Part Three ended with Dr. Kerr making a surprise discovery. Actually, a few of them: he had somehow traveled back in time to observe Trazmo the night he supposedly disappeared – and he had disappeared; he wasn't murdered – which allowed him to put two-and-two together to realize he should check out this piano teacher in Sanza, MO, Rose Philips; not only did he find her, he found her at the same time someone had broken into her house; then he found someone had attacked him; and then he heard a shot.
Part Four takes us back to Maine and Tom Purdue, still trying to figure out what all that meant, a piece of music recently composed by some young kid that quoted a theme of his – verbatim, at that – from a piece he'd never published. How did the guy, this Dexter Shoad, even know about it?
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–
PART FOUR –
CHAPTER 25
It was like being dropped into a warm bath which normally you'd find relaxing once your muscles started to loosen up. Gradually it becomes so hot, you're screaming to get out. “The Lobster's Nightmare.” It's an image that's kept him from eating lobster ever since he was a child, unhandy now he's living in Maine.
Tom Purdue kept moving around, walking the perimeter of his small yard to exercise the legs, strengthen the back, get the blood flowing, but mostly to keep his heart pumping and his mind alert.
But that music kept gnawing at him – music was always gnawing at him. In this case, his own music, that one, stillborn piece he'd always liked but never figured out what to do with. He liked the core of it, basically, never sure what kind of setting it needed, a problem “diamond” requiring special care.
At different stages it had been different things but always recognizably the same. He thought at first it had started as a song that never worked, then a string quartet but not that, either. He'd tried it out in an orchestra piece he hoped a few weeks at that artists' colony could whip into shape. For lack of anything better, rather than calling it by its failed attempts, he referred to it simply as “The Tune.” Susan liked it – his daughter, young and impressionable, loved it. Maybe that's why...
“Once more, into the lobster pot.” He continued thinking (will you, won't you, will you, won't you, living by the sea?).
When he'd listened to Dexter Shoad's piece about “absence,” he came face to face with it, “The Tune,” all over again. He couldn't believe it could be his, hearing it in someone else's piece. No, it must've reminded him of something else, at first, something he liked. Since “The Tune” never found its final form, it took on any appearance it wanted. Maybe it wasn't really even his.
And what if it was only something he'd wished he'd written – the infamous “crib,” another way of excusing a referential homage – but then there was so much of it, the whole tune and nothing but the tune: how could you explain that? He'd never finished it, never published it. Could he prove he'd written it?
He put off looking through old boxes of manuscripts, pretty sure he'd saved even the oldest ones (despite thinking, if nobody was interested in his later stuff, who'd be interested in his earlier things?). Who had ever heard it, this Tune? Sue had, he'd played it often for them, but her memory was notoriously bad.
Hadn't he played it that night at the White Hill Colony when he'd worked on the Orchestra Thing (requiescat sine nomine)? Who heard it – Perry Harcourt, certainly; also Nathan Noximov. Toscanello was there, too. They played bits from their own Works-in-Progress for each other that night in the Music Room, only a few days left in their stay, but with so much work still to do on them. Then Trazmo came bounding in in full Ass-hole Mode and tried kicking them out so he could practice, ruining the mood.
The rest of that night aside, were those other familiar bits, mostly motivic, from works played by Perry, Nathan, and Florian? They appeared consecutively in what passes for Shoad's exposition, his “Absence,” before expanding. He had been courteous enough to use Tom's Tune as the Big Second Theme, brought back climactically for the joyous “Return.”
Ironically, Shoad could do nothing developmental with it beyond stating it over again, the same problem Tom always had with it. But how'd Shoad get hold of his tune? Of all four of them?
At first, Tom hadn't seen the “promotional video” put out by this Allegro Conservatory, only a 3-minute clip that included a few brief excerpts from the piece (only the final restatement of his Tune) interspersed with comments from the composer and a trendy spokesman for the school (obviously they weren't aiming for a discriminatory demographic). There was a more extensive interview proclaiming the brilliance of young Shoad on the school's website – he'd check that out, later – but something definitely sounded suspicious: his first work was a piece for orchestra?
Checking the website's “About Us” link only showed the school was founded the previous fall yet one of their first students who'd only started writing music “recently” completed his first composition only in March. It wasn't a matter of “doing the math.” Not even prodigies like Mozart or Mendelssohn developed that quickly. (“A rat, forsooth...”)
At least the boy was genuine about not outwardly trying to “emulate” Beethoven, despite the obvious reference between his title and Beethoven's famous Les adieux Sonata, its last two movements subtitled “Absence” and “Return.” Nor was he making any overt reference to a particular Someone's return. “A hidden program? A girlfriend?” the interviewer asked coyly.
“I just wanted to try something new, original,” the composer explained, “with these ideas I'd come up with” – (uh-huh, Tom thought) – “take them apart and then, in the end, put them back together again.”
While Tom wondered how he would define “Originality,” he also assumed Shoad knew nothing about the basic aspects of Sonata Form, but that's his teacher's fault and everybody, given time, had to start somewhere. Like many enthusiastic beginners, he was just another brash young student smitten with his own creativity, intent on re-inventing Creativity's wheel. The only problem was, having heard the piece first, there wasn't anything amateurish about it, nothing that smacked of “rank beginner.” (“A very large rat, forsooth... How gullible do they think the public is?”)
The boy doesn't sound bright enough, to be blunt, for this level of accomplishment, especially the attention to details in the harmony, form, and orchestration (could he be that intuitive without some intellectual understanding?). Tom began to wonder if someone else wasn't paid to write the piece for him? It wouldn't be the first time.
When Perry Harcourt called him back, checking out the video link Tom sent him that morning, he also felt it unlikely anyone of any age with so little training and experience could write this. “Sure, people accused Rimsky-Korsakov of writing Glazunov's First Symphony, but even at 17, Glazunov had studied music more than five months.”
It might be unkind to attack someone new and especially so young but in general, he agreed with Tom's assessments and added it was too tempting to headline a review “Much Adieux About Nothing.”
As for that other, more pertinent issue Tom had hinted at in his initial e-mail, Perry wondered about the greater mystery: how did a boy born in the mid-'90s happen upon pieces by not one or two composers writing at the same place at the same time in 1983, but four? “And particularly yours, Tom.”
He and Perry had stayed friends ever since they met at White Hill that spring though their professional paths rarely crossed. Toscanello had always been more aloof with them both – with everybody, there – and they'd only gotten back in touch recently to form a kind of support group once “Great American Cold Cases” reconnected them. His immediate thought was to share the Shoad Videos with them, send the various links, then discuss the implications of the body that had been discovered on Monday (he assumed they'd also been called).
Not an expert in Copyright Law himself, Perry thought there was little he or Florian could do about plagiarism charges against Dexter Shoad (if it even mattered until he chose to publish his piece). “To quote Toscanello's argument about those 'sounds-like' similarities between any two composers, 'there are only so many notes to go around.' But your piece, that tune – that's an extended quote, almost verbatim, isn't it? If he publishes it first, it's now his. Is there any way you can prove that you wrote it in 1983?”
Tom admitted to never throwing sketches away. “Somewhere in some closet there are reliquaries full of abandoned sketches, especially that tune. And I am such an obsessive-compulsive freak, I date every scrap of paper. Plus, if you guys can testify that you'd heard me play it then, that night in the Music Room, that'd help.”
“Sure,” he said, “I'd be glad to. And with this 'idiotic memory' of mine, it should be convincing enough to a jury or whoever decides these things. Not sure how Florian's memory is, though.”
“Idiotic” was how Perry downplayed his eidetic memory, this uncanny ability – “a.k.a. curse” – to recall almost every thing he'd ever learned. It made passing exams a cinch, especially those infamous “Drop-the-Needle” tests where you ID a piece wherever the professor starts the recording. With the Internet Age, his students had started calling him “Dr. Google.”
He explained it as a cross between having perfect pitch and a photographic memory except it was more like a “phonographic” memory, working best with any music he'd heard. All he'd need is synesthesia.
“Which reminds me, there were two notes different between your original tune, as you played it, and how Shoad used it. Do you know if Shoad has perfect pitch? That could mean he didn't physically copy it out from a written source but transcribed it from having heard it somewhere. A distinction worth noting, incidentally.”
Tom sat back and laughed. “God, Perry, you have to include that in your deposition! Signed and dated for my file!”
“However, you played it in G-flat Major; he used it mostly in B-flat.”
“Oh, that's right, I did play it in G-flat! I remember thinking how fucking hard that was with all those accidentals...”
Perry had already set up a conference call through Skype, since Tom wasn't savvy enough to manage it on his own, chiding him to “zoom with the times, dude – the wave of the future!” Tom grumbled, “easy for you to say, kid...” (Perry, the youngest of them, was two years from being welcomed into Medicare).
It took a few minutes for him to make the arrangements with Florian. It was too early for him, he complained, though technically for Perry, who lived outside San Francisco, it was earlier still. They'd joked how Tom was East Coast, Perry was West Coast, with Toscanello now smack-dab in the Heartland, retired in Kansas City but recently starting a new part-time job at some local music school. Unfortunately, Florian was not in a good mood, a curmudgeon at 75 on the best of days. He hated these calls.
Florian Toscanello was an Old-Fashioned Man even among the day's more conservative composers. It may have been early but he was still dressed in a suit-and-tie with contrasting vest, his silver hair magnificently coiffed. Even if his reputation had faded considerably – honestly, it had never been bright – he made a point of looking the part. When genealogists revealed he was not descended from Italian nobility, was born in Brooklyn, not Florence (the source, he'd said, of his name), nor even conceived there, he'd labeled it all a serialist plot.
To the Florian Toscanello Tom knew from thirty years ago, retiring to Kansas City would've meant retreat, the outcome of failure, no longer able to afford spending the summers in his beloved Florentine villa. His wife had family in Missouri but nobody there knew who he'd been or cared; then she died five years ago.
“I know all about Dexter Shoad,” he started with a bad taste in his mouth, “the superstar of the Allegro Conservatory.” He'd just started teaching there, though previously he hadn't mentioned the school's name.
“He'd been Harmon Friedhof's student, before he died in that freak avalanche back in February” (Tom assumed he meant Friedhof'd died). “The boy's insufferable – arrogant little bastard, all this publicity's gone to his head. I'd only listened to that piece once, of course it's very derivative, he's only 20...” – but then he stopped in mid-ramble.
Perry and Tom explained the reason for this particular call, Perry doing most of the talking about how they'd recognized certain parts of it, especially that big Second Theme in B-flat in the cellos.
“Oh, that,” Florian warmed, “yes, that was one thing I thought rather good. It held out some hope for the boy.”
“Well,” Perry said with some caution, “do you remember hearing it somewhere before? Or that bit in the brass, measures later?”
“That's a lot like a motive I'd used in one of my operas.”
“Yes, in The Song of Roland you were writing at White Hill back in 1983.”
“Naturally, only you'd remember that, Perry...”
Frankly, Tom thought, it sounded like something Florian used in every opera of his Tom ever heard: it's a “stylistic fingerprint.”
Then Tom asked him specifically about that Second Theme.
“Oh yes, very memorable!”
“But,” Perry added, “you don't remember hearing it at White Hill when Tom played it, almost verbatim, over thirty years ago?”
“What, you're saying Tom wrote that? That's impossible...”
Tom reminded him he was still there, even if only by phone connection.
Perry was positive Tom had composed Shoad's Second Theme back in the 1980s.
“No, I mean,” Florian back-tracked, “well, there are only so many notes to go around, but... that whole tune? That's improbable!” No, he couldn't recall hearing Tom play it – “that's a long time ago.”
Florian said he'd bring up this matter of creative integrity at Shoad's lesson before lunch (if he'd bother to show up), how there's imitation and borrowing, but out-and-out plagiarism was the equivalent of theft. While he always thought Stravinsky suspect in the greater scheme of things, he did say “all composers borrow – great composers steal.”
“However, it's my duty to remind Mr. Shoad he is not yet a great enough composer to get away with it. And in my humbled opinion, he's a long way from ever becoming one.”
The universe had once again managed to impress Tom just how few people there were to go around in the world, that of all possible cosmic connections, Dexter Shoad's teacher was someone he knew. Perry, more pragmatically, reminded Florian they're basically more interested in how Shoad found these bits to steal in the first place.
“This piece reminds me of what today's kids call a 'mash-up,' disparate elements taken from here and there and crammed together,” Florian admitted, “like a bad film score, switching from one scene to another.” And Friedhof's music, what little he knew of it, always reminded him of a film score in search of a movie.
“Wait... say that again?”
“What, about the mash-up?”
“No, Friedhof – the guy Shoad studied with when he wrote this piece, right?”
Perry said, “So, you think he's stealing Friedhof's music, too, not just ours?”
Florian, however, was more focused on whether any of this would make it into the “Cold Cases” show, since it involved all three of them from their brief time at the White Hill Colony. “It could certainly be great publicity for us old composers, wouldn't it; maybe get people to check out our music again?”
“Yeah,” Tom suggested, “if that's the kind of publicity we old composers really need, implicated in some rival composer's allegèd murder.” Tom's career hadn't benefited from being implicated in a whole bunch of murders.
“Other than our having been at the White Hill Colony with Trazmo, then, what connection does Dexter Shoad have to that? He wasn't even born yet, was he? Unless – wait, what if Trazmo'd disappeared, living in obscurity, and Shoad is his son?”
“But how would Trazmo get our music? That sounds pretty far fetched, Perry.”
Not to change the subject, Toscanello said, but he was curious what the others thought about that body found in Iowa – since it appears the good sheriff had called each of them about it. “She said it was tied into the 'Missing Persons Case regarding Phillips Hawthorne,' but not that the body was Phillips Hawthorne.”
Perry anticipated the inevitable call from Monty Martello about his reaction to these “latest developments,” but so far, he'd heard nothing. (Once TV's ex-detective, Mike Scapuletta, Martello was now hosting “Great American Cold Cases.”)
When Toscanello said “no news is good news,” Tom countered with his trademark cynicism, “no, 'no news is no news' – seriously.” Still, the best advice was always to give them a dead-pan “No comment.”
“When was the last time either of you'd been contacted by them,” Perry asked. “It's been weeks, for me.”
“Same here.”
Whatever this new wrinkle in the case implied, Tom figured it was bound to throw the “Cold Cases” folks into a blender of activity, since he imagined by now they're probably well into post-production. There's enough to warrant the sheriff's consideration, more than just being the first random action in the case in thirty years.
“I've only heard it second hand, so it's not official. All I'll say is, 'don't breathe a word of this to the GACC people'.” (Tom loved saying that – “GACC” – not the industry's finest acronym.)
Tom proceeded to tell them about his friend, Richard Kerr, the music detective – his friend Terry from years ago in grad school – who on occasion consulted with the International Music Police in certain investigations. (Toscanello grunted, with little to say about the IMP who proved singularly helpless in his running feud with the Serialist Mafia.) He was already heading out to Iowa to observe what was going on with this GACC production – “as a favor to me,” Tom explained – when Sheriff Diddon's call came in Monday about the body.
“Terry told me, once he'd seen it at the morgue, skeletal remains – a male – had been found in a field not far behind the Express Motel, sticking out of a small culvert. Fairly intact, he may have been stuck in there for years or maybe he'd just been unearthed by recent heavy rains.
“So? What's the connection?” Toscanello asked.
“It was still wearing a distinctive pair of boots, and a flamboyant belt buckle – the exact sames one in the last photograph taken of Trazmo at the colony.”
Perry sat back and gasped, his hand clamped over his mouth; Florian groaned and lowered his eyes; both shook their heads.
“...And a polished turquoise stone which might or might not be the one I'd accused Trazmo of stealing from my desk.”
Perry and Florian agreed that sounded pretty conclusive. “Are they sure it's him?”
Tom mentioned Terry felt the coroner wasn't convinced, thinking maybe the remains belonged to someone older than Trazmo, possibly decades older. “Basically, they're waiting on some tests, specifically DNA, to confirm age and identity.”
“How'd you explain somebody else ending up with Trazmo's boots and belt buckle?” Florian sighed, resting his head in his hands.
“That's a pretty massive wrinkle, guys,” Perry said.
“You realize,” Florian quickly pointed out, “the GACC people are going to turn this into national headlines to boost their ratings?”
“The thought crossed my mind.”
“Tom, what about that turquoise stone you mentioned. Are they sure that's yours?”
“It's polished, so it's not a 'wild' stone.”
Then Tom remembered when he'd described it to Terry over the phone, trying to recall its shape and how it seemed to have this thumbprint worn into it, he said it was a match.
That led to a sufficient “Moment of Silence” as the others processed this bit of news. Tom wondered if the unrelated mystery surrounding Dexter Shoad's plagiarism had been significant enough to bother bringing up, aside from the coincidence of its involving all four of the composers who'd been on the bus with Trazmo in Orient. Tom knew he hadn't done anything to cause Trazmo's death, as much as the man irritated him, and he couldn't imagine how or even why Perry or Florian would have. So, what happens next?
Discussing the disappearance when it was first suggested there'd been foul play with only the body lacking to prove it, they'd agreed there was hardly a single person on that bus who, on a scale of one to ten, wouldn't have found Trazmo's annoyance level closer to a ten, but enough to wish him dead?
Now, Perry's overworked imagination concocted a scenario: “what if everyone on the bus had thought hard enough about 'wishing him dead'?” Could Trazmo, weighed down by the awareness of this accumulated karma, how everybody hated him, be driven out into the blizzard? “Had everybody's mental concentration essentially been enough to cause him to commit suicide?”
Tom pointed out presumably legal distinctions between 'wishing someone dead' and killing him.
“But if we'd all agreed to concentrate on it, the way people send out 'thoughts and prayers' after a school shooting?”
Florian – who could blame this on the serialists still trying to defame him – imagined a jury might see it that way. “People are paranoid, these days: be very careful. Watch every word you say. It only takes a misplaced suggestion before one person's rumor becomes another's fact: Fox News could turn this into another Salem.”
Tom ventured beyond Dexter Shoad's plagiarism in a wider sense, and thought perhaps he was the sanest person on the line. Could Hawthorne's lawyer seriously cook up a charge of “death by wishful thinking”?
On that note, rather than ponder the possibility someone back at the colony might be controlling those thoughts, not just a few people on the bus, Tom suggested their conversation had run its course.
“When shall we three meet again? If your friend Kerr finds anything, Tom, keep us posted.” And Perry ended the call.
If nothing else, Tom was grateful to have Perry's confirmation he wasn't imagining things: what he heard in Dexter Shoad's Absence & Return was indeed his Big Tune, and the whole tune at that (he'd have to scour through those old boxes he'd hauled up to the attic to see if he could find it). And those other motives weren't just a collection of similar notes; they were identifiable fragments from works by three other composers who just happened to share White Hill's music room with him that evening. But that wasn't going to be enough to prove a case, if it came to that; and what was the point? Tom knew if he hadn't published or copyrighted his theme or any of those compositions he'd planned using it in, how could he claim it had been stolen from him in the first place?
That was the real mystery, as Perry said: how did his Big Tune and those motivic fragments (and only those fragments) of Perry's, Florian's, and Nathan Noksimov's pieces, all worked on there in 1983, end up in a piece written by some apparent prodigy who'd only begun composing in 2016? “How much coincidence was believable?”
His mind tried keeping track of them, not just that one – in fact, how many were there? He tried making a list, the way a detective might come up with suspects and likely motives.
Speaking of motives, whatever happened to those specific compositions the others had written: they were all published, they'd all been performed (even Toscanello's opera – he had a knack for getting his operas premiered; second productions, not so much), but not performed recently. Perry's was the only one that had been recorded, some long out-of-print LP. So technically it wasn't impossible for someone to find their music, but how would Shoad have known to group them together, given their connection to the White Hill Colony? Why not other composers, there?
“That's right, we weren't the only composers there: what about the others, like Rosalind Arden and... was it Andrea Goldberg? Did Shoad include any of their music, too, but we just don't recognize it?” He'd no recollection of any pieces they'd been working on at White Hill or of hearing them discuss them over dinner.
Tom jotted down a note to ask Perry if he recalled anything about “the two ladies” – which reminded him how inseparable they were and how the men, likewise inseparable after-dinner companions, wondered if maybe they were lesbians, unaware they, hanging out as they did, weren't presumed by the other guests to be “closet homosexuals.” Wasn't there something about about a big scene between Trazmo and Goldberg the night before they left? What was that about? Tom couldn't recall ever hearing a note of either Goldberg or Arden's music.
What possible connection could a late-blooming composer-wannabe named Dexter Shoad have with a promising former prodigy named Phillips Hawthorne whom everybody called Trazmo like it was his pen name, who'd disappeared three decades ago?
And that's where Tom's Little Gray Cells came up blank, staring at a glaringly white wall. “There was no obvious connection.”
The key word was “obvious.”
It disappointed him Perry, with his fascination for Agatha Christie, kept coming up with absurd plots like Shoad being the “Son of Trazmo” which made him laugh out loud. Now that he considered it, it sounded more ominous, like this Shoad would continue to haunt him into the next generation.
Connections between Shoad and Trazmo were another thing. How would Trazmo have had access to Tom's and the others' music to begin with?
What Tom needed now was to hear something – anything – from Kerr.
= = = = = = =
©2022 by Dick Strawser for Thoughts on a Train
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