A Chorus of Detectives Read online

  Quaglia’s upper lip lifted. “I do not add to other conductors’ prestige by sitting in their audience!”

  “But singers go to hear their rivals.”

  “Singers are totally irrational breed of animal,” Quaglia said in all seriousness. “You cannot ever, under any circumstances, expect rational behavior of singers.”

  O’Halloran thought of the conductor’s battle with Geraldine Farrar and suppressed a smile. “If you hold such a low opinion of singers, why are you working in opera?”

  Quaglia let out a sigh that seemed to come all the way up from his toes. “Because, Captain O’Halloran, the human voice is most beautiful musical instrument on face of the earth. The instruments we manufacture, they imitate it but they never reproduce it, not exactly. If you want to work with that exquisite sound the voice is capable of producing, eh, then you must work with singers. No matter how infuriating they are.”

  “Are you thinking of Miss Farrar?”

  Quaglia started, and laughed. “Am I so obvious? Farrar is senza dubbio the best vocalist I ever work with. Her musicianship, it is near faultless. But the voice, per sfortuna, it deteriorates. She should not sing Marguérite … in Faust?” O’Halloran nodded. “The role is too high for her now,” the conductor explained. “Yet once in a while—the last rehearsal, for instance—she finds the top notes to sing the role superbly.”

  “You told her she was flat.”

  “Did I? I do not remember. But my point is, you cannot tell her anything. She remembers the way she once sounds and does not admit the voice is different now. She is impossible woman.”

  O’Halloran tried a different tack. “Mr. Quaglia, did you ever work as an assistant chorus master?”

  A look of distaste crossed the conductor’s face. “Never! Assistant to chorus master—it is worst job in opera! Why do you ask?”

  “I was told you started out as an assistant chorus master.”

  “Who tells you this?” he cried. “Ella sbaglia! I have nothing to do with rehearsing chorus!”

  “What was your first job in opera?”

  “Violinist, in orchestra. I am seventeen years old when I am hired,” Quaglia added proudly.

  “Where was this?”

  “Naples. Il Teatro San Carlo.”

  O’Halloran asked the conductor to spell it for him and wrote it down. A wire to the Naples police politely asking for help ought to clear the contradiction up quickly enough. When Quaglia asked him again who had said he’d once been a chorus master, O’Halloran thought it better not to tell him.

  The conductor leaned forward in his chair, his forearms resting on his thighs and his hands clasped between his knees. “Mr. Gatti? No, he has no reason to tell such a lie. It must be Giulio Setti—he once accuses me of encroaching on his territory.” Quaglia snorted. “I would not have his job for ten times the money I am paid to conduct!”

  O’Halloran asked him where he was when the first two murders took place. “The two times you say you weren’t at the opera house.”

  Quaglia looked annoyed but answered. “When the hanged man is discovered, I am home. The first violinist calls me on the telephone and tells me. The other time—I do not remember.”

  The police captain made a note to check with the first violinist, thanked the conductor for his help, and left.

  Antonio Scotti was in a part of the Metropolitan Opera House he hadn’t even known was there. It was a small room in the substage area, the official resting place of mops, buckets, scrub brushes, five-gallon jars of ammonia, tin containers of brass polish and wax, bar after bar of lye soap. A clothesline holding drying rags was strung across one end of the room, and the sharp tang of some cleaning compound made the baritone’s nose tingle. Crowded in among the cleaning supplies was a wooden bench, two discarded auditorium seats, and a low three-legged stool. In one corner stood an enamel coffeepot on an electric heater. The cleaning crew’s greenroom.

  “Another, ladies?” Scotti asked.

  “Sure and that’s a fine idea, Mr. Scotti,” Mrs. Reilly said, holding out her coffee cup.

  Scotti topped up her drink from the flask he’d had the foresight to bring with him; rye whiskey was not his favorite libation, but in these prohibitory days one took what one could find. He and the plump Mrs. Reilly shared the wooden bench. Mrs. Poplofsky, as long and lean as Mrs. Reilly was short and round, sat in one of the auditorium seats; and on the three-legged stool perched Just-Call-Me-Maude. Scotti filled their cups. The whiskey was tingling pleasantly in his veins, and the three scrubwomen were looking a little more content with their lot in life.

  “Perhaps she does not talk much because of difficulties with the language,” he said, continuing a line of conversation he’d initiated.

  “Nooo, that’s not it,” said Mrs. Reilly. “She’s just not what you’d call a friendly soul, doncha know.”

  “Mebbe she can’t talk English,” Mrs. Poplofsky said in a tone of secrets-sharing, “but that don’t mean she can’t understand it.” She closed one eye conspiratorially.

  Scotti raised an eyebrow. “You mean when you speak English to her—”

  “I mean she understands what it suits her to understand,” Mrs. Poplofsky nodded. “Oh, she’s a deep one, she is!”

  Mrs. Reilly laughed. “Deep! That one? Sure and you’re mistaken, Mrs. Poplofsky. She’s by way of bein’ standoffish, that’s what she is!”

  Scotti looked at Just-Call-Me-Maude. “What do you think?”

  She giggled and said she didn’t know.

  Mrs. Poplofsky took out a box of cigarettes, offered one to Scotti (who declined), and toed a scrub bucket into position to use as an ashtray. “She’s up to something, mark my words.”

  Scotti took a swallow from the flask cap he was using as a glass and thought to himself that Just-Call-Me-Maude had a rather sweet face—or was that the whiskey’s opinion? “Mrs. Bukaitis is up to something? What?”

  “Can’t rightly say what it is,” Mrs. Poplofsky replied, “but she’s alla time going places she has no business going.”

  Scotti suppressed a desire to cough; Mrs. Poplofsky had taken only two puffs of her cigarette but already all the breathable air in the basement room was filled with smoke. Nobody else seemed to mind, but then they were all getting a bit glassy-eyed. “Where does Mrs. Bukaitis go that she should not go?”

  “Well, once I caught her trying the door of Miss Farrar’s dressing room, and everybody knows that nobody cleans that room except Miss Farrar’s own maid. And another time she was nosing around that platform thing they got out there—you know, the platform that goes up through the trap door in the stage?”

  Scotti sat up straight. “Is this before or after the chorister falls to his death?”

  Mrs. Poplofsky thought back. “After.”

  “Oh.” Scotti sank back, deflated.

  “Poor man,” Mrs. Reilly said sincerely. “Tumblin’ down like that, not knowin’ what’s happenin’ to him. Dreadful, just dreadful.”

  Mrs. Poplofsky crossed one long leg over the other. “Funny thing ’bout that time. She had a box she kept trying to hide from me.”

  “Her cigar box?” Mrs. Reilly asked.

  “Naw, bigger’n that.” She blew out a cloud of smoke.

  Just-Call-Me-Maude hiccupped.

  “Mrs. Bukaitis keeps her personal things in a cigar box,” Mrs. Reilly explained to Scotti.

  Scotti nodded as if that were something he’d been wondering about. He rubbed an itching nose; the combination of cigarette smoke and cleaning compound was making it hard for him to breathe and he was growing woozy. A little whiskey should clear his head—but the flask cap was empty.

  “You too, huh?” Mrs. Poplofsky said pointedly.

  Scotti poured her some rye. “Maude?”

  “Yespleaseandthankyou.” She held out her cup. But when Scotti turned to Mrs. Reilly, only a drop was left in the flask.

  “Awr, now ain’t that a cryin’ shame,” she said mournfully.

  “D
o not distress yourself, dear Mrs. Reilly,” Scotti said happily as he reached into a pocket and pulled out a second flask. “Per servirla! We still manage to ward off the cold!”

  “Glory be!” cried Mrs. Reilly. “Now there’s a sight for sore eyes!”

  Just-Call-Me-Maude laughed and spanked one thigh with her free hand.

  “I like a man who thinks ahead,” Mrs. Poplofsky said, closing one eye meaningfully and holding out her cup still again.

  When they had further fortified themselves against the winter, Scotti said, “The box she tries to hide from you, Mrs. Poplofsky—what kind of box is it?”

  “I dunno, just a box. About so big.” She demonstrated with her hands, trailing cigarette ash.

  “Her lunch?”

  “Nooo, couldn’t be,” Mrs. Reilly said. “She brings her lunch wrapped in paper.”

  “Mrs. Poplofsky, you are sure this is after trap door breaks open?”

  She guffawed. “I was sure until you found that other flask.” She stretched a long arm down to stub out her cigarette in the bucket at her feet. “Now you got me addled.”

  Just-Call-Me-Maude fell off her stool.

  “Aow, there she goes,” Mrs. Reilly sighed. “Come on, lass, up with ye.” She hoisted the other woman back up on her stool and explained to Scotti, “She’s not used to spirits so early in the day.”

  He wondered why her face was growing blurry and turned back to Mrs. Poplofsky. “Per favore, try to remember,” he entreated her. “Is important.”

  She scrunched her face up in the effort of concentration. “You know, Mr. Scotti, now that I think on it, I ain’t all that sure it was after. It mighta been before.”

  “Che fortuna!” the baritone cried, exuberantly flinging out an arm and knocking over a row of mops that had been standing in their buckets next to him. “Oh—scusi, scusi!”

  “Ah, don’t you be worryin’ yerself about them mops, darlin’,” Mrs. Reilly laughed. “You can’t hurt ’em.”

  Scotti fought down an urge to rest his head on Mrs. Reilly’s motherly bosom. “Do you see what she does with the box?” he asked Mrs. Poplofsky.

  He was answered by a snore. Mrs. Poplofsky’s head had sunk forward on her chest.

  “Ah, poor dear,” Mrs. Reilly crooned. “She works hard, she needs her rest.”

  Just-Call-Me-Maude was weaving unsteadily on her stool, humming a little tune to herself and smiling at no one in particular. It was beginning to seem to Scotti that he’d spent half his life in this close little room among the mops and the brooms and the lye soap. He fumbled his watch out of his vest pocket, but the Roman numerals on the face were a blur. He held the watch out to Mrs. Reilly. “Tell me the time?”

  She squinted at the watch. “It’s gone a quarter past the hour of eleven.”

  Scotti moaned. He was supposed to meet Gerry fifteen minutes ago; she was going to be furious! “I must go.” He got shakily to his feet—and stared helplessly at the barrier of spilled mops that separated him from the door.

  “Never you mind,” said Mrs. Reilly, disposing of the mop obstacle with a few well-placed kicks of her surprisingly small feet. “Allus wanted to do that,” she muttered. “Now you lean on me, dear. You’re not lookin’ any too steady.”

  Scotti placed one hand on her plump shoulder and let her lead him to the door. “I think you take me all the way out, yes?”

  “Be careful!” Just-Call-Me-Maude squeaked unexpectedly.

  “Of what?” he asked, but Mrs. Reilly was already leading him away.

  She took him to the Seventh Avenue scenery doors, which were standing open to accommodate the shifting of stage flats out into the street. A light snow was falling, ignored by the stagehands maneuvering the scenery through the gaping double doors. “Now, Mr. Scotti, what you’re needin’ is a brisk walk in the fresh air,” Mrs. Reilly told him. “Invigoratin’, it is. You take deep breaths, hear, and you’ll be feelin’ right as rain in no time.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Reilly, I follow your advice.”

  “And be sure you come back to see us again,” she laughed. “You’re allus welcome!” She waddled away toward her basement kingdom, still laughing.

  Scotti stepped out onto Seventh Avenue, where the stage scenery was stacked on the sidewalk exposed to the elements, waiting for the trucks that would haul it away to a warehouse; the Metropolitan Opera House had no room to store its own scenery. Scotti followed Mrs. Reilly’s instructions and took a deep breath of the December air—which cut through his lungs like a knife. This was supposed to make him feel better?

  Walk it off. He strode purposefully toward the corner and looked up at the street sign: Thirty-ninth Street. Gerry lived on West Seventy-fourth; he was heading in the wrong direction.

  She was going to be furious. Thirty-nine from seventy-four was what? He puzzled over it a minute and then decided that anything that hard to subtract was bound to be too far to walk. He hailed a taxicab.

  In Gerry’s apartment building, the elevator motor said, She’s going to be furious. She’s going to be furious all the way up. Down the hallway, there’s the door. After two or three attempts, Scotti located the doorbell and pushed it. She’s going to be furious.

  And then she was in the doorway, blocking his entrance. “Do you have any idea,” she asked icily, “what time it is?”

  “You are furious,” he said sadly.

  “You were supposed to be here at eleven o’clock! I’ve been waiting for you the better part of an hour!”

  “I am inves, I am inveshigay, I am asking questions.”

  Gerry peered at him closely. “Toto, are you tipsy? What have you been doing?”

  He pulled himself up to his full height. “I,” he announced with dignity, “I am this morning carousing. With other women. With three other women. Are you not jealous?”

  The corner of her mouth twitched. “What other women?”

  He ticked them off gloved fingers. “Mrs. Reilly. Mrs. Poplofsky. And Just-Call-Me-Maude. Three of them.”

  Gerry blinked and said, “I think I’ll wait to ask for an explanation of that one. Right now, you’d better get some coffee in you. Come on in.”

  Two cups of coffee later, Scotti was able to tell her of his morning’s visit with selected members of the Met’s cleaning crew. To his surprise. Gerry seized on Mrs. Bukaitis’s trying to get into her dressing room as the most important matter he’d uncovered. “Maybe I should add another lock,” she said.

  Scotti said it wouldn’t hurt. “I think she steals. But, cara mia, the important thing is that she does something around the stage platform. The platform that is right under the trap door!”

  “Honestly, Toto, you can’t think that’s evidence of anything?” Gerry objected. “A scrubwoman standing in one place instead of another place? Your Mrs. Popplesofty didn’t actually see her doing anything, did she?”

  “Poplofsky. She saw her trying to hide a box.”

  “A box. Oh, that sounds ominous, that does. Toto, I’m glad you had a nice gossip with the girls, but don’t make too much of it.”

  He was hurt. “At least I try.”

  She gave him a quick kiss by way of apology. “And you’ll go on trying. And so will I, if we can ever get started. We’d better hurry—it’s after noon, and Setti may already have left. Come on, let’s go.”

  They took Gerry’s limousine to Setti’s house on Forty-second Street and got there just as the man himself was coming out the door. They offered him a ride; Setti, who usually walked the short distance to the opera house, squinted up at the snow and accepted. When they were all tucked in comfortably under the lap rug, the chorus master asked why they wanted to see him. “More questions, I suppose. Why does everyone think I see something nobody else sees?”

  “Oh, we’re all being asked questions,” Gerry said with a show of casualness. “But there’s something you’re in a position to know that nobody else is. It’s about Teresa Leone. Didn’t you miss her before the performance started?”

&nb
sp; He shrugged. “I count heads, I end with right number.”

  “Un momento,” Scotti interrupted. “Teresa Leone—which one is she?”

  “The mezzo-soprano who is stabbed,” Setti said. “Right before Carmen.”

  Gerry asked, “When did you take your head count?”

  “Eh, twenty minutes before curtain, perhaps fifteen.”

  “Mm, that doesn’t leave much time. I suppose the killer just waited for any chorister who strayed away from the others. What do you do after you make your count, Mr. Setti?”

  “Usually I listen to complaints. I do not stab the singers.”

  “Of course not—I didn’t mean to imply you did.” Not yet, anyway. “But do you move around a lot? Do you remember actually seeing Teresa during that fifteen- or twenty-minute period?”

  “I move around, yes.” Setti wrinkled his forehead. “I think I see her, right before curtain.”

  “But didn’t one of the other choristers say she’d gone looking for Teresa a half hour before the curtain … and couldn’t find her?” Not true; Gerry had made that up just to see what Setti would say.

  “Eh, then perhaps I am mistaken,” was what he said. “Or she is. I do not remember—no one knows these details are important until later.” At that moment the chauffeur pulled up to the Broadway entrance of the Metropolitan. “Now I must bid you adieu, Miss Farrar,” Setti said. “I have busy day awaiting me and I can answer no more of your questions.” He nodded to Scotti, climbed out of the limousine, and went into the opera house.

  “And so, carissima?” Scotti asked. “What do you learn?”

  “I learned I need to know a lot more about interrogating people,” she said frankly. “Maybe he’s only pretending he ended up with the right number when he counted. Who’s to check up on him? Maybe she was already dead by then.”

  “He could make mistake when he counts,” Scotti suggested.

  “Yes, that too, I suppose,” Gerry sighed. “Well, that was a waste of time. When I retire from the opera,” she said dryly, “I don’t think I’ll be opening a detective agency.”

  “Of course not,” Scotti teased. “Who would consult eighty-five-year-old detective?”

  Gerry laughed. “You may still be singing in your eighties, but I won’t. I always said I’d retire at forty.”