“You and your foolishness,” she retorted, coiling her hair again. “You forgot to buy salt. You’ll have to eat your dinner saltless tonight unless you feel like walking over to Catalino’s in the dark to borrow some.” She had her back to him but he could see the curve of her smile.
Capriccio for Unaccompanied Violin
by S. L. Franklin
R. J. Begins:
The home of Byron L. Davis was almost new, virtually isolated in the countryside, and nearly the size and general likeness of the rural English manor houses you get a glimpse of sometimes in old Hitchcock movies. Instead of appearing to rise up out of the landscape, though, the way those generally do, the Davis place seemed as if it had been prefabricated elsewhere and lowered by a squadron of helicopters onto the wrong plot of ground, a treeless hillock that overlooked a year-old artificial lake to the west, a newly completed golf course to the east, and the poured concrete foundations of structures similar to itself to the north and south.
It was midaftemoon when I got out of the Chevy at the base of the hillock, and partly because I’d spent most of the day driving, I took a minute or so to stretch and look around before I tackled the ascent. The weather was warm for early April — at least in south-central Wisconsin — but the lake on the other side of the road was still an irregular stretch of soggy looking ice, and if the terraced lawn rising up to the house had ten green blades of grass on it, that was all it had.
I walked across to the verge of the lake and stared down at the grayish slush for a moment before I turned back and climbed the brick and pink-stone steps. As I got within about forty feet of the entrance, I could hear, from an open casement, the sound of a violin being played by someone with limited talent, and the inevitable recollection sprang to mind, from a radio program of my boyhood, of Jack Benny sawing away at “Love in Bloom.”
The person who came to answer the door wasn’t the violin player but a tall, muscular-looking male of around thirty in stylish tan slacks and a matching cotton sweater. He looked me over through the storm door to make certain I wasn’t peddling The Watchtower, peered past me down the slope at the Chevy, then opened the door a crack.
“What is it?”
I handed him one of my cards and said, “Václav Hucek — he’s still missing.”
He propped the door with his foot and examined the card closely, then fanned it with one hand against the opposite thumb.
“Mr. Davis can’t tell you anything,” he said.
“Then I won’t take much of his time,” I responded.
He looked me over again with the air of someone about to be forced by circumstance into committing an unpleasant but necessary act, so I drew the door open suddenly and said, “Look — I can come back with the sheriff if you want, but that’s what you don’t want and the sheriff won’t want it either if he has to come. Why not just skip the stale repartee and show me in? You can make jokes about my looks and my cheap suit after I’m gone.”
I stepped inside, forcing him back a pace, into a large parqueted foyer. “The name is R. J. Carr, just the way it reads on the card. Who are you?”
He stepped back two more paces as if he didn’t want to be close, but he did let me come in. The truth is, although he was big and tall, I was bigger and taller and tougher looking even though I’d just turned forty-eight. It was one of the few scenarios in which my birthmarked cheek and thick glasses were an asset.
“I’m... Mr. Davis’s man-of-all-work,” he said. “I manage the accounts, supervise the out-source help, cook, play games—” he hardened his stare “—such as chess and golf.”
“Do you have a name?”
“Clive Macmillan.”
“Were you here, Mr. Macmillan, on the night of December fifth?”
“Yes. But I can’t tell you anything either. Hucek never arrived, and that’s the extent of our knowledge on the subject.”
One of a pair of doors inset with stained glass opened to my right, and a tall, pear-shaped specimen choking a violin by the throat leaned out. “Is the man asking about Václav, Clive? Show him in.”
“...which, as you must have heard, was the evening of the ice storm, followed the next morning by two feet of snow.” Davis was a young-looking sixty in spite of his spreading waist and hips, a retired stockbroker and budding real estate tycoon from Chicago by way of Lake Geneva forty miles to the south of where we sat. He collected things in a small way, he told me: rare stamps and currency, not coins, an antique car or two. Mansion Lakes, the development outside the window, was his conception, so to speak, without being his concern — except for the one house — or not until it proved itself, at which time he was leveraged to buy in heavily.
In our first five minutes, in other words, Davis gave me the insider’s story of his life.
He had played the violin as a young man, he’d said, and for the past six years had resumed his musical studies by taking master lessons every other week from Václav Hucek, formerly concertmaster of the Prague Symphony Orchestra, well-known soloist, and currently — one hoped currently — professor emeritus of the University of Wisconsin music faculty, who had retired to the Lake Geneva area in 1984.
“Václav was stubborn about his driving,” Davis said, “and that’s why I called to tell him not to come. He was to have dinner here and stay the night as he usually did, but even by four thirty our little byway was like a sheet of glass. Unfortunately, he’d already left home by then, or so one must assume, since he didn’t answer the telephone. At seven thirty, when he was two hours late, I called again.” He shook his head, then turned to stare across the room. “It’s been a shocking thing to me, Mr. Carr. I — sometimes I seem to see him, out of the corner of my eye, you know. But of course—” He drew his gaze back to me. “My playing has deteriorated. He was a wonderful teacher.”
Davis had been alternately tuning and sighting along the violin for much of our conversation. “Do you play, by chance?” he asked me, gesturing with the instrument.
“Organ and piano,” I admitted. “Not as much as I used to. That’s a beautiful violin, though.”
“Yes,” he said. “Not a true collector’s piece or I wouldn’t dare to play it but quite old, rebuilt many times, so Václav says.” He paused, then went on. “Oh, it is worth something, and I shouldn’t belittle it. Possibly by one of the lesser Amatis or... possibly not.”
“Not a Stradivarius, at any rate,” I said. I stood up from where we’d been sitting in Davis’s intimate little library-music room — twenty feet by thirty by twenty feet high with a sky-lit ceiling. He stood, too.
“When’s a good time to call you, Mr. Davis, in case I need to check back? Doesn’t seem likely right now, I know, but—” I shrugged.
“I wish you would call, Mr. Carr, if you find out anything about poor Václav. Anything at all.” He pondered with a hand to his chin. “Mornings are best because I’m always here. Weekdays only, though, and not too early, please. I’m no longer a slave to the opening bell on Wall Street.”
“Sure,” I said. He gave me his telephone number and accompanied me to the front door.
“It’s strange that Václav never mentioned having a brother,” he said.
“Oh, when someone disappears, a next-of-kin is bound to show up eventually, wanting to know what happened. Your friend is someplace between here and Lake Geneva, Mr. Davis, let’s not kid ourselves. He just hasn’t been found yet. He’s buried under fallen brush in a ravine or off in some woods, hidden from the highway, probably still behind the wheel of his car. If he came in a direct line, he was traveling county roads most of the way — in the dark, in hard, freezing rain. And he was seventy-four.”