Wendy Hornsby - Midnight Baby

Mike gave me a sidelong leer. “I’m thinking maybe I should let you and Leslie get the truth out of her. There’s a flashlight in my trunk.”

“Anytime,” I said. “Anytime.”

I was thinking a great big old hammer might be helpful, too, when Mike pulled up in front of MacLaren Hall.

“I need the receipt for the tires,” he said as he got out.

“I told you I’d take care of it.”

“No need. I’ll turn it in to the department. The boss said he can find funds to cover it.”

Couldn’t argue with that. I opened my bag and handed him the receipt. He didn’t even look at it when he put it into his pocket.

In the last hour of daylight, the MacLaren play yard was full of kids and full of racket. At one end of the asphalt six or eight of the older boys were pitched against some of the teachers in a rowdy game of half-court basketball. A bruising round of dodge ball took up the other end of the pavement, with hopscotchers and jump-ropers filling the space between. The lines between the games slopped over now and then, but no one seemed to be bothered by proximity.

Sly, my little loner, was off on the grass away from the other children, playing hit-and-run softball with a single adult. The young man with him was tall and slender, with dark shoulder-length hair and a single stud earring that caught the low sun. I pegged him for a volunteer, or maybe a college student collecting clinic hours for class credit.

The young man pitched a slow, straight ball at Sly’s bat, talking to Sly the whole time, encouraging, joking with him. Sly slugged the ball, a bouncing grounder, and took off on a shambling run toward the single base. The man snagged the ball barehanded and went after the boy, full out, giving him no slack. About halfway to the bag, man caught boy in an easy tackle around the legs and wrestled him to the ground.

“You’re out,” he said over and over, using the ball to tickle Sly’s midsection.

Sly was screaming. With delight, I thought. Before I could stop Mike, he lit out toward the dog pile, his marathon-runner legs pumping for all they were worth, suitcoat flapping in the wind.

“Wait, Mike,” I yelled, sprinting after him. I didn’t want him to interfere. To me it looked like the sort of good-natured roughhousing Sly had doubtless missed out on. But Mike had left the starting blocks first, and he’s just plain old faster than I am.

To my utter and absolute astonishment, when Mike reached the tussle on the grass, instead of breaking it up, he joined in. Mike pounced and somehow rolled up on his back with his legs locked around the young man’s midsection. Sly squealed with joy.

“Tickle him, Sly,” Mike urged. “Get him in the ribs. Atta boy. Now the other side.”

I stopped at the edge of the fray. They all stopped and looked up at me, all three of them red in the face and sweaty and giggly. To my further astonishment, the young man relaxed his head back against Mike’s chest and Mike kissed him, a wet one, square on the cheek.

“See?” Sly said to me with mock disgust. “I told you the cop was a faggot.”

“Maggie,” Mike said, panting, “meet Michael.”

“Hi,” I said, dumbfounded. Here, at last, was Mike’s seventeen-year-old son. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“Me, too,” he gasped, looking at me through the same gray eyes as his father’s. Very disconcerting.

Sly, who had collapsed atop Michael, started in tickling again. Mike released Michael and rolled away. The youth bounded to his feet holding the squirming, scrawny boy in a headlock.

“Save the energy for the arithmetic.” Michael knuckled Sly’s head, sending out a spray of grass clippings. “We have two whole pages of it to do, squirt. We’d better get started, because I have to go home and do my own homework.”

Reluctantly, Sly settled down, still breathing hard, still grinning so big his face might have split. He looked up at Michael with absolute adoration. I didn’t blame him.

Mike got up and brushed himself off, managing to shoulder-bump the others a few times as he rose. This was a new side of Mike. I roughhouse with my daughter, I tease with Mike. But it’s pretty tame stuff in comparison.

They were all looking at me, as if I had come with some message. Or a wet blanket. I said, “We’re going to get dinner, Michael. Will you two join us?”

“We already ate here,” Michael said.

“Pig vomit,” Sly confirmed.

“And bats’ asses,” Michael added. “It was great.”

I couldn’t laugh yet. Watching Michael gave me such a strange feeling. Here was a younger, probably more handsome, maybe more saintly version of Mike. Whatever, he was Mike’s product. A magnificent product. Like a rush I was hit with how deeply I adored Mike and everything about him. I stood there as if stricken, gasping as if I had been wrestling. I think Mike mistook my quietude for disapproval.

“Girls,” Mike said, grabbing me in a headlock. “Girls can’t take it.”

“Can too,” I said, punching his hard backside. “Just not now.”

He kissed my cheek then, and let go. “Can’t take it, but they sure can dish it.”

Michael was watching us. “We saw one of your films in sociology, something about old people who live alone. I told the class my dad’s girlfriend made it and no one believed me.”

“Want me to write a note to the teacher?” I asked, jangled by the sound of “my dad’s girlfriend.”

“No big thing.” He shrugged. “Dad says you’re working on a film now. I wouldn’t mind tagging along on a shoot.”

“Me, too,” Sly chirped.

“Fine. I’ll put you both to work.”

Mike tucked in his shirt, straightened his tie. He said, “Sly, we brought you another picture. Want to see it?”

Sly’s entire being lit up, given another chance to nail the girl’s killer. I pulled a manila envelope out of my bag and handed it to Michael. There was a single eight-by-ten glossy inside that Guido had managed to get for us from the files of Central Casting. Elizabeth had told Mike that Ricco Zambotti was an actor.

Ricco had looks, big pale eyes with long Mel Gibson lashes, curly blond hair, big white teeth. The statistics printed under the face claimed he was six-three, 190 pounds, thirty-four-inch waist, forty-eight-inch chest. Martha had said Elizabeth’s daytime sneak-in friend was beefy. Ricco qualified as beefy. Prime, maybe, but still beefy.

Ricco’s coloring was a problem. When Sly first described the man he saw slit Pisces’ throat, he had said the man had dark hair.

Michael sat back down on the grass, Sly tucked in beside him. Together they looked at Ricco for a long time.

Mike wandered over behind them. “What do you think, Sly?” Sly squinted up his little fox face. “Dunno.”

I fished some felt-tip pens out of the bottom of my bag and sat down beside Sly.

I offered him the pens. “One time, Hilly colored in the hair of a picture of a little blond girl to see if that would make her look more like Hilly.”

“She told me.” Sly took a black pen from my hand and took off the cap. “Only it wasn’t her who done it. It was her mother. She told Hilly she was kidnapped and all these people were looking for her to get her.”

Mike frowned. “Get her how?”

“Like, do her,” Sly said. “Just like they done.”

“Why didn’t you tell us this sooner?” Mike asked.

Sly shrugged. “Guess I didn’t think of it. Guess it just came to me now.”

“Did she say who these people were?”

“No. Except that the only person in the world who knew and could save her from them was her father. And she didn’t know where he was.”

Sly bent over the picture and started to color in the hair. He had made only a couple of strokes before he looked up at Michael with anxiety. “I messed up. I can’t color good. I can’t do it.”