A Pinchbeck Bride (15 page)

Chapter Twenty-five

The woman in the Shawmut College registrar’s office, Trudie, gave me Fletcher Coombs’ new address, a condominium in a former warehouse in South Boston, in the area between the new Moakely Courthouse and Fan Pier. It was a hulking building made of granite the color of a dirty snow pile, snow soaking up exhaust in a shopping center parking lot for weeks. It dominated its own pier in the choppy, cloudy water of Boston Harbor.

In the North End, such structures had been transformed into costly quarters for people and corporations. Through the massive plate glass doors, I could peer past the lobby down a long, dim corridor littered with drop cloths, a ladder, and rolls of what could be carpeting or insulation. Plainly, this place was under construction, and Fletcher was living in one of the first completed units. Fletcher buzzed me in without waiting for me to identify myself, so I assumed the developer must have trained hidden security cameras onto the entrance.

In the lobby, a fake birch kept company with a marble waterfall adhering to one wall; its cascade had been turned off for some time. The basin had collected its share of trash—a coffee cup, some plastic straws, a losing scratch ticket. An elevator, padded in the manner of a lunatic’s cell, transported me silently to the top floor, where, in the distance, Fletcher waved in the light flooding over his threshold. “Mark.”

“What a great place.”

His Superbowl T-shirt was speckled with paint, as were his putty-gray shorts, and the expensive sneakers he’d sported the first time I’d seen him. “What’s up?”

“Your view is spectacular.” Which it was. So much had happened since I’d spoken with him last that I was unsure how much I should divulge. Should I mention Jon Kim and his possible interest in Genevieve, his alleged temper and propensity to violence?

“Larry Courson told me you’ve spoken to him.”

That sure preempted me.

“Twice. At Mingo House and in the Public Garden.”

“He contacted me, I didn’t contact him.”

“Same here. He phoned…So, you’re upset about my film career, so Larry says. At least you’re not like that horny Asian guy. The big software honcho. He kept hitting on me again and again. He even offered to pay me. ‘I’ll pay you in blow,’ he said. ‘A blow for a blow.’ He thought that was hilarious.”

So Jon Kim was capable of propositioning a young male beyond an anonymous cruising site. What about a young female? The condo was sparsely furnished, with just three blue beanbag chairs facing a runt of a television, and a portable bar stocked mostly with tequila. No posters adorned the gesso-white walls, of Renoir ladies or anything else.

“It was just for money, just a business transaction—the movies…Hey, Larry thinks Jon Kim killed Genevieve. I can believe that. These executive types, they’re used to getting their own way. They say, ‘Jump,’ you say, ‘How high?’ ‘My way or the highway,’ that mind-set.”

Fletcher went to the kitchen and got us each a glass of the pomegranate-strawberry beverage.

“Jon Kim knows judo or something. I know because he used it on me, in the men’s room at Flex. I was taking a leak and just as I’m finishing, ready to zip up, he gets me in a headlock and starts kissing me. Which, no offense, I found gross as hell. I mean, Genevieve was right outside the door. Eating raw eel with Rudy Shits and his cronies. That Kim is a strong bastard. I thought he was going to
strangle
me.”

So he did have a temper, he was sexually aggressive, the Korean Wonder Boy, as Sam Ahearn called him. And this was first-hand testimony, so to speak.

“But who was the father of Genevieve’s baby? Whoever was the father probably didn’t kill her. If he knew she was pregnant.”

“Genevieve didn’t have many morals. I hate to say it, but it’s true.”

“Bryce Rossi believed he was the child’s father.” I was curious to see whether Fletcher would disparage Bryce Rossi’s masculinity, the way so many others so readily had—or whether he saw beyond the fey exterior to discern the fence and heterosexual.

“Bryce lectured at Shawmut. He gave a talk about Biblical archaeology, King Herod’s palaces. How Herod was a great builder. He didn’t just kill all those babies.”

“Bryce had done time. He’d fenced stolen art. He supposedly thought there was a robbery in the works. Targeting Mingo House, maybe stealing the monstrance of King Charles the First…Did you know Genevieve was a Mingo? Through her mother?”

“Well, I knew she thought she was. But she had so many big ideas. She thought she could do anything. Get away with anything. And look what happened. It’s horrible.”

Pounding commenced in the building, several floors below.

“This place is a work in progress,” Fletcher said. “I’m kind of being the handyman. They let me live here on the cheap.”

I needed the bathroom, used it, and glanced into the bedroom—at a sight that transfixed me. In the middle of the floor sat a fantastic contraption, a bit of Jules Verne imagining the Internet. It was a computer, sheathed in a carved walnut cabinet, with red velvet armrests projecting from its sides and a brass tray enclosing the keyboard. Small brass heads, of Athena or Medusa, guarded the velvet-lined mousepad. Some thumbtacks needed hammering into the upholstery and the whole thing reeked of glue.

Scattered throughout the bedroom were pieces from Victorian furniture—legs from chairs, handles from bureaus, finials, a bell, the pineapple posters of a dismembered bed, and architectural items—a pediment of gilded plaster, a frieze of mermaids from some bank or burial vault, and all sorts of doorknobs, of brass and porcelain, of clear and amethyst glass. It was a Victorian body shop, complete with jars of nails, cans of varnish, files, a chisel,
hammers
. I hadn’t yet heard the term “steampunk” back then, the movement to graft technology with the antique.

Fletcher had come up behind me. “It’s my hobby. I like making things. It relaxes me after studying all day. I think technology is making us all less human. I’m very keen on craftsmanship. So many things made today are just slapped together. I hate that. Someday, I’d like to live in an Arts and Crafts house. Nothing lavish, just something made with care.”

“So this terminal—”

“It’s just a regular Apple. But I’ve customized it. Covered up the plastic, given it some character.”

On the bed, a bland thing minus even a headboard, he had sorted out parts taken from period jewelry—pallid rubies, peridot, some moonstones and jet, and cheap clasps from bracelets and watch fobs.

“Is that gold?”

“No, it’s pinchbeck.”

I had heard the term somewhere. “What’s that?”

“It’s an alloy made from copper and zinc. It was used in cheaper—less expensive—jewelry. I use that stuff for ornamentation. You know, finishing touches.”

His other projects included a microwave oven on wrought-iron legs and a Bose radio in the belly of a gilded griffin. He had yet to fuse any antique tidbits onto his Patriots memorabilia.

“Did Genevieve help you in any of this?”

“She thought it was stupid.”

To his chagrin. “I felt I had to see you. Just to talk. After Larry Courson saw me. I figured you were his friend too.”

“The guy’s been through so much.”

“Did you tell the police about Larry calling you?”

“Of course not.”

“I figured he’d be long gone by the time they got to Mingo House or the Public Garden. It’s so easy to disappear in the city.”

Yes, Fletcher was obsessed with the past—as in thrall to it as Genevieve or Bryce Rossi. Did he want to live its ideals, revive its restrictions? Beyond the whims of attendees at Dickens fairs or the men who reenact the Battle of Gettysburg? Had he killed for that ideal? Used a dead girl for his own private
tableau vivant
?

Walking back through Quincy Market, I heard a gaggle of drinkers at one of the pseudo-colonial bars excitedly mention the “Victorian Girl.” Wasn’t it “amazing” that the case should break open so suddenly? So I elbowed through the crowd, past the wooden dummy of John Hancock hoisting a stein of beer and the resin lobster in a powdered wig, to watch Marcia Haight on a widescreen TV, summing up the day’s events. Larry Courson had been arrested in a motel in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in the company of a twelve-year-old Providence girl, Laura Petacci, who had been missing from a camp at Indian Lake since morning. So he was a liar, a pedophile, who used his dead daughter as a ghoulish prop in his act for sympathy. He had no empathy, no compassion, for the young girls whose lives he had defiled for his own pleasure.

“And, to repeat, there’s also been a break in the actual murder of Courson’s own daughter, Genevieve, the so-called Victorian Girl, whose slaying captivated the entire world. A software executive with ties to Mingo House, the historic site and scene of the crime, has been picked up by police and taken in for questioning. His name has not yet been released…”

The only software executive with ties to Mingo House was of course Jon Kim. Had Larry Courson tried to find him, tried to kill him, failed, and, upon capture, voiced his suspicions to the police, prompting Jon Kim to be interrogated? Wouldn’t Larry’s credibility be zero, considering his actions, especially being caught with an underage girl? But the restraining order would be seen as damning for Jon, as would his fight with the super at the condo.

Fletcher, independently, had pegged Jon Kim as violent. Who knows, maybe Rudy Schmitz had aided the authorities, monitoring his “Jonny” even while bedding him. That could be in character; this Mingo House crowd was so duplicitous…

“Can you believe it? It
is
the Korean,” Roberto said when I arrived home. “One report says they found a silk cord with Genevieve’s DNA on it at the suspect’s apartment. And guess what? The suspect had thousands of Ativan stashed at his place in the South End. Rudy Schmitz must be mega-mortified. Not to mention newly single.”

“But would Jon Kim play Victorian dress-up with Genevieve? He’s all about technology and
now
. And would he kill his own child? If he thought her child was his?”

“Look at what Alonzo said. About his threats. Breaking his wife’s neck—”

“But Emily Kim hasn’t been murdered.”

“He led a double life, sexually. He’d become a drug addict. People get hooked, they have pushers, they become desperate. You told me his company was in trouble. He’d shacked with that sleazy Rudy Schmitz. I know of at least four people who’ve called the attorney general’s office, complaining about their contracts with Flex. About roaches in the locker room and broken treadmills…”

“What’s Jon Kim’s motive for killing Genevieve?”

“Blackmail, who knows? Maybe Genevieve took some embarrassing photographs. Needing money for school. And Kim, you know, over-reacted.”

“Yeah, strangulation is a tad overreacting. And dressing her up?”

“She was already dressed up. She dressed herself up. No one could have fitted her and then killed her. It’s too time-consuming. Chloe solved that.”

“Jon Kim was due at Mingo House for a meeting of the board of trustees. If he were planning to murder Genevieve—or anyone else—he wouldn’t plan it in a place where his friends and colleagues were due any minute!”

“Maybe it wasn’t planned. Maybe it was spontaneous.”

“I knew this guy. Well, I thought I did.”

“
Thought
is the operative word,” Roberto said. “You can’t argue with DNA, Mark.”

Chapter Twenty-six

Rudy now re-thought his relationship with Jon Kim. “He didn’t really have background. His parents ran a hardware store. Jon would help customers find the right kind of screw. As a child. It seems somehow appropriate…And he actually permitted a drug dealer to enter my home. He told me that. Some former medical student who peddled tranquilizers. Imagine! Why that pusher could’ve stolen my Warhol. Or beaten us both senseless. But dope deranges people, doesn’t it? So eventually he became entangled with that scrappy college girl, and ended up killing her. Tragic, tragic. Straight out of Aeschylus.”

Rudy had distanced himself from Bryce Rossi too. “For all of his affectations, Bryce was basically a street tough. I mean, he knew art and wine and antiques, but he’d come from a hardscrabble home. His father was a bookie and his mother was a nurse’s aide. He’d served time in the big house: he had the most hideous tattoos that some pimp had applied to his arms. His cell mate, I suppose. It makes me shudder.” Rudy believed Bryce was killed by “some thug” who’d materialized out of his past, to settle an old score. The police could make no sense of Bryce’s tale that a burglary was imminent at Mingo House. “Perhaps it was his way to get us to pay for his services. Appraising everything. Who knows how these people’s minds work?”

***

Sam Ahearn had mixed feelings about the arrest. “Well, I was as shocked as anyone about the Korean Wonder Boy. He sure fooled me. I thought he was just a tense nerd in love with Rudy and his computer. Not necessarily in that order. But him going after a college kid like Genevieve, that’s just incredible. I guess he got so he hated all women. What with his wife ditching him and then Genevieve wanting out.”

The fundraising party, “An Evening with the Mingoes,” would go on. Rudy Schmitz was adamant about that. It was needed more than ever after the “distractions” of the summer—the murders, the manhunt, the headlines spawned by the Victorian Girl. This was, in fact, an ideal time to refocus on the museum’s core mission: to educate the public about Victorian domestic life. And the evening was an occasion to announce the founding of a new organization, The Mingo Circle, offering programs, lectures, and small teas to a paying membership. Seemingly, Bryce’s murder and Jon Kim’s arrest had made Rudy believe Mingo House might be “sustainable” after all.

And the party would be an exorcism, a cleansing of the karma of the earlier violence. “In a few years, the people who count will remember Mingo House for this party and its bright future,” Rudy maintained. “Not for this period of…sordidness.”

After the rain and humidity of the summer, “the deluge,” as Roberto called it, the weather was finally improving. The sun reasserted itself, battling away the gloom and baking the sidewalks and rousing the flowerbeds in the Public Garden. The evening of the party was sultry, and suffused with golden sunlight, with shafts of sunlight pouring down from Maxfield Parrish clouds. The summer fragrance of new-mown lawns, perhaps from the Public Garden or the mall on Commonwealth Avenue, rode the warm wind and gave the evening the indolence of lazing in a pasture. Boston—the old houses of brick and brownstone, the London-ish chimney pots, the majestic trees—had never appeared more beautiful.

I’d bought a new suit and a red rose boutonniere for my buttonhole. I arrived at the premises early. Beacon Street thronged with the sort of laughing, chatting, air-kissing people you seldom see congregate in public. Roberto remained at home, ostensibly studying, but actually avoiding Rudy Schmitz, I was sure.

In Mingo House, the larger pieces of furniture had been shifted and cordoned off. Red velvet ropes also fended guests away from brittle knickknacks and chairs that beckoned but would collapse if used. The barren expanse of concrete and crabgrass out back had been weeded and renamed the “courtyard.” It was beautified with rented palms, and its ailanthus trees strung with white fairy lights. Clara Mingo’s gilded harp, restored through the generosity of Dorothea Jakes, was being plucked by a Taiwanese college student as guests filed into the high-ceilinged old rooms. For the first time in decades, Mingo House was hosting a party and everyone was enthralled.

“How enchanting!”

“You can almost imagine Louisa May Alcott…”

“And hear the clip-clop of a hansom cab…”

“I hope we don’t offend the ghosts.”

Rudy seemed elegant and somehow feline as he greeted guests, his face lighting up like the landmark Citgo sign in Kenmore Square whenever he spied a potential trustee. The VIP guests, who had shelled out a steeper fee, would be segregated in the courtyard to be cultivated by our current trustees.

Rudy addressed everyone in the library, making a speech about history and Mingo House that I found surprisingly heartfelt: “I greet you, one and all, as we begin a new chapter in the life of Mingo House, one of Boston’s only historic houses, that preserves, intact, a slice of life from the turn-of-a-century past. It is said that the past is prologue to the future, that we cannot know where we are going if we do not know where we have been. And how prescient that remark is, today, more than ever, in a world that is changing almost by the microsecond. Now, more than ever, we need the lessons of the past to inform and enrich our present.”

The crowd in the hot, close library, which flowed out into Corinth One’s bedroom, listened patiently.

“When I first came to Boston as a young student and entrepreneur—that was a while ago, before, in fact, the word entrepreneur had entered our everyday vocabulary—I was green and a bit bewildered, and I called home and related my feelings to my father. Now my dad was a no-nonsense fellow who ran our family store, Schmitz Brothers, in Baltimore. He was the son of an immigrant from a small village in the Black Forest who’d created a local institution out of dreams, grit, and perseverance. My father was not a sentimental man, but he knew the value of history, not just in terms of its physical remnants—houses, museums, antiques—but for what it can teach us all.”

Dorothea Jakes, over by the shelf where we had discovered that morbid hair wreath, was speaking to a teenager in what seemed to be an angry tone, judging by her expression. The teenager turned, and I saw that it was her grandson, Chris.

“So when I told my dad that I just didn’t get Boston, didn’t relate to its intelligent but somewhat formal citizenry, he asked me, ‘Have you studied New England’s history? Have you read Van Wyck Brooks and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Bradford’s account of Plymouth Plantation?’ And here is where my involvement with this house originates. My dad said, ‘Have you been to Mingo House? That in itself is a portal to the past.’”

Rudy went on, testifying how this historic property had “schooled” him in the culture and values of New England, thus making the case why the guests should become members of The Mingo Circle, become trustees, docents, volunteers, regular visitors. “We need you, the history of this city—irreplaceable, important, and endangered—needs you. Tonight, we are all Corinth and Clara’s children. Well, I know that I am!”

Rudy won prolonged applause. And the puckered, flaking ceiling in the library was a ready and eloquent prop corroborating his pitch for donations.

I squeezed toward Dorothea, now alone.

“Well, we’ll see if they break out their wallets,” she said to me.

“Everyone really enjoyed the harp. Thanks again for restoring it.” I couldn’t resist adding, “The music is heavenly.”

“Well, we’ve been dealing with a little hellion.” She ate her fig hors d’oeuvre and nodded toward the young man now across the room, stuffing himself with mini crab-cakes. “My grandson, Chris, is on probation at Lenox. We hope he can stay. He’s had a humdinger of a year.”

Dorothea drank deep from her glass of fruit punch and elaborated. “Chris is quite the math prodigy. Two grades ahead of his peers. Unfortunately, he’s equally ahead in…sowing his wild oats. He was caught in the girls’ dormitory, showering with a girl at three AM. They couldn’t sleep. Insomnia, they said. Then he failed English and just squeaked by in history. He’d been an honor student until his complexion went bad. It could be hormonal, I suppose.”

“Aren’t there prescriptions…?”

“Well, his parents are opposed to medicating children. My daughter-in-law read some book attacking Ritalin. And she thinks laser treatments cause cancer, so…She’s adamant, stubborn, just like Chris.”

Then Chris began descending the stairs, so Dorothea suggested we trail him. “I promised my son, his father, that I wouldn’t let him out of my sight. His parents had a corporate commitment they couldn’t skip, that’s why he’s with me.”

Chris paused in the front hall, where he was staring at the placard in memory of Genevieve Courson. Balanced on an easel, it featured a full-color photograph of her shaking hands with Rudy. It cited her “extraordinary devotion to the Mingo House family.” Genevieve herself had used that mawkish phrase on my first day of orientation. But for her that phrase bore literal truth, as I had just learned at Grace Torrance’s in Rockport.

“Keep your eye on him, Mark,” Dorothea said. “I have to pay the harpist.”

Threading through the networking horde, I reached Chris, who had somehow procured a glass of punch. In the boy, I could discern the man forty years in the future, the country club alcoholic, all gin blossoms and right-wing indignation. “Incredible woman,” he said, as much to the placard as to me.

“You knew her?”

“She worked here, dude.” Around his wrist, he’d wound several bead-and-hemp friendship bracelets. He was bombed. “She gave our class a tour. Our whole class came here, see? She told us all about the ghosts and Mrs. Mingo being a psychic. She showed us awesome photographs of the Civil War. Heads in a bucket and this dude cut in half by a cannonball.”

Genevieve had violated Mingo House policy by letting anyone see the horrifying record Clara Mingo had commissioned of Civil War carnage. Let alone a school group.

“She was a babe.” He drained his punch and was eating the leftover lemon wedge, rind and all.

“Clara Mingo was a babe?”

“No, Genny, Genevieve Courson. She had a bod to die for.” He had smeared mustard from the crab-cakes onto his rep tie with its design of lacrosse sticks.

“How would you know about Genevieve Courson’s…body?” For me, that last word meant something devoid of sensuality.

“She came to my school. Later, as a speaker, through Shawmut College. She read from her paper about the Mingo family. How weird they all were and how they helped kill King George the Third.”

“Charles the First.”

“Whatever.” He set his empty glass onto a Chinese teakwood table, and I moved it before it could spoil the inlaid marble top. “I was assigned to be her guide. To show her the campus after she gave her talk. We ended up walking out by the pond, and this tool shed was open. Hey, we balled like there was no tomorrow.” Then his snickers morphed into sobs and he began wiping his tears onto his blazer sleeve.

Did I believe him? This pimply little preppie with a slight lisp? Oh, yes.
In vino, veritas
. And Genevieve Courson had led a freewheeling sex life, with men many years her senior. But she had to inherit
something
from her father. Why not a taste for young flesh?

“Dude, you look surprised. It wasn’t my first time. I made it with a lifeguard in Edgartown last summer. This townie whose father owns a clam shack. But Genevieve was better. Way better. One of a kind.”

I couldn’t argue with that.

“But the life guard didn’t get pregnant.” He teetered a bit. “Genevieve did. She said it was no big deal. She’d had an abortion once before, when some Harvard guy knocked her up. I felt shitty when she got killed.” He blew his nose and cleaned the mustard from his mouth with his handkerchief. “I felt shitty, but Gramma said it was a blessing, that Genny was just a goddamn tramp.”

“Did Dorothea know
you
were the baby’s father?”

He sighed. “Sort of.” Chris almost knocked Genevieve’s placard off its easel. I righted it.

“Gramma said the father could’ve been any number of people. How she once caught Genny kissing this German tourist. Right here. While his wife was in the bathroom. She said we’d keep it hush-hush. That was her word.” He struggled to fix me with his bleary eyes. “Did you know her?”

“No.” My answer surprised even me: “I don’t really know anyone here.”

What could I do with this information? Tell the police? I couldn’t ask Dorothea Jakes; she was being groomed as a potential trustee, and could easily dismiss her grandson’s boasting as “just the liquor talking.” But she herself had disparaged his character, had portrayed him as indolent and sexually precocious, had made his claim seem plausible. Learning he was soon to become a father would rattle any high school sophomore. But if Chris had divulged the reason behind his behavior, he’d have sabotaged his future, compounded his problems, and no doubt gotten himself expelled. Chris certainly hadn’t strangled Genevieve, and Dorothea, understandably, had protected her grandson, striven to keep him far from the garish spotlight, the seamy vortex surrounding the Victorian Girl.

I needed more punch. I ladled a glass, drank some, and ladled more. Miriam and Chloe were standing in the dining room, where the table laden with the pink and gilded Mingo china had been roped off and pushed flush with the wall.

Miriam seemed disturbed by the portrait of the Mingo triplets. “Victorian children always look so gloomy. It’s like they’re staring out at you through time, pleading to be rescued, even the privileged ones. You really wonder about their psychology. They seem squelched, somber, burdened.”

“This is a posthumous portrait,” I told her.

“How did they die?” asked a somber Chloe. The triplets were just about her age, but worlds away from BlackBerries, gummy worms, and crushes on skateboarders. Before I could reply, Chloe blurted, “Was
this
the room where the Victorian Girl was found? It
was
, wasn’t it?”

Miriam confiscated the fig Chloe was handling but not eating. “I stipulated we wouldn’t mention that, Chloe. That was a condition of your coming.”