Lisa took the picture over to the window and looked at it closely. “Not on Sunday, madam. But I believe he was here, perhaps a week ago. I can’t be sure, I see so few black men, but it looks like a man I noticed when I left you after lunch.”

“When was that?” I asked.

She pursed up her lips, trying to remember. “It would have been the day I washed Madam’s hair, because I realized I had brought the shampoo bottle with me. I was standing there by my car, wondering should I go back up, or could it wait until the morning, when he pulled in across the way from me. I felt foolish standing there looking at the shampoo, so I got into my car.”

“So when was it?”

“I always wash Madam’s hair on Monday, Thursday and Saturday.” She seemed surprised that I wouldn’t know that.

“So which was it?” I asked.

She paused again to think. “The Thursday, it would have been.”

“A week ago! But why would he have come here, if it wasn’t to see you, Ms. Graham?”

Geraldine Graham surprised me again. “If he was that interested in this dancer, and if she had been blacklisted, perhaps he went to see Olin. Olin Taverner, I mean. He lived here, after all.”

Taverner, of course. He’d been one of HUAC’s hatchet men, after all. And now he, too, was dead, so I couldn’t ask him about Marcus Whitby. Or Kylie Ballantine.

“How well did you know Mr. Taverner?” I asked.

“Well enough. We grew up together. He was my cousin.”

I vaguely remembered now, from that 1903 newspaper I’d read: Geraldine’s mother had been somebody Taverner before she married whoever Drummond. “Mr. Taverner’s death must be quite a loss, then. Did you see much of him while he lived here?”

“Very little.” Her voice frosted over again. “Consanguinity does not necessarily breed intimacy. I was sad to know he died only because it ended a chapter in my own life.”

I tried to rearrange my ideas. If Whitby had come out here to see Taverner, instead of Calvin Bayard, it put him closer to Larchmont Hall. But I couldn’t see why Taverner would have met him there, or sent him there. I asked Ms. Graham if Taverner had lived alone.

“I wasn’t in close touch with him, but I assume he had someone to look after him. Lisa will know.”

Lisa, when summoned again, knew the name of Taverner’s attendant, how many hours a day the man had worked, and even what he’d said and done on finding the old lawyer’s dead body.

“Did Mr. Taverner have a family? Children or other relatives?” Geraldine Graham gave another involuntary glance over her shoulder at her mother’s portrait. “He never married. His-tastes-ran in other directions than women. It was one of the things that made Calvin particularly angry during the fifties, Olin’s hypocrisy”

I tried to add this to the bewildering array of information I was getting. Taverner had been gay, but in the closet. Maybe Whitby had uncovered Taverner’s secret and-what? Taverner, afraid of disclosure, had murdered Whitby, rolled him over to the Larchmont pond, then come back here and died of a heart attack brought on by his exertions? The notion made me smile, which drew Geraldine’s sharp attention and a demand for the “source of my amusement.”