Melancholy Baby

“Yes. Are you in trouble?”

“No. There was a bunch of mail piled up while I was with you. I just looked at it this morning. There’s a big manila envelope. It’s from my father.”

“What’s in it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t dare open it. I need you to come and open it with me.”

“I’ll be there in an hour,” I said.

And I was. We sat in her single dorm room on either side of her small wooden desk in the small window alcove that gave her a view of the library steps. The envelope was on the desk between us.

“Where’s Rosie?” Sarah said.

“With my ex-husband,” I said. “We share custody.”

Sarah nodded. We were both looking at the envelope.

“Would you like to open it?” I said.

“No,” Sarah said. “You.”

I nodded and picked it up. I was postmarked Andover, the day before he’d been shot. I took a nail file from my purse and used it to slit open the top. It had been through the mail system, and there were very few clues likely to be still clinging to it, but I tried to be careful anyway. In the envelope were four photographs and a letter. I put the photographs on the desk, faceup, so that Sarah could see them. They were full-frontal nude pictures of an attractive young woman looking coquettish. In one picture was a cute, slender young man with a camera who must have been taking the picture of them together in a full-length mirror. They appeared to have been taken in someone’s living room. You could tell by the grain that they had been enlarged from snapshots. Sarah stared at the pictures without comment.

“Do you want me to read the letter to you?” I said.

She nodded, looking at the nude pictures.

“ ‘Sarah Dear,’ ” I read. “ ‘I have always thought you were my biological child, though I was not married to your biological mother. Recent DNA test results tell me I’m not. But in my heart, in my love, in my every fiber, I am your father and I love you as I always have. I don’t know who your biological father is. Your biological mother is Lolly Drake. I’ve enclosed pictures, which I took of her, and one of her with me when we were intimate, to authenticate my case. I thought I had made her pregnant with you, and when she offered, I took you to raise as my own. I’m ashamed to say she paid us to do that. I don’t know more than this yet, but I’m determined to find out. If things work out, you and I can talk about this letter and these pictures. The pictures are embarrassing; I was married. But it is all the evidence I have, and if anything happens, I want you to know the truth as far as I can tell it.

“ ‘I love you, honey, Dad.

“ ‘PS: I’ll always be your Dad, whatever the DNA says.’ ”

I put the letter down in front of her. She didn’t look at it. She was staring at the photographs.

“That’s him,” she said. “That’s Daddy.”

“Yes,” I said.

“And that’s my mother?”

“Yes.”

“Who did he say she was?”

“Her name is Lolly Drake.”

“Not the same one?”

“Yes. The queen of the airwaves,” I said.

“Lolly Drake is my mother?”

“It appears so.”

“Did you know?”

“There was a lot of reason to think so,” I said. “Now we have proof.”

“What should we do.”

“First thing,” I said. “I think you ought to meet her.”

“You’ll be there?”

“I wouldn’t miss it,” I said.

60

Corsetti, with his Yankees cap on backwards, swaggered into the Viand Coffee Shop uptown on Madison Avenue, and squeezed into the small booth opposite us. It was a fairly upscale area, but several customers must have thought cop as soon as they saw him. Corsetti knew who Sarah was, but I maintained the formalities and introduced them.

“How ya doin’, kid,” Corsetti said. “Whaddya got for me?”

Sarah looked at me. I nodded. She slid the manila envelope across the table to Corsetti. He waited while the waiter brought him coffee. Then he opened the envelope carefully and took out the contents and spread them out carefully. He looked at the pictures without expression. Then he read the letter without expression. Then he looked at the pictures again and read the letter again. When he was through, he put the pictures carefully back in the envelope and refolded the letter, and put it back. Then he sat back and drank some coffee. He put the mug back on the tabletop and looked at me and Sarah and smiled.

“Va... da... voom,” he said.

“It is Lolly Drake,” I said. “The man in the picture is George Markham, who raised Sarah, thinking he was her father.”

“Yeah, you told me on the phone.”

“I want Sarah to meet her.”

“Won’t get her convicted of anything yet, but sure, she can meet her,” Corsetti said.

“She’s hard to get to,” I said.

“Remember, you are talking to a New York City police detective, and that police detective ain’t just anyone. The detective is me. Eugene Corsetti. We want to see Lolly Drake, we see Lolly Drake.”

“Will we really?” Sarah said.

“Probably,” I said. “Has there been any give in Harvey Delk’s position.”

“You think you can get him to roll on Lolly?”

“Delk?” Corsetti said. “Sure. Sooner or later, guys like Delk don’t hold up. He’ll rat somebody for us. Anything in Boston?”

“I have a, ah, friend, looking into the matter of George Markham’s death.”