“Have you seen this?” I showed them the note. Rudy made the sound sometimes written as “Pshaw.” “That’s about the seventh one of those.” He took the note and was about to rip it up, but I stopped him. “I’ve taken a whole stack of them to the police. They said we’re bound to get kooks of all kinds leaving messages. Some sad, some nasty. And that shrine encouraged them. Now that they know poor Genevieve was pregnant, we’ll probably get a whole slew of vicious ones.”
Jon Kim was twirling Rudy’s ponytail. “Time to go, big guy.”
“Yes, Mark. We’ve got to lock up. You don’t want to be here alone, with Clara Mingo and her ghosts.”
Or Genevieve’s ghost, I might have added. As I lingered alone in the kitchen, rinsing my hands one last time, I saw a figure in the concrete-lined space back of the house—a person in a hooded, green rubber poncho, standing there in the rain.
The person gestured, as if recognizing me. Then Rudy yelled from the dining room that he was alarming and locking the building.
Rudy punched in the security code and slammed the door. The rain was intensifying. “Well, the Esplanade is out but not the run,” Jon Kim said, as he and Rudy dashed off toward Beacon Hill. I sprinted to Arlington Street, went east, and reached the alley at the rear of Mingo House.
It was empty, I thought. I was relieved.
“Here.” Did I recognize the voice? It was male but disguised by a cold. He was hunched under the eaves of a garage, by a stack of old boards and, in a puddle, the flattened corpse of a pigeon. “You didn’t tell anyone?” Larry Courson said.
“Aren’t you under house arrest? Did you get permission—”
“What does it matter after what happened to my daughter?” The lines scoring his face, of age and grief and illness, had deepened, and his chin bore the stubble of a man in a homeless shelter. He was coughing, his nose congested. “I had to come, I had to see where it happened. If I saw where, maybe I could figure out why.” He glared at Mingo House. “That place is evil, you mark my words. That was built with blood money, built with corpses. It’s a charnel house.”
“Well, Genevieve told me she loved Mingo House. She said her mother brought her there for her tenth birthday.”
“Her mother had some peculiar ideas, God rest her soul.”
He gripped my arm and I’m afraid I recoiled, recalling the charges leveled against him. His daughter’s tragedy didn’t lessen or excuse them.
“You’ve got to understand that I’ve lost everything: my child, my spouse, my reputation. Do you know what that’s like?”
Of course I didn’t, but I had lost, found, and again lost a father and half-brother, and any semblance of a normal childhood. “Did Genevieve tell you she was pregnant? Did she tell you who the father was?”
He noticed the dead pigeon in the puddle and cringed. “We always taught Genevieve to be comfortable with her body, never to be ashamed of the gifts God had bestowed. I took beautiful portraits of Carol nude, after she’d been diagnosed with breast cancer. She wanted a record of her body before the mastectomy.”
His reassurances weren’t making me more comfortable.
“Genevieve never mentioned any pregnancy to me. She knew I had enough on my plate.”
And on his conscience, perhaps. Even though we had squeezed under the eaves of the garage, the wind blew the rain so that it pursued us like a sheriff’s posse. We were getting soaked.
“Who do you think killed Genevieve?”
“I have no idea. If I did, I’d have addressed the situation.”
By killing the killer? “I realize that some…photographers use period costumes as props. In places like Rockport. You know, dress up as a gunslinger or a saloon girl.” Was it possible he had killed her, her own father, a photographer? No, he’d been under house arrest then.
“No serious photographer would do that.” He glanced back at Mingo House. “Was she found on the first floor?”
“Yes, in the dining room in the back.”
“In Victorian clothing.”
I was tired, so I said it accidentally: “She looked beautiful.”
“You saw her?” He clamped his hands around my throat.
“I found her.”
“You never told me.” The rain streamed down his face, as though the sky was supplying his tears.
“I didn’t kill her.”
“Are you the father?”
I was gay and partnered, I told him, and his fury subsided. I explained about the trustees’ meeting and Genevieve saying she had something she wanted to show me.
“Some nonsense about Mingo House, no doubt.”
“Did you leave any notes here? At Mingo House? Today or recently?”
“You think I have time…?”
“Someone left a note with a verse from the Bible.” I dug it from my jeans. By now it had become stained with wasabi mustard. ‘Vengeance is mine,’ the Isaiah quote.”
He pulled the front of his hood lower over his forehead. “Please don’t tell anyone you saw me. Just give me half an hour to get away.” Then he sprinted down the alley, splashing through the puddles, almost tripping over a cardboard box that had escaped from some dumpster, and was gone.
I waited fifteen minutes before walking to the police station. Thankful no one I knew was on duty, I gave the officer at the counter the note with the biblical rant. He confirmed that “Mr. Schmitz” had brought other messages, “Holy Roller stuff,” and thanked me. When I told him I saw a man resembling Larry Courson loitering near Mingo House, the cop laughed, “Are you sure it wasn’t Marcia Haight? She’s been going undercover, so we hear. To crack the case.” Perhaps Larry was allowed a little freedom, after all.
The rain had abated, and, when I returned to our condominium, Chloe shouted from the adjacent balcony: “Have you heard? It just came on as breaking news—the father is missing, the Victorian Girl’s. What does that make him, the Victorian Guy? The Victorian Dad? He disabled his ankle thing and flew the coop.”
I had just shielded a man who was an accused pedophile, who could endanger a young girl like Chloe.
She was spreading her blue rubber yoga mat on the wet slate of her balcony to begin her afternoon meditation, something she and her mother were doing these days. “I know he’s a creep, but I still feel sorry for him.” Assuming the lotus position, she squeezed her eyes shut.
When I switched on our television, Larry Courson’s sullen mug shot was dominating the news, even on CNN.
Chapter Seventeen
Bryce returned the next day to Mingo House. Cat Hodges came back too, weighted down with three canvas tote bags full of art books as well as more sculpture-sized jewelry, spheres of chrome and copper on her wrists and neck. She emanated Genevieve’s kookiness without any warmth or humor. She assured Bryce she would be at his side as they dealt with the dining room, assessed the contents of the crime scene where Genevieve and her child had met death.
“Oh, Cat, dear, it fills me with trepidation.”
“Yes, but it must be faced.” Cat plopped her art books onto the rosewood rocker where Genevieve had been positioned by her killer. She appraised her reflection in a gilt-framed mirror, prodded her hair, and then began overturning the raspberry-pink china on the table. “Aren’t these precious? If you like that sort of thing.”
Sam Ahearn and Jon Kim were the only other trustees present, since Rudy had business commitments. Sam shook his head as Bryce balked at entering the dining room. Bryce and Cat reversed roles, Cat describing all the items while Bryce scribbled notes onto a coil pad. “Who’s in charge?” Sam muttered into my ear.
“Oh, these must be the triplets who coordinated their births and deaths with such precision.” Cat regarded the little girls with a skeptical expression. “The lacework is rendered beautifully, and so is the leather of their shoes, and the light on the little brass buttons…But they look sickly, don’t they? ‘Peaked,’ as my grandmother used to say. Oh my, if I’m not mistaken, isn’t that a…monstrance in the background?
”
Bryce strode into the dining room, pushed past Sam Ahearn like he was a turnstile.
“There, in the background, on the shelf.”
“It’s a vase.” Bryce pronounced it “vahse.” He had changed color, gone damask-red. “I think you’re way off, way off.”
“What would a monstrance be doing in a portrait of an old WASP family? Weren’t these people Episcopalian? Or Unitarian?” Sam Ahearn said.
“Exactly.” Bryce laughed. “Exactly.”
“That portrait of the little girls,” Jon Kim said, “is that a Mary Cassatt?”
“It isn’t a Mary Cassatt. It’s by Phoebe Choate Whitman. Her initials are in the lower right-hand corner, by the doll, the lamb, on the floor. She was a painter who lived in Still Pond, Maine. She was particularly skilled at depicting children in posthumous portraits. This could have been done from a single photograph. In which, incidentally, the objects in the background might be much more discernable.”
Bryce reasserted some control. “Cat, dear, let’s attend to the task at hand. Our colleagues are taking valuable time from their places of business to be here.”
Jon Kim and Sam Ahearn assisted Cat by pulling a sideboard away from a wall so Cat and Bryce could scrutinize its back. Jon Kim was intrigued by a collection of netsuke shaped like deer, rabbits, bear cubs, and turtles that had accumulated on the mantel above the fireplace. His “Auntie Kay” had collected netsuke in Hawaii.
Cat resumed her descriptions, dictating to Bryce, and dismissing the kinds of flaws he had noticed. “The condition and quality of the items in the dining room is a step above the objects in the rest of the house. That’s expected, in a way, because this was their Sunday best, so to speak. Seldom used or used less frequently.”
The rain abated just as we adjourned for lunch. Sam Ahearn treated us to ribs from a barbecue place, messy but tender, with delicious crusts of fat. Jon Kim consumed this fare as eagerly as he had the Flex sushi. He and Cat were discussing a Herb Ritts exhibit they both had admired. “That man with the tire certainly raised my blood pressure. Has grease ever looked so good?” Jon Kim said. Bryce was gnawing away at the ribs, but Cat had abstained in favor of her own soda crackers, Gouda cheese, and organic strawberries.
“They certainly are a weird pair,” Sam Ahearn whispered to me as he threw a mortuary’s worth of bones into the garbage bag we’d carted out to the front steps. “But at least Miss Toothpick isn’t as critical of our collection. Unlike Mr. Hairline Crack, as I call him.”
Today, Mr. Hairline Crack had selected a morbid choice for his lapel, a stickpin with an onyx skull and pink diamond eyes. He saw me staring. “From the school of Faberge.” Then, he rushed by us, taking the front stairs two at a time, announcing, “Bathroom break, bathroom break. And we must all scrub off this delicious but disastrous-for-a-historic property barbecue sauce.”
Of course 9/11 was still fresh on our minds. We discussed the latest terrorist threat. Was it code yellow or code orange? It changed color like fall foliage. “Where on earth is Bryce?” Cat eventually asked.
I’d track him down, I told them. He wasn’t in the kitchen or in the first floor bathroom, and the Mingo bedrooms were all equally empty. So I scaled the stairs to the library. For some reason—playfulness, giddiness, just being happy because the sun was finally shining—I began tiptoeing as I approached the library.
Bryce was in the library, all right, up to something very bizarre. He was pressing his ear flush with the room’s walnut paneling, tapping it, as if conversing with one of Clara Mingo’s ghosts—or attempting to locate something embedded within the wall.
“Find the monstrance yet?” It was the first thing that came into my mind.
Bryce tried to counterfeit the laugh he had used over the veal Umbria, and failed miserably.
“So you think the monstrance was sealed in the wall? It must be awfully valuable to still capture your interest, even after what happened to Genevieve.”
“It’s a legend. Like the Seven Cities of Cibola.”
“People died looking for those too, didn’t they? Was Genevieve killed because of that monstrance? Because she’d hit a bull’s eye in her research?”
Bryce dug deep into the Brioni pocket of his suit.
“Your period of mourning for Genevieve certainly was brief. You’ve already replaced her with a thinner, more fashionable model.”
His thinness gave him the look of an ascetic, a monk from El Greco subsisting on bread and theology. How this skinny, effete man could cast an air of genuine menace was beyond my understanding, but cast it he did then and there.
“If you and your cohorts plan to shut this museum and auction off its contents so it can become—I don’t know—some condominium or yuppie cigar bar, I’m certainly going to give you a fight. And I won’t be alone.”
“Folks…”
Bryce and I turned in tandem to see Jon Kim and his Liberace smile.
“Cat says it’s back to work.”
And then I saw, to my surprise, what Bryce had drawn from his pocket—brass knuckles, the kind Depression-era hoods carried.
***
“So, how was the Last Judgment?” Roberto asked when I got home.
“Well, that ditzy Bryce kept hedging about specifics. He doesn’t specify a value for anything. He just takes down a description and says he’ll think about it.…And he carries brass knuckles. Can you believe it?”
“From that crowd, I can believe anything.” Roberto indicated our bottle of Bombay Sapphire, which I had raided for the occasional gimlet. “You’re taking this pretty seriously. And you’re drinking more. Mark, that place, Mingo House, has god-awful karma. You’re stressing without even being aware of it.”
My mother and stepfather, Subash Chaudry, no longer went to AA meetings when staying in a strange city, trusted themelves and their fortitude not to drink. Was I just beginning their odyssey? Would I be their age when I ended it?
Chapter Eighteen
The next morning, as Roberto was rustling up a breakfast of Texas toast, our telephone rang and a jumpy Sam Ahearn all but yelled, “I’m so glad I got you! Turn on the TV. To Channel Four.”
When I did, I got a commercial for insect repellent, featuring a computer-generated mosquito buzzing a man grilling a steak.
“It’s just…” I punched the remote…The footage rolling depicted a blanket-wrapped body being borne by police down the steps of a bow-fronted brick townhouse. The lurid lights of squad cars beat against the scene as the voice-over spoke: “…The murder victim is identified as forty-four-year-old Bryce Rossi, an art dealer and philanthropist…”
“You there?”
“Some of me.” But I didn’t trust the floor. It seemed unstable, the trap door beneath a condemned man on a gallows.
The inevitable neighbor, saying the inevitable, came next: “He was very quiet, but very friendly. He always gave my daughter ribbon candy at Christmas, and he was famous for his Halloween parties. He’d decorate his whole house with spider webs and jack-o-lanterns. He loved children and animals.” Then she sobbed into her sleeve, and the camera cut to an anchor putting on his grimmest expression: “Rossi, however, was known to police, having worked as a fence of stolen art in the past.”
Of course, he had those crude tattoos, a cross and a heart, prison graffiti, done in inmates’ ink. And he’d carried brass knuckles. Another commercial came on. “How was he killed? Strangled?”
“He should be so lucky. He was bludgeoned. With a hammer. They found it at the scene. But get this, he was ‘positioned,’ their word, in the broadcast, under a medieval statue of the Madonna and Child. Like he was some kind of offering. How sick is that?”
“Genevieve was positioned. All set up for tea with Queen Victoria.”
“And guess who found him? Our friend, Cat. I guess I had old Bryce wrong after all. He really did like the ladies.”
“Does Rudy know?”
“I haven’t told him.”
Sam agreed
to do that. I didn’t want to be the bearer of bad news a second time.
Roberto was logging onto our computer. “The newspapers haven’t got the story yet.” His Texas toast was charring.
“They’re linked, they have to be.” I channel-surfed to get more coverage, but the stations were doing national news now. “Genevieve, then Bryce, the father of her child. And Bryce being found under a statue of a child, the Child.”
Roberto ceased clicking the mouse. “How did you know that? Who fathered her child?”
“Bryce, um, told me,” I admitted.
“Larry Courson just busted out. Could he have slaughtered Bryce because he thought Bryce strangled Genevieve? At least you were on good terms, so they can’t suspect you.”
Yeah, right. I didn’t dare tell him that I’d quarreled with Bryce Rossi—and was witnessed by the duplicitous Jon Kim. Jon Kim might well tattle to the police, how he had seen Bryce drawing brass knuckles on me—only hours before his slaying. And how long would it take the media, via Cat or Rudy, to link Bryce Rossi to Mingo House and concoct a “curse” for the place?
The answer was four hours: Marcia Haight seized the angle for the noon news.
Two people intrigued by the “mythical” Mingo monstrance had been murdered. In a sinister, almost ritualistic manner. And Nadia Gulbenkian hovered in critical condition, by means fair or foul. Were all of us connected to Mingo House in danger? And because of what and by whom? Now I was obligated to revisit the police and detail my sighting of Larry Courson, since Bryce had been slaughtered and Larry was obviously a suspect.
As I left the lobby, a police car came braking in front of our condominium and two officers disembarked. One I knew from the earlier investigation when I’d been interrogated about finding Genevieve’s body. The cops questioned me, there beside the ashtrays filled with sand stamped with our condominium’s pseudo-heraldic logo. I described the dinner I’d had with Bryce and related his believing Genevieve was carrying his child. The cops absorbed all this with blank expressions. I also mentioned the monstrance.
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