Free Troubles in the Brasses by Charlotte MacLeod Page A

last night? I’d been given to understand that the players usually preferred to travel with their instruments. You didn’t bring your cello with you?”
    “No, it’s on the train, where I thought I was supposed to be. They’d already taken away the instrument cases and I was getting on the bus when Lucy ran up and told me I was on the list for the plane. God knows why, I loathe flying. I assumed it was some sort of mixup, but Lucy’s been having such a hellish time trying to do two jobs that I didn’t want to make a fuss. Besides, I have a favorite cousin in Vancouver and it looked like my chance to grab some free time with her. You just can’t count on anything, can you?”
    “Sometimes it seems that way. But my mother is counting on me to find her a clue, so I’d better get cracking. Thank you for your help, ladies. If you’d like a wash, there’s hot water in the kitchen.”
    They didn’t want a wash. They wanted to go back to sleep, as who could blame them? Funny ladies, Madoc thought; they hadn’t shown much interest in what had happened to Lucy Shadd. Perhaps they hadn’t really believed him; maybe they were still so traumatized by their own near-miss from being killed on the plane that a failed attempt at a murder down the hall seemed trivial by comparison. It might simply be that they felt Lucy Shadd as staff didn’t merit the same concern that she would have if she were still principal horn player.
    Or maybe Helene and Corliss just didn’t like Lucy Shadd. Maybe her officiousness annoyed everybody else the way it had got under Madoc’s own skin last night. That was one more thing to think about. He went next door and tried another experimental rap.
    Nobody was home. A beautiful dark blue suit with an ever so faint pinstripe was hung with great care over the back of the one wooden chair, a black cashmere overcoat across two hooks on the wall. An initialed calfskin carryall stood beside the chair, an expensive shaving kit and a black homburg hat reposed on the stained and battered dresser top. The bed had been neatly made up, but nobody was lying in it. Madoc cocked an eyebrow and continued his explorations.
    The neighboring room was empty of inhabitants but far from unused. Both beds were a mess of rumpled blankets and shed garments. The floor and dresser were strewn with objects ranging from an empty vodka bottle to an old-fashioned shaving brush and mug to a toy wind-up mouse that was a pretty good imitation of the real thing except, of course, for the key in its backside. Madoc didn’t need the two open instrument cases to inform him that this had to be where the trumpeter and the trombonist had set up housekeeping. But where were they?
    They weren’t in the room occupied by the sleeping Lucy Shadd and the wide-awake Frieda Loye. Madoc met the flautist’s horrified stare with a reassuring nod.
    “Just checking,” he murmured, and backed out, closing the door with exaggerated care, not that he supposed it mattered much.
    In the room beyond, he discovered the missing concert-master, slumbering peacefully in a double bed beside the opulent Madame Bellini. Both Monsieur Houdon and his lady were wearing flannel pajamas, silk eyeshades, and fuzzy white earplugs. L’amour, toujours l’amour.
    So by the process of elimination, Delicia Fawn must be at the far end of the hall. And so she was, looking ravishing in her sleep. And so was Steve MacVittie, looking ravished. And so were Cedric Rintoul and Jason Jasper, wearing surgical masks and tiger-striped pajamas with feet in them, standing one on either side of the bed with their instruments raised to the approximate presumed location of their lips.
    “Rehearsing a matinatta, gentlemen?” said Madoc politely.
    The sound of his voice woke Delicia, and she began to speak. What she said was not nice. It was not genteel, it was not comme il faut, and it was just as well her next-door neighbors had their earplugs in. But she got her point across. Boiled