The music lovers, p.1
The Music Lovers, page 1
THE MUSIC LOVERS
The Harry Stoner Series, #10
Jonathan Valin
TO KATHERINE, AS ALWAYS, AND THE MUSIC LOVERS EVERYWHERE
Copyright © 1993 by Jonathan Valin
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form
without permission in writing from the publisher.
First ebook edition © 2013 by AudioGO. All Rights Reserved.
Trade ISBN 978-1-62064-330-3
Library ISBN 978-0-7927-9363-2
Cover photo © Cevdet Gökhan Palas/iStock.com.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
MORE HARRY STONER EBOOKS
THE MUSIC LOVERS
1
HOW IT happened I was in the office that Friday night, when I should have been in a bar like Arnold’s eating a hot turkey sandwich and downing a cold beer, is in retrospect a piece of sobering irony: I’d stayed past my usual five-thirty closing to listen to music on the radio. WGUC was playing an opera by an obscure Polish composer named Szymanowski. I couldn’t understand a word of the libretto, but I liked the choruses. I’m a sucker for the cracked harmonies of Middle European choirs with their sudden Slavic growls and weird, hilarious wails, like wind in organ pipes or criers in a minaret.
I probably would have stayed late even if Szymanowski hadn’t caught my fancy. Business had been miserably slow all month and my lady friend, Jo Riley, was out of town for two weeks. I had nothing to do and nowhere to go. I consoled myself with the fact that it was bitterly cold outside—the heart of January, with an Alberta Clipper sailing straight down the Ohio Valley. I had a bottle of Scotch in the desk drawer and a dime novel in the corncrib—a detective story written by some woman from Nome who was as arty as . . . well, as Szymanowski. The Scotch helped. It’s amazing what Scotch will do for bad prose and Polish music.
Anyway the wind was whistling through the ranks of Szymanowski’s chorus and the Nome detective was just working her way out of a “well of dreams”—close quarters, I guess, and damp as a diaper—when I heard the office door creak. It was either the door or a Polish tenor. I looked up and saw a shadow on the glass insert. It was too late to do anything about the bottle, but I chucked the paperback in a wastebasket and took my feet off the desk just as a bent man in a nylon jacket and a knit cap stepped into the room. He was carrying a record jacket in his right hand. His left hand and forearm were wrapped in a soft cast.
He swiped the cap off his head and folded it up carefully before tucking it in his jacket pocket like a linen hankie.
“I’m always leaving these things behind,” he explained in a squeaky voice. “Hats, gloves, scarves, umbrellas. My honey, Sheila, says I’d lose my head if it weren’t screwed on.”
The man walked over to my desk.
He was one of the S-shaped people, hunched at the shoulder, caved at the chest, a little paunchy around the middle, and no ass at all. In fact his pants, chinos with a dark muddy stain on one cuff, began to slip down his legs as soon as he stepped through the door. By the time he got to the chair they were halfway off his butt. He put the record on the desk and hiked the chinos up with his good hand, tucking his lumberjack shirt in at the back.
“You have no idea what it’s like going through life with your ass hanging out,” he said as he sat down on the chair.
“It must be humbling.”
“Humbling is the word.”
He was a short man in his mid-forties, with lanky brown hair going gray at the temples and a Charlie Chaplin mustache the color of tobacco ash beneath a long, thin nose. He wore sixties-style, wire-rimmed specs with lenses so thick his watery blue eyes seemed to pop from his face.
The odd little man took in my barren office as I took him in. Although he wasn’t dilapidated enough to be homeless, he had the markings of a lost soul—one of the sixties’ remnant who never crossed the divide of the Reagan years into the kinder, gentler polity of the nineties. He’d have no money, of course, or next to none. Which meant he’d be a charity case, which meant I couldn’t afford him. Not in that kinder, gentler year.
I’d already decided to show him the gate when he said something that changed my mind.
Still staring thoughtfully into space he raised his good hand and dropped it in a downbeat timed to the music that was playing on the radio. He turned to me with a pleasant smile.
“That’s Szymanowski, isn’t it? King Roger?”
Anyone who knew that was worth hearing out.
******
The odd little man with the pop-eyes and toothbrush mustache had a musician’s name, Leon Tubin.
“Like the Estonian composer,” he said. “Do you know Tubin’s violin concerto?”
I shook my head. “I didn’t know Szymanowski either until this afternoon. You did, though.”
Leon Tubin shrugged his round shoulders. “It’s a gift I have. I can barely remember my own phone number. I’m at sea in a grocery store without a shopping list. I don’t dare park in a lot that has more than two aisles. But I can usually tell you who composed a piece of classical music after hearing a bar or two.”
“You must do a lot of listening,” I said, eyeing the record he’d carried in with him and dropped on the desk. Although I was looking at it upside-down, it appeared to be a photograph of dancing legs and a flouncy skirt.
“Classical music is my great love,” he said. “Not counting Sheila, of course. I compose music, too.”
“For a living?”
“For a living, if one can call it that, I’m a part-time instructor at NKSU. I teach introductory math—you know, calc and algebra? I also teach night school on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”
“That doesn’t leave a lot of time for composition.”
The little man sighed. “Don’t I know it. I’m a weekend musician—that’s what Strauss called Mahler. Not that I’m another Mahler. But on a good Sunday afternoon I half-believe I have something worthwhile to say.”
“What happened to your hand?” I asked.
Leon Tubin stared bitterly at the soft cast on his left arm. “That’s what I came to talk to you about. That and the record, of course.”
He pushed the album jacket across the desk.
I swiveled it around and picked it up. It was a recording of Offenbach’s Gaîté Parisienne, conducted by Arthur Fiedler. The cover did, indeed, picture dancing legs and a flouncy skirt—a chorine doing the can-can. There was no record inside the jacket.
“That is—or was before it was stolen from me—RCA number 1817,” Leon Tubin said. “One of the very first stereo recordings.”
“Was it valuable?”
“Quite valuable from a collector’s standpoint. The music itself isn’t to my taste.”
“I thought these things were being replaced,” I said, pitching the empty jacket back on the desk. “You know, CD’s and all.”
Leon Tubin started as if I’d cursed God in French.
“CD’s are shit,” he said with sudden, surprising bitterness. “Horrible, emasculated travesties of their analog originals. They are nothing more than a plot concocted by greedy record companies to gull brainless consumers into discarding their vinyl and repurchasing the very same performances in overpriced, sonically inferior forms. It makes me furious to think that a medium which has preserved some of the greatest performances of the greatest music ever written is being sacrificed wholly for gain. These things are priceless time machines.” He tapped the album with his forefinger. “What you’re listening to on an analog disc is an exact replica of a unique moment in history. When you play this record, for instance, you’re hearing music being born on a summer afternoon in 1954—the actual waves of sound created by the Boston Pops, echoing through Symphony Hall and striking the microphones’ diaphragms. It’s life itself you’re listening to. Not a series of digits.”
He leaned back in his chair, bright-eyed and invigorated by his oration. I could tell from the look on his face that he could ride this particular hobbyhorse all night and into the morning—and fully expected me to hop on behind. I was interested in stereo but not enough to engage in a trail ride with a veteran bore.
“Getting back to your arm.”
Leon Tubin allowed himself a moment’s disappointment when I didn’t saddle up.
“My arm was broken by a thief,” he said, a touch sullenly. “This man—a man whose name I know—sneaked into my home and stole thirty-five of my most valuable records.”
“Did you call the police?” I asked.
“Of course. Insufficient evidence, they said. I say if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, it’s a duck.”
“Who is this duck?”
“Sherwood Loeffler is the bastard’s name.”
“And what would you have me do with this Sherwood Loeffler?”
Leon Tubin drew himself up in the chair. “I would like to hire you to kill him .”
“Uh-huh.”
“Of course I know that isn’t possible.” But a note of hope persisted in his voice like a pedal point.
“It is not possible,” I said flatly. “At least, it’s not possible at this window.”
“Short of that, I would like you to recover my records and to prove that Sherwood Loeffler is the culprit.” He gave me a slightly withering look. “Is that possible?”
“For a fee, yes.”
“Ah, your fee.”
Leon Tubin reached into his pants pocket and pulled out one of the largest wads of paper money I’d seen this side of a Monopoly game. I actually had to look at the bills twice—to make sure they didn’t have pictures of Mr. Moneybags on them.
“You make that kind of dough teaching math, Leon?”
The little man smiled. “Hardly. In my spare time I sell records, Mr. Stoner. Vinyl, analog records.” He separated each word for emphasis. “The thirty-five that were stolen from me are worth roughly ten thousand dollars in today’s market, considerably more in New York or Tokyo.”
“Christ,” I said, “they’re like grams of cocaine.”
“Better,” Leon Tubin said. “They make music and they’re legal.”
2
OF COURSE, I took the case. I’d been living off my Visa card and Jo’s Christmas bonus since New Year’s Day. The five-hundred-dollar retainer that Leon Tubin gave me—in crisp new hundreds no less—was the most cash I’d seen in three weeks. So what if he was a little odd? I can work odd, I told myself.
Off we went to Leon Tubin’s house—my little Pinto making its way through the bright and frosty snow. I nearly slid into an embankment at the Elberon overpass. Aside from that the trip down River Road to Saylor Park was uneventful.
Along the way Leon filled me in on the used record business. Used vinyl, analog records. I heard all about RCA’s, EMI’s, London Bluebacks, Lyritas, English Deccas, and the best of the best, Mercury Living Presences. I discovered that the finest RCA Victor recordings had a dog pictured on their label—a little dog who listens to his dead master’s voice on a windup phonograph. But it wasn’t just any little dog—on the finest RCA’s the dog was “shaded.”
“Shaded, like half in light, half in shade?”
“No,” Leon said. “The shaded area surrounds the little dog like a dark backdrop.”
“What about the Mercuries? Do they have dogs on them, too?”
“No. Just the words ‘Mercury Stereo’ on top of the label, and ‘Living Presence—High Fidelity’ on the bottom along with a line drawing of Mercury in his winged hat.”
“What makes these records so special?”
Leon Tubin shut his eyes as if in silent prayer. “The sound, man. The sound.”
Leon’s house was just a block north of River Road in the old, riverside community of Saylor Park. It was a small, tidy-looking bungalow—white stucco with a pitched roof and a walled-in porch. The rest of the street was lined with the same foursquare homes—some of them still decked with Christmas lights.
We parked in Leon’s driveway, in front of a basement garage, and walked up a short flight of steps to the front door. Someone had salted the stairs to melt the snow, and the rock salt crunched like plastic popcorn underfoot. When we got to the door Leon held a hand to my chest.
“Would you mind waiting outside for a second, Harry,” he said. “I wanta make sure that Sheila is decent.”
He slid a key in the lock, opened the door, and went in. A moment or two later he came back out with a glum look on his face.
“She’s kinda in a bad mood,” he said.
“You want me to come back?”
He thought about it for a second. “No. The sooner you get going on this, the sooner that bastard will be behind bars.”
He opened the door and I stepped into Leon Tubin’s living room. There was a couch with a throw to the right, a portal leading to a dark dining room at the rear, and on the left the largest pair of stereo speakers I’d ever seen. At least I thought they were speakers—they looked like screen doors with hardwood frames and had wires the size of garden hoses running from somewhere behind them over to a bank of glowing boxes.
“They’re electrostatic,” Leon said.
“Every bit of it,” I said, looking them over. “These things make music?”
“Wonderfully. I could fire them up, if you like.”
“Maybe we should look at the records first.”
“You’ve ruined his day,” a woman called out.
I looked up and saw a fortyish blonde dressed in a man’s white dress shirt and a black leotard, standing in the dining room portal. She had a pair of half-frame glasses perched on her forehead, a cigarette in her lips, and a glass of whiskey in her right hand. She held a paperback novel in her left hand—the same damn book I’d been reading at the office. The detective story about the well of dreams.
“I’m Sheila Mozkowski,” she said, putting the book down on a cane table and holding out her hand to shake. “Leon’s moll.”
She smiled a pretty smile and shook with me, holding my hand a beat or so longer than felt right.
“Give the man his hand back, Sheila,” Leon said, forcing a smile.
“Oh, for chrissake.” She dropped my hand. “So you’re the detective?”
“That’s me.”
“Very nice,” she said, looking me up and down. “Especially since we picked you out of the phone book more or less at random. Loved the big eye in your ad.”
“It’s supposed to be a joke—you know, private eye?”
“Ha-ha,” the woman said distinctly. “You a sixties guy, Harry? You look like a sixties guy.”
I nodded. “Sixties to the bone.”
“That’s the way we are—Leon and me. Leftovers in the refrigerator of life.” She laughed, showing a set of large white teeth.
She was a brazen thing and damn good-looking. A little wrinkled by her years in the fridge, but well preserved, with eyes the color of hothouse grapes and a build like the hothouse itself. She certainly made an odd accompanist to Leon Tubin, the music lover. But the case had started in the key of odd.
“Pull up a chair and Leon’ll break out some o.z. and crank up the system. I’ve had a hard day and I feel like some music.”
She sat down on the couch and patted the cushion beside her.
“C’mon. Sit down, for chrissake. Tell me your sign and who you’ve been screwing. Oops, I almost said the F-word.” She looked up at Leon, who was staring at her with a pasty grin. “I’m sorry, honey, I know that’s just for you—like mother’s milk.”
“You’re being rude to our guest, Sheila,” Leon said, trying to keep his voice level and not succeeding.
“Who the hell asked me whether I wanted to entertain a guest?”
“You know we discussed this.”
“You discussed it,” the woman said sharply. “And I am sick to death of hearing you carry on like a child over a bunch of goddamn records you paid a buck apiece for. I mean why can’t you just forget about it. You’ll get more of them—you know it and so do I. Why do you have to make a federal case out of it, if you get my drift?”
I assumed she was talking about me—and my eye.
“It’s the principle of the thing.”
“Right. Are we going to listen to music or what?” she said directly to me.
“I think I’ll have to pass.”
Looking disgusted, Sheila Mozkowski picked up a remote control and flipped on a TV like she was flipping Leon and me off. She stared at the screen and sipped her drink as if we’d already left the room.
“C’mon, Harry,” Leon said in a tiny voice. “The records are downstairs in the basement.”
Leon led me through a dark dining room into a small white kitchen, then down a flight of stairs to the basement.
“I’m sorry about Sheila,” he said.
“Don’t worry about it.”
“She just hasn’t been the same since the records were stolen,” he said with a sigh. “Or maybe I haven’t been the same.”
“How long have you two been together?” I asked.
“Thirteen years, if you can believe it. We met in a bookstore in Anaheim where Sheila clerked and . . . just hit it off. We both liked the same things—music and books. She’s a classically trained singer, you know. Well, of course you didn’t know that. But she is. She can sing anything. Anything. And she plays the piano, too. She’s so talented. I honestly don’t know what she sees in me.”
