Arnoff slowly shook his head. “Our clients don’t always confide in us. We are the executors, of course, of the Taverner estate.”

“Who are the heirs, since he didn’t leave a family?” I asked. “Several foundations whose work he valued.”

“Including the Spadona Foundation? I wonder how Renee Bayard will feel, seeing her son use money from his father’s old enemy to set a policy agenda she and Calvin oppose.”

Arnoff smiled primly. “If Calvin Bayard had kept better track of his own documents, Edwards Bayard might not be in such opposition to him today.” “Meaning?”

“Meaning all these great families have something they don’t want anyone else to know. I’m sorry I can’t help you with Olin’s papers. I doubt I ever saw those.”

I asked what Arnoff knew about Kylie Ballantine’s connection to Taverner.

He gave his thin, supercilious smile again. “The African dancer? I don’t think it was Olin who had a connection to her.”

“Calvin Bayard, then?” I asked.

“Calvin supported a number of artists. I believe Ballantine was his protegee for a time. Before he married Renee, of course.”

The brief pause he gave before the word “protegee” was supposed to let me know they had been lovers. Everything in this office-in New Solway-was done by innuendo. I wondered how long it would be before young Yosano picked up the same skin-crawling habit.

“Renee Bayard was telling me this morning that Taverner had a bee in his bonnet about the Committee for Social Thought and Justice. There’s a rumor that Calvin Bayard gave them money.” A rumor I myself was just

starting, but he might have been the patron mentioned in the Ballantine archive.

“Oh, Calvin was generous with many left-wing groups in the thirties and forties. There’s never been any doubt where his politics lay. But just because he published known Communists like Armand Pelletier, I don’t think anyone ever seriously believed Calvin was a Communist himself Not even Olin, when he was hounding him back in the fifties. I think they were simply two men who didn’t like each other. Calvin was the flamboyant young success, Olin had to climb his way slowly. And Olin was hampered by the homosexuality you alluded to. By the way, I understand Darraugh Graham hired you to find who his mother was seeing in the Larchmont attic. Did you ever discover who was there?”

I shook my head slowly. Somehow I’d forgotten the original inquiry that had taken me out to New Solway. “Catherine Bayard told me it was her grandfather, that he had a key to the old Graham house.”

Arnoff made a sound like an engine starting in cold weather; I realized after a startled moment he was laughing. “So young Catherine has all the Bayard spirit. One never knows how the next generation will behave with so much wealth available to it.”

“But when I asked Darraugh about it, he became furious.”

“I’m afraid I’m not in Graham’s confidence, young woman; he took his legal affairs elsewhere,” Arnoff said. “He was much attached to his father, however, and Mrs. Drummond’s attitude when MacKenzie Graham died did cause Darraugh to run away that summer. He was something like fourteen or fifteen. Eventually he returned to Exeter to finish his education but I don’t believe he ever returned to Larchmont.”