Blacklist

by Sara Paretsky

  I was the hero back from the war, a hero in some places anyway, with my arm in an interesting sling and my eyes dazed from too much blood, so much blood that I couldn’t drink it away. A hero to my golden brother, who’d spent my war years getting rich. I was fighting, he was taking over the family firm.

  No George Bailey role for Gene, nossir. No, Gene had a truly wonderful life. Big brother risking his life on the Ebro, little brother minting the stuff in buckets, turning a sleepy family business into an international power. So that when I came back, although the girls clustered round to hear my battle stories, they slipped out the side door with Gene. He was renting the apartment on Elm Street in those days, just the place to take the girls, where Mother couldn’t see, and then come home for church on Sunday, hair slicked back, bending solicitously over her, butter not melting in his mouth.

  We hung out at Goldie’s. It was just one of those west Loop bars. Guys heading home for work stopped for a quick one, listened to the racing results or a late ball game. We used to go after a meeting, Toffee Noble all excited about his basement magazine. He sometimes came with Lulu, who painted outsized canvases of African ritual dances. He also hung out with Edna Deerpath, the tiny black whirlwind who represented the hotel laundry workers in their bloody battles against the Mob.

  Toffee never joined in anyone’s battles, just smirked from the sidelines, Mr. Cool, then went home and wrote us all up in stories he cranked out on his basement press. We never knew whether he held one of those pasteboard squares, the pass to the inner circle, or not. Some said he was too chicken to join, others that he was too chicken to admit he traveled all the way.

  We were all brothers then, or brothers and sisters, even Gene, my blood brother, although everyone knew he only came to meet girls. We used to tease him, you think you’re the good capitalist? The one who won’t be hanged from the lamppost just because you like Red nookie?

  I was the grand old man, being five or six years older than everyone but Lulu, and the only one who’d ever been shot at for being Red-although Edna and Lulu had ducked their share of stones for being black. Goldie herself didn’t care if you were black or white or red as long as your folding paper was green, and she set the tone; everyone at Goldie’s took you as you were, so of course it was a place where rich girls came, because rich girls gravitate to poor men when they want a little kick on the side.

  And one of those was Rhona. I’d met plenty of Rhonas before, or thought I had, rich girls with too much money and too little to do. When they’ve tried dope and skiing and race cars, then they dabble a little in politics, a little in Communism because it’s daring and exciting. In the powder room at the Drake the next day, “Oh, darling, I went to this hovel on the West Side, can you believe people live in two rooms, there wasn’t even a closet, I had to hang my Balenciaga on a nail, and a shared bathroom halfway down the hall, and they’re all so earnest, comrade this and that, but Herman fixes me with those black eyes and I feel actually pinned to my chair, a wet puddle, I can’t get up or everyone will know, and it’s all so exciting because the government could raid us at any second. I brought him to Oakdale and Mother never guessed, she would have turned fifteen shades of red herself.” Oakdale. Larchmont Hall, Coverdale Lane. The name seemed deliber ate. I looked at my watch and tried to read faster. Rhona, with her silk teddy and painted nails, became enthusiastic about Communism, but was terrified of being discovered by her family. She would type fliers in Herman’s Kedvale Avenue apartment-wearing nothing but her rose teddy, to Herman’s intense satisfaction, then put on overalls and a blond wig to march on picket lines or to leaflet commuters. She and Herman made love in the afternoons on his unwashed sheets.

  The sheets were gray from too little soap. A girl like Rhona, she might type or run a mimeograph machine, but she stood baffled in front of the washing machine in the basement, teased by thirteen-year-old girls who’d been turning a mangle since they were five. I didn’t get to the laundry more than once a month, so the sheets came to smell like Rhona, and like sex, a little joy by Patou, a little joy by Herman.

  “Cute,” I muttered, showing the paragraph to Amy. “Couldn’t he operate a mangle himself?”

  “Don’t get so exercised. It’s only a novel, and anyway, the guy is dead. And for heaven’s sake, don’t mark on it!”

  Shamefaced, I put my pencil down and turned back to Pelletier’s words. I loved leaving my own scent on her. She was too fastidious to wash in the communal bathroom, rich little Communist girl, and when I’d licked

  her nipples into red cherries against her whipped cream body, I’d ask what Ken would think when she raced home to undress and bathe. “Won’t he lean over you and wonder who or what he’s smelling over the bath salts.” At first she would laugh it away, but one day she explained the sad truth, that Ken was impotent, that he’d long since stopped leaning over her in the bath or bed or any other place.

  It was Dryden who said that pity melts the mind to love, and maybe that’s when I started to love her, when I started to pity her. Maybe if she’d whined about it the first time she unbuttoned her white silk blouse, “I only fuck strange men because my husband’s impotent,” I would have despised her, but it was four months before I learned the truth, and then she never mentioned it again.

  And Gene, who never missed anything, saw the pity and the love, and began coming to the apartment, where he pantomimed dismay at the rat droppings in the hall and uncurtained cracked windows in the front room. But it didn’t stop him hanging about after meetings. “I can run Rhona home and come back to finish discussing business with you, Herman. Do you need a buck for the laundry? Those sheets are going to get up and walk off that bed on their own pretty soon.”

  Disgust didn’t keep him from lying in those sheets. It was the day after I’d found her there with him, the day I beat her (long red fingers on the whipped cream skin, red fingers from her red lover, red fingers turning to blue, blue blood of the master class, it would rule her in the end) the day she left and didn’t come back, the day I started to die.

  The next twenty pages dealt with his dying: “Every man imagines he’s Jesus, or at least Trotsky, important enough for execution. That’s what I thought for the first five years I lay in the ground. Finally, I realized selfpity and booze were what really did me in.” He compared himself to Lulu: “… she was in the same boat as me, unloved, unwanted, but she didn’t turn her face to the wall. Instead she turned her back on all of us, went to Africa, painted her giant canvases whether anyone bought them or not.”

  If Pelletier’s works were all-what had been Amy’s phrase? A something of clay-Lulu definitely stood in for Kylie Ballantine. Kylie continued her

  work, she went to Gabon, she refused to be bowed down by Taverner’s spite in getting her fired.

  And Gene stood for Calvin, the Boy Wonder. And Rhona… and Ken. MacKenzie Graham. He’d been impotent, so Geraldine turned elsewhere for love? Was that what she meant, when she said she and MacKenzie had so little in common?

  I drew circles on my notepaper. Edwards Bayard had overheard talk as an adolescent about someone who looked just like his mother, and so didn’t seem to realize who his father was. Adolescent self-absorption, a fantasy yearning for the perfect father, made Edwards assume the neighbors were gossiping about him. And then his hurt and bitterness with Calvin kept him clinging to this adolescent version of events. Funny to see someone with so much education, and with the power of his personal wealth and his position in the Spadona Foundation, unable to let go of his adolescent view of the world.

  I listed all the Bayards in one of the circles I’d drawn. In another, I put Darraugh’s family, starting with Laura Taverner Drummond, then Geraldine and MacKenzie, whose father connived with Laura to marry the two wild children. Their daughter Laura, named after the formidable grandmother. Darraugh, born in 1943. Darraugh’s son, young MacKenzie.

  I slowly added a line joining the Grahams to the Bayards. Darraugh looked exactly like his mother. Everyone s
aid Geraldine Graham had been a wild young woman. In his current illness, Calvin Bayard wandered to Larchmont in the dark. He had kept a key to the house. He had clutched me, crying, “Deenie.” Geral-deeme. She had spilled coffee all over herself when I reported it. Whatever Pelletier had thought about Calvin, the Boy Wonder, Calvin had loved Geraldine Graham.

  I again imagined Darraugh as a boy-not galloping around the fields on his horse, but kneeling in bed in the middle of the night, head cupped in his hands, watching Calvin Bayard appear through the woods and let himself into Larchmont after the servants had locked the place up. He had stood up fiercely for MacKenzie Graham; he had weathered his grandmother’s fury by naming his son MacKenzie. Whether Calvin Bayard, MacKenzie Graham, or, for that matter, Armand Pelletier had been his birth father, MacKenzie was the man Darraugh loved. No wonder he hated Larchmont Hall.

  CHAPTER 45

  The Ice Cube Man Cometh

  I skimmed the rest of the manuscript. Armand’s sense of personal grievance ran too deep for him to record a little thing like “Rhona’s” pregnancy, so he didn’t leave any hint about whether he or Calvin might have been Darraugh’s father. On the other hand, he heaped a lot of scorn on Toffee Noble-an offensive name for anyone, even someone totally imaginary. If Noble was supposed to be Augustus Llewellyn-and it sounded like him, with his basement printing press-Pelletier must have really hated him.

  Llewellyn was a prominent Republican donor these days, but in the forties he’d hung out with Calvin and Pelletier and Kylie Ballantine at the bar where lodal leftists and labor organizers congregated.

  Marc had read this manuscript. What if he’d gone to see Llewellyn after all: “I’m troubled, sir, by a manuscript Armand Pelletier wrote. It suggests you were some kind of fellow traveler in the forties.” Maybe Llewellyn wouldn’t want his-Republican pals, or his sailing friends, to know this. If he’d asked Marc to meet him after hours-“Come with me to New Solway, I’ll show. you what that setup, what those people were really like”Marc would have gone with him readily. Llewellyn did know all those New Solway people, after all. He was the one black member of the Anodyne Park Golf Course. Julius Arnoff was his registered agent as well as Geraldine Graham’s and Calvin Bayard’s-in his casual gossip with his clients, Arnoff had probably told Llewellyn about the nounous abandoning Larchmont Hall; what a shame it’s standing empty-the ornamental pool is filling up with dead carp…

  “VI.! Wake up-you’ve gone catatonic on me.” Amy was shaking my arm. “Didn’t you say you had an appointment at four? It’s three-forty, and you’ve been blanked out for the last ten minutes.”

  I blinked at her, trying to feel some urgency about my appointment. “Twenty to four? Yes, I guess I need to get going.”

  I started to put the manuscript into my briefcase, but remembered it was the library’s a second before Amy squawked at me. “Sorry. Look, they’ll be closing the reading room in an hour. Do you think you could read this by then? Or get a copy made? If it’s a thingamajig, a clay something-“

  “Roman a clef,” Amy interrupted, spelling it for me. “A novel with a key. I can read it and tell you what I think, and get a copy made, but it’s still a novel, even if it’s a novel with a key, and I don’t think you can rely on it for evidence.”

  The librarian came over to ask if we would carry on our conversation outside; other patrons were complaining about our noise. Amy walked out with me.

  “Not as evidence,” I said. “But come on: the article on ComThought you found said it started at an integrated bar on the West Side called Flora’s, where left-leaning intellectuals and labor organizers met. Pelletier’s manuscript talks about a West Side bar called Goldie’s where artists and labor organizers met. This manuscript casts light on all these people. Even if Armand is distorting what happened for the sake of his story, or because he saw himself as a victim at Calvin’s hands, or even at Augustus Llewellyn’s, the manuscript suggests that Llewellyn and Ballantine and Geraldine all hung out together with Pelletier and Calvin Bayard back before the McCarthy hearings. They all dabbled in Communism. Which might be the secret Taverner sat on for fifty years. Although it doesn’t explain why Taverner kept quiet until the night Marc came to see him.

  I kicked a stone in irritation. “Damn it all! I’d better run. Look, just read the thing, will you-I’ll call you tonight.”

  “Yeah, I’ll read the blessed book, and I’ll make you a copy of it. Now

  go, unless these are clients you want to blow off.” Amy gave me a push between my shoulder blades.

  I sprinted past the dorms stuffed behind the library to Fifty-fifth Street, where I’d left my car. My clients were in the west Loop, on Wacker Drive, which the city had completely dismembered; by the time I found parking and ran back to their building, I was over twenty minutes late. Not good for my professional image. Worse, I had forgotten to put a pen in my bag and had to borrow one from the client. Worse still, I had trouble keeping my mind on their problem, which wasn’t fair, since they pay their bills on time. As I was looking at my notes in the elevator down to the ground floor, I saw to my embarrassment that I’d written “Toffee Noble” on my legal pad three or four times, like a schoolgirl with a crush.

  The reports I’d read on Llewellyn said he still came to work every dayunless he was in Jamaica or Paris. I looked at my watch. It was five-thirty, and the lobby was thick with departing office workers. But I was only a ten minute walk across the river from Llewellyn’s building, and it was possible that he stayed late. I stuffed my notes into my bag and started north.

  When I got to Erie Street, my optimism was rewarded: a navy Bentley with a license reading “T-SQUARE” was parked in front of the building. A uniformed chauffeur sat inside with the Sun-Times propped open on the steering wheel. That meant the great man was still in his office.

  As I’d trotted up Franklin Street, I tried to figure out how to get past the hostile receptionist in the lobby. It was one thing to crawl through a culvert to get into Anodyne Park, but more difficult to get into an office building where they don’t want to see you. I still hadn’t come up with a good idea when I saw Jason Tompkin about half a block away on Erie. I broke into a run again. When I caught up with him at the light on Wells, I tapped him on the arm and called his name.

  He turned, brows raised, then gave his cocky grin. “The lady detective. Well, well. Have you come to arrest me for killing Marc?”

  “Did you kill him? That would be a help. I could stop trying to ask people questions that they don’t want to answer.”

  “I think a gal like you would develop a pretty thick skin by now. No one

  wants to answer a dick’s questions. Not even me.” The grin was still in place, but it pushed me back as effectively as a stiff arm.

  “Yeah, well, even a rhinoceros starts showing wear and tear if it’s hit by enough big sticks. I don’t imagine you killed Marc Whitby, but maybe I’ve been barking up the wrong tree all week; maybe you got tired of his ambition and his standoffishness, got him drunk, and drove him to a pond to drown him.”

  He stopped smiling. “I didn’t kill the brother. I just didn’t join in the choir of the blessed shouting `Hallelujah’ every time someone said his name.”

  “If you do me a favor, I won’t ask you any more questions, or even expect you to shout `Hallelujah’ over Marc’s name. I want to see Mr. Llewellyn. Without having to sweet-talk my way past your receptionistshe’s one of the people who’s whacked at my rhino hide recently.”

  “Ah, yes, the dulcet Shantel. I can’t get you in to Mr. Llewellyn. He knows all his staff, of course, because he owns us, and, anyway, it’s not like we’re Time, Inc. At the Christmas party or in the elevator, when our paths cross, he greets me by name: he says, `How are you today, Mr. Thompson. That was a nice piece you did for the last issue, a very fine piece of writing indeed.’ One year he called me Mr. Pumpkin.”

  I laughed. “I’ll take my chances once I’m in the building. If he hasn’t left for the day.”


  “And in return?”

  “If you lose your dog, I’ll find it for you, no charge.”

  “Dang. You must’ve known I have a cat.” He turned around and led me back to the Llewellyn building.

  The chauffeur was still reading the Sun-Times, a good sign since it meant he didn’t expect to see the boss for a bit. Inside the lobby, the hostile receptionist was gone, replaced by a uniformed guard, who asked for my ID but didn’t make any objection to J.T taking me up in the elevator. After all, the place published magazines. Writers are always bringing in people to interview.

  On the sixth floor, I got J.T. to let me use his computer to type up a note for Llewellyn. “Do you know that Marcus Whitby tried to see you before he died? He had read Armand Pelletier’s unpublished memoirs about the group that used to get together at Flora’s on the West Side. He went to see Olin Taverner after he read the memoir. The forties must have been heady days for you. Can we discuss them?”

  J.T. kept shifting from foot to foot as we waited for my note to come out of the community printer. He quickly deleted my file from his machine, told me Llewellyn’s office was on the eighth floor and fled down the hall while I was stapling a business card to my note. By the time I reached the elevator bank, J.T. had disappeared.

  When the elevator opened on the eighth floor, a woman about my own age was standing on the other side. Age was all that we had in common: the makeup on her cinammon skin was fresh but subtle, her hair was perfectly combed, her nails recently manicured. The wool in her rust-colored suit was that smooth soft weave that doesn’t make it into the stores where people like me shop. She looked me up and down as if she could see the tear in the lining of my own jacket before asking if I needed help.