Death at Charity's Point (9 page)

Charlie and I play golf together weekly, as our schedules permit. I’ve envied his stable marriage, his home where he tucks his kids in every night, and the way he can hit a high, controlled fade that always seems to end up on the fairway.

He professes to envy my independence, the sex life he imagines I live, my income, and my long, wild hooks that generally sail fifty or sixty yards beyond his.

Charlie is just about my best friend, and he has been for twenty years. Ever since our years in New Haven. He gives good advice when I ask for it. And he knows when not to give any advice at all. Best of all, he listens to me talk, and somehow talking with him makes things clearer for me even when he says nothing.

“It was strange,” I said to him as we walked toward the eighteenth tee, the match now officially his. “They all seemed to be projecting their own self-images onto George Gresham, somehow. The Headmaster saw him as a great academic, the Dean as mysterious and inscrutable, the coach as tough, and the pretty little Latin teacher from Des Moines as a scared, lonely man far from home.”

“Seems natural enough,” said Charlie. “My honor, right?”

“Of course it is,” I said. “And then there was the kid in the guerrilla suit, spouting some kind of fascist bullshit, and those sweet little girls yelling ‘fuck’ and their anger just oozing out of them.”

“Yeah. Survivalists, sounds like,” he said. “Now hush up, there. I gotta concentrate on this shot.”

Charlie stepped up to the ball, wagged his club once, and whacked his standard high fade into the middle of the fairway.

“Good hit.”

“Yup. Listen, Brady, me boy. Haven’t you got anything better to do than run around talking to people about some dead guy? That your idea of practicing law?”

I teed up my ball. “It’s a living.”

My big hook managed to stay in the fairway. “You do that regularly,” said Charlie, “and you wouldn’t be buying the beers all the time.”

I ignored his comment. “It seemed,” I said, picking up my bag and following him toward our balls, “like a closed little world there. No one really said anything. They were all nice enough, and cooperative—all except the play director. But they didn’t tell me a damn thing. I got the feeling that there was more there than met the eye, you know?”

“A conspiracy of silence?”

“Yeah, kinda.”

“More likely you got what there was,” he said.

“You’re probably right. Still, I’ve got to satisfy Florence.”

“Like I said, that’s a funny piece of work for an attorney. Yale Law, no less.”

“Yeah, well, it keeps me in Big Macs,” I replied, perhaps a bit defensively.

I had been putting off calling Florence. It was several days after my discussion with Dr. Clapp and my visit to The Ruggles School before I asked Julie to ring the Gresham estate in Beverly Farms. Charlie’s assessment of my work still lingered in my brain, and I had to contend with the realization that I couldn’t disagree with him. This task that Florence Gresham had set for me did not seem worthy, somehow, of a man with a degree from Yale Law School.

Florence’s familiar voice rasped, “Well? What’d you find out?”

I summarized quickly what Dr. Clapp had told me and what I had surmised from my visit to the school.

“You think it adds up, then,” she said.

“Seems to,” I said.

“Suicide. Hmm.”

“I’m sorry, Florence.”

“You’ve missed something.”

“But…”

“Keep trying. You can start by meeting me at George’s room at the school. I’m supposed to pick up his things, now that the police are through with them.”

I sighed. “When, Florence?”

“How’s today?”

“Okay. Sure.”

“Five-ish?”

“Fine.”

George Gresham’s suite at The Ruggles School gave the impression that he had just stepped out for a moment. Perhaps to go to the bathroom, or to take a telephone call. If the police had searched through his things, they had done it with uncharacteristic tidiness. The clothes were neatly hung in the closet, the bed made, the towels folded in the bathroom. In George’s study, the chair was pushed back from the desk, the top of which was littered with a couple of open books and several others stacked carelessly on the corner.

Against one wall of this little room stood a floor-to-ceiling bookcase crammed with more volumes, mostly histories. It was an eclectic collection. Thucydides, Herodotus, Beard, Schlesinger. He had a big, unabridged Webster’s Second Edition, a Rand-McNally Atlas, a United States Zip Code Directory, and a Rodale Synonym Finder. There was a volume of Frost poems and a thick, blue book with faded gold lettering entitled
The Complete Works of Shakespeare.

I returned my attention to the open books on the desk and picked one up, careful not to lose George’s place. Its title was
The Terrorists of the Sixties,
by someone named Ronald Glazer. The other book bore the pretentious title
Up from the Classroom: The Growth of Radical Consciousness of Students in America 1965–1975.
It was written by one Allison Cohen-Brown.

Florence was in George’s bedroom, sitting forlornly on his bed. I brought the two books to her, each closed on my finger to mark George’s place.

“I didn’t know George was interested in contemporary American history,” I said, showing them to her.

She waved her hand tiredly. “George was interested in everything.”

I shrugged. I was supposed to be looking for clues. To something. I imagined the police had scoured George’s rooms thoroughly. On the other hand, if, as Dr. Clapp had suggested, they conducted their investigation from the theory that the commonest things most commonly happen, and assumed that they were looking at the living quarters of a man who had killed himself—they would find evidence that would tend to confirm that assumption.

My job, I decided, was to try to find clues that might support the contrary hypothesis, which, at that point, I could only phrase as: “George Gresham did not commit suicide.” Florence, I knew, wanted something more definitive. “George fell accidentally,” perhaps, or, “George had a stroke before he fell.” Or even, “George was murdered.”

The two books had been borrowed from the Boston Public Library, as had several of the other volumes that were stacked on the desk. I glanced through them, as well, and wrote their titles into my notebook.
Most Wanted
was one, subtitled,
Modern Fugitives from Justice.
Also, there was
American Extremists and the Anti-War Movement,
and
Underground: The Mind of the Fugitive,
and a thin volume whose title proclaimed in large red capital letters
Students Outside the Law.

I knew George had been a compulsive researcher, an inveterate note-taker and collector of clippings, a writer of dry, scholarly monographs. I assumed that somewhere in the three-drawer file cabinet beside his desk I would find the notes or outlines or drafts for this work he was doing.

But there was nothing. Two of the drawers contained ditto masters—old tests, bibliographies, charts and graphs, outlines, and a seemingly limitless supply of meticulously typed excerpts—speeches of Thomas Jefferson and John C. Calhoun, succinct commentaries on human nature from Machiavelli, the entire Funeral Oration of Pericles as reconstructed by Thucydides, a letter written by John Adams, an eyewitness description of the storming of the Bastille. The sort of stuff a dedicated teacher would make into lesson plans. I imagined George Gresham maneuvering his students into fascinating discussions of historical cause and effect, diffidently probing with quiet questions. “But
how
do you know?” “Where’s your evidence?”

His files did not indicate an interest in the twentieth century, never mind the contemporary scene. The third drawer in the file contained a dozen or so manila folders. Each held a draft of an article he had written. There was one on the influence of Thomas Hobbes on the authors of
The Federalist Papers.
Another purported to refute a Marxist interpretation of the American Civil War. A third was entitled, “Religious Symbolism in Enlightenment Florentine Poetry.”

George Gresham’s study persuaded me of two things: the man had many interests, all of them academic; and, he was a thoroughly prepared teacher. One other thing impressed me: the complete absence of any suggestion that he had a family, or friends, or indeed, that anyone at all shared his life. No pictures, no letters, no mementoes.

Tucked under George’s desk I found a cheap, gray metal strongbox. I pulled it out, and, finding it unlocked, opened it up. It contained the usual documents—insurance policies, income tax forms, an automobile title. Some of the files were upside down, others backwards. It looked as if the police had sorted through this stuff with their usual attention to order and tidiness, which suggested that they hadn’t even glanced at the rest of his things. One thin file attracted my attention. It held Blue Shield benefit forms, indicating payments that had been rendered for medical services to a Leonard Wertz, M.D. I called to Florence, who was still in the next room.

“Was George sick?”

“Not that I know of,” she answered.

“Must’ve been something wrong. Looks like he had to see a doctor twice monthly for a while last fall and winter. There’s ten or twelve visits listed here. Dr. Wertz ring a bell?”

“No,” she said. “He never said anything to me. Do you think it’s significant?”

“Might be. I’ll check it out.”

I wrote Dr. Wertz’s name into my notebook, along with the address in Danvers that the Blue Shield computer had thoughtfully provided on the form for me.

Also in the back of the strongbox I found what turned out to be a photocopy of a six-page, hand-written paper—a student’s paper, quite obviously. The name on the front was Harvey Willard, and it was dated January 23. The paper bore the title, “The Radical Anti-War Underground.”

The paper had received a grade of C, and George had scrawled across the title page, “Your thesis is interesting, but the paper suffers from inadequate documentation and mechanical errors. I suggest rewriting.” Clearly it was at best an average piece of work. And yet it was the only student paper I could find among George’s things, even after I went carefully through the files all over again. It seemed odd to me. Why would anyone make and retain a photocopy of this obviously mediocre piece of student writing? How did it relate to the research George had been doing in all those books that were piled upon his desk?

I folded the paper and tucked it into the pocket of my jacket and wrote Harvey Willard’s name into my notebook.

It all seemed silly, somehow. But I figured anything that might explain George’s suicide—whether it had some connection with a student or a mysterious illness that had escaped Dr. Clapp’s detection—would help to get Florence back into living her own life again. And that, it seemed to me, had become my task.

I sat at the desk and began to open the drawers. They contained the usual pens, pencils, reams of paper, boxes of paper clips and thumbtacks. I slid them shut, one by one.

Florence’s voice startled me. “What do you make of this?” she said.

She stood in the doorway, a little notebook held up for me to see.

“What is it?”

“Addresses and phone numbers,” she said. “Not many, at that.”

“Any names you recognize?”

She nodded. “A few. He corresponded with some of his former students, I know. Most of these addresses are at universities. Maybe they’re students, maybe professional acquaintances. That’s not what I found interesting. Look at this.”

I moved to stand beside her. She held the little book open to the last page. On it I saw a list of numbers. That was all. No words, no names, no explanation. There were eleven numbers in all, lined up meticulously in a row.

12-12929

199-12981

22109-11204

4K-24740

81-70360

93R-59072

7718-05478

909-27970

69-12901

44S-04845

22-03592

Florence looked up at me. “What do you make of it?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. Safe deposit box numbers, maybe? Bank accounts? Lottery numbers?”

“Think it means anything?”

“Well, it means
something
. Or at least it meant something to George, I assume. Whether it’s relevant to his death is another question.”

Florence shut the little book and handed it to me. “Why don’t you keep it? Maybe you can make some sense out of it.”

I took it from her and tucked it into the inside pocket of my jacket. I could check out the names in it, anyway. It seemed futile. But it was the least I could do.

“Excuse me,” came a voice from behind us.

I turned. In the doorway stood a tall, slim woman with short, dark hair. She wore a straight, black skirt and a pale green blouse that reflected the color of her eyes, and a shy smile.

“Miss Prescott.”

“Hello, Mr. Coyne. I’m sorry to intrude…”

“That’s quite all right,” I said. “Turnabout is fair play. This is Mrs. Gresham. George’s mother. Florence, this is Miss Prescott, the drama teacher here at the school. I chatted with her briefly the other day when I was here.”

Florence held out her hand. Rina Prescott entered the room to take it. Then she looked at me. “I saw the cars outside. I hoped it might be you. I wanted to apologize for my behavior the other day. I was rude. I’m sorry.”

I shrugged. “It’s okay. We intruded on you.”

She turned to Florence. “Mrs. Gresham, I’m so sorry about your son. He was a special person to all of us here.”

“Thank you, dear.”

“Well, I didn’t mean to barge in here,” Rina Prescott continued. “As I said, I saw the cars. And I did want to say I was sorry for the way I treated you at the rehearsal. Anybody who played Quince deserves
some
attention from a drama teacher, I think.”

I bowed to her. “Perhaps I’ll take you up on that. I don’t know what sort of schedule you have here at school, and obviously this isn’t a good time, but I’d still like to talk to you about George.” I took one of my business cards from my pocket and handed it to her. “I’d like to hear from you.”