Songs in the Key of Death

by William Bankier

  As he was leaving the house by the front door, he was confronted by Carol. Her face was streaked with tears and dirt. “Where are you going? The police are coming.”

  “Bye-bye, Carol.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “I told you to stop fooling around.”

  “Why did you keep hitting him? Once was enough.”

  “Why did you drink so much?”

  She held him by the arm as he tried to walk away. He twisted free, feeling skin from his forearm collecting under her fingernails as he released himself. “Feel better?”

  “Where are you going?’

  Latchford had no idea.

  He followed curving streets and found himself close to the river. The metropolis lay on the other side, humming, vibrating like a starship just landed after a voyage across the universe. To his right, a gigantic bridge connected the south shore with the city. He began walking in that direction.

  Halfway across the bridge, he stopped and stared out at the night past a barrier of steel struts and girders. He was like a prisoner in a cage, but he felt safe, protected rather than confined. The considerable amount of alcohol he had consumed was beginning to wear off. Latchford realized now, for the first time, that he had deliberately killed Steve Pullman, beaten him to death, murdered him. He tried to recall the event but it wasn’t clear in his mind. He had a suspicion he had enjoyed it.

  Carol’s question had been “Why did you keep hitting him?” Latchford stood in his cage and tried to think of an answer. Hardly a day went by in which he was not tense as a spring, racing from here to there, doing what everybody else wanted, singing their nonsensical jingles, taking their money and their praise when he knew he was guilty of conspiring to produce rubbish.

  What should he be doing then? What sort of life would have converted him into a satisfied man who did not beat rivals to death at parties? The days of singing with his brothers—were those not happy times? Latchford tried to recapture the feeling that went with standing around the piano in the family living room, harmonizing gospel hymns —“Throw Out The Lifeline,” “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” The memory of the music brought tears to his eyes but he could identify no sense of inner peace from that faraway life.

  Perhaps he had always been driven to go further and try new things. Maybe that was why he’d left the quartet and pursued a commercial career. Latchford didn’t really understand why he did what he did. For as long as he could remember, he had been carrying a giant rage. Maybe he deserved credit for containing it till now. The question was not really why he had killed but how everybody else kept the blood off their hands.

  A giant bus frightened him as it hissed its brakes going past on the road behind him. With his heart pounding, Latchford began walking toward the city.

  The police arrived at the Inch residence promptly and were disturbed to learn that the assailant had been allowed to walk away from the scene. They took a description and spent half an hour checking out the neighborhood gardens with flashlights.

  “He’s miles away by now,” one of them said with satisfaction as they slammed the doors of the police car and followed the ambulance carrying Pullman’s body.

  Nobody slept. By nine-thirty in the morning Flora had washed three loads of dishes. Carol was drying and stacking. Norman was sitting at the table, smoking, staring out the window at the glorious morning, shaking his head solemnly every now and then, like a baseball pitcher shrugging off his catcher’s signals. They were all waiting for the phone to ring.

  At last Carol said, “Can we have the radio on?”

  Norman reached out and snapped the switch of the transistor. An announcer read the weather, gave the time, then an organ played an introduction and a lugubrious male voice began to sing.

  “Sweet hour of prayer, sweet hour of prayer

  That calls us from a world of care...”

  Flora raised her head from the detergent bubbles. “I know where Barry is,” she said. “He’s at church.”

  “He hasn’t gone since we’ve been married,” Carol said.

  “I told him last night about St. James the Apostle.” She began drying her hands.

  “I’ll get the car out,” Norman said.

  “No, I’ll drive myself. You haven’t shaved.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better to call the police?” Carol said.

  Flora stared at her, then turned to the door. “Wash your face, child. We’re going to find your husband and bring him home.”

  In the car, Carol said, “I guess I sounded inhuman back there.”

  “My husband has never killed anybody,” Flora said, “so I don’t know how I’d behave in your place.” She gunned illegally past a line of cars on the bridge. “As far as I know he’s never killed anybody.”

  “It can’t get any worse for me. I’ve been misrable for most of the last six years. Barry is bound to go to jail for a long time and I know I’ll be happier without him.” They were off the bridge now, moving through the narrow streets of east Montreal. “I’m a bitch, eh?”

  Flora gave Carol a speculative glance. “Yes, I’d say a bitch.”

  Parking spaces were plentiful on a Sunday morning. Flora stopped on Crescent Street, locked the car, then led the way at a fast pace toward the gray-stone church. The fine weather showed no signs of breaking. Flora’s cream straw hat sparkled in the sunlight. She had offered to lend a hat to Carol but the Torontonian declined and wrapped her head in a scarf. Small-town girl, was Flora’s assessment of that decision.

  They were just in time for the service. The church was filled. An usher helped them cram into a pew near the back. Flora, a choir-trained Anglican, genuflected and said a silent prayer, then sat back. In every direction she saw massed heads and shoulders. Carol leaned close to whisper, “We’ll never find him, even if he is here.”

  “Don’t worry, he’s here.”

  The service began with the choir chanting what to Flora were familiar notes, but there was no response from the congregation so she remained silent. Then the minister announced the opening hymn and as the organ played the seventeenth-century tune, “Nun Danket,” the congregation and choir rose, shuffling and coughing.

  “Now thank we all our God,

  With heart and hands and voices....”

  It was at the beginning of the second verse that she realized something unusual was happening. The congregation had fallen silent and many of the choir members had their eyes raised to the balcony. Above her, out of Flora’s sight, Barry Latchford was singing as if it had been rehearsed this way.

  “Oh, may this bounteous God

  Through all our life be near us...”

  Gradually the choir stopped singing until, by the last quatrain, it was Barry alone accompanied by the organ. His tone was fuller than anything Flora had heard in Carlo’s studio all those months ago. She felt she was listening to a different voice.

  “And keep us in His grace,

  And guide us when perplexed,

  And free us from all ills

  In this world and the next.”

  The women waited for Latchford in the sunlight outside the church. He made no attempt to walk away. He was unshaven and red-eyed but he was smiling. This boyish smile was different from the cynical one Flora had come to think of as typically Latchford. Carol didn’t move to him nor did he approach her.

  Flora watched them for a few seconds, squinting into the sun. “Let’s go home,” she said at last.

  “Are the police there?”

  “No. I thought we’d have lunch, you can clean up and rest for a while, then we’ll call them.”

  He nodded. In the car he said, “Not a bad ending.”

  “What ending?” Flora said. “You won’t be in forever. You’ll come out and start singing the proper music, the way you sang this morning.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  “I killed that man. All he did was play a little game with Carol and I took his life. That can’t
be right.”

  The police took Latchford away at four. By five, Carol had departed in a taxi for the airport, refusing a lift. The house was tidy—Norman had been busy. He came into Flora’s study carrying two drinks; she was in her swivel chair, staring at the typewriter.

  Norman handed her a glass and sat down. “I wouldn’t want to go through that again,” he said.

  “You won’t. Not with Steve, anyway.”

  “I could do without the smart answers. He was my partner.”

  “You’ll find somebody better. Carol will settle down with a small-town boy who suits her. Latchford will sing the roof off the prison chapel. Everybody’s ahead.”

  “Except Steven Pullman.”

  The telephone rang and Norman went down the hall to answer it. When he came back a couple of minutes later, the glass in his hand was empty. “That was somebody from the police. Latchford is dead.”

  “I don’t believe it.” Flora looked stunned. “What happened?”

  “They didn’t handcuff him because he was so quiet, the way he gave himself up. In the station he knocked over a cop, managed to get hold of his gun, and turned it on himself.”

  Flora reached under the desk and lifted Richelieu from the basket. She cradled him on her lap, rocking back and forth in the swivel chair.

  “That’s how right you were about Latchford,” Norman said bitterly. “I wonder about the rest of us.”

  Making a Killing with Mama Cass

  Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, January 1980.

  “WHY WEREN’T YOU AT THE AIRPORT?” GARY PRIME SAID to his wife Anitra as she let herself into the apartment. “The car would have made sense. Instead I was stuck with an eight-dollar taxi.” This was about as much anger as Gary ever expressed.

  “I got your wire but Lee had important clients in the screening room. I had to be there.” Anitra glanced at herself in a mirror, wondering if her adventure had made any visible difference. Gary back a day early was all she needed. She could have used more time to compose herself, to decide where they were all going from here—herself and Gary and Lee Cosford.

  “Busy while I was away?” Gary asked.

  “As usual. How was London?”

  “I enjoyed it.” This was not the whole truth. Gary was a good mixer—his job demanded it. As a salesman for a Montreal engraving house, calling on the production departments of ad agencies, he got on well with the men who could discuss the advantages of offset reproduction versus letterpress. But throw him in with the clever boys from the creative department and it wasn’t the same.

  He was grateful for his free trip to England even though he knew he’d been asked only because somebody dropped out at the last minute. His engravings were the backbone of the prize-winning campaign, therefore some Samaritan had suggested filling the vacant seat with good old Gary. He had asked Anitra to come along but she refused, pleading too much going on at Lee Cosford Productions.

  “I enjoyed London,” Gary repeated, “except for some of the brilliant conversation. My idea of hell is to be locked up for twenty-four hours with two copywriters, an art director, and an unlimited supply of booze. --The drunker they get, the more they laugh. Only I can’t see the joke half the time.” Gary suspected that sometimes they derived their amusement from him. Not that he was a clod: his suit cost two hundred dollars, his shoes were shined, and he kept his hair trimmed. Maybe it was the haircut. The creative types either let their heads go altogether or had it styled and sprayed so they looked like Glen Campbell.

  “Pay no attention to them,” Anitra said. She was pouring herself some coffee from the pot Gary had made when he came in. She looked good against the counter in slim denims made stylish by a gold belt. “Agency guys are all the same. They think they’re some kind of elite.”

  “Elite. That’s the word. Everything is a put-down. You don’t dare tell them you enjoyed a movie--they’ll say it was commercial and leave you feeling stupid. To hear them, the girls going by are all dogs or hustlers, the food in the restaurant contains the ‘permissable level’ of rodent hairs, and the wine is sulphuric acid.”

  “Kill-joys.”

  “That’s the word for them. Kill-joys. If you have a sincere feeling you have to hide it or they’ll make it into a joke.”

  “So you had a lousy time. At least it was free.” Anitra studied her husband. Something was on his mind. He could never conceal enthusiasm—it shone from the large square face, the jaw set firm, the thick black hair neatly combed and gleaming with Vitalis.

  “It was only two days and apart from the meals I was usually on my own.” He was getting ready to tell her. “But there was a thing happened --I’m excited about it. It’s as if...”

  When Gary finished talking, Anitra could not understand what he was so worked up about. He had been watching late-night television in his hotel room and had turned on a talk show. The guest was the English actress Donna Dean, the sex symbol from the sixties, who was still pretty today but hugely overweight.

  Anitra said, “And your idea is what? You want to ask her to be in a film about Mama Cass?”

  “Not me. I can’t ask her. A film producer has to ask her. But she’d be perfect—if you saw her you’d know what I mean. She’s blonde, of course, so she’d need a dark wig. But she has the same baby face as Mama Cass and that majestic build. She was even wearing one of those big tent dresses Cass used to wear --”

  Anitra found it difficult to become interested. Years ago, she had enjoyed listening to The Mamas and The Papas and she had agreed with Gary in those days that the bell-like voice of Cass Elliott had a lot to do with the group’s success. More recently, she had heard something about the young woman’s untimely death, but nothing much about it had registered. “O.K., there could be a film in it,” Anitra said. “What’s it got to do with you?”

  “I’m the one to make it happen. I’ve got to do it.”

  After watching the Donna Dean interview, Gary had left the hotel and gone for a walk along Bayswater Avenue. It was midnight. Hyde Park was on his right, substantial white Edwardian buildings on his left. Ahead loomed Marble Arch and Park Lane with its lineup of hotels far posher than the one he was inhabiting. Noisy little cars, square black taxis, and an occasional red double-decker bus kept up a continuous roar beside him, but Gary hardly heard the traffic.

  His mind was filled with music from the cassettes he used to play till they nearly fell apart, the songs of dreams and of young girls coming to the canyon.

  According to the newspapers, Cass Elliott had died in a hotel somewhere near there. They said she choked to death on a sandwich alone in her room.

  “I have to get the film going,” Gary told his wife. “And now. Something tells me it’s important.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Your boss said once that a feature film will never happen unless somebody puts all his energy behind it. There are too many other ideas competing for the funds and the facilities.”

  “Lee should know.”

  “Right. So I thought you might lay it on him tomorrow.”

  “Me? It’s your idea.” The last two days at Lee’s place had given Anitra a shaking up. Some change in the relationship had been coming for a long time. But now she felt uncertain about her future and the sensation was distasteful to her. From the time eight years ago when she organized her marriage to Gary, Anitra had kept uncertainties to a minimum. The false pregnancy was a cheat but it got her out of a dismal situation at home. And it had done Gary no harm; he was forever testifying that the unexpected marriage had stabilized his life.

  Now, for the sake of some excitement, she had gone with Lee Cosford. The event was satisfying enough as it was happening, but when they parted there had been a distant look in Lee’s pale eyes and Anitra was no fool.

  “You’d better describe the idea to Lee yourself,” she said. “I wouldn’t do it justice.” It would kill her to approach him with this loony request, as if she thought he owed her something.
>
  “Just mention it. Set it up for me.”

  “You’re a big boy, Gary. You know his number. Call him and tell him you’ve got a business proposition. Lee Cosford would rather talk business than anything.”

  Lee Cosford, rotund and dynamic, rolled out into the waiting room and took Gary by the arm. “Stranger,” he said laughing, eyeing Prime anxiously, “where’ve you been keeping yourself? Come in and sit down. Stephie, make us a couple of coffees, will you?”

  The idea sounded even better to Gary as he described it in Lee Cosford’s panelled office, taking pulls at a huge mug of coffee, squinting against sunlight streaming through the window past the spire of a church on lower Mountain Street. Cosford lay back in his leather recliner, boots on the glass desk, eyes closed like a man in a barber chair. As Gary finished, the bells in the tower across the street began to peal. He thought it was a good omen.

  Cosford opened one eye. “Is that it?”

  “That’s it Lee.”

  The film producer sat up. “I think it’s a sensational idea.”

  “Really?”

  “Fabulous. And you’ve probably heard Anitra mention I want to get into feature films. You can’t know how soul-destroying it is producing thirty-second pieces of film to sell detergent or sausages. Or maybe you do know. You have the same assignment in print.”

  “I know what you mean.” Actually, Gary was proud of the engravings his firm produced.

  “The trouble is,” Cosford said, “there are too many good film ideas chasing too little money. You just can’t get the financing.”

  “I thought there was this Canadian Film Development Council. Don’t they put up money?”

  “That’s right.” Cosford put his knees under the desk and folded his arms precisely on the cold glass. This square individual in the overpressed suit had managed to brief himself. “The CFDC will, on occasion, back a good idea.”

  “And this is more than a good idea, Lee. It’s a great idea.”

  “Right.” Cosford’s mind was working fast. He was more than ready to see the last of Gary Prime. “But there’s only one way to approach the Council. They have to see a treatment.”