but most were leaning over the edges of the carrels talking to each other. They stared frankly at me, but didn’t interrupt their conversations.

Marcus Whitby’s name was on a black plaque two from the end. Unlike most of the other desks I’d seen, his was extraordinarily tidy-no stacks of paper on the floor, no leaning towers of files. I asked Aretha if she’d cleaned up after his death.

“No. Marc was just a neatness freak. Everybody teased him about it.” Her voice wobbled but didn’t break.

“That’s right.” A man in the adjacent carrel who’d been talking to his far neighbor leaned in our direction. “Whitby was Mr. Anal Compulsive. You couldn’t borrow anything from him if you hadn’t returned what you took last week. You his lawyer?”

“No-why? Did he need one?”

The man grinned. “Just a guess. Know you’re not with the magazine. Jason Tompkin.”

“V I. Warshawski. I’m an investigator, hired by the family to see how he died. Did he ever mention going out to New Solway to you?”

Tompkin shook his head. “But Marc was a solo operator. Most people here share and share alike-you know, you’re stuck, you want an opening, you bring your buddies up to speed on what you’re doing. Not Marc. He owned his material.”

“He was happy to help people,” Aretha snapped. “You’re just lazy, J.T, and you know it.”

Tompkin grinned. “You ought to be a perch, Aretha, you rise faster to the bait than anyone I ever met. But you can’t deny Whitby didn’t let people in on what he was doing. Simon and he had a few words about it now and then.”

“Is that why Mr. Hendricks was reluctant to let me know what Mr. Whitby was working on?” I asked.

Tompkin thought that was funny enough to laugh about, but, when Aretha glared at him, he subsided and returned to his other neighbor. Aretha rifled quickly through a plastic disk holder. “Here’s Bronzeville, but I know Marc kept most of his Kyle Ballantine stuff at home. His notes, his notebook-he did stuff by hand-I don’t see that. But he probably had that

at home, too. A lot of the writers do most of their work at home. Can you imagine trying to work with Jason Tompkin blaring away all day?”

This last was said loud enough for Tompkin to hear, but all he did was laugh again and say, “Stimulation, darling. I was stimulating him, but Marc was too uptight to enjoy it.”

I followed Aretha to her own desk. The research assistants and fact checkers were another peg down from the writers: her desk wasn’t in a cubicle but one of four put together to make a square. She slipped the disk into her own computer, skimmed through the contents, but said there wasn’t anything current on it.

I leaned over her shoulder to study what was on the screen. She brought up the file that showed Kylie Ballantine’s history. It was annotated with his sources, mostly private papers labeled “VH”-“The Vivian Harsh Collection at the Chicago Library,” Aretha explained. When she realized I was trying to scribble notes off the screen onto my own notepad, she printed out a copy.