Mansions Of The Dead (32 page)

The first question was about tax policy and Sweeney, not knowing anything about the subject, tuned out and looked around her at the crowd. There were a fair number of students, but a good percentage of older people as well. A group of young women sitting on one side of
the theater were wearing T-shirts that said, “A Woman’s Place Is in the House.”

The candidates answered four more questions and then finished up. In her closing statement, Camille Putnam said, “I appreciated Congressman DiFloria’s acknowledgment of what a hard time this is for our family. As many of you know, my younger brother, who was one of your classmates, passed away recently. I think about him all the time as I’m out there talking to people his age, talking to them about their hopes and dreams and about the world they hope to inherit. So, what I want to say to you is get out there! I don’t care if you vote for me or my opponent, I just hope that you’ll find some issues that you care about and you’ll get out there and change the world. Thank you.”

The audience, and Sweeney too, rose to its feet, clapping and cheering. Camille waved and acknowledged the applause, then came down off the stage, running a hand through her hair as though it had driven her crazy to have it hairsprayed into place for an hour and a half.

Sweeney stood at the back of the hall and watched Drew come forward to hug Camille as a group of students crowded around her. The guy in the tweed jacket who had been talking to Drew earlier was interviewing a couple of young women who were waiting in line to talk to Camille, and as she watched him nodding earnestly and writing on his notepad, Sweeney was again struck that she knew him from somewhere.

She watched as he shook hands with the women and then started up the aisle, flipping back and forth in his notebook. Who was he? It was bothering her.

Out in the hallway, he paused for a moment as though he were trying to decide what to do. Sweeney stopped a couple of yards from him and stood against one wall, out of the way of the groups of people milling around in the lobby, trying to watch him without bringing attention to herself. He was about her height, with graying dirty blond hair, a close-cropped beard, and friendly brown eyes behind John Lennon glasses. He looked like a stereotypical English professor. He even had the dark circles under his eyes.

It was when he looked up to check the clock on the wall that
Sweeney realized where she knew him from. He had been in Brad’s apartment the day she and Toby had hidden in the closet.

Right then he looked up at her and flashed her a smile. “Hi, can I talk to you for a minute? My name’s Bill McCann. I’m a reporter for the
Globe
and I’m covering the campaign here. Can I ask you what you thought of Ms. Putnam’s speech here tonight?” He raised his eyebrows speculatively, his pen poised over his little reporter’s notebook.

“Oh,” Sweeney said. “I’m not . . . I mean, I’d really rather not.”

“Just tell me, do you think you’re likely to vote for her? Based on what you heard here tonight?”

“I really would rather not comment.” She zipped up her jacket and found her car keys. “Sorry.”

“That’s all right,” he said. “Have a good night.” He smiled and turned away, looking for another likely source.

Sweeney walked out into the evening, her heart thudding in her chest. One thing made sense to her all of a sudden. Quinn had said that the notebook they found in the apartment was a reporter’s notebook. And Bill McCann had been looking for something the day she and Toby had been there. The notebook that Quinn said had been found under Brad’s bed must have belonged to McCann.

She remembered the conversation with Quinn. The notebook had only had a few words in it, something about the Putnam family’s real estate holdings in the Back Bay. Had McCann been looking into a story on the Putnam family and gone to interview Brad? That would make sense. So maybe he had somehow left the notebook behind. Then Brad had died, and he had feared that someone would find it, so at the first chance he had gone back to get it.

It was after ten by the time she got home. She did a quick check of her mail and pressed the play button on her answering machine.

“Hi, Sweeney,” came an unfamiliar voice, hesitant and soft. “This is Melissa Putnam. I just wanted to ask you something. No big deal. Don’t even worry about calling back. I’ll try you tomorrow.”

Sweeney looked up at the clock. It was probably too late to call, and besides, Melissa had said that she’d call tomorrow.

But it wasn’t too late to call Paul Blum. She dialed his extension and he picked up on the first ring. “It’s Sweeney. Are you on deadline?” she asked him.

“Nope. Just filed. I have a few minutes before anyone gets back to me.”

“Listen, Paul, do you know a guy named Bill McCann?”

“Yeah, he sits a couple of desks away from me. Nice guy. Why?”

“What can you tell me about him? I met him tonight and I was just wondering . . . well, if he’s single.” It was the best excuse she could come up with and she knew it was one that Paul, an inveterate match-maker, would jump on.

“Oh,” Paul said, sounding suddenly interested. “Yeah, I think so. I’ve never heard about him dating anyone. He’s a good guy. One of the stars around here.”

“What does he write about?”

“Well, he was on the statehouse beat, but they just switched him over to covering the Putnam-DiFloria congressional race. He’s written some great stories.”

“Did he cover the Putnam family before he started the congressional beat?”

“Funny you should ask. He’d done this big Sunday feature a couple of months ago. The story didn’t reach any conclusions, if I remember, it was looking into the family’s real estate holdings and whether they’d benefited from the Back Bay Tunnel project. Anyway, when Brad Putnam died and I was writing those stories about the family’s long string of misfortunes, Bill helped me out with a lot of the history.”

“Thanks. Hey, could you e-mail me that story? I’d go into the archives, but it costs money.”

“Cheapskate. Hang on.” She could hear him tapping away at his computer keys. “Okay, you should have it.”

“Thanks.”

“So do you want me to give him your phone number or something?”

“No, that’s all right. I have his and I’ll figure out a way to meet him that won’t seem obvious. Don’t say anything, okay?”

“Okay. But I get to give the speech at your wedding.”

Sweeney checked her e-mail and opened the message from Paul. As far as she could figure it out after three readings, McCann’s concerns centered around the Putnam family’s ownership of much of the land that the Back Bay Tunnel was being built on. In the late seventies, when the project was being proposed, Senator John Putnam had been the chair of the senate. There had been some question about whether it was ethical for Putnam to vote on the project since his family owned some of the land the new road would go on. But he had quelled the concerns by effectively giving the federal government the parcels that were needed. McCann’s article centered on whether the Putnams had benefited from their ownership of the land around the parcels. The family still owned ten residential properties in the Back Bay: Jack’s building on Comm. Ave., and nine other nearby buildings.

McCann had found the tax records and listed the real estate values for the buildings—3 million for Jack’s building and amounts between2.5 million and 7.2 million for the other buildings. Sweeney did the math. They were sitting on a small fortune in real estate. And they owed it all to Charles Putnam, who had had the good foresight to buy the land in the first place.

McCann quoted a couple of real estate agents, half of whom said that the buildings would increase in value because of the Back Bay Tunnel project; the other half said that the project might actually deflate the value of the buildings because of the long construction coinciding with the spike in the market. There weren’t any conclusions and what Sweeney took away from it was that the family hadn’t either benefited or lost out from the tunnel project.

But again, she was struck by what a wise investment Charles Putnam had made all those years ago. So how did it all fit together? If Brad had realized—because of his research into the jewelry—that his family was not the rightful owner of the Back Bay property from which it had made a fortune, he was a danger if he was talking to a reporter like McCann. Had someone killed him to stop him from telling what he knew?

But what did he know? Until she knew if her suspicions about the jewelry—and what it signified—were correct, she had nothing to go on.

Or not nothing, she realized, because she had McCann. McCann coming back to Brad’s apartment to look for the notebook. She didn’t understand why he hadn’t told the police about being there. Presumably he had gone to Brad’s to interview him at some point over the past few months. Why wouldn’t he just have come forward? It didn’t make a lot of sense, but she had the feeling that the reporter might be able to lead the way.

SWEENEY WAS WORKING IN
her office when she heard the motorized hum of Fiona Mathewson’s wheelchair and looked up to find her colleague smiling at her from the doorway.

“Hi, Sweeney. What are you up to?”

“Getting ready for seminar.” Sweeney was hurriedly trying to organize her slides.

“Which one?”

“Mourning Objects.”

“Oh, that’s the one that Brad was in, right?”

“Yeah.”

“They’re a pretty tight group, huh? Had you had them before?”

“Yeah. Then they all took the seminar together.” Sweeney looked up. “Wait, Fiona. Why do you say that?”

“I don’t know. I guess I’ve just seen them around together a lot. They seem pretty tight. Seem to have a good time together.”

“Yeah. I think they are. See you later, Fiona.” Fiona was gone when Sweeney looked up again. They
were
pretty tight. And they spent a lot of time together. Why not the Saturday night that Brad had been killed? She remembered Raj’s face when she’d asked him about it that
day in his apartment. She wasn’t entirely convinced he hadn’t been lying to her. She’d just have to ask again.

When Sweeney came into the seminar room a few minutes later, the first thing she said was, “Where are Becca and Jaybee?”

Nobody said anything. “Well, we’ll just have to go on without them.” She stood up at the podium, but didn’t take out her notes or set up the slide projector. They all looked around at one another, nervous now.

“I want to know something. Were you guys all together the night that Brad died?”

There was a long silence.

“It’s going to come out somehow,” Sweeney said. “And it would look a lot better to everyone if you were the ones to come out with it.”

“Okay, okay,” Jennifer finally said. “We were.”

It was beginning to make sense to Sweeney. “Had you been out in a cemetery that night?”

Ashley started to say something, then stopped, and finally Raj broke in. “I’ll . . . I should have told you when we talked before. I’m sorry I lied. I knew that we’d all be suspected if you knew. We didn’t have anything to do with it. It was just . . . ”

“Why didn’t you tell the police? There’s nothing illegal about . . . ” She looked around at them. “But there was something illegal about it. What were you doing?” Raj hesitated for a few moments before she went on. “Look, I’m only twenty-eight. It was pretty much last week that I was doing whatever it is you’re afraid to tell me about.”

“That’s what I told them,” Raj said. “I said we should invite you to come too.”

“Thanks. So what happened?”

He glanced at the others. “All right. As I told you, we’d been going to cemeteries and just kind of hanging out. We’d gotten drunk a few times and it was kind of cool, running around in the cemetery, kind of spooky. But Ashley said that we should eat mushrooms and go there. She said it would be amazing, that we might see ghosts and it would be like breaking down the walls between the living and the dead.”

“It was like that,” Ashley said. “Even if you want to deny the experience.”

Raj rolled his eyes. “I wasn’t going to do it with them. It sounded like kind of a bad idea to me, but then . . . ” He stopped. “Anyway. We decided to spend the whole day—that day—in the cemetery.”

“Which one?”

“Oh, Mount Auburn. We didn’t want to have to drive. So Ashley got the mushrooms and I gave some to everyone beforehand, because they take a while to kick in. And we went out to the cemetery and for a while it was really cool. We just walked around looking at all the stones, and I felt just really happy, you know. I remember that everything looked sunnier and brighter and I had this feeling that all the dead people in the cemetery loved me, that they were all kind of embracing me. It sounds stupid to say it, but . . . there you go. That’s how it was. We had brought lunch—Brie and grapes and chicken and all this good stuff, and I remember that I didn’t think I’d ever tasted anything that good. Even Brad, who always seemed kind of depressed, seemed kind of happy that day.” He stopped and his face appeared to cloud over.

“But . . . ”Sweeney prompted him. Jennifer and Ashley were staring down at the table.

Raj grinned at her wryly. “But. But then there were all these other people in the cemetery. Tourists or something, and it started to get cold, and it was late afternoon and it was getting dark, or seemed like it was. It seems now like it must have happened slowly, but I think it was pretty fast actually. The whole mood changed, and all of a sudden I felt so sad. Just . . . monumentally sad.” As he described it to her, Sweeney almost sensed that he had enjoyed feeling that way, and she knew that someday she would pick up a book by Rajiv Patel and she would find a passage that described that feeling of monumental sadness.