Mansions Of The Dead (33 page)

“It was awful,” he said. “We all started getting really freaked out. Ashley was convinced that all these people in the cemetery, all the tourists, were actually dead people, and they were coming after her.
She was screaming and I have to say—obviously I was kind of suggestible, because I was so freaked out—I started believing her. I didn’t know what to do. Anyway, I decided to take her home. We were getting worried that someone might call the police. I don’t know. We just got really paranoid.”

“So you left?” Sweeney asked him.

He nodded. “I took Ashley home, then I went home and went to sleep.”

“I went right to sleep when I got home,” Ashley said. “I swear.”

Sweeney turned to Jennifer. “What did the rest of you guys do?”

“We took Brad back to the apartment,” Jennifer said. “He had gotten really angry and he was acting weird and started drinking tequila. We were trying to get him to stop, but he just kept getting more and more angry and finally we just left and I went home and Jaybee and Becca went to Becca’s.”

“You left him alone?”

“Well, it didn’t seem like the mushrooms or being drunk were going to hurt him. You just have to sleep it off. And Brad wasn’t a big drinker. We figured he’d just pass out and be fine in the morning.”

“What was he so angry about?” Sweeney watched their faces.

“I think he was kind of freaked out from the mushrooms,” Raj said finally. “He was really out of it. The whole night. He kept disappearing and he wasn’t himself at all.”

“What about when you got back to his house?” Sweeney asked Jennifer. “Could you tell what it was about?”

Jennifer thought for a moment. “I don’t think he was mad exactly. Not at anyone. It was more like he was mad at himself. He just kept saying he was a coward and that he didn’t have any balls. Stuff like that. That he was so afraid of everyone, afraid to do anything, afraid to say anything.”

“Afraid of who?”

“He didn’t say, but for some reason I had the idea it was someone in his family. He said something about how no one he knew talked about
anything, how they were all so silent about the things that mattered. But I guess that could be anyone.”

Sweeney studied them. “Okay,” she said. “I may need to tell some of this to the police. But you won’t get into trouble for any of it, so don’t worry about that. Now, let’s have class.”

“DID ALISON HAVE ANY
enemies that you know of ?” Quinn was asking. “Anyone who had been bothering her lately, who might have been mad at her?”

“I don’t think so,” said the girl named Emma. “I mean, she and her stepmother didn’t really get along. But her family lives in L.A.”

He and Marino were interviewing Alison Cope’s roommates, a pair of skinny blond girls who seemed to have come to resemble each other in the time they’d been living together. Emma and Angela had almost identical straight blond hair falling below their shoulder blades, and their arms—on full display in the tank tops they wore—were stick-thin, making them look emaciated to Quinn. He found himself bothered and oddly disturbed by the extremely low riding jeans they were both wearing—he could see the elastic bands of their underwear peeking out at their hips, underwear decorated with childish floral patterns.

They hadn’t called ahead to tell Emma and Angela they were coming, and the girls hadn’t wanted to let them in until they’d confirmed their identities with the officer on duty down at the station. Once they’d gotten a satisfactory answer, though, they’d been remarkably friendly, and Marino had taken them up on their offer of a glass of Diet Coke.

Quinn took a quick look at the bookshelf. Kant. Nietzsche. Kierkegaard. Schopenhauer. And on the next shelf, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and Emily Brontë. He didn’t need those books to know they were smart girls. They’d figured out right away that Quinn and Marino were exploring the possibility that Alison’s death hadn’t been an accident. “You think someone killed her on purpose?” Emma had asked, and he had said that they weren’t sure but that they had to look into all the possibilities.

He looked around at the walls. One end of the living room was decorated with a large flowery poster. “Monet at the Metropolitan Museum of Art” it read. The other wall was covered with band posters, Bruce Springsteen, Crosby, Stills, and Nash, the Grateful Dead. Quinn and Maura had the Dead poster at home in their basement.

“Did she have a boyfriend?” he asked Emma once Marino was settled on the couch with his Coke.

“No. She’d been dating this guy in the fall, but they broke up at Christmastime.” Quinn nodded. They’d already looked into him.

“No one else? Even something casual?”

“Well . . . ” Emma hesitated. “I don’t know. I mean, she didn’t say anything. But there were a couple of nights where she didn’t come home and when we kidded her about it, she didn’t seem to want to say where she’d been. The last time she got kind of mad at me.”

She raised her eyebrows, smiled, and gave a little what-are-yagonna-do shrug.

“She didn’t say anything to you either?” Marino asked Angela. Quinn could just about hear the sound of a good lead going nowhere. Whoosh.

“Un—unh.” She shook her head. “I was up early writing a paper and she came in at seven-thirty or something and I asked where she’d been. She kind of smiled but then she just said that she’d stayed at Genevieve’s place.”

“Genevieve?”

“Oh, a friend of hers.”

“Do you remember when this was?”

“Yeah. It was the night that Brad Putnam died. I remember because we all went to lunch and we were giving her a hard time about where she’d been and then someone told us.”

“What’s Genevieve’s last name?” Quinn asked. He’d have to check with her, but he was already pretty sure that Alison had been lying. “Alison was friends with Brad Putnam, right?”

They looked at each other and Emma shook her head. “I don’t think so. She may have met him at a party or something, but they definitely weren’t friends.”

“Are you sure? I’ve heard that she was at his memorial service. Why would she have gone if they weren’t friends?”

“I don’t know, but I remember talking to her about him once and asking if she knew him. She didn’t.”

“What about casually? Hanging out at parties, that kind of thing? I mean, you guys weren’t with her every single second, were you?” Marino drained his glass and put it down on the coffee table.

“Maybe,” Angela said doubtfully.

Quinn walked over to the bookcase. “Who are all these guys then? You studying German?”

Emma and Angela exchanged a quick look.

“They’re philosophers,” Emma said, smiling up at him. “They philosophize.”

“Oh yeah? What’s their philosophy then?”

“Depends on who you mean.” Emma got up and joined him at the bookcase. She took the Kant down from the shelf and handed it to him. “Immanuel Kant. Kant believed that man wants to answer three questions for himself. What can I know? What may I hope? How should I live?”

Quinn look at the book, turning it over in his hands. He’d thought it was “Can’t” but she pronounced it “Cahnt.”

“Oh yeah? And what’s the answer? How
should
I live?”

Marino laughed.

“Morally,” Emma said, looking up at him again. “Kant believed that it is always better to do what is moral than to do what makes you happy, or makes other people happy.”

Embarrassed, he put the book back on the shelf. “And you’re sure you don’t have any idea about who the guy was? The guy she was dating?”

The girls looked at each other. “I always thought it was an older guy,” Emma said finally.

“Why’s that?”

“Because we were having this conversation about guys and she said something about it.”

“She just came out and said that? Why would she say that?” Marino asked her.

Emma looked up at them. “Well, I’d been saying that I thought older guys were really sexy or something. And she started to say something . . . You know how people start to tell you something and you can almost see where they’re going with it?” Quinn nodded. “Well, she had this look on her face, kind of a triumphant look, like she wanted to tell me that she knew that older guys were sexy or something, because she had one.”

Emma blushed. “I don’t know, it was kind of a feeling I got. But I don’t know for sure.”

“You believe all that stuff about doing the moral thing all the time, Quinny?” Marino was driving and turned to look at Quinn. “What do you think she was getting at with all that?”

“I think just what she said. You should do what’s right, rather than what makes you happy. So you shouldn’t have an affair or go out gambling just because you like sex or cards.”

“Yeah, yeah. I see what you mean.”

Marino was silent for a few minutes as he waited to turn on to Mass. Ave. “Old Leary didn’t agree with that kind of thing. He was a guy who liked to make himself happy. Other people too. He was a good time, Leary.”

Not for his wife, Quinn wanted to say, but didn’t.

Leary had been Marino’s partner for eighteen years before he’d been killed by his five foot two wife with a butcher knife, in self-defense after years of beatings, everyone said. Marino hardly ever talked about him, except to say things like “When me and Leary were working together, we would have picked up on that guy’s lie the first day of the investigation” or “Leary would have liked that sandwich. He’d go miles for a good roast beef.”

But now he glanced over at Quinn and said, “But he wasn’t such an upstanding guy really, when it came right down to it. He wouldn’t have liked what that German guy had to say. Wouldn’t have liked him at all.”

Quinn tried not to smile.

CAMILLE PUTNAM WAS ATTENDING
a fund-raiser at the home of Londa and Barry MacAdam in Cambridge that night. Sweeney had found this out by calling the “Putnam for Congress” office downtown and telling them she was a reporter for the
Hartford Courant
.

“My editor asked me to cover the thing tonight, but he didn’t have any details.”

“The fund-raiser? Hold on. I can get you the address.” The woman put the phone down for a moment and Sweeney could hear phones ringing and people talking in the background. “Okay, I got it,” she said, once she was back on the line, giving Sweeney an address off Fresh Pond Parkway.

“Great, thanks,” Sweeney said, writing the address down. “Hey, by the way, do you know if the
Globe
is sending anyone?”

“Yeah, Bill McCann is covering it,” the woman said. “He called to get directions too.”

“Great.” Sweeney tried to imagine how a cynical reporter type would sound. “Thanks a lot.”

The MacAdams’ house was a rambling Victorian on one of the side streets off Fresh Pond Parkway. It was painted a vibrant blue and had a porch swing and lots of potted plants. Through the big bay windows, she could see people moving across the windows, the whole house filled with warm light.

Parked across the street so she could keep an eye on the door, she looked up from her book every few seconds for Bill McCann.

Around nine-fifteen, he came out of the house and got into a little red Toyota pickup. Sweeney started the Rabbit and waited until he had turned off the MacAdams’ street before speeding up and catching him at the intersection with Fresh Pond Parkway. They turned left, toward Mount Auburn Cemetery and Sweeney thought that was where they were headed until he turned left on Mount Auburn Street and headed down Mass. Ave. toward Central Square and over the bridge.