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.
CHAPTER 10
Trackless Desert
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.
“I see, Ms.”- he glanced at my card-“Warshawski. So the family believes you can tell them something the police can’t? They have actually hired you to conduct this investigation?” He sounded as though it was about as likely as my being asked to pinch-hit for Sammy Sosa.
“Your guard dog here spoke with Harriet Whitby,” I said. “And the family believes it, yes, or they wouldn’t have asked me to do the job.”
He and Delaney both stiffened at the “guard dog” title, but Hendricks merely said coldly, “And what do you expect to learn from Mr. Whitby’s current assignments?”
I again went through my song and dance about trying to understand what had taken Whitby to New Solway.
“We’d all like to know that, Ms.-uh. I don’t believe it was connected to his work. You spoke to Whitby’s sister, Delaney? You’re convinced it really was the sister?”
Delaney murmured a respectful assent.
Hendricks picked up a sheaf of papers: the busy man interrupted middecision. “Mr. Whitby was working on a story on the writers in the Federal Negro Theater Project. You know what that is?”
When I repeated the little knowledge I’d picked up from Whitby’s articles, Hendricks curled his lip. “I see. I would have thought the family-but I suppose they know their own business best. Very well, Ms.-uh… You’re welcome to look at the proposal he gave me, but he hadn’t turned in the completed story. Nothing in the proposal would have taken him to the western suburbs. And I don’t know of anything else he was working on that would have done so. He did freelance work, but he always cleared such projects with me, to make sure they didn’t conflict with anything we were doing here. Delaney, take her out to talk to Aretha. And give her a copy of the proposal.”
He returned to the printout in front of him before we’d left the room. When I asked Delaney who Aretha was, she said tersely, “Research assistant and fact checker who worked with Mr. Whitby”
The coldness I was meeting was riling me, and I braced myself for a confrontation with the fact checker. To my relief, Aretha Cummings turned out to be the opposite of Delaney in everything, from her height-about five feet tall in her pumps-through her plump, curvy body, and her warm energy.
“We’re all devastated here,” she said when Delaney had minced off in her three-inch heels. “Even Delaney, although she won’t admit it. She has such a crush on Mr. Hendricks, so she thinks she has to act like him to get him to like her. I could give her a few tips, but she isn’t the kind to invite them, and anyway she intimidates me. But I’m glad Marc’s sister had the sense to bring someone in to investigate his death. He was a wonderful, wonderful man, a really inspired reporter. He’d had offers from Esquire and Vanity Fair, but he wanted to stay here. I think sometimes Mr. Hendricks sat on him because he was frightened that Marc would show him up. Not that Marc wanted an administrative job, he loved writing and tracking down sources.”
All the time she was talking, she’d been motoring down the hall on her worn pumps, moving as fast as me, even though she took two steps for each one of mine. We passed cubicles and offices, all of them filled with paper.
I spied production schedules pinned to different doors, shelves stacked with old issues of Llewellyn publications, reference books, a supply room where a woman and a man were arguing in fierce undertones.
We finally landed in a conference room, barren of everything but a scarred deal table and a couple of folding chairs. “This is where the writers get to meet,” Aretha explained. “Nothing fancy for them or for us RAs. The editors have mahogany and a refrigerator and everything, but I can get you a soft drink or coffee from the vending machine.”
My throat was dry; lemon soda sounded better than vending machine coffee. While Aretha was out of the room, I read through the proposal Delaney had handed me. The single page assumed the reader knew what the Federal Negro Theater Project was; Whitby was proposing to look at several Chicago contributors-“… not the well-known Theodore Ward or Shirley Graham, but some who should be as well known, especially Kylie Ballantine. Their stories will be woven into the ongoing history of Bronzeville.”
I read it through twice. When Aretha came back, I was studying an erasable board on the wall. It was covered with arrows and bullet points about Halle Berry and Denzel Washington and the upcoming Oscars.
She grinned. “Of course we’re sending a couple of writers to the Oscars. I wish one of them was me, I adore Halle Berry. I suppose winning an Oscar is in line with the Talented Tenth, even if it’s not the same as the Nobel Prize. We scooped everyone with our stories on Toni Morrison and Derek Walcott.”
Oh. T-Square. W. E. B. DuBois’s Talented Tenth of the Negro Race turned into a celebrity magazine.
“Were you helping Marcus Whitby with his story on the Federal Negro Theater Project? I don’t really know much about it.”
“It was part of the WPA, see, in the thirties, the federal theater project that FDR set up for out-of-work performers. They were trying to provide work for artists and playwrights, and they had this idea of people’s theater. Can you imagine the government today doing something like that?” She grinned en
gagingly.
“So there was a Yiddish theater, experimental puppets, a lot of different things, including Negro theater, which existed in twenty-two cities, although they were only really productive in three, Chicago and New York,
and, for some reason I don’t understand, Seattle. So we had Richard Wright and Theodore Ward here in Chicago, they were playwrights, and Kylie Ballantine was a choreographer. Shirley Graham-she was DuBois’s wife and a well-known stage director. They did some pretty amazing things the Swing Mikado was the most famous, but Ward wrote something called the Big White Fog about the real state of race relations in this country. Then the Republicans in Congress got freaked, almost like they were today’s fossils screaming about the NEA: they claimed the Federal Theater Project was a Communist front and shut it down after only about two years.”
“Was it, do you think?” I was curious.
She leaned forward, the brown check of her jacket sleeves straining against her plump forearms. “See, this was when Gone With the Wind was published, and everyone-well, a lot of white America-was buying Margaret Mitchell’s idea that we were all contented little pickaninnies until the evil Yankees came and ended slavery. There were definitely some fellow travelers in the project, but mostly it was people for some brief time getting a chance to put real theater on real stages, instead of having to do minstrel shows or play mammies and Stepin Fetchit.”
“So what was Mr. Whitby’s interest? The ideological battles?”
She shook her head so vigorously her short curls danced. “No. Some folks think the NTP-the Negro Theater Project was just a chance for the white bourgeoisie to exploit black artists, but Marc wasn’t interested in the ideological angle. He wanted to follow the Chicago Writers Workshop that a lot of these artists belonged to, to see what happened to them. And he was especially interested in Kylie Ballantine. She was so complex, she danced, she did choreography, but she also was an anthropologist and wrote books on African dance and ritual. She had a studio in her home in Bronzeville. Marc tried to buy her house-he’s been hoping to turn it into a museum-had been,” she corrected herself mournfully, “but the new owner cut it up into a bunch of little apartments and refused to sell. So Marc bought a place close to hers, then he started a campaign to get her home in the national register of historic buildings. Maybe I’ll try to take that over.”
She gave a little hiccup and busied herself with her notebook for a minute. I waited until she regained her composure, then asked if she knew how much of Kylie Ballantine’s story Marcus had finished.
“It was more like, how much he was cutting it back. He had so much material on Kylie, he was turning it into a book. The piece for T-square was almost finished. He’s been doing occasional pieces on the history of Bronzeville, you see. You know Bronzeville, right?”
I made an apologetic grimace. “Not really. It was the corridor along Cottage Grove Avenue where African-Americans were restricted when they started moving to Chicago in large numbers after the First World War, I think.”
“Not exactly,” she said, with a friendly smile that made me glad it was she, not Delaney or Simon Hendricks who was educating me. “You’re right that we were pushed into that narrow stretch along Cottage on the South Side. But Bronzeville-oh, in some ways it was a state of mind-it included the wonderful mansions on King Drive, you know, a bit west of Cottage-that’s where Ida B. Wells lived, for instance, and Richard Wright when he was here, and Daniel Hale, he had a clinic there because even though he did the first open-heart surgery in the world none of the white hospitals would let him practice. But also, because the downtown stores were segregated there was a shopping district around Thirtyfifth Street. No one misses segregation, but it’s really sad all those stores and little businesses disappeared.”
We were both quiet for a minute, mourning the passing of the little shops, or perhaps the passing of Marcus Whitby.
Aretha gave her curls another shake. “Anyway, Marc was fascinated by Bronzeville. He came from Atlanta, so he had such a different experience-better in some ways, worse in others, but definitely different-and he felt like he had a mission to preserve and record Bronzeville. Then he fell in love with Kylie.”
“She isn’t still alive, is she?” I asked, startled.
“Oh, no. She died in 1979. But you know how you can be so fascinated by a dead person that they feel really present for you. I used to tease Marc about it, about how I could never-” She dissolved suddenly into tears.
I pulled some clean tissues from the stack I’d packed before starting out today, but didn’t try to stop her crying. She’d loved him when he was alive, that much was clear, and now she was likely to have her own dead hero to keep alive.
“It isn’t fair. He was so smart and so loving, he didn’t deserve to die,” she gulped out. “I don’t believe he killed himself. I know people like Delaney laughed at me, just the way I laugh at her with her stupid crush on Simon Hendricks, but Marc was different, he was special, he never would have gotten drunk and jumped into a creepy old pond.”
“That’s what his sister thinks, too-that he wouldn’t have done that, I mean,” I said when Aretha’s sobs had died down and she’d wiped her face. “No, don’t apologize. Grief keeps hitting us at unexpected moments, knocking the wind out… But do you know why Marc-Mr. Whitbywent out there? Did Kylie have a house in New Solway?”
She swallowed the rest of her Coke. “No, she only ever lived in Bronzeville, except the years she spent in Africa. And she didn’t have any family in those western suburbs: I did a search through Marc’s notes, because I wondered the same thing.”
“Did Mr. Whitby ever mention Calvin Bayard?” I asked.
“Is he in charge of Bayard Publishing? We’re not supposed to go to them; Mr. Hendricks is afraid they’ll scoop our stories because they own magazines with tons more reporters and money than we have. Marc would have known that.” She stopped. “Oh. Does Mr. Bayard live in New Solway? Do you think Mare went out to see him without telling us because he knew it would annoy Mr. Hendricks?”
I shook my head. “At this point, I don’t know enough to have theories. But it sounds like one possibility.”
“I can look through his notes and see if Marc says anything about Bayard, but he never mentioned, well, either Mr. Bayard, or Bayard Publishing to me.”
“Could I see Marc’s notes?” I tried not to sound like Peppy with a rabbit in view.
She wrinkled her face up in doubt. “I don’t think Mr. Hendricks would like it if I let his stuff leave the building. But I can see what Marc left at his desk if you’ll read it here.”
I followed her out of the conference room and on down the hall. Like most offices, the floor was laid out in a square around the elevators and bathrooms. We ended up at the corner near where we’d started, at a row of cubicles facing an interior wall. A few people were working at their desks,
but most were leaning over the edges of the carrels talking to each other. They stared frankly at me, but didn’t interrupt their conversations.
Marcus Whitby’s name was on a black plaque two from the end. Unlike most of the other desks I’d seen, his was extraordinarily tidy-no stacks of paper on the floor, no leaning towers of files. I asked Aretha if she’d cleaned up after his death.
“No. Marc was just a neatness freak. Everybody teased him about it.” Her voice wobbled but didn’t break.
“That’s right.” A man in the adjacent carrel who’d been talking to his far neighbor leaned in our direction. “Whitby was Mr. Anal Compulsive. You couldn’t borrow anything from him if you hadn’t returned what you took last week. You his lawyer?”
“No-why? Did he need one?”
The man grinned. “Just a guess. Know you’re not with the magazine. Jason Tompkin.”
“V I. Warshawski. I’m an investigator, hired by the family to see how he died. Did he ever mention going out to New Solway to you?”
Tompkin shook his head. “But Marc was a solo operator. Most people here share and share al
ike-you know, you’re stuck, you want an opening, you bring your buddies up to speed on what you’re doing. Not Marc. He owned his material.”
“He was happy to help people,” Aretha snapped. “You’re just lazy, J.T, and you know it.”
Tompkin grinned. “You ought to be a perch, Aretha, you rise faster to the bait than anyone I ever met. But you can’t deny Whitby didn’t let people in on what he was doing. Simon and he had a few words about it now and then.”
“Is that why Mr. Hendricks was reluctant to let me know what Mr. Whitby was working on?” I asked.
Tompkin thought that was funny enough to laugh about, but, when Aretha glared at him, he subsided and returned to his other neighbor. Aretha rifled quickly through a plastic disk holder. “Here’s Bronzeville, but I know Marc kept most of his Kyle Ballantine stuff at home. His notes, his notebook-he did stuff by hand-I don’t see that. But he probably had that
at home, too. A lot of the writers do most of their work at home. Can you imagine trying to work with Jason Tompkin blaring away all day?”
This last was said loud enough for Tompkin to hear, but all he did was laugh again and say, “Stimulation, darling. I was stimulating him, but Marc was too uptight to enjoy it.”
I followed Aretha to her own desk. The research assistants and fact checkers were another peg down from the writers: her desk wasn’t in a cubicle but one of four put together to make a square. She slipped the disk into her own computer, skimmed through the contents, but said there wasn’t anything current on it.
I leaned over her shoulder to study what was on the screen. She brought up the file that showed Kylie Ballantine’s history. It was annotated with his sources, mostly private papers labeled “VH”-“The Vivian Harsh Collection at the Chicago Library,” Aretha explained. When she realized I was trying to scribble notes off the screen onto my own notepad, she printed out a copy.
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