Graham was a good man, he was a good father. His death, his life, that’s a scar on a wound that still hurts. I thought you were trying to slice it open. I should have known you better.”
CHAPTER 57
During the next week, I had dinner with Darraugh several times. One evening, I almost went to bed with him in his East Lake Shore Drive condo. At the last minute, 1 realized I couldn’t do it-not as Penelope, faithful to the absent Ulysses, but as a detective: it was only loneliness, mine as well as his, that was drawing us together. That would pass, and when it did, I’d find it hard to work for him again. I think he understood. I think we parted on good terms.
Catherine stayed with me for over a week. Wisconsin officials held Renee briefly, but released her without filing charges. Those might come later, if the police machinery ground through all the forensic evidence around Marc Whitby’s death, but for now, Renee was home. In fact, she was back at work, running Bayard Publishing. She even appeared on Good Morning America to spin her version of what happened that night in Eagle River.
When Catherine wouldn’t take her phone calls, Renee wrote a letter to her granddaughter. The letter was in the spirit of the times, not acknowledging guilt or shame, but begging Catherine to understand that if Renee had done anything that distressed Catherine, it was done out of love for Calvin and the ideals they shared. The letter upset Catherine so much that we had to stay up until three the next morning discussing it. I’d forgotten how much emotional energy adolescents absorb.
Geraldine and I both put such muscle as we had into trying to convince both Illinois and Wisconsin authorities that Renee had shot Benji only to protect herself from his testimony, but we were no match for the government’s itch to shed Islamic blood. And Catherine, while bitter with her grandmother over Benji’s death, wasn’t going to try to send Renee to prison: she refused to testify.
Marc’s death was also a sticky matter. Despite his frosty words to me, Bobby had dispatched his right-hand detective, Terry Finchley, to work with the DuPage sheriff on looking for evidence. The tape I’d found in the Saturn of Marc’s interview with Olin helped piece some of the story together-the part I’d learned from MacKenzie Graham’s suicide note I kept to myself.
I was hopeful when Terry found a cabdriver who’d picked Renee up at Thirtyfifth and King the night Marc died, but I still knew we were facing an uphill struggle, as I tried explaining to Amy Blount and Harriet. The three of us got together for frequent strategy sessions, and to try to make sense of why or how Marc had died.
“Why did Renee take Marc out to Larchmont?” Amy asked.
I shrugged. “My guess is, she figured he’d be there for months before anyone found him. The house was empty, and in this economy no one was looking to buy it. The agents aren’t doing a lot of maintenance on the grounds, so it was a good bet that Marc’s body would disintegrate to where it would be hard to identify him, or get a real cause of death. It was just one of those pieces of luck that Renee’s granddaughter was also using the deserted mansion.”
“I hate it when you talk like this, like it was a game,” Harriet said. “Sorry. But it was a game to Renee-her wits against the world. She drove Marc’s car back to his house in the middle of the night, let herself in and destroyed all his notes and computer files. She killed Olin with the phenobarb in his nightcap and destroyed the papers in his secret drawer and showed up at her office the next morning as bright as a new lightbulb. Her son says Renee has always prided herself on her organizational gifts. The last couple of weeks, she was in her element. Trouble was, she was trying to organize too much, and it started oozing out around the edges.”
One afternoon I took Catherine to see Father Lou, who left her in a
chastened frame of mind: she had been irresponsible in racing off to the North Woods with Benji. Renee had shot him, but Catherine had put him in the line of fire. The priest was still angry-no one who had come to his church for sanctuary had ever died while under his care; he wasn’t softened by Catherine’s pale face and quivering upper lip.
The next day, Catherine and I went to Benji’s funeral at his mosque. We stood outside with a handful of other women while the men conducted the service. A couple of women hissed at us-the two Westerners who had led Benji to his death-but several commiserated with Catherine, imagining her in love with him. As perhaps she had been. Romeo and Juliet. When you’re sixteen, everything seems as though it will be forever, the bad as well as the good.
It was Mr. Contreras who brought Catherine the consolation she needed. He was delighted to have a beautiful young waif to fuss over. In the daytime, while I was working, he brought Catherine down to his place, where she convalesced on his couch and watched horse races on television with him and the dogs. As someone who rode and groomed horses, she even gave him tips on animals that might run well; on her advice, Mr. Contreras won a hundred dollars at the offtrack place he frequents and bought us all steaks. Catherine, vegetarian that she was, wasn’t proof against his ingenuous good will: she ate a bite to please him.
Catherine knew that I was trying to build a case against Renee for Marcus Whitby’s murder, but Whitby had never existed for her. One evening, after I’d been on the phone with Stephanie Protheroe in the DuPage sheriff’s office, going over Theresa Jakes’s statements about how much of her medication had disappeared, Catherine asked if I couldn’t just let it go.
“I know Granny behaved terribly, but I don’t want her to go to prison.” “You want two things that can’t both happen,” I started to say, then told her instead to come for a ride with me.
“Not home,” she said suspiciously.
“Not home. I want you to meet someone.”
We drove to the South Side, where I introduced her to Harriet Whitby. “This is Catherine Bayard. Her arm’s in a cast because some excitable deputies shot her a couple of weeks back. Tell Catherine about Marc; I want her to know what kind of man your brother was.”
Harriet thought for a minute. “He was a writer. He was a careful man, quiet and private, really quite shy, but when he’d made up his mind to stand up for someone, he could be fierce, and always loyal. When I was six and he was twelve, I had a bad infection on my face, some kind of out-ofcontrol acne.
“Some kids used to wait for me and taunt me on my way to school, until it got to the point where I would leave home in the morning, then hide in the park all day. When Marc found out I was skipping school, he told me I would go, that no bully could keep me from my right to an education, and he walked me to school, holding my hand. When we got to the waiting children, he stopped and said, `This is my sister, who is a beautiful black girl child. I expect you to recognize her beauty and respect her.’ He said it as calmly as if he were reading the weather report. He walked me to school every morning for three months, and fought five of them, two of them more than once, and I will never know a better man if I live to be a hundred and twenty.”
Catherine didn’t say anything on the ride home, but the next afternoon when I got in from work, she tried to sort out her complicated feelings. “I loved Granny. I thought she and Grample were the most wonderful people on earth. I thought of them the way Harriet thinks of her brother. So how could they give Kylie Ballantine’s name to that creep Olin and then set themselves up as the biggest free speech defenders in the universe?” She was sitting on my living room floor with her good arm around Peppy.
I shifted in my chair: these same questions had been churning in my own mind. “Everyone has a different breaking point. And a different fear point. The things you can’t bear to face, I mean. The McCarthy and HUAC blacklists shattered lives. People never worked again, or never worked well. They were ostracized, they lived in terrible poverty. Some committed suicide. Many went to prison, only for their beliefs, not for anything they’d done- not in China or Iraq, but right here in America.
“You don’t race to embrace that kind of martyrdom. At the same time, your grandfather feared for the future of Bayard Publishing. Geraldine Graham’s mother was constantly threatening to give her shares in the company to Olin Taverner. If Laura Drummond had known your grandfather supported a group that she thought was a Communist front, she’d certainly
have given Olin her shares. And that would have turned Bayard into a rightwing organization. They wouldn’t publish the great magazines they do today, such as Margent, or writers like Armand Pelletier and the guy you
