Since her bill for doing the paper restoration was eighteen hundred dollars, I was afraid to find out what her idea of “quite expensive” might be. 1 entered the eighteen hundred into the expense sheet for the Whitby inquiry. The debit side was building nicely and I wasn’t sure how much of it I could expect Harriet to pay-she hadn’t authorized overtime costs at Cheviot Labs, for instance. I looked wistfully at my open file for Darraugh, but I couldn’t push that expense over to him. I called Kathryn Chang and told her to wait on the Palm Pilot.

The material she’d salvaged contained a lot of information, but I felt I needed some kind of key or clue to make sense of it. I hadn’t learned enough from Ballantine’s papers in the Harsh Collection, but maybe Pelletier’s would be more revealing-if they were available.

I phoned Amy Blount and described the documents that Kathryn Chang had rescued. “Pelletier was more closely involved with Ballantine

than I realized; maybe there’s more information in his own papers. Do you know whether they’re available to the public some place?”

The idea that Marc had found hidden documents brought real excitement to Amy’s voice. She couldn’t wait to see these letters; she’d locate Pelletier’s papers at once.

While I waited for her to call back, I kept rereading the letters. Taverner had told Ballantine to talk to those of “her own blood.” I winced at the phrase, with all its implications about race and heredity, but I also wondered who he had meant. It could have been Augustus Llewellyn, who certainly was involved in this drama. On the other hand, someone I didn’t know about might have ratted out Ballantine. She’d been involved in the Federal Negro Theater Project, she’d known every important black writer and artist of the mid-twentieth century-Taverner could have been referring to Shirley Graham or Richard Wright or a host of other people. It seemed ludicrous to imagine one of them denouncing her to HUAC, but I couldn’t imagine Augustus Llewellyn doing so either.

I stared at the photographed sheets until the words danced red in front of my eyes. I finally put them down to do work for a paying client, a tedious bit of tracking that I’d been putting off for a week. While I was deep in the background of an old insurance transaction, Larry Yosano, the legal dogsbody, called. I’d forgotten phoning him yesterday and had to look at my notes before I could remember why.

“Larry. You’re on sensible hours this week?”

“Yep. That means I turn my phones off at ten P.M., so don’t imagine you can call me if you’re locked in or out of Larchmont Hall. The junior who’s covering this week is an aggressive young woman who is more likely to side with Sheriff Salvi than with you, so watch your step.”

I laughed. “Larry, your firm is the registered agent for Llewellyn Publishing. How did that come about?”

To my relief he didn’t interrogate me on why I wanted to know, just put me on hold while he looked at the back files. “Calvin Bayard secured Llewellyn’s original loans back in the early fifties. He referred Mr. Llewellyn to us and we’ve been working for him ever since.”