Mausoleum (2 page)

In case anybody failed to get the message, Scooter had planted a skull and crossbones on a staff beside old Constantine's headstone, which had not weathered one bit since an 1870 great-great-great grandchild—Connie's grand-father—replaced the original sandstone with expensive granite.

Connie's lips barely moved. “It seems to me that Scooter MacKay could have portrayed some member of his own family—such as the swineherd who founded their newspaper—instead of ours.”

Her “ours” was kind, but not entirely accurate. While my full name is Benjamin Constantine Abbott III, the Constantine only reflects an Abbott custom of hanging wealthy relatives' names on kids in the futile hope that those in the more direct line of fortune will open their coffers. My side of the Abbotts, those cousins who stayed behind, kept on being farmers, tradesmen, preachers, horse traders and, starting with my great-grandfather, real estate agents. They often served as selectmen of their nice little town, which was no way to get rich if you were honest, which they were. I was the only one who had ever made a ton of money, but that was during a misspent youth on Wall Street doing yeoman service for bubbly exuberance—and the loot hadn't lasted longer than it deserved to.

“
Scooter McKay
!” Connie raised her cane.

On the verge of blurting, “Aye, Me Hearty!” and unsheathing his cutlass, Scooter lost his nerve and turned pale. There were few men in Newbury under seventy who did not recall delivering the newspaper to Miss Abbott's mansion, or raking the front yard under her watchful eye, and Scooter had lived his whole life directly across the street from her. How he thought he could get away with this act was beyond me.

His daughters crept toward a bigger elm. Eleanor got very busy swapping out her camera's memory card, and Scooter fell back on the manners we learned as day-students at Newbury Prep. He swept his pirate hat off his head and bowed low. “Good afternoon, Miss Abbott.”

“You just wait until the next tercentennial, Scooter McKay.”

“The
next
—yes, Miss Abbott?”

“I will portray your great-grandmother Emily, the pig farmer. And I will bribe the fattest McKay children I can find to portray piglets.”

A sudden blast of organ music drowned out the sound of hefty teenage daughters weeping and saved Scooter from having to come up with a polite, much less bright rejoinder. The music was so loud it seemed to fall from the sky. Bach (his Mass in B-Minor, I learned later), thundered down the hill, echoed to Main Street and, judging by the volume, halfway to Massachusetts. It was both moving and exuberant, but it totally derailed the Notables' Tour.

All eyes focused on the Grose Mausoleum. I had not believed the rumor that Brian Grose had installed surround sound to entertain him through Eternity. Now that rumor sounded stentorianly true.

“Ben,” Connie said, “please do something about that.”

I hoofed it up the hill to tell him to put on a headset and worked my way through the crowd gathering around Grose's spike fence. Up close Bach shook the ground. I expected to find Grose sitting inside the thing's foyer, mind blown on his own loudness. But the mausoleum was shut tight as a bank vault. I climbed over the front gate, stepped under the portico, and knocked on the thick bronze door, which had the effect of making very little noise, while hurting my knuckles a lot.

I looked down for a rock to bang on it.

Instead of picking up a rock, I stepped back, gingerly. Then I took out my cell phone, and tapped 911.

Chapter Two

“Benjamin Constantine Abbott III” on Resident State Trooper Oliver Moody's caller ID was not a name to put a smile on his grim face or warmth in his truculent voice. We had been butting heads since I was a mutinous teen.

“What do you want, Ben?”

I had to clap a hand on my ear to hear him over Bach. “Come up to the cemetery.”

“What part?” The cemetery was enormous, much of it open space—wooded Castle Hill—reserved to bury generations unborn.

“Brian Grose's mausoleum.”

“Are you tying up a 911 emergency line to report an act of vandalism?”

“Blood is seeping out of it.” I would have thought a mausoleum door would be sealed at the bottom, but I was standing in sticky, half-dried blood and tracking it on the grass.

“Sure it's not red paint?”

“Not this time. Better bring the ambulance—And Ollie?”

“What?”

“Maybe a wrecker to open the door. It's locked tight.”

“Ben,” Connie called. “Is everything all right?”

She was surrounded by a crowd of kids and parents who were watching anxiously from the fence. They couldn't see the blood, but they knew something was wrong and now they heard sirens in the distance. I called, “Would some of you kids please find Scooter McKay and Ted Barrett and Rick Bowland?”

The guys came running and gently moved people away.

Sirens descended; Ollie's cruiser whooping, the ambulance howling, the wrecker's air horn baying like a pack of pit bulls. Ollie got there first. The volunteer EMTs and Chevalley Enterprises Garage tied for second.

Ollie, six-foot nine-inches from his storm trooper boots to the top of his broad-brimmed Stetson, and wearing a grey uniform so crisp that he might have ironed it out of sheet metal, crouched down for a close look at the blood. He beckoned Betty Butler from the ambulance. “I don't want to mess up a crime site. How fresh is this? Could they still be alive?”

“No way I'll say no,” said Betty. “Open the door.”

Ollie beckoned Donny Butler, the Cemetery Association's groundskeeper who was hurrying up to see what the excitement was about. Donny was shaggy, craggy, and cadaverous, and every woman in the cemetery brightened at the approach of the handsomest gravedigger in New England.

“You got the key?”

“Nope.” Donny did not look unhappy that there was a problem at Grose's mausoleum. Last Spring, with a couple of beers in him, he had used the rusty bumper of his pickup truck to clear the cemetery service road of a “Freakin' Yuppie Audi” which Brian Grose had parked inconsiderately. Harsh words invited a poke in the eye and Grose had pressed charges, calling the beaming owner of a body shop as his first witness and a bored ophthalmologist as his second.

“Open the door,” Ollie told Pinkerton Chevalley, a large cousin of mine who was looming beside his wrecker like the Grand Coulee Dam.

Pink issued heavy tools to a pair of our vandalistic cousins he had brought along.

“Open the door.”

Dennis and Albert swaggered up to the mausoleum grinning at this amazing turn of luck. I overheard Dennis mutter, “You believe we are getting
paid
to nuke this ‘sucker?”

“Right in front of Ollie. And he can't do squat.”

They attacked the bronze with crowbars and sledge hammers. They were powerful young men, and they made a wonderful noise almost as loud as Bach, but didn't do much to the door. In fact, all their banging and crashing had no effect at all, except for some gouges and scratches. Pink stepped in, shouting over the din, “The blood's coming under the door. That means there's a crack under the door. Shove your bar in the crack. Morons.”

Albert and Dennis did as they were told. Perplexed, they stopped.

“What?” chorused Pink and Ollie, the first time the anti-social Pink and his natural enemy the state trooper ever agreed on anything.

“The bar's stuck.”

Pink, known to bench press a Harley Davidson when in a playful mood, yanked it out with one hand and tossed it at Dennis. “
Open the door
!”

Sweating, grunting, Dennis and Albert attacked again.

Betty Butler said, “Somebody could be bleeding to death in there. We really ought to open the door.”

Pink, who regarded all women except his mother as inept food and sex delivery systems, turned red from his cap to his black Chevalley Enterprises T-shirt. “What do think we're doing, Betty?”

“I got some dynamite,” said Dennis. “It's in the—Oww! Whad you hit me for?” He swung back, punching his brother before he realized that Albert was nodding his Minotaur head in the direction of Trooper Moody who, even before 9/11, had taken a dim view of explosives in the hands of private citizens—especially Chevalleys. “Oh, yeah,” said Dennis. “Thanks, Dude.”

Aunt Connie said, “Here's Grace Botsford. She'll have a key.”

Grace's father, Gerard, who had died last March in a car crash at age ninety-five, had been president of the Newbury Cemetery Association for as long as anyone could remember and had appointed Grace treasurer when she came home from Connecticut College in 1970.

“She was brave to attend the Notables. Gerard so loved this ground.”

Grace, who had just turned sixty, had run the family insurance agency with her father and never married. Father and daughter had served on virtually all the town's unpaid commissions at one time or another and they had been a fixture at the old families' lawn parties and garden tours: white-haired Gerard resplendent in seersucker and straw hat; Grace, old-fashioned in silk, tall and straight on his arm.

Grace took a sealed envelope from her purse, tore it open, and handed a key to Trooper Moody.

Next question was, had the Chevalley vandals so damaged the door that the key wouldn't open it. Trooper Moody inserted it, turned it. Even over the roar of the music, I could hear a massive lock like a Fox Lock clank inside. Ollie grunted in triumph and pulled the door open. Softly colored light poured into the foyer from a stained glass ceiling, which if we had thought about it could have been more easily broken open than the Fort Knox door.

Connie's white glove bit into my arm. Grace Botsford pressed her hand to her mouth. Pinkerton Chevalley and Oliver Moody chorused, “What a mess.” Albert Chevalley threw up on Dennis Chevalley's boots, and one of Scooter's daughters snapped a photograph too gory to print in the
Clarion
.

Chapter Three

Brian Grose lay on his back on the polished floor. The vast oozing hole in his chest would surely have killed him. But whoever had shot him had finished the job by shooting him twice in the forehead. Two neat holes in front had exited violently in back, and the man's death was, to bowdlerize Pinkerton Chevalley and Trooper Moody, one holy mess.

“Turn off that music,” said somebody.

“Don't touch anything,” shouted Trooper Moody. “Everyone step back. Back, back, out of the way. Don't touch anything.”

I said to Cousin Pink that whoever had turned the music on must have set a timer. Pink said, “No shit, Sherlock.”

Ollie shouted, “All you people get out of here!”

People shuffled uncertainly, caught between fear of Ollie and morbid curiosity, until Aunt Connie raised her voice, “Everyone go home, please. Take the children and leave Trooper Moody to his work.”

Ollie whipped out a cell phone and called in a suspicious death. He did not look happy. As the town's resident state trooper—lone-wolf master of sixty square miles of Connecticut turf, lord over all he could intimidate —Oliver Moody would rather slug it out single-handedly against raiding urban street gangs than have his territory invaded by the State Police Major Crime Squad.

***

In a sensible world the murder of Brian Grose would be investigated by the thoroughly competent Major Crime Squad that was on the scene within an hour. In a sensible world the responding officers, Detective-Lieutenant Marian Boyce, the best of the best, and her long-time partner Arnie Bender, far less pleasant to look at, but equally skilled, would have conducted their investigation while normal citizens went about their business building houses, teaching summer school, writing insurance policies, milking cows, repairing vehicles, mowing grass, and selling real estate.

But the next day, I got a visit from three guys I had known a long time who made it clear that it was not a sensible world, at least when it came to the war to control Newbury's Village Cemetery Association. Two bankers with whom I had grown up, pugnacious Dan Adams and easy-does-it Wes Little, and Rick Bowland—last seen wearing vest and shirt sleeves while reading the accounts of Newbury's first general store in a monotone—represented the original Village Cemetery Association, the pre-mausoleum, anti-mausoleum faction that had secured a sixty-day court injunction against new mausoleums. They wanted to hire me to investigate the murder.

I wanted the job, but all I said was, “Why?”

Dan said I was qualified.

“So are the cops. They sent the best squad in the state.”

“It is important that we appear to take charge of the situation that affects the perceived integrity of the association,” said Rick Bowland.

I knew enough about the struggle to ask, “Is this to influence the court?”

“The new people are attempting to get the injunction lifted.”

“What does that have to do with Brian getting killed?”

“Quote: ‘The security breach proves that cronyism has undermined the competence of the entrenched bloc who seized control of the Cemetery Association.'”

Everyone started talking at once.

“They're making us sound like Rumsfeld in Iraq.”

“They're trying to steal the Association, Ben.”

“Steal it?”

“Steal control, so they destroy the cemetery. They've got plans for fifty of them.”

“Fifty what?”

“
Mausoleums
. It'll look like a Toll Brothers subdivision instead of our burying ground.”

“They'll do anything to beat us.”

“They're making hay out of this murder.'

“You know what we're saying, Ben?”

I said, “You are saying that you don't want anymore Hummer-house headstones in the burying ground. Neither do I.”

“So you'll help us?”

I said, “This could get expensive, guys.”

“Well, we're thinking you'll do it pro bono,” they said, not surprising me a lot.

I wanted the job for numerous reasons. The money, of course. Unless the state police immediately turned up an obvious killer, then a man shot in his own mausoleum was a case to get the juices flowing. And I disliked gross mausoleums as much as my friends who were fighting to retain control of a beautiful burying ground that was my cemetery, too. But I had no intention of taking as deep a pay cut as they were plotting.

The Cemetery Association was solvent, and happened to own enough open ground right on the edge of the borough to bury Newburians until our next Tercentennial, because its trustees were tight-fisted, skin-flinty, penny-pinching Yankees and had been for the last three hundred years. If I allowed myself to get taken by a mob that regarded knocking my price down as a godfearing act, I'd get jerked around next time I negotiated a real estate deal with any of them.

I wasn't particularly worried: playing hard-to-get gave me an edge; that they felt under the gun helped; nor was it in their nature to hire an outsider.

Indeed, Banker Dan Adams, whose family had been around almost as long as mine, grudgingly sweetened the offer. “Maybe we could work out something where you'd get a free burial plot.”

“I already have a burial plot,” I reminded him. “In fact, I believe I have an extra one as my mother has announced she prefers to be buried in Frenchtown.” Having fled “snobby” Main Street when my father died and left me the house, she was threatening to make the move eternal, even though it would mean leaving my father alone with his family.

Dan glowered. “Okay, how about we give you a break on your dues?”

In a sensible world a part-time private investigator would not have been invited to address the Cemetery Association's board of trustees that evening. But a town that's been home for centuries is not always a sensible world. Salary negotiation notwithstanding, there was no way I would dodge a request from any of the associations of volunteers that made Newbury work, be they firefighters, ambulance crews, Lions, Rotary, or custodians of the dead.

I promised the guys I would attend the meeting. I didn't necessarily buy into their reasoning about the court case. But I totally agreed that we should do whatever we could to prevent our burying ground from becoming a gated community for the eternally crass.

Aiming to wow the salary committee with clues the State Police would never turn up, I telephoned my sticky-fingered cousin Sherman Chevalley. None of the “Notables” pageants had been that close to Brian Grose's mausoleum. Brian and/or somebody could easily have slipped inside unnoticed. But Sherman had to have gone to the cemetery much earlier than the other performers to set up the complicated gas engine and weave a spider web of drive belts to his corn sheller, water pump, and buzz saw.

Alone in the cemetery, with an eye ever-roving for valuables not nailed down, Sherman could have noticed something like a car or a truck or someone lurking around the mausoleum— information that he was unlikely to share, voluntarily, with his nemesic foes, the cops, or even his parole officer. But he might talk to me if I bought him enough beers and promised to keep him out of it.

His cell phone rang and rang and rang. He didn't answer and it didn't take messages. I drove down to Frenchtown to his mother's house trailer, which huddled in the lee of a tumbled-down barn last painted by Sherman's grandfather. She was “Aunt Helen” to me, although there were several cousins once or twice removed between her and my mother, and she greeted me warmly. She was tall and skinny, like Sherman. Fifty years of mothering him would have worn most women to the bone, but in Aunt Helen a cheery optimism had somehow survived.

She sounded a little worried that he hadn't showed up for any free meals since Sunday morning. Which made me really worried. He could be off on an innocent drunk, but disappearing hours after a shooting where several hundred people had seen him all day was the sort of behavior that could pique the curiosity of the State Police.

“How did he do at the cemetery thing?” she asked hopefully.

“Star attraction,” I assured her, thinking to myself, Sherman, what have you gotten into this time?

“Do you think Scooter McKay will write about him in the paper?”

I told her I thought he would, a safe bet. The Notables was big news to the
Clarion
, easily as big as Brian's murder—How many Tercentennials will most people experience? But even if Scooter neglected to mention his antique gas engine in the many pages of Notables coverage, Sherman's name would most weeks be attached to minor infractions in the Police Reports. I was just hoping that this time it wouldn't be a felony.

I asked her if the police had been by about Brian Grose's murder.

“That doesn't have anything to do with Sherman,” she said with complete and utter faith in the boundaries of Sherman's criminality. With that she repeated one of those mottos that get a mother through the day: “I have always said that Sherman can't be all bad because animals and kids love him.”

***

When I took Aunt Connie home Sunday, after we talked to the cops, I had pressed her about her Brian Grose gossip that would “curl your hair.” She had alluded, tangentially, to what she called, “assignations.” “With an ‘S?'” I had asked. More than one? “‘S' as in several,” said Connie. When I asked if she had heard any names attached to the assignees, she reminded me that she did not repeat gossip.

Now I had to ask her again, and this time it was business. “I know that you don't repeat gossip, Connie. But in view of the circumstances, could you possibly tell me a little more about Brian Grose's ‘assignations?'“

“You mean the assignees?”

“Their names.”

We were having our regular Tuesday afternoon tea at a marble topped table set in the bay window of her dining room, as we had had the majority of Tuesdays since I was old enough to talk.

“No I can't,” she said.

“Connie, I would not ask if it wasn't important. The Cemetery Association got the idea in its collective head to pay me to look into Mr. Grose's murder. It sounds a little loony, but they've got big problems with that court case. I have to meet with them tonight. The smarter I go in, the better I can serve them.”

Connie looked away. Her jaw started to work. I could see frail bone press thin skin. When she turned back to look at me her eyes were watery. “I can't Ben. I would if I could, but I can't remember.”

I could have cheerfully shot myself at that moment. Or shoved a rusty knife into my chest. One of the ways I dealt with Connie's increasing frailty was to pretend it wasn't happening. I was so successful at it that I could actually walk into her house and ask something truly stupid while totally missing every quiet signal she was sending about her fear and dread.

“I'm sorry. I didn't realize that was what you meant.”

“Obviously, I heard it from someone. I can't remember whom. And I can't remember what she said.”

“So you heard from a woman?”

That brought her back with a vengeance. She sat straighter than usual, which was very straight indeed and said, as crisply as a winter morning, “Well I certainly wouldn't listen to such talk from a man—well, maybe from a gay man—well, you know what I mean. But I don't think it matters, Ben. A name that would have led to a shooting, a murder for pity sake, would have stuck in my mind. Don't you agree?”

“Absolutely!” I lied to her and myself.

Connie squinted through me like a dirty window. “Do not patronize me, young man!”

“Sorry.”

“Try some.”

“Try some what?”

“Names, you ninny. Try some names, and perhaps they'll jog my memory.”

I looked at her. She was perched on the edge of her chair, tea forgotten, the one cucumber sandwich I had persuaded her to try, half eaten. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“You said it was important, for your sake. And it's now become important to me, for the sake of my old brain.”

I started at the head of Main and worked my way down the street. “Mary…”

“No.”

“Lori…”

“No.”

Betty.”

“No.”

“Sydney…”

“No.”

“Jeanne…”

“No.”

“Anne Marie.”

“No.”

“Priscilla…”

“…Maybe.”

Priscilla Adams, pugnacious Dan's wife. Maybe that's why he was so prickly, of late. Priscilla was a very nice looking blonde with the kind of glossy, straight hair pharmaceutical fortunes have been spent trying to replicate for ordinary mortals. But married to the sort of man who would not think twice about punching the interloper in the nose. On the other hand, love and sex make people brave, as well as silly. “Maybe?” I coaxed.

Connie nodded slowly. “Yes, I think so—Benjamin, this goes no further than this room.”

“Of course not.”

“Unless of course Dan was the one who shot him.”

“Of course.”

“I'm not positive. And when we're talking about angry husbands shooting, accuracy becomes paramount. More names, please.”

“Lorraine.”

“Oh yes.”

“Lorraine? Lorraine Renner?”

“Definitely! I heard an earful.”

“Do you recall any details?”

“Nothing true.”

“What do you mean?”

“It was just silly gossip. You know, Ben, there are people who can't imagine a man and woman in the same room without ascribing all sorts of…activities.”

“Wait. Let me get clear on this. The rumor was that Lorraine had a thing going—” Connie's eye fell bleakly on mine. “—an assignation, but there was none?”

“I recall every detail. It was claptrap. More names, Ben. Quickly, now, you've got me cooking.”

We went down the rest of Main Street with no more hits, so I started tossing names at random. “Cindy.”