A Pinchbeck Bride

by Stephen Anable

  Fletcher seemed to have taken a shorter route back because we had arrived at the funeral home parking lot in record time. By now poor Genevieve was being incinerated in a retort. “I appreciate the ride.” As I set one wingtip shoe onto the pavement, I asked, “What happened to Genevieve’s mother? Was she at the service? Are they divorced?”

  “She died of breast cancer two years ago. An incredibly sweet lady. Her photograph was on the wall—the nude, on the red silk.” Then he reached across the passenger seat, and, clutching its handle, slammed the door shut and sped the SUV away.

  Chapter Nine

  The next morning, helping to remove some “memorial” items from the Mingo House steps and rub off a message marked in lipstick on the brownstone—“Genevieve Courson, forever in our hearts”—I was interrupted by Dorothea Jakes. In sunglasses and a blue-and-white seersucker dress, she was carrying a single peony. “Oh, I feel so gauche, but I was actually going to leave a flower in memory of Genevieve. To counter the presence of the Beanie Babies. You know Genevieve was a bit of a kook, but I enjoyed her. At times.” Then, the usually diplomatic Dorothea blurted it out: “Wasn’t that the most pathetic funeral?”

  “Well, plenty of reporters came.”

  “But only two trustees. And I was so surprised Bryce Rossi wasn’t there.” She deposited her peony on the lowest step, next to a resin unicorn. Had Peggy O’Connell brought that figurine from her collection? She hadn’t even gone to her roommate’s funeral.

  “Who’s Bryce Rossi?”

  “Oh, he’s a real character. He does genealogical research. He used to meet Genevieve some evenings.”

  “His nickname wasn’t Nosferatu, was it? Was he an old boyfriend?”

  She scoffed. “Hardly!” Then Dorothea gave me his business card, on thick teal cardboard, with embossed lettering reading: “Bryce Ralph Rossi, Appraisals & Genealogical Research.” The card listed a Boston address in the financial district and a phone number with a city exchange.

  I telephoned Bryce Rossi’s business number, discovered it was disconnected, and then, via directory assistance, found him at a number in the South End, Boston’s “gay ghetto.” Bryce told me Genevieve Courson had consulted him about “some personal research.” My subsequent questions were met with responses that became progressively more curt and opaque until he told me, “Look, you’re a stranger. You’re just a voice on the telephone. I mean, we’ve never even met…”

  So I suggested we do exactly that, meet for a bite in the Back Bay. He insisted it be dinner, not lunch, and requested he pick out the restaurant.

  Newbury Street that evening was thronged with people, mostly college-age or at least young, savoring the sunlight, the foreplay of summer. They ignored the “old” businesses: the Ritz and the sole merchant still devoted to fur, the galleries selling the American Impressionists. They passed the antique shops, their grated windows gleaming with cascades of pocket watches, with golden dryads hoisting aloft candles and crystal prisms, alabaster putti riding clouds and eating cherries, Lalique bowls frosted with prancing bathing beauties…They passed windows of ormolu girandoles, Lalique vases, and busts of French courtesans—of terra-cotta the same papery gray of wasps’ nests. They ignored the funky places Genevieve loved, with their racks of trash and treasures. These people—yuppies and rich college kids from Europe and Asia—swept into the open air cafes to eat tapas and spring rolls, to drink designer beer and apple martinis. They strolled cockily because this was Boston’s paseo, thick with youth, status, and hormones.

  Bryce Rossi was lean; any excess flesh anywhere on his body had been dieted or exercised away. Every hair on his head was perfectly cut and lay obediently in place without the burden of gel. He had an obsessive-compulsive neatness, and was, to me, totally sexless.

  “There’s so much to discuss.” He chose a restaurant on Newbury Street called Villa D’Este, which had “al fresco dining.” “It’s me, Bryce Rossi,” he told the maitre d’, and then tried a few lines of Italian. His performance meant little to the staff, and we were given a corner table next to a small concrete cupid. “I spent a magnificent year in Padua, studying abroad. I find the whole Mediterranean world so simpatico. Healthier, more sensual.” He reached across the table and ran his skeletal finger down the back of my hand.

  The waiter saved me from having to respond. Judging by his flaxen hair and name tag (“Dmitri”), he was Slavic, which seemed to disturb my companion a great deal. “Isn’t Luciano here tonight? He always knows exactly what I want. He can all but read my thoughts.”

  “He returned to Milan last January, sir.”

  “What about Mauritzio?” Bryce relished pronouncing these names with shameless Italian gusto.

  “Mauritzio left a while back. He’s working in a restaurant in Chicago.”

  Bryce gave a haughty snort. “Things certainly have changed.”

  “We’re under new management.”

  “As I feared. But your wine list is still respectable, I trust?”

  Before I could refuse any liquor whatsoever, Bryce had ordered a bottle of Palazzo Barbarini 1992, costing forty-eight dollars. “I know exactly what to have. Veal Umbria, you’ll swoon.” The vermillion dots on his tie seemed to move surreptitiously. He was the sort to hijack a conversation unless thwarted, so I made a preemptive strike: “Were you close to Genevieve?”

  He leaned over the bread and extra virgin olive oil. “We were soul mates.”

  But surely not bed mates, I thought.

  He dipped his heel of bread into the olive oil, pressed it, and thrust it into his thin-lipped mouth. “Genevieve had a passion for history. That we shared. She was a world-class researcher. Why she was enamored of that fool at Harvard, I never knew.”

  “Fool?”

  “Zack Meecham. You didn’t know him? Consider yourself blessed. What a fraud. He taught a course about post-Civil War America. She got permission to audit it. He was insufferable.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, please. Don’t make me lose my appetite. Let’s not bring him up unless we have insecticide handy. He makes my skin crawl.”

  “But he’s…dead.”

  “Mercifully. He should have won a Darwin Award. Or perhaps we might give it to that tree on the Jamaicaway. I’m sorry, but I refuse to discuss him.” Bryce had a prominent Adam’s apple, and as he spoke, it was getting a workout, so he liberated it by unfastening the top button on his shirt.

  “I warned Genevieve. But she was headstrong, as you must have observed.”

  The waiter brought the bottle of wine and expertly poured us each a glass. Bryce sipped. “Magnificent? Don’t you agree? Good heavens! Don’t guzzle it like it’s Orangina. You must let it bloom on your tongue.”

  “Of course,” I said, laughing, and somehow he thought I was laughing with him rather than at him. Then, quite rapidly, the veal arrived, a pallid piece of meat all but floating in a viscous vile sauce, and I knew consuming it would take effort. I asked how he had first met Genevieve and he paused, holding one admonitory finger in the air while chewing his veal with squirrel-fast jaws. “She was climbing her family tree.” Then he laughed, roared, at his own anemic joke, showing the mercury fillings of his upper teeth. “I think she had issues, the poor thing, about finding a family tree dripping with knights and countesses. But it yielded only mill girls and the occasional clerk. The fantasies we spin about the past. They’re a guilty pleasure.”

  “Why did she work at Mingo House? Was it just an internship?” I didn’t really care for this veal or any other; I kept imagining the small fattening calf, confined to its pen and awaiting slaughter. In a way the calf’s plight seemed analogous to Genevieve’s, confined with her questionable father and then Zack Meecham.

  “Oh, Mingo House meant the world to Genevieve. I think she fantasized about it being her family home. She wanted to be ‘to the manor born’ and she ‘adopted’ Mingo House in a way. In hopes that it might adopt her.” His voice broke with an unfeigned grief. “And look what
happened.” He shoveled more veal through his lips, feeding his sorrow. For a slender man he had an enormous appetite, devouring his veal and requesting more bread by tapping the wire basket on the table and calling out “Signore!” He was also consuming enough wine to deplete the vintage, and, as he grew drunker, he again tried running his finger down my hand, so I had to keep my hands inaccessible, in my lap. “And, signore, more vino!”

  “Ah, the Mingoes,” Bryce sighed, as he pushed his empty plate away, almost pushing my butter knife off the table and onto the concrete cupid. “Of course Clara Mingo was a certified nutcase, with her séances and spiritual photographs. Did you know she was a friend of Mary Todd Lincoln’s? Mary stayed at Mingo House and consulted Clara about contacting Honest Abe. I think Tad stayed there too. Genevieve couldn’t look at a penny or a five-dollar bill without picturing Clara and Mary summoning the Great Beyond.”

  Then he mumbled something about “my little girl” and poured so much of the second bottle of wine into his glass that it slopped over and flooded the bread basket. He drank the whole glass in one quaff and smeared away tears from his eyes. He stood with the wobble of a minutes-old colt, mumbled something about needing a men’s room, collided with a planter, and sent an empty wine bottle careening onto the pavement, where it shattered with a humiliating crash that caused the whole world to gawk—our fellow diners, the restaurant staff, the couples strolling hand-in-hand along the sidewalk. “How ghastly, how ghastly,” he said.

  Dmitri appeared, followed by the maitre d’ and a woman I assumed was the manager. Bryce now seated himself not in his chair but on top of a concrete harlequin, where he began weeping, softly at first, and then with the wailing of professional mourners at Third World funerals.

  “Sir, I must ask you to leave.”

  “My child, my child,” Bryce wept. Defiantly, he hurled our bread basket to the ground.

  The woman, the manager, repeated her request. “Sir, please, you must be on your way. You’re disrupting everyone’s…” Bryce fished for his wallet, found six fifty-dollar bills, forked over the money, and told me, “You will see me to my home, Mr. Winslow.”

  What choice did I have? He clung to me, weightless as a puppet, as I steadied him up Newbury Street, down Clarendon, and through the South End to his bow-fronted townhouse on Union Park. “I owe you so much.” Actually, I owed him for my portion of our dinner, for the wine and veal Umbria I had left cooling on my plate.

  We had just entered the front hall of Bryce’s home when he suddenly announced, “I’m going to faint. My collar, it’s too tight. I can’t breathe, I’m having a panic attack.”

  Clearly Genevieve’s murder had dealt him a serious blow. I helped unbutton his shirt and peel the jacket and shirt from his torso. His tie was secured in a Gordian knot that took me forever to dissect. He was hairless and he wore a ponderous gold crucifix on a chain around his neck, some seriously Catholic bling. His pants were stained; had he wet them or doused them with wine? Mercifully, he was able to remove them himself, until he sat in his scarlet bikini briefs on his long leather sofa. Seeing this stranger brought so low embarrassed me, and I forgot about the urge to escape. Tattooed on his left and right biceps, respectively, were a cross and a heart, rendered in crude, light ink, as if done with a fountain pen. “Will you be so kind as to bring me a hot towel? I have heated towel racks in the bathroom. It’s just down the hallway. I’d be ever so grateful.”

  The house was filled with a combination of Bauhaus furniture and museum-quality art: a polychrome wood Buddha, Mayan jade, medieval iron prickets for holding cannon-sized candles, and what looked like a section of a choir stall—with slim figures of robed men, their mouths open in song. Switching on a button in the bathroom, I successfully heated a huge towel until it was omelet-warm. By the time I returned to the living room, Bryce was a bit more composed. He submerged his face in the towel, then pressed it against his concave chest, against the crucifix. I hoped he wasn’t about to come on to me.

  “My child was murdered.”

  “She was so full of life, Genevieve.”

  He hiccupped. “No, my child.”

  When he said it, it barely registered, I was that dumbfounded: “Genevieve was pregnant with my child. She was carrying my child. We hadn’t planned it. It just happened. I was just thrilled, but Genevieve was…conflicted. She mentioned putting the baby up for adoption. She would never have aborted, of course.” He draped the hot towel around his neck. “It’s a child not a choice.”

  Genevieve had been carrying his child when she was murdered. His child had been murdered too. As I tried to absorb this information, my eyes wandered around the room and came to focus on a Madonna holding the infant Jesus, a Gothic statue of cracked stone. “I’m so sorry.”

  His sense of propriety—and heterosexuality?—returned, and he took a leather pillow from a corner of the sofa and deposited it in his lap so that it covered both his briefs and his chest.

  “Of course I could have killed Zack Meecham. I was mad with jealousy. I mean I’m a little long in the tooth—thirty-eight—to be dating a college girl, but Genevieve liked older men. She was susceptible to father figures.” He attempted to get up but couldn’t summon the equilibrium. Instead, he fell back, hugged the pillow in a paternal fashion, and again began crying.

  “Would you like some coffee?”

  “No, water, without flavoring. Just Poland Spring water. It’s in the refrigerator, by the pitcher of iced tea.”

  He was ordered, organized, as one would expect of a researcher. The refrigerator might have been located in an upscale South End restaurant; it was crammed with roast beef and Cornish hens, all sorts of sauces for pasta labeled in Tupperware, bunches of white asparagus, trays of new potatoes, a plate of tarts, a bowl of mousse, a box of macaroons with its cover ajar, a pitcher of iced tea, and, yes, spring water. I found glasses for both of us in a cherry cabinet next to a window containing herbs sprouting from small ceramic pots.

  “Wonderful, wonderful.” Bryce drank the water and revived gradually. Then he tucked the pillow back in its customary place on the sofa. “The staff at Mingo House, do they believe the accounts about the monstrance?”

  That was so far from my thoughts that I asked, “What?”

  “A monstrance is a container for holding the host for adoration before communion.” His pedantry and pretensions, once banished by the liquor, were reactivating.

  “I know what a monstrance is.”

  “Did they mention the monstrance at Mingo House?”

  “You mean the ecclesiastical silver some Mingo supposedly smuggled out of England? When King Charles the First was deposed?”

  For the first time this evening Bryce Rossi seemed sincerely pleased.

  “I thought that was just a legend.”

  “So do most scholars. But Genevieve was convinced that the monstrance—and the rest of the silver—existed. Exists.”

  Was that the subject of the school project she’d wanted to show me on the evening I’d found her murdered?

  His voice grew hard as cloisonné: “You’ve thought of something. What is it?”

  I wouldn’t tell him, of course. “Genevieve was a bit of a romantic, don’t you think? I mean, she had that cameo fetish. She’d hit the thrift shops and antique stores. She actually told me she’d like to live in the past. That’s pretty unusual for a young person.”

  “So you think she was a fool whose opinions have no consequence.” He was growing soberer by the minute.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Genevieve Courson was very much a realist. My God, I should know.”

  “You weren’t at her funeral.”

  The potent insult didn’t faze him in the least. “I was cowardly. Afraid. If I’d met her father, I was afraid…of what I might do.” He’d realized I’d noticed the crude heart, his tattoo, and, caressing his right arm, covered it with his left hand. “I could have strangled him.”

  That certainly was an interesting resp
onse. I would let him volunteer the details, to see if they matched Fletcher’s. Of course the father was in some sort of trouble, but was he a sex offender?

  “He’s a pedophile, the old man. Genevieve always denied it, defended him, but he enjoyed photographing little girls in salacious positions. Some high school girl was having her photograph taken. For her yearbook. Old man Courson put his hand up her skirt. He claimed he was ‘posing’ her. Odious.”

  This was new, but it backed up Fletcher’s version.

  “Genevieve’s mother was going to leave him. She’d had it with his…predilections. Then she got sick, she got breast cancer. She was too busy dying to get divorced.”

  To cooperate a bit, I responded truthfully about the royal silver rumor. “No one at Mingo House takes the monstrance story seriously. It’s…a legend.”

  “Really?”

  That comforted him somehow. “You’ll excuse me, Mr. Winslow. I’ve been under a great strain.” He rose.

  I had to ask him the obvious question: “Do you have any idea who killed Genevieve?”

  “None. None whatsoever.”

  “Does the name Fletcher Coombs mean anything to you?”

  “It does not.” When he had escorted me to the door and closed it, I counted one, two, three deadbolt locks that he drew. I’d neglected to pay for my dinner. That could be my excuse if I wished to contact him in the future.

  Chapter Ten

  There was no way I could determine whether Genevieve Courson was pregnant. The details of her murder in the media and the brief descriptions of her autopsy made no mention of a fetus or its possible father. But all of the friends in Genevieve’s circle portrayed her as a young woman with a good deal more drama than the average “coed.”

  Was there a possibility the father of Genevieve’s child could have been someone other than Bryce Rossi, perhaps even his dead “rival,” Zack Meecham? The college community was in the process of disbanding for the summer. If I was going to investigate Zack’s life, I had to do it soon. It was already June. So I headed “across the river” to Cambridge.