Coda: The Third Albert Mystery (The Albert Mysteries Book 3) Read online

  She took care of his clothes and dressed him whatever way she thought would reflect best on her if they went out for dinner or to ‘diddle royalty’ as the agent put it. It was he, the agent, who determined how Albert would dress for concerts. A pint-sized tuxedo with a Davy Crockett T-shirt was one of his favorite combinations. ‘Keep him young as long as we can,’ had been his motto.

  Then the collapse, and Albert found himself in a hospital, much like the one he was in now and for much the same reason—fainting.

  Another bubble. And so he’d gone, from bubble to bubble, ending up in the bubble of the Ultimate Enabler, academia; Trophy Genius of a small college in western Massachusetts that guarded him jealously and allowed his eccentricities broad scope and, truth be told, subtly publicized examples of their expression.

  Having an athletic department whose only claim to fame was a third-place LaCrosse trophy from 1926, the Alumni loved throwing money at a genuine Genius of international renown. Especially one who was as much a mystery to the world as the world was to Albert.

  The thing about bubbles, Albert had learned when his had been burst by the sudden, tragic deaths of people close to him, was that, being self-contained ecosystems, they had not prepared him to live and breath the air of the Real World, a world of expected responses and unspoken meanings in which he was a Stranger.

  UnSuperman.

  “There’s a boy wants to see you when visitors are allowed,” said Edna, intruding upon Albert’s bittersweet reverie.

  Albert’s heart skipped a beat. “Does he have legs?”

  “Legs?” said Edna, as if someone had given a mighty and unexpected upward tug to her underwear. “Well, now that your mention it, I can’t say as I know. He’s in a wheelchair with a blanket over his knees.”

  “That’s Jeremy Ash,” Albert declared. “Will you show him in, please?”

  “Can’t, love” said Edna, looking meaningfully from her watch to the clock on the wall above Albert’s bed. “Not for seven minutes.”

  “What’s happening in seven minutes?” Albert asked, suspecting that she’d tell him he should know.

  “Visiting hours start at 5:00.”

  “What’s happening between now and then?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why can’t he come in now?”

  “Because.”

  “Why?”

  “I already told you. Weren’t you listening? Visiting hours start at 5:00 sharp.”

  “It makes a difference?”

  “Of course it does,” said Edna, who seemed to be getting flustered, but was not forthcoming with an explanation.

  “What?”

  “What, what?”

  “What difference?”

  Edna tapped her watch with her finger and the floor with her toe—in an irregular syncopation. “Five o-clock is visiting hours. Is it five o’clock yet?” she asked, holding the watch so close to his nose that Albert couldn’t focus. He wasn’t sure, but probably seven minutes hadn’t passed.

  “No?”

  “No. That’s right. I’m glad we’ve got that sorted in our tiny little brain.”

  Albert decided to wait for seven minutes.

  “Well, look at you!” said Jeremy, when he came wheeling in at 4:58. “I’ve seen worse.”

  “You can’t come in here,” Edna objected. She attempted to interpose herself between her patient and the Intruder—he wouldn’t be a Visitor for two minutes yet.

  “That’s Jeremy Ash,” said Albert proudly, by way of explanation.

  “I didn’t think it was Dudley Moore,” said the nurse, as if Albert would know who that was. “He still can’t come in for,” once more she consulted her watch and the clock, which nodded in agreement, “two minutes.”

  “Are you finished in here, lady?” said Jeremy.

  “Well, yes, but . . . ”

  “Then buzz off before I run over your toes.” Jeremy pivoted threateningly.

  And Edna left the room and their lives with a lower opinion of Americans than she had theretofore entertained, and that was saying something.

  Albert wanted to hug the boy; his Rock and Foundation, his Interpreter of the World, his Guardian, his Only Friend. But one such friend was enough; another would be surplus blessing. There was no situation, no individual Jeremy Ash couldn’t handle, whether Albert’s housekeeper, the formidable Mrs. Gibson, or the obstructionary Sister Edna. They were putty in his hands. He’d have been able to sort out all that business in Tryon, North Carolina, with his eyes closed.

  Even without legs.

  Bring it on, thought Albert on behalf of Jeremy Ash, but not in so many words.

  “Passed out, huh?” said Jeremy Ash, wheeling close to the bed and looking around to see if there was anything to eat. There wasn’t, but, no stranger to disappointment, he took it in stride.

  “Yes.”

  “Those two you were with, they’re outside.”

  “Oh.”

  “Don’t ‘oh,’” said the boy. “They want to see you. Make sure you’re still in one piece.”

  “Tell them I’m okay.”

  “I’m not doing your dirty work for you,” said Jeremy Ash. “You want ‘em to go away, tell ‘em yourself.”

  “Okay.”

  “Yeah, sure you will,” said Jeremy Ash, and then, as always, wheeled away to do his master’s bidding. “Just this one time.”

  Albert loved Jeremy Ash just a little bit more, and thought he’d like some toast, but couldn’t find the button to beckon Edna. Apparently nurse-summoning buttons were not part of the National Health. Not that he was sure she’d give him toast if she was up to her neck in it.

  Was that another joke? He smiled, just in case.

  “They want to come back in an hour or so,” said Jeremy Ash as he wheeled back in the room, going much too fast and coming to an abrupt stop just short of the bed frame. He made a sound like brakes squealing, which was an improvement over the raspberries with which he had once punctuated such statements; a rare occurrence these days. “They said they want to move you to a Proper Hospital,” he said, sticking his nose in the air and mimicking BBC English on the last two words. And pretty well.

  “What’s wrong with this one?” said Albert, looking at the plastic band on his wrist. “St. Thomas Hospital,” he read.

  Jeremy Ash shrugged. “Who knows? They said you need to be in private care. I guess you’re only here because it was the nearest place to the Museum where you passed out.”

  “I think I’m okay now. I don’t think I need to be in a hospital. Let’s go back to the hotel.”

  “Fine by me,” said the boy. “But they’re gonna piss nails if they see you walkin’ out.”

  Jeremy Ash and Albert had long-ago mastered the art of Leaving Hospitals Unseen.

  “Huffy’s not gonna be happy with you,” said Jeremy Ash over his shoulder as Albert wheeled him across Westminster Bridge to the intersection at Parliament Square still wearing his paper hospital slippers. They were comfortable.

  Huffy was rarely happy with Albert. He was always wanting him to be somewhere he wasn’t, or didn’t want to be, wanting him to do something he didn’t want to do for people he neither knew nor cared about. “Huffy,” Albert’s mother had said, “is your cross to bear, Albert. A necessary evil. Some endure ulcers, or boils, like Job. You must endure Huffy.”

  “Sounds like a disease, don’t it?” Jeremy Ash had said after meeting Huffy for the first time. “I got a horrible case of Huffy.”

  Albert had gotten that, and he had laughed, despite the fact that’s just what he had, and, apparently, there was no remedy.

  In the School’s eyes, however, Huffy was a vast improvement over Albert’s previous agent, the one who had made him famous and, according to the School in the lawsuit it filed on Albert’s behalf, proceeded to turn most of the Albert’s share of the proceeds to his own advantage, thereby usurping the School’s prerogative. Albert didn’t care. He’d always had enough for cigarettes and Dun
kin’ Donuts. Still, the School had insisted.

  The result, lawyers for the School had informed him gleefully, was that he was a millionaire several times over.

  Albert—having little use for folding money, since it was useless in cigarette machines, and he had no room for it in his apartment—told the School to keep it. Which they were happy to do, in the form of a tax-free endowment in his name.

  The School loved Albert very much, and if he was eccentric, well, love is blind.

  They split the interest on the endowment 60/40—in the School’s favor—and, for the last few years, had paid his portion to Mrs. Bridges at the Bank who invested it somewhere and, more importantly, made sure he always had quarters for cigarette machines. She had also made some sort of magical arrangement with stores in town where he could get anything he wanted, and all he had to do was autograph a piece of paper!

  Mrs. Bridges loomed large in Albert’s life. She was one of those people who Knew Everything and could Do Anything. The anti-Albert. He wished she was in London to do it now. Fortunately, Jeremy Ash was here.

  “So,” said Jeremy Ash, when Albert didn’t seem eager to talk about Huffy; not that he was ever very eager to talk about anything, but some things he was more prepared to pretend to be listening to than others. Jeremy Ash, one of those people who couldn’t let silence go unmolested, had developed the habit of fishing ‘til he caught something, “what did you faint about?”

  The question took Albert by surprise and the response brought laserlike focus to his cognitive apparatus. Consequently, he brought the wheelchair to a halt in the middle of a pedestrian crossing; a maneuver that didn’t go unnoticed by drivers to either side. “Murder,” he said.

  “Cool!” said Jeremy Ash. “Whose?”

  At the subconscious level, Albert became aware that nearby horns were tuning up for a recital. “I don’t know. I think a man in a picture.”

  “In the museum?” said Jeremy, who was enjoying sitting still in the middle of the crosswalk and causing the Great Disturbance of London, 1986.

  “Yes. I think somebody killed him a long time ago.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. There was a treasure.” The ambient noise finally reached the critical mass necessary to breach Albert’s consciousness. He looked at the faces behind the wheels to the right and left, all of which seemed prepared for battle of some kind. He thought it best to get Jeremy out of harm’s way and wheeled him to the refuge of the sidewalk.

  “What kind of treasure?”

  Albert had, very early in their relationship, resigned himself to the fact that Jeremy’s conversation dealt almost exclusively with questions for which he, Albert, had no answer. This was merely the latest in a long line.

  “Why did you faint?”

  Another.

  “Something to do with blood rushing to my head,” said Albert indefinitely as he swung the wheelchair into the pedestrian stream.

  “But why would it rush to your head when someone says something about murder?”

  “I don’t know,” said Albert. This was the response Jeremy got to most of his questions in spite of which he seemed to come up with the right answer eventually. This time, though, Albert had an inspiration. “Could hate make blood rush to your head?”

  “Why not? Fear can. Too much exercise can. Love can.”

  Love could make you faint? Why hadn’t Albert fainted when he was with Miss Bjork? He’d been so sure he’d loved her. But he’d had no previous experience with which to compare the emotion. He would have sworn it was love.

  Still, he hadn’t fainted.

  Jeremy Ash was talking—which, to Albert, was much like saying ‘the air is full of oxygen.’

  “Why hate?”

  “What?”

  “Why did you say that about hate? Did you hate the guy in the painting?”

  Something heavy squatted at the juncture of Albert’s eyebrows and twiddled its thumbs while waiting for him to make sense of what he was hearing. “I don’t know the man in the painting.”

  “Then who are you talking about?”

  Good question. Albert turned quickly to avoid a paperboy who was waving a newspaper at them and shouting the same thing over-and-over again. “Macca cleared of paternity charges! Get yourSun today!”

  Then he remembered. “Murder. That’s what I hate.”

  Jeremy Ash—more aware than perhaps anyone of the trail of murders that had recently intruded on Albert’s hermit-like existence, most especially that of Melissa Bjork, the public defender who had died in his arms, understood.

  “Then yes. I’d say hate could make you faint.”

  “Let’s talk about something else.”

  “Suits me. Shoot.”

  Albert realized that he should have been more specific. What he meant to suggest was that they stop talking altogether.

  “My lips are tired.”

  Chapter Three

  London cabbies are required to know all the streets in London by name and location. In consequence of which, they are reputed to have prodigious memories. Albert didn’t know this when, his mind occupied with trying not to think about the murder of the man in the blue pajamas, he stepped off the curb and onto the zebra crossing with Jeremy Ash foremost. At that moment, a cab bearing two Canadian tourists was approaching the crossing at considerable speed. Upon seeing a legless boy thrust into his path, the cabby whipped the wheel sharply to the left and swerved, mostly on two wheels, down one of the tiny little alleys that his prodigious memory must have suddenly reminded him was there.

  Jeremy Ash, only momentarily at a loss for words, had discovered something else that could cause the blood to flow to the head: imminent demise. He looked around to see if Albert had fainted.

  Albert, only dimly aware of unfolding events, nevertheless, was propelled forward by a nebulous impetus to be elsewhere. The cabby had ground his vehicle to an abrupt stop—seemingly not willing that the Doppler effect should diminish the impact as he delivered himself of his feelings with a vocabulary every bit the equal of his memory. Upon this verbal tide, which reminded Albert of something out of Shakespeare, though he couldn’t remember exactly what, he and Jeremy Ash were washed to the far side of the intersection and castaway on its farther shore.

  As the sound and fury retreated behind them, Jeremy Ash regained mastery of his tongue. “You’ve gotta be more careful, A! You could’ve got me killed.”

  Albert was sorry for that. The boy was right. Mental note: henceforth, do not step off the curb without looking both ways to make sure no one was coming.

  He knew better.

  He knew that he knew better.

  It’s just, you have to think about this kind of thingall the time. Even when your brain is busy with something else.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and meant it. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m thankful I don’t have any legs,” said Jeremy Ash.

  This struck Albert as a novel comment. “Why?”

  “Because if I’d had ‘em, I’d’ve just lost ‘em.” The boy laughed but Albert, feeling that it was probably a private laugh, since he couldn’t see anything funny in it, didn’t.

  “That man was very angry.”

  “Scared is all.”

  Scared? Albert, in a quick backward glance, had seen the face of the cabby. It hadn’t seemed scared at all. It had been like the face of Mongol Hordes descending on a small unprotected village of widows and orphans. However, the two Canadians in the back seat—identified as such by their maple leaf T-shirts—seemed genuinely terrified. “You think so?”

  “Sure. He was startled. When that happens, your adrenaline kicks in and it’s gotta have somewhere to go, so you do and say things you wouldn’t normally. It’s like an emotional fart; noisy and unpleasant but it goes away pretty quick. Can’t say as I blame him. I’d’ve had something to say, too, but it ain’t polite to talk with your mouth full—and mine was.” He was referring to his heart, which Albert might have picked up
on had he been listening.

  “People can surprise themselves when they’re startled,” Albert repeated. This was one of those revelations that Jeremy Ash dispensed at irregular intervals, like a legless little Pez dispenser or Indian mystic. Sometimes they were big revelations, sometimes small. But revelations nevertheless. This was probably a big one. Time would tell.

  The notion that he was surrounded by people ready to erupt at any time like that was unsettling. Were people nothing but balloons, ranging the earth with all that emotional gas trapped inside, just waiting for some sharp remark or unanticipated incident to poke a hole in them?

  That would make the world a scary place.

  Albert resolved that, in addition to looking both ways before pushing Jeremy Ash into traffic, he would examine his words for sharp edges before he spoke them.

  “So, anyway,” said Jeremy Ash, “Murder’s been going on since Cain. You can’t go fainting every time you hear the word, else you’ll be up and down like one of them punchy dolls.”

  It was curious, Albert thought, how he seldom understood what Jeremy Ash was saying, but always knew what he meant. The image that sprang to mind at the mention of ‘punchy dolls’ required a bit of head-shaking to dispel, and while he was doing that, Jeremy Ash continued speaking. “It’s got nothing to do with you, this time,” he said comfortingly. “Some guy in a painting.Everyone in paintings is dead. That’s why they get painted, so people can remember what they looked like.”

  Albert spotted a flaw. “They must have been alive when they were painted.”

  Jeremy Ash amended his theory on the fly. “Of course they were, but thereason they got painted is ‘cause they’re afraid family will forget ‘em when they’re dead. They want something for prosterity.”

  “Prosterity,” Albert echoed. That was a new word to him. He’d have to remember it; then find out what it meant. The fellow in the painting hadn’t looked particularly old or unhealthy, as Albert recalled. Perhaps he knew he was going to be murdered and wanted to make sure his portrait was done in time.

  There was something else strange about that man, besides that he was wearing sky-blue pajamas during the daytime, which the light shining on him in a way that cast a lattice of shadows on his face suggested it was. His body was turned to his left, but his neck was turned to the right. His eyes seemed to be looking at something over the viewer’s left shoulder.