Blacklist (21 page)

CHAPTER 23

The Family Retainer

Even though I reached the Eisenhower at two-thirty, traffic was already heavy; by the time I’d found a place to park, found the right building in the massive shopping-office complex and used a ladies’ room to brush biscuit crumbs from my blouse, I was fifteen minutes late for my meeting. Larry Yosano whisked me straight into the senior partner’s office.

Julius Arnoff was a short, bony man, perhaps in his late seventies, with deep-sunk eyes under hooded lids. He didn’t shake hands with me, just waved Yosano and me to a couple of straight-back chairs on the far side of his desk. “I understand from young Yosano here that you are a Chicago detective? A private detective, not with the Chicago police?”

“That’s correct.”

He produced a cold smile. “You are not the first Chicago detective to be curious about our clients’ affairs.”

“I expect not,” I said. “From what Ms. Geraldine Graham’s been telling me, your clients could have kept an entire bureau of detectives busy.” Larry Yosano sucked in his breath and looked from me to Arnoff in dismay, but the senior lawyer said, “If Mrs. Graham has been confiding in you, then Yosano here can hardly add anything to what you know” “She’s told me fragments, not anything like a whole, coherent story. She’s told me about her battles with her mother, and that her mother …

persuaded her to marry MacKenzie Graham. She’s told me that Olin Taverner was a homosexual. I know that Calvin Bayard suffers from Alzheimer’s and that Renee Bayard is at great pains to keep the world from knowing he’s ill. But a lot of the connecting details are missing.”

“And you hope we’ll tell you what we wouldn’t tell the detectives and reporters who sniffed around here fifty years ago?” His tone was supercilious.

“My concern isn’t with New Solway’s fifty-year-old riff on Peyton Place, but with a couple of contemporary murders. I’m investigating Marcus Whitby’s death: he’s the man who died-“

“I know all about the man who died at Larchmont. Even though the Grahams sold Larchmont Hall, we continue to be involved with the property. I know that Rick Salvi believes the man committed suicide, and that you are out to force us into a murder investigation.”

“When murder has been committed, an investigation is usually a good idea,” I said mildly.

“Not always, young woman, not always,” he snapped.

“I’ve been wondering about that myself.” I assumed a thoughtful expression. “I discovered evidence at Olin Taverner’s apartment yesterday that makes me suspect he may also have been murdered. And yet, I have to ask whether that needs to be investigated. Does it matter that someone hustled an old man off the planet a few months before his time? Do I waste my energy on the death of a man who himself ruined many people’s lives?”

“Olin Taverner began his legal training in Theodore Lebold’s office,” Arnoff said. “He went on to more important matters before I joined the firm, but we have always held him in esteem here.”

“So you think his murder deserves investigation. But that Marc Whitby’s doesn’t.”

“Don’t twist my words, young woman.” Arnoff turned his hooded gaze to Yosano. “What do we know about Mr. Taverner’s death, Larry?” Yosano sat up straight. “Only that Ms. Warshawski found something unusual in his apartment, sir. She was going to explain the situation to me in our meeting this afternoon.”

“And that situation is-?” Arnoff turned back to me.

I leaned back in my chair, legs crossed, trying to establish that I wasn’t a surbordinate. “Someone was in Taverner’s apartment the night he died. That person took pains to cover up his, or maybe her, presence, but nonetheless left telltale traces. I know firsthand that someone broke into the place yesterday-I interrupted him. Unfortunately, he knocked me over and got away. I know Marcus Whitby consulted Taverner last Thursdaya week ago yesterday. And I know Taverner let him see some documents that he kept in a locked drawer. Those documents have been stolen from the apartment. I’m hoping you know what was in them.”

Arnoff slowly shook his head. “Our clients don’t always confide in us. We are the executors, of course, of the Taverner estate.”

“Who are the heirs, since he didn’t leave a family?” I asked. “Several foundations whose work he valued.”

“Including the Spadona Foundation? I wonder how Renee Bayard will feel, seeing her son use money from his father’s old enemy to set a policy agenda she and Calvin oppose.”

Arnoff smiled primly. “If Calvin Bayard had kept better track of his own documents, Edwards Bayard might not be in such opposition to him today.” “Meaning?”

“Meaning all these great families have something they don’t want anyone else to know. I’m sorry I can’t help you with Olin’s papers. I doubt I ever saw those.”

I asked what Arnoff knew about Kylie Ballantine’s connection to Taverner.

He gave his thin, supercilious smile again. “The African dancer? I don’t think it was Olin who had a connection to her.”

“Calvin Bayard, then?” I asked.

“Calvin supported a number of artists. I believe Ballantine was his protegee for a time. Before he married Renee, of course.”

The brief pause he gave before the word “protegee” was supposed to let me know they had been lovers. Everything in this office-in New Solway-was done by innuendo. I wondered how long it would be before young Yosano picked up the same skin-crawling habit.

“Renee Bayard was telling me this morning that Taverner had a bee in his bonnet about the Committee for Social Thought and Justice. There’s a rumor that Calvin Bayard gave them money.” A rumor I myself was just

starting, but he might have been the patron mentioned in the Ballantine archive.

“Oh, Calvin was generous with many left-wing groups in the thirties and forties. There’s never been any doubt where his politics lay. But just because he published known Communists like Armand Pelletier, I don’t think anyone ever seriously believed Calvin was a Communist himself Not even Olin, when he was hounding him back in the fifties. I think they were simply two men who didn’t like each other. Calvin was the flamboyant young success, Olin had to climb his way slowly. And Olin was hampered by the homosexuality you alluded to. By the way, I understand Darraugh Graham hired you to find who his mother was seeing in the Larchmont attic. Did you ever discover who was there?”

I shook my head slowly. Somehow I’d forgotten the original inquiry that had taken me out to New Solway. “Catherine Bayard told me it was her grandfather, that he had a key to the old Graham house.”

Arnoff made a sound like an engine starting in cold weather; I realized after a startled moment he was laughing. “So young Catherine has all the Bayard spirit. One never knows how the next generation will behave with so much wealth available to it.”

“But when I asked Darraugh about it, he became furious.”

“I’m afraid I’m not in Graham’s confidence, young woman; he took his legal affairs elsewhere,” Arnoff said. “He was much attached to his father, however, and Mrs. Drummond’s attitude when MacKenzie Graham died did cause Darraugh to run away that summer. He was something like fourteen or fifteen. Eventually he returned to Exeter to finish his education but I don’t believe he ever returned to Larchmont.”

“Was there something especially difficult about MacKenzie Graham’s death?” I asked.

“All deaths are difficult. But MacKenzie had hanged himself, as I understand it.”

“But why?” Larry Yosano was startled into speaking.

“He was at that age,” Arnoff said. “In my experience, the unhappy of the Earth either learn to live with it by the time they’re fortyfive, or they decide they no longer can make the effort. It was particularly unfortunate that Darraugh found his father’s body. I believe his father didn’t know Exeter had sent him home. MacKenzie was very attached to his son. I doubt he would have killed himself, at least not then, had he known Darraugh was there.”

I tried to digest this. “By Ms. Graham’s account, it was an unhappy household. Why did she and Mr. Graham marry in the first place? And why did they never move into a place of their own?”

“Had you known Mrs. Matthew Drummond, you would have understood the answer to both questions. Mr. and Mrs. MacKenzie Graham both caused their parents considerable anxiety when young, as Mr. Lebold explained the matter to me. Both Mrs. Drummond and Mr. Blair GrahamMr. MacKenzie’s father, that is-thought marriage would settle the two young people down. Of course, when I came into the firm, Mrs. Drummond was sixty-five, but she was still a formidable power. In fact, she refused at the outset to work with-” Arnoff broke off.

“She wouldn’t work with a Jewish lawyer?” I suggested.

“She had old-fashioned prejudices,” he said primly. “When Theodore Lebold made me a partner, a few took their business elsewhere, just as some did when we brought Yosano here into the firm, but most of New Solway saw then, as they do now, that Lebold, Arnoff still has their interests very much at heart.”

CHAPTER 24

Scuba Diver

Twilight softened the pond’s surface, blurring the tangled nest of weeds so that only the lily pads showed. Even the dead carp looked as if it might be merely floating near the surface waiting for a fly to land.

When I left Arnoff’s office, I’d thought about returning to Chicago and leaving the pond until the morning, but that would have meant yet another drive out to the western suburbs. After all, it was going to be dark under all those weeds whether I went in at six in the morning or six at night.

All I had left in my thin arsenal was the dogged desire to find what Taverner had told Marc Whitby. Arnoff had dropped hints that I should be able to sort out. He clearly was proud of knowing the secrets swirling around New Solway. Like indiscretions that Calvin Bayard should never have committed to paper. Or at least made sure were far from his son’s prying eyes.

I negotiated the turn onto the East-West Tollway, and joined the milelong backup at the tollbooths. Arnoff had said no one, not even Taverner, ever seriously believed Calvin Bayard was a Communist. So what else had he done that had shocked his son into becoming ultraconservative? And done on paper?

I inched forward. That was what was so frustrating about this parade of prima donnas. All of their lives were intertwined, by history, by marriage, by shared lies. They were like a group playing three-card monte, and laughing as I kept diving for the court card. I was beginning to doubt a South Side street fighter could be a match for such smooth hustlers.

I oozed off the tollway at Warrenville Road. I could find my way from the tollway to Larchmont Hall on autopilot by now. At Larchmont, I pulled my Mustang around behind the barn, where it was hidden from both the road and the woods connecting to the Bayard estate. If someone-say, young Catherine, or even Ruth Lantner-were visiting Larchmont Hall, they wouldn’t be able to see the car.

Before leaving Oak Brook, I’d stopped in the shopping center to change out of my business clothes and put on a swimsuit, sweatshirt and jeans. These last I took off now and left in the car. I squirmed my way into the wet suit. The rubber was hard to maneuver. I was sweating from exertion by the time I finished, but feeling clammy at the same time from the cold rubber against my skin.

I put on the diver’s headlamp I’d bought this morning. Tucking the twine and small knife under my arm with fins and goggles, I padded around the barn, through the overgrown gardens to the pond.

I’d never done underwater work, but I’d learned to swim in Lake Michigan. In fact, my cousin Boom-Boom and I used to drive our mothers mad with worry by going into the foul waters of Lake Calumet, since that was closer to our homes. Funny how the stuff that’s exciting when you’re a kid with a scolding mother in the background seems horrifying when you’re an adult on your own. If Boom-Boom were here, it would be an adventure. If Boom-Boom were still alive, I wouldn’t feel so alone. Self-pitying tears spurted out. I dashed them away angrily. You’re a woman saved by action, I mocked myself get the damned fins on and get going.

The water was as nasty as I’d imagined. I made a face, then pulled the goggles over my eyes, stuck the breathing tube between my teeth, and did a handstand, trying to ignore the shock of cold water against my head. Almost at once, I became tangled in the nest of roots. Picking and kicking my way through them got my blood flowing enough to keep the cold at bay, although it also stirred up dirt from the bottom, making it harder to see anything-the headlamp couldn’t penetrate more than a few feet of this murk. As I’d expected, it didn’t matter that I’d gotten to the job late-daylight wouldn’t have made it through the knotted vegetation on the surface.

I estimated I had about four hundred square feet to cover. I grimly set about working the lanes: headstand, paw my way through the roots, feel the bottom, surface for air, repeat. The breathing tube was useless, so I laid it along the pond ledge. Each time I reached one of the walls, I’d tie off a length of twine. I started at the west end, where I’d tumbled onto Marc’s body on Sunday.

At the end of an hour, I’d covered about a hundred square feet. I’d found three rusty cans, a corroded watch, shards of china with edges worn smooth by the water and a crystal champagne goblet miraculously whole. I’d also found a number of pieces of wood so logged by water they’d sunk to the bottom.

It was seven o’clock and completely dark now in the upper world. My shoulders ached from pushing through the weeds, my nose was running and I was feeling sorrier for myself than ever. I put the goblet on the edge of the pond next to the china, tied off my line, and dove again.

At seven-thirty, I’d added more cans, some forks and spoons, more china shards and a woman’s ring to my trove. The ring had been there for some time, judging by the amount of dirt on it, but it looked as though it might have impressive stones in it. I zipped it into a pocket of the wetsuit.

At eight, when I was so cold and discouraged I wanted to quit, I found a pocket organizer. I surfaced and stared at it. I was numb, unable to summon any excitement, but I knew it had to be either Marc’s or his murderer’s-beneath the muck of dirty water and plant detritus, the grain on the brown leather was still visible. My hands were too thick with cold to try to open it here. I hoisted myself out far enough to zip it into my pocket next to the ring.

I’d covered most of the pool by then. I was tempted to call it quits, but I only had one more section to do. If I didn’t search it, I’d lie awake all night imagining the vital piece of evidence I’d overlooked. I sucked cold air into my damp lungs for a few minutes, then slid back into the water.

Nothing else was there except more wood. One piece felt as though it might actually be an artifact, not just a dead branch. I brought it to the surface with me. Pushing myself thankfully free of the murk, I walked around the pond undoing my lengths of twine, looping it around my shoulder. My legs were wobbly from two hours of diving and kicking.

Before I could start gathering up my trove of china and glass, I heard footsteps whicking across the lawn. I gripped the breathing tube between my teeth and slid into the pond, remembering at the last second to switch off my headlamp.

Water amplifies sound. The feet-Catherine Bayard’s? Ruth Lantner’s?sounded as though they were pounding past in hobnailed boots. I waited a long minute, giving her time to clear the pond and head up the lawn to the house. As I was starting to climb out again, I heard another set of feet crunching along the brick walk next to me. I dropped back under water. The steps stopped. A light shone across the pond’s surface.

My heart stood still. I held my breath while the light played through the tangle of reeds, lily pads, dead fish. Surely my breathing tube didn’t stand out in that mess. After a moment, the light swept away; the steps moved on.

It was a windless night. If I scrambled out of the pond now, sound might carry to a suspicious ear. If I stayed where I was, someone might be attacking Catherine Bayard. I lifted my head out of the water, straining to see through the dark. In front of me, up near the house, a flashlight bobbed. I heard voices-an exclamation of surprise?-followed by murmurs. It didn’t sound like an assault.

I’d been standing still in the cold water too long: my teeth were chattering so loudly I couldn’t believe they couldn’t hear me up at the house. The noise couldn’t be louder than I’d make climbing out of the pond. For the third time, I hoisted myself out of the water, moving as carefully as I could. I slipped out of the fins and trotted to the far side of the pond where I’d left my shoes. Before I could put them on, the voices sounded more loudly. I was damned if I was going into that rank and chill water one more time. Grabbing my shoes, I rolled under one o? the stone benches.

“Catherine, you’re lying to me and I don’t like it. Ruth told me the detective who was at Banks Street on Wednesday came out to see her yesterday with a tale of you coming over here in the night with a key belonging to your grandfather. So-“

“I told you, she made it up. I don’t know why. Not Ruth, the detective-“

“No.” Renee Bayard halted a yard from my nose. “I called Darraugh yesterday. I didn’t like the idea that he would send a detective to you who dealt with murder. There’s time, and to spare, for you to delve into human misery, but-at any rate, he said he hadn’t heard from you recently, and nor had his staff. So either you found this woman on your own, or she found you. Why?”

“She found me, she stalked me!” Catherine cried.

Renee was silent for a few beats, apparently collecting her thoughts; when she spoke again, her voice was tired. “Darling, if she were stalking you, why did you support the stories she was telling yesterday afternoon? If she’s blackmailing you, you need to tell me. If you think you need a detective for something, can’t you tell me that, too?”

“I can’t. If I could, I would, but I can’t. Don’t make me say any more because it will only be lies and you’ll know and get angrier.”

“Were you here Sunday night?” Renee said. “Did something frighten you?”

“You mean, if I was out here, did I interrupt whoever killed that journalist? No, Granny: I wasn’t here, I didn’t have a clue a murderer was hanging around here.”

Renee sucked in a breath, as if she was about to dispute Catherine’s repeated claim of not being here, then paused, as if aware that this argument was futile. I clenched my jaws together to keep my teeth from rattling at her feet.

“But now you do know, Trina, you mustn’t come back here. We don’t know who killed that reporter. Someone is taking advantage of Larchmont standing empty to use the house: that’s why your detective was here. Geraldine Graham has been seeing lights in the attic, and while Darraugh thinks she could be making it up to force him to spend more time with her, I don’t agree: she’s a shrewd woman, she doesn’t use petty tricks. A deranged person could be hiding in this house. If you’re coming here to meet a friend or a lover or to use drugs or anything you don’t want me to know about, please-” She broke off, unable to complete the thought.

“No one can get into these buildings, they have a security system,” Catherine said. “An alarm goes off in Julius Arnoff’s office.”

“Do you know that because you’ve triggered it?”

“It’s not like it’s a secret. I mean, we all have alarms on our houses, and we all know what to do when they go off, and everyone knows they ring at the lawyer’s office and at the police.”

Catherine was talking in the breathless run-on sentences she’d used on me yesterday when she wanted to rush me past sensitive topics. What didn’t she want her grandmother to push on here? Renee Bayard clearly was wondering the same thing, because there was another long pause before she spoke again.

“Do you have a key to the alarm system, Catherine?”

“No, Gran-how could I have a key to someone else’s house?”

“By taking it if you found it lying around.” Renee Bayard’s voice was casual, almost as if she wasn’t interested in the subject. “I expect this house is like all the houses out here. We’re such special people in New Solway, so unusually honest and moral by virtue of our wealth and position, that newcomers don’t have to bother with new alarm systems: they know the old owners won’t come around breaking in. I daresay the-what was the name of the family that bought Larchmont?-I daresay they left the Grahams’ alarm in place and keys to that system could have been drifting around out here for years. I’m not suggesting you stole anything, but that you couldn’t resist using a key once you’d found it.”

“Oh, please, Gran, I couldn’t stand those Jablon kids long enough to get a key from them, they were such nounous with their-“

“Such what?” her grandmother demanded.

“Sorry,” Catherine mumbled. “We use it at school. Nouveaux-nouveaux riches, you know”

“I do now,” Renee said dryly. “Contempt for those born in different circumstances than your own is the easiest way to stop thinking.”

“I know, I know, but if you’d-hey, Gran, someone has been herelook at all this stuff laid out, like they’d been having a picnic or something, except using all this old broken china.”

Renee swept a circle of light outward toward the china shards Catherine had seen. These were from my first lot, at the end of the pond closest to us. I watched her feet march over. Catherine followed.

“Was the sheriff here, do you think? Was he dredging the pond for clues?”

“I don’t know,” Renee said. “Rick Salvi doesn’t seem that interested in the situation. Maybe it was your detective, returning to the scene of the crime. These look like bits of Geraldine Graham’s mother’s Coalport. She

had place settings for a hundred, all in this blue-and-gilt. They must have fallen into the water during alfresco evenings.”

“People got drunk and threw china into the pond?”

“We weren’t quite as wild as that, darling. I shall have to call Rick and see if he sent a crew to the pond. Recently it would be, too, there are still wet patches under these pieces. You didn’t see anyone? I thought I heardbut I didn’t see-” The flashlight swept around again.

“Here’s something else.” Catherine had moved to the far end of the pond, her own flashlight cutting a narrow cone along the pond’s edge. If I’d left wet footprints on the walk she was obliterating them. “Oh, it’s just more grubby old bits of something. Not more china from Mrs. Graham’s drunken orgies, it’s all dark and nasty-hey, if you look close, it looks like a mask, you know, like the one Grample has in his study. Didn’t some friend in the arts or something give that to him? It looks like they gave one to the Grahams who didn’t like it quite as much.”

Renee’s feet crunched on the broken brick as she strode over to her granddaughter’s side. “I think you’re right. We’ll have to clean it up: most of it’s here, it’s just the top corner around the left eye that’s broken off. I must say, this explains a lot.”

“About what, Gran?”

“Life, Trina, although it is always an inexplicable mystery. Let’s go home now” As their footsteps crunched out of the garden, she added, “What did you see here Sunday night?”