Dead in D Minor

by David Crossman

  It was a tactic Sarah wasn’t prepared for. Had he yelled, she would have gone fifteen rounds, toe-to-toe, lip-to-lip. Had he become violent, she would have brought her rolling pin into the argument. The soul of southern chivalry, however, she was not proof against.

  Jimbo turned to Cindy. “Now, darlin’ . . . “

  “Don’t you buttermilk me, Jimbo,” Cindy snapped sharply. “I don’t owe you the time of day and you know it.”

  “That’s what you say,” said Jimbo with uncustomary calm. “I put you and Maylene up six months, didn’t I?”

  Cindy looked pleadingly at Sarah and Alice, both of whom were hamstrung by the huge man’s demeanor.

  Jimbo turned to the jury. “Six months I supported her and Maylene. Did they ever want for somethin’ to eat? Was they ever cold? Didn’t they have a nice place to sleep?” He looked at Cindy. “Go on, ask her.

  “Didn’t I buy ‘em both all the clothes the closet could handle?”

  Under the weight of his veiled accusation, Cindy crumpled on the bottom step of the stairs.

  “Tell ‘em it ain’t so, Cindy,” said Jimbo confidently. “If it ain’t.”

  Albert wondered where Standish was. He’d know what to do.

  Cindy looked up with tears in her eyes, her voice trembling with hurt and anger. “You beat Maylene,” she said. “You beat me half to death.”

  This reminded Sarah of the sight Cindy and Maylene presented when they showed up on her doorstep. She tightened her grip on the rolling pin she held behind her back. “That’s right. There’s no accountin’ for that.” Her letter-perfect diction had fallen victim to the passion of the moment. “I saw them.”

  Jimbo remained calm. “Well, I don’t know about that. They run off at night, likely they got off the path and fell down the hill, for all I know. But, I never raised a hand to neither one of ‘em. I swear on all that’s holy, ma’am. I do.”

  Suddenly, as if he’d ignited charge under her, Cindy was up and swinging at him with all her might. “You filthy liar!” she screamed. He stood still as a statue for a few seconds, allowing the frantic blows to rain down on him in mindless fury. He even managed a look of long-suffering. Finally, he grabbed her wrists and restrained her.

  “She’d have fits like this, sometimes,” he said sympathetically. “Never could figure what set her off. But mighty hard to live with, I tell you.

  “You know, I’d say, (and I don’t like sayin’ it, ‘cause I think Cindy wants to be a good mother, I really do), but, well, if Maylene got beat – and I know it wasn’tme done it . . . “

  Cindy’s eyes grew wide as saucers, an analogy Albert had heard before, but never understood until now. She stood nose to nose with Jimbo. “I can’t believe even you would stoop low enough to say something like that,” she said with all the hurt in the world in her eyes. “If I had the money, I’d give it to you just to buy you out of our life.”

  “Why don’t you just go?” She broke down weeping. “Go away!”

  “I’ll give him the money.”

  It was Albert’s voice, he looked around to see where it was coming from, but he was alone on the landing.

  All eyes turned toward him.

  “It’s the crazy pismire,” said Jimbo beneath his breath with a leering grin.

  “But, I don’t owe him any money, Professor,” Cindy protested. “Don’t you believe me?” She looked from face to face like Judy Garland in theWizard of Oz. “Don’t any of you believe me?”

  “Of course we believe you,” said Antie Em, a.k.a Sarah. She put her arm around Cindy and patted her.

  “Will you go away, if Cindy gives you the money?” said Albert. This was the kind of thing money was made for.

  “Sure,” said Jimbo, adding ‘Pismire’ with his attitude. “Sure I will.”

  “How much?”

  Jimbo searched the faces, then glared at Cindy. “Oh, let’s say a thousand dollars would cover it. Wouldn’t you say, old girl?”

  “It was four hundred eighty-three dollars!” said Cindy.

  “Oh,” Jimbo said calmly, “then you admit you stole it?”

  “I know she didn’t steal anything from you,” said Albert. He remained at the top of the stairs, subconsciously positioning himself between Jimbo and Maylene. “But I’ll give you the money.” He appealed to Sarah. “Do I have a thousand dollars?”

  “Well, yes,” said Sarah hesitantly. “Of course you do. But . . . ”

  “Then give it to him so he will go away.”

  “But he’ll be back!” Cindy cried. “He’ll just keep saying I owe him the money!”

  Albert thought a minute. Then another. Then he got a Plan. “Write it down,” he said.

  “Do what?” said Jimbo.

  “Write down on a piece of paper that Cindy has paid you all she owes you. And put the date on it.” This was getting better and better. “And sign it with your name and . . . ” thecoup de grace“let everyone else sign it. That will proved you’ve been paid.”

  He glanced at Sarah and Alice and was pleased to see approbation in their eyes, even if it was mixed with a bewilderment he couldn’t quite fathom.

  Evidence of the true soundness of the Plan, however, was provided by Jimbo.

  “I ain’t signin’ nothin’,” he spat. His strained pretense of manners snapped over the chasm of his contempt.

  “Then you won’t get the money,” Albert explained flatly. His brain was too busy trying to figure out what his mouth was up to, to spend any time making him nervous at the black cloud that descended on Jimbo’s face.

  “How about if I come up there and twist your pointy little head off its post, pismire.” He feinted in Albert’s direction, but Sarah interposed, raising the rolling pin.

  “Then I’ll have to do some baking,” she said, entering into the spirit of the thing.

  Jimbo stepped back.

  “$900,” said Albert.

  “Wait a minute! You said a thousand!”

  “$800,” said Albert.

  “Wait! Okay!” said Jimbo, breaking out in a cold sweat as the money drained through his fingers. “Okay! Eight hundred. Write up the paper!”

  Albert nodded at Sarah, who assumed the role of amanuensis without missing a beat.

  As the paper was drawn up and signed by principals and witnesses, Jimbo kept searching the faces of those present. Were they serious? Was it legal? What was he getting himself into?

  It was his turn to sign. He hesitated.

  “Seven-hundred,” said Albert.

  “No! No! I’ll sign!” said Jimbo, signing. Sarah returned from the other room with the money, counted it out and handed it to him.

  Just as the last hundred dollars was in his hand, he lunged for the freshly signed document, which sat on the telephone table. But Alice, having a presentiment about the lack of character of the character in question, swept up the paper and stuffed it in her blouse.

  “I’ll mind that,” she said.

  Though he’d leave with more than he’d come for, Jimbo somehow felt beaten. He thrust the money in his pocket and, strafing the room with a parting glance, turned and left Cindy’s life. She ran up the stairs. Albert braced himself as she threw herself around him and squeezed for all she was worth; which was about twice what Albert was worth.

  “Maylene’s in my closet,” he said on what might have been his dying breath.

  “Oh, my poor baby!” She practically flung Albert from her. Coming to rest against a nearby wall, he checked himself for dents, wondering what ‘death by bra’ would look like on his autopsy. Cindy disappeared into his room at the end of the hall.

  Sarah trudged up the stairs with Alice in her slipstream. “Every time that boy spends some of that money,” she prophesied as she climbed, “it’ll burn him like a red hot poker, and there’s nothing he can do about it.” She giggled, or as near a giggle as she could come.

  “Nothing legal, anyway,” said Alice.

  “Oh, pooh,” said Sarah. “I think we’ve seen the la
st of . . . ”

  “She’s not there!” Cindy cried, bursting wild-eyed from Albert’s room. “Maylene’s gone!”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Each member of the search party made a thorough examination of the closet, the windows, behind the chair, and under the bed in turn, as these constituted the only hiding places in Albert’s room. Fortunately, nobody looked in the bags.

  The posse then made its way down the hall, opening and closing each door (a total of two) as they came upon it. Five opens and closes for each door. Ten in all.

  The procession was accompanied by cries of ‘Maylene!’ or variations thereof, in voices high, low, female, male, frantic, anxious, distraught, bewildered (Albert’s), and dull. A symphony of searching.

  They concluded in the bathroom with a minute inspection of the hamper and the shower stall, in each of which Maylene was absent in all particulars.

  “The windows are all open,” said Alice, who had been dispatched for that aspect of the investigation. “But the screens are latched.”

  “My word,” Sarah sighed, having expelled the final ‘Maylene!’ to no avail. “Where could she have got to, do you suppose? It’s like she just disappeared!”

  “The attic stairs!” Cindy remembered.

  “Locked,” Sarah replied.

  Cindy wanted to be sure. “Are you sure?” she said, jogging down the hall. She stopped at the door in question and tugged on it. “It’s locked.”

  Sarah didn’t say ‘I told you so,’ but she thought it.

  “Kitty,” said Maylene calmly, as she emerged from Albert’s room with Jebby imprisoned in her arms.

  The eight eyes at the disposal of the search party turn into orbs of stupefaction and wonder. Had one of them twinkled, it would have done so in more time than it took for Cindy to sweep her daughter and Jebby into her arms. “Where were you, child?” she said.

  Maylene emerged from the arch of her mother and pointed at the closet door.

  Cindy held her at arm’s length. “Maylene!” she exclaimed. “You weren’t in the closet. We looked.” She cast a bewildered, apologetic glance at her fellow lodgers. “She never lied before.”

  “Television,” Alice diagnosed. “Nothing good ever came of it . . . nor ever will.”

  Meanwhile, Maylene, from whom aspersions bounced like foam rubber balls, had wiggled free from Cindy’s grasp and begun a sort of jig in which the cat was the central figure. She held him by the armpits of the forelegs, as was her custom, leaving the remainder to dangle freely as if to test whether Jebby, or any cat so conceived and so constructed, could long endure as she spun, and twirled, and gyrated in transports of delight.

  “Kitty was lost in the closet,” she warbled. Then she started to sing it to the tune ofMy Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean, but it didn’t fit, so she made up her own tune.

  “You come downstairs with me, young lady,” Cindy chided, thrusting a motherly hand into the spokes of joy.

  “That’s the second time that cat has turned up in your room, Professor,” said Sarah, perplexed. She followed the others. Halfway down the stairs she stopped and turned to Albert, who was still on the landing, half-dressed. “You did a wonderful thing,” she said.

  “I did?”

  Sarah tossed a nod toward the front door. “With Cindy’s problem caller.”

  “Oh,” said Albert thoughtfully. “He’s not a happy man. I don’t think the money will make him happy.” It didn’t make Albert happy, and he had a lot more of it.

  “Burning coals,” Sarah said with a significant expression. “Zip your fly, Professor.”

  Albert obeyed unabashedly and went to his room to stare at the closet.

  Closets.

  Albert had always taken them for granted – like everything else; toasters and hurricanes and mildew – they were just there. Houses came with them.

  He didn’t know how this closet compared to others. He’d never really studied one. Under the file marked ‘closet’ in his brain, there was only a vague, shadowy place filled with clothes he didn’t wear and smelling of mothballs.

  Mothballs he knew. He’d bitten into one when he was a child. They shouldn’t make them look so much like mints.

  It was a vivid memory.

  There was also the closet where they’d kept Jeremy Ash, but he’d never seen that, and didn’t know if it smelled of anything but fear.

  This closet smelled of garlic and sulfur. Specifically, it smelled of the garlic in DuShane’s cellar – another poignant memory – the little closet with preserves on the shelves and on the floor, but not on the back wall. Why? There was plenty of space. It didn’t make sense to Albert. But, he’d never pickled anything. Maybe there was a reason.

  This closet, though, it was like a magician’s trunk. Things disappeared into it and came out of it that just shouldn’t. Something told him to tap all the closet walls, so he did. They sounded like walls. He pushed them. Nothing. He was too tired to think about it. He closed the door and went to sleep

  Another disturbance woke Albert. Once again he stumbled out of bed, and had gone through most of the motions of pulling on his pants before he realized he hadn’t taken them off. He hobbled to the top of the stairs.

  “I’m really sorry, Miss Sarah,” Matt Harvey was saying. He was holding Heather Proverb by the arm and looking like a scolded dog.

  “I’m not interested,” Sarah replied brusquely. She was in her robe and her hair was messy. Albert had never seen her in disarray. “You put her down this instant!”

  Harvey was made of the kind of stuff that melted in the presence of extreme heat. He let go of Heather’s arm. “Sorry, miss,” he said. “But I’ve got to take you . . . ” he turned to Sarah, “I’ve got to take her in for questioning.” He looked from the rock to the hard place. “It’s just, there’s a few questions we’ve got to ask.”

  “Questioning for what?” Sarah demanded.

  “Well,” Harvey replied, shuffling uncomfortably. “It’s confidential, Sarah, ma’am. Miss?” He gestured toward the door.

  Albert looked outside. It was daylight. “Good morning,” he said.

  Matt Harvey meant to give his visor a respectful tap with his forefinger, but he’d left his hat at the office, so he just struck himself on the forehead.

  “Professor,” he acknowledged.

  Mr. Elmo had apparently gone the way of the dodo.

  “Professor,” said Sarah, who looked at Albert as if he was the last man alive.

  “Really, Mrs. Grandy,” said Heather, reddening, “I’m sure it’ll be alright. I’ll be right back.” She looked at the officer as a suppliant looks at a weeping Madonna. “Won’t I?” Harvey only shrugged. “What could you possibly want with me?” Her voice rose and tears stood in her eyes. The veneer of British reserve was peeling away in large chunks.

  “That’s what I’d like to know,” Sarah wanted to know.

  Albert longed for peace and quiet, a cigarette and a piano, even if there wasn’t any music to speak of.

  “You can say whatever you’ve got to say right here,” Heather protested. Something about her was dissolving and something else was showing through. Albert had seen the look before; a blend of fear and desperation tethered by fraying cords. “I have nothing to hide from these people.”

  “Don’t say that,” Albert begged. He knew better.

  “That’s right,” said Sarah, who was coming to respect Albert more and more every time she misunderstood him. “You don’t have to say anything without a lawyer present.”

  “No,” Heather cried. “I just want to know what I’m being arrested for. I want everyone to . . . ”

  “I’m not arresting you, Miss,” Harvey explained. “Just taking you in for questioning is all.” He gazed from Sarah to Albert. “We have a complaint.”

  “A complaint?” said Heather, between sobs.

  “Yes, Miss,” said Harvey who, if he’d remembered his hat, would have been turning it over and over in his hands. “Someone called.”
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  “Who called?” said Sarah, realizing at the same instant it might be none of her business.

  “He didn’t leave a name.” Harvey considered. “I guess I can ask you straight out, if that’s what you want.” He studied Heather closely.

  Heather, having committed herself, flashed glances at those around her. She swallowed and clenched her fists. “Go on.”

  Harvey thought a minute. Phrasing was important. “Were you in the Judge’s house last night?”

  A sharp compression of the diaphragm. A quick breath drew the curtain from the stage of Heather’s face. Just a glimpse, and then it was gone. She hadn’t expected this. Albert knew what she had expected. The curtain descended and a fragile composure fused her emotions for the moment. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said. “I was with Sarah last night.”

  “She was,” Sarah testified. “We were . . . “

  “This would have been about two in the morning, Miss Sarah,” Harvey interjected. “Were you together at that time?”

  Sarah looked at Heather with impotent eyes. “Well, no,” she said softly. “Not at two o’clock.” She re-tied the belt of her robe. “I was sound asleep by then. I’m sure we all were.”

  Again she looked at Albert.

  “I was,” he said. That’s all he could say.

  “Two o’clock?” Heather said feebly.

  “Someone saw you there,” Harvey said.

  “That’s impossible!” Heather complained softly. Too softly. The ropes of her reason had unraveled, and the remaining threads snapped in rapid succession. “That’s impossible,” she repeated. “I wasn’t there.” Pause. “There wasn’t any light.” Her eyes began roaming their sockets, and she repeatedly pinched her chin with the forefinger and thumb of her right hand.

  Sarah suddenly understood she was in the presence of someone who had slipped away for the moment. “Oh dear,” she said, under her breath. “Oh dear!”

  Albert had seen the needle skip the groove before. “Daphne Knowlton,” he said.