Blacklist

by Sara Paretsky

  She nodded, a wary eye on her father. “He locked his door, called to us to be careful and headed on up the street.”

  “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.

  Amy was right about the search. In this bare place, it took very little time. I pulled latex gloves from my bag and handed her a pair.

  “We’ll quarter the room,” I said. “Everything you touch, you put back exactly as you found it.”

  “You think there’s been a crime.”

  “He left on foot Sunday evening. How did he get to New Solway? If he went out there to die, surely he would have driven, instead of taking a train to a remote town, followed by a five-mile hike to that pond. No one goes to that much work to kill themselves.”

  “Then-the police?”

  “If I can persuade one of my acquaintances there. But first let’s check this out ourselves.”

  Amy was a scholar, a dogged researcher. She was willing to collect data before pushing me into further action. She was thorough, not as fast as me on her first search, but careful and tidy. We went through the drawers, shelves, looked in the books, looked behind pictures, under the neat stack of sweaters in his closet. Nothing. Nothing about Kylie, about the Federal Negro Theater, about New Solway. No datebook. No notebooks. We logged onto his laptop. The word-processing files had been wiped clean. Nothing anywhere.

  Back in the kitchen, Harriet had somehow persuaded Rita Murchison and her mother to a cease-fire. Ms. Murchison was making coffee, her lips a thin angry line. Mrs. Whitby was in the living room, staring blankly at a photograph of her son in front of the old Ingleside Theater.

  I had only seen Marc Whitby dead, by flashlight. In the picture, he was smiling, pointing at the theater doors, but his essential seriousness was still evident. Despite having his father’s height, he looked very like his mother, with her slender bones and bronze skin.

  “I took that,” Amy said. “We went on a walking tour of Ballantine’s haunts, and of FTP sites, and he liked this one particularly.”

  Mrs. Whitby clutched it to her breast, her face finally cracking into grief. “My baby, my baby,” she crooned.

  Harriet and Amy pulled her to a chair and knelt on either side of her. I went back to the kitchen to confront the angry housekeeper.

  “Did anything in this house look different to you when you came in this morning?”

  “Don’t start in on me about the dust, I’ve had it. If it wasn’t for Mr. Whitby being dead and me knowing him all this time, I wouldn’t stay around here to be insulted.”

  “I don’t care about dust or no dust,” I said. “It’s the house. I’ve been looking for his papers; they’re gone.”

  “If you’re accusing me of stealing-” She smacked the coffeepot down so hard the glass carafe broke. “Now see what you’ve done.”

  “Listen to me for a minute,” I said, my voice rising a half register in exasperation. “I know you and Mrs. Whitby have been in each other’s hair, but I’m not part of that fight. I want to know where he kept his papers. I want to know what you noticed when you came in. Maybe someone was here stealing them, or maybe he kept them someplace else.”

  She began to pick up the pieces of glass. “The door. It wasn’t locked right. I thought, maybe he left in a hurry and forgot to put the deadbolt on, but he was a careful man, careful and saving, you know, because he didn’t make a lot of money at that magazine, and what he made he spent on this house, this house and that dancer he was so crazy about. But I never came here once all the years I’ve been working for him and found only the one lock on.”

  I nodded. So someone had been in here. “Did you ever find anyone here with him when you came in? Or signs of a lover?”

  “He was a man. He had a man’s normal instincts.”

  I looked at her speculatively. She wasn’t that old, and beneath her frown and ostentatious bustle she wasn’t unattractive, but when I put out a tentative question she bristled. She’d been interested and he hadn’t? It might explain her aggressive possessiveness when the Whitbys arrived this morning. Something to ask the neighbors, whether anyone had come and gone at odd hours. An angry lover could have keys. She-he-could have driven Marcus Whitby out to a remote place to die.

  In the meantime, I went through the motions here, asking Rita Murchison to come with me to the second floor to see what was out of place. She opened the drawers and cupboards Amy Blount and I had already inspected, but all she could tell me was that the stack of notebooks he usually had on his desktop was gone.

  CHAPTER 16

  Burke and Hare

  I found Mr. Whitby in the basement, inspecting the furnace. “He got a good model, the one I told him to buy. Good fuel rating. I told him he needed that up north here. Of course he knew all about winter, going to the University of Michigan like he did. He wasn’t good with his hands, I never wanted him to have to be a handyman, but I talked him through some of the work when he decided to do this house himself. He was methodical, he did things right. You see how he laid that tile in the bathroom? He called me, we talked it through, he did it right. ‘Course, a furnace, I told him not to try installing that himself, get a plumber, spend the extra money, but he bought the model I recommended.”

  I looked respectfully at the furnace for a few minutes before taking Mr. Whitby upstairs to collect his family. I persuaded Rita Murchison to give me her keys just a loan, I said, offering to pay her for the time she’d taken to come here. Money and keys changed hands while the family lingered in the living room.

  While I drove the family back to the Drake, I tried to urge Mrs. Whitby to return to Atlanta. “There’s something serious going on here, and I don’t know how much time it will take before we can get it sorted out.”

  “I know something’s serious,” she said in her leaden voice. “My son is dead.”

  “But how he died-“

  “I don’t care how he died.”

  “Edwina,” her husband said. “Edwina, we’ve had all this out before now. Listen to the lady. What do you mean, Miss-I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.”

  “Warshawski,” I said, “but people call me VI. All of your son’s papers are missing. I think someone came back to his house with his keys and scooped up all his notes and computer files. They even took time to wipe out his hard drive. This is a street where the kids at least notice who’s coming and going; I might be able to canvass the neighbors and see if anyone noticed a stranger here Sunday night. In the meantime, getting a proper autopsy performed is the most urgent task. We need to know how Marc died.”

  In the seat next to me, Mrs. Whitby moaned but didn’t interrupt again. “I will be looking at everything your son was doing over the last few weeks,” I continued. “I don’t expect anything terrible to emerge about him, but-if it comes to that, I won’t hide evidence of a crime. Within that constraint, I will be working for you and-“

  “My boy never did a criminal deed in his life,” Mr. Whitby growled. “If you’re trying to imply that he did, we’ll stop this business right now and take him home.”

  “No, sir, I’m not implying that. I just want you to be aware that an investigation like this doesn’t follow a straight path.”

  “I am not having any investigation done that frames my baby as a criminal,” Mrs. Whitby said. “That’s why I never wanted you to start your digging around in the first place.”

  I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Amy lean over to murmur something to Harriet. After a short dialogue, Harriet said, “VI. isn’t out to frame Marc. And if we don’t let her finish the investigation, we’ll always have that nagging worry about why he did die. And Mama, Daddy, you two should go home. We’re spending a fortune on that hotel. I can stay with Amy until-until things are cleared up: the office urged me to take all the time I need.”

  “I just can’t bear to go home with my baby lying in a drawer in the morgue,” Mrs. Whitby fretted.

  “Harry’s right; we can’t afford to stay in that hotel for God
knows how long,” Mr. Whitby said. “But if you want to stay on, we could move into Marc’s house, I suppose.”

  “Not until a forensics team has been through it,” I said.

  They argued it over among themselves while I turned onto Lake Shore Drive. The lake, at its lowest level in a century, looked sullen, not the roiling of a usual stormy winter, but the dull surface of a creature in retreat. Mrs. Whitby, staring through the windshield, seemed just as remote.

  When I pulled up in front of the Drake, they still hadn’t decided who would stay and who would go, but Mr. Whitby had agreed that I could go ahead with “my business.” Amy got out with them, but after she’d hugged Harriet and her parents she climbed into the front seat.

  “I can drop you at the train,” I said, “but I don’t have time to take you home.”

  “I thought I’d ride with you, see what kind of help you need.”

  I opened my mouth to protest but shut it again. I did need help, and Amy Blount was a skilled researcher. I invited her to come with me to my office while I tried calling the cops. “We’ll decide what to do next when I see what kind of reaction I get.”

  Amy lifted her brows at the unorganized stacks of files, but didn’t say anything. She perched on Mary Louise’s chair and watched me while I tried the police. I started with Terry Finchley, a detective in the First District’s violent crimes unit. Terry had been Mary Louise’s boss when she was with the police. He was also a close friend of a Chicago cop I’d loved and lost, and he’s never quite forgiven me for how I treated Conrad. Still,, we’ve sort of worked together several times, and he takes my opinion seriously.

  After I’d laid out such facts as I had, Finchley said, “It’s a jurisdictional problem, Vic. He died out in DuPage County. He’s their puppy.”

  “But, Finch, he lived here on the South Side. His car’s here, his house has been cleaned out.”