“What did he drive?” I pulled a notebook out of the heap on the table. “A Saturn SLl? We’ll see if he left it at his house.”
Amy volunteered to find a lawyer or someone else who might have a spare key to Marcus Whitby’s house. I didn’t say I could get past the lock myself if need be: I’d save that parlor trick for when I had to use it. Mentioning the search I’d made of his pockets made me remember the matchbook and pencil I’d found. I’d tossed them in a bowl by the front entrance when I took Catherine’s teddy bear out of my pockets. I went back for them and showed them to Harriet and Amy.
Water had gummed the matchbook into a solid mass that wouldn’t open. The cover had originally been some shade of green. Water had turned it blackish, and whatever the logo had been, it now looked like a child’s amorphous picture of a star. The cover didn’t have an address or phone number. I might be able to get a forensics lab to open it to see whether Whitby had written something on the inside. The pencil was an ordinary number 2 with no names stamped on it.
Harriet turned the matchbook over in her hands. Neither she nor Amy had any idea where it was from, but Harriet wanted to keep it, as the last thing her brother had touched. I looked closely at both the matchbook and the pencil again. They weren’t going to tell me anything. I handed them over to Harriet Whitby.
When I’d ushered them out, I was utterly beat. I steamed myself for a few minutes in a hot pot of my mother’s invention-herbal tea, lemon, ginger-and crawled into bed, where I fell at once down a hole of sleep. The phone dragged me out of it at one in the morning.
“Is this V I. Warshawski?” the night operator from my answering service demanded. “We’ve gotten a phone call from a Mrs. MacKenzie Graham. She says it’s an emergency and insisted that we wake you.”
“Mrs. MacKenzie Graham?” I echoed, bewildered: I knew Darraugh’s son, MacKenzie, and didn’t think he’d gotten married. Then I remembered through the fog of sleep that MacKenzie had also been Darraugh’s father’s name. I switched on a light and fumbled around on the mghtstand for a pen.
When I had Geraldine Graham’s number, I was tempted to make her wait until morning. But-I’d found a dead man in her childhood pond Sunday night. Maybe someone was making a habit of tossing bodies there and she was watching them do it again. I dialed the number.
“I want you out here at once, young woman.” She sounded as though she thought I was the night chambermaid.
“Why?”
“Because it’s your job to discover who is breaking into Larchmont. You didn’t find them last night, but they are here right now”
“What are you seeing?” I croaked hoarsely.
“What is that, young woman? Don’t grumble at me.”
I tried to clear my throat. “What are you seeing? People? Phantom lights? Cars?”
“I’m seeing the lights in the attic. Didn’t I tell you that? If you come right now, you’ll find whoever it is red-handed.”
“You need to call the cops, Ms. Graham. I live more than forty miles from you.”
She brushed the distance aside: the cops had proved how useless they were; she hoped I wasn’t going to be similarly ineffectual.
“If someone is using Larchmont as a dump for dead bodies, you need to get the local cops there at once. Me arriving ninety minutes from now would serve very little purpose. If you’d like me to call them for you, I can.”
She took my offer as a face-saving out. “And what is your direct number, young woman? I’m tired of relaying messages to you through your help. They’re not cooperative.”
“They’re your best chance of reaching me, Ms. Graham. Good night.” I didn’t want to call Stephanie Protheroe again: one favor a night is all I expect from anyone. I finally remembered the young lawyer on emergency duty for the rich and famous. I found his card with a pager number and beeped him. When he called me back ten minutes later, he was as groggy with sleep as I was, but he agreed to get someone from the New Solway police to drive over to Larchmont.
“Will you let me know what they find?” I asked. “I’m working for the Graham family, you know.”
“It’s a strange life, isn’t it,” he said, “responding to the demands of the very wealthy. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a lawyer joke that covered that aspect of our work.”
While I waited, I made myself another pot of herbal tea. My mother had brought me up to believe one drank coffee as a matter of course, but tea only in illness. I took it into the living room and drank two cups, idling away the early morning by watching Audrey Hepburn stare wistfully at Gregory Peck. All the time I looked at Hepburn’s doelike eyes, I kept wondering whether the New Solway police would catch Catherine Bayard breaking into Larchmont Hall.