A Note Before Dying
Book One in the Mara Solomon Series
Adam Cole
Part Ten
(C) 2020 Adam Cole
Published by Nuncici Press, an imprint of Adam Cole Works LLC
Mara sat across from Dr. Bottomdorfer, Chair of the Musicology department at Emory University, in his high-ceilinged office. His desk was large, walnut, and clear of any impediments whatsoever. It was a vast, empty landscape like a desert or the surface of the moon.
Dr. Charles Bottomdorfer’s hands were currently on the desk, clasped together. He sat on the edge of his seat in his loose-fitting suit, fingers intertwined, with his eyes looking askance at the heavens he was praying to.
“Doyle was an idiot, of course,” he was telling her. Doyle was Bottomdorfer’s favorite subject, his arch rival, the only musicologist bright enough to cause him genuine misery. Bottomdorfer went on and on about Doyle. And on and on. He had been singing the litany of Doyle’s sins to himself before Mara arrived at the University, and he would be doing so until she left.
Mara periodically visited Dr. Bottomdorfer, ostensibly to chew the fat but really just to keep up some kind of relationship with him. Bottomdorfer liked to gossip, and he loved to complain. Mara liked neither, but Bottomdorfer was the department chair and she needed him to be her friend. In fact, today she needed him to help her, and if he would just shut up for a minute and listen she could ask him for that help.
He sat there at his desk with his eyes askew and his mind on some sleight that Doyle had no doubt inflicted upon him. There were others he despised, too. Baldwin, Mercer. But when he was really mad, he’d turn to Doyle.
“The man never actually graduated from Harvard, you know,” Bottomdorfer said.
Mara would have liked to answer, just to illustrate to her colleague that she was in the room. But Bottomdorfer didn’t give her a chance. He didn’t care that she was in the room. He spoke after too short a pause. Maybe he imagined that he heard her answering him.
“He failed some senior class of some sort, something easy like Literature 101, and he wasn’t allowed to walk. But he somehow talked himself into the Master’s Program and got his degree retroactively. I suppose Bramwell must have been shooting people for him. I don’t know. You’d never be able to prove it, of course, not now, it’s all been fixed on paper…you’d have to go back to the archives if you really wanted to prove something like that.”
Again, Bottomdorfer waited a requisite one-and-a-half seconds for Mara not to say something, then went on. “Someday I might do that…just for fun!” He looked at Mara then, and curved his mouth into a saccharine smile. Mara smiled back congenially.
“But no…” Bottomdorfer groaned. “No, they’d call it vigilante-ism, they’d say I was after him. Even though he managed to ruin my chances to work at Harvard and nobody said anything about that.”
“Yes,” Mara said, trying to get an important point across. “It’s terrible when someone has the power to help you and they don’t.”
The hint was wasted on Bottomdorfer. What he had actually heard Mara say would remain a mystery, for he continued to speak from the monologue in his head.
“Just the other day I saw that he’d published a treatise on Cherubini. The man doesn’t know anything about Cherubini. He’s an expert on Liszt! If you can call him an expert…which I don’t…”
“Charles,” Mara began.
“And you know who published it? The International Review of Musicology. Of course. They’ve published everything he’s ever written when it wasn’t…”
Mara was subjecting herself to this punishment because without Dr. Bottomdorfer she would be unable to pursue her next project. He was one part of a long chain that kept her ambitions in check. The authorization of funds for her research were currently tied up in a bundle in a drawer in his walnut desk. She was here to ask him to pull it out.
“Charles, can I ask you something?”
“Hmmm, what?” Dr. Bottomdorfer seemed surprised to discover that there was someone sitting across the desk from him.
At that moment, Mara’s cell-phone sounded Liszt’s Liebestraum. This particular ringtone produced two very unfortunate effects. It prevented Mara from making her request, and it irritated Dr. Bottomdorfer, because the ringtone was a piece by Liszt, which only just rocketed Dr. Bottomdorfer back to his tirade against Doyle.
“Expert on Liszt my foot. My ass,” Bottomdorfer said, more emphatically, raising himself up with the aid of his hands and leaning emphatically across the desk, his eyes flashing.
Waving apologetically, Mara opened her phone. The ringtone had already told her who it was: Edna Solomon, her mother. She hardly had a chance to say hello.
“My sink’s broken.” A cold, insistent voice, heavy from years of doing nothing but complaining.
“Your sink?” Mara repeated.
“I can’t do my dishes. I can’t do a goddamn thing. I can’t eat my lunch. I haven’t eaten since three AM.”
“Three AM…” Mara echoed dully. She didn’t want to know.
“I couldn’t sleep.” Her mother snorted into the phone. “I woke up, I had something to eat. I think I must have dropped something down the drain.”
Edna would never ask Mara to come over and fix it. The demand was always implied. The only question was how fast Mara could get there.
“I can be there in an hour,” Mara suggested.
Insulted by the offer, her mother hung up the phone.
Dr. Bottomdorfer was glaring imperiously at her.
“I have to go,” Mara said, folding her phone and putting it in her pocket. “My mother.”
Dr. Bottomdorfer wasn’t interested in hearing about Mara’s mother. He was only interested in complaining. Mara didn’t want to ask him for her favor now. She knew it would only launch him into a tirade about how terrible it was that he was Chairman this year and that he didn’t have time to handle everyone’s financial affairs. By the time he got around to listening to exactly what it was she needed done, it could be an hour or more, and she’d already promised her mother she’d come right away.
“I’ll see you later,” she said to him.
“Bye!” he cried sardonically, wiggling his fingers with an exaggerated enthusiasm. As she shut his door, he turned away, disgusted, to stare out his window, no doubt to lick his never-healing wounds in solitude.
More about A Note Before Dying
Mara Solomon is a musicologist, not a detective. She has no idea that she’s about to take on a murder case.
In an unexpected visit to the Decatur Police Station she discovers that her estranged friend, the harpist Reanne Adastra, has been brutally beaten to death, her body left to rot in the South River. The only clue to the movie seems to be a piece of music, scrawled by Adastra before her death and left behind. The police have no idea what to make of that.
But Mara thinks she knows.
Adam Cole is the host of TruerMU where he interviews celebrities and up-and-coming musicians and creatives. His guests have included Shawn Mullins, Liberty Devitto and Rick Beato, among many others. A jazz and classical pianist, Adam’s numerous fiction and non-fiction titles engage readers with the truth about music. Visit Adam at www.acole.net
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