Mansions Of The Dead (23 page)

Camille, angry now, said, “I think that if you use some imagination you can figure out why we didn’t say anything. And this has nothing to do with the investigation. Someone, some crazy maniac, came into Brad’s apartment and saw him . . . like that. And this person must have killed him.”

Quinn was standing and he loomed over her, furious now. “We have spent the last week following up leads related to the way he was found. This is all wasted time now. I’m sure you’ve heard that the first couple of days are the most important in a murder investigation? Well thanks to your brother’s little white lie, we’ve lost that window of opportunity. If we don’t find Brad’s killer, it will be your fault. We’ll be in touch.”

Sweeney was shocked by how cruel his words were. She got up and was almost out of the room when she turned around and asked them, “Did you think of Brad as having a drinking problem?”

Jack and Drew looked at each other, and Drew said hurriedly, “No. But as I said, he’s in college. It wouldn’t be the most surprising thing in the world.”

“Okay,” Quinn said, sounding calmer now. “Thank you.”

Drew and Melissa walked them to the door. Sweeney watched Melissa put a hand on his back, rubbing small circles with her index
finger. Drew stepped away neatly, and a hurt look flashed across Melissa’s face.

“Would it be all right to use the bathroom before I go?” Sweeney asked.

“Of course,” Melissa said. “The one down here is being renovated, but I’ll show you up to the guest bath.”

They climbed the elegant staircase and Melissa led Sweeney through a pristine guest bedroom papered with a black-and-white toile pattern. The bed was made up in black-and-white satin and covered with a huge array of black and white pillows.

“Here it is,” Melissa said.

“Great, thanks.” Sweeney smiled at her and awkwardly closed the door. Was Melissa going to wait out there for her?

The bathroom matched the guest room—the same black-and-white wallpaper, black towels monogrammed with elaborately scrolled P’s and little black-and-white soaps in the shape of swans. Afraid to ruin one of the birds, she rinsed her hands with plain water. When she came out again, Melissa was nowhere to be seen, so she took her time going back downstairs, looking into a few of the bedrooms along the hall. Two were clearly guest rooms, sterile and empty. The third was the master bedroom. It was completely overdone to Sweeney’s mind, lots of pink and gold, and so many pillows on the bed that it must have taken ten minutes to remove them all before going to sleep.

She listened to make sure there was no one coming up the stairs and ducked into the bedroom. It smelled of expensive perfume and clean laundry. There were two matching bureaus, ornate and scrolled. One was clearly Melissa’s and on its polished surface, there was a wedding photograph, Drew looking serious and Melissa grinning as they exited a church. On a low dressing table, there were a couple of bottles of expensive perfume; Sweeney picked each up and sniffed the caps.

Listening again to make sure that there was no one in the hall, she moved over to Drew’s bureau. It was very neat. There was a photograph of a young woman in a wedding dress—Kitty, Sweeney could see when
she looked closer—and a family photograph taken sometime in the late eighties or early nineties, from the look of the clothes. Kitty and Andrew sat in Adirondack chairs on the lawn in front of the Newport house, the children standing around them. Sweeney felt her heart constrict a bit at the sight of Brad, a skinny nine- or ten-year-old with sun-burnished hair and a goofy grin. Petey was a year or so younger, with reddish hair and freckles. Camille and Drew, already adults, looked basically the same, but Jack, a teenager in the picture, looked much younger. He had a pseudo punk haircut and was wearing a leather jacket.

There was another photograph on the bureau too, a more recent one, of the whole family in formal dress, and she recognized it as the same family photo that had been on Andrew Putnam’s desk. Other formally dressed people milled around in the background of the photo looking at a series of huge statues, vaguely human forms with loose, moving limbs. The window behind them in the picture read—in backward letters—”The Davis Gallery.” Jack was grinning broadly. Andrew and Kitty were on either side of their children, grinning too. Andrew had on a bright blue tie and Sweeney was again struck by how handsome he was, and how much he looked like Jack and Brad.

“Did you get lost?” Melissa asked from behind her. Sweeney turned around, still holding the photograph.

“I’m sorry, I must have taken a wrong turn and then I saw your photos.”

“That’s okay,” Melissa said. “Isn’t that a nice one? That was Jack’s opening a couple of months ago.”

Sweeney, still humiliated at having been caught, put the photo down and said, “It’s great,” in a falsely cheery voice. “I guess I should get going.”

Melissa didn’t say anything. Together they walked silently back downstairs.

Quinn was quiet until they got out to the car, but once he was safely behind the steering wheel and Sweeney had shut the passenger’s side
door, he slammed his hand on the dashboard. “Those people, screwing around with me like they don’t even know what they’re doing. They know exactly what they’re doing.”

“They did come clean, though.”

“But only because you confronted them about it. And that’s
if
they’re telling the truth,” Quinn said, glancing quickly at her.

“I think they are,” she said. “I don’t know why. I just do. Why did you ask Jack if he’d left something behind?”

Quinn looked straight ahead, thinking. “We found something, near the bed. A steno pad with some writing on it. It wasn’t in Brad’s handwriting and it didn’t belong to the roommate.”

“What did the writing say?”

He looked over at her again, considering.

“Something about the Back Bay Tunnel project. There were a couple of notes about when the construction started and some general history of the project. Whoever it was jotted down a question about who benefits from the development project. Does that ring a bell for you?”

Sweeney shook her head. “The Putnams own some buildings in the Back Bay, I think. But I doubt they’re benefiting from it very much right now.”

“I don’t think anyone’s benefiting much from the tunnel project right now except for those guys who try to sell flowers to you when you’re stuck in the traffic for twelve hours.”

Sweeney laughed.

The Back Bay Tunnel project was one of those endless urban renewal projects that had been going on for what seemed like twenty years. Actually, it probably had been going on for twenty years, Sweeney realized. The project—which would offer easier access via a tunnel from downtown to Cambridge and points north of Boston—had been approved by Congress nearly two decades ago and was just now nearing completion. It had snarled traffic, torn up neighborhoods, gone wildly over budget, and considerably added to the stress levels of Bostonians.

“Anyway,” Quinn said. “If you hear anything about who the notebook might have belonged to, I hope you’ll let me know.”

“Yeah, of course.”

It struck her that he had only told her because he thought she might be able to help him.

THE FIGURE LAY PROSTRATE
, arms stretched out over its head, its back arched as though in agony. The slim hips and narrow shoulders gave it a boyish quality. It had no face to speak of, just a blank plane of wood. Yet you could almost imagine the figure screaming out in pain.

Jack Putnam took a sip of his coffee and went back to work. He had carved the figure’s body and limbs from red cherry and it gave the figure an oddly lifelike look, as though blood were pumping through its veins. He had sanded it only roughly, so that the surface was grained and textured, as scratchy as a cat’s tongue.

He turned away from the sculpture and went to pour himself another cup of coffee. He had been working almost nonstop for twenty-four hours now, driven by the kind of inspiration he hadn’t felt in months. The idea had come to him at Brad’s memorial service, a man, bent in supplication before God. It would be nearly life-sized. He had attached the limbs with bolts and nuts that he had painted black and he liked the play of the dark metal against the auburn-hued wood.

But the coffeepot, when he lifted it, was filled only with the burnt remnants of the last pot. Shit. He kept forgetting to turn it off. Now he’d have to go up to the kitchen to wash it out. He had an extra-deep
utility sink in his first-floor studio, but it was filled with paintbrushes soaking in turpentine, so he took the coffeepot and climbed the stairs to the main part of the house on the second floor.

It was a gorgeous spring day, the sky a cloudless blue, the sun enthusiastic and unhesitant through the wide windows in his living room. He left the coffeepot to soak in the sink and went upstairs to the roof deck. He was barechested—it was how he liked to work, no matter how cold the day—and he stood with his back to the sun, his eyes closed, enjoying the feeling of warmth on his back.

It was the first sensual pleasure he’d allowed himself since the night Brad had died. Well, perhaps the second. He had, after all, let himself enjoy talking to Sweeney St. George, to enjoy the feel of taking her arm to lead her upstairs at the house after the memorial service. He had allowed himself a quick erotic fantasy as they’d walked downstairs, then shut it off, feeling guilty. But those few moments of the fantasy stayed with him, teasing him with their vividness. He was holding her arms above her head, pressing them against the head-board of his bed. Under him, she could barely move her legs and she struggled playfully as he kissed her neck . . . The fantasy unspooled for another couple of seconds before he forced himself to stop thinking about it.

He had been thinking of calling her. He liked the idea of an evening with her, drinking and talking, and if she was willing, a few moments of physical escape. Again he stamped down the image of her arms stretched above her head. It would feel good. It would make him feel alive. But he wasn’t sure if she would welcome any kind of an advance from him.

She was an odd person. There was something wild about her, which he’d picked up on right away, but there was something else too, something that made him suspicious. Why was she so interested in Brad anyway? He remembered Brad talking about her, about her class, and blushing when he said her name. Jack had kidded him about it. “You hot for teacher, Bradley?” he’d teased. Brad had gotten pissed off and punched him in the arm. Was it possible she’d been interested
in Brad too? Was that why she seemed so intent on finding out who had killed him?

Anyway, maybe he would call her. He’d had the strangest feeling, right after meeting her, that they knew something of each other, that they could skip over much of the initial small talk and move on to the part of relationships he liked, the companionship, the easy physical knowingness, the anticipation of desire.

Warm now from the sun, he opened his eyes and went back downstairs to the kitchen where he rinsed out the pot and headed back down to the studio.

As he came down the circular staircase, he saw the figure for what it was.

It was Brad, lying on the bed, his arms fixed, his back arched.

“Oh God!” he screamed, rushing to it as though it was a person he could save if he could only get there in time. But instead he took a handsaw from the workbench and went to work destroying it, rasping the saw across the figure’s limbs. He hacked and pulled at the wood, splintering it, cutting his hand when the saw caught on a bolt. The blood poured down over the red wood and still he worked, making the figure unrecognizable.

And then he went to the file cabinet in one corner of the studio, his hands shaking. He never allowed himself a drink until four, when he had stopped working for the day. It was his own private rule and he had never broken it, not once.

But now he took out a bottle of vodka that he kept there. It was Stoli, half empty, the liquid glistening beneath the glass as he struggled to unscrew the cap. He lifted it to his lips and drank straight from the bottle, ignoring the protestations of his stomach. He drank and drank, past the gagging, past the burning down his throat. He drank until he shuddered, and lay down amid the wreckage of the sculpture.