Spur of the Moment Read online

  Spur of the Moment

  A Renata Radleigh Opera Mystery

  David Linzee

  Coffeetown Press

  PO Box 70515

  Seattle, WA 98127

  For more information go to: www.coffeetownpress.com

  www.davidlinzee.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Cover design by Sabrina Sun

  Spur of the Moment

  Copyright © 2016 by David Linzee

  ISBN: 978-1-60381-341-9 (Trade Paper)

  ISBN: 978-1-60381-342-6 (eBook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015957346

  Produced in the United States of America

  * * *

  To Claire,

  il “mio dolce tesoro”

  * * *

  Part I

  Saturday, May 22

  Chapter 1

  Hefting her heavy bag of musical scores and water bottles, Renata Radleigh pushed through the stage door into the heat and humidity and the glare of the sun. She shut her eyes and gripped the handrail. In St. Louis, May could be like August. She’d been here a month and still hadn’t got used to it.

  She opened her eyes to see Hannah, the receptionist from the admin building, waiting at the bottom of the steps.

  “Oh, Renata, there you are. Your brother wants to see you in his office.”

  “I’ll see him later.”

  But as she descended the steps, Hannah did not step aside.

  “It’s all right. I’ll see him later. I’m staying at his house, you know.”

  “He said he wanted to see you now.”

  Renata sighed. A bad day of rehearsal had left her exhausted, but it was a point of honor with her not to snap at assistants or secretaries who were only doing what they’d been told to do. She mustered a smile, nodded, and headed for the admin building.

  Don was on the phone when she entered his office. He grinned and waved her to a chair, but Renata remained standing in hopes of shortening the meeting. As he leisurely wound up his conversation, she wondered, not for the first time, how it was that though he had been in America for a decade while she still lived in England, his accent was stronger. Posher too, though they’d shared the same middle-class upbringing.

  “Renata darling.” He replaced the receiver, put his feet on the edge of the desk, and pushed back into the depths of his comfortable chair, interlacing his fingers behind his head. He was always striking the sort of poses television actors did. Not the best actors, either. “How would you like to be my guest at Carmen’s Cornucopia tonight?”

  “At what?”

  Irritation rippled across his face. “The season kick-off donor appreciation party. Only our biggest do of the year.”

  “Oh, Don. You know I’m no good at those things.”

  “You needn’t scintillate. The donors will be thrilled just to meet the singer they’ll see playing Mercédès.”

  “No. They’d be thrilled to meet the singer they’ll see playing Carmen.”

  “Yes, well, Carmen’s busy.”

  “Oh. And Micaëla and Escamillo? Am I the best you could do?”

  Don swung his feet to the floor and sat up, glowering. “A lot of the artists round here lack a sense of their larger responsibilities.”

  “Don, please, I’m knackered. There are serious problems with Act Three—technical problems. I’ve been sitting in the theater all day listening to the director shouting at the boffins. I’ve had hardly a chance to sing.”

  “Then how can you be tired? This is what I mean about a sense of larger responsibilities. You’re upset about a technical problem in Act Three. Until last week, we weren’t sure we’d be able to put on Carmen at all. It was a co-production with Opera Oklahoma and they had a funding crisis of their own and dropped out, leaving us with a stack of unpaid bills. Do you remember any of this?”

  When her brother fished for compliments, he didn’t use a hook and line. He used dynamite. “Yes. And I remember you went out and got the big donation. You’re the man of the hour. Your name is on everyone’s lips. It ought to be a thrill for me to be at your side tonight.”

  Don nodded contentedly. Over the years in America, his irony detector had become rusty. “My feelings aren’t important,” he said unconvincingly. “What matters is that the Stromberg-Brands have a lovely evening. This will be the first public announcement of their gift. Considering that without them you wouldn’t have a job, it doesn’t seem too much to ask that you say a civil word to them.”

  The strap of her shoulder-bag was wearing a groove in her clavicle. There was no point standing here arguing any longer. “Oh, very well. But you ought to know by now, Don, how easy it is to make me feel guilty. You needn’t be so heavy-handed about it.”

  But he had lost interest as soon as she capitulated. His smartphone was in his hand and he was bowing over the little screen. “See you under the tent in half an hour, then.”

  “Half an hour? Is it all right if I come as I am?”

  He looked her up and down and returned his gaze to the screen. “Renata. Of course not.”

  Chapter 2

  Emerging from the shower, she found that eighteen of her thirty minutes had passed. It would serve Don right if she were late for the party, but she didn’t think she would be able to manage it. Years of showing up on time for auditions, rehearsals, and performances had made unpunctuality difficult for her.

  She was in the tiny dressing room she shared with two other soloists. Luckily, she’d found the best of her recital dresses—a dark-blue silk gown only three years old—hanging in the closet. Before putting it on, she sat at the dressing table and gave her face a moment of hard appraisal in the well-lighted mirror. Was there time to make herself beautiful?

  It took longer and longer. She had one of those fair English complexions that picked up wrinkles as readily as fine linen did. Without a foundation layer, she looked five years older than her real age, which was thirty-six. The gray hairs that kept sprouting at her temples were certainly no help.

  A touch of lipstick and eye shadow and she’d look good enough for the donors. For performing, luckily, a few wrinkles didn’t matter. Looking good under stage lights required chiefly a prominent chin and high cheekbones. Those she still had. No, it wasn’t the fault of her face that she wasn’t a star.

  Her body, on the other hand …. She wasn’t fat, by the standards of any sensible era. But she was a tall, broad-shouldered, large-breasted, full-hipped woman, and these days opera managements wanted sylphs. Sylphs with big voices, and the two rarely came in one package.

  “No whingeing,” Renata said aloud to her image, before getting up. For a struggling singer, self-pity was a more dangerous habit than drugs or booze. She constantly patrolled her mind, casting out excuses. There were women built like storage units still getting star parts—if they had the talent. And she did.

  She put on the blue-silk dress and twirled, eying the hemline. Too much leg showing. She wouldn’t be able to get away without tights, or pantyhose as Americans called them, which was an appropriately ugly name. Unceremoniously hoisting her dress, she sat and struggled into the wretched things. Then she was ready, and right on time.

  Chapter 3

  She climbed the stairs and pushed through the door to the Charles MacNamara III Auditorium, then went up the aisle and through the door to the Emmanuel Gerwitz Lobby.
As she left the Jane B. Pritchard Theatre she repeated the names to herself, since she might be meeting some of these people tonight.

  The sun had set and the heat was letting up a little. The St. Louis Opera was located in the leafy suburb of Webster Groves. Don and his colleagues in fundraising called it “the American Glyndebourne” and made much of its park-like grounds, with tall oaks, broad lawns, and beds of pansies and petunias. The interior of the white-and-green striped pavilion where the party was being held glowed invitingly in the dusk. It was already about half-full, and more guests were filing down the path from the parking lot.

  As she stepped into the tent, a man with a drinks tray approached. It was someone she knew. “Well, hello, Ray.”

  He grinned, showing a fine set of dentures, white against his ruddy skin. A lock of his still abundant gray hair had fallen over his right eyebrow. Since his hands were full, she thought of brushing it back for him, but he was not the sort of man to welcome feminine fussing.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked. “I would have thought you’d done enough for the opera today.”

  “They nailed me on the way to the parking lot. Said they needed more waiters.”

  Ray was a supernumerary—a volunteer extra—in Carmen. The St. Louis Opera, being located in a city with a small supply of out-of-work actors, had to fill out its crowd scenes with retired men like Ray. He’d volunteered simply because he lived nearby and had time on his hands. Being an engineer who had spent his working years in a factory, he had little fellow-feeling with theater people. During the long technical delays in Act III he tended to grow irascible. Renata, doing her bit for the show, took it upon herself to jolly him along.

  “How come you’re not home with your feet up?” he asked.

  “Oh, they thought it would be nice to have someone here from the cast of Carmen.”

  “And The Slope couldn’t be bothered?”

  Amy Song, the fast-rising mezzo-soprano playing Carmen, was Korean-American. Ray, like so many white American men of his age, took delight in these slips of the tongue that weren’t slips but taunts. He was trying to get a rise out of her. She said mildly, “Ray, please don’t call Amy that.”

  “Okay. But I’m right, I’ll bet. She couldn’t be bothered.”

  Renata conceded with a shrug.

  “Be sure and tell the donors you might be singing Carmen some night,” Ray went on. “If she gets sick or something.”

  “Only happens in films. I’ve covered a dozen parts in the last year and haven’t sung a single note.”

  In these cost-cutting days, opera managements didn’t just let understudies sit around. Renata was contracted to sing Mercédès unless Amy Song became indisposed. Then Renata would sing Carmen and a chorister would take over Mercédès. In reality, Amy Song would be fine and Renata would just sing Mercédès. Such arrangements did at least bring in some extra income that Renata had come to count on. She belonged to that class of singers—experienced, reliable, and cheap—whose fate was to spend a lot of time preparing roles they would never get a chance to sing.

  No whingeing, she told herself again, silently this time. She took a glass of white wine from Ray’s tray. “Time for me to start chatting. Cheers.”

  She put a smile on her face and went looking for someone to talk to. It ought to be easy enough. Fundraisers in New York or Los Angeles could be intimidating. You might find yourself chatting with an international arms trafficker, or a super-model so coked up she was practically shooting sparks. But these were the solid folk of the Midwest, CEOs, senior partners, and surgeons—men with gray hair or bald spotted pates. Most seemed to have kept their original wives. All she had to do was catch someone’s eye, make a rueful comment about the hot weather, and ask about their grandchildren.

  Renata wasn’t a shy person. After all, her job was to step into a spotlight, open her mouth, and sing to thousands of people. Although being comfortable on stage didn’t necessarily preclude shyness. But tonight she could not get going. She was preoccupied with the suspicion that her brother wasn’t just being typically self-absorbed in browbeating her into attending the party—that he had also been motivated by a touch of malice.

  The St. Louis Opera offered her a part almost every year, which meant that she spent May and June in St. Louis. This had begun when their parents were still alive, and she stayed with Don because it was impossible to explain to them why she didn’t want to. The habit survived their parents’ deaths. Her quarters grew more luxurious as Don moved from apartment to condo to house, but relations between the siblings were as strained as ever.

  When Renata’s latest therapist had suggested that Don was secretly in awe of her, she’d sacked him. Awe indeed. There was a theory to make a cat laugh. Oh, perhaps he’d been a bit envious when they were children. He was the younger by three years. She’d shown talent early on, and their parents, both maths teachers at a grubby suburban comprehensive, had made a fuss over her, buying her recital gowns and driving her to faraway competitions where she usually won prizes. By their teens, though, Don had discovered and was capitalizing on his own talent, which was for sucking up to toffs. As he went out to ride horses with Saskia or sail a boat with Rupert, leaving her at the piano, symptoms of awe weren’t manifest.

  Anyway she had become less and less awe-inspiring. The high point of her career had probably been here, eight years ago. SLO was considered one of the best regional opera companies in America, a proving ground for talent bound for the Met and Covent Garden, and Renata had sung a widely praised Dorabella in Così. Invitations had come in, to sing big roles at little companies, and little roles at big companies. Reviews were generally good and important people said encouraging things to her. But the flurry died down, for reasons she had not been able to figure out in a thousand sleepless nights. Things just hadn’t worked out.

  Not for her, anyway. Don, who like most English snobs couldn’t wait to leave his damp homeland for the States, had just collected an American MBA. Trading on her name and contacts, he had wangled a job as a fundraiser at SLO. It had all been uphill from there. His title was Director of Development now, and he was one of the youngest in the country to hold such a post.

  As for Renata, she lived in a cramped flat In London W. 11 that she shared with four other singers. Not that she saw much of it. Most of the year, she wound her way around Europe and America, taking pretty much any part she could get. It was all a bit hard on the ego. Wandering through this jolly crowd with glass in hand, she hesitated to talk to people because she knew what they would say. In an effort to be polite and interested, these affable Midwesterners would twist the knife:

  “And will this be your debut at SLO?”

  “Erm … no, I’ve been coming here for ten years.”

  “Oh … what might I have seen you in?”

  “Last year I was Flora in La Traviata.”

  “Oh … I saw that. Who was Flora?”

  Renata played a lot of roles like that.

  No whingeing. It was all part of the job, and if she was tired of the job, she should go back to England and give piano lessons. But it bothered her to think that Don knew what he was asking of her and relished causing her embarrassment. No, better to think he was just being his usual thoughtless self.

  Above intervening heads and shoulders, she saw Don enter the tent, wearing a beautiful cream-linen suit and striking another of his studied attitudes, the one she called the JFK—left elbow crooked and hand in pocket, right hand brushing back his blond forelock. His handsome face was full of pleasure and excitement. Carmen’s Cornucopia was the high point of his year.

  She turned away, put her empty glass of Chardonnay on a waiter’s tray—and took a full one. This was inadvisable. Renata hardly drank at all, because alcohol redoubled the effect of her antidepressants and was dehydrating—bad for the vocal cords. But now she felt the need to soften life’s sharp edges.

  She had reached the edge of the tent and remained there, her back to the crowd, si
pping Chardonnay. Well, gulping it, actually. It was completely dark now. A single light, a few feet above ground level, very bright and wavering occasionally, caught her eye. It was moving slowly toward her. This was like something in a science fiction movie, Renata thought. She gazed at it for some time before figuring out that it was the headlight of a bicycle, coming up the path from the street. The bike stopped a few yards away and a man swung gracefully off of it.

  Chapter 4

  He was tall and slender, dressed in a blue blazer much the worse for wear, white shirt and jeans. When he took off his helmet and turned, she saw that he had an intelligent face, which to her meant a high forehead, spectacles, a neatly trimmed beard, and an aloof, critical expression. In brief: her type. She walked toward him.

  He had a U-lock in his hands and was looking around.

  “The nearest bike rack is miles away. I think you can just leave it.”

  He looked at her and smiled. “True. It’ll be safe. They’re all millionaires here.”

  “Well, except for me.”

  “And what are you?”

  “A mezzo-soprano.”

  He hung the lock on a handlebar and stepped up to her. He had a pleasant smell, a salty tang of good, clean sweat from having got here on his own muscle-power. “Oh, you’re actually in an opera. You outrank the rest of us, then. Nice to meet you. I’m Bert.”

  “Renata. You know, you don’t look like a Bert.”

  “Short for Bertrand, after Lord Russell. My parents actually wanted me to be a philosopher.”

  “Mine actually wanted me to be an opera singer. Tell me, how did you get to be a millionaire in philosophy?”