A Pinchbeck Bride (14 page)

Chapter Twenty-three

Rudy Schmitz seemed distinctively lacking in sympathy over the death of his “friend” Bryce Rossi. “This is obviously a crime of passion,” he told me on the telephone, “very much unrelated to Mingo House, thank goodness. It just demonstrates the violent world which we inhabit. I plan to light a candle in memory of poor Bryce at church this weekend.” Rudy was a regular at the Church of the Advent on Beacon Hill. “Bryce tried to outrun his past but flagged, and it caught up with him.

“People laugh at the Victorians’ obsession with background, but this is precisely why they required references for everything. To keep at bay the seedy and syphilitic…But Bryce dying does rather leave us in the lurch. I mean, he’d spent two full days appraising our collection, and now, this.”

“Well, poor Cat must be in shock. She found him, and it was a grisly scene, according to the media.”

Then Rudy muttered something to a companion about driving and “setting off” around noon. “Jonny and I are going to Crane Beach for a bit of sun. It’s such a precious commodity this year. We want to take full advantage of what little is offered. I just hope the rain hasn’t swollen the greenhead population.”

The greenheads were large, almost carnivorous flies that left you bleeding after they bit you. They bred in the salt marshes near Crane Beach, north of Boston. “Perhaps I’ll express our sympathy to Cat. From the Mingo House staff. I can discreetly inquire about Bryce’s appraisals and see how much he accomplished, how much he wrote down.”

Seldom had I encountered a more mercenary crew than the people associated with Mingo House. They had accountants’ ink running in their veins.

Rudy had left Cat’s business card at Mingo House. “Cathryn Lee Hodges, Art Historian,” it read, and included a Boston number and a Back Bay address on Marlborough Street. When I called Cat, her voice was hoarse with grief, but she agreed to my coming.

She was so skinny and neat that I expected her apartment to be as clean and clutter-free as an art gallery, but it proved to be one stingy, dank room with a bricked-up fireplace and cheap Scandinavian furniture smothered with clothing: tartan coats of Scottish wool, suede skirts, some vintage things of tulle and satin…

“Wow!” I thought immediately of Genevieve.

“I’m doing a double major. In art history and fashion design.”

“Really. Where?”

She mentioned an online university, then added, “I transferred from Shawmut.”

“Did you know…Genevieve Courson well? She liked vintage clothing too.”

“Genevieve.” Cat’s indigo glass beads and blue vinyl miniskirt were not exactly mourning attire. “She missed a lot of school after the accident, her motorcycle crash. And when she was around, she was very proprietary about Bryce. She acted as though she owned him. She was the same way with that Harvard professor and with poor Fletcher.”

Was she packing? Was she moving, like “poor Fletcher”? And why?

“Why do you feel sorry for Fletcher? He strikes me as a person who can take care of himself.”

“Fletcher is kind of a train wreck. That’s what everyone assumes Genevieve was, but, from what I gather, she was a pretty tough cookie. Fletcher has trouble with women. He hasn’t got the greatest social skills. He used to carry notes on dates, you know, cue cards, index cards. To help him with conversation. Genevieve said he’d done that since grammar school.”

She seemed to have mastered her emotions, so I decided to ask about Bryce. “Bryce dying was such a shock.”

She slammed her fist against an already bullied table. “Being made to die! It was murder. I didn’t go into the living room because I could see all the blood from the foyer. And see him slumped on the floor in front of the Madonna and Child. Like he was some sort of sacrifice.”

“Have you any idea—”

“Who could have killed him? Of course not. I’d have told the police and they’d have arrested him by now. But he dealt in valuable art. Someone must have taken something, some statue or coin or whatever. Do you know he had vertebrae from St. Francis of Assisi? Bryce was very religious. He was a monk for three years. At a monastery in Ohio.”

“But the police said nothing was stolen. And there was no forced entry.”

“Bryce was too trusting. Like a child.” She began putting clothing onto hangers, some Sixties mohair sweaters in Easter egg colors.

“But Bryce and Genevieve, two people associated with Mingo House, have both been murdered in bizarre circumstances this summer.…Are you afraid?”

“I only went to Mingo House twice. The two days you were there. I’m not superstitious. I once owned a black cat and I was born on Friday the thirteenth. I’m not even religious. My mother is a Christian Scientist, but my father is a card-carrying atheist. I mean that. He’s a member of this atheist society. I’m somewhere in-between.”

I mentioned Genevieve Courson’s pregnancy, how Bryce “I had heard” was the father.

Cat snickered. “That was one way she kept her hooks in men. Genevieve. By telling little fairy tales.”

“So who was the father?”

“I have no clue. Whoever she wanted to manipulate at the moment, I suppose.”

“Bryce had made some…mistakes in his life.”

“Being taken in by Genevieve for instance?”

“No. Acting as a fence for stolen art. He had served time in prison. It was reported in the media.”

“The media. What can you believe, even on a good day? Besides, after what I’ve seen, I avoid watching the news. I’ve seen enough, too much. You don’t know what it’s like to find someone dead.”

“You’re wrong.”

She pouted and slipped two chain-link belts onto a hanger.

“I was the person who found Genevieve. At Mingo House. She was wearing this green Victorian dress, with a bustle. Something from the Eighteen-eighties. She had little lace mittens on her hands.”

For an instant, a long instant, she became the freeze frame in a movie. Then her features tightened and she burst into tears. “You say that as if you relished the experience.” Mouthing something I couldn’t decipher, she seized a coat and flung it toward my head. I ducked and it hit the bricked-up fireplace.

“Cat—”

“Get out!”

“I only meant I understood—”

“Get out before I call the police! Maybe you found Genevieve because you put her there—after you killed her, you monster! And you never liked Bryce, all you Mingo House snobs. I saw you, sneering behind his back. You and that bald shit Ahearn!”

The appraisal was now a moot point.

Shaken, I retraced my route back home. Surely, Cat Hodges couldn’t be serious about blaming me for Genevieve’s murder. But she certainly was hysterical, certainly was crazy. Would she convey her crazy suspicions to the police?

I proceeded home. I almost expected a squad car idling outside of our building, but none had materialized. I wanted a gin and tonic but poured an iced tea instead and went out onto our balcony.

“Mark, you had company,” Chloe Hilliard called from next door. “This man was in the lobby when I came home from school. He said he’d wait for you in the Public Garden. By the Japanese lantern his daughter liked…He was a little weird.”

It could only be him. “What…did he look like?”

“Older with gray hair and a beard.”

“Was he wearing a poncho?”

“It’s sunny, Mark. Duh.”

My only thought was to keep him away from Chloe. “Thanks…Just one of the Mingo House oddballs.”

He was actually under the little granite bridge that spans the swan boats’ pond. Larry Courson’s facial hair differentiated him from the wanted posters, and he’d procured a preppie wardrobe Dorothea Jakes would have admired: an Oxford-cloth shirt with mint-green pinstripes and khakis held up by a cross-grain belt with a golf ball pattern. Where had he been spending his time? In homeless shelters? With loyal friends? Camped in the woods or in some alley?

“I knew I could count on you.”

“You didn’t touch that little girl. You are never to go near that little girl again!
Do you hear me
?”

“Don’t shout, take it easy. She was just in the lobby. I asked for you, and the doorman said the girl might know where you were.” Tears were accumulating in his eyes. “I thought you believed in me.”

He was playing me again, the way he played everybody, using his dead daughter as a prop. “You’re a pornographer, you ran Zephyrus Studios in Roxbury. Does the film
Fresh Men Initiation
, starring Fletcher Coombs, ring a bell?”

He laughed, the only time I’d ever heard him do it. “Fletcher needed some extra cash. I referred him to a friend of mine, Derek Clayton. This black guy, on the down low. Derek got into trouble when he, well, auditioned this hustler who turned out to be underage.”

“Zephyrus Studios? Zephyrus isn’t exactly a common name. But it’s intimately connected with your wife’s family—the
Mingoes
.”

“Those foul people.” He averted his face while a family of tourists passed, carrying bagged souvenirs from Cheers. “It was a little joke, the name. I suggested it to Derek when he was thinking of forming his business. He wanted something classical. He was thinking of ‘Hercules,’ but I said, ‘Derek, you’ve got a small-time operation. Hercules implies big.’ So I suggested ‘Zephyrus.’ I never thought he’d use it. I mean it sounds like the name of an air freshener. Hey, I never even saw Fletcher’s movies. But they helped him stay in college and buy books. His sisters all went to the Ivy League and that cost his dad big bucks.”

He was a more confident, cocky man than he’d seemed previously.

“Derek wasn’t very good at being a movie magnate. Well, he wasn’t very good at being anything. He did a piss-poor job at whatever he tried.” More tourists sidled past. “Can we walk a bit? This place is kind of busy.”

“Not far. I don’t want to be seen with you.”

He went ahead and I followed until we met once more by the fountain at the far end of the Public Garden, the one with an angel carrying her bronze basket of grain. People seldom stop here since it’s deep in shade and the fountain’s basin, made of beach stones imprisoned in concrete, holds no water and no interest either for ducks or penny-pitching children.

Larry Courson said, “I know who got Genevieve pregnant. And who killed her. It was that Asian creep, Jon Kim. He was cheating on his wife.”

“He’s gay,” I said.

“Exactly. But he didn’t want to be. He even went to one of those ex-gay ministries. To get cured. While he was still with his wife and after. He went on a prayer retreat and saw a Christian psychiatrist.”

The wind ruffled the trees, showering us with droplets of water from the last rainstorm. “How do you know this?”

“Genevieve told me. Jon Kim told her. When a bunch of them from Mingo House went to Rudy Schmitz’s gym for sushi. Went to Flex. Jon Kim singled her out. He decided his problem was his castrating wife. He’d tried prayer and Viagra. He thought with another woman he could be quote-unquote normal.”

“Did Genevieve actually say they had sex?”

“The point is he had the hots for her.”

A crude phrase to use in speaking of a dead daughter. But maybe not for a pedophile.

“Genevieve didn’t tell me everything.” He glanced at the angel. “She had her mother’s disposition, and her grandmother’s. Her grandmother was a Stalinist. She admired Joseph Stalin. ‘He played an honorable role in the struggle against fascism.’ She said that. Honest to God.”

Honesty wasn’t something I associated with his family. But Genevieve had been strangled, killed using the power of someone’s hands, and Jon Kim had bragged he was a black belt. Surely his hands could marshal the strength to choke the life from a college girl. “Jon Kim is a nerd, a geek. There is no way he killed Genevieve.” But, saying these words, wasn’t I being racist? Using the model minority Asian stereotype, long outdated by the violence of Cambodian and Vietnamese gangs.

“What about Fletcher?”

He winced. “Gimme a break. Fletcher’s a wimp.” He sat on the bench next to the fountain’s basin. “He looks like an athlete, but all he could do was play JV hockey. Until he got hit by the puck and lost a tooth and freaked out. After that, he’d have a panic attack if he saw an ice cube.” He sneered. “Fletcher is a joke.”

“Did you kill Bryce Rossi? The art appraiser?”

“Of course not.”

“He died just after you busted out. And he claimed he was the father of Genevieve’s child.”

“Did you ever meet him? I met him once when Genevieve took him to visit Carol’s mother. He was a pretty unlikely Casanova.”

“Bryce Rossi carried brass knuckles. He’d spent time in prison.” I didn’t tell him Grace Torrance’s suspicions because she detested her son-in-law and I didn’t care to reveal my own investigating to this man.

“For what? Stealing Girl Scout cookies?”

“Just go away. And don’t go after Jon Kim.” I lied: “He’s traveling on business in Silicon Valley.”

“Genevieve said his company was in trouble. They’d had a product recall and their CFO got the boot. Jon Kim was eating antacids by the bushel. He was really on edge.”

A throng of college students approached, some sort of summer school excursion, perhaps. I was anxious at being seen with this fugitive. “Don’t do anything foolish, Larry. At least you’re not wanted for murder.”

The students kept jostling by.

“How did you get my address?”

“Genevieve wrote it down.”

Then Larry Courson merged with the stream of college students, and, once they were gone, he too had vanished.

Chapter Twenty-four

Officially, Mr. and Mrs. Jon Kim lived in a modernist high rise of glass and brick near Mount Auburn Hospital and the bird sanctuary that makes this bend of the Charles River in Cambridge off-limits to development by Harvard, the various neighboring day schools, or the upscale markets peddling wine, organic food, and antiques in the vicinity. The simplicity of the building—vaguely resembling a high school designed during the 1960s, with a lobby with concrete planters of pink-flowering African succulents—could fool you into thinking you could afford a condo here.

I’d persuaded Roberto to tag along. He was doing anything not to hit his textbooks, even sneaking out onto our balcony to babble in the voices of his old characters from our days in improv. Besides, he liked Asians; he’d once had a boyfriend, a weightlifter from Melbourne with a Mohawk and a cute Aussie accent. “Are you sure this Kim lives here? If he’s separated?”

“Yes, and more importantly, his wife lives here. Rudy finally e-mailed us all a list of trustee contacts.”

“And we’re snooping around
why
?”

“Because Jon Kim is acting strange.”

Roberto absent-mindedly kneaded the subtle pot belly his Tex-Mex cooking had sired. “Is he acting
killed-someone
strange?”

“Hard to say. Just think of this as a background check.”

“What is our mission, should I choose to accept it?”

“To try to see the all-important Mrs. Kim and get a handle on Jon’s darkest secrets.”

“And if that fails?”

“We’ll talk to whomever we can. We’ll say we’re interested in buying a condo. I saw a unit listed for two-million dollars with Coldwell Banker.”

The lobby was locked, with no guard or concierge in sight. Someone entered the building from the Charles River side, a girl I guessed was an au pair or nanny, but she was too intent on the baby in her carriage to respond to my frenzied waving.

“I guess you’re a bust with Swedish girls.”

“My Norse period is definitely over.”

Then a Verizon repairman exited on our side, but was too engrossed in the drama on his cell phone to stop. So we stood there, too summery dressed to seem respectable in this neighborhood, especially Roberto in his ratty Ogunquit T-shirt and cut-offs.

“How long do you have to sit before you’re loitering?” I asked him. “Legally?”

“In this zip code, about ten minutes.”

Soon, an ark of a limousine, big enough to accommodate a dozen giggling, prom-bound teenagers, eased quietly to the curb, and a thin woman, all rouge and frosted hair, alighted. “Alonzo,” she told her driver, “bring the groceries up once you’ve parked the car. But not before Anastasia has had a stretch.” She wore a miniskirt of sorts, and opaque white hose on her knock-kneed legs. On one wrist was a watch emphasized by an oval of diamonds, and on the other, a cuff of beaten silver. “Are you delivering something?” she asked Roberto—because he looked Hispanic?

“No. We figured you’ve got everything you want.”

“Because, if not, we don’t allow salespeople on the premises.” She clutched her small bag with its clasp in the guise of a rhinestone cat’s head.

“I’m a friend of Jon Kim.”

When she wrinkled her brow, she aged another decade. “Are you Rudy Schmitz?” Before I could answer, she ran on like the Boston Marathon. “Because everyone in this building,
everyone
, is on Emily’s side. She has done no wrong,
she
is the wronged party. Jon knows perfectly well not to send his friends here on any little reconnaissance missions. But he wouldn’t stay away, and
that’s
why Emily took out that restraining order. So
he
has no business here, and
you
have no business here.
Either
.”

She stamped into the lobby in her sling-back high heels. The doors to the elevator opened and she was born skyward to her expensive lair, the raptor flown home with fresh meat.

“Popular, this buddy of yours.”

“Not at all. And that’s relevant information.”

Next, hugging four Whole Foods bags and a corpulent angora cat, Alonzo came lumbering along. A scratch on the back of his right hand was leaching blood. The cat yawned lavishly, parting its pink mouth to bare very white fangs. Then it nipped two vicious times at Alonzo’s thumb.

“She’ll bite me if I put her down, she’ll bite me if I keep holding her. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Mrs. Merrithew, she doesn’t want cat hair on her new organza blouse. Or on her new cat purse. So I get stuck carrying Anastasia. But Anastasia, she’s in a really bad mood because she just came from the vet’s and got a pedicure. That always makes her really mad. Almost as mad as Mrs. Merrithew.” It suddenly dawned on him that we were strangers and he swiftly channeled his employer. “Who do you want to see? Are you delivering something?”

“We’re friends of Jon Kim.”

“Jon Kim—the
maricon
. I don’t know the Korean word for that.”

“It’s
kimchi
,” Roberto told him in English, “it means ‘hot stuff.’” Then he and Alonzo conducted an extended exchange in Spanish. Roberto kept nodding, sympathizing, I assumed, about being employed by such a diva. Then Anastasia again punctured Alonzo’s hand.

“Jon Kim moved out,” Alonzo said in English. “Quite a while ago. He came back from a conference in Singapore, and his wife had all the locks changed, so they had a big fight. Right here in the lobby. The superintendent told me all about it. He yelled at her, he threatened her life. He said, ‘I can break your neck like a chicken bone. Any time I choose. I’m a black belt and blah-blah-blah.’ The superintendent threw him out of the building. See that boxwood?
Stop it, Anastasia
. Where the hedge is all caved in?
Little bitch
! That’s where he landed when he fell. Jon Kim, the
maricon
. He was crying like a baby.”

Roberto asked a few more questions in Spanish and Alonzo replied, then said, “I’ve got to get going and show Mrs. Merrithew my hand. She pays me extra when this stupid cat bites me. She’s scared shitless I’ll sue. That extra cash makes this dumb job worthwhile. And she gives me her old clothes, for my wife. Like this cashmere sweater Anastasia scratched, and this negligee Mrs. Merrithew stained with her Bloody Mary. My wife’s very clever, she can fix anything. But Jon Kim’s wife, now she’s really smart. She’s an M.B.A. from Harvard.”

Fluffy cat in bleeding hand, Alonzo watched to be sure we both left the premises. Roberto paraphrased the information he’d gleaned. “Guess where Jon Kim met Rudy Schmitz? According to the super, anyway. In the bird sanctuary across Memorial Drive.”

“A notorious cruising area.”

“He’d been warned by the police. I mean, a guy in a three-piece suit and wingtips isn’t a very convincing birdwatcher. Especially with his pants down in a field of cat-o-nine-tails. And the rumor mill in the condominium says this Kim’s personality had changed. He’d become crazier, more confrontational.”

We were walking toward the trolley stop outside Mount Auburn Hospital, where a group of young people in scrubs were clustering.

“A restraining order. What does it take to get one of those?”

“Threatening someone. Threatening to break your wife’s neck would do the trick. And brawling with your super would help.”

“Genevieve Courson died from a neck injury. As the result of someone using his hands. Of course, the police would know about the restraining order. And all of us were questioned, all of the trustees. The night I found Genevieve, the night of the trustees’ meeting.”

The trolley crept toward us, making that pinging, outer-space sound in the wires overhead.

“But why would Jon kill Genevieve Courson? He wouldn’t have been involved with her while playing in the bulrushes and coming out.”

“But if his marriage was crumbling and he’d dated Genevieve as an alternative to Emily or as a beard…Then realized he was gay and tried to dump her, but perhaps she wasn’t willing to go easily. Perhaps she had a few requests, a few
demands
…And if she had a bun in the oven that could give his wife more ammo for their divorce…”

It was becoming evident that Jon Kim was a suspect
in something
.