Melancholy Baby

15

There were planes from Chicago to the Quad Cities, but I was certain they would be small and scary, and I chose to rent a car. The drive from O’Hare Airport is almost due west across the Illinois prairie, where the flat farmland is made various only now and then by the rise of a silo or the bigger rise of a grain elevator. I got there about seven o’clock in the evening, and checked into a motel in Moline, near the Quad Cities airport. Moline was on the east bank of the Mississippi River, along with Rock Island. Bettendorf and Davenport were in Iowa, west of the river.

Talk Radio WMOL was located in a low cinder-block building on John Deere Road, and in the morning, I went over there. I spent some time in the reception area, while the receptionist tried to figure out whom I should talk to. And I waited some more while the person I should talk to decided if he wanted to talk with me. While I waited, I had to listen to the current program broadcasting on WMOL. It was a call-in show. The host was discussing abortion with callers. The program didn’t seem very controversial to me. The host was opposed to abortion and so were all the callers. I looked at the photos of the on-air talent on the wall near the reception desk. There was a woman and three men. The woman and two of the men looked young. WMOL was probably a stepping stone. The third man looked old. For him, WMOL was probably a stepping stone in the other direction.

Finally, a small, neat young man in a white shirt and a red tie came into the reception area and looked at me.

“Miss Randall?”

“Yes.”

“Hi, I’m Jeff. I’m the station manager,” he said, and gestured toward the door behind him. “Come on in.”

Jeff’s office was small, and there were more pictures on the wall. The on-air personalities were there, and a lot of other pictures that were meaningless to me except for a picture of Adlai Stevenson shaking hands with someone in front of the WMOL building, and a youthful-looking publicity still of Lolly Drake in front of a WMOL microphone.

“She worked here?” I said.

“Fresh out of law school,” Jeff said. “Half-hour call-in at noon. She answered legal questions.”

“I’ll be damned,” I said.

“Everybody’s got to start someplace,” Jeff said.

“You hope,” I said.

“I do indeed. How can I help you?”

“I’m looking for a man who appears to have worked here in the early 1980s,” I said. “Man named George Markham.”

“Hell,” Jeff said. “In the early eighties, I was in grammar school.”

I nodded.

“Do you have personnel records?”

“Probably, somewhere,” Jeff said. “But I got something better.”

He leaned over his desk and pressed an intercom button and said, “Millie, could you come in here.”

Then he leaned back and grinned at me.

“I got Millie,” he said. “Millie was here when Adlai Stevenson cut the ribbon.”

Millie, when she came in, was tall and angular and sort of mean-looking, with a lot of small wrinkles on her hard face. Her hair was gray and curly and cut short. Her cheeks had the sunken look of a longtime smoker.

“Whaddya need, Jeffy?” she said, and sat down next to me.

Jeff glanced down at my card on his desk to refresh his memory.

“Sunny Randall, Millie McNeeley.”

Millie reached across and gave me a hard handshake.

“Nice meetin’ ya,” she said. Her voice was raspy.

“Miss Randall is a detective from Boston.”

“No shit?” Millie said. “A girl detective?”

“Me and Nancy Drew,” I said. “Do you remember George Markham?”

“George? Sure. He was an announcer here, you know, the booth guy.” She dropped her raspy voice and cupped a hand behind her ear. “This is WMOL, Quad City Sound.”

“We say ‘Quad City Talk’ now,” Jeff said.

I took a picture of George Markham out of my purse and held it up.

“Is this him?” I said.

Millie had reading glasses on a string around her neck. She put them on and took the picture and looked at it, holding it away from her as far as she could.

“Sure,” she said. “That’s George. Wow, he sure didn’t get better-looking as he got older, did he?”

“Was he good-looking when you knew him?”

“Oh, you bet,” Millie said, “Twenty years ago. I had a little yen for him myself.”

“Did anything work out?” I said.

Millie grinned at me.

“None of your damn business,” she said.

“Of course it’s not,” I said. “Was he married then?”

“His wife was,” Millie said.

“But he fooled around?”

“I’m not one to tell tales out of school,” Millie said.

“And he worked here in 1981?”

“Lemme see, it was around the same time as Lolly. She came in 1980. He was here in ’79 and left in... ’84.”

“Did he have a child?” I said.

“Not that I know about.”

“Was his wife pregnant?”

“I only saw her a couple of times when she’d come to the station. A real pickle-puss.”

“She look pregnant?”

“No.”

“So what was he like?”

Millie took a pack of Chesterfield cigarettes, the long, unfiltered ones, shook one loose, took it from the package with her mouth, tossed the pack on the desk, and lit the cigarette with a Zippo lighter. She took a deep inhale, let the smoke out in little smoke rings, took the cigarette out of her mouth, and held it between the first two fingers of her right hand.

“He was a slick one,” Millie said.

She’d been holding cigarettes for a long time. The fingers holding this one were nicotine-stained.

“Like how?” I said.

“Well, he let you know that he was just passing through here. Let you know he’d worked a lot of big markets, and knew a lot of big-time people.”

“But he was working here,” I said.

“Hey,” Jeff said.

I smiled.

“Sorry,” I said. “But...” I shrugged.

“Yeah, yeah,” Jeff said. “I know.”

“Did he say where he’d worked before?” I said.

“Nope. He was a little older than most of the girls who worked here, except for me, and he spent a lot of time snowing them about how he’d worked with William B. Williams in New York, or Milt Rosenberg in Chicago.”

“You believe him?”

She snorted and took a drag on her Chesterfield.

“Hell, no,” she said. “He just wanted to get their pants off.”

“Did he succeed?”

Millie shrugged.

“Got no way to know,” she said.

“Well,” I said, “it certainly sounds like he fooled around on his wife.”

“I’m not saying he did, or didn’t.”

“And,” I said, “as far as you know, there were no children.”

“Far as I know. ’Course, I never went to his house or anything.”

“Did anyone? Was he close to anyone that might still be around?”

“None that I know of.”

“This is a transient business,” Jeff said.

“ ’Cept for old Millie,” Millie said. “Been here since 1950. Started as a typist right out of high school. Station played Patti Page music.”

“The singing rage,” I said.

“You’re older than you look,” Millie said.

“Not really. My friend Spike has all her old records.”

“God knows why,” Millie said.

“God knows,” I said. “Did you like George Markham?”

Millie thought about that for a minute, while smoking her Chesterfield.

“No,” she said. “I didn’t. He was kind of cute and sexy, but you got past that. He was the kind of guy willing to spend his life saying, ‘This is WMOL Quad City Sound.’ ”

“ ‘Talk,’ ” Jeff said.

“He’d be a nice night?” I said. “A terrible week?”

Millie smiled a big smile at me.

“You know the type,” she said.

“I do,” I said. “Too well.”