“You’ve said about twenty actionable things in the last five minutes,

Bayard.” My own temper was rising. “But let’s keep to the real questions here. Isn’t it more likely Taverner kept his secrets to himself because he didn’t want his own secrets coming out?”

“If you mean his homosexuality, he didn’t hide that from me. It didn’t affect my respect for him,” he said stiffly.

“It doesn’t matter now the way it did in the fifties,” I agreed. “So what secret of his own did Taverner care so much about that he kept one of your father’s for four decades?”

“You are completely wrong about Olin’s character because you only believe what you read in the liberal media.”

“This line about the liberal media is the same kind of garbage as `lies of the capitalist press’ that the old fellow travelers reiterated,” I snapped, exasperated. “Both of them are slogans to keep you from thinking about what you don’t want to know. But have it your way: Taverner pledged his life, his fortune and his sacred honor not to tell people your father had been stealing from Augustus Llewellyn. Now, tell me: How did you know Taverner had this secret file in his desk, the one you broke into his place to find?”

He scowled. “It was a desk that had belonged to one of the early Supreme Court justices, William Johnson, and it was Olin’s most prized possession. He had it in his Washington home, not his office, and he moved it back to Chicago with him. A couple of times when I was visiting him and we were talking about-about Calvin and Renee, he tapped the desktop and said, `It’s all in there, my boy, and when I’m gone you can learn the whole sorry story.”’

“So when you learned he was dead, you wanted to get to the whole sorry story before the lawyers did,” I suggested, “just in case Julius Arnoff thought the papers ought to go to your mother or even be suppressed, instead of including them with what he turned over to the heirs.”

“It would be like Julius,” he said bitterly. “Damned little busybody, trotting around like Calvin’s lapdog, wagging his tail anytime the big man threw him a biscuit.”

“And when you got there, and went to all that trouble busting open the patio door, what did you think when you saw the papers were already gone?” “I figured the Mexican who looked after him stole them to see what he could get for them.”

I thought of Domingo Rivas, with his quiet dignity in looking after his “gentlemen,” and felt another spurt of anger. “So did you talk to Mr. Rivas?” “I told him I’d pay him a thousand dollars for anything he removed from Olin’s desk, but he claimed he knew nothing about those papers.”

“He has his own code of honor, and I doubt it includes stealing from his patients. You know, of course, that if he’d wanted to take something of Taverner’s, he would have known where the keys were-he wouldn’t have had to follow your sterling example and break any locks.”