A Pinchbeck Bride

by Stephen Anable

  “We don’t believe this is art-related,” the cop I had met previously said.

  “But had he done time? I heard that on the news. For selling a hot crucifix stolen in Miami. Was he dangerous? Could he have killed Genevieve Courson? Larry Courson is on the lam—”

  The cop I had met earlier said, “Larry Courson has been seen in Boston this morning. He was seen by a woman who has a garden in the Fens. She caught him sleeping against a tool shed.”

  That was after I’d spoken to him back of Mingo House, so my meeting was old information. I spoke up anyway. “I saw someone loitering back of Mingo House the day before yesterday. It looked like Larry Courson.”

  Then one cop got a message on his walkie-talkie and the two jumped into their squad car and left me there by the ashtrays in a cloud of exhaust.

  The day was sunny, the birds were trilling in the Public Garden. People crowded the swan boats as they circled the rippling, glassy water. Ducks came panhandling toward tourists and children. The shrubs around the George Washington statue, marshaled in the manner of warring chess pieces, had grown the fattest they would all year. The plantings of high summer were in place: flame-like scarlet flowers and brown, wide-leafed things resembling tobacco. A toddler squealed with joy as the wind animated his pinwheel so that it whirled and flashed in the sun-vivid air.

  The scene reminded me of Genevieve: the woman I knew—or thought I knew—and the ten-year-old whose mother had treated her to a “voyage” on the swan boats. Genevieve had been luckless as the Titanic. Who could have wanted to end her life, to deny her this day and the thousands of days comprising her future?

  Something pulled me toward Beacon Street, past Mingo House, with its diminishing number of bouquets, toward Genevieve’s alma mater. Shawmut College should have emptied for the summer, or so I thought, but students were still assembling in front of the dormitories, including in front of Howard Hall. Peggy O’Connell was among them. Had Sam Ahearn seen her room, he would have tagged Peggy the “Unicorn Girl.” She was smoking, something I hadn’t thought she’d do, and drinking a frappe from a massive paper cup. She didn’t seem happy to see me. Exhaling smoke, she stared toward a powder-blue Mercedes convertible as it began stopping. “Jesus, it’s him,” she said, stamping out her cigarette and pitching it into the mulch surrounding the magnolias.

  Fletcher Coombs, a passenger in the frat-boy-laden Mercedes, leapt out—shirtless, muscular, and extroverted in a way I’d never imagined. “Hey, babe!” he laughed, and, I noticed that one of his nipples was pierced with a gossamer-thin ring of silver. “Let’s mooove.”

  Had Peggy’s scorn been for me or him? It was hard to tell until she spoke. “Guess who dropped by like clockwork, Fletcher? The ever-curious Mr. Winslow.”

  “We gotta pack.” Fletcher had shaved his chest, something few straight men I’d encountered ever did. He was joining Peggy in giving me the kind of look most people reserve for late-night drunks on the subway.

  One of Peggy’s companions, who seemed, I now noticed, quite teary, asked Peggy, “Aren’t you going to the remembrance for Professor Rossi?”

  “Bryce Rossi? He was a professor here?”

  “Well, a lecturer. He spoke a few times every year, in a Biblical archaeology class. About authenticating the Shroud of Turin and the search for Noah’s ark, you know. He collected religious relics. He had a cabinet full of saints’ bones at his apartment. And he gave wonderful parties on Halloween.” A tear trickled down the girl’s cheek. “He was murdered last night. Bludgeoned. What a horrible world. To kill such a gentle soul.” She was all in pink, pink cotton halter, pink denim shorts, pink sandals. She also was very buxom. Perhaps Bryce liked that. She was very talkative; I liked that.

  “He used to have us over to his house. It was beautiful, like a museum. He had this beautiful statue of the Virgin Mary, and the news stations are saying he was found murdered in front of it. In some kind of ritual, some kind of Black Mass!” She wept.

  That, I hadn’t heard.

  “So Mr. Investigative Reporter, have you gotten all the information you’re after?” Peggy O’Connell shifted her bulky legs. Her shorts and sleeveless blouse accentuated her weight, as did the delicacy of the gold chain encircling her thick, linebacker’s neck.

  “Peggy thinks you’re doing a story about Genevieve.”

  “And now Bryce.”

  “Well, I’m not. But it’s pretty bizarre that Bryce Rossi was murdered, so brutally. After what happened to Genevieve. And I didn’t know Bryce had a connection to Shawmut.”

  “It was tenuous.”

  “Tenuous like his heterosexuality.” Peggy glanced at me.

  “He had the hots for Genevieve.” Fletcher settled onto the concrete stoop.

  Fletcher’s shoulders had reddened, raw with sunburn. Perhaps he had been “catching some rays” on the lawns by the river, on the Esplanade. For people stuck in the city during the summer, it substituted as a beach—where they could tan, picnic, toss Frisbees, and display their bodies, by the lapping, weedy-smelling water. Gay men cruised there, especially after dark. I fought the urge to admire Fletcher’s physique. And the pierced nipple seemed so out of character. Was I noticing it because I hoped he was secretly gay?

  “No straight men wear tassel loafers and collect saints’ bones. I mean…really!” Could Peggy be dating Fletcher? He had called her “babe.” Was that cruelty or camaraderie?

  “Well, teaching in a college would give him access to young girls. As it had Zack Meecham,” I told them.

  “Bryce thought he was quite the alpha male,” Fletcher said. Earlier, Bryce had denied knowing Fletcher.

  “In his dreams.” Peggy crumpled the frappe cup and cast it behind the magnolias.

  “I’m not doing a story. I’m not a journalist and I didn’t come here on purpose, I just happened to wander by. But the chairman of the board of trustees at Mingo House dismantled the memorial for Genevieve on the front steps. So I saved a little unicorn, white resin, with a collar of red sequins. I wondered if you might have put it there.”

  “I hate unicorns,” Peggy said. “My grandmother gave me the ones in my room. She’s paying my tuition here. So my mother insisted I bring them along.” Now she smiled, enjoying the put-down. “And I never visited Mingo House. I hated that place. I never liked Genevieve working there. So after she was killed, that was the last place I’d go.” She eyeballed Fletcher. “Unlike some people.”

  Fletcher deflected the subject. “Have the cops gotten Larry Courson?”

  The teary girl said she was off to send flowers in the students’ name to the Rossi family. The registrar would tell her their address.

  “Could Larry Courson have killed Bryce Rossi?” I asked Fletcher. “If Larry believed Bryce had strangled his daughter?”

  “Couldn’t any father?”

  Now, the frat boys from the Mercedes, a walking Abercrombie ad, enveloped us. “Fletch, dude, you want help with your move or not? Time’s wastin’, bro.”

  Fletcher waved the frat boys away. “Change of plans, guys. Gotta take care of some last-minute shit.”

  “Dude, you’re moody lately. You on the rag?” one of them laughed.

  “Yeah, that’s the title of his latest flick,” another said.

  Flick?

  Fletcher glowered and they dispersed, one belching ballistically.

  He told Peggy, “Later,” and, to me, said, “Come back to my old place for a minute.”

  His “old place” was literally that, in an apartment building just up the street, one of the last in the neighborhood still smothered with ivy; most owners had stripped the vines away because they infiltrated brick and stone, eroding them. The foyer, all junk mail, dust, and chicken-wire tile, yielded to a lobby whose darkness was relieved only by the dingy skylight four stories above us. “They’re not big on housework. The Delts.” So this was a fraternity. Perhaps the customary gold Greek letters had been camouflaged by the ivy.

  His quarters, on the top floor
at the back of the building, boasted a view of the sailboats flecking the Charles; one boat had just capsized. Cardboard boxes monopolized much of the space in the living room. When Fletcher shut the door he drew three bolts, the way Bryce Rossi had, in vain.

  “I’m scared shitless.”

  He stepped close to me, as if to hug or hit me.

  “We all are.” I hadn’t realized this was true until saying it then and there. Maybe that was why I was drinking. I hoped so, I hoped it wasn’t some alcoholic’s gene.

  “I mean, it could be Larry. Who killed that Rossi character. If Larry thought he killed Genevieve.”

  “Is Larry Courson capable of murder? You seemed to believe he was innocent of molesting that girl.”

  “People freak out.”

  “But if Bryce killed Genevieve and Larry killed him, why would you be in danger? Or me?”

  “Hey.” He slapped his chest, with the washboard stomach and convex navel. “I’m just glad I’m moving.” He raided the fridge, barren compared to Bryce Rossi’s, with just pickles, mayonnaise, a loaf of Wonder Bread, and…. “Want some pomegranate nectar? It’s full of antioxidants. Even though it looks pretty gross.” It was a new thing that summer, a pomegranate-strawberry vitamin concoction.

  “Are you moving because you’re afraid?”

  When drinking, his muscled chest rose and fell, and the ring in his nipple glinted correspondingly. “Living here just wasn’t cutting it. I mean, the guys are great, incredible. But I want to make something of myself, you know? And there’s too much partying here. Music blaring until two in the morning. The Delts aren’t into studying. I’m on a scholarship. I can’t live like Donald Trump.”

  “It must be hard to concentrate with all that’s happened. Losing Genevieve and now Bryce Rossi murdered.”

  He placed his empty glass on the kitchen counter, along with a stack of unopened bills. One, from a telephone company, was emblazoned with a red stripe and the words, “Your account is past due.” “Genevieve was lost…long before she died.” His voice quavered, went up an octave, became a little boy’s voice for a moment: “The thing with her father, him being accused, it knocked her out of kilter, you know? Genevieve used her life like it was part of her resume. To gain experience, climb the ladder. She wanted out of her old life, out of Lynn. That Zack jerk and Rossi—they were a means to an end. Rossi was a crook, a fence. Did you hear that on the news?”

  So he confirmed what Zack’s widow had claimed, that Genevieve had pursued him. Not the other way around.

  “Whose baby was she carrying?”

  “God only knows. It could have been anyone’s. The way she acted. When her mother got sick, she just lost it. She was, like, ‘Chances are, I’ve got the gene for breast cancer. I could be dead at forty just like her.’” He took my empty glass and set it by his on the counter. “I was, like, ‘You’re half your father’s gene pool, your grandmother, Mrs. Torrance, she’s still going strong and she’s seventy-something.’”

  “Her grandmother?”

  “Mrs. Torrance. Her mother’s mother. She lives on Cape Ann.”

  His eyes met mine. Was there sexual yearning there? No, but there was more intelligence than I’d given him credit for. “Are you a private investigator?” he asked softly.

  “No, Fletcher, I swear I’m not. I just happened to become involved with Mingo House. Rudy Schmitz asked me to become a trustee. Because I’m a history buff.”

  “Rudy, that horndog.” Fletcher sniggered. “You know Larry Courson…wasn’t the greatest husband in the world. He used to rough up his wife, Genevieve’s mom. He’s a very perfectionistic guy. Exacting. It’s what makes him such an awesome photographer. Getting the perfect shot at the exact right moment. But he can be difficult.”

  “You’re saying he has a dark side.”

  “He and Mrs. Torrance fought like cats and dogs.”

  Fletcher hadn’t taken down all of his decorations. On the door, partially ajar, leading to the stairs to what I assumed was the floor below, he had taped a poster from the Museum of Fine Arts, that famous Renoir of the man in the straw hat dancing with the sensuous woman in the red bonnet. Like the women of that day, she was plump by our standards.

  “Mrs. Torrance lives in Rockport.”

  “Really? I’m from Gloucester. Where does she live?”

  “Near Halibut Point.”

  “She’s kind of crazy. She’s a Communist. She used to run this leftist bookstore in Cambridge.”

  “Was she at Genevieve’s funeral? You never mentioned her.”

  “Mrs. Torrance won’t be in the same room with Larry Courson. If she could blame him for Mrs. Courson’s breast cancer, she would.” He opened the kitchen cabinet and removed a Fiesta ware mixing bowl and two Super Bowl coffee mugs.

  I decided to be bold, risk alienating him: “Why do you shave your chest?”

  “It’s not my choice.”

  That was an odd answer. “Whose was it?”

  “Long story.” He removed more things from the kitchen cabinets: boxes of herb tea, a bottle of Omega 3 capsules, Pop Tarts, curry powder. Then, surprisingly, from a higher shelf, he retrieved six or seven copper gelatin molds.

  “You’ve got as many molds as Bryce Rossi.”

  “They were just for decoration.…What were you doing in his kitchen?”

  “Escorting him home from dinner. He’s gotten hammered—” I realized the awkwardness of my adjective too late. “He wanted to talk about Genevieve. He’d told me she was carrying his child. When she was murdered.”

  Fletcher lugged a browning spider plant and two small phallic cactuses from the windowsill to the trash. “Genevieve had bad taste in men.”

  “So how come you two never…?”

  “We grew up together. We were like siblings.”

  “Always?”

  “I could never have thought of her that way, it would have creeped me out. It would have felt incestuous.”

  “Where are you moving?”

  “I’d…rather not say…This place is expensive. These guys have expensive tastes. Did you see that Mercedes Trent was driving? You’ve seen the heap I have.” He twisted old newspapers around the mixing bowl and tucked it into a cardboard box.

  “Do you think I’m dangerous?” I laughed. It was a joke, but no humor registered in his expression.

  “If I can do anything to help, feel free to call me.” He scribbled his cell phone number on a junk mail return envelope and gave it to me. “Please excuse me. I have tons to do.”

  Fletcher Coombs was odd all right, a man of few words and fewer social skills. Being with him required “having personality for two.” He had lied before, telling Mr. Courson the police had suspects in mind. He now claimed his friendship with Genevieve predated their years at St. Monica’s. But he had given me a new source, accidentally, apparently—Genevieve’s grandmother, whose telephone number and address were available online.

  Mrs. “G Torrance,” as the directory called her, had no driveway, only an unpaved path winding through woods conquered by green coils of cat briar. I felt like the prince, slicing through thorns to reach Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Mrs. Torrance’s house was burr-brown, seventeenth-century, with small, diamond-paned windows and a sagging roof verdant with moss. Time had warped its contours as it had settled unevenly into the ground.

  No bell, no knocker greeted me at the door; the house itself seemed to shun visitors. Then, from behind me, a voice asked, “What do you want?”

  It was a gray-haired woman, with the austere beauty of an elder Puritan, with the cheekbones of a model and the wardrobe of Priscilla Alden, a long dress of unbleached cotton the color of moths’ wings, without ornamentation of any kind. Her shoes, however, were the kind young people favor, orange work boots from an Army and Navy store. She cradled a bouquet of tiger lilies and a pair of yellow-handled garden shears. “You’re not from the media, I hope.”

  “I’m a friend of Genevieve’s.”

  “God, I thought
they’d found me.” She looked me up and down like a tailor judging the fit of a suit. “This Victorian Girl nonsense. Summing up Genevieve as though she’s the Black Dahlia. It’s revolting.”

  “I work at Mingo House. I was asked to be a trustee this spring. Before all of this happened. Genevieve of course was a docent. She was assigned to orient me. She was so enthusiastic about history. She remembered being taken to Mingo House on her tenth birthday. The same day her mother first took her on the swan boats.”

  Mrs. Torrance pinched a shriveled blossom from a stem of otherwise flawless lilies. “Carol had so many bad ideas.” Mrs. Torrance resembled Genevieve in the intensity of her eyes and the square heft of her jaw, but her nose was less pointed, more restrained. Her skin bore few wrinkles; she must have evaded sun long before it was recommended. “You might as well come in.”

  The interior of the house was scrubbed and stark. The wide-boarded floors, honey-gold, tilted slightly, throwing me off-balance here and there. The low ceilings were of hand-hewn timber and ancient plaster, and the few tables and chairs had been crafted with simplicity—which was why the walls provoked such a reaction: they were red with posters from the Russian Revolution, of Bolshevik sharpshooters in red caps and jackets, of a giant skeleton swinging a bloody scythe, running through the streets of St. Petersburg…

  “From my bookstore. I had a bookstore in Cambridge. In Central Square. In the days before espresso bars.” She arranged the lilies in an earthenware vase with a glaze that looked wet like slip. The room lacked modern appliances—no television, radio, computer. Mrs. Torrance seemed to read my thoughts. “I don’t live in a museum. I’m not held hostage by the past. Don’t think I’m some sort of Luddite. I have all of my electronics in my office, upstairs…Why did you come here, Mr….?”

  “Mark Winslow.”

  She kept her hands clasped, wouldn’t shake mine. “I’m Grace.”

  What she said next came as a shock.

  “Grace Mingo.”

  It wasn’t meant to shock me, I could tell; she was being matter-of-fact. But it shocked me just the same, to hear that “extinct” name applied to a living person. “Mingo, like the house?”