Blacklist (16 page)

I had only seen Marc Whitby dead, by flashlight. In the picture, he was smiling, pointing at the theater doors, but his essential seriousness was still evident. Despite having his father’s height, he looked very like his mother, with her slender bones and bronze skin.

“I took that,” Amy said. “We went on a walking tour of Ballantine’s haunts, and of FTP sites, and he liked this one particularly.”

Mrs. Whitby clutched it to her breast, her face finally cracking into grief. “My baby, my baby,” she crooned.

Harriet and Amy pulled her to a chair and knelt on either side of her. I went back to the kitchen to confront the angry housekeeper.

“Did anything in this house look different to you when you came in this morning?”

“Don’t start in on me about the dust, I’ve had it. If it wasn’t for Mr. Whitby being dead and me knowing him all this time, I wouldn’t stay around here to be insulted.”

“I don’t care about dust or no dust,” I said. “It’s the house. I’ve been looking for his papers; they’re gone.”

“If you’re accusing me of stealing-” She smacked the coffeepot down so hard the glass carafe broke. “Now see what you’ve done.”

“Listen to me for a minute,” I said, my voice rising a half register in exasperation. “I know you and Mrs. Whitby have been in each other’s hair, but I’m not part of that fight. I want to know where he kept his papers. I want to know what you noticed when you came in. Maybe someone was here stealing them, or maybe he kept them someplace else.”

She began to pick up the pieces of glass. “The door. It wasn’t locked right. I thought, maybe he left in a hurry and forgot to put the deadbolt on, but he was a careful man, careful and saving, you know, because he didn’t make a lot of money at that magazine, and what he made he spent on this house, this house and that dancer he was so crazy about. But I never came here once all the years I’ve been working for him and found only the one lock on.”

I nodded. So someone had been in here. “Did you ever find anyone here with him when you came in? Or signs of a lover?”

“He was a man. He had a man’s normal instincts.”

I looked at her speculatively. She wasn’t that old, and beneath her frown and ostentatious bustle she wasn’t unattractive, but when I put out a tentative question she bristled. She’d been interested and he hadn’t? It might explain her aggressive possessiveness when the Whitbys arrived this morning. Something to ask the neighbors, whether anyone had come and gone at odd hours. An angry lover could have keys. She-he-could have driven Marcus Whitby out to a remote place to die.

In the meantime, I went through the motions here, asking Rita Murchison to come with me to the second floor to see what was out of place. She opened the drawers and cupboards Amy Blount and I had already inspected, but all she could tell me was that the stack of notebooks he usually had on his desktop was gone.

CHAPTER 16

Burke and Hare

I found Mr. Whitby in the basement, inspecting the furnace. “He got a good model, the one I told him to buy. Good fuel rating. I told him he needed that up north here. Of course he knew all about winter, going to the University of Michigan like he did. He wasn’t good with his hands, I never wanted him to have to be a handyman, but I talked him through some of the work when he decided to do this house himself. He was methodical, he did things right. You see how he laid that tile in the bathroom? He called me, we talked it through, he did it right. ‘Course, a furnace, I told him not to try installing that himself, get a plumber, spend the extra money, but he bought the model I recommended.”

I looked respectfully at the furnace for a few minutes before taking Mr. Whitby upstairs to collect his family. I persuaded Rita Murchison to give me her keys just a loan, I said, offering to pay her for the time she’d taken to come here. Money and keys changed hands while the family lingered in the living room.

While I drove the family back to the Drake, I tried to urge Mrs. Whitby to return to Atlanta. “There’s something serious going on here, and I don’t know how much time it will take before we can get it sorted out.”

“I know something’s serious,” she said in her leaden voice. “My son is dead.”

“But how he died-“

“I don’t care how he died.”

“Edwina,” her husband said. “Edwina, we’ve had all this out before now. Listen to the lady. What do you mean, Miss-I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.”

“Warshawski,” I said, “but people call me VI. All of your son’s papers are missing. I think someone came back to his house with his keys and scooped up all his notes and computer files. They even took time to wipe out his hard drive. This is a street where the kids at least notice who’s coming and going; I might be able to canvass the neighbors and see if anyone noticed a stranger here Sunday night. In the meantime, getting a proper autopsy performed is the most urgent task. We need to know how Marc died.”

In the seat next to me, Mrs. Whitby moaned but didn’t interrupt again. “I will be looking at everything your son was doing over the last few weeks,” I continued. “I don’t expect anything terrible to emerge about him, but-if it comes to that, I won’t hide evidence of a crime. Within that constraint, I will be working for you and-“

“My boy never did a criminal deed in his life,” Mr. Whitby growled. “If you’re trying to imply that he did, we’ll stop this business right now and take him home.”

“No, sir, I’m not implying that. I just want you to be aware that an investigation like this doesn’t follow a straight path.”

“I am not having any investigation done that frames my baby as a criminal,” Mrs. Whitby said. “That’s why I never wanted you to start your digging around in the first place.”

I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Amy lean over to murmur something to Harriet. After a short dialogue, Harriet said, “VI. isn’t out to frame Marc. And if we don’t let her finish the investigation, we’ll always have that nagging worry about why he did die. And Mama, Daddy, you two should go home. We’re spending a fortune on that hotel. I can stay with Amy until-until things are cleared up: the office urged me to take all the time I need.”

“I just can’t bear to go home with my baby lying in a drawer in the morgue,” Mrs. Whitby fretted.

“Harry’s right; we can’t afford to stay in that hotel for God knows how long,” Mr. Whitby said. “But if you want to stay on, we could move into Marc’s house, I suppose.”

“Not until a forensics team has been through it,” I said.

They argued it over among themselves while I turned onto Lake Shore Drive. The lake, at its lowest level in a century, looked sullen, not the roiling of a usual stormy winter, but the dull surface of a creature in retreat. Mrs. Whitby, staring through the windshield, seemed just as remote.

When I pulled up in front of the Drake, they still hadn’t decided who would stay and who would go, but Mr. Whitby had agreed that I could go ahead with “my business.” Amy got out with them, but after she’d hugged Harriet and her parents she climbed into the front seat.

“I can drop you at the train,” I said, “but I don’t have time to take you home.”

“I thought I’d ride with you, see what kind of help you need.”

I opened my mouth to protest but shut it again. I did need help, and Amy Blount was a skilled researcher. I invited her to come with me to my office while I tried calling the cops. “We’ll decide what to do next when I see what kind of reaction I get.”

Amy lifted her brows at the unorganized stacks of files, but didn’t say anything. She perched on Mary Louise’s chair and watched me while I tried the police. I started with Terry Finchley, a detective in the First District’s violent crimes unit. Terry had been Mary Louise’s boss when she was with the police. He was also a close friend of a Chicago cop I’d loved and lost, and he’s never quite forgiven me for how I treated Conrad. Still,, we’ve sort of worked together several times, and he takes my opinion seriously.

After I’d laid out such facts as I had, Finchley said, “It’s a jurisdictional problem, Vic. He died out in DuPage County. He’s their puppy.”

“But, Finch, he lived here on the South Side. His car’s here, his house has been cleaned out.”

“A car in front of an empty house isn’t evidence of a crime, Vic. I can’t send a forensics team down there, or ask the Twenty-first District to order one in. No crime has been committed there.”

“Burglary-“

“On your say-so only. He could have burned his papers. He could have had a power surge and lost all his files. No sale, Vic. You can talk to the captain, of course, but I can’t take it on.”

The captain was Bobby Mallory, my father’s oldest friend on the force. Like the Finch, he sort of respects my work without liking my doing it. In his case, it has nothing to do with my old lover and everything to do with my being his friend’s daughter. He gave me less time than the Finch had, and finished by saying, “The last I heard, your intuition wasn’t considered grounds for Chicago to demand jurisdiction of a body from DuPage County. We got five hundred unsolved homicides here in town. I’m not creating a political stink by trying to catch five-oh-one. Eileen wants to see you for dinner. Call her, set up a date. That nice boy of yours still being a hero in Afghanistan?”

“He’s over there being something,” I snapped. “You watch your step until he comes home.”

Meaning, don’t sleep around, Penelope, even if Ulysses is lying in the arms of a British journalist. I hung up savagely on that thought.

“You’re not seeing me at my most effective,” I told Amy. “But at least I can find out if the Cook County ME will do the autopsy privately.” I tried Bryant Vishnikov at the morgue, but he had the day off.

When I reached him at home, he snarled, “If I’d wanted live patients paging me day and night, I wouldn’t have gone into pathology. I thought my home phone was unlisted, anyway.”

“Is it? You didn’t tell me that. Marc Whitby’s father wants a second autopsy performed on hi., son. Would you be willing to do that?”

He waited a minute to .. ;swer. “It’s something I do do, and can do, but it’s not something Cook County can pay for, Vic. And you know, if I do a thorough autopsy and simply-find that the guy drowned with alcohol in his system, the family may not accept those results.”

“What would you charge?”

“For the tox screens, and the time and space, it could go as high as three thousand.”

I had no idea what kind of resources the Whitbys had, but I told Vishnikov to proceed and asked how we should get the body to him.

It would help to have a third party, like a funeral director, do it, so I don’t have to step on Jerry Hastings’s toes by going to him direct. So, Vic,” he added, as I was preparing to hang up, “don’t go babbling about this to the press. It could be very hard on me politically to look as though I’m taking a public position against DuPage’s ME.”

“Someone’s going to have to know,” I objected, “unless you’re planning on stealing his body out of their morgue and doing this in your basement.” He burst out laughing. “You’re outrageous, Warshawski, making me sound like Burke and Hare. But I still don’t want this broadcast.”

“Copy that, Houston,” I said. “Your ass will be draped with the same discreet purple our government is using on the statues of justice.”

He laughed again and hung up.

While I’d been on the phone, Amy had been organizing papers. She’d cleared a space on Mary Louise’s desktop and had spread out the contents of my Larchmont file to study.

“You’re good,” she said, looking up at me. “You don’t bully unless it’s the only way, do you? What are you doing next? Want me to hold Mrs. Whitby’s hand while you move Marc’s body?”

“No. I want you to find out everything you can about Kylie Ballantine.” She opened her eyes wide at me. “Whatever for-oh. You think that’s why Marc went out to this mansion? Why?”

I grimaced. “I don’t know, that’s why. But I only have a couple of starting points. He’s been thinking about her day and night for months, he’s writing a book about her-and all his files have disappeared.”

I pulled the printout on Ballantine that Aretha Cummings had given me yesterday from my briefcase and handed it to Amy Blount. I’d read it before I went to bed-I summarized the high points for Blount.

Kylie Ballantine had been both a dancer and an anthropologist. She’d been trained in classical ballet, but she’d gone to Africa to study tribal dance in French Equatorial Africa (modern-day Cameroon and Gabon, I was guessing). On her return she’d started the Ballet Noir, a deliberate pun on Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, incorporating African dance into classical ballet, using costumes and masks from Africa. With the Negro Theater Project money, she’d done an ambitious ballet called Regeneration, which depicted an African-American sense of awakening and self-respect as people reclaimed their African heritage.

“It’d be great to see that,” Blount commented. “There probably aren’t films of it, though. What did she do after the theater project lost its funding?” “She went back to Africa, I think.” I thumbed through the printout. “I know she wrote a couple of books on tribal dance, and taught briefly at the University of Chicago.”

“That must have been something special,” Blount said dryly. “Black woman at that school in the forties or fifties. No wonder she took early retirement.” She took the printout from me to examine Whitby’s brief paragraph on that part of Ballantine’s life. “It looks like Marc was really only interested in her dance career. And then-I see. She ran a private dance studio from her home in Bronzeville until she died in ‘seventy-nine. Okay. I’ll see what else I can figure out. What are you going to do?”

“Go back to his house and canvass the neighbors. It occurred to me, private as he was, there might have been a lover in the picture you and Harriet never heard about. The kids on that block see everything. Someone had to notice something about him.”

Amy looked at me speculatively from under her thick lashes. “You know, I’m second to none as a researcher, and I’d be glad to go on-line, or down to the Vivian Harsh Collection. But I’m wondering if I wouldn’t be more effective on that street than you.”

I felt my cheeks grow hot, but I remembered the cautious response I’d already received this morning. The kids might talk to me as readily as to a black woman, but the adults were more likely to be open with Amy.

“Point taken. Do you have a cell phone?” We exchanged mobile numbers. “I’m not sure what I can pay you for this-I hadn’t factored that into the estimate I gave Harriet for taking the case. But your help will make a big difference, and I don’t expect you to donate it.”

She shook her head. “It feels good to be doing something. Even after Marc moved here, I didn’t know him all that well, but Harry-Harrietis like my own sister. Doing something active to track down what happened to Marc, it’s the one thing I can do for her. You don’t need to be paying me.”