“You probably want to get back to the hospital.” I got up. “When I visit Catherine, I won’t mention our chat. I don’t pledge my honor, because we both know I’m a liberal and don’t have any, but I do care about disillusioning children’s belief in their parents. For whatever reason, your daughter seems fond of you.”
“I told you to stay away from my daughter, and I mean it.” He stalked from office.
I followed him down the hall to the front door. “You might notice the strong resemblance between Catherine and the portrait of Calvin’s mother that hangs over your big staircase in New Solway. Have you ever considered DNA testing? That could clear up your worries about your paternity.”
He didn’t thank me for my helpful advice, but walked around his BMW, looking for any damage. Elton crossed the street to offer him StreetWise, but Bayard ignored him and drove off with a great thrust of his afterburners.
I went back into my office. My anger had subsided, but Edwards Bayard’s turbulent emotions hung heavy in the room.
I wished I did have a tape recording of the conversation. I tried to reconstruct it, especially the letter Laura Taverner Drummond had written Calvin. “Theft against her household,” that could mean anything, from sexual to financial plundering.
I should have mastered my own temper better: I didn’t get as much out of the interview as I would have if I’d kept my cool. Edwards interpreted the letter as proof that Calvin had been stealing from the Grahams, or at least from the Drummond-Graham household. And then Olin Taverner said he was surprised that Laura Drummond cared about Negroes. Had Calvin stolen from some black servant in the Drummond family?
Augustus Llewellyn was the only African-American whose name had
cropped up in connection with Bayard’s. Just in case… I logged on to Nexis and looked up Llewellyn.
Like Bayard Publishing, Llewellyn was a closely held corporation, so I couldn’t find much on their finances. Besides T-square, they published four other magazines, including one for teens, two for women and a general news magazine. Llewellyn also owned the license for an AM radio station that featured jazz and gospel, an FM station that played rap and hip-hop and a couple of cable channels. I couldn’t see how they were financed or what their debt load was.
Personal data were easier to gather. Augustus Llewellyn was in his seventies, lived in a big home, some six thousand square feet, in Lake Forest. He had one getaway place in Jamaica, and an apartment in Paris on rue Georges V He was married, had three children and seven grandchildren. His daughter Janice managed the two women’s magazines, while a grandson worked at the AM radio station. Llewellyn himself still came to work every day. He was a big Republican Party donor, despite having been treated as a chauffeur by GOP operatives when he drove his Mercedes sedan to a recent fund-raiser at the opera house. He was a passionate sailor. A photograph showed a slender dapper man in tennis whites, carrying himself erect with no sign of aging except his grizzled hair.
From an old interview with him in T-Square, I learned that Llewellyn had gone to Northwestern University in the forties, where he’d majored in journalism. When he found it impossible to get the kind of job his white fellow graduates were finding, he’d started T-square in his basement while he worked days as a mail clerk at the old Daily News. In the early days, he and his wife, June, carried magazines to stores on the black South Side, ran and repaired a handpress and wrote all the copy for each issue.
In 1947, he was able to pay a photographer and a part-time staffer. In 1949, he found financing to set up a real piublishing operation. By 1953, he was making enough money to start Mero for women and to buy his FM and AM licenses. The radio stations began to make real money; he started his other publications in the early sixties, about the time he built his cube on west Erie Street.
I whistled “If you miss me at the back of the bus” under my breath. The
information was all interesting, but didn’t tell me whether Llewellyn’s family had ever worked for Laura Drummond in the dim past. I flipped back to the business reports and read them in more detail. And there, buried in the fine print on the third screen, was a fascinating little factoid. Registered agent for the Llewellyn Group: Lebold, Arnoff, attorneys with addresses in Oak Brook and on LaSalle Street.
“‘Come on over to the front of the bus, I’ll be riding right there,’ yes, indeedy,” I said aloud. “Why are you using New Solway’s tame lawyers as your registered agent, Mr. Llewellyn?”
I didn’t think Julius Arnoff would tell me anything, but the young associate might. I called Larry Yosano, both his home phone and his mobile, but only got voice mail at both places. I left a message with my own cell phone number.
Of course, Geraldine Graham would know. She’d also know what her mother was referring to when she talked about theft against her household. I called Anodyne Park. Ms. Graham was resting, Lisa told me, and couldn’t be disturbed.
“I really just wanted to know if Augustus Llewellyn’s family worked at Larchmont Hall before he became rich and famous.”
“Who are you working for?” she hissed. “Does Mr. Darraugh know you’re with the newspapers, trying to dig up that old dirt? We never knew the Llewellns. Mrs. Graham met him socially through Mr. Bayard. And if you try to say something else, the lawyer will deal with you, or Mr. Darraugh will take care of you himself.”
I hung up, more bewildered than ever. Had Geraldine been Llewellyn’s lover? But what did that have to do with her mother’s letter to Calvin Bayard?
Geraldine had met Llewellyn socially through Calvin Bayard. Which is also how she had met Kylie Ballantine. Who’d been fired from the University of Chicago because Olin Taverner demanded it of the university’s president. Olin was Geraldine’s cousin as well as a neighbor, even though he spent most of his time in Washington in those days.
Amy Blount had given me her photocopy of Taverner’s letter to the university, along with the picture of Kyhe Ballantine dancing for the Committee for Social Thought and Justice benefit. I still had the copies in my briefcase.
I took them out and studied them. Dancers in Western tights and toe shoes, faces obscured by African shields or masks-who had known one of them was Kylie Ballantine? Or, for that matter, where she was dancing? The shot was of the stage, not of the audience. All you could tell was that it was an outdoor venue, because evergreen branches appeared behind the wings.
Who had taken the picture? Who had sent it to Taverner? I dropped it on my desktop. The more bits and pieces about New Solway that I gathered, the more confused I became. And what about Edwards Bayard’s conviction that Calvin wasn’t his father? The gossip he’d overheard as a child-did that have anything to do with this story, or was it just gossip?
Amy had included a few notes on the Committee for Social Thought and Justice. She said not much had been written about it because it wasn’t as well known as other left-leaning groups of the forties and fifties, “not like the Civil Rights Congress, where Dashiell Hammett sat on the board, and Decca Mitford and Bob Truehoft did groundbreaking legal and social work for African-Americans out in Oakland.” She’d found one article in the Journal of Labor History, part of the oral history of black labor organizers of the forties, which included reminiscences about the beginnings of the group.
The article dealt mostly with the role that black members of the hotel workers union played in the struggle against the Mob and the hotel industry. One of the men interviewed had been a Communist who hung out at a West Side bar called Flora’s, where left-leaning workers and intellectuals, both black and white, congregated.
Apparently, when Armand Pelletier returned from Spain, he started bringing some of his writer and painter friends to Flora’s, where they had informal meetings, gave impromptu concerts and also helped the labor leaders write and print leaflets. Artists and writers from the Federal Negro Theater Project often showed up; “… the man in the interview definitely remembers Kylie Ballantine coming there,” Amy had written. “Not very many other writers or artists were mentioned by name, except Pelletier, because he was the important organizer of the artists; the interview was focusing on black labor leaders.”
One day Pelletier joked that the Dies Committee in Congress would shut down Flora’s if they knew that the Federal Theater Project was still
active there. “We’ll call ourselves a committee, too, just like Dies does, one that keeps American values alive. But we’re not here to investigate people’s toilets and peer in their bedrooms; we’ll have a committee for working people who believe in the real values of America.” Someone came up with the cumbersome title, Committee for Social Thought and justice, which the members themselves shortened to “ComThought.”
