“Dang. You must’ve known I have a cat.” He turned around and led me back to the Llewellyn building.
The chauffeur was still reading the Sun-Times, a good sign since it meant he didn’t expect to see the boss for a bit. Inside the lobby, the hostile receptionist was gone, replaced by a uniformed guard, who asked for my ID but didn’t make any objection to J.T taking me up in the elevator. After all, the place published magazines. Writers are always bringing in people to interview.
On the sixth floor, I got J.T. to let me use his computer to type up a note for Llewellyn. “Do you know that Marcus Whitby tried to see you before he died? He had read Armand Pelletier’s unpublished memoirs about the group that used to get together at Flora’s on the West Side. He went to see Olin Taverner after he read the memoir. The forties must have been heady days for you. Can we discuss them?”
J.T. kept shifting from foot to foot as we waited for my note to come out of the community printer. He quickly deleted my file from his machine, told me Llewellyn’s office was on the eighth floor and fled down the hall while I was stapling a business card to my note. By the time I reached the elevator bank, J.T. had disappeared.
When the elevator opened on the eighth floor, a woman about my own age was standing on the other side. Age was all that we had in common: the makeup on her cinammon skin was fresh but subtle, her hair was perfectly combed, her nails recently manicured. The wool in her rust-colored suit was that smooth soft weave that doesn’t make it into the stores where people like me shop. She looked me up and down as if she could see the tear in the lining of my own jacket before asking if I needed help.
“I’m here to see Mr. Augustus Llewellyn.” “And you have an appointment?”
“I know you’re not his secretary, and this is a confidential matter.” The name of the daughter who ran Llewellyn’s two women’s magazines came to me. “I suppose you’re Ms. Janice Llewellyn?”
She didn’t smile back. “Mr. Llewellyn is leaving for the day. If you don’t have an appointment and you want to-talk to him, you can call his secretary in the morning.”
Just at that minute, a door at the end of the hall opened, and Llewellyn came out in person, accompanied by a couple of young men and an older woman.
Janice called out, “Daddy, go back into your office for a minute, why don’t you. I’m going to get this person out of the building.”
In the second that everyone stood frozen, trying to absorb the situation at the elevator, I walked up the hall and handed Llewellyn my note. He took it reflexively, but the two young men formed a barrier between him and me and ushered him back into his executive offices, along with the older woman. As soon as they had the old man safely inside, one of the young men reappeared and joined Janice and me by the elevators.
He seized my arm and said to Janice, “You go in with Daddy and call down to Ricky in the lobby; I’ll get her out of the building.”
He had the stocky build of a middle linebacker. I knew I couldn’t really fight him, but I never like being grabbed. And I was tired of being stiffed and pushed around by everyone I wanted to talk to. I moved into the circle of his arm and elbowed him sharply in the ribs. He cried out and dropped my arm.
“I’ll leave if your daddy doesn’t want to see me,” I said, moving away from him. “But you don’t need to help me.”
Janice had her cell phone out. She was starting a firm conversation with the lobby guard, demanding to know how I had come to be in the building without permission, when the door to the executive offices opened again. The other brother appeared. In a voice overflowing with astonishment and indignation, he announced that “Daddy” wanted to talk to me.
Janice and her brother glared at me, but Daddy’s wishes took precedence over their bruised egos, or rib cages, as the case might be. Janice’s plucked brows met briefly over her nose, but she kept from wrinkling her forehead. It pays to work for a woman’s magazine-you learn good tips on how to preserve your face. She put her cell phone into the side compartment of her briefcase and told me to follow her. Her brother stayed in step next to me.
When we got to the executive suite, the other brother took me into his father’s office. Augustus Llewellyn was sitting behind his desk, a leatherinlaid partners’ specimen that might have been a couple of hundred years old. There were a number of interesting antiques in the room besides the desk, but the one that caught my eye was an old hand press standing on an octagonal table.
I walked over to look at it. “Good evening, sir. Is that what you used to print T-Square on?”