A Pinchbeck Bride

by Stephen Anable

  Before replying, she scanned the garden, the rain-soaked clusters of perennials: azaleas, false indigo, asters. She dropped her voice to an espionage agent’s whisper, “Henri is my nephew by marriage. He’s quite the mercenary vulture. I caught him taking down a Winslow Homer watercolor. Nothing attractive, some canoeist in the Adirondacks. But he was appraising it. Like that awful Bryce Rossi Rudy told me he brought in to appraise everything. A bit crass, I’d say.”

  “But are you all right?”

  “Oh, yes. Thank God it wasn’t a stroke or a heart attack. I got my pills scrambled. And I’d been nervous in that questionable crowd at the club. I’d ordered a mai tai and drank it much too fast. Those college boys got on my nerves. And those greasy chicken wings were the worst.”

  Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln…“But you had said you had to see me. That night.”

  “Absolutely.” She again monitored the grounds and the back porch.

  “What did you need to tell me, Nadia?”

  “I remember, I’d read you’d be at the Soong Dynasty and just barged in…” She ate the rest of her Rolos. Was she really diabetic? She was desperate enough to wash them down with the nutrition supplement, which I saw was black raspberry-flavored. “It was so important. I wish I knew what it was.” In her bag, Nadia found an appointment calendar, also with a faux-alligator cover, and leafed through its pages. “No, nothing. I guess it was too important to write down.”

  Or remember. “Was it anything to do with who killed Genevieve? Or who killed Bryce Rossi?”

  “Oh, Lord!” she said. Her dumbfounded expression meant she had been shielded from the media, at the rehab and here, by Henri. “Bryce Rossi was murdered?”

  “I’m sorry—”

  The crusty Nadia revived. “I’m not. He had a criminal past. I’d warned Genevieve about him. He was beneath her. He’d actually proposed to her. He’d gotten down on one knee—that was passé in my youth for heaven’s sake. He’d taken her to the symphony so there were troops of people around. Genevieve was mortified. And he wouldn’t take No for an answer. He kept badgering her. Buying her vintage clothing to buy her.”

  “She was pregnant. Genevieve. They found out during the autopsy.”

  Nadia sighed. “She never struck me as loose. How sad, the way people wreck their lives. But what happened to Rossi? Did some underworld associate do him in? And to think he had that house filled with reliquaries and crucifixes. Why, it was like visiting Philip the Second at the Escorial.”

  So they had socialized with Bryce Rossi, some of the trustees, other than Sam Ahearn.

  “Bryce was killed with a hammer, in his home. His assistant, Cat Hodges, found him. It was brutal, gruesome.”

  “He was so attracted to the gruesome, your word, in art, all those bloody, martyred saints, do you think he…indulged in that sort of thing in his sexual life?”

  “I could never read him well, read him at all, really. I mean, he kept touching me, touching my hand when we had dinner.”

  “You saw him socially?”

  “Only once. I was fishing—”

  “Aunt Nadia!” Henri called from the back porch. “You must not overextend yourself. Time to go, Mr. Windsor.”

  “Thank you so much for coming.”

  “Of course,” I told Nadia.

  As I followed Henri through the house, I felt compelled to mention my concerns for Nadia’s safety. I had first thought she had been drugged, at the Soong Dynasty. “We’ve had a…dangerous summer around here. In connection with Mingo House.”

  Henri was the all-black sort: black turtleneck, jeans, sneakers, the SoHo hipster by way of the Left Bank. “Yes. The Victorian Girl. She has been of interest even in France. Did you also know this Genevieve Courson?” He gave her name a full French flourish.

  “I don’t think it was possible to know her. But this house is secure, right?”

  “Alarmed. And I am here with my wife and sons. And my uncle, Nadia’s brother, is flying in from Berkeley tonight.”

  “Two people associated with Mingo House have been murdered. Genevieve Courson and Bryce Rossi. Both of them knew Nadia. To some degree.”

  “We will take care. As you Americans say.”

  Framed in the front hall was a photograph of the young Gulbenkians—with Nadia resembling the lush, early Ava Gardner, and her husband—a bona-fide hunk—smiling with John F. Kennedy in the Oval Office.

  “He was quite the tom cat. My late uncle. My aunt learned, how do you say it? Forbearance.” He smiled for the first time. “Thank you again for the chocolate.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Rudy Schmitz seemed distinctively lacking in sympathy over the death of his “friend” Bryce Rossi. “This is obviously a crime of passion,” he told me on the telephone, “very much unrelated to Mingo House, thank goodness. It just demonstrates the violent world which we inhabit. I plan to light a candle in memory of poor Bryce at church this weekend.” Rudy was a regular at the Church of the Advent on Beacon Hill. “Bryce tried to outrun his past but flagged, and it caught up with him.

  “People laugh at the Victorians’ obsession with background, but this is precisely why they required references for everything. To keep at bay the seedy and syphilitic…But Bryce dying does rather leave us in the lurch. I mean, he’d spent two full days appraising our collection, and now, this.”

  “Well, poor Cat must be in shock. She found him, and it was a grisly scene, according to the media.”

  Then Rudy muttered something to a companion about driving and “setting off” around noon. “Jonny and I are going to Crane Beach for a bit of sun. It’s such a precious commodity this year. We want to take full advantage of what little is offered. I just hope the rain hasn’t swollen the greenhead population.”

  The greenheads were large, almost carnivorous flies that left you bleeding after they bit you. They bred in the salt marshes near Crane Beach, north of Boston. “Perhaps I’ll express our sympathy to Cat. From the Mingo House staff. I can discreetly inquire about Bryce’s appraisals and see how much he accomplished, how much he wrote down.”

  Seldom had I encountered a more mercenary crew than the people associated with Mingo House. They had accountants’ ink running in their veins.

  Rudy had left Cat’s business card at Mingo House. “Cathryn Lee Hodges, Art Historian,” it read, and included a Boston number and a Back Bay address on Marlborough Street. When I called Cat, her voice was hoarse with grief, but she agreed to my coming.

  She was so skinny and neat that I expected her apartment to be as clean and clutter-free as an art gallery, but it proved to be one stingy, dank room with a bricked-up fireplace and cheap Scandinavian furniture smothered with clothing: tartan coats of Scottish wool, suede skirts, some vintage things of tulle and satin…

  “Wow!” I thought immediately of Genevieve.

  “I’m doing a double major. In art history and fashion design.”

  “Really. Where?”

  She mentioned an online university, then added, “I transferred from Shawmut.”

  “Did you know…Genevieve Courson well? She liked vintage clothing too.”

  “Genevieve.” Cat’s indigo glass beads and blue vinyl miniskirt were not exactly mourning attire. “She missed a lot of school after the accident, her motorcycle crash. And when she was around, she was very proprietary about Bryce. She acted as though she owned him. She was the same way with that Harvard professor and with poor Fletcher.”

  Was she packing? Was she moving, like “poor Fletcher”? And why?

  “Why do you feel sorry for Fletcher? He strikes me as a person who can take care of himself.”

  “Fletcher is kind of a train wreck. That’s what everyone assumes Genevieve was, but, from what I gather, she was a pretty tough cookie. Fletcher has trouble with women. He hasn’t got the greatest social skills. He used to carry notes on dates, you know, cue cards, index cards. To help him with conversation. Genevieve said he’d done that since grammar school.”


  She seemed to have mastered her emotions, so I decided to ask about Bryce. “Bryce dying was such a shock.”

  She slammed her fist against an already bullied table. “Being made to die! It was murder. I didn’t go into the living room because I could see all the blood from the foyer. And see him slumped on the floor in front of the Madonna and Child. Like he was some sort of sacrifice.”

  “Have you any idea—”

  “Who could have killed him? Of course not. I’d have told the police and they’d have arrested him by now. But he dealt in valuable art. Someone must have taken something, some statue or coin or whatever. Do you know he had vertebrae from St. Francis of Assisi? Bryce was very religious. He was a monk for three years. At a monastery in Ohio.”

  “But the police said nothing was stolen. And there was no forced entry.”

  “Bryce was too trusting. Like a child.” She began putting clothing onto hangers, some Sixties mohair sweaters in Easter egg colors.

  “But Bryce and Genevieve, two people associated with Mingo House, have both been murdered in bizarre circumstances this summer.…Are you afraid?”

  “I only went to Mingo House twice. The two days you were there. I’m not superstitious. I once owned a black cat and I was born on Friday the thirteenth. I’m not even religious. My mother is a Christian Scientist, but my father is a card-carrying atheist. I mean that. He’s a member of this atheist society. I’m somewhere in-between.”

  I mentioned Genevieve Courson’s pregnancy, how Bryce “I had heard” was the father.

  Cat snickered. “That was one way she kept her hooks in men. Genevieve. By telling little fairy tales.”

  “So who was the father?”

  “I have no clue. Whoever she wanted to manipulate at the moment, I suppose.”

  “Bryce had made some…mistakes in his life.”

  “Being taken in by Genevieve for instance?”

  “No. Acting as a fence for stolen art. He had served time in prison. It was reported in the media.”

  “The media. What can you believe, even on a good day? Besides, after what I’ve seen, I avoid watching the news. I’ve seen enough, too much. You don’t know what it’s like to find someone dead.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  She pouted and slipped two chain-link belts onto a hanger.

  “I was the person who found Genevieve. At Mingo House. She was wearing this green Victorian dress, with a bustle. Something from the Eighteen-eighties. She had little lace mittens on her hands.”

  For an instant, a long instant, she became the freeze frame in a movie. Then her features tightened and she burst into tears. “You say that as if you relished the experience.” Mouthing something I couldn’t decipher, she seized a coat and flung it toward my head. I ducked and it hit the bricked-up fireplace.

  “Cat—”

  “Get out!”

  “I only meant I understood—”

  “Get out before I call the police! Maybe you found Genevieve because you put her there—after you killed her, you monster! And you never liked Bryce, all you Mingo House snobs. I saw you, sneering behind his back. You and that bald shit Ahearn!”

  The appraisal was now a moot point.

  Shaken, I retraced my route back home. Surely, Cat Hodges couldn’t be serious about blaming me for Genevieve’s murder. But she certainly was hysterical, certainly was crazy. Would she convey her crazy suspicions to the police?

  I proceeded home. I almost expected a squad car idling outside of our building, but none had materialized. I wanted a gin and tonic but poured an iced tea instead and went out onto our balcony.

  “Mark, you had company,” Chloe Hilliard called from next door. “This man was in the lobby when I came home from school. He said he’d wait for you in the Public Garden. By the Japanese lantern his daughter liked…He was a little weird.”

  It could only be him. “What…did he look like?”

  “Older with gray hair and a beard.”

  “Was he wearing a poncho?”

  “It’s sunny, Mark. Duh.”

  My only thought was to keep him away from Chloe. “Thanks…Just one of the Mingo House oddballs.”

  He was actually under the little granite bridge that spans the swan boats’ pond. Larry Courson’s facial hair differentiated him from the wanted posters, and he’d procured a preppie wardrobe Dorothea Jakes would have admired: an Oxford-cloth shirt with mint-green pinstripes and khakis held up by a cross-grain belt with a golf ball pattern. Where had he been spending his time? In homeless shelters? With loyal friends? Camped in the woods or in some alley?

  “I knew I could count on you.”

  “You didn’t touch that little girl. You are never to go near that little girl again! Do you hear me?”

  “Don’t shout, take it easy. She was just in the lobby. I asked for you, and the doorman said the girl might know where you were.” Tears were accumulating in his eyes. “I thought you believed in me.”

  He was playing me again, the way he played everybody, using his dead daughter as a prop. “You’re a pornographer, you ran Zephyrus Studios in Roxbury. Does the film Fresh Men Initiation, starring Fletcher Coombs, ring a bell?”

  He laughed, the only time I’d ever heard him do it. “Fletcher needed some extra cash. I referred him to a friend of mine, Derek Clayton. This black guy, on the down low. Derek got into trouble when he, well, auditioned this hustler who turned out to be underage.”

  “Zephyrus Studios? Zephyrus isn’t exactly a common name. But it’s intimately connected with your wife’s family—the Mingoes.”

  “Those foul people.” He averted his face while a family of tourists passed, carrying bagged souvenirs from Cheers. “It was a little joke, the name. I suggested it to Derek when he was thinking of forming his business. He wanted something classical. He was thinking of ‘Hercules,’ but I said, ‘Derek, you’ve got a small-time operation. Hercules implies big.’ So I suggested ‘Zephyrus.’ I never thought he’d use it. I mean it sounds like the name of an air freshener. Hey, I never even saw Fletcher’s movies. But they helped him stay in college and buy books. His sisters all went to the Ivy League and that cost his dad big bucks.”

  He was a more confident, cocky man than he’d seemed previously.

  “Derek wasn’t very good at being a movie magnate. Well, he wasn’t very good at being anything. He did a piss-poor job at whatever he tried.” More tourists sidled past. “Can we walk a bit? This place is kind of busy.”

  “Not far. I don’t want to be seen with you.”

  He went ahead and I followed until we met once more by the fountain at the far end of the Public Garden, the one with an angel carrying her bronze basket of grain. People seldom stop here since it’s deep in shade and the fountain’s basin, made of beach stones imprisoned in concrete, holds no water and no interest either for ducks or penny-pitching children.

  Larry Courson said, “I know who got Genevieve pregnant. And who killed her. It was that Asian creep, Jon Kim. He was cheating on his wife.”

  “He’s gay,” I said.

  “Exactly. But he didn’t want to be. He even went to one of those ex-gay ministries. To get cured. While he was still with his wife and after. He went on a prayer retreat and saw a Christian psychiatrist.”

  The wind ruffled the trees, showering us with droplets of water from the last rainstorm. “How do you know this?”

  “Genevieve told me. Jon Kim told her. When a bunch of them from Mingo House went to Rudy Schmitz’s gym for sushi. Went to Flex. Jon Kim singled her out. He decided his problem was his castrating wife. He’d tried prayer and Viagra. He thought with another woman he could be quote-unquote normal.”

  “Did Genevieve actually say they had sex?”

  “The point is he had the hots for her.”

  A crude phrase to use in speaking of a dead daughter. But maybe not for a pedophile.

  “Genevieve didn’t tell me everything.” He glanced at the angel. “She had her mother’s disposition, a
nd her grandmother’s. Her grandmother was a Stalinist. She admired Joseph Stalin. ‘He played an honorable role in the struggle against fascism.’ She said that. Honest to God.”

  Honesty wasn’t something I associated with his family. But Genevieve had been strangled, killed using the power of someone’s hands, and Jon Kim had bragged he was a black belt. Surely his hands could marshal the strength to choke the life from a college girl. “Jon Kim is a nerd, a geek. There is no way he killed Genevieve.” But, saying these words, wasn’t I being racist? Using the model minority Asian stereotype, long outdated by the violence of Cambodian and Vietnamese gangs.

  “What about Fletcher?”

  He winced. “Gimme a break. Fletcher’s a wimp.” He sat on the bench next to the fountain’s basin. “He looks like an athlete, but all he could do was play JV hockey. Until he got hit by the puck and lost a tooth and freaked out. After that, he’d have a panic attack if he saw an ice cube.” He sneered. “Fletcher is a joke.”

  “Did you kill Bryce Rossi? The art appraiser?”

  “Of course not.”

  “He died just after you busted out. And he claimed he was the father of Genevieve’s child.”

  “Did you ever meet him? I met him once when Genevieve took him to visit Carol’s mother. He was a pretty unlikely Casanova.”

  “Bryce Rossi carried brass knuckles. He’d spent time in prison.” I didn’t tell him Grace Torrance’s suspicions because she detested her son-in-law and I didn’t care to reveal my own investigating to this man.

  “For what? Stealing Girl Scout cookies?”

  “Just go away. And don’t go after Jon Kim.” I lied: “He’s traveling on business in Silicon Valley.”

  “Genevieve said his company was in trouble. They’d had a product recall and their CFO got the boot. Jon Kim was eating antacids by the bushel. He was really on edge.”

  A throng of college students approached, some sort of summer school excursion, perhaps. I was anxious at being seen with this fugitive. “Don’t do anything foolish, Larry. At least you’re not wanted for murder.”

  The students kept jostling by.