Mansions Of The Dead (5 page)

“Sure.”

“I heard from some of the other kids about what happened in London. About your husband.”

They had gotten that part of it wrong.

“He wasn’t my husband. We were engaged.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.” He’d hesitated, then he’d stammered on. “I heard about how it happened, about how it was an explosion and they never caught the person or people or whatever who did it and I was just wondering . . . ” He’d stopped there, as though he was trying to figure out what to say. “Have you ever, when you were doing research or something, have you ever found out something about somebody, something that would change everything, change the way people looked at things?”

Sweeney had been confused. “Do you mean about a gravestone?”

“Maybe, or about . . . I mean, have you ever come across information that could maybe hurt someone, but that could be important? I mean . . . ” He’d struggled. “If someone had a piece of information that was . . . something else about a person, some important
thing
that you didn’t know before, and they could tell you—would you want to know?”

“I’m not sure I know what you’re asking,” she’d said. “It would depend on what the information was. Do you want to tell me anything more?”

She’d had the sense that her answer was very important to him and had felt somehow that she had let him down by not figuring out what he wanted. She had watched as he’d wrestled with something, staring at her with his strange, changing blue eyes. But in the end, he had just shaken his head.

They had sat there on the floor of her office, staring at each other awkwardly, and she had felt an urge to embrace him.

So she had gotten up, a little too quickly, and had said that they
should get downstairs before someone towed the car. The next day, in class, she had been concerned about how he would act. Would he assume an intimacy that would make things awkward? But no, he had behaved perfectly, giving her a conspiratorial grin when he came into the lecture room, but treating her exactly as before.

And now he was dead. It had seemed impossible, when Quinn had told her, to believe that he was no longer alive. It was just as Brad had said—she couldn’t accept that he wasn’t
somewhere
.

Quinn had been embarrassed by her tears, handing her a tissue from a box on a side table. He hadn’t given her any more details about how Brad had died, and he’d reminded her not to talk about the jewelry to anyone and had said that they would be in touch tomorrow. “We may need your help in talking to the family about where the jewelry came from,” he’d said. As she’d gone, he’d said kindly, “I’m sorry you had to find out about it this way. If we had known you knew him, we wouldn’t have let it happen like this.”

She took Mass. Ave. toward Somerville and Davis Square. It was almost six when she pulled onto Russell Street, the Victorians lining the street shadowy and spooky in the low light, the dusk descending in a cloud of spring-scented mist.

Toby, wearing a raincoat, the hood pulled over his head, was waiting for her on the sidewalk. She had called him from her cell phone to tell him about Brad and he had promised company and dinner—Chinese she saw from the logo on the bag he carried.

The gods smiled and she found parking right out front and in a few seconds she was enfolded in a hug and the scent of
kung pao
chicken and dumplings. “You okay?” Toby asked, watching her face. He had been her best friend since college, had been with her through three deaths—no, four, she realized—in a little more than a year. This was the fifth.

Sweeney led him upstairs.

“Jesus,” she said, collapsing onto the couch and leaning back
against the cushions. The moist blur of the headlights on the way home had given her a headache and now her head was pounding. “I feel like someone mugged me.” The apartment, clean and freshly painted, the walls covered with photographs of gravestones and monuments, the black-and-cream color scheme pleasingly simple, usually made her feel better.

“I did some asking around after you called,” Toby said. “Want to hear what I found out?”

“Yeah, hold on a second.” She got up to pour them both a scotch—neat for her, on the rocks for him—took off her coat and lay back on the couch again. Toby’s hair had gotten mashed down by the hood of his jacket and he looked slightly mad, his black eyes wide behind his glasses, his curly dark hair pressed into an odd sort of cap. They had known each other for ten years now and the sight of him still filled her with pleasure.

“Well, I called a couple of kids in Brad’s class who I knew from that play I directed last year.”

Toby, who had been a thespian during his undergraduate years, had directed a student production of
Macbeth
the year before. His interpretation had been set in a 1980s New York crack house. Privately Sweeney believed it not to have been a success. She recalled with a cringe the opening scene—three homeless addicts mumbling “Double, double, toil and trouble” around a grate fire. But Brad had done sets and Toby had gotten to know him a little.

“You know Jaybee Mitchell and Becca Dearborne, right?”

Sweeney nodded. They were both in her seminar, Jaybee—a long-go approximation of J.B.—a smart but somewhat lazy kid who, she suspected, had chosen Sweeney’s classes because his friends had, and Becca, a more motivated scholar, who had often worked with Brad on group projects. She had even wondered once if Brad and Becca were dating, but their casual way with each other had offered her no clues.

“Well, Jaybee lives . . . lived with Brad. They’ve been friends since they were kids and went to prep school together and I think Becca’s family knew Brad’s from Newport. Apparently he and Becca found
him when they came home this morning. They slept at Becca’s and came back to the apartment because the shower at Becca’s dorm wasn’t working. Anyway, they came in and found him. The police told them not to say anything about how he looked when he was found, but Becca called a bunch of people before the police got there and it seems like everyone knows at this point. When they came in, he was wearing only his underwear and his arms were tied to the bed with neckties. He had a bag over his head and he was wearing the jewelry. Well, you know that part of it.”

Sweeney felt guilty all of a sudden for telling Toby about her conversation with Quinn. Quinn had asked her not to say anything, but she had been so shaken when she left the station that she’d called Toby and blurted out the whole thing.

“Yeah, you know what? Don’t tell anyone about the jewelry. I was supposed to . . . ” She closed her eyes for a moment, her head pounding. “Toby, what do you think happened to him?”

“I don’t know. It seems like it must have been someone he knew, to let them tie him up like that. Maybe he met somebody and brought them home and they killed him.”

“Was he gay? I don’t think he was gay. That’s silly, I guess, but it’s just hard to imagine a woman tying him up like that. He was pretty tall.”

“I don’t know.” Toby was preoccupied with the dumplings.

“And putting a bag over his head? Why wouldn’t they use a knife or a gun or something. It seems weird.”

“Apparently, Jaybee and Becca had come home earlier that night and found him really drunk. Maybe someone came along, found him passed out, and tied him up and put the bag over his head so they could rob the apartment.”

“But that doesn’t explain the jewelry,” Sweeney said, sitting up on the couch. “I think the police believe he was killed by some kind of ritual killer who uses the jewelry as a calling card or whatever you call it. They were trying to find out from me whether the jewelry had significance.
When I told them that he’d been working on a project on mourning jewelry for my class, they almost seemed disappointed.”

“Had you seen it before?”

“No. And I can’t figure out where he would have gotten it. I told the class to go out to museums and antique stores and see if they could find examples of mourning jewelry. I didn’t mean for them to go out and buy it.” Sweeney took a bowl of rice and chicken from him.

“God, that poor family. You knew his younger brother died a few years ago, right?”

“What? I didn’t know that.”

“You knew who he was, though?”

“Yeah, I mean when I heard the last name I wondered and then I think one of the other kids in the class asked me if I knew that he was a Putnam, of
the
Putnams.”

There were a handful of families who were synonymous with the history of Brahmin Boston and the Putnams were one of them. An early ancestor had come over from England to make his fortune, and that fortune had been made a generation or two later in overseas shipping, then multiplied through savvy real estate deals and influence wielding. Putnams had served in almost every political office in the Commonwealth, and Brad’s grandfather, John Putnam, had been an influential U.S. senator when moderate Republicans could still get elected in Massachusetts. His career had crossed paths with a far more famous Boston pol, Senator Patrick “Paddy” Sheehan, whose family name had become synonymous with politics in the city.

Sheehan came from a family of Irish immigrants who had risen to prominence in the city, and it was when his youngest daughter, Kitty, had fallen in love with Andrew Putnam, the youngest son of his Republican rival, that the two families were forever melded. Andrew and Kitty Putnam had gone on to have five children. Brad was the second to youngest.

Now that Toby said it, Sweeney did vaguely remember a tragic death. “I think I remember something,” she said. “What was it?”

“Five years ago, Brad went to college, I think. They were down at the family house in Newport and there was a car accident. Brad’s younger brother Petey died in the crash. All of the Putnam kids were in the car but they never told anybody who had been driving. The police up in Newport tried for months to get them to talk, but they all claimed that they’d been knocked out and couldn’t remember anything. The assumption was that whoever had been driving was drunk and they were covering it up, but the Putnams threw their weight around and the case was closed eventually.”

Sweeney ate her chicken slowly, thinking.

“So what do the police want from you?” Toby asked.

“I don’t know. They said they might call me to help with the jewelry some more. I think they have this theory about a ritual killer.”

He was quiet for a few minutes.

“What?” Sweeney asked him.

“I don’t know. I was just thinking about Brad.”

“What about him?” The images flashed up before Sweeney again. Those eyes.

“Just that I thought once he seemed like the kind of person who I could imagine getting himself killed. Do you know what I mean?”

“Yeah. It was like he’d given up. Not on the things he did every day, but on the big stuff.”

“He was what, sixteen, when his brother died? That must have been pretty traumatic. Maybe that’s what it was.”

“Yeah,” Sweeney said. But she didn’t feel convinced.

While Toby did the dishes, Sweeney pressed play on her answering machine and heard the voice of Katie Swift, a friend from college. Katie hadn’t received Sweeney’s RSVP card . . . maybe it had gotten lost in the mail . . . she just wanted to check . . . she was so hoping that Sweeney would be coming.

RSVP card?

“Did you forget to RSVP?” Toby called from the kitchen. “That’s so rude. You’re going, right?”

“Shit!” Sweeney brushed past him and started searching through the mess of stuff on her refrigerator.

It was covered with pieces of paper—parking tickets, invitations, and other assorted summonses—and, behind a picture of another college friend’s new baby, a surprised-looking, very new baby girl named Hester, Sweeney found the tasteful ecru card informing her that Mr. and Mrs. Donald Swift requested the honor of her company at the wedding of Katherine Marie Swift and Milan Simic in Newport in two weeks’ time.

“I completely forgot,” she said.

“You’re going, though, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know. It’s Newport . . . ”

He turned to look at her. “When was the last time you were down there?”

“Five years ago. My grandmother’s funeral. Before I left for Oxford.”

“Really, you haven’t been down since then?”

“No. And I don’t really want to go now.” She took a plate from him and dried it with the hem of her sweatshirt, then put it away.

“But it’s Katie.”

“I know, I should go, shouldn’t I? If I do, can I be your date? I hate going to those things alone. They always stick you at a table with the teenage cousins or something.”

“Of course. But don’t wear something weird.”

“What do you mean?”

Toby disapproved of Sweeney’s affinity for vintage clothes. “Just what I said. Don’t wear something weird. It’s a wedding. It’s supposed to be a happy occasion.”

“All right. But I’ll only promise if you promise not to hit on teenagers.” The last time they’d gone to a wedding together, Toby had ended up going home with the bride’s nineteen-year-old sister.

“Ha,” he said, flicking a palmful of soap bubbles at her. “Ha, ha, ha.”

When Toby had gone, Sweeney looked up at the antique mantel clock on her bookshelf. It was only eight. Not too late for reporters’ deadlines. She found the phone book and dialed the main number for the
Boston Globe
.