The Spadona Foundation has a direct pipeline to the current administration. As I’d hoped, taking for granted that Edwards had spoken to the attorney general got him to answer without realizing he was being pumped. The fact that anger with his mother had knocked him off balance helped.
“An X-ray machine hardly sounds very dangerous, Eds,” Renee remarked. “You’re surely not imagining it can be used to make nuclear weapons.”
He shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Mother, don’t let your hostility to the attorney general and his methods blind you to the reality of how dangerous our enemies are.”
“You’re right,” she said. “His methods make it hard to remember who is more dangerous: the people who are attacking our liberties overseas, or those who are suppressing them at home.”
“The most dangerous people at home are the ones refusing to cooperate with the government’s efforts to root out terror, either out of real loyalty to AlQaeda, or ignorance, or through misguided ideas about the legal rights of America’s sworn enemies.” Edwards set his coffee cup down so hard that the delicate handle snapped off.
“Just because you express your anger more violently than I do doesn’t mean you’re right-it doesn’t even mean you’re angrier than I am,” his mother said. “Don’t you see that Catherine was shot because people like Rick Salvi believe they’ve been given a green light to use any means at their disposal if they think they have a terrorist in view? It was your daughter they had in view. And they acted literally on the old saw, `Shoot first, ask questions later.”’
Edwards’s eyes were angry slits in his face. “They knew they had a terrorist who’d fled the house; they didn’t know my daughter was there. It was a shocking mistake, but if you’d been looking after her properly, it wouldn’t have happened.”
He turned to me. “As for you, if you were in Larchmont Hall Friday night, you fled the scene. You could have had Sadawi with you.” “Tucked under my arm like Anne Boleyn’s head,” I agreed.
When he exclaimed “What the-” I said, “You know, that old Bert Lee song–’The sentries shout is Army going to win/They think that it’s Red Grange instead of poor old Anne Boleyn! What did you tell the police when they asked about Mr. Bayard’s books?”
“Mr. Bayard’s books?” Edwards repeated uncertainly, looking from me to his mother.
“Your father’s childhood books. Maybe the police don’t ask people like you the same questions they ask people like me. They wanted to know why his book about the boy attacked by the giant clam was in the attic next to an Arab-English dictionary. I told them I thought Mr. Calvin Bayard was coming over in the middle of the night to translate the story into Arabic. At the time, I didn’t know there was an Arab-speaking kid in the house.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth I regretted them: it was a ghastly mockery of a man with Alzheimer’s, to joke that he was studying a foreign language.
Renee frowned at me, her heavy brows almost meeting across her nose. “I think we all know why the books were there. And I can see that you are agile at dancing away from questions you don’t want to answer. Did you see Benjamin Sadawi? Or talk to him? Or help him escape?”
“No, ma’am.” The lie got easier every time I told it. “And I am most eager to talk to him.”
“Why is that?” she asked.
“Because he had a chair set up in the attic where he stood looking out into the back garden. He was lonely; he probably stood up there watching, hoping Catherine would appear. So I think he saw what happened the night that Marcus Whitby died in that pond.”
Edwards smacked his chair arm impatiently. “The FBI are confident that Sadawi killed Whitby.”
“I told you in the hospital that their theory overlooks a number of important facts. Some of which you know better than L”
Edwards fell silent at that nasty reminder of his housebreaking.
“If you don’t believe in the police version of this journalist’s death, do you have any information yourself about why he went to Larchmont Hall?” Renee asked me.
“I know he visited Olin Taverner, I guess ten days ago. I know Taverner showed him some secret papers which he claimed would make the Hollywood Ten look like Goldilocks and the Three Bears. But I don’t know what was in the papers, and, now that Mr. Taverner is dead, we may never know-since someone broke in and stole them.”
“And neither the magazine nor his family had any inkling of what took Whitney to New Solway?” Renee persisted.
“Whitby,” I corrected her. “I’m assuming it had to do with the dancer Kylie Ballantine-Whitby was interested in her.”
“Oh, yes, the dancer,” Edwards said, a spiteful undertone to his voice. “One of Father’s special projects, wasn’t she, Mother?”
“As you say, Eds,” Renee spoke quietly, but her brows contracted again. “It was good that he was in a financial position to help her out.”