“What about something called `the Committee’? You know the one I mean? Could that have been considered a subversive group?”
He flipped through the plastic sleeves until he found the references, but he couldn’t shed any light on them. “I know Mr. Whitby wrote for her file under the Freedom of Information Act, but it’s like so many of those files: most of what you want to know is inked out so you can’t read it. Since September 11, they’ve made it harder to find out what records they’re keeping on the citizens. It’s kind of frustrating, our own government spying on us, then not letting us see what they claim we’ve been up to.”
When I asked if there were other Ballantine papers anywhere-a diary, or financial records, Reed shook his head again. “If there are, they’re not in a public archive. Her estate didn’t amount to much, and even though she was highly respected in the black community, no one had the kind of
money to do preservation or restoration in her home-it had to be sold to pay her debts. If there was some kind of trove of documents, I’m thinking they’re in the CID landfill by now.”
Reed paused to answer a question from a woman who’d been waiting for several minutes, then turned back to me. “Mr. Whitby did go through her old house. After she died, the bank or whoever bought it cut it into a bunch of little apartments, but Mr. Whitby hoped something might have been left in a basement or crawl space.”
“Did he find anything?”
Reed slowly shook his head. “That may have been why he called me, maybe a week or ten days ago. I wasn’t in and he left a message for me. I never did reach him when I tried calling back, but that could have been it-he knew I shared his interest in Kylie. If he’d found some papers, well, he would have wanted to show them to me.”
Another patron was trying to get the archivist’s attention. I turned to leave, feeling frustrated at how little information I was able to collect.
As I walked away from his desk, Reed called out to me, “Let me know what you find out about Mr. Whitby. If you get to the truth, it may not make the evening news, you know”
A sad commentary. Kylie Ballantine’s life should have been seen on stage, under spotlights, but she’d died in the wings, and now Gideon Reed was afraid her lone champion was going to vanish into the same shadows.
I imagined melodramatic statements I might make, picturing myself as Annie Oakley riding to the rescue of both Ballantine and Marcus Whitby. Maybe I was just Lassie the dog, though, barking around frantically for help.
“Timmy’s in the well,” I said aloud as I unlocked my car. A woman with a couple of toddlers passed me just then, but she barely spared me a glance: people saying odd things to themselves are commonplace at the public library, after all.
CHAPTER 18
Crocodile in the Moat
I’m going out to New Solway,” I told Amy Blount when I reached her on her cell phone. “I didn’t find anything definite in the Ballantine papers, but there’s a possibility that Marc tried seeing Calvin Bayard, who published one of Ballantine’s books. I want to talk to Mr. Bayard, if I can get in-his wife has a shark-filled moat dug around him. Did you find out anything?”
“Like you, nothing definite. The woman who lives on Marc’s south side thinks she saw lights at three yesterday morning-she’s got a newborn who woke her up around then, and she was rocking by the window, but she wasn’t really paying attention. She couldn’t be a hundred percent sure it was Sunday-she’s up most nights and she’s pretty sleep deprived. And anyway, she didn’t look at the front walk, so she wouldn’t know if it was Marc or an intruder. The old man across the street, he save Marc bring a woman home with him once or twice, but no one had spent the night here for several months, as far as the local gossip columns know.”
I was on Ninety-fifth Street, heading west to the tollway, doing the worst kind of driving: the steering wheel wedged between my knees, one hand on the cell phone, one on a raspberry smoothie I’d picked up in lieu of lunch. When I had to brake for a semi that suddenly changed lanes, I dropped the smoothie.
I swore and pulled over to the curb, where I daubed pink liquid from my green-striped trousers. I’d lost the connection by the time I finished with my clothes. When I redialed I asked how many people Amy had left to talk to. She hadn’t reached the neighbor on his north, or the kids-school wouldn’t get out for another hour.