Blacklist

CHAPTER 48

I walked up to North Avenue, where I caught a crosstown bus to my office. The street is an important conduit between the city and the expressway, which is why I suppose the big national chains have stuffed it full of outlets. The traffic is so heavy on North these days that it took half an hour for the bus to trundle the three miles across town. Delays like that usually leave me gnawing my nails in annoyance. Today I welcomed the chance to rest.

When I finally got off at Western, I didn’t bother to check for tails. I was tired, I didn’t care and, anyway, it didn’t matter if people followed me to my office-if they were tapping me, they’d know I was in there:

It was close to lunch time. I walked down to La Llorona for a fish taco. The lunchtime crowd was heavy, so I didn’t chat with Mrs. Aguilar but ate my taco at one of the high tables in the corner while I finished glancing through the papers.

The taco was so good, and I was feeling so sorry for myself, that I took a second one back with me to eat at my desk. At Division Street, where Milwaukee changed abruptly from a neighborhood street to an extension of Yuppie Town, I stopped in one of the coffee bars for a cappuccino. Either protein or caffeine would revive me, or at least that was my theory.

While I was out, Freeman’s secretary had messengered over the toxicology report. Tessa had signed for it and taped it to my office door. I took it

in with me and laid it on my desk. I almost couldn’t bear to read it: I’d moved heaven and earth, or at least medical examiners in two counties, to get this document. If it told me nothing, I might he down and never get up again.

I finally took the report from the envelope and began reading. Callie had sent a photocopy of a ten-page fax, so it was blurry in places. The text bristled with “epithelial cells of the distal part of the renal tubules” and “immunocytochemical electron microscopy of the hepatocytes.” Fascinating, if you knew what it meant.

I slowly went through the whole ten pages. The analysis of Marc’s last meal (skinless chicken, broccoli, baked potato and a lettuce-tomato salad, consumed three hours before death, with a statistical variation of so much based on digestive whatever) was so detailed that I abruptly tossed the second taco into the trash.

The lab had found no trace of cocaine, diazepam, nordiazepam, hydrocodone, cocaethylene, benzoy-lecgonine, heroin ‘hydrochloride or marijuana metabolites in Marc’s urine. He had alcohol in the vitreous humor and phenobarbital in the blood plasma, discovered with “high-performance liquid chromatography.” The report gave the drugs in milligrams per liter, with the information that Marc had weighed eighty kilos, so I couldn’t tell how much Marc had drunk on top of the drug, but Vishnikov had provided a summary at the end: “… a six hundred milligram dose of phenobarbital taken with approximately two shots of bourbon would have depressed respiration and most likely killed him if he hadn’t first died of drowning.”

I leaned back in the desk chair. It wobbled badly; I needed to get a screwdriver out to tighten the castors.

All I knew about phenobarbital was that it was used to treat epilepsy. If Marc had epilepsy, he should have known better than to mix alcohol with his medication. He would have known better: by all reports he was a careful man; he wouldn’t have taken a drug without knowing its side effects. But maybe after years with the disease, he knew he could drink a modest amount without getting into distress with his medication.

The sinking feeling returned to my diaphragm; he had gone into that pond alone. Unless-a couple of shots of whisky wasn’t much for a man

who weighed-eighty kilos-I scratched arithmetic on a scrap of papera hundred seventy-five pounds. But I didn’t know how to evaluate the amount of phenobarb he’d taken.

Since I couldn’t ask Vishnikov to explain, I phoned Lotty, who was in her clinic today. Mrs. Coltrain, her longtime administrator, said Dr. Herschel was with patients and couldn’t be disturbed.

“All I want to know is how much of a dose six hundred milligrams of phenobarbital is. Can you ask her, or Lucy Choi?” Lucy was the advanced practice nurse who did a lot of the routine patient care at the clinic.

After a minute on hold, Lotty came to the phone herself. “Six hundred milligrams is a huge dose, Victoria. Did someone prescribe that for you? It could kill you if you took it all at once.”

“How long would it take?”

“This isn’t a game, is it? I don’t know. It moves fast into the system, depresses respiration. You might have an hour for someone to try to revive you, possibly only half an hour.”

“What if I weighed thirty pounds more than I do?”

“Still far too much. If someone prescribed that for you, don’t ever see her again.”.

She hung up. I looked again at the report. If Marc had epilepsy, he wouldn’t have taken such a lethal dose on purpose. Not unless he wanted to die. But then, why go into the Larchmont Pond? Why not stay in the comfort of his bed? Maybe he didn’t know he would die from it-maybe he thought it would just make him unconscious enough not to mind drowning. But why go all the way out to that foul pond at Larchmont instead of the welcome expanse of Lake Michigan? And then, his car-I shook my head, trying to stop the incessant buzzing: hamster on its wheel again.

My hand hesitated over my phone. Harriet Whitby had planned to move in with Amy after her parents left for Atlanta yesterday. If I phoned Amy’s apartment, would that get the law to monitor her calls, too? I shook my head angrily: I couldn’t live like this, second-guessing whether anyone was listening to me and my friends, or following me. And I wasn’t going to spend an hour on public transport just to make sure I talked to her unsupervised.

Amy answered, sounding relaxed: she and Harriet were enjoying a comfortable day alone together, she explained, without having to worry about Harriet’s folks. As she called her friend to the phone, I felt like a vulture, intruding on their light mood.

“Dr. Vishnikov sent me your brother’s autopsy report,” I told Harriet. “Would you like me to come to Amy’s so we can discuss it in person?” “Are you trying to prepare me for something awful?” she demanded. “Something I don’t want to know? Tell me now. This has been the hardest week of my life-I don’t want even a half hour of agony imagining things while I wait to see you.”

“Marc had a lot of phenobarbital in his system, but only one largish bourbon. Did he suffer from epilepsy, or have any history of seizures where he would have been taking this drug?”

“No,” she said blankly. “No, he’s always been-always was-really healthy. What does this mean?”

“I’m afraid it means what we’ve been saying all along: he really was murdered. Someone gave him a drug that knocked him out, and then put him in that pond to die.”

Saying it out loud brought me a sense of relief. The wheel stopped turning, the buzzing in my head ended. Murder. Not suicide. Not accident. I didn’t have to make a plaster cast of the wheel marks in the culvert: Mark’s killer had driven him to the pond in a golf cart.

Harriet became so quiet I thought perhaps she’d gone away, but at last she said in a dull, dead voice that sounded like her mother’s, “We’ve known this, anyway, all week. Not about the drug, but that someone killed him. It’s just hard to hear it finally said out loud. Marc wasn’t really healthy after all, was he? It didn’t matter that he attended the University of Michigan or was a prizewinning writer, or kept a healthy diet, did it? He still died from the black man’s disease.”

“I’m sorry?” I was confused-all I could think of was sickle-cell anemia. “Murder,” she hiccupped. “It doesn’t matter if you’re educated and live a decent life, it’s still going to get you.”

“I’m sorry,” I repeated, helplessly. “I’ll come to Amy’s right now if you want.”

“No, thank you. I know you’ve been working hard on my behalf-on

my family’s behalf. I know you’re only doing what I asked you to do. But I need to be alone with a sister for now.”

When she hung up, I felt embarrassed: the news that elated me had brought her distress. I got up and walked around the room. We’d found Mark’s bottle of Maker’s Mark when we searched his house last week. Bourbon and branch: his drink, Amy had told me. If there were fingerprints on his bottle-if the whisky had been doctored-I wanted to collect that Maker’s Mark and get it tested, even if I had to pay for the job myself.

After Amy and I had finished inspecting Mark’s house on Friday, what had I done with his keys? I dumped the contents of my briefcase onto my desk. The set I’d borrowed from Mark’s housekeeper tumbled out in the jumble of papers, tampons and my PalmPilot. So did the key Luke Edwards’s locksmith had created for me to get into the Saturn.

I picked up the car key and turned it over in my palm, studying it as though it were a text in an unknown language. I could take the train down to Mark’s house, collect his bourbon and borrow his car. As long as I didn’t park it near my office or home, I should be able to drive freely around town for a few days. I might even be able to pick up Benji. And instead of taking him to a motel, I could leave him at Marc Whitby’s house. Tell the neighbors Benji was my cousin, needing a job and a place to stay-we were letting him look after the house so it didn’t stand vacant until the family sold it. Gosh, you’re good, V I.!

I stuffed the toxicology report back into its envelope and put it in my bag. Picklocks-you never know. A loaded clip for my gun-because, again, you never know. Latex gloves, a gallon-sized plastic bag for the bourbon, pulled clean from the box and inserted into a second clean bag to make sure there was no contamination of the specimen.

“Far from this something bosom haste, ye doubts, ye fears that laid it waste,” I sang, dancing to the door.

It was a long El trip to the South Side, since I had to ride into the Loop to change trains. I danced impatiently on the platform while I waited, and found myself leaning forward in my seat, as if that would move the train faster. At Thirtyfifth Street, I jumped down the stairs two at a time and ran over to Giles.

When I jogged down the walk to Mark’s house, a half-dozen girls were

jumping double Dutch out front. They watched me go up the stoop and unlock Marc’s front door. Maybe this wasn’t such a good place to bring Benji: nothing happened unobserved in this neighborhood. Except for someone coming here to steal all Marc’s papers.

The house had taken on the forlorn, musty aspect of any abandoned building. After a week, dust was visible even to my unhousekeeperly eye. I took a quick look around. I didn’t think anyone had been here, robbers or cops, despite Bobby Mallory’s assertion that the police would reopen the investigation into Marc’s death.

In the kitchen, I pulled on the latex gloves, picked up the Maker’s Mark at the base with my thumb and forefinger and slipped it into the clean plastic bags. The whole package went into my briefcase.

On my way out, I stopped to look up at the poster of Kylie Ballantine in the stairwell. “What could you tell me?” I demanded. “Were you Calvin Bayard’s lover? Were you Augustus Llewellyn’s? What secret do those New Solway people care about so much that they killed your young champion to protect it?”

The vital silhouette floated above me-above all the petty concerns of the people she had known. Kylie Ballantine had moved on, had not let her life be mired in the bitterness the McCarthy era had generated. She had struggled financially, but unlike that crew of wealthy people, she had shrugged off the wounds of those turbulent times. Even if she’d known hardship, Ballantine had been fortunate to die with her powers intact, her spirit strong. Unlike Calvin Bayard, whose mind once overmatched Olin Taverner’s, and now was happy to watch the cook boil milk.

My fingers clenched on the handle of my case. I started toward the front door, trying to make myself think about the best way to deliver the Maker’s Mark to Cheviot Labs, but the image persisted: urine masked by talcum, Calvin’s nurse shepherding him toward the kitchen.

My hand was on the front doorknob when I stopped. The house around me was quiet as death. The nurse, Theresa Jakes. Who had seizures, Catherine Bayard told me; Granny mustn’t know about them.

I hadn’t wondered where the phenobarb had come from. But there it was, right out in New Solway where Theresa took it to control her own seizures. Where Ruth Lantner, the housekeeper, threatened to tell Renee about them if Theresa slept through Calvin’s wanderings again.

I turned around and walked back to stare again at the poster. Nothing happened at New Solway that Renee didn’t know about. Even if Ruth Lantner hadn’t told her about Theresa’s seizures, Renee would have found out somehow. Renee exulted in her organizational skills: during the day she juggled details of a mammoth commercial enterprise; at night she stayed effortlessly on top of a major domestic one.

If she had killed Marc, it would have been to protect Calvin’s reputation. But Calvin didn’t need protecting. He was the man who had stood up when few people would, who had confronted Taverner and Bushnell and walked away.

Fragments of conversations passed through my head. They turned on each other like rats in a proverbial barrel, Augustus Llewellyn said last night. Pelletier’s Boy Wonder, skimming the cream from Pelletier’s work, from Pelletier’s love life.

Who had sent Taverner that picture of Kylie and told him where it had been taken? Who wanted people to give money to ComThought’s legal defense fund without coming forward himself? What had Llewellyn done to get that money from Bayard? Taverner had kept a dastardly secret about Calvin Bayard, only because Bayard knew one just as bad about Taverner. That truth had been staring me in the face for days. I just hadn’t wanted to see it.

Not about the hero of my youth. Not Calvin. Not, not. My knees buckled. I collapsed on the stairs.