A Measure of Blood (3 page)

“She shouldn't have done that to him.”

Something snapped like the twang of a guitar string in Christie's chest.

WHEN COLLEEN WENT
into Maggie Brown's apartment, she saw the techs were busy in the kitchen and at the front door, examining the blood and the knife. Potocki was lining up boxes of papers in front of the sofa. Everyone was working fast. Potocki led Colleen straight to the table with Maggie's personal phone book and even to the entry for Sasha.

“In the back. Alphabetized by first name,” he said as he handed the small phone book to her. His face was slightly flushed. They'd partnered in the past, but now that they were involved and thus
not
working as partners, there was the whole new problem of avoiding touch on the job. He started back to the mother's bedroom.

She took a deep breath, carried the phone book to the boy's bedroom—a messy space, books and toys, a nest. She made the call from there.

Sasha asked, “Who is this again?”

“Detective Colleen Greer.” Then she made the announcement.

There was a silence. “Are you sure?” came a thin, reedy voice, then a sound of gasping and sobbing.

When Colleen told her what had happened, the best friend kept saying, “Oh my God, oh my God, are you sure?”

“Yes, I was here.”

Colleen kept a detective's mind on the matter of Sasha's reaction. Bizarre and tabloid images flashed before she nixed them. She could imagine scenarios—Sasha's boyfriend messing with Maggie, Sasha getting furious, things like that, the worst of human behaviors.

Sasha was saying, “Oh my God. I can't … How could such a thing happen?”

“I'm sorry. I understand how shocking it is. But Sasha, we need to talk to you. Do you live very far away?”

“No. No, just Highland Park.”

“We need for you to come here.”

“To … to her place?”

“We're using the apartment down the hall, 2A. Will it take you long?”

“About … twenty minutes. I … have to bring my daughters.”

“We'll find a place for them. Sasha. Let me ask you one thing now. Can you tell me the name of Matt's father?”

“Matt's father? No. I have no idea.”

Twenty minutes, Colleen thought. Then we get to ask why nobody knows who this kid's father is.

Colleen went back to the boxes. Potocki had gone through everything including kitchen drawers for notes, pieces of paper. She could see him through an open doorway in Maggie's bedroom, working. Maggie had used a corner of her bedroom as an office, so the computer was there and Potocki was sitting at it.

“How's it going?” she asked from the doorway.

“She kept almost everything, sometimes very organized, other times not. Does Boss have a suspect?”

“Nope. I have to call a few other people to come in.” She had her finger poised on the phone buttons. She moved farther into Maggie's bedroom for a moment. A whiff of perfume or soap. Suddenly the woman and her death were very real. Colleen stared at a bureau full of lotions and lipsticks. A good number of them were natural products of the kind sold in health food stores. Potocki, with a tuft of hair mussed, kept working at Maggie's computer.

“I'm in,” Potocki was saying. “I'm in her email.”

She wondered if it was true that Matt really had nobody. She knew the kid had already wrapped himself around Christie's heart.

MAGGIE'S FRIEND APPEARED
at the fast command post. She was a tall, blonde woman, sturdy, with thick, curly, long hair. She wore no makeup and flushed easily. She brought to mind butter and cheese. Her gauzy skirt and shirt were a throwback to the '70s. She'd fit at a commune with a dairy farm and a good-sized vegetable garden.

Christie helped her walk her daughters to the Panikkar residence. Her eyes were red, but she was more in shock now than able to weep.

“My kids brought a DVD for Matt. I don't know if these people have a player …” she murmured.

“We can hope so.”

Oopale opened the door and took the girls smoothly, saying, “I'll watch them, of course.”

Christie guided Sasha back down the hall, explaining, “As Maggie's best friend, you are bound to be our best lead. You would know her other contacts.”

“I still can't believe … I can't …” She looked about at the apartment she'd landed in, then focused on Christie again.

He decided to go at her sideways. “First, can you give us some insights about Matt?”

“He's a sweet kid. Oh, difficult sometimes …”

“Is he?”

“A little. Headstrong.”

“Well, some kids just are. You told my colleague you don't know who his father is?”

“No.”

“You mustn't keep that from us if you know. It's important.”

“Why?”

“Someone was bothering Maggie about the boy. The person who killed her was, we believe, saying he was the father. So, you see …”

“Oh, some joker bothered her a few months ago … ”

“Ah. Good. What do you know about that?”

“Only that she said some guy scared her and he was a nut.”

“What else did she say? A name?”

“No. It sounded like someone from her past from a long time ago. She said he was always a bit odd.”

“But
was
he Matt's father? Did she say?”

“Oh, no, he wouldn't have been. I knew her when she was trying to get pregnant. She opted for artificial insemination. I saw Matt the day he was born.”

“It still could have been this guy as biological father.”

“No … no she went to a clinic in New York. She wanted a choice of donors. And then she got pregnant.”

“Can you be sure it was the artificial insemination that did it? And not another contact.”

“Well … that's what she said. I believed her.”

“She wasn't seeing someone?”

“No. No, she told me she was done with the whole dating scene. She'd been using some kind of dating service and she said she only met duds.”

“The name of the dating service?”

“Oh, I don't know. She was disgusted with it and never said the name.”

“Then straight to artificial insemination? So the goal was a baby all along?”

“Yes. She really wanted a baby. She was thirty-eight or thirty-nine. She knew a woman who had had luck with the clinic in New York. See, Maggie lived there for quite a while before moving here, so she—”

“She went the whole way there for the treatments?”

“She … made that decision.” Sasha rubbed at her forehead as if that would help make sense of today. “I argued that with her. Pittsburgh is way up there medically. But she traveled to New York a couple of times and when she did get pregnant, she was ecstatic. It was what she wanted. She told me she'd made the right decision.”

“But she didn't give you any details? Who she chose, why?”

“No.”

“Nothing?”

“Only that she felt she had always loved men with dark hair and dark eyes. She chose dark hair and eyes, she said, on the guy's profile, but she never saw a picture. She said he was probably very smart too because of his college degrees.”

“Which degrees?”

“He was starting on a master's.”

“In what?”

“I don't know. She didn't say.”

“What was the name of the clinic?”

“She never told me. She was very private.” Sasha's eyes drifted, as if for the first time she had allowed herself to feel insulted by this withholding of information. She shook her head. “She always said the kid was enough for her.”

“Tell me about men she worked with.”

“She didn't date them. Jason is married. Ben is gay. Look. I don't like this—digging in her past when she's dead. We're just sitting here talking about her and, and criticizing her life.”

“I'm not criticizing. I'm trying to find her killer. Please keep thinking. She's got to have leaked something.”

Sasha swallowed hard and bit her lip.

“Tell me about the man who bothered her and Matt a couple months ago.”

“She was freaked that he thought there was something between them. She said she only went out with him twice a long time ago.”

“No name?”

“No.”

Christie pressed. “Did she say what he did, where he lived?”

“No.”

“Did
she
call him a joker?”

“No, she said he was sad, mixed up.”

“Did she give you the location of the clinic in New York?”

“In the Village, I think, but I'm not sure.”

“And she didn't think the guy
was
the father.”

“She told me the father was a number in a book. Why don't you believe me? She was my best friend.”

He had to stop. Sasha was getting shaky. Finally she said, “She was a good person. I just want you to know that. She cared about people. She loved her son.”

“I sense that. I'm trying to figure out what it meant when she held back, didn't tell you things.”

“She got embarrassed. She thought she made a mess of relationships.” Sasha began to cry.

“I understand. You didn't probe because you could sense she was sensitive.”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“You spoke daily?”

“Pretty much.”

“Phone calls?”

“Phone calls. Or in our studio. We shared a studio.”

“I don't know about the studio. Explain.”

“We're both painters. I teach school, too, but I'm a painter mostly—Maggie was starting to let painting go.”

“Why? Did she say why?”

“She said her painting wasn't going anywhere and it was a waste of time.” Sasha shook her head and dabbed at her eyes. “She was losing confidence that she could do something with it.”

At that, she excused herself to go into the bathroom down the hall in the apartment they were using.

Christie paced. He was tired of badgering her. There was something stubborn in her, as there was with a lot of aging hippies who just wanted love and peace.

Colleen Greer came back in. Christie indicated with a pointed finger that Sasha was in the bathroom.

“It doesn't look great for leads,” Colleen said in a low voice. “I have the two men friends coming over. They sounded truly shocked.”

Sasha shuffled back into the room. He noticed her feet. Thick feet, thick sandals.

Colleen moved forward and introduced herself.

“We're almost finished,” Christie told Sasha. “Just two more questions occur to me.” He tried to keep pressure out of his voice. “What about Maggie's own family? Her parents?”

“Her father and his second wife were academics, not in the arts. And her mother and her stepfather were academics, too. Her mother was a musician.”

Christie felt hopeful. “That's a lot of parents. Where are they?”

“Dead. All of them. It's why she wanted a child so badly.”

“Brothers, sisters?”

“She didn't have any.”

“Well, I have another kind of question, my second question. About Matt. Who would she have wanted to care for him? Did she make any legal plans?”

“I don't think so. She didn't, you know, think like that.”

Christie flashed a look at Colleen, both of them aware that Sasha hadn't said anything about making a claim for Matt herself. After all, she was his godmother.

“You think he's a good kid.”

“Rebellious sometimes, but smart, smart. And he's … yes, a good kid.” She began crying again.

Finally Christie released her to go get her kids.

Colleen said, “I think I got a sense of her.”

“Hmm. Talk to me.”

“She's a ‘let it be' kind of person. And Maggie wasn't telling her much. Both women are probably loving enough to their kids but they aren't
strong
mothers. Stubborn, uncertain, spacey.”

“Yeah.”

“How things change,” she murmured. “In
olden times
,” she said, mocking the phrase, “women just told the kid his father was dead.”

MARINA WAS HOME
,
FEELING BLUE
that her Sunday with Richard had ended so abruptly. He didn't even have time to change clothes.

He was upset about the little boy.

It had been almost two years and Richard was strong again, recovered from the chemo, in remission from the leukemia, totally … himself. Looking good.

He thought his looks were boring, ordinary—medium height, medium brown hair, olive skin, slightly crooked nose. Like some old boxer, he said of himself.

Marina could never in a million years find him or anything about him boring.

She'd spent the afternoon sitting in the sun, reading over the play she was about to be in. She was precast as Titania in the Shakespeare production at Pitt, about to go into auditions. The payback for being cast was that she taught two courses and she was expected to coach the student actors—a good deal, a great deal for an actress. She'd be out at rehearsals most evenings. So much for keeping a neat house, but she was not an especially eager homemaker.

Her phone rang and it was Richard again.

“I'm on thin ice here. The kid is, for all intents and purposes, an orphan. But I have an idea.”

Was he going to bring the boy home? She got a quick stab of excitement and fear. And then she understood. Not them. The Morrises.

“Look. I want to try Arthur and Jan again.”

“Oh, won't that be hard to pull off?”

“I'll have to do an end run. Do you have a phone number for them?”

“Yes, but Richard, they're in France. Let me think. Yes. Jan said she'd get back right before auditions, so I think that means they get back tomorrow.”

“Get me the phone number. I'll make the first move now.”

“I'm out in the yard,” she said, “but I'm going in. This will take a sec. Only you should know Jan told me she and Arthur have given up on children. She said right before they went to France that she appreciates how rich their lives are, able to go to Europe, and all their time to themselves. They don't want to open up all that longing again.”