Bloodline (32 page)

“Well, I'll certainly try,” she said.

“I have an old friend who I think still lives in town here. I'm on my way up north to go hunting and I thought I'd stop and surprise him. Name's Gary Putnam. I can't remember his address, and he's not in the book.”

I smiled again. The woman had been looking at my cuts and my black eye but she caught herself and smiled back.

“Putnam. Putnam,” she mused, then turned. “Jane? Putnam. Gary. Mill Creek Road?”

“Back to Route 88. First right after the little bridge. House is second on the left,” another silver-haired woman said without lifting her eyes from her computer screen. “Big colonial with a big garage. Three-car.”

“Oh, does she know the Putnams?” I asked.

“No,” the first silver-haired woman said. “Just the names and the tax bills.”

I thanked her as her gaze moved again to my damaged face.

“Bear,” I said. “That's why they say you gotta kill 'em with the first shot.”

Mill Creek Road led from Route 88, a meandering coastal road, down toward the bay. The biggest houses were on the water. Putnam's was at the other end.

It was a dark red colonial, set back from the road with a two-story garage off to the right and a big addition to the left. The driveway wound through lawn crowded with bushy twenty-foot pines. I paused for a moment at the entrance, then drove in, parking in the driveway next to a bright red Audi, an older one. Next to the garage was a very big sailboat propped up on those stilt-looking things and wrapped in a blue tarp. It was a very, very big sailboat, the kind that consumes money standing still. The tarp was sprinkled with pine needles. Next to the boat was a basketball hoop. Leaning against the posts of the hoop was a neon-green motorcycle with big knobby tires.

The Putnams had kids. And they spent money.

I turned off the motor and listened. A chickadee peeped but that was about it. I got out of the truck and walked slowly past the Audi and toward the back door. The chickadees were swooping to and from a wooden feeder, full of sunflower seeds, that was on a post by the back door. The ground by the feeder was littered with hulls.

Instant nature.

I stood for a moment at the door and listened. From inside the house I could hear music, but only faintly, mostly the thump of the bass. I pushed the doorbell, which was cracked. In case it didn't work, I pushed it again. I wasn't born yesterday.

Nothing happened so I waited. I pushed one more time and waited some more, and then the music got louder, as if somebody had opened the door to an inner room where the music was playing. There were footsteps and then a rattle, and I readied myself for Gary Putnam or the missus.

And got the miss.

She was blonde and small, maybe fifteen, with dark brown eyes made even darker by eye shadow, and sallow skin made more so by ruby-red lipstick. Her sweatshirt said
HARVARD
in big letters, and she was chewing gum.

“Yes?” she asked.

“Hi, is your dad home?”

The girl looked at me warily, but not warily enough.

“He isn't home.”

“How 'bout your mom?”

“She isn't home, either.”

“Don't you know you shouldn't say that to strangers?”

“Why not?”

“Because never mind. So will they be home soon?”

“Doubt it.”

She said it with an air of defiance and resignation.

“Okay,” I said. “Will they be home late?”

“Maybe. You never know with them.”

“Whether they're going to come home?”

“Whether. When. If. That's not true. They usually come home, but I don't wait up.”

I was puzzled.

“Well, where do they go?”

“My dad goes down to his boat. He goes down in the morning before work. He stops on the way home. Sometimes he has dinner there, 'cause it's a yacht club and they have a restaurant. Sometimes he stays and talks to the guys there.”

“What do they talk about?”

“Boats.”

“If he goes down to his boat, what's that thing under the tarp, Noah's ark?”

“That's his old one. His new one's better.”

“I'm glad.” I said. “Where's your mom? Down on the poop deck?”

“Are you kidding? She hates boats. She says they're boring. She goes to plays and stuff. She's going to one tonight. She's totally into the theater. She was on the stage before my parents got married.”

“Then she stopped?”

“To have my brother. Then me. He's in boarding school, but I wouldn't go. Now my mom just goes to her plays and parties with the theater crowd. Those people are always good for a party. They come here and drink and talk like la-di-da this, la-di-da that. Last week a whole bunch of 'em came and stayed 'til, like, midnight, and this one guy tried to hit on me. I was like, ‘Give me a break. You're old enough to be my father.'”

She paused to take a breath. What kind of kid was this, I wondered, telling all to a stranger. I didn't know but I'd take it.

“So are you a friend of my dad's?”

I thought for a moment about just what I wanted Gary Putnam to hear from his daughter when he straggled home. While I thought, the daughter leaned against the door frame and eyed me curiously. From inside the house, the music pulsed like the beating of a giant, racing heart.

“We're not friends,” I said. “We just have a mutual acquaintance. I needed to talk to him.”

“What's your name?”

“Jack McMorrow.”

“I'm Mariel. Are you a lawyer, too?”

“Oh, no.”

“Are you a detective? Did you get beat up arresting some criminal?”

“Beat up?”

“Your face.”

“Oh, that,” I said. “No, I walked into a door.”

“Yeah, right,” she said. “So you're not a detective?”

“Nope.”

“So what are you?”

“I'm a reporter.”

“For what paper?”

“No paper. For myself.”

She looked skeptical.

“So what do you do with your stories?”

“I sell them to magazines.”

“Oh, I get it. Freelance. So what are you working on now?”

“This and that.”

She grinned.

“Oh, come on. You can tell me. I won't blow your, what do you call it, your scoop?”

I smiled back. She was beginning to grow on me. There was something appealing about her brashness and independence, this latchkey kid in Mom's makeup.

“I'm doing a story about girls your age. Maybe a little older. Girls who have babies.”

Her grin seemed to falter. I went with a hunch.

“Yeah, you might've heard about one of them. She was killed a few days ago, right in Portland. Maybe you saw it in the paper? Her name was Missy Hewett.”

Her grin vanished and her skin went gray, leaving the garish blood-red lipstick the only color on her face.

“She was killed?” the girl said, in a hoarse whisper.

“Did you know her?”

She looked like she might collapse, so I took her by the shoulder and led her inside. We were in a hallway with carpeted stairs leading up. I sat her on the bottom step and squatted beside her.

“You didn't know she was dead?”

She moved her head side to side.

“How did you know her?”

She sat for a long time and didn't say anything. I wasn't sure she'd heard the question. I didn't want to ask it again.

“We talked,” she said, finally. “She called and, you probably noticed I like to talk. I'll talk to anybody. She wanted to talk to my dad, but a lot of the time he isn't home, so I'd talk to her instead. I can't believe …”

The words trailed off.

“Are you sure?” she said.

I nodded. She wiped her eyes, which had begun to tear. I waited. I didn't want to spook her.

“She said she was living with her sister because her mother was a drunk or something. I could relate to that. She said she'd get in trouble if there were a lot of calls on the bill, so a couple of times I called her. I kind of thought we could be friends, you know?”

Two young girls, with loneliness in common.

“What did she talk about?”

“Nothing much, at first. Then we kind of hit it off, I guess, and she told me about how she was gonna have this baby, but she didn't want to just sit home on welfare, and she wouldn't raise a child in her mom's house. No way. So she was gonna have the baby adopted.”

She paused. Licked her lips.

“That bothered her. I mean, it was still her kid and everything. She cried on the phone.”

“What did she want with your dad?”

“He was helping her with the adoption stuff.”

“Is he an adoption lawyer?”

“No, he's into corporate something. I don't know much about it. But when he first started out, he worked with a firm that did a lot of adoption kind of stuff. So he still knows how it all works.”

“How did Missy come to call him?”

“I don't know. She never said.”

“Did he call her back?”

“Yeah, but not as fast as she wanted.”

“Why did she call him at home?”

“I don't know,” she said. “I never asked her.”

Sitting there on the step, Gary Putnam's daughter seemed to have shrunk. She sat very still, and I could hear her breath going in and out in a listless wheeze. The door was still open and the chickadees were calling and peeping outside.

“How was she killed?”

I hesitated.

“They thought she'd been hit by a car,” I said. “But she was dead before that. Somebody suffocated her.”

“Why would they do that?”

“I don't know.”

She didn't say anything. I waited.

“When did you talk to her last?” I asked.

“It was funny. We talked in the summertime. She told me how she was gonna move to Portland to go to school. We made these plans to get together, 'cause we'd never really met, you know? Not face-to-face, I mean. So in the summer we talked, and then I didn't hear from her for a long time. I called one time and some guy said she'd moved to Portland and he didn't have the number. So I figured she'd call me, and last week, she finally did.”

“What'd she say?”

“I don't know. My father talked to her. He was home. For once.”

28

T
he bartender at Three Dollar Dewey's was a young guy with several earrings. He brought me a pint of Samuel Smith's Nut Brown Ale, which was the color of mahogany. I stared at the glass a bit before I tried a sip. The ale was good and the pub was quiet, in that lull between lunch and the late-afternoon crush. It was just what I needed: a place to think.

I needed to think about Gary Putnam and his daughter, to take that step back. My first reaction had been to want to call Poole and his state police buddy from the first phone booth I found on Route 1. I wanted to tell them I knew who Missy was dealing with about the baby. And I knew who she most likely called when she decided she wanted her baby back.

If Putnam hadn't killed her, I'd bet he could point a finger at the person who had.

I felt an urgency, a need to grab the guy before he could take off or get himself an attorney, or even to get the messages that some guy named Jack McMorrow had come to talk about Missy Hewett. I wanted Poole to be waiting when he got home that night. I wanted Poole to be waiting with an arrest warrant.

It was the feeling you had when you came back to the newsroom with a big one. You marched onto the floor, maybe even into the news meeting, because you knew the story would turn the news budget upside down. Early on at the
Times
, I'd done exactly that a couple of times, knocking on the door and actually calling the deputy metro editor out of the room. The first time it had been warranted: A kid killed in a drive-by had been ID'd as the son of an alderman. It made him, his death, and the story more important. The second time, the editor had walked me back to my desk and told me that the newspaper required more than information from me. It required perspective, and when I rushed into the newsroom with my heart still pounding, I didn't have that.

“Sit there for a minute,” he'd said. “Sit there for ten minutes if that's what it takes to put your information in context.”

So I sat. The music was jazz with a funky edge, and the bartender was reading some sort of hip music magazine. He looked a lot like the guy on the cover, except the guy on the cover had a ring in his nose. I sipped my beer and he read and was quiet. The only other people in the place were a man and a woman who were hunched over the other end of the bench, holding hands and staring into each other's eyes as if they were doing some kind of mutual hypnosis. The Sam Smith's went down slowly. The perspective came slowly, too.

When the pint was finished, I had a better grip on what I knew. I probably had come up with Missy's adoption advisor, if not her connection. I didn't know how she had found him, but if he didn't advertise his expertise in this part of the law, it must have been word of mouth. But whose?