I covered the mouthpiece and explained his advice to Amy and Harriet, who frowned in worry. “Mother-she won’t agree to that. All she wants is to get Marc away from this place as fast as possible. Isn’t there anything else you can do?”
When I relayed that back to Bryant, he said, “Then there’s nothing I can do to help you. You want the autopsy, you’ve got to get the family to release the body to me or someone else who will perform a private exam. Or come up with some compelling reason for Jerry Hastings to revisit the body.”
“I need to buy time for an investigation!” I exclaimed, frustrated. “Look, Warshawski, if the family won’t agree to a private autopsy, then you’ll just have to let them take the body away in the morning. Speaking of which, the dawn is not far distant. I’m going back to sleep. And you, you start gargling, or your next stop will be one of my slabs-assuming you die in Cook County.”
Vishnikov hung up, but just as I was explaining the problem to Harriet he called back. “In my morgue, I’m always having to battle with low-level clerks who lose the paperwork on bodies.”
He hung up again before I could speak. I waved a hand at my visitors, urging them to silence, while I frowned over his advice. I only had one possibility. I combed through the papers I’d dumped from my briefcase until I found Stephanie Protheroe’s cell phone number.
“I watched the television news tonight,” I said when she answered. “The sheriff seemed pretty convinced that Mr. Whitby drowned on purpose.” “We didn’t see anything to suggest foul play,” she said.
“Deputy, I have Mr. Whitby’s sister with me. They were pretty close; she finds it hard to believe her brother committed suicide.”
“It’s always a struggle for the family,” Protheroe said.
“They find his car?” I asked. “Or discover how he got to Larchmont Hall? It’s what, about five rniles from the nearest train station. Do they have a cab service out there?”
A long pause told me Protheroe realized they had a biggish hole in their solution to Whitby’s death. I didn’t push on the point.
“Ms. Whitby’s hired me to ask a few questions. Ordinarily, I advise the family to get a private autopsy when they’re not satisfied with the medical examiner. But the mother only wants to get her son out of Chicago and interred; she won’t consent to a tox screen or anything else.”
“Then you have a problem, don’t you?” Protheroe wasn’t hostile, just cautious.
“Of course, if the paperwork for the body got misfiled for three or four days, I might come up with a different reason for why Mr. Whitby was in New Solway than just that he stumbled out there to die. I might find his car. I might find something that would make Dr. Hastings want to reopen the autopsy without anyone looking bad.”
“And why should I risk my career on this?” Protheroe demanded. “Oh, because I think you went into law enforcement for the same reason I did: you care more about justice than jelly doughnuts.”
“Don’t knock jelly doughnuts. They’ve saved me more times than my Kevlar vest.” She broke the connection.
“Will the person you just talked to help?” Harriet said anxiously.
“I think so. We won’t know until your mother tries to claim your brother’s body tomorrow.”
Amy Blount looked at me with respect: I had a feeling she hadn’t
expected me to come through for her. “We should let you get to bed. Did you get sick from trying to rescue Marc?”
“It’s just a cold,” I said gruffly. “Who can I talk to tomorrow who might know what Mr. Whitby was working on, or what might have taken him out to New Solway? Did he have a girlfriend, or any close men friends here?”
Harriet rubbed the crease between her eyes. “If he was dating anyone in a serious way, it was still too recent for him to have told me or Mother. His editor is a man named Simon Hendricks; he would know what Marc was working on-if he was writing for T-square. Marc did freelance stuff, too, you know. As for his friends, I can’t think right now. I know his college friends, but not his Chicago ones.”
“I’ll start with the magazine in the morning,” I said. “And maybe I can ask your mother about his friends?”
She gave another fleeting smile. “Better not-Mother would be terribly upset to find out I’d hired you.”
I stifled a groan: this meant the second client in a week where I had to tread lightly between mother and child. “What about your brother’s house? Can you get in there, do you think? We might find some notes or something. I looked in his pockets, hoping for some ID, and he didn’t have any keys on him. It hadn’t occurred to me until I was talking to the deputy just now, but there weren’t any house keys or car keys, unless maybe those fell out of his pockets into the pond.”
Harriet turned in bewilderment to Amy. “Then-but his car-I didn’t think about that.”