Blacklist

by Sara Paretsky

  “A car in front of an empty house isn’t evidence of a crime, Vic. I can’t send a forensics team down there, or ask the Twenty-first District to order one in. No crime has been committed there.”

  “Burglary-“

  “On your say-so only. He could have burned his papers. He could have had a power surge and lost all his files. No sale, Vic. You can talk to the captain, of course, but I can’t take it on.”

  The captain was Bobby Mallory, my father’s oldest friend on the force. Like the Finch, he sort of respects my work without liking my doing it. In his case, it has nothing to do with my old lover and everything to do with my being his friend’s daughter. He gave me less time than the Finch had, and finished by saying, “The last I heard, your intuition wasn’t considered grounds for Chicago to demand jurisdiction of a body from DuPage County. We got five hundred unsolved homicides here in town. I’m not creating a political stink by trying to catch five-oh-one. Eileen wants to see you for dinner. Call her, set up a date. That nice boy of yours still being a hero in Afghanistan?”

  “He’s over there being something,” I snapped. “You watch your step until he comes home.”

  Meaning, don’t sleep around, Penelope, even if Ulysses is lying in the arms of a British journalist. I hung up savagely on that thought.

  “You’re not seeing me at my most effective,” I told Amy. “But at least I can find out if the Cook County ME will do the autopsy privately.” I tried Bryant Vishnikov at the morgue, but he had the day off.

  When I reached him at home, he snarled, “If I’d wanted live patients paging me day and night, I wouldn’t have gone into pathology. I thought my home phone was unlisted, anyway.”

  “Is it? You didn’t tell me that. Marc Whitby’s father wants a second autopsy performed on hi., son. Would you be willing to do that?”

  He waited a minute to…;swer. “It’s something I do do, and can do, but it’s not something Cook County can pay for, Vic. And you know, if I do a thorough autopsy and simply-find that the guy drowned with alcohol in his system, the family may not accept those results.”

  “What would you charge?”

  “For the tox screens, and the time and space, it could go as high as three thousand.”

  I had no idea what kind of resources the Whitbys had, but I told Vishnikov to proceed and asked how we should get the body to him.

  It would help to have a third party, like a funeral director, do it, so I don’t have to step on Jerry Hastings’s toes by going to him direct. So, Vic,” he added, as I was preparing to hang up, “don’t go babbling about this to the press. It could be very hard on me politically to look as though I’m taking a public position against DuPage’s ME.”

  “Someone’s going to have to know,” I objected, “unless you’re planning on stealing his body out of their morgue and doing this in your basement.” He burst out laughing. “You’re outrageous, Warshawski, making me sound like Burke and Hare. But I still don’t want this broadcast.”

  “Copy that, Houston,” I said. “Your ass will be draped with the same discreet purple our government is using on the statues of justice.”

  He laughed again and hung up.

  While I’d been on the phone, Amy had been organizing papers. She’d cleared a space on Mary Louise’s desktop and had spread out the contents of my Larchmont file to study.

  “You’re good,” she said, looking up at me. “You don’t bully unless it’s the only way, do you? What are you doing next? Want me to hold Mrs. Whitby’s hand while you move Marc’s body?”

  “No. I want you to find out everything you can about Kylie Ballantine.” She opened her eyes wide at me. “Whatever for-oh. You think that’s why Marc went out to this mansion? Why?”

  I grimaced. “I don’t know, that’s why. But I only have a couple of starting points. He’s been thinking about her day and night for months, he’s writing a book about her-and all his files have disappeared.”

  I pulled the printout on Ballantine that Aretha Cummings had given me yesterday from my briefcase and handed it to Amy Blount. I’d read it before I went to bed-I summarized the high points for Blount.

  Kylie Ballantine had been both a dancer and an anthropologist. She’d been trained in classical ballet, but she’d gone to Africa to study tribal dance in French Equatorial Africa (modern-day Cameroon and Gabon, I was guessing). On her return she’d started the Ballet Noir, a deliberate pun on Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, incorporating African dance into classical ballet, using costumes and masks from Africa. With the Negro Theater Project money, she’d done an ambitious ballet called Regeneration, which depicted an African-American sense of awakening and self-respect as people reclaimed their African heritage.

  “It’d be great to see that,” Blount commented. “There probably aren’t films of it, though. What did she do after the theater project lost its funding?” “She went back to Africa, I think.” I thumbed through the printout. “I know she wrote a couple of books on tribal dance, and taught briefly at the University of Chicago.”

  “That must have been something special,” Blount said dryly. “Black woman at that school in the forties or fifties. No wonder she took early retirement.” She took the printout from me to examine Whitby’s brief paragraph on that part of Ballantine’s life. “It looks like Marc was really only interested in her dance career. And then-I see. She ran a private dance studio from her home in Bronzeville until she died in ‘seventy-nine. Okay. I’ll see what else I can figure out. What are you going to do?”

  “Go back to his house and canvass the neighbors. It occurred to me, private as he was, there might have been a lover in the picture you and Harriet never heard about. The kids on that block see everything. Someone had to notice something about him.”

  Amy looked at me speculatively from under her thick lashes. “You know, I’m second to none as a researcher, and I’d be glad to go on-line, or down to the Vivian Harsh Collection. But I’m wondering if I wouldn’t be more effective on that street than you.”

  I felt my cheeks grow hot, but I remembered the cautious response I’d already received this morning. The kids might talk to me as readily as to a black woman, but the adults were more likely to be open with Amy.

  “Point taken. Do you have a cell phone?” We exchanged mobile numbers. “I’m not sure what I can pay you for this-I hadn’t factored that into the estimate I gave Harriet for taking the case. But your help will make a big difference, and I don’t expect you to donate it.”

  She shook her head. “It feels good to be doing something. Even after Marc moved here, I didn’t know him all that well, but Harry-Harrietis like my own sister. Doing something active to track down what happened to Marc, it’s the one thing I can do for her. You don’t need to be paying me.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Timmy’s in the Well

  We spent some time on-line, me looking for the Negro Theater Project, Amy checking the trains to the western suburbs. Marc could have caught a nine-thirty, which would have set him down in the station nearest to New Solway at ten-twenty. He still would have been miles from Larchmont Hall. One of us would have to fit in time to hunt down any suburban cabs or buses that might have picked him up. I ground my teeth at that prospect.

  When the Web yielded only two meager references to the Negro Theater Project and none at all to Kylie Ballantine, I drove the fifteen miles south to look at real documents in the Vivian Harsh Collection.

  Amy took off for Bronzeville when I left for the library. She’d described the Harsh Collection before we separated. Harsh, who’d been the first African-American to head a branch of the library, had been a private collector of material on black writers and artists. When she died, she donated everything-photos, documents, booksto the city. The Harsh Collection was the best of its kind in America, next to one in Harlem.

  To my surprise, the papers were housed in a room off a major library branch-I’d pictured the collection in its own building. The library itself was doing a bustling business,
mostly with women bringing their young children in to look at books, but also the usual collection of homeless and elderly that a library gathers. It’s a respectable destination. It’s warm, you can be with other people. All reasons why the Web cannot take the place of your branch library. Also it had books. And an archivist who knew and loved his collection.

  At first, Gideon Reed frowned over my request. Yes, he knew those papers well, but why did I want to see them?

  “I know Marcus Whitby’s been looking at them for some time,” I said. “That’s why I’m here.”

  When I explained my role in Whitby’s death-finding him, working for the familyand showed him my ID, the archivist unbent. Mr. Whitby had been a real scholar. They didn’t get many here, mostly students working on term papers just wanting a few facts about Martin Luther King, not that he didn’t love showing young people how to use books and documents, but there was something satisfying about seeing this collection in the hands of someone who truly appreciated it.

  Reed set me up in a temperature-controlled room with photographs of black poets and artists on the walls. While Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes smiled down at me, I went through the same papers that Marcus Whitby had studied. The letters and other documents were encased in plastic sleeves. I tried to skim, looking for names or events that might mean something to me, but Ballantine had a fine, spiderlike handwriting and she’d often written in pencil, making deciphering a maddening task. She sometimes wrote on pages torn from school exercise books, sometimes on thin green paper, where her pale handwriting became even more undecipherable.

  I read Ballantine’s correspondence with Franz Boas at Columbia over her discoveries in Africa, her correspondence with Hallie Flanagan about the staging of Regeneration, her angry letter to W E. B. DuBois’s wife after Congress pulled the plug on the Federal Theater Project.

  We were doing good work, we were doing important work. The notion that a ballet like Regeneration, or your own Swing Mikado, are Communistinspired because we try to tell the truth about Race in this country-is enough to make me look seriously at Communism. I don’t know what I live on now-back to private dance classes for earnest little girls whose mothers tuck away a dime a week from washing white women’s clothes so

  that their children can learn in my studio what would have been their birthright in Africa.

  The archive was patchy, sometimes holding letters like Ballantine’s to Shirley Graham without Graham’s response, sometimes letters or typed notes to her without any way of telling what she’d written to the correspondent. Several typed ones in the late forties came from an anonymous committee (“… the Committee is grateful for your involvement in the benefit. We were able to raise $1700, which our patron matched.” “The next Committee meeting will be on June 17 at the Ingleside church”).

  Right before the Second World War, Ballantine somehow got a grant from the University of Chicago to travel and study in Africa. How she spent the war years, or where, wasn’t clear, but in 1949 she signed a contract with University of Chicago Press for her book on Ritual Dance Among the Bantu of West Equatorial Africa. They paid her five hundred dollars. Perhaps that was a standard advance in 1949.

  Her second book dealt explicitly with slavery, and the dances she was able to trace from America back to Africa. The Longest Leap: African Dance in American. Slavery didn’t come from an academic press but from Bayard Publishing. That was a bit of a surprise: maybe Ritual Dance Among the Bantu had sold better than you’d expect. Maybe Ballantine had lived on her royalties. Or perhaps Calvin Bayard had known her personally and wanted to support her.

  I stared at the Bayard logo on the title page, the jagged outline of a lion, as if it could tell me something, but finally turned to the book itself. There were photographs of masks, photographs of shyly smiling African girls demonstrating dance steps, shyly smiling African-American girls demonstrating what were supposed to be similar steps-I couldn’t tell from the pictures. I read paragraphs here and there about where Ballantine had been, what she had seen, how it compared with the dances she observed in the American South. She wrote fiercely about the patronizing attitude of white America to black dance.

  They ignore the history of civilizations far older than theirs, African civilizations which each step and ritual encode. In their eyes, we Africans exist shamelessly in the body, and our dances are thought to be only a sign of our mindlessness, leaving the mind itself to the high civilizations that think up atom bombs and gas chambers.

  A yellowed article from the Daily Defender, dated from 1977, gave a few biographical facts. Ballantine had been born in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1911, but her family had moved to Chicago when she was six. She had attended Howard University, where she studied anthropology and dance. She’d gone to Columbia when Franz Boas was welcoming black students there, and achieved a master’s degree in anthropology before returning to Chicago, where she taught dance, performed dance, studied dance. In the Defender’s photograph, she was shown standing regally in front of a wall of African masks, wearing a dancer’s leotard and an African-print skirt.

  The reporter had been more interested in her dance than in her academic career. He burbled in print over her energy-there she was, sixtysix, still dancing four hours a day, still teaching children in her Bronzeville home. He hadn’t asked how she’d spent the years from 1937 to 1977 except to discuss her trips to Africa-besides the two I’d already read about, she’d lived in Gabon for three years following its independence. The reporter did ask whether she felt any bitterness toward her treatment in the late fifties, and she had said that bitterness only wasted one’s energy.

  I skimmed the rest of the papers, hoping for a diary or something personal, but there wasn’t much else here. A letter from the University of Chicago provost, dated October 1957, coldly stating that they would not need her services after the end of the fall quarter, but there was nothing from her to the university. Her contract with Bayard, a one-page document offering her seven hundred dollars. Not the advance of a commercially successful writer, after all.

  Calvin Bayard’s bold thick signature stood out against the faded paper, making him seem vividly present in the room. It seemed odd for a commercial press to publish a book with such an academic title. Had he and Kylie Ballantine been friends, or even lovers? Bayard had published her, they lived in the same town-if you thought the Gold Coast and Bronzeville were the same town. If Bayard had known Ballantine personally, that could easily explain why Marc had gone to New Solway on Sunday evening-to see what Calvin Bayard remembered of her.

  I stacked everything in a tidy pile to return to the archivist. Gideon Reed was talking earnestly to a teenage boy, showing him something in a fat reference book.

  When I handed him the stack of Ballantine documents, Reed gave me a kind smile. “Did you find anything useful?”

  “Nothing that shed direct light on what might have taken Marcus Whitby out to New Solway. It’s a bit of a stretch, but The Longest Leap was published by Calvin Bayard. He lives out there, so I’m going to drive out, see if Whitby tried to talk to him about Kylie Ballantine. Did Whitby ever mention Bayard?”

  Reed shook his head. “It’s not like I saw him that often. I’m sure he did a lot of research I never knew anything about-and of course he worked full time, he had a lot of other stories to cover.”

  “I read Ms. Ballantine’s interview in the Defender. Do you know what happened to her in the fifties? The reporter asked if she were bitter-was that because of the U of C firing her?”

  The archivist turned reflexively to the article, but didn’t look at it. “Mr. Whitby was guessing she’d been blacklisted, but I don’t think he’d found any evidence to confirm that. She was never called to testify before Congress, and except for that one letter, I’m sure you saw the one she wrote when she was so angry about Congress canceling the Theater Project, she never discussed Communism.”

  “What about something called `the Committee’? You know the one I mean? Could that have been consid
ered a subversive group?”

  He flipped through the plastic sleeves until he found the references, but he couldn’t shed any light on them. “I know Mr. Whitby wrote for her file under the Freedom of Information Act, but it’s like so many of those files: most of what you want to know is inked out so you can’t read it. Since September 11, they’ve made it harder to find out what records they’re keeping on the citizens. It’s kind of frustrating, our own government spying on us, then not letting us see what they claim we’ve been up to.”

  When I asked if there were other Ballantine papers anywhere-a diary, or financial records, Reed shook his head again. “If there are, they’re not in a public archive. Her estate didn’t amount to much, and even though she was highly respected in the black community, no one had the kind of

  money to do preservation or restoration in her home-it had to be sold to pay her debts. If there was some kind of trove of documents, I’m thinking they’re in the CID landfill by now.”

  Reed paused to answer a question from a woman who’d been waiting for several minutes, then turned back to me. “Mr. Whitby did go through her old house. After she died, the bank or whoever bought it cut it into a bunch of little apartments, but Mr. Whitby hoped something might have been left in a basement or crawl space.”

  “Did he find anything?”

  Reed slowly shook his head. “That may have been why he called me, maybe a week or ten days ago. I wasn’t in and he left a message for me. I never did reach him when I tried calling back, but that could have been it-he knew I shared his interest in Kylie. If he’d found some papers, well, he would have wanted to show them to me.”

  Another patron was trying to get the archivist’s attention. I turned to leave, feeling frustrated at how little information I was able to collect.

  As I walked away from his desk, Reed called out to me, “Let me know what you find out about Mr. Whitby. If you get to the truth, it may not make the evening news, you know”