Keeper (33 page)

Scott nodded.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“He was taking his time on everything else, except when we were pressing him,” she told me. “On that one, he had the time, and he rushed. Trust me.”

“It may not matter,” Fowler said. “We get Crowell in for questioning, I’m certain one of them will roll on the other.”

“Nobody’s brought him in yet?” I asked.

“We can’t find him,” Scott said.

“First Barry, then Crowell.”

“They probably left town. If the bomb had gone off, they’d have been at the top of our suspect list.”

“So they left in anticipation,” Bridgett said.

He nodded. “Rich thinks he’s buying them time. We’ll give him a little while to stew on it, then hit him with Katie’s murder, see what else breaks loose. He’s already confessed to building the bomb, so he’s got to know that his options are diminishing. He’ll break, and when he does, we’ll know who killed Katie.”

We went to a bar near the precinct house. Bridgett had a pint of Guinness and I had a Scotch.

“He’s wrong about Rich and Katie,” Bridgett said. “There’s no link there to Romero, no revenge motive.” 

“None that we’ve found,” I said. “Does this mean you buy my theory?”

“At this point, yes. Look at the list. Is there a Rich anywhere on it?”

I pulled it out and flipped to the last page, looking. “Rafael, Rodriguez, Rossi, Ruez,” I said. “No Rich.”

“Sigh and double sigh,” she said, and drank some of her Guinness.

I put the papers on the bar and sipped my Scotch, thinking. The names on the list were in small print, in four columns, starting with the last name, then the first, then a date, and then a number.

“The dates are for what?” I asked Bridgett.

“When the file went inactive,” she told me. “Lynn explained it to me. If a patient misses three follow-ups, moves, has their records transferred, or dies, they close the file. The last number is the actual file code.”

I finished my drink, looking at the dates on the first page. A couple of them were recent, in the last month. One of them only ten days ago. “Baechler, Melanie,” I said.

“She on there?”

“Closed out about a week before Katie died. Melanie Baechler,” I said, and then it hit me, and I read it again. “What?”

“Katie,” I said. “Oh, yes, that’s it, that’s got to be it. Katie knew her. Melanie B. Melanie Baechler. Katie knew her.”

Bridgett turned on the stool and looked closely at me. “What are you talking about?”

“Why’s she on the list?” I asked her. “It doesn’t say.” 

“I don’t know. I told you, she could have moved or missed a follow-up or—”

“She’s dead,” I said. “That’s got to be it.”

“Explain it to me,” Bridgett demanded.

I ordered a cup of coffee and did just that. Then I asked the bartender if he would let me see his white pages. I found the address I wanted, and Bridgett and I paid and left.

Melanie Baechler’s apartment was up on West 124th off Claremont, directly north of the Columbia campus, one of the many buildings consisting entirely of apartments rented to students, and it showed. Clean, well-lit, and fairly secure, but not so nice as to buck the average rent in the area. The first floor of the building on the south side had been converted into a bodega, so access to the interior was limited from the west. Standard New York fare, the same two-door setup that allowed entrance into my apartment building in the Village. The building was prewar design, gray with orange and blue art deco tiles around the trim. The tiles looked original, faded and weathered, and had a pleasant sheen in the fading light of dusk.

I held the door of the building for Bridgett and we stepped into the foyer, searching the intercom listing. Next to the button for 4A were the names “Baechler & Scarrio.”

“You or me?” Bridgett asked.

“You,” I said. “Your melodic voice and gentle manner will immediately put whoever answers at ease.”

She gave me the finger and a smile and pressed the button.

After a few seconds we got a garbled voice saying, “Yes?”

“My name is Bridgett Logan. I was wondering if I could speak with you about Melanie Baechler?”

“She, uh . . . I’m sorry, but she . . . she passed away about a week and a half ago.” Even with the distortion of the intercom, you could hear that the wound was still fresh.

“This is in connection with her death,” Bridgett said. “I’m wondering if you would answer a few questions.”

There was a long moment, filled with just the sound of the traffic on the street, and I wondered if this wasn’t a wild goose chase after all. Melanie B. wasn’t a real person. Katie had probably been referring to a character from a television show.

There was another click and the voice said, “All right.” The intercom clicked off and the door buzzed. I pushed it open and we walked into a large and brightly lit lobby. There was a fern in the corner by the elevator, and it looked real, but I get fooled by the plastic ones a lot. A flight of broad stairs started at the left of the plant. We took them up. From over the rail I could see that the next floor, and the stairs, too, were well-illuminated. Security-conscious management, I suppose. It would be hard to take anyone by surprise around here. Maybe the owners could talk to my building’s management.

At the end of the fourth-floor hall, opposite 4F, was 4A. The door was metal and painted white with no other markings upon it but for the peephole. Bridgett pressed the buzzer. The door opened immediately and a woman, perhaps in her early twenties, stood there.

“Are you the police?” she asked, looking at each of us suspiciously. We were quite the couple, I admit, with Bridgett in her leather jacket and nose rings and me in my Brooks Brothers suit.

“No.” Bridgett reached into a coat pocket. She produced a business card and handed it to the woman. “Private.”

The woman glanced at the card, then asked, “What can I do for you?”

“We have some questions about Melanie Baechler,” I said.

“Did Melanie’s family hire you?” she asked. “The police haven’t found the guy yet. They probably never will.”

Bridgett said, “This is in relation to something else. Miss—?”

“Scarrio, Francine Scarrio.” Francine had curly black hair, glossy and wild, wrapping her head and shoulders. She was wearing either a perfume or hair spray that smelled like strawberries and made my nose itch. Tugging a curl, Francine looked us both over again, then moved out of the way to let us in. We stepped onto a throw rug with blue-and-black five-pointed stars stitched into the weave. Francine Scarrio closed the door behind us, then slipped past in the narrow hallway and said, “Why don’t you have a seat in here?”

“Here” was a combination office/living room/dining room, with a short hallway leading to the left and a galley kitchen off to the right. The walls had posters of different musicians and bands mounted with green thumbtacks, ranging from Melissa Etheridge to Miles Davis, and I counted six separate shoes, each without an apparent mate, as we walked into the main room. A table was positioned flush against the wall, and on it were a pile of envelopes, a roll of stamps, and a stack of stationery. The envelopes and stationery matched, each with a drawing of unicorns in the lower left comer. Scarrio took a chair from under the table, saying, “I was writing letters.” It sounded like a guilty pleasure. She gestured to a small brown love seat and companion chair, saying, “Please.”

Bridgett took the chair while I took the love seat. Scarrio was looking at the business card again. I looked at her. She had on a tight navy blue top, short-sleeved and low-cut, just above the swell of her breasts, and she had on white shorts and no shoes. Her skin was tanned, and she projected that collegiate vitality I’d seen in Alison when we first met. I wondered if anyone had ever complained about Francine’s perfume.

She looked up at me and said, “Who are you?”

“My name’s Kodiak.”

“Are you both private eyes?” She didn’t wait for an answer, but said, “What’s this about?”

"Have you heard of the Women’s LifeCare Clinic on Amsterdam and One Thirty-fifth?” I asked her.

"I’ve even been over there a couple of times—NARAL and clinic defense stuff. You know, demonstrations.” 

“When was the last time you were there?”

"Couple weeks ago, I think. Why?”

"You know about Katie Romero’s murder?” Bridgett asked.

“The retarded girl?” Francine nodded, and her curls bounced on her shoulders.

“Did you know Katie?” I asked.

“I spoke to her once or twice.”

Bridgett rolled her shoulders and looked around the room. “Baechler was your roommate?”

"Yes. What does this have to do with the clinic?” "What can you tell us about Melanie’s death?” Francine frowned. "Melanie got mugged. She was coming back from dinner and she was mugged, some guy stole her purse and stuff. The police told me they think it’s some crackhead, but they haven’t found the guy.” She picked at her nails for a moment. "He beat her to death.”

“When was this?” I asked.

“Wednesday before last,’’ Francine said, softly. “She’d gone out to the library and then went to dinner off campus, at Kowloon’s, and she got mugged on her way back. The guy beat her to death,” she said again. “I had to identify her.” She had a broad face with heavy freckles, and the lines around her eyes suddenly became vivid with the memory. “She’s from Cincinnati, sec? And her parents couldn’t arrive until the next day.”

“Were you close friends?”

She nodded.

“I’m sorry.”

“I don’t even know why she went out. We had done all this shopping the day before,” Francine said. “We had all this food and she wanted to make a shepherd’s pie.” Bridgett asked, “Did she have any boyfriends? Anything like that? Anyone she might have been out to eat with?” 

“Melanie had a lot of friends, some were guys, if that’s what you mean, but, like, she wasn’t sleeping around.” 

“Both of you used the clinic, right?”

“We’d both been there.”

“But inside?” Bridgett asked.

“No.”

“How’d you meet Katie?” I asked.

Scarrio blinked. “She was outside once or twice.”

“She didn’t normally go out.”

“It was at a demonstration.”

“Francine,” Bridgett said. “We don’t really care what you’ve done at Women’s LifeCare. We’re just trying to figure out what Melanie’s relationship to the clinic was.”

She bit her lip. “We went there for our checkups.” 

“Columbia has a health service.”

“We couldn’t get the doctor we wanted,” she said. She looked directly at Bridgett. “It’s stupid, but I don’t like having a male OB/GYN, you know. And Melanie didn’t either, so this one time we went to the clinic and got examined there.”

“There must be a female OB/GYN connected with the school,” Bridgett said. “Why didn’t you use her?”

“Dr. Lucas, the one we normally use, she’s not here during the summer session. I was embarrassed. We’d made the appointment, found out it was Dr. Ferrer, he’s this old guy, really nice, but just, you know? And I got all embarrassed. So I told Melanie and we decided to go to the clinic. We only went inside that one time. We didn’t have abortions, if that’s what you’re trying to find out.” She kept her eyes on Bridgett.

“That’s where you met Katie?”

“She was just wandering around the building with, like, this Walkman on and the cord had gotten all tangled. Melanie asked her if she could help and they started talking about music.”

“Madonna?” I asked.

“No, Cyndi Lauper, I think. Yeah, that’s it, because we all sang a couple verses of ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun.’ She couldn’t sing very well. She was sweet.”

“Anything else happen?”

She shrugged. This was ancient history and it was already cold for her. “We had to wait for a couple of hours before they could see us; they were busy, because there were protesters outside that day. Not many, but it was distracting. We spent a lot of that time talking to Katie. She couldn’t pronounce my last name really well, so I told her to just call me Fran and she said she should know my last name so we settled on S. Fran S. So she was Katie R. and I was Fran S.”

And Melanie was Melanie B.

“Melanie had no boyfriends?” Bridgett asked again, a little more insistently.

“She’d just broken up with a guy. They’d been seeing each other for maybe a month at the most. No big thing.”

“When’d that happen?”

“The breakup? End of the term, would’ve been last week of May, I think.”

“Why’d she stop seeing him?” I asked.

“Dunno. Melanie said he was hard to talk to, real old-fashioned.”

“And she didn’t see him after that?”

“No. I mean, if she saw Paul again, she didn’t tell me about it.”

There is a God, I thought.

“Could you describe Paul Grant?” I asked.

She stared at me a second as if she hadn’t truly noticed me before, then got up, saying, “There’s a picture of them.” She disappeared into the last door on the hall, returning quickly with a Polaroid. She handed it to me. “I took that at a Yankee game we went to. That was the beginning of May.”

Melanie Baechler was wearing a navy-and-white Yankee cap, pale hair spilling out around a thin face. She wasn’t a big girl. My memory of Grant put him at over my height, and Melanie came to above his elbow in the photograph. She was smiling for the camera.