I had been a Cubs fan for too many years to have any hope; I switched off the set.
“That the pond you was in, doll?” Mr. Contreras said. “Doesn’t look like the kind of place a man would choose to drown in. Not if he lived in the city and had this whole great big lake right at his doorstep.”
“None of it makes a lot of sense. Unless he was meeting someone out there.” I told the old man about Catherine Bayard. “I don’t know if she was a source he was meeting or a lover-“
“A lover? Sixteen-year-old kid and a black-” He caught my eye and hastily changed to “and a man that age?”
“Please,” I coughed hoarsely. “You’re the only person I’ve told about finding her there. I just learned her name this evening and I am counting the minutes until I can get my hands on her in person. But if Whitby didn’t go out to New Solway to see her, what was he doing there? Maybe his magazine will talk to me. I know they’ve been stiffing reporters, but, after all, I’m the person who found their guy’s body.”
Mr. Contreras patted my arm reassuringly. “You’ll have some bright idea in the morning, cookie: I know you. Right now you need to go back to bed, nurse that cold.”
The phone rang as I got up to help him stack the dishes. I looked at the clock: nine-forty. I almost let it go, figuring it was either Beth Blacksin or Murray Ryerson, wanting to talk about the sheriff’s report on Marcus Whitby, or, even worse, Geraldine Graham wanting more attention. But what if Morrell-I jumped on the phone before my answering service could pick it up.
“Is this V I. Warshawski? It is? You sound different. This is Amy Blount ” “Ms. Blount?” I was surprised. Our paths had crossed last summer: she
had a Ph.D. in economic history and had written a book on an insurance company I was investigating. We’d achieved some degree of mutual respect during the course of my investigation, but we weren’t friends.
“I’m sorry to call so late, but-Harriet Whitby is with me. We were roommates at Spelman. She wants to talk to you.”
“Sure. Put her on.” I tried to mask the dismay I felt: I didn’t have the energy to talk to the dead man’s sister. “Although I doubt I can tell her anything that she hasn’t heard from the sheriff.”
“She wants to talk in person. It’s difficult to explain, and I shouldn’t try to do it on her behalf, but, because I know you, it seemed easier for me than her to call you… I don’t know if you remember, but you gave me your home number last summer.”
Of course Marcus Whitby’s sister would want to talk face-to-face to the person who found her brother’s body. My morning was free; I told Amy I’d be glad to drive down to her Hyde Park apartment if she and Ms. Whitby didn’t feel like coming to my office.
“Can we do it now? I know its late, and I can tell you’ve got a cold, but she’d like to see you tonight. Before all the funeral arrangements get so far under way that they can’t be undone.”
I thought longingly of my bed, but I infused what brightness I could into my hoarse bark and said I’d be on my way in short order. Mr. Contreras frowned at me and deliberately rattled the stack of dishes.
Amy Blount heard him. She apologized again for disturbing me so late, but only perfunctorily-she wanted me to see Harriet now. She did, however, offer to bring Whitby’s sister to me: Harriet was staying with her parents at the Drake; Amy would drive her up to my place before taking her to the hotel.
When we’d hung up, I managed to shoo Mr. Contreras out of the apartment. He disapproved heatedly of my setting up an appointment this late in the day: I was sick, these weren’t people he knew, nothing was so important it couldn’t wait until morning.
“You’re right,” I said. “I’m sure you are, but this is the dead man’s sister. She needs special consideration. If you take the dogs downstairs, I can rest for twenty minutes until she gets here.”
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
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?”