The Horse You Came in On (34 page)

“But if you tell the cops where I got that jacket, I'll say you're crazy, which you must be, anyway!”

Melrose denied he had any intention of doing so.

Milos finished rolling up the cuffs of the blazer, shrugged the shoulder seams about, and shouted, “How do I look?”

“Fine!” Melrose yelled back. He yelled it again when Milos barked out “What?” He wasn't about to go through the palm writing again.

Since he no longer had his overcoat and was hardly going to travel about Baltimore in the opera cape, he had no choice now but to wear the pin-striped jacket. He didn't care. He patted the sewn-up breast pocket (which had prevented the cigar's going in) and felt something inside that sounded like paper.

The doin's, he hoped, climbing back into the cab.

The red brick and concrete ballpark, open to a sky like a blue backdrop, was almost redolent with newness and resonant with the voices of crowds not come. Expectation hummed in the air. As he descended the high, sweeping steps of the stands, he marvelled at the structure and the skyline.

The guard had directed him up ramps and down ramps outlined in red brick arches, and all around the huge webbing of stands and boxes to somewhere in the center of this sea of green seats. “He could be anywhere,” the guard had said; he seemed more impressed by the name Patrick Muldare than by Jury's laminated ID. The guard had been taking a coffee break, tilted back in his chair. He had thumbed Jury off through an arched doorway behind them and gone back to his
Sports Illustrated
(“swimsuit issue,” he'd leeringly informed Jury). He was not unfriendly; he was simply not impressed by Scotland Yard.

The guard had told him to check around sections 35 and 36, right below the press box. Jury would still probably have missed Muldare if the man had not stood up and waved his arms around. Having gone to the bottom, Jury would now have to climb back up.

Pat Muldare said without preamble as Jury sat down beside him, “Isn't it great? A great ballpark?”

Jury had to agree. They sat there looking out over the irregular stretch of the outfield, past the giant Sony scoreboard to the view of the Baltimore skyline beyond.

“Do you come here often?” asked Jury.

“Every chance I get. There was a lot of resistance to spending public money to build this. We've got Memorial Stadium, after all. But it was worth it; seeing it, well, I think a lot of people might have changed their mind. Getting season tickets will probably turn out to be as hard as getting them to the old Colts games. You know, at one time the only way to get season tickets to those Colts games over at Memorial was to pray somebody died.” He grinned. “But even if somebody
died
they'd will them to a family member. Last game I saw the Colts play was in 1983,
just before they took off for Indianapolis. At that point, they couldn't even fill half the stadium; it was sad, really sad. I'm thinking: maybe I could buy back the name. It'd probably help with the owners. Right now, the NFL might be figuring that Baltimore has the Eagles on the one side and the Skins on the other, so we're pretty football-saturated. But if you look at Charlotte, though—that area's football-poor. They need a team and they've got more money. And they'll certainly build a stadium, too. I think they've got a better chance. But we've got a better chance than St. Louis.”

“But the others didn't have the Colts.”

“If I could
only
find something to tip the scale.”

Jury smiled. “Something Hollywood.”

“Something goddamned dramatic, you better believe it.”

“Doesn't Johnny Unitas live in Baltimore?”

“Yeah. How'd you know that?”

“I'm a detective. Why don't you get him to coach?”

Muldare laughed, happy Jury was getting into the spirit of things. “That would be dramatic, all right. Yep.” Muldare smiled out over the diamond as if this whole park had been his own invention. It would have been fond and fatherly, that smile, had it not been so much like a little kid's. Bereft of his office football, Muldare was digging a fist into the palm of his other hand, as if he were winding up for a pitch.

Jury tried to imagine Patrick Muldare in a business venue: out on one of his construction sites in a hard hat; or sitting at the head of a long, polished table as chairman of the board; or doing some multi-million-dollar deal with the Japanese. But he couldn't do it; or at least each of these images—construction site, boardroom—dissolved nearly the instant it took shape. But Jury could easily visualize Pat out there on the pitcher's mound, or stealing a base, or with a catcher's mitt. He could actually see it, and it made him smile. Here was a man who had found his calling, even though he didn't act upon it.

The closest he got to performance was to sit up here in a green, slat-backed chair, hitting his fist into his hand as if he wore the glove and held the ball. Now he looked up, his blue eyes squinting at the blue sky, as if the ball had left his hand, had been hit, and was making its high, sweeping arc to God knew where.

Jury felt almost envious. And he almost hated to wake Muldare from his dream. But he did. “Your stepmother happened to mention something about your family background. He said your great-great-grandfather got in a squabble with other family members and changed his name.”

“That's right. Except I think it was great-great-great.” Muldare held up three fingers.

“I don't care about the number, only what happened. Whether there's some possible connection between you and the others.”

“Well, there's the name, I guess. Used to be Calvert.”

“
What?
What exactly are you saying?”

“Muldare was my grandmother's—great-great, or was that three ‘greats' too? I don't know—Muldare was
her
maiden name. Irish.”

“Your name would have been Calvert?”

“Look, I'm sorry I didn't make it clearer, but why the hell should I think of that?”

“Because the murdered man in Pennsylvania was named Philip Calvert. I would have thought
that
was pretty clear.”

“So? There are a zillion Calverts in this part of the country. There's Calvert County, even. It's as common as Howard. And your guy was from PA, not Maryland, and not Baltimore. You've got to remember, Muldare has been the family name for generations. Ever since the middle of the eighteenth century, maybe longer. Look, I'm sorry. But with this NFL decision coming up, well, I've had a lot on my mind.”

“Jesus Christ,” whispered Jury impatiently. “Your one-
track
mind, if I may say so.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Is there anything at all this suggests to you, now?” Jury told him what he knew about Philip Calvert and his aunt, Frances Hamilton.

Embarrassed that he hadn't taken Jury's inquiry seriously enough at the outset, Pat Muldare now adopted a studiously grave expression, and he gazed at Jury, while Jury talked, with the absorption and intensity of a man genuinely interested in what is being said, but also with the studied air of a man who well might not be taking in one damned word. His mind was probably out there running the bases. Jury sighed.

“Pat, are you hearing what I'm saying?”

“Of course. You said this Phil Calvert would have been a rich man when the aunt died, except he died too, and the aunt was leaving nothing to anyone else, there really wasn't anyone else, except for some distant cousin or other. I guess you think that's me, I'm the distant cousin, and I went up there and popped him.”

Naturally, a baseball term had to get wedged in there. “Congratulations. You heard me. No, I don't think that. What the hell would someone with enough money to buy a football franchise want with Frances Hamilton's money?”

“I could have had
some other
reason, Inspector.” He wiggled his eyebrows, teasingly.

“Superintendent. That's right, you could have. So tell me.”

“I was only kidding.”

“Well, you can stop kidding and tell me about your family.”

Pat went back to his pitcher's gesture, rubbing his fist in his hand, and said, “I don't think of my father all that much, really. An angry man is what I remember. My mother, her I think about.”

For the first time, Jury was sure Muldare's mind had followed his eyes as he looked away from the playing field and down at the boards beneath his feet. “She was a Howard. There's a Howard County, too, you know. She might have been a descendant of John Eager Howard—he was the philanthropist who gave away so much of his land to the city. She was a lot younger than my father—twenty, twenty-two years, maybe. And still he outlived her.” There was in his tone a note almost of resentment that his father had had
such
nerve. “My mom died in a car accident. We were on our way to Cape May—in New Jersey—”

“You were with her?”

“Yes. It was just the two of us, headed for Cape May. Something went wrong with the braking system and we went off the road, over into a gulley. I wasn't hurt except for superficial cuts.” He stopped and looked up again, this time at that sky so blue it looked enamelled and permanent. “I was knocked unconscious. When I came to, well, there was my mom.”

There was silence. Jury said, “I'm sorry.”

“Maybe I'm still trapped back there. I should be married, have kids, I'd like that, but . . .” He shrugged his shoulders. Then he looked at Jury. “I'll tell you something: I never really grew up.”

In all his long years of questioning people—suspects, witnesses, innocent, guilty—Jury had never heard a man make such an admission, evaluate himself, if not harshly, in a way most men would consider unmanly.

“Maybe you're lucky, Pat,” said Jury, smiling.

“Look, isn't it likely that it's just coincidence, these names?”

“I'd be more willing to put it down to that if it weren't for Beverly Brown's apparently tying them together. She was a very clever woman.”

“Bev.” Muldare made no effort to hide his lack of enthusiasm for “Bev.” “But that would mean that Bev knew my background, and I never told her what I just told you. Unless Alan told her. I imagine family connections might be important to Alan. He'll get a lot of money, if he's still around when I go.” He looked at Jury. “Am I going? Since you seem to take those notes of Bev's seriously—the other two are dead.”

Jury didn't answer that question directly. He looked out over the playing field and around the stadium that a few men like Patrick Muldare
had helped to build. “You're a very rich man, Pat. Is it possible there might be claims on your money you're not even aware of?”

Reasonably, Muldare answered, “Well, if I'm not aware of it, I don't know how I can answer the question.”

“No, I expect not. Well . . .” He got up. “You staying?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

Jury smiled, said goodbye, and climbed the cliff of steps. He turned at the top and waved to Patrick Muldare, who returned the wave. He looked out over the irregular diamond, the concentric rings of seats, and felt again that surge of power. He wondered if it were true that certain places drew energy to them, collected it like some huge generator and held it there, setting the atmosphere thrumming as if it were laced with high-voltage wires. The ley lines of Oxfordshire and Wiltshire; Stonehenge; or that town in Arizona with its vortexes—all were such places. He thought of the Rollright Stones in North Oxfordshire that had recently been said to drain power from radios and stop watches. When he looked down from the ramp onto the grassy field, he felt almost as if this grand new stadium was one of the ancient places of the earth.

He checked his watch to see if it was still running.

Melrose had repaired to the warmth of his fireplace in the Admiral Fell Inn, where he was picking at the threads stitched across the jacket pocket. He wished he had something else to pick with other than his own fingernails. The stitching had been reinforced, and it took some time to work the edging loose. Finally he did, and pulled out a square of paper that crackled when he touched it. Like the stitching gone over so many times, the paper had been folded and refolded—halved and quartered so that it was a thick square. Melrose took great care in unfolding it; the tea-colored paper was old and so worn that seams of light showed through.

It was a birth certificate for one Garrett John Joiner Calvert. Mother, Ann Joiner. Father, Charles Calvert.

Calvert
. Melrose stared into the fire.

Calvert . . . Joiner. Wes's voice came back to him: “That John-Joy's just a nickname.” Joiner . . . Joy. But the birth certificate couldn't have been John-Joy's; it was dated 13 August 1784. But it established some relationship—or at least John-Joy must have thought it had—to the Calverts. And if so, did that mean to Philip?

Melrose picked up the certificate again. Philip Calvert (Jury had told him) would be a rich man when his aunt died, this Mrs. Hamilton. But that didn't make sense, killing for that inheritance. Whoever murdered Philip Calvert would hardly have expected to claim the fortune of Mrs. Hamilton. Unless, of course, a new will were to be produced, a new relationship discovered. Was a way being paved towards something in the
future
rather than in the
past?

Melrose tried to remember the name of the professor Beverly Brown had worked for, the one in history. The genealogist. Lamb. Melrose picked up his phone and asked the desk clerk to put him through to Johns Hopkins. After being switched from one extension to another to another, he was finally told that Professor Lamb had left for the day; no, they did not give out home telephone numbers, he was told, and rather testily. Then he tried Ellen. Not there, either. Melrose gave up.