A Pinchbeck Bride (9 page)

Chapter Sixteen

Mingo House closed for a day so that what Rudy Schmitz called “The Last Judgment” could take place with privacy and efficiency. Sam Ahearn, the other skeptical trustee, volunteered to be on hand, as of course did Rudy and his protégé, Jon Kim. Theoretically, we were present to help move things—highboys and armoires, bric-a-brac and Persian carpets—so we were decked out in shirts with fraying collars and jeans with threadbare knees and ripped-out pockets—although Sam retained his gold claddagh ring. Bryce, by contrast, was as elegant as ever, in a fawn linen suit with an art nouveau stickpin of an opal-winged hornet brightening his lapel.

He had won the stickpin last month on e-Bay. “I was awake until the wee hours, bidding away in my nightshirt, with a quart of Dutch fudge ice cream in my lap.” An assistant accompanied him—a young, almost anorexic woman with black hair cut in a trapezoid of sorts, a necklace of clear Lucite cubes, and an MoMA tote bag bulging with glossy art books. “This is Cat Hodges. Cat, dear, you may
deposit votre petite bioliotechque
on the floor by that hideous Victorian coat-rack, mahogany, circa 1875.”

That was an apt beginning to the day because Bryce disparaged almost every piece in the collection. He found hairline cracks in china, chips and fissures in marble, bad restoration—“Oh, they crucified this lacquer, crucified it.” He would command Cat to hand him some art tome to date a figurine or plate. Cat kept close to his side, like a dog taught to heel. At times, they would touch their heads together as they read from a catalogue or monograph, whisper and giggle before Bryce would say, “Just as I thought,” and Cat would scribble onto the pad as she recorded his comments.

They were an odd, disconcerting pair, but were they a couple? They acted as such, to the swelling irritation of Sam Ahearn, who muttered to me, “What team is he playing on, this Bryce guy? Can you tell me? He seems a little light in the loafers, like our fearless leader. Hey, Rudy converted the Korean Wonder Boy. I caught them kissing like lovebirds near the fountain in Copley Square. Right in front of all the little kids wading and swimming.” Obviously, Sam knew nothing of my personal life. Bryce admired: four English chairs from the Restoration period, all cherubs and demons; a Chinese junk fashioned from one massive elephant’s tusk; and a Duncan Phyfe table (“Good God, it’s genuine! Whodda thunk?”).

Bryce requested we break for lunch before tackling the Italian paintings, his specialty. Rudy had ordered us sushi—eel, soft-shell crab, tuna, and shrimp—prepared by the chef from Flex. Since Mingo House had no yard or garden, only a bleak expanse of concrete the stable and coal chute had once occupied, now being prepped to serve as the “courtyard” for our August fundraiser, he proposed we sit on the front steps to eat.

“Won’t that violate the shrine?” Jon Kim asked, referring to the teddy bears, Beanie Babies, and votive candles still persisting after the slaying of the “Victorian Girl.”

Rudy snorted, swirling his gray pony tail. “Enough is enough, I say. These morbid people who inflict their cyber-grief on those of us who actually knew poor Genevieve ought to learn some limits.” He scooped up the soggy stuffed animals, the withering flowers in supermarket cellophane, the Hallmark cards, and even a resin unicorn I thought Peggy O’Connell might have contributed—and pitched them into a green garbage bag, just as Bryce and Cat, who’d brought their own prosciutto and lettuce on baguettes, ventured outside.

“Are you taking it all?” Bryce blanched.

“Every blessed thing. Every damned thing, I should say.” Rudy twisted a red wire around the neck of the bag. I couldn’t help but notice his powerful hands. Had they been used on Genevieve? If so, why? He always spoke condescendingly of her. Was that personal or class bias or both?

“But it’s her shrine.”

Cat postponed biting her baguette, dousing it with extra balsamic vinegar instead.

“It’s public support for Genevieve…” Sorrow fractured Bryce’s voice.

Cat pressed her finger onto the back of Bryce’s hand, the exact gesture Bryce had used with me during our dinner of veal Umbria, when we’d been ejected from the restaurant on Newbury Street.

Rudy lit some sort of foreign brown cigarette and sucked its essence into his lungs. “Sadly, we’ve had complaints from our neighbors. The other weekend, a homeless man spent the night asleep on the steps, cuddling a big plush panda. That had never happened before our little zoo accumulated. The steps reeked of urine afterward.” Rudy clapped Bryce on the shoulder. “I’ve commissioned a more suitable way of remembering Genevieve: I’m having a placard created to display in the front hall of Mingo House. Right where our visitors can see it as our docents say a word about Genevieve. How special she was, how unique. It will be ready for the fundraiser in August.”

Cat was separating a piece of fat from her prosciutto.

“Oh, thank you,” Bryce said. “That’s a superb idea. And something she would have appreciated. Remember when we all went out to Flex, when she first volunteered as a docent? And she was on one of her fad diets, an all-raw diet? And she ate that tuna that was so bloody it looked like a crime scene?” Then Bryce began crying and Cat rescued him with a tissue from her MoMA bag.

“Don’t you just love history?” Rudy took the conversation on a detour away from homicide, describing his own experience in historic preservation, beginning with his childhood in Baltimore. He had grown up in the Guilford section of the city, in a gleaming-white colonial revival house that his great-grandfather had filled with cuckoo clocks, a reminder of his native village in the Black Forest. He could hear them even now, the dozens of clocks chiming all at once, and the little wooden birds bowing as they shot out from their holes. How many hiding places that place had contained: back stairs, porches, inglenooks, a gazebo, the little rock garden with the lily pond where he’d launched his plastic replica of a pirate ship. He remembered the tiles flanking a fireplace, especially one depicting a sexy, pelt-clad Hercules. “I couldn’t have cared less about Venus.” The family lived not far from Evergreen House, the Italianate pile built by the railroad tycoon John Work Garrett, with its theater painted by Leon Bakst and the graves of favorite horses marked by sugar-white slabs of marble. All of this stirred the pre-adolescent Rudy, and while his contemporaries were worshipping Johnny Unitas, Rudy began collecting case glass and lithographs of Lillian Russell. “You can see where I was headed.” He coughed, blowing smoke all over us.

Rudy was the crown prince of the downtown store of Schmitz Brothers, with its black granite facade carved with Art Deco tulips. At Christmas, he was the first child to sit on Santa’s exalted lap, and he got to press the button that animated the displays in all of the department store’s windows, the button that set the “old-fashioned” plaster figures in motion so that they skated on ponds of glistening mock ice, bobbed their heads and “sang” carols, and waved repetitiously from miniature sleighs. “I was quite the little monster. I wanted what I wanted when I wanted it.” He’d requested and received double the amount of presents the birthday after his tonsils were removed. “I got two motor scooters and two Robert Robots.”

Rudy’s father had helped save Fells Point, the nineteenth-century neighborhood of brick buildings—now townhouses, oyster bars, and fudge shops—from falling before the wrecker’s ball. “Yes, preservation is in my blood.” He was irritating the rest of us with his acrid smoke, especially Cat, who seemed ready to live up to her nickname and scratch his eyes out.

I saw an opening to obtain some information. “Rudy, how did you and Bryce meet?” He could out Bryce if he mentioned a gay setting.

“Boston is such a small town,” Jon Kim cut in.

I hadn’t asked him.

“We were members of the Victorian Society, right, Bryce?” Rudy stubbed out his cigarette and had the nerve to dispose of it in a tub of marigolds in front of the building next door.

“I believe so, Rudy. We’ve known each other since the flood.”

Sam Ahearn had declined to accept any of the Flex sushi, opting instead for a calzone. “So I saw on the news that the docent, Genevieve Courson, was pregnant.” Then Sam attacked his calzone as Bryce, Rudy, and Jon Kim all seemed to be fighting heartburn.

Cat cocked her head the way mannequins do, in that gesture that makes them look lynched, with a broken neck. “The media can be so ghoulish. Let the poor woman rest in peace. Why go publicizing her autopsy? Is her uterus national news? Hasn’t she suffered enough? Being killed and put in costume by some kinky pervert?” Bryce leaned against her bony shoulder. “Oh, kitten…But the work Genevieve did here lives on.”

“Could it have gotten her killed?” I was recalling the “something” she’d wanted to show me the evening I’d found her dead. “Genevieve told me that her mother brought her here. On her tenth birthday. To Mingo House and a ride on the swan boats. Genevieve couldn’t decide which she liked better, Mingo House or the swan boats. Most kids that age would have picked the swan boats, no contest. She was very unusual.”

“So who was the father of the baby she was carrying?” Sam Ahearn was clearly too immersed in his calzone to have noticed Bryce’s grief. “Was she dating a fellow from college?”

I wondered whether Bryce would claim paternity. He said, “Genevieve was a very popular girl. Pretty. Vivacious. Intelligent.”

“But careless when it came to sex. To not use protection in this day and age.” Sam balled up the waxed paper from his calzone. “I would think the cops would make a beeline toward anybody she’d been dating. Killing a pregnant girl. How low can you go?”

Jon Kim clapped his hands and proposed we get back to work. Rudy deposited his second cigarette stub in the neighbor’s planter. “I’ll get that later.”

We trudged back inside and Bryce began examining Corinth One’s Italian paintings: of Romulus and Remus sucking the wolf’s teats, of Tiberius in his villa above the cliffs of Capri, of Pompeiians eating sparrows cooked in honey. Squinting at each canvas with a magnifying glass, he seemed slightly more positive, cooing on occasion. “The pigments are bright. There’s a little cracking, but no haphazard restoration. However, this was done rather late in Randazzo’s career, past his prime, when he was having his worst bout of malaria…” Cat scribbled manically on her notepad.

Bryce could put no value on Clara’s bizarre trove of Civil War photographs, the glass plates of hands, legs, and entrails. “I abhor violence. I’m stymied. And repulsed. That family, this house—it has a blackness.”

At four, he flopped into the sofa in the library. “I’ll have to beg off on doing the dining room today. This is far more taxing than I’d imagined. And the dining room is where they found poor Genevieve, isn’t it?”

Sam Ahearn’s bald spot seemed ready to emit heat. “Well, what’s the tab? How much is this stuff worth?”

Bryce polished his hornet stickpin with a bit of his own saliva. “I’ll have to pontificate a bit.”

“What have you been doing all day? You brought those books, you brought your assistant. You mean to tell me that between the two of you, you can’t come up with a ballpark figure for the whole kit and caboodle?”

Cat now bared her claws: “This isn’t accounting, Mr. Ahearn. It’s not like tabulating a grocery bill. We are not cashiers. We have to research a few issues and debate the finer points.”

“Holy Toledo.” Sam whistled with disgust.

“Thank you, one and all, for a very special day,” Rudy complimented the group. Sam Ahearn failed to respond, but I managed a “You’re welcome.” Cat and Bryce scurried away; she wanted fresh grilled sardines at the Portuguese restaurant in Kendall Square and then a new Iranian film at the nearby cinema…Rudy stepped outside to make a call on his cell phone, so, finding I’d jammed a napkin smeared with wasabi mustard into my pocket, I trailed Jon Kim into the kitchen.

“Where’s the trash?”

He was soaping his hands in the sink.

“Good idea. This place is even dustier than I’d expected.”

“Jonny?” Rudy called from the front hall. “My maitre d’ took care of that nastiness, so I’m free.”

I opened the garbage bag containing the contents of Genevieve Courson’s impromptu shrine. Before consigning my dirty napkin to the bag, I would rescue the little resin unicorn and perhaps give it to Peggy O’Connell; it would be the pretext to my questioning her further. As I sifted through the toy animals with their seams disgorging their moist stuffing, I also scanned the strangers’ media-inspired messages: “Rest well, Victorian Girl” and “Shine on, Ginnny” and “Always in our hearts.” They were handwritten on the kind of stationery you could buy in drugstores—except one, which was typed on computer paper and consisted of some sort of quotation. Was it a line of Khalil Gibran, Rod McKuen, William Blake?

A cold ripple of fright rode my spine when I read it: “Vengeance is mine; I will repay.” The famous verse from Isaiah, in 14-point Arial type.

Rudy rounded the corner, nuzzling Jon Kim. “Why don’t we jog along the Esplanade?” Rudy asked Jon.

“You’ve got to kick the tobacco habit. And did you get those cigarettes you put in the planter next door?”

“They’re right here, Mr. Ecology.” He tossed them into the garbage bag with the stuffed animals.

“Have you seen this?” I showed them the note. Rudy made the sound sometimes written as “Pshaw.” “That’s about the seventh one of those.” He took the note and was about to rip it up, but I stopped him. “I’ve taken a whole stack of them to the police. They said we’re bound to get kooks of all kinds leaving messages. Some sad, some nasty. And that shrine encouraged them. Now that they know poor Genevieve was pregnant, we’ll probably get a whole slew of vicious ones.”

Jon Kim was twirling Rudy’s ponytail. “Time to go, big guy.”

“Yes, Mark. We’ve got to lock up. You don’t want to be here alone, with Clara Mingo and her ghosts.”

Or Genevieve’s ghost, I might have added. As I lingered alone in the kitchen, rinsing my hands one last time, I saw a figure in the concrete-lined space back of the house—a person in a hooded, green rubber poncho, standing there in the rain.