Sara Paretsky - Blacklist

“So he was a conservative dresser. He wrote hip and dressed square. Anything else?”

I thought a long minute. Pros, cons. “The DuPage medical examiner seems to have given the body a lick and a promise. Some people are wondering if they would have been as cursory if Whitby had been white.” “What people?” Murray was on it like a flea on a dog.

“Unnamed sources,” I said primly. “A client I won’t reveal. Anyone been able to find out what he was working on at T-Square?”

“They’ve got a lockdown at Llewellyn. The editor, Simon Hendricks, he’s the guy with a face like a tomahawk if you were watching last night’s news, if you try to ask him anything he chops you off at the knees for violating editorial integrity.”

I hoped that didn’t apply to an ambassador from the dead man’s family, but it definitely meant going in person with a note instead of facing the runaround of voice mail. I checked my e-mail one last time, even though I knew Morrell had said he’d be out of touch for a week. And of course the new messages in my in box were either spam or business related.

An old lover of Morrell’s, an English journalist, was also in Afghanistan. Morrell traveling with Susan Horseley-I tried to put that thought out of my mind. What did Penelope really do those twenty years that Ulysses was sleeping with Calypso and fighting the Cyclops? Only a man would imagine she spent it all weaving and unweaving. She probably took lovers, went on long trips herself, was sorry when the hero came home.

I locked up and headed south to the trendy stretch of land developers like to call River North. Llewellyn’s building was an eight-story cube, built when the streets west of the Magnificent Mile were a no-man’s-land between the Cabrini Green housing project and the Gold Coast. Land was cheap then, and it was also spitting distance from both the river and the expressways-valuable for a publisher needing to bring in tons of paper every week.

Nowadays, the old warehouses hold chichi art galleries, while high-rise condos filling the vacant lots dwarf Llewellyn’s cube. The boom has also made parking a supreme hassle. I finally found a meter several blocks west of the building.

Llewellyn’s lobby was as spare as the exterior. All it held was a waiting area with beige-upholstered chairs, and a high horseshoe counter where a receptionist sat. No art, no glitz, only a photograph of Llewellyn himself hanging in the waiting area relieved the monotony. A uniformed guard lounged between the receptionist and modest elevator bank, although the receptionist was built on a massive enough scale to stop an intruder without help from the guard. She frowned majestically when I identified myself and said I was hoping to see Mr. Simon Hendricks.

“And do you have an appointment?” “No, but-“

“He’s not taking any unsolicited interviews.”

“I have a note for him. Can you send that up, please?”

She took the envelope from me and opened it-even though it was sealed and addressed to Hendricks. I’d kept it simple:

Dear Mr. Hendricks,

I am the private investigator who found Marcus Whitby’s body at Larchmont Hall on Sunday night; I got him out of the water and tried to give him CPR. His sister, Ms. Harriet Whitby, has hired me to investigate his death. I’d like to know if Mr. Whitby was working on something that

took him to New Solway on Sunday.

V 1. Warshawski

When the receptionist had read it-taking her time, as if hoping to goad me into some display of impatience that would allow her to throw me out-she made a call on the house phone, speaking too softly for me to overhear. She mutely nodded me to a seat in the lobby. I sat on the scratchy beige upholstery, hoping my message was persuasive enough to open doors closed to Murray’s aggressive style.

After a wait long enough to let me read most of the January issue of T-square, which was on a small table with current copies of the other magazines in the Llewellyn Group, a woman got off the elevator and came over to me. She was about six feet tall, as lean as a whippet, wearing skintight turquoise leather and high-heeled boots that added another three inches to her height. The shiny turquoise made my striped suit look dowdy and conventional.

The woman didn’t sit down, so I got up. It isn’t often I feel like a shrimp, but my eyes just about connected with her breastbone. She ignored the hand I held out as I smiled and introduced myself.

“I’m Mr. Hendricks’s assistant. What is it you’re hoping to get out of a meeting with him?”

I let my hand drop, and spoke with a phony sincerity more grating than outright hostility. “I’m so sorry your receptionist didn’t let you read my note. I’m a private investigator; Marcus Whitby’s sister has hired me to find out how and why he died. It would be helpful to learn what he was working on these days that took him out to New Solway.”

She curled her lip in disdain. “And for proof you offer-?”

I pulled the laminate of my investigator’s license from my wallet. She looked at it, but told me she wanted proof that Harriet Whitby had really hired me.

I pulled out my cell phone and called the Drake. Harriet wasn’t in her room, but when I rang the senior Whitbys I found the client with her mother. She answered cautiously, trying not to give herself away to her mother.

“I’m at the publishing company right now, Ms. Whitby. One of the secretaries wants to make sure you’ve really hired me, that I’m not using your name as a smoke screen for infiltrating Llewellyn Publishing. Can you talk to her?”

“I guess so, but I can’t really, that is, well, let me see what I can do,” Harriet stammered.

The assistant was frowning mightily, but she took the phone from me and had a terse conversation with my client. At the end of it, she gave me back my phone. “I’ll talk to Mr. Hendricks about it.”

She clicked over to the reception desk in her high heels and picked up the phone. I followed her over.

“She says she’s his sister… No, I don’t… all right, I’ll tell her.” She hung up and turned to me. “Mr. Hendricks wants some proof that we were really talking to Harriet Whitby”

By now we had drawn a small crowd-the guard and two people who had been on their way out of the building joined us at the reception counter. They weren’t saying anything, but secret smiles and nudges showed Hendricks’s assistant that she was putting on a good performance.

I leaned against the countertop, my eyes hot. “Are you seriously suggesting that this grieving woman leave her mother’s side to produce a photo ID for you? Is there some scandal about Marcus Whitby that you’re trying to hide? Did the magazine send him out to New Solway to die?”

The assistant’s plucked eyebrows rose in great semicircles. “Of course not. We’re only trying to protect our own privacy”

“Then take me up to Simon Hendricks now. If he knows anything about Marcus Whitby’s death, the sooner he tells me the sooner I can help the Whitby family take their dead son back home for the funeral.”

“That’s right, Delaney,” one of the onlookers said. “Stop horsing around and take the woman up to Simon.”

Several others in the group echoed the sentiment. Delaney hesitated, but realized the group’s mood had shifted against her. She stalked to the elevator, telling me over her shoulder to come with her. I followed her to the editorial offices on the sixth floor.

Hendricks himself was as bleak in person as he’d seemed on television Monday night. He didn’t smile when his assistant introduced me, didn’t change expression when I explained why Harriet Whitby had hired me, didn’t as much as blink when I mentioned her concern that DuPage hadn’t done a proper postmortem.