by Justin Scott
I switched channels to a New York station and it got even better. Newbury got its own version of vid-scrutiny. File footage borrowed from the cable company’s public access station (their loyal viewership of six allowed the cable folks to retain their monopoly) showed a Main Street sweep of colonial houses, Federal mansions, Second Empire extravaganzas, clapboard churches, the Yankee Drover, our red general store, our sturdy white bank, and our famously tall flagpole.
They even showed my Georgian colonial, a tidy medley of white clapboard and black shutters, and the camera lingered—God bless a certain lady who volunteered at the station—on my Benjamin Abbott Realty sign, which was sure to draw some business from the city. But my favorite part of the press conference was the way they kept cutting to close-ups of Marian Boyce, who was standing shoulder to shoulder with the feds and troopers in the back row. The comely detective-lieutenant revealed none of her doubts, of course, but the fact that she was as stone-faced as her law enforcement colleagues did nothing to discourage the camera man or the news director back at the TV station; professionals who recognized telegenic cheekbones, which boded well for the political career Marian was aiming for in the future.
I kept waiting for some reporter to ask, “Why did a Quito slum gang leader fugitive stealthily establishing his slum gang in the small town of Newbury draw attention to himself by shooting a rich American who had stiffed him for fifty bucks?”
No one asked.
Or, “Why would a Quito slum gang leader stealthily establish his slum gang in the Newbury in the first place since small towns are impossible places to do anything stealthily?”
No one asked.
“I have a third question,” I yelled at my TV which was usually shut up in a cabinet in the library in the oldest part of the house. “If he did murder Brian Grose for stiffing him for fifty bucks, why did he set the surround-sound timer to turn the music on full blast?”
No one answered.
I telephoned Sherman Chevalley, again. He didn’t answer, either. As I hung up the phone rang in my hand. It was Rick Bowland. “I just saw the news.”
“Me too.”
“There’s something you should know.”
“I’ll get a pencil…All right I have a pencil.”
“This Charlie Cubrero?”
“Yes.”
“Well he, uh, shall we say, worked for us, a little.”
“What us?”
“The Cemetery Association.”
So much for Dan Adams vehement “No!”
“Off the books?”
“Well…”
“How dumb could you be?” I asked. “You hired an illegal and paid him cash?”
“Everybody does it.”
“It’s not like a homeowner slipping him a couple twenties to split firewood. You’re an institution. You’re an organization—”
“I know. It was stupid.”
“I can’t believe Grace Botsford allowed it.”
“I never told her. I just paid him myself. If I asked to be re-imbursed, she would have gone ballistic. Like you are.”
In other words he had known it was stupid from the get go. “Why’d you hire him anyhow? Doesn’t Donny Butler do everything?”
“Remember when Donny got arrested?”
“Yes.”
“When Grose pressed charges for blasting his Audi?”
“And punching him in the eye.”
“That made it assault and it took Tim two weeks to get him out because there was some history of similar—”
“Twenty years ago!”
“Anyway, the grass was going crazy—the place looked like hell—and I had already had Charlie digging out my pond for me, so I—”
“Who else knows?”
“It’s those insurgents I’m worried about. If they get wind they’ll take it to the judge, and even though it was just me, the entire association will look….”
I waited, but he couldn’t finish, so I did it for him. “Stupid?”
“Like incompetent cronies who will destroy the Association if the injunction is not lifted.”
If I were the sighing type, I would have sighed. “What do you want me to do?”
“What we hired you to do. Find out who really murdered Brian Grose.”
“The judge that issued the temporary injunction against more mausoleums doesn’t care who killed Brian Grose.”
“If our guy—you—solves the case, the cemetery comes out smelling like a rose.”
“What if Charlie is the killer?”
“Charlie Cubrero wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
I hooked my legs over the arm of a short, cracked-leather sofa crammed into the library, ordered my thoughts a little better, thought of former acquaintances still locked up in Leavenworth (one hoped), and said, “Mothers routinely make such claims about the accused. Just the other day I heard one say, ‘He can’t be all bad because animals and kids love him.’ What’s your connection, Rick?”
“What?”
“There is something about Charlie that you are not telling me.”
Rick was silent.
I said, “You’re too smart, and certainly too cautious, to hire an illegal for the Cemetery Association even with Donny Butler in the hoosegow and the grass getting messy.”
I waited awhile.
Rick said nothing.
Finally, I said, “I’m walking over to the Drover to sit downstairs at a private corner table and have a private glass of wine.”
Anne Marie hadn’t even taken my order when Rick hurried in, glowering suspiciously at the bar crowd as if they were only pretending to watch the Red Sox get pounded so that they could spy on a trustee of the Newbury Cemetery Association. He sidled across the room and took the chair I would ordinarily hope a date would take to make it easier to hold hands or whatever under the table.
Anne Marie came and went and returned with red wine for Rick and Rosé for me.
“What’s with you and Charlie?” I asked.
Rick drank deep. “Georgia,” he said, referring to his wife, “is…”
I waited a full minute and finally, again, finished it for him. “…a handful.”
Rick flashed me a grateful smile. “Some people just find it very hard to just get through the day. Nothing is simple. Nothing is easy. Nothing has value if it isn’t a struggle. Very little ever gets done.”
Now he looked me straight in the eye. As is common, the first person he met in Newbury was his Realtor. So I had known him and Georgia since they came house hunting.
“But when very little gets done, it all gets even harder because there’s no sense of purpose to bounce off of. Most of us take purpose for granted. I drive down to the office every day. I do well, or I don’t. I do better every day, or I don’t. I do my work, I fend off the corporate BS, I destroy my enemies, I drive home. I may be tired. I may be frustrated. But I’ve done a day’s work. Georgia never has that. Her old man gave her everything. Left her plenty—you know, we live a lot better than we would on just my salary—not that I’m doing badly. But the one thing he didn’t leave Georgia was a purpose—you know Ben, not just a purpose, but a belief in purpose. I mean I very rarely question when I get up in the morning why am I going to work. I’m going to work because that’s what I do. I mean, hell, at the end of the day it’s fun. And if it’s not fun, it’s more fun that not doing anything. I’m sure you do the same.”
He looked to me for agreement, and I nodded heartily. Juggling two careers, I was having twice the fun and glad of it.
But I wondered where Rick was going with this. We had never spoken so intimately. And yet, he wasn’t telling me much I didn’t suspect. Georgia drifted from brief interest to brief interest. She was charming and stylish, but brittle in the sense that no one would be totally surprised to discover her on Main Street in her bathrobe directing traffic with a bourbon bottle.
Rick took another slug of wine and looked away. His eyes were g
listening.
“Charlie?” I asked.
“He was working at my place. Spring cleanup on a Sunday. His day off from Jay. I had to run down to New Milford to the Depot. When I got back, he comes running out of my house yelling, ‘Mr. Mr. Come quick.’
“Georgia’s lying on the kitchen floor throwing up.”
Rick sat there shaking his head.
“It took a while to figure out what was happening. There were about a hundred pills on the floor, floating in puked up wine. I don’t think she really tried to kill herself. I think she was pretty high, forgot she had already taken some pills, took some more, forgot, took some more. All pretty quick. Then she must have gotten scared and staggered to the door with the wine bottle in one hand and the pill bottle in the other looking for help. Forgetting I was gone. Well Charlie took one look—got the whole scene—and acted so quickly he saved her life.”
“How?”
Rick laughed. “I don’t know where he got the smarts. Or the guts. But when Georgia pieced it back together and figured out the sequence of events, she told me that Charlie rammed his fingers down her throat and made her vomit up the pills…
“Think of this twenty-one-year-old kid, with almost no English, no white folk friends except Jay Meadows who wasn’t there, a rich white lady in a big house turning blue in front of his eyes. Instead of running for help, or running for his life, he thinks fast and violates her space, as it were. I mean would you stick your hand down some woman’s throat? I sure as hell wouldn’t even think of it. Point I’m trying to make, Ben, is that everything else aside—fast-thinking, decisive, brave—Charlie Cubrero was compassionate. He saw a human being in trouble and he helped. He is not a man to shoot that asshole Brian in the back. Much less drill two holes in his head.”
“Didn’t Immigration and the troopers say he’s a gang leader?”
“Bull. He’s no more a gang leader than I am. Besides, where’s the gang? How come he was living in Newbury and working all winter for six bucks an hour? How come he took the job with Fred Kantor?”
“Steady work.”
“Why would a gang leader take steady work, Ben?”
I did wonder. But while “compassionate” was not a word I associated with the gang leaders whose acquaintance I had made, “fast-thinking” was. So was “decisive.” They had to be. The gang world—prison or slum or criminal enterprise—is not big on bureaucracy, so the slow-witted have no place to hide.
“So what he did for Georgia is why you hired Charlie to fill in for Donny Butler?”
“I tried to thank him with money. He wouldn’t take it. When the cemetery job came along, I thought I could do him a favor.”
“How’s Georgia doing?”
Rick brightened. “A little better, actually. It was a kind of a wake up call. Like discovering that she is not indestructible. That acts have consequences.”
“She looked great at the Notables.”
“She’s like a child, Ben. But maybe she’s growing up.”
I said, “Good luck,” instead of “maybe.”
“So you’ll keep trying to find out what the hell really happened?”
I said, “I thought I would lean on Tim or even Ira to represent Charlie pro bono when they catch him. Could you contribute to expenses?”
“Of course—but privately. I can’t get the association involved.”
“You know it will come out, somehow, that he worked for the cemetery.”
“That’s why I’m hoping you’ll find out who really killed that son of a bitch before they catch poor Charlie.”
“Rick, they have two powers I don’t—manpower and the power of arrest.”
He went home to Georgia.
I didn’t feel like going home to an empty house—by this hour the cat would be out hunting for things to kill or mate with—so I ordered another glass of wine and stepped outside to phone Sherman Chevalley getting, again, no answer. Back at my table I took out my note pad and made a list of plans for tomorrow, starting with the people I could call in New York to turn me on to a Spanish-speaking investigator.
“Hey!”
I looked up into the angular face of Lorraine Renner, noticed that the hair she had collected into a bun to keep out of the camera while video-ing Scooter’s graveyard pirate act, was long and loose, and said, “Hi, how’ve you been?”
Though Newbury was small, and we had been born when it was smaller, we knew of each other more than we knew each other. We had older fathers in common—hers and mine had swung the occasional joint real estate deal and had served side by side on the Board of Selectman. One time when I was home for Thanksgiving we had talked at some family and friends gathering about the pleasures of leaving home to go to college. But she was eight years younger than I, which meant that when I was in high school she was a little kid in elementary school, and by the time she graduated from high school I was a lieutenant in Naval Intelligence. When she was in college I was on Wall Street, and when she went to film school in Los Angeles I was in enrolled in Leavenworth. Still, it couldn’t have slipped either of our minds entirely that we represented a very small set of Newbury citizens: youngish, single, never married and child free. And in fact, as she stood there smiling in dark jeans and a white blouse, it occurred to me that features I had thought a trifle austere formed interesting planes. And the long hair that framed them looked more reddish brown than brunette in the soft light of the Yankee Drover’s cellar bar.
“Would you like a glass of wine?”
She held one up half full. “I’m okay, thanks.”
She folded into the chair opposite and looked me over the way you might look at a bush that had been in your yard for years and discovered one day it was covered in berries. But curiosity was cloaked in wariness. Newbury was way too small a town to dodge each other if curiosity worked out badly.
I said, “I saw you taping Scooter at the Notables. “
“He wanted a fifteen minute DVD.”
“Fifteen minutes of ‘Yo ho ho?’”
“I added some of the others for context.”
“Did you shoot my cousin Sherman?”
“Shot, digitized, edited, and entered in the New Haven Shorts Festival.”
“That was fast.”
“Popped some speed. Stayed up all night. Poor Scooter thought I was going to enter him, but documentary judges go for the gnarly types…I heard you’re investigating Brian Grose.”
“You did? Where?”
“Around.”
Ten trustees of the Cemetery Association. One had to be a blabber mouth. “Well, I’m not exactly investigating Brian.”
“Being dead and all.”
“Right.”
“But you are investigating who killed him?”
“Why do you ask, Lorraine?”
“I worked for him.”
“Really? Doing what?”
“I was his videographer.”
“Video-graphing what?”
“His death video.”
“I beg your pardon.”
She had a fun grin. “Don’t you know what a death video is?”
“You’ve never struck me as the type of woman to make a snuff flick.”
“Not a snuff flick! It’s like a bio. Like you have at your retirement party? Except they show it at your funeral.”
“Why was he planning his funeral?”
“That was my first question. Why did he want a death film at age forty-whatever? He said it went with the mausoleum. It was like, now I have my mausoleum, I might as well get the rest of the stuff out of the way and done so it’s ready when I pop off.”
“Was he sick?”
“He wasn’t psycho. He was just trying to get the job done.”
“I meant was he ill?”
“I don’t think so. He looked fine.”
I took a sip of wine and watched her face, wondering how close she had been with him. I couldn’t say she was grieving.
And Connie had said that the rumors about her and Brian were “claptrap.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Do you think Brian had a feeling he was in danger?”
“Like a premonition?”
“Or actual knowledge that someone was after him. Wanted to kill him?”
Lorraine shrugged bonily, all shoulder blades and clavicle. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. But I don’t know. I mean he never said anything to me.”
“Would he have?”
“What do you mean?”
“Were you close?”
She shrugged again. “I guess when you’re making a movie about somebody’s life maybe they tell you stuff they don’t tell other people.”
“Did he tell you anything?”
“Like what?”
“Like what he wouldn’t tell other people.”
She hesitated. “Not really.”
“How did he happen to hire you? Saw your wedding ad in the Clarion and figured, what the heck, weddings, funerals, same thing?”
“No. I got the job from the mausoleum company. The film was part of the package—tomb, film, funeral services, etc.”
“The mausoleum builders sell a package? Including embalming?”
“One stop shopping. They’ll even hire mourners. Anyway, the mausoleum company Googled for a videographer in the area and Google sent them to my website. They tried to knock my price down, but I checked out their website, saw that Brian probably paid them six-hundred thousand dollars so they could afford my measly ten.”
“Did you finish it?”
“I’m still editing the rough cut. The company says they’ll put the DVD in the mausoleum.”
“Did Brian see any of it?”
“Are you kidding? He was all over me like a cheap suit. He would have vetted every frame if I let him.”
“Could you show it to me, sometime?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“When would it be convenient?”
She swigged her glass empty. “Now?”
We walked. Another thing we had in common was I lived in what had been my parents’ house and Lorraine had moved into hers’ when they retired to Lake Champlain. It was set back a few steps off Main Street and was probably the oldest in town, a 1710 colonial with a massive center chimney, a beehive oven in the kitchen and, like mine, home to numerous deferred maintenance projects like woodwork to be painted and floors replaced.
