The Monteverdi Manuscript

By Joseph Allen

The action revolves around the death of a famous musician, who hits the pavement outside Carnegie Hall from the window of his apartment seven stories up. He has recorded keyboard versions of a lost opera by Claudio Monteverdi, the man who “invented” opera. Set in New York, London and Venice, action includes a kidnapping, drug use, prostitution, LGBT characters, one character who comes back from the dead, and three classic New York detective characters led by Hugo Miller.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rogue Phoenix Press
• Release date: Sep 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781624202896

Book preview

The Monteverdi Manuscript

A Hugo Miller Mystery

Joseph Allen

Published by Rogue Phoenix Press for Smashwords

Copyright © 2016

ISBN: 978-1-62420-289-6

Electronic rights reserved by Rogue Phoenix Press, all other rights reserved by the author. The reproduction or other use of any part of this publication without the prior written consent of the rights holder is an infringement of the copyright law. This is a work of fiction. People and locations, even those with real names, have been fictionalized for the purposes of this story.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Dedication

To my brother and sister, Tom & Maggie.

Chapter One

You learn to ignore noise, especially when you live near Times Square. They say it is the crossroads of the world, but sometimes it seems like a dumping ground for slow walkers, drunk tourists, and people who have no idea whatsoever where they are going. Then again, sometimes it seems like the center of the known universe.

You can hear twenty languages being spoken walking just a few blocks. Sometimes there are three languages being spoken in an elevator ride. There are so many people on the street at midnight that it is difficult to walk, and nearly impossible to talk on a smart phone, never mind see the screen, because the streets are so brightly lit. And by 4AM when the bars close, Eighth Avenue becomes so rowdy with drunks that the police have to pull out bullhorns to yell at them to get out of the middle of the street so they won't be run down by taxis. That, combined with the fact that there was an active fire station directly downstairs, made my life a paean of city noises.

Oddly enough, after about a week, I found I could sleep through almost anything except a high wind that rattled the windows on the 34th floor, and in the summer, with the windows open, I woke up every night at 4:15 when the army of drunks took over Eighth Avenue. After a while it became a brief moment, listening to all those slurry voices so far downstairs, and the blurry commands on the police bull horns to pull your pants up and get out of the street.

I liked where I lived, but I lived there mostly by accident. My company opened an office in Rockefeller Center, in the building behind the Christmas tree, and I wanted to be able to walk to work. The East Side was totally out of the question, and Hell's Kitchen was mostly walk-ups. There were a few tallish buildings. I found one across from Morgan Stanley that had the perfect apartment, and took it. It was my company, after all, no reason why I shouldn't live within walking distance.

A far cry it was from the ranch in Texas where I grew up, or the quiet seashore in California where we moved when I was twelve. It was even a step up in noise from UCLA, where Westwood Village was one of the only places in Los Angeles that was clogged with foot traffic, mostly because there were so many movie theaters and 30,000 or so students.

It was 1998, shortly after I moved into the apartment. The weather was beyond crisp, getting downright cold as we neared New Year's Eve. On about December 28th a professor from UCLA who had been a grad student when I was there invited me to go to the opera, a performance of La Boheme. Fred Glamorgan was in town for the holidays, had some relatives in the area, and looked me up. We had been close for a while back in the college years, but no longer, although that was not Fred's choosing. We were young, and there was a fair amount of experimenting.

We went over to Carnegie Hall beforehand. There used to be some beautiful old apartments there above the auditorium, very hard to get, and mostly rented out to actors and musicians--famous ones. Marlon Brando lived there. We went to visit a well-known harpsichordist, Hubert Fulmer, who announced when we arrived that he had some great hashish. I was never bashful about recreational drugs, but for some reason I was lucky enough never to take anything that was really addictive. My drug of choice was then and is now alcohol. I much prefer a martini to a hit of 420. But I went along. The apartment was phantasmagorical, with valuable art and carpets everywhere, and fascinating books that I wanted to browse. There was a black fur coat slung over the back of a chair. I picked it up and threw it over my shoulders; I'm tall and it came nearly to the floor. Hubert was not tall.

If you decide you don't want this, I'll take it.

Hubert walked over to me with a sour look and held out his hand wordlessly. I gave him the coat and he put it back on the chair without saying anything.

Fred was sitting in the living room and Hubert led me back in. We took a couple of drags on the water pipe sitting on the table. We chatted a bit. I sipped some scotch and took another couple of deep hits on the water pipe. Fred had a token sniff at it and begged off without inhaling anything. Then we said toodles and went to the Met. I thought as we left that place was like an opium dream, really pretty, but seriously overdone.

Once at the Met I started to feel strange. Although I was not a total stranger to hashish, I just figured it was good stuff as I had been told, but it was making the room spin. We were sitting on the railing in the Dress Circle, which is the third balcony, and I was seeing doubles and triples of everyone around me. I looked over the edge of the railing and the whole orchestra was lighting up with rainbow colors.

Fred caught me just as I was about to fly off the railing; it was the strangest feeling, as though I were weightless and could levitate. He dragged me out to the hallway, where we were met by an usher who assumed I was drunk and told us to leave the auditorium. Fred maneuvered me to a cab and took me downtown to the apartment of a friend who was out of town (where Fred had been staying, it turned out), and put me in bed.

I was severely nauseated if I was on my back, because the room was spinning out of control. I curled up on my side like a hedgehog in Alice in Wonderland. A doctor showed up out of nowhere and gave me an injection and that's all I remember for a while--it turned out I was in that state for nearly thirty-six hours.

The fabulous hashish had been augmented with what the doctor guessed was LSD and maybe some Angel Dust. He gave me Thorazine, which was intended originally to deal with anxiety or psychotic episodes, but in this case was intended to bring me down from whatever trip I was on. Eventually, I woke up feeling wrung out, soaking wet, and it was Sunday, where it had been Friday night at the opera.

There was a police detective in the apartment who wanted to talk to me. He asked me about the drugs I had taken on Friday at Carnegie Apartments. I told him what I had been told, that it was hashish and I only had a little because I didn't want to get high.

I asked him why he wanted to know since I was apparently going to be okay from whatever it was.

Well, Mr Fulmer was not so lucky. He tried to fly out the window and landed six stories down on Seventh Avenue., he said.

Is he going to be okay? I asked, and looked at Fred, who was standing by the door, looking at his shoes.

He's dead, the detective said. The lab found LSD and PCP mixed in with the remains of the hash, and there was a note in his jacket pocket that said, 'Let me die.' I understand you tried to fly off the balcony at the Met."

I started to shake and couldn't say anything.

Why would Hubert do that? I finally asked, looking at Fred.

We can't say for sure that he did, the detective said. Someone else might have strong-armed him out the window.

You mean that wasn't a suicide note, that let-me-die thing? Fred asked.

We don't know. There was apparently a bit of a struggle near the window and some broken crockery. There could have been a fight or Mr Fulmer might have at least resisted being pushed out the window. Or he could have kicked the pottery trying to get up on the windowsill. The CSI people will give us their ideas on it later. Since he was a celebrity, we will not be giving any of the details to the media or the public until we have a final report on the incident.

I started to dry-heave. The detective backed away and took Fred into the living room. The doctor put a cold compress on my neck and pushed a suppository into my rear. The nausea subsided after a while.

Apparently, they accepted for the moment that neither Fred nor I had spiked the drugs, and the lethal combination was intended for Hubert.

First time I totally missed New Years Eve and New Years Day, I said to the doctor. I hope it never happens again. And from now on it's vodka for me. I'd rather have the occasional hangover than this spinning in my head.

I was well enough to sit up and Fred magically found a can of chicken soup and warmed it, and I was able to eat it--well, I gulped it down like a Labrador who had been swimming in cold water to tell the truth. Then the police detective, whose name was di Saronno, like a liqueur, took Fred and me down to the Midtown West precinct on 54th Street and took a statement from each of us.

Fred seemed devastated that Hubert was dead, but he was also more or less in shock at the whole situation, and stared somewhat vacantly when he was asked questions. He looked at me finally and said, Hubert was ahead of me in school, and he was a better harpsichordist than I will ever be, and we hated each other for the most part, but he was a fine artist and although he was frequently a sorry excuse for a human being, I felt like he was family.

That sounded like you wrote it down before you said it, Fred.

I did kinda, I guess. At least I went over it in my head several times. But I did feel like he was family, even though we always bickered and one-upped each other.

I think what he meant was that they studied with the same teachers, because he never, ever spoke of Hubert in a friendly way. As a matter of fact, I was shocked that we went to Hubert's before the opera, because I know they would prefer to spit at each other than talk--especially Fred, who was far less successful as a performer than Hubert, though more successful as an academic and teacher. For my part, I only knew Hubert from recordings, and my first reaction when I met him that evening was that he was really quite short and balding and pasty. Even flying on drugs, though he had a sexiness in his near-transsexual trappings that surprised me. I found myself wondering what he would do if I grabbed him. Overall he was unpleasant, which added to the power of the personality. If we had not gone there, I would not have been poisoned or drugged or whatever. Though I guess he would still have jumped out his window if he thought he could fly. Or been pushed, or whatever.

Chapter Two

My name is Hugo Miller, and I am mostly English genetically, but one of my grandfathers was 100% second-generation German, so I am 25% German. When I was still small enough to squeeze between my grandfather and my uncle in the front seat of an old Ford pickup truck, we used to go out to the ranch after dinner on a late summer evening and look for deer, who mixed in with the cattle. The old truck would creak and bounce along the pebbled road, and they would point when they saw deer, and count, to see who found the most. I almost never found the most, but felt all grown up with the two most important men in my life, and I never stopped treasuring the moments when we went looking for deer. Those deer would blend in with the dun-colored cattle so you couldn't see them.

Then my father got an important new job in California and we drove out there with a parakeet in a cage on the shelf behind the back seat, and it took five days to get there. Then we moved into a motel near the beach while my mother and father looked for a house. The company gave them plenty of time when they transferred him, but it seemed very romantic and strange to me, who had always lived with my grandparents, because my father didn't much care for me.

Not that there was any way around that, because I didn't care for him either. I was born four weeks after the French turned tail and ran when they were trapped at Dien Bien Phu, and my father had been a UPI correspondent and spent well over two years in southeast Asia and the Philippines in those days when the country we know as Vietnam was still called French Indochina. We didn't meet until I was a toddler; when he got back he had no relationship with the baby who had been born while he was gone. Soon my brother came along, and then my sister, and those two and my parents became a family unit, and I went back to the little country town where my grandparents lived, and everything was fine. At least until we moved to California.

But Dad and I made a truce in California. We avoided each other but respected each other in odd ways. I didn't want to play sports, but my slightly overweight brother, Kev, did, and Kev was pretty good at football, even though he was more pudgy than strong. I took to wandering around the tide pools near the cliffs where the new house was, and the fields around were planted with garbanzo beans, which were so hard if you picked them that you couldn't crack them with your teeth. I always wondered what they were good for but figured they were probably cattle feed.

I was naturally a good student, graduated at the top of my high school class and made it into a good university, even though it wasn't Catholic. The Catholic high schooling had put me miles ahead of the students at UCLA, and I majored in Classics, because I already had a decent command of Latin and Greek, and had read a bunch of Caesar, Cicero, standard poets like Horace and Catullus, and a bit of Suetonius, not to mention Aesop, some bits of Homer, some love poetry that left me totally cold, and some New Testament in Greek. The Latin teacher, who also taught a few of us Greek, didn't assign anything difficult because we were doing it in our spare time anyway.

Meanwhile ,Hugo Senior took the rest of the family and moved to New York City during my first semester at college, leaving me a glorious 2700 miles away from them. That's when I discovered sex. The sixties had set the stage for the sexual revolution. By the time I got there the spirit or the smell of sexual freedom was everywhere at UCLA.

I lost my cherry to a girl named Debbie. She was pretty and what she called zoftig--what I thought was that although she was fairly overweight she had big tits. Debbie was a theater arts major who was taking movement and voice classes, and she had a bit of a British accent that was entirely fake because she was from North Hollywood, which is the Valley. She had a helmet of brown hair that was round like Jackie Kennedy's hair, and altogether you didn't think fat when you saw her because she took great care to look good all the time, and she sure merchandised those breasts. When she took her clothes off, I thought fat. But she was good with me, patient, showing me how to do those things you do before you have intercourse, how to stimulate her nipples and breasts without being rough, for instance, and how to kiss her and finger her and rub her clitoris, which was on the side, (I had always expected it to be at the top in the middle—symmetrical, like). Anyway, we fucked a couple of times, and then I felt like I had the hang of it and moved on. Debbie stayed friendly, looked a bit hangdog sometimes, but she knew she was fat, and maybe she was used to moving on, or guys moving on. She wore a diaphragm so she would not get pregnant, she told me, and she showed it to me. It looked like a neoprene clamshell, and she put jelly in it and just shoved it up there. No need for a rubber. She also wanted to do it the other way. There was a corny and gross joke going around about that, and I took a pass, but stored away that some girls like that.

I had a series of failed girlfriend starts and stops, and a couple of guys too, but nothing seemed to gel. Later I married and things being what they are, I am a grandfather, but I seldom see any of them--the ex-wife, the kids, the grandkids. The divorce was not pretty, and I was not proud of myself for how I behaved. My parents had rejected me for divorcing, and so I guess it came naturally to drift away from my family the same kind of way. It soured me on wanting to live with my next love, whoever she might be, and as a matter of fact she (or he) hadn't ever showed up.

That's why I live with Carl. No, not that way, we just live together. Neither of us would be interested in anything else. We're both capable of sex but not with each other. For one thing, he's about the same age as some of my cousins. The thing is, if you don't have a family that works, you more or less have to invent one. Carl is my family.

He has issues, like I do. He used to be a cop but left long before he would have retired and ended up surrendering what he had accumulated in his pension fund to his ex-wife on the theory that it would help with the kids (they had two). He pays a fortune in child support, and I don't charge him rent because he keeps me from cracking up when I'm depressed--and he fixes things when they break. He works for my company because he is goddamned smart and clever and can tell things about people that no civilian ever could guess. He has digestive problems that act up; he says it feels like he swallowed a razor blade sometimes.

I started the company in the early nineties as it evolved from my own unemployment and consulting. We do publicity and PR for entertainment and sports. Some movies, some minor and college sports teams, and the occasional outlier, like somebody running for local or state office. I used to do a lot of the creative work, but by 1998 I had stepped back to being simply the major rainmaker. My only job, since I wrote the job descriptions, was bringing in new business. I had never hired anyone who was good at that. Job protection?

I get panic attacks sometimes. They feel the way I imagine a heart attack feels. I'm sure that's why I like vodka and scotch so much. I am only a few years older than Carl, but a lot of people take us for father and son. We have no resemblance to each other, but his blondness makes him look northern European, like I do, and that's enough, apparently. I think of us as Holmes and Watson. Or maybe Henry Higgins and Colonel Pickering. We respect each other's privacy most of the time.

I never did learn to play the piano, although it was long an ambition. Both my parents had been victims of boring piano teachers. Both could pick things out on a keyboard, but neither could bear listening to a child practice, which I did by the hour when I was allowed to try lessons. So my keyboard career was cut short when I was about nine. I later learned to play the guitar by ear and actually made some money at it when I was at UCLA. And after both my children were born and we were living a young-family idyll, I finally took two years of piano lessons, but I was 33 at that point, and my hands were just not going to train the way they needed to--neither was my hand-eye coordination.

Anyway, I always hero-worshipped musicians. I would have done anything to be a real friend of a real musician, and Fred was a real musician, and I did, well, things I normally would not have been interested in doing just to be close to him. And that is how I ended up with a doctor injecting thorazine in my butt to bring me down from an acid trip after having been 86'd from the Metropolitan Opera while a famous harpsichordist sailed out the window of the Carnegie Apartments and splatted on the sidewalk across the street from Trattoria dell' Arte.

Chapter Three

Of course Hubert was dead, so he couldn't provide any helpful information about how the hashish got spiked, or by whom. He was a very non-meticulous person, apparently. According to Fred, he never filed his income taxes on time because he kept no records and had to have his agent gather things together and take them to the accountant just to get on file. He was always slightly in debt to the IRS, nothing egregious, but he never had enough of anything deducted from his pay. He was perennially paying last year's taxes this year, or the year before that's taxes this year. Needless to say, he did not keep a datebook that would show who had been there in the day or days before he flew out the casement window onto the Avenue.

Hubert was gay. I thought all harpsichordists were gay, which as it turns out, is not true. Fortunately not all gay people are harpsichordists, or the world would be ringing with two- and three-part inventions to the point where we would all be sick of them. Harpsichords went out of fashion when Mozart was a kid, as a matter of fact, although they survived in the opera house for a while, accompanying the spoken or slightly sung recitative parts of operas. They came back into fashion when some lesbian keyboard artists in Paris in the first part of the twentieth century decided that baroque and rococo music ought to be played on them instead of on Steinway grands. That would be principally Wanda Landowska, whose recordings always seemed to me to reveal a startling lack of style and metronomic regularity.

Because he was a fag and a musician, it was assumed after his somewhat colorful exit from life, there were all kinds of unsavory people in and out of his apartment. Being a Great Artist, one accepted that, especially in New York where certain famous conductors had a history of pederasty, even when on tour. The police shrugged and assumed that virtually anyone could have wandered into Hubert's palatial apartment populated with antique Persian rugs and nineteenth-century Orientalist paintings, as long as he was willing to have his thing sucked, or maybe vice versa. After all, I didn't know Hubert, but he did seem like a flamer for the few minutes of our acquaintance. He was wearing a multicolored Japanese bathrobe and at least six rings, including on one of his thumbs, the left I think. .

I said to Fred, I wonder if there was anything in the apartment when we were there that would tell us something about who did this? I admit to feeling a bit like Hercule Poirot, although I did not have little moustaches to twirl, but I felt my little gray cells whirling about in my head, looking for clues. I tried to walk mentally into the apartment again, as I had done before. It was the first time I saw it, and I was trying to take it all in. The carpets, Persian carpets everywhere dominated by that orangey burgundy color that seems to be the background of a lot of Sarouks.

I looked at the first bookcase while Hubert and Fred were making nice and asking about old friends and protégés. The books in that first bookcase were largely fiction, not at all the music library I would have expected. Some nice old bindings, and there was Thackeray and Dickens, and Proust. I grabbed one of the volumes of Proust and it was in French, because of course Hubert would have spoken French--if he had read In Search of Time in the first place, that is. I tried, but only barely made it through Swann's Way in English--what can I tell you? I can speak a little parley-voo, but as to reading a French masterpiece, forget it. I barely got through Un Certain Sourire and L'Etranger in French 1 and 2.

Hubert took the Proust volume out of my hand and air-kissed me. First edition, he said, opened the book and read the famous bit about the Madeleine dissolving in the tea with what sounded like a credible accent, but I saw Fred scowling behind him, so I knew he was doing something wrong. I have to say Fred was better in Italian than in French, but I would have trusted him with accents. Anyway, Hubert gave me a snakey or lizardish kind of smile, like Dracula leading a sweet young thing into a roomful of coffins. But of course I hung back and continued looking at the art. Nothing I recognized, but I remember an Arab with a huge scimitar standing in front of a doorway or gate with blue and white tiles in that semi-arched way that a lot of Muslim architects favored. Like at the Alhambra.

He took us into what I would call a living room and there was indeed a table with a huge hookah on it and cushions all around the edges. Was he acting at all strange? Well, I didn't know the man, but he just seemed like he was doing a guided tour of his own apartment to me, nothing goggle-eyed or unduly weird other than the slightly ridiculous come-hither looks he kept flashing at me. Clearly he thought I was Fred's boyfriend, so that was probably it--I was fair game. I had unknowingly been Fred's boyfriend briefly, when I had pneumonia in grad school and had to move out of my apartment because I was too sick to take care of myself. Fred had a carriage house in Santa Monica, or maybe a converted garage, but it was big, and he actually nursed me back to health with the meds the doc gave me and a lot of actually home-made soups and fresh baguettes and bottle after bottle of ginger ale, the kind made with real ginger.

So I had this pinky ring, which people wore then, though they don't any more. It was small, shaped like a signet, but smaller than a signet, and with a nice small oval of spinach-colored jade in it instead of a crest or whatever a real signet would have. No carving, no cameo.

Fred had admired it, and I had bought it at Tiffany with some found money at some point and actually turned it around so the jade faced into my hand when I wore it because it made me feel like I ought to be in New York when I was a student at UCLA. So I handed it to him one day and said, Here, you can wear this.

That made me publicly Fred's boyfriend, though I did not realize it at the time. People at school were familiar with the ring (who knew?) and Fred made them familiar with it if they were not already, telling them that I gave it to him, preening like a slightly overweight and not very attractive