The Horse You Came in On

by Martha Grimes

  “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.

  31

  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.

  32

  I

  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.

  He wondered about Milos. He could return yet again to Nouveau Pauvre, but the thought of striking up a conversation with Milos was simply too daunting. Anyway, it was nearly seven; Milos might have left his post to patrol the city.

  He ran his hands down over his face; he scrubbed at his head with his clenched fists. He was trying to dislodge that little bit of conversation in the cab that Hughie had given him, or tried to give him; Melrose hadn’t really been paying attention. Now he was sorry. There was something floating around in his mental ether that he couldn’t net, couldn’t hook, couldn’t pull up. . . . He wondered if Hughie was still out in the street, trawling around in his cab—

  Good lord, if he didn’t stop this nautical line of thinking, he’d turn into a fish himself.

  Then he thought: go to Cider Alley. John-Joy’s companions might be able to tell him something else about the man. Probably not; he had a feeling that his contributions to their welfare had bought him every morsel of information they had, and then some.

  Melrose sighed, thought for a bit, and remembered Hughie pointing out the Enoch Pratt Library. He got out his Strangers’ Guide, looked in the index, found it on one of the sectional maps. One call that Hughie had made correctly.

  He made sure the certificate was secured in his locked bag, tossed the cape about his shoulders and went down the stairs.

  No Hughie, so he hailed a cab from which its present fare was exiting and gave the driver his destination. As they drove up Calvert Street, Melrose asked the driver what he knew about the Calverts.

  The driver told him they made whisky.

  II

  Melrose was not sure exactly what he was looking for, but he asked the librarian for books relating to Maryland history, old records, family history, and so forth. The librarian walked him over to one of the reference shelves and asked him what specifically he wanted. He just wanted to browse, he told her, and she said she might have one or two other books—a history of Baltimore, did you say? Baltimore, or Maryland more generally, he told her, especially seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Maryland.

  He took three books over to one of the long tables and sat down with them. There were plenty of seats; the library was not crowded. A few readers were spotted here and there at the long, dark tables, quietly turning the pages of books or writing on index cards or in notebooks, or otherwise engaged in fruitful literary pursuits.

  Melrose lo
ved libraries, had always thought them oases, sanctuaries in an otherwise tumultuous world. He liked to hear the soft rattle of leaves of paper, the soft tread of shoes, the whispered exchanges. Directly across from him sat an old gray-bearded man in an outsized overcoat surrounded by books and bags, reading by the laborious means of following a running finger from one line to another and mouthing the words. There was a satchel on each side of him, by means of which (Melrose thought) he would transport reading material out the door, and an oily-looking brown bag, into which he dipped and brought out part of a rough-cut sandwich. He munched it happily and in the process looked across the table at Melrose and smiled broadly.

  Melrose returned the smile and sat wondering if perhaps he oughtn’t to put in for the post coming vacant at the Long Piddleton Library.

  Mindful of the task at hand, he started reading through Maryland Records of the Colonial Revolutionary Church. Here were census records, records of marriages and deaths. It was full of the sort of arcane facts that Diane Demorney loved. The pleasant-faced, pink-cheeked librarian stole up to his table, placed two books on it, and crept away. She’d have made an excellent cat burglar. One book included facsimiles of Council proceedings for the years 1636 to 1647. He opened it, leafed through it, and came to one of the many documents listed as taken from the House of Lords Journal.

  Melrose read:

  Lord & Comons for fforraigne Plantacons, Novem: 1645,

  . . . as alsoe of the Letters Patents, whereby his Ma(ty) in the eighth yeare of his Raigne, granted the said Prouince to Cecill Caluerte, and of a Certificate from the Judge of the Adm(lty) that Leonard Caluerte late Gouerno(r) there had a Comission from Oxford. . . .

  Caluerte. Calvert, surely.

  Leonard Calvert had been the first governor of Maryland.