Blacklist (17 page)

CHAPTER 17

Timmy’s in the Well

We spent some time on-line, me looking for the Negro Theater Project, Amy checking the trains to the western suburbs. Marc could have caught a nine-thirty, which would have set him down in the station nearest to New Solway at ten-twenty. He still would have been miles from Larchmont Hall. One of us would have to fit in time to hunt down any suburban cabs or buses that might have picked him up. I ground my teeth at that prospect.

When the Web yielded only two meager references to the Negro Theater Project and none at all to Kylie Ballantine, I drove the fifteen miles south to look at real documents in the Vivian Harsh Collection.

Amy took off for Bronzeville when I left for the library. She’d described the Harsh Collection before we separated. Harsh, who’d been the first African-American to head a branch of the library, had been a private collector of material on black writers and artists. When she died, she donated everything-photos, documents, booksto the city. The Harsh Collection was the best of its kind in America, next to one in Harlem.

To my surprise, the papers were housed in a room off a major library branch-I’d pictured the collection in its own building. The library itself was doing a bustling business, mostly with women bringing their young children in to look at books, but also the usual collection of homeless and elderly that a library gathers. It’s a respectable destination. It’s warm, you can be with other people. All reasons why the Web cannot take the place of your branch library. Also it had books. And an archivist who knew and loved his collection.

At first, Gideon Reed frowned over my request. Yes, he knew those papers well, but why did I want to see them?

“I know Marcus Whitby’s been looking at them for some time,” I said. “That’s why I’m here.”

When I explained my role in Whitby’s death-finding him, working for the familyand showed him my ID, the archivist unbent. Mr. Whitby had been a real scholar. They didn’t get many here, mostly students working on term papers just wanting a few facts about Martin Luther King, not that he didn’t love showing young people how to use books and documents, but there was something satisfying about seeing this collection in the hands of someone who truly appreciated it.

Reed set me up in a temperature-controlled room with photographs of black poets and artists on the walls. While Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes smiled down at me, I went through the same papers that Marcus Whitby had studied. The letters and other documents were encased in plastic sleeves. I tried to skim, looking for names or events that might mean something to me, but Ballantine had a fine, spiderlike handwriting and she’d often written in pencil, making deciphering a maddening task. She sometimes wrote on pages torn from school exercise books, sometimes on thin green paper, where her pale handwriting became even more undecipherable.

I read Ballantine’s correspondence with Franz Boas at Columbia over her discoveries in Africa, her correspondence with Hallie Flanagan about the staging of Regeneration, her angry letter to W E. B. DuBois’s wife after Congress pulled the plug on the Federal Theater Project.

We were doing good work, we were doing important work. The notion that a ballet like Regeneration, or your own Swing Mikado, are Communistinspired because we try to tell the truth about Race in this country-is enough to make me look seriously at Communism. I don’t know what I live on now-back to private dance classes for earnest little girls whose mothers tuck away a dime a week from washing white women’s clothes so

that their children can learn in my studio what would have been their birthright in Africa.

The archive was patchy, sometimes holding letters like Ballantine’s to Shirley Graham without Graham’s response, sometimes letters or typed notes to her without any way of telling what she’d written to the correspondent. Several typed ones in the late forties came from an anonymous committee (“… the Committee is grateful for your involvement in the benefit. We were able to raise $1700, which our patron matched.” “The next Committee meeting will be on June 17 at the Ingleside church”).

Right before the Second World War, Ballantine somehow got a grant from the University of Chicago to travel and study in Africa. How she spent the war years, or where, wasn’t clear, but in 1949 she signed a contract with University of Chicago Press for her book on Ritual Dance Among the Bantu of West Equatorial Africa. They paid her five hundred dollars. Perhaps that was a standard advance in 1949.

Her second book dealt explicitly with slavery, and the dances she was able to trace from America back to Africa. The Longest Leap: African Dance in American. Slavery didn’t come from an academic press but from Bayard Publishing. That was a bit of a surprise: maybe Ritual Dance Among the Bantu had sold better than you’d expect. Maybe Ballantine had lived on her royalties. Or perhaps Calvin Bayard had known her personally and wanted to support her.

I stared at the Bayard logo on the title page, the jagged outline of a lion, as if it could tell me something, but finally turned to the book itself. There were photographs of masks, photographs of shyly smiling African girls demonstrating dance steps, shyly smiling African-American girls demonstrating what were supposed to be similar steps-I couldn’t tell from the pictures. I read paragraphs here and there about where Ballantine had been, what she had seen, how it compared with the dances she observed in the American South. She wrote fiercely about the patronizing attitude of white America to black dance.

They ignore the history of civilizations far older than theirs, African civilizations which each step and ritual encode. In their eyes, we Africans exist shamelessly in the body, and our dances are thought to be only a sign of our mindlessness, leaving the mind itself to the high civilizations that think up atom bombs and gas chambers.

A yellowed article from the Daily Defender, dated from 1977, gave a few biographical facts. Ballantine had been born in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1911, but her family had moved to Chicago when she was six. She had attended Howard University, where she studied anthropology and dance. She’d gone to Columbia when Franz Boas was welcoming black students there, and achieved a master’s degree in anthropology before returning to Chicago, where she taught dance, performed dance, studied dance. In the Defender’s photograph, she was shown standing regally in front of a wall of African masks, wearing a dancer’s leotard and an African-print skirt.

The reporter had been more interested in her dance than in her academic career. He burbled in print over her energy-there she was, sixtysix, still dancing four hours a day, still teaching children in her Bronzeville home. He hadn’t asked how she’d spent the years from 1937 to 1977 except to discuss her trips to Africa-besides the two I’d already read about, she’d lived in Gabon for three years following its independence. The reporter did ask whether she felt any bitterness toward her treatment in the late fifties, and she had said that bitterness only wasted one’s energy.

I skimmed the rest of the papers, hoping for a diary or something personal, but there wasn’t much else here. A letter from the University of Chicago provost, dated October 1957, coldly stating that they would not need her services after the end of the fall quarter, but there was nothing from her to the university. Her contract with Bayard, a one-page document offering her seven hundred dollars. Not the advance of a commercially successful writer, after all.

Calvin Bayard’s bold thick signature stood out against the faded paper, making him seem vividly present in the room. It seemed odd for a commercial press to publish a book with such an academic title. Had he and Kylie Ballantine been friends, or even lovers? Bayard had published her, they lived in the same town-if you thought the Gold Coast and Bronzeville were the same town. If Bayard had known Ballantine personally, that could easily explain why Marc had gone to New Solway on Sunday evening-to see what Calvin Bayard remembered of her.

I stacked everything in a tidy pile to return to the archivist. Gideon Reed was talking earnestly to a teenage boy, showing him something in a fat reference book.

When I handed him the stack of Ballantine documents, Reed gave me a kind smile. “Did you find anything useful?”

“Nothing that shed direct light on what might have taken Marcus Whitby out to New Solway. It’s a bit of a stretch, but The Longest Leap was published by Calvin Bayard. He lives out there, so I’m going to drive out, see if Whitby tried to talk to him about Kylie Ballantine. Did Whitby ever mention Bayard?”

Reed shook his head. “It’s not like I saw him that often. I’m sure he did a lot of research I never knew anything about-and of course he worked full time, he had a lot of other stories to cover.”

“I read Ms. Ballantine’s interview in the Defender. Do you know what happened to her in the fifties? The reporter asked if she were bitter-was that because of the U of C firing her?”

The archivist turned reflexively to the article, but didn’t look at it. “Mr. Whitby was guessing she’d been blacklisted, but I don’t think he’d found any evidence to confirm that. She was never called to testify before Congress, and except for that one letter, I’m sure you saw the one she wrote when she was so angry about Congress canceling the Theater Project, she never discussed Communism.”

“What about something called `the Committee’? You know the one I mean? Could that have been considered a subversive group?”

He flipped through the plastic sleeves until he found the references, but he couldn’t shed any light on them. “I know Mr. Whitby wrote for her file under the Freedom of Information Act, but it’s like so many of those files: most of what you want to know is inked out so you can’t read it. Since September 11, they’ve made it harder to find out what records they’re keeping on the citizens. It’s kind of frustrating, our own government spying on us, then not letting us see what they claim we’ve been up to.”

When I asked if there were other Ballantine papers anywhere-a diary, or financial records, Reed shook his head again. “If there are, they’re not in a public archive. Her estate didn’t amount to much, and even though she was highly respected in the black community, no one had the kind of

money to do preservation or restoration in her home-it had to be sold to pay her debts. If there was some kind of trove of documents, I’m thinking they’re in the CID landfill by now.”

Reed paused to answer a question from a woman who’d been waiting for several minutes, then turned back to me. “Mr. Whitby did go through her old house. After she died, the bank or whoever bought it cut it into a bunch of little apartments, but Mr. Whitby hoped something might have been left in a basement or crawl space.”

“Did he find anything?”

Reed slowly shook his head. “That may have been why he called me, maybe a week or ten days ago. I wasn’t in and he left a message for me. I never did reach him when I tried calling back, but that could have been it-he knew I shared his interest in Kylie. If he’d found some papers, well, he would have wanted to show them to me.”

Another patron was trying to get the archivist’s attention. I turned to leave, feeling frustrated at how little information I was able to collect.

As I walked away from his desk, Reed called out to me, “Let me know what you find out about Mr. Whitby. If you get to the truth, it may not make the evening news, you know”

A sad commentary. Kylie Ballantine’s life should have been seen on stage, under spotlights, but she’d died in the wings, and now Gideon Reed was afraid her lone champion was going to vanish into the same shadows.

I imagined melodramatic statements I might make, picturing myself as Annie Oakley riding to the rescue of both Ballantine and Marcus Whitby. Maybe I was just Lassie the dog, though, barking around frantically for help.

“Timmy’s in the well,” I said aloud as I unlocked my car. A woman with a couple of toddlers passed me just then, but she barely spared me a glance: people saying odd things to themselves are commonplace at the public library, after all.

CHAPTER 18

Crocodile in the Moat

I’m going out to New Solway,” I told Amy Blount when I reached her on her cell phone. “I didn’t find anything definite in the Ballantine papers, but there’s a possibility that Marc tried seeing Calvin Bayard, who published one of Ballantine’s books. I want to talk to Mr. Bayard, if I can get in-his wife has a shark-filled moat dug around him. Did you find out anything?”

“Like you, nothing definite. The woman who lives on Marc’s south side thinks she saw lights at three yesterday morning-she’s got a newborn who woke her up around then, and she was rocking by the window, but she wasn’t really paying attention. She couldn’t be a hundred percent sure it was Sunday-she’s up most nights and she’s pretty sleep deprived. And anyway, she didn’t look at the front walk, so she wouldn’t know if it was Marc or an intruder. The old man across the street, he save Marc bring a woman home with him once or twice, but no one had spent the night here for several months, as far as the local gossip columns know.”

I was on Ninety-fifth Street, heading west to the tollway, doing the worst kind of driving: the steering wheel wedged between my knees, one hand on the cell phone, one on a raspberry smoothie I’d picked up in lieu of lunch. When I had to brake for a semi that suddenly changed lanes, I dropped the smoothie.

I swore and pulled over to the curb, where I daubed pink liquid from my green-striped trousers. I’d lost the connection by the time I finished with my clothes. When I redialed I asked how many people Amy had left to talk to. She hadn’t reached the neighbor on his north, or the kids-school wouldn’t get out for another hour.

“If you have the time, stay down there until you talk to some of the kids. What about the autopsy? Have the Whitbys come to a definite decision on that? They have? Then I’ll find a funeral director who will get Mare’s body from DuPage and deliver it to Bryant Vishnikov.” That was the kind of detail Mary Louise Neely knew from her years of police work; I’d give her a quick call at her fancy new office.

“Finally,” I said to Amy, “do you think Harriet is up to a trip to T-Square? I’m wondering if Simon Hendricks-Mare’s editor-knows more than he would tell me about Mare’s current project. Maybe he’d be more forthcoming with you and Harriet.”

“What should I say?” Amy asked.

“Mare’s assistant-Aretha Cummings-thinks Hendricks was jealous of Mare’s abilities. Start with Aretha, see if you can get something specific to use as a lever. Usually, two emotions start people talking-resentment or sympathy. So try to get Hendricks feeling sorry for Harriet and the Whitbys. Talk about their need for closure. But if that doesn’t work, see if anything Aretha tells you will goad him into revealing something. Augustus Llewellyn, he owns T-square and all those other magazines, has a policy against talking to anyone at Bayard. I want to know if that’s truly a policy about not going to any competing publisher, or if there’s some specific issue between Llewellyn’s enterprise and Bayard’s. The guy in the cubicle next to Marc, Jason Tompkin, seems willing to talk.”

“I can try,” she said doubtfully, “but I’m not very skillful sorting out office politics.”

I was about to give her a hearty pep talk, but her words triggered a memory from my encounter with Renee Bayard. “I think you’re up to the job-but there is something you might find on the Web or the SEC or even from Aretha Cummings: Calvin Bayard helped Llewellyn get his original financing. There’s some history there, something that made Renee Bayard think Llewellyn wouldn’t respond to a call from her. See if you can

pick up anything on that. If I manage to see Calvin Bayard, I’ll ask him, too. Let’s talk tonight, okay?”

While I finished my smoothie, I called Mary Louise. We had a quick chat about her new job, which she confided was more work and less excitement than she’d hoped for. As I’d thought, she knew a funeral director whose fees were reasonable and who knew the ropes at the county morgues. First I called Deputy Protheroe, and told her the paperwork on Marc Whitby’s body might be getting ready to show up. Then I called Mary Louise’s funeral director, who set up the transfer for the next morning. Finally, I left a message on Vishnikov’s voice mail to tell him to expect Marc Whitby’s body. Only then did I reenter traffic.

With both hands on the wheel I was the model of the good driver, feeling superior to the people with books propped on steering wheels, cell phones in ears, hamburgers in mouths. As if to reward me, I had an easy run all the way from Kedzie to the tollway, and made it to the Warrenville Road exit well ahead of the afternoon rush.

When I reached the turnoff to Coverdale Lane, I pulled over to inspect my detail map. The woods behind Larchmont Hall belonged to a sort of common area in the middle of New Solway. The Bayard and Larchmont estates were about four miles apart if you followed the road, but only a mile if you went through the woods. I supposed that’s what Catherine did Sunday night-skittered through the underbrush home. Even if I hadn’t fallen in on top of Marc Whitby, I probably couldn’t have kept up with her in the dark through woods she knew well.

All the way out to New Solway, I’d tried to think of a persuasive argument to get me into the Bayard house. Nothing came to me. Maybe I’d park at Larchmont and cut through the woods myself. But when I found 17 Coverdale Lane, the gates to the Bayard estate stood open. I turned through the stone gateposts onto the carriageway. After winding about half a mile through old trees, I came to a four-story mansion, its stone facade aged to a golden gray. Like Larchmont, the Bayard grounds also held a series of outbuildings: garage, stable, greenhouses, a barn. The surrounding gardens and meadows fed into the woods.

In front of the house, the drive split in three, one fork leading to the garage, one to the other outbuildings, and the third along the left side of the house itself, where a discreet sign pointed to a tradesman’s entrance. The main entrance, where I pulled up, faced south; shallow steps led to a porticoed doorway.

I could hear voices from around the north side of the mansion, so I climbed out of the Mustang and followed the sign to the tradesman’s entrance. A van and a small truck were parked there. Three men were unloading supplies while a woman in blue jeans and a black turtleneck and blazer supervised.

In the near distance, someone was doing something with hay and a wagon. How bucolic. Almost justifying calling this spread “rural Illinois,” as Calvin Bayard had done in the testimony I’d watched last night. Out in his overalls at four in the morning like all the other Illinois farm boys who had forty-room palaces to protect from weasels.

“That’ll see you through the weekend, Ruth.” One of the men laughed loudly and handed a clipboard to the woman.

The woman in black signed, frowning at his familiarity, but he laughed again, clapping her on the shoulder, telling her he’d be back first thing Monday. He slammed the back panels of the van shut and jumped into the driver’s seat, whistling “Danny Boy” in a cheerful tuneless way. The back panels proclaimed “Home Body-For All Your Home Care Needs” in green cursive.

The other two men were unloading groceries from the truck. Ruth checked each item before letting it into the house.

“Miss Catherine doesn’t like this brand of yogurt. Why didn’t you bring the Bulgarian? And we specified teriyaki tofu; she won’t touch the Hawaiian.” This was the woman who’d answered the phone when I called pretending to be one of Calvin Bayard’s old interns; I hoped I’d been so much hoarser yesterday that she wouldn’t recognize my voice today.

The man explained that the Bulgarian yogurt was past its shelf date. Ruth told him sharply to bring some when he came back on Friday, even i? he had to go into Chicago for it.

If I’d thought about it, I would have guessed Catherine Bayard would be a vegetarian. She was rich; she could be a picky vegetarian.

Ruth scowled in my direction and told me she’d be with me in a minute. “You’re not with the media, are you? If you are, you’d better leave now: we have nothing to say to you.”

The media. People always say this as if it were some foul disease: you’re not with the cholera pouring out of the sewer, are you? And yet we worship and bow down before the television’s eye. I meekly denied connection to the sewage.

Ruth finished her work with the men, telling them they could have coffee in the kitchen, before turning back to me. “Yes?”

Trying to pitch my voice higher to disguise it from yesterday’s croak, I explained that I was a detective investigating Marcus Whitby’s death. “You know that Mr. Whitby died in the Larchmont pond Sunday night.”

“I watch the news, yes, I saw that story, that he had come out here to end his life, and I fail to see why that means you can bother us.”

“Oh, that’s a story Sheriff Salvi put out to calm down the community” I said carelessly. “We know better than that. 1 can step you through the evidence that shows Mr. Whitby didn’t go into that pond on his own, but you’re probably more interested in his connection to the Bayard family.”

She frowned more deeply but didn’t say anything.

“We know Mr. Whitby came out here to see Mr. Bayard, because-” “That is a lie. Mr. Bayard has seen no one this week.”

“Because Mr. Whitby was writing about one of Mr. Bayard’s authors,” I continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “Kylie Ballantine, who had such a difficult time in the fifties and sixties. Perhaps Mr. Bayard didn’t talk to Mr. Whitby, but he did come out here, didn’t he?”

She paused, as if deciding what she could reveal, then said, “The man telephoned, but we don’t allow journalists to talk to Mr. Bayard.”

“So you sent him to Ms. Renee Bayard in Chicago, but she wasn’t helpful and he came out here hoping to gate-crash.”

I held up a hand to forestall a further objection. “We know Catherine was at Larchmont both Sunday and Monday nights. She told me her grandfather-“

“You are full of lies,” Ruth said scornfully. “Catherine was in the city Monday night, as she always is during the school year. And she certainly had no reason to be at Larchmont either of those nights.”

“I talked to Catherine yesterday afternoon. She was certainly out here Monday night. We can call her.” I looked at my watch. “School’s out for the day. Unless she has lacrosse practice, she’s probably with her friends, either at Banks Street or the coffee shop they go to-Grounds for Delight, it’s called. I don’t have her cell phone number, but you probably do.”

It was a bit of a gamble-I had no idea what Catherine would say if the housekeeper called my bluff-so I only paused briefly before adding, “I’ll be honest with you: Catherine would not tell me what she was doing at Larchmont. But she says that when her grandfather can’t sleep, he goes over there, that he has a key, and she sometimes goes with him-they like the privacy at Larchmont Hall.”

“A key to someone else’s house? I never heard such a ridiculous suggestion.” She sounded fierce, but her eyes were moving uneasily between me and the house.

I pulled out my cell phone. “I agree it sounds ridiculous, but that’s what Catherine told me. Let’s call her to check on that. All I really want to know was if Mr. Bayard did go to Larchmont, if he did see Mr. Whitby. I’m trying to find the person who last saw him alive.”

Ruth looked again from me to the house. Hers wasn’t really an indecisive nature: after a moment’s further hesitation, she ordered me to come with her. I followed her through the side door to an areaway where people left coats and muddy boots. Beyond that, another door opened onto the kitchen, where the two deliverymen were drinking coffee and laughing with someone out of my field of sight. On our right, I could see the food cartons stacked in a pantry.

Ruth whisked me past a back staircase, whose narrow pine steps presaged perilous journeys for anyone carrying laundry or logs or whatever had to be hauled up and down. We passed through a swinging door into the body of the house, where the hall immediately widened. Something dark and highly polished, with thick blue runners down the middle, replaced the pine flooring. Our feet whispered in the blue pile.

Ruth moved so fast that I almost had to trot to keep up with her, so I got only a blurry sense of a dining room with a vast table loaded with silver, followed by a series of doors to smaller rooms, and pale walls hung with art of the kind people like me see only in museums.

When we reached the east end of the hall, Ruth opened the door into a small anteroom and commanded me to remain there. She continued down a right turn in the hall, heading to the front of the house.

The little room was primly furnished, with a couple of hard chairs standing in front of an empty grate. Mullioned windows gave a view of the back of the property. A series of gardens stair-stepped down to a small stream, beyond which lay New Solway’s communal wood. I stared out the window at the bare trees.

A couple of deer stepped out of the woods into the gardens. A Border collie raced out to drive them back into the woods. A man appeared, whistling the collie to his side. The two disappeared toward the outbuildings.

With the live figures gone from the landscape, I turned away, looking for something to read or do as the minutes ticked past. The room held that sense of despair you feel in any waiting area. No one worked or lived here, they only waited for someone to make decisions about them. Like at the doctor.

I abruptly went down the hall in the direction Ruth had taken. This took me to the main entryway, where an ornately carved staircase rose from a marble floor. Life-sized portraits of bygone Bayards were hung on the walls.

I prefered Marcus Whitby’s simple staircase with its poster of Kylie Ballantine’s “Ballet Noir,” but I backed up to get a better look at a stern woman in mauve silk, wondering if she was the Mrs. Edwards Bayard who had gone to the opening of Larchmont Hall in 1903; I could see a resemblance to young Catherine and to Calvin Bayard in the narrow planes of her face. Not the great beauty Geraldine Graham’s mother had been.

I heard Ruth’s voice above me and slid around behind the stairwell where the balustrade formed an alcove. “All you have to tell her is that he was asleep and in bed. But you know if this happens again, I will have to talk to Mrs. Renee about it.”