When I returned to her room, Renee had moved to the deep leather armchair behind her desk. I helped myself to water from a pitcher on the trolley and looked at the prints on the wall. Most were cover art from notable books published by Bayard Publishing. A Tale of Two Countries held pride of place above Renee’s desk, with an inscription “To the Boy Genius” from “the weary old man, Armand Pelletier” I guess it was supposed to be a joke-Pelletier was only a dozen years older than Calvin Bayard himself when Calvin took on the press’s first nonreligious novel.
“I’d rather speak to your face than your back,” Renee said.
I pulled up a chair to face her. “When we first met last Wednesday, I mentioned to you that I worked for the Bayard Foundation during law school because of my admiration for your husband’s work. When did your son start holding such very different views?”
“It was one of those things,” she said. “It started as an adolescent rebellion that hardened into adult intransigence.”
I made a sour face. “You are at least as agile as I at dancing away from questions you don’t want to answer.”
“I’m not subtle-I’d quell you when you asked intrusive questions, not dance around you, if I didn’t want your cooperation. You wouldn’t have betrayed a confidence with Edwards in the room, since it’s obvious that he supports the attorney general’s efforts to round up every Arab in the country for questioning. But now that we’re alone, you can tell me where this Arab boy is. I feel certain that you know.”
I was startled. “You’re wrong, Ms. Bayard: I don’t know where Benjamin Sadawi is. If he is in league with a terrorist group, I hope the law soon catches up with him, but if he’s just a scared runaway kid-I hope he finds another friend as good as your granddaughter.”
She looked at me through narrowed eyes. “I don’t know how to persuade you to tell me. Because I don’t believe you don’t know.”
“Why does it matter so much to you? I should think you’d be glad to have h~m out of Catherine’s life.”
She stopped for a moment to choose her words. “I am. And the surest way for her to continue to be infatuated with him, or the romance of his situation, as you put it, is for her to think of him as being on the run. If she could see him for what he is-an immigrant dishwasher caught up in events out of his control-she’d stop imagining herself as a romantic heroine in his novel.”
“She’s impulsive and passionate,” I said, “but I think she’s fundamentally levelheaded. Still, as I told you, I’m eager to question him myself, so if I find him I will let you know. You should realize, by the way, that my phones may be monitored by various law enforcement agencies.”
She didn’t want to be satisfied with my response, but she couldn’t think of a lever to pry the information out of me. If all this had happened twenty years ago, she’d probably have made Calvin hire me as a personal assistant just to get what she wanted, but she couldn’t come up with any good lever or bribe this afternoon. She was a smart woman-she didn’t keep pushing when she saw she had nothing to push with.
“If Darraugh Graham hadn’t hated Larchmont so much, it wouldn’t be standing empty,” I said idly. “Catherine might have brought young Sadawi to you in that case. I gather that Darraugh hates Larchmont because he was the person who found his father’s dead body. Did you ever know what drove Mr. Graham to take his life?”
Renee looked at me steadily. “It happened around the time that I married Calvin, and I had a great deal else on my mind. I do remember that Mr. Graham’s death was considered a scandal in the community, although old Mrs. Drummond made sure it didn’t get into the papers.
“It was that kind of event that made me determined not to live in New Solway: the women spent their lives in the most backbiting gossip, while the men did deals with each other, and had affairs with their neighbors. The women married their sons to their neighbors’ daughters and so the backbiting continued between mothers-and daughters-in-law. I insisted that we buy this apartment in town. I involved myself in the press. We spent weekends out on Coverdale Lane, riding and doing country things, but I didn’t keep track of our neighbors’ personal lives.”
It was my turn to look at her distrustfully: I was sure she knew more about the Grahams and the other Coverdale Lane residents than she pretended, but, like her, I didn’t have a crowbar for prying out more information. I changed the subject again.