Sara Paretsky - Blacklist

After a stubborn minute, she finally admitted that she only came in on Fridays for four hours. “He was a bachelor. He lived a simple life. He didn’t need a lot of help.”

Behind us, Mrs. Whitby said, “I had no idea this neighborhood collected so much dust. Because I’m sure you must have gone over this last Friday, and yet here we are on Thursday knee-deep in dust.”

Rita Murchison wheeled around. I peered over her shoulder down the narrow hallway to the staircase which rose halfway down its length. Mrs. Whitby had found the light switches. A spotlight was trained on a framed poster on the stairwell wall. It showed the silhouette of an African dancer, back arched, in the social realist style of the thirties; around the sleek figure was an intricate design of African prints and masks.

“The Federal Negro Theater Presents,” proclaimed the header, and,

underneath, “Kylie Ballantine’s Ballet Noir of Chicago, April 15-16-17, the Ingleside Theater.”

The light also revealed a thin film of dust along the edges of the stairs. Mrs. Whitby stood there, inspecting her finger. Rita Murchison surged forward, prepared for battle. Harriet put her arm around her mother, trying to persuade her not to worry about dust when Marc was dead. I slid away from the trio into the room on my right. Amy Blount followed me.

“I tried to persuade Mrs. W to stay at the hotel, but I could hardly blame her for wanting to see her son’s house. She’s been wanting to fight someone all week, anyone to distract her from her distress over Marc. When Harriet and I wouldn’t play, I thought for sure she’d take you on.”

I grinned. “I thought she would, too. Let’s leave them to it and see if we can find any trace of his notes, or a diary, or anything that would tell us why he went out to New Solway.”

Amy nodded. “It’s not that big a place. It’s got three floors, but only nine rooms and he didn’t really use the third floor at all. His study was on the second floor, next to the bedroom. Want to start there? We can go up a back staircase from the kitchen.”

“You spend a lot of time here?” I asked.

“We weren’t lovers, if that’s what you want to know,” Amy said roughly. “We were friends-Harriet and I were close at Spelman, I used to spend Christmas with the family, so even though Marc was six years older than us, I knew him through the family. When he moved to Chicago three years ago to take the job at T-Square, I introduced him to people. He was quiet, not naturally outgoing, not like Harriet. Unless he was working on a story-then he would feel comfortable calling people and talking to them. Later he developed this interest in Ballantine, which began absorbing his spare time.”

I followed her through a dining room to the kitchen and the back stairs, our feet echoing on the uncarpeted floors. Whitby had masks from one of Ballantine’s productions on the living room wall, photographs from the Swing Mikado along the stairwell. He even had a pair of Ballantine’s toe shoes under a glass bell on his dresser.

He’d also been rehabbing his house bit by bit. The kitchen walls were

scraped and painted. He’d put in a new stove and refrigerator, but stacked all his pots and dishes on a trolley instead of buying cupboards.

The refrigerator held half a cooked, skinless chicken breast, skim milk, orange juice and a carton of eggs. No beer, no wine, was in sight; only a bottle of Maker’s Mark, about a quarter empty, stood on a shelf with spices and pastas.

“His drink,” Amy said when she saw the bottle. “Bourbon and branch.” He’d begun work on a bathroom, had finished two upstairs rooms, his bedroom and the study, but the rest of the house was still either half-built, or untouched. Books were housed neatly on board-and-brick shelves. Most dealt with black history and theater, or with African art and dance. He didn’t seem to read much fiction. Next to his bed, though, he had a library copy of Armand Pelletier’s A Tale of Two Countries, the first novel Calvin Bayard had published when he’d taken over the press-Bayard Publishing’s first nonreligious novel.

Amy was right about the search. In this bare place, it took very little time. I pulled latex gloves from my bag and handed her a pair.

“We’ll quarter the room,” I said. “Everything you touch, you put back exactly as you found it.”

“You think there’s been a crime.”

“He left on foot Sunday evening. How did he get to New Solway? If he went out there to die, surely he would have driven, instead of taking a train to a remote town, followed by a five-mile hike to that pond. No one goes to that much work to kill themselves.”

“Then-the police?”

“If I can persuade one of my acquaintances there. But first let’s check this out ourselves.”

Amy was a scholar, a dogged researcher. She was willing to collect data before pushing me into further action. She was thorough, not as fast as me on her first search, but careful and tidy. We went through the drawers, shelves, looked in the books, looked behind pictures, under the neat stack of sweaters in his closet. Nothing. Nothing about Kylie, about the Federal Negro Theater, about New Solway. No datebook. No notebooks. We logged onto his laptop. The word-processing files had been wiped clean. Nothing anywhere.

Back in the kitchen, Harriet had somehow persuaded Rita Murchison and her mother to a cease-fire. Ms. Murchison was making coffee, her lips a thin angry line. Mrs. Whitby was in the living room, staring blankly at a photograph of her son in front of the old Ingleside Theater.

I had only seen Marc Whitby dead, by flashlight. In the picture, he was smiling, pointing at the theater doors, but his essential seriousness was still evident. Despite having his father’s height, he looked very like his mother, with her slender bones and bronze skin.

“I took that,” Amy said. “We went on a walking tour of Ballantine’s haunts, and of FTP sites, and he liked this one particularly.”

Mrs. Whitby clutched it to her breast, her face finally cracking into grief. “My baby, my baby,” she crooned.

Harriet and Amy pulled her to a chair and knelt on either side of her. I went back to the kitchen to confront the angry housekeeper.

“Did anything in this house look different to you when you came in this morning?”

“Don’t start in on me about the dust, I’ve had it. If it wasn’t for Mr. Whitby being dead and me knowing him all this time, I wouldn’t stay around here to be insulted.”

“I don’t care about dust or no dust,” I said. “It’s the house. I’ve been looking for his papers; they’re gone.”

“If you’re accusing me of stealing-” She smacked the coffeepot down so hard the glass carafe broke. “Now see what you’ve done.”

“Listen to me for a minute,” I said, my voice rising a half register in exasperation. “I know you and Mrs. Whitby have been in each other’s hair, but I’m not part of that fight. I want to know where he kept his papers. I want to know what you noticed when you came in. Maybe someone was here stealing them, or maybe he kept them someplace else.”

She began to pick up the pieces of glass. “The door. It wasn’t locked right. I thought, maybe he left in a hurry and forgot to put the deadbolt on, but he was a careful man, careful and saving, you know, because he didn’t make a lot of money at that magazine, and what he made he spent on this house, this house and that dancer he was so crazy about. But I never came here once all the years I’ve been working for him and found only the one lock on.”

I nodded. So someone had been in here. “Did you ever find anyone here with him when you came in? Or signs of a lover?”

“He was a man. He had a man’s normal instincts.”