“We’d all like to know that, Ms.-uh. I don’t believe it was connected to his work. You spoke to Whitby’s sister, Delaney? You’re convinced it really was the sister?”

Delaney murmured a respectful assent.

Hendricks picked up a sheaf of papers: the busy man interrupted middecision. “Mr. Whitby was working on a story on the writers in the Federal Negro Theater Project. You know what that is?”

When I repeated the little knowledge I’d picked up from Whitby’s articles, Hendricks curled his lip. “I see. I would have thought the family-but I suppose they know their own business best. Very well, Ms.-uh … You’re welcome to look at the proposal he gave me, but he hadn’t turned in the completed story. Nothing in the proposal would have taken him to the western suburbs. And I don’t know of anything else he was working on that would have done so. He did freelance work, but he always cleared such projects with me, to make sure they didn’t conflict with anything we were doing here. Delaney, take her out to talk to Aretha. And give her a copy of the proposal.”

He returned to the printout in front of him before we’d left the room. When I asked Delaney who Aretha was, she said tersely, “Research assistant and fact checker who worked with Mr. Whitby”

The coldness I was meeting was riling me, and I braced myself for a confrontation with the fact checker. To my relief, Aretha Cummings turned out to be the opposite of Delaney in everything, from her height-about five feet tall in her pumps-through her plump, curvy body, and her warm energy.

“We’re all devastated here,” she said when Delaney had minced off in her three-inch heels. “Even Delaney, although she won’t admit it. She has such a crush on Mr. Hendricks, so she thinks she has to act like him to get him to like her. I could give her a few tips, but she isn’t the kind to invite them, and anyway she intimidates me. But I’m glad Marc’s sister had the sense to bring someone in to investigate his death. He was a wonderful, wonderful man, a really inspired reporter. He’d had offers from Esquire and Vanity Fair, but he wanted to stay here. I think sometimes Mr. Hendricks sat on him because he was frightened that Marc would show him up. Not that Marc wanted an administrative job, he loved writing and tracking down sources.”

All the time she was talking, she’d been motoring down the hall on her worn pumps, moving as fast as me, even though she took two steps for each one of mine. We passed cubicles and offices, all of them filled with paper.

I spied production schedules pinned to different doors, shelves stacked with old issues of Llewellyn publications, reference books, a supply room where a woman and a man were arguing in fierce undertones.

We finally landed in a conference room, barren of everything but a scarred deal table and a couple of folding chairs. “This is where the writers get to meet,” Aretha explained. “Nothing fancy for them or for us RAs. The editors have mahogany and a refrigerator and everything, but I can get you a soft drink or coffee from the vending machine.”