Blacklist (4 page)

Her soft mouth puckered into a scowl. “I’m not breaking any laws, so let me go. Then I won’t sue you for assaulting me.”

“You’re too young to sue me yourself, but I suppose your parents will do it for you. Since you came on foot, you’re probably from one of these mansions. I suppose you’re like all the other rich kids I’ve ever met, so overindulged you never have to take responsibility for anything you do.”

That did rouse her. “I am responsible!” she shouted.

She wriggled out of my slackened grasp and rolled over. I grabbed at her arm, but only got her backpack. A furry wad came loose in my hands as she wrenched herself free. She sprinted through the opening to the gardens. I jumped up after her, stuffing the furry thing into my jeans as I ran.

As I crashed through the garden, she disappeared around the pond, heading for the woods behind the outbuildings. I charged up the path and tripped again on the loose brick. I was going too fast to catch my balance. I flapped my arms desperately, trying to keep upright, but tumbled sideways into the water.

Weeds and leaves clogged the surface. The water was only five feet deep, but I panicked, terrified that I wouldn’t be able to push my head through the tangled roots. When I finally broke through the rotting mass, I was several yards from the edge. I was freezing, my clothes so heavy with the brackish water that they pinned me like an iron shroud. My feet slipped on the clay bottom and I grabbed at the plants to stay upright. Instead my numb fingers closed around clammy flesh. One of the dead carp. I backed away in disgust so fast I fell over again. As I righted myself, I realized it wasn’t a fish I’d seized but a human hand.

CHAPTER 4

Once More Unto the Pokey, Dear Friends

I worked my way around to the head. It was a man, weighted down by his clothes, kept on the surface only by the tangle of weeds underneath him. I thrust my arm under his armpits and started dragging him, holding his head out of the water in case he wasn’t really dead. My feet kept slipping on the clay bottom. Pulling his waterlogged weight through that muck made my heart hammer. After some enormity of time, I managed to haul him to the pool’s edge. The water was half a foot below the pool’s perimeter. I took a deep breath, squatted in the rank plants, and did a dead lift to get him out.

My arm and leg muscles burned with fatigue. My own legs weighed about a ton each now. I lay my torso across the marble tiles surrounding the pool and managed to swing my legs over the side. My teeth were chattering so violently that my whole body shook. I lay on the sharp stone for a minute, but I couldn’t afford to stay here. I was remote from help; I’d die of cold if I didn’t move.

I got to my hands and knees and crawled to the man. I rolled him onto his back and cleaned the weeds out of his mouth and undid his tie and pushed on his chest and blew cold trembly gusts into his mouth, and, after five minutes, he was still as dead as he’d been when I’d clutched his hand in the water.

By now I was so cold I felt as though someone was slicing my skull with

knives. I pried the zipper of my windbreaker open and dug my cell phone out of one of the pockets. I couldn’t believe my luck: the little screen blinked its green lights at me and I was able to connect to the emergency network.

The dispatcher had trouble understanding me, my teeth were chattering so loudly. Larchmont Hall, could I identify that? The first house you came to off the Dirksen Road entrance to Coverdale Lane? Could I turn on my car lights or the house lights so the emergency crew could find me? I’d come on foot? Just what was I doing there?

“Just tell the New Solway cops to come to Larchmont Hall,” I croaked. “They’ll find it.”

I severed the connection and looked wistfully at the house behind me. Maybe the dot-com millionaires had forgotten a bathrobe, or even a kitchen towel, when they left. I was halfway to the house when I realized that this would be my one chance alone with the dead man. Larchmont Hall was sealed like Fortress America. Without tools, with my hands frozen, I’d be lucky to have a door open before the cops arrived, but I’d have enough time to look for some ID on the body.

I found my flashlight near the French doors where I’d wrestled with the girl. I took it back with me to the dead man.

Was this my teenager’s boyfriend? Despite her smart remark about the sex police, were they meeting in the abandoned house-somehow bypassing the security system? Maybe he hadn’t made tonight’s rendezvous because he’d tripped over the same brick I’d stumbled on, fallen into the pond and hadn’t been able to fight free of the weeds. He hadn’t tried to take off his shoes or his clothes: I’d undone his tie and unbuttoned his shirt to give him CPR, but he had on a suit; belt, fly button and zipper were all tidily done up. The suit looked as though it had been a good one, a brown wool basket weave. He’d been wearing wing tips, not an outfit for the woods at night.

I moved my flashlight along the length of his body. He was about six feet tall, lean, not particularly athletic looking. His skin was a nut-brown, his hair African, which might explain the need for secret meetings in an abandoned house. Or maybe it was his age-he looked to be in his thirties. I could picture the girl attracted to an affair with an African-American:

the need to do something dramatic, something daring, was clearly strong in her.

Who was he? Who would meet his end in such a remote and dreadful way? I dug gingerly into the pockets. Like my own, they had clammed shut from the weight of the water. I had a hard job of it, as cold as I was, and I wasn’t rewarded with much when I finished. There was nothing in his jacket or his front trouser pockets but a handful of change. I gritted my teeth and stuck my hand under his buttocks. The back pockets were empty, too, except for a pencil and a matchbook.

No one in the modern age goes out in a suit and tie without a wallet, or at least a driver’s license. But where was his car? Had he done like me? Parked two miles away and come on foot for a secret rendezvous?

My head was aching so with cold I couldn’t think clearly, but I’d have been bewildered even if I were warm and dry. I know people drown in their baths in panic, and I myself had had a moment’s terror when I couldn’t get my head through those weeds, but why had he left all his papers at home? Had he come here on purpose to die? Was this some dramatic event planned for my teenager? Come out in the open about me or I’ll kill myself? He looked in repose like a steady man, not the person for such dramatic actions. It was hard to picture him as Romeo to my young heroine’s Juliet.

When the emergency crew arrived, I was still holding his matchbook and pencil. I stuck them into my own jacket pocket so I wouldn’t be caught in the act of stripping the body.

Besides a fire department ambulance, the dispatcher had sent both the New Solway cops and the DuPage County sheriff’s police. The body had turned up in unincorporated New Solway. That technically meant it belonged to the DuPage County sheriff, but the dispatcher had also notified the New Solway police. Even in my frozen state, I could understand why. The houses along Coverdale Lane were a who’s who of greater Chicago Big Money: New Solway cops would want an inside track on who to blame if the local barons-or baronesses-got testy.

The two groups jockeyed for dominance in inspecting the body. They wanted to know who I was and what I was doing there. Through my

chattering teeth I told them my name, but said I couldn’t talk until I was some place warm.

The two forces bickered for another long minute while I shivered uncontrollably, then compromised by letting the New Solway police ride along while the sheriff’s deputies took me to Wheaton.

“My God, you stink,” the sheriff’s deputy said when I climbed into his squad car.

“That’s just the rotting vegetation,” I muttered. “I’m clean inside.”

He wanted to open the windows to air out the smell, but I told him if I ended up with pneumonia I’d see he footed the medical bills. “You have a blanket or an old jacket or something in the trunk?” I added. “I’m wet and freezing and your pals waiting for the shift change so they wouldn’t have to take the call didn’t help any: it’s been over forty minutes since I phoned.”

“Yeah, bastards,” he said, then cut off the rest of the sentence, annoyed with me for voicing his grievance. He stomped around to the trunk and fished out an old towel. It couldn’t be any dirtier than I was: I draped it around my head and was asleep before the car left the yard.

When we got to the sheriff’s headquarters in Wheaton, I was so far gone I didn’t wake up until some strong young deputy yanked me out of the backseat and braced me on my feet. I stumbled into the building, joints stiff in my clammy clothes.

“Wake up, Sleeping Beauty,” the deputy snapped. “You need to tell us what you were doing on private property out here.”

“Not until I’m clean and dry,” I mumbled through cracked and swollen lips. “You must have some clothes out here I can borrow”

The deputy who’d brought me in said that was highly irregular, they didn’t treat housebreakers like hotel guests in DuPage County. I sat on a bench and began undoing the zipper on my windbreaker. A chunk of some dead plant had worked its way around the pull. My fingers were thick with cold, and I worked slowly while the deputy stood over me wanting to know what in hell I thought I was doing. The zipper took all my attention. When I finally had the jacket undone, I pulled off the wet sweater underneath. I was starting to take off my bottom layer, a T-shirt, when he grabbed my shoulder and yanked me back to my feet.

“What are you doing?”

“What it looks like. Taking off my wet clothes.”

“You can’t do that out here. You produce some ID and some reason for being on private property in the middle of the night.”

By now, a number of other officers, including a couple of women, had joined him. I looked past him and said to them, “Darraugh Graham asked me to check on Larchmont Hall. You know, the old Drummond estate where his mother lived until the year before last. It’s been standing empty and she thought she was seeing housebreakers. I found a dead man in the pool behind the house and got thoroughly soaked pulling him out. And that’s all I can say until I get clean and dry.”

“And how you planning on proving that story?” my deputy sneered. One of the women gave him a sour look. “Be your age, Barney. You never heard of Darraugh Graham? Come along,” she added to me.

My eyes were swelling with the onset of a head cold. I squinted at her badge. S. Protheroe.

Protheroe led me to the women’s locker room, where I toweled myself dry. She even dug up an old set of uniform trousers and a sweatshirt, a size or two too big on me but clean. “We keep spares out here for officers who’ve been through the wringer. You can sign for ‘em on your way out and get ‘em back to us in the next week. You want to tell me your name and what you were really doing out here?”

I pulled on clean socks and looked with disgust at my shoes. The tiled floor was cold, but my shoes would have been worse. I sat on the locker room bench and told her my name, my relationship to Darraugh, his mother’s belief that there were intruders in her old home, my fruitless surveillance-and the body I’d stumbled on. I don’t know why I didn’t feed her my young Juliet. Native caution, maybe, or maybe because I like ardent young women. I dug my wallet out of my windbreaker and showed her my PI license, fortunately walled in laminate.

Protheroe handed it back to me without comment, except to say the state’s attorney would want some formal statement about finding the dead man. When she saw me rolling my foul clothes into a bundle, she even found a plastic bag in a supply cupboard.

Protheroe took me to a room on the second floor and called someone on her cell phone. “Lieutenant Schorr will be along in a minute. You do

much work out here? No? Well, I know the Cook County sheriff’s office is a cesspool of Democratic patronage and favors. Out here it’s different. Out here it’s a cesspool of Republican patronage. So don’t mind the boys, they’re not all real well trained.”

Lieutenant Schorr arrived with a couple of male sidekicks and a woman who announced she was Vanna Landau, the assistant state’s attorney. One of the New Solway police officers had stayed for the meeting, as well. A fifth man came hurrying in a minute later, straightening the knot in his tie. He was introduced as Larry Yosano, a member of the law firm that had handled Larchmont’s sale-apparently a very junior member.

“Thanks, Stephanie,” Schorr dismissed my guide. She gave me a discreet thumbs-up and left.

I was used to Chicago police interrogation rooms, with their scarred tables and peeling paint, and where strong disinfectants don’t quite cover the traces of vomit. Stephanie Protheroe had brought me to something like a modern boardroom, with a television and camcorder ruling over blond furniture. Behind the modern facade, though, the smell of disinfectant and stale fear rose to greet me like an unwelcome neighbor.

Vanna Landau, the ASA, was a small woman who leaned across the table as if trying to make herself bigger by taking up as much room as possible. “Now just what were you doing on the land?”

In between coughs and sneezes, I explained in as mild a voice as I could summon.

“Spying on Larchmont Hall in the middle of the night?” Landau said. “That is trespassing, at a minimum.,,

I pinched the skin between my eyebrows in an effort to stay awake. “Would it have been better if I’d done it in daylight? Geraldine Graham was worried when she saw intruders around the house late at night. At her son’s request, I went over to take a look.”

Larry Yosano, the young lawyer, was trying to rub sleep out of his own eyes. “Technically, of course, it’s trespass, but if you’ve ever dealt with Mrs. Graham, you’d know that she’s never really acknowledged that she no longer owns Larchmont. She’s a strong personality, difficult to say no to.”

He turned to me. “Lyons Trust is the titleholder. They’re ‘he ones you should call if Mrs. Graham sees a problem with the property.”

I didn’t say anything except to ask for a Kleenex. One of the deputies found some paper napkins in a drawer and tossed them across the table at me. “Or the police,” Lieutenant Schorr said. “Did that ever occur to you, Ms. Private Eye?”

“Ms. Graham called the New Solway police several times. They thought she was a crazy old woman making stuff up.”

The New Solway cop, whose name I hadn’t heard, bristled. “We went out there three times and saw nothing. Yesterday, when someone really was on the property, we responded to the alarm within fifteen minutes. Her own son even says she could be making stuff up because she wants attention.”

I sat up at that. “I met with Ms. Graham yesterday afternoon. She didn’t strike me as delusional at all. I know she’s old, but if she says she’s seeing lights in that house she is. What about the man in the pool? If nothing else, him being there proves someone was using that abandoned estate for something.”

“I don’t think Mrs. Graham makes things up,” Yosano agreed, “but she doesn’t listen to advice. We, for instance, advised her to move away from New Solway when she sold, but her ties to the community are very deep, of course.”

I had a picture of the hapless dot-com millionaire, fending off Geraldine Graham’s efforts to help him run Larchmont the way her mother had done. The young state’s attorney seemed to feel the interview was slipping away; she demanded to know my relationship to the dead man.

“We kissed once, very deeply…” I waited until one of the deputies had eagerly written this down before adding, “… when I was doing CPR on him. His mouth was full of the crud in the pool and I had to clean that out first … Did you get that? Need me to spell any of the words?”

“So you don’t admit to knowing him?” Vanna Landau said.