Blacklist

CHAPTER 20

The emotions of the afternoon left me limp. I didn’t go to my car, but walked aimlessly along the paths that wound through Anodyne Park. Night had fallen while I was in with Geraldine, but the paths were well dotted with fake gas lamps and I found my way easily. Not that I exactly knew what my way was, right now.

It was that time of evening when people were out with their dogs, or heading over to the bar on the shopping strip for a drink. I thought about following a dour couple into the bar, but I’d had too much company the last few hours. I kept walking.

I was too tired to try to make sense of everything I’d heard this afternoon, but the image of Geraldine and her mother kept floating in my mind, Geraldine’s futile rebellions culminating in her unhappy marriage. Culminating, really, in her son Darraugh’s wintry personality. I imagined scenes at the breakfast table, Laura Drummond giving her son-in-law his coffee with a barbed comment on his character, Geraldine slamming out of the house to do-what? I couldn’t imagine her wasting time over bridge or shopping. I didn’t know how she’d spent the years from 1937 until her mother died.

Beyond the bar, the path made a gentle descent. By and by, I found myself going under Powell Road and rising again onto the Anodyne Park golf course. The course itself was dark, but the occasional lamppost let me see

the path. A late golfing foursome passed, going the other way in their cart. At the top of a rise, I came on the clubhouse, a well-lighted, sprawling building with a rack of golf carts at the far end and a couple of valets moving cars at the other. A wave of laughter rolled toward me. I shuddered away from the jollity.

I scrambled to the top of a hillock and lay on my back looking at the stars. The grass was velvety soft, but cold; it wasn’t long before I started shivering and sneezing. I sat up again and pulled out my cell phone. Maybe I could reach Domingo Rivas, the man who had looked after Olin Taverner. He didn’t have a listed number that I could find, but when I called the Anodyne Park management office and identified myself as a detective they were happy to give me his number: he lived with a married daughter in nearby Lyle.

“I hope there’s not a problem, Detective. Domingo looked after Mr. Taverner as carefully as if he were his own father, and we have recommended him to another older gentleman in our assisted living compound.”

I reassured her, explaining that I just wanted to talk to Mr. Rivas about Marc Whitby’s visit to Olin Taverner. She put me on hold for a minute, then came back on to say that Rivas would be here in an hour to meet with the family of the “gentleman” who might be hiring him.

“We can ask him to stop by the office early to talk to you.”

She gave me directions to the office. I found the underpass from the golf course back into the Anodyne Park community, but once inside the complex, the dark and the winding paths unsettled my sense of direction. I pulled a small flashlight from my bag, but couldn’t make out any building that I recognized. I figured all the paths would end up either at the exit or the bar, and kept going. I was wrong-this particular walkway suddenly ended at a large shrub which caught on my trousers.

As I bent to untangle myself, I dropped my flashlight. Its beam picked out wheel marks going around the evergreen. Curious, I followed them and found myself at the entrance to a culvert. The ground was damp; I saw the tracks easily. It looked as though someone had driven a golf cart through here.

I was tempted to follow the trail to see whether this culvert ended up in New Solway on its far side, but I didn’t want to muck up my good shoes in the damp soil. And I didn’t want to miss Domingo Rivas.

I turned around. More by luck than skill, I found my way to the main part of the complex. A woman walking a toy poodle directed me to the management office.

The office took up a wing of the skilled nursing facility, a building tucked well away from the jolly parts of Anodyne Park so that no one had to think of disagreeable things like dementia or death. The woman on evening duty said, Oh, yes, they were expecting me. Domingo Rivas arrived soon after me, before it occurred to the woman to ask me for identification.

Rivas was a small man, perhaps my age, dressed like a waiter in black trousers and a white shirt. He watched me with worried eyes while the administrator explained that I was a detective with some questions to ask about “the black man” who’d died across the street last weekend.

After some urging, I got her to let us use a conference room where we could be private-she clearly wanted to be part of the conversation. With a little patient coaxing, I persuaded Rivas to sit down, and even to reveal his chief worry-that someone had complained that he didn’t take good care of Olin Taverner.

“He has-had-very high standards, very high, but so do I. His apartment, it is always spotless when I leave him, his clothes also. His meals, I make them with my own hands, I am a good chef for the old who cannot eat strong food.”

“No one has ever complained about your care of him,” I assured Rivas. “I wanted to talk to you about something different.”

I took out the photograph of Marc and Harriet Whitby. “This man came to see Mr. Taverner last week, didn’t he?”

When he nodded and said, yes, the man had been there on Thursday, I continued, “You know he was killed on Sunday. I’m wondering if he came back to see Mr. Taverner Sunday evening.”

Rivas slowly shook his head. “Sunday I do not work, I spend with my family. Maybe this man comes back again when I am not there, although Mr. Taverner, he says nothing on Monday, nothing about a visitor.”

That was disappointing. “On Thursday, when Mr. Whitby did see Mr. Taverner, do you know what they talked about?”

“Papers. Old papers Mr. Taverner wants to show this man. He keeps them in a locked drawer in his desk. I never see them. I only help Mr.

Taverner walk to the desk: with a visitor he does not like to use a wheelchair, he does not like to seem helpless. Many of my old people are like that, very proud. And he is the proudest of the proud, Mr. Taverner. I help him walk to his desk, I help him undo the lock, I help him walk back to the man, then I wait in the kitchen while they talk. In case he needs tea, water, whisky or suddenly needs help, you understand, with his private functions, sometimes they come-came-on him suddenly.”

Rivas’s solemn courtesy would be comforting to people whose strength was waning, but who prized their dignity. “Were the papers written or typed?”

“They were written by hand. That much I know. What they say, that I do not know.”

“And did he give them to Marc Whitby?”

“No, Mr. Taverner shows them only. The other man, he writes things from the papers into a little notebook that he carries in his pocket, but when he goes away, Mr. Taverner, he locks the papers again in his desk.” “And did Mr. Taverner say anything to you about the papers?”

“He says what the old so often say, he says, `I will die soon, the time to hold secrets is over.”’

I thanked him, but when I tried to offer him money for his time, he drew himself up to his full height and said quietly he did not take money for such things. I felt embarrassed, as one does in making a social mistake, and left the room ahead of him, stopping at the administrator’s desk to get Taverner’s address.

Rivas caught up with me at the exit. “I am thinking someone has been visiting Mr. Taverner on Monday night. Not Sunday, when this black man dies, but the next night. On Monday, I leave Mr. Taverner as always at nine-thirty, ready to go to bed but not in bed, that he likes to do by himself He likes to sit in his chair with his whisky, to read or sometimes to write, and then move into his bed when he is ready for that. For the private functions in the night, he has a bottle on his chair and one on his bed.

“But Tuesday morning, when I find him, when he is still in his chair and I know he has never gone to bed, also his glass is clean. He never has washed a glass in his whole life, I think, and now that he is old and he walks so badly, he will not start now washing glasses. When I was finding him, then everything was too-too much drama, I didn’t think about the glass, I didn’t think until tonight, until now when you ask me did this black man come back on Sunday. But someone did visit Mr. Taverner on Monday.”

My heart beat faster. “What did you do with the glass?”

“I put it in the cupboard, with the others. When someone comes for his things, they will find all of his glasses just so, everything just so.”

“Do you still have a key to Mr. Taverner’s apartment? I know you’re meeting some people, but could you take five minutes to show me which glass? It’s possible we might find something in it still, some fingerprint or something.”

And then I could stay behind and break into the drawer where Taverner had locked the papers he’d shown Marc Whitby. The weariness that enveloped me an hour ago had vanished. Excitement made my fingers tingle.

Rivas led me solemnly from the nursing facility to a nearby apartment building. He said little, except that he was meeting his “new gentleman’s” family in this same building, so he had enough time.

From the outside, the assisted living building looked like Geraldine Graham’s, but inside it had been designed for people in wheelchairs and walkers, with handrails bolted into extrawide halls. Taverner had lived on the ground floor. Rivas took a key chain from his pocket and, with the compact motions that characterized him, opened the front door.

When he turned on the lights, I saw we were in an apartment similar again to Geraldine’s, but again with wider halls and doorways to accommodate wheelchairs. The rooms as a consequence were smaller. Rivas led me past a sitting room to the kitchen, which was, as he had boasted, spotless, and opened a cupboard where the glasses stood at attention. It was only after he’d pointed out the relevant glass that he spoke.

“You think there is a problem with Mr. Taverner, with his life ending, because of this glass?”

“I’m like you: the washed glass makes me suspicious. Can you show me where you found Mr. Taverner?”

Rivas led me into the bedroom, a large room with heavy drapes covering a set of sliding doors. The bed was still as he’d left it on Monday night, the sheets turned down so that an old man could easily get under them. A leather easy chair was placed about five steps from the bed. A table stood next to it with two canes hanging from a rack; on the polished tabletop were a phone, Monday’s newspapers and a bottle of Berghoff’s fourteenyear-old bourbon.

“You’ve seen many people die, haven’t you?” I asked. “Was there anything unusual about Mr. Taverner’s body when you found him?”

He slowly shook his head. “He has gone in his sleep, I think, as we all hope will happen, without the hospital, the-the equipment, all of those things that hurt us.”

“But something wasn’t right,” I suggested, seeing his troubled frown. He looked around the room, again shaking his head. “You are right. It is something, not only this glass. Is it the pillow? I think it is, it has the”-he fumbled for a word, showing with his fist the way the head makes a hollow in the pillow after sleep-“yes, the hollow; the pillow looks like he sleeps on it, but he is in his chair. Now”-he crossed to the bed-“now it is normal, but-not quite right, not where I have been leaving it. And also, I think someone has moved this chair.”

He pointed at a cane chair on the far side of the bed, next to the drapes covering the sliding doors. You could see four indentations in the pile where the legs had stood for months; whoever replaced the chair hadn’t aligned it exactly.

I wanted to inspect the rest of the apartment, but Rivas was anxious not to be late for his meeting. I tried to get him to leave me his key, telling him the police would want to send in a forensic team, but Rivas didn’t want to be part of a police inquiry. If someone had been here with Mr. Taverner the night he died, had moved furniture, moved pillows, it would seem as though Rivas hadn’t looked after his gentleman carefully, even though Mr. Taverner always wanted to be left to go to bed alone. Besides, the new family would take it amiss to have Rivas involved in a police inquiry. The administrator would help with keys and entrance to the apartment, he said, if investigators needed to search Mr. Taverner’s apartment in greater detail.

I nodded my understanding. Following him down the hall and out the door, I took advantage of his anxiety about the time to depress the lip of the dead bolt so it wouldn’t fasten when we left. Rivas went to the elevators while I walked outside. As soon as he got into an elevator, I darted back down the hall, pushed Taverner’s door open and flipped the lights back on. A handsome old leather-topped desk stood in a corner on the far side of the sitting room. Nearer to me were the armchairs where Taverner and Whitby had presumably sat to have their conversation. I started toward the desk, then decided caution was the better part of valor. I returned to the kitchen, found some latex gloves under the sink, and put those on.

When I returned to the sitting room, I realized it was considerably colder than the kitchen and bedroom had been. I stopped on my way to the desk: a draft was seeping under the brocade drapes, which swayed with the air currents.

I crossed the room fast and flung the drapes open. Someone had broken the glass on the door to the patio and forced the lock from the inside. I pulled the heavy fabric away from the wall. A man was flattening himself into the corner. He swore and ran toward me bull-like, head lowered. I didn’t let go of the drapes fast enough. The man butted me in the stomach, shoved open the broken patio door and took off.

I doubled over, gasping and gagging, and tripped in the drapes. I fought free of the heavy fabric and staggered after the intruder across the patio, through a small garden. I could hear his feet pounding away from me, but I was too winded to move fast. I lost him on the winding paths.

Damn and double damn. I hadn’t gotten a good look at him, just a confused impression of a youngish white man with dark thick hair, in jeans and running shoes. A burglar who knew the place was standing empty, or someone after Taverner’s secret papers?

I found my way back to the assisted nursing compound and returned to Taverner’s apartment. It wasn’t so hard to find the locked drawer. Except the lock was broken and the drawer was empty.

Like Domingo Rivas, I didn’t want to spend a whole lot of time with the police, especially not the suburban forces. I thought of driving back to Chicago and leaving this mess for the Anodyne Park management to sort out when they got the apartment ready to sell. I thought of the hollow in the pillow disarranged on the bed, the glass rinsed out. What if Taverner’s visitor Monday night had put something in his bourbon to make him drowsy, and then taken the pillow from the bed and held it against his face until-well, until, yes.

I couldn’t think of one thing about Olin Taverner that I didn’t despise. The careers he’d ruined through the blacklist, the homosexuals he’d hounded

in public life while remaining deeply closeted himself, the list could go on for days. Did it really matter if someone had hastened the end of an old HUAC hatchet man?

On the other hand, he’d died soon after showing Marc Whitby some secret papers. And Marc Whitby had died soon after seeing them. Who had Whitby discussed those papers with? His young assistant? But then, why hadn’t she mentioned them to me? Maybe she’d been more forthcoming with Harriet and Amy.

I rubbed my sore diaphragm. The man who’d butted me was either lucky or well trained. Maybe he’d murdered Whitby and Taverner and come back to search the premises. But that made no sense-he’d have had plenty of time to search when Taverner died. Unless he hadn’t known until later that Whitby had seen the documents?

I pulled out my cell phone and called Stephanie Protheroe, the sheriff’s deputy I’d been dealing with.

“Warshawski, isn’t your boyfriend jealous of the amount of time you’re spending with me? I’ve lent you clothes, I’ve lost and found documents for you. Now what?”

“You’re right,” I said. “I’ve been imposing. Maybe I should take this to the New Solway cops.”

She sighed. “Okay, I’ll bite. What is it?”

“I was visiting Geraldine Graham this afternoon. She lives in the same complex as Olin Taverner-the guy who died on Monday or Tuesday. As I was leaving her place, I discovered that someone had broken into Taverner’s apartment.”

“That someone wasn’t you, was it, Ms. Warshawski?”

“No, ma’am. That someone was a man who knocked me to the ground when I went in to investigate. White, maybe forty, lots of hair-I didn’t get much of a look.”

“Okay,” she sighed again. “We’ll send someone over.”

“And, Deputy-Marc Whitby visited Olin Taverner last Thursday night. I don’t know if Whitby came back here on Sunday before he diedbut it seems worth exploring. And Taverner had an anonymous visitor on Monday, someone who washed out Taverner’s whisky glass. Just thought you’d like to know.”