A Pinchbeck Bride (6 page)

“I thought that was just a legend.”

“So do most scholars. But Genevieve was convinced that the monstrance—and the rest of the silver—existed. Exists.”

Was that the subject of the school project she’d wanted to show me on the evening I’d found her murdered?

His voice grew hard as cloisonné: “You’ve thought of something. What is it?”

I wouldn’t tell him, of course. “Genevieve was a bit of a romantic, don’t you think? I mean, she had that cameo fetish. She’d hit the thrift shops and antique stores. She actually told me she’d like to live in the past. That’s pretty unusual for a young person.”

“So you think she was a fool whose opinions have no consequence.” He was growing soberer by the minute.

“I didn’t say that.”

“Genevieve Courson was very much a realist. My God, I should know.”

“You weren’t at her funeral.”

The potent insult didn’t faze him in the least. “I was cowardly. Afraid. If I’d met her father, I was afraid…of what I might do.” He’d realized I’d noticed the crude heart, his tattoo, and, caressing his right arm, covered it with his left hand. “
I could have strangled him
.”

That certainly was an interesting response. I would let him volunteer the details, to see if they matched Fletcher’s. Of course the father was in some sort of trouble, but was he a sex offender?

“He’s a pedophile, the old man. Genevieve always denied it, defended him, but he enjoyed photographing little girls in salacious positions. Some high school girl was having her photograph taken. For her yearbook. Old man Courson put his hand up her skirt. He claimed he was ‘posing’ her. Odious.”

This was new, but it backed up Fletcher’s version.

“Genevieve’s mother was going to leave him. She’d had it with his…predilections. Then she got sick, she got breast cancer. She was too busy dying to get divorced.”

To cooperate a bit, I responded truthfully about the royal silver rumor. “No one at Mingo House takes the monstrance story seriously. It’s…a legend.”

“Really?”

That comforted him somehow. “You’ll excuse me, Mr. Winslow. I’ve been under a great strain.” He rose.

I had to ask him the obvious question: “Do you have any idea who killed Genevieve?”

“None. None whatsoever.”

“Does the name Fletcher Coombs mean anything to you?”

“It does not.” When he had escorted me to the door and closed it, I counted one, two, three deadbolt locks that he drew. I’d neglected to pay for my dinner. That could be my excuse if I wished to contact him in the future.

Chapter Ten

There was no way I could determine whether Genevieve Courson was pregnant. The details of her murder in the media and the brief descriptions of her autopsy made no mention of a fetus or its possible father. But all of the friends in Genevieve’s circle portrayed her as a young woman with a good deal more drama than the average “coed.”

Was there a possibility the father of Genevieve’s child could have been someone other than Bryce Rossi, perhaps even his dead “rival,” Zack Meecham? The college community was in the process of disbanding for the summer. If I was going to investigate Zack’s life, I had to do it soon. It was already June. So I headed “across the river” to Cambridge.

It was commencement week at Harvard, and Tercentenary Theatre was filled with hundreds of gray folding chairs and its trees hung with loudspeakers, cables, and crimson banners bearing the insignia of the university’s individual schools—bewildering the squirrels doing their trapeze act amid all this new paraphernalia. Throngs of graduates carried red-sheathed diplomas as they tried to act blasé while showing their families the Yard and posing for photographs with the John Harvard statue. Some visitors were rubbing John’s bullion-gold left foot for good luck.

My goal was Boylston House, with its white bell tower crowned by a cobalt-blue dome and courtyards cooled by venerable trees. This dormitory pretended to date from colonial times but was actually constructed during the Depression. Zack Meecham had lived here as a tutor, in close proximity with the students. Surely someone, feeling the wistfulness and nostalgia of the ending of his undergraduate career, would be willing to reminisce about this young scholar, killed in such an untimely manner.

Getting into Boylston House on this day of chaos and good-byes was easy. I just trailed along with the tide of families, all focused on their star graduate. I found myself in a common room not unlike such spaces at my prep school, with wallpaper murals of the Revolutionary War, saggy furniture, and a flat-screen TV. Many college-age young people were milling about, but, when asked, they proved to be siblings and cousins of students. Then I found an Indian girl from the subcontinent who confessed she was a senior, graduating and going to medical school in the fall. She knew Zack Meecham only by sight, but pointed to a trim blonde woman in a hot-pink Oxford cloth shirt, khaki pants, and espadrilles. “That’s his, um, widow.”

I certainly didn’t expect this Ivy League Casanova would be married—and to such a prim and preppie spouse. Her clothing appeared ironed and starched, as though she never sat down and risked a wrinkle. She was holding a clipboard, helping a family negotiate a trunk down some challenging steps. “A little to the right and you’ll be fine. Well, Susan, the very best of luck.”

“Thanks so much, Mrs. Meecham,” the slightly weepy girl managed to say.

“Mrs. Meecham?” I asked.

She turned with her eyebrows raised, her kiwifruit-green eyes aglitter.

“My name is Mark Winslow. I was a friend of a student I believe your husband mentored. From Shawmut College, Genevieve Courson.”

Her tone had less warmth than a Baffin Island winter. “She had friends? How extraordinary.” She had the debutante diction you might first think was British; it was that crisp and clipped.

“Well, I worked with her at Mingo House.”

She simply stared, a basilisk in a pageboy haircut.

I had to spend all my capital. “I was the person who found her dead.”

She had the frozen expression of a much older woman who’s had too many facelifts, whose stiffened skin becomes a kind of desert, without emotion. But she was 28 at most. “All I can say is good riddance. Good riddance.”

“I’m just curious about the murder—”

“Hers or my husband’s? I consider Genevieve Courson responsible for my husband’s death. She’d harassed him for months, with phone calls and intimidation. She’d harassed him in the most public, inopportune places, in class, on the subway, on his motorcycle. And being sweet-natured, Zack always forgave her. For what, in my mind, was unforgivable.”

She stepped toward me, a bit too close. “There is no doubt, in my mind, that Genevieve Courson caused my husband’s crash by her own actions. She pulled his hands off the controls—she had done it before—and killed him.”

Her claim was so extraordinary that I found myself shaking my head.

“Oh, you doubt me, do you? Well, she could be charm itself. Why, when I first met her, I thought she was wonderful too.”

The Indian student now returned. “Mrs. Meecham, is there a dolly we can use?”

“I’ll show you.”

Surely, now, I would lose her, but she told me, “Don’t go away.”

When she returned, she led me up a slate-floored staircase to her apartment. Scattered throughout the quarters were photographs of Zack, a bearded man with one unbroken, caterpillar of an eyebrow and a high-wattage grin: with his wife at a red-lacquered Shinto shrine, outside Westminster Abbey, in a drenched orange windbreaker while whitewater rafting. She served us tart, homemade lemonade.

“I apologize for the outburst. It’s just that I can’t discuss this with the students and my colleagues have heard it ad infinitum. But it still hurts. She tried to kill Zack twice, first his reputation and then physically.

“Zack tried to be a mentor to any student who needed it. And God knows Genevieve was a needy girl. She was a veritable black hole of need. Zack had a hard time saying No, and, when he did, that little parasite wouldn’t take No for an answer.”

“How did your husband meet Genevieve?”

“At a lecture on nineteenth-century urban planning. Here at Harvard. It was free and open to the public. I was there. Genevieve was in her Goth phase, with lots of piercings, black eye shadow, dressed in black. The Columbine look. Very prophetic, considering what happened.

“She asked a number of intelligent questions about the filling of the Back Bay, how it was transformed from a marsh into a neighborhood, the construction of various houses by speculators…We all went out for espressos afterward, Zack, me, a couple of other students. Genevieve asked for Zack’s e-mail and, foolishly, he gave it to her. Big Mistake Number One.

“Then she dropped in during his office hours and invited herself to dinner here at the House. Zack gave her permission to audit a few of his lectures, in ‘Post-Civil War America.’ That’s when she really glommed onto him.

“She was from a troubled family. Her father was a sex offender and her mother had just died of breast cancer. She had a boyfriend she’d nicknamed Nosferatu. We never saw him. She was trying to dump him.”

“Do you know the boyfriend’s real name?”

She shook her head. “Sorry.”

“You say she tried to kill Zack twice, his reputation—”

“She implied Zack had made a pass at her, put his hand up her skirt. She was a liar, a scheming little liar. When Zack tried to shake her off, she spread lies, harassed him in person and via e-mail. ‘If you don’t see me, I’ll tell everyone everything you’ve done.’

“Then, once, when he gave her a ride on his motorcycle, she tried to pull his hands off the handlebars, one day on Memorial Drive. She almost made Zack hit a truck.”

“The time he died—”

“There was a party in Jamaica Plain for a historian from NYU. Zack went and Genevieve showed up. She had a way of weaseling into parties. I had a strep throat and stayed home. It was a miserable night, rainy, the roads were slick. Genevieve needed a ride home. She had an exam the next day. She and Zack were the only two sober people at the party. Zack lost control of his motorcycle on the Jamiacaway. He hit the tree and died instantly.” She paused, glanced toward a photograph of her and Zack as a bride and groom outside what might have been Memorial Church at Harvard.

Then the vehemence returned to her voice: “It was her, I know it. She must have asked him for something and when he refused, she fought him, hit him, made him lose control. She should have died in that crash, not my husband.”

She had discussed her suspicions with the police, but couldn’t prove them. The evidence at the scene, the marks the tires had scored on the asphalt, the motorcycle wreckage, and the tree, provided no clues regarding a fight between the driver and passenger. Neither Zack nor Genevieve had been drinking, as confirmed by tests, via breathalyzer and the autopsy…This traumatized woman had been extraordinarily open in discussing her painful past, so much so that I hesitated to ask any more questions, except one: “Was Zack at all familiar with Mingo House?”

“He was involved with the Victorian Society of Boston. On a purely informal level. He’d go to their programs. I think they had a lecture at Mingo House once. On the spiritualist movement in the wake of the Civil War. All those widows desperate to contact their dead husbands.” Here, finally, her voice faltered. “You’ll have to excuse me, Mr. Winslow. Commencement makes for a long and emotional day.”

Just talking about Genevieve Courson exhausted people. What could it have been like to know her well?

Chapter Eleven

In the wake of the murder, attendance at Mingo House tripled. People asked the same questions, again and again: “Is that the room where the murder happened?” “Was the Victorian Girl found in that chair?” “Can you stay here overnight?” We actually trained three extra docents to handle the crowds. The
Boston Globe
named Mingo House one of the region’s ten best house museums;
The Early Show
did a segment on it. Nadia Gulbenkian kept hounding us all about the need to raise funds for the restoration of the roof, but Rudy kept fobbing her off, saying we needed a second opinion on the matter, and that all the architects were already out of town, summering on the Vineyard or Nantucket. Plus, the party in August, the fundraising bash, “An Evening with the Mingoes,” in planning now for two years, would be a time to alert the public to our needs…

The second week of June, Rudy Schmitz telephoned just as Roberto and I were taking a post-coital shower. Rudy invited me to his home on Beacon Hill for “an informal brainstorming session. Seven sharp tomorrow evening.” When I asked whether any other trustees were going to attend, he flattered me by saying, “Only the best and the brightest.”

It turned out Rudy owned a townhouse on Mount Vernon Street, all mellow rose brick with black shutters, blossoming window boxes, and a granite stoop sporting its original boot scraper. I rapped the knocker, a gleaming brass crab. Rudy gave me a kiss on my mouth: “Welcome!” I could taste the nicotine that sustained him, helped him achieve his slender physique.

The interior of the house shocked me: it had been gutted like the carcass of a steer in a slaughterhouse—to yield an off-white shell composed around a spiraling modernistic iron staircase. Above the red marble fireplace was a Warhol silkscreen of a sexy young Rudy with dreamy, lavender-smudged eyes and naked shoulders. A massive saltwater aquarium contained bored-looking fish gliding among fan coral and seaweed.

“Please don’t hate me. This house was a ruin when I bought it. The termites had been running rampant for years.”

I had come to this meeting in a blue blazer and tie, but Rudy was the most casual I’d ever seen him, in a workingman’s undershirt and black denim shorts with lots of pockets with Velcro flaps. He was hairier than I’d expected, with wide bony feet pink with bunions. He must just have removed his shoes. He led me through a high-tech kitchen, outside, to an intimate garden where Jon Kim waited, in nothing but orange surfer’s jams splashed with white, Hawaiian-style flowers. Jon laughed self-consciously.

“Jon, this is a surprise.”

Jon had the muscular chest I’d imagined, so defined it might have been molded plastic.

“We’ve played hooky today. We went down to Horseneck Beach. The ocean was like bathwater.”

This revelation made Jon laugh a little more, even less convincingly. He hadn’t removed his wedding ring, but I couldn’t help wonder if he and Rudy were conducting a little fling, knowing gay Asians often admire older men. And Jon had been recruited to the Mingo House board by Rudy Schmitz. Had he been “recruited” into Rudy’s bed as well?

I took one of the canvas-backed director’s chairs all marked “RUDY.” Rudy had made chicken-salad sandwiches and offered me a bottle of Sam Adams summer ale. “I met Jon at the opening of Tank.” Rudy twisted the cap from a fresh Sam Adams. “His company was scouting for a place to hold their Diversity Day party.”

“What an, um, incredible place. The aquarium in Rudy’s living room was
the small one
from Tank. Pretty amazing.” Jon removed the toothpick from his chicken-salad sandwich and took an extra-large bite from it, perhaps to excuse him from further conversation.

Rudy was staring at Jon’s chest with what could only be described as lust. “Jon is on board with me. With my feelings about Mingo House. We both believe it isn’t
sustainable
as a museum.”

Jon swallowed, took a deep draught of his ale, and coughed. “Unsustainable. Yeah.”

“Jon, I thought you said we needed a major fundraising campaign, going after grants, that sort of thing…Wasn’t that why you asked for my help to begin with, Rudy?”

“That was before we got the news about the roof.” Rudy made a steeple out of his hands, joined them together in a pseudo-pious gesture. “The roof situation is seismic, Mark, seismic.”

“But we’ve had a record number of people flocking to Mingo House. Thanks to poor Genevieve Courson. Mingo House is known…around the world. We had a TV crew from Bulgaria there last week.”

Jon rippled his pectorals as he fidgeted in his chair. He focused his gaze on a bed of begonias flourishing against one of the walls delineating the garden. “That flurry of people won’t last, of course. And the original records of the house suggest that it had substantial structural issues, right from the beginning. The foundation has buckled. Which wasn’t alluded to in the architects’ report.”

I had purposely consumed as little ale as possible, since this was, purportedly, a business meeting. “It sounds like you two have written Mingo House off. Like you’re ready to call in the bulldozers.”

“There’s no need to sound like Nadia, Mark,” Rudy said. “The building can be used for other purposes. If massive renovations take place.” Then Rudy rambled on, quoting great slabs of copy from the architects’ report, as if savoring the details about the dire state of Mingo House, how the brownstone used in the house matched that used in Arlington Street Church, a stone quarried in New Jersey that became all the rage before it proved wretchedly unstable…“Perhaps there
is
a curse on the old place, who knows?”

Was Rudy coveting Mingo House as real estate? Had his developer’s greed already converted it into a club, restaurant, or condominium? Gutted like his own house, of course.

“The collection—the furniture and artifacts—can be donated to the Museum of Fine Arts.” Rudy reached out and almost touched Jon’s knee in the intimate gesture of a sexual partner, then censored himself.

“Why would the MFA want the things in Mingo House? They’re pretty mundane. It’s their being together—the intact state of the household items after all these years—that makes it unique. Will the MFA want the soapstone sinks in the basement or Clara Mingo’s sewing and cribbage board? Come on!…And you’re still having the party in August.’

“Well, that’s been planned for so long.”

I’d rattled them both—the atmosphere had become taut—I was the serpent in Rudy Schmitz’s garden. Rudy passed Jon another chicken-salad sandwich without offering me any. “I heard you went to Genevieve’s funeral,” he said to me.

“How did you know?”

“Nadia told me.”

“Why was she there?”

“She’s ubiquitous. Like ragweed…I wish I could have gone. I had an important financial meeting.”

Jon Kim now directed the conversation away from anything to do with delicate matters. “You live quite nearby, Mark. Is that correct?”

“I’m just on the other side of the Public Garden.”

“Do you live with a partner?”

“Yes, he’s a law student.”

“Mark is taken, Jon.” Rudy sounded jealous.

“You’re married, aren’t you?” I asked Jon.

Rudy answered for him: “He’s in transition.”

“Speaking of which, I should be off.” I consumed the last of my chicken-salad sandwich, and Jon said, “I should be off also. I’ll walk out with you.”

Rudy didn’t object, but accompanied us as Jon fetched his beach things from the kitchen; these included, I noticed, a sage Ralph Lauren polo shirt, three sandy towels, aviator sunglasses with silver lenses, French tanning cream, and, to his chagrin, a box of Trojan condoms that had the audacity to drop onto the floor. “You’re such a butterfingers,” Rudy chided him, as Jon snapped up the condoms, turned and pulled on his polo shirt. Jon made the move and embraced Rudy, who responded by tousling his hair.

Outside, Jon said, “Rudy is a wonderful guy.”

“You would know.”

“He’s such a Renaissance man.” Jon tripped on an uneven brick in the sidewalk, and then walked ramrod-straight. “We’re just friends.”

Do “friends” bring condoms on jaunts to the beach? I forced him to fill the silence, let it hang in the air.

“My wife and I are separating. It’s a long story, but she wants to relocate to Silicon Valley. She’s getting a promotion.”

“So were you a regular at Tank?”

“Once in a while. It wasn’t my scene. Too much Ecstacy, a little too fast. I was just becoming…self-aware.”

“Does Rudy have any suspicions as to why Genevieve Courson was killed at Mingo House?”

“No, I’m sure he’s as baffled as the rest of us. She was a bright, promising young girl—so I’ve heard.” At that moment, he found his fog-gray Audi, parked in front of Chill on Charles Street. I almost asked him to have a gelato and talk further. Now that he was leaving, he again became his formal, corporate self: “It was great to speak with you, Mark.”

I never use the expression, but it came out anyway: “Take care.”