Blacklist (8 page)

He huffed and puffed, but when I pulled the blanket up to my chin and stretched out he rattled the dishes out to the kitchen and left.

CHAPTER 8

Twinkle,Twinkle, Little Light

(Wonder If You’re There Tonight)

Aloud knock on my own door jerked me awake forty minutes later. I hadn’t heard the bell for the simple reason that Mr. Contreras had been on the watch for my visitors: he let them in and brought them upstairs before they could announce themselves. It’s a perennial source of conflict between us, his monitoring of my company. At least the pulse of anger I felt at his intrusion woke me up enough to greet the two women with some show of alertness.

Amy Blount looked much as she had when I last saw her, her long dreadlocks twisted in a bundle behind her head, her expression wary, solemn. She had an arm around the other woman, whose face had the drained, pinched look that follows on loss. We murmured introductions and condolences. While I got them settled on the couch, with herbal tea for Harriet Whitby and me, a glass of wine for Amy Blount, I managed to force Mr. Contreras to return to the first floor. He blurted out a final admonishment, directed at my guests, that I wasn’t to stay up late: I was sick, remember?

As soon as he disappeared, Amy began. “When we heard your name on TV, I told Harriet I knew you. We’d been talking over what we could do, because it’s outrageous to think Marc committed suicide. He was the most, oh, not optimistic, I wouldn’t say that-“

“Hopeful. He was a hopeful man,” Harriet Whitby said. “And he knew

how much our parents not just loved him, but relied on him to make a difference with his life. You know, he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his piece on the Federal Negro Theater Project and he’d won several other awards. He wouldn’t do something like this to Daddy and Mother.”

I made noncommittal noises. It can be hard, when everyone relies on you, to let them know that you’re feeling despair, but I didn’t think it would be helpful to suggest that.

“How did you find him?” Harriet asked. “I don’t know Chicago at all, but Amy says that mansion where he-he died-is forty or fifty miles away, in some kind of wealthy town most people never heard of.”

“Your brother never mentioned New Solway or Larchmont Hall to you or your parents?”

She shook her head. “But he worked on a lot of different stories. If he was doing research, or even if he had a friend out there-we talked once a week or so, but he wouldn’t go into those kinds of details, not unless it was something that was becoming, well, a regular part of his life. Did you think he was in danger? Is that why you went out there?”

I told them about Darraugh Graham and his mother, and the family connection to Larchmont. At Harriet’s prodding, I told them about finding her brother, hefting him out of the water, trying to revive him. But I didn’t mention Catherine Bayard.

I expected them to leave then, but they looked at each other with the kind of wordless communication that old friends or lovers develop. When Harriet nodded, Amy Bount said, “We want you to ask some questions about Marc’s death. Mr. and Mrs. Whitby are too shattered to take any action, but we think, well, at a minimum, we want a better answer to what happened to him than the DuPage County sheriff is giving us.”

Harriet Whitby nodded again. “It’s not that Marc didn’t drink, but he wasn’t a drinker, if you understand me, and he didn’t use alcohol to bolster his courage. What they said on TV was a cruder version of what they told us this afternoon when my parents and I met with them, that he’d been drinking and fallen in this pond and drowned. If he-oh, it’s too hard to explain, but nothing about his death makes sense to me. Even if he had wanted to die, which I don’t believe for one minute, he wouldn’t do it like that. But they’re saying that their examination showed he drowned and that he’d been drinking. Would they make that up?”

“No. But they don’t do a complete autopsy on every body that comes to them. It’s too expensive, and this-your brother-must have looked straightforward to them. They wouldn’t do a complete screen for drugs or poison if they’d found traces of alcohol.”

Harriet and Amy looked at each other again, and again it was Amy who spoke. “Do you think they could be making that up? The alcohol?”

I frowned, thinking it over. “It seems unlikely. You could get a lawyer to subpoena the medical examiner’s report, I suppose. Do you have some reason to think they might make it up?”

“Their general indifference,” Harriet said. “We didn’t meet the sheriff, just some spokesman. He was polite enough to Mother, but not very interested. They don’t seem at all curious about why Marcus was in that place to begin with. They want it to be that he got drunk and-stumbled onto a deserted mansion and drowned himself. Either by accident or on purpose, they don’t care which.”

“That’s what we’d like to know,” Amy said. “Why he was out there. And how he really died.”

I was curious enough myself to want to take the job, but I had to explain that I couldn’t work for free. I hate to talk about money to someone in the shock of bereavement, but I outlined my fee structure: if Harriet Whitby lived on graduate student earnings as Amy Blount did, she might find the bills mounting up faster than she expected.

“That’s all right; I’m not like Amy-I was smart enough to get a real job when we left Spelman.” She gave the glimmer of a smile. “I can tell you’re sick, but if you’re going to do this, I need you to start right now.”

“Tonight, you mean?” I was startled. “There’s very little I can do tonight. Anyone I might have questions for-people who knew him at the magazine, for instance, or his neighbors-wouldn’t be available until morning.”

“You don’t understand,” Amy said. “The Whitbys will be collecting Marc in the morning. They want to take him home to Atlanta for the funeral. So if there are any questions to be asked about-about his body-we thought you would know who to talk to even at this hour. I mean, just the

idea that he was drunk is so odd it makes us wonder if they did an autopsy at all.”

My eyes were swelling and tearing with a weariness that made it hard for me to think. But I suddenly heard the unspoken question in the room: had the DuPage ME given Marcus Whitby’s death a once-over-lightly because he was black, and out of place in wealthy New Solway?

I didn’t know anyone in DuPage County, unless you counted the deputy who’d lent me the pants and sweatshirt, and she wasn’t in a position to put pressure on the medical examiner to reopen the autopsy. If only he’d died in Cook County, where I know …

I got up abruptly and started tossing aside papers on the table I use as a home desk, trying to find my PaImPilot. When it didn’t turn up there, I dumped out my briefcase. The Palm was buried in the bottom. I looked up Bryant Vishnikov, the deputy chief medical examiner for Cook County, but of course he wasn’t in his office this late at night. It was after eleven now. I hesitated, but finally dialed his home number.

He wasn’t happy at being awakened. “This had better be a real emergency, Vic. I’m on duty at six tomorrow morning.”

“Nick, do you know the DuPage ME?”

“That is not an emergency question,” he snapped.

“This is serious. They have Marcus Whitby’s body out there. You know, the man who drowned at one of those big estates near Naperville Sunday night. I found him.”

He grunted. “I can’t keep up with every corpse you stumble on in the six counties, Warshawski. I have enough trouble with the ones right here in Cook.”

I rode over his sarcasm. “I think DuPage only gave him a brief look-see and it’s really important that they do a complete autopsy before they release him to the family tomorrow”

“On your say-so?” Vishnikov was sarcastic.

“No, Dr. Vishnikov, on yours. The sheriff is saying he was drunk, but it doesn’t seem likely. They need to do a thorough exam, see if they’ve overlooked something.”

“Like what?” he growled.

“I don’t know. A blow to the head or sternum, or curare in the blood

stream, or-I’m not a pathologist. Anything. Anything that might have made him go into that pond. If he even drowned there. Maybe he died in Lake Michigan and someone carried him out to Larchmont”

“You’ve been watching too many Law F7 Order reruns. Give it a rest, and let me get back to sleep.”

“Not until you tell me you’ll talk to the DuPage County ME.”

“Do you have any idea-no, apparently not. This is not like calling one of my own colleagues at Cook County. I only know Jerry Hastings very slightly, and if he called me to tell me to go back over a body I’d tell him to go to hell. So that’s what I’d expect him to do to me.”

“Can’t you say you have a body that died in a similar way and you want to compare notes? Or get them to let you look at Marcus Whitby yourself for the same reason?” I started coughing again and had to stop to drink more tea.

“No. What I can do is a private autopsy if the family hires me. If DuPage is releasing the body to them, it’s within their rights to make that decision.”

I covered the mouthpiece and explained his advice to Amy and Harriet, who frowned in worry. “Mother-she won’t agree to that. All she wants is to get Marc away from this place as fast as possible. Isn’t there anything else you can do?”

When I relayed that back to Bryant, he said, “Then there’s nothing I can do to help you. You want the autopsy, you’ve got to get the family to release the body to me or someone else who will perform a private exam. Or come up with some compelling reason for Jerry Hastings to revisit the body.”

“I need to buy time for an investigation!” I exclaimed, frustrated. “Look, Warshawski, if the family won’t agree to a private autopsy, then you’ll just have to let them take the body away in the morning. Speaking of which, the dawn is not far distant. I’m going back to sleep. And you, you start gargling, or your next stop will be one of my slabs-assuming you die in Cook County.”

Vishnikov hung up, but just as I was explaining the problem to Harriet he called back. “In my morgue, I’m always having to battle with low-level clerks who lose the paperwork on bodies.”

He hung up again before I could speak. I waved a hand at my visitors, urging them to silence, while I frowned over his advice. I only had one possibility. I combed through the papers I’d dumped from my briefcase until I found Stephanie Protheroe’s cell phone number.

“I watched the television news tonight,” I said when she answered. “The sheriff seemed pretty convinced that Mr. Whitby drowned on purpose.” “We didn’t see anything to suggest foul play,” she said.

“Deputy, I have Mr. Whitby’s sister with me. They were pretty close; she finds it hard to believe her brother committed suicide.”

“It’s always a struggle for the family,” Protheroe said.

“They find his car?” I asked. “Or discover how he got to Larchmont Hall? It’s what, about five rniles from the nearest train station. Do they have a cab service out there?”

A long pause told me Protheroe realized they had a biggish hole in their solution to Whitby’s death. I didn’t push on the point.

“Ms. Whitby’s hired me to ask a few questions. Ordinarily, I advise the family to get a private autopsy when they’re not satisfied with the medical examiner. But the mother only wants to get her son out of Chicago and interred; she won’t consent to a tox screen or anything else.”

“Then you have a problem, don’t you?” Protheroe wasn’t hostile, just cautious.

“Of course, if the paperwork for the body got misfiled for three or four days, I might come up with a different reason for why Mr. Whitby was in New Solway than just that he stumbled out there to die. I might find his car. I might find something that would make Dr. Hastings want to reopen the autopsy without anyone looking bad.”

“And why should I risk my career on this?” Protheroe demanded. “Oh, because I think you went into law enforcement for the same reason I did: you care more about justice than jelly doughnuts.”

“Don’t knock jelly doughnuts. They’ve saved me more times than my Kevlar vest.” She broke the connection.

“Will the person you just talked to help?” Harriet said anxiously.

“I think so. We won’t know until your mother tries to claim your brother’s body tomorrow.”

Amy Blount looked at me with respect: I had a feeling she hadn’t

expected me to come through for her. “We should let you get to bed. Did you get sick from trying to rescue Marc?”

“It’s just a cold,” I said gruffly. “Who can I talk to tomorrow who might know what Mr. Whitby was working on, or what might have taken him out to New Solway? Did he have a girlfriend, or any close men friends here?”

Harriet rubbed the crease between her eyes. “If he was dating anyone in a serious way, it was still too recent for him to have told me or Mother. His editor is a man named Simon Hendricks; he would know what Marc was working on-if he was writing for T-square. Marc did freelance stuff, too, you know. As for his friends, I can’t think right now. I know his college friends, but not his Chicago ones.”

“I’ll start with the magazine in the morning,” I said. “And maybe I can ask your mother about his friends?”

She gave another fleeting smile. “Better not-Mother would be terribly upset to find out I’d hired you.”

I stifled a groan: this meant the second client in a week where I had to tread lightly between mother and child. “What about your brother’s house? Can you get in there, do you think? We might find some notes or something. I looked in his pockets, hoping for some ID, and he didn’t have any keys on him. It hadn’t occurred to me until I was talking to the deputy just now, but there weren’t any house keys or car keys, unless maybe those fell out of his pockets into the pond.”

Harriet turned in bewilderment to Amy. “Then-but his car-I didn’t think about that.”

“What did he drive?” I pulled a notebook out of the heap on the table. “A Saturn SLl? We’ll see if he left it at his house.”

Amy volunteered to find a lawyer or someone else who might have a spare key to Marcus Whitby’s house. I didn’t say I could get past the lock myself if need be: I’d save that parlor trick for when I had to use it. Mentioning the search I’d made of his pockets made me remember the matchbook and pencil I’d found. I’d tossed them in a bowl by the front entrance when I took Catherine’s teddy bear out of my pockets. I went back for them and showed them to Harriet and Amy.