Death at Charity's Point (2 page)

“He called Win a killing machine. Were those his words?”

“Yes,” I said. “But remember, this was an ignorant farm boy whose arms had been blown off. A bitter kid. I wouldn’t put too much stock in what he says.”

She shook her head. “No, the boy’s right. That would be Win, all right. A killing machine. My son had a great capacity for hatred and cruelty. Just the opposite of George. George is a gentle boy. My Cain and my Abel.”

Florence Gresham said this matter-of-factly, much as if she were discussing characters in a book. She peered at me. “He could still be alive.”

“Oh, now, Mrs. Gresham…”

“No, he could,” she said, nodding her head vigorously. “He’s a survivor, Win. And,” she added, her voice soft, “a killing machine.”

I had not really done my job. The question of what had happened to Lt. Winchester Gresham in the jungles of Vietnam had not been definitively answered. But Florence Gresham seemed satisfied. She put me on retainer. Some of her wealthy friends began to do the same. I have, ever since, served the legal needs of rich folks.

A month or so after I delivered my report, two uniformed Army officers knocked at Florence Gresham’s door. They presented her with a letter from the President of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, which purported to recount Lt. Gresham’s courage in battle and to cite the manner in which he met his death. They handed her two small, velvet-covered boxes. One contained a bronze star. The other held a purple heart.

Lt. Winchester Gresham was now, officially, killed in action. Florence Gresham thanked the gentlemen and didn’t mention her son, the “killing machine,” at least in my presence, for another twelve years.

Throughout the Winchester Gresham affair, Florence never revealed to me the slightest hint of emotion. Win might just as well have been a stranger to her. Her interest appeared to be strictly intellectual. She had a question, she wanted an answer, and she was prepared to pay a persevering lawyer handsomely to try to produce that answer.

As I worked with her over the next several years, I learned to recognize her characteristic response to bad news: Her eyes would narrow, the corners of her mouth would pinch, and she would say, “Well,
that’s
a bitch, ain’t it?”

She didn’t believe in God, or the stars, or bad luck. She simply felt that one did the best one could, and that regrets and second-guessing were a waste of time. That philosophy held equally true for her personal tragedies as for her business reverses. What happened one sultry July evening in 1974 showed me that.

Florence and her husband, Dudley, had been sipping gin-and-tonics in the living room of their summer place, which Florence insisted in calling a “cottage”—all twelve rooms of fieldstone, with its nine acres of manicured lawns and formal rose gardens high on a hill overlooking the sea in Bar Harbor, Maine. They were watching the United States House of Representatives conduct impeachment hearings and chatting idly after a day of sailing in their thirty-eight-foot sloop, which Florence called “the little boat.” Dudley had painted its name and port of call in square black letters across its transom. It read:
DAUGHTER, BAR HARBOR
.

Dud Gresham was absently scratching the ears of his pair of field trial champion English setters, Boone and Crockett. Their surviving son, George, was upstairs reading Toynbee.

A Republican Congressman from Maine named Cohen was declaring his mournful duty to the nation. A Profile in Courage in the midst of the President’s Last Crisis.

“Think he’s Jewish?” Florence asked.

“Mmm,” replied Dudley. “From Maine?”

“I think he’s Jewish,” said Florence. “That explains it.”

Dud Gresham scratched Boone’s ears.

Dud was happy to leave the management of the Gresham holdings to Florence. I worked for her, not them. In the five years since I had investigated Win’s death, though, I had come to know Dud well. We never talked business. He preferred to tell rambling tales of grouse hunting in Scotland and Wales, quail shooting in Georgia, and bringing geese to the decoys over Chesapeake Bay. Florence and Dudley considered their division of labor equitable. They both did what they wanted to do. It was more than tolerance—they seemed to be genuinely in love with each other.

On that July evening, Dud Gresham smiled at the image of the young Congressman from Maine, set down his empty glass, whistled to Boone and Crockett, and went upstairs. Florence wagged her fingers at him without taking her eyes off the television set.

I have imagined what Dud did then. He unlocked the polished oak gun cabinet that stood in the corner of his study and removed his Purdy double. He sat on the ragged, overstuffed easy chair, rubbing his thumb along the oiled stock of the fine shotgun. Boone and Crockett rested their chins on his leg. Then Dud stood up. “Wait,” I can hear him instructing the dogs. He slipped a shell into the right chamber and carefully closed the gun. It shut with the satisfying click of an expensive precision instrument. Boone and Crockett sat and watched, their tails twitching expectantly.

I can still see Dud in my mind’s eye, striding down the hallway, gun slung under his arm, as if he were crossing a meadow on a frosty October morning. I imagine his purposeful stride, as if he were intent on keeping up with the dogs as they ranged wide, seeking the day’s first covey.

He entered the bathroom, locked the door behind him, sat on the closed toilet seat, bit down on the business end of the gun barrels, and blew the back of his head all over Florence’s monogrammed towels.

Florence refused to let the police break down the door of the bathroom. It took an hour for the carpenter to remove the entire frame. “Wouldn’t do Dud any good to ruin the door,” Florence said. “Dud’s an excellent shot,” she added.

Dud left a note. “Not because of him,” is what it said. The summer people of Bar Harbor were divided on the interpretation of Dud’s note. Some figured Dud was referring to Win; others figured he meant Nixon. A third school of thought held that Dud meant George, whose decision to pursue the ascetic life of a scholar—and who detested hunting—must have been a grave disappointment to his parents, and that the note was Dud’s way of absolving him.

The carpenter replaced the door. Florence’s housekeeper cleaned up the mess in the bathroom. I settled the matter of Dud’s estate. For Florence, life went on. A week or so after they buried Dud, she was back in the bathroom soaking in the old-fashioned porcelain tub when she summoned the housekeeper.

Florence pointed into the corner behind the toilet. “That looks like a piece of skull. Clean it up, if you please. Really, my dear, you must do better.”

Florence told me that story herself. The point, she said, was: “You just can’t get good help any more.”

It wasn’t until several years later that Florence told me why Dud killed himself. “The prostate cancer had spread,” she said. “It was into his bones. The doctor gave him two months to a year. He made it clear that Dud would be luckier if it were on the two months’ side. There would be pain. Lots of pain. So Dud and I talked about it. It was his decision, of course. That’s how we left it. He’d make the decision. And he did.”

“I don’t understand his note,” I said to Florence. “‘Not because of him.’ What did that mean, anyway?”

“Why, it was a joke, of course. A joke for all of us to enjoy. That’s all. It wouldn’t have been like Dud to
mean
anything very significant by a suicide note. He had already said what needed to be said.” Florence paused then, I remember, and smiled wistfully. “Still,” she said, “he really didn’t have to make such a mess.”

George Gresham remained an enigma to me. On the few occasions that I saw him, he seemed willing to defer to his mother in matters of the family fortune. Like his father, he did so without embarrassment. He made it clear that he simply wasn’t interested in maneuvering large sums of money around. He was a small, balding man, a few years older than me. He taught history at a very swank little private school on the North Shore of Massachusetts, not far from the family estate in Beverly Farms. He drove second-hand cars, lived in faculty housing, and ate in the dining room with the students. He successfully side-stepped matrimony. For George, it always seemed more a matter of disinterest than active resistance to the lures that were trolled in front of the only heir to the vast Gresham fortune.

George Gresham did exactly what he wanted.

His mother, to her credit, supported George by accepting the life-style he had carved out for himself, satisfied that he spent his summers with her pecking out lucid articles for scholarly magazines from his study in the Bar Harbor “cottage.” She asked no more of him. I suppose she knew his limits, respected them, and understood that he, in his way, was as tough-minded as she.

She wintered in Sarasota, continued to summer in Bar Harbor (still using the toilet where Dud squeezed off his last shot), and spent the spring and autumn months at the estate in Beverly Farms. She employed a cook, a maid, a chauffeur, a housekeeper (the same one who cleaned up Dud’s “mess”), and two gardeners. Full time. Year round.

Florence Gresham is a leathery, shrewd old lady. I’m very fond of her.

When she called me on that rainy Monday morning last May, her tone was typically businesslike. “George is dead,” she said.

“Ah, hell, Florence. What happened?”

“Drowned, apparently. Fell from some rocks by the ocean. They’re investigating. I just wanted you to know. There’ll be details, of course. I’ll be needing you.”

“Of course,” I said. “Anything at all.”

“They insist on doing an autopsy. Routine, they’re telling me. And they’ve temporarily impounded his things. Damn inconvenient. Anyhow, until they’re done there’s really nothing. In due course, I suppose you and I will have documents to work on.”

“The estate. Sure. Keep me posted,” I said. “Are there arrangements?”

“For the funeral, you mean? I wish you wouldn’t circumlocute, Brady. No, no arrangements, as you call them, yet. It’s all up in the air. I’ll let you know.”

“Well, I’m terribly sorry.”

“Yes. We all are.”

Florence’s stoic acceptance of George’s death mirrored her response to Win’s and Dudley’s. It did not surprise me. I could picture her at the other end of the line, her tanned, craggy face grim, her strong mouth set. At seventy-two, she still wielded the Gresham fortune like a scythe.

The following Friday I found an uncharacteristically subdued Florence Gresham waiting in the anteroom of my office. She rarely visited me there. She summoned me to her if she needed me. We never met without an appointment.

My secretary, Julie O’Malley, arched her eyebrows at me and twitched her shoulders in a tiny shrug.

“Florence. Pleasant surprise,” I said.

She took my hand and pulled me toward her. “I must talk to you,” she said. There was an urgency to her tone that was not typical of Florence Gresham. “I took the chance that you’d have a minute for me. May we go into your office?”

“Of course,” I said. “I’ll get us some coffee.”

I have the sort of office that befits an attorney whose practice caters to the very well-to-do. Julie calls my decor “neo-
nouveau-riche
.” The paneling is solid mahogany, the furniture sleek chrome, glass, teak, and leather, the carpet imported from Afghanistan. I own two Wyeth pencil sketches, which hang unobtrusively over the sofa. My ex-wife Gloria, a professional photographer, contributed a sequence of shots of my two sons, Billy and Joey, one a year of each, up through the time of our divorce. Eleven shots of Billy, nine of Joey. They’re both adolescents now. Their pictures are framed individually and hang in a mass on the wall opposite the Wyeths. I look at them often.

At one end of my office is my desk, my swivel chair behind it so that I sit with my back to the big window that looks out toward Cambridge. When I confer with adversaries in my office, I put my desk between us, on the theory that such an arrangement puts me in charge. I keep the top of my desk clear of papers. That, too, is a trick for negotiating. It gives the impression that I’m efficient and focused on the issue of the moment.

Actually, most of my adversaries know and practice the same tricks. We admire each other for being as shrewd as we are. None of us really thinks the tricks mean a damn thing. Failure to employ them, however, would set one at a disadvantage immediately.

I do leave two mementoes on my desktop. One is a Titleist golf ball under a dome of glass, mounted on a white wooden tee. On the marble base a gold plate bears the inscription, “Stow Acres C. C., June 6, 1965.” It’s the ball I hit into the cup on the fifth hole of the North course from a fluffy lie at the edge of the fairway. A three iron for a double-eagle. Gloria made up the trophy for me. I keep it to remind me of the days when I could reach the par fives with a driver and an iron. It also helps me to remember the days when Gloria and I were too poor to afford membership in a private country club. When we were young, and happy, and in love.

The other item on my desktop is one of those clear, solid plastic cubes used for paperweights. Imbedded in it is a scarred, red-and-white Dardevle spoon. One prong of the treble hook is bent straight. I don’t need an inscription to remember Manitoba in July of 1971 and the closest I ever came to catching a muskellunge.

I have a sitting area for my discussions with my clients—fawn leather sofa, glass-topped coffee table, and a couple of comfortable armchairs. That’s where Florence and I sat.

She perched tensely on the edge of the sofa, her elbows on her knees, leaning forward. I pulled an armchair near her.

Normally she carried herself as if she were in the saddle—straight, tall, angular. Her face was always well tanned and craggy, her black hair streaked dramatically with white. The horsey-doggy look. A well-preserved woman on the far side of seventy. But now I noticed that her skin seemed blotched and pouchy, her usually sharp blue eyes watery and faded. Suddenly she looked like an old lady to me.

“Florence, you’re looking well,” I lied.

“I am like hell, Brady Coyne. I look terrible and I feel terrible and I’ll tell you exactly why. They are now saying that George killed himself, that’s why. Suicide! Can you imagine a less likely candidate for suicide than my George?”