clean from the box and inserted into a second clean bag to make sure there was no contamination of the specimen.
“Far from this something bosom haste, ye doubts, ye fears that laid it waste,” I sang, dancing to the door.
It was a long El trip to the South Side, since I had to ride into the Loop to change trains. I danced impatiently on the platform while I waited, and found myself leaning forward in my seat, as if that would move the train faster. At Thirtyfifth Street, I jumped down the stairs two at a time and ran over to Giles.
When I jogged down the walk to Mark’s house, a half-dozen girls were
jumping double Dutch out front. They watched me go up the stoop and unlock Marc’s front door. Maybe this wasn’t such a good place to bring Benji: nothing happened unobserved in this neighborhood. Except for someone coming here to steal all Marc’s papers.
The house had taken on the forlorn, musty aspect of any abandoned building. After a week, dust was visible even to my unhousekeeperly eye. I took a quick look around. I didn’t think anyone had been here, robbers or cops, despite Bobby Mallory’s assertion that the police would reopen the investigation into Marc’s death.
In the kitchen, I pulled on the latex gloves, picked up the Maker’s Mark at the base with my thumb and forefinger and slipped it into the clean plastic bags. The whole package went into my briefcase.
On my way out, I stopped to look up at the poster of Kylie Ballantine in the stairwell. “What could you tell me?” I demanded. “Were you Calvin Bayard’s lover? Were you Augustus Llewellyn’s? What secret do those New Solway people care about so much that they killed your young champion to protect it?”
The vital silhouette floated above me-above all the petty concerns of the people she had known. Kylie Ballantine had moved on, had not let her life be mired in the bitterness the McCarthy era had generated. She had struggled financially, but unlike that crew of wealthy people, she had shrugged off the wounds of those turbulent times. Even if she’d known hardship, Ballantine had been fortunate to die with her powers intact, her spirit strong. Unlike Calvin Bayard, whose mind once overmatched Olin Taverner’s, and now was happy to watch the cook boil milk.
My fingers clenched on the handle of my case. I started toward the front door, trying to make myself think about the best way to deliver the Maker’s Mark to Cheviot Labs, but the image persisted: urine masked by talcum, Calvin’s nurse shepherding him toward the kitchen.
My hand was on the front doorknob when I stopped. The house around me was quiet as death. The nurse, Theresa Jakes. Who had seizures, Catherine Bayard told me; Granny mustn’t know about them.
I hadn’t wondered where the phenobarb had come from. But there it was, right out in New Solway where Theresa took it to control her own seizures. Where Ruth Lantner, the housekeeper, threatened to tell Renee about them if Theresa slept through Calvin’s wanderings again.
I turned around and walked back to stare again at the poster. Nothing happened at New Solway that Renee didn’t know about. Even if Ruth Lantner hadn’t told her about Theresa’s seizures, Renee would have found out somehow. Renee exulted in her organizational skills: during the day she juggled details of a mammoth commercial enterprise; at night she stayed effortlessly on top of a major domestic one.
If she had killed Marc, it would have been to protect Calvin’s reputation. But Calvin didn’t need protecting. He was the man who had stood up when few people would, who had confronted Taverner and Bushnell and walked away.
Fragments of conversations passed through my head. They turned on each other like rats in a proverbial barrel, Augustus Llewellyn said last night. Pelletier’s Boy Wonder, skimming the cream from Pelletier’s work, from Pelletier’s love life.
Who had sent Taverner that picture of Kylie and told him where it had been taken? Who wanted people to give money to ComThought’s legal defense fund without coming forward himself? What had Llewellyn done to get that money from Bayard? Taverner had kept a dastardly secret about Calvin Bayard, only because Bayard knew one just as bad about Taverner. That truth had been staring me in the face for days. I just hadn’t wanted to see it.
Not about the hero of my youth. Not Calvin. Not, not. My knees buckled. I collapsed on the stairs.
CHAPTER 49
I sat under Kylie’s picture a long time. Someone else might have access to phenobarbital-it was a common drug, it didn’t have to have come from the Bayards. It didn’t have to be Renee who used it to dope Marc’s whisky-it could have been Theresa Jakes herself, or Ruth Lantner. Ruth Lantner could have had the necessary strength to push Marc into that pond if he was close to death already. But she had no reason to do so.
What about Edwards Bayard, determined to protect Olin Taverner’s memory? After all, it was Edwards who had broken into Olin’s apartment last week, Edwards who held a grudge against his parents, who was desperate to establish some kind of ascendancy over those two strong personalities.
The cold in the hallway was getting into my bones and making my sore shoulder ache. I wanted it to be Llewellyn or Edwards, rather than Renee -I liked her, I didn’t like her son. But the truth, oh the truth, was-if Calvin Bayard had done-had done things I didn’t want to say, even in the silent space of my own mind-I couldn’t bear it. He had done much that was good. Didn’t that count?
If Renee had killed Marcus Whitby, she’d done it to keep the world from knowing her husband had betrayed Kylie Ballantine. Couldn’t I let it go, to keep Calvin’s reputation intact? In these times, any whiff of wrong
doing by a prominent progressive would only give rightwing radicals more cause for triumphalism. I couldn’t bear to contribute to their jubilant trampling on human rights. I couldn’t pursue this investigation further.
I looked again at Kylie Ballantine’s silhouette. She had lost her career because someone had betrayed her to Olin Taverner. Marc had lost his life for the simple crime of trying to revive her memory. No amount of good that Calvin had done, through his foundation, or the books he’d published, could outweigh the crime of killing Marcus Whitby. If it was Renee who’d killed him. And look at the probabilities: she was the one who relished organizing great enterprises. I could imagine Edwards ordering a subordinate to “take care of this problem for me”; I couldn’t imagine him doing it himself.
I shouldn’t discount Augustus Llewellyn. He could have given Marc doped whisky more easily than a stranger. And he, too, had secrets he was determined to hide.
I tried to imagine a confrontation that would make Renee or Llewellyn show their hand. Nothing came to me. Let the police figure it out. Bobby Mallory had been telling me for years that murder was police work. I’d give him all my tangled ideas, the nurse with seizures, every little thing I’d learned from Geraldine Graham and from the archives. He could turn the police machinery on and if it led to Renee then that’s where it would go.
I pushed myself to my feet, my joints stiff from sitting so long in the cold. The weight in my bag reminded me of my own brief jubilation. Marc’s bottle of bourbon-I’d turn that over to Bobby, too. In exchange, I’d ask Bobby to protect Benji, tell him that Benji was his material witness to whoever put Marc in that Larchmont pond. Bobby was at odds with the federal attorney, he’d work out something.
I thrust away a nagging voice that said Bobby would brush off my ideas as insubstantial, or unsubstantiable. Or that he’d be so angry with me for hiding Benji he wouldn’t listen to me. I didn’t have evidence, the nagger said, only the connections that came from reading archives and listening to people; I didn’t have hard evidence. I fought the notion that Bobby would flat out refuse to investigate that New Solway crowd.
Anyway, I shouldn’t go to Bobby without talking it over with Benji and Father Lou. I’d explain to Benji that things had changed since yesterday
morning: now I knew the murderer was one of two, maybe three, people, all I needed from him was a shortcut to the person’s identity. Bobby and Benji would both do my bidding. They had to.
I went slowly down the stairs to the front walk and climbed into Marc’s Saturn. To my astonishment, it was only four o’clock: I felt as though the day had been going on for thirty or forty hours by now.
The girls were still jumping double Dutch in the road. Among them was the one who’d pointed out Marc’s car to me last week. She nudged someone waiting a turn at the ropes. They all stopped jumping to stare at me. I waved as I climbed into the driver’s seat.
“You with the police, miss? The police want that car or are you stealing it?” my informant asked, hands on
