13 Short Mystery Novels by Bill Pronzini & Martin H. Greenberg

Author:Bill Pronzini & Martin H. Greenberg [Pronzini, Bill & Greenberg, Martin H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0517444992
Publisher: Greenwich House
Published: 1987-02-24T21:00:00+00:00

FREDRIC BROWN

Murder Set to Music

It started on a Tuesday evening in early October. It had been a fine evening, up to then. I’d made a good sale and when the phone rang I guessed that it was Danny and was glad he’d called so I’d have a chance to tell him about it.

Danny Bushman and I run a used car lot together. My name is Ralph Oliver. Danny and I have been close friends since we started high school together. He played trumpet and I played sax and we played together in the high school band and orchestra, and in our junior and senior years we made our spending money playing at parties and dances.

After graduation we were apart for a year. Danny got a few thousand bucks from his father’s life insurance—his mother had died before he entered high school—and he threw it into starting a small but hot dance band, which he called The Bushmen, from his own name which, in case you’ve forgotten already, was Bushman. He wanted me to go with him on it, but I had other ideas. I enrolled as a student at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music. Both of my parents had died by then too (funny how many parallels there have been in Danny’s life and mine, in big things as well as little ones) but I figured I could work my way through by playing evenings. I found that I could, but I also found within a year that longhair, although not for the birds was not for me either, and I quit. And in just the same length of time Danny found out that he was a better trumpet player than a band leader and The Bushmen, as Danny put it, went back to the bushes.

For the next ten years we blew for our bread and butter, and managed most of the time to stick together. If not in the same band, at least in bands in the same city.

Something happened then that might have broken up our friendship, but only showed how strong it was. We both fell in love with the same girl, Doris Dennis, who was a singer with Tommy Drum’s orchestra, with which both Danny and I were playing at the time. She liked both of us but Danny was the one she fell for. They were married, and still we were friends. All three of us, in fact.

A few months later, Tommy Drum got behind the eight ball and had to break up the orchestra. Almost any musician who’s really good, and Tommy Drum was, tries his hand as an orchestra leader once; few of them are businessmen enough to make a go of it.

Danny and I, with Doris kibitzing, had a conference to decide what band might be able to take both of us on, and ended up deciding, with Doris abetting, that we were getting a little old for the game. Most dance musicians quit and get into something else by the time they’re thirty, and that’s how old we were.

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