Mausoleum (7 page)

Though Newbury was small, and we had been born when it was smaller, we knew
of
each other more than we
knew
each other. We had older fathers in common—hers and mine had swung the occasional joint real estate deal and had served side by side on the Board of Selectman. One time when I was home for Thanksgiving we had talked at some family and friends gathering about the pleasures of leaving home to go to college. But she was eight years younger than I, which meant that when I was in high school she was a little kid in elementary school, and by the time she graduated from high school I was a lieutenant in Naval Intelligence. When she was in college I was on Wall Street, and when she went to film school in Los Angeles I was in enrolled in Leavenworth. Still, it couldn't have slipped either of our minds entirely that we represented a very small set of Newbury citizens: youngish, single, never married and child free. And in fact, as she stood there smiling in dark jeans and a white blouse, it occurred to me that features I had thought a trifle austere formed interesting planes. And the long hair that framed them looked more reddish brown than brunette in the soft light of the Yankee Drover's cellar bar.

“Would you like a glass of wine?”

She held one up half full. “I'm okay, thanks.”

She folded into the chair opposite and looked me over the way you might look at a bush that had been in your yard for years and discovered one day it was covered in berries. But curiosity was cloaked in wariness. Newbury was way too small a town to dodge each other if curiosity worked out badly.

I said, “I saw you taping Scooter at the Notables. “

“He wanted a fifteen minute DVD.”

“Fifteen minutes of ‘Yo ho ho?'”

“I added some of the others for context.”

“Did you shoot my cousin Sherman?”

“Shot, digitized, edited, and entered in the New Haven Shorts Festival.”

“That was fast.”

“Popped some speed. Stayed up all night. Poor Scooter thought I was going to enter him, but documentary judges go for the gnarly types…I heard you're investigating Brian Grose.”

“You did? Where?”

“Around.”

Ten trustees of the Cemetery Association. One had to be a blabber mouth. “Well, I'm not exactly investigating Brian.”

“Being dead and all.”

“Right.”

“But you are investigating who killed him?”

“Why do you ask, Lorraine?”

“I worked for him.”

“Really? Doing what?”

“I was his videographer.”

“Video-graphing what?”

“His death video.”

“I beg your pardon.”

She had a fun grin. “Don't you know what a death video is?”

“You've never struck me as the type of woman to make a snuff flick.”

“Not a
snuff flick
! It's like a bio. Like you have at your retirement party? Except they show it at your funeral.”

“Why was he planning his funeral?”

“That was my first question. Why did he want a death film at age forty-whatever? He said it went with the mausoleum. It was like, now I have my mausoleum, I might as well get the rest of the stuff out of the way and done so it's ready when I pop off.”

“Was he sick?”

“He wasn't psycho. He was just trying to get the job done.”

“I meant was he ill?”

“I don't think so. He looked fine.”

I took a sip of wine and watched her face, wondering how close she had been with him. I couldn't say she was grieving. And Connie had said that the rumors about her and Brian were “claptrap.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Do you think Brian had a feeling he was in danger?”

“Like a premonition?”

“Or actual knowledge that someone was after him. Wanted to kill him?”

Lorraine shrugged bonily, all shoulder blades and clavicle. “I don't know. I don't think so. But I don't know. I mean he never said anything to me.”

“Would he have?”

“What do you mean?”

“Were you close?”

She shrugged again. “I guess when you're making a movie about somebody's life maybe they tell you stuff they don't tell other people.”

“Did he tell you anything?”

“Like what?”

“Like what he wouldn't tell other people.”

She hesitated. “Not really.”

“How did he happen to hire you? Saw your wedding ad in the
Clarion
and figured, what the heck, weddings, funerals, same thing?”

“No. I got the job from the mausoleum company. The film was part of the package—tomb, film, funeral services, etc.”

“The mausoleum builders sell a package? Including embalming?”

“One stop shopping. They'll even hire mourners. Anyway, the mausoleum company Googled for a videographer in the area and Google sent them to my website. They tried to knock my price down, but I checked out
their
website, saw that Brian probably paid them six-hundred thousand dollars so they could afford my measly ten.”

“Did you finish it?”

“I'm still editing the rough cut. The company says they'll put the DVD in the mausoleum.”

“Did Brian see any of it?”

“Are you kidding? He was all over me like a cheap suit. He would have vetted every frame if I let him.”

“Could you show it to me, sometime?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“When would it be convenient?”

She swigged her glass empty. “Now?”

We walked. Another thing we had in common was I lived in what had been my parents' house and Lorraine had moved into hers' when they retired to Lake Champlain. It was set back a few steps off Main Street and was probably the oldest in town, a 1710 colonial with a massive center chimney, a beehive oven in the kitchen and, like mine, home to numerous deferred maintenance projects like woodwork to be painted and floors replaced.

Eighty years older than my Georgian, it had fewer straight walls, bigger fireplaces, and smaller windows. Unlike my parents—my father having died, my mother having fled—her parents had taken most of their furniture with them. Some of the rooms appeared empty, or nearly so, and the living room was decorated in a style I'd have to call, “Moved from dorm rooms via condo apartments.” Since she was tooling around town in a brand new Saab convertible, I guessed that the sparseness was due more to a shortage of time than money. What surprised me was her television set, the only object in the dining room. “Your TV's even older than mine.”

“After staring at a screen all day I'd rather read a book or drink wine. Would you like some red?”

“Love some.”

She poured from a dark jug into sturdy glasses and led me into the birthing room which she had converted into her editing studio. In that small back room near the kitchen, she had three computers with serious monitors on plywood work tables, banks of multi-gigabyte storage on the floor under the tables, and several hundred miles of wire connecting them all. She indicated a stool to sit on and began turning on machines. A zillion green and blue lights began blinking like a runway glide path on a dark night. A pair of square windows appeared side by side on the center monitor. Under them a wide window indicated a multi-layered time line. Lorraine caressed a roller-ball mouse, and Brian Grose
jumped
out of the right hand window.

“He wanted it to begin like this. It's so corny, but he wanted it and it's kind of like he was. Running around all the time, always in motion. I'll shut up, now…Oh, just so you know, there's no music. He didn't want music until the end. Said it would distract from the message…”

Brian walked quickly up his lawn in close up.

“He insisted on this shot. Paid two thousand extra for a steadicam. What the client wants—I'll shut up now….”

Now the camera pulled back, and we saw him open the ghastly front door of his stucco mansion. The next shot picked him up inside. He was striding along a row of French doors, looking out at his lawn and the Forestry Association trees he had not been allowed to cut down.

“Does he ever speak?”

“Not yet. He said he wanted to create a visual impression of what it was like to be alive at his age at this time.”

“Do all your clients do their own direction?”

“Most. But I don't listen and they don't notice.”

“Why'd you make an exception for Brian?”

“Shhh. Watch the film. Talk later.”

I shut up and watched a fit, handsome guy in his forties rush around his house showing off the many rooms from kitchen to billiard rooms, to basement swimming pool, to screening room, to dining room, to den, to drawing room, to living room, to many bedrooms reached by multiple staircases.

I said, “Whoever gets the listing to sell Brian's house should pay you for a copy of this.”

“Excellent idea.”

He was smiling happily. He had brown hair and no hint of balding. And he had a face that looked warmer than the full-of-himself hotshot I remembered. “The camera loves him,” murmured Lorraine. “He didn't look half that great in the flesh.”

“Could have been a movie star.”

“Not that jerky way he moves. Handsome, but too jumpy.”

I found myself wondering two things. Why was he alone in that huge house? And why had such a high-energy guy retired? Three things. Why would he stiff a immigrant lawn guy out of fifty bucks? Speaking of whom…I leaned closer to the monitor; deep in the background three little guys were carrying tools and trundling a wheelbarrow across the lawn.

“Is that Charlie Cubrero?”

“The guy they think shot Brian?”

“Is that Charlie pushing the wheelbarrow?”

Lorraine shrugged bonily. “All I know is I had to cut this scene short because the wheelbarrow guy turned around and ran away like we were chasing him.”

“Did Brian call him Charlie?”

“He just called them ‘the Ecuadorians.' Like they were a unit. Watch the film, talk later.”

The camera had moved elsewhere. A title superimposed said, “Ed Kelman: Brian's California Business Partner.” A prosperous-looking tanned middle-aged gent in a book-lined law office was saying, “I had the pleasure of working with Brian on a some very big projects; and I have to tell you, he was
the
‘go-to guy.' What Brian Grose said, it was as good as done. There are so many phonies in the development business, but this guy was the real deal.”

The next scene was shot inside the raw lumber colonnade of a new house being framed. I could hear staple guns in the background. The title said, “Horace Pinchot: Architect.” Mr. Pinchot was clutching a roll of blue prints and he said, “I designed Brian's house in Newbury, Connecticut. Actually, by the time he got done showing me what he wanted, Brian designed the house and I just made sure we left enough bearing walls in place to prevent it falling down.”

“Wait a minute. You started shooting this when he was still building the house? He had already bought the mausoleum?”

“No. That's not this house.

“But it seems to be.”

“Artistic license. Stop talking.”

The next scene showed his New York lawyer at the helm of a sailboat, smiling that when Brian structured a deal all he had to do was dot the ‘i'-s.”

Then we met his squash partner who said with a studiedly rueful laugh, “Brian plays a Rumsfeld game, if you know what I mean. Slow to clear, but not so slow you can call him on it.” A bland smile learned young at Choate or a properly-laid dinner table, conveyed clearer than words: “The man cheats.”

There were interviews with a chauffeur who drove him to and from New York, and the waiters at a lunch club, and his ski instructor atop a Killington peak. I said, “I'm surprised he didn't ski the Rockies.”

“He said he liked ice. The challenge.” Ice was plentiful on Northeast slopes. In fact, the surest way to make a seasoned New England skier crash was to cover a slope with actual snow.

A bright-eyed saleswoman at a glass desk addressed the camera: “The Bastian Mausoleum Company serves the rainmakers of our time. We are equipped with compassion, sensitivity, loyalty, intuition, and common sense in order to be successful in obtaining their trust and business.” She uncrossed shapely legs and walked outside to a sturdy truck with a sign on the door that read, “Bastian Mausoleums. We Deliver.”

I asked, “Did Brian really want a mausoleum advertisement in the middle of his death flick? Or was that part of the deal?”

“He loved being called a rainmaker.”

The scene shifted and there was the rainmaker at a garden party. I recognized one of the finest perennial borders in Connecticut, if not the nation, aflame in forty species of day lilies. “I can't believe the Bells allowed you in with a camera—they even sent Martha Stewart packing.”

“Babs made me hide in the woods.”

“Wait, there I am.” I was squiring Connie on a lily tour. “I didn't know you were filming.”

“I rented a humongous lens and shot the whole party from the woods,” said Lorraine. “Getting eaten by mosquitoes—you look good, there.”

The elegant drape of my cotton suit last summer was a grim reminder of the pounds and bulges I had gained in one short year. I said, “I remember being surprised that Babs and Al invited Brian.”

“I told Brian to write a huge check to Spay and Neuter.”

“Slick move.” Babs Bell's efforts to neuter and adopt Connecticut's feral and abandoned cats were legendary. She was currently on my case to de-ball Tom, who had arrived intact from a horse farm, and while I agreed with her in theory that the world had enough cats, I found myself putting it off on the grounds that Tom may one day be lured home by the ladies of the horse farm. But while it might be possible to buy into a (brief) social connection with the Bells, a family that had been doing well since the invention of the telephone, by supporting Babs' passion, I suspected that it was more that the Bells would have done anything to help their friends the Renners' daughter.