Twenty Cents Flat

by Alan Ginsberg-Cobden, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The detective wanted to know whether Warren Hale had seemed like a man who was about to die.

"He was eighty-one," Frank Delisle said. "He'd seemed like that for a while."

Sergeant Yvonne Kittredge of the Cape May County Prosecutor's Office did not smile. She stood in the middle of Frank's workshop in Rio Grande, between a gutted Wurlitzer spinet and the bins of hammer felt, and she held her notebook against her chest like a hymnal at a funeral she hadn't wanted to come to.

"You were at his house from two until four-thirty yesterday."

"Four-forty. I did a pitch raise. Nobody had touched that piano in two years. He kept cancelling."

"A pitch raise."

"Pianos sink," Frank said. "The strings stretch, the wood breathes, the whole thing drifts flat. His was sitting at about four-thirty-five. Concert pitch is four-forty. So you pull every string up a hair, then you go round again and tune it properly. Two hundred and thirty strings, twice." He heard himself. "Sorry. You asked a yes-or-no."

"Did he mention anyone coming over that evening?"

Frank thought about it, because it was a fair question and she had asked it fairly.

"When I was packing up, he was on the phone in the hall. He said half past seven. He said, 'And bring the real ones this time, not the pretty ones.'"

"The real what?"

"He didn't say. I didn't ask. You didn't ask Warren things."

She wrote it down. "Did he say who he was talking to?"

"No."

She took out her phone. "His neighbour across the street, Mrs. Pell, has been keeping a file on him for the city. Noise after ten p.m. He's played that piano at half past ten every night for twelve years, with the windows open, and for twelve years she's complained." She tapped the screen. "Last night she recorded him. For the file."

The sound came out of the little speaker thin and distant, with a street's width of September air in it: a car going by on Columbia Avenue, somebody's wind chime. Under all that, Warren Hale played what he always played, the C-sharp minor nocturne that Chopin never published, slow, and a shade too sweet in the left hand.

Frank had tuned that Steinway for twenty-two years. He knew the piece the way you know a neighbour's cough.

It was flat.

Not by much. Not enough for Mrs. Pell to hear it, or Kittredge, or anyone in Cape May County except perhaps six people. Twenty cents, a fifth of a semitone. The A above middle C was sitting down at four-thirty-five, where Frank had found it at two o'clock yesterday afternoon. At four-forty, when he shut the lid, every string on that piano had agreed on four-forty.

Then, in the middle of the phrase where the melody climbs and hangs, the music stopped.

It didn't end. It stopped, mid-bar.

"That's ten forty-four," Kittredge said. "Mrs. Pell says he always finishes. Twelve years, and he never once stopped in the middle. So we think that's when somebody came in." She put the phone away. "Does that sound like the piano you left?"

Frank looked at the bench, where the action of a Baldwin lay in pieces, eighty-eight hammers in a row, waiting.

He knew exactly where that phrase stopped. He had been standing four feet from the keyboard when it stopped, at a quarter past two yesterday, because his phone had gone off in his shirt pocket in his grandson's voice, Grandpa, PICK UP, Grandpa, PICK UP, and Warren Hale had lifted his hands off the keys and said, "For God's sake, Frank."

"Sounds like Warren," Frank said.

---

He waited until her car had turned up onto Route 47 before he took out his phone.

Frank recorded every piano before he touched it. He had started thirty years ago with a cassette machine the size of a lunchbox. He would ask the owner to play whatever they liked, and record it, and when he was done he would ask them to play the same thing again, and then he would play them both versions, one after the other, so they could hear what they were paying for. Most people went a little quiet at the second one. Once a widow in Wildwood Crest had cried.

He had never got to play Warren the before. The recording had cut itself off when the call came in, which the phone did, and he had answered it, and it was Nora.

On Sunday the Voice Memos app had held four hundred and some recordings.

Now it held none.

He looked at the empty screen. Then he remembered there was a folder for deleted things, because Leo had once shown it to him, very patiently, the way you show a dog where the door is.

Recently Deleted. Four hundred and eleven recordings. At the top was Hale Steinway M — before, recorded at 2:11 p.m. on Monday, three minutes fifty-two seconds long, and deleted at 5:19 p.m. on Monday.

At nineteen minutes past five yesterday he had been standing in his daughter's kitchen in Cape May Court House with her birthday present under his arm, a 1950s Wittner metronome he had rebuilt with new springs and a walnut case. Graham had held out his hand.

"Give it here, Frank. Your storage is full again. You can't even take a picture of Leo."

Graham had said that a dozen times over the years, and a dozen times Frank had handed the phone over, because Graham was good with phones and money and things that ran on numbers, and Frank was good with things that ran on felt and wire. Graham had stood at the window with it, thumb going, while Nora wound the metronome and set it ticking on the counter at sixty, a beat a second.

Frank pressed play.

Warren came out of the speaker close up this time, with no street and no wind chime in it. The flat A. The left hand a shade too sweet. The climb and the hang. Silence, at three minutes fifty-two.

He played it four times. It never got any less flat, and it never got any further.

Then, because once you start remembering you can't pick and choose, he remembered the call.

"Are you at Dr. Hale's?"

"Where else would I be at two on a Monday?"

"Is he—how is he? Is he in a mood?"

"He's Warren. He's playing."

The line went quiet for so long that he thought the call had dropped.

"Okay," Nora said. "Okay. You're still coming tonight?"

"I said I'd come."

"You said that at Christmas, Dad."

---

He had come. He had been at Dellaney's on Beach Avenue at eight o'clock exactly, and Nora had looked up from the table at her father, on time, in a jacket, and laughed out loud.

Graham had come at twenty past eight. Client thing, sorry, sorry. He had kissed Nora's hair, ordered the swordfish, asked Frank about the Baldwin, and listened to the answer. He was a good listener. Frank had always given him that.

And at twenty to eleven, over the coffee, Graham had stood up and tapped his glass and checked his watch, and told the whole room that his wife had been born thirty-seven years ago at ten-forty p.m. at Burdette Tomlin Memorial, and that he knew because he had looked it up, and would everyone please raise a glass to Nora, right now, this minute. The room had raised its glasses. Two tables had sung. The waitress had brought out a candle in a slice of cheesecake.

Frank had thought, at the time, that it was the nicest thing he'd seen Graham do.

Now he sat in his van in his own driveway, with the engine off, and thought about how many people at Dellaney's could say exactly where Graham Brandt had been at ten-forty on Monday night.

Twenty people. Thirty. And a waitress. And Frank.

---

Columbia Avenue at five o'clock was all gingerbread trim and hydrangeas gone the colour of paper bags. Hale's house had yellow tape across the porch steps and a county car outside. The tall windows of the music room were shut now.

Across the street a woman in a quilted vest was deadheading geraniums she had already deadheaded. She watched Frank park, and she watched him get out.

"You're the piano man," she said. "Ardith Pell. I've heard you through the window for twenty years, plinking. Plink, plink, plink, all afternoon."

"That's me."

"I told the detective about you. Not in a bad way." She snipped a stem that didn't need it. "Twelve years I've been on at the city about that man. Now I feel like I wished it on him."

"You recorded him."

"For my file." She lifted her chin. "I'm not ashamed of it."

"You were out here? Last night?"

"On my porch. I always sit out for it." She looked across at the dark windows. "I'll tell you what I told her. He plays with the lamp on. The one with the green shade. Twelve years, the lamp's on, you can see his head going. Last night the music was going and the room was black as a pocket." She put the shears in her vest. "I thought he'd fallen asleep at it. That's how old I've got. I thought, he's playing in his sleep."

Frank looked at the window. He thought about something small sitting in the dark on the lid of a Steinway M, playing a dead man's afternoon to an empty street, and about whoever had walked in this morning to find the body, and what that person could have carried out again in a coat pocket.

"He always finished, though," Mrs. Pell said. "That's the part I can't get over."

---

Brandt Wealth Partners occupied the ground floor of a converted Victorian on Route 9, with a brass plate and a ramp and a bowl of wrapped mints on the reception desk. The receptionist had gone home. Graham's door was open.

"Frank." Graham stood up. He was in shirtsleeves, and the cuffs were turned back exactly twice. "Nora said the police came to see you. Are you okay? Sit down."

Frank didn't sit. He put his phone on the desk and pressed play.

Graham listened to all of it, all three minutes fifty-two. He didn't look away from the phone once.

"He always took it slow," Graham said.

"It's flat."

"I'll take your word for it."

"I had that piano at four-forty by twenty to five. What Mrs. Pell heard at ten-forty wasn't Warren. It was this." He tapped the screen. "My phone. You had it at five-nineteen."

Graham sat back down. He did it slowly, the way a man sits in a chair he isn't sure of.

"Okay," he said. "Let's say you're right about the pitch, and I'm sure you are. Then a recording from your phone was played in that house, at a time when the man was dead. Frank—listen to how that sounds. Whose phone? Yours. Who was in that house for nearly three hours? You. A man who made you wait two years, called you an hour early to tell you not to be late, and paid you one-eighty by check. You had your phone all night. You were showing the waitress pictures of Leo." He spread his hands. "Where were you at half past seven?"

"At home. Getting changed."

"Who with?"

Frank said nothing.

"That's the thing about a recording," Graham said, quite gently. "It's only ever on one phone."

"He told somebody to bring the real ones," Frank said. "Not the pretty ones."

Graham's face didn't change much. His left hand went to his right cuff and turned it back a third time, then turned it down again.

"Go home, Frank," he said. "It was Nora's birthday yesterday. Let her have had a nice birthday."

The phone on the desk lit up and shouted in a nine-year-old's voice, Grandpa, PICK UP, Grandpa, PICK UP, loud enough to fill the room, and both men looked at it as if it had walked in on them.

NORA, the screen said.

Frank picked it up.

"Dad." Her voice was low and flat, with no echo, as if she were in a small room with the door shut. "Where are you?"

He looked at Graham. "Out."

"Can you come? Not to the house. To school. The band room. Please."

---

The band room at Middle Township was a long cinder-block room that smelled of valve oil and a hundred years of spit, with the chairs stacked and a Kawai upright against the back wall that Frank had been offering to tune for free since 2019. Nobody had ever taken him up on it.

Nora was sitting on the piano bench with her back to the keys. She had her coat on.

"He came home at lunchtime," she said, before Frank had got the door shut. "He'd found him. He said it like that, as if it was a job. Then he took a shower. Graham doesn't shower in the day, Dad. He's never once in eleven years showered in the day."

Frank pulled a chair off the stack and sat down in front of her.

"There were two sets of statements," Nora said. "For the same clients. I found them in March, when I was looking for Leo's passport. One set was the real one, and the other set was the one he sent out. He'd been moving the money around for years. Warren Hale's, and the Fennerty sisters', and the Lutheran church's." She looked at her hands. "The pretty ones. He says it out loud at his desk at night, when he thinks I'm asleep."

"Nora."

"I didn't know what to do. If I went to the police, Leo's father goes to jail and Leo's mother is the one who sent him. So I photocopied Dr. Hale's, both sets, and I mailed them to him on Friday. No note. I thought, he's a mean old man, he'll get a lawyer, he'll make it stop, and it won't have been me." She laughed. It came out wrong. "That's why I called you. I wanted to know if he'd opened it."

"I told you he was playing."

"You told me he was playing." She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. "I sent it, Dad. I sent him that envelope."

Frank had driven over here with a speech. It was gone now. He took out his phone, opened Recently Deleted, and held it so she could see the top line.

Deleted 5:19 PM.

She looked at it for a long time. He watched her get there: the kitchen, the metronome ticking at sixty on the counter, her husband at the window with his thumb going.

"He stood by the window," she said. "He had his back to us."

"Yes."

"He said, 'Your dad's going to miss Leo's first home run one of these days, Nora, because he'll have no room left for it.' And I laughed." She lowered her hands. "I laughed."

"Listen to me," Frank said. "He's right about one thing. It's my phone. It's my recording. I was in that house all afternoon, and at half past seven I was alone in my kitchen ironing a shirt for your birthday. If anyone goes down for this and it isn't him, it's me. And I'm sixty-six. I can do that. You don't have to—"

"Don't."

"—stand up in a courtroom and—"

"Don't, Dad." She turned round on the bench to face the keys, and lifted the fallboard, and played a C major chord, the first thing every child learns. It was ugly. Half the unisons were beating against each other.

"This is flat," Frank said, because he couldn't help it.

"Everything in here's flat. Nobody tunes it." She kept her hands on the keys. "You know what the worst part of Christmas was? It wasn't that you didn't come. I'd stopped expecting you. It was Leo, standing at the window with his coat on for an hour, because I hadn't stopped him expecting you yet. You came last night. You were on time. Don't take that back by doing this."

She closed the lid very quietly, the way you close a door on a sleeping child.

---

The parking lot of the Cape May County Prosecutor's Office in Court House faces the back of a pizza place.

Frank sat in the van in the lot at nine-fifteen the next morning with his tuning kit on the passenger seat, because he hadn't known what else to bring. The hammer, the mutes, the felt strip, the fork he still carried although he hadn't needed it since 1998. Nora had gone in at twenty to nine, alone, at her own insistence. Leo was at school. Leo thought his mother was at the dentist.

Through the windshield Frank watched a man in a Wawa vest eat a breakfast sandwich in the doorway of the pizza place, very slowly, as if it were his last.

At nine-thirty-one the phone on the dashboard lit up and his grandson shouted at him to pick up.

It was Nora's number. Kittredge's voice was on the line.

"Mr. Delisle," she said. "Your daughter says you've got a recording I need to hear, and she says you'll want to tell me yourself what's wrong with it."

Frank looked at the tuning kit on the seat beside him. Then he put the phone in his shirt pocket, picked up the fork, and got out of the van.

---

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, prīdiē Nōnās Octōbrēs (6 October 2026), ab Alanō Ginsberg-Cobden per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Alan Ginsberg-Cobden, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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