ллллллллллллллллллллллллллллллл л THE MOZART CODE, An Excerpt л ллллллллллллллллллллллллллллллл Author: Dick Alder Title: THE MOZART CODE Category: Detective Novel Interface: Writers Dream Publisher: Da Ponte and Co. Price: $6.95 Available from: Da Ponte and Co. 402 Broadway Venice CA 90291 Excerpt: THE MOZART CODE By Dick Alder Copyright 1992 By Dick Alder INTRODUCTION "I very much liked the character and musical detail. I really was very tempted..." said Suzanne Kirk of Scribner's. "Welcome humor and vivid local color," said Joe Blades of Ballantine. "I loved THE MOZART CODE. If we weren't on a buying hiatus at the moment, I'd champion this here. Dick Adler has a strong, engaging voice," said Sara Ann Freed of the Mysterious Press. "I particularly enjoyed Ivan's irreverent manner," said Tara Harnett of Houghton Mifflin. "Ivan Davis is a wonderful, funny character, who I think readers would enjoy following from book to book," said Melinda Metz of Berkeley. Those were some of the notices I got when my agent sent my first mystery novel to 23 different publishers. Everybody loved it; nobody bought it. So I'm trying to reach an audience by another route - disktop publishing. I'm sending the first three chapters up into BBS Land as a free appetizer. And the delicious main course - another 200 pages - can be yours very cheaply: $6.95, with tax and postage tossed in free. Type "ORDER" at the DOS prompt to print out an order form. Or if your printer went south, send a check for $6.95 to DICK ADLER, 402 Broadway, Venice CA 90291. Even if you don't order, a comment would be appreciated - either by surface mail or at CompuServe #76346,546. Thanks for taking the time to read this. DICK ADLER is the co-author, with former California Governor Edmund G. (Pat) Brown, of PUBLIC JUSTICE, PRIVATE MERCY: A Governor's Education on Death Row, published in 1989 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. He also co-authored a book about the Richard Miller FBI espionage case, SLEEPING WITH MOSCOW, published in 1987. A former magazine editor in New York, London and Los Angeles, Adler has written more than 500 articles for major magazines in America and England. He regularly reviews mysteries for the Chicago Tribune. THE MOZART CODE has been prepared using a licensed copy of WRITER'S DREAM, which is the copyrighted property of ANOTHER COMPANY. All other files copyright (c) 1992 by Dick Adler. CHAPTER ONE The bogus UPS man was now holding a gun. Like the purple and green running shoes, I was sure it wasn't a regular part of the uniform. "Back off, fat man. And put your hands up -- high!" It was the running shoes that had first caught my attention. Wearing a Santa Claus suit that didn't need much extra padding and a fake beard pasted over my real one, I was standing outside of Praeger's Jewelry Store on the third floor of the Westside Pavilion, ringing my bell and trying to get a line on how large quantities of merchandise were slipping out of the shop almost every day without being paid for. I had noticed UPS men and women coming and going several times a day, which seemed perfectly normal for the holiday season. But the rest all wore those standard issue shiny brown brogans. This guy, who came in once a day at about the same time, didn't fit the pattern. So I watched through the window as he went over to a woman behind the counter, and noticed that she looked around nervously before dropping half a dozen small packages into his sack. It wouldn't be the first time that someone inside a store had figured out a new way to steal. "Mind if I look at those?" I said as quietly as I could to the UPS man as he came out of Praeger's. "Security," I added, flashing the badge I'd been given when I took the job. That's when he pulled out his gun and started shouting. I wasn't carrying anything more lethal than a small Swiss Army knife, buried deep under my Santa suit. If I could get it out, I might stab him with my ivory toothpick. On the other hand, his noise had already attracted the attention of several other Santas who were real cops and carried real guns. There were too many possible hostages around; I had to do something before he thought of grabbing one. I started to raise my hands, and as naturally as I could I also began to swing my sack of toys toward his gun hand. The idea was to knock his hand away long enough for one of the armed Santas to get his own gun out. But I must have swung harder than I thought; the sack caught his arm and then his jaw and lifted him backwards, off balance. He hit the guardrail and kept on going, up and over and down three floors to the gallery below. I heard the screams from down there and hoped he hadn't taken any shoppers with him. He hadn't. The screams came from people upset by the sight of a body in a brown suit suddenly dumped into the Pavilion's decorative fountain... CHAPTER TWO "Remind me after rehearsal. I want to ask you a favor." A favor. As I watched her enchanting bottom walk away, I wondered what kind of favor Esther had in mind. Sexual, perhaps? She was 28, a light soprano who one day could be as foxy as Janacek's "Cunning Little Vixen" and the next as soft and innocent as Sophie in "Rosenkavalier." She projected a combination of strength and vulnerability which most of the men in the chorus would have left home for. On the surface, she didn't seem to require the sexual services of a heavyset (to put it kindly) amateur bass 20 years her senior. But stranger things had happened, so I let the idea dance through my head while we tried to clean up the mess of the Fair Scene chorus from the first act of "Faust." "It's about my father," Esther began as we drank a velvety Italian red wine from Barry Salzman's cellar in a booth away from the other singers. Aha! I thought. Maybe it was sex after all. The last two freelance outings I'd enjoyed had both called me Daddy at a certain point in the proceedings. "He's missing. Somebody told me that you look for missing people." Five years before, when an Australian press lord bought the magazine I was editing and paid me two years' salary not to work for him, I spent six months of it getting my private investigator's license. I thought the work would be a continuation of what I'd been doing for 20 years as a writer and an editor -- getting people to help me find out things for money, love or other perverse reasons. For the next 18 months I sat in my office in the Writers and Artists Building on Little Santa Monica and waited for cases to walk up the two flights. It was a long 18 months. Then an orchestrated piece in the View section of the Los Angeles Times, another former employer, brought in a few clients. A couple were short-term and got me even more attention; some others were less interesting but became regulars. Now I actually lived on what I made as a p.i. -- although the $1,000 a month sent by my ex- wife, who I had once put through law school, helped pay the rent from time to time. "It's one of the things I do," I told Esther, watching her teeth dip into the wine. "What's the story on your father, and how long has he been missing?" "I'm not sure. I usually talk to him about once every two weeks, but he's on sabbatical and he's been travelling a lot this year, so I didn't think much about not hearing from him until Thanksgiving came and went. We always spend Thanksgiving together, because I go to my mother's for Christmas. They were divorced when I was in college," she explained, as though I'd asked a question. "He lives by himself?" "Yes. He has an apartment in Northridge, not far from the campus. Did I tell you he's a professor in the English Department? Anyway, I called and called and got no answer, not even his machine, so I drove up there on Friday. His car wasn't in his spot. I used the key he gave me to go in. I got the feeling that he hadn't been there for a long time -- but also that he hadn't planned to stay away so long. You know what I mean? And the answering machine was turned on, but the tape was full so it couldn't take any more messages." I had been singing under Esther Lundberg's direction in the chorus at The Opera Cafe for six months, but this was the first time I'd ever had her to myself for more than 30 seconds. I wanted to know a lot of things, chiefly did she ever fool around with older men, but I decided the best idea at this point was to stick to business. "You say he was on sabbatical, travelling a lot -- maybe he just got delayed someplace." "I'm sure he would have called me if he did that," she said. "We're not the closest family in the world, but we both worked at it. No, I'm afraid he's sick or in some kind of trouble. I tried to file a missing person report with the Northridge police -- they told me to wait another week or two. 'Sixty-year-old men get some funny ideas sometimes,' the detective said to me. Is there anything you can do to help?" "I could probably do a little looking around, if you'd like," I told her. "I'm not overburdened with work at the moment." In fact, the Santa gig at the Westside Pavilion was all I had going, and this afternoon's little drama had probably ended that. "The only trouble is," she said, turning the full force of her Nordic blue eyes on my face, "I haven't got much money. I thought maybe... we could work out some sort of an arrangement..." Be still my heart. "An arrangement?" I echoed dumbly. "Didn't you once say you wanted to take some private singing lessons but couldn't afford it? I usually get thirty dollars an hour -- I don't know how much you charge..." I swallowed my dashed hopes manfully. In the long run, music lasted longer than sex anyway. "Something like that, but on a daily rate. Sure, that would be fine. Anyway, I'm not even sure I can help you. But I'll be glad to give it a try." She arranged to meet me outside her father's apartment building the next morning, then slid out of the booth to grab some cake and catch the accompanist before he left for the night. I was watching her walk away again when Barry Salzman interrupted my thoughts. "Keep your mind on the music, Ivan. That bass solo in the 'Faust' still sounds thin and ragged." "It will improve dramatically after the first performance," I told him. "There's nothing like a little public embarrassment to motivate people into learning their parts." The owner of The Opera Cafe was an entertainment lawyer who, like me, had chosen the straight world over music early in his life and was now regretting that choice. He plowed most of the money he made defending the lifestyles of the rich and famous back into his restaurant, which soaked it up the way a soprano soaks up love. There were 14 young professional singers like Esther on Barry's payroll, not to mention an authentic Italian chef from Parma and a gang of waiters straight out of the road company of "Hello, Dolly." Barry slipped easily into the seat just vacated by Esther, and I cursed again his ability to eat at his own restaurant every night of the week and still look as gaunt as a marathon runner. Maybe he was a secret bulemic, sneaking into the onyx-walled john to unload all that angel hair pasta primavera and anisette-soaked cheesecake. "I've got some work for you, if you're available," he said. "Absolutely," I replied. "Which one of your superstars is in trouble?" "Fish Taylor. Remember him?" "Sure. I used to buy all his records in the Sixties. 'Street Girl,' 'Sun Dreams,' 'The Last Time I Saw Samantha' -- great stuff. Didn't he change his name and become some sort of religious fanatic?" "Brother Serenity," Barry said. "He lives at a place called Earth Works, near Santa Fe. Lots of rich people trying to find redemption by working the soil." "And just what seems to be Brother Serenity's problem? Somebody dipping into his supply of nose candy? From what I recall, he snorted up a sizeable slice of Colombia in his time." "He swears he's been clean for five years," Barry said. "That was my first thought when he told me about the death threats -- that they were drug-related. I tend to believe him. I know that the people who started Earth Works make a big thing about renouncing all artificial stimulants. I can't even get a cup of coffee when I go out there." As if to compensate, Barry drained his inky espresso and signalled for a refill. "What form did these death threats take?" I asked. "A few postcards and then two phone calls. It was the calls that made Fish turn to me for help. He was sure after the second one that he recognized the voice -- and that it was someone he and I both know. That's when I thought about using your services. For a singer, you know how to keep your mouth shut when necessary." I thanked him for the compliment. "And now you're going to tell me who he thinks the mystery voice belongs to?" "Not yet. Drop by the office tomorrow and we'll kick it around some more. I just wanted to be sure you were interested," Barry said as he rose to leave. "Interested? I'm fascinated. I'll see you after lunch, if that's acceptable. About 2:30?" Barry said that was fine, and moved off to talk shop with some of the women in the chorus. The Opera Cafe was becoming an increasingly expensive hobby until his wife Rose had the brilliant idea six months ago of starting a chorus of dedicated amateurs who enjoyed singing opera enough to pay a hundred dollars for eight rehearsals and three performances. Esther liked the idea because working as choral director added to her meager income. The Salzmans liked it because each of the 40-odd members of the chorus filled the restaurant on performance nights with their friends and families. I liked it because it combined three of my four major interests -- music, food and (in the form of fantasies about Esther and a whiskey- voiced alto named Jeanine who I had my eye on) sex. As for my fourth major interest, crime -- things seemed to be looking up in that direction as well. Esther's father lived in an apartment complex that looked like a Swiss chalet on the outside. Inside, it had the same cottage cheese ceilings and metal-framed sliding windows and midget pool as my place in Santa Monica -- which looked like a Morroccan cathouse from the front. She had kissed me on the cheek as I got out of my car. "Did you check his mailbox?" I asked to cover my confusion about this change in our relationship. "I don't have a key, but it looks empty." Which meant either lying in wait for the mailman or a visit to the post office to see if he'd left a temporary hold order. As we entered her father's apartment, I knew what Esther meant about nobody having been there for awhile. The air was stale and dusty, with the faint odor of dead plants. The only sign of life was the flashing red light on the answering machine on the desk in the living room. It was the kind you can call from any touchtone phone to get your messages and clear the tape. I rewound it now; the tape was full, and most of the messages seemed routine. "Call me when you get back and we'll have dinner," said a woman named Norma. A book editor from New York had called three times; the second time he sounded impatient and the third time he was definitely angry. I wrote down all the names and numbers as possible leads. Then I checked the outgoing message, which Esther wouldn't have heard. A smooth, unruffled man's voice gave no indication of being away for an hour or a year. "Can you tell if any of his clothes are missing?" I asked Esther as we moved into the small bedroom. "What kind of luggage did he use?" "I gave him a matched set last Christmas -- a garment bag and a small suitcase in tan canvas with brown leather trim," she said, going through his closet. "I don't see them here. And his good blue blazer isn't here, either. He wore that for dressy occasions. Shoes I can't be sure about, but I don't see his desert boots. He lived in those." She checked off a few more obviously missing items -- a favorite tweed jacket, a shirt she had given him for his birthday. Adding them to the absence of basic toilet articles in the bathroom convinced me that Carl Lundberg had gone on a trip somewhere. But looking around the apartment also made me agree with Esther that he probably hadn't meant to stay away longer than a couple of weeks. The plants in the living room each had those self-watering gadgets that would keep them moist for up to two weeks, but the things had all run out of water and the plants were dry and in some cases long dead. And there were three books neatly stacked on the hall table, waiting to be returned to the UCLA Music Library. I recognized the signs of a fellow library compulsive and checked the due days; the books were 10 days overdue. My guess was that Lundberg had planned to stay away for two weeks, but hadn't been back here for a month. I'd be able to pin down the dates better when I checked with the post office and called some of the messages on the answering machine. What bothered me most was why he hadn't called in to get his messages. Esther may have thought about the same thing, but I wasn't going to mention it in case she hadn't. "Is there anybody else he might have told where he was going?" I asked her. "A friend at college, maybe? Or a woman - - the Norma on the tape?" "He never mentioned women to me," Esther said. "I tried to ask him about it a couple of times, to encourage him, but he always changed the subject. Daddy was very reserved about things like that -- very Norwegian, if you know what I mean. And the only friend I ever met was Briscoe McBride, the director of the opera program at Northridge." McBride's name and number were in the Rolodex on Lundberg's desk, which I asked to borrow. The desk itself looked curiously neat and bare. "Did he do most of his work here?" I asked. "No, he used the computer in his office. He joked about becoming very dependent on it in his old age." I looked through the rest of the apartment and asked Esther if there was someplace nearby where we could get some coffee. I followed her in my car and we joined the early lunch crowd at a Denny's down the road. "You said your father was on sabbatical. Did he have some definite project in mind?" "Oh yes, he was working on a book about Lorenzo Da Ponte in America. He was very excited about it; he found some research material at the University of Texas that hadn't been looked at for 50 years." I knew enough about Da Ponte from reading various Mozart biographies to understand why Lundberg would want to write about him. Born a Jew near Venice, he became a Catholic priest and poet, got mixed up with Casanova and was kicked out of the Church for adultery, then wound up writing the libretti for Mozart's three best Italian operas in Vienna. After that, Da Ponte had moved on to London and ended up in New York, where he worked with Clement Clark Moore at Columbia College and helped bring Italian opera to America. A hell of a life; I envied Lundberg for having the chance to dig into it. "Could that be where he is now -- in Texas?" I asked Esther. "Maybe. But I think he had already finished the work he had to do there. He was in Austin for about three weeks in September, looking through the material. He couldn't stop talking about it after he got back." The memory of her father's happiness brought tears to her eyes. "What else can you tell me about him?" I asked gently, to get her over the hump. "How was his health? Did he have a problem with drinking?" I hadn't seen any signs of that in Lundberg's apartment, but he might have been the type who never boozes at home. "I don't think Daddy has ever been drunk in his life," she said. "The most I've seen him take is a second glass of wine. And as far as I know, his health is good." She paused, then looked me full in the face with those dazzling eyes. "Tell me the truth, Ivan. Do you think something has happened to him?" "It's too early for theories. He could be in Bermuda with some hot-blooded companion and has just been too busy to call home." She smiled gamely, either at the thought or my attempt to ease her mind, then handed me the picture I'd asked for. It showed a 20-year-old Esther, her blonde hair a lot longer than it was now, laughing and resting her head on the shoulder of a handsome, silver-haired man in his 50s. They were standing outside of what appeared to be a Western saloon or restaurant. "That was taken in 1978, on our last vacation as a family, at Bishop's Lodge in Santa Fe," she said. "Daddy hasn't changed much since then, although lots of other things have." That meant Mommy was presumably behind the camera. But Esther hadn't mentioned her directly, and I decided not to pursue the subject just yet. Esther had a lesson to give in Pasadena. I asked her to write a "To Whom It May Concern" note explaining that she had retained me to look for her father. She brought up the subject of payment again; we agreed that I'd spend another few hours of my valuable time trying to come up with a lead and worry about our barter arrangement later. After she left, I sat for a moment, finishing my coffee and looking at the picture she'd given me. Carl Lundberg was a good-looking guy, in good health, with a job he liked and a daughter who cared about him. What could make a man like that decide to drop out of sight? I could think of a lot of things, none of them pleasant, so I stopped speculating and headed for the main Northridge post office. I had noticed a current voter registration card in the top drawer of Lundberg's desk and slipped it into my pocket just in case. Rather than go through some long and possibly useless routine wagging my note and license at the mail pickup window, I flashed the registration card instead, said I was back from vacation and asked for my mail. "Stayed away a little longer than you planned to, eh Mr. Lundberg?" said the clerk, who looked like a black, female version of the Pillsbury Dough Boy. "That's all right, no additional charge for the extra two weeks," she chuckled. "What did I put down I'd be gone, two weeks or three?" I asked, trying my best to look like an absent-minded professor. "You put down from the sixth through the 20th," she said, waving a form. "Guess you couldn't tear yourself away, huh?" Today was the 10th of December, which meant that Lundberg had been gone for exactly five weeks. There wasn't much mail to show for it, either -- none of the catalogues which clog my box with memories of past excesses, only a few magazines like "Opera News" and "The New Republic," plus a dozen bills and a couple of personal letters. One, with Lundberg's name and address hand-printed in green ink, no return address and a Santa Fe postmark ten days old, I opened on the spot. Inside there was just a single sheet of music paper, with no note attached. It wasn't the kind of printed score I was used to reading. This was written out by hand, the notes sketched in quickly in pencil, the words printed in slanting letters below. It seemed to be a scene from an opera, with a rough orchestra line and two voice parts -- a baritone and a soprano duet. The words were in Italian, and I didn't recognize them. But there was something familiar about the pattern of the music, or what my fading sight-reading skills could make of it. I thought it was by a composer I knew, someone whose work I had been looking at recently. Since that could have covered anyone from Mozart to Gounod, with Gilbert and Sullivan thrown in, I decided to get some expert advice. Briscoe McBride wasn't back from lunch yet, so I used the time and Esther's note to check out Carl Lundberg's office in the English Department's motel-like wing on the Cal State Northridge campus. The secretary who opened his door for me thought she hadn't seen Lundberg for about a month, but hadn't worried about it because he hadn't come in more than once or twice since he'd been on sabbatical anyway. That sounded odd; Esther said he was doing all his work on his office computer. "Could he have come in early or late, without you seeing him?" I asked her. "I guess so. Now that I think of it, Professor Lundberg once said he was a night owl. And I leave at 5, so maybe I just missed him." Lundberg's computer was a Wang, one of several hooked up to the department's hard disk. I knew enough about it to turn it on and try to call up his files. "ENTER PASSWORD" flashed on the screen, and on a hunch I typed in "ESTHER." Sure enough, up came a directory listing a dozen separate files. Ten were labeled "PONTE.l" through "PONTE.10," and seemed at a fast look to be working drafts of chapters of his book. One was called "PERSONAL"; feeling even more like a voyeur than when I went through his apartment or his mail, I called it up. There wasn't much in it: copies of letters to people at other colleges, asking for or giving advice on details about Da Ponte's life; a household inventory for insurance purposes; a standard short form will, leaving everything to his daughter. If Lundberg's personal life added up to just these few electronic bytes on a computer screen, I felt sorry for him. There was one more file on his directory, labelled "LIBRETTO." I tried to call it up and got another "ENTER PASSWORD" message. "ESTHER" didn't work this time; neither did "CARL" or "LUNDBERG" or "LORENZO" or any of the other possiblities I tried. I wondered what was in this particular file that made Lundberg cover it with extra security. Then I saw that the computer was hooked up to a telephone modem. Definitely a job for Nephew Charles; I smiled to myself as I wrote down the modem's calling code. McBride's office in the Music Department was just a short jog across campus, and he was back from lunch when I got there. Exploding out of his tan corduroy suit, his round face framed by wisps of long, unnaturally black hair, he looked more Russian or Italian than Celtic, and his voice boomed with European authority. "I called Carl twice last week to invite him to dinner, but I got no answer," he told me. "I thought he'd come back from Santa Fe and forgot to turn his answering machine back on." "What was he doing in Santa Fe, do you know?" "It was all very mysterious," McBride said. "Carl wasn't the most communicative man in the world anyway, although once he got going on Da Ponte he could talk your ear off. I gathered there was someone or something in Santa Fe that was important to his research. I got one card from him about three weeks ago, and he wrote something very strange on it -- 'LSD Lives!' I didn't know if he was talking about drugs, the old British sign for pounds, shillings and pence, or something else entirely." I showed McBride the page of music from Lundberg's mail, and he too thought it looked familiar. "Wait a minute!" he said as he got up to check a score from a bulging shelf behind him, then "I thought so!" as he found something of interest. "Look at this. It's 'La Nozze di Figaro' -- do you know it?" "I've tried learning a couple of Figaro's pieces," I confessed. "As Tito Gobbi said, they're a lot harder than they look." Now, as McBride held the handwritten page up against one from the printed score, I saw what he meant. "The patterns are similar, aren't they?" "Similar isn't the half of it," McBride said. "Every composer has a definite signature, a style you can recognize if you look for it. It's hard to be certain from just one page, but I'd still be ready to go out on a limb and say this was either by Mozart or someone doing a damned good imitation." "Any idea what it's from?" I asked. "That's just it -- I haven't a clue! I know all the Mozart operas fairly well, and this isn't from any of them. I don't recognize the words, either; they don't seem to tie in with any of the Italian operas he wrote, so this probably isn't a scene cut out from one of them. Can I copy this, do you think? There are some Mozart experts I'd like to consult." At the time, I didn't see any harm in letting him show the page around. He ran it through the department's copier, clucking like a hen who has suddenly found herself sitting on an unusual egg. I appreciated his enthusiasm, but it didn't seem to bring me any closer to understanding why Carl Lundberg was three weeks late in picking up his mail. CHAPTER THREE Ellen was looking vulnerable, an aspect so rare in our 25-year-relationship that I was immediately worried. "What's wrong?" I asked as I sat down opposite her at one of Duke's patched red vinyl boothes. "Is it one of the kids?" "They're both fine, as far as I know," she answered quickly. "It's my mother I'm worried about." There had been a message from my ex-wife on the machine when I got home from Northridge: she would be with clients all afternoon, but could I please meet her at seven at what had been our favorite cheap dinner joint on Santa Monica Boulevard. Our son Dean was about two when we started coming to Duke's, and he used to throw so much food on the floor from his highchair that I always had to leave an extra buck tip. "What's Madame La Farge up to now?" I asked. "A campaign to bring back the guillotine?" Ellen's mother had moved to Los Angeles from her native Montreal ten years ago, despite our repeated suggestions that such a permanent change might bring on drastic culture shock. And so it had: she sat in her Hollywood apartment, knitting unsuitable garments and muttering in Quebecoise, or else took long hunched walks in the neighborhood, harassing the prostitutes and Russian emigrants. "She seems to be giving away a lot of her money to some astonishing queer," Ellen said. Like me, she was of an age when the expression "gay" hung heavy on our lips -- especially when so many of our homosexual friends were anything but. "Is there anything you can do to scare him off, Ivan?" My relationship with my ex-wife is friendly. She worries about my weight, sends me money, and as far as I know doesn't ask the kids about evidence of other women in my life. (I on the other hand have hinted frequently to Dean and Karen that any gossip about their mother which they might care to share would not be scorned. They haven't risen to the challenge as yet, but I live in hope.) She has even referred me to clients of hers who needed my services. But this was a first -- an admission that what I did might be personally helpful to her. End of excerpt PRESS the RIGHT ARROW (numeric keypad) for next file, or PRESS INS key to return to the INDEX MENU. To QUIT, return to the INDEX MENU, then enter 0 (zero). End of file.