I wished Whitby’s notepad had survived the immersion, or that I’d known enough to keep it wet until I got it to Cheviot Labs. Marc had taken notes during his meeting with Taverner, that’s what Taverner’s attendant had said; the mess of gray pilling which Kathryn Chang had sealed into a protective wrapper was all that remained of those notes. Kathryn been able to pull some of it apart into fragments of pages, but only a few individual words survived: inform, disgrace, and, tired, now, the, dead, sixty. I doubt if even the Enigma machine could have put those into a meaningful sentence.
I glanced back at Kathryn Chang’s letter to me. I hadn’t read the last paragraph, in which she explained that Whitby’s PalmPilot had also been in his pocket organizer. She could send it to the electronics division to see if they could recover the data, “but this is likely to be quite expensive, so I don’t want to proceed unless you authorize the work.”
Since her bill for doing the paper restoration was eighteen hundred dollars, I was afraid to find out what her idea of “quite expensive” might be. 1 entered the eighteen hundred into the expense sheet for the Whitby inquiry. The debit side was building nicely and I wasn’t sure how much of it I could expect Harriet to pay-she hadn’t authorized overtime costs at Cheviot Labs, for instance. I looked wistfully at my open file for Darraugh, but I couldn’t push that expense over to him. I called Kathryn Chang and told her to wait on the Palm Pilot.
The material she’d salvaged contained a lot of information, but I felt I needed some kind of key or clue to make sense of it. I hadn’t learned enough from Ballantine’s papers in the Harsh Collection, but maybe Pelletier’s would be more revealing-if they were available.
I phoned Amy Blount and described the documents that Kathryn Chang had rescued. “Pelletier was more closely involved with Ballantine
than I realized; maybe there’s more information in his own papers. Do you know whether they’re available to the public some place?”
The idea that Marc had found hidden documents brought real excitement to Amy’s voice. She couldn’t wait to see these letters; she’d locate Pelletier’s papers at once.
While I waited for her to call back, I kept rereading the letters. Taverner had told Ballantine to talk to those of “her own blood.” I winced at the phrase, with all its implications about race and heredity, but I also wondered who he had meant. It could have been Augustus Llewellyn, who certainly was involved in this drama. On the other hand, someone I didn’t know about might have ratted out Ballantine. She’d been involved in the Federal Negro Theater Project, she’d known every important black writer and artist of the mid-twentieth century-Taverner could have been referring to Shirley Graham or Richard Wright or a host of other people. It seemed ludicrous to imagine one of them denouncing her to HUAC, but I couldn’t imagine Augustus Llewellyn doing so either.
I stared at the photographed sheets until the words danced red in front of my eyes. I finally put them down to do work for a paying client, a tedious bit of tracking that I’d been putting off for a week. While I was deep in the background of an old insurance transaction, Larry Yosano, the legal dogsbody, called. I’d forgotten phoning him yesterday and had to look at my notes before I could remember why.
“Larry. You’re on sensible hours this week?”
“Yep. That means I turn my phones off at ten P.M., so don’t imagine you can call me if you’re locked in or out of Larchmont Hall. The junior who’s covering this week is an aggressive young woman who is more likely to side with Sheriff Salvi than with you, so watch your step.”
I laughed. “Larry, your firm is the registered agent for Llewellyn Publishing. How did that come about?”
To my relief he didn’t interrogate me on why I wanted to know, just put me on hold while he looked at the back files. “Calvin Bayard secured Llewellyn’s original loans back in the early fifties. He referred Mr. Llewellyn to us and we’ve been working for him ever since.”
“Was there ever a time when Bayard’s own finances were rocky? I met
Edwards Bayard yesterday, and he was hinting that Bayard Publishing was on shaky ground during that same time.”
“Mr. Edwards is bitter because of what Mr. Arnoff told you on Friday, that Mrs. Renee passed over him in distributing her shares.”
“Who inherits them, then?”
He thought a minute. “I guess there’s no real harm in your knowing. They go to Catherine Bayard, in trust until she’s twentyfive.”
Prodded further, he told me Darraugh was the trustee, jointly with the Lebold, Arnoff firm. And that the Drummonds, the Taverners and MacKenzie Graham’s father, Blair, had all been among the original shareholders of Bayard. The Bayard family held a thirty-one percent stake, the Drummonds, Taverners and Grahams a thirty-five percent total, with the remainder divided among twenty-some smaller shareholders.
“So Geraldine Graham has a controlling interest in the firm now? She inherited from her mother, her father and her husband, right?”
Yosano hesitated again, but finally said, “Actually, she only holds her husband’s five percent stake. Laura Drummond was angry both with Ms. Geraldine Graham and with Mr. Darraugh Graham when she made her will; she passed her shares on to Ms. Graham’s daugher, Ms. van der Cleef, who lives in New York State.”