Blacklist (37 page)

“I fail to see how that concerns you, young woman.”

“Did he ask you to make a contribution to ComThought’s legal defense fund? And if so, why should that be a secret?”

“Again, this is no concern of yours. You come in here with tales of Armand Pelletier and Miss Ballantine, but you were hired, I believe, to find Marcus Whitby’s killer, and, if I’m not mistaken, Mr. Whitby died last week, not in 1957.”

I smiled evilly. “He died because of what he’d learned about 1957, about the relations among you and Calvin Bayard and Armand Pelletier. I’m tracking those down.”

His pressed his lips together in a tight angry line, but said, “Armand Pelletier made Calvin’s fortune. Not that book alone, that famous Tale of Two Countries, but he got Calvin the entree to the kind of authors Bayard Publishing needed if Calvin was going to turn a stodgy family firm into a success. If Pelletier was enthusiastic about something, Calvin was bound to be there, too. I never knew if Calvin was protecting his investment in Pelletier, or if he really was the eager puppy dog he acted around Pelletier. After all, Armand had been shot in Spain-that counted for a lot in the crowd they hung out with. I was a young and earnest journalist, Pelletier thought he could patronize me, Calvin tagged along. I paid back those loans. If you’ve dug enough dirt to find that Calvin secured them, you know that I repaid them.”

“Yes, sir. But Mr. Bayard exacted a quid pro quo, which startled even some of the starchy old ladies in New Solway, who didn’t share his enthusiasm for your enterprise.”

“And if he did, you think I should tell you?” His voice was level, but a pulse throbbed in his temple.

“I’ll find it out,” I said. “Geraldine Graham-do you remember her from those days at Flora’s?-may make up her mind to speak. Or I’ll find out from Renee Bayard. Or-someone else. People like to talk, and when they get old, they get to be like Olin Taverner-they don’t want their secrets to die with them.”

A corner of his mouth lifted into a sneer. “Oh, I remember Geraldine Graham. She was like so many rich white girls of the forties. And the fifties. And the current age. Hot bored things who look for the secret thrill the black man can provide. In her case, it was the Red man, the Communist man, but the spice of feeling the sweat of black workers gave it an added zest for her. If she decides to talk to you about those days -I will be very surprised.”

“Every generation likes to think it was the first to discover sex; Ms. Graham might enjoy reminding the rest of us that.she got there ahead of us. If Pelletier can be believed, she was sleeping first with him, then with Calvin Bayard; meanwhile, you brought Kylie Ballantine to Flora’s bar, where she met Pelletier and Bayard and all those other people.” I was embroidering recklessly, both on Pelletier’s manuscript and on the hints I’d picked up from Geraldine Graham. “So when they decided to hold a fund-raiser for ComThought’s legal defense fund, you all went up to Eagle River together.”

He said coldly, “It’s not unusual for a journalist to write up a political fund-raiser, especially when it’s an unusual political group.”

“Pelletier wrote that you were a fellow traveler back in the forties. I’m sure that interested Bushnell’s committee no end.”

“Pelletier wrote a lot of crap in his later years. He was a drunk and bitter man. I didn’t worry about it then and I won’t lose sleep over it now.” “You wouldn’t mind if the Republican National Committee found out you’d been Communist, or at least a Communist sympathizer?”

He gave a derisive snort. “My fellow Republicans include many repentant former leftists. As a black man, I already command unusual attention in the party. If I confessed to Communism, it would only add to my luster.”

“So it didn’t bother you that Marc Whitby learned you’d been at the ComThought fund-raiser. Would you mind the world knowing it was you who sent Olin Taverner a photograph from that same event that cost Kylie Ballantine her job?”

“That’s a damned lie!” In fury, his voice rose to a shout. “Whether Armand wrote that or not, I’ll see anyone who spreads that rumor destroyed in the courts and damned in hell.”

“Or pushed into Larchmont’s pond to drown?”

He stood. “If that means what I think it does, my lawyers will talk to you about a slander suit, young woman.”

“Slander is slippery in court,” I said. “Mart’s notes would be part of my defense. Which means the accusations would come into the public domain.”

I was hoping he’d say, “What notes, I destroyed all his notes,” but instead he said Marc couldn’t have any notes about him sending Kylie’s picture to Olin, because he hadn’t done so.

“Taverner wrote a letter to Kylie Ballantine; she discussed it in a letter of her own to Pelletier.” I took the photocopy from my bag and showed it to him. “See where she says Taverner told her not to blame him and Bushnell, but to talk to `those of her own blood’? If he didn’t mean you, who did he mean? The hotel workers?”

An ugly smile creased Llewellyn’s face. “Even if I knew, you’re not the person I’d tell. You will do well to inform the Whitby family that the tragedy of their son’s death is one of those many murders of young black men that will never be resolved. Let them go home to Atlanta. Let them grieve decently and move forward with their lives. Get your stick out of that old pond you’re stirring. The stench from the rot on the bottom could rise up and choke you.”

The interview was clearly over.

CHAPTER 46

Hamster on a Wheel

Llewellyn’s children were waiting outside their father’s office. When I emerged, the sons hustled me into an elevator which they’d kept waiting, then muscled me outside with more force than the situation really warranted. They watched until I turned the corner onto Franklin.

The sky was dark; the area restaurants and nightspots were just starting to fill up. I passed knots of eagerly chattering thirty-somethings on their way to jazz bars and dinner. Was there a Geraldine among them, escaping from an impotent husband and an overbearing mother into the city’s nightlife? Or an Armand Pelletier, brilliant, impetuous, trying to organize them all to act?

I walked slowly, hunched over, my hands in my pockets. Llewellyn was yet another player from that old New Solway team with old secrets to keep. He said he didn’t care if people thought he’d been a Communist, but that could be a sophisticated bluff it’s always the best strategy to scoff at threats, not to cower before them. What made him furious was the suggestion that he’d cost Kylie her career. If Marc thought he’d found evidence proving Llewellyn had betrayed her to Olin Taverner, maybe Llewellyn would have silenced his star reporter.

Those muscular sons of his were-strong enough to carry someone from

his car to a pond and hold him under until he drowned to death. And they would pretty much do whatever their daddy wanted.

The Merchandise Mart loomed in front of me, its mass ominous in the dark. I skirted it to Wells Street. When I reached the river, I didn’t cross over, but walked east alongside it, picking my way through construction rubble, passing homeless men in makeshift shelters who froze at my passing. Rats skittered across my path.

The walkway narrowed and the concrete bank on my left grew steeper. Struts for the bridges loomed over me. Between the fathomless black of the water and the iron towering above me, I felt small and fragile. A chill wind cut down the river from the lake. I pulled my torn jacket tightly across my chest and plodded ahead.

I needed Benjamin Sadawi to reveal what he’d seen from the attic last Sunday night. He was afraid to tell me or Father Lou, but there was one person he would talk to: Catherine Bayard. It might be hard to persuade her to dig the information out of him, but I couldn’t see any other road to pursue. She was supposed to come home from the hospital today. Maybe Renee would let me into the apartment to talk to her.

I took out my cell phone, but the ironwork around me blocked the signal. When I reached Michigan Avenue, I climbed the two flights of stairs to the street. I blinked as the lights of the night city hit me. Suddenly, instead of the solitary rustling of rats or homeless men and women, I was in the middle of crowds: tourists, students taking night classes at a nearby university, people shopping on their way home from work, swarmed around . me. A mass of buses and cars crept up the avenue, honking irritably at each other. I picked my way along the street until I came to a hotel where the glass wall would block enough noise to let me use my phone.

I pulled open my PalmPilot to get the Bayard apartment number when I suddenly realized I hadn’t called Mr. Contreras. When I reached him, my neighbor had already been on the phone to Freeman Carter to warn him that I’d disappeared. The old man’s relief at hearing from me slid rapidly into a prolonged scolding. I cut him short so I could get to Freeman Carter before he spent billable hours trying to find me in a holding cell.

It was seven-thirty; Freeman was at home. “I’m glad you’re still at large, Vic. Your neighbor has been anxious enough to phone me three times. For God’s sake, if you’re not in trouble, remember to check in with him on time-once he starts, he goes on for a year or two before he stops.” “Yeah, sorry: I was in a meeting with Augustus Llewellyn, trying to figure out what all these rich important people did fifty years ago that they don’t want anyone to know about today. While I’ve got you on the phone, did Harriet Whitby talk to you about getting her brother’s tox screen from the county?”

“The tox screen. Right. Callie told me it came in just as we were shutting down for the day. Neither of us have read it, but I’ll have her messenger over a copy first thing in the morning. I’m going to dinner. Good night.”

People kept hanging up on me abruptly, or shoving me out of their homes and offices, as if talking to me wasn’t the pleasure it should be. Even Lotty … and Morrell, who should have been here to hold me close and tell me I was a good detective and a good person, where was he?

As if to underscore that I was a pariah these days, a concierge came over and asked if I was waiting for someone in the hotel; if not, could I go elsewhere to use my phone? Rage rose in me-useless, since I had no choice except to leave. On my way through the revolving door, I caught sight of myself in a lobby mirror: my face was haggard from lack of sleep, my hair wild from running across the Loop this afternoon. No wonder the concierge wanted me to leave. And no wonder Janice Llewellyn’s first instinct had been to send for the guard-I looked more like the people in the shanties underneath the avenue than those passing me on top of it now.

I felt more like them, too, confused, tired, cold. My tired brain went round and round like a hamster on a wheel. At the top, yes, it was clear that Whitby had been killed. At the bottom, no, he’d gone into the pond on his own. How had Whitby … why wouldn’t Benji … why had Llewellyn said … why had Darraugh … Renee Bayard … I was too tired to make decisions, too tired to do anything but doggedly plow in the direction I’d already started.

Under the dim bulb of a streetlight, I picked the Bayards’ apartment number out of my PaImPilot and typed it into my cell phone. Yes, Elsbetta told me, Miss Catherine had come home today, but she was resting now and couldn’t be disturbed. Could I call back later this evening? No, Mrs. Renee had given strict orders.

A request for Mrs. Renee brought the Wabash Cannonball to the phone. She wanted to know if I had located the missing Egyptian boy; if I hadn’t, there wasn’t much point in our talking. And, no, I couldn’t see Catherine. I had caused enough disturbance in her granddaughter’s life; she didn’t want me bothering her again.

“I’m not the one who summoned Sheriff Salvi to Larchmont Hall Friday night,” I said. “I was just a bystander, remember, caught in the crossfire you were generating.”

“You’re hardly a bystander, Ms. Warshawski. I’d call you more of an instigator. Thanks to you, I had an offensive call from Geraldine Graham, and I just got off the phone with Augustus Llewellyn, who says you all but accused him of orchestrating his own journalist’s death.”

Shivering under a streetlamp wasn’t the best way to carry on this conversation. “Did he, now. That’s quite telling, all the old crowd from Flora’s rallying around. What I really wanted to know is why it was such a shameful thing to give money to ComThought’s legal defense fund that neither Llewellyn nor Ms. Graham will discuss it. I gather your husband persuaded them to make their donations. Why should they be afraid to tell me?”

“Taverner and Bushnell’s most despicable legacy was to make people afraid to acknowledge they had ever supported progressive causes. Even successful, rich people, or perhaps most especially successful, rich people. Augustus actually wanted to know what I had told you about ComThought. I had to remind him all that happened while I was still in high school.”

The torn muscle in my shoulder began to ache from cold. “Did you know that Armand Pelletier left an unpublished manuscript in his papers describing where ComThought met, and who took part in the discussions? According to him, Mr. Bayard was prominently involved in those conversations at Flora’s-I thought he might have told you about it, especially since you were helping him when he was facing down Bushnell’s interrogation.”

“Armand was a sad case, a gifted man who frittered away his talents on drink, and on blaming others for his problems. He never forgave Calvin for the poor sales of his book Bleak Land, and he never forgave me for suggesting to Calvin that we not publish it. Armand had served prison time for his beliefs and Calvin felt we owed it to him to help him out. My husband tried to help a number of the ComThought people in ways like that, to show Olin and Walker Bushnell he didn’t care about their vulgar blacklist. That’s quite different from being the driving force behind an avowedly Communist group, which Olin and Congressman Bushnell hoped to pin on Calvin. I wouldn’t pay much attention to Armand’s unpublished manuscripts; he was a bitter man with an ax to grind. All of that past is long dead. I think it’s time for you to leave it to bury itself”

“Is that why Ms. Graham called you? To complain that I was resurrecting the past?”

Renee paused briefly. “I don’t know which of the two of you is more intrusive. She wanted to inquire after Calvin’s health, as if I didn’t know how to care for him. An impertinence I wouldn’t have received if you hadn’t first invaded my privacy in New Solway, and then discussed Mr. Bayard with Geraldine. Unless you have something useful to contribute, Ms. Warshawski, don’t bother my family further. You may not be an instigator, but you’re certainly not a bystander: you generate turmoil.”

When she cut the connection, I had an impulse to run up to Banks Street and hurl a bazooka rocket through her window, something that would make an explosion big enough to match my impotent fury. Instead I stomped over to Michigan and flagged a taxi to my car. Where I found yet another ticket. One more and I’d get booted. I kicked a piece of concrete savagely enough to hurt my toes. Damn it all, anyway.

At home, soaking in a hot bath, I tried to make sense of all the conversations I’d had today. Taverner’s secret was about sex, the complicated relations among Calvin and Geraldine, MacKenzie Graham and Laura Drummond. But it was also about money. There was the money Geraldine had given Calvin’s pet charity, presumably the Committee for Social Thought’s legal fund. And the money Calvin had loaned Llewellyn. Sex and money. They led to murder in the heat of the moment, but the heat from these moments surely had cooled in the last fifty years.

Still, something about that past was upsetting people so much they kept menacing me. Darraugh called it quicksand, Llewellyn a pond filled with some kind of rot. Darraugh himself had threatened me when he realized

what information I was starting to dig up, even though he was the one who brought me out to New Solway in the first place. He was strong, too, strong enough to overpower Marcus Whitby. But he was the person who’d brought me to New Solway to begin with. The hamster wheel began buzzing in my brain again.

I ran more hot water into the tub and sank deeper into it. My shoulder started to relax. My bones warmed up. I drifted away from Whitby and turmoil. My birthday last July, Lake Michigan warmer than this bathwater. Lying on an Indiana beach under the summer stars, the night air and Morrell’s long fingers caressing me.

The shrill bell to my front door jerked me awake. I sat up, splashing water onto the floor. When the bell sounded a second time I climbed out of the tub and padded to the front room, wrapping a bath sheet around me. It wasn’t cops, but a trio of boys on bikes doing wheelies on the walk. Pranksters. My lips tightened in annoyance. I walked back to my bedroom, to dress, but, when they rang for the third time, I suddenly remembered that Father Lou had said he would send messages by his kids on bikes.

“Be right with you,” I shouted through the intercom.

I dried off fast, pulled on jeans and a heavy sweater, tucked my damp hair into a baseball cap and skittered down the stairs. Mr. Contreras and the dogs were already in the lobby, arguing with the boys, who were backing away from Mitch-by far the most vociferous of the group.

“‘S okay, I’ve got it.” I pushed past them out the front door.

One of the boys came forward, striking a determinedly aggressive posture. “You the detective lady?”

“Yep. You the guy from St. Remigio?”

He nodded, eyes slits, detective on a mission. “Father Lou said to tell you you wasn’t alone when you came to church this morning. Got it?” “Is that all he said? Did he want me to call?” I demanded.

“Uh, yeah. Yeah, you should try to call him.”

Mechanically, I thanked the boys. I gave them a five to share among themselves, and went back into the building.

“What was that about?” Mr. Contreras demanded. “You shouldn’t give punks like that money, only encourages them to come around begging for more.”

I shook my head. “They’re from Father Lou. Someone followed me to church this morning. Somehow, some way. But-damn, I made sure I was clear. I have to call him, see whether the Feds got Benji”

I sprinted back up the stairs, the dogs racing ahead of me while the old man followed more ponderously in the rear. By the time he got to my door, I had on my running shoes and a coat. Mr. Contreras offered to let me use his phone, but I couldn’t be sure that wasn’t tapped-if they were listening to me they would know to listen in on him, too.

The nearest pay phone I could think of was in the Belmont Diner, a couple of blocks south of us us. I ran down there and called the rectory. “No one was on my tail this morning; I triple-checked,” I said when the priest finally answered his phone. “What happened?”

“Had a federal marshal and a Chicago cop here this afternoon. They asked after you-told them you’re one of my parishioners, don’t come often enough:” He let out a rusty chuckle: I’m never sure whether he harbors secret fantasies of converting me. “They also thought I was hiding some runaway they want. Told them to be my guest, search the place, but it’s a big church, took them the better part of two hours, got me behind in catechism and boxing classes both.”

“Did they find anyone?” I asked.

“Boys playing hide-and-seek behind the altar was all, thinking it was a good joke to jump out on a cop. Gave them what for when I found them. But if you’re bringing cops into the church, you’d better find someplace else to worship-too disruptive of education here.”

Meaning, if I understood him right, that he’d put Benji in the crypt, which lies behind the altar, but that I’d better move him in case the Feds came again.