Hex: A Ruby Murphy Mystery Read online

  “Excuse me?”

  “Yes. Passed down from my Sicilian grandmother. She put a hex on my mother for having a child—me—with a man she didn’t approve of. My mother died young. Now the bad luck has come to me.”

  “Ah,” I say.

  The woman looks about as Sicilian as iceberg lettuce. And equally as likely to believe in a hex.

  “But that’s of no importance,” she says. “What matters is that you do this for me.” She puts her hand on my forearm again.

  “So call me,” I say, feeling embarrassed because she looks so relieved. I’m sure she’s got more problems than I or any one individual could ever handle, but my life’s been a bit pathetic ever since my boyfriend moved out some months ago. Maybe worrying about someone else’s disenfranchised love life will help me.

  An A train comes romping into the station. I turn and board the train, waving at her through the smeared window. She just stares.

  The car is packed and grim. I feel badly for lying to the blond woman. I’ve never been much good at lying or pulling off scams. It just makes me feel guilty. I decide that when she calls, I’ll admit the whole thing was just a story I made up to keep myself entertained. I’ll tell her if she really needs help stalking her boyfriend, she ought to try the yellow pages.

  Mark Baxter

  2 / Her Royal Stubby Fingeredness

  I’m just stuffing down some sandwich when I notice that the clock atop the piano reads seven minutes past four. The alarm is evidently malfunctioning. The thing was supposed to go off at 3:45 to warn that my appointment with the Wench is imminent. Though, sadly I hadn’t lost track of time due to being hard at work on the partita, as I had hoped might happen. No. I was merely stuffing myself With egg salad, no less. And I loathe eggs.

  I put the sandwich back in its wax paper wrapping then set it on the corner of the piano so I will remember to eat it later.

  I walk down the hall, passing Ian the Idiot, as I like to think of him. Ian is bumbling in front of his locker—no doubt having forgotten the combination again.

  “Hello,” I threaten.

  He quivers, turns around, and looks up from under puffy white eyelids, “Mark.” He cowers. “Hi.”

  “Forget your combination?” I say.

  “Uh … yes.”

  I laugh. Bassoon players can’t be trusted to remember their own names.

  My ladyfriend, Wanda, calls me evil for mocking ninety percent of my fellow Juilliard students. But it can’t be helped.

  “You’re so judgmental,” she’ll coo in a mock harsh whisper whenever I go on a tirade about the vast ineptitude of the average musician—a pastime I am often prone to right after Wanda’s had her way with me, perhaps wearing her red corset, perhaps wearing nothing at all.

  “That, dear Wanda, is patently untrue. I’m very fair. If someone is competent, I am the first to acknowledge it. For example, you, beautiful woman, are gifted.”

  And she’ll laugh, throwing back her mane of brown curls.

  I never tire of her. The many gifts of her body. Her easy laugh. Her rapt appreciation of music. And I love to sometimes meet her on a job and watch her work, performing complicated electrical procedures like a beautiful surgeon of voltage. I marvel at her lovely hips cinched by her tool belt, implements protruding from the pockets of her work pants or, better yet, from her exquisitely puffy mouth. There is nothing more glorious than Wanda with a screwdriver sticking out of her mouth. And then, when she’s done with the day’s electrical work, I accompany her home and watch her peel off her tired work clothes, stripping down to a T-shirt and thong, having her way with me and then leaving me to lie dreamy on her futon while I watch her paint. She paints murals on the walls of her apartment as she gets new ideas for her magnificently strange paintings of mythical creatures. Wanda herself is a mythical creature.

  And, to some degree, so is the Wench. Her Royal Stubby Fingeredness. Ruby Murphy. My adult student. My lovely walking disaster of a fledgling pianist who never practices her scales and short-circuits at the mere mention of the Circle of Fifths. She came to me through Benjamin, my piano tuner, a lopsided soul who, in addition to tuning, travels throughout fair Gotham buying up broken-down pianos and restoring them. Ruby bought a piano from Benjamin, and, eventually, when Benjamin grew frustrated trying to teach her what little he knows about music, he sent her to me.

  She arrived for her first lesson one gray afternoon in October. I’d told her to meet me in the Juilliard lobby. We’re allowed to give lessons in the practice studios, and I certainly wasn’t going to go carting some unknown new student to my home up at the northernmost corner of Manhattan. Ruby had told me to look for a dark-haired girl in a bright red coat, but it didn’t matter, I’d have picked her out of the little crowd without these markers. She was pretty and half wild and just didn’t seem at all like a Juilliard student.

  I walked by her, then stood a few inches away, examining her from head to toe. She looked a bit alarmed then said, “You’re Mark? Benjamin’s friend?”

  “That I am,” I agreed, taking one of her stubby little hands in mine and examining the chewed-down nails. “What terrible things you do to your hands,” I said.

  She withdrew her hand, scowled, and looked capable of kicking me. Then she laughed. A laugh as easy as Wanda’s, and for a moment I wondered if I’d have to court her. Thankfully, her boyfriend had recently moved out and she was nursing heartache. Besides, with Wanda, I really didn’t need another wench. And Her Majestic Stubby Fingeredness was certainly a Wench. She’d probably been a gorgeous scullery maid courted by kings in medieval times. Or a court acrobat. Though certainly not a court musician. That, I found out the moment I’d ushered her up to my practice room, placed her chewed-up little hands on the keyboard, and ordered her to show me her stuff.

  She was a disaster.

  And furthermore, she played Satie. I wanted to find the nearest machete and chop her hands off.

  “No!” I screamed. “That man lived in a rooming house and urinated in jars. You shall not play his ditties.”

  The Wench scowled. “What?” she said.

  “None of that fussy weird Frenchman, please. And there will be no Debussy either. If you must touch that particular époque and country, you shall go with Ravel.”

  To her credit, she didn’t get up and storm out. She considered me through narrowed eyes then carefully said, “Have you anything against Bach?”

  Now it was my turn to throw back my head and laugh. “Okay go ahead, make poor Johann Sebastian turn over in his grave.”

  She sniffed, and then, from memory, carefully picked out the first page of a lovely little prelude.

  When she finished, I grunted, not giving her approval, though in truth I was heartened. She had a good feel, her hand position wasn’t abominable, and she clearly worshiped Johann Sebastian Bach. It was a starting point. I could work with this wench even if she was thirty-three years old and stubby-fingered.

  Six months had now passed and she was progressing. She was still awful, mind you, and those fingers certainly hadn’t magically elongated, but there was a glimmer of hope that she’d one day do justice to a few of JSB’s inventions and perhaps haul herself through some of Herr Beethoven’s simpler sonatas.

  I get off the elevator and emerge into the Juilliard lobby, but the Wench is nowhere to be found. I frown at my naked right wrist. Wanda had given me several watches since our dalliance began, hoping I would not keep her waiting when she’d spent the afternoon shopping for a particularly fetching new sex garment.

  I scan the lobby again, but no Wench. Just a gaggle of string players, all scattered around one couch, gibbering like small senseless birds. I loathe birds. But strings are, alas, necessary.

  I don’t want to sit, as those couches have served as cushioning to more rear ends than I care to dwell on. I pace.

  Julia, a lanky blond cellist who often eyes me in a lascivious manner, takes the opportunity of my lingering to eye me in a lascivious manner. I turn
and deliberately make a face at her, but she does not laugh. I’ve never been sure why I loathe her, but I do.

  Growing impatient, I go outside to the steps, where many nefarious smokers are lingering. Among them is Maria, a lovely cocoa-colored soprano who never gives me the time of day and whom I therefore loathe on principle, her exquisite pipes notwithstanding.

  I furiously pace in front of the Juilliard music store, repeatedly staring at my wrist, each time expecting a watch to have somehow appeared.

  I am about to give up, go to a phone, and leave the Wench a scathing message on her phone machine when I see her come scurrying toward me. Her long hair is in disarray and her eyes look anxious. She is puffing on a cigarette.

  “Put that out now, you’ll stink up my practice room,” I tell her. “Pianos loathe smoke, and I have food in there too.”

  “Nice to see you, Mark,” she says. “I’m sorry I’m so late. There was an event on the F train.”

  Though I want to upbraid her a while longer, I’m so pleased at the way she says event on the F train that I can’t stay annoyed.

  “Well, I don’t know why you insist on living out there on that island,” I say impatiently.

  “It’s not an island. Hasn’t been for a century or two.”

  I sigh, knowing she is about to launch into one of her lopsided oral histories. I usher her into the lobby, but that doesn’t quiet her.

  “When the first settlers moved to Coney, it was an actual island,” she presses on. “They were a bunch of disgruntled religious zealots who got kicked out of Boston in 1680 or so. Headed by one Lady Moody. They went out there, to the end of Brooklyn, and built a little village. At that point, Coney Island Creek ran all the way around Coney so it really was an island. But the water level or something changed, or maybe it’s just full of garbage, I don’t know, but the water doesn’t fully encircle it anymore. It’s not an island now. Though I’d like to live on an island someday,” she says, a little wistfully.

  “You’re so tardy that this will have to be a brief lesson,” I inform her haughtily as the elevator lifts us up several stories.

  She shrugs. “I figured. Actually, I thought you wouldn’t give me a lesson at all. Maybe flog me a little and send me packing.”

  “Not today,” I say, “although on other occasions it could be prearranged.”

  I lead the way through the labyrinthine halls to my practice room.

  “Nice sandwich,” she says, gesturing at my befouled egg salad on the piano. The wax paper has come loose and the filling is oozing out from its casing of white bread.

  “Do not mock my food,” I advise.

  I order her to play scales. Which she does haltingly. I yell at her about the necessity of practicing her scales, particularly at her age. She makes faces and grunts but then pleases me with her Schumann. It’s just a little ditty from Album fur die Jugend. I’d learned it when I was five. But she is playing it well, considering I only gave it to her the previous week.

  “Well,” I say when she finishes, “that was adequate.”

  I then regale her with the story of Schumann’s fourth finger. This was one of the pleasures of teaching the Wench. She delights in anecdotes about the composers. She grows pale when I explain how Herr Schumann, tiring of his fourth finger’s inadequacy and lack of flexibility, devised a sort of harness for it. This he attached to a wire suspended from the ceiling. As he slept or idled about the house, he kept the finger in this contraption, being pulled on in order to stretch it. In the end he crippled his finger and his career as a pianist. He then, thankfully for us, switched over to composing. This went well for a while. Until he started unraveling. Possibly syphilis, though such things weren’t discussed at the time. In his forties, he tried to drown himself and was then institutionalized. A few years later he died, in the laughing academy, of an unspecific “mental malady.”

  Ruby looks aghast.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t make you do that,” I tell her.

  She rolls her eyes, pays me my full fee, and leaves. No doubt getting lost in the halls on her way out since I refuse to show her to the elevator. Perhaps Ian the Idiot will still be bumbling at his locker and offer to help her. Of course, stubby-fingered and inept as she is, I adore the Wench. I wouldn’t wish an idiot on her.

  When I am sure she is gone and won’t come back, I put the sandwich in the trash and cover it with a few sheets of crumbled paper so I won’t have to see it again. I check the alarm clock. It is now five. I will fight with the partita for an hour and then, at six, walk the seventy-three blocks down to the loft in Tribeca where Wanda is busy installing lighting in some temperamental painter’s new loft. I don’t know how Wanda deals with these awful ornery artists. I suppose she’s just gifted.

  Ruby Murphy

  3 / Broken Voices

  As the F train grinds to a halt I notice a gamy smell wafting out of my bag. I shut the bag tighter to keep the meat odor contained. Although I’m a vegetarian, my two cats, Stinky and Lulu, live on raw meat. Specifically, organic ground turkey. According to the various natural cat books, raw food is the answer for virtually anything that ails any cat. And my cats are both plagued by ailments. Stinky a black and white cat who resembles a raccoon, is obese, while Lulu, a small nervous calico who came in my window one day and refused to leave, was apparently abused in her youth and hisses if anyone other than me comes near her.

  The raw meat diet hasn’t rendered Stinky slender or Lulu sedate, but both cats look better and have greatly improved breath. However, organic ground turkey is hard to come by at Coney. Which is why I usually pick some up from the overpriced upscale food store near Juilliard. Only the stuff doesn’t travel well. Even though I have a special dry ice pack in my backpack for the occasion, the stuff is getting malodorous. My lone fellow passenger, an old black woman with the dignified dark-clad look of a Jehovah’s Witness, is glancing at me sideways, and I’m very relieved when the train doors open. The lady and I both shuffle onto the elevated platform. There’s a nice view of Coney—a bright sight in the middle of summer, when Astroland is alive and churning, but somewhat ominous late at night this time of year, when the place hasn’t quite woken from its long winter sleep.

  As the woman forges ahead down the stairs, I stop to look around. Even though I’ve lived out here for two years, I never get tired of gawking at the place.

  The wind is howling, whipping through the shut-down rides that look like dark metal birds, their wings taped to their sides. Off in the shadows, where the old Thunderbolt rollercoaster used to stand, is a big vacant lot. To its right the new baseball park, home of the Brooklyn Cyclones.

  Straight ahead, toward the boardwalk, a lone light glows from Guillotine’s trailer. Guillotine is a French expatriate who, as the story goes, was a famous clown in his youth but had tremendous socialization problems. He finally ended up at Coney, running one of the kiddie parks. In winter Guillotine hibernates in his trailer with his five pitbulls. He’s not the friendliest guy in the world, but that’s usually the case with both clowns and kiddie park operators. Guillotine never expresses much warmth to me, but I sense that he watches my back.

  As I linger on the platform, taking in the view, I light a cigarette—my first in several hours. Though I’ve never succeeded in controlling anything in my life, I’ve recently started trying to control my smoking. As a result, I’m constantly thinking about cigarettes. It takes my mind off sex, at least. Which is pretty much all I’ve thought about since Sam moved out.

  I stub out my cigarette and then descend the endless stairs into the crumbling station. There’s a small stream coursing down one of the old tiled walls. Yellowed water streaks over the ancient Stillwell Avenue sign. The whole station is undergoing a sorely needed renovation. All the same, I’ll miss the dingy glory of the place and I’ll never get over the loss of Pete’s candy store, the candy-apple-serving institution with its grimed old windows looking off into the station’s bowels.

  I pass through the turnstile an
d wave at Mikey the token booth man. He nods at me with his chin.

  There’s not much life on Surf Avenue, just one knot of kids hovering around the pay phones near Nathan’s. They eyeball me as I pass by. Not many white people live right around here. There’s me. My boss, Bob, who lives in back of the museum. Half a dozen white crack whores who room at the SRO on Eighteenth Street. Mostly, though, it’s Spanish and black people and, a few blocks north, Russians.

  I turn right on Stillwell and cross over to my building. The furniture store I live above is closed—though there’s no telling if they bothered opening at all. The two old Russian cranks that run it are extremely moody. Often they’re too irritated to open the store long enough to discourage whatever shoppers happen to straggle in.

  X

  MY NEIGHBOR Ramirez has his door open as usual. He’s sitting at the kitchen table, eating something that looks frighteningly like feet. Maybe chicken feet. Maybe Ramirez makes double use of his Santeria chickens.

  “Hey there, Miss Ruby,” he says, glancing up.

  “Ramirez,” I say cordially. We smile at each other for two moments, then I turn to my door and open it.

  Stinky tries to trip me and Lulu takes a running leap at my leg. I set my bag down and, for a minute, just stand there, relieved to be home, away from the world and all its debilitating extravagances. I like my apartment. It has odd touches. A strange rounded wooden step leading from the narrow living room to the bedroom. To the right of the step, a wooden door to the bathroom—which has an avocado-colored toilet and sink.

  Lulu weaves between my legs and Stinky lets out a wailing hunger cry then follows me as I walk into the small kitchen that some macabre previous tenant painted bright green. I wash my hands then pull the packet of meat from my bag. Lulu leaps onto the counter and starts pawing at the package. Stinky, who’s much too large to leap, sits staring up at me, periodically letting loose with a low howl as I mix vitamins and baby food vegetables into the meat, put it into bowls, and set these on the floor.