Mansions Of The Dead (34 page)

They were heading into the Back Bay.

He drove along at a good clip, and she had to focus all of her attention on the road so that she didn’t lose him. The traffic was snarled because of a broken-down car and Sweeney almost lost McCann’s pickup when he quickly changed lanes and then pulled in front of a delivery van and made a quick left onto Marlborough Street. It took her a few minutes to get over and by the time she was able to turn, she’d lost him.

She cursed loudly and slammed her fist on the steering wheel, but miraculously, when she reached the intersection of Marlborough and Dartmouth, the red pickup was disappearing down toward Comm. Ave.

She turned left and watch the pickup’s brake lights come on, slowing so he wouldn’t see her behind him. Then he turned onto Gloucester and quickly made a right into a public alley.

She drove past the entrance and found parking a little farther down Gloucester. It was Back Bay resident parking only, but she decided to risk it. She got out of the car and stood at the entrance to the alley, peeking around the brick corner of a building. McCann had parked in one of the parking spaces behind a tall residential building and he got out of the truck.

Like most of the public alleys behind Comm. Ave., this one had
been fixed up to suit the upscale residences it backed. Most of the buildings had newly paved parking areas behind them and a few had tiny back gardens, surrounded by high fences. There were cars parked behind almost all of the buildings, but the one that McCann had parked behind—as well as the two other huge buildings next to it—didn’t have any cars at all. Sweeney wasn’t sure why, but the buildings seemed uninhabited to her. It was the windows, she realized, looking up at the rows of dark rectangles. There were lights on in the windows of the other buildings. They were a couple of houses down from Jack’s building, and as she started counting, she realized that these were the buildings owned by the Putnams that McCann had mentioned in his story.

Sweeney watched him go to the back door of one of the buildings, get his wallet from his pocket, take a credit card out, and then fiddle with the lock. After about thirty seconds he opened the door and disappeared inside.

She approached the door and found that he had propped it open with a brick. Because of the light coming into the building from the street, and the almost-full moon, she could see pretty well and, her heart pounding, her mouth suddenly dry, she entered the building.

She was in a first-floor apartment, and she looked around at the empty living room and almost whistled. At one time, these had been pretty fancy pads. The ceilings soared high above her and the crown molding, hardwood floors, and stained glass windows were the original stuff.

She stood still and listened, not hearing any sign of movement in the building. Very quietly, she looked around the empty apartment and then found the door open to a hallway flanked by two staircases.

The hallway was typical upscale apartment house fare—a row of mailboxes and a little desk on one side, a stripey, formal-looking wall-paper on the walls. But everything looked worn and damaged, as though the place had been vandalized. Paper hung off the walls in strips and there were holes in the ceiling. Sweeney stood in the hallway
for a minute. Where had McCann gone? She couldn’t hear his footsteps upstairs.

She was about to climb the stairs when she felt a quick premonition of danger and then someone’s arm around her chest.

She tried to scream, but there was a hand over mouth and all she could do was bite the soft flesh. She heard a man’s voice swear and then she was able to get some leverage. Her assailant wasn’t as tall as she was and she bucked sharply, loosening his hold on her, then turned and kicked, aiming for the groin area. He cursed again and she was able to twist around and get a look at Bill McCann, sweating and looking as surprised as she was to find himself engaged in a wrestling match on the floor of an abandoned building.

“Shit!” He was clutching at his groin and breathing hard. “Why were you following me?” he groaned. “Why the hell were you following me?” He opened his eyes and squinted up at her. His glasses had fallen off and she picked them up and handed them to him. It took him a moment to clean them off and put them on again. “I know you,” he said when he’d gotten his breath. “I tried to interview you the other night at the debate.”

She didn’t say anything.

“What are you doing here?”

“I know that you were in Brad’s apartment and that you’d left your notebook there.” It was all she could think of to say. “If you don’t tell me why you were in Brad’s apartment and what you were doing, I’m going to tell the police. I don’t know what’s going on, but . . . ”

“Just hold your horses,” McCann said, surprised. “I have to make a phone call.” With effort, he got to his feet and led the way out to the alley, taking a cell phone out of his jacket pocket, scrolling down through a list of programmed numbers.

“Hey, it’s me,” he said quietly into the phone. “I know, I know, I’m sorry. But listen, there’s a woman here who says she saw me in Brad’s apartment. No, I’m in the Back Bay. Comm. Ave. and Gloucester. The public alley behind the houses. She knows about the notebook and
she’s asking . . . Yeah. I know. No, I think we should just . . . Okay. Drive carefully.” He hung up the phone and put it back in his pocket.

“All will be explained,” he said to Sweeney. “Jesus, you got me good. I think you kicked my balls up into my lungs.” He took a deep breath, then laughed out loud. “What the hell were you thinking, following me like that? I knew you were there from the moment I got into the truck. Jesus!” He sat back down on the ground and took a few more deep breaths before he began to look more relaxed.

They lapsed into uncomfortable silence again and Sweeney was beginning to be afraid, when a black Jeep Cherokee drove up and parked behind McCann’s Toyota.

The door opened and Camille Putnam got out.

“You’re right, I was there the night that Brad died,” McCann said from the backseat of Camille’s Jeep. “But it’s not what you think. Do you want to, Cammie, or should I?”

“You,” she said. Sweeney turned in her seat to listen to his story.

“I covered the statehouse until recently,” he said. “It was a good beat, where they put the up-and-comers and I was pretty happy there. I’d interviewed Cammie a few times and she’d given me some good background on a few stories. And then when she got really involved with women’s issues, she went on this junket to Zimbabwe.”

Camille turned around and grinned at him. “It wasn’t a junket!”

“Yeah, yeah. Whatever. A fact-finding mission. Anyway, my editor thought it would be a good story. I went too, and well, one thing led to another.” He smiled. “It wasn’t too bad once we got back. I wrote the story and then I dodged writing other stories about Cammie. We kept our relationship mostly secret. She decided to run for Congress, which meant she would eventually be off my beat, but then they offered me the campaign. Covering a campaign is how you prove yourself in the big time. I was going to turn it down . . . ”

“But I wouldn’t let him,” Camille finished. “It’s what he’s been working for his entire career. I said that we could stop seeing each
other during the campaign and then when it was all over we could see where we were.”

“I didn’t like it,” Bill said. “But it seemed like a solution. And we were good. From the moment the campaign started, we didn’t see each other at all, or not that way. It was sort of okay at first because we were seeing each other every day, and we were talking on the phone. But then it just became kind of painful, to see her and not be able to . . . ” He reached forward and rubbed Camille’s arm.

“But we sort of felt that if we could make it until November everything would be all right,” Camille said. “Or at least I felt that way. But then on the . . . on the night that Brad died, I got home early from a fund-raiser and it was the first time in months that I was home, alone, with no staff making me practice speeches, no cocktail parties or fund-raisers to go to. And I . . . I called him.”

“I think I said something like, let me just come over and we’ll talk about the campaign,” Bill said, and laughed. “When she said she wanted to get together, I can’t describe it, I felt as though all was right with the world, I was happier than I’d been in months, and I realized that I had to do something about our situation. I suddenly realized that I didn’t care much about my career, or about what people thought, or anything. I decided I was going to quit and ask Cammie to marry me.

“So we met at this diner and I was just starting to explain all of this to her—God, it seems so long ago, doesn’t it?—and then her cell phone rang. Do you want to . . . ?”

Camille took over. “It was Brad. He was drunk. I had never thought of him as a drinker. But he was going on and on about Petey and the spirits. I don’t know what he was talking about, something about how I was the only woman who cared about him and he knew I would come. And that I was a good woman, not cold like her. I had no idea what he was talking about, or who, but I was concerned because he was just so drunk, and sounded so
desperate
. So I asked Bill to come with me. It was stupid, I know, anyone could have seen us, but we’d been, well, talking about the future and it seemed like we were going to be together and I just felt like . . . like anything was possible.” She took a deep breath.
“So we went to Brad’s apartment.”

“Did he let you in?”

“No, he was passed out on the floor of the living room. But we’d all had to feed those damn fish when he was away and I knew that there was a key they kept outside, by the door. Anyway, he was in bad shape. He had thrown up and I cleaned him off. Bill helped me drag him into the bedroom and take his clothes off and I . . . well, you know this part of it. I put him on his stomach and tied his arms to the bed so he wouldn’t choke.” She started crying. “I should have stayed.”

“It’s my fault,” Bill said. “She would have stayed if I hadn’t been there. She was worried about me being involved.”

“So you dropped the notebook when you were helping to get Brad into bed?” Sweeney asked.

“I must have. But I didn’t realize it until the next day and by then I’d heard the news about Brad. There was no way I could get it back then. So I waited and went back a week or so later. I thought there was a chance that they hadn’t found it, but as soon as I looked around I realized it was gone. How did you know about that anyway?”

“Oh, I happened to be outside and I saw you go in,” Sweeney lied.

“You don’t know how scared I was when that cop called,” Camille said. “I thought he’d figured it out. When I realized he’d just figured out the part about it being me and not Jack who had tied Brad up, I was so relieved I couldn’t believe it.”

Sweeney thought for a moment. “You’ve got to tell the police. They know about the notebook and they’re going to find you. The fact that you didn’t tell them is going to be a problem.”

“If this comes out, it could end Bill’s career, it could affect the campaign. I’d be letting so many people down. I mean, we’ve been good, but it just looks terrible.” Now Camille sounded very young.

“It would look a lot better if you called them and told them.”

She almost asked Camille about the mourning jewelry, about whether Brad had said anything to her about discovering something odd about their family, but she realized that she had ceased to trust
that anyone in the Putnam family was telling her the truth.

She thought for a moment. Something still wasn’t computing. “But I don’t understand,” she said finally. “I read some of your old stories about the Back Bay properties. You were interested in whether Camille’s grandfather had benefited from the tunnel project. Why did you come here?”

Camille looked up at him questioningly. “I didn’t get a chance to ask you that,” she said. “Why are you here tonight?”

Bill looked uncomfortable.

“Did you find out something new about the Back Bay Tunnel project?” Sweeney asked.

That was it. He looked up quickly, then over at Camille.

“Billy?” she said nervously. “What’s going on?”

“I did find out something, Cam. It’s . . . not good about your family. It could affect things. I was hoping you wouldn’t have to know.”

“Whatever it is, I want to know.”

“But . . . ”

“I don’t care about Sweeney. She’s already shown we can trust her. Come on. I’d rather know as soon as possible.”

McCann hesitated. “All right. Here’s what happened. A couple of months ago, I was working on a story about the campaign.” He turned to Sweeney. “We hadn’t seen each other in a while at that point and I was feeling optimistic about things, like we’d be able to get through it. Anyway, I was thinking about doing sort of a color piece on Cammie’s grandfathers and how she was following in their footsteps and I was going over some old pieces about the negotiations over the Back Bay Tunnel project. There was a mention of how initially there had been some suspicion of Senator Putnam’s motives because of his real estate holdings in the area, but he was able to allay them by giving the land that they wanted for the tunnel to the federal government. It was fairly worthless anyway, a swampy little strip that wasn’t fit for building on. The Puntnams’ really valuable holdings were on Comm. Ave.—right here—and it was hard to argue that ten years of drilling and noise were going to make those properties worth anything at all.

“Anyway, I got interested in what had happened to that land. Had it become worthless? Had Putnam committed basically a totally selfless act in allowing the government to build on it? Or had he actually made a profit? I interviewed some real estate agents. There wasn’t any clear answer.

“But then I came down here and discovered that about half of the houses had been vacant for almost ten years. I started getting interested in why that was and discovered that during the initial drilling for the tunnel project a couple of years ago, the depths had been misfigured and the buildings were permanently damaged during the drilling. It was too close to the surface and it permanently wrecked the foundations. They were condemned.”