Mausoleum Read Free Page B

“Here’s Grace Botsford. She’ll have a key.”
    Grace’s father, Gerard, who had died last March in a car crash at age ninety-five, had been president of the Newbury Cemetery Association for as long as anyone could remember and had appointed Grace treasurer when she came home from Connecticut College in 1970.
    â€œShe was brave to attend the Notables. Gerard so loved this ground.”
    Grace, who had just turned sixty, had run the family insurance agency with her father and never married. Father and daughter had served on virtually all the town’s unpaid commissions at one time or another and they had been a fixture at the old families’ lawn parties and garden tours: white-haired Gerard resplendent in seersucker and straw hat; Grace, old-fashioned in silk, tall and straight on his arm.
    Grace took a sealed envelope from her purse, tore it open, and handed a key to Trooper Moody.
    Next question was, had the Chevalley vandals so damaged the door that the key wouldn’t open it. Trooper Moody inserted it, turned it. Even over the roar of the music, I could hear a massive lock like a Fox Lock clank inside. Ollie grunted in triumph and pulled the door open. Softly colored light poured into the foyer from a stained glass ceiling, which if we had thought about it could have been more easily broken open than the Fort Knox door.
    Connie’s white glove bit into my arm. Grace Botsford pressed her hand to her mouth. Pinkerton Chevalley and Oliver Moody chorused, “What a mess.” Albert Chevalley threw up on Dennis Chevalley’s boots, and one of Scooter’s daughters snapped a photograph too gory to print in the Clarion .

Chapter Three
    Brian Grose lay on his back on the polished floor. The vast oozing hole in his chest would surely have killed him. But whoever had shot him had finished the job by shooting him twice in the forehead. Two neat holes in front had exited violently in back, and the man’s death was, to bowdlerize Pinkerton Chevalley and Trooper Moody, one holy mess.
    â€œTurn off that music,” said somebody.
    â€œDon’t touch anything,” shouted Trooper Moody. “Everyone step back. Back, back, out of the way. Don’t touch anything.”
    I said to Cousin Pink that whoever had turned the music on must have set a timer. Pink said, “No shit, Sherlock.”
    Ollie shouted, “All you people get out of here!”
    People shuffled uncertainly, caught between fear of Ollie and morbid curiosity, until Aunt Connie raised her voice, “Everyone go home, please. Take the children and leave Trooper Moody to his work.”
    Ollie whipped out a cell phone and called in a suspicious death. He did not look happy. As the town’s resident state trooper—lone-wolf master of sixty square miles of Connecticut turf, lord over all he could intimidate —Oliver Moody would rather slug it out single-handedly against raiding urban street gangs than have his territory invaded by the State Police Major Crime Squad.
    ***
    In a sensible world the murder of Brian Grose would be investigated by the thoroughly competent Major Crime Squad that was on the scene within an hour. In a sensible world the responding officers, Detective-Lieutenant Marian Boyce, the best of the best, and her long-time partner Arnie Bender, far less pleasant to look at, but equally skilled, would have conducted their investigation while normal citizens went about their business building houses, teaching summer school, writing insurance policies, milking cows, repairing vehicles, mowing grass, and selling real estate.
    But the next day, I got a visit from three guys I had known a long time who made it clear that it was not a sensible world, at least when it came to the war to control Newbury’s Village Cemetery Association. Two bankers with whom I had grown up, pugnacious Dan Adams and easy-does-it Wes Little, and Rick Bowland—last seen wearing vest and shirt sleeves