“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.
Water had gummed the matchbook into a solid mass that wouldn’t open. The cover had originally been some shade of green. Water had turned it blackish, and whatever the logo had been, it now looked like a child’s amorphous picture of a star. The cover didn’t have an address or phone number. I might be able to get a forensics lab to open it to see whether Whitby had written something on the inside. The pencil was an ordinary number 2 with no names stamped on it.
Harriet turned the matchbook over in her hands. Neither she nor Amy had any idea where it was from, but Harriet wanted to keep it, as the last thing her brother had touched. I looked closely at both the matchbook and the pencil again. They weren’t going to tell me anything. I handed them over to Harriet Whitby.
When I’d ushered them out, I was utterly beat. I steamed myself for a few minutes in a hot pot of my mother’s invention-herbal tea, lemon, ginger-and crawled into bed, where I fell at once down a hole of sleep. The phone dragged me out of it at one in the morning.
“Is this V I. Warshawski?” the night operator from my answering service demanded. “We’ve gotten a phone call from a Mrs. MacKenzie Graham. She says it’s an emergency and insisted that we wake you.”
“Mrs. MacKenzie Graham?” I echoed, bewildered: I knew Darraugh’s son, MacKenzie, and didn’t think he’d gotten married. Then I remembered through the fog of sleep that MacKenzie had also been Darraugh’s father’s name. I switched on a light and fumbled around on the mghtstand for a pen.
When I had Geraldine Graham’s number, I was tempted to make her wait until morning. But-I’d found a dead man in her childhood pond Sunday night. Maybe someone was making a habit of tossing bodies there and she was watching them do it again. I dialed the number.
“I want you out here at once, young woman.” She sounded as though she thought I was the night chambermaid.
“Why?”
“Because it’s your job to discover who is breaking into Larchmont. You didn’t find them last night, but they are here right now”
“What are you seeing?” I croaked hoarsely.
“What is that, young woman? Don’t grumble at me.”
I tried to clear my throat. “What are you seeing? People? Phantom lights? Cars?”
“I’m seeing the lights in the attic. Didn’t I tell you that? If you come right now, you’ll find whoever it is red-handed.”
“You need to call the cops, Ms. Graham. I live more than forty miles from you.”
She brushed the distance aside: the cops had proved how useless they were; she hoped I wasn’t going to be similarly ineffectual.
“If someone is using Larchmont as a dump for dead bodies, you need to get the local cops there at once. Me arriving ninety minutes from now would serve very little purpose. If you’d like me to call them for you, I can.”
She took my offer as a face-saving out. “And what is your direct number, young woman? I’m tired of relaying messages to you through your help. They’re not cooperative.”
“They’re your best chance of reaching me, Ms. Graham. Good night.” I didn’t want to call Stephanie Protheroe again: one favor a night is all I expect from anyone. I finally remembered the young lawyer on emergency duty for the rich and famous. I found his card with a pager number and beeped him. When he called me back ten minutes later, he was as groggy with sleep as I was, but he agreed to get someone from the New Solway police to drive over to Larchmont.
“Will you let me know what they find?” I asked. “I’m working for the Graham family, you know.”
“It’s a strange life, isn’t it,” he said, “responding to the demands of the very wealthy. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a lawyer joke that covered that aspect of our work.”
While I waited, I made myself another pot of herbal tea. My mother had brought me up to believe one drank coffee as a matter of course, but tea only in illness. I took it into the living room and drank two cups, idling away the early morning by watching Audrey Hepburn stare wistfully at Gregory Peck. All the time I looked at Hepburn’s doelike eyes, I kept wondering whether the New Solway police would catch Catherine Bayard breaking into Larchmont Hall.
After an hour, Larry Yosano called me back. “Ms. Warshawski? I went over with the New Solway police, and we didn’t see anyone. We made a circuit of the house and the outbuildings and didn’t notice any breakage; the security company confirms that no one has tripped an alarm out here.
We double-checked the pond: you’ll be glad to know there aren’t any new bodies there. Maybe Ms. Graham confused lights in the attic with the traffic going by on Coverdale Lane.”
I felt absurd, breathing a sigh of relief. I saw nothing but shoals ahead in talking to young Catherine Bayard, but I was still happy that if she was the person Geraldine Graham had seen at Larchmont Hall, she’d finished whatever she was doing before the cops arrived.
CHAPTER 9
When I woke again the sun was bright in the sky. I, on the other hand, was stiff and congested; when I tried my voice, I sounded more like Sam Ramey than Renee Fleming. I stumbled out of bed and into my clothes, but the late night with Harriet Whitby and Amy Blount-followed by Geraldine Graham’s demands-had knocked out any reserves I had. I was too hoarse even to make phone calls. Finally I gave in to the luxury of a day off. I played tapes of my mother’s old concerts, listened to Leontyne Price sing Mozart, and ate soup that Mr. Contreras brought in from the market.