Murder at the Opera - Margaret Truman [49]
“A nice early night,” she said. “Good book?” He’d picked up where he’d left off in E. L. Doctorow’s The March.
“Excellent,” he replied, glancing at what she was reading, the magazine Pawkins had given her. “Any startling revelations about our gadfly detective?”
“Is that how you view him?”
“Well, he seems to enjoy a little bit of this, a little bit of that. A dabbler
“Listen to this,” she said, rearranging herself so that she knelt beside him. “It says that although he spent his law enforcement career in Homicide, he became involved in a couple of cases handled by MPD’s art squad
“Doesn’t surprise me,” Mac said. “He told me he does PI work in cases involving musical manuscripts and works of art
“The writer cites this one case that I certainly recall. I’m sure you do, too. Remember when that musicologist from Georgetown University was murdered? Aaron Musinski?”
“Sure. It was big news
“Pawkins was the lead detective on it, according to this article
“As I recall, there was controversy about some missing music. Do they mention that in the article?”
“No. It’s just a few lines summing up some of the big cases he’d handled while a cop
She hopped out of bed. “I’m going to Google it,” she said on her way to the study, where one of their two computers was located. He followed and stood behind her as she typed in “Aaron Musinski.” A full page of sites in which the subject was mentioned came up on the screen, with dozens of additional possibilities listed on subsequent pages. She clicked on the first site, and one of the Washington Post articles about the murder appeared. They read in silence. She pulled up other sites, too. When they were finished reading, she spun around in her chair. “Fascinating,” she said, but without much animation.
• • •
The Aaron Musinski murder had occurred six years earlier. Musinski, a professor at Georgetown University, was considered one of the world’s leading experts on the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He’d written extensively about Mozart, and his most recent book, published the year in which he was murdered, was considered the seminal work on the subject.
Musinski was no genteel academician. Short and built like a wrestler, his head shaved, he was a pugnacious, intensely private man in his personal life who scorned the views of fellow Mozart scholars and wasn’t reticent about attacking them in magazine and journal articles and other venues. Washingtonian magazine, in one of its yearly “Best and Worst” features, listed him among the most disliked professors in the D.C. area. His sour relationship with colleagues at the university was openly known and discussed; his tenure was assured, however, because of his stature in his field and his ability to generate large donations to Georgetown’s Department of Music. His frequent absences—he spent considerable time in Europe—were overlooked for the same reasons. One wealthy donor, who requested anonymity, told a magazine writer, “Every time Professor Musinski asks for a contribution, I’m afraid that if I decline he’ll grab me in a headlock and throw me to the ground. I don’t mean that literally, of course, but it sometimes seems that way
On the day of his death, Musinski had taught a graduate seminar at the school. According to his students, he’d seemed especially distracted and short-tempered, although as one of them said, it was hard to make such distinctions with the professor. His fuse was always short, and he wore his disdain for his students on the sleeve of the black cardigan sweater and black T-shirt he seemed to never be without.
Others told the police that they’d seen him hurry from the building immediately following the seminar, get into his vintage red MG sports car, and race from the parking lot.
That was the last time Aaron Musinski was seen alive. His only known family member in the Washington area, a niece named Felicia James, called 911 at ten-thirty that night to report a break-in and murder at her uncle’s home, a quaint, albeit poorly maintained Victorian town house on Georgetown’s Q Street. When the