Nowadays, the old warehouses hold chichi art galleries, while high-rise condos filling the vacant lots dwarf Llewellyn’s cube. The boom has also made parking a supreme hassle. I finally found a meter several blocks west of the building.
Llewellyn’s lobby was as spare as the exterior. All it held was a waiting area with beige-upholstered chairs, and a high horseshoe counter where a receptionist sat. No art, no glitz, only a photograph of Llewellyn himself hanging in the waiting area relieved the monotony. A uniformed guard lounged between the receptionist and modest elevator bank, although the receptionist was built on a massive enough scale to stop an intruder without help from the guard. She frowned majestically when I identified myself and said I was hoping to see Mr. Simon Hendricks.
“And do you have an appointment?” “No, but-“
“He’s not taking any unsolicited interviews.”
“I have a note for him. Can you send that up, please?”
She took the envelope from me and opened it-even though it was sealed and addressed to Hendricks. I’d kept it simple:
Dear Mr. Hendricks,
I am the private investigator who found Marcus Whitby’s body at Larchmont Hall on Sunday night; I got him out of the water and tried to give him CPR. His sister, Ms. Harriet Whitby, has hired me to investigate his death. I’d like to know if Mr. Whitby was working on something that
took him to New Solway on Sunday.
V 1. Warshawski
When the receptionist had read it-taking her time, as if hoping to goad me into some display of impatience that would allow her to throw me out-she made a call on the house phone, speaking too softly for me to overhear. She mutely nodded me to a seat in the lobby. I sat on the scratchy beige upholstery, hoping my message was persuasive enough to open doors closed to Murray’s aggressive style.
After a wait long enough to let me read most of the January issue of T-square, which was on a small table with current copies of the other magazines in the Llewellyn Group, a woman got off the elevator and came over to me. She was about six feet tall, as lean as a whippet, wearing skintight turquoise leather and high-heeled boots that added another three inches to her height. The shiny turquoise made my striped suit look dowdy and conventional.
The woman didn’t sit down, so I got up. It isn’t often I feel like a shrimp, but my eyes just about connected with her breastbone. She ignored the hand I held out as I smiled and introduced myself.
“I’m Mr. Hendricks’s assistant. What is it you’re hoping to get out of a meeting with him?”
I let my hand drop, and spoke with a phony sincerity more grating than outright hostility. “I’m so sorry your receptionist didn’t let you read my note. I’m a private investigator; Marcus Whitby’s sister has hired me to find out how and why he died. It would be helpful to learn what he was working on these days that took him out to New Solway.”
She curled her lip in disdain. “And for proof you offer-?”
I pulled the laminate of my investigator’s license from my wallet. She looked at it, but told me she wanted proof that Harriet Whitby had really hired me.
I pulled out my cell phone and called the Drake. Harriet wasn’t in her room, but when I rang the senior Whitbys I found the client with her mother. She answered cautiously, trying not to give herself away to her mother.
“I’m at the publishing company right now, Ms. Whitby. One of the secretaries wants to make sure you’ve really hired me, that I’m not using your name as a smoke screen for infiltrating Llewellyn Publishing. Can you talk to her?”
“I guess so, but I can’t really, that is, well, let me see what I can do,” Harriet stammered.
The assistant was frowning mightily, but she took the phone from me and had a terse conversation with my client. At the end of it, she gave me back my phone. “I’ll talk to Mr. Hendricks about it.”
She clicked over to the reception desk in her high heels and picked up the phone. I followed her over.
“She says she’s his sister… No, I don’t… all right, I’ll tell her.” She hung up and turned to me. “Mr. Hendricks wants some proof that we were really talking to Harriet Whitby”
By now we had drawn a small crowd-the guard and two people who had been on their way out of the building joined us at the reception counter. They weren’t saying anything, but secret smiles and nudges showed Hendricks’s assistant that she was putting on a good performance.
I leaned against the countertop, my eyes hot. “Are you seriously suggesting that this grieving woman leave her mother’s side to produce a photo ID for you? Is there some scandal about Marcus Whitby that you’re trying to hide? Did the magazine send him out to New Solway to die?”
The assistant’s plucked eyebrows rose in great semicircles. “Of course not. We’re only trying to protect our own privacy”
“Then take me up to Simon Hendricks now. If he knows anything about Marcus Whitby’s death, the sooner he tells me the sooner I can help the Whitby family take their dead son back home for the funeral.”
“That’s right, Delaney,” one of the onlookers said. “Stop horsing around and take the woman up to Simon.”
Several others in the group echoed the sentiment. Delaney hesitated, but realized the group’s mood had shifted against her. She stalked to the elevator, telling me over her shoulder to come with her. I followed her to the editorial offices on the sixth floor.
CHAPTER 10
Hendricks himself was as bleak in person as he’d seemed on television Monday night. He didn’t smile when his assistant introduced me, didn’t change expression when I explained why Harriet Whitby had hired me, didn’t as much as blink when I mentioned her concern that DuPage hadn’t done a proper postmortem.
“I see, Ms.”- he glanced at my card-“Warshawski. So the family believes you can tell them something the police can’t? They have actually hired you to conduct this investigation?” He sounded as though it was about as likely as my being asked to pinch-hit for Sammy Sosa.
“Your guard dog here spoke with Harriet Whitby,” I said. “And the family believes it, yes, or they wouldn’t have asked me to do the job.”
He and Delaney both stiffened at the “guard dog” title, but Hendricks merely said coldly, “And what do you expect to learn from Mr. Whitby’s current assignments?”
I again went through my song and dance about trying to understand what had taken Whitby to New Solway.
“We’d all like to know that, Ms.-uh. I don’t believe it was connected to his work. You spoke to Whitby’s sister, Delaney? You’re convinced it really was the sister?”
Delaney murmured a respectful assent.
Hendricks picked up a sheaf of papers: the busy man interrupted middecision. “Mr. Whitby was working on a story on the writers in the Federal Negro Theater Project. You know what that is?”
When I repeated the little knowledge I’d picked up from Whitby’s articles, Hendricks curled his lip. “I see. I would have thought the family-but I suppose they know their own business best. Very well, Ms.-uh… You’re welcome to look at the proposal he gave me, but he hadn’t turned in the completed story. Nothing in the proposal would have taken him to the western suburbs. And I don’t know of anything else he was working on that would have done so. He did freelance work, but he always cleared such projects with me, to make sure they didn’t conflict with anything we were doing here. Delaney, take her out to talk to Aretha. And give her a copy of the proposal.”
He returned to the printout in front of him before we’d left the room. When I asked Delaney who Aretha was, she said tersely, “Research assistant and fact checker who worked with Mr. Whitby”