Blacklist (6 page)

CHAPTER 6

Neighborhood Joint

Back when I signed a seven-year lease for my part of a warehouse at the south end of Bucktown, the surrounding neighborhood was chiefly Hispanic, with a handful of starving artists who needed cheap rent. Two taquerias within half a block of my front door served fresh tortillas past midnight and I had my choice of palm readers.

This evening as I drove south and west toward my office, all I could see was old six-flats like mine coming down and new town houses going up. Strip malls with identical arrays of Starbucks, wireless companies and home renovation chains were replacing factories and storefronts, as if the affluent were afraid to take chances on neighborhood places. The taquerias are a memory. Now I have to walk almost a mile farther south for the nearest good tostada. Of course, tenants like me are one reason the neighborhood is changing, but that doesn’t make me any happier about it. Especially when I figure what my next round of lease negotiations will look like.

I drove past my office without stopping, although I could see lights in the tall windows on the north side; my lease partner, Tessa Reynolds, was working late on a sculpture.

A few blocks south of our building, Milwaukee Avenue narrows to Model T width, making for congestion at all hours of the day. I parked at the first meter I came to and walked the last two blocks to La Llorona,

threading my way through the kinds of crowds that I knew from my South Side childhood. Worn-out women with litters of children straggling around them were stopping in the markets for dinner, or fingering clothes on the racks set out on the sidewalk. Boys darted in and out of the noisy narrow bars and I saw a girl of about eight slip a hair clip off a table and into her pocket.

When I got to La Llorona, some six or seven women were talking to Mrs. Aguilar while she packed up their families’ dinner. Celine was at the cash register, her red-brown hair swept up in a ponytail. She was working math problems in between ringing up purchases.

“Buenos dias, Senora Aguilar,” I croaked when Mrs. Aguilar glanced over at me.

“Buenos dias, Senora Victoria,” she called back. “You’re sick, no? What you need? A bowl of soup? Celine, chica, bring soup, okay?”

Celine sighed in the manner of all beleaguered teenagers, but she ducked smartly under the counter to fill a big bowl for me. While I waited, I glanced at her book: Differential Equations for Math SAT Students. A snappy title.

I sat at one of three high-topped tables that were stuck in the far corner of the storefront, drinking the soup slowly. When the shop was empty of other customers, I listened to Mrs. Aguilar’s endless fret about her bad back and her rotten landlord, who was raising her rent but refused to fix the leaking pipe that had shut her store down for two days last week.

“He want to make it so I go away, then he take down the building and make condos or something.”

She was probably right, so I didn’t do anything but commiserate. I finally managed to steer the conversation to Mrs. Aguilar’s third-favorite topic, Celine’s education. I asked if she had a current yearbook for Vina Fields. Mrs. Aguilar came around in front of the counter and pulled it out from the drawer underneath the cash register.

“Field hockey, I don’t understand this game, but at this school it is important, and Celine is the best.” Celine squirmed and moved with her equations to one of the high tables. When another handful of customers came in I took the yearbook with me to my table, asking for a refill on the soup.

“Don’t get no food on that, Victoria,” Mrs. Aguilar admonished me, as she ducked underneath the countertop and returned to her skillets.

I started going through the class pictures, seniors first. So many freshfaced, self-confident girls, so many with long dark hair and arrogant poise. I stopped at each such face, trying to match it to last night’s phantom. I didn’t think it had been Alex Dewhurst, favorite sport, showing horses, favorite singers, ‘NSYNC, or Rebecca Caudwell, who loved figure skating and wanted to become an attorney, although both were possible.

“What are you looking for?”

I’d been so absorbed I didn’t notice Celine shutting down the till and coming to stand next to me. Senora Aguilar was scrubbing down her counters. Time to pack up.

“I ran into one of your classmates when I was on a job last night. She dropped something valuable, but I don’t know her name.”

“What does she look like?”

“Long dark braid, kind of narrow face.”

Celine offered to take the found item with her to school and post a notice on their in-house WebBoard, but I told her the girl probably wouldn’t want the circumstances of her loss publicized. When I finished the seniors and moved on to the juniors, I saw my Juliet almost at once. Her eyes were serious despite the half smile the photographer had coaxed from her, and tendrils from her French braid were spiraling around her soft cheeks, as if she’d been too impatient to comb her hair just for a picture. Catherine Bayard, who loved Sarah McLachlan’s music, whose favorite sport was lacrosse and who hoped to be a journalist when she grew up. She probably would be: Bayard and publishing, the two words go together in Chicago like Capone and crime.

I didn’t linger on Catherine’s face-I didn’t want Celine alerting her at school the next day. Instead, I shrugged as if giving up the search as a bad job. Celine eyed me narrowly. Girls who work advanced calculus problems find adults like me tiresomely easy to solve. She knew I’d spotted someone, but maybe she couldn’t tell who it was.

Before giving the book back, I looked at the faculty section. The director was a woman named Wendy Milford, who had the strong expression principals put on to make you think their young charges don’t terrify them.

I asked Celine to point out her field hockey coach, and memorized the names of a math and history teacher. You never know.

I closed the book and handed it to her with money for my soup. Three dollars for two bowls-you wouldn’t find that in 923 or Mauve, or whatever trendy name you’d see on whatever bistro ultimately muscled La Llorona out of business.

I stopped in my office on my way home. Tessa had left for the day and the building was dark. It was also dankly cold. Tessa mainly wrestles large pieces of steel into towering constructions, work which makes her sweat enough to keep the furnace at sixty. I turned up my thermostat and sat bundled in my coat while I brought my system up.

Calvin Bayard, one of the heroes of my youth. I’d developed a huge crush on him when he addressed my Con Law class at the University of Chicago. With his magnetic smile, his easy command of First Amendment issues, his ready wit in answering hostile questions, he’d seemed in a different world than my professors.

After his lecture, I’d gone to the library to read his testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which had made me glow with pride. Illinois’s own Congressman Walker Bushnell, who’d been a leading member of the House Un-American Activities committee, had hounded Bayard for most of 1954 and 1955. But Bayard’s testimony made Bushnell sound like a small-minded voyeur. He had walked away from the hearings without ratting out his friends, and without facing prison time. And despite the fact that many of his writers were blacklisted, Bayard Publishing had grown throughout the fifties and sixties.

My law school had been a conservative place. A number of students had written angry letters to the dean about being subjected to one more liberal, but I’d been so enthusiastic I’d even applied for an internship at the Bayard Foundation on South Dearborn. I only got to see the great man twice that summer-in company with a few dozen other people. I hadn’t made the final cut for a permanent job, which hurt deeply at the time. I’d ended up with my third choice, the Public Defender’s office.

After all this time, I didn’t remember a lot of details about Bayard Publishing itself. I knew Calvin Bayard had been the person who moved it from a religious publishing house to doing secular books-the kind of books that got him in trouble with Congress. And there was some business about his supporting civil rights groups which HUAC perceived as Communist fronts. I pulled up Lexis-Nexis and scanned the company’s history. It had been founded by Calvin’s great-grandparents-evangelical Congregationalists who’d come west in the 1840s from Andover, Massachusetts, to start a Bible-and-tract publishing house.

Calvin had taken over the company in 1936, a boy wonder, twentythree years old. He’d published their first nonreligious novel in 1938, Tale of Two Countries by Armand Pelletier, who’d died in poverty in 1978, after years of blacklisting kept him out of print. That wasn’t in the Nexis report-it was just one of those things I remembered.

I counted on my fingers: Calvin Bayard must be around ninety now. If Catherine Bayard was part of that family, she would likely be a granddaughter.

I turned to Nexis’s personal search section. Calvin and Renee Genier Bayard had five addresses, including one on Coverdale Lane in New Solway. Of course. I’d read about Mrs. Edwards Bayard in the article about the gala opening of Larchmont Hall: she’d been the one with a mind above clothes. So last night Catherine had slipped through the woods between 17 Coverdale Lane and Larchmont Hall, and had k.iown exactly how to find her way back in the dark.

I copied down the address, and another one on Banks Street along Chicago’s Gold Coast. The family also maintained residences in London, New York and Hong Kong. I wrote those down, too, although if Catherine had fled that far, I couldn’t afford to go after her. The record included everyone who made their home at 17 Coverdale Lane. There seemed to be a staff of seven in residence. I added their names to my list and looked more closely at the Bayard family.

Renee was twenty-some years younger than Calvin. They’d married in 1957, right after his triumphal downing of Bushnell. They had one son, a man with three last names: Edwards Genier Bayard, born in fifty-eight, living in Washington.

I rubbed my sore eyes. Why was Edwards in D.C. while his daughter Catherine was here? And if Catherine had a mother, why wasn’t she in the file? The screen offered no answers. I returned to the company reports.

Bayard Publishing was still closely held. It didn’t approach the size of AOL Time Warner or Random House in the book world, but it wasn’t that far behind them either. Besides the publishing house that made up its core business, it held a thirty percent share in an online company, an audio label called “New Lion,” a bunch of magazines and a part interest in Drummond Paper.

I leaned forward, as if I could dive into the files in front of me. Drummond Paper had been started by Geraldine Graham’s grandfather. I guess it wasn’t surprising that the Bayards owned part of it-the neighbors up and down Coverdale Lane probably did little deals together all the time. While Mrs. Edwards Bayard attended the opening of Larchmont in her mauve bombazine, her husband probably discussed business with Mr. Matthew Graham in his “masculine sanctum,” as the 1903 society writer put it. It only made me uneasy because I kept finding places where the people from New Solway connected: Who knew whom? Who did what to or with whom?

I was closing the screen when I noticed Margent and Margent.Onlinethe magazine paying Morrell to hunt around Afghanistan for stories. I had a moment’s fantasy of calling Calvin Bayard: look after Morrell-in fact, bring Morrell home, and I won’t rat out your granddaughter. I shut my swollen eyes, the conversation and its aftermaths rolling through my imagination. Morrell home, in my arms-then never speaking to me again after he found out what I’d done.

I sat up and left Nexis to check my messages, including my log from the answering service. Among the litter of e-mails was one from Morrell. I put it aside to open last-dessert for doing my chores.

My phone message log took up two computer screens. I closed my eyes again, ready to turn my back on the whole caboodle, but, if I did that, the total would only be worse in the morning.

I squinted at the screen. Geraldine Graham had left two more messages this afternoon. She could wait until morning. Murray again. He could also wait. Inquiries from three clients whose projects were close to finished. I called them all, and actually found one live person on the end of the line. I explained where I was on his problem and that he’d have a report in two days. One of the things Mary Louise started me doing was to keep a time sheet for each client, including due dates. I entered this one in big red letters so I wouldn’t forget.

Stephanie Protheroe from the DuPage County sheriff’s office had phoned at four-thirty. When I reached her, she said she thought I’d like to know that they’d identified the man I’d found.

“His name was Marcus Whitby. He was a reporter for some magazine.” I could hear her rustling through pieces of paper. “Here it is: T-square. Someone at the magazine called in an ID when they saw his face on the wire.” “T-square,” I echoed. “What was he doing out in Larchmont?”

“They either don’t know or won’t say. Lieutenant Schorr tried to talk to Whitby’s boss, but didn’t get anywhere. You know the magazine?”

“It’s a kind of Vanity Fair for the African-American market-covers a mix of high-profile figures in black entertainment, politics and sports. They usually have a political section, too.” Tessa, my lease partner, has a subscription; they’d profiled her last year in “Forty Under Forty: Brothers and Sisters to Watch.”

“Did he live out there?” I asked.

“Uh, his address is somewhere in Chicago.” She fumbled with her notes again. “A street called Giles. Also, we got an autopsy result. He hadn’t been dead long when you found him, maybe an hour or two. And he died from drowning. They’re saying he got himself drunk and went to a place to die where he thought he could be private.”

“They’re saying? That means they found blood alcohol levels of some alarming height?”

“I haven’t seen the detailed report, so I can’t tell you that. All I know is, Sheriff Salvi talked to the press this afternoon. I guess it will be on the news tonight. His secretary says he told reporters that Marcus Whitby came all the way out to DuPage County to commit suicide. I thought you’d like to know”