She looked at me in hauteur. “Calvin’s support of art and artists is legendary. But I must say I’m surprised you have time to visit libraries. Are you planning to follow in this dead journalist’s steps in writing a book about Ballantine?”
“No, ma’am. Just trying to figure out why he went out to New Solway.” “Yes, well, I can’t see that that concerns me. My only interest in your activities is how they affect my granddaughter’s well-being.” She got up to press a buzzer on her desk phone. After a moment, Elsbetta appeared and was told to show me out.
“When you decide to tell me about the Sadawi boy, call my office and set up an appointment. I’ll make sure my secretary knows to fit you in immediately.” She was right: she didn’t dance, she slam-dunked.
I walked the four miles from Banks Street to my office. I’d heard a great deal today, and I was hoping I could remember enough of the nuances to let me sort lies from truth. I wished I had someone to talk it all over with. My old assistant, Mary Louise, with her astringent approach to the business side of detection, would have given me good feedback.
Or Morrell, whose thoughtful response to my own passionate ideasMorrell-I was getting so I couldn’t express his name without feeling
something in my center disintegrate. I had a moment of despair so overwhelming that I collapsed onto a bench, head on my knees. I flung out a hand, as if I could touch him.
Something cold landed in my outstretched fingers: a passerby had given me a quarter. I looked around, but I was at a crowded intersection on North Avenue. Any of the people leaving Walgreens or heading into Starbucks could have felt sorry for a woman so decrepit she couldn’t hold up her head.
I sighed and stood up. Back to your loom, Penelope.
I continued west on North Avenue, doggedly thinking about the Bayards. Neither Renee nor Edwards would have said as much to me on their own as they had together. Edwards’s anger with his mother over Catherine, and his mother’s anger about his rightwing views, had let me learn that there was something fishy about Bayard Publishing’s finances-either today, or sometime in the past. Edwards had also implied that his father had slept around-he’d called Kylie Ballantine one of his “special projects.”
And Geraldine Graham? I had reached the bridge over the Chicago River, where I came to a halt, staring at a crane moving scrap metal in a plant at the river’s edge. Had she also been one of Calvin Bayard’s special projects? A lover, supplanted by the new young wife from Vassar? If that was the case, it was funny that MacKenzie Graham killed himself after Calvin arrived back in New Solway with Renee, instead of while Geraldine and Calvin were still lovers.
All those New Solway lives, they were like the twisted ribbons of steel dangling from the crane’s magnet. You could turn them and see them in different combinations. I could see a version in which Geraldine Graham threw a mask into the pool so she wouldn’t remember the lover who made her buy it. Or because she had found out that she shared the lover with the mask’s provider. I could see, less clearly, her formidable mother throwing the mask away: No primitive art allowed? No primitive passions allowed? Or Darraugh throwing it in because he resented anything to do with Calvin Bayard-if Calvin had been Geraldine’s lover.
Calvin had also forced Olin Taverner to buy a mask. And Edwards Bayard had grown up to give Olin any revenge against his neighbor and nemesis the old lawyer might crave. But why should Taverner want
revenge-surely it was Calvin Bayard who was the wronged party here. And what did that have to do with Marcus Whitby-aside from his interest in Kylie Ballantine?
The crane dropped its load. The sound didn’t reach me over the traffic noise along the bridge, but the end of the show galvanized me back into motion. At the corner of Damen, a drunk was panhandling. I gave him the quarter I’d gotten on Wells Street. He wasn’t grateful-these days a quarter is a pathetic handout.
Tessa’s truck was in the parking lot. When I passed the door to her studio, I stopped for a moment to watch. She was working weekends to finish a commissioned piece for a Cincinnati park, highly polished chunks of chrome that made you want to touch and slide on them. Despite the cool day, she had the heat turned off and was working in a tank top and shorts under her protective apron, her beaded hair pulled back under a hard hat.
I’ve learned not to interrupt her when she’s got her blowtorch going full blast, but when she saw me in the doorway she turned off the flame and came over to me, removing her hard hat and flipping her protective eye shield up over her head. “Are you still full of germs? How far away do I have to stand from you?”
“Keep burning your blowtorch under your nose; it’ll kill any viruses.” She laughed and came over to the door. “How many people have you given your office keys to lately, Warshawski?”
“Just one-a young economics Ph.D. who’s doing a little work for me.” “Some men were here yesterday and again this morning who didn’t seem to have any trouble with your front door. What’s going on?”
So much for trying to operate without the fear that leads detectives to unacceptable levels of nerviness. “They think I’m hiding an Arab terrorist.” “If you are, keep him buried until these guys lay off they’re a thoroughly mean-spirited bunch. If I didn’t have to finish `Children at Play’ this week, I’d take a hike, too-they make me nervous. These are what-federal agents? You know, my mother’s family was from Cameron, Mississippi. My grandparents had to run away in the middle of the night when the local sheriff led a group in burning down their house because it was in a spot where some local white muckety-muck wanted to build. I am not crazy about citizens having to stand helplessly by while the law takes over their homes.”
“Me, neither, but I don’t know what to do about it at this point. They keep waving that damned Patriot bill in my face.”
“Bastards!” She took me to a glassed-in cubicle at the back of her studio. She sat at a drawing board and began sketching rapidly with charcoal. In a minute, she had drawn four faces, two each on two separate sheets of newsprint. They were the same two men, dressed in service overalls in the first picture, in suits in the second. One of them was the man who’d insisted on searching my apartment last night.
“The one guy is a federal marshal, so I suppose his sidekick is, too.” I took the sketches from her.
“Try not to do anything to get these boys in blue so mad they burn down our space here: I’ve got two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of equipment that I don’t want to try to replace. Insurance company never paid my granddaddy one thin dime for his house, you know.” She stomped back to her blowtorch.
I moved slowly across the hall and undid the locks to my office. Why did I bother, when the FBI or whoever could come in with sophisticated lock busters and help themselves to my space?
At least they hadn’t trashed my office, not like the horrible time I’d had a year or so back when I’d gotten on the wrong side of a malevolent city cop. I booted up and checked my messages. I wrote Morrell a long e-letter, telling him everything I’d been doing since Friday morning, even about getting a quarter when I was reaching out a hand for him. I wanted to be able to discuss Benjamin with someone, or rehash how we’d run away from Larchmont, leaving Catherine Bayard bleeding in the fields behind us, and I poured it all into the letter. But when I read it through, I deleted that part. If they were tapping my phone line, they could pick up my e-mail as readily as my conversations.
Oh, darling, I wish I knew where you were. Surely you wouldn’t have gone off with some set of extremists and not left word with someone from your team. Surely you’re not with Susan Horseley or some other fascinating jet-setting journalist?
In the end, I deleted the whole letter and turned to my own phone logs.