Mansions Of The Dead (29 page)

QUINN WAS GETTING A
cup of coffee out of the machine when Marino came out into the hallway. “Jesus, Quinny! Every time I try to find you you’re getting a cup of coffee. Have you ever thought you might need to cut down on your caffeine habit?”

Quinn waited for the machine to stop spraying the awful stuff into his little Styrofoam cup. “What’s going on?”

“I want to get down there and interview anyone who lives in that neighborhood. Anyone who may have been up last night, convenience store clerks, bartenders, anybody like that. Get the names of any cabdrivers who got called out in that area. You ready to go?” He was drinking a Coke and in between orders, he paused to take swigs from the can.

Quinn took a deep breath. “But what about the Putnam thing? I was thinking we could interview the family again and there are a couple of leads I want to follow up on related to the jewelry.”

“We’ve gotta focus on this,” Marino said. “The lieutenant said he’s got Yolen and Anderson on the Putnam thing.” He looked away. Yolen and Anderson were senior homicide detectives and Quinn knew that it wasn’t the first time Marino had been pushed out to give them a chance on a case.

“Besides I don’t think there’s anything more we can get from the family,” he went on. “We’re running the details through the database again. See if we get any matches.”

“Is he taking us off Putnam?”

“I don’t know. He was saying just for today.” Marino looked embarrassed.

“Marino, I’m telling you. This doesn’t feel like a ritual killer thing. I think Brad Putnam’s killer knew him, I think . . . ”

“Yeah well, it doesn’t matter what you think. It matters what you know. And the lieutenant wants us on this hit-and-run.”

“But—”

“Be ready in five, Quinny,” Marino said before he left the room. “We’ll take two cars ‘cause I got some stops to make later.”

They spent the morning stopping at every house or apartment that looked out on the accident scene. There were mostly students or senior citizens in the neighborhood and so they found that most of the residents had been either not home yet or long asleep when the accident had happened.

They stopped in at the couple of twenty-four-hour stores and Laundromats in the vicinity, but the first anyone had heard of the accident was the ambulance and police sirens responding to the scene.

It seemed that Alison Cope’s death had been witnessed by no one.

Except for the person who had killed her, Quinn reminded himself.

Marino had headed back to the station, and Quinn was on his way to Mount Auburn Cemetery when he passed the apartment building where Brad Putnam had lived. They had already interviewed the residents, but one guy hadn’t answered his door and Quinn thought he could try him again. Marino hadn’t told him to do it, of course, but it was really just a question of tying up loose ends.

He parked in front of the building and checked his notebook. The apartment he’d struck out at was at the back of the building. He went around and knocked on the door. No answer. He knocked again. Still nothing.

So he went up and knocked on the door next to Brad’s and Jaybee’s apartment. He had already interviewed the guy who lived there. He was a musician, Quinn remembered, and he hadn’t heard or seen anything the night Brad Putnam was murdered. He’d been practicing for some kind of concert and he’d gone to bed early and slept through the night.

He seemed to do a lot of practicing. From behind the door Quinn heard the strains of some kind of classical music. Nothing very well organized, more like someone practicing scales. Quinn knocked.

The music stopped. “Yeah?” a male voice asked.

“Cambridge police,” Quinn said. “Can I come in and ask you some questions?”

The door opened and a guy in a blue bathrobe stood there, holding a mug of what smelled like coffee.

“Hi, I’m Detective Tim Quinn. Cambridge police. I think I already interviewed you about the night of Brad Putnam’s death.”

“Yeah, I remember you. Come on in.” The guy had the kind of accent that made Quinn hyper aware of his own, Boston, but not the part of Boston Quinn had been raised in. This guy sounded like a Kennedy.

Quinn nodded and stepped into the messy apartment. A couple of music stands were arranged in a half circle, and a cello was lying on its side on the floor. A bow was resting on the music stand.

“Do you know who lives downstairs around back?”

“Oh. Yeah. Lorcan. He’s Irish.”

“Does he work a lot or what? I’ve tried a couple of times and haven’t been able to talk to him.”

“He’s away. Florida.”

Quinn wrote that down. “Know when he’s back?”

“I think he said he was going for three weeks. He just finished up a big paper or something. Maybe his thesis.”

“Yeah? What’d you say his name was?”

“Lorcan something. You know how it is when you live next door to
someone. You never really get their last name. Oh. No, I do know what it is. Lyons. I had to sign for a package for him once.”

Quinn wrote that down. “Okay. Guess I’ll have to try him again. Thanks for your help.”

It was only three-thirty. He was meeting Sweeney at four, but he figured he’d head up to the cemetery and look around before she got there. He drove through the imposing archway, which looked a little like the entrance to a prison, and parked along one of the side roads, as the signs told him to do. Then he got out and walked back toward the main gate, stopping to read some of the stones along the way. He had never thought that much about gravestones. During his childhood, they seemed to kind of always be there, in the neighborhood, when he was forced to go to the funeral masses and burials of relatives or neighbors. His father’s stone was just a big block of—what kind of stone was it? Granite, marble? He realized he didn’t know. It was gray, with black flecks, so that was probably granite, he decided. Quinn and his mother had ordered just his name and dates and a cross. It had been years since he’d gone to see it. When his mother had died, she’d told him she didn’t even want a stone, so he’d had her cremated and he and Maura had sprinkled the ashes in the ocean off Cape Cod. Back to Ireland, she’d told him one of those last days in a painkiller-induced haze. I want to drift across the ocean back to Ireland.

But these stones were different from his father’s. They were in the shapes of things, coffins or pyramids or angels, and they had beautiful flowers carved on them. As he wandered along the rows, reading the names on the stones, he recognized some of them from buildings he’d see around town, street names.

He stopped in front of a small statue of an angel, inscribed with the words, “My Wife and Child.” That was it, no names, no dates. He stood for a moment, reading the words, conscious that his eyes were filling up, and embarrassed, he wiped them away.

“Hi, sorry I’m late.”

Sweeney St. George’s voice broke the still air and he turned to find
her standing behind him, wearing a bright yellow raincoat and carrying a brown paper shopping bag. Between the raincoat and her hair, she was the only bright thing in the sea of gray and white.

“That’s fine. I was just . . . looking around.” He turned away from her so she wouldn’t see his eyes. “Why don’t you show me where it is?”

She led the way down one of the side streets and on to a dead end walking path with four family plots. “Here,” she said, gesturing to a small square of gravestones with a little fence around it. In the middle of all the other stones was a tall one, shaped almost like a church steeple. It had to belong to someone important, he decided, someone rich.

“Whose was that?” he asked. He was standing outside the little fence, but Sweeney walked right in, going over to the stone and gesturing him over to look at it. “Is it okay?” he asked nervously.

“Yeah, this is what gravestones are for,” she said. “You’re supposed to look at them, touch them. Think about people you know who have died. Would they want you to be afraid?”

“No, I guess not.” He joined her next to the stone, conscious the whole time of what he was probably standing on.

“This is Charles Putnam’s stone,” she said.

“Edmund’s father?”

“Yeah. It’s a little ostentatious, don’t you think?”

“Just a bit.” He grinned, looking up at the high tower.

“I think it’s safe to say that Charles Putnam saw himself as the patriarch of the family. I suppose, though, that he was right. He has a lot of descendants. Now here’s Edmund’s stone.”

It was large too, made of white stone that had been dirtied with age. It was a masculine stone, he decided. The squared-off top had been carved so that it looked as though pieces of cloth were draped over it. It was so perfectly done, you could almost imagine the way the cloth would feel, soft and rich, like velvet, and there were little tassels at the corners that seemed to move in the slight breeze. The words, carved in plain, straightforward letters, read “Edmund Danforth Putnam. December 4, 1863–June 23, 1888. All Is Bright.”

“What’s the cloth for?” He tentatively put a hand out to touch it. The stone was cold and rough.

“It’s supposed to be a funeral shroud. But see what I mean about the dates? It’s December here, not March.”

He leaned down and looked carefully at the letters, trying to determine if it had been tampered with. But the date of Edmund Putnam’s birth was in the same plain type as his name and the date of his death. All of the carving had worn away at about the same rate, he decided. It was becoming harder to read and he wondered suddenly if there were ever stones that were so worn away you couldn’t read them at all.

“It is strange,” Quinn said. He didn’t want to let Sweeney know how excited he was. He got the same feeling he got when he got a new lead in a case, a sense that someone had opened a door for him. But he wanted to think about it for a minute.

“It’s different, this cemetery,” he said. “I mean, it doesn’t seem like other ones I’ve been to.”

“Well, Mount Auburn came out of a change in the way Americans saw death and by extension, burial and mourning,” Sweeney said. “As America moved away from the skull and crossbones sense of death of the Puritans, it began—especially in Boston, which was kind of ahead of its time—to see death as a more natural process, something not to be feared but accepted. And it began to think of burial grounds as natural places for spiritual refreshment and melancholy contemplation, rather than festering yards of corpses buried four or five deep because of space constraints. Before Mount Auburn, everyone who died in Boston was interred in one of a few church cemeteries in the city. The churchyards had become completely overcrowded as the city’s population grew in the early 1800s and by the 1820s, the city was embroiled in controversy over the sanitary implications of continuing to bury bodies in the city.”

She remembered reading an account of the controversy in a history of the cemetery. On the one side were the religious leaders who felt it was imperative for their parishioners to find their final resting place
next to the church. On the other side had been city leaders who saw continued city burial as a public health disaster in the making.

Inspired by the growing Unitarian and Universalist movements, a group of prominent Bostonians allied with the Boston Horticultural Society had banded together to create Mount Auburn, a green oasis of trees and flowers, shaded groves, and pastoral ponds.

“It does feel peaceful,” he said. “I see what you mean.”

He wandered back over to Charles Putnam’s stone and read the epitaph again.

“ ‘Amid the mansions of the dead.’ What does that mean?”

“Oh, most people know the line from a poem by Robert Blair,” she said. “In fact, there are references to the ‘mansions of the dead’ as far back as Sophocles. But it became kind of a popular way to describe cemeteries. There are a couple of Protestant hymns that use the term. It’s in Mark Twain even. I think he uses it describing Père Lachaise in Paris.” Quinn had no idea what she was talking about. “Blair made it well-known though.”

When she spoke again it was in a strangely formal voice, deeper than her own. “See yonder hallow’d fane, the pious work/Of names once fam’d, now dubious or forgot,/’And buried ‘midst the wreck of things which were;/There lie interr’d the more illustrious dead./The wind is up—hark! how it howls!—Methinks/’Till now, I never heard a sound so deary:/Doors creak, and windows clap, and night’s foul bird,/Rook’d in the spire, screams loud; the gloomy aisles/Black plaster’d, and hung round with shreds of ‘scutcheons,/And tatter’d coats of arms, send back the sound,/Laden with heavier airs . . . .” She paused, then said dramatically, “ ‘From the low vaults,/The mansions of the dead.’ ”

“Wow.” He felt a little chill go up his spine, and looked around at the gravestones, spotting the spire of some kind of church up above them on the hill. The words acted on him like a drug, chilling his blood. “ ‘From the low vaults, the mansions of the dead,’ ” he repeated, in his own mind hearing the dark rhythms of the verse.

He was disappointed when she said, “It’s all so melodramatic. But
Blair and all the Graveyard Poets were in the business of scaring people. These were pretty much evangelical poems. They were trying to tell people how awful the grave was so that they could . . . ” She stopped talking and a look of confusion came over her face. “It’s funny actually.”

“What?”

“Nothing, just that Brad and I were talking about Robert Blair. Almost two months before he died.” She was silent for a moment. “Anyway, places like Mount Auburn were built because people were tired of that scary, Puritan view of death as something horrible and macabre. The idea was to create a peaceful place where mourners could appreciate nature and feel sort of melancholy and think about the person who had died. As you can see, death was thought of as kind of a pastoral, natural experience; you would hear the birds singing, smell the flowers. In creating the landscape here, they were re-creating the idealized notion of death.”

Quinn took a deep breath. He felt a kind of understanding of what she was saying hit him as though he’d been punched. He couldn’t think how to articulate it, though, so he quoted from the poem he’d read so many times, surprising himself with his perfect memory of it.