Melancholy Baby

by Robert B. Parker

  I looked at Sarah and smiled. “I have cool friends,” I said, “too.”

  39

  Brian Kelly called me. “I’m working homicide,” he said. “Last year or so. And we got a stiff in Park Square with your business card in his wallet.”

  “What’s the name?”

  “George Markham,” Brian said.

  “Suspicious nature?” I said.

  “He was shot.”

  “You there?” I said.

  “Yeah. Parking lot behind the Castle. I thought you might want to stop by.”

  “I do,” I said, and hung up the phone.

  The Castle, in Park Square, is a gray granite building that was once a National Guard armory and looks like a medieval fortress. They use it now for trade shows and other events. There were half a dozen police cars parked on Huntington Avenue in front of the Castle, and a bunch more in and around the parking lot off Arlington Street. Lights were set up in the parking lot, and the place looked like a movie set. When I pulled up, a uniform stopped me.

  “Crime scene, ma’am. Can’t park here.”

  “Brian Kelly asked me to come down,” I said.

  “Sit right there,” the uniform said.

  He walked over to a cluster of plainclothes people that included Brian. They were looking down at something. The uniform spoke to Brian, who nodded and half turned and waved me in. I parked next to an EMT vehicle and got out.

  “Detective Kelly’s over there,” the uniform said.

  I smiled and said thank you. I decided not to tell him that I had slept with Detective Kelly and would have recognized him anywhere. What the plainclothes group was looking at was the late George Markham. When I joined them, Brian put his arm around me and gave me a squeeze.

  “Frank,” he said to one of the other cops. “Sunny Randall. Sunny, Frank Belson.”

  Belson was very lean, midsized, and clean-shaven, though he showed what must have been an eternal five-o’clock shadow.

  “Phil Randall’s kid,” he said.

  I nodded. We shook hands.

  “Liked your old man,” Belson said, and squatted on his heels next to the body.

  “What have we got?” I said.

  “So far, looks like he took one in the chest, and one in the middle of the forehead.”

  “The one in the head to make sure?” I said.

  “Reasonable guess,” Belson said. “There’s powder burns around the head wound. Haven’t dug out a slug yet but it looks like standard-issue. A nine, or a thirty-eight, maybe.”

  Belson stood and began to walk through the crime.

  “Vic’s walking along here,” Belson said. “Shooter appears about here, shoots him in the chest. Vic falls over backwards. Shooter walks over, puts the gun against his forehead, and makes sure.”

  “Don’t sound like a robbery gone bad,” Brian said.

  “No,” Belson said. “It don’t.”

  He stood, looking at the crime scene, as if he were taking slow-exposure pictures.

  “Sunny,” Belson said, “whyn’t you tell Brian what you know about the vic.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “And when you see your old man,” Belson said, “give him my best.”

  I said I would, and turned and followed Brian into the Castle, where they had set up temporarily for business.

  40

  Three days after the funeral, Brian went with me to see Mrs. Markham in her silent Andover living room. Sarah wasn’t there.

  “Is your daughter home, Mrs. Markham?” Brian asked.

  “No.”

  “We’ll need to talk with her as well,” Brian said.

  “I don’t know where she is.”

  “Could she be at school?” I said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is she okay?” I said.

  “I hope not,” Mrs. Markham said. “She killed her father and you helped her.”

  “Tell me about that,” Brian said.

  “If the two of them hadn’t harassed the poor man to death about who was whose parent, he’d be alive today.”

  “His death was connected to Sarah’s parentage?” Brian said.

  “You think it’s a coincidence?”

  “Who might have killed him?” Brian said.

  “I can’t imagine,” Mrs. Markham said. “He was a fine man.”

  “And Sarah’s father?” Brian said.

  “Of course.”

  “So how is his death connected?” Brian asked.

  “I don’t think it’s a coincidence. They’ll probably get me, too.”

  “ ‘They’?” Brian said.

  “Whoever killed my George.”

  “Could you make a guess who that is?” Brian asked.

  “How would I know. But if the little bitch hadn’t started asking all these questions, her father would be alive.”

  “The little bitch being your daughter,” Brian said.

  “And her friend here.”

  Brian nodded. “Before his death,” Brian said, “Mr. Markham told people that he was going to get a DNA test to prove he was Sarah’s father.”

  I was the people Markham told, as far as Brian knew. He was obviously trying to keep me out of it.

  “That’s nonsense,” Mrs. Markham said.

  “So he didn’t get DNA testing?”

  “No, of course not.”

  Brian nodded and wrote in his notebook.

  “Why wouldn’t he,” Brian said, “or you?”

  “If our word isn’t sufficient to our own daughter, then we will not further humiliate ourselves and submit to a dehumanizing pseudoscience test.”

  Brian nodded and wrote.

  “And you haven’t any other thoughts on who might have killed your husband.”

  Mrs. Markham glared at me.

  “I don’t know who pulled the trigger,” Mrs. Markham said. “But I know who killed him.”

  “Do you have a family doctor?” Brian said.

  “No. Neither George nor I have ever been sickly.”

  “If you had to go to the hospital,” Brian said, “where would you go?”

  “I don’t need a hospital,” Mrs. Markham said.

  “Do you have medical insurance?” Brian said.

  “Of course.”

  “HMO?”

  She nodded. “Merrimack Health,” she said.

  Brian wrote for a little while. Then he put his notebook away and took out his card.

  “Anything that you might think of,” he said, “or anything that happens that might tell us something, please, give me a call. Or, if you prefer, call the Andover police. They’ll know how to get me.”

  Brian gave her his card. We stood.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” I said to Mrs. Markham.

  She looked at me in poisonous silence for a moment. “I don’t wish to speak with you,” she said.

  In the car, driving, Brian turned and smiled at me.

  “Bitch,” he said.

  “I see,” I said. “You believe her.”

  “Why wouldn’t I?” Brian said. “She knows you and the kid were responsible because you pushed the question of parentage. But she has no idea who killed him, nor how that connects with you and the kid. Did I miss anything?”

  “Not unless I missed it, too,” I said. “Do you think she got to be fifty years old and has neither a family doctor nor a hospital to which she would go?”

  “No.”

  “You have the name of her HMO,” I said. “That was smart.”

  “I do, and it was,” Brian said. “We can see if the Markhams submitted any claims for treatment.”

  “The question is,” I said, “does she know something that she’s not sharing, or is she just trying to find an
object for her anger.”

  “She always been a fruitcake like that?” Brian said.

  “When I first met her she was sweet, and subservient, and eager to please,” I said.

  “People can be drunk with grief.”

  “Except,” I said, “I didn’t see a lot of grief. I saw a lot of rage, but no grief.”

  Brian nodded. “She didn’t seem too griefy to me,” he said. “How about the daughter.”

  “I need to find her. If her mother treated her the way she treated me, right after her father’s death . . .”

  Brian looked at the dashboard clock.

  “You think she’s at school?” he said.

  “Worth a try,” I said.

  “Taft?” he said.

  “Yes. You might want to use the siren.”

  “You think she’s suicidal?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “I’ll call the campus police,” Brian said. “See if they can locate her.”

  Brian turned the siren on, and the blue light on the dashboard, and drove faster.

  41

  The campus police had Sarah in an interview room at the campus police station.

  “Why did the cops come?” she said when I came in.

  “This is Brian Kelly,” I said. “He’s a Boston police detective.”

  “I don’t care,” Sarah said. “Why did the cops come and get me.”

  There was a conference table and six chairs, but she was standing with her arms folded tightly across her chest.

  “We were worried about you,” I said. “We wanted to be sure you were all right.”

  She stared at me.

  “All right?” she said. “Of course I’m not fucking all right. My father’s dead and it’s my fault. How fucking all right is that?”

  Brian somehow managed to fade from the confrontation a little. He didn’t move much, but it was clearly my conversation.

  “It is not your fault,” I said. “It is the fault of the person who shot him.”

  “And if I hadn’t gotten this crazy bug in my bonnet,” Sarah said, “he’d still be fine.”

  I could almost hear Mrs. Markham saying “bug in your bonnet.”

  “Sarah, there is something terribly wrong in your family.”

  “Yeah,” Sarah said. “Me.”

  “No,” I said. “Not you. You’re the one who saw it. Your parents don’t remember things that everyone remembers. Your father lied about his past. A simple, painless DNA comparison would have answered your concerns. Neither of them would submit.”

  “My father was going to,” she said. “They got the swab from me.”

  “Where?”

  “I did it at the college infirmary.”

  “Do you know if he did it?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know, if he had, where he’d have done it?”

  “No.”

  “The infirmary will know where they sent the swab,” Brian said.

  I nodded.

  “Why do you care now?” Sarah said.

  “Maybe it had something to do with his death,” I said.

  “You mean someone didn’t want him to?”

  “I don’t know. But he died shortly after he decided to do the DNA test.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It is. And it’s crazy that somebody hired men to beat you up. And it’s crazy that your mother won’t do the DNA comparison. And you’re the one that saw the craziness first. You had to do what you did. Someone had to. There was something fundamentally wrong in your family. We still don’t know what. But we will.”

  “I wish I’d never started all this,” she said.

  “I don’t blame you. It’s a lot nastier than you expected it to be. But I’m with you. And the cops are with you. And we’ll hang in there together until we find out why.”

  Sarah sat down suddenly at the conference table and folded her arms on the tabletop and put her face down on them.

  “I loved him, you know,” she said.

  Her voice was muffled.

  “Sure, I know,” I said. “I love my father.”

  “Even if he wasn’t my father. I loved him. Mostly, he was nice to me.”

  “Regardless of biology,” I said. “He was your father.”

  She nodded her buried head without speaking.

  “I need to ask you one more question,” I said.

  Sarah nodded, her face still down.

  “How do you get your trust money?” I said.

  “It just shows up in my checking account every month,” she said.

  “Wire transfer?”

  “I guess so.”

  “From where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where do you have your checking account?” I said.

  “Pequot Bank.”

  “Here in Walford?”

  “Yes. On Oak Street, right across from the student union.”

  “And before you came to Taft?”

  “I didn’t get it,” Sarah said. “I wasn’t old enough.”

  “When does it come?”

  “First of the month.”

  I looked at Brian. He nodded and tapped himself on the chest.

  “Okay,” I said.

  She stayed the way she was. I looked at Brian. He shook his head slightly and shrugged and turned his palms up.

  “Are you rooming with anyone?”

  She shook her head.

  “Boyfriend?”

  Shake.

  “Would you like to go home?”

  “No.”

  I didn’t blame her.

  I looked at Brian. He looked at me. He smiled faintly. I nodded slowly and took a deep breath and let it out.

  “I want you to come stay with Rosie and me for a while,” I said.

  Sarah was silent. Her face was still down on the table, resting on her forearms. She didn’t move.

  Then, without looking up, she said, “Okay.”

  I looked at Brian again. He was staring up at the ceiling.

  “While we’re packing,” I said to him, “maybe you could check where the infirmary sent the DNA sample.”

  “Let’s have Sarah join us,” Brian said. “They’ll be more co-operative if the donor is doing the asking.”

  “Okay with you, kiddo?”

  She was sitting up now, looking at us.

  “I guess so,” she said. “What about the school? If I don’t go to class, I’ll get in trouble.”

  “I’ll talk to the school,” Brian said. “If the dean is a woman, I’ll charm her. If it’s a man, I’ll frighten him.”

  Sarah almost smiled. “It’s a woman,” she said.

  “Oh, good,” Brian said. “Charming is so much easier than scary.”

  “It is?” I said. “I can’t usually tell which you’re being.”

  Sarah actually did smile, though very slightly.

  42

  LifeForm Laboratory was in the rear of the second floor of an old brick building on Albany Street near Boston Medical Center. The director talked with Sarah and me in her tiny office overlooking a narrow parking lot.

  “I don’t know if I can release this information,” the director said.

  She was a lanky, gray-haired woman, wearing rimless glasses.

  “Sarah is one of the two donors,” I said.

  “But the actual testing was requested by the other donor.”

  “Who is now a murder victim,” I said.

  The director frowned. She looked like everyone’s stereotype of an elementary-school principal. And she clearly disapproved of people being murdered.

  “Oh,” she said to Sarah, “how dreadful. Were you related?”
/>   “He was my father,” Sarah said.

  “The biological relationship may be an important part of the murder investigation,” I said. “We can do this informally, or we can come back with the police and a court order. And the cops will probably close you down while they search all the records, and the press will probably learn of it and your name will be in the paper as part of a murder investigation.”

  “Are you threatening me, Ms. Randall?”

  “I prefer to think of it as warning you,” I said.

  She looked at me sternly. I smiled my sweet, young, blonde-girl smile. She nodded as if she was confirming something with herself.

  “Well, surely,” the director said, “since this young woman is one of the donors, I don’t see a problem.”

  “Thank you,” Sarah said.

  The director stood, turned to her computer, and tapped the keyboard for a moment and sat back. We waited. She studied the screen.

  “I’ll print this out for you,” she said, and tapped the keyboard again. “But I can tell you that it is not a match.”

  I heard Sarah breathe in.

  “He’s not my father?”

  “You do not share his DNA.”

  The printer on the top of a file cabinet began to hum, and in a moment the printout came sliding forth and the printer went silent. No one spoke for a moment.

  “You’re sure,” Sarah said.

  “Yes.”

  “You couldn’t have made a mistake.”

  “Very unlikely.”

  Sarah looked at me. She was breathing quickly, as if she was a little short of breath.

  “Now you know,” I said.

  She nodded and didn’t say anything.

  “When did Mr. Markham get the results?” I said to the director.

  She looked at her computer screen.

  “Five days ago,” she said.

  “Two days before he died,” I said.

  “Who the hell is my father?” Sarah said.

  I was startled. I had begun to think of this as a murder case. But for Sarah it was still paternity-related.

  “Before we’re through,” I said, “you and I will find out.”

  “And is she my mother?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  The director looked uncomfortable. This was very unscientific.

  “I’ll bet she isn’t,” Sarah said.