Since her bill for doing the paper restoration was eighteen hundred dollars, I was afraid to find out what her idea of “quite expensive” might be. 1 entered the eighteen hundred into the expense sheet for the Whitby inquiry. The debit side was building nicely and I wasn’t sure how much of it I could expect Harriet to pay-she hadn’t authorized overtime costs at Cheviot Labs, for instance. I looked wistfully at my open file for Darraugh, but I couldn’t push that expense over to him. I called Kathryn Chang and told her to wait on the Palm Pilot.
The material she’d salvaged contained a lot of information, but I felt I needed some kind of key or clue to make sense of it. I hadn’t learned enough from Ballantine’s papers in the Harsh Collection, but maybe Pelletier’s would be more revealing-if they were available.
I phoned Amy Blount and described the documents that Kathryn Chang had rescued. “Pelletier was more closely involved with Ballantine
than I realized; maybe there’s more information in his own papers. Do you know whether they’re available to the public some place?”
The idea that Marc had found hidden documents brought real excitement to Amy’s voice. She couldn’t wait to see these letters; she’d locate Pelletier’s papers at once.
While I waited for her to call back, I kept rereading the letters. Taverner had told Ballantine to talk to those of “her own blood.” I winced at the phrase, with all its implications about race and heredity, but I also wondered who he had meant. It could have been Augustus Llewellyn, who certainly was involved in this drama. On the other hand, someone I didn’t know about might have ratted out Ballantine. She’d been involved in the Federal Negro Theater Project, she’d known every important black writer and artist of the mid-twentieth century-Taverner could have been referring to Shirley Graham or Richard Wright or a host of other people. It seemed ludicrous to imagine one of them denouncing her to HUAC, but I couldn’t imagine Augustus Llewellyn doing so either.
I stared at the photographed sheets until the words danced red in front of my eyes. I finally put them down to do work for a paying client, a tedious bit of tracking that I’d been putting off for a week. While I was deep in the background of an old insurance transaction, Larry Yosano, the legal dogsbody, called. I’d forgotten phoning him yesterday and had to look at my notes before I could remember why.
“Larry. You’re on sensible hours this week?”
“Yep. That means I turn my phones off at ten P.M., so don’t imagine you can call me if you’re locked in or out of Larchmont Hall. The junior who’s covering this week is an aggressive young woman who is more likely to side with Sheriff Salvi than with you, so watch your step.”
I laughed. “Larry, your firm is the registered agent for Llewellyn Publishing. How did that come about?”
To my relief he didn’t interrogate me on why I wanted to know, just put me on hold while he looked at the back files. “Calvin Bayard secured Llewellyn’s original loans back in the early fifties. He referred Mr. Llewellyn to us and we’ve been working for him ever since.”
“Was there ever a time when Bayard’s own finances were rocky? I met
Edwards Bayard yesterday, and he was hinting that Bayard Publishing was on shaky ground during that same time.”
“Mr. Edwards is bitter because of what Mr. Arnoff told you on Friday, that Mrs. Renee passed over him in distributing her shares.”
“Who inherits them, then?”
He thought a minute. “I guess there’s no real harm in your knowing. They go to Catherine Bayard, in trust until she’s twentyfive.”
Prodded further, he told me Darraugh was the trustee, jointly with the Lebold, Arnoff firm. And that the Drummonds, the Taverners and MacKenzie Graham’s father, Blair, had all been among the original shareholders of Bayard. The Bayard family held a thirty-one percent stake, the Drummonds, Taverners and Grahams a thirty-five percent total, with the remainder divided among twenty-some smaller shareholders.
“So Geraldine Graham has a controlling interest in the firm now? She inherited from her mother, her father and her husband, right?”
Yosano hesitated again, but finally said, “Actually, she only holds her husband’s five percent stake. Laura Drummond was angry both with Ms. Geraldine Graham and with Mr. Darraugh Graham when she made her will; she passed her shares on to Ms. Graham’s daugher, Ms. van der Cleef, who lives in New York State.”
“Laura Drummond really was a nasty woman, wasn’t she! So was it financial need that made Ms. Graham sell Larchmont?”
“No, oh no, she had a large fortune, partly from her husband’s estate, but her father also settled substantial monies on her when she married. No, I think-Mrs. Drummond could be very spiteful, especially where her daughter was concerned… Ms. Warshawski, I’d be grateful if you kept this information to yourself.”
“Of course,” I promised readily. I’d keep it to myself unless it had something to do with Marcus Whitby’s death, that is.
Amy’s return call came soon after I’d hung up. “Pelletier’s papers are right here beside me in the University of Chicago library. Want me to go look at them?”
“I think I’ll come down myself,” I said. “It’s a fishing trip and I don’t know what I’m fishing for.”
“From what I can tell on-line, it’s a huge archive,” she said. “Forty
Hollinger boxes-what they call the special cartons made for documents, you know. I could help you sort through it if you’re coming down now.”
I looked at my calendar: nothing on it until four, when I had a meeting with a small corporation for which I ran background checks. I told Amy I’d be with her in twenty minutes.
CHAPTER 44
Hey, Boy Wonder -
What meat cloth Caesar feed on? Your child bride is an attractive little colt and your infatuation is understandable, but until she grows up and learns how to read don’t fob my work off on her. If you don’t like Bleak Land, say so yourself-. getting a letter from the baby saying “it’s not right for our list at this time” is such an outsized insult I’m even willing to believe just barely, mind you, and only out of self-delusion-that you didn’t know your infant had written to me. What I also will delude myself into believing is that you can’t be as chickenshit as the rest of the industry, afraid to touch me because the lesser apes in Washington put me in the can for six months and had my books yanked from every embassy around the world. Me and Dash. No undersecretary of protocol in Canberra is going to have his morals corrupted by the Maltese Falcon, or A Tale of Two Countries. Dash, poor bastard, is drinking himself into an early grave, but I refuse to break so easily.
This was a carbon copy, and therefore unsigned, but the smudgy type sizzled.
As Amy had said, the Pelletier archive was enormous. She and I were
facing each other across a table in the University of Chicago’s rare books room, with boxes of papers and books between us. When we’d signed in, the librarian said Pelletier must suddenly be a hot item-we were the second people asking to see the papers in the last month.
With the instincts of the born detective, Amy said, yeah, her cousin Marcus always had been a jump ahead of her, and the archivist agreed that Marcus Whitby had been looking at the boxes three weeks ago. He’d only come once, the archivist said, so whatever he wanted, he found on his first trip. We were lucky, she added, that Mike Goode, their premier processing archivist, had sorted and labeled the boxes.
Even so, we had a formidable hoard to inspect. The collection was probably a lit crit’s dream come true, but made for a detective’s nightmare. Pelletier had kept everything-bills, eviction notices, menus from memorable dinners. He thought highly enough of his historical importance that he’d made carbons of most of his own letters. Most were like this one to Calvin, long fulminations against someone or something. In the thirties and forties, the correspondence was energetic if caustic-astute observations on personalities or public events.