Bantam of the Opera

by Mary Daheim

  MARY DAHEIM

  Bantam of the Opera

  A BED-AND-BREAKFAST MYSTERY

  CONTENTS

  ONE

  JUDITH GROVER MCMONIGLE Flynn peered up at the clear blue…

  TWO

  “LISTEN, YOU LAMEBRAINED knothead, I’m not paying for Deb’s damned…

  THREE

  “NOW WAIT A minute,” said Judith, taking the silken garment…

  FOUR

  JOE FLYNN HAD slipped into his role as policeman. He…

  FIVE

  RENIE TALKED JUDITH into stopping for an early lunch at…

  SIX

  IN THE BRIEF time it took Judith to open the…

  SEVEN

  TIPPY DE CARO scoffed at Winston Plunkett’s announcement. She had…

  EIGHT

  THE EXPLOSION OVER the phone line had practically deafened Judith.

  NINE

  ONE HOUR AND ninety-five dollars later, Judith was home from…

  TEN

  FOR THE NEXT four hours, while waiting for Woody Price…

  ELEVEN

  “PHILISTINES,” MUTTERED RENIE, whose only consolation for being up so…

  TWELVE

  WOODY WAS OUT to lunch when Judith called. Renie had…

  THIRTEEN

  RENIE SAT DOWN on the hundred-year-old wedding ring quilt that…

  FOURTEEN

  WOODY PRICE HAD some news of his own. Justin Kerr…

  FIFTEEN

  “HE’S GREAT,” RENIE declared over the phone through a mouthful…

  SIXTEEN

  CORAZON PEREZ HAD left a message, so Judith called her…

  SEVENTEEN

  JUDITH DIDN’T EXPECT to reach Woody Price, but she definitely…

  EIGHTEEN

  JUDITH’S FEELING OF triumph wasn’t diminished one whit by the…

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  OTHER BOOKS BY MARY DAHEIM

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  ONE

  JUDITH GROVER MCMONIGLE Flynn peered up at the clear blue October sky through the charred ruins of her toolshed. Glancing at the cluttered shelf behind her, Judith grimaced at the boot box that contained the ashes of her first husband, Dan McMonigle. Through what was left of the window, she observed her second husband, Joe Flynn, sitting in a lawn chair, presumably thinking about raking leaves.

  “Joe,” she called, coming out of the toolshed, “I can’t stand it any more. We’ve got to get rid of Dan and put Mother here instead.”

  Joe turned his round face toward Judith. “But she’s still alive,” he said, not without a trace of regret. “Shouldn’t you wait until…”

  “I mean,” interrupted Judith with a shake of her silvered dark curls, “redo the toolshed, expand it, turn it into an apartment for Mother. The situation with her and Aunt Deb living together just isn’t working out. I can’t stand any more of Mother’s bitching and Cousin Renie is driving me nuts with her complaints about their complaints.” Judith plopped her statuesque form into the matching lawn chair. “When Mother said she wouldn’t live under the same roof with you, she meant it. But I don’t think she ever dreamed she’d be the one to live somewhere else. In a way, it’s not fair. This was her home. If we turned the toolshed into an apartment for her, at least she’d be on her own turf.”

  “Turf,” mused Joe, sipping at the mug of coffee that had been resting on a small wooden table between the two chairs. “How fitting. Your mother with a poleax. Your mother defending the goal line. Your mother spraying me with mustard gas. How did I know it would always come to this?” The round face with the magic green eyes grew vaguely morose.

  “Knock it off, Joe,” said Judith. “Don’t be so damned Irish. At least we got rid of Mike and Kristin,” she pointed out, referring to her son and his girlfriend. Both were forestry majors at the state university, a convenient three hundred miles across the mountains. But through an error in job assignments, they had ended up not in Montana as planned, but working at the local city zoo. Naturally, they had settled in at Hillside Manor for the summer, disrupting Judith and Joe’s hopes of newlywed privacy. Not, Judith reflected with a wince, that there was ever a great deal of privacy in a home that was also a bed-and-breakfast establishment. Still, after their late-June wedding, Joe and Judith had hoped to have the third-floor family quarters to themselves. Instead, Mike had taken over his old room and, at Joe’s somewhat old-fashioned insistence, Kristin had been ensconced in Gertrude’s former hideaway. The guests, as usual, used the bedrooms on the second floor, and hardly a night had passed right up through Labor Day without the B&B being full.

  Joe was now staring at the toolshed, still looking gloomy. “It’d cost a bundle,” he pointed out. “Plumbing, rewiring, kitchen facilities. It’d take months to get permits from the city. In fact, I suspect you’d have to start with a new foundation…”

  “Joe…” Judith spoke in a soft, cajoling voice. “You work for the city. You’re a big shot homicide detective. Don’t you think you could get somebody downtown to wink a bit at our plans?”

  “Wink?” Joe gazed at Judith, the gold flecks in the green eyes glittering. “They’ll blink. Hey, Jude-girl, I’m an honest cop, remember? Do you really think I’d try to pull the wool over the building permit guys’ eyes?”

  Judith’s strong features set; her chin jutted. “Of course you would. Besides, I doubt we’d have a problem. I had this whole house redone when I converted it four years ago.” She made an over-the-shoulder gesture in the direction of the blue-and-gray Edwardian saltbox that was, along with Mike, her pride and joy. Hillside Manor nestled in the shade of russet-leafed maples and two tall evergreens, high above the heart of the city, overlooking the bay, offering ease in the cul-de-sac of a stately residential neighborhood. “I didn’t have that many problems. If you don’t change the original exterior too much, the city doesn’t make a fuss. The fireworks those kids set off didn’t do any structural damage, except to the roof,” Judith went on, referring to the Fourth of July accident perpetrated by their paperboy, Dooley, and some of his buddies. “And Mother wouldn’t need a kitchen, just a bathroom and a bed-sitting room. It wouldn’t take up much more space than the toolshed does right now.”

  “What about a place to park her broom?” Joe was still looking unhappy.

  “Joe!” Judith was beginning to lose patience, an uncharacteristic occurrence, especially with the man she had waited twenty-five years to marry. “Look, we knew this wasn’t going to be easy. We even talked about buying a condo and running the B&B from there. But that wasn’t practical. Then we conned Mother into moving in with Aunt Deb, which was a great plan on paper but a terrible idea in reality. Mother and Aunt Deb get along only if there’s two thousand feet of phone cord between them. The bottom line is that it isn’t fair. My mother has lived in this house since she was a bride in 1936. She and my father came to stay with my grandparents to get on their feet during the Depression. They never left. Until now.”

  “Your father left. Quietly,” said Joe, brushing at his faintly receding red hair.

  “I know. He died,” said Judith between gritted teeth. “And quit looking like that.”

  Joe’s expression had changed from glum to hopeful. But he had the grace to give Judith a sheepish grin. “Hey, you and Renie sort it out. It’s your mothers we’re talking about. If Renie agrees they’re better off on separate ground, we’ll find your mother an apartment of her own. Close. You know, like Patagonia.”

  Judith might have been married to Joe for only four months, but she’d known him off and on for over a quarter of a century. She realized when it was time to hold and when to fold. “I’ll talk to Renie. Again,” she added on a resigned note. “Meanwhile, you give
it some thought while you’re in New Orleans at that sociopath conference with Bill.”

  “Hmmm,” murmured Joe, warily eyeing the rake that leaned against the maple tree. In a week’s time he and Bill Jones, Renie’s psychologist husband, would be off to New Orleans to attend a conference called “It Starts with Hamsters,” regarding the sociopathic personality, social and criminal. Bill had thought that a homicide detective would benefit as much from such a gathering as would any psychologist, psychiatrist, or sociologist, and had invited Joe to join him. To Joe’s amazement, the department had agreed to pay his way as part of personal development. Bill and Joe were due to leave the following Saturday. While they were gone, Judith figured she’d ask her aging but expert Swedish carpenter to give her a bid on remodeling the toolshed. An apartment, even one somewhat closer than Patagonia, wouldn’t solve the problem.

  Getting up from the lawn chair, Judith started for the back porch. “That rake’s not making much progress,” she noted.

  “It’s broken,” replied Joe, who had moved the little table and put his feet up. “I think I’ll get one of those blower things. Or is it a vacuum?” He settled his hands over his budding paunch.

  Judith’s black eyes fixed on the rake, which looked perfectly usable to her. “You’re in a vacuum, Flynn. No wonder your own house looked like rubble.”

  Joe had closed his eyes. “That was because Herself had such a big bottle collection. All of which she emptied first. Fast. First and fast-most. That was Herself…” His mellow voice drifted off on the crisp autumn air.

  If Joe found Judith’s mother a sore point, Judith thought of Herself, Joe’s first wife, as an open wound. Over twenty years earlier, Judith and Joe had been engaged, with a late March wedding planned. But on a cold night in January, after seeing one too many overdosed teenagers in body bags, Joe had decided to drink to forget. Among the things he’d forgotten that frosty night was that he was engaged to Judith. In the morning he awoke in a Las Vegas hotel room with an expensive Herself at his side and a cheap wedding ring on his finger. It had proved a costly mistake for everyone concerned.

  Joe hadn’t given up liquor, but eventually he had given up on Herself. Unlike Joe, his first wife hadn’t been merely a social drinker, unless you counted downing fifths of bourbon alone in the bathtub. Or, when she was feeling particularly cunning, filling up the garden hose in the garage and slurping out of the nozzle. After one daughter and two decades, Joe ran up the white flag, leaving Herself to a condo on the Gulf in Florida, where she could have as many cocktail parties with cockroaches as she damned well pleased. Or so Joe had put it when he filed for divorce. Judith, reflecting on the rocky road to romance that had led her back to Joe, smiled thinly. Maybe Herself wasn’t a raw wound any more; maybe she was just a large scar. Poor woman.

  In the kitchen, Judith searched the refrigerator for ingredients. No longer did she have to keep an eye out for green baloney, brown tapioca, or blue ham. Gertrude and Aunt Deb had at least one perversion in common: Neither ever threw anything away, no matter how rotten, how stale, or how disgusting. At present, the only nonedible item in the fridge was a plastic bag containing lily-of-the-valley pips, which Judith was saving for Mrs. Dooley to plant at the proper time in December. Pushing them to one side, Judith remembered the six dozen tulip, daffodil, and hyacinth bulbs she’d bought the previous week at Nottingham Floral. They should be put out in the next week or so. Housework was a chore for Judith, but gardening was a joy. She looked upon it as therapy.

  Deftly, Judith tossed the makings for salmon mousse into the blender. Onions. Garlic. Cream cheese. A can of sockeye. Guests at Hillside Manor were entitled not only to a full breakfast, but hors d’oeuvres and sherry circa 6:00 P.M. All four sets of couples were holdovers from Friday night, one from Portland, one from Denver, and two from in-state, spending the weekend in the city for shopping, shows, and sight-seeing. A perfect time of year for a vacation, Judith thought to herself as she glanced through the kitchen window at the bright red pyracantha berries and the lacy red Japanese maple. Next door, the Rankers’s Tree of Heaven swayed in graceful russet splendor. A scattering of red, yellow, orange, and purple dahlias turned bright faces between the two houses, friendly guardians of the property line. Arlene Rankers was on her back steps, throwing dried bread to the birds. Her husband, Carl, was rolling their gas mower out of the garage, hopefully, Judith figured, for the last time this year. Arlene gazed at her mate, a slight smile on her lips. Carl bent over the mower.

  “It’s broken,” he called. Judith saw Arlene frown, then watched Carl head back to the garage. A moment later he emerged, said something Judith couldn’t make out through the closed window, and disappeared into the laurel hedge.

  Over the whirr of the blender, Judith heard the phone ring. It was Cousin Renie, and Judith girded herself for yet another diatribe about their mothers.

  But Renie was off on a different tangent. “Hey, coz, I just realized that Bill won’t be here for the opera next weekend. Want to go with me? It’s Traviata, with that tenor who’s staying with you.”

  Momentarily, Judith closed her eyes. She dreaded the coming of Mario Pacetti, world-renowned singing pain-in-the-ass. She had agreed to his stay at Hillside Manor only because the local opera company had offered to triple her usual fee for the two weeks that Pacetti and Company would be residing at the B&B. His reason for seeking alternative lodging was simple. The great tenor despised hotels and wished to avoid hordes of fans in the lobby. Ordinarily, he was able to move in with friends, of which he had a plethora in most other opera capitals of the world, but in Judith’s hometown, Pacetti appeared to be chumless. Indeed, Renie, who had done some graphic design work for the local symphony, reported that the conductor, Maestro Dunkowitz, had hosted the tenor on his previous visit six years earlier and had taken a sacred oath on his baton never to let Pacetti waddle across his threshold again.

  “Well,” said Judith at last, “since he’s staying here, I suppose I should go hear him sing. Sure, I’ll take Bill’s place. After all, Bill is taking mine. I always did want to see New Orleans.”

  “Me, too,” said Renie, sounding a bit sulky. “I would have gone if I didn’t have a deadline on this Henderson Cancer Center brochure. They’re breaking ground next week on the new facility.”

  “Someday,” said Judith, “maybe we can go for Mardi Gras. Just think, we could take our mothers and dress them up like gargoyles.”

  “Yeah, think of the money we could save on costumes. Say, when are Pacetti and crew arriving? I wouldn’t mind sort of hanging around, you know, getting a preview.”

  Judith consulted the big calendar that hung by the phone, though in fact the date was inscribed on her heart, not unlike Gilda’s “Caro nome” in Rigoletto. “Thursday. I gather somebody like Pacetti doesn’t need to rehearse much. How the heck did we get him to sing here in the first place? Most of the people the local opera hires are either on their way up or going in the other direction.”

  “A lot of them aren’t going anywhere,” said Renie with some asperity. “Honestly, I get so sick of paying forty or fifty bucks a ticket every season and watching those bozos do Lucia in modern dress, with a set made out of Astroturf, or Lohengrin in L.A., where the hero shows up on the Number 46 bus to Burbank…Well, don’t get me started…”

  “Right, right,” said Judith hastily, aware that once her cousin got launched on a favorite topic of derision, there was no stopping her. “Pacetti, you were saying why he came…”

  “Oh, yeah…well, he sang here about six years ago—he’d signed up before he went global—but it was as Pinkerton in Butterfly, not exactly a tenor’s most sympathetic role. The Cio-cio-san was wonderful, actually a Japanese soprano, and she stole the show, which is saying something considering how terrific Pacetti was even then. I heard from Maestro Dunkowitz that it ticked Pacetti off and he’s always wanted to come back. I guess he felt he had something to prove to local audiences. So the opera signed him then and there, and now he’
s here. Or will be, come Thursday. Lucky you.” Renie sniggered.

  “Keep that up and I won’t tell you when they get here,” said Judith, propping the phone against her shoulder and using a rubber spatula to get the mousse out of the blender. “Frankly, it’s a nuisance, having Pacetti and his entourage take up the whole house for two weeks. I’ve had to turn away at least three regulars, who always come in late October. I won’t do that again at any price.”

  “What do you mean?” inquired Renie. “It’s just Pacetti and his wife and the business manager, right?”

  “Wrong. It’s Pacetti and wife—who require separate rooms so he can rest his multimillion dollar vocal cords, presumably without sexual or any other kind of harassment from Signora Pacetti. Then the business manager has a so-called assistant, and with a name like Tippy de Caro, I can only guess what she’s assisting. But she, too, must have a separate room, for appearances’ sake. And last but certainly not least, there is the chief executive officer of Cherubim Records who, for reasons unknown to this poor bed-and-breakfast hostess, sticks to Pacetti like Elmer’s Glue. Bruno Schutzendorf, by name, and why do I feel as if the Hun Also Rises?”

  “Schutzendorf!” exclaimed Renie, ignoring her cousin’s pun. “Hey, I’ll tell you why—he signed Pacetti to a ten-year ten-zillion-dollar contract, that’s why. It was in the paper last spring. Don’t you read Melissa Bargroom’s culture column?”

  “Only when she writes about people whose names I can pronounce without hyperventilating. Say, what time is Tom’s birthday party tomorrow night?”

  “Six-thirty,” said Renie. “Bill and I are giving him the Apartments-Furnished section of the classifieds.”