Blacklist Page 4

  the need to do something dramatic, something daring, was clearly strong in her.

  Who was he? Who would meet his end in such a remote and dreadful way? I dug gingerly into the pockets. Like my own, they had clammed shut from the weight of the water. I had a hard job of it, as cold as I was, and I wasn’t rewarded with much when I finished. There was nothing in his jacket or his front trouser pockets but a handful of change. I gritted my teeth and stuck my hand under his buttocks. The back pockets were empty, too, except for a pencil and a matchbook.

  No one in the modern age goes out in a suit and tie without a wallet, or at least a driver’s license. But where was his car? Had he done like me? Parked two miles away and come on foot for a secret rendezvous?

  My head was aching so with cold I couldn’t think clearly, but I’d have been bewildered even if I were warm and dry. I know people drown in their baths in panic, and I myself had had a moment’s terror when I couldn’t get my head through those weeds, but why had he left all his papers at home? Had he come here on purpose to die? Was this some dramatic event planned for my teenager? Come out in the open about me or I’ll kill myself? He looked in repose like a steady man, not the person for such dramatic actions. It was hard to picture him as Romeo to my young heroine’s Juliet.

  When the emergency crew arrived, I was still holding his matchbook and pencil. I stuck them into my own jacket pocket so I wouldn’t be caught in the act of stripping the body.

  Besides a fire department ambulance, the dispatcher had sent both the New Solway cops and the DuPage County sheriff’s police. The body had turned up in unincorporated New Solway. That technically meant it belonged to the DuPage County sheriff, but the dispatcher had also notified the New Solway police. Even in my frozen state, I could understand why. The houses along Coverdale Lane were a who’s who of greater Chicago Big Money: New Solway cops would want an inside track on who to blame if the local barons-or baronesses-got testy.

  The two groups jockeyed for dominance in inspecting the body. They wanted to know who I was and what I was doing there. Through my

  chattering teeth I told them my name, but said I couldn’t talk until I was some place warm.

  The two forces bickered for another long minute while I shivered uncontrollably, then compromised by letting the New Solway police ride along while the sheriff’s deputies took me to Wheaton.

  “My God, you stink,” the sheriff’s deputy said when I climbed into his squad car.

  “That’s just the rotting vegetation,” I muttered. “I’m clean inside.”

  He wanted to open the windows to air out the smell, but I told him if I ended up with pneumonia I’d see he footed the medical bills. “You have a blanket or an old jacket or something in the trunk?” I added. “I’m wet and freezing and your pals waiting for the shift change so they wouldn’t have to take the call didn’t help any: it’s been over forty minutes since I phoned.”

  “Yeah, bastards,” he said, then cut off the rest of the sentence, annoyed with me for voicing his grievance. He stomped around to the trunk and fished out an old towel. It couldn’t be any dirtier than I was: I draped it around my head and was asleep before the car left the yard.

  When we got to the sheriff’s headquarters in Wheaton, I was so far gone I didn’t wake up until some strong young deputy yanked me out of the backseat and braced me on my feet. I stumbled into the building, joints stiff in my clammy clothes.

  “Wake up, Sleeping Beauty,” the deputy snapped. “You need to tell us what you were doing on private property out here.”

  “Not until I’m clean and dry,” I mumbled through cracked and swollen lips. “You must have some clothes out here I can borrow”

  The deputy who’d brought me in said that was highly irregular, they didn’t treat housebreakers like hotel guests in DuPage County. I sat on a bench and began undoing the zipper on my windbreaker. A chunk of some dead plant had worked its way around the pull. My fingers were thick with cold, and I worked slowly while the deputy stood over me wanting to know what in hell I thought I was doing. The zipper took all my attention. When I finally had the jacket undone, I pulled off the wet sweater underneath. I was starting to take off my bottom layer, a T-shirt, when he grabbed my shoulder and yanked me back to my feet.

  “What are you doing?”

  “What it looks like. Taking off my wet clothes.”

  “You can’t do that out here. You produce some ID and some reason for being on private property in the middle of the night.”

  By now, a number of other officers, including a couple of women, had joined him. I looked past him and said to them, “Darraugh Graham asked me to check on Larchmont Hall. You know, the old Drummond estate where his mother lived until the year before last. It’s been standing empty and she thought she was seeing housebreakers. I found a dead man in the pool behind the house and got thoroughly soaked pulling him out. And that’s all I can say until I get clean and dry.”

  “And how you planning on proving that story?” my deputy sneered. One of the women gave him a sour look. “Be your age, Barney. You never heard of Darraugh Graham? Come along,” she added to me.

  My eyes were swelling with the onset of a head cold. I squinted at her badge. S. Protheroe.

  Protheroe led me to the women’s locker room, where I toweled myself dry. She even dug up an old set of uniform trousers and a sweatshirt, a size or two too big on me but clean. “We keep spares out here for officers who’ve been through the wringer. You can sign for ‘em on your way out and get ‘em back to us in the next week. You want to tell me your name and what you were really doing out here?”

  I pulled on clean socks and looked with disgust at my shoes. The tiled floor was cold, but my shoes would have been worse. I sat on the locker room bench and told her my name, my relationship to Darraugh, his mother’s belief that there were intruders in her old home, my fruitless surveillance-and the body I’d stumbled on. I don’t know why I didn’t feed her my young Juliet. Native caution, maybe, or maybe because I like ardent young women. I dug my wallet out of my windbreaker and showed her my PI license, fortunately walled in laminate.

  Protheroe handed it back to me without comment, except to say the state’s attorney would want some formal statement about finding the dead man. When she saw me rolling my foul clothes into a bundle, she even found a plastic bag in a supply cupboard.

  Protheroe took me to a room on the second floor and called someone on her cell phone. “Lieutenant Schorr will be along in a minute. You do

  much work out here? No? Well, I know the Cook County sheriff’s office is a cesspool of Democratic patronage and favors. Out here it’s different. Out here it’s a cesspool of Republican patronage. So don’t mind the boys, they’re not all real well trained.”

  Lieutenant Schorr arrived with a couple of male sidekicks and a woman who announced she was Vanna Landau, the assistant state’s attorney. One of the New Solway police officers had stayed for the meeting, as well. A fifth man came hurrying in a minute later, straightening the knot in his tie. He was introduced as Larry Yosano, a member of the law firm that had handled Larchmont’s sale-apparently a very junior member.

  “Thanks, Stephanie,” Schorr dismissed my guide. She gave me a discreet thumbs-up and left.

  I was used to Chicago police interrogation rooms, with their scarred tables and peeling paint, and where strong disinfectants don’t quite cover the traces of vomit. Stephanie Protheroe had brought me to something like a modern boardroom, with a television and camcorder ruling over blond furniture. Behind the modern facade, though, the smell of disinfectant and stale fear rose to greet me like an unwelcome neighbor.

  Vanna Landau, the ASA, was a small woman who leaned across the table as if trying to make herself bigger by taking up as much room as possible. “Now just what were you doing on the land?”

  In between coughs and sneezes, I explained in as mild a voice as I could summon.

  “Spying on Larchmont Hall in the middle of the night?” L
andau said. “That is trespassing, at a minimum.,,

  I pinched the skin between my eyebrows in an effort to stay awake. “Would it have been better if I’d done it in daylight? Geraldine Graham was worried when she saw intruders around the house late at night. At her son’s request, I went over to take a look.”

  Larry Yosano, the young lawyer, was trying to rub sleep out of his own eyes. “Technically, of course, it’s trespass, but if you’ve ever dealt with Mrs. Graham, you’d know that she’s never really acknowledged that she no longer owns Larchmont. She’s a strong personality, difficult to say no to.”

  He turned to me. “Lyons Trust is the titleholder. They’re ‘he ones you should call if Mrs. Graham sees a problem with the property.”

  I didn’t say anything except to ask for a Kleenex. One of the deputies found some paper napkins in a drawer and tossed them across the table at me. “Or the police,” Lieutenant Schorr said. “Did that ever occur to you, Ms. Private Eye?”

  “Ms. Graham called the New Solway police several times. They thought she was a crazy old woman making stuff up.”

  The New Solway cop, whose name I hadn’t heard, bristled. “We went out there three times and saw nothing. Yesterday, when someone really was on the property, we responded to the alarm within fifteen minutes. Her own son even says she could be making stuff up because she wants attention.”

  I sat up at that. “I met with Ms. Graham yesterday afternoon. She didn’t strike me as delusional at all. I know she’s old, but if she says she’s seeing lights in that house she is. What about the man in the pool? If nothing else, him being there proves someone was using that abandoned estate for something.”

  “I don’t think Mrs. Graham makes things up,” Yosano agreed, “but she doesn’t listen to advice. We, for instance, advised her to move away from New Solway when she sold, but her ties to the community are very deep, of course.”

  I had a picture of the hapless dot-com millionaire, fending off Geraldine Graham’s efforts to help him run Larchmont the way her mother had done. The young state’s attorney seemed to feel the interview was slipping away; she demanded to know my relationship to the dead man.

  “We kissed once, very deeply…” I waited until one of the deputies had eagerly written this down before adding, “… when I was doing CPR on him. His mouth was full of the crud in the pool and I had to clean that out first… Did you get that? Need me to spell any of the words?”

  “So you don’t admit to knowing him?” Vanna Landau said.

  “The verb `admit’ makes it sound like you think knowing him is a crime.” I sneezed again. “Does that mean you know who he is? Some DuPage County career criminal whom it would be dangerous to admit knowing?”

  “Black guy on the land, what else was he but a criminal?” one of the deputies snickered to his fellow.

  I reached across the table and ripped a sheet from the state’s attorney’s

  legal pad. “Let me just write this last comment down word for word to make sure I have the quote exactly right when I call the Herald-Star tomorrow. `Black guy on the land, what else was he but a criminal: Right?”

  “Barney, why don’t you and Teddy go get us some coffee while we wrap this up,” Schorr said to his deputies. When they had left, he pulled the paper away from me and balled it up. “It’s late, we’re all pretty tired and not using our best minds on this problem. Let’s just go over a few last questions and let you get back to Chicago where you belong. Do you, or do you not, know who the dead man is?”

  “I never saw him until tonight. I can’t add anything to this discussion. You have any prelimary report from the ME?” I could feel a sore throat rising up my tonsils.

  Schorr and the ASA exchanged looks. She pursed her lips but picked up the phone at her end of the table. She had a brisk conversation with one of the ME techs and shook her head. Even under the cold light of the DuPage County morgue, no one had found any clues I’d overlooked.

  “You’ll run a photo in the papers and on the news, right?” I said to the ASA. “And a full autopsy, including dental impressions?”

  “We know our job out here,” she said stiffly.

  “Just asking. I wouldn’t want to think that because he was a black man, you wouldn’t put your best effort into cause of death and so on.”

  “You don’t need to worry about that,” Schorr said, the fake good humor in his voice not masking the anger in his face. “You go on home and leave this investigation to us.”

  When I told him where I’d left my car, he gave an exaggerated sigh and said he supposed one of the deputies could drive me, but I’d have to wait in the front hall.

  My hamstrings had stiffened while we sat. I stumbled on my way out of the room. Larry Yosano, the young lawyer, caught my arm to keep me from falling. When I thanked him, I wondered why he’d joined our happy band tonight.

  He yawned. “I’m the junior on call for difficult problems this week. We handle affairs for most of the estates in New Solway; we have keys, so if the lieutenant had wanted to get into the house I could have let him in. In fact, when they called me, I drove over to Larchmont, but your group had already left for here. I took some time to check the alarm; it hadn’t been set off, and it’s still functioning. I had a quick look around the ground floor, but there wasn’t any sign of an intruder.”

  He yawned more widely. “I wish Lyons Trust-they’re the titleholders-would find a buyer. It’s not good to have a place like that standing empty. We advised hiring a caretaker, but the bank didn’t want to spend the money”

  Deputy Protheroe, the woman who’d given me my dry clothes, appeared: she’d been elected to drive me. Yosano walked out with us. Before climbing into his BMW, he gave me a card. I squinted at it through my swollen eyes: he was an associate with Lebold, Arnoff, offices in Oak Brook and LaSalle Street. I’d never heard of them, but I don’t often have to deal with the property issues of the superrich.

  “Give Geraldine Graham my number the next time she calls,” Yosano said. “I’ll try to talk her out of more private surveillance at Larchmont.” My cards were gummed together in my wallet. I wrote my office number on a scrap of paper for him.

  “You awake enough to get that car of yours home?” Protheroe asked when we reached the Mustang. “I don’t want to be called out in half an hour to scrape your body off the tollway. There’s a Motel 6 up the road. Maybe you’d better check in for what’s left of the night.”

  I knew I was tired enough to be at risk behind the wheel, but I was feeling so rotten that I wanted my own bed. I summoned a travesty of bravado, sketching a two-fingered salute and a smile. The dashboard clock read three-fifteen when I pointed my little Mustang toward the city.

  CHAPTER 5

  Stochastic Excursion

  I was in a cave, looking for Morrell. Someone had handed me a wailing infant; I was hunched over, trying to get out of the way of massive roots that pushed down through the rocks. The air was so bad I couldn’t breathe; the rocks themselves were squeezing the air out of me. The infant howled more loudly. Next to me lay the body of a black man in a brown weave suit, dead from the bad air. A buzzing in the distance meant an air-raid warning. From far away I could hear planes whining overhead.

  The howling of the planes, the wailing of the infant, finally forced me awake. The phone and downstairs doorbell were ringing simultaneously, but my head cold left me too groggy to bestir myself. I didn’t even stick out a hand for the phone but rolled over onto my side, hoping to relieve the pressure in my sinuses.

  I was startled to see the clock read two-forty: I’d slept the whole day away. I tried to raise a sense of urgency about the man I’d found last night, or about the girl I’d tackled, but I couldn’t manage it.

  I was just drifting back to sleep when someone pushed the buzzer right outside my third-floor door. Three insistent hoots, and then I heard a key in the lock. That meant one thing: Mr. Contreras, who has keys to my

  place, with strict orders to save them for emergenci
es-which he and I

  define very differently. I couldn’t deal with him while flat on my back. By the time his heavy tread sounded in my hall, I’d pulled on a sweatshirt and the pants I’d borrowed from DuPage County last night.

  He started talking before he got to the bedroom door. “Doll, you okay? Your car’s out front and you ain’t been out all day, but Mr. Graham, he just sent over a messenger with a letter for you. When you didn’t even come to the door, I got kinda worried.”

  “Yeah, I’m okay.” My voice sounded like Poe’s raven after a night mainlining chloroform.

  “You sick, doll? What happened to you? It was on the news, you being out in wherever diving into a pond after a dead guy. You have pneumonia or what?”

  The dogs pelted down the hall and circled around me with delighted yips. All was forgiven in the three days since I’d last force-marched them down Lake Michigan to the Loop-they were ready for action. I fondled their ears.

  “Just a cold. I didn’t get home until four this morning-been sleeping. ‘Scuse minute.” I snuffled down to the bathroom, blenching at the sight of my face in the mirror. I looked worse than I sounded. My eyes were puffy. I had a bruise across my cheekbone and more on my arms and legs. I hadn’t noticed banging myself up so badly when I was hefting bodies around the Larchmont estate last night.

  I turned the hot water on in the shower and steamed myself for a few minutes. When I emerged, clean, and, thankfully, dressed in my own clothes, my neighbor had produced a large mug of tea with lemon and honey. Unlike Geraldine Graham’s gilt eggshells, mine were real mugs, thick, clunkyand cheap.

  “When I heard the news, them saying you’d been brought in to DuPage County for questioning about this dead man, I thought maybe you’d been arrested. You been fighting? You got some case that’s gonna kill you and you ain’t said nothing to me?” His brown eyes were bright with hurt. “Nothing like that.”