‘You find it odd that he left them nothing?’
‘It’s impossible to believe. And now you’ve come back because you’re wondering where he got the pills, haven’t you?’
‘Yes, and I’d like to see his calendar again. You’re certain there was only one bottle of Gendarin in reserve?’
‘Certain as I can be. As I said, Mr Whitman wanted to keep more on hand, in case the pain got worse, but his doctor wouldn’t go for it. Federally regulated narcotics are so very tightly dispensed.’
‘Could he have set aside a pill or two from each refill, to build up an extra supply?’
‘That’s very doubtful. He truly needed those pills, and skipping one would mean going twelve full hours in pain. And yes, Mr Elstrom,’ she said, ‘I told that to the police, but they didn’t seem interested.’
‘Any more thoughts on where Mr Whitman might have gone that last night?’
‘Mr McClain was no help?’
‘He dropped off Mr Whitman on North Michigan Avenue. Someone else drove him home.’
‘In that tan car I saw.’
‘Any idea whose it was?’
‘Only thing I know it was tan, and it was a Buick.’
‘You know cars well enough to spot a Buick?’
‘Goodness, no. All cars look the same to me these days, like jelly beans. It’s just that when I was young, Buicks had those holes…’ She stopped, searching for the words.
‘Like portholes, on the sides of the car?’
‘That’s it. Imagine Buick still doing those holes, only smaller, after all these years.’
We went into Whitman’s study. She picked up the calendar from the desk and handed it to me. I opened it to the page for December 13, the day he died, and looked again at the half-dozen entries. His first appointment was for lunch, at eleven-thirty. Other names were penciled in, beginning at one, ending at two-thirty. After that, the calendar was blank until the ‘C’ entry, scrawled across the lines for the evening. I pointed to it.
‘As I told you last time, I don’t know that one,’ she said. ‘After you and Debbie left, I flipped back a few months. There are other entries just like it.’
‘McClain said the same thing. He dropped Whitman at the same intersection, Michigan at Walton, every few weeks.’
‘You think he got the Gendarin there?’
‘I can’t understand why he’d need to. He had enough in reserve here to kill himself.’
‘I went through the whole house, Mr Elstrom. I found no third vial, no trace he’d hidden more Gendarin.’ She studied my face. ‘You came back because you’re thinking what I’m thinking.’
‘Two pills remaining in the vial in his jacket, as there should have been? Full reserve supply upstairs, as there should have been? Leaving us to accept he’d gone to the bother of obtaining the pills he needed to kill himself elsewhere, when he didn’t need to? Yes, I’m having a problem understanding why he’d go to that trouble.’
‘He didn’t commit suicide, did he, Mr Elstrom?’
‘I can’t prove that.’
‘Why would someone risk killing him? Why not simply wait?’
‘Did he have enemies?’
‘Business adversaries, perhaps, though Mr Whitman was not ruthless, not someone who took unfair advantage.’
I started turning back the calendar pages. ‘I need to know where he went that evening.’
The appointments looked to have been written by two different people. Most were in a feminine hand. ‘Did you make most of these entries?’
‘His secretary made those,’ she said. ‘The ones that are barely legible, like that ‘C’ for the night Mr Whitman died, he wrote himself.’
Almost every page had an abbreviation for an evening appointment. I started pointing randomly to different evening entries.
‘Y?’
‘YMCA of Metropolitan Chicago, usually a dinner meeting for the directors, every three months.’
‘MP?’
‘Millennium Park, the new park on Michigan Avenue. He donated one hundred thousand dollars.’
I came to another ‘C’ entry, two months earlier, in October.
‘That’s one of the others I found,’ Mrs Johnson said.
Again it was simple and cryptic, scrawled across the lines for evening appointments. Beside me, Mrs Johnson shook her head, offering nothing. I turned back more pages. There were ‘C’ entries in August, June, April and February.
‘Did he keep another desk diary at his office?’ I asked.
‘This was the only one; he carried it back and forth in his briefcase.’
‘Maybe the prior year’s book has more information?’
‘His secretary kept his old diaries,’ she said, picking up the phone. Then, while she was dialing, ‘Why would someone murder an already dying man?’
There was no answering that.
SEVENTEEN
Whitman Industries occupied four floors in a high-rise office building just north of the Chicago River. Jim Whitman’s former secretary, a trim, efficient woman in her mid-fifties, came to the lobby carrying two blue leather desk calendars identical to the one I’d brought from Whitman’s house. We sat in a secluded corner next to a plant.
I opened the calendar I’d brought to December 13, the night Whitman died. ‘Do you know what this is?’ I asked, pointing to the ‘C.’
‘I wondered about those,’ she said. ‘I wrote most of the appointments in his book, and knew almost all of the ones he entered. But those “C”s…’ She shook her head. ‘I never asked, of course.’
‘Were there many?’
‘Several a year.’ She opened one of the calendars she’d brought, the book for the year before last. Turning the pages, she made notes on a small pad. When she was finished, she said, ‘The year before last, he attended ‘C’ meetings on February tenth, April thirteenth, June eighth, August tenth, October twelfth, and then December fourteenth. They seem to have been regular enough, all on Tuesdays.’ She handed me the list.
‘How about the year before that?’
She opened the other book she’d brought, the one for the third year going back, and, turning the pages, read off the dates so I could write them down. ‘Regular thing,’ she said, when she was done. ‘Tuesdays, every other month.’
‘You have no idea where he spent those evenings?’
‘No.’
‘How did he seem, his last day here?’
‘For a man whose life was being cut short – a strong, powerful man who had to give up control of an empire he had constructed?’ Her lips tightened, then relaxed. ‘Actually, he seemed in remarkably good humor that day. He met with several people, dictated a few letters, mostly apologies for matters he could not attend to personally, and left around three o’clock.’
‘Did he keep any extra medication in his office?’ I asked.
‘You mean pills to kill himself?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I went through his office thoroughly. There was no trace of pills.’
I had no doubt she’d searched immediately, looking to destroy any evidence Whitman had taken a deliberate overdose.
‘You wouldn’t tell me if there were,’ I said.
‘I find it difficult to believe he killed himself. In any event, there was no trace of an extra supply in his office.’
I believed her like I believed Mrs Johnson. Whitman had no extra pills.
And that was enough for Wendell Phelps to call the cops.
I called his private cell phone number as soon as I got outside. ‘I’ve got something for you to take to the police. Jim Whitman loved his grandsons, and would have known his suicide would null the insurance policy he’d left for their well-being.’
Wendell said nothing for a moment, and then asked, in a surprisingly weak voice, ‘Insurance?’
‘He had a two-million-dollar life policy, benefitting his grandsons. Death by suicide nulled it.’
Again he paused. ‘Perhaps there were other policies…’ He let the question trail away.