“Laura Drummond really was a nasty woman, wasn’t she! So was it financial need that made Ms. Graham sell Larchmont?”
“No, oh no, she had a large fortune, partly from her husband’s estate, but her father also settled substantial monies on her when she married. No, I think-Mrs. Drummond could be very spiteful, especially where her daughter was concerned … Ms. Warshawski, I’d be grateful if you kept this information to yourself.”
“Of course,” I promised readily. I’d keep it to myself unless it had something to do with Marcus Whitby’s death, that is.
Amy’s return call came soon after I’d hung up. “Pelletier’s papers are right here beside me in the University of Chicago library. Want me to go look at them?”
“I think I’ll come down myself,” I said. “It’s a fishing trip and I don’t know what I’m fishing for.”
“From what I can tell on-line, it’s a huge archive,” she said. “Forty
Hollinger boxes-what they call the special cartons made for documents, you know. I could help you sort through it if you’re coming down now.”
I looked at my calendar: nothing on it until four, when I had a meeting with a small corporation for which I ran background checks. I told Amy I’d be with her in twenty minutes.
CHAPTER 44
Boy Wonder
Hey, Boy Wonder —
What meat cloth Caesar feed on? Your child bride is an attractive little colt and your infatuation is understandable, but until she grows up and learns how to read don’t fob my work off on her. If you don’t like Bleak Land, say so yourself-. getting a letter from the baby saying “it’s not right for our list at this time” is such an outsized insult I’m even willing to believe just barely, mind you, and only out of self-delusion-that you didn’t know your infant had written to me. What I also will delude myself into believing is that you can’t be as chickenshit as the rest of the industry, afraid to touch me because the lesser apes in Washington put me in the can for six months and had my books yanked from every embassy around the world. Me and Dash. No undersecretary of protocol in Canberra is going to have his morals corrupted by the Maltese Falcon, or A Tale of Two Countries. Dash, poor bastard, is drinking himself into an early grave, but I refuse to break so easily.
This was a carbon copy, and therefore unsigned, but the smudgy type sizzled.
As Amy had said, the Pelletier archive was enormous. She and I were
facing each other across a table in the University of Chicago’s rare books room, with boxes of papers and books between us. When we’d signed in, the librarian said Pelletier must suddenly be a hot item-we were the second people asking to see the papers in the last month.
With the instincts of the born detective, Amy said, yeah, her cousin Marcus always had been a jump ahead of her, and the archivist agreed that Marcus Whitby had been looking at the boxes three weeks ago. He’d only come once, the archivist said, so whatever he wanted, he found on his first trip. We were lucky, she added, that Mike Goode, their premier processing archivist, had sorted and labeled the boxes.
Even so, we had a formidable hoard to inspect. The collection was probably a lit crit’s dream come true, but made for a detective’s nightmare. Pelletier had kept everything-bills, eviction notices, menus from memorable dinners. He thought highly enough of his historical importance that he’d made carbons of most of his own letters. Most were like this one to Calvin, long fulminations against someone or something. In the thirties and forties, the correspondence was energetic if caustic-astute observations on personalities or public events.
As time passed, though, Pelletier became more embittered and more embattled. He wrote angrily to the New York Times over the review they gave Bleak Land, to the University of Chicago for not keeping him on as a lecturer in the sixties, to his landlord for raising his rent, to the laundry for losing a shirt. Amy and I looked at each other in dismay: What had Marc found in this mass on his first pass through it?
The Herald-Star had given Pelletier a two-column obituary. I read it for biographical information. He’d been born in Lawndale on Chicago’s West Side in 1899, gone to the University of Chicago for a year, volunteered to fight in France in 1917 and had come back to join the radical labor movements sweeping Chicago and the country.