Mansions Of The Dead (6 page)

“Paul Blum, please.” The secretary put her through. Paul was a friend of Sweeney’s from college and had recently come back to Boston after a stint in Little Rock, Arkansas. He was covering the cops beat now and Sweeney was betting that he’d been put on the Brad Putnam story.

“Hi, Sweeney,” he said distractedly. “It’s not a great time. I’m on deadline. I’m sure you heard about this thing with the Putnam kid.”

“I know. I know. Look, he was one of my students and I was thinking I could give you a quote about him. I knew him pretty well. He was a nice kid.”

“Great. Let me bring up the . . . okay. Go ahead.” Sweeney gave him some very nice words about Brad, about his talents as a scholar and her regard for him. When she was done, Paul said, “Listen, thanks a lot. I’ve been having trouble getting anything like that. That family has a pretty formidable PR operation. I owe you one.”

“Actually,” Sweeney said, “I was going to see if you could do me a favor. After you’ve filed your story, fax or e-mail me whatever you’ve got on the Putnams. Stuff about the accident, about the family business. Anything recent. I’m just kind of curious, since I knew him and all.”

“Okay, great. I’ve got it all right here. You can look it up on the archives online if you want, but there’s a charge and it’ll take a lot of searching to find all of it. I’ll fax it. But it’ll be a couple of hours or so. That all right?”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

She tried halfheartedly to clean up a bit around the apartment and to not stare at the fax machine. It was just after ten when the fax line rang and the machine began to spit out paper. She poured herself another scotch, and when the machine was finished, took the stack into bed with her and began to read.

From the printed sheets Paul had sent her, Sweeney surmised that the
Globe
archive only went back to 1979. There were a couple of pieces about the death of Senator John Putnam, a formal obituary and a long story about the star-studded funeral. Sweeney noted that there weren’t any stories about the death of Paddy Sheehan. She had assumed he was dead too but apparently not. He must be at least eighty by now.

And then there was a piece from five years ago, when Brad was sixteen, about the accident near the family’s Bellevue Avenue home in Newport.

“Celebration turned to tragedy last night for one of Newport’s most well-known families,” the article started off. As far as she could tell, Brad and his younger brother Peter, fifteen, their older brother Drew, twenty-nine at the time, another older brother named Jack, who had been twenty-five, and their sister Camille, twenty-eight, had been driving home from a Newport bar called Full Fathom Five when the family’s Jeep Wagoneer went off the road and into a ditch. Peter had been thrown out and had been killed instantly. When the police arrived on the scene, the Putnam siblings were trying to resuscitate him. When questioned by police, the Putnam children had all said that they were knocked out directly after the accident and couldn’t remember who was driving.

The reporter had written a snide little paragraph about how police were unable to determine the cause of the accident because the Putnams had “tampered with the evidence.” The police had requested that the siblings all submit to blood alcohol tests, but a lawyer had been called and by the time he had spoken to everyone, it was too late.

There were a few more articles about the police investigation, with a final one about a press conference in which Newport police announced they were closing the case due to the impossibility of determining what had happened.

Then, about eight months after the accident, there was a small piece about Kitty and Andrew Putnam’s separating and saying that Kitty was living in the family’s Newport house. It mentioned that their
son Peter had died in a car accident the previous summer and listed the names of their surviving children.

Some earlier articles told Sweeney about Brad’s siblings. A few years before the accident, Drew had been made partner at the family law firm. Camille had decided on public service, and at only twenty-five, had been elected to the state assembly. A more recent piece announced that she was running for Congress. Jack Putnam, Sweeney saw from a series of arts section articles about him, was a sculptor.

She poured herself another drink and went to sit by her window, which looked toward Davis Square. Every summer of her childhood, she had gone alone to spend five or six weeks with her paternal grandparents in Newport. Their house was an old Victorian, right in town on Narragansett Avenue. It had a back garden, which Sweeney’s grandmother had planted with formal English perennial beds, and from the upper floors you could see the water.

When she visited her grandparents, Sweeney had always stayed in the room that had been her aunt Anna’s. It was overbearingly feminine, but she had loved it just the same, the pink- and red-rose pattern on the walls, the chenille bedspread, and the canopy bed. The shelves had been filled with books about adventurous girls of the twenties and thirties, with names like Madge and Nan. She remembered lying in Anna’s bed, which always smelled of rose petals, moonlight filtering through the windows. She had looked forward to those summers all year, looked forward to waking up that first morning to the sound of her grandparents moving about downstairs, to the distant sound of classical music on the radio. No other part of her life had that sense of timelessness, of permanence. There was nowhere else she felt as safe.

Until her mother had fallen out with her grandparents the summer she was sixteen and she hadn’t gone to Newport anymore. After she was in college, she had gotten back in touch with her grandparents, even went down to visit them one summer for a couple of days. But Newport had never again had the same magic for her; it never again looked as beautiful as she remembered it from her childhood.

She remembered the thick, salty air, the constant rush of the sea.
What had it been like for them, the sudden crash, then silence, being out there all alone with their dead brother and one of them—who was it?—responsible for that death.

Before she got into bed, Sweeney made some quick sketches of the jewelry. Her photographic memory made it easy and she was pleased when they were done, though not quite sure why she’d done them. As she drifted off to sleep, she thought again of Newport, of the night air, and of the Wagoneer, hurtling through the night toward death.

IT WAS NEARLY ELEVEN
by the time Quinn left the station. He was tired, but his brain was moving fast, churning and sifting images and information. It was why so many cops had trouble at home, he’d decided. You couldn’t just turn off your brain at the end of the day, couldn’t just go home and talk about the fact that the furnace needed to be serviced or that your wife needed a new car. He pushed down a wave of guilt. He’d forgotten about Maura. For most of the day, while he’d focused on the murder case, he’d forgotten about what was waiting for him at home. He took a deep breath. He had to give himself a break. The doctor had said that he needed to leave her alone sometimes.

As he drove through Davis Square, he hesitated for a minute, then pulled over and parked across from Easter 1916, one of the best Irish pubs in the neighborhood, locking the car and leaving his jacket behind. The inside of the pub was warm and close, with the usual Sunday-night crowd—neighborhood couples, kids on dates, a few old men scowling into their Guinnesses—ensconced in the front bar. From the back room, Quinn could hear the strains of the session, the clean dance of a fiddle bow on strings, the whine of the elbow pipes, the low thrum of the bodhran. He ordered a Guinness from the girl behind
the bar and made his way to the back, waving at the few people he knew along the way.

As a kid, he’d often come along when his father played sessions—not at this pub, but at ones like it all over the city. He found an empty chair in the corner and settled in. His father had closed his eyes while he played, holding the bodhran like a baby, the playing stick moving over the skin in figure eights and stars. Quinn remembered feeling disturbed sometimes, watching his father surrender to the collective effort of the music. It was as though he’d lost him to drink for those hours while he was playing. Quinn had always felt relieved when his father had stood up and stumbled outside, ready to go home, still intoxicated with the music.

They were just fooling around tonight, a couple of fiddlers and flute players, the bodhran player not keeping the beat very well. Quinn listened for a half hour and then, feeling guilty, got up and took his empty glass into the bar.

The little house off Holland Street was dark and quiet. The day they’d gone to look at it, he remembered Maura saying that it reminded her of a cottage out of a fairy tale. It was a double-decker with a robin’s egg blue front door. The white vinyl siding was stained in places and the lawn needed a trim, but he was pleased overall by its appearance.

They had planted bulbs along the little stone path the past fall, when they were full of hope and happiness, waiting for the baby, and in the streetlight he could just see the beginnings of the bright green stalks trying to catch up after the long winter. He had forgotten about them until that moment and they seemed somehow cruel, reminding him of their innocence, of their life before, of all their expectations.

He hesitated for a moment outside the front door and listened. He turned his key in the lock and stepped inside, the stifling atmosphere of the house contrasting with the fresh, cool air outdoors.

In the dim light from the kitchen, he could see Maura sleeping on the couch, the television muted and flashing the bright lights of a late night talk show. The room smelled stale, rodenty. He needed to do some laundry, but there had just been too much going on.

He climbed halfway up the stairs to the second floor and listened. Everything was quiet, except for Maura’s sister Debbie snoring loudly in the guest bedroom at the top of the stairs. In the living room again, he tiptoed quietly over to the couch and looked down at his wife’s sleeping face. He knew he should wake her and convince her to go upstairs, but she looked so peaceful he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He turned off the TV and covered her with the afghan draped over the back of the couch. She stretched in her sleep and for a moment she looked almost happy. He stared down at her, trying to recall the person she had been. But it wasn’t that he couldn’t remember—their smiling faces in their wedding picture on the fireplace mantel provided a cruel point of comparison. It was just that it was a kind of torture to think of how she used to be.

That morning as he’d left for work she had spoken to him softly. “I sometimes feel as though I’m nothing more than a creation of your mind, that all of the things you used to like about me were things that you made in me, that I’m nothing more than a shell that you filled with your expectations.”

It struck him as strange that it was only in this crisis that they should be having the kinds of conversations he had always wanted to have with her, the kinds of conversations he imagined people like Sweeney St. George had all the time, profound, intellectual conversations that mattered. The times he’d tried to start those kinds of conversations with her she had looked at him strangely and said, “You okay, hon? Why do you want to talk about all this heavy stuff ?”

He flipped through the mail, made sure she was warm on the couch, and went upstairs to bed, stopping to look in on Megan. She was sleeping, on her back as the doctor had told them she should sleep, and her tiny fists were curled up against her face as though she were protecting herself from some dreamworld demon. He wanted to pick her up, wake her, and look into her eyes, to make her feel safe again, but he knew that there’d be hell to pay if Debbie had to get out of bed because she heard the baby crying. Instead, he put a hand on her head,
still dented, the soft, wispy hair so pale it could barely be seen, and felt himself start to choke up, then turned away and closed the door.

Their bedroom was a mess, clothes draped over the end of the bed and the bureaus. He started to separate the clean things from the dirty, but got frustrated and dumped everything into the basket they used as a hamper. Then he stripped down and took a quick shower before getting into bed alone.

He lay there in the dark and thought about the Putnam kid. Quinn and Maura’s bed was a low four-poster, about the same height as the bed the kid had died on. He flipped over onto his stomach and stretched his arms out, grasping each post. How long would it take to secure one of his hands? A minute at least, to make sure it was really tight. But it hadn’t been that tight. In fact, if Brad Putnam had really tried, Quinn thought he could have gotten his hands untied. So why hadn’t he tried? Why, while his assailant was tying the other hand, hadn’t he slipped his other hand free and tried to escape?

There were two possibilities. One was that he had wanted to be tied up and the other was that he had been unconscious. Quinn remembered the reek of tequila. Perhaps it was both. Perhaps he had invited someone back for a little S&M and then gotten so drunk he’d passed out. They had asked the roommate if he knew of anyone Brad was seeing who might have done this to him and the roommate had just looked horrified and said that he knew all of Brad’s friends.