Devoted in Death (In Death #41)(11)

“She held up longer than I thought she would,” Peabody commented.

“That’s an iron spine. We’ll check in with Morris now, then start hitting friends, coworkers. I want to talk to Chamberlin. The conductor guy’s the in-charge guy, so, yeah, we need a conversation.”

She got behind the wheel, sat a moment with an eye on the side mirror to judge traffic. “Earnest Tina.”

“He had a sense of humor,” Peabody said. “He probably told somebody else about her, and we can get the names of the clubs he liked to play in.”

“She’s a possibility.” Eve took her shot, zipped out, left a blast of horns in her wake. “She’s writing an opera – do people still do that? I thought all the people who wrote operas have been dead for centuries.”

“There was that thrash opera a couple years ago – Noise. I sampled the disc, but it gave me a headache. I think people still write the regular ones.”

“Well, she’s writing one, and with a name like Earnest Tina it won’t be thrash. She wants to pick Kuper’s brain about dead opera-writer types. Maybe she wants him to use his influence to get hers produced. His mother’s sleeping with the in-charge guy, another potential leg up there. But he’s not serious enough by her standards, goes around playing at dingy clubs. Disrespectful to her and the opera.”

It seemed seriously out of orbit as motive, but…

“People kill people for all sorts of screwy reasons,” Eve concluded.

“The torture?”

“We have to meet this Earnest Tina, figure out just how screwy she is. Let’s do a run on Ethan Chamberlin. He’s got the initial. Maybe he couldn’t get what he wants from the mother with the son so tight in there.”

“Or maybe he really wanted to do the son instead of the mother.”

“Now you’re thinking.”

“I bet you’ve been to the opera,” Peabody said as she started the run on her PPC.

“Twice. Then I drew the line. I’d go again when they finished building the ice palace in hell.”

“I think I’d like it – I mean to at least go. The costumes, the music, the drama, and everybody all dressed up and sparkly.”

“You can’t understand anything anybody’s saying, then they all die. We get plenty of that on the job.”

“But if they’re doing all that in Italian – I’d want to go to an Italian opera, I think – then it’s romantic.”

“I don’t get how dying’s romantic.”

“Well, like Romeo and Juliet —”

“Double teenage suicide. Yeah, that makes my heart melt.”

Sulking a little, Peabody continued the run. “It’s romantic tragedy.”

“That’s one of those oxygons.”

“Moron.”

Eve turned her head, aimed steely eyes. “Repeat that.”

“I meant oxymoron. It’s oxymoron not gon. Sir.”

“Either way.” Eve added a shrug.

“Moving right along,” Peabody said quickly. “Chamberlin, Ethan, age sixty-two. Divorced, twice, one offspring, daughter, thirty, resides in London. He’s been the in-charge guy for eleven years, and was in-charge guy for the London Symphony Orchestra prior. Resides… huh, just two blocks south of the vic and his mother. Few bumps here and there. Destruction of personal property – busted up a viola – paid the damages. Same deal for throwing a piccolo out of the window and threatening to throw the piccolo player after the instrument. Assault, charges dropped. Another assault, suspended sentence with mandatory anger management.”

“Violence. Temper.” Eve shook her head. “That’s a run of a flash temper. This murder doesn’t read that way. But we’ll talk to him. Pull out the E names – just first for now – start quick runs. Can you do a geographical, so we have the most efficient route for interviews?”

“Totally can do. His mom seemed really sure nobody who knew him could do this.”

“His mother loved him, and figured everybody else did, too. At least one person didn’t, whether they knew him or not. So we check it out.”

A thin snow started to spit out of grumpy gray skies. Which meant, Eve knew, that at least fifty percent of the drivers currently on the road would lose a minimum of one-third of their intelligence quotient, any skill they’d previously held at operating a vehicle thereby turning what had been the standard annoying traffic into mayhem.

She bulled her way south, determined to beat the onset of insanity.

The minute she stepped into the morgue, she yanked the cap off her head, stuffed it in her pocket.

The white tunnel echoed with their footsteps – the post-holiday, frozen-tundra lull, Eve thought. It wouldn’t last.

She caught Peabody eyeing the vending machine that offered hot drinks.

“You know everything in that thing is crap.”

“Yeah, but it’s snowing a little, and when it starts to snow I start thinking hot chocolate. Even though the strange brown liquid that machine pees out doesn’t bear much of a resemblance. Why can’t law-enforcement facilities get decent vending?”

“Because then we’d all be snuggled up with hot chocolate instead of doing the job.”

She pushed open the door to Morris’s domain.