Murder of the Maestro by Anna Celeste Burke

Author:Anna Celeste Burke [Burke, Anna Celeste]
Language: eng
Format: E, P, U, B
Published: 2018-03-02T05:00:00+00:00

13 Catty Critics

All the way home I stewed about Pat. I reran our lunch conversation hoping I could come up with an answer to Carol’s question. I’d broached the subject of Dave’s past, starting with his Chicago days. Things had gotten off to a good start.

“Wow! The Windy City Jazz Quartet,” Pat had said in a soft voice as she sat across from me. “When I first met Dave, he and the members of that group were in frequent contact. Once they all visited for a reunion. They piled into that tiny beach cottage he rented, and I don’t think they stopped talking or joking except to play music.”

“It sounds as if they were all on good terms.”

“Oh, yes, as far as I could tell. Dave hadn’t made it big yet, but his career was in lift off. Dave was almost finished with his degree, had made the switch to violin as his instrument of choice. He’d signed on as an intern at Marvelous Marley World, and held court with his old bandmates about the work he was doing with composition, orchestration, and arranging.”

“Had he left jazz behind?”

“Not completely, although that’s when I first heard someone call him Maestro. They used it as a nickname in place of his old one—the Jazz Man. He still had a bass—an electric bass guitar rather than the huge acoustic stand-up bass he’s playing on the cover of the albums the band recorded in Chicago.”

“They made records, as in vinyl?”

“Yes. Several albums. They never sold many copies. Dave has a couple of them at the Malibu house and donated others to the Marvelous Marley World archive. It’s too bad, though, that once he had enough money to build his big house in Malibu with lots of guestrooms and a high-end home studio, the band never visited again.”

“Why not?”

“Dave had settled down. I don’t know for sure since Dave and I parted ways for a time. When I started my job as his PA, it was clear to me that Marla would have had a fit if he’d wanted to have a bunch of his old bandmates turn their house into a hotel. The guys in the band had families and careers, too. Barry Midland died the year he turned fifty. That was shortly after I began working for Dave. Dave was so devastated he couldn’t even attend the funeral, although he paid for it.”

“How did the surviving bandmates take that?”

“I’m not sure, but he remained on speaking terms with the other two men. Teddy Austin came here for a visit not too long ago, but Handley Jones died several years ago.”

“Do you still know how to reach him?” I had asked. That was the first point at which Pat had turned “foxy” on me, to use Carol’s word for it.

“I’m sure I have contact information for him somewhere. I’ll look for it.”

“If it’s easy to find, text it to me, okay? If not, Carol’s working on it. I doubt she’ll have much trouble tracking him down.

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