“She isn’t still alive, is she?” I asked, startled.
“Oh, no. She died in 1979. But you know how you can be so fascinated by a dead person that they feel really present for you. I used to tease Marc about it, about how I could never-” She dissolved suddenly into tears.
I pulled some clean tissues from the stack I’d packed before starting out today, but didn’t try to stop her crying. She’d loved him when he was alive, that much was clear, and now she was likely to have her own dead hero to keep alive.
“It isn’t fair. He was so smart and so loving, he didn’t deserve to die,” she gulped out. “I don’t believe he killed himself. I know people like Delaney laughed at me, just the way I laugh at her with her stupid crush on Simon Hendricks, but Marc was different, he was special, he never would have gotten drunk and jumped into a creepy old pond.”
“That’s what his sister thinks, too-that he wouldn’t have done that, I mean,” I said when Aretha’s sobs had died down and she’d wiped her face. “No, don’t apologize. Grief keeps hitting us at unexpected moments, knocking the wind out … But do you know why Marc-Mr. Whitbywent out there? Did Kylie have a house in New Solway?”
She swallowed the rest of her Coke. “No, she only ever lived in Bronzeville, except the years she spent in Africa. And she didn’t have any family in those western suburbs: I did a search through Marc’s notes, because I wondered the same thing.”
“Did Mr. Whitby ever mention Calvin Bayard?” I asked.
“Is he in charge of Bayard Publishing? We’re not supposed to go to them; Mr. Hendricks is afraid they’ll scoop our stories because they own magazines with tons more reporters and money than we have. Marc would have known that.” She stopped. “Oh. Does Mr. Bayard live in New Solway? Do you think Mare went out to see him without telling us because he knew it would annoy Mr. Hendricks?”
I shook my head. “At this point, I don’t know enough to have theories. But it sounds like one possibility.”
“I can look through his notes and see if Marc says anything about Bayard, but he never mentioned, well, either Mr. Bayard, or Bayard Publishing to me.”
“Could I see Marc’s notes?” I tried not to sound like Peppy with a rabbit in view.
She wrinkled her face up in doubt. “I don’t think Mr. Hendricks would like it if I let his stuff leave the building. But I can see what Marc left at his desk if you’ll read it here.”
I followed her out of the conference room and on down the hall. Like most offices, the floor was laid out in a square around the elevators and bathrooms. We ended up at the corner near where we’d started, at a row of cubicles facing an interior wall. A few people were working at their desks,
but most were leaning over the edges of the carrels talking to each other. They stared frankly at me, but didn’t interrupt their conversations.
Marcus Whitby’s name was on a black plaque two from the end. Unlike most of the other desks I’d seen, his was extraordinarily tidy-no stacks of paper on the floor, no leaning towers of files. I asked Aretha if she’d cleaned up after his death.
“No. Marc was just a neatness freak. Everybody teased him about it.” Her voice wobbled but didn’t break.
“That’s right.” A man in the adjacent carrel who’d been talking to his far neighbor leaned in our direction. “Whitby was Mr. Anal Compulsive. You couldn’t borrow anything from him if you hadn’t returned what you took last week. You his lawyer?”
“No-why? Did he need one?”
The man grinned. “Just a guess. Know you’re not with the magazine. Jason Tompkin.”
“V I. Warshawski. I’m an investigator, hired by the family to see how he died. Did he ever mention going out to New Solway to you?”
Tompkin shook his head. “But Marc was a solo operator. Most people here share and share alike-you know, you’re stuck, you want an opening, you bring your buddies up to speed on what you’re doing. Not Marc. He owned his material.”
“He was happy to help people,” Aretha snapped. “You’re just lazy, J.T, and you know it.”
Tompkin grinned. “You ought to be a perch, Aretha, you rise faster to the bait than anyone I ever met. But you can’t deny Whitby didn’t let people in on what he was doing. Simon and he had a few words about it now and then.”
“Is that why Mr. Hendricks was reluctant to let me know what Mr. Whitby was working on?” I asked.
Tompkin thought that was funny enough to laugh about, but, when Aretha glared at him, he subsided and returned to his other neighbor. Aretha rifled quickly through a plastic disk holder. “Here’s Bronzeville, but I know Marc kept most of his Kyle Ballantine stuff at home. His notes, his notebook-he did stuff by hand-I don’t see that. But he probably had that