by Gerald Elias
‘I’m aware of that, Sybil. Which is why I’ve told Lilburn that if you prevent me from coming forward with the truth, he should print it immediately. On the tape I told him that you had invited me to dinner and that I suspected it was your intention to kill me with a poison mushroom. You would then cover up the murder to make it look like an accident, as you’ve done before.’
‘What a laughable fairy tale! Dinner? Killing you? Is that the other possible outcome you alluded to? Turn myself in or kill you? Please, Mr Jacobus! How absurd!’
‘But you’re wrong, Sybil. If you don’t turn yourself in, you are going to kill me.’
‘Truly? Let me understand this correctly. I … am going to kill … you?’
‘Yes. You will kill me.’
‘Mr Jacobus, your musical imagination comes as no surprise, but it appears I never gave you enough credit for your cloak-and-dagger fantasies! I’m not sure how I’m supposed to play my part in this game, but might it have something to do with your trusty tape recorder that you’ve hidden in your jacket?’
‘What tape recorder?’ Jacobus asked. The surprise in his voice was real.
‘Why, the one you used to record the fairy tale you sent to Mr Lilburn. Don’t think I haven’t been aware that you’ve been wearing your shabby jacket since you arrived, even though the evening is warm as midsummer. And that bulge inside which only a blind man could fail to see. Sorry for the insult, but it’s true. There is an advantage to being able to see, after all. Mr Jacobus, I don’t know what kind of a simpleton you take me for, but I realized your intent from the moment you crossed my threshold. You’ve been trying to elicit a confession from me on your tape recorder and I’m sorry to say your childish scheme simply is not going to work.’
‘That’s what you think is in my jacket? A tape recorder?’
‘Well, if not, then what? Please show me that I’m not correct. Put your cards on the table. If you’re man enough.’
‘Very well. If that’s what you want.’
Jacobus pulled the small, brown paper bag from inside his jacket. From it he extracted a small object. He held it out so that Sybil could see it clearly.
‘You will recognize this, Sybil. Gyromitra esculenta. False morel. The same kind of mushroom you used to murder your husband. No one knows I have it. I’m going to eat it now. It may kill me. It may not. Either way, there will be no doubt who served it to me on a silver platter. Maybe in the delicious steak-and-kidney pie you prepared for the occasion. Like Lilburn, the young man who dropped me off here also believes you invited me for dinner because I told him you had. He saw you, and no one else, greet me. Once I eat this mushroom, it will give credence to everything I said on the tape. The police will find my body here. There will be evidence. There will be the corroboration from Lilburn and Anderson. There will be no other possible explanation of my death. You will be arrested, tried, and convicted. Whether they also convict you for the murders of your husband and Lisette Broder won’t matter very much because paying the price for my murder will be sufficient. Once I eat this mushroom, Sybil, my life will be over, but so will yours.’
‘There’s no evidence I made dinner for you.’ All the bravado of having the upper hand had disappeared. It was replaced by cold, desperate calculation.
‘After you poison me,’ Jacobus pursued, ‘you’ll do your damnedest to clean up after yourself. You’re clever that way. And a fine housekeeper.’
‘That’s not a real false morel. You’re faking!’
‘I don’t think so. This is your last chance.’
‘You’re a madman. You wouldn’t dare!’
As a musician, Jacobus had always been intrigued by how many disparate thoughts the human brain was capable of processing in a single instant. He could be totally immersed in a late Beethoven string quartet while simultaneously wondering what he would have for dinner after the performance and which students he hoped would cancel lessons in the upcoming week.
Now, he was similarly impressed with how many thoughts circled his brain in the twinkling of an eye: Will Mia perform ‘Spring’ tomorrow, or will she have convinced Audrey to return? Will Mia give up the violin entirely as she said? Will their futures be scarred from their experiences with Schlossberg? How could they not?
What about Hedge? Will he get the ninety-million dollars from the Feldstein fortune? Is the conservatory ‘Going for Baroque’ or just plain going broke? Lousy pun. Has Hedge been covering up Schlossberg’s mysterious death as well as his sexual crimes? Yumi did interrupt that whispered meeting among Hedge, Cooney, Dunster, and Dr Pine when they were supposedly mourning Schlossberg.
Did Connie Jean really try to push me down the stairs? Will Tawroszewicz get his tenure or be booted out of the school? Will Dunster retire? Will Handy take over the helm from Sybil? What will become of all the others? And that good kid, Chase Anderson? Will he become a detective or a medical assistant? I fooled Anderson. As far as the kid knows, there was only one false morel in the bag, and that one went to the lab. A mere diversion so that neither he nor Knotts could know my real purpose.
Would the ‘not insignificant growth’ on my lung have killed me anyway? Doesn’t matter now.
Those were questions he’d never know the answer to if he ate the mushroom. Not that he cared all that much. It wasn’t as if those kinds of things only happened once. The human soap opera had been going on since apes started walking upright, and no matter when he died he’d always have a nagging curiosity about what would happen tomorrow. There would always be unanswered questions, no matter how the current story ended. But that couldn’t be helped. That’s just the way things were.
And Schneidermann! What would he think of me killing myself in order to incriminate someone else? ‘On one hand, Mr Jacobus, such actions are highly objectionable. Suicide is considered by many a desecration of God’s work! On the other hand …’ God’s work! Where the hell has He been all these years?
Will Trotsky miss me? Probably not. And Nathaniel and Roy Miller. I’ll miss playing checkers with Nathaniel. Maybe they’ll miss me. I told them on the tape not to. And Yumi – dear Yumi. I told her I hope she gets a black belt in judo. Break those fuckers’ arms.
I really do want to hear ‘Spring.’ Oh, well. Just another concert.
‘Oh, yes, I would, Sybil,’ Jacobus replied, and popped the mushroom into his mouth. ‘King me!’ he proclaimed.
‘King me?’ Sybil asked.
‘Nobody be whuppin’ my white ole checkers ass!’ Jacobus cackled.
The mushroom didn’t taste particularly good. It didn’t go very well with the final drops of Scotch he used as a chaser. He dropped the glass and heard it break on the wooden floor. The mushroom was slightly bitter and fibrous, and he had to chew longer than he expected. He wondered whether eating it raw increased or decreased its potency. Maybe he should have cooked it. Lucien would have known. Schlossberg would have known. Too late now. False morels, Sybil and I. Will tomorrow’s Vivaldi by Twilight concert go on at all? Will Sybil be reciting Vivaldi’s sonnet? In Venetian? Smiling pompously? I think not. Last damn symposium I’ll ever attend.
Jacobus loved silence. You would think a blind man would be afraid of it, but he loved the silence. Even more than music at times. It liberated him. At his old home in the Berkshires the silence had been so deep, so profoundly deep, especially at night, that he could hear his own breathing and nothing more. He would hold his breath in order not to disturb it.
Jacobus had won his final game of checkers. He sat back and waited and smiled. Stirred by the festive tones of rustic pipes, nymphs and shepherds lightly dance beneath the verdant canopy of spring. So much for nymphs and shepherds.
The days would be getting longer now. Jacobus thought he heard a light patter at the window behind him. Or was it inside him?
‘Is it raining?’ he asked.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
My primary goals in the Daniel Jacobus series have been to write entertaining stories, provide a glimpse into th
e multi-faceted world of classical music, and give lay readers a good beginners’ listening list of some of the world’s greatest music. I’ve generally shied away from wading into political or broad social issues. When I started writing Spring Break I knew it was going to take place in a music conservatory and that a murder would be committed over some bone of contention, of which there are enough to make complete skeletons. I hadn’t determined who the victim or murderer would be, or the motive.
But as I worked through my rough draft, those question marks became clear as, one after another, institutions of higher education became the subject of front-page headlines in highly publicized cases of sexual violence on their campuses. It didn’t matter whether it was a major Ivy League university or a church-administered one. Sexual harassment remains a doggedly tenacious epidemic in our general culture, and no less so on college campuses where, literally, one is presumed to know better. With the setting of Spring Break already established, I felt compelled to address this issue head on.
When drunken frat boys and campus sports heroes rape female students, we wring our hands but chalk it up to bad upbringing or aberrant behavior or extra testosterone or the reason-numbing effects of binge drinking. We decry it but can, to some degree, understand it. But when such crimes are committed by revered university professors, how do we explain that away? Misunderstandings? If a professor can’t discern the difference between right and wrong, who can? Is it that difficult?
We cringe in disgust when Catholic priests are exposed for abusing children. We are outraged when male-dominated cultures of so-called Third World countries relegate women to second-class status. We recoil in horror when marauding mercenaries in Africa rape women as their reward and as a tool to terrorize the populace into submission. Why is it, then, in our supposedly advanced democracy, we continue to tolerate sexual violence on college campuses? To claim we don’t tolerate it is simply denying the reality. The abuse persists, administrations continue to place the prestige of their universities ahead of the well-being of their own students, and the justice system continues to bend over backwards to protect the rights of the accused to the point of victimizing the victims. Why is it we do not demand change? Is it because we’re in a state of denial that “the greatest country in the world” may be no better than the lowest of the low? I don’t really have answers to those questions. I wish I did, but what I at least can do in Spring Break is provide food for thought.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’ve spent many a year on the faculty of various educational institutions, so I have a pretty thorough sense of how that end of the music business works. But there were two critical components of Spring Break I didn’t know much about: the best way to kill someone using mushrooms, and what happens to murder victims after they’ve been offed. Searching the Internet, I became very confused about the differences between death certificates, coroner’s reports, medical examiner’s reports, and autopsy reports. Nor was I confident I could figure out the difference between a coroner, a pathologist, a forensic pathologist, and a medical examiner simply from CSI reruns. The solution was to contact Utah’s chief medical examiner, Dr Todd Grey, at the University of Utah Medical Center, a stone’s throw from my house in Salt Lake City. Dr Grey, who has since retired, kindly set aside time for me in his intensely busy schedule for a revelatory meeting in which he explained all these things and patiently answered my redundant questions. Having been thus enlightened, Daniel Jacobus was ultimately able to piece together who killed the unfortunate Aaron Schlossberg.
Regarding the mushrooms, I was able to take advantage of the best kind of person-to-person research: that which is done when the source of the information one needs is one’s own offspring. My son, Jacob, a PhD student in evolutionary and ecological biology at Cornell University, provided me with crucial insight into the nature of certain poisonous mushrooms and the various ways one could kill people with them. Walking through the woods with Jake has become a fungi-spotting adventure. I couldn’t be a prouder parent.
Thanks, too, to my intrepid agent, Josh Getzler of HSG Agency, who is diligently on the prowl seeking new platforms for my work. To my editors, and the team at Severn House, with whom it has been a pleasure to ‘make the rough places plain.’ And finally, to my wife, Cecily, and daughter, Kate, whose moral and critical support means so much.
