The Haunting Ballad (2 page)

Little beauty? Back off right there, pal!
I thought but didn't say.

The next few minutes were devoted to Spires' half-mumbled reflections on music and life. He ended his monologue with this gem: “Gotta search it out—the music, the memory. Gotta follow the trail. Like a detective, y'know? Hunting the clues, the rhythms…”

At this, one of the women (not Audrey) revealed that I was myself a detective.

Spires seemed to notice me for the first time. “Yeah? Like a police inspector or something?”

“Private eye,” I stated in a voice I hoped sounded no-nonsense and robust.

“Cool,” Spires said, almost interested. “Used to read Dashiell Hammett as a kid. I always dug that Sam Spade. So, are you like ol' Sam?”

Audrey laughed. It was a pretty uncharitable response, I thought—uncharitable, but not unfair. She knew and I knew that my deductive skills weren't exactly the stuff of legend. My father had been the
real
private eye—not just in title, but in temperament—with a tough-guy scowl, a nose for crime, and a mouthful of hard-knock tales. Buster Plunkett packed a gun (which I never have) and a punch (I have fists of clay) and knew his way around the shadowy back alleys of human nature. His death a couple of years back had dropped his sleuthing business squarely in my hesitant lap. I wasn't my father; any success I'd enjoyed as a PI was due largely to a certain clever old Irishman. But I'll get to Mr. O'Nelligan later.

“Sam Spade was fictional,” I told Spires with forced dignity. “I'm the real deal.” Good God, I was sounding like a fictional character myself—one from the cheesiest sort of hard-boiled thriller.
Keep your mouth shut, Lee,
I mentally instructed myself. No doubt, Audrey was thinking the same thing.

At this point, another young man bearing a guitar walked over to our table. Garbed in a dark green turtleneck sweater, he was slender like Spires but more substantially built. He had a pleasant, open face marked by a tumble of black hair and a slightly upturned nose. He didn't look much out of his teens.

“Hey, Byron, you doing a second set?” The accent was deeply Irish, not unlike the one I'd heard countless times from the lips of the aforementioned Mr. O'Nelligan.

“I don't need to, Tim. Not if you're ready to start. So where are your brothers?”

“Out of town. Mazzo has me going on solo. Guess I'll have to be raucous enough for three Paddies. Or die trying.”

“And your delectable lady? Where's she tonight?”

Tim's brow wrinkled. I had the distinct sense that he didn't like Spires referencing his woman in such terms. I could commiserate.

“Kimla's got a gig at the Golden Hut.”

“Cool.” Apparently, for Spires, everything was in the lower temperatures. “Well, get working, son.”

The young Irishman did just that. No sooner had he taken the stage and launched into song than a jarring cry of anger rang out across the room. Tim stopped midstrum. Through the cigarette smoke and candlelight, I saw a tall woman, fortyish, in a red dress hurling toward our table with locomotive speed. Her long blond hair flew wildly behind her, and her face, which normally might have been attractive, was twisted in a furious scowl.

“Spires!” Clearly here was one lady not presently enamored with our pretty boy. “You bastard, you!”

From a half-slouch, Spires straightened abruptly in his chair. “Jesus, Lorraine!”

Then the woman was looming over us, staring daggers, maybe even swords, down at the folksinger. I vaguely noted a second blonde—younger, shorter, less crazed-looking—standing directly behind the other. The room had gone silent.

Spires tried to sound calm. “Hey, Lorraine, you need to relax. Get peaceable, y'know?”

Lorraine's balled fists and murderous glare seemed anything but peaceable. “Who the hell do you think you are?”

Spires drew in a fortifying breath and, for a moment, I thought he might reply,
Why, I'm Byron Spires, as you well know—dashing young flatterer of other men's women.
Of course he didn't; he said nothing.

Lorraine barreled on. “What made you think you could record ‘The Wild, Weeping Heather'? That's my song!”

“Yours? It's a centuries-old Scottish ballad, last I heard.”

“
I'm
the one who found it! Brought it into the light, nurtured it!”

“Nurtured it?” Spires smirked unwisely. “Well, guess your baby's grown up and run loose.”

Lorraine let fly something between a scream and a curse and drew back her arm, fist intact. Before she could strike, her companion pulled her away from our table.

“Lorraine, stop! Just stop it!” the lesser blonde pleaded.

Lorraine shook her shadow loose and headed for Spires again.

That's when the Grand Mazzo made a timely appearance, placing his sizable self directly before the raging woman. “Enough, Lorraine.”

“This is just not cool,” Spires declared, unsurprisingly.

“Not cool at all,” Mazzo added, making it official. “You know I don't want any aggression in this place. We're all about the tranquility here.”

That earned a harsh laugh from Lorraine. “Oh really? Tranquility? So, is Byron Spires the great prince of peace?”

Not waiting for an answer, she abruptly pivoted and, companion in tow, made a beeline for the exit. The door slammed behind them like a thunderclap. For a very long moment, the room seemed to throb with a dense, awkward silence. Then Tim, forgotten onstage, called out spryly, “You folks out there should really leave the fighting to us Irish. After all, it's our national pastime.”

The audience burst into grateful laughter, and Tim jumped into a rousing upbeat song about a drunken rooster.
This kid I like,
I thought to myself.

Mazzo gave our table a theatrical bow and moved off to resume his hosting duties. Byron Spires shrugged dismissively and said (particularly to Audrey, I noticed), “That was Lorraine Cobble. She collects songs. And enemies.”

Then he, too, was up and off, his slung guitar and head of curls bouncing as he strode toward the door. I watched Audrey as she watched Spires.

*   *   *

ON OUR DRIVE
home that night, Audrey and I exchanged a few words of review. Very few.

“Well, it's certainly an interesting world in the Café Mercutio,” she said.

“Sure, if you like interesting.”

Audrey looked at me for a moment before saying, “Maybe I do. Maybe I would.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning life's a strange thing, isn't it? It can call to you, beckon you, and you might end up … Oh, I don't know…”

Then she turned away to stare out her window. I had the unpleasant feeling that she was seeing Byron Spires' face out there in the rushing night landscape. My hands tensed on the steering wheel. We said little for the remainder of the ride home.

Of course, on that evening I couldn't have known that my connection with the Café Mercutio had only just begun. It would soon lead me down a road peopled with singers, sinners, desperate lovers, and a killer. As Mr. O'Nelligan once said to me, “You just never know what the world will want of you.” Or, he could have added, what darkness you will need to pass through.

 

CHAPTER TWO

 

It was Audrey who first informed me of Lorraine Cobble's death. “It happened a little over two weeks ago. She leapt off the roof of her apartment building, and her body was found in the alley below. Dead on impact, the police think.”

We were standing in the cluttered backroom of the Thelmont Five-and-Dime, where Audrey worked full-time. It was early spring, four or five weeks after our visit to the Village. We actually hadn't seen much of each other since that night. I'd been tied up with a convoluted case that had taken me out of town for a spell, followed by news that my younger sister had been injured in a car accident in California. I'd flown out to be with Marjorie and ended up staying for nearly three weeks. Now she was recuperating nicely, and I'd just arrived back in Connecticut that morning.

“That wild woman who came screaming into the coffeehouse?” It wasn't an image I'd soon forget. “She committed suicide?”

“That's the assumption. They say she left a note.”

“
Who
says?”

“The crowd at the Mercutio.”

“Your Village girlfriends moved away right after we saw them, didn't they? So how would you know what people at the Mercutio are saying?”

She blushed—and Audrey generally was no blusher. “I've been going down there from time to time.”

This caught me up. “Alone?”

Audrey didn't seem to like the way I said the word. “Yes, alone. I have a valid driver's license, you know, and I'm certainly of legal age to travel without an escort.”

I didn't much fancy the sarcasm, so I offered my own. “Nobody said you weren't. I just never knew you were such a fan of sawdust and scruffy warblers.”

She turned away and began rummaging through a shelf of household items. I had the strong sense that she wanted to avoid eye contact.

Then it struck me—
Byron Spires
. Could he be the male siren drawing my fiancée to the land of languid bohemians? I didn't say his name and neither did she, but I felt the echo of it bouncing around the room.

After a long, uncomfortable moment, Audrey broke the silence. “Anyway, a suicide always shakes people up. Understandably.”

“Sure, understandably,” I repeated, feeling shaken up myself—but not, to be honest, by the Cobble woman's death. “So you've been going down there a lot?”

“Not so very much…” Audrey snatched a handful of spatulas from the shelf. “I really need to get back to work, Lee.”

That was that. Two minutes later, I was standing out in front of the store, wondering how the ground beneath my feet had shifted so dramatically.

*   *   *

DECIDING TO GO
to my office, I climbed into my '52 Nash Rambler, which I had christened Baby Blue on account of its color, and headed across town. Baby Blue was a swell-looking vehicle, but I always thought it looked even better when Audrey was beside me in the passenger seat. So, at the moment, it wasn't as swell as it could be. I'd bought the car off Joe Valish, Audrey's mechanic father, who'd hammered it back into form after the previous owner had slammed it into a parking meter. Since that guy had money to burn, he'd simply bought himself a new chariot, and Mr. Valish had sold me Baby Blue at a discount he only gave to men who planned to marry his daughters. Though, as I've mentioned, I really hadn't held up my end of the bargain.

From the first time we'd ever talked together—side by side at a soda fountain—Audrey and I just clicked. She was twenty back then; I was three years older. Her sister, Clare, and I had been in the same grade in high school, and I had a vague recollection of Clare having a gangly, uninteresting younger sibling. Apparently, in the ensuing years, that sibling had molted: The gangliness had been shed, and Audrey had suddenly become very interesting indeed. The day after our soda fountain encounter, we shared our first bona fide date. There was a movie, strolling, kissing—it was great. Over the next couple of years we had our starts and stops, accounted for by, among other things, my need to travel beyond the borders of Thelmont and the reappearance of an old beau of Audrey's, a navy hero you couldn't help but like. Though Lord knows I tried. In the end, I got some miles under my belt, the lovable sailor returned to the sea, and Audrey Valish and I became a permanent item.

In '54, just after my father took me into the business, I proposed to Audrey. Over the next three years—through my detective apprenticeship, through Dad's death, through my stumbling solo career—she and I held pretty firm, but, as I've said, we just never made it up the church steps. People who knew us thought I was a certifiable idiot for not getting the job done, and they were right. Who'd ever heard of a three-year engagement? Maybe during wartime, but that wasn't the story here. Certainly the fault was mine that we'd stalled on the matrimonial highway. That is, I always presumed so. Audrey had made it clear that she expected to be a married woman before she hit thirty, so it stood to reason that I was the one dragging his heels. However, as they say, it takes two to tango—or, in our case, to stand frozen in the middle of the dance floor. Money woes, timing problems, spats and sputters: Could these all be laid at my doorstep alone? In truth, hadn't many a couple faced the same obstacles and still managed to echo their I-do's at the obligatory moment? Maybe Audrey herself had a hand in the heel-dragging. Maybe she wasn't as gung ho on getting hitched as she made out. Now, into this breach of doubts and delays, had marched a young crooning scallywag named Byron Spires.

I was pondering all this as I shuffled into my office and plopped behind the desk. It was the same narrow space that had served my father before me, with the very same dinged-up desk, creaky swivel chair, battered file cabinet, and framed portrait of Teddy Roosevelt (a “guy among guys,” as Dad had often declared). Even the words
PLUNKETT AND SON INVESTIGATORS
remained on the office door. My rent was dirt cheap because of some shadowy favor that Dad had once done for the landlord.

This was the first time I'd been here since leaving for California three weeks back, and an orderly stack of letters awaited me on the desktop. This, I knew, was the work of Mr. O'Nelligan, the one person beside the landlord and me with a key to the office. Preoccupied as I was, I wielded my letter opener without enthusiasm. The yield was uninspiring: a sizable number of bills, a few small checks, and a note from an octogenarian thanking me for locating her run-amuck Pekingese—not my most illustrious case.

I was finishing up the letters when the phone rang.