He turned, brows raised, then gave his cocky grin. “The lady detective. Well, well. Have you come to arrest me for killing Marc?”
“Did you kill him? That would be a help. I could stop trying to ask people questions that they don’t want to answer.”
“I think a gal like you would develop a pretty thick skin by now. No one
wants to answer a dick’s questions. Not even me.” The grin was still in place, but it pushed me back as effectively as a stiff arm.
“Yeah, well, even a rhinoceros starts showing wear and tear if it’s hit by enough big sticks. I don’t imagine you killed Marc Whitby, but maybe I’ve been barking up the wrong tree all week; maybe you got tired of his ambition and his standoffishness, got him drunk, and drove him to a pond to drown him.”
He stopped smiling. “I didn’t kill the brother. I just didn’t join in the choir of the blessed shouting `Hallelujah’ every time someone said his name.”
“If you do me a favor, I won’t ask you any more questions, or even expect you to shout `Hallelujah’ over Marc’s name. I want to see Mr. Llewellyn. Without having to sweet-talk my way past your receptionistshe’s one of the people who’s whacked at my rhino hide recently.”
“Ah, yes, the dulcet Shantel. I can’t get you in to Mr. Llewellyn. He knows all his staff, of course, because he owns us, and, anyway, it’s not like we’re Time, Inc. At the Christmas party or in the elevator, when our paths cross, he greets me by name: he says, `How are you today, Mr. Thompson. That was a nice piece you did for the last issue, a very fine piece of writing indeed.’ One year he called me Mr. Pumpkin.”
I laughed. “I’ll take my chances once I’m in the building. If he hasn’t left for the day.”
“And in return?”
“If you lose your dog, I’ll find it for you, no charge.”
“Dang. You must’ve known I have a cat.” He turned around and led me back to the Llewellyn building.
The chauffeur was still reading the Sun-Times, a good sign since it meant he didn’t expect to see the boss for a bit. Inside the lobby, the hostile receptionist was gone, replaced by a uniformed guard, who asked for my ID but didn’t make any objection to J.T taking me up in the elevator. After all, the place published magazines. Writers are always bringing in people to interview.
On the sixth floor, I got J.T. to let me use his computer to type up a note for Llewellyn. “Do you know that Marcus Whitby tried to see you before he died? He had read Armand Pelletier’s unpublished memoirs about the group that used to get together at Flora’s on the West Side. He went to see Olin Taverner after he read the memoir. The forties must have been heady days for you. Can we discuss them?”
J.T. kept shifting from foot to foot as we waited for my note to come out of the community printer. He quickly deleted my file from his machine, told me Llewellyn’s office was on the eighth floor and fled down the hall while I was stapling a business card to my note. By the time I reached the elevator bank, J.T. had disappeared.
When the elevator opened on the eighth floor, a woman about my own age was standing on the other side. Age was all that we had in common: the makeup on her cinammon skin was fresh but subtle, her hair was perfectly combed, her nails recently manicured. The wool in her rust-colored suit was that smooth soft weave that doesn’t make it into the stores where people like me shop. She looked me up and down as if she could see the tear in the lining of my own jacket before asking if I needed help.
“I’m here to see Mr. Augustus Llewellyn.” “And you have an appointment?”
“I know you’re not his secretary, and this is a confidential matter.” The name of the daughter who ran Llewellyn’s two women’s magazines came to me. “I suppose you’re Ms. Janice Llewellyn?”
She didn’t smile back. “Mr. Llewellyn is leaving for the day. If you don’t have an appointment and you want to- talk to him, you can call his secretary in the morning.”
Just at that minute, a door at the end of the hall opened, and Llewellyn came out in person, accompanied by a couple of young men and an older woman.
Janice called out, “Daddy, go back into your office for a minute, why don’t you. I’m going to get this person out of the building.”
In the second that everyone stood frozen, trying to absorb the situation at the elevator, I walked up the hall and handed Llewellyn my note. He took it reflexively, but the two young men formed a barrier between him and me and ushered him back into his executive offices, along with the older woman. As soon as they had the old man safely inside, one of the young men reappeared and joined Janice and me by the elevators.
He seized my arm and said to Janice, “You go in with Daddy and call down to Ricky in the lobby; I’ll get her out of the building.”
He had the stocky build of a middle linebacker. I knew I couldn’t really fight him, but I never like being grabbed. And I was tired of being stiffed and pushed around by everyone I wanted to talk to. I moved into the circle of his arm and elbowed him sharply in the ribs. He cried out and dropped my arm.
“I’ll leave if your daddy doesn’t want to see me,” I said, moving away from him. “But you don’t need to help me.”
Janice had her cell phone out. She was starting a firm conversation with the lobby guard, demanding to know how I had come to be in the building without permission, when the door to the executive offices opened again. The other brother appeared. In a voice overflowing with astonishment and indignation, he announced that “Daddy” wanted to talk to me.
Janice and her brother glared at me, but Daddy’s wishes took precedence over their bruised egos, or rib cages, as the case might be. Janice’s plucked brows met briefly over her nose, but she kept from wrinkling her forehead. It pays to work for a woman’s magazine-you learn good tips on how to preserve your face. She put her cell phone into the side compartment of her briefcase and told me to follow her. Her brother stayed in step next to me.
When we got to the executive suite, the other brother took me into his father’s office. Augustus Llewellyn was sitting behind his desk, a leatherinlaid partners’ specimen that might have been a couple of hundred years old. There were a number of interesting antiques in the room besides the desk, but the one that caught my eye was an old hand press standing on an octagonal table.
I walked over to look at it. “Good evening, sir. Is that what you used to print T-Square on?”
Llewellyn ignored me, turning to his children and telling them they could leave. When the son I’d elbowed protested that I might be violent, his father managed a small smile. “If she harms me, you’ll know exactly who did it, and you can have her arrested. But for now I want to be alone with her. And that means you, too, Marjorie.”
The last remark was addressed to the older woman, who I assumed was the secretary I’d spoken to the day before. When all four had left, I pulled up one of the two contemporary chairs in the room and faced Llewellyn across his desk. He folded his hands in his lap but didn’t speak.
“I’m the detective whom the Whitby family-“
He cut me off. “I know that you and your underlings have been questioning my staff recently, young woman. Not much happens in this company that I don’t know about.”
“Then you know that Marcus Whitby wanted to see you shortly before he died. Did he talk to you about his meeting with Olin Taverner?”
“If he did, that would be of no concern to you.”
“You agreed to see me, Mr. Llewellyn,” I said gently. “I think if you knew what Taverner had told Whitby you wouldn’t need to talk to me. So I’m assuming you didn’t see Marc Whitby before he died.”
He nodded slightly, but didn’t offer any comment.
“Olin Taverner held on to a secret, or maybe a series of secrets, about people in New Solway, and people involved in ComThought-the Committee for Social-“
“Yes, I know what ComThought is, or was.” He cut me off again. “And I know Taverner was obsessed with it as a Communist front. I don’t think they were ever the threat to America’s safety that Olin claimed, but I had my fill, of the left at Flora’s all those years ago. They were a ramshackle lot who turned on each other like rats in a proverbial barrel. They had no real interest in the working man or woman, only in their stupid revolutionary rhetoric. America rewards self-determination. They could never see that.”
“Pelletier says you sat in on the committee’s beginnings at Flora’s.” I spoke flatly, as if what I were saying were undisputed truth, not my own unverifiable guesses “You say this is an unpublished manuscript.” Llewellyn tapped my note with his index finger. “How did you come to read it?”
“The same way Marc Whitby did-by going through Pelletier’s papers at the University of Chicago. It sounds as
