Mausoleum (8 page)

Lorraine's camera panned the party, which was set on an emerald lawn in front of white porches and sunrooms. The mostly older crowd were dressed for a summer event, the ladies in white cotton dresses, the gentlemen in the pastel colors that well-off retirees get talked into. The focus closed in on Brian Grose who was gesticulating at a group of men who listened with polite expressions. They looked relieved when Gerard Botsford approached in his trademark seersucker, bow tie and straw hat. Grace Botsford glided into the frame and handed Gerard a tall glass.

“Beautiful, isn't she?” asked Lorraine.

“Grace?” I had never noticed, before. Staid, even matronly, she had always dressed older than her years, and while old-fashioned could have an allure, her old-fashioned seemed more like a barrier than an invitation to admire.

“Do you see how she stands? Do you see how still?”

She did stand tall and straight. And now that Lorraine pointed it out I could see a powerful stillness about her that captured attention. She seemed to dismiss the motion of the video camera and the other people, especially Brian's gesticulations, as if they were superfluous.

The scene faded to the green of the Bells' lawn, and suddenly we were on Main Street watching Brian walk briskly up the steps of Town Hall to greet a puzzled-looking Gerard Botsford, who was standing beside a marble column in a business suit. I found myself leaning forward. It was a strange moment, both men in the picture now dead.

They shook hands. Gerard gazed toward the camera, then looked away, hurriedly, as if remembering he had been told not to look at it. But he recovered with aplomb, gazing down at Brian Grose as if he were a new species of wildlife. This went on for a few moments with no sound except for cars passing along Main Street and birds singing. The pillars of Town Hall went fuzzy and re-materialized as the bronze gates that Aunt Connie had contributed to the Village Cemetery back in the ‘50s.

Brian Grose walked briskly into ground and opened the gate. Just inside was Grace Botsford. A superimposed title filled the screen:

Grace Botsford, Treasurer of the Village Cemetery Association,

and

Newbury's Official Town Historian

Grace greeted Brian with a handshake and said in her dry Yankee tones, “Afternoon, Brian. Ready for your history lesson?”

Grose said he was.

“In the beginning,” said Grace, “Newbury's churches were built in the middle of the road.”

“In the middle of the road?”

“The proprietors listed in the original charter were entitled to share in the ‘common land', and they had no intention of giving up any of it for ‘churchyards.' So the selectmen voted to approve the expense to buy some ground for burying the dead, which would be open to all “admitted inhabitants.”

“As opposed to un-admitted inhabitants?” Brian interrupted with a broad smirk for the camera.

Grace was not to be derailed. “As opposed to undesirables,” she answered with a singleness of purpose. “Those not welcome to live in the town were not welcome in our burying ground.”

They commenced a slow walk through the cemetery, trailed closely by the camera, while Grace gave him a capsule history, illustrated by who was buried beneath each headstone. It was a sort of private version of the “Newbury Notables” tour, just for him.

Describing the McKay Mausoleum, she pointed out the Greek Cross on the roof and displayed an understated sense of humor that went right over Brian's head. “Of course in those days, no Newburian was Greek, or had ever met a Greek, but the builder had seen a tomb like it for sale at the Chicago World's Fair.

“The word ‘cemetery' is a 19th Century euphemism, Brian. The ‘resting place.' The old word goes back to the Roman catacombs, of course, but by the 19th Century, people were looking for a new word to imply less death than sleep. Our older forebears said “burying ground.” Mortality was brief then, death offered the possibility of eternal salvation. You'll notice that the old headstones are facing east. So when the Christ rose with the sun at dawn He would reach for your hand and pull you erect.”

“So if they made a mistake and buried you facing west,” Brian said to the camera, “you would end up for all Eternity on your head.”

Grace gave that a thin smile and said, “Cotton Mather suggested stopping by the burying ground to contemplate your mortality. We are here are only briefly and our bodies will soon be dust. But attitudes toward death keep changing, as you will see here when you read the inscriptions. Around the middle of the 19
^th
Century people preferred to think that the dead were only sleeping. These days, we regard death as a terrible mistake: if only we had worked harder or smarter we would have prevailed.”

“I didn't know Grace was a philosopher.”

“Brian wanted me to edit out that last line about the mistake. If he hadn't made the mistake of getting killed I would have had to. Now it stays.”

The camera followed them up the slope from the old section to the new area where lay Brian's plot.

“Before McTomb,” I said.

“Grace would never have appeared in the film afterwards. I shot all this before they delivered the mausoleum.” (It had arrived last March on two flatbed trucks equipped with cranes.)

“Did Grace know it was coming?”

“I don't think so. She was thinking it was something smaller. All I know is when they brought it, and I was shooting them unloading the pieces, Grace got really mad. For a while, she blamed me. Then she realized it wasn't my fault—shhh. It's almost over.”

The camera lingered on Brian's grassy plot. And then it shifted to Brian who looked right into as if he was talking to Grace and said, “You look at where you'll be buried and you ask yourself, what is the secret to life? Here in this beautiful cemetery it comes up simple for me. The first thing you must do is stay independent, stay private, be master of your own destiny. Second thing, you have to hire good people. Third thing, you must always strive for perfection. Fourth is you never should be satisfied. Fifth is don't plan too far ahead. Sixth is have a sense of urgency. Seven is work like hell. And eight is be lucky. The secret to life is the secret to success.”

“I've heard that somewhere,” I said.

“Yeah, I thought I did, too,” said Lorraine. “But it's just one of those things that sound so smart and clear you figure you've heard it before. He then went on and on about dealing with success and all, and a whole bit about dealing with adversity, but I cut it to this and it stands out better.”

“It seems so familiar.”

“Shhh.” Now the camera swept the burying ground and then slowly tilted up a big elm and traced the branches to where the tree's crown anchored the sky. Music, at last. Up came Bach, the same Bach that had thundered the afternoon he was killed.

When it was over I asked Lorraine, “Was he a little lonely, maybe?”

“Lonely? I don't think so.”

“No family?”

“He decided he didn't want family in it. That's why I had to fill it out with the driver and waiters at that club.”

“No girlfriends? Wives? Brothers, sisters, kids? Nobody out in California.”

“Just his business partner.”

“But not his New York partners?”

“He never mentioned them.”

It sounded to me like a deeply lonely life, and I wondered if he had always been that way, or slipped away from people when he retired so young. “What was his thing with death?”

Lorraine answered indirectly. “Before weddings, when I was still trying to make it out on the Coast, I did some 60th birthdays. Rich people who worked twenty-four/seven to make their pile suddenly shift obsessions. Suddenly, with time on their hands, they discover a world beyond the dwarf life they made it in. I did one film about a guy who bought a basketball team. I did another about a guy who got totally wrapped up in solar power. And one who bankrupted himself racing sailboats. Brian seems to have developed a passion for death.”

“His own.”

“So what do you think of the film?”

“I think you made a lot out of very little.”

“I guess that's a compliment?” She looked away, as if afraid to be disappointed.

“I mean, what do you say about a lonely life?…I mean, you can have a ‘rich' life—he was obviously a talented man with many interests, but so alone. Living a life where the only people you know work for you?” It felt uncomfortably close to my own situation. Certainly, I had a close circle in Newbury, friends I had known all my life. But at the end of the day they went their way and I went home alone.

“Would you please tell me if you liked it or not?”

“Definitely. I liked all the different settings. Great looking. What do they call it, ‘production values?' I can't believe you did all of that for ten thousand dollars.”

“It started at ten. It was nearer to sixty when I started editing. He spent a ton on my travel. And the steadicams. The whole cemetery walk was steadicam, too. That took days.”

“I liked that. And I loved the stuff you got Grace to say.”

“Grace was wonderful. She sat for an audio interview, after, so I could get clean sound for the cemetery scene.”

“Any more death films lined up?”

“Could be. The mausoleum company says they're going to recommend me to their clients. What they've seen so far they think is great.”

I thanked her for the show and asked her if she would like to come to dinner Friday night. She said she would, and I walked home feeling kind of lucky.

I turned on the eleven o'clock news to see if the fugitive alien from hell needed a lawyer, yet. He did not, and I lay awake awhile wondering what it felt like to be on the lam in a foreign land. Lonely, of course. Scary, too. But what were the odds of getting captured if you looked similar to twelve million penniless immigrants, few cops spoke your language, and citizens never looked you in the face?

Chapter Six

Of the three things that could happen to Charlie Cubrero, two were vaguely likely. The combined forces of the ICE and the Connecticut State Police and local cops might stumble upon him hiding in one of the urban immigrant communities. Or Charlie would light out for some far away community or even all the way home to Ecuador and disappear. (If Marian was right that he was “good at” hiding and ICE was right that Charlie was a gang leader, he might conceivably be snorting coke in a nice hotel in Bogota.) That I would find him first, was so unlikely that I wouldn't even bother.

Except that Marian Boyce thought Charlie might be innocent. Rick Bowland thought he was a hero. The Village Cemetery Association had its venerable tail in a crack. And a supposed gang leader was someone I knew only as a hard-working, polite kid who was about to be treated very badly. So I got on the horn with people I knew in New York.

A friend, a “buddy of mine” in Brooklyn-ese, steered me to a buddy of his, a private investigator who spoke Spanish. He was Puerto Rican, not Ecuadorian, and his accent was more Brooklyn than Caribbean, but he was guaranteed a stand up guy. Nor was he hideously expensive, which was an important consideration as I was not certain where the money was coming from. I gave him a bare bones situation report on the telephone, and when I was done Hector Ramirez confirmed that he was the straight shooter I had been promised by our mutual acquaintance.

“Sorry, Buddy. No way.”

“Why not?”

“There is no way I can duke it with Homeland Security for a fugitive from a murder warrant.”

“My clients believe the guy is innocent.”

“Tell your clients to spend their dough on a lawyer.”

I said, “It's possible he's so deep in the community we could find him before ICE.”

“Believe me, Buddy. They got Federal funds paying Connecticut troopers and city cops to co-operate with Immigration, and paying ICE to be nice to the yokels. Wait 'til they nail the ‘sucker. If they don't blow him away in the process, put your money on a lawyer.”

Good advice. But it didn't quite fit the peculiar situation, which, as Ramirez had pointed out, included the grim possibility of what could be called a fatal arrest experience.

Stymied, I took another shot at my best possible witness, telephoned the White Birch biker bar and asked Wide Greg, the proprietor, “Has my cousin Sherman shown up yet?”

“Staggering in as we speak,” said Greg, and hung up.

I drove down to the White Birch, in Frenchtown, at the foot of Church Hill. The only motorcycle in the parking lot belonged to Sherman Chevalley. Interestingly, the other vehicle, a rusty pickup truck, was Donny Butler's. (Even if Wide Greg owned a vehicle, no one could recall seeing him anywhere but inside the White Birch.)

It had been some time since Connecticut banned smoking in bars, but so many cigarettes had burned over the years that the stench of tobacco would never disappear. By contrast, last night's spilled beer smelled fresh. Decor consisted of an antique Miller High Life beer sign with spinning lights and a clock that didn't work, tables scattered sufficiently far apart to prevent overhearing conversations that should not be, knotty pine paneled walls blackened by the aforementioned smoke, a remarkable long bar, and very few windows.

It was early, well before noon. At the end of the bar nearest the door, the tall, angular Sherman Chevalley was nodding over his beer, apparently the latest in a long line of nightcaps. He seemed oblivious to his friend Donny Butler, Village Cemetery groundskeeper and gravedigger and puncher of Brian Grose in the eye, who was propping up the other end of the bar and yelling toward him. Wide Greg stood dead center the middle, reading the morning papers' police reports.

Sherman opened his eyes when I approached. They were broad slits of a hard green-grey color that resembled countertops in what my competitors called “gourmet kitchens.” Sherman's hadn't been wiped in a awhile.

I said, “I've been looking all over for you. Got a minute?”

Before he could stir himself to answer, Donny shouted down the bar. “Ben! That trooper—that friend of yours?”

“Ollie's no friend of mine.”

“You can say that again,” Sherman muttered sleepily.

“Not Ollie, for Christ sake!” Donny yelled. “Everybody knows about you and Ollie. Ollie hates your guts, ‘cause of the logging chain. The
woman
. The babe with the great ass.”

“Well she's not exactly a trooper. She's a detective. And yes, she is a friend of mine, so let's leave her ass out of it.”

“Yeah, well she's leaning on me.”

“How?”

“Keeps asking questions.”

I said, “Sherman, don't leave, I got to talk to Donny a minute,” and walked to the Donny end of the bar. The redness of his handsome, weathered face suggested that he had had enough to drink to appreciate simple sentences. “That's her job, Donny. She's a major crime squad detective. Murder is a major crime. Brian Grose was murdered at the cemetery. She's asking everybody questions, including people who work there. You work there.”

“I told her to get lost.”

“What did you do that for?”

“She was bugging me.”

Wide Greg, ever-wary of information he should be able to deny knowledge of under oath, sauntered to the Sherman end of his bar to polish a vodka bottle, and I asked Donny, quietly. “Do you have an alibi that will stick?”

“Not one I'm giving to her.”

“Donny, she can make your life awful.”

“I didn't shoot that freakin' yuppie!”

“You might have to prove that.”

“That's crazy!” Donny bellowed, turning redder and pounding the bar. “I'm not a killer.”

I glanced up-bar at Greg, who looked pleased that nothing Donny had shouted could not be repeated happily in court. “You got any coffee?” I asked. Greg poured some black in a mug from the pot he had going for himself. I walked to it, got it, and walked back.

“Donny. You know you're not a killer. I know you're not a killer. But they don't know you're not a killer, and they are looking for a killer—or at least someone they can convince a jury is a killer.”

“You don't understand, Ben. I don't take that crap from anybody.”

“She was just doing her job.”

“Like I was telling Greg. Didn't I tell you Greg? I don't take crap from anybody.”

Wide Greg was very good at ignoring such questions.

Donny asked me, “What are they bugging me for? I'll tell you why. I'll tell both you and Greg why.”

“What about me?” Sherman called down the bar.

“I'll tell all a ya. They're bugging me ‘cause they can't find that goddamned wetback.”

I put down my mug. “Donny you keep talking about friends of mine in ways that aren't, shall we say, respectful.”

“The wetback is your friend?”

“He worked for Jay. He's a good kid.”

“So why doesn't he turn himself in?”

“So why don't you answer Detective Boyce's question?”

“Because I didn't do nothing—Greg! Another beer!”

“I don't think so,” said Greg.

“What?” Donny half rose from his stool. “Are you cutting me off?”

“Yes.”

I said, “Donny, let me drive you home.”

Donny got redder in the face. He started to set his jaw. Then his eyes went a little fuzzy and his cheeks a little slack and he said, “Oh come on, guys.”

“Toss me your keys,” Greg said conversationally. “I'll get one of the boys to drop your car off later.”

Donny stood there a moment, swaying on the rungs of his stool. “Do I owe you anything?”

“You're fine.” This was not kindness. The White Birch was pay as you go until Greg extended a dispensation as rare as one papal.

As I walked Donny out I said to Sherman Chevalley, “I got to talk to you. I'll buy you a beer when I get back.”

“Buy me one now so I'll stay.”

“Greg,” I called, “A beer for my cousin, please.”

Instead of saying thank you to me, Sherman looked Donny in the face and said, “Pussy.”

“What did you say?” asked Donny.

“Pussy. Takin' all that crap.”

I got quickly between them and said, “Back off, Sherman.”

My cousin, a man of few words, immediately threw a punch, which I slipped while managing to kick his feet out from under him. He landed on his back with a crash that shook the building and laughed. “You see that, Greg? The kid's growing up.”

Knowing Sherman too well, I was backing away as fast as I could, though not fast enough. Sherman sprang quick as a cobra, wasting a mere giga-second to pick up a bar stool to swing at my head. But if Sherman was a cobra, Wide Greg was a broad-shouldered barrel-chested mongoose. If you were to gather a hundred warring Hells Angels, Pagans, Mongols, and Devils Disciples in a parking lot, the rivals would all agree on one thing: Wide Greg was the fastest biker-bar proprietor on the planet.

His sawed off baseball bat materialized in his hand. Before Sherman could hit me with the stool, he went down for the second time in two breaths, popped hard, but not so hard as to be concussed thanks to Wide Greg's fine-tuned sense of proportion. Flat on his back, holding his head, groaning, his eyes grew large with terror. For how many weeks would Wide Greg bar him from the White Birch? How many long, lonely nights would pass alone with the History Channel?

But Wide Greg did nothing to excess. Order restored, justice dispensed, he slipped his bat back in its scabbard of PVC pipe nailed under the bar, picked up a towel, and resumed polishing.

I walked Donny out to my car.

He looked around blearily. “What is this piece of crap?”

“Rented from Pink. Put on your seat belt.”

I got him home and up his front steps, in the door and up the stairs to his bedroom. When I came back down, his mother, a white-haired lady in her seventies with whom he moved in after his last divorce, was in the front parlor wiping her hands on dishtowel. “Oh it's you. Hello Ben. Donny okay?”

“Touch of flu.”

She looked at me. “Yes, it's going around this summer.”

Mercy Mission accomplished, I went back to the White Birch where I found Sherman yawning over a new beer. “What was all that about?” I asked. “What were you on Donny's case for?”

Sherman shrugged.

“And why'd you take a swing me? Donny's your pal, I'm your cousin. What's going on?”

“Stressed, man.”

“Over what?”

“Stress.”

“You're stressed out by stress?”

“Big joke. You'd be stressed too.”

“Parole officer on your case?”

“Naw. He don't have anything on me…Nothin' that'll stick.” He glanced over at Greg polishing and lowered his voice. “Thing is, man, somebody's leaning on me.”

“Who?” I asked, wondering who would dare.

“I don't know.”

“Well, what do you mean leaning?”

“Tried to kill me.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“Someone's trying to kill you and you have no idea who it is?”

“Nope.”

I looked at him. He looked back.

Sherman was a first class liar. His vast arsenal of mendacity had been honed in prison where congenital prowess takes on a professional edge. It made him an excellent judge of character and a keen observer of motive. I did not doubt that someone was trying to kill him. Several of the worlds he inhabited could generate enemies; some, for sure, who regarded death as an appropriate closing argument. But I did doubt that he didn't know who.

“Something from inside?”

“Naw. I didn't have any problems inside.”

That I believed. Sherman was just too ornery for fellow prisoners to bully and too anti-social to hook up with a gang.

“So how'd they try to kill you?”

“Hack-sawed the brake cables on the Harley.”

“Are you sure?”

“You'd be sure if you lost both brakes doing 90 on Route 7, came round a bend, and found a semi jackknifed across both lanes.”

“How come it didn't work?”

“What do mean?”

“You're still living.”

“Oh. Yeah, well there's more than one way to skin a cat.”

“How'd you stop?”

“Couldn't stop.”

“Then what happened?”

“I went under him.”

“How?”

“Slid.”

I tried to picture Sherman and seven-hundred pounds of motorcycle sliding sideways under a trailer truck like a runner stealing second base. Failing, I asked, “How did you pull out of the slide?”

“Got lucky,” said Sherman.

“So you're still a little shaken up.”

“I ain't shaken up.”

“You just said you were stressed.”

“I'm stressed, ‘cause I don't know what he's plannin' next.”

“Did you tell Ollie?”

“Yeah, right. Tell Ollie.”

“Could I see the cables?”

“Already changed them out.”

“Where'd you put the broken ones?”

“On the junk pile.”

“Let's have a look.”

“You don't believe me?” Sherman asked dangerously.

“I want to see for myself.”

We said good-bye to Wide Greg and drove to Sherman's junk pile which contained enough parts to build half of many vehicles and machines. It was in and around the sagging barn behind his mother's house trailer. Any Chevalley worth his name had a heap like it, though rarely as deep. Sherman's had been started by his grandfather, who had inherited items from
his
grandfather, so that the green 1975 Jeep pickup front fender visible under a defunct cement mixer represented a mid point in a buried time line that probably originated with a chrome bumper from a ‘37 De Soto. We found his discarded Harley brake cables tangled in a coil of copper cable that looked suspiciously like a grid element strung between poles to transmit electricity. “Aren't you taking a chance keeping this ‘scrap?' What if Connecticut Light and Power comes looking?”