High Profile

“I am too old for you,” Ellen said.

“No,” Jesse said. “You’re not.”

Ellen smiled and bowed her head slightly toward Jesse in acknowledgment.

“I always thought it was connected to the womanizing,” she said.

“Womanizing,” Jesse said.

“Yes. He was compulsive,” she said.

“You think he did it because of his, ah, secret?” Jesse said. “Or that it was his secret?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “What I do know is that no matter how many women he had, his aloneness remained visceral.”

“He was arrested outside Baltimore,” Jesse said. “In 1987, for public indecency.”

Ellen smiled sadly.

“No doubt with a young woman,” she said.

“Yes. In the backseat of a car in the parking lot of a shopping mall.”

“He liked young women,” Ellen said.

“How young did he like them?” Jesse said.

“Sometimes maybe too young,” Ellen said. “I don’t know. If that’s the only time he was caught, he’s very lucky.”

“Girl was Bonnie Faison, she was nineteen,” Jesse said. “Mean anything to you?”

“No. But I wasn’t with him by then. He was Stephanie’s problem in 1987.”

“Did he fool around when he was with you.”

“Jesse,” she said. “He could no more not fool around than he could not breathe. I don’t think it was really a choice for him.”

“So you assume he fooled around when he was with Stephanie?”

“Of course.”

“And Lorrie?”

“Of course.”

“Do you know Carey Longley?” Jesse said.

“The woman who died with him?”

“Yes.”

“No, but I can describe her. Quite young. Quite pretty. Quite amazed to be with a man like Walton.”

“She was young and pretty,” Jesse said.

“I’ve known a hundred of her,” Ellen said.

“She was also ten weeks pregnant,” Jesse said.

Ellen sat silently for a moment.

“With Walton’s child?”

“Yes.”

“Oh,” Ellen said, “my God.”

Jesse waited. As he watched, Ellen Migliore teared up.

“How awful,” she said. “To come so close, to finally come so close...”

“He wanted children?”

“Terribly,” she said. “At least during our time.”

“And you never had any.”

“No,” she said.

“Do you know why?”

“No,” she said. “We never sought medical advice. I guess we were each more comfortable assuming the other one was at fault.”

“Have you had any since?”

“Three,” she said.

“So you figured it was his, ah, fault,” Jesse said.

“I know, fault isn’t the right word, and by the time I was having my children, I wasn’t really thinking much about Walton — but yes, one would have assumed that he was the infertile one in our marriage.”

“Apparently neither of you were,” Jesse said.

“He never had children in either of his other marriages,” Ellen said.

“Maybe this time he got medical help.”

“That would not be the Walton Weeks I knew,” Ellen said.

“People change,” Jesse said.

“Not without help,” Ellen said.

“Psychiatric help?”

“Yes. And Walton would never consider it.”

Jesse smiled.

“Sometimes people change,” he said.

Ellen shrugged slightly.

“Or circumstances do,” she said.

“You think he needed shrink help,” Jesse said.

“The infertility thing bothered him,” she said. “And that distance-around-him thing, and... the womanizing. Yes, he needed help.”

“Do you know the other wives?” Jesse said.

“I’ve met them. I don’t really know them.”

“Do you know why he was in Boston?”

“No.”

“Do you know of any connection with Paradise.”

“Of course,” she said. “You don’t know?”

Jesse shook his head.

“He used to come here as a boy. His parents would rent a place every summer. He and his mother would spend the summers here. His father would come on the weekends.”

“Where was the house?” Jesse said.

“He said it was near the beach. Some college professor went to Europe every summer and rented his house out.”

“Did he ever come here later?” Jesse said.

“Not that I know of. But it was always, pardon the pun, a paradise lost for him. He always talked about it as if it were magical.”

“Do you have any idea who might have killed him?”

“No,” she said.

Jesse was quiet.

“But,” she said, “I’ll bet it was a woman, or about a woman.”

“Do you have an alibi for the time of his death?” Jesse said.

“I know you have to ask,” she said. “Yes, I have an alibi.”

“I haven’t told you exactly when he died,” Jesse said.

“It doesn’t matter,” Ellen Migliore said. “I haven’t left Italy in five years.”

“And you can prove it,” Jesse said.

“Yes.”

“That should cover you,” Jesse said. “Do you have time to give us a statement today?”

“Of course,” she said. “Will there be any kind of memorial service for Walton?”

“Not that I know of,” Jesse said.

“How sad. Shuffled off the stage so quickly, and with so few trumpets.”

“He may not care,” Jesse said.

Ellen nodded.

“I’ll ask Molly Crane to take your statement,” Jesse said.

“Police chiefs don’t take statements?” she said.

“Police chiefs tend to screw up the tape recorder,” Jesse said.

“I’m not so sure,” Ellen said, “that I believe you’ve ever screwed up anything.”

“Maybe a few relationships,” Jesse said.

28

Some people,” Dix said, “find that they are infertile and are saddened but say, in effect, ‘We still have each other,’ and get on with their lives. Some adopt. Some fear infertility as a personal failure and refuse to be tested, or even admit to it. These people usually blame their partner.”