The Music Lovers, page 9
“Sure, I do. Sheila Mozkowski was their lead singer. They were our house band for about six months in ‘72.”
“Do you know what happened to them?”
Rochberg put on his thinking cap. “As I recall they got a recording contract with Capitol and went out to L.A. But I don’t think they ever cut a record, and Capitol eventually dropped them. I heard they had some personnel problems after that and ended up splitting up in ‘73 or ‘74. Over the last decade a few of them have drifted back into town. Sheila, of course. And Luddy Carter.”
“How ‘bout Bob Sousa?”
Ken Rochberg shook his head. “He’s the real reason Sheila and the band never made it. That guy was a bummer. Always stoned on something nasty like MDA or dust. Always pushing other people around. And greedy as hell.”
It sounded like the recipe for a kidnapper.
“Do you think this guy Luddy Carter might know where Sousa is?” I asked.
“He might. He was as tight as anyone was with Bob. You want me to give him a call?”
“Yeah.”
Rochberg stood up.
“While we’re waiting,” Sherwood said, “how about some tone?”
“O.K.?” Rochberg said to me.
“Sure.”
That brought him all the way back—the full half-inch.
******
As promised he played us Wagner, the first act of Die Walküre. Siegmund, Sieglinde, Hunding, the whole Volsung crew.
“Kinda appropriate, don’t you think,” Sherwood said, “after the Silver Fox’s confession?”
I told Loeffler I had a little trouble fitting Larry Peacock, Sheila Mozkowski, and Leon Tubin into the Ring myth. But he was only too happy to disabuse me.
“It’s all myth, Harry,” he said, shutting his eyes and running his hand over the melody like it was a tangible presence. “That’s all life really amounts to, isn’t it? Old stories we keep acting out on different stages?”
“Are you quoting Nietzsche again?”
“Sort of.” He smiled. “You know sometimes I think philosophy is just a heap of dead ashes. None of your organized thinkers ever gets down to bedrock. Only your great artists go that deep. The stories they tell—that’s where the real wisdom lies.”
“But music doesn’t tell a story,” I said.
“Of course it tells a story. Are your ears stuffed up? Can’t you hear what’s going on?”
“It’s an opera.”
“It’s drama, man. All music is drama and myth.”
“What about a symphony or a piece of chamber music?”
“Same deal.”
“There aren’t any words.”
“We supply the words,” Sherwood Loeffler said.
Siegmund was hailing Sieglinde as his sister and his bride when Luddy Carter showed up. Down went the sound like a curtain, and Sherwood’s spirits seemed to sink along with it.
Carter was a husky man in his mid-forties with a full brown beard, horn-rim glasses, and a bad hairpiece. So bad it looked as if a beaver had perched on his head. Like most people with pieces he kept patting and scratching and touching his wig in a vain attempt to convince everyone else that his hair was real.
Sherwood Loeffler laughed when he saw it, then turned away to avoid making eye contact with poor Carter, who knew—as people with hairpieces always know—that the laugh was on him.
“He woulda been better off with a gallon of Sherwin-Williams glossy enamel,” Loeffler said, not quite under his breath.
The interview started badly and went downhill. Carter couldn’t forget his wig. And even if he could have Sherwood wasn’t going to let him. I had the feeling that Sherwood was suffering from Wagner interruptus and holding it against Luddy.
“What kind of name is that?” Sherwood said. “Luddy? Are you a Luddite?”
“I’m Episcopalian,” Carter said.
I managed to get one solid piece of information out of Carter between Sherwood’s jibes. Unfortunately it was a very bad piece of information.
“Bob Sousa’s dead,” he told us. “He got killed in a motorcycle accident back in ‘77.”
My spirits fell—better than half an inch.
“You sure of that?” Sherwood said suspiciously. “Don’t some of you hippies practice living burials and things like that?”
“What’s with this guy?” Luddy said to Ken Rochberg.
Ken just shook his head.
“Hey, check it out, if you don’t believe me. It made the papers here. Bob got drunk on Christmas Eve and drove onto an exit ramp of I-75, right into a semi.”
“Very sensible,” Sherwood said.
“Hey, he was drunk!” Luddy Carter said.
Luddy and Sherwood almost came to blows before the hour was out. But when Sherwood stood up, Luddy backed down.
“Let that be a lesson to you,” Sherwood said, stretching to his full six feet eight.
It was two-thirty when I got the big S back to his Currier & Ives house in East Walnut Hills.
“I’m gonna stop at the hospital,” I said to him. “You want to come along?”
“Oh, I think I’ll wait till tonight. The little fella’s probably sick of visitors by now.”
“Suit yourself.”
As he got out of the car I said, “You been a help, Sherwood.”
He tossed a giant hand at me. “De nada, as them spics always say.”
12
IT WAS a little past three when I arrived at Jewish Hospital. I got Leon’s room number from a volunteer at the reception desk in the first-floor lobby.
“He’s in room 1222 Ridgeway,” she said, looking puzzled. “There must have been a shortage of beds last night because the twelfth floor is where they usually put the geriatric cases.”
I followed arrows down a glassed-in corridor to the Ridgeway wing, past a long wall full of the usual banal industrial artwork—photographs of flowers and framed quilts and insipid abstract prints that were like Tums for the eyes. There was a bank of elevators at the end of the hall. I took one up to twelve, nearly running down an old man in a walker as I got off.
“Oops,” he said, as if it had been his fault.
Room 1222 was at the north end of a wing of rooms to the right of the central nurses’ station. I knew which one it was without looking at the numbers because LeRoy Anderson was standing outside the door, alongside a tall, balding man I hadn’t met.
“Have you been here all night?” I said, smiling at LeRoy.
“Naw,” he said, smiling back at me. “I went home and got some sleep once they settled him down. Just got back a coupla hours ago. Do you know Pavel Fleischer?”
The tall man held out his hand.
“I’m Pavel Fleischer,” he said as we shook.
Pavel Fleischer had a trace of Middle Europe in his soft voice, and more than a trace in his long, melancholy face. Even when he smiled his eyes stayed melancholy, as if sometime in the past he’d simply laughed himself out.
“Pavel’s an immigrant,” LeRoy said. “That’s how come he talks funny.”
“I’m from Hungary. Budapest. My family came over 1968. So I’m practically American.”
LeRoy chuckled. “With that brogue you ain’t never gonna be an American.”
“How’s Leon?” I asked.
“Just fine,” LeRoy said. “Running them nurses ragged fielding his phone calls. They’re just now changing his sheets.”
Inside the hospital room I heard someone groan like a sea lion.
“Jesus!” I said.
LeRoy laughed. “That ain’t Leon. That’s that Mr. Goldfarb they put him next to. He’s ninety years old and they just give him a catheter that he don’t much like. Fact is he keeps pulling it out.”
“You’re killing me with that tube!” a man shouted.
“Has it been like this all day?” I asked.
“Pretty much,” LeRoy said. “They’re gonna move Leon down to six soon as they get a bed.”
A red-faced nurse came out the door of 1222 with a bundle of sheets in her arms and a fresh scratch on her cheek.
“You can go in now,” she said testily.
“You go on, Harry,” LeRoy said. “We’ll wait out here for ya.”
I went into the room. Leon was propped up in the near bed. Mercifully someone had drawn a curtain around Mr. Goldfarb’s bed. Leon smiled when he saw me come through the door, and I saw the wires on his teeth from where they’d set his jaw.
“How ya doing?” I said.
“I been better,” Leon said, although it came out through the wires sounding like “I b’bear.”
“You got a broken jaw, huh?”
He nodded.
“Leon, I know it’s tough for you to talk but I need to ask you a few questions about Sheila.”
He nodded again, vigorously. “G’head.”
“I been trying to run down the guy who kidnapped her, this guy Bob. At first I thought it might be Bob Sousa, the drummer who played in Sheila’s band.”
Leon shook his head, left to right. “‘S dead.”
Great, I said to myself. I could’ve saved a couple of hours if I hadn’t let Sherwood Loeffler drag me to a concert.
“Has Sheila ever mentioned any other Bobs to you? Guys she might have spent some time with?”
“M’be. Don’ ‘member.”
“The one who beat you up—did Sheila say anything else that might identify him?”
“S’d D’troy.”
“I didn’t catch that.”
Leon reached over to the nightstand and picked up a pad of paper and a pencil. He scribbled something on the pad and showed it to me: “She said ‘Detroit.’”
“Detroit? Like the guy was from Detroit?”
Leon shrugged. “Dunno.”
“Did Sheila ever live in Detroit?”
“Don’ th’n so.”
Bob from Detroit. That was a hot tip for the FBI.
“What did this guy look like, Leon?”
He started writing on the pad. After a moment he handed it to me: “He looked like Richard Wagner—only a lot bigger and without the muttonchops.”
I laughed. “Sherwood will be so pleased.”
Leon made a pained face—which in his condition wasn’t difficult to do. Grabbing the pad back he wrote something else down: “I’m not kidding!”
I tried to picture Richard Wagner—a foot or so taller and without the muttonchops. The square, pouchy, brick-red face. The unruly hair, going gray at the temples. The cold, uneasy eyes and twisted, chewed-over mouth. If you put that package in a leisure suit with a wide-lapel shirt and wingtip shoes, Wagner had the makings of a good German thug.
“How tall was he, Leon? What did he weigh?”
Leon scribbled on the pad: “Over six feet, and real husky, almost fat.” He grabbed the notepad back from me: “He had a tattoo on his right forearm.”
“What did it say, ‘Blood of the Volsungs’?”
Leon didn’t smile. “It said ‘Semper Fi,’” he wrote.
Bob from Detroit, an ex-Marine who looked like Richard Wagner in a leisure suit. It was starting to add up.
I had the feeling Leon was feeding me a line of bull. And I thought I knew why.
“Leon, I found the money in the freezer of your refrigerator. You know, the hundred-dollar bills wrapped in aluminum foil?”
“Frig’raor?” he said with an innocent look.
“C’mon, Leon, quit wasting time here. Sheila’s life may be at stake. Where’d that money come from?”
“Dunno ‘bout m’ny.”
“I don’t buy that, Leon. Sheila’s been living with you for thirteen years, and you’re telling me you never opened the freezer?”
Leon’s lips trembled as if he was going to break into tears. He stared at me with an imploring look on his face. “Tellin’ all I c’n.”
“What can’t you tell me? Did someone contact you, Leon? I know you’ve gotten quite a few phone calls. Did Bob call here at the hospital?”
“Bob called?” a man suddenly cried out in a demanding voice. “Why didn’t someone tell me that Bob called?”
I looked around the room, then back at Leon. He pointed to the curtain drawn in front of Mr. Goldfarb’s bed, then back to his temple, circling his finger in the classic sign for craziness.
I started to laugh.
“Na’ f’ny,” Leon said.
Picking up the notepad he wrote: “You gotta trust me, Harry. You gotta find Sheila before it’s too late. And you can’t go to the cops. I have good reasons.”
I wasn’t happy with Leon Tubin or his good reasons when I left the hospital room. I knew he wasn’t telling me the truth, and I thought I knew why. The thirty thousand good reasons why. He’d had a day to think about what to do and had apparently decided to clam up until he heard from Bob—if he hadn’t heard from him already. I didn’t completely trust his cockamamy description of the kidnapper, which sounded like it owed more to his hatred of Sherwood Loeffler than it did to reality. And I didn’t believe him when he’d denied knowing about the thirty grand.
Outside in the hall LeRoy and Pavel Fleischer were pretending that they hadn’t overheard the conversation between me and Leon. At least Pavel Fleischer was.
“Who is this guy Wagner?” LeRoy said, after what he considered a decent interval of silence. “Is that like Robert Wagner?”
“He’s a German composer,” Pavel Fleischer said. “A Nazi.”
LeRoy grew wroth. “You tellin’ me a Nazi beat Leon up?”
“A guy that looked like a Nazi,” Pavel said.
“I’m gonna get my magnum,” LeRoy said, stalking back into Leon’s room. “Case that son-of-a-bitch shows up again.”
It wasn’t an altogether bad idea.
I wandered up the hall to the nurses’ station, with Pavel Fleischer trailing behind me like a baby chick. Even after twenty-some years in the States Fleischer had the stranger’s air of not being quite at home in a new town.
I found a girl at the nurses’ station who’d been on duty all day—a pretty kid in a candy-stripe uniform.
“Have you been fielding calls for the guy in 1222?”
“Yes,” she said. “He can’t talk very well, so we’ve been trying to answer the phone for him.”
“Do you remember getting a call from a guy named Bob?”
She laughed nervously. “What a peculiar question.”
“Bob’s a friend of Leon’s,” I said.
The girl thought it over for a second. “I don’t remember anybody named Bob calling. There was a Caroline and a Larry Peacock.”
“How ‘bout Bob’s wife Sheila? Maybe she made the call.”
“We didn’t take all the names, sir,” the girl said, looking slightly bewildered. “And we didn’t answer every call. Sometimes Mr. Tubin answered—or tried to.”
“Thanks,” I said, turning away from the counter.
“Mr. Stoner?” Pavel Fleischer was standing right behind me. He had a sad look on his long, pensive face. “I think I must tell you something. In private, please.”
“O.K.”
We went down the hall to a consultation room fitted out with a round wooden table and several chairs. Fleischer sat down at the table and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He shook one out and half the pack came with it. Blushing he bent over and picked them up, shoving them back in the pack one by one.
“Oh hell,” he said, tossing the pack on the table and putting his hands to his face. “I’m so ashamed. I don’t know how to say this.”
“Is it about Leon?”
He nodded, dragging his hands down his cheeks and pulling the flesh under his eyes with them. “This is awful. Leon, he was my first buddy when I move here. He teaches me about music and records. I wouldn’t make a living if not for Leon.”
“You’re a musician?”
“I sell records. Like Leon. Records and other stuff.”
“What other stuff?”
“Junk. Cameras, books, paintings. Anything I find secondhand. I go to estate sales, auctions. I have customers who will buy anything for the right price. Émigrés. Greenhorns, you know?” He shook his head unhappily. “This is so shameful.”
I stared at him for a moment, wondering if he had enough arm to push a bookshelf full of records onto my head. He was certainly in an agony of remorse over Leon. And the robberies were the only things I could think of that might have caused it. “Don’t tell me you’re the one who’s been stealing Leon’s records?” I said.
Pavel Fleischer dropped his hands from his cheeks and slapped the table with his palms. “Me! Steal records from Leon! Oh, please. What kind of man do you think of me?”
His face twisted with disgust.
“I’m sorry,” I said quickly. “It was just a wild guess. What is it you wanted to say?”
“It’s about Sheila.”
“You have some information about Sheila?”
He nodded. “I seen something—maybe it could be important. Maybe not.”
“What did you see?”
“This guy Bob?” He swallowed hard. “I think maybe I have met him.”
“When?”
“I buy records from him, maybe. Many years ago in Kentucky.”
I started to get a little excited. “Go on.”
“It is Sheila who tells me he’s in town and has records to sell. I go over and talk to him. We meet in this motel by the river. You know this one? Big cylinder with the restaurant?”
“The Quality Court?”
Pavel nodded. “Yes. This is the one. Anyway I go up to his room and Sheila, she is there, too. I think . . . I don’t know what I think. This guy, he shows me these records he’s got. Says he was in the record business, you know—rep’d for one of the record companies. He says he would like to keep these records, but he is always in road. Besides he needs money. I say, ‘Sure. I got money, you got goods.’ I buy a hundred of them. Very reasonable. Then I say to myself, why doesn’t Sheila tell Leon about this guy? I mean these were good records—shaded dogs, Mercuries. I’m not classical music lover, you know? But I buy them anyway. Later I found out why Sheila doesn’t tell Leon about this guy.”
“Why?”
“He was shtupping her is why.”
“How do you know that?”
Pavel Fleischer dropped his head to his chest. “This is what is shameful.”
