“The one guy is a federal marshal, so I suppose his sidekick is, too.” I took the sketches from her.
“Try not to do anything to get these boys in blue so mad they burn down our space here: I’ve got two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of equipment that I don’t want to try to replace. Insurance company never paid my granddaddy one thin dime for his house, you know.” She stomped back to her blowtorch.
I moved slowly across the hall and undid the locks to my office. Why did I bother, when the FBI or whoever could come in with sophisticated lock busters and help themselves to my space?
At least they hadn’t trashed my office, not like the horrible time I’d had a year or so back when I’d gotten on the wrong side of a malevolent city cop. I booted up and checked my messages. I wrote Morrell a long e-letter, telling him everything I’d been doing since Friday morning, even about getting a quarter when I was reaching out a hand for him. I wanted to be able to discuss Benjamin with someone, or rehash how we’d run away from Larchmont, leaving Catherine Bayard bleeding in the fields behind us, and I poured it all into the letter. But when I read it through, I deleted that part. If they were tapping my phone line, they could pick up my e-mail as readily as my conversations.
Oh, darling, I wish I knew where you were. Surely you wouldn’t have gone off with some set of extremists and not left word with someone from your team. Surely you’re not with Susan Horseley or some other fascinating jet- setting journalist?
In the end, I deleted the whole letter and turned to my own phone logs.
CHAPTER 39
Edwards Bayard came late to our meeting. I figured that was to show me he was really in charge, despite agreeing to meet on my home ground. While I waited, I made my call to Mr. Contreras to let him know I hadn’t been arrested, at least not so far today.
I still had a stack of unanswered messages from yesterday. Most that I returned just got me voice mail, since it was Sunday afternoon, but I reached Geraldine Graham. She was feeling cranky for being neglected, said she couldn’t hear me when I mumbled into the phone, then lectured me for shouting at her. What she really wanted was for me to come out to New Solway. When I told her I’d try to make it tomorrow afternoon, if my schedule permitted, she got rather huffy and ordered me to remember who was paying me.
“Not you or Darraugh, ma’am. If you want to put me on your payroll, I bill my time at two hundred dollars an hour.” On those occasions that I found clients who could afford it.
She paused. “I’ll expect you at five tomorrow, then.” “If I can make it. If I can’t-I’ll let you know.”
I felt honor-bound to call Darraugh, just to let him know I was visiting his mother, despite his orders to the contrary. He was home and slightly less arctic than the last time we’d spoken-although, naturally, he didn’t apologize for threatening to fire me.
“So Mother actually saw someone in the attic. Maybe she’s a heroine in the war on terrorism. She probably enjoyed herself at the social hour after church this morning.”
He wanted a report on what had actually happened at Larchmoilt. Like Bobby Mallory and Renee Bayard, he didn’t believe I didn’t know where Benjamin Sadawi was, but, even if I’d been sure of my phones, Darraugh sure hadn’t earned the right to my secrets lately.
When we finished talking, I looked at Tessa’s charcoal sketches of the men who’d broken into my office so efficiently. I wondered if they’d come in to bug my place. Even though I knew i? the FBI wanted to tap my phones they’d do it from a remote location, I unscrewed the handsets and went out to the junction box but didn’t find anything.
And if they wanted to bug the office… I looked around in dismay. Even though Tessa rents two-thirds of our warehouse, I still have a lot of room. I had it divided into human-sized work areas to make it look friendlier-there’s a meeting space for clients with couches and a glass-topped table-my own work area with a long table for laying out big exhibits or maps-Mary Lou’s old desk. And then the computers and the light fixtures and the pictures on the walls. The walled-off back area for supplies, a small room with a cot for when I needed to crash.
I supposed I could have someone come in and sweep the room, but, in the meantime, should I even let clients talk to me here? Should I take Edwards Bayard someplace else if he was going to spill his guts?
To amuse myself while I waited, I made headers for Tessa’s sketches of the two federal agents: Warning- Housebreakers. Pretend to be U… S. Marshals. Armed, Dangerous, Call 911 at once if you see them in the area. I made twenty photocopies and did a circuit of the block, taping them to lampposts and getting the local shops and coffee bars to put them in their windows.
Elton, a homeless man who sells StreetWise on my stretch of Milwaukee Avenue, peered over my shoulder as I taped up my last copy. “They break into your place, V L? I see them on the street, you bet I’ll let you know right away.” He probably would, too, if he was sober: he struggles with his drinking, but it’s not an easy habit to combat at the best of times, let alone while you’re on the streets.
“Kind of looks like one of them right now,” he added, jerking his thumb across the street at my building.
I whirled around. It was Edwards Bayard. He did look like one of the Feds, with the thick, side-parted hair that’s become a kind of uniform among men in the corpo-political world. But no federal agent could have afforded his clothes, or his BMW convertible.
Bayard was looking from me and Elton to his car, not sure he and his valuable machine belonged near us. I crossed the street and greeted him cheerily. “I don’t have much time,” he said sternly as I tapped in the code for the front-door lock.
“No, I know: you’re a busy man,” I soothed him. “I, of course, have nothing else to do, so I don’t mind when you’re fortyfive minutes late.” He flushed and murmured something about his daughter and the hospital. Nyaa, I thought: the first person to apologize loses.
Edwards turned down offers of refreshment and aggressively moved my desk chair into the area where I meet with clients.
I sat on the arm of the couch. “So tell me why you broke into Olin Taverner’s apartment on Thursday and then pretended to your family you’d been in Washington until Catherine was shot.”
“I wasn’t-“
“No, no, you’re a busy man, let’s not add to your burdens by sifting through lies. We both know you were there; you weren’t wearing gloves.” “Yes, I was,” he started, and then bit his lip midsentence.
He’d never been interrogated-he’d fallen for the easiest trick in the book. “We’ll take that as a `Yes, I was there.’ Catherine will find it thrilling when she learns you’re a housebreaker-it’ll make you seem younger, more daring in her eyes. Not to mention your mom, who thinks you’re on the stodgy side.”
His jaw dropped. “I-my daughter is too young to understand why I might have to do something unorthodox.”
I smiled sweetly. “And your mother is too old. So what was in those files Taverner kept in his locked drawer?”
“You know so damned much, you tell me.”
“Bayard, for a smart guy, you’re not so bright. Rick Salvi may be in your family’s pocket, but Chicago’s Captain Mallory is starting to pay serious attention to New Solway. He can call on some of the working cops out in DuPage to do a real criminal investigation out there. So stop stalling, because the next time you do, I’m on the phone to the captain.”
He smacked his thigh with a balled-up fist. “I’m Olin’s executor; I had a right to be there.”
“Then why break in through the patio? Why not go over to Julius Arnoff’s office and present your credentials and get him to let you in?” When he didn’t say anything, I said, “Is it because Arnoff is really the executor and your Spadona Foundation is one of the heirs? Is it because you didn’t want anyone to know you weren’t really in Washington on Thursday? Had you flown out on Sunday and killed Marcus Whitby, without realizing the important papers were in Taverner’s desk?”
Bayard turned pale. “That’s an outrageous accusation. I did not kill Marcus Whitby or any other person.”
“Including Olin Taverner?”
