Sara Paretsky - Blacklist

“I watched the television news tonight,” I said when she answered. “The sheriff seemed pretty convinced that Mr. Whitby drowned on purpose.” “We didn’t see anything to suggest foul play,” she said.

“Deputy, I have Mr. Whitby’s sister with me. They were pretty close; she finds it hard to believe her brother committed suicide.”

“It’s always a struggle for the family,” Protheroe said.

“They find his car?” I asked. “Or discover how he got to Larchmont Hall? It’s what, about five rniles from the nearest train station. Do they have a cab service out there?”

A long pause told me Protheroe realized they had a biggish hole in their solution to Whitby’s death. I didn’t push on the point.

“Ms. Whitby’s hired me to ask a few questions. Ordinarily, I advise the family to get a private autopsy when they’re not satisfied with the medical examiner. But the mother only wants to get her son out of Chicago and interred; she won’t consent to a tox screen or anything else.”

“Then you have a problem, don’t you?” Protheroe wasn’t hostile, just cautious.

“Of course, if the paperwork for the body got misfiled for three or four days, I might come up with a different reason for why Mr. Whitby was in New Solway than just that he stumbled out there to die. I might find his car. I might find something that would make Dr. Hastings want to reopen the autopsy without anyone looking bad.”

“And why should I risk my career on this?” Protheroe demanded. “Oh, because I think you went into law enforcement for the same reason I did: you care more about justice than jelly doughnuts.”

“Don’t knock jelly doughnuts. They’ve saved me more times than my Kevlar vest.” She broke the connection.

“Will the person you just talked to help?” Harriet said anxiously.

“I think so. We won’t know until your mother tries to claim your brother’s body tomorrow.”

Amy Blount looked at me with respect: I had a feeling she hadn’t

expected me to come through for her. “We should let you get to bed. Did you get sick from trying to rescue Marc?”

“It’s just a cold,” I said gruffly. “Who can I talk to tomorrow who might know what Mr. Whitby was working on, or what might have taken him out to New Solway? Did he have a girlfriend, or any close men friends here?”

Harriet rubbed the crease between her eyes. “If he was dating anyone in a serious way, it was still too recent for him to have told me or Mother. His editor is a man named Simon Hendricks; he would know what Marc was working on-if he was writing for T-square. Marc did freelance stuff, too, you know. As for his friends, I can’t think right now. I know his college friends, but not his Chicago ones.”

“I’ll start with the magazine in the morning,” I said. “And maybe I can ask your mother about his friends?”

She gave another fleeting smile. “Better not-Mother would be terribly upset to find out I’d hired you.”

I stifled a groan: this meant the second client in a week where I had to tread lightly between mother and child. “What about your brother’s house? Can you get in there, do you think? We might find some notes or something. I looked in his pockets, hoping for some ID, and he didn’t have any keys on him. It hadn’t occurred to me until I was talking to the deputy just now, but there weren’t any house keys or car keys, unless maybe those fell out of his pockets into the pond.”

Harriet turned in bewilderment to Amy. “Then-but his car-I didn’t think about that.”

“What did he drive?” I pulled a notebook out of the heap on the table. “A Saturn SLl? We’ll see if he left it at his house.”

Amy volunteered to find a lawyer or someone else who might have a spare key to Marcus Whitby’s house. I didn’t say I could get past the lock myself if need be: I’d save that parlor trick for when I had to use it. Mentioning the search I’d made of his pockets made me remember the matchbook and pencil I’d found. I’d tossed them in a bowl by the front entrance when I took Catherine’s teddy bear out of my pockets. I went back for them and showed them to Harriet and Amy.

Water had gummed the matchbook into a solid mass that wouldn’t open. The cover had originally been some shade of green. Water had turned it blackish, and whatever the logo had been, it now looked like a child’s amorphous picture of a star. The cover didn’t have an address or phone number. I might be able to get a forensics lab to open it to see whether Whitby had written something on the inside. The pencil was an ordinary number 2 with no names stamped on it.

Harriet turned the matchbook over in her hands. Neither she nor Amy had any idea where it was from, but Harriet wanted to keep it, as the last thing her brother had touched. I looked closely at both the matchbook and the pencil again. They weren’t going to tell me anything. I handed them over to Harriet Whitby.

When I’d ushered them out, I was utterly beat. I steamed myself for a few minutes in a hot pot of my mother’s invention-herbal tea, lemon, ginger-and crawled into bed, where I fell at once down a hole of sleep. The phone dragged me out of it at one in the morning.

“Is this V I. Warshawski?” the night operator from my answering service demanded. “We’ve gotten a phone call from a Mrs. MacKenzie Graham. She says it’s an emergency and insisted that we wake you.”

“Mrs. MacKenzie Graham?” I echoed, bewildered: I knew Darraugh’s son, MacKenzie, and didn’t think he’d gotten married. Then I remembered through the fog of sleep that MacKenzie had also been Darraugh’s father’s name. I switched on a light and fumbled around on the mghtstand for a pen.

When I had Geraldine Graham’s number, I was tempted to make her wait until morning. But-I’d found a dead man in her childhood pond Sunday night. Maybe someone was making a habit of tossing bodies there and she was watching them do it again. I dialed the number.

“I want you out here at once, young woman.” She sounded as though she thought I was the night chambermaid.

“Why?”

“Because it’s your job to discover who is breaking into Larchmont. You didn’t find them last night, but they are here right now”

“What are you seeing?” I croaked hoarsely.

“What is that, young woman? Don’t grumble at me.”

I tried to clear my throat. “What are you seeing? People? Phantom lights? Cars?”

“I’m seeing the lights in the attic. Didn’t I tell you that? If you come right now, you’ll find whoever it is red-handed.”

“You need to call the cops, Ms. Graham. I live more than forty miles from you.”

She brushed the distance aside: the cops had proved how useless they were; she hoped I wasn’t going to be similarly ineffectual.

“If someone is using Larchmont as a dump for dead bodies, you need to get the local cops there at once. Me arriving ninety minutes from now would serve very little purpose. If you’d like me to call them for you, I can.”

She took my offer as a face-saving out. “And what is your direct number, young woman? I’m tired of relaying messages to you through your help. They’re not cooperative.”

“They’re your best chance of reaching me, Ms. Graham. Good night.” I didn’t want to call Stephanie Protheroe again: one favor a night is all I expect from anyone. I finally remembered the young lawyer on emergency duty for the rich and famous. I found his card with a pager number and beeped him. When he called me back ten minutes later, he was as groggy with sleep as I was, but he agreed to get someone from the New Solway police to drive over to Larchmont.

“Will you let me know what they find?” I asked. “I’m working for the Graham family, you know.”