The Horse You Came in On (11 page)

“
WHAT
'
LL IT BE
?” she asked Melrose—or, rather, yelled at him, cranking up the pitch to make herself heard.

He thought he should forgo his Old Peculier (which they probably didn't have, anyway) and order something American. Glancing at the row of bottles on the shelves behind her, he said, “How about an Amstel Light?”

“
WHAT
?”

He raised himself slightly and leaned over the counter. “
AMSTEL LIGHT.
”

“
YOU WANT A GLASS WITH THAT
?”

“
DOESN
'
T IT COME IN A GLASS
?”

She thought he was trying to be funny and cut him a look.

He noticed that the painter was drinking from a bottle and the black from a silver can. “
BOTTLE,
” he said.

“
YOU GOT IT.
”

His accent had, of course, attracted the attention of the men on either side of him, and he smiled at them, and nodded towards the television. “Who's playing—Baltimore?”

The two exchanged a glance over his head. “Baltimore ain't got no team, my man,” said the black before his attention was pulled to the screen, as a cry went up from both stadium and room. “Skins and Eagles, man. Where you from?” The tone of the question (to which Melrose made a mumbled and forgettable reply) implied it surely couldn't be this planet.

And now, looking around, Melrose couldn't say he blamed the man. Although he knew he'd wandered into a wave of burgundy and old gold and green, the emblematic words printed on the jerseys and knitted caps and satiny jackets hadn't registered.
REDSKINS
and
EAGLES.

“Sorry,” said Melrose, a break that he supposed was a time-out allowing him to speak in a fairly normal tone. “I don't know much about American football.” He knew enough, though, to tell the woman behind the counter to set his friends up with refills.

The improvement in Anglo-American relations underway, the tall black said, “It's a playoff game between Washington and Philly.”

“
Play
off?” It had looked pretty damned serious to Melrose.

“Super Bowl, dude,” said the painter, smiling broadly and displaying a mouthful of rather chipped teeth.

The Supper Bowl.

He cursed himself for forgetting Diane Demorney's morsel of information about the Colts. Before he left, he had called upon Diane to see if in her mental stockpile of arcana she could come up with anything newsy about Baltimore. Although no one had ever been deceived into thinking Diane Demorney wise, a great number of people thought her knowledgeable. Actually, Diane didn't really know anything; her bits of information—and to give Diane her due, they were admittedly legion—floated around in a contextless sea. Most of her acquaintance had no idea that the tip of Diane's iceberg was floating free.

“The Orioles,” she said when Melrose asked her about Baltimore. He was seated in her stark white living room, drinking a martini. Using a long glass wand filled with stars dropping through purple-colored oil, Diane was stirring her pitcherful of vodka barely kissed by vermouth. The price of her help had been his acceptance of her invitation to stay for a drink. “A great team,” she added, tapping the glass wand on the pitcher. “Baltimore is full of rabid baseball fans.” She handed Melrose
one of her sunshade-sized glasses and sat herself down on her white sofa next to her nasty white cat, which had been glaring at Melrose ever since he'd sunk into the shapeless, bottomless white leather chair. “There's Orel Hershiser, if you're interested.”

“He's an Orioles player?” Melrose was keeping his eye on the cat.

“No, no. Los Angeles Dodgers. He's one of the reasons they won the Series in '88.”

“I thought it was the
Brooklyn
Dodgers.” The cat was struggling with itself, waving its rump in the way cats do before they charge.

“It used to be, but they sold the team to L.A. The name goes with them. Same thing happened with the Colts. The Baltimore Colts, it used to be.”

He asked her more, but she'd clearly exhausted her baseball-football fund of knowledge. She moved right along to Edgar Allan Poe, who (Melrose was certain) she had never read, but about whom she knew what she considered the salacious detail that he'd “married his cousin and she was only fourteen at the time.”

Melrose undercut this bit of gossip by telling her that marrying one's cousin was not, in the mid-nineteenth century, at all unusual; and also that girls in their teens, even thirteen and fourteen, often married.

And although Diane knew even less about politics than she did about literature, she moved smoothly to the Clinton administration. After she informed Melrose that the only Democrat who should have beaten George Bush was Perry Como, he drained his glass, gave the white cat a wide berth, and left.

 • • • 

A black player intercepted a pass and Elroy stood up again, yelling “Go, Art!”

“You ain't from around here's my guess,” said the black man during the next time-out. His name, he said, was Conrad; his handshake was knuckle-bashing; Melrose felt to see if the small bones were still intact. He had to confess that no, he wasn't, and a brief exchange followed about the rather boring subjects of heads of states and politics and what Melrose thought of Baltimore and whether he was going to Murder City.

“I beg your pardon?”

Conrad chortled. “D.C., dude. Crack Capital.”

Elroy, whose eyes didn't even leave the television screen during the commercial, said, “Philly's worse.”

They argued, their argument intermittently punctuated by epithets and jeers aimed at the television, occasionally interrupted by a shout of approval.

“It's a shame Baltimore doesn't have a team. Didn't the Colts—”

There was a troubling moment when they both turned to glower at him, but that passed quickly enough, and Elroy said, “Well, maybe we will again.”

“Not a Chinaman's fucking chance,” said Conrad (“Connie” to the young woman behind the bar). “Shit, Elroy, we're sittin' here pinned between the Skins and the Eagles.”

Sounded uncomfortable, thought Melrose, matching their sour head-shakes with one of his own as he tried to look clever. He was glad the others weren't here so he didn't have to look clever in front of them.

Play had resumed, and a chant was swelling the upper reaches of the bar—“D-D-D-D-D-D-D”—accompanied by bottles and glasses pounding on the bar in a sort of jungle-drum rhythm.

One of the most enthusiastic of this group was a youngish, light-haired man who stood out not only for his focused chanting but for the absence of colorful garments. No Redskins scarf, no Eagles sweatshirt. No burgundy, no green—nothing. Nothing except for what Melrose could see were very expensive clothes, no matter that they were casual. He recognized quality because he wore it himself. The fellow looked like renegade management here amongst the shop stewards, the sort of role Peter Sellers might have played in one of those labor-union-oriented comedies popular thirty years ago. He looked
rich,
that's all; Melrose could sense it, being rich himself. And he also looked
happy,
swaying there to the tune of “D-D-D-D” and rising with the others to yell.

One of the players had intercepted a pass. Elroy banged his bottle on the bar. “
Shee-it!”
he yelled as a voice announced a flag on the play. He slapped his cap down.

Melrose squinted upwards at the screen, searching for a flag.

“Whose penalty? Whose? Holding? Holding, God-
damn
!”

If only Melrose could figure out where the ball was—ah, there! My God, but that chap could throw! The quarterback had moved back, taken aim, and put the ball in the running back's hands as smoothly as if a wire had connected them. The receiver clasped the ball to his chest like a newborn infant. Melrose ordered his fourth beer and the same for his companions as the running back peeled yardage before he was brought down by two defensive players big as lorries.

He was just getting into the game when he felt a tug at his elbow that he tried to shake off. Ellen was yanking at him.

“Throw it to the posse!” yelled Elroy, up in the stirrups again.

“Who's playing?”

Another cheer went up around the bar, more chanting from the other end, this time “RYP—RYP—RYP—RYP—RYP.”

Jury, Wiggins, and Ellen were standing behind Melrose. Ellen craned
her neck to look at the screen. “It's a playoff, right?” Then to Melrose she said, “Too noisy for you?”

With massive irritation, Melrose turned with his bottle of Amstel Light. He was tired of being Old Man Melrose, taker of naps and hater of noise. “Skins and Eagles, for God's sake.” He tipped his bottle into his mouth and recrossed his arms along the bar.

“No kidding? You know anything about it?”

“Do I
know
anything about it? Ha!” Then, “What are you drinking?” he asked.

“Whatever you aren't. You sound pretty smashed.”

“Amstel Light.” He held up the bottle.

“Bass,” said Ellen. “Or we could get a pitcher. Or do you want bottled?” she asked Jury and Wiggins.

Wiggins, naturally, wanted a cup of tea, which he couldn't get, and so was left standing there trying to settle on something else after the others had taken their pitcher and found a table.

Ellen waved to the fellow at the end of the bar whom Melrose had noticed. Now he also noticed the chap was rather handsome, decidedly so when he smiled.

“That's Pat. Patrick Muldare. He was a friend of Beverly Brown. Some say a very, you know,
good
friend.”

Jury studied Patrick Muldare for a few moments, then said, “This woman was a student of yours?”

She nodded.

“What happened?”

“The night of January nineteenth is Poe's birthday.”

They all looked at her. Jury asked, “Poe's birthday? What's that got to do with it?”

“A lot. Poe was buried in the churchyard of Westminster Church. Every year, the night of his birthday, someone—no one knows who, except it's a man—brings cognac and flowers, roses, to his grave. It's a tradition that's been going on for years. Some years, a few people have gathered there in hopes of discovering who the person is. No one ever has. Anyway, Beverly is—was—a real Poe fancier. She loved his writing, and he was to be the subject of her doctoral thesis. Just for fun, she'd go to this little birthday party. She did; she was murdered. Strangled. It must have happened, the cops say, just after the crowd—well, not a crowd, really—had dispersed, because no one saw anything.”

“But why wouldn't the Brown woman have left with the others?”

Ellen shrugged. “I have no idea. Unless she thought the man who came wasn't the real one. See, it was the habit of the curator of the Poe museum, or one of his people, to come in advance of the flower giver,
pretend he was him in order to get rid of the little crowd that would collect there. Now, she might have thought the person who'd appeared was a fake, that it was a ruse. She was right. So she hung around. And she got killed.”

Sergeant Wiggins was making his way back to the table with a glass of fizz. He sat down. Ellen went on:

“Beverly took a couple of courses from me. Three, to be exact.” Ellen frowned. “I guess she liked me—I don't know. She was awfully critical of her instructors. One thing I can definitely say about her is that she was very smart. She was clever and she had a lot of imagination. And she was a superior researcher—she had an eye and a mind for detail. She was assistant to Owen Lamb, and he's pretty demanding.

“Beverly asked me if she could use these newspaper reports as the subject of a paper I'd assigned.” Ellen dug around in her bag and brought out some clippings. “I said yes, of course. It sounded interesting. I really think she was going to try and—well, not solve, but do some sort of ‘Marie Roget' thing—you know that story by Poe called ‘The Mystery of Marie Roget'?” They nodded, all except for Wiggins, who frowned and continued stirring his fizz with his finger. “So I saw a lot of her notes, because she'd check in with me every once in a while to see what I thought.” Ellen pulled some more papers from her MPTV bag. “Beverly had just been in to see me the day she was killed. And she left all of this stuff with me.” Ellen lined up two of the clippings. “I don't know exactly what she saw in the newspaper accounts, but she must have thought there was some sort of connection between these two murders.”

“Which two murders?”

Ellen pointed to an item, or a paragraph no more than an item, from the
Baltimore Sun
. “An old guy, a street person called John-Joy. He was found in Cider Alley; that's a narrow little street off Lexington, near the Market. He was found by another street person, another old guy he used to hang around with. The man who found him was named Milos. No one seems to know his last name, either. Milos hangs out all the time—you know, panhandling—in front of a store run by Patrick Muldare's brother. Or half-brother, stepbrother—I don't know which. Milos is blind and deaf. But he's not dumb. He can speak perfectly plainly. Or yell perfectly plainly, I should say. Like a lot of deaf people, he raises his voice.

“The other murder that Beverly seemed to think is related—I can only guess about this because of these notes she left—is going to surprise you.” She was speaking now directly to Jury as she shoved the other clipping towards him.

Jury looked from it to her. “Philip Calvert? The
same
Calvert?”

“Well, I guess there wouldn't be two, would there? In Philly?”

This one was a longer piece than the other and was clipped from the
Philadelphia Inquirer
. Jury scanned it, passed it to Wiggins.