Melancholy Baby

by Robert B. Parker

  “We’ll take good care of Rosie,” Kathryn said. “She’s a wonderful dog.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Isn’t she.”

  Richie’s face had no expression. Rosie was on the couch now, lying on her back, with her short legs in the air. I went over and sat for a moment and rubbed her stomach and bent over and gave her a kiss.

  “You be a good girl,” I said. “I’ll be back soon.”

  Rosie wagged her tail. I stood.

  “I should be back by Friday,” I said. “I’ll call.”

  “Rosie is always welcome,” Kathryn said.

  “Thanks, Kathryn,” I said. “It’s been great meeting you.”

  We shook hands again. I gave Richie a kiss on the cheek and left.

  Kathryn seemed very nice. Richie loved her. And Rosie liked her. How bad could she be?

  I drove to the airport, parked in the garage, and got a 1:30 flight to Chicago. I passed the two-hour flight thinking about ways to kill Kathryn without getting caught.

  15

  There were planes from Chicago to the Quad Cities, but I was certain they would be small and scary, and I chose to rent a car. The drive from O’Hare Airport is almost due west across the Illinois prairie, where the flat farmland is made various only now and then by the rise of a silo or the bigger rise of a grain elevator. I got there about seven o’clock in the evening, and checked into a motel in Moline, near the Quad Cities airport. Moline was on the east bank of the Mississippi River, along with Rock Island. Bettendorf and Davenport were in Iowa, west of the river.

  Talk Radio WMOL was located in a low cinder-block building on John Deere Road, and in the morning, I went over there. I spent some time in the reception area, while the receptionist tried to figure out whom I should talk to. And I waited some more while the person I should talk to decided if he wanted to talk with me. While I waited, I had to listen to the current program broadcasting on WMOL. It was a call-in show. The host was discussing abortion with callers. The program didn’t seem very controversial to me. The host was opposed to abortion and so were all the callers. I looked at the photos of the on-air talent on the wall near the reception desk. There was a woman and three men. The woman and two of the men looked young. WMOL was probably a stepping stone. The third man looked old. For him, WMOL was probably a stepping stone in the other direction.

  Finally, a small, neat young man in a white shirt and a red tie came into the reception area and looked at me.

  “Miss Randall?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hi, I’m Jeff. I’m the station manager,” he said, and gestured toward the door behind him. “Come on in.”

  Jeff’s office was small, and there were more pictures on the wall. The on-air personalities were there, and a lot of other pictures that were meaningless to me except for a picture of Adlai Stevenson shaking hands with someone in front of the WMOL building, and a youthful-looking publicity still of Lolly Drake in front of a WMOL microphone.

  “She worked here?” I said.

  “Fresh out of law school,” Jeff said. “Half-hour call-in at noon. She answered legal questions.”

  “I’ll be damned,” I said.

  “Everybody’s got to start someplace,” Jeff said.

  “You hope,” I said.

  “I do indeed. How can I help you?”

  “I’m looking for a man who appears to have worked here in the early 1980s,” I said. “Man named George Markham.”

  “Hell,” Jeff said. “In the early eighties, I was in grammar school.”

  I nodded.

  “Do you have personnel records?”

  “Probably, somewhere,” Jeff said. “But I got something better.”

  He leaned over his desk and pressed an intercom button and said, “Millie, could you come in here.”

  Then he leaned back and grinned at me.

  “I got Millie,” he said. “Millie was here when Adlai Stevenson cut the ribbon.”

  Millie, when she came in, was tall and angular and sort of mean-looking, with a lot of small wrinkles on her hard face. Her hair was gray and curly and cut short. Her cheeks had the sunken look of a longtime smoker.

  “Whaddya need, Jeffy?” she said, and sat down next to me.

  Jeff glanced down at my card on his desk to refresh his memory.

  “Sunny Randall, Millie McNeeley.”

  Millie reached across and gave me a hard handshake.

  “Nice meetin’ ya,” she said. Her voice was raspy.

  “Miss Randall is a detective from Boston.”

  “No shit?” Millie said. “A girl detective?”

  “Me and Nancy Drew,” I said. “Do you remember George Markham?”

  “George? Sure. He was an announcer here, you know, the booth guy.” She dropped her raspy voice and cupped a hand behind her ear. “This is WMOL, Quad City Sound.”

  “We say ‘Quad City Talk’ now,” Jeff said.

  I took a picture of George Markham out of my purse and held it up.

  “Is this him?” I said.

  Millie had reading glasses on a string around her neck. She put them on and took the picture and looked at it, holding it away from her as far as she could.

  “Sure,” she said. “That’s George. Wow, he sure didn’t get better-looking as he got older, did he?”

  “Was he good-looking when you knew him?”

  “Oh, you bet,” Millie said, “Twenty years ago. I had a little yen for him myself.”

  “Did anything work out?” I said.

  Millie grinned at me.

  “None of your damn business,” she said.

  “Of course it’s not,” I said. “Was he married then?”

  “His wife was,” Millie said.

  “But he fooled around?”

  “I’m not one to tell tales out of school,” Millie said.

  “And he worked here in 1981?”

  “Lemme see, it was around the same time as Lolly. She came in 1980. He was here in ’79 and left in . . . ’84.”

  “Did he have a child?” I said.

  “Not that I know about.”

  “Was his wife pregnant?”

  “I only saw her a couple of times when she’d come to the station. A real pickle-puss.”

  “She look pregnant?”

  “No.”

  “So what was he like?”

  Millie took a pack of Chesterfield cigarettes, the long, unfiltered ones, shook one loose, took it from the package with her mouth, tossed the pack on the desk, and lit the cigarette with a Zippo lighter. She took a deep inhale, let the smoke out in little smoke rings, took the cigarette out of her mouth, and held it between the first two fingers of her right hand.

  “He was a slick one,” Millie said.

  She’d been holding cigarettes for a long time. The fingers holding this one were nicotine-stained.

  “Like how?” I said.

  “Well, he let you know that he was just passing through here. Let you know he’d worked a lot of big markets, and knew a lot of big-time people.”

  “But he was working here,” I said.

  “Hey,” Jeff said.

  I smiled.

  “Sorry,” I said. “But . . .” I shrugged.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Jeff said. “I know.”

  “Did he say where he’d worked before?” I said.

  “Nope. He was a little older than most of the girls who worked here, except for me, and he spent a lot of time snowing them about how he’d worked with William B. Williams in New York, or Milt Rosenberg in Chicago.”

  “You believe him?”

  She snorted and took a drag on her Chesterfield.

  “Hell, no,” she said. “He just wanted to get their pants off.”

  “Did he succeed?”

  Milli
e shrugged.

  “Got no way to know,” she said.

  “Well,” I said, “it certainly sounds like he fooled around on his wife.”

  “I’m not saying he did, or didn’t.”

  “And,” I said, “as far as you know, there were no children.”

  “Far as I know. ’Course, I never went to his house or anything.”

  “Did anyone? Was he close to anyone that might still be around?”

  “None that I know of.”

  “This is a transient business,” Jeff said.

  “ ’Cept for old Millie,” Millie said. “Been here since 1950. Started as a typist right out of high school. Station played Patti Page music.”

  “The singing rage,” I said.

  “You’re older than you look,” Millie said.

  “Not really. My friend Spike has all her old records.”

  “God knows why,” Millie said.

  “God knows,” I said. “Did you like George Markham?”

  Millie thought about that for a minute, while smoking her Chesterfield.

  “No,” she said. “I didn’t. He was kind of cute and sexy, but you got past that. He was the kind of guy willing to spend his life saying, ‘This is WMOL Quad City Sound.’ ”

  “ ‘Talk,’ ” Jeff said.

  “He’d be a nice night?” I said. “A terrible week?”

  Millie smiled a big smile at me.

  “You know the type,” she said.

  “I do,” I said. “Too well.”

  16

  I’m not her roommate anymore,” Polly Murphy said. We were talking softly at a table in the main library reading room at Taft.

  “Why?” I said.

  “Well . . . I guess I thought I would study better.”

  “So you moved in with someone else?”

  “Yes. Maxine Goetz.”

  Polly was cute. Her weight would probably become an issue in a few years. Right now it wasn’t. She had thick, dark hair, which she wore like Catherine Zeta-Jones, and probably shouldn’t have. And her teeth were very white.

  I smiled at her.

  “Maxine is a studier,” I said.

  “Yes. She’s been dean’s list every semester.”

  “You?”

  She looked down modestly. “Most.”

  “Good for you,” I said.

  “My parents are paying good money to send me here,” Polly said. “I think they deserve my best effort.”

  Wow!

  I looked at her for a minute to see if she was teasing me. She seemed sincere.

  “How about Sarah?”

  “She was more of a party girl,” Polly said.

  “When I was in college that meant basically beer and boys,” I said.

  “Well, Sarah liked that, certainly.”

  “She bring it back to the room too much?”

  Polly shrugged.

  “You and she were childhood friends,” I said.

  She nodded.

  “All through high school?”

  Polly nodded again.

  “Even after she changed?”

  “You know about her?” Polly said.

  “Just what I hear,” I said. “I heard she was kind of a smart, sweet girl until junior high.”

  “I know what people said about her,” Polly said. “But she was my friend.”

  I nodded.

  “We decided to come to Taft to stay with each other.”

  I nodded again. “But . . .” I said.

  “It was . . . very difficult . . . living with her,” Polly said.

  “Beer and boys?”

  “Some of that . . .”

  “And?”

  Polly leaned across the table, closer to me.

  “Sarah took a lot of drugs.”

  “More than grass?” I said.

  “Oh, yes. Hard drugs.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t use drugs.”

  “Good for you,” I said.

  “I graduate this June, and next year, I want to be in a really good MBA program. I don’t want to do anything to spoil my chances.”

  “So her drug use was disruptive?”

  “Yes. She’d come in at night, late sometimes, and act crazy.”

  “Like?”

  “Like she’d be crying and seeing things and . . .” Polly shook her head. “Did you ever go to college?”

  “I did,” I said.

  “What did you major in?”

  “Art.”

  “Really?”

  I could tell that Polly found that puzzling.

  “How did you do?”

  “I was a good artist and quite a bad student,” I said.

  “Really?” Polly said.

  She frowned. I could see that she was puzzled again.

  “Who does Sarah room with now?” I said.

  “I don’t know. Different people, I think. You know? Boys, mostly.”

  “She got a boyfriend?” I said.

  “No, not really. I guess she plays the field.”

  “Where does she get her drugs?”

  “I don’t know. I mean it’s a college, you know? I mean anybody can get drugs at a college.”

  “Any one person?”

  Polly shrugged and shook her head.

  “Sarah ever talk about her parents?” I said.

  “Not really. I don’t think she liked her mom much.”

  “How about her father.”

  “I think she liked him.”

  “She say why she didn’t like her mother?”

  Polly shrugged again. “I think she thought her mom didn’t like her.”

  She shook her head. Incomprehensible.

  “You know her mother?” I said.

  “Oh, yes.”

  “You think she liked Sarah?”

  “Well, of course,” Polly said. “She was Sarah’s mom.”

  “Why do you suppose Sarah thought that?” I said.

  “I don’t know, Ms. Randall. I really don’t. I mean, walking around saying your mom doesn’t like you. I think it’s probably the drugs.”

  “She’s been doing drugs for a while, then,” I said.

  “Yes, since junior high, probably. But then it was different. I didn’t live with her. I didn’t have to be there when she got crazy, or worry about all her druggie friends stealing my stuff.”

  “She ever steal from you?”

  Polly sighed. “There were things that disappeared,” she said.

  “Did you ever bring it up to her?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened?”

  “She told me if I didn’t trust her, she didn’t want me there, and I should get out.”

  “And that’s when you moved?” I said.

  “Maxine’s roommate moved in with her boyfriend, and so I went over there with Maxine. I felt bad leaving her. But she was so . . . sometimes she would have sex in the other bed . . . in the same room.”

  “Ick,” I said.

  “It’s not goodie-goodie to not like that,” Polly said.

  “No,” I said. “It’s human.”

  17

  So when she reached seventh grade . . . which would be, what, twelve, thirteen . . . Everything went to hell.” Dr. Silverman nodded.

  “And I can’t find out if something happened.”

  “You think something happened?”

  “Everyone says she changed.”

  “Perhaps puberty happened,” Dr. Silverman said.

  “I thought of that,” I said. “But I went through puberty without becoming a drugged-out, promiscuous whack job. Didn’t you?”

  “Maybe she had more compelling reas
ons to become a whack job,” Dr. Silverman said. “Or more thoroughly a whack job.”

  “So she might have had problems which didn’t become evident until her chemistry changed.”

  “Maybe,” Dr. Silverman said.

  “So, if puberty is a process of sexual maturation,” I said, “are the problems associated with it sexual?”

  “Often,” Dr. Silverman said.

  “Boy,” I said. “It is hard to get a straight answer from you.”

  “Getting answers from me is not our goal here,” Dr. Silverman said.

  “Oh, shit,” I said.

  Dr. Silverman raised her eyebrows and tilted her head a little.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I mean, I know that it’s about me, not about you. You’re just so goddamned shrinky.”

  “I am, after all, a shrink.”

  “I know, I know. There’s just this know-it-all, goddamned, I’m-the-grownup-you’re-the-child quality to it all.”

  Dr. Silverman leaned back in her chair. She was wearing a dark pinstripe suit today. Her nails gleamed with clear polish. She wore makeup. Which was good. I was uneasy about women who didn’t wear makeup. But it was very understated makeup. Nothing flamboyant—don’t want to jar the patient. With her hands clasped in her lap, she rubbed the tips of her thumbs together gently. I had already learned that that meant she had encountered something interesting.

  “What?” I said.

  “Do you really think I treat you like a child?” she said.

  “Oh, hell, I don’t know. I was just mad.”

  “At what?”

  I stared at her. She seemed almost eager as she leaned forward in her chair, though I was pretty certain she wasn’t. Without any real sign that I could pick up, she seemed to be cheering me on. She was like a herd dog: a lean here, an eyebrow there. Rub the thumbs. And all of a sudden, there it was. I was where I’m sure she wanted me to be.

  “It’s so corny I’m embarrassed,” I said.

  Eyebrow. Head tilt.

  “I’m mad at my mother,” I said.

  Dr. Silverman smiled. For her, that was like jumping in the air and clicking her heels.

  “Let’s talk about that a little,” she said.

  “Does this mean you’re not going to solve the Sarah Markham case for me?” I said.

  She smiled. “I’m afraid it does,” she said.