please go on. Then Mr. Flogger began to—”

Madoc glared at his mother, but it was all right. Frieda didn’t need any prompting.

“So anyway, Samson began having this big winning streak, or so he claimed. He’d come home with a wad of money and stuff it into this fake mute he had in his instrument case. I never knew how much he had in there; he kept the case locked. Anyway, I suppose most of it went right out again to the bookies and the croupiers. But he bought me this”—a handsome star sapphire set in platinum that she’d been wearing on her third finger left hand ever since Madoc first noticed her at the concert—“and a diamond bracelet I never wear, and a few other pieces of expensive jewelry I needed like a hole in the head.”

She mopped her eyes again. “I keep them in a safe deposit box; I don’t know what else to do with them. Samson bought things for the apartment, too, and he was talking about a boat and a Ferrari and—oh, I don’t know. He was just throwing money right and left.”

“And he kept on gambling?” said Madoc.

“I suppose so. Mostly on horses, I expect. He used to say there wasn’t always a casino handy, but one could always find a bookie. He was doing a lot of traveling that summer, he had a temporary gig with a brass ensemble. They spent a lot of time in Central and South America. Apparently the Latinos are crazy about brasses.”

“So now you assume that he was smuggling drugs back in his trombone all the time his alleged winning streak was going on?”

“He must have been. I don’t know whether you’re aware of it, but most professional musicians have more than one instrument. We usually play our best ones when the orchestra’s at home, and take our next-best on tour. We’re always concerned that an instrument might get lost or stolen, or damaged in one way or another. It’s not all that unusual for a musician to carry a spare, for that matter. And that’s what Samson did. Remember, Lucy?”

“Not offhand, no. Does it matter?”

“Yes, of course it matters. Samson had to have an instrument he could play on, didn’t he? And a mute that wasn’t crammed full of thousand-dollar bills. I didn’t know that was why he was taking the extra trombone; it seemed a reasonable enough thing for him to do. South America’s a long way from Wagstaffe, and I just assumed Samson was afraid he wouldn’t be able to get hold of another instrument that suited him if anything happened to the one he was using. Doesn’t that make sense to you, Lady Rhys?”

“Perfect sense, Frieda. Sir Emlyn always carries a spare baton. But you finally did find out why Mr. Flogger needed the extra?”

“Oh yes, I found out. The hard way. That day—the day it happened—he’d just got back from what was going to be the ensemble’s last South American tour. There was some mixup about the planes; they’d had to change I don’t know how many times and go through customs and all that. Anyway, we had our first rehearsal for the fall season and they’d promised faithfully to be back in time for it. They’d already missed a couple on account of that brass ensemble gig, and Maestro Pettipas was getting pretty hot under the collar about it.”

“Why do you say they, Frieda?” Madoc asked. “Who else was with Flogger?”

“Oh, didn’t I mention that? It was Wilhelm Ochs.”

“Thank you. And was any other member of the Wagstaffe in the ensemble?”

“No, just the two of them. They were only filling in, you know. A couple of the regular players had been hurt in an automobile accident or something. I forget. Anyway, the ensemble needed a horn and a trombone so they hired Wilhelm and Samson to fill in. Samson jumped at the offer because it was a chance to get away from the bookies who were after him. Of course the regulars didn’t know that, and I don’t suppose they’d have cared one way or the other. It was strictly business with them, Samson said, they weren’t a bit friendly. Not that it mattered. He and Wilhelm had each other for company.”

“Was Ochs also a gambler?” Madoc asked her.

“Heavens, no. Wilhelm had only two interests in life. One was playing and the other was eating.”

“Have you any reason to suppose he could have been involved in your friend’s drug-smuggling activities?”

“I’m sure he wasn’t, or the police would have nabbed him, too. They’d had their eyes on Samson for some time, I believe, because of the way he’d been throwing money around. Wilhelm wouldn’t have gone for anything risky, he preferred life to be slow and easy. I expect he only signed on for those South American appearances because he was curious to find out what the food was like down there. But I do think he had at least a hunch about what Samson was up to.”

“Why do you say that?”

“It’s just a feeling.”

“The hell it is,” Jasper growled. “Wilhelm knew perfectly well where Sam was stashing the loot. Frieda knows that as well as I do.”

“What makes you so sure?” Madoc was pretty sure himself by now.

“Look, Inspector, Wilhelm and Cedric were real buddies, not like Cedric and me. Whatever Wilhelm knew, you can bet your bottom dollar Cedric knew, too. And as soon as the police put the arm on Sam, Cedric switched the mutes.”

“Do you mean he took the mute with the money in it and exchanged it with the mute from Flogger’s other instrument case?”

“Hell, no. Cedric was too smart for that. He swapped it for his own mute.”

“How did he manage that?”

“Easily enough. You see, we were all set to rehearse when the cops blew in. Cedric had his instrument out of the case and the mute stuck in the bell; that’s how we usually go onstage. We can’t very well take our instrument cases with us because they’d make the floor look messy and people would be tripping over them, so we have to carry whatever we’re going to need during the performance. Sam had already opened one of his cases to get his instrument out, and they made him open the other one, too. Naturally we all started crowding around to see what was up.”

“Excuse me,” said Madoc. “Where were these cases? On the floor?”

“No, on a long table backstage. The cops started yelling at us to get back. That caused a little confusion, which was all Cedric needed. Then Sam broke away and ran into the conductor’s room—that was a bad scene. A couple of the cops stayed to guard the cases, but it was all over by then. They never knew the mutes had been touched, but I knew Cedric. He was a real whiz at sleight-of-hand, in case you didn’t know.”