Blacklist (38 page)

“Is this something I have to figure out tonight?” I asked. “You know I don’t go to church very often-1 don’t have a second one right at my fingertips.” He grunted. “Can wait until tomorrow. Maybe the next day, not much longer.”

The Feds might have gone to St. Remigio’s because they’d done so much research on me that they knew Father Lou was a friend of mine and Morrell’s. Or-they’d installed an electronic gadget on my car so they could follow me without putting manpower on the street. My stomach turned over.

I tried to remember if I’d gone anywhere else incriminating the last few days. The hospital, the university library, back up to the Loop, then home. Maybe agents would next be down at the University of Chicago, demanding to know what I’d read today. Under the Patriot Act, they didn’t need a warrant or probable cause to make the library tell them, but if the librarians told me the Feds had come around, the librarians would go to jail. So I’d never know-unless, of course, Pelletier’s archives disappeared.

I’d been tired all day, but now I felt completely exhausted. It was what I’d tried to tell Lotty last night: I didn’t know who frightened the more these days, radical Muslims, or radical Americans.

I hadn’t eaten dinner and I certainly didn’t have the energy to cook for myself. I went inside the diner and took a seat at the counter.

The diner is a gallant survivor from the days when Lakeview was a bluecollar neighborhood, from when Mr. Contreras and I had bought shares in our co-op. Now it’s become a neighborhood we can barely afford. The diner has changed, too-I guess it had to in order to survive. The Formica tables are gone, and the chicken-fried steak, replaced by polyurethaned wood and grilled salmon. I didn’t want modern trendy food tonight, but they still had some old diner standbys on the menu. I ordered a plate of macaroni and cheese. It wasn’t anything like what my mother used to make, with her hand-rolled pasta and homemade white sauce, but it was comfort food nonetheless.

While I drank a cup of weak diner coffee, I tried to imagine where I could put Benji. I couldn’t bring him home, either to me or Mr. Contreras. I certainly couldn’t ask Lotty or Max to put him up. I hardly knew Amy Blount, and, anyway, she lived in a studio apartment. If I could get in to see Catherine Bayard in the morning, I’d see whether she had some fallback place. Maybe the family apartment in Hong Kong or London. No, that would mean getting him out of the country past a security screen. I gave up on it and went home to bed.

CHAPTER 47

Tough on a Rhino Hide

When I woke, the sun was out for the first time in days. Perhaps that was an omen. I had slept for nine hours, deeply, hardly stirring, despite the anxieties I’d taken to bed with me. Another good sign.

I dressed for the day in jeans and running shoes. Since the cops had trailed me to St. Remigio’s, I was going to leave my car at my office; I wanted to be able to move fast through the city. The dogs got the shortest of walks. I left them with Mr. Contreras, then drove to my office, where I went inside just long enough.to check my messages. No tox report. No messages that couldn’t wait. I put a fresh battery pack in my cell phone and took off.

On my way to the El, I turned abruptly into a bakery, then stuck my head out the door. No one had halted on the walk behind me. I bought a ginger scone and a bottle of orange juice, picked up the morning papers and hurried to the train.

The detective’s life is harder on public transport. The train was so packed I had to stand. I couldn’t eat or read and when I got out, I was still two miles from my destination, since the line to the Gold Coast is different from the one near my office. At Division, I flagged a cab to the corner of Banks and Astor. When I got out, a young woman swung into the backseat

before I finished paying-it was eight-ten, the time when aggressive young lawyers and financiers race to their desks.

I crossed the street to where I could see the Bayard apartment. With the Herald-Star in front of my face, I called up and asked for Renee. She was still inside; I hung up just as she came to the phone. I made a little eyehole in the Herald-Star; while I ate my scone, I watched nannies and mothers hurry their children to school. I also got to see a ferocious competition for cabs among the work-bound-including a shoving match between two women. The one I was silently betting on lost.

Renee Bayard could probably have won a battle for a taxi, but she didn’t have to fight: a dark sedan was waiting in front of the Banks Street apartment. At eight-forty-eight, the driver climbed out and stood by the rear door. At eight-fifty, Renee came through the front gate, a commanding figure in navy wool. Her son was with her. The driver tucked Renee into the backseat, but Edwards walked over to State Street and headed north.

He could be going anywhere, but the Vina Fields Academy lay in that direction. If he was going to pick up books or lesson plans for Catherine, Elsbetta would know about it, and I couldn’t use that as my pretext for getting into the building. I bit my lip in indecision, but finally crossed the street and rang the lower apartments, starting with the first floor. No one answered there, the second floor hung up on me, but the third floor buzzed me in as soon as I said I was from the Vina Fields Academy. They buzzed me again through the inner door. Just to minimize suspicions in the building, I rode to the third floor, said I was there for Catherine Bayard and was directed to five. So far, so good.

On the fifth floor, the entrance to the Bayard apartment stood openthey assumed the locks on the gate and lobby doors were enough protection. I shook my head disapprovingly: this is how ax murderers get into your home.

I slipped into the entry area, pausing to admire a Louise Nevelson bronze before passing through the arched doorway that led to the interior. I tried to remember how to find Catherine’s room. The path to Renee’s study lay to the left; I thought Catherine’s bedroom was in the opposite direction.

As I walked down the hall, a vacuum cleaner roared into life. I jumped, but moved boldly forward. A furtive glance showed me a cleaning crew in action. Elsbetta stood with her back to me, barking orders in Polish. Excellent.

At the end of the hall, I came to Catherine’s room. The door was shut. I gave a perfunctory knock and went in. The bedroom was empty, but an open door on the near wall led to a bathroom. When I peered around the door, I saw Catherine in front of a dressing table trying to button a man’s shirt with one hand. Her dark hair fell unbraided down her back. She didn’t look around at my entrance, but kept stubbornly trying to manage the buttons.

“It’s easier if you don’t watch in the mirror,” I said.

She turned, startled. “Oh! It’s you. I thought it was Elsbetta. Why are you here? Is Benji okay?”

I pulled up a chair to face her. “I saw him yesterday. He seemed fine, he asked after you, but there are a couple of problems.”

Her eyes grew dark with dismay. “Like what?”

“Like the Chicago cops showed up late yesterday to look for him. Apparently, because I’d been there. So we need-“

“I thought you were a detective.” Her voice was scornful. “Don’t you know to watch for tails?”

“Check for tails! Now, you tell me. Gosh.” I slapped my forehead. “Listen, you little mutt, I drove in circles at six in the morning. The streets were empty. No one was behind me. One of two things happened: they put a tracer on my car so they can watch me on a screen instead of wasting gas. Or they have been tracking down every person I know and checking up on them. Father Lou had time to get Benji into a safe place inside the church, but the kid can’t stay there much longer. For obvious reasons, I can’t take him to any of my friends. I was hoping you could talk to your grandmother and get her to agree to let him stay at your New Solway house. She’s basically on the side-“

“No! She thinks I’m in love with Benji, or in love with Benji’s adventure. She wants him out of-the country. The only thing she and Daddy agree on is that Benji needs to go back to Egypt. If I tell her I know where he is, she’ll call the justice Department. But they won’t deport him, they’ll lock him up. You said I didn’t read any news, but I’ve been reading on this and reading on this and reading on this. It happens all the time, people are caught with their visas expired, and they can’t even go home. They get put in detention some place and held for months. I promised Benji, I won’t let him down.” She started to cry.

I patted her good hand. “It’s okay, babe: we’ll think of something else. You’re recovering from a bullet wound. Try to calm down: you need to save your strength for healing. I’m on your side in this, really, truly. If I wasn’t, I would have talked to your granny without consulting you, you know.”

She blew her nose. “I can’t even braid my own hair. I can’t play lacrosse or ride for months until this stupid arm heals. Everything takes forever, or I have to get people to do stuff for me. I hate it.”

“Speaking as one who’s been through the wars, I agree: it’s a pain. Want me to finish buttoning you? Just this once?”

She nodded, her eyes still tearing a bit. Judging by the size and the cut, the shirt must have been filched from her father’s closet. It covered her tasted right arm with room to spare.

“Your dad off getting your lesson plans?”

“Yeah. He’s meeting with Ms. Milford to see what I can do online. It’s only a few days, I keep telling him not to be so anal.”

“And he says, `Young lady, where did you pick up that kind of language?”’ I suggested.

She gave a shaky laugh. “Something like that. And that it’s a competitive world and I need to learn that losers are not strivers. Then he adds he’s going to take me to Washington, to a school with my natural peers where I’ll learn how to behave with proper respect. Like, learning how to totally trash the environment or something while I’m pretending to protect it, that’s his idea of respect. Where can Benji go i? he has to leave St. Remigio’s?”

“I’ve only had one not very bright idea. I could put him up in a motel for a few days, while I try to find an immigration lawyer who can help him. It’s not the best idea-I hate for him to have keep skulking around, not to mention for him to have to be by himself. It’s not good for his spirits, and, anyway, as he himself says, there’s no point in his staying here if he can’t work. And he ought to be with kids his age-your age-and feel able to relax.”

“But he can’t do that as long as those racists are looking for him.” She

smacked the dressing table with her good hand. “I tried to get him to let me send his mom money, but he wouldn’t take it. No matter what Daddy and Granny are saying, he isn’t trying to exploit me.”

“I have a tiny idea about that, too. Last Sunday night, when Marcus Whitby drowned in the Larchmont pond, Benji was standing at the attic window watching for you. I’m almost certain Benji saw what happened. If Marcus Whitby didn’t go in on his own, Benji saw who pushed him in. Benji won’t tell me or Father Lou, but if you could get him to talk about it, I might be able to work out a deal with the Chicago police. Captain Mallory, who’s in charge of the city’s antiterrorism squad, could-“

“No!” she shouted, her face very white. “You’re not on my side or his, are you? You only want to use him for what you can get out of him about your stupid murder. I should have known better than to trust you. Get out of here! Don’t come near me again. Don’t go near Benji again!”

“Catherine. Something has to change if he’s going to stay here without being arrested or deported. If he witnessed a murder-“

“Go away! If you don’t leave now, I’ll page Granny and she’ll get our lawyers. I hate you, I hate you.” She doubled over with sobs.

I stood up. “I’m leaving my card on your desk. If you change your mind, if you realize I’m on your side, you can call me on my cell phone at any hour. But I’m going to have to move Benji, whether he’s willing to talk to me or not.”

I waited another minute, but she only sobbed, “Oh, go, why aren’t you gone yet?”

I left a card inside her laptop, away from her grandmother and father’s prying eyes, but where she’d see it when she next went to log on. On my way out of the apartment, Elsbetta appeared from the other wing, the one that held Renee’s office. She was taken aback, since she hadn’t let me in, and demanded to know my business. I told her I’d been calling on Catherine, yes, I knew Mrs. Renee didn’t want me here, but I had come anyway, and now I was leaving.

My visit was completed by running into Edwards Bayard just as I opened the gate to the street. He also wanted to know what I was doing there.

“I peddle Tupperware door-to-door; it augments my agency income. I hit Schiller Street yesterday, but this neighborhood is a tough sell.”

He reacted as predictably as Peppy to a squirrel: he was a presidential adviser, he was a Bayard, no one talked to him like that.

“Yeah, you’re a Bayard when you want to call up some privileges. The rest of the time, you slink away from your parents.”

I stomped west, away from the island of wealth and privilege, back toward my own world. I felt exhausted, the morning’s good omens dissipated by Catherine’s outburst. Her wound and the anesthesia that lingered in her system were knocking her off balance. And then, she was sixteen, it wasn’t like her judgment was the steadiest to begin with.

I knew these things, but her tantrum left me feeling as though I had been beaten by sticks. I kept replaying the conversation, wondering what I should have said differently. I should have described Bobby first, explained that he was at odds with the Feds, I should have spent more time talking to her on neutral topics first, I should have this, I shouldn’t have that, over and over. You’d think a detective like me would be thick-skinned by now, as J.T had said last night, but lately every whack against my rhino hide was making me more prey to self-doubt.

CHAPTER 48

Seizures

I walked up to North Avenue, where I caught a crosstown bus to my office. The street is an important conduit between the city and the expressway, which is why I suppose the big national chains have stuffed it full of outlets. The traffic is so heavy on North these days that it took half an hour for the bus to trundle the three miles across town. Delays like that usually leave me gnawing my nails in annoyance. Today I welcomed the chance to rest.

When I finally got off at Western, I didn’t bother to check for tails. I was tired, I didn’t care and, anyway, it didn’t matter if people followed me to my office-if they were tapping me, they’d know I was in there:

It was close to lunch time. I walked down to La Llorona for a fish taco. The lunchtime crowd was heavy, so I didn’t chat with Mrs. Aguilar but ate my taco at one of the high tables in the corner while I finished glancing through the papers.

The taco was so good, and I was feeling so sorry for myself, that I took a second one back with me to eat at my desk. At Division Street, where Milwaukee changed abruptly from a neighborhood street to an extension of Yuppie Town, I stopped in one of the coffee bars for a cappuccino. Either protein or caffeine would revive me, or at least that was my theory.

While I was out, Freeman’s secretary had messengered over the toxicology report. Tessa had signed for it and taped it to my office door. I took it

in with me and laid it on my desk. I almost couldn’t bear to read it: I’d moved heaven and earth, or at least medical examiners in two counties, to get this document. If it told me nothing, I might he down and never get up again.

I finally took the report from the envelope and began reading. Callie had sent a photocopy of a ten-page fax, so it was blurry in places. The text bristled with “epithelial cells of the distal part of the renal tubules” and “immunocytochemical electron microscopy of the hepatocytes.” Fascinating, if you knew what it meant.

I slowly went through the whole ten pages. The analysis of Marc’s last meal (skinless chicken, broccoli, baked potato and a lettuce-tomato salad, consumed three hours before death, with a statistical variation of so much based on digestive whatever) was so detailed that I abruptly tossed the second taco into the trash.

The lab had found no trace of cocaine, diazepam, nordiazepam, hydrocodone, cocaethylene, benzoy-lecgonine, heroin ‘hydrochloride or marijuana metabolites in Marc’s urine. He had alcohol in the vitreous humor and phenobarbital in the blood plasma, discovered with “high-performance liquid chromatography.” The report gave the drugs in milligrams per liter, with the information that Marc had weighed eighty kilos, so I couldn’t tell how much Marc had drunk on top of the drug, but Vishnikov had provided a summary at the end: “… a six hundred milligram dose of phenobarbital taken with approximately two shots of bourbon would have depressed respiration and most likely killed him if he hadn’t first died of drowning.”

I leaned back in the desk chair. It wobbled badly; I needed to get a screwdriver out to tighten the castors.

All I knew about phenobarbital was that it was used to treat epilepsy. If Marc had epilepsy, he should have known better than to mix alcohol with his medication. He would have known better: by all reports he was a careful man; he wouldn’t have taken a drug without knowing its side effects. But maybe after years with the disease, he knew he could drink a modest amount without getting into distress with his medication.

The sinking feeling returned to my diaphragm; he had gone into that pond alone. Unless-a couple of shots of whisky wasn’t much for a man

who weighed-eighty kilos-I scratched arithmetic on a scrap of papera hundred seventy-five pounds. But I didn’t know how to evaluate the amount of phenobarb he’d taken.

Since I couldn’t ask Vishnikov to explain, I phoned Lotty, who was in her clinic today. Mrs. Coltrain, her longtime administrator, said Dr. Herschel was with patients and couldn’t be disturbed.

“All I want to know is how much of a dose six hundred milligrams of phenobarbital is. Can you ask her, or Lucy Choi?” Lucy was the advanced practice nurse who did a lot of the routine patient care at the clinic.

After a minute on hold, Lotty came to the phone herself. “Six hundred milligrams is a huge dose, Victoria. Did someone prescribe that for you? It could kill you if you took it all at once.”

“How long would it take?”

“This isn’t a game, is it? I don’t know. It moves fast into the system, depresses respiration. You might have an hour for someone to try to revive you, possibly only half an hour.”

“What if I weighed thirty pounds more than I do?”

“Still far too much. If someone prescribed that for you, don’t ever see her again.” .

She hung up. I looked again at the report. If Marc had epilepsy, he wouldn’t have taken such a lethal dose on purpose. Not unless he wanted to die. But then, why go into the Larchmont Pond? Why not stay in the comfort of his bed? Maybe he didn’t know he would die from it-maybe he thought it would just make him unconscious enough not to mind drowning. But why go all the way out to that foul pond at Larchmont instead of the welcome expanse of Lake Michigan? And then, his car-I shook my head, trying to stop the incessant buzzing: hamster on its wheel again.

My hand hesitated over my phone. Harriet Whitby had planned to move in with Amy after her parents left for Atlanta yesterday. If I phoned Amy’s apartment, would that get the law to monitor her calls, too? I shook my head angrily: I couldn’t live like this, second-guessing whether anyone was listening to me and my friends, or following me. And I wasn’t going to spend an hour on public transport just to make sure I talked to her unsupervised.

Amy answered, sounding relaxed: she and Harriet were enjoying a comfortable day alone together, she explained, without having to worry about Harriet’s folks. As she called her friend to the phone, I felt like a vulture, intruding on their light mood.

“Dr. Vishnikov sent me your brother’s autopsy report,” I told Harriet. “Would you like me to come to Amy’s so we can discuss it in person?” “Are you trying to prepare me for something awful?” she demanded. “Something I don’t want to know? Tell me now. This has been the hardest week of my life-I don’t want even a half hour of agony imagining things while I wait to see you.”

“Marc had a lot of phenobarbital in his system, but only one largish bourbon. Did he suffer from epilepsy, or have any history of seizures where he would have been taking this drug?”

“No,” she said blankly. “No, he’s always been-always was-really healthy. What does this mean?”

“I’m afraid it means what we’ve been saying all along: he really was murdered. Someone gave him a drug that knocked him out, and then put him in that pond to die.”

Saying it out loud brought me a sense of relief. The wheel stopped turning, the buzzing in my head ended. Murder. Not suicide. Not accident. I didn’t have to make a plaster cast of the wheel marks in the culvert: Mark’s killer had driven him to the pond in a golf cart.

Harriet became so quiet I thought perhaps she’d gone away, but at last she said in a dull, dead voice that sounded like her mother’s, “We’ve known this, anyway, all week. Not about the drug, but that someone killed him. It’s just hard to hear it finally said out loud. Marc wasn’t really healthy after all, was he? It didn’t matter that he attended the University of Michigan or was a prizewinning writer, or kept a healthy diet, did it? He still died from the black man’s disease.”

“I’m sorry?” I was confused-all I could think of was sickle-cell anemia. “Murder,” she hiccupped. “It doesn’t matter if you’re educated and live a decent life, it’s still going to get you.”

“I’m sorry,” I repeated, helplessly. “I’ll come to Amy’s right now if you want.”

“No, thank you. I know you’ve been working hard on my behalf-on

my family’s behalf. I know you’re only doing what I asked you to do. But I need to be alone with a sister for now.”

When she hung up, I felt embarrassed: the news that elated me had brought her distress. I got up and walked around the room. We’d found Mark’s bottle of Maker’s Mark when we searched his house last week. Bourbon and branch: his drink, Amy had told me. If there were fingerprints on his bottle-if the whisky had been doctored-I wanted to collect that Maker’s Mark and get it tested, even if I had to pay for the job myself.

After Amy and I had finished inspecting Mark’s house on Friday, what had I done with his keys? I dumped the contents of my briefcase onto my desk. The set I’d borrowed from Mark’s housekeeper tumbled out in the jumble of papers, tampons and my PalmPilot. So did the key Luke Edwards’s locksmith had created for me to get into the Saturn.

I picked up the car key and turned it over in my palm, studying it as though it were a text in an unknown language. I could take the train down to Mark’s house, collect his bourbon and borrow his car. As long as I didn’t park it near my office or home, I should be able to drive freely around town for a few days. I might even be able to pick up Benji. And instead of taking him to a motel, I could leave him at Marc Whitby’s house. Tell the neighbors Benji was my cousin, needing a job and a place to stay-we were letting him look after the house so it didn’t stand vacant until the family sold it. Gosh, you’re good, V I.!

I stuffed the toxicology report back into its envelope and put it in my bag. Picklocks-you never know. A loaded clip for my gun-because, again, you never know. Latex gloves, a gallon-sized plastic bag for the bourbon, pulled clean from the box and inserted into a second clean bag to make sure there was no contamination of the specimen.

“Far from this something bosom haste, ye doubts, ye fears that laid it waste,” I sang, dancing to the door.

It was a long El trip to the South Side, since I had to ride into the Loop to change trains. I danced impatiently on the platform while I waited, and found myself leaning forward in my seat, as if that would move the train faster. At Thirtyfifth Street, I jumped down the stairs two at a time and ran over to Giles.

When I jogged down the walk to Mark’s house, a half-dozen girls were

jumping double Dutch out front. They watched me go up the stoop and unlock Marc’s front door. Maybe this wasn’t such a good place to bring Benji: nothing happened unobserved in this neighborhood. Except for someone coming here to steal all Marc’s papers.

The house had taken on the forlorn, musty aspect of any abandoned building. After a week, dust was visible even to my unhousekeeperly eye. I took a quick look around. I didn’t think anyone had been here, robbers or cops, despite Bobby Mallory’s assertion that the police would reopen the investigation into Marc’s death.

In the kitchen, I pulled on the latex gloves, picked up the Maker’s Mark at the base with my thumb and forefinger and slipped it into the clean plastic bags. The whole package went into my briefcase.

On my way out, I stopped to look up at the poster of Kylie Ballantine in the stairwell. “What could you tell me?” I demanded. “Were you Calvin Bayard’s lover? Were you Augustus Llewellyn’s? What secret do those New Solway people care about so much that they killed your young champion to protect it?”

The vital silhouette floated above me-above all the petty concerns of the people she had known. Kylie Ballantine had moved on, had not let her life be mired in the bitterness the McCarthy era had generated. She had struggled financially, but unlike that crew of wealthy people, she had shrugged off the wounds of those turbulent times. Even if she’d known hardship, Ballantine had been fortunate to die with her powers intact, her spirit strong. Unlike Calvin Bayard, whose mind once overmatched Olin Taverner’s, and now was happy to watch the cook boil milk.

My fingers clenched on the handle of my case. I started toward the front door, trying to make myself think about the best way to deliver the Maker’s Mark to Cheviot Labs, but the image persisted: urine masked by talcum, Calvin’s nurse shepherding him toward the kitchen.

My hand was on the front doorknob when I stopped. The house around me was quiet as death. The nurse, Theresa Jakes. Who had seizures, Catherine Bayard told me; Granny mustn’t know about them.

I hadn’t wondered where the phenobarb had come from. But there it was, right out in New Solway where Theresa took it to control her own seizures. Where Ruth Lantner, the housekeeper, threatened to tell Renee about them if Theresa slept through Calvin’s wanderings again.

I turned around and walked back to stare again at the poster. Nothing happened at New Solway that Renee didn’t know about. Even if Ruth Lantner hadn’t told her about Theresa’s seizures, Renee would have found out somehow. Renee exulted in her organizational skills: during the day she juggled details of a mammoth commercial enterprise; at night she stayed effortlessly on top of a major domestic one.

If she had killed Marc, it would have been to protect Calvin’s reputation. But Calvin didn’t need protecting. He was the man who had stood up when few people would, who had confronted Taverner and Bushnell and walked away.

Fragments of conversations passed through my head. They turned on each other like rats in a proverbial barrel, Augustus Llewellyn said last night. Pelletier’s Boy Wonder, skimming the cream from Pelletier’s work, from Pelletier’s love life.

Who had sent Taverner that picture of Kylie and told him where it had been taken? Who wanted people to give money to ComThought’s legal defense fund without coming forward himself? What had Llewellyn done to get that money from Bayard? Taverner had kept a dastardly secret about Calvin Bayard, only because Bayard knew one just as bad about Taverner. That truth had been staring me in the face for days. I just hadn’t wanted to see it.

Not about the hero of my youth. Not Calvin. Not, not. My knees buckled. I collapsed on the stairs.