Killer on the Keys

by Michael Avallone

  Far too easy. Incidentally, the Chief had squeaked in again. Not by the landslide predicted by the experts, but he'd won it going away.

  Maybe the Connecticut fieldstone retreat was a myth after all, but the doorman of the building had seen Maestro Gregory climb into his blue little Volkswagen, weighed down with violin case and one grey Jad suitcase and drive off in a cloud of gloom and fear. The doorman was a beet-faced, heavy-shouldered old Irishman named Farley who had liked Gregory very much and was kind of upset that the favorite tenant on his own job had looked so terrible. When Gregory never returned, it was Farley's grim deduction that he'd "—never saw him that off his feed, Mr. Noon. I know he's had a bad time—those piano players croaking on him—but geez, ain't his fault, is it? Hope he comes back. He's a real good egg. No high-hat from him, what with all his rep and dough."

  Further questions and a Thank-You five dollar bill produced the address of the garage two blocks away where Gregory had housed the Volks. At the station, which was a combination fill-her-up, complete with parking lot with monthly rates, a freckled kid with long hair who had gassed the Volks on the morning of the drive-off told me he had talked with the Maestro when he came to pick up the car. When I asked him if Gregory had said anything unusual and wondered how he had looked, the kid, whose name was Jeremy, pulled at his earlobe and frowned. "Yeah. Funny thing too. Old Gregory, he was really down in the dumps. Looking like Death warmed over and I knew about his trouble, you know, the papers and all. But I left him alone. Then when he got into the car and was about to pull out, he suddenly threw me a curve. You know what I mean?"

  "What kind of a curve, Jeremy?"

  "Screwiest thing. Asked me where I came from."

  "Came from?"

  "Yeah. Home town. Like I was a refugee or something. Tie that, will you?"

  "I really can't. And you told him?"

  "Pittsburgh. No secret around here. The guys are always kidding me about how the Pirates started winning as soon as I left the place four years ago." Jeremy's good-natured grin had as much to do with me leaving him a Lincoln bill as his valuable information did.

  So Pittsburgh it was. And not for Baseball. The season was over.

  With a man like Gregory, desperate, nowhere to turn, not wanting to go back to familiar haunts where his friends or business acquaintances could find him—it was just like a man like that to pick a place to go—literally out of a hat. Or out of the mouth of his friendly neighborhood gas station attendant. Jeremy's account proved to be a goldmine.

  I found Tadeusz Anton Gregory in Pittsburgh.

  After a full day of checking all the hotels, rooming houses and the local YMCA and Men's Clubs. He hadn't checked into any of them, not under his own name, at least. But at one good stab at the brass ring, I rolled that lucky seven. A natural, all the way. The break came while I was wandering around the downtown section of the Smoky City, with its factory skyline and making some plans for the evening myself, when I heard the sound of Gregory playing the violin. I almost became a believer in Madame Alarma on the spot. Talk about million-to-one shots paying off. True, I had tracked the man to town, narrowed down the search, but to have him come at me in the neon haze of the night like that, was downright eerie. For a long second, I had to shake my head, trying to think coherently.

  But there was no mistake. No magic, other than the playing itself.

  It was him, all right.

  It had to be.

  The instrument spoke volumes for him. A whole goddamn library.

  Nobody else on this earth ever played like that before.

  And maybe never will. Except in some Valhalla of Genius.

  Tracing the pure liquid sounds filtering through the metropolitan night, brought me to a low-class Italian restaurant. It was pushed back from the street, buried between a cleaning establishment and a real estate office, both of which were closed. It was that small of a place, with a stoop going down one flight, bordered by iron rails and a chicken-wire grilling. I hardly looked at the neon sign over the front window; the music had mesmerized me, the lucky break had almost bowled over all logic. Finding a missing man like that is purely miraculous, but it does happen sometimes. Life is always fooling you.

  The violin's magical voice drew me downward and inward, through a curtained door, like a magnet. Past old-style wood booths, garish wall designs of Venetian fountains and piazzas and an army of red candles flickering in a dim, speak-easy replica of a restaurant. You couldn't see the patrons for the candles and aromas of garlic, wine and steaming pasta dishes filled the atmosphere. You'd expect to find Capone's ghost in such a place. Or an accordionist, strumming Santa Lucia.

  I dropped into the nearest empty booth, without taking off my hat or my coat. I saw him, then. Gregory. No one paid any attention to me. How could they? When the Maestro played, the outside world stopped.

  He was gliding about the irregular arc of what passed for a stage, as small as the joint was. Slowly, with measured movements, his head inclined to the gleaming Stradivarius. His own Strad, which could have purchased a thousand joints like this one. Talk about irony.

  There was a change in him. I could see that too, in the flame of the red candles. The kind of change that scared people.

  Would have scared people that had known him, that is.

  His eyes were dead ashes. His black hair was peppered with gray, unbelievably. Even his old hawk nose seemed to droop. His mouth was a bitter almond. His dress suit looked rented. Only the violin in his deft fingers was the old Gregory. That would never change, obviously. Some things never do. But his appearance—he looked ten years older and somehow a pale shadow of his former self.

  As he performed, drifting across the glow of candlelight, for a half-filled cafe, his notes were still perfect. Gently, slowly, he wended his way through the booths until he drew his piece to a close. A magnificent one along the lines of the windup of the 1812 Overture. But he hadn't been playing Tchaikowsky; he'd been rendering Mozart.

  Scattered applause greeted the finale and he bowed. Almost lifelessly. While he straightened out of his bow, his eyes caught mine. He blinked, his mouth worked, no words came and then in an impulsive surge, he rushed toward me, his dead eyes sparkling, as if we both hadn't lost three weeks of an incredible affair that still didn't make much sense.

  "Edward, old friend! This is a marvel!"

  His handshake wasn't as firm as I wanted it to be but you can't have everything. Some things have to change, anyway. He wasn't the same man, any way you looked at him. He might never be again.

  "Well, Maestro. We meet again. And what the hell are you doing in this dump? Paying off an election bet?"

  "What would you, Edward? I have no regrets for the past. That is all done and gone. It is comfortable this way."

  "Can we sit down and talk? It's important."

  "Later, perhaps. I have a few more encores." His smile was sad. "Even in an establishment such as this poor place, there are rules."

  "Gregory, this is ridiculous." I pulled him to one side, toward my table. "You've got absolutely no business selling a talent like yours for a plate of spaghetti. You belong with real music. Where it starts and ends. In the concert halls."

  His shrug was a blend of world-weariness and abject defeat.

  "None want me back, Edward. I am the jinx, the bad penny. The bete noire of accompanists, eh? You are a very good friend and you are kind but—it is true, all the same. I can never revisit the scene of my triumphs. I am the fool. Sick to the heart—and to the soul."

  I shooed away a tall, dark-suited man approaching with a menu card tucked over his arm. Gregory was making it harder than I liked. The flat resignation in his low voice, the boom all gone, spelled out Quitter. Q-U-I-T-T-E-R. That's hard to take from pure talents.

  "You can lick this, I tell you. All you have to do is pick up a phone, call Rodor Fife, Hendricks, anybody at all—people forget. All they'll remember is how a Strad sounds when you play it. In a few weeks, maybe two months, you'll be as
big as you ever were. Bigger. Gregory the Finest. The Great Gregory. The First Violin."

  "Edward—you are more than generous. But I am sorry." He plucked my hand from his arm as if it were but another violin string. "It can never be as it was. I too wish the past. But look about you. These are the only people and the only places that will have me now. They know nothing of good music—they just want some sound while they eat their daily bread and conduct their untidy little lives. Their intrigues, the shady business ventures. . . ."

  "No, Maestro. Your story won't wash. There are too many flat notes in it. You talk and all I hear are clinkers. Come on, Gregory. There's something you're not telling me. Something I don't know. You can't tell me you can really blame yourself for those boys dying. You didn't give Valentin a bum ticker and you certainly aren't responsible for Gerard not being able to read a medicine bottle."

  "Edward—"

  Something fleeting, weird and indescribable flitted over his face. The dark eyes smouldered, but only for a second. He shrugged.

  "That's it?" I growled. "That's all you're going to say?"

  "There is nothing else to say. There is nothing left—for me. I've told you. Leave me alone. It is better this way, old friend."

  "Then it has to be something about this Madame Alarma." I was keeping after him, leaving him no room to dodge or duck, completely uncaring about our surroundings or the patrons possibly gawking at us. "What else did she tell you that you didn't tell me? Come on. I am your friend but I'm also a detective. I could be a big help if you'll only trust me and give me all of it."

  He tried to straighten up in the worn dark jacket, his angular shoulders squaring. There was a faint return of the old bombast, the sheer bravado that had so characterized every onstage performance of the Great Gregory. Even his chuckling rejoinder had some familiar bite and braggadoccio. But then the mirth died as soon as it had begun and the attempt at humor was a bitter reminder of what had once been.

  "No, no, Edward. You are looking for mysteries where there are none. You seek more clients when in fact, you have all the business you need. Forget me. I will survive. Even in these four walls—"

  "Knock it off," I snapped. "Nothing justifies your playing in this dive and you know it. Is the manager an old friend of yours glad to get a bargain or is he tone-deaf, too?"

  "I am afraid," he whispered, not answering my question, his eyes rolling. The Strad twitched in his hands, for he held it at high port, like a rifle. "I can never play with an accompanist again, you see. I have such dreams—dreams of true horror. Valentin's poor face and that other boy with the bad eyes . . . no, no! I cannot. You must understand. I am happy here. Believe that, Edward. I speak the truth."

  "Tell it to Sweeney, Maestro. I won't buy that. And even if I did believe it—why don't you solo again for God's sakes? You don't need a back-up piano. Not really. Make your own music—"

  "That in itself is the real failure, Edward. Don't you see?"

  I didn't and started to argue some more, but he had retreated from me with abrupt speed. Backing off, turning, the violin in place under his chin again, the skilled fingers moving. All at once, he was briskly interpreting some Polovetsian Dances, racing through Prince Igor's Wedding with all its fire and ice. Borodin really revisited.

  It was as if some hidden control switch had activated him. He fairly shot the melodies out, whirling around that crummy little restaurant cafe like a puppet dancing on a string. The patrons didn't seem to know the genius they were getting a la carte. All of the Russian spirit of jubilation, conquest and suffering are wrapped up in that particular selection and Gregory was beating it to a fare-theewell.

  I don't know why I did what I did next

  To this day I don't.

  Something pushed me, propelled me from my table. I was on my feet all of a sudden, crossing the floor toward a gloomy corner where an old upright piano, stool and all, loomed in the roseate glare of the red candle flame. A piano at which no one was sitting.

  Gregory's back was to me.

  Somebody in the cafe tittered as I sat down. The din of the string music drowned out the sound. Gregory didn't hear the titter. I was closer to the offender though I only had eyes for the Maestro. And hands.

  Even as I raised my fingers, tense and stiff, I wondered if the Karate lessons that Georges Valentin had paid me for with some piano instruction, wouldn't make my performance an utter travesty. I don't know what my reasons were for sitting at that piano at that time but maybe I was trying to prove to Gregory that he could play with an accompanist who would live a long, healthy life, no matter what a palm reader had told him. I still intended to reach a hundred, with some breaks.

  Like I said, I'm not superstitious either. Not really.

  Softly, taking great care to hit the right keys, I eased into a meek offering of Moonlight Sonata. It wouldn't make too awful a counterpoint for Prince Igor. My eyes were still on Gregory as I stepped very lightly across the keyboard. The piano got louder as I probed a little and I watched his back, waiting for a reaction. Hoping for one.

  I got one.

  More than I bargained for, by any yardstick of expectation.

  As the tinkling notes reached him, I saw him stiffen in the rented tuxedo, saw his fingertips strain on the strings. And so very suddenly, that I struck the wrong note; he whirled. His eyes were two mad sparks. And I couldn't go on. I crashed to a full stop. The keyboard echoed with a clump of discordant melody. Gregory was glaring across the candlelit room at me, coming forward in a lurching, drunken roll of motion. His face was chalk-white again. He was goggling at me as he came. There were veins popping out on his smooth forehead. The Strad was dangling from his limp hand. A great hush had fallen over the room.

  His voice rose in a garble of tangled thoughts and memories.

  "Valentin! Why have you stopped playing? Play, I say! Play! Continue the piece or be damned! It's your eyes, you idiot! Your confoundedly sightless stupid eyes—idiot! Can't you tell iodine from cough syrup? Play, damn you—before your heart gives out—"

  I was motionless where I sat. Still Life in Perpetuity.

  So was everyone else.

  This was worse than what had happened at Carnegie Hall. Far worse.

  I'd started it all and I didn't know how to end it. Gregory did it for me. He hurtled on in my direction, bulleting for my piano, and then suddenly, his face flushed crimson and he went down. All in a rush. Like a toy balloon deflating, sprawling in a grisly tangle on the center of the floor. A female diner let out a scream that had High C written all over it. And men bellowed, shouted and chairs scraped and thudded.

  When I reached Gregory, he was this side of insanity. Stoned right out of his brain. His face wore a tight, almost fiendish smile that revealed every tooth he owned. And even his graceful fingers, the ones that made violins speak, were arched and clawing like talons.

  But his eyes most of all told the story.

  They were glassy, remote, seeing things that Gregory had never seen before. And his opened mouth, so coiled and breathless, was babbling a string of incoherent gibberish that sounded like another language.

  The people who give names for such things called it a mental breakdown, brought on by extreme shock to the central nervous system. They didn't add fear, terror, superstition and Old World despair which had been building steadily and relentlessly, like a mad house of jumbled blocks, since the night he had been trapped into having his palm read at Lady Eliza Forsgate Dunley's by a seeress named Madame Alarma. A bad luck dollie all the way.

  And I was in Pittsburgh with an insane musical great known as Tadeusz Anton Gregory, isolated and lost in a gaudy little Italian cafe, with none of the right answers and all of the wrong questions. Each of them a million dollar challenge.

  I was stuck with all of the troubles, too.

  Gregory should have laughed when I sat down to play the piano. Howled his head off at the dumb gall of an amateur.

  He didn't.

  He went crazy, instead.<
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  On another cold, dark evening in late November, when the whole idiotic world was crying and the Devil must have been laughing. Laughing to beat the band.

  Or Rodor Fife's full orchestra with dress suits.

  It got to me, too.

  It had to.

  I saw Georges Valentin flopped lifelessly at the keyboard in Carnegie Hall, his awful face empurpled and livid.

  I saw Algernon Gerard holding onto his stomach while his insides churned with poison, dying on a bed in Kips Bay Plaza.

  I remembered the haunted, terrified glaze in Gregory's two eyes. The tragic almost horrible cupidity of the man.

  I remembered what he had told me about Madame Alarma.

  And his nightmare. Especially his nightmare.

  That pip of a grotesque, mind-bending trip. The Far-Out Flight.

  The Nightmare For Violins.

  I could have gone crazy myself, just thinking about everything, wondering how it was all going to come out.

  The night was dark enough.

  Dark enough to go nuts by.

  ACT TWO

  (Another apartment somewhere in Manhattan. Evening again but this time the room is one of incredible wealth and spellbinding glamour. Tall silk drapes, wine red shag rug, chairs and lounges of impeccable taste. A Capehart console, as polished as ivory in one corner, an immense crystal chandelier dangling Stage Center. Directly below this stands the most beautiful woman in the world. This is not so, of course, but the woman, arrayed in backless, strapless jet-black gown, exquisitely molded to her tall, superb figure makes one think so. She is facing the audience, a Sphinx smile on her flawless face as a man enters from Stage Right. A man in a pork-pie hat, Italian silk suit, with a worried expression on his rather handsome face. The man does not take his hat off.)