A cab pulled up in front of Whitby’s house. Amy Blount hopped out of the front seat and opened the back door to help out a dimunitive woman in a severe black suit and hat. A man slowly climbed out of the other door, followed by Harriet. So the whole Whitby family had arrived. I sucked in a breath. This could make things more complicated.
The man bent over the driver’s window to pay the fare. When I stepped forward, Mrs. Whitby turned to look at me. I couldn’t see her face: even in high heels she only stood about five foot two, and the hat brim shielded everything but her chin. I made conventional noises of condolence and introduced myself.
“Yes, it’s very difficult,” she said in a dry, dead voice. “But since my daughter and my husband want you to pry open my son’s life, I thought I should make the effort and come out to see you. Poor Marcus, I couldn’t protect him in life, I don’t know why I think I can protect him in death.”
Harriet bit her lip; she’d obviously been hearing these sentiments for the last twenty-four hours. She introduced her father, a tall, thickset man. I guessed he was in his fifties, but he was walking with the stoop of someone older and frailer.
“So you’re the woman who found Marc. I don’t understand it, I don’t understand it at all. And you think you can explain it? Find out why he was out there, how he came to die?”
Amy stepped forward with determined briskness and asked if I’d been inside yet.
“I was waiting for the family,” I said. “When is Ms. Murchison getting here?”
She had already arrived. She must have stood inside the doorway watching while I talked to the neighbors, because before we had sorted out the protocol of who went first, and whether Mr. Whitby or Harriet would support her mother up the five steep stairs to the front door, Rita Murchison opened it.
Like me, like Mrs. Whitby and her daughter, Rita Murchison was wearing a dark suit, chosen to prove she wasn’t a cleaning woman but a legitimate mourner. She didn’t step back as our awkward group converged on the small concrete stoop. I was afraid she was going to demand IDs before she’d let us in.
I moved forward, forcing her to retreat. “Thanks for coming over here, Ms. Murchison. Was this your usual day to clean for Mr. Whitby?”
She scowled at me. “I’m a housekeeper.”
“You look after the house?” I said. “Meaning you live here? What time did Mr. Whitby go out on Sunday?”
“I don’t live here, but I do look after the house.”
Mrs. Whitby pushed past me and Rita Murchison into the hall. The rest of the family followed her, leaving me alone with the housekeeper.
“So when you were looking after the house on Sunday,” I persisted, causing her to say she was a Christian, she certainly didn’t work on Sundays. “On Monday, then?” I asked.
After a stubborn minute, she finally admitted that she only came in on Fridays for four hours. “He was a bachelor. He lived a simple life. He didn’t need a lot of help.”
Behind us, Mrs. Whitby said, “I had no idea this neighborhood collected so much dust. Because I’m sure you must have gone over this last Friday, and yet here we are on Thursday knee-deep in dust.”
Rita Murchison wheeled around. I peered over her shoulder down the narrow hallway to the staircase which rose halfway down its length. Mrs. Whitby had found the light switches. A spotlight was trained on a framed poster on the stairwell wall. It showed the silhouette of an African dancer, back arched, in the social realist style of the thirties; around the sleek figure was an intricate design of African prints and masks.
“The Federal Negro Theater Presents,” proclaimed the header, and,
underneath, “Kylie Ballantine’s Ballet Noir of Chicago, April 15-16-17, the Ingleside Theater.”
The light also revealed a thin film of dust along the edges of the stairs. Mrs. Whitby stood there, inspecting her finger. Rita Murchison surged forward, prepared for battle. Harriet put her arm around her mother, trying to persuade her not to worry about dust when Marc was dead. I slid away from the trio into the room on my right. Amy Blount followed me.
“I tried to persuade Mrs. W to stay at the hotel, but I could hardly blame her for wanting to see her son’s house. She’s been wanting to fight someone all week, anyone to distract her from her distress over Marc. When Harriet and I wouldn’t play, I thought for sure she’d take you on.”
I grinned. “I thought she would, too. Let’s leave them to it and see if we can find any trace of his notes, or a diary, or anything that would tell us why he went out to New Solway.”
Amy nodded. “It’s not that big a place. It’s got three floors, but only nine rooms and he didn’t really use the third floor at all. His study was on the second floor, next to the bedroom. Want to start there? We can go up a back staircase from the kitchen.”