“I can also give you the back issues of T-Square where he wrote about Bronzeville already. They’ll tell you some of the history. There’s nothing here about his new story. If his sister has his things, she’ll have his notebooks and stuff. Do you think-could you ask his sister-I’d love to have one of his notebooks …”

I promised her that as soon as I’d sorted through what he’d left in his house I’d see she got some of his personal papers. I was disappointed, though: I’d hoped for some kind of breakthrough here, or insight. But maybe there wasn’t anything to find. Maybe Marcus Whitby had gone to talk to Calvin Bayard-but about what? Blacklisted writers whom Bayard might have known? He hadn’t mentioned it because you weren’t supposed to go to Bayard about anything. And then he’d gotten lost on his way back to his car. He’d tripped on the loose bricks and fallen to his death. It could have happened.

“Why didn’t Simon Hendricks want to let me know what Marc was working on if there isn’t anything very secret about it?” I asked Aretha as she waited with me for the elevator.

She shifted uncomfortably. “Oh, corporate stuff, you know…”

“Oh.” I grinned, suddenly making sense of Jason Tompkin’s laughter. “He didn’t want a white woman poking around?”

She blushed. “It’s not personal. But Mr. Hendricks, well, he came up in the organization when Mr. Llewellyn was still fighting every inch o? the way, to get funding, to get distributors, everything. I think he would have expected the Whitby family to hire a different investigator.”

As I rode the elevator back down to the lobby, I hoped Hendricks was wrong.

CHAPTER 11

A Child’s Garden of Verses

BMWs and Mercedeses stood three abreast on Astor Street as parents and nannies waited to fetch their children from the Vina Fields Academy. Chicago taxpayers were helping out: city cops had blocked off the street and were directing outsiders like me away from the area. I found a sort of legal space on Burton Place and sprinted back, but the students hadn’t yet started to emerge.

I was cutting it close because I’d hung around the entrance to Llewellyn Publishing hoping Jason Tompkin would come out for lunch-he hadn’t seemed like the type to eat at his desk. After fortyfive minutes, when I was about to give it up, he’d emerged with a couple of coworkers. One of them was Delaney, Simon Hendricks’s assistant, who frowned when she saw me. The third was the woman Jason had been talking to when I was in Marc Whitby’s cubicle.

Jason Tompkin came over to me, tipping the beret he was wearing. “Ah, the special investigator, looking for the X-Files. What can I do for you?” His voice and smile were without malice; I had to smile in turn. “X-Files is right. I was hoping, since you worked right next to Marc Whitby, you might have heard something-anything-that would explain why he’d gone out to New Solway. Aretha said you all weren’t supposed to talk to anyone at Bayard about work in progress, so I did wonder if he’d had a surreptitious appointment with Calvin Bayard.”