“Was he in a hurry?” I asked.
She flung up her hands. “I don’t know. Me and Tanya, we didn’t pay special notice to him.”
“Maybe he’d parked up the street and drove off” I suggested. “Do you know what his car looked like?”
When she pointed at a green Saturn SL1 across the street, I said, “That’s what his looked like? A green four-door?”
“No,” she said, annoyed with my stupidity. “That’s his car.” “You’re positive? Is that where it was Sunday night?”
“I dunno.” She was tired of answering questions. “We didn’t think nothin’ of it. He took the bus to work most days. Then we saw he was dead. Daddy, I’m going to be late and Miss Stetson, she’ll give me detention. Please drive me, please?”
“Yeah, okay, but you know I don’t want you jumping rope in the street. And was Kansa part of your group Sunday night? Because if she was, you are definitely-“
They climbed into a car before I heard what she definitely was. I crossed the street to look at Whitby’s Saturn. Underneath a film of dust, the body was in mint condition, no dings or scratches, except for a dent in the left front fender.
I peered into it, cupping my hands against the glare. If I could believe the girls, he’d left on foot. Where had he been going? And how had he gotten out to New Solway?
A cab pulled up in front of Whitby’s house. Amy Blount hopped out of the front seat and opened the back door to help out a dimunitive woman in a severe black suit and hat. A man slowly climbed out of the other door, followed by Harriet. So the whole Whitby family had arrived. I sucked in a breath. This could make things more complicated.
The man bent over the driver’s window to pay the fare. When I stepped forward, Mrs. Whitby turned to look at me. I couldn’t see her face: even in high heels she only stood about five foot two, and the hat brim shielded everything but her chin. I made conventional noises of condolence and introduced myself.
“Yes, it’s very difficult,” she said in a dry, dead voice. “But since my daughter and my husband want you to pry open my son’s life, I thought I should make the effort and come out to see you. Poor Marcus, I couldn’t protect him in life, I don’t know why I think I can protect him in death.”
Harriet bit her lip; she’d obviously been hearing these sentiments for the last twenty-four hours. She introduced her father, a tall, thickset man. I guessed he was in his fifties, but he was walking with the stoop of someone older and frailer.
“So you’re the woman who found Marc. I don’t understand it, I don’t understand it at all. And you think you can explain it? Find out why he was out there, how he came to die?”
Amy stepped forward with determined briskness and asked if I’d been inside yet.
“I was waiting for the family,” I said. “When is Ms. Murchison getting here?”
She had already arrived. She must have stood inside the doorway watching while I talked to the neighbors, because before we had sorted out the protocol of who went first, and whether Mr. Whitby or Harriet would support her mother up the five steep stairs to the front door, Rita Murchison opened it.
Like me, like Mrs. Whitby and her daughter, Rita Murchison was wearing a dark suit, chosen to prove she wasn’t a cleaning woman but a legitimate mourner. She didn’t step back as our awkward group converged on the small concrete stoop. I was afraid she was going to demand IDs before she’d let us in.
I moved forward, forcing her to retreat. “Thanks for coming over here, Ms. Murchison. Was this your usual day to clean for Mr. Whitby?”
She scowled at me. “I’m a housekeeper.”
“You look after the house?” I said. “Meaning you live here? What time did Mr. Whitby go out on Sunday?”
“I don’t live here, but I do look after the house.”
Mrs. Whitby pushed past me and Rita Murchison into the hall. The rest of the family followed her, leaving me alone with the housekeeper.
“So when you were looking after the house on Sunday,” I persisted, causing her to say she was a Christian, she certainly didn’t work on Sundays. “On Monday, then?” I asked.
After a stubborn minute, she finally admitted that she only came in on Fridays for four hours. “He was a bachelor. He lived a simple life. He didn’t need a lot of help.”
Behind us, Mrs. Whitby said, “I had no idea this neighborhood collected so much dust. Because I’m sure you must have gone over this last Friday, and yet here we are on Thursday knee-deep in dust.”
Rita Murchison wheeled around. I peered over her shoulder down the narrow hallway to the staircase which rose halfway down its length. Mrs. Whitby had found the light switches. A spotlight was trained on a framed poster on the stairwell wall. It showed the silhouette of an African dancer, back arched, in the social realist style of the thirties; around the sleek figure was an intricate design of African prints and masks.
“The Federal Negro Theater Presents,” proclaimed the header, and,
underneath, “Kylie Ballantine’s Ballet Noir of Chicago, April 15-16-17, the Ingleside Theater.”
The light also revealed a thin film of dust along the edges of the stairs. Mrs. Whitby stood there, inspecting her finger. Rita Murchison surged forward, prepared for battle. Harriet put her arm around her mother, trying to persuade her not to worry about dust when Marc was dead. I slid away from the trio into the room on my right. Amy Blount followed me.
“I tried to persuade Mrs. W to stay at the hotel, but I could hardly blame her for wanting to see her son’s house. She’s been wanting to fight someone all week, anyone to distract her from her distress over Marc. When Harriet and I wouldn’t play, I thought for sure she’d take you on.”
I grinned. “I thought she would, too. Let’s leave them to it and see if we can find any trace of his notes, or a diary, or anything that would tell us why he went out to New Solway.”
Amy nodded. “It’s not that big a place. It’s got three floors, but only nine rooms and he didn’t really use the third floor at all. His study was on the second floor, next to the bedroom. Want to start there? We can go up a back staircase from the kitchen.”
“You spend a lot of time here?” I asked.
“We weren’t lovers, if that’s what you want to know,” Amy said roughly. “We were friends-Harriet and I were close at Spelman, I used to spend Christmas with the family, so even though Marc was six years older than us, I knew him through the family. When he moved to Chicago three years ago to take the job at T-Square, I introduced him to people. He was quiet, not naturally outgoing, not like Harriet. Unless he was working on a story-then he would feel comfortable calling people and talking to them. Later he developed this interest in Ballantine, which began absorbing his spare time.”
I followed her through a dining room to the kitchen and the back stairs, our feet echoing on the uncarpeted floors. Whitby had masks from one of Ballantine’s productions on the living room wall, photographs from the Swing Mikado along the stairwell. He even had a pair of Ballantine’s toe shoes under a glass bell on his dresser.
He’d also been rehabbing his house bit by bit. The kitchen walls were
scraped and painted. He’d put in a new stove and refrigerator, but stacked all his pots and dishes on a trolley instead of buying cupboards.
The refrigerator held half a cooked, skinless chicken breast, skim milk, orange juice and a carton of eggs. No beer, no wine, was in sight; only a bottle of Maker’s Mark, about a quarter empty, stood on a shelf with spices and pastas.
“His drink,” Amy said when she saw the bottle. “Bourbon and branch.” He’d begun work on a bathroom, had finished two upstairs rooms, his bedroom and the study, but the rest of the house was still either half-built, or untouched. Books were housed neatly on board-and-brick shelves. Most dealt with black history and theater, or with African art and dance. He didn’t seem to read much fiction. Next to his bed, though, he had a library copy of Armand Pelletier’s A Tale of Two Countries, the first novel Calvin Bayard had published when he’d taken over the press-Bayard Publishing’s first nonreligious novel.