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

  Maybe he was looking at his murderer.

  Painters. Who knew? Some of them seemed offended by reality, maybe the fellow who painted the picture of the man in his pajamas was one of those. Maybe the man hadn’t really been in his pajamas at all. Maybe the painter just did that as a joke.

  It wouldn’t have mattered to the man in the pajamas; he’d be dead pretty soon.

  A red, double-decker bus pulled noisily to the curb not three feet away, reminding Albert that he’d best keep his mind on negotiating Jeremy Ash safely across the busy intersection in front of Victoria Station which was packed with travelers.

  “We should hail a cab,” said Jeremy.

  That would never have occurred to Albert any more than to hail a space shuttle. “I don’t know how.”

  “You just step out in front of one and hold your hand up.”

  A series of miracles that would have strained the resources of even the most ingenious and adaptable Guardian Angel, found Albert and Jeremy Ash ultimately deposited in the lobby of the Cadogan, in time for afternoon tea.

  While they waited, Albert thought about his most recent experience; people who drove on the wrong side of the road, and went the wrong way, and taxi drivers who seemed not to comprehend the art of hailing as described by Jeremy Ash, Albert didn’t understand. He didn’t understand blood pudding or Spotted Dick. He didn’t understand Guinness stout, his only sip of which had made him think his mouth had died. He didn’t understand bubble and squeak, potted rabbit, or eel pie—all delicacies Huffy had thought it imperative to inflict upon his Client in the interest of ‘making you a bit more cosmopolitan, Albert.’

  Huffy was English. More specifically, he was from the East End of London, where these abominations were heart and soul of the dinner table, and probably accounted for the fact that his speech was nearly unintelligible; his tongue must try to escape his mouth every time his lips parted.

  The gastronomic appraisal of someone like Albert whose meals—prior to sitting at Miss Grandy’s table in Tryon, South Carolina, and Mrs. Gibson’s ‘home-cookin’ (‘that’ll hold you down in a stiff breeze, you Popsicle stick’)—often consisted of sardines dipped in peanut butter, Twinkies, and frozen corn, straight from the box, rang hollow with Huffy.

  Afternoon tea at the Cadogan, was one of the few traditions the world had to offer that made sense to Albert. You sat in a comfortable seat in a quiet room where nondescript music played like the surf in the background and young people in uniforms brought you sandwiches and tall trays of pastries and tea and coffee without even being asked!

  It was a custom to which Albert had been introduced on his first European tour, and the one that had made the Cadogan his home-away-from-home ever since. The doorman, concierge, and desk clerk all knew him by name, and it was they whom Albert and Jeremy Ash left behind in a little knot of consternation dealing with the cabbie, two bobbies, and a small cross section of British pedestrians as they wheeled toward the Drawing Room, which is what they called the place they served tea. Why they didn’t call it the Tea Room, Albert couldn’t fathom. But they called Magdelane College Maudlin, and Worchestershire sauce. Woostersheer, so who knew?

  Someone should teach the British English.

  “Everybody’s lookin’ at us,” said Jeremy Ash.

  Albert became conscious of his hospital slippers.

  Flies were not permitted on the walls of the Cadogan—nor in any of its precincts. If, however, one had managed to evade expulsion over the years, and grown to a ripe old age, it would have stories to tell about the night Oscar Wilde was arrested in his rooms, or the midnight visitations to the rooms of Lily Langtry by Bertie, Prince of Wales and, no doubt, a list of scandals and mini-scandals such as the privileged despise among the common classes, but themselves practice with brio.

  Even the fly in question, however, would find it difficult to maintain his ennui at the sight of the world’s foremost concert pianist—even more disheveled than was his custom, sporting, as he did, fragments of hospital attire, paper slippers, considerably the worse for wear, and a plastic wrist band—bouncing the wheelchair of his legless and voluble teenage companion noisily from one to the other of the many padded chairs and linen-draped tables of the hotel’s sanctum sanctorum, like a pinball.

  Albert, as a rule, didn’t like to be stared at, and couldn’t imagine why people spent so much time doing it. Often they would point, as well, making him feel they expected him to say something, or break into song. But what do you say or do to someone who’s pointing at you? As for singing, that was something he’d never done. He wondered what his voice would sound like if he tried and, in following that train of thought was soon oblivious to the watching eyes.

  “I think we went the wrong way down that last street,” Jeremy said, when he was situated at the table.

  That would explain a lot, thought Albert. All those little arrows painted on the pavement saying ‘Look Left’ were helpful to an extent, but they needed clarification.

  “Good afternoon, Maestro,” said the girl with Spanish eyebrows. Albert didn’t know why he thought she had Spanish eyebrows, he just did. The concierge had said she would betaking personal care of you and Mr. Ash, sir and that’s what she did. “Mr. Ash,” she said, giving a kind of curtsey to Jeremy Ash which, for some reason, made Albert happy. “Usual today, gentlemen?”

  Albert nodded. “Yes, please.”

  “You got them biscuit things?” Jeremy wanted to know.

  “Scones. Yes, sir. I think we might have just one or two left,” said the girl with a smile.

  “Grab ‘em, will ya? With some strawberry jam.”

  “Consider it done,” said the girl and she made a small, unobtrusive gesture to some uniformed subordinates at the far end of the room and the wheels were set in motion. “Could you be tempted to add some fresh Devon double-cream?”

  And so it went and Albert settled into the deep cushions of his chair and closed his eyes, and breathed deeply and slowly, and lit a cigarette, and waited.

  “What do you think of that girl?” Jeremy asked.

  “She has Spanish eyebrows,” said Albert. He rested his elbows on the arms of the chair and knitted his fingers on the stomach that would soon be full of crustless little triangular sandwiches and cakes.

  The remark got nothing more than a queer expression from Jeremy Ash, which went unnoticed by Albert, who had his eyes closed.

  “She’s pretty.”

  Albert supposed she was, but not so much that it overwhelmed the impression that she had Spanish eyebrows.

  Unable to generate conversation on that tack, Jeremy Ash, undeterred, chose another. “What kind of treasure was in that painting?”

  Albert had developed the ability to extract from recent memory the subject to which Jeremy Ash was referring at those times he seemed to be referring to nothing in the present. “I don’t remember. Sir and Lady just said something about a treasure.”

  “Probably the crown jewels,” said Jeremy, eyeing the approaching tower of comestibles as if they were the jewels in question. “That’s what it is in all the movies.”

  Jewelry didn’t interest Albert so he devoted his attention to buttering his scones and sugar-and-creaming his coffee as Jeremy Ash dipped deeply into his catalog of trivia and came up with numerous examples of people wishing to make off with the crown jewels.

  “He didn’t have a crown,” said Albert with his mouth full when the boy lapsed into silence necessitated by eating and drinking.

  Jeremy Ash asked ‘who are you talking about?’ with his eyes.

  “That man in the picture. He didn’t have a crown.” Hence, Albert deduced, no crown jewels. Simple deduction.

  This observation drew a shrug from the boy. He cleared his throat with a sip of tea. “Well, there are lots of kinds of treasure. Gold, money—even secrets.”

  Albert’s ears thought this was an important remark, and nudged his brain to pay attention. He mentally replayed the statement. “Secrets? You mean l
ike blackmail?”

  “Sure.”

  “I knew someone who did that.”

  “I know,” said the boy, to whom Albert had—over the years—related in dribs and drabs all his experience in Tryon, North Carolina, including incidents not mentioned in magazine and newspaper accounts. “Anyway. I’m just sayin’, treasure can be anything. Something you and me don’t think’s worth anything might be worth everything in the world to someone else.”

  “Maybe the painting is a treasure.”

  Jeremy Ash tilted his head a little bit to let the comment sift in. “Somebody killed the man in the painting because the painting was a treasure? Nah. Paintings only get to be treasures when the guy who painted ‘em dies. Not the people in ‘em.”

  “Then, maybe the artist was murdered, so the painting would become a treasure.”

  “But you said the guyin the painting was the one who died.”

  So he had. “Maybe they both died.”

  “Maybe it was a self-portrait.”

  Jeremy Ash’s brain was a possibility machine that could go on conjecturing and ‘what-iffing’ long after Albert’s had decided to take a long, leisurely nap.

  “Professor?”

  The voice was not that of Jeremy Ash, yet it was instantly, heart-stoppingly familiar. Albert’s eyes flew open and fixed upon a ghost of the recent past. “Heather?”

  “Angela,” the girl corrected. “Remember?”

  Albert had known her by both names, back in Tryon, three years ago. He tried to get up, but the gravity of the plush chair wouldn’t release him, and he fell back.

  “Don’t get up,” she said.

  Good. He wasn’t sure his legs, startled as they were, could support him even if he did manage to get to his feet. “Angela,” he said.

  She lightly touched the back of a vacant chair Albert hadn’t noticed before. “May I?”

  Albert looked quickly at Jeremy Ash, as if the sight of him would restore reason. Jeremy returned a look that said ‘who the hell is this?’

  “Yes,” said Albert, and Angela sat. “This is Jeremy Ash.”

  “Hello, Jeremy,” said Angela, extending her hand.

  The boy looked at it for a second, then took it, shook it a little sheepishly, and let it go. “Heather or Angela?”

  “Angela McLauren,” said Angela. “The Professor knew me as Heather Proverb, back in America.”

  Jeremy Ash made the connection. “You’re the one who was drivin’ the car when . . . ” he made a sweeping gesture illustrating a car going off a cliff.

  “Jeremy, don’t . . . ” said Albert. but it was too late.

  “What? This ain’t her?”

  It was. She had been driving and her best friend, Heather Proverb, whose car it was, had been in the passenger seat when it went over the cliff. She had managed to jump out at the last instant. Heather had not.

  So much effort was spent trying to close doors on the past, but the mechanism that held them in place was so easily sprung. Jeremy Ash was an excellent springer.

  “Yes. It’s me,” said Angela, her eyes on her hands which had begun to strangle a napkin.

  “I thought you was in jail.”

  “Jeremy,” said Albert. He wanted to say ‘shut up,’ but his mother had raised him better. “Please don’t.”

  “It’s okay, Professor.” Angela turned to Jeremy Ash. “Yes. I was in prison—until about three months ago.”

  “Did you break out?” Jeremy cleared space on a higher shelf of his estimation.

  “No,” she said with a little smile. “My sentence was for five years. I was granted early release for good behavior.”

  Albert wondered to what authority he could apply for early release from his prison, the one whose walls were defined by hurt, the gaping loss of Melissa Bjork, who had bled to death in his arms, and all the noise and confusion of a world in which he didn’t belong. Hadn’t he been well-behaved?

  Then he thought of Jeremy Ash, and wondered how, in his prison under the stairs, he’d learned more through a crack in the door than Albert had from the world through which he traveled from cocoon-to-cocoon.

  “I heard about your concert. It’s in all the papers. I decided to risk if you’d see me.”

  How could he help it? She was there in front of him. His eyes were open.

  Why would she want to see him? Why would anyone want to see him? “Why?”

  “I’m not sure. I guess . . . all the time I was in prison, I thought about you. Remember the night we sat on the porch and talked and—everything came out?”

  Albert remembered. It was one of many things he’d tried to forget, and those were the things he remembered best.

  Not that he’d tried to forget her as a person. She was pleasant to listen to and much nicer to look at than those pictures in the museum, and she was alive, which made it better. But she was surrounded by a miasma of violent death and it had shattered her innocence, as his own had been shattered. Together, they were mismatched glasses, leaking sorrow.

  “Yes.”

  She hesitated. “This is going to seem really strange,” she said at last.

  What didn’t? thought Albert, sitting in the Tea Room of the Cadogan in the shredded remains of his hospital slippers, across the table from legless Jeremy Ash and a woman who, until the night she’d been talking about, had assumed the identity of her dear, dead friend.

  Jeremy Ash seemed about to say something, but this time he read ‘shut-up, Jeremy’ in Albert’s eyes and, for the first time in over three years of companionship, he did.

  “In prison, you have a lot of time to think,” Angela continued. “Sometimes you fixate on things, I guess. Like an anchor to hold on to. And that’s what I fixated on—that night; the time we spent together. I wondered what it was about you that made me open up like I did, when I’d worked so hard, so very hard, to be Heather.

  “I still don’t know what it was. But, over time, I realized that night was the closest I’ve ever been to anyone, apart from Heather. I guess I’ve come to think of you as a friend. A confidant. Family, in a way.”

  Jeremy Ash arched a meaningful eyebrow or two in Albert’s direction. He started to make the space-ship sound that always preceded ‘beam me up, Scotty,’ one of several phrases he used often but Albert didn’t understand. Seeing it coming, Albert preempted him.

  “What about Heather’s family?”

  She was genuinely startled. “I hardly think. . . ”

  “That’d be too weird, A,” said Jeremy. “They don’t want to see the girl who was impersonating their dead daughter—who was drivin’ the car that . . . ” he repeated the fatal gesture. “You gotta think.” He tapped his temple. “Think.”

  Albert thought he had been thinking. Where had he gone wrong? Why did he always go wrong? “What do you want me to do?”

  The girl hadn’t been prepared for his directness but, almost instantly, realized that she should have been. “I don’t know.”

  “You want him to adopt you?” said Jeremy, always happy to move things along. “You’re a little old for that.”

  “Well, no. Of course not.”

  “You want him to marry you?”

  “Jeremy!” said Albert at the same time Angela said, “Of course not!”

  “You want him to give you money?”

  “Jeremy!” said Albert again, wishing, painfully wishing, impotently wishing he would be inspired by that magic combination of words that would render the boy mute. Temporarily, at least.

  Probably temporarily.

  Angela smiled. “I hadn’t even thought of that.”

  Jeremy Ash looked at her slyly. “I bet if you give her some money, A, she’ll go away.”

  “I will go away if you want me to, Professor,” said Angela. “All you have to do is say the word and I’ll never darken your door,” she flashed an angry glance at Jeremy Ash. “No money involved.” She turned back to Albert. “I was just hoping, I guess I was hoping we could be friends.”

  A
lbert already had a friend. Were two allowed? He looked at Jeremy Ash, who looked back and, after a moment, shrugged. It was a gesture Albert could interpret any number of ways, so he picked one.

  “Were you lonely in prison?”

  The girl shuddered visibly. “You do one of two things in prison, Professor; you either fight every day to remember who you are, to be true to yourself, or you become someone else. Something else. I was lonely, yes. Because I want to be good. Good through and through. Clean. Free from this . . . this tremendous guilt I feel. And I could only do that by separating myself from all the other women.”

  “Sounds like you want Jesus,” said Jeremy, who had seen more than his share of Sunday morning sermons through the crack in his door. “He comes in to your heart.”

  That must be why so many people wrote music for Him, Albert thought. It made sense that you’d want to make music for someone who lived in your heart. At that moment he had an idea; he would create something for the resident of his heart;Symphony for Melissa Bjork.

  “Perhaps I do,” said Angela, intruding on Albert’s Idea.

  “Do what?” he asked, hoping the answer would remind him where he was, who he was with, why he was there, and what he was supposed to be doing.

  Angela played with the hem of the tablecloth. “Need Jesus in my heart.” She smiled as if she meant it. “That’s not a English concept. I would have laughed at the notion before Tryon. Going to church with Miss Grady and all the folks at her house just seemed a quaint custom, so I joined in. Then I realized it wasn’t a custom, it was real to them, all that talk about Christ’s atonement for our sin—bridging the bottomless chasm between ourselves and God with the cross. I began to wonder if it applied to me.”

  “That’s why He died,” said Jeremy, matter-of-factly, “That’s what Miz Gibson says. So you wouldn’t have to carry all that around with you. ‘Far as the east is from the west’,” he said, mimicking one of those Sunday morning preachers. He held his hands as wide apart as he could reach. “That’s how far away He puts your sin, so far He can’t even see it no more. Which must be pretty far, ‘cause He’s God.”