CHAPTER 15
Tome, the South Side has always meant the broken-down mills of South Chicago, where I grew up; when I got a scholarship to the University of Chicago four miles up the lake from my home, I used to scoff at Hyde Parkers, with their big yards and their kids in expensive schools and camps, for claiming to be South Siders-they might live below Madison Street, but they were more at home in the restaurants and theaters on the far side of the Loop.
Bronzeville, where Marcus Whitby had bought a house, was yet a different South Side, one I only knew secondhand. I got there early enough to do a little exploring. Whether because of Lotty’s magic potion, or because Geraldine Graham let me sleep through the night, I’d woken early, with more energy than I’d had lately. I took the dogs for a brisk walk, went to my office to check messages and complete a report-and still reached Twenty-sixth and King, where Bronzeville starts, before eight-thirty. I paused in front of a statue commemorating the great wave of black immigration into the city. Driving on down King to Thirtyfifth Street, I passed the husks of the businesses that used to make up the so-called Black Metropolis. As Aretha Cummings, Whitby’s assistant, said yesterday, no one wants those old segregation days back, but it was painful to see the wreck of buildings that once had been the heart of a vital community.
The same thing has happened in South Chicago; I can hardly bear to return to the scenes of my youth because of my old neighborhood’s rotting buildings. But South Chicago has forty percent unemployment and the highest murder rate in the city, while Bronzeville is on its way back. True, many of the businesses around me were dilapidated, but an art deco building on the corner of Thirtyfifth and King had been turned into an insurance company, and the stately mansions that lined both sides of the boulevard looked well maintained.
Marcus Whitby had bought a town house on Giles, a short narrow street just west of King Drive. I found a parking space on the corner of Giles and Thirty-seventh, and walked back up the street to the address I’d found on Nexis. Some of the houses on Giles seemed to be teetering on their last beams, with broken windows and sagging roofs. Others had been restored even beyond their original beauty, with the addition of painted Victorian curlicues on the porches and window trim. Most, like Whitby’s own, fell somewhere in between.
I stood on the pavement, staring at it, as if I could learn something about Whitby’s life from studying his home. It had been built high and narrow to fit on a small lot. The dark red brick was old, cracked in many places, but freshly mortared, the modest porch and wood trim around the windows patched and painted. Louvered blinds were drawn on all three floors, making the house look forbidding, its empty eyes closed to the world.
Children straggled out of the nearby houses, backpack laden, on their way to school. They flowed around me like fish parting around a piece of piling-I was a grown-up, nonexistent. For the adults heading to work, it was a different story: I stood out as a stranger, and a white one to boot. Several people stopped to ask i? I needed help. When I told them I was just waiting for someone, they eyed me narrowly: white suburbanites come into the black South Side to buy drugs, so they can keep their own little towns clean and crime-free. I’d dressed soberly, in my greenand-blackstriped wool, to look both respectful of the dead and professionally competent-but that didn’t prove I wasn’t a crackhead.
If anyone probed further, I told them who I was, and asked what they knew of Marcus Whitby. People responded charily, not willing to discuss
the dead man with a stranger, but I got the impression his neighbors hadn’t known him well. Oh, yes, he got on with everyone, but he kept himself to himself. Not that he was mean in any way, not at all-if you needed your car jumped, or help installing a window, he pitched in. He just didn’t sit out on the porch at night joining in the neighborhood chitchat.
None of the adults who stopped remembered seeing Whitby on Sunday night, but a ten-year-old, waiting impatiently while her father questioned me, said she’d seen Whitby come home.
“He was out all afternoon, then on his way home he stopped at the corner for milk. We saw him because me and Tanya went up there to get a Snickers bar. Then he went out again. About nine o’clock.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Me and Tanya were jumping rope, we saw him walking up toward Thirtyfifth Street.”
“What? In the middle of the night?” her father thundered. “How many times-“
“I know, I know,” I cut in hastily. “It’s dangerous, but you do it in the street because you can see under the lights-my girlfriends and I always used to, no matter how many times my mother yelled at us not to. So you saw Marcus Whitby leave?”
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.
