Mansions Of The Dead (2 page)

Becca felt cold all of a sudden. “He was really drunk, and really out of it. Maybe he just . . . ”

“Yeah.” Jaybee tried to smile. “That’s right. He was pretty trashed, wasn’t he?”

“I’m going to get dressed.” She walked past Brad’s closed door and into Jaybee’s room, where she hurriedly put on her clothes, toweling her hair for a second and then going back out into the living room. Jaybee was standing in front of Brad’s door.

“You going to check on him?” She was making a conscious effort to stay calm, though she knew something was wrong. Later, she would wonder if it was Jaybee’s pale, terrified face or something less tangible that had made her so afraid.

Jaybee didn’t say anything. He just put a hand on Brad’s doorknob and turned it, hesitating a few minutes before pushing the door open. “Brad?” Over his shoulder, she saw the gravestone photographs that Brad had all over his walls. The black-and-white images seemed to crowd the room.

And then she heard nothing but the waterfall rush in her own head as she followed Jaybee in and saw Brad, lying there on the bed.

“Jesus!” Jaybee whispered. “Jesus!”

DETECTIVE TIMOTHY QUINN STOOD
in the doorway, preparing himself, as he had only done a couple of times in the year he’d been working homicide, for his first sight of an unnaturally deceased human body.

This one was male, young, lying facedown on a large double bed pushed against one wall. The body was naked except for a pair of boxer shorts. The shorts, which Quinn fixated on for a moment in order to avoid looking at the rest of the body, were blue madras, well made. A working-class, Hanes-briefs-wearing boy from Somerville, where people didn’t shop at Brooks Brothers, Quinn thought back to college and knew this was high-quality stuff. Though he was later ashamed to recognize it, they made him sit up and take notice.

The boy was thin but muscular, a tennis player or a runner perhaps, his back still dark with last summer’s tan. Because his arms were tied to the bedposts—with bright, striped neckties, Quinn saw—the lean muscles across his back stood out in stark relief. His arms looked oddly stiff. Rigor setting in, Quinn thought, checking his watch. It was now 2 P.M. That meant he’d been dead for around twelve hours. Early this morning. He’d taken his last breath sometime before the sun came up.

Beneath the clear plastic bag that covered his head and was secured around his neck with another tie, a jaunty red-and-blue-striped one, the boy’s longish hair was a dark shadow. His face, pressed into the bedspread, could not be seen.

But Quinn could see the jewelry the kid was wearing. Around his neck, trailing down to the middle of his back like a snake, was a long, dark chain, made of twenty or so beads. Pinned to his boxer shorts, just over his left hip, were two brooches. One was white and had a drawing of a woman sitting in a graveyard, her head in her hands. The other was smaller and darker and had a crisscrossed design on the front. He suddenly remembered buying a shamrock brooch for his mother the Christmas he went away to college. “What a nice brooch,” she’d exclaimed, pronouncing the double o.

“No, Ma, it’s ‘broach,’ ” he’d corrected her, pronouncing it like the clerk in the store in Amherst. She’d shot back that now he was a college boy he thought he knew everything. He almost smiled, thinking of the way she liked to take her American son down a peg in her Dublin brogue.

Someone had tried to put the last piece of jewelry, a gold locket on a chain, around the boy’s neck, but the chain had caught on the plastic and was kind of half slung around the back of his head.

“You got any idea what this stuff is, Quinn?” Marino asked, a small smile on his lips. He was testing him. Quinn had already heard the kids who had found the body telling Marino what it was. They were sitting out in the living room now, the girl crying, the boy looking terrified. Quinn had made a note of how terrified the boy looked. The roommate, he’d told them. He was the dead boy’s roommate. The girl was a friend of both of theirs, the dead boy and the roommate, though from the way the two of them were locked together on the couch, Quinn decided that they were a little more than friends. They’d come back because the shower in the girl’s apartment wasn’t working.

But Marino didn’t know that. He just wanted to make Quinn look stupid. They had been working together for a year, ever since Quinn had been moved over to homicide after Marino’s partner was stabbed
by his wife during what the Cambridge police dispatcher would have referred to as a “domestic” and what Quinn had heard was a knockdown wife-beating session.

Quinn had been hoping for the transfer to homicide for four years, and he’d been—he realized now—a little eager probably. Marino was a compact, barrel-chested guy with a salt-and-pepper crew cut, a cauliflower ear from high school wrestling, and eyebrows that peaked in the centers. He loved paperback westerns and he always had five or six piled up on his desk, a couple tossed into the back of his car in case he got stuck somewhere without something to read. He didn’t seem to read anything else and Quinn had always liked the idea that Marino got off on cowboys and ranchers’ daughters and desert sunsets.

Marino resented the death of his partner, resented it because the way the guy had died, he was prevented from talking about him with the reverence that his colleagues used in talking about their own dead partners, killed heroically in the line of duty. And he resented his own place in the department, which Quinn had soon realized was somewhat insecure. Marino and Quinn got pulled off cases by the lieutenant in charge of the homicide division when they got thorny and Quinn knew that they weren’t the first choice for anything, that they’d been put on this one because it it had happened on Sunday morning.

He also knew that Marino disliked him. Quinn’s second week on the job, he’d come back from a coffee break and overheard Marino referring to him as “college boy” and he’d been careful around him ever since. But Marino knew the job and he had good instincts. Quinn could learn from him.

He inspected the brooch for a moment, trying to look thoughtful, then said, “I took this class once about English history and I remember this whole thing about mourning jewelry. It wasn’t quite like this, but I think that’s what it is.”

“Okay,” Marino said. “Now tell me what else you see.”

Quinn took his time, studying the boy’s back and the ties before speaking. “Well, the obvious cause of death is suffocation, but we’ll have to wait for the postmortem to be sure.”

“Good,” Marino said. “Anything else?”

Quinn sniffed the air. “Well, I’d do a tox screen. He reeks of booze. Tequila.”

“Sure does. What else?”

Focusing on the details of the room and letting the noise in the apartment fade away, Quinn turned his gaze around the bedroom. He squatted down and looked at everything from waist level. “Well, there’s the source of the tequila,” he said, pointing to the half-empty bottle pushed under the bed. He dipped his head and surveyed the floor. There were a couple of dusty, but neatly labeled boxes—”BOOKS,” “SWEATERS,” and “MISC.”—a pair of dress shoes with dust kitties in them, and a small notebook. “And there’s a notebook under there,” he said. “Check it out. It looks less dusty than the rest of the stuff. It may have been pushed under there more recently.”

“What? Shit! You’re right. Good one, Quinn.” Marino was grinning and Quinn felt inordinately satisfied.

“What about suicide? You think he did this himself ?”

Quinn went to the bed and stood next to it with his feet wide apart. He leaned over the body and put a hand just over each of the low bedposts, taking care not to touch the posts, the hands, or the ties holding them there. “I don’t know,” he said. “It would have been tricky. I think he had help getting tied up. And someone put the jewelry on after the bag was already over his head. This might be sex-related. He got drunk, invited someone back here, asked them to tie him up.”

“Yeah,” Marino said. “I think you’re right. We better check for signs of sexual contact—heterosexual and homosexual. In the meantime, it’s a good bet the jewelry was just some weirdo thing he liked to do while he got off, but I want you to check up on it, in case it points to a ritual murder. Try someone at the university or the museum. We’ll ask the family about it but I want to get an expert’s opinion first.”

Marino waved him out into the hallway, dismissing him.

The phone calls didn’t take long, though since it was Sunday, it took some doing to get the home number for the chair of the art history department. But the switchboard operator gave it up when Quinn explained
that he was from Cambridge P.D. A few minutes later he was talking to the chairman’s wife, who said that he was out but gave him the number of the department secretary. Once he had the secretary on the phone, he asked if there was anyone who specialized in mourning jewelry, if that’s what it was called.

“Oh, that’s Professor St. George you want. Professor St. George knows about death. Give me your name and number and I’ll call her and tell her to get right back to you. I’ll have to go into the office to get it, though. She might even be there. She’s in the office a lot on the weekends.” Quinn heard a note of disapproval in her voice.

He gave her his number at the station and was just hanging up the phone when one of the uniformed cops came back into the room. “They’re talking to the kid that found him, the roommate. He told us the kid’s name when he called but no one put it together until now. The kid’s a Putnam.”

“As in . . . ?”

“As in.”

The cop was almost grinning.

SWEENEY ST. GEORGE WAS
having her lunch on Cuphea Path in Mount Auburn Cemetery, leaning up against a monument carved to look like an elaborately draped coffin, when her cell phone rang.

It was Sunday and she had meant to turn off the phone—which she hated, but had come to depend upon—but she had forgotten and now it trilled harshly at her.

She checked the display, and seeing it was the number of the department secretary, leaned back against the stone and let it ring. It was Sunday, for God’s sake. If it was important, they’d leave a message.

As a small breeze came up in the trees, Sweeney closed her eyes and breathed deeply the wet, cool air. It was late April; after a long, unusually frigid winter nature hovered at the edge of spring. The snow had melted, but the ground was soaked and cold, not yet fertile. The tree branches above her were a lime green pointillist haze and the bright sun felt different, stronger, than it had only a few weeks ago. A friend’s art opening she’d attended the night before had gone too late—the artist hadn’t even welcomed everybody until almost midnight and she’d stayed an hour or so after that, having too much of the good wine. She leaned into the stone, sinking into the sharpness, and she felt
the fresh air cleanse away the last vestiges of her hangover.

The phone had stopped ringing and she opened her eyes, enjoying the relative silence again. Somewhere out there she could hear cars and trucks rushing by on Mount Auburn Street. But in here she could almost believe that she was in the country. She turned around and pressed her face against the moist stone, breathing in its gray, outdoor odor.

Set on a small rise on the Cambridge/Watertown border, a stepped series of sloping hills with the family plots of some of Boston’s most important families decorating the hillsides, Mount Auburn Cemetery had been founded in 1831 as one of America’s first garden cemeteries and had marked a shift in the way Americans thought about death, a change from the festering, overcrowded churchyards and catacombs of the city to the pastoral quiet of the hills outside. The graves, marked with markers and monuments large and small, were placed along little roads with names like Tulip Path and Fir Avenue, nodding to the trees and flowers that were carefully cultivated around the cemetery.

The cemetery had gotten its name from the university students who, in the early nineteenth century, had liked to hike on the plot of land and called it “Sweet Auburn,” after the Oliver Goldsmith poem “The Deserted Village.”

Sweeney had always liked the idea of those early students, obsessed with Goldsmith’s ideal of a pastoral country village. Later, when those very same students were running the city, they called on those old memories of youthful contemplation of mortality when faced with the problem of overcrowded and unsanitary churchyard cemeteries and charnel houses, and the question of where Boston’s dead should be laid to rest.