Deep Pockets by Linda Barnes Page A

done something, displeased someone. She’d never even seen a photograph of him. She never talked much about her life, but every once in awhile — She was well traveled.”
    “How did a poor kid from an Indian tribe get to be so well traveled?”
    “The woman who raised her made a lot of money from gambling casinos. They traveled together at first. There was a falling-out, but by then Denali rowed, and her rowing took her places. She’d done things you never hear about in Cambridge. She’d lived in the desert and worked on a ranch. In Switzerland, she met her great-uncle on her father’s side, an old man, and he told her her father’s name.”
    I wondered whether the great-uncle was the elusive next of kin.
    “Harvard must have been quite a jump.”
    “She did well in my class.”
    “Did you know she didn’t get along with her roommate?”
    “No.”
    “Did you know she was living in a half-built addition by the side of the boathouse? With no heat?”
    He swallowed. “I didn’t know. It’s not like I picked her up at her front door.”
    “Why did she break it off?”
    “What does that have to do with anything?”
    “Did she find someone else?”
    “No!”
    “How do you know?”
    “I don’t know. I—”
    “Was she pregnant?”
    “What?”
    “Could she have been pregnant?”
    He took off his sunglasses, and his eyes were fierce. “You’re saying you think she killed herself rather than bear a black man’s child? Is that what you’re saying?”
    “I’m saying she might have thought she had no way out.”
    “This is Cambridge, Massachusetts. This is the fucking twenty-first century. You’re telling me she wouldn’t have had an abortion.”
    “Some women won’t. If she had religious—”
    “If she had religious scruples, she probably wouldn’t have killed herself. What you said bordered on racist, that she’d rather die than—”
    “Don’t put that on me. I might as well call you a sexist pig for not understanding that for some women, ending a pregnancy is not just a medical prodecure, but I’m not going to take that way out.”
    “You want a way out?”
    “I want it clear: I wasn’t hired to investigate a suicide.”
    “I don’t want you to. I want you to handle the blackmailer. Will you do that? Look, I made a mistake. I slept with a student. If I were white or she were black, I might be able to weather the storm, but I can’t, not with my department head against me.”
    I didn’t say anything. The light was going out of the sky.
    “Don’t people deserve second chances?” he asked.
    A good question, I thought. But irrelevant. Who the hell gets what they deserve?
    “Call me as soon as the blackmailer makes contact.”
    I left him sitting on the bench.
     
Chapter 7
     
    Paolina spent the night, so no Leon, not that I could have questioned him about his buddy, the professor. This whole business of her spending the night started as a cover story when Paolina’s family moved out of the Cambridge projects. They wanted to stay in the city, but the areas that used to be cheap turned gentrified and high-priced, so they wound up in a tiny house in Watertown. Paolina used my address to continue at the local high school. She started sleeping over occasionally, when band practice ran late, or if she pulled a detention.
    Then Marta found a part-time job as a bar hostess, and one of her friends agreed to stay with Paolina’s younger brothers two nights a week. We institutionalized Paolina’s occasional nights over. So far so good; Paolina seems to get along better with her mother the less she sees her.
    She’d never had her own room before. I’m no great shakes at decorating, but I can paint. She’d wanted pink, but I’d balked at the girlieness of it all, and we’d settled on a deep rose. I was taken back by her choice of decor. Her walls are plastered with the usual magazine pics of rock stars, but the main focus is a huge poster of Medellín, Colombia, stuff of her heritage and