The tape, ended there; the camera tonight flashed back on Renee Bayard. She was dabbing tears away from the corners of her eyes. I felt pretty sniffy myself.
Dennis Logan said, “That was a fine speech your husband gave, but people are still left wondering why it moved Olin Taverner and Walker Bushnell. After all, your husband was the only person who ever got Olin Taverner to let go once he’d dug his heels in. But Calvin didn’t name names, he didn’t go to prison, he wasn’t even fined. What was his secret?”
“Poor Calvin, with all the work he did to allow people like you to say whatever you want whenever you want-and all you want is to put him behind bars.”
“Renee, that isn’t fair, is it? It’s a legitimate question. Now that Olin Taverner is dead, is there any harm in letting us know how your husband persuaded him to leave him in peace?”
“Calvin always had a great deal of charm.” This time her smile held genuine warmth-even a touch of mischief, which made her seem suddenly appealing. “He charmed me right out of Vassar when I was twenty. He might have been able to charm Walker Bushnell, too, although it would have been heavy work. You’re too young to have known the congressman, weren’t you, Dennis? But I typed up some of the-“
Logan could feel the interview slipping out of his control and hastily said, “We had hoped for a comment from Calvin on Taverner’s passing, but he wouldn’t come to the phone.”
The heavy lines settled back in Renee Bayard’s face. “On Olin’s death, you mean? Calvin hates euphemisms for the most common acts of our bodies, and nothing is more common to us all than death.”
Logan conceded defeat. “When we come back, more on Olin Taverner and the House committee he served, this time with a team of constitutional scholars. Renee, thank you for coming in. I know this can’t have been an easy evening for you.”
The station shifted to a commercial before Renee’s answer came on. Lotty switched off the set.
“I’d say game, set and match to the lady,” Max said. “He wanted something that he couldn’t get from her.”
“It was very moving, that old piece they ran,” Lotty added. “I’d never paid much attention to those hearings. But how extraordinary that their son is betraying them.”
“Not betraying them,” I objected. “They raised him to think for himself.” “He’s not thinking for himself,” Lotty said. “He’s echoing what every other rightwing lunatic in America is saying.”
“What I want to know is why he’s living in Washington while his kid is in Chicago with her grandmother. And how he came to think so differently on politics from his parents. And why Calvin Bayard has no comment on Taverner’s death. And a lot of other stuff that’s none of my business. I’m going to take my sore nose home to bed, although whatever you put in this drink, Lorry, I feel a whole lot better. Thanks-for everything.”
She and Max saw me to the elevator, their arms around each other. Riding down the elevator I felt both the assurance one gets from seeing others in love, and the pang of feeling separate from the world of lovers.
CHAPTER 15
House of the Dead
Tome, the South Side has always meant the broken-down mills of South Chicago, where I grew up; when I got a scholarship to the University of Chicago four miles up the lake from my home, I used to scoff at Hyde Parkers, with their big yards and their kids in expensive schools and camps, for claiming to be South Siders-they might live below Madison Street, but they were more at home in the restaurants and theaters on the far side of the Loop.
Bronzeville, where Marcus Whitby had bought a house, was yet a different South Side, one I only knew secondhand. I got there early enough to do a little exploring. Whether because of Lotty’s magic potion, or because Geraldine Graham let me sleep through the night, I’d woken early, with more energy than I’d had lately. I took the dogs for a brisk walk, went to my office to check messages and complete a report-and still reached Twenty-sixth and King, where Bronzeville starts, before eight-thirty. I paused in front of a statue commemorating the great wave of black immigration into the city. Driving on down King to Thirtyfifth Street, I passed the husks of the businesses that used to make up the so-called Black Metropolis. As Aretha Cummings, Whitby’s assistant, said yesterday, no one wants those old segregation days back, but it was painful to see the wreck of buildings that once had been the heart of a vital community.