we have had no Negro employees during the last twenty years. And I don’t believe I ever saw one working there after I sold Larchmont. Mexicans, yes, but no Negroes. This Boor, or Schorr, showed me a photograph, but the man’s own mother wouldn’t have known him from it. Who was he?”
“A journalist named Marcus Whitby. I don’t suppose he wanted to interview you?”
“About what, young woman? Journalists lost interest in me after my marriage. I haven’t talked to one since then, not even during a time when I might have had something newsworthy to tell them. Was this man using the Larchmont attics for some purpose?”
“It’s possible.” I wondered what newsworthy events she’d concealed. “It’s hard to know how he would have bypassed the security system.” “What’s that? You have to speak up, young woman: you are not speaking clearly. My hearing is not sufficiently acute to understand mumbling.” I made a face at the phone. “This is as good as I can do tonight, Ms. Graham. We’ll talk later in the week when I feel better.”
She tried to bully me into coming out to New Solway to see her in person, but I deflected that as well. And what should she do if she still saw the lights in the attic?
“Call the cops, ma’am. Or that nice young lawyer who handles your affairs.” I squinted, conjuring up his face, his name. “Larry Yosano.” “What? Who? I know no such person. Julius Arnoff handles my affairs, as he has done for decades.”
Lebold, Arnoff, that was the firm on Larry Yosano’s card. Naturally Geraldine Graham only dealt with principals. I said “Yes, ma’am” and took my aching head home. Mr. Contreras came out into the hall, scolding almost before he had his front door open: how come I went out in this weather as sick as I was, and without letting him know; he hoped I hadn’t turned my cold into pneumonia.
Ordinarily his monitoring of my comings and goings sets up my hackles, but tonight I was weary down to my bones. His concern was a comfort, giving back an illusion of childhood with a mother whose scolding conceals affection and the promise of protection. I agreed to stay put for the rest of the night, agreed to wrap myself in a blanket-an afghan-on the couch while he brought supper up to my place.
We ate spaghetti and meatballs with the dogs at our feet and watched the nine o’clock news on Channel 13 to see how the DuPage sheriff would spin the Whitby story. We had to sit through a report on terrorism first, this
time on some Egyptian immigrant who’d disappeared before the FBI could question him about his links to AlQaeda.
A reporter I didn’t recognize explained that the man was a seventeenyear-old dishwasher whose visa had expired.
“Benjamin Sadawi came to Chicago from Cairo two years ago to learn English and to try to find a better job than he could at home. He lived with his uncle’s family in Uptown, but, when his uncle died, his aunt moved back to Egypt with her children. Sadawi decided to stay here alone. The FBI says the job was a cover, that Sadawi was really here as a terrorist. Our Middle East correspondent spoke with his mother through an interpreter.”
“My son is a good boy.” A tired-looking woman sat cross-legged on a floor with a dozen people crowding around her. “Since my husband is dead, Benji works hard for me, for his sisters, washing dishes, sending money home to us. When would he have time for meeting terrorists? We only want to have him back safe with us. We worry all the time, but we cannot even come to America to look for him, we have only the money that he sends us to live on.”
The anchor switched to an assistant U.S. attorney, who explained that every terrorist had a plausible cover story, and most of them had doting mothers. The anchor thanked him, then said, “Just ahead, a grisly death in one of Chicago’s most exclusive suburbs.”
I muted the set as a group of frantic beer drinkers began jumping and dancing across the screen.
Mr. Contreras grunted. “Kid is probably hand in glove with those AlQaeda thugs. That’s why his ma won’t come here in person to look for him: she knows as soon as Immigration looks at her passport the cat’ll be out of the bag.”
“You don’t think she’s just worried about her son? Morrell did a story last month about reaction in Pakistan to a guy who died out in Coolis prison. He’d been held for eleven weeks without anyone in our government telling his family where he was.”
“All I’m saying, doll..:’ Mr. Contreras began. We’d had the same disagreement a few dozen times, ever since the FBI and INS started rounding up Middle Easterners on suspicion of terrorism back in September.
“I know, I know,” I said hastily. “Let’s hope he’s not a terrorist and that he hasn’t been kidnapped. Kids do funny things.”
I turned the sound back on as a picture of Larchmont Hall filled the screen. Marcus Whitby’s death was a made-for-TV story: the wealth and power of New Solway, the deserted mansion, the sinister weed-choked pond. The network had dug up file footage of a charity garden party at Larchmont some twenty years ago. We got to see the meadows when horses had roamed in them, and the formal gardens were in full flower. Well cared for, it had been a beautiful place. Channel 13 contrasted that with a view of the ornamental pool, shot at twilight, with a close-up on the dead carp.
“And here is where Chicago private investigator V I. Warshawski found Whitby. Channel 13 has been unable to find out what brought Warshawski to Marcus Whitby’s side; all we know is that she arrived too late to save him.”
DuPage County sheriff Rick Salvi came on as Mr. Contreras was crowing at hearing me mentioned on television. Salvi took most of the juice out of the story by poohpoohing any suggestion that Marcus Whitby had been murdered. “There’s no sign of foul play, no gunshot wounds or blows to the head that would have meant someone put him in that pond to die. We talked to the magazine that employed Whitby. They say he wasn’t working on any stories that involved New Solway.
“For reasons we’ll probably never know, he chose what he thought would be a secluded spot to end his life. If that Chicago investigator hadn’t been out checking on the estate, we probably wouldn’t have found the body until the next time a caretaker checked the pond, probably not for some months. We were lucky we got to see him while we could still identify the body.”
“We heard he had been drinking,” someone from Fox said.
“No one could face that water sober,” the sheriff said, garnering a laugh. Channel 13 moved from the press conference to reporter Beth Blacksin talking to Whitby’s editor at T-Square. An austere-looking man in his fifties with a hatchet-shaped face, he said he wouldn’t discuss an ongoing investigation, “even with our colleagues in the media,” but none of Whitby’s current assignments had a connection to New Solway.
“Marcus Whitby’s family lives in Atlanta,” Blacksin concluded. “His parents and his sister, Harriet, have come to Chicago to claim his body”
We watched a somber trio-the elder Whitbys and a young woman
arrive at O’Hare. They ducked into a cab as cameras and mikes were thrust at them.
“The Whitbys are utterly shocked by their son’s death and insist he was not in any emotional turmoil that might have led him to take his own life. Reporting live from Wheaton, I’m Beth Blacksin, Channel 13.”
“Thank you, Beth,” the anchor said. “Next, Channel 13’s own Len Jimpson is with the Cubs in Tucson. Do they have a prayer going into full workouts this week? Stay tuned.”
I had been a Cubs fan for too many years to have any hope; I switched off the set.
“That the pond you was in, doll?” Mr. Contreras said. “Doesn’t look like the kind of place a man would choose to drown in. Not if he lived in the city and had this whole great big lake right at his doorstep.”
“None of it makes a lot of sense. Unless he was meeting someone out there.” I told the old man about Catherine Bayard. “I don’t know if she was a source he was meeting or a lover-“
“A lover? Sixteen-year-old kid and a black-” He caught my eye and hastily changed to “and a man that age?”
“Please,” I coughed hoarsely. “You’re the only person I’ve told about finding her there. I just learned her name this evening and I am counting the minutes until I can get my hands on her in person. But if Whitby didn’t go out to New Solway to see her, what was he doing there? Maybe his magazine will talk to me. I know they’ve been stiffing reporters, but, after all, I’m the person who found their guy’s body.”
Mr. Contreras patted my arm reassuringly. “You’ll have some bright idea in the morning, cookie: I know you. Right now you need to go back to bed, nurse that cold.”
The phone rang as I got up to help him stack the dishes. I looked at the clock: nine-forty. I almost let it go, figuring it was either Beth Blacksin or Murray Ryerson, wanting to talk about the sheriff’s report on Marcus Whitby,
