A Pinchbeck Bride (10 page)

The person gestured, as if recognizing me. Then Rudy yelled from the dining room that he was alarming and locking the building.

Rudy punched in the security code and slammed the door. The rain was intensifying. “Well, the Esplanade is out but not the run,” Jon Kim said, as he and Rudy dashed off toward Beacon Hill. I sprinted to Arlington Street, went east, and reached the alley at the rear of Mingo House.

It was empty, I thought. I was relieved.

“Here.” Did I recognize the voice? It was male but disguised by a cold. He was hunched under the eaves of a garage, by a stack of old boards and, in a puddle, the flattened corpse of a pigeon. “You didn’t tell anyone?” Larry Courson said.

“Aren’t you under house arrest? Did you get permission—”

“What does it matter after what happened to my daughter?” The lines scoring his face, of age and grief and illness, had deepened, and his chin bore the stubble of a man in a homeless shelter. He was coughing, his nose congested. “I had to come, I had to see where it happened. If I saw
where
, maybe I could figure out
why
.” He glared at Mingo House. “That place is evil, you mark my words. That was built with blood money, built with corpses. It’s a charnel house.”

“Well, Genevieve told me she loved Mingo House. She said her mother brought her there for her tenth birthday.”

“Her mother had some peculiar ideas, God rest her soul.”

He gripped my arm and I’m afraid I recoiled, recalling the charges leveled against him. His daughter’s tragedy didn’t lessen or excuse them.

“You’ve got to understand that I’ve lost everything: my child, my spouse, my reputation. Do you know what that’s like?”

Of course I didn’t, but I had lost, found, and again lost a father and half-brother, and any semblance of a normal childhood. “Did Genevieve tell you she was pregnant? Did she tell you who the father was?”

He noticed the dead pigeon in the puddle and cringed. “We always taught Genevieve to be comfortable with her body, never to be ashamed of the gifts God had bestowed. I took beautiful portraits of Carol nude, after she’d been diagnosed with breast cancer. She wanted a record of her body before the mastectomy.”

His reassurances weren’t making me more comfortable.

“Genevieve never mentioned any pregnancy to me. She knew I had enough on my plate.”

And on his conscience, perhaps. Even though we had squeezed under the eaves of the garage, the wind blew the rain so that it pursued us like a sheriff’s posse. We were getting soaked.

“Who do you think killed Genevieve?”

“I have no idea. If I did, I’d have addressed the situation.”

By killing the killer? “I realize that some…photographers use period costumes as props. In places like Rockport. You know, dress up as a gunslinger or a saloon girl.” Was it possible he had killed her, her own father, a photographer? No, he’d been under house arrest then.

“No serious photographer would do that.” He glanced back at Mingo House. “Was she found on the first floor?”

“Yes, in the dining room in the back.”

“In Victorian clothing.”

I was tired, so I said it accidentally: “She looked beautiful.”

“
You saw her
?” He clamped his hands around my throat.

“I found her.”

“You never told me.” The rain streamed down his face, as though the sky was supplying his tears.

“I didn’t kill her.”

“Are you the father?”

I was gay and partnered, I told him, and his fury subsided. I explained about the trustees’ meeting and Genevieve saying she had something she wanted to show me.

“Some nonsense about Mingo House, no doubt.”

“Did you leave any notes here? At Mingo House? Today or recently?”

“You think I have time…?”

“Someone left a note with a verse from the Bible.” I dug it from my jeans. By now it had become stained with wasabi mustard. ‘Vengeance is mine,’ the Isaiah quote.”

He pulled the front of his hood lower over his forehead. “Please don’t tell anyone you saw me. Just give me half an hour to get away.” Then he sprinted down the alley, splashing through the puddles, almost tripping over a cardboard box that had escaped from some dumpster, and was gone.

I waited fifteen minutes before walking to the police station. Thankful no one I knew was on duty, I gave the officer at the counter the note with the biblical rant. He confirmed that “Mr. Schmitz” had brought other messages, “Holy Roller stuff,” and thanked me. When I told him I saw a man resembling Larry Courson loitering near Mingo House, the cop laughed, “Are you sure it wasn’t Marcia Haight? She’s been going undercover, so we hear. To crack the case.” Perhaps Larry was allowed a little freedom, after all.

The rain had abated, and, when I returned to our condominium, Chloe shouted from the adjacent balcony: “Have you heard? It just came on as breaking news—the father is missing, the Victorian Girl’s. What does that make him, the Victorian Guy? The Victorian Dad? He disabled his ankle thing and flew the coop.”

I had just shielded a man who was an accused pedophile, who could endanger a young girl like Chloe.

She was spreading her blue rubber yoga mat on the wet slate of her balcony to begin her afternoon meditation, something she and her mother were doing these days. “I know he’s a creep, but I still feel sorry for him.” Assuming the lotus position, she squeezed her eyes shut.

When I switched on our television, Larry Courson’s sullen mug shot was dominating the news, even on CNN.

Chapter Seventeen

Bryce returned the next day to Mingo House. Cat Hodges came back too, weighted down with three canvas tote bags full of art books as well as more sculpture-sized jewelry, spheres of chrome and copper on her wrists and neck. She emanated Genevieve’s kookiness without any warmth or humor. She assured Bryce she would be at his side as they dealt with the dining room, assessed the contents of the crime scene where Genevieve and her child had met death.

“Oh, Cat, dear, it fills me with trepidation.”

“Yes, but it must be faced.” Cat plopped her art books onto the rosewood rocker where Genevieve had been positioned by her killer. She appraised her reflection in a gilt-framed mirror, prodded her hair, and then began overturning the raspberry-pink china on the table. “Aren’t these precious? If you like that sort of thing.”

Sam Ahearn and Jon Kim were the only other trustees present, since Rudy had business commitments. Sam shook his head as Bryce balked at entering the dining room. Bryce and Cat reversed roles, Cat describing all the items while Bryce scribbled notes onto a coil pad. “Who’s in charge?” Sam muttered into my ear.

“Oh, these must be the triplets who coordinated their births and deaths with such precision.” Cat regarded the little girls with a skeptical expression. “The lacework is rendered beautifully, and so is the leather of their shoes, and the light on the little brass buttons…But they look sickly, don’t they? ‘Peaked,’ as my grandmother used to say. Oh my, if I’m not mistaken, isn’t that a…
monstrance
in the background?”

Bryce strode into the dining room, pushed past Sam Ahearn like he was a turnstile.

“There, in the background, on the shelf.”

“It’s a vase.” Bryce pronounced it “vahse.” He had changed color, gone damask-red. “I think you’re way off, way off.”

“What would a monstrance be doing in a portrait of an old WASP family? Weren’t these people Episcopalian? Or Unitarian?” Sam Ahearn said.

“Exactly.” Bryce laughed. “Exactly.”

“That portrait of the little girls,” Jon Kim said, “is that a Mary Cassatt?”

“It isn’t a Mary Cassatt. It’s by Phoebe Choate Whitman. Her initials are in the lower right-hand corner, by the doll, the lamb, on the floor. She was a painter who lived in Still Pond, Maine. She was particularly skilled at depicting children in posthumous portraits. This could have been done from a single photograph. In which, incidentally, the objects in the background might be much more discernable.”

Bryce reasserted some control. “Cat, dear, let’s attend to the task at hand. Our colleagues are taking valuable time from their places of business to be here.”

Jon Kim and Sam Ahearn assisted Cat by pulling a sideboard away from a wall so Cat and Bryce could scrutinize its back. Jon Kim was intrigued by a collection of netsuke shaped like deer, rabbits, bear cubs, and turtles that had accumulated on the mantel above the fireplace. His “Auntie Kay” had collected netsuke in Hawaii.

Cat resumed her descriptions, dictating to Bryce, and dismissing the kinds of flaws he had noticed. “The condition and quality of the items in the dining room is a step above the objects in the rest of the house. That’s expected, in a way, because this was their Sunday best, so to speak. Seldom used or used less frequently.”

The rain abated just as we adjourned for lunch. Sam Ahearn treated us to ribs from a barbecue place, messy but tender, with delicious crusts of fat. Jon Kim consumed this fare as eagerly as he had the Flex sushi. He and Cat were discussing a Herb Ritts exhibit they both had admired. “That man with the tire certainly raised my blood pressure. Has grease ever looked so good?” Jon Kim said. Bryce was gnawing away at the ribs, but Cat had abstained in favor of her own soda crackers, Gouda cheese, and organic strawberries.

“They certainly are a weird pair,” Sam Ahearn whispered to me as he threw a mortuary’s worth of bones into the garbage bag we’d carted out to the front steps. “But at least Miss Toothpick isn’t as critical of our collection. Unlike Mr. Hairline Crack, as I call him.”

Today, Mr. Hairline Crack had selected a morbid choice for his lapel, a stickpin with an onyx skull and pink diamond eyes. He saw me staring. “From the school of Faberge.” Then, he rushed by us, taking the front stairs two at a time, announcing, “Bathroom break, bathroom break. And we must all scrub off this delicious but disastrous-for-a-historic property barbecue sauce.”

Of course 9/11 was still fresh on our minds. We discussed the latest terrorist threat. Was it code yellow or code orange? It changed color like fall foliage. “Where on earth is Bryce?” Cat eventually asked.

I’d track him down, I told them. He wasn’t in the kitchen or in the first floor bathroom, and the Mingo bedrooms were all equally empty. So I scaled the stairs to the library. For some reason—playfulness, giddiness, just being happy because the sun was finally shining—I began tiptoeing as I approached the library.

Bryce was in the library, all right, up to something very bizarre. He was pressing his ear flush with the room’s walnut paneling, tapping it, as if conversing with one of Clara Mingo’s ghosts—or attempting to locate something embedded within the wall.

“Find the monstrance yet?” It was the first thing that came into my mind.

Bryce tried to counterfeit the laugh he had used over the veal Umbria, and failed miserably.

“So you think the monstrance was sealed in the wall? It must be awfully valuable to still capture your interest, even after what happened to Genevieve.”

“It’s a legend. Like the Seven Cities of Cibola.”

“People died looking for those too, didn’t they? Was Genevieve killed because of that monstrance? Because she’d hit a bull’s eye in her research?”

Bryce dug deep into the Brioni pocket of his suit.

“Your period of mourning for Genevieve certainly was brief. You’ve already replaced her with a thinner, more fashionable model.”

His thinness gave him the look of an ascetic, a monk from El Greco subsisting on bread and theology. How this skinny, effete man could cast an air of genuine menace was beyond my understanding, but cast it he did then and there.

“If you and your cohorts plan to shut this museum and auction off its contents so it can become—I don’t know—some condominium or yuppie cigar bar, I’m certainly going to give you a fight. And I won’t be alone.”

“Folks…”

Bryce and I turned in tandem to see Jon Kim and his Liberace smile.

“Cat says it’s back to work.”

And then I saw, to my surprise, what Bryce had drawn from his pocket—brass knuckles, the kind Depression-era hoods carried.

***

“So, how was the Last Judgment?” Roberto asked when I got home.

“Well, that ditzy Bryce kept hedging about specifics. He doesn’t specify a value for anything. He just takes down a description and says he’ll think about it.…And he carries brass knuckles. Can you believe it?”

“From that crowd, I can believe anything.” Roberto indicated our bottle of Bombay Sapphire, which I had raided for the occasional gimlet. “You’re taking this pretty seriously. And you’re drinking more. Mark, that place, Mingo House, has god-awful karma. You’re stressing without even being aware of it.”

My mother and stepfather, Subash Chaudry, no longer went to AA meetings when staying in a strange city, trusted themelves and their fortitude not to drink. Was I just beginning their odyssey? Would I be their age when I ended it?

Chapter Eighteen

The next morning, as Roberto was rustling up a breakfast of Texas toast, our telephone rang and a jumpy Sam Ahearn all but yelled, “I’m so glad I got you! Turn on the TV. To Channel Four.”

When I did, I got a commercial for insect repellent, featuring a computer-generated mosquito buzzing a man grilling a steak.

“It’s just…” I punched the remote…The footage rolling depicted a blanket-wrapped body being borne by police down the steps of a bow-fronted brick townhouse. The lurid lights of squad cars beat against the scene as the voice-over spoke: “…The murder victim is identified as forty-four-year-old Bryce Rossi, an art dealer and philanthropist…”

“You there?”

“Some of me.” But I didn’t trust the floor. It seemed unstable, the trap door beneath a condemned man on a gallows.

The inevitable neighbor, saying the inevitable, came next: “He was very quiet, but very friendly. He always gave my daughter ribbon candy at Christmas, and he was famous for his Halloween parties. He’d decorate his whole house with spider webs and jack-o-lanterns. He loved children and animals.” Then she sobbed into her sleeve, and the camera cut to an anchor putting on his grimmest expression: “Rossi, however, was known to police, having worked as a fence of stolen art in the past.”

Of course, he had those crude tattoos, a cross and a heart, prison graffiti, done in inmates’ ink. And he’d carried brass knuckles. Another commercial came on. “How was he killed? Strangled?”

“He should be so lucky. He was bludgeoned. With a hammer. They found it at the scene. But get this, he was ‘positioned,’ their word, in the broadcast, under a medieval statue of the Madonna and Child. Like he was some kind of offering. How sick is that?”

“Genevieve was positioned. All set up for tea with Queen Victoria.”

“And guess who found him? Our friend, Cat. I guess I had old Bryce wrong after all. He really did like the ladies.”

“Does Rudy know?”

“I haven’t told him.”

Sam agreed to do that. I didn’t want to be the bearer of bad news a second time.

Roberto was logging onto our computer. “The newspapers haven’t got the story yet.” His Texas toast was charring.

“They’re linked, they have to be.” I channel-surfed to get more coverage, but the stations were doing national news now. “Genevieve, then Bryce, the father of her child. And Bryce being found under a statue of a child,
the
Child.”

Roberto ceased clicking the mouse. “How did you know that? Who fathered her child?”

“Bryce, um, told me,” I admitted.

“Larry Courson just busted out. Could he have slaughtered Bryce because he thought Bryce strangled Genevieve? At least you were on good terms, so they can’t suspect you.”

Yeah, right. I didn’t dare tell him that I’d quarreled with Bryce Rossi—and was witnessed by the duplicitous Jon Kim. Jon Kim might well tattle to the police, how he had seen Bryce drawing brass knuckles on me—only hours before his slaying. And how long would it take the media, via Cat or Rudy, to link Bryce Rossi to Mingo House and concoct a “curse” for the place?

The answer was four hours: Marcia Haight seized the angle for the noon news.

Two people intrigued by the “mythical” Mingo monstrance had been murdered. In a sinister, almost ritualistic manner. And Nadia Gulbenkian hovered in critical condition, by means fair or foul. Were all of us connected to Mingo House in danger? And because of what and by whom? Now I was obligated to revisit the police and detail my sighting of Larry Courson, since Bryce had been slaughtered and Larry was obviously a suspect.

As I left the lobby, a police car came braking in front of our condominium and two officers disembarked. One I knew from the earlier investigation when I’d been interrogated about finding Genevieve’s body. The cops questioned me, there beside the ashtrays filled with sand stamped with our condominium’s pseudo-heraldic logo. I described the dinner I’d had with Bryce and related his believing Genevieve was carrying his child. The cops absorbed all this with blank expressions. I also mentioned the monstrance.

“We don’t believe this is art-related,” the cop I had met previously said.

“But had he done time? I heard that on the news. For selling a hot crucifix stolen in Miami. Was he dangerous? Could he have killed Genevieve Courson? Larry Courson is on the lam—”

The cop I had met earlier said, “Larry Courson has been seen in Boston this morning. He was seen by a woman who has a garden in the Fens. She caught him sleeping against a tool shed.”

That was after I’d spoken to him back of Mingo House, so my meeting was old information. I spoke up anyway. “I saw someone loitering back of Mingo House the day before yesterday. It looked like Larry Courson.”

Then one cop got a message on his walkie-talkie and the two jumped into their squad car and left me there by the ashtrays in a cloud of exhaust.

The day was sunny, the birds were trilling in the Public Garden. People crowded the swan boats as they circled the rippling, glassy water. Ducks came panhandling toward tourists and children. The shrubs around the George Washington statue, marshaled in the manner of warring chess pieces, had grown the fattest they would all year. The plantings of high summer were in place: flame-like scarlet flowers and brown, wide-leafed things resembling tobacco. A toddler squealed with joy as the wind animated his pinwheel so that it whirled and flashed in the sun-vivid air.

The scene reminded me of Genevieve: the woman I knew—or thought I knew—and the ten-year-old whose mother had treated her to a “voyage” on the swan boats. Genevieve had been luckless as the
Titanic
. Who could have wanted to end her life, to deny her this day and the thousands of days comprising her future?

Something pulled me toward Beacon Street, past Mingo House, with its diminishing number of bouquets, toward Genevieve’s alma mater. Shawmut College should have emptied for the summer, or so I thought, but students were still assembling in front of the dormitories, including in front of Howard Hall. Peggy O’Connell was among them. Had Sam Ahearn seen her room, he would have tagged Peggy the “Unicorn Girl.” She was smoking, something I hadn’t thought she’d do, and drinking a frappe from a massive paper cup. She didn’t seem happy to see me. Exhaling smoke, she stared toward a powder-blue Mercedes convertible as it began stopping. “Jesus, it’s him,” she said, stamping out her cigarette and pitching it into the mulch surrounding the magnolias.

Fletcher Coombs, a passenger in the frat-boy-laden Mercedes, leapt out—shirtless, muscular, and extroverted in a way I’d never imagined. “Hey, babe!” he laughed, and, I noticed that one of his nipples was pierced with a gossamer-thin ring of silver. “Let’s
mooove
.”

Had Peggy’s scorn been for me or him? It was hard to tell until she spoke. “Guess who dropped by like clockwork, Fletcher? The ever-curious Mr. Winslow.”

“We gotta pack.” Fletcher had shaved his chest, something few straight men I’d encountered ever did. He was joining Peggy in giving me the kind of look most people reserve for late-night drunks on the subway.

One of Peggy’s companions, who seemed, I now noticed, quite teary, asked Peggy, “Aren’t you going to the remembrance for Professor Rossi?”

“Bryce Rossi? He was a professor here?”

“Well, a lecturer. He spoke a few times every year, in a Biblical archaeology class. About authenticating the Shroud of Turin and the search for Noah’s ark, you know. He collected religious relics. He had a cabinet full of saints’ bones at his apartment. And he gave wonderful parties on Halloween.” A tear trickled down the girl’s cheek. “He was murdered last night. Bludgeoned. What a horrible world. To kill such a gentle soul.” She was all in pink, pink cotton halter, pink denim shorts, pink sandals. She also was very buxom. Perhaps Bryce liked that. She was very talkative;
I
liked that.

“He used to have us over to his house. It was beautiful, like a museum. He had this beautiful statue of the Virgin Mary, and the news stations are saying he was found murdered in front of it. In some kind of ritual, some kind of Black Mass!” She wept.

That, I hadn’t heard.

“So Mr. Investigative Reporter, have you gotten all the information you’re after?” Peggy O’Connell shifted her bulky legs. Her shorts and sleeveless blouse accentuated her weight, as did the delicacy of the gold chain encircling her thick, linebacker’s neck.

“Peggy thinks you’re doing a story about Genevieve.”

“And now Bryce.”

“Well, I’m not. But it’s pretty bizarre that Bryce Rossi was murdered, so brutally. After what happened to Genevieve. And I didn’t know Bryce had a connection to Shawmut.”

“It was tenuous.”

“Tenuous like his heterosexuality.” Peggy glanced at me.

“He had the hots for Genevieve.” Fletcher settled onto the concrete stoop.

Fletcher’s shoulders had reddened, raw with sunburn. Perhaps he had been “catching some rays” on the lawns by the river, on the Esplanade. For people stuck in the city during the summer, it substituted as a beach—where they could tan, picnic, toss Frisbees, and display their bodies, by the lapping, weedy-smelling water. Gay men cruised there, especially after dark. I fought the urge to admire Fletcher’s physique. And the pierced nipple seemed so out of character. Was I noticing it because I hoped he was secretly gay?

“No straight men wear tassel loafers
and
collect saints’ bones. I mean…really!” Could Peggy be dating Fletcher? He had called her “babe.” Was that cruelty or camaraderie?

“Well, teaching in a college would give him access to young girls. As it had Zack Meecham,” I told them.

“Bryce thought he was quite the alpha male,” Fletcher said. Earlier, Bryce had denied knowing Fletcher.

“In his dreams.” Peggy crumpled the frappe cup and cast it behind the magnolias.

“I’m not doing a story. I’m not a journalist and I didn’t come here on purpose, I just happened to wander by. But the chairman of the board of trustees at Mingo House dismantled the memorial for Genevieve on the front steps. So I saved a little unicorn, white resin, with a collar of red sequins. I wondered if you might have put it there.”

“I hate unicorns,” Peggy said. “My grandmother gave me the ones in my room. She’s paying my tuition here. So my
mother
insisted I bring them along.” Now she smiled, enjoying the put-down. “And I never visited Mingo House. I hated that place. I never liked Genevieve working there. So after she was killed, that was the
last
place I’d go.” She eyeballed Fletcher. “Unlike some people.”

Fletcher deflected the subject. “Have the cops gotten Larry Courson?”

The teary girl said she was off to send flowers in the students’ name to the Rossi family. The registrar would tell her their address.

“Could Larry Courson have killed Bryce Rossi?” I asked Fletcher. “If Larry believed Bryce had strangled his daughter?”

“Couldn’t any father?”

Now, the frat boys from the Mercedes, a walking Abercrombie ad, enveloped us. “Fletch, dude, you want help with your move or not? Time’s wastin’, bro.”

Fletcher waved the frat boys away. “Change of plans, guys. Gotta take care of some last-minute shit.”

“Dude, you’re moody lately. You on the rag?” one of them laughed.

“Yeah, that’s the title of his latest flick,” another said.

Flick?

Fletcher glowered and they dispersed, one belching ballistically.

He told Peggy, “Later,” and, to me, said, “Come back to my old place for a minute.”

His “old place” was literally that, in an apartment building just up the street, one of the last in the neighborhood still smothered with ivy; most owners had stripped the vines away because they infiltrated brick and stone, eroding them. The foyer, all junk mail, dust, and chicken-wire tile, yielded to a lobby whose darkness was relieved only by the dingy skylight four stories above us. “They’re not big on housework. The Delts.” So this was a fraternity. Perhaps the customary gold Greek letters had been camouflaged by the ivy.

His quarters, on the top floor at the back of the building, boasted a view of the sailboats flecking the Charles; one boat had just capsized. Cardboard boxes monopolized much of the space in the living room. When Fletcher shut the door he drew three bolts, the way Bryce Rossi had, in vain.

“I’m scared shitless.”

He stepped close to me, as if to hug or hit me.

“We all are.” I hadn’t realized this was true until saying it then and there. Maybe that was why I was drinking. I hoped so, I hoped it wasn’t some alcoholic’s gene.

“I mean, it could be Larry. Who killed that Rossi character. If Larry thought he killed Genevieve.”

“Is Larry Courson capable of murder? You seemed to believe he was innocent of molesting that girl.”

“People freak out.”

“But if Bryce killed Genevieve and Larry killed him, why would you be in danger? Or me?”

“Hey.” He slapped his chest, with the washboard stomach and convex navel. “I’m just glad I’m moving.” He raided the fridge, barren compared to Bryce Rossi’s, with just pickles, mayonnaise, a loaf of Wonder Bread, and…. “Want some pomegranate nectar? It’s full of antioxidants. Even though it looks pretty gross.” It was a new thing that summer, a pomegranate-strawberry vitamin concoction.

“Are you moving because you’re afraid?”

When drinking, his muscled chest rose and fell, and the ring in his nipple glinted correspondingly. “Living here just wasn’t cutting it. I mean, the guys are great, incredible. But I want to make something of myself, you know? And there’s too much partying here. Music blaring until two in the morning. The Delts aren’t into studying. I’m on a scholarship. I can’t live like Donald Trump.”

“It must be hard to concentrate with all that’s happened. Losing Genevieve and now Bryce Rossi murdered.”

He placed his empty glass on the kitchen counter, along with a stack of unopened bills. One, from a telephone company, was emblazoned with a red stripe and the words, “Your account is past due.” “Genevieve was lost…long before she died.” His voice quavered, went up an octave, became a little boy’s voice for a moment: “The thing with her father, him being accused, it knocked her out of kilter, you know? Genevieve used her life like it was part of her resume. To gain experience, climb the ladder. She wanted out of her old life, out of Lynn. That Zack jerk and Rossi—they were a means to an end. Rossi was a crook, a fence. Did you hear that on the news?”