Monument to Murder - Margaret Truman [15]
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He’d met Marylee Greene shortly after joining the Washington, D.C., police department. Their mutual attraction was instantaneous. It was also culture shock for the Brooklyn-born Robert Brixton. Marylee was nothing like the girls he knew back home, nor were any of the other young women he’d met in the nation’s capital. They tended to be bubbly and gushy, their southern accents only adding to that persona. There wasn’t any gushing in his Brooklyn home while he was growing up, with his dour father and taciturn mother.
Marylee had been a cheerleader at the University of Maryland, and Brixton expected her to launch into a “Give me an M, give me an A” at any moment no matter the setting or occasion.
They’d crossed paths for the first time when Brixton, a rookie patrolman, was summoned to a restaurant where a customer had gotten out of hand over his bill. Marylee was on duty as a hostess—she’d majored in European literature and hadn’t yet found a job in D.C. calling for that particular knowledge—and greeted Brixton as he and his partner came through the door. The fracas was quickly settled. The irate customer left, and Marylee gave Brixton the information he needed to complete his report. She was taken with his strong, youthful face and snappy uniform, he with her dazzling smile, shapely figure, and fashionably styled blond hair. He didn’t know whether asking for a date while on duty was against MPD rules but did it anyway.
They were married six months later, to the chagrin of her mother, who considered police service a necessary albeit lower-class way to make a living.
Marylee became pregnant the first month of their marriage and Jill was born nine months later. The second pregnancy occurred as soon as Marylee’s physician told her it was okay to have sex again. Janet arrived nine months after that.
Things went downhill from there. Brixton had become disenchanted with his job, which was a mild reaction compared to Marylee’s revised view of being married to a cop. With her mother, arms crossed, supervising the move, Marylee, Jill, and Janet vacated the apartment in The District and headed to the family home in Maryland. Brixton didn’t contest the divorce or the amount of child support and alimony. Marylee’s mother had been left a lot of money when her husband died, and Brixton got off easy. Within months he’d resigned from Washington’s MPD, been hired by the Savannah Police Department, and moved to that quintessential southern city where there were plenty of other Marylees that he assiduously avoided. Flo Combes was originally from Staten Island. Enough said.
Brixton’s daughters considered him a bit of a flake, which was okay with him. He called weekly, sent the checks on time until they reached eighteen, and managed a visit every couple of months. He missed watching them grow up but didn’t wallow in that disappointment. The older girl, Jill, went on to receive a degree in accounting from Maryland University and landed a good job with a firm in Bethesda, where she met her husband. Brixton had attended the wedding a year ago and proudly walked her down the aisle. Janet proved to be less conventional. She dropped out of college and became involved with the music industry in capacities that Brixton never fully understood. Most recently she claimed to be promoting rock concerts in the D.C. area featuring bands Brixton had never heard of, nor wanted to. He knew she was into the rock world’s drug scene and had warned her on many occasions of the ramifications of that life. She always listened but he was certain that his words fell on deaf ears. That he was now a private investigator, a private eye, amused Jill and Janet, whose knowledge