Mansions Of The Dead (16 page)

He stirred a little.

“Jaybee?” she whispered again. But he was snoring, his back rising and falling with his breath.

WATER. HE WAS DROWNING
. He could feel the cold water closing over his head, the ache in his lungs as he struggled not to breathe, struggled for air. The water was dark, strangely gelatinous. He tried to summon enough strength in his limbs to propel himself forward, but it was futile and he began to sink.

Quinn’s head jerked up; it had been about to hit the passenger side window of Marino’s Chevy. He had been dreaming. Trees and buildings whizzed by outside. The sunlight was bright through the glass. He blinked.

“You okay there, Quinny?” Marino asked. The lieutenant had told them to get out and talk to Brad Putnam’s roommate and his girlfriend. Marino was pissed they had to do it on Sunday and he was taking it out on Quinn.

“Yeah. Sorry. Just didn’t get a lot of sleep last night.”

Marino looked over at him. “Everything okay at home? How’s the baby?”

“Yeah, yeah, fine. Sorry about that.”

“Okay.” He managed to imbue the two syllables with a paragraph’s worth of condescension. “If you’re sure.” He drove through a yellow light on Mass. Ave. “Tell me about those interviews.”

“Okay, great.” Quinn sat up and struggled to clear his head. “Well, I talked to the family again.” He got his little notebook out of his pocket. “Here’s what they were all doing Saturday night. Andrew Putnam had been at a benefit dinner. Youth Arts Society of Boston. Something like that. He got home at ten, took care of some paperwork, went to bed. His housekeeper, Greta Bergheim, was out for the evening, but when she came home around midnight, his car was in the garage. That’s what she says anyway.”

Marino raised his eyebrows. “You got any reason to think she’s lying? There anything between them?”

“Probably not. She’s kind of . . . I don’t know. Doesn’t seem like Andrew Putnam’s type.”

“What about the mother?”

“Kitty Putnam? She was down in Newport. No alibi, except for her father, who lives in the house. But he’s pretty old, seems pretty out of it. I don’t think he’d know if she’d gone out and come in again in the middle of the night. The house is so big, you wouldn’t even hear.

“Then there’s Jack Putnam. He was at some kind of art opening that night. Doesn’t remember what time he got home. I checked with some of the names the gallery gave me and they all remembered seeing him there, though no one could remember when. As far as Drew Putnam goes, he and his wife were at a dinner party Saturday. That checks out.” Quinn flipped the page in his notebook. “Everyone says they seemed fine, nothing out of the ordinary. They got home about ten-thirty and Melissa Putnam went straight to bed, says she took a sleeping pill. Drew Putnam says he got some paperwork done and went to bed himself around twelve-thirty.” Quinn anticipated Marino’s next question and cut in before he could ask it. “No housekeeper or anything like that. No way of confirming it. I asked some of the neighbors, but it’s one of these neighborhoods where you wouldn’t know what anybody’s up to. Long driveways. Lots of bushes and trees.”

“And what about the sister?”

“Camille Putnam. She attended a fund-raising dinner and says her
campaign manager dropped her off at her home around nine. Here’s the thing, though. One of her neighbors looked out her window around eleven and says she didn’t see the car. It’s pretty distinctive. Black Jeep with state senate plates.”

“That right? What does she say?”

“She says the neighbor must have been mistaken. She was home all night.”

“Hmmm. So anyway, whaddya think, Quinny? Who’s the favorite?”

Quinn forced himself to focus. “Well, according to the postmortem, there wasn’t any sexual contact, but that doesn’t rule out that it was why he asked this person back. Say he got off on wearing the jewelry and being tied up. So he invited someone back and the guy . . . or the woman, I guess . . . ”

“Woman?”

“Well, assuming the bondage was consensual, this wasn’t a crime that took a lot of strength, right? Anyway, so this person ties him up and puts the jewelry on and puts the bag over his head and maybe something goes wrong. We know he was all full of liquor when he died. He’s drunk, the bag’s too tight or whatever, and he dies. Then the person doesn’t know what to do and he leaves and doesn’t say anything.”

“That’s good. What about the stranger scenario?”

“Well, maybe the guy—in this case I think it had to be a guy—was planning on assaulting him and got it all set up, you know tied him up, put the bag on his head, found the jewelry somewhere in the apartment and put it on him, then before he could uh . . . you know, do whatever he was going to do, maybe someone was outside and he was nervous, or he lost his nerve. So he left the kid there and the kid suffocated.”

“Pretty good. So what kinds of stuff do we want to ask?”

“I’d say whether he was gay, whether he was known to have hired prostitutes.”

“Prostitutes . . . that’s a good idea. He could have hired someone to tie him up like that and then . . . ”

“And then something went wrong and he died and the girl got out of there.”

“Yeah,” Marino said. “Hey, maybe you should go talk to some of the girls who help us out from time to time.”

“Okay. I’ll do it tomorrow.”

“What about drugs?”

“He didn’t have any in him when he died, right?”

“Not as far as we know,” Marino said exasperatedly, “but what about the rest of the time. These rich kids get mixed up in some nasty stuff. Remember that kid from the university last year?”

“Okay, I’ll find out.”

“The other thing I want to know is why there weren’t any finger-prints on that bag or on the jewelry.”

“The killer had gloves?” Quinn let just a little too much sarcasm creep into his voice.

“I know the killer had gloves, but what kind of gloves? Were they leather gloves or fucking ski gloves?”

Quinn decided to keep quiet until they reached campus.

“So what are we asking these kids?” Marino asked, glaring at him.

“Anything they know about his friends, whether he was dating anyone. That kind of stuff.”

Marino pulled up in front of the dorm and waited for a group of kids to cross the driveway before parking right in front of the entrance. It was an old brick building, with dull green vines twining along the sides and over the windows and doors.

“Guess that’s why they call it the Ivy League, huh?” Marino said.

Quinn looked around the yard. It was a warm day, and the bulbs planted in the low beds in front of the dorm were just coming open. He bent to sniff a cluster of hyacinths planted in one of the flower beds.

The summer after his senior year of high school, he’d worked for a landscaping company. They’d been on a job in Cambridge, and on his lunch hour he’d come across to the yard and sat on a bench while he
ate his sandwich. Someone had left a folded-up piece of paper wedged between two slats of the bench, a photocopy of a poem, John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” and he remembered thinking of Florence Nightingale. He didn’t know Florence Nightingale from Adam, but still he’d had this picture of a beautiful woman, dressed in white. He had read the poem in a junior high English class, he thought, but he couldn’t recall anything about it. It had just been one of any number of bewildering things that adults had asked him to do.

But sitting there in the yard that summer afternoon, he had read the poem to himself and suddenly—and it had been sudden, one moment clearly delineated from all the moments after it—he had understood, understood that the poet was listening to a bird singing, and he had understood what the bird’s song meant to the poet. He remembered breathing in the air around him, air that seemed suddenly different, rarefied and rich.

Quinn had been about to head off to UMass that summer. He hadn’t applied anywhere else, hadn’t even thought about it. The fact that he was going to college at all was such a big deal to his mother that he hadn’t been able to get past the basic fact of it. But sometime that spring, his English teacher had said to him, “Timmy, have you thought at all about majoring in English when you get to college You’ve done so well this year and I would hate to see you stop your work with literature.”

“I was thinking Criminal Justice,” he said. “Maybe be a cop or something.”

The teacher, Mrs. Lieber, he remembered, had taken a deep breath, as though she were afraid of offending him. “I know you’ll do well and I know that the criminal justice field needs more smart, sensitive people like you, but I just hope that you won’t close yourself off to anything.”

He hadn’t been sure what she was talking about then. But that summer he had sat on the bench and read those mysterious words and suddenly he had felt a rushing of his hopes and dreams, a kind of intense feeling of
being
. He had the feeling, which he had experienced only a
few times before, of understanding something about the world, something of what every human being experienced when they lived in the world. He hadn’t been able to discuss it with anyone. He hadn’t known anyone who he could say it to without sounding crazy.

He was almost dizzy and he closed his eyes for a moment to ground himself. When he opened them again, Marino was looking at him oddly, but he felt steadier, better.

They pressed the buzzer next to “R. Dearborne” on the panel next to the door.

“Have to talk to her about letting people up without checking first,” Marino said as the door buzzed open and they started up the staircase. “What do you think about this kid anyway, Quinny. I mean, you’ve been asking around for a few days now. What was he like?”

Quinn thought carefully for a few seconds. The inside of the dorm smelled of new carpet and puke.

“I think he was sad,” he said. “I think he felt as though life had gotten out of his hands, that it was something happening to him that he couldn’t turn around or change.”

IT WAS RAINING AND
after stepping in a puddle next to her car and going back for another pair of shoes, Sweeney had arrived late and slipped into the back of the Bigelow Chapel at Mount Auburn, passing a knot of reporters who had been relegated to the steps outside. As she walked by, a guy in a tweed jacket and glasses tried to ask her a question, but she brushed him aside. Seeing the pews were full inside, she joined about twenty other mourners on fold-out chairs lined up against a back wall.

“We feel sometimes that God is unfair when He takes our young from us,” the minister was saying as she took her seat. “We feel angry at him, we feel that He has betrayed a promise to us. But God makes no promise but to love us, and love us He does. He exacts his plan in mysterious ways. We do not know until the end what He has planned for us and we do not know until the end what our true purpose is.”

Sweeney found that she was weeping for the second time in twenty-four hours. She did not believe that there was any plan. She did not believe that there would be any meaning and purpose in this death—there was not in any other death.

And yet, she cried. She cried for Brad’s unlived life, and for all the other unlived lives. She cried because she thought that he might have
asked her for something and she hadn’t understood and she was afraid that she had let him down.

The Putnams were sitting in the front rows, and she had a good view of them across the pews. Jack was at one end of the front row, next to an elderly man who Sweeney assumed was Paddy Sheehan. He was in a wheelchair, his thin frame slumped forward, his pale hair almost gone. He raised a hand to scratch his cheek and Sweeney saw it tremor violently.

Next to him was Kitty, and then Camille, unadorned and somber in another dark suit. In contrast, Melissa Putnam was quite heavily made up, her long legs in sheer, dark hose and stiletto-heeled shoes. Next to her were her husband and father-in-law.

All of them were dressed in dark funereal colors except for Kitty, who was wearing yellow—the bright, Easter egg suit was a kind of protest, Sweeney decided, and she liked Kitty for making it.

None of the family members got up to make speeches or eulogies. It was a staid, formal kind of memorial service but when the family stood to the organ strains of “Morning Has Broken,” she saw that Jack was gripping his mother’s arm, his face streaked with tears.