Rose City

By Eric Stern

In Portland, the City of Roses, it takes more than raindrops to make Detective Max Rose bloom. A pipe, a bourbon, and all the brain-power that goes into solving a murder makes him blossom. And what about emerald-eyed Lily Roberts, the victim's widow. A tonic. Hopefully not one made with hemlock. To find Jack's killer, Max journeys into Portland's Circus Underground and uncovers a secret that leads him all the way back to the Third Reich, and finally to 18th-century Cremona. Detective Rose always gets his man. And as for the ladies? Well...Max is an accordionist.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eric Stern is an accordionist, singer and composer. Most famous for starting the cabaret ensemble Vagabond Opera, he has composed two full-length operas (including their librettos), and has performed internationally as a singer, accordionist, and as a story teller. Born in Philadelphia, he grew up wandering the aisles of Wooden Shoe Books and Records, an anarchist collective bookstore, started by his parents and their friends. Naturally with such a radical foundation he studied opera and went on to perform it. He lives in Portland Oregon with his family and his dog Bijou. He's written many short stories. Rose City is his first mystery novel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eric Stern
• Release date: Dec 6, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463748527

Eric Stern

Eric Stern is an accordionist, singer and composer. Most famous for starting the cabaret ensemble Vagabond Opera, he has composed two full-length operas (including their librettos), and has performed internationally as a singer, accordionist, and as a story teller. Born in Philadelphia, he grew up wandering the aisles of Wooden Shoe Books and Records, an anarchist collective bookstore, started by his parents and their friends. Naturally with such a radical foundation he studied opera and went on to perform it. He lives in Portland Oregon with his family and his dog Bijou. He's written many short stories. Rose City is his first mystery novel.

Book preview

Rose City

A Max Rose Mystery

by Eric Stern

Copyright © 2018 by Eric Stern

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States

I would like to express my gratitude to my wife, Jill Simons, for reading the first draft of this novel and believing in me, in all things. And to my friend Gypsy, for her help in editing. Most of all thanks to Annie Rosen who was there every step of the way, first draft, last draft, and all the ones in between—a fellow artist and friend who remains unrivaled.

In memory of Adrian Derbyshire, anarchist, atheist, and friend. You gave me my first Sherlock and were always glad to loan me a Maigret.

1

I remember Jack Roberts. His axe had a good tone. His playing was second-rate. Our paths didn't cross much. He seemed to think working in restaurants below him, but he spent his last few months playing a weekly at Dante's club at the Circustown Social. It's where they found his body, face up in the tiny green room below the stage. Someone had shot him in the guts. Twice. Twice was enough.

Now I'm just an accordionist, but Lucien and I have known each other since we were very young, served together in that almost forgotten First Gulf war, and every now and then he asks for my help with a little coin attached to the matter. I'm always glad to do it too, but something about this case bugged me and I finally figured it out last night. It's not that I would ever wish anyone dead. But there were times I wanted to shoot Jack myself. Or at least punch him hard. In the face.

Every day Alma opens the restaurant at two o'clock and gets it ready for the customers. It's an optimal time to review cases and I'll have a pipe while I do it and smoke and work my way towards a bourbon. Today it was so cold that the usual rain turned to snow for a half hour and you could see traffic slowing down on the slick street outside the thick-paned window.

You want some tea before Georges comes in? She already had her black apron on. She wore pantaloons, flared and Gallic with wide strips of blue alternating with thin white pin stripes.

Thanks Alma. I hope the snow doesn't keep the customers away.

Alma always looks a little lost before she responds to you, like she's a five-year old dragging her toe in the sand thinking deeply about her answer.

She spoke slowly. Well, you know I hope it doesn't either. I can't feed my husband anymore croissants. He's already too fat.

And don't feed them to me either, Alma.

Oh, you're fine Max. We all put on a few pounds as the years go by.

Alma I'm not even forty.

You're pretty close though. She set a beveled tumbler on the table. Here try this Pinot. From Washington.

It glistened weakly.

No thanks.

She wrinkled her nose.

Le Snob.

It's not the wine, it's the hour.

She smiled. Always so deliberate. You know you're allowed to drink after twelve.

I clock-in at four. Otherwise...well...there must be some joke about a drunk accordionist.

Okay Maxie. She sat and drank the wine herself, slowly, and then ambled back to the kitchen.

Alma's the other reason Lucien calls on me. He's had a thing for her for years now, and it gives him an excuse to stop by the little French restaurant. She always flirts despite her fat husband, and today Lucien came in brushing snow off his coat. He sat down. He huffed.

Maxie what do you think?

I think that if you grab a chair by the window you'll have a fine time watching Portlanders try to drive in the snow.

I'll look the other way. But your moustache is twitching so you must have something for me.

No. Nothing more than what we figured out last night. Nothing but the usual questions. Did Jack have any money or a will? I remember he had a wife, didn't he?

Ex. She left him recently.

Why?

Well you remember Jack. He got on everyone's nerves. I guess he got on hers too. She says they were still friends though and she took it pretty hard when I called her. She'll come in tomorrow to talk with us.

That's what I was trying to remember. He annoyed me too and I can't recall what exactly it was. But you don't divorce someone for getting on your nerves do you?

You don't need a reason nowadays. Lucien lit a cigarette.

You try the electronic ones they have?

He scowled. No. They look ridiculous. Like you have R2D2 shoved in your face.

I took out my pipe, tapped the wooden bowl and emptied the ashes.

The last time I saw Jack Roberts, we shared a stage at the Secret Society Ballroom. It was a swing dance night when everyone dressed their finest, chucking their street shoes underneath the wooden tables after they came in. Shiny red lipstick and heels. Garters. Suspenders with real hooks, and spats. Polka dots spattering bow ties. Derbys, fedoras and straw boaters. The outfits spanned the decades, but not too many of the decades and nothing much past the war. Looking out you'd never know it was 2008. Rosalee Swan played her trombone. It was silver-plated and she sang in a voice like Betty Boop's. Her husband led the spit-shined band. They hired me to play that night along with Jack and if I think of it, I remember what annoyed me.

I filled my pipe and lit it.

Lu, was his ex-wife a musician?

Lily? She sings. As a hobby I guess.

Not professionally?

I don't know. I don't think so. She's independently wealthy.

I sucked the air in the pipe to stoke the flame.

He continued.

She has a solid alibi. She was miles away climbing Mt. Hood. With the facebook pictures to prove it.

The what?

C'mon Max. It's a social site. On the internet.

For dating?

Not really.

Okay. He had a gun with him right? Was it registered?

We're checking.

What was he wearing?

A Goodwill suit. Top to toe.

I glanced at my watch.

Thanks Lu. I'd better drink now.

We each drank a bourbon. I still had a couple of hours until I began playing so I got a little more work done and then ate dinner with the wait staff. Pasta Florentine.

That night I played the usual.

My mother was born in France and so my fingers go to Piaf and Brel and that's what Americans think of when they think of French music. For me those tunes are the old creaky jaunty music of my grandparents, but it's what most of the customers expect to hear. You know, the part of the movie where someone walks the cobblestone streets of an alley and tucked into the wall is a bistro in Paris. It's the music that's coming out of that place. Just to buck the trend, sometimes I want to light a cigarette and do a Serge Gainsbourg impersonation, but no one would get the joke.

Some musicians don't like to play background music at all. I do. You can take everything in, the polished eaves, Marianne at the counter with her little smile that goes with her little lips, the man at the bar with the expensive eyeglass rims and his date that smells like lotion. Petite gateaux with quince and crumbled chevre on a plate and more croissants in the counter box and to the left a couple of ladies in beads going to a flapper party and a little boy with his blue-suited father. Alma hums along sometimes and then there are glasses clinking and the door to the kitchen swinging back and forth and the forks tapping and patrons murmuring.

Somehow I can weave myself into this as I play accordion on the flagstones, looking up at the polished brass icons of wheat and I take the snatched bits of conversation and make them into little songs that beat along with the trays setting down and the train whistle far away. It helps me think and helps me get a bigger picture and I can puzzle some pieces together.

The way that man treated his violin.

For now I'd end the night with Je ne regrette rien, as I always did, have a drink and go home. Bijou was waiting.

2

I lay in bed going over the scene from twenty-four hours ago.

Frank owned a string of bars and strip clubs, Dante's and Devil's Point and the Star Theater. Fire dancers, strippers and circus performers drank and performed at the clubs. Most of them were in Jasper O'Hara's underground circus.

Find a warehouse near the river and you'd find them. Or they'd congregate under the Morrison bridge in high summer like a mystery cult, performing only for each other. Lithe contortionists, Dell 'Arte clowns, piercers, incidental Crowleyites, and female acrobats and aerialists who wore sheer spangled vestments. At the after-parties, antique ivory-keyed squeezeboxes and violins played sepia orchestrations accompanied by noise machine contraptions that had brass shells of Victrola horns welded to them, with glinting peacock feathers, iron gears, and bones for mallets.

There were shimmying belly dancers in the clubs. Tribal, black lipstick and pierced, or the razzle dazzle ladies of Cabaret, and then subdivisions of the genre were debated over Turkish coffee and shishah at the Haflas. Some wore heavy make-up, Egyptian eyebrows, fake eyelashes, their skin inked with long sinewy tattoos of vines or Sanskrit, Urdu, Arabic and other scripts, winding back into their arms to floating veils. They glowed, lambent with sweat by the time the doumbek started the baladi. Glitter and scarabs everywhere.

Then the rest of them, the ragged street teams of whiskeyed twenty year-olds shot-gunning the nights and plastering the rainy telephone poles with show posters, Brittany who could shoot an apple with her toes, Karl Creature the quiet muscle behind Jasper's operation, and of course all the musicians.

All members of this cabal are dear to my heart and while I maintain professional distance I know where to seek them and am always refreshed to immerse myself in their company. It's like slipping on an old well-worn overcoat or smoking my pipe.

Everyone stuck around after the murder for questioning. Everyone except Jasper.

Rosalee Swan was the one who discovered the body. I sat opposite her at one of the club tables in the back of the room. She wore a fox-fur stole, a flapper dress, and was drinking a glass of cold champagne.

Hi Rosalee. You okay?

God, no Max.

I'll get you out of here as soon as I can. What made you come back to the dressing room?

I just wanted to get my things. The lights came on at the bar and they said it was closing time.

They already did last call?

Yes. You know how they are at these establishments. They want you gone and they let you know by turning on the lights full.

Okay. Was anybody nearby?

No. She fiddled with her black purse. Max, do you mind if I smoke?

Go ahead.

She took out an engraved silver cigarette case and pushed opened the latch with her thumb. There were two left and after taking one she offered me her last. Rosalee was that kind of person.

I shook my head. That's okay. Rosalee. I waited a second and then continued. This part might be difficult. I'll keep it short. What did you see when you opened the door?

She took a long drag, breathed, and then finally spoke. You want to know the funny thing Max?

What's that?

I only thought of myself. She pondered and blew more smoke upwards. I mean there he was lying on his back, blood on his vest, and without knowing why anybody did it, I just thought that that could be my body.

She closed the cigarette case. Selfish, isn't it?

I reflected. Let's call it empathetic. He was on his back?

Yeah. I guess I just assumed it was senseless or random, and pictured myself lying there, blood on my sequins. Then I thought of what an asshole he could be sometimes, and then I thought that still, he had a mother, you know? Then I screamed.

Do you remember anything else? Did you hear anything?

No. Just the music from the bar.

Okay. Thanks.

I continued the questioning.

Riccardo Evans was Rosalee's husband. He wore his hair long, longer than the two-foot feather in his cap. He kept his wide tie on, and his suspenders up as we sat together. He was turning the small crank of a brass pot.

What on earth are you doing?

Grinding coffee beans. Mind waiting until I'm finished?

Not at all. Makes it fresher, does it?

Yup. You wouldn't want to smoke old tobacco would you?

No I suppose not. I don't need it freshly cured today either though.

There. In the dim light, and with all the deliberateness of a medieval apothecary he finished cranking and then poured the dark powder into the receptacle that he fit into a small double boiler. He placed that on a hot plate he had plugged in by the window.

Okay. I can talk now. Generally useless until I've had my coffee.

I understand. Has it been since this morning?

He calculated mentally. Nah. Two hours since my last injection.

Right. I just spoke to your wife, but why don't you tell me what happened?

Sure. I've never heard her scream like that. I've never heard anyone scream like that. I ran in and saw Jack lying there. I couldn't tell if he was dead, but he looked dead, and then everyone crowded around me and tried to revive him.

Who's everyone?

Oh Zitti and Jo, Rex, Miss DD Luxe and the guys in the band.

Jasper?

No. Didn't see him.

Did they move the body?

No. Not really. Just shook him a little. The way I wanted to shake him when he was alive a lot of the time.

I leaned back. I remember. He thought a lot of himself.

Never wanted to be amplified much either. It was a pain in the ass. He thought the audience should be listening to him, quietly. Hold on...

His coffee was boiling and Riccardo switched off the hot plate and poured the black liquid slowly into the waiting cup. Elixir in a chalice. I knew better than to expect him to take cream or sugar. I allowed him the first sip of the divine without interrupting.

He sat back down. I shouldn't speak ill of the dead though, I guess.

It's okay. It's probably still hard to believe he's dead. You see anything else? Anything at all?

He thought for a minute. Nah. Just his handkerchief by his feet.

I didn't remember seeing that.

His handkerchief? The one that he would wipe the violin off with? He had so many rituals before a show.

I guess so, Max. I don't really know. It might have been monogrammed.

Yeah that sounds like it. Nothing else? Nothing out of place?

Well that green room is always a mess, but no, nothing out of place.

Okay Riccardo. Enjoy your coffee.

Sure. You want me to make you a cup?

Maybe in the morning sometime. I don't touch the stuff after noon. Keeps me up 'til late.

Sure Max. I'll let you know if I think of anything else.

Thanks.

The rain was beating on the windows a little outside, but Frank still had the fire on and I cozied up to it and spread my hands on the smooth black table. Someone turned up the lights a little. It got pale like the room was starting to take off its make-up.

Lorelei was next and she took her perch across from where I sat. She was a little person, pushing fifty. Jasper often had her play the role of a swashbuckling pirate. She was good with a sword, a real fencer, but had trouble making rent. Every few months she'd haul her trunks of musty books, her chain mail armor, and her pirate costume to storage and then crash on Jasper's couch.

Lorelei, was everyone at the bar?

Mostly. Everyone except Jack of course. And Jasper.

Jasper wasn't with you all?

No. I don't think so. But he told us to meet at the bar. Her legs swung over the chair seat.

I raised an eyebrow. "Why?

He wanted to go over notes. He said he'd buy us all drinks.

Is that something he usually does?

Notes, yes, but Jasper's never bought me a drink in his life, let alone a round for everyone. Don't get me wrong, I sleep on his couch all of the time, but I've never seen him buy anyone a drink.

But tonight he bought a whole round?

Yes. He paid for them and then left.

When was that?

I'd say about one thirty.

Thanks.

Lorelei got down from the chair, walked over, and solemnly shook my hand.

"For what it's worth...I don't believe that Jasper