Before I could get out the door, Murray Ryerson phoned, hoping I knew something about Whitby that hadn’t been in any of the official material.

“He had on an Oxxford suit,” I said helpfully. “I think the shoes were Johnston & Murphy, but I’m not a hundred percent sure.”

“So he was a conservative dresser. He wrote hip and dressed square. Anything else?”

I thought a long minute. Pros, cons. “The DuPage medical examiner seems to have given the body a lick and a promise. Some people are wondering if they would have been as cursory if Whitby had been white.” “What people?” Murray was on it like a flea on a dog.

“Unnamed sources,” I said primly. “A client I won’t reveal. Anyone been able to find out what he was working on at T-Square?”

“They’ve got a lockdown at Llewellyn. The editor, Simon Hendricks, he’s the guy with a face like a tomahawk if you were watching last night’s news, if you try to ask him anything he chops you off at the knees for violating editorial integrity.”

I hoped that didn’t apply to an ambassador from the dead man’s family, but it definitely meant going in person with a note instead of facing the runaround of voice mail. I checked my e-mail one last time, even though I knew Morrell had said he’d be out of touch for a week. And of course the new messages in my in box were either spam or business related.

An old lover of Morrell’s, an English journalist, was also in Afghanistan. Morrell traveling with Susan Horseley-I tried to put that thought out of my mind. What did Penelope really do those twenty years that Ulysses was sleeping with Calypso and fighting the Cyclops? Only a man would imagine she spent it all weaving and unweaving. She probably took lovers, went on long trips herself, was sorry when the hero came home.

I locked up and headed south to the trendy stretch of land developers like to call River North. Llewellyn’s building was an eight-story cube, built when the streets west of the Magnificent Mile were a no-man’s-land between the Cabrini Green housing project and the Gold Coast. Land was cheap then, and it was also spitting distance from both the river and the expressways-valuable for a publisher needing to bring in tons of paper every week.

Nowadays, the old warehouses hold chichi art galleries, while high-rise condos filling the vacant lots dwarf Llewellyn’s cube. The boom has also made parking a supreme hassle. I finally found a meter several blocks west of the building.

Llewellyn’s lobby was as spare as the exterior. All it held was a waiting area with beige-upholstered chairs, and a high horseshoe counter where a receptionist sat. No art, no glitz, only a photograph of Llewellyn himself hanging in the waiting area relieved the monotony. A uniformed guard lounged between the receptionist and modest elevator bank, although the receptionist was built on a massive enough scale to stop an intruder without help from the guard. She frowned majestically when I identified myself and said I was hoping to see Mr. Simon Hendricks.