Blacklist Page 5

  When I’d croaked out enough explanation to satisfy him, he suddenly remembered Darraugh’s letter. The blistering prose raised welts on my fingers.

  I have been trying to reach you all day to find out why you sent the police to my mother without informing me first. Since you aren’t answering your phone or e-mail I am sending this by hand. Call immediately on receipt of this message.

  How nice to be the man in charge and bulldoze your way through people as if they were construction sites. I checked in with my answering service. Christie Weddington, the operator I’ve known longest, answered. “Is that really you, Vic? Just to be safe I’d better do our security check. What was your mother’s maiden name?” When I’d spelled “Sestieri” she added severely, “When you’re going to hole up, can you let us know? Now that Mary Louise has left your company, you don’t have any backup person to call for emergencies. We got like eleven calls from Darraugh Graham’s office, and five from Murray Ryerson.”

  Darraugh, or his PA, Caroline, had started in at ten and kept it up every half hour. Geraldine Graham had phoned four times herself, the first time at a quarter of ten. So the DuPage sheriff had been to see her by nine. At least they were taking it seriously. Murray had called early, before eight, presumably when he’d looked at the morning wires. I got back to him first, in case he knew something that would help me in my conversation with Darraugh. Murray was indignant that I hadn’t called him when the blood was fresh enough to lick.

  “Have they ID’d the guy yet?” I croaked into his barrage of questions. “You sound like a frog in a cheese grater, Warshawski. So far the DuPage sheriff is clueless. I gather they’re running your John Doe’s prints through AFIS. And they’ve put his picture on the wires.”

  “They have a cause of death?” I wheezed.

  “He drowned. What were you doing, Warshawski, turning up so pat minutes after the guy plunged to his watery death?”

  “You should write for the Enquirer, with prose like that. You drive out to Larchmont? No one could plunge to a watery death in five feet of water. Either he did like me, tripped and fell, or-” A coughing fit interrupted me. Mr. Contreras leaped up to pour me more tea, and to mutter that Murray was an inconsiderate jerk, keeping me talking when I was sick.

  – or he went in on purpose or he was put there,” Murray finished for me. “What’s your theory? Did it look as though he’d struggled?”

  I shut my eyes, trying to remember the body as I’d found it. “I only had my flashlight to augment the moon, so I can’t say whether he had unusual bruises or scratches. But his clothes were tidy-no undone buttons, and his tie was still neatly knotted. I undid it when I was trying CPR.”

  “Cross your heart, you never saw him before?” Murray demanded. “Hope to die,” I coughed.

  “So you didn’t go out there to meet him?”

  “No!” I was getting impatient. “He’s what Professor Wright used to call a `stochastic excursion’ in my physics class.”

  “Then what about the `Warshawski excursion’?” Murray asked. “What were you doing in the land of hope and glory?”

  “Catching the cold of a lifetime.” I hung up as a cough started racking me again.

  “You oughta go back to bed, cookie,” Mr. Contreras fussed over me. “You can’t talk, you won’t have any voice at all you keep at it. That Ryerson, he just uses you.”

  “Street runs both ways,” I choked. “I have to call Darraugh.”

  Darraugh interrupted a meeting on the fate of his Georgia paper division to take my call. “Mother had the police with her this morning.” “That must have pleased her,” I said.

  “Excuse me?” The frost in his voice turned the phone to dry ice against my ear.

  “She likes people to attend to her. You don’t visit her enough, the cops didn’t respond when she told them about intruders in your boyhood home. Now she’s gotten the attention she thinks is her due.”

  “You should have reported to me at once when you found a dead man at the house. I don’t pay you to leave me in the dark.”

  “Darraugh, you’re right.” My words came out with annoying slowness, the way they do when you don’t have a throat. “Hear how I sound? I got this way falling into your pool. After hauling out a dead man, futilely trying CPR, spending two hours with the sheriff’s deputies in Wheaton, it was three-thirty. A.M. I could have called you at home then, but I went to bed instead. Where I regret that I slept through ringing phones, sirens, doorbells and atom bombs. I wish I weren’t so human, but there you have it.” “Who was that man and what was he doing at the house?” Darraugh barked after a moment’s silence-he wasn’t going to agree that I had mitigating circumstances on my side, but he wasn’t going to go for my jugular any more right now, either-from him a concession.

  I repeated what little information Murray had given me, then said, “Why didn’t you tell me Larchmont was your boyhood home?” Darraugh paused another moment, before saying abruptly he was in an important meeting, but he wanted me to report to him at once if I learned who had died in the pool, and why he’d been there.

  “You want me to investigate?” I asked.

  “Give it a few hours. Not until your voice is better: no one’s going to take you seriously when you sound like this.”

  “Thanks, Darraugh: chicken soup for the PI’s soul,” I said, but he’d already hung up. Just as well. He has plenty of options among the big security companies that handle most of his heavy-muscle jobs. He stays with me not because he likes to support small businesses, but because he knows there will be no leaks out of my tiny operation-I get the jobs that he wants total confidentiality for, but, if he got fed up enough, he’d take the work elsewhere.

  When Mr. Contreras finally left with the dogs, I lay down on the couch. I didn’t go back to sleep-I actually felt better after being on my feet for a bit. I put on an old LP of Leontyne Price singing Mozart and watched the shadows change on the ceiling.

  I had one little bit of information that no one else did: the teenage girl. It wasn’t only a wish to keep a hole card, although of course I wanted one, but that her spunk and ardor reminded me of my own youth; I felt protective of her the way you do of your childhood. I wanted to find her on my own before deciding whether the cops or reporters ought to have a crack at her.

  I assumed she lived in one of the Coverdale Lane estates. I tried to imagine a strategy for going door-to-door looking for her. I was her scoutmaster coming to collect her Girl Scout cookie sales money. I was looking for my lost Borzoi. I’d found emerald earrings when I was jogging and wanted to restore them to the owner.

  Perhaps I could check the area high school, although who knows where people in mansions like those in New Solway send their children. Not only that, I’d only seen the girl briefly, by moonlight. I wasn’t sure I’d recognize her again, let alone be able to describe her.

  I shut my eyes and tried to conjure her face, but all I remembered was her long braid and the soft cheeks of youth, the planes or lines that might show character not yet formed. Had she said anything that might lead me to her? I was a pig, she’d bet with some of the other kids, she knew someone was in the attic. What had I said that got her so mad she’d run away? Something about not taking responsibility for And then I remembered the little thing that had come loose in my hand when she jerked free. I had stuffed it into my jeans pocket. And my jeans were in the garbage bag the sheriff’s deputy had given me.

  I’d dumped the bag in the front hall when I came in this morning. With a ginger hand, I fished out the damp, mud-caked pants. Rotted leaves and threads of plant roots fell away when I shook them out. I had a feeling I was lucky be too congested to smell them. I had to pry the pocket flap open and pull the whole pocket inside out to get the thing I’d torn from my teenager’s backpack. It was black with mud.

  When I ran it under the kitchen tap for a few minutes, the mud washed off to show an ancient teddy bear. The last few years it’s become kind of a fetish with kids, putting the toys of ea
rly childhood on their backpacks or binders. A high school senior had told me that the coolest kids use ratty crib toys; wannabes buy them new. So my girl was cool, or aspired to be: this little guy was missing both his eyes, and even without a night in my muddy pocket his fur had been pretty forlorn, worn down to the nub in places.

  The distinguishing feature of the bear was a tiny green sweatshirt with gold letters on it. At first I thought it was a Green Bay Packers shirt, which would only narrow my search to the million Packer fans in the ChicagoMilwaukee corridor, but then I saw the tiny V and F monogrammed around a minuscule stick. The Vina Fields Academy.

  Vina Fields Academy used to be a girls’ school when Geraldine Graham had gone there, where they’d learned French, dancing and flirting. Since turning coed in the seventies, it’s not only become the most expensive

  private school in the city but an important academic one. The stick on the teddy bear’s little shirt was supposed to be the candle or lighthouse or whatever the school uses to illustrate that it’s a beacon of light.

  I only know all this because I see a life-sized version of the sweatshirt every time I go into La Llorona on Milwaukee Avenue. The owner, Mrs. Aguilar, wasn’t noticeably proud of her daughter, Celine, getting a scholarship to attend Vina Fields: she only had one entire wall papered with her yearbook photos from sixth grade on, along with pictures of Celine with the school field hockey team, Celine accepting the top prize in mathematics for her class three years running, and the sweatshirt.

  I hadn’t eaten for almost twenty-four hours. I might as well drive down there for some of Mrs. Aguilar’s chicken soup with tortillas.

  CHAPTER 6

  Neighborhood Joint

  Back when I signed a seven-year lease for my part of a warehouse at the south end of Bucktown, the surrounding neighborhood was chiefly Hispanic, with a handful of starving artists who needed cheap rent. Two taquerias within half a block of my front door served fresh tortillas past midnight and I had my choice of palm readers.

  This evening as I drove south and west toward my office, all I could see was old six-flats like mine coming down and new town houses going up. Strip malls with identical arrays of Starbucks, wireless companies and home renovation chains were replacing factories and storefronts, as if the affluent were afraid to take chances on neighborhood places. The taquerias are a memory. Now I have to walk almost a mile farther south for the nearest good tostada. Of course, tenants like me are one reason the neighborhood is changing, but that doesn’t make me any happier about it. Especially when I figure what my next round of lease negotiations will look like.

  I drove past my office without stopping, although I could see lights in the tall windows on the north side; my lease partner, Tessa Reynolds, was working late on a sculpture.

  A few blocks south of our building, Milwaukee Avenue narrows to Model T width, making for congestion at all hours of the day. I parked at the first meter I came to and walked the last two blocks to La Llorona,

  threading my way through the kinds of crowds that I knew from my South Side childhood. Worn-out women with litters of children straggling around them were stopping in the markets for dinner, or fingering clothes on the racks set out on the sidewalk. Boys darted in and out of the noisy narrow bars and I saw a girl of about eight slip a hair clip off a table and into her pocket.

  When I got to La Llorona, some six or seven women were talking to Mrs. Aguilar while she packed up their families’ dinner. Celine was at the cash register, her red-brown hair swept up in a ponytail. She was working math problems in between ringing up purchases.

  “Buenos dias, Senora Aguilar,” I croaked when Mrs. Aguilar glanced over at me.

  “Buenos dias, Senora Victoria,” she called back. “You’re sick, no? What you need? A bowl of soup? Celine, chica, bring soup, okay?”

  Celine sighed in the manner of all beleaguered teenagers, but she ducked smartly under the counter to fill a big bowl for me. While I waited, I glanced at her book: Differential Equations for Math SAT Students. A snappy title.

  I sat at one of three high-topped tables that were stuck in the far corner of the storefront, drinking the soup slowly. When the shop was empty of other customers, I listened to Mrs. Aguilar’s endless fret about her bad back and her rotten landlord, who was raising her rent but refused to fix the leaking pipe that had shut her store down for two days last week.

  “He want to make it so I go away, then he take down the building and make condos or something.”

  She was probably right, so I didn’t do anything but commiserate. I finally managed to steer the conversation to Mrs. Aguilar’s third-favorite topic, Celine’s education. I asked if she had a current yearbook for Vina Fields. Mrs. Aguilar came around in front of the counter and pulled it out from the drawer underneath the cash register.

  “Field hockey, I don’t understand this game, but at this school it is important, and Celine is the best.” Celine squirmed and moved with her equations to one of the high tables. When another handful of customers came in I took the yearbook with me to my table, asking for a refill on the soup.

  “Don’t get no food on that, Victoria,” Mrs. Aguilar admonished me, as she ducked underneath the countertop and returned to her skillets.

  I started going through the class pictures, seniors first. So many freshfaced, self-confident girls, so many with long dark hair and arrogant poise. I stopped at each such face, trying to match it to last night’s phantom. I didn’t think it had been Alex Dewhurst, favorite sport, showing horses, favorite singers, ‘NSYNC, or Rebecca Caudwell, who loved figure skating and wanted to become an attorney, although both were possible.

  “What are you looking for?”

  I’d been so absorbed I didn’t notice Celine shutting down the till and coming to stand next to me. Senora Aguilar was scrubbing down her counters. Time to pack up.

  “I ran into one of your classmates when I was on a job last night. She dropped something valuable, but I don’t know her name.”

  “What does she look like?”

  “Long dark braid, kind of narrow face.”

  Celine offered to take the found item with her to school and post a notice on their in-house WebBoard, but I told her the girl probably wouldn’t want the circumstances of her loss publicized. When I finished the seniors and moved on to the juniors, I saw my Juliet almost at once. Her eyes were serious despite the half smile the photographer had coaxed from her, and tendrils from her French braid were spiraling around her soft cheeks, as if she’d been too impatient to comb her hair just for a picture. Catherine Bayard, who loved Sarah McLachlan’s music, whose favorite sport was lacrosse and who hoped to be a journalist when she grew up. She probably would be: Bayard and publishing, the two words go together in Chicago like Capone and crime.

  I didn’t linger on Catherine’s face-I didn’t want Celine alerting her at school the next day. Instead, I shrugged as if giving up the search as a bad job. Celine eyed me narrowly. Girls who work advanced calculus problems find adults like me tiresomely easy to solve. She knew I’d spotted someone, but maybe she couldn’t tell who it was.

  Before giving the book back, I looked at the faculty section. The director was a woman named Wendy Milford, who had the strong expression principals put on to make you think their young charges don’t terrify them.

  I asked Celine to point out her field hockey coach, and memorized the names of a math and history teacher. You never know.

  I closed the book and handed it to her with money for my soup. Three dollars for two bowls-you wouldn’t find that in 923 or Mauve, or whatever trendy name you’d see on whatever bistro ultimately muscled La Llorona out of business.

  I stopped in my office on my way home. Tessa had left for the day and the building was dark. It was also dankly cold. Tessa mainly wrestles large pieces of steel into towering constructions, work which makes her sweat enough to keep the furnace at sixty. I turned up my thermostat and sat bundled in my coat while I brought my system up.

 
Calvin Bayard, one of the heroes of my youth. I’d developed a huge crush on him when he addressed my Con Law class at the University of Chicago. With his magnetic smile, his easy command of First Amendment issues, his ready wit in answering hostile questions, he’d seemed in a different world than my professors.

  After his lecture, I’d gone to the library to read his testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which had made me glow with pride. Illinois’s own Congressman Walker Bushnell, who’d been a leading member of the House Un-American Activities committee, had hounded Bayard for most of 1954 and 1955. But Bayard’s testimony made Bushnell sound like a small-minded voyeur. He had walked away from the hearings without ratting out his friends, and without facing prison time. And despite the fact that many of his writers were blacklisted, Bayard Publishing had grown throughout the fifties and sixties.

  My law school had been a conservative place. A number of students had written angry letters to the dean about being subjected to one more liberal, but I’d been so enthusiastic I’d even applied for an internship at the Bayard Foundation on South Dearborn. I only got to see the great man twice that summer-in company with a few dozen other people. I hadn’t made the final cut for a permanent job, which hurt deeply at the time. I’d ended up with my third choice, the Public Defender’s office.

  After all this time, I didn’t remember a lot of details about Bayard Publishing itself. I knew Calvin Bayard had been the person who moved it from a religious publishing house to doing secular books-the kind of books that got him in trouble with Congress. And there was some business about his supporting civil rights groups which HUAC perceived as Communist fronts. I pulled up Lexis-Nexis and scanned the company’s history. It had been founded by Calvin’s great-grandparents-evangelical Congregationalists who’d come west in the 1840s from Andover, Massachusetts, to start a Bible-and-tract publishing house.