Death Before Facebook

didn’t she? Someone older?”
    “Kit Brazil?”
    “Kit. That’s it. I met her at the funeral. Maybe I could call her.” He picked up a phone book from the coffee table. Simultaneously and for no apparent reason, Caitlin began to cry. “Oh, God, you wouldn’t know how to change a baby, would you?”
    Skip smiled. “I’m afraid not. Not if you don’t have any diapers.”
    He looked so sad and helpless, she said, “You should be with relatives today. Can I call someone for you?”
    He shrugged. “There isn’t anyone. Just me and the baby now. Us and the good Lord.” In the dim light, she thought she saw a glint that might have been a tear. He took out a handkerchief.
    “Were you close to your daughter?”
    “Not since she had the baby. Seemed to forget about me then. Say, you don’t know where I could get a nanny, do you?”
    “Sorry, I don’t.”
    He’d picked Caitlin up, but she only wailed more. Skip didn’t look forward to interviewing him over the din, but didn’t see much choice. If she held Caitlin herself, she’d lose her focus.
    “Mr. Marquer, it doesn’t seem to me as if you know how to take care of a baby.” It wasn’t what she’d come about, but first things first.
    He blustered. “I can do okay. I’ve got the key to Lenore’s. I can go over and get some stuff—Caitlin’s bed and everything. Mothers have babies and they don’t know anything. It’s no different. Lenore was only a kid—what did she know that I don’t? I raised her, you know.”
    “From this age?”
    “Her mother died when she was nine. But I was always around—I was a regular dad.”
    His blustery determination wiped away the sadness. He set Caitlin down.
    “Okay,” she said. “I’m sure you need to get to Lenore’s. I’ll tell you what I came about.”
    Skip longed to pick up the baby; she had a strange need to try to comfort this tiny being who’d lost her child-mother, a mother who was probably doing a lousy job, but who at least loved her child. Skip thought it possible that no one loved Caitlin now; Butsy didn’t even seem to know her.
    “I want to talk about Marguerite Terry.”
    “Marguerite? I barely know her.”
    “Maybe now, Butsy”—she was through with “Mr. Marquer”—“but you used to know her pretty well, didn’t you?”
    “No.” He sounded puzzled, but it was probably an act.
    “Come on. Go back in time about twenty-seven years. To when you had the affair with her.”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    Caitlin pulled at Skip’s hand, put out her arms to be picked up, as if she knew, somehow had intuited, what had happened, and she wanted to be held. Skip’s attention, which should have been on Butsy, slipped over to her.
    Perhaps because she was upset with herself, she spoke more sharply than she had to: “Can it, Butsy. The kid needs a home. You want to stay out of jail, you better talk.”
    “Jail? For what? Look, I’m a churchgoing man—”
    She just loved that one. As if going to church meant a person never broke the law or his marriage vows. She spoke harshly. “You figure it out.”
    He was silent for a moment, either trying to catch on or pretending. “Wait a minute. If I had an affair, I must have shot Leighton? Which means I killed Geoff? Is that what this is all about? What about Lenore? You want to give me one good reason why I’d kill my own daughter?”
    Caitlin set up a howl, a pathetic white heap on the dirty brown rug. Skip’s nerves were starting to fray, badly.
    “Don’t fuck with me, Butsy. Start talking—loud enough for me to hear over that.”
    “I didn’t even know Marguerite in those days. I mean, I saw her around. She sang in clubs and she was kind of a local figure about town. But I never met her to say hello to until Cole and I went into partnership. I didn’t even meet him until six or eight years ago.”
    “Well, why would she say you were lovers then?”
    “Marguerite said that?”
    Caitlin yelled louder. Skip didn’t speak.
    “She’s protecting Pearce.” He said it in the tones of a person making a big discovery. “Pearce Randolph got it on with her. I remember it—that was the phrase he used. He ‘got it on with her.’ He bragged about it.”
    “When was this?”
    “I don’t know—you know what they say about the sixties—if you can remember, you weren’t there.”
    “You better start remembering fast.”
    So I can get out of here.
    Neither she nor Butsy was making a move to help Caitlin. Skip was fed up with