Mausoleum

by Justin Scott

“Did I what?”

  “Recognize the guy.”

  “Nope.”

  “So it wasn’t Charlie.”

  “I don’t know Charlie.”

  “Works for Jay.”

  “I never looked at him.”

  “So you didn’t give the police a positive ID?”

  “I couldn’t have dropped a dime on the guy if I wanted to. I didn’t see his face.”

  “How’d you know he was Latino?”

  “Stood like one—little guy, you know how they stand, low to the ground, but kind of loose like they could move real fast if they had to. Strong little bastards, too. You ever seen them lift stone? Those little guys are something else.”

  “Sherman let me pop a thought on you. Is it possible that whoever you saw hanging around the cemetery wants to knock you off before you tell the cops you saw him?”

  “No way, man. No way! I told you, I didn’t see him.”

  “What if he thinks you did?”

  “Then he’s got his head up his ass. Later, Ben, I gotta get some sleep.”

  ***

  I drove to Grace Botsford’s office to ask her if she could try to talk sense to Donny Butler who had worked for the Cemetery Association since high school.

  Inside, the Botsford Insurance Agency office was a wonderful throwback to the days before plastic and Formica. It had paneled walls, heavy rails supported by turned balusters, and etched glass in the wooden doors. Behind the railing was a magnificent quartered-oak and rosewood partners desk that Scupper McKay would have bid his eye teeth for if the antique cops weren’t on his trail. Grace sat at it, alone, eying a pair of sleek, black flat-screen monitors as she typed on a keyboard on a low table beside the desk.

  Gerard Botsford cast a thin, knowing smile down from a oil portrait of the two of them in business attire standing in front of that same desk. Grace wore the same smile in the painting and on her present face as she stood and extended her hand. Their smiles said, “Life is unpredictable, but you can count on Botsford Insurance. Just don’t miss any premiums.”

  Grace did not seem surprised that Donny Butler would strike a self-destructive posture with the cops.

  “Dad always said that two circumstances shaped the Yankee character. Donny is an example inscribed in stone: fixedness and resistance. Fixedness because for three-hundred-and-forty years after the boat landed at Plymouth Rock, most New Englanders moved West. Those whom the pioneers left behind represent three and a half centuries of inertia.”

  “I don’t know about that, Grace. I mean I’m still here. You’re still here. We’re not inert.”

  “No, you’re wrong about that,” she said with the same purposeful single-mindedness that she had dismissed Brian’s lame jokes in Lorraine’s video. It was not that she was humorless, but utterly absorbed and completely confident in her opinion. “We went off to college. We saw the larger world. We chose to return for whatever reason.” She blinked, looked a bit surprised for a moment as trying to recall her reason to return. Then she laughed. “Dad was absolutely spot on. If it weren’t for immigrant Irish, Italians, Poles, and Portuguese, the entire region would have reverted to forest.”

  She held up two fingers like an umpire counting strikes. “The second and more important facet of Yankee character is resistance. What Dad called, ‘Dodging the Puritans.’

  “We started as a strictly-managed theocracy. For generations, the Puritans and their blue-nose predecessors ruled—organizing, writing the laws, enforcing ordinances, implementing an entire way of life—demanding by law and example that everyone behave like them. Human beings being human beings—a favorite phrase of Dad’s—many resisted. An anti-Puritan, anti-establishment culture took hold from the day after Plymouth Rock. Resistance was bred and re-bred among those who remained for twelve generations. That’s why a real Yankee would rather put one over on you than do a good job.”

  “Pretty harsh, Grace,” I said with a smile, because it rang kind of true.

  “Not at all. It’s part of the game. It’s how people maintain their dignity.” She named a carpenter I knew, a craftsman who took pride in his skills, yet always found a way to screw up a job, whether by disappearing in the middle of it or introducing an exotic new material that he knew in his heart would not work as well as old-reliable wood.

  I argued back with the names of electricians who did precision work.

  “They have to or the house will burn down,” said Grace. “But have you ever met an electrician who wasn’t at least slightly psychotic?” Again, I could not deny a ring of truth. Both of us, she selling insurance and I selling houses, butted up against the material world on a daily basis. She named plumbers who would find any excuse to tear out a ceiling while hunting for a leak, and couldn’t leave a job happy until at least two rooms looked like Baghdad.

  “Bet you can’t tar stone masons with that brush. At least not always.”

  “Stone masons are sometimes the exception,” Grace admitted. “Ours is a harsh climate. Anything but stone will rot.”

  “Frost will kill a wall.”

  “Not a good one. The masons know that they’re not bucking the establishment. They’re vying with weather and each other. And physics. Masons love physics.”

  “It doesn’t fit farmers, either. They work too hard.”

  “What happens if you’re driving down the road at the speed limit and a farmer is coming out of his driveway in a pickup truck?”

  “He pulls out right in front of me, and then drives fifteen miles under the limit. But the truck is old or he’s old and—.”

  “What happens when you come to a straight where you could pass?”

  “The farmer speeds up. Okay, but—”

  “Do you recall what Scooter and you did at the General Store when you were ten years old?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean. When Gordon Williams installed the new Coca Cola machine?”

  “I only stood lookout. Scooter did it. Oh, my god, I’d completely forgotten.”

  Grace said, “As I heard it, Scooter had figured a way to pry two bottles out of the old machine for one coin, but you couldn’t do it to the new one.”

  “We spent the entire summer sneaking in there trying to fox the machine. That second bottle just stayed locked. One day Scooter figured out all he had to do was pop the cap off and suck it up with a long straw. You win, Grace. Yankees are perverse.”

  “Not perverse. Resistant.”

  “How’d you hear about that, by the way?”

  “Gordon Williams told Dad he billed Scooter’s father for every bottle.”

  “Will you talk to Donny?”

  Grace stood up and called to her Jeannie, “I’ll be back.” To me she said, “I’ll stop by his house, call on his mother—we’ll double-team him.”

  I walked home, pondering what next.

  I knew that I really ought to put some time into investigating who exactly Brian Grose was: what anomalies in his life might have led to his murder, what enemies he had made. The means of doing that offered a secondary pleasantry of having an excuse to see Lorraine Renner. I continued up Main to her house.

  She came to her door with her hair wild and looking mad as hell. “Oh. It’s you. Hi. Come in!”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I have just had a visit from the goddamned cops, and I am really pissed.”

  “What happened.”

  “That bitch practically threatened to arrest me if I didn’t hand over my tapes.”

  “What tapes.”

  “From shooting Scooter at the Notables.”

  “Was this cop a State Police Detective-Lieutenant named Boyce?”

  “Bitch.”

  “Actually, she’s kind of a good friend of mine.”

  “That’s your problem.”

  “She probably wants to scan the tapes for witnesses and suspects.”

  “Well she could have been
a little nicer about it.”

  “I think she’s under the gun. There’s a lot of pressure from Immigration, and I got the impression”—I wanted to say this carefully, without giving anything Marian had entrusted to me—“that she’s feeling backed into a corner. I gotta tell you, she’s really a good person. You would like her under different circumstances.”

  “What’s up? What did you come over for?”

  “I’m trying to remember something you told me about Brian’s film.”

  “My film about Brian.”

  “Right. You said you had to fill it out with a waiter and a ski instructor or something.”

  “His driver.”

  “Because you dropped some material?”

  “He changed his mind about having family in the film.”

  “That’s it. Had you already shot family?”

  “Oh God, yeah. I was down there for three days getting bit by chiggers.”

  “Down where?”

  “Arkansas. I stayed at his brother’s. They were good people.”

  “Could I see what you shot?”

  “All I’ve got is partially-edited raw footage.”

  “Could you show it to me?”

  “I’ll set you up at a screen. I’m busy. I’ve got to do other stuff.” She opened a file drawer and fished out a couple of mini DV tapes. “Here. Actually, it’s kind of cool. Very WPA Okie-project, if you know what I mean.”

  What she meant was that Brian’s family were small time cotton farmers in the Arkansas Delta. She had shot beautiful scenes of machinery crossing land as flat as the ocean and truly wonderful portrait-quality shots of Brian’s cousins and brothers dressed in khaki work clothes with their shirts buttoned to the throat. The young were reddened by the sun. The older brown and crinkly-eyed. They looked into Lorraine’s camera with polite, indulgent expressions that seemed to say, “Don’t know why you all are wasting video tape on me, but if that’s what you want, Ma’am, you all go right ahead.”

  His oldest brother was named Chance. He led Lorraine on a tour of the farm where they had grown up. The frame house, which looked sun-faded and wind-battered on the treeless field, had been converted to migrant worker housing. An overgrown kitchen garden was surrounded by broken picket fences, but they still kept machinery on the place. “House was six hundred square foot.” said Chance. “Tractor shed and shop are almost six thousand.”

  Chance’s new house up a dirt road was only a little bigger than the old. His pickup truck was beat up. But the tractor, which was about eight times bigger than any in Newbury and carried chemical tanks big as Volkswagens on front and back, looked brand new, as did a huge large backhoe and a two-story tall cotton picker.

  “Does Brian visit?” I heard Lorraine ask off camera.

  “Yes, Ma’am. He come by, three-four years back.”

  “What’s it like when you visit him?”

  “We never made that California visit. But we’re fixing to drive up to Connecticut, after the crop’s in, one of these days.”

  I watched an hour and a half of tape and decided I’d seen enough. I called into the room where she had retreated. “Hey, thanks a lot.”

  “No problem.”

  “See you Friday.”

  I walked back to my office, doubting that Chance Grose’s family visit to Connecticut would have occurred even if Brian hadn’t been killed. I felt a little guilty charging the Cemetery Association for my viewing time. All I knew now that I hadn’t known before was that Brian Grose was a self-made man who had left his roots in the dust—which I could have guessed looking at his over-size house and flashy mausoleum.

  Better to fix on Charlie Cubrero?

  How well did I know Charlie? What do you know in eight hours? And glimpses over the months of seeing him mowing lawns with Jay. Body language showed how much he loved machines. Jay said the kid could drive anything. But that could be said about a murderer. One thing did not fit, and that was the look in Charlie’s eyes when I slipped him a measly extra twenty at the end of a long day’s work: gratitude, not for the money, which surely he needed, but for the fact that I had noticed how hard he had worked.

  I kept thinking about the loneliness suffered by the hunted. And the fact was the cops were looking for him. And the fact was that my employers in the Cemetery Association wanted to look good. And if I brought Charlie in with a lawyer, they would look good and the kid would get a break and I could concentrate on who actually killed Brian.

  So I went looking, sans Spanish-speaking detective.

  I started at the Newbury Funeral Home. Mortician Brooks, a calm, gray-haired gent who was president of the Ram Pasture Photography Club had let himself be conned into volunteering to edit a coffee table book that would be a photographic record of Newbury’s Tercentennial year. The club had fanned out around town shooting everything that moved. Don himself had come by my mother’s with his camera the day Jay brought Charlie out to help pull stumps. We went through a slew of shots he had scanned into his computer under the heading “Newbury Workers.”

  Don said, “Do you notice how he always turns away from the camera?”

  Or hides in the shadow under the brim of his cap.

  Or casually shields his face with his hand.

  I did not recall that Ecuadorians were among the people who feared that photographs would steal their spirit. But that didn’t make him any more a gang leader than any illegal immigrant dodging cameras just to be on the safe side.

  We found a wide shot of Jay’s tractor backing up, pulling a huge octopus of a stump at the end of a chain. Don had taken it from the other side of my mother’s pond and had achieved an arty reflection in the water. He had been so far away that Charlie Cubrero, concentrating on the machine, probably didn’t realize he was facing the camera. He had both hands on the controls, and he was looking over his shoulder with the late afternoon sun angling under the bill of his cap.

  Unfortunately, the shot was so wide that his face was little more than a dot. Don blew it up and up and up on the computer, and we watched Charlie’s face grow broad cheekbones, a handsome hawk nose, dark eyes, and a smile that suggested he was having a fine time on Jay’s tractor.

  It’s a long way from the computer screen to paper, and I held little hope for more than a blown up blur. But Don printed me a color three by five that was as crisp as any portrait in the high school yearbook. When I marveled at the miracle, he explained, very proudly that he was an anti-digital troglodyte who still used 35 mm film.

  As I was leaving I asked if he knew when Brian’s funeral would be. Don looked annoyed. “I have no idea. The mausoleum company contracted a mortician from Waterbury. Not someone I would have hired, but nobody asked.”

  Next, I dropped in on my twelve-year-old friend Alison Mealy, who had until recently lived with her mother in the old stable hand’s apartment over my barn. Her father had returned after a long absence, stone cold AA sober and working hard to rescue his family from the destruction he had visited upon them. They lived down in Frenchtown in a tiny rented ranch house that had a shed out back big enough for Redman, the horse I had given Alison.

  I missed the kid, and found what excuses I could to visit. Alison was usually busy doing kid stuff, of course, school, computer, music lessons, biking with her friends. I got lucky this summer day and found her at home on her horse. She demanded I watch Redman jump a fence, which I did with my heart in my throat as she was small for her age and the horse was very big.

  While she brushed him down she told me that come Fall the school was assigning her a more advanced flute teacher. She grabbed her flute and played me an air from the “Magic Flute,” which impressed me mightily. Then she showed me the used computer her father’s boss had passed down to her. Then she asked about Tom. The cat had originally come with Redman but had decided to stay with me when the horse left. Then, she told me that she had had tea with Aunt Connie last week and that Connie had invited her to come every Wednesday
after school. (Just as Tuesday after school had been my day to learn the manners that would make me comfortable anywhere.)

  Then Alison asked, as always, if I had seen First Selectman Vicky recently. I said no, running the town and Tim was keeping her very busy. Alison made a face. She adored Vicky and harbored fantasies of Vicky and me getting back together. Finally she asked, “What’s up?”

  “How are you doing in Spanish class?”

  “Okay.”

  “Can you print me a sign in Spanish?”

  “I got Spanish software. What do you want to say?”

  “I want the sign to say, ‘I am not a cop.’ That’s policia right?

  “Yeah,” she said dubiously.

  “Yes, not yeah.”

  “Yes.”

  “And then I want it to say, ‘I am a private detective.’”

  “Detective privado.”

  “Great. Then I want it to say, ‘I want to help this man.’ And I’ll show them this picture.”

  “That’s Charlie Cubrero.”

  “How do I say I want to help him?”

  “Desear…socorrer, like save. Por que?”

  “What?”

  “Why?”

  “Even I know por que? means why.”

  “Why would they trust you?”

  “Why not?”

  “Charlie’s lo busca la policia.”

  “What is that?”

  “Wanted by the police.”

  “That’s the problem. So how do I say, Trust me?”

  “Esperar en alguien.”

  “Put that on the sign, too.”

  “If you say so.”

  I did and she did.

  As I was leaving, climbing into the car, reaching for the key I had left in the ignition, she said, “Guess what.”

  “What?”

  “My father?”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “They made him manager.”

  “Good. He said he was hoping that would happen.” The hope was if it worked out the boss could buy another store, leave Alison’s father in charge of the first store, and give him a break buying the ranch house, which the boss owned.

  “He got a raise.” It meant, she explained that her mother could cut back to only three days a week cleaning houses.