Mausoleum (9 page)

“I gotta sit on it. Copper just took a nosedive. Goddamned commodity speculators, biggest thieves on the planet.”

We untangled the Harley cables and had a look in the daylight. There were three lines, two for the front brake calipers, one for the rear. Sherman showed me where they had snapped. If it were only one I would have suggested they just broke from wear. But all three had broken. “See this little nick?” said Sherman. “That's where they cut it—you see here's the cut, here's the break. And look at this scrape. The saw slipped, and he went back and finished here. Right?”

“You really ought to show this to Ollie.”

“I'll handle this myself.”

I asked how, if he didn't know who was after him. But there was no talking to Sherman when he made his mind up. I was quite sure that he knew exactly who had done it. I asked again who it might be, but he still wouldn't tell me, so all I could say, “If I were you I'd keep my eyes open.”

Sherman yawned and pressed large fingers to his temples. “Man, my head hurts.” Then he changed the subject. “Wha'd you want to talk about?”

“Remember Sunday you had the gas engine at the Notables?”

“Notables?”

“In the Cemetery.”

“Sure. I had the saw, too. Really cool. Did you hear that sucker screaming?”

“Sherman. The guy was killed. Remember? Shot? In the mausoleum?”

“Yeah? What about him?”

“You were there, early. Right. Setting up the engine?”

“And the saw. I figure they shot him when I had the saw running loud. You think?”

“I don't know. Steve Greenan told me he was maybe dead longer than that.” Steve was a retired doctor who worked part time as an assistant medical examiner. Aunt Connie having helped him pay for medical school, and he, having attended my mother and father, and delivered me, Doc Greenan was generous with information. “Sherman, did you notice anybody at the mausoleum?”

“I saw the guy who got shot. Freaking yuppie who gave Donny Butler a hard time.”

“You saw Brian Grose go inside?”

“Yeah.”

“Alone?”

“Yeah.”

“What time?”

“I don't know. Right after I got there.”

“What time was that?”

“About ten.”

“So you're saying Brian Gross went inside around ten in the morning?”

“About.”

“Did you see anyone else?”

“Latino dude was hanging out.”

“Charlie Cubrero?”

“I don't know one of them from the other.”

“Did you tell the cops?”

“I don't talk to cops.”

I said, “Sherman, please stop bullshitting me. You're on parole. When the cops questioned you they surely reminded you that you are on parole, and they probably leaned very hard on you to tell them what you saw being there early. What did you tell them? You must have told them something just to get them off your back.”

“I told them I saw a Latino dude.”

“Did they show you a picture?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you recognize the guy in the picture.”

“Nope.”

“You told them nope, or you didn't recognize the guy?”

“I told them nope I didn't recognize the guy.”

“Did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Recognize the guy.”

“Nope.”

“So it wasn't Charlie.”

“I don't know Charlie.”

“Works for Jay.”

“I never looked at him.”

“So you didn't give the police a positive ID?”

“I couldn't have dropped a dime on the guy if I wanted to. I didn't see his face.”

“How'd you know he was Latino?”

“Stood like one—little guy, you know how they stand, low to the ground, but kind of loose like they could move real fast if they had to. Strong little bastards, too. You ever seen them lift stone? Those little guys are something else.”

“Sherman let me pop a thought on you. Is it possible that whoever you saw hanging around the cemetery wants to knock you off before you tell the cops you saw him?”

“No way, man. No way! I told you, I didn't see him.”

“What if he thinks you did?”

“Then he's got his head up his ass. Later, Ben, I gotta get some sleep.”

***

I drove to Grace Botsford's office to ask her if she could try to talk sense to Donny Butler who had worked for the Cemetery Association since high school.

Inside, the Botsford Insurance Agency office was a wonderful throwback to the days before plastic and Formica. It had paneled walls, heavy rails supported by turned balusters, and etched glass in the wooden doors. Behind the railing was a magnificent quartered-oak and rosewood partners desk that Scupper McKay would have bid his eye teeth for if the antique cops weren't on his trail. Grace sat at it, alone, eying a pair of sleek, black flat-screen monitors as she typed on a keyboard on a low table beside the desk.

Gerard Botsford cast a thin, knowing smile down from a oil portrait of the two of them in business attire standing in front of that same desk. Grace wore the same smile in the painting and on her present face as she stood and extended her hand. Their smiles said, “Life is unpredictable, but you can count on Botsford Insurance. Just don't miss any premiums.”

Grace did not seem surprised that Donny Butler would strike a self-destructive posture with the cops.

“Dad always said that two circumstances shaped the Yankee character. Donny is an example inscribed in stone: fixedness and resistance. Fixedness because for three-hundred-and-forty years after the boat landed at Plymouth Rock, most New Englanders moved West. Those whom the pioneers left behind represent three and a half centuries of inertia.”

“I don't know about that, Grace. I mean I'm still here. You're still here. We're not inert.”

“No, you're wrong about that,” she said with the same purposeful single-mindedness that she had dismissed Brian's lame jokes in Lorraine's video. It was not that she was humorless, but utterly absorbed and completely confident in her opinion. “We went off to college. We saw the larger world. We chose to return for whatever reason.” She blinked, looked a bit surprised for a moment as trying to recall her reason to return. Then she laughed. “Dad was absolutely spot on. If it weren't for immigrant Irish, Italians, Poles, and Portuguese, the entire region would have reverted to forest.”

She held up two fingers like an umpire counting strikes. “The second and more important facet of Yankee character is resistance. What Dad called, ‘Dodging the Puritans.'

“We started as a strictly-managed theocracy. For generations, the Puritans and their blue-nose predecessors ruled—organizing, writing the laws, enforcing ordinances, implementing an entire way of life—demanding by law and example that everyone behave like them. Human beings being human beings—a favorite phrase of Dad's—many resisted. An anti-Puritan, anti-establishment culture took hold from the day after Plymouth Rock. Resistance was bred and re-bred among those who remained for twelve generations. That's why a real Yankee would rather put one over on you than do a good job.”

“Pretty harsh, Grace,” I said with a smile, because it rang kind of true.

“Not at all. It's part of the game. It's how people maintain their dignity.” She named a carpenter I knew, a craftsman who took pride in his skills, yet always found a way to screw up a job, whether by disappearing in the middle of it or introducing an exotic new material that he knew in his heart would not work as well as old-reliable wood.

I argued back with the names of electricians who did precision work.

“They have to or the house will burn down,” said Grace. “But have you ever met an electrician who wasn't at least slightly psychotic?” Again, I could not deny a ring of truth. Both of us, she selling insurance and I selling houses, butted up against the material world on a daily basis. She named plumbers who would find any excuse to tear out a ceiling while hunting for a leak, and couldn't leave a job happy until at least two rooms looked like Baghdad.

“Bet you can't tar stone masons with that brush. At least not always.”

“Stone masons are sometimes the exception,” Grace admitted. “Ours is a harsh climate. Anything but stone will rot.”

“Frost will kill a wall.”

“Not a good one. The masons know that they're not bucking the establishment. They're vying with weather and each other. And physics. Masons love physics.”

“It doesn't fit farmers, either. They work too hard.”

“What happens if you're driving down the road at the speed limit and a farmer is coming out of his driveway in a pickup truck?”

“He pulls out right in front of me, and then drives fifteen miles under the limit. But the truck is old or he's old and—.”

“What happens when you come to a straight where you could pass?”

“The farmer speeds up. Okay, but—”

“Do you recall what Scooter and you did at the General Store when you were ten years old?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. When Gordon Williams installed the new Coca Cola machine?”

“I only stood lookout. Scooter did it. Oh, my god, I'd completely forgotten.”

Grace said, “As I heard it, Scooter had figured a way to pry two bottles out of the old machine for one coin, but you couldn't do it to the new one.”

“We spent the entire summer sneaking in there trying to fox the machine. That second bottle just stayed locked. One day Scooter figured out all he had to do was pop the cap off and suck it up with a long straw. You win, Grace. Yankees are perverse.”

“Not perverse. Resistant.”

“How'd you hear about that, by the way?”

“Gordon Williams told Dad he billed Scooter's father for every bottle.”

“Will you talk to Donny?”

Grace stood up and called to her Jeannie, “I'll be back.” To me she said, “I'll stop by his house, call on his mother—we'll double-team him.”

I walked home, pondering what next.

I knew that I really ought to put some time into investigating who exactly Brian Grose was: what anomalies in his life might have led to his murder, what enemies he had made. The means of doing that offered a secondary pleasantry of having an excuse to see Lorraine Renner. I continued up Main to her house.

She came to her door with her hair wild and looking mad as hell. “Oh. It's you. Hi. Come in!”

“What's wrong?”

“I have just had a visit from the goddamned cops, and I am really pissed.”

“What happened.”

“That bitch practically threatened to arrest me if I didn't hand over my tapes.”

“What tapes.”

“From shooting Scooter at the Notables.”

“Was this cop a State Police Detective-Lieutenant named Boyce?”

“Bitch.”

“Actually, she's kind of a good friend of mine.”

“That's your problem.”

“She probably wants to scan the tapes for witnesses and suspects.”

“Well she could have been a little nicer about it.”

“I think she's under the gun. There's a lot of pressure from Immigration, and I got the impression”—I wanted to say this carefully, without giving anything Marian had entrusted to me—“that she's feeling backed into a corner. I gotta tell you, she's really a good person. You would like her under different circumstances.”

“What's up? What did you come over for?”

“I'm trying to remember something you told me about Brian's film.”

“My film about Brian.”

“Right. You said you had to fill it out with a waiter and a ski instructor or something.”

“His driver.”

“Because you dropped some material?”

“He changed his mind about having family in the film.”

“That's it. Had you already shot family?”

“Oh God, yeah. I was down there for three days getting bit by chiggers.”

“Down where?”

“Arkansas. I stayed at his brother's. They were good people.”

“Could I see what you shot?”

“All I've got is partially-edited raw footage.”

“Could you show it to me?”

“I'll set you up at a screen. I'm busy. I've got to do other stuff.” She opened a file drawer and fished out a couple of mini DV tapes. “Here. Actually, it's kind of cool. Very WPA Okie-project, if you know what I mean.”

What she meant was that Brian's family were small time cotton farmers in the Arkansas Delta. She had shot beautiful scenes of machinery crossing land as flat as the ocean and truly wonderful portrait-quality shots of Brian's cousins and brothers dressed in khaki work clothes with their shirts buttoned to the throat. The young were reddened by the sun. The older brown and crinkly-eyed. They looked into Lorraine's camera with polite, indulgent expressions that seemed to say, “Don't know why you all are wasting video tape on me, but if that's what you want, Ma'am, you all go right ahead.”

His oldest brother was named Chance. He led Lorraine on a tour of the farm where they had grown up. The frame house, which looked sun-faded and wind-battered on the treeless field, had been converted to migrant worker housing. An overgrown kitchen garden was surrounded by broken picket fences, but they still kept machinery on the place. “House was six hundred square foot.” said Chance. “Tractor shed and shop are almost six thousand.”

Chance's new house up a dirt road was only a little bigger than the old. His pickup truck was beat up. But the tractor, which was about eight times bigger than any in Newbury and carried chemical tanks big as Volkswagens on front and back, looked brand new, as did a huge large backhoe and a two-story tall cotton picker.

“Does Brian visit?” I heard Lorraine ask off camera.

“Yes, Ma'am. He come by, three-four years back.”

“What's it like when you visit him?”