Mausoleum

by Justin Scott

  “Well you guys and Grace let him into the Association. Which surprised a lot of people. Maybe it started with the checking account.”

  Wes Little laughed. “Got you there, Dan. You’re the one who brought him in.”

  “I did not.”

  “First time I met Brian, you introduced us. Remember, you had a cookout. Just Cyn and me and you and Priscilla and him. Hey, Cyn, was he on you too, that night?”

  Cynthia drilled him with a cold stare. “Not that I noticed.” Connie, too, was looking a little chilly as Wes’s “on you” was moving outside her bounds of party talk. But she rose to the occasion, saying, “And how did you meet Brian, Georgia?”

  “I’m trying to remember. I think Rick and I were having dinner at the club. And, Priscilla, you brought him over, didn’t you?”

  “Cynthia and I brought him over. We were waiting for these two,” she indicated Wes and Dan, “who were working late as usual, and we ran into him at the bar.”

  “Well,” said Connie. “A checking account goes a long way, these days. Dan, if you would allow me your strong arm, we could go inside and fill our glasses.” She took Dan’s arm and got two steps before she said, “Grace? Where did you meet poor Mr. Grose?”

  “Dad wrote the policy for his house. Next thing I knew he had invited himself to supper.”

  ***

  After they all went home, Connie went upstairs to get ready for bed. I made her tea and brought it up when she was settled in. “What do you think?” I asked her.

  “It seems Mr. Grose was very clever at getting to know people.”

  “And wives?”

  “I have no idea. Beyond the obvious fact that little Cynthia has a roving eye.”

  “Sounded to me like Dan was his wedge.”

  “Certainly no love lost between Grace and Mr. Grose.”

  “Grace told me that Brian used her father. Took advantage.”

  Connie said, “You must be aware that for Grace everything comes back to her father. They were such companions. She must miss him so.”

  “Is that why she never married?”

  “Who knows such things? You might as much as ask me why I never married.”

  “Did Gerard Botsford really ask you to marry him?”

  “Of course.”

  “Of course?”

  “Well why wouldn’t he? He was a widower. I was single, wealthy and, if I could believe half the men who called on me, beautiful enough. Gerard and I had known each other for years, and his father had known my father, and his grandfather had worked for my grandfather.”

  “Why did you turn him down? He was full of himself?”

  “I didn’t love him.”

  “Oh.”

  “Well why else would I turn him down, for pity sakes? Gerard was available, prospering, and handsome. And what a piano player! Oh my lord, I could listen to him play for hours.”

  “Any regrets?”

  “No more than for any of the others I turned down,” she said with a smile. Then she turned serious. “Would I change my life?” she asked, and answered, “No. I was probably meant to be alone. I have a wide circle of friends and acquaintances—had, they’ve mostly died…As has Gerard. So at this moment I would be a widow instead of a spinster.” Then she was smiling again, her face alight; and she said to me, “But I do not believe you were meant to be alone.”

  “The evidence suggests otherwise.”

  “The evidence suggests you are dodging involvement. That is different than wanting to be alone. You are alone by mistake. Or confusion.”

  I went home and was still lying awake thinking about being single, like most of my Chevalley cousins and dead Brian Grose when Father Bobby telephoned. The priest did not apologize for the late hour, but accused in a hard voice that would have made an Inquisition subject’s blood run cold, “We had a deal.”

  “That’s right. I agreed not to mention you to anybody, which I didn’t. You agreed to talk to Charlie and call me, which you didn’t.”

  “You broke your word, Ben.”

  “I did not.”

  “Then who sent the fat guy after me.”

  “The only fat guy I know is a bail bondsman who calls himself Big Al Vetere, and I did not send him after you.”

  “Somebody did. Why’s he nosing around Bridgeport?”

  “He’s a sad sack who feels more comfortable in a city. That doesn’t mean he’s on to Charlie. Or you. Though, just as a point of fact, Father, he told me he met a priest who sent him on a wild goose chase up here. Anyone you know?”

  “He told you that? God in heaven.”

  “Did you?”

  “I said the first thing I could think of to get rid of him.”

  “Well it worked. He’s lucky he didn’t get shot by the Feds. But speaking of finding, how are we doing with Charlie? Have you talked to him?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What are you waiting for, Father? The Feds are all over the place. Lame as they are, there are so many of them one might actually stumble into him.”

  “Sorry to telephone so late,” Father Bobby said, and hung up. I snared his number from my Caller ID and wrote it on a scrap of paper, thinking it could be handy to have before he got around to changing cell phones.

  Now I was wide awake. I started thinking about Brian again. The familiar-sounding phrase “sense of urgency” from his meaning-of-life-statement in Lorraine’s death movie, began running through my head. Over and over, like a song you began to wish you had never heard. But I had heard it before, just as I had heard a whole bunch of things he had prattled on about. I stopped pretending to sleep, went downstairs, poured a glass of wine, kicked my computer off Standby and Googled “sense of urgency.”

  “Sense of urgency” turned out to be a very popular phrase in the self-help world. Google claimed one point two million results to do with managing goals, projects, and employees. It was equally popular in the news; interviews with politicians found them either promising a sense of urgency, demanding one from their rivals, or threatening to investigate bureaucrats lacking it.

  What else, I wondered, had struck a memory chord in Brian’s speech to the camera? A neat one, “Don’t plan too far ahead.” I had liked that one and was sure I had heard it before. So I Googled, “sense of urgency don’t plan too far ahead.”

  First result came a web page for another White House Briefing, with the text excerpt reading, “…My displeasure with the President.”

  “No.”

  “Press Briefing.”

  “No.”

  “Another Press Briefing.”

  “No.”

  Marketplace from American Public Media, said the next title, “Fourth is you never should be satisfied. Fifth is don’t plan too far ahead. Sixth was have a sense of urgency. Seventh is work like hell…” read the except.

  I nearly broke a finger clicking Marketplace from American Public Media, which I listened to on NPR whenever I was near a radio at 6:30. Up came a transcript of a “Conversations From the Corner Office” interview I had heard with Joe Gallo, president and CEO of E.& J. Gallo winery. It had stuck in my head because the vintner, an Exxon Mobil of bulk wine, had complained to Marketplace that customers had too many choices in the liquor store. Before I could drop the radio in the garbage, he had spoken from the heart about what he had learned from his father, and I had listened attentively.

  “Brian, you self-important Grose, you died a plagiarist. What else were you lying about?”

  ***

  “Thank God,” said Sherman’s mother when she saw the sturdy handcuffs that attached Sherman to his hospital bed. She tugged her kerchief tighter to her hair, crossed herself, and said, “They wouldn’t cuff him if he couldn’t run.”

  Sherman, who was wrapped in a head bandage of Sikh turban proportions and had both legs in casts above the knee, opened murky eyes and whispered, “Thanks for coming, Ma. I gotta talk to Ben a minute.”

&
nbsp; Aunt Helen took off her kerchief, ran a comb through her white hair and a lipstick across her lips, and went out the door with a pretty smile for the elderly security guard standing guard for the cops.

  Sherman whispered, “You tell about the rifle?”

  “Not yet. Did you tell the doctor how you got the bullet crease?”

  “Shuddup, I got enough trouble already.” He looked around and lowered his whisper. “They think I banged my head on the road.”

  “Sherman, what in hell is going on? Did you really steal Brian Grose’s credit card?”

  “Not in the way you mean steal.”

  “In what way did it end up in your possession?”

  “The yuppie didn’t need it. He was dead.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I am beginning to get the picture.”

  “I ain’t talkin’ about it.”

  The last thing I wanted was to be hauled into court to testify about his confession. So I whispered, “Just shake your head if anything I whisper is wrong, okay? Or blink,” I added, realizing that shaking his head would hurt like hell.

  “Okay.”

  “After you set up the gas engine Sunday morning at the Notables, you wandered over to the mausoleum to see if by any chance it was open and you might find something inside not cemented to the floor. To your surprise and delight it was open. But inside, instead of moveables, you found Brian Grose shot dead. I’m guessing he had just been shot because you left no bloody footprints and he hadn’t bled much yet. And by the time I saw the body he’d bled a river.”

  Sherman blinked. “There was plenty. I was careful not to step in it.”

  “But he was sure as hell dead with all those bullet holes in him. So you figured since you couldn’t help him, you might as well help yourself. You took most, but not all, of whatever cash he had in his wallet. And then you got really, really smart and lifted only two or three credit cards, so it wouldn’t look like he was robbed.”

  Sherman blinked and mouthed, “One.”

  “I underestimate you. You snuck out with one credit card and went back to the stationary engine and pretended nothing happened. And you stayed smart. You waited nearly a week before you tried the credit card at a gas station to see if it has been reported. You left the motor running and dipped it at the pump nearest the road. Comes up clean. Now you’re in business. You gas up a truck, go to Home Depot and—”

  Sherman blinked.

  “No?”

  “Lowes,” he whispered. “Not Home Depot. You know the new one down in Danbury?”

  “Sorry—Lowes, where you charge a huge mess of 2 x 10s you can sell to a contractor who pays cash for a hot deal on hot lumber. But then for some reason you got really, really stupid and bought something that was traced to you when it was delivered. I’m presuming it’s something online.”

  Sherman shook his head violently, winced, moaned, and blinked rapidly.

  “You didn’t buy something online?”

  “Just a little something for my girl.”

  “Didn’t know you had one.”

  “There’s a lot you didn’t know.”

  “So you did something really stupid like having what you charged online delivered to your girl. The cops, who obviously have been watching to see if anyone, the murderer, for instance, uses the dead man’s credit card, lean on your girl and she says, “Sherman Chevalley.”

  “No way,” said Sherman. “I’m not an idiot.” Then, forgetting we were in a hospital room with an elderly security guard outside, and for all we knew a state police stenographer under the bed, he explained how to buy something online with a stolen credit card and not get caught.

  “You borrow somebody’s computer with wireless and take it to a hot spot, download the software you bought onto a CD.”

  “Software?”

  Anyone who can build his own bulldozer with parts from his junk pile (augmented by parts from the town garage—occasioning his most recent incarceration) is a can-do guy, but I hadn’t realized he had made the leap to computers.

  “Wait a minute. Who gives a girl software?”

  “I do. After Effects Ultra. Fifteen hundred bucks. I got it for her free.”

  “What is After Effects—Ultra?”

  “For faking video location. Makes it seem like you’re on location where you’re really shooting your movie in front of a green screen and keying in the virtual set.”

  The penny dropped like an anvil. “Lorraine? Lorraine Renner?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “That was kind of fast.”

  “Yeah, well sometimes you get lucky. I been hoping a long time to meet somebody like her. She makes this movie about me and the engine and puts it in a contest, and all of a sudden we’re getting it on.”

  “You want me to bring her here?”

  “I didn’t want her seeing me like this.” He rattled the chain of the handcuff.

  “Should I get you a lawyer?”

  “Lorraine got me Ira Roth.”

  “You can’t afford Ira Roth.”

  “She’s making a movie about his horses. He says I’ll get bail. The case sucks. All I got to do is keep saying I found the card in the grass. Ira says they won’t even bother charging me with the murder.”

  “What about your parole?”

  “We’re working on it.”

  Well, Sherman had moved up. And if Sherman could get lucky, surely there was hope for every man still alone in the world.

  “You know what Lorraine told me the other night?”

  “No,” I answered, thinking, Please God, spare me Sherman’s pillow talk.

  “Told me that the yuppie had something bent going on the side.”

  “What side?” I wondered why she had never mentioned that when we talked about Brian. “He didn’t have a side. He wasn’t married. He didn’t even have a girlfriend anyone knew about.” Unless you count the lovelies he was romancing to get his mausoleum, but Sherman knew nothing about them, which was not much less than I did.

  “Lorraine thinks he was scamming somebody—Hey, you know what?”

  “What?”

  “I can help her. I can be her grip. You know what a grip is?”

  “A guy who carries stuff for a filmmaker.”

  “Yeah, I could do that while she makes her new movie.”

  “Which new movie?”

  “Lorraine’s thinking she could make a documentary movie about a murder victim.”

  “She already did one.”

  “No, no, no. Not the snuff flick. That was for the mausoleum. She means use all that extra video for like background. Cool idea, right? She said there’d be clues in the film about who blew him away. That’s really cool, isn’t it? I never knew anybody who made stuff up like that.”

  “You’ve been making up stuff your whole life, Sherman.”

  “I’m gonna help her.”

  “Excellent idea. Now could we go back to this guy who’s trying to kill you?”

  “What guy?”

  “Who dropped the woodchuck gun I saw in the woods. The gun I know exactly where to find if I have to.”

  “Oh.”

  “Does the guy trying to kill you have to do with the credit card you acquired?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Sherman.

  “Then it had to do with who you saw go inside Brian Grose’s mausoleum?”

  “Maybe.”

  “So who did you see, Sherman? Goddammit!”

  “Latino guy. I told you.”

  “But not this Latino guy?” I showed him Charlie’s photograph, yet again.

  “Told you no, Ben. That’s not the guy.”

  “The guy you saw walked in the same unlocked door you walked in?”

  “I saw him walking out.”

  “Before or after you went in?”

  “Before. Yuppie was dead by the time I got there.”

  “Aha,” I said, walked to window, and looked do
wn at the crowded cemetery across the street. The hospital stood on a high hill. Across a valley of hundred year old frame houses and old factories and busy roads I could see the gold domed cupola atop Danbury’s City Hall. “How did you find him, Sherman?”

  “What do you mean find him?”

  “In order to blackmail the Latino guy—in order to threaten to tell the cops that you saw him coming out of the murder scene immediately after the murder—you had to know where to find him.”

  “I’d seen him around.”

  I sat back down by his bed. “Where?”

  “A joint down in Waterbury, once. And up at the River End when he was delivering something.”

  The River End Bar, a Jervis-owned establishment, was a fine place to take delivery of “something” not stocked at Lowes, Mike’s Hardware, or your corner pharmacy. Though you ran the risk of someone taking it away from you in the parking lot.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Angel.”

  “Angel? The guns guy?” That did not make any sense at all. I knew Angel of Waterbury as a standup gentleman who dealt in contraband arms. And, it was rumored, explosives, which I doubted, though I knew him only slightly. Wide Greg had introduced us, and I owed the bar owner big for it. Angel was not a man to kill unless he was actually surrounded by people already shooting at him.

  “Not that Angel,” said Sherman. “Another one. There’s a lot of Latino Angels, in case you didn’t know.”

  “What does your Angel look like?”

  “Like they all look. Short.”

  “So you’re blackmailing him?”

  “Kind of wish I wasn’t,” said Sherman. “He took it the wrong way.”

  I stood up for another gander at the cemetery across the street and found myself wondering if the surgeons’ lounge overlooked it. “Any chance of you introducing me to this Angel?”

  “What are you nuts? The dude’s a stone killer.”

  “Well, I’m working on who killed Brian Grose, so there’s a kind of symmetry.”

  “Angel didn’t kill him.”

  “You just said he’s a stone killer.”

  “Yeah. But Angel didn’t shoot the yuppie.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He said he didn’t.”

  “Why do you believe him?”

  “Because when I bumped into him when he was coming out the door, he wasn’t carrying.”