Creed Ordered Me Out Before I Collected The Last Note

Harlan Creed gave me six minutes to leave the Sable Theater. He checked his watch as if my forty-five years had been a delay in his day.

"Take your little whistles, Mr. Khoury. The city condemned this place."

"They're tuning cones," I said. "The whistles stay in the organ."

He looked past me toward the stage.

I was a lean Lebanese American man with olive skin, a bent nose, and black curls going gray above my ears.

My father had called that nose a family receipt. At forty-five, I had stopped wishing for a refund. I earned my living tuning pipe organs across south Alabama, though the Sable had kept me busy most of that wet March.

Harlan Creed was a broad white man of fifty-nine, with pale blue eyes, swept-back white hair, and hands too smooth for the work he claimed to do.

He owned the theater through one company and the old Calder Transfer House across the alley through another. Both names sounded like trees. Neither company had ever planted one.

"The city gave me a service permit," I said. "Through five today."

"I gave the city a reason to change its mind."

His man, Owen Pruitt, held the exit door. Pruitt wore work boots that had never met wet cement.

I put my felt earplugs in their silver thimble case. My mother had kept sewing needles in it. The lid made a small, clear click.

Creed smiled.

"You hear that? He hears a pin drop. Doesn't hear anything useful."

Pruitt laughed.

The theater smelled of old wool and damp plaster. Outside, rain moved down Dauphin Street in silver sheets. A ship horn sounded from the river, low enough to trouble the loose window glass.

"My bill is $1,840," I said.

"Submit it."

"I did. Twice."

He turned away. In his world, a person stopped being real when he stopped looking at them.

I had worked in the Sable for nineteen years. The roof was bad. The organ wasn't. Its lowest pipes stood in a brick chamber, and its blower sat across the alley in Calder, where the old builders had found cheap space. An air line ran through a covered passage between them.

My separate Calder service key hung beside the theater key. Both permits were in my folder.

"I need my recorder from the blower room."

"Get it. Then give Pruitt the keys."

Creed thought the case in my hand held my whole business. He had never asked who owned the old service books or the sound files behind each bill.

I did.

Since taking over my father's shop, I had kept every raw test. Wind pressure. Bearing noise. Building shake. Dates, places, and the name of the person who let me in. I had learned that a note without a record became an argument.

Calder's freight lift served three floors of empty storage. Its guide shoe had a flat spot. When it rose, it gave seven slow knocks, then a thin whine as the brake settled.

I had told Creed to fix it for $620 eighteen months earlier. He had refused in writing.

On Tuesday, I had clipped a contact pickup to the blower frame. A separate air microphone caught leaks and rattles. The recorder had run overnight while I checked whether freight loads shook the organ's wind supply.

It was Thursday now. Creed had cut off my access on Wednesday before I could collect it.

Pruitt waited outside Calder's service door while I unplugged the unit. The blower room had no windows. Through a floor grate, I could see the edge of the freight bay above.

Someone had left a paper coffee cup beside the grate.

"Find treasure?" Pruitt called.

"A bad bearing."

"You people can make anything sound expensive."

I handed him the keys and kept my permits. At my shop near Government Street, I set the recorder on a clean towel and played Tuesday night's test.

At first, I heard only the blower.

Then seven knocks.

Then Creed's voice, small but clear through the grate.

"Nora Ellis doesn't reach that hearing. Keep her at Dry Bay until the signatures clear."

Pruitt answered, "What if somebody asks?"

"She took the relocation money and left. That's what the papers say."

I stopped the playback.

Nora had come to the theater two weeks earlier with tenants from a row of flats Creed wanted torn down. She had brought me coffee in a plain jar because the lid didn't leak. She had asked whether the organ could be saved.

I put my hands flat on the towel.

The morning paper lay beneath my unpaid bills. I unfolded it to the short item I had barely read at breakfast.

Nora Ellis had been reported missing on Wednesday.

Below her picture was a phone number and a name: Detective Ruth Bell.