I nodded my understanding. Following him down the hall and out the door, I took advantage of his anxiety about the time to depress the lip of the dead bolt so it wouldn’t fasten when we left. Rivas went to the elevators while I walked outside. As soon as he got into an elevator, I darted back down the hall, pushed Taverner’s door open and flipped the lights back on. A handsome old leather-topped desk stood in a corner on the far side of the sitting room. Nearer to me were the armchairs where Taverner and Whitby had presumably sat to have their conversation. I started toward the desk, then decided caution was the better part of valor. I returned to the kitchen, found some latex gloves under the sink, and put those on.
When I returned to the sitting room, I realized it was considerably colder than the kitchen and bedroom had been. I stopped on my way to the desk: a draft was seeping under the brocade drapes, which swayed with the air currents.
I crossed the room fast and flung the drapes open. Someone had broken the glass on the door to the patio and forced the lock from the inside. I pulled the heavy fabric away from the wall. A man was flattening himself into the corner. He swore and ran toward me bull-like, head lowered. I didn’t let go of the drapes fast enough. The man butted me in the stomach, shoved open the broken patio door and took off.
I doubled over, gasping and gagging, and tripped in the drapes. I fought free of the heavy fabric and staggered after the intruder across the patio, through a small garden. I could hear his feet pounding away from me, but I was too winded to move fast. I lost him on the winding paths.
Damn and double damn. I hadn’t gotten a good look at him, just a confused impression of a youngish white man with dark thick hair, in jeans and running shoes. A burglar who knew the place was standing empty, or someone after Taverner’s secret papers?
I found my way back to the assisted nursing compound and returned to Taverner’s apartment. It wasn’t so hard to find the locked drawer. Except the lock was broken and the drawer was empty.
Like Domingo Rivas, I didn’t want to spend a whole lot of time with the police, especially not the suburban forces. I thought of driving back to Chicago and leaving this mess for the Anodyne Park management to sort out when they got the apartment ready to sell. I thought of the hollow in the pillow disarranged on the bed, the glass rinsed out. What if Taverner’s visitor Monday night had put something in his bourbon to make him drowsy, and then taken the pillow from the bed and held it against his face until-well, until, yes.
I couldn’t think of one thing about Olin Taverner that I didn’t despise. The careers he’d ruined through the blacklist, the homosexuals he’d hounded
in public life while remaining deeply closeted himself, the list could go on for days. Did it really matter if someone had hastened the end of an old HUAC hatchet man?
On the other hand, he’d died soon after showing Marc Whitby some secret papers. And Marc Whitby had died soon after seeing them. Who had Whitby discussed those papers with? His young assistant? But then, why hadn’t she mentioned them to me? Maybe she’d been more forthcoming with Harriet and Amy.
I rubbed my sore diaphragm. The man who’d butted me was either lucky or well trained. Maybe he’d murdered Whitby and Taverner and come back to search the premises. But that made no sense-he’d have had plenty of time to search when Taverner died. Unless he hadn’t known until later that Whitby had seen the documents?
I pulled out my cell phone and called Stephanie Protheroe, the sheriff’s deputy I’d been dealing with.
“Warshawski, isn’t your boyfriend jealous of the amount of time you’re spending with me? I’ve lent you clothes, I’ve lost and found documents for you. Now what?”
“You’re right,” I said. “I’ve been imposing. Maybe I should take this to the New Solway cops.”
She sighed. “Okay, I’ll bite. What is it?”
“I was visiting Geraldine Graham this afternoon. She lives in the same complex as Olin Taverner-the guy who died on Monday or Tuesday. As I was leaving her place, I discovered that someone had broken into Taverner’s apartment.”
“That someone wasn’t you, was it, Ms. Warshawski?”
“No, ma’am. That someone was a man who knocked me to the ground when I went in to investigate. White, maybe forty, lots of hair-I didn’t get much of a look.”
“Okay,” she sighed again. “We’ll send someone over.”
“And, Deputy-Marc Whitby visited Olin Taverner last Thursday night. I don’t know if Whitby came back here on Sunday before he diedbut it seems worth exploring. And Taverner had an anonymous visitor on Monday, someone who washed out Taverner’s whisky glass. Just thought you’d like to know.”
CHAPTER 21
It wasn’t until I was back in my own home that I remembered the wheel tracks going into the culvert. I was bone tired, too tired to think about it further, let alone try to decide whether I should do something about the tracks. I soaked in the tub for half an hour and ate a bowl of canned chicken soup. It wasn’t anything like as good as Mrs. Aguilar’s, but it was what I had.
I was drifting off to an early sleep when Deputy Protheroe called me back. I tried to rise to her level of energy as she explained what she’d done. The guard at the entrance to Anodyne Park couldn’t possibly identify my intruder: too many people came in all day, either making deliveries or visiting families, for him to recognize anyone from my vague description.
She added, almost casually, “You didn’t bust the lock on that desk, did you, during your look-around?”
“Deputy, if I’d gone into that desk, you wouldn’t know about it. You got a crime scene team doing prints and so on?”
“The Anodyne management doesn’t like a big police presence-it lowers morale and leads to lawsuits.” She gave a dry laugh. “But just to keep you from calling six times an hour, I did take the glass into our lab.”
“And you’ll let me know what they tell you? Just to keep me from calling you six times an hour?”
“You never know: I might even do that.”
When she’d hung up, I went back to bed, but I’d woken up too much and couldn’t relax. It was still early, only nine. I phoned Amy Blount to see if she’d had any luck either at T-Square, or from Mare’s other neighbors. Unfortunately, the nursing mother was the only person who’d been up in the middle of the night, or at least the only one who’d seen any sign of activity at Mare’s house.
“When I asked who used to visit him, the kids thought I was some jealous girlfriend trying to stake him out-they could remember seeing me come out of Mare’s house, but not anyone else. They began creating a scenario where I had murdered him. It made me laugh, and then it made me cry-I can’t believe how lonely he must have felt, and I can’t believe he’s dead.”
“Yeah. Investigation sometimes feels like a game, until you remember a person died who was important to their friends and family… What about Mare’s editor-Simon Hendricks?”
“Umh. Cold fish. He had to talk to us, because Harriet was there. We started the way you suggested, with Mare’s assistant Aretha, but she didn’t think there was anything specific to the tension between him and Hendricks beyond professional insecurity. Marc had a contract for a book about Kylie Ballantine-we found that in his desk drawer at the office. Aretha said Hendricks was furious about that because he-Hendricks-had been trying for five years to sell a book about Martin Luther King’s summer in Chicago.”