I frowned, thinking it over. “It seems unlikely. You could get a lawyer to subpoena the medical examiner’s report, I suppose. Do you have some reason to think they might make it up?”
“Their general indifference,” Harriet said. “We didn’t meet the sheriff, just some spokesman. He was polite enough to Mother, but not very interested. They don’t seem at all curious about why Marcus was in that place to begin with. They want it to be that he got drunk and-stumbled onto a deserted mansion and drowned himself. Either by accident or on purpose, they don’t care which.”
“That’s what we’d like to know,” Amy said. “Why he was out there. And how he really died.”
I was curious enough myself to want to take the job, but I had to explain that I couldn’t work for free. I hate to talk about money to someone in the shock of bereavement, but I outlined my fee structure: if Harriet Whitby lived on graduate student earnings as Amy Blount did, she might find the bills mounting up faster than she expected.
“That’s all right; I’m not like Amy-I was smart enough to get a real job when we left Spelman.” She gave the glimmer of a smile. “I can tell you’re sick, but if you’re going to do this, I need you to start right now.”
“Tonight, you mean?” I was startled. “There’s very little I can do tonight. Anyone I might have questions for-people who knew him at the magazine, for instance, or his neighbors-wouldn’t be available until morning.”
“You don’t understand,” Amy said. “The Whitbys will be collecting Marc in the morning. They want to take him home to Atlanta for the funeral. So if there are any questions to be asked about-about his body-we thought you would know who to talk to even at this hour. I mean, just the
idea that he was drunk is so odd it makes us wonder if they did an autopsy at all.”
My eyes were swelling and tearing with a weariness that made it hard for me to think. But I suddenly heard the unspoken question in the room: had the DuPage ME given Marcus Whitby’s death a once-over-lightly because he was black, and out of place in wealthy New Solway?
I didn’t know anyone in DuPage County, unless you counted the deputy who’d lent me the pants and sweatshirt, and she wasn’t in a position to put pressure on the medical examiner to reopen the autopsy. If only he’d died in Cook County, where I know …
I got up abruptly and started tossing aside papers on the table I use as a home desk, trying to find my PaImPilot. When it didn’t turn up there, I dumped out my briefcase. The Palm was buried in the bottom. I looked up Bryant Vishnikov, the deputy chief medical examiner for Cook County, but of course he wasn’t in his office this late at night. It was after eleven now. I hesitated, but finally dialed his home number.
He wasn’t happy at being awakened. “This had better be a real emergency, Vic. I’m on duty at six tomorrow morning.”
“Nick, do you know the DuPage ME?”
“That is not an emergency question,” he snapped.
“This is serious. They have Marcus Whitby’s body out there. You know, the man who drowned at one of those big estates near Naperville Sunday night. I found him.”
He grunted. “I can’t keep up with every corpse you stumble on in the six counties, Warshawski. I have enough trouble with the ones right here in Cook.”
I rode over his sarcasm. “I think DuPage only gave him a brief look-see and it’s really important that they do a complete autopsy before they release him to the family tomorrow”
“On your say-so?” Vishnikov was sarcastic.
“No, Dr. Vishnikov, on yours. The sheriff is saying he was drunk, but it doesn’t seem likely. They need to do a thorough exam, see if they’ve overlooked something.”
“Like what?” he growled.
“I don’t know. A blow to the head or sternum, or curare in the blood
stream, or-I’m not a pathologist. Anything. Anything that might have made him go into that pond. If he even drowned there. Maybe he died in Lake Michigan and someone carried him out to Larchmont”
“You’ve been watching too many Law F7 Order reruns. Give it a rest, and let me get back to sleep.”
“Not until you tell me you’ll talk to the DuPage County ME.”
“Do you have any idea-no, apparently not. This is not like calling one of my own colleagues at Cook County. I only know Jerry Hastings very slightly, and if he called me to tell me to go back over a body I’d tell him to go to hell. So that’s what I’d expect him to do to me.”
“Can’t you say you have a body that died in a similar way and you want to compare notes? Or get them to let you look at Marcus Whitby yourself for the same reason?” I started coughing again and had to stop to drink more tea.
“No. What I can do is a private autopsy if the family hires me. If DuPage is releasing the body to them, it’s within their rights to make that decision.”