Blacklist (42 page)

CHAPTER 55

Shoot-Out at the Eagle River Corral

A cold sun hung well over Elk Horn Lake before I got into a bed. It took hours to sort things out with the local authorities. I didn’t blame themthe carnage in the house was shocking. Nor did I blame them for first wanting to haul me away-a youth lay dead in the dining room, a teenager and an old woman both had gunshot wounds and I was the one with a gun.

The officer in charge, a raw-faced man named Blodel, ordered a couple of deputies to hold on to me and my gun. When she realized what they were doing, Geraldine put on her grandest dame manner. She commanded Blodel to listen to her before he did anything he might afterwards feel “had been regrettable.” Despite her pain and her loss of blood, she gave a short, fluent account of Renee’s role in the evening’s wreckage. She stayed in the wicker chair, but her air of command was such that Blodel stopped what he was doing to attend to her.

“She shot the boy, she tried to kill Victoria. Victoria, where is Renee’s gun?” I told Blodel he would find the gun in the snow outside the kitchen door. “It will have Ms. Bayard’s fingerprints on it. And you’ll find its bullets will match the one that killed the youth in the dining room.”

Blodel sent a woman out to look for Renee’s gun, but his other officer kept a grip on me. Renee saw this as her opportunity to seize control of the situation. She left Catherine’s side, wearing an air of command like a second jacket, to tell Blodel that Benjamin Sadawi was a terrorist, wanted by the FBI, and that she had shot him to protect her granddaughter. She would appreciate Blodel’s help in getting her granddaughter to an airplane; the child was in shock, was recovering from an injury, and needed to be flown back to Chicago for medical care.

Geraldine and I listened to this with mounting indignation, but we couldn’t edge in a word to contradict her: Blodel kept silencing us when we tried to speak.

Geraldine’s wrath finally pushed her to her feet. “Oh, these lies, Renee, these lies; they fit you like the glove to hand. And you should know, Renee, that Marcus Whitby saw the agreement Calvin and Olin signed together. Whatever was in that agreement, Julius Arnoff has a copy of it.”

Before she could go further, her bad foot gave way and she collapsed, scrabbling at Blodel’s arms on her way down. My deputy let go of me to help get Geraldine back into a chair, and to make sure she hadn’t suffered further hurt. While their attention was on Geraldine-and on Renee, who was saying, “Oh, Geraldine, must you always play the victim to garner attention?”-I retreated to a corner of the living room with my cell phone.

My first call was to Freeman Carter. My lawyer wasn’t happy to hear from me at four in the morning, but he took in a summary of what had happened. He said he knew a lawyer in Rhinelander, the nearest big town, and put me on hold while he looked up the number. When he’d given it to me, he told me to wait half an hour before phoning so he could put the local guy in the picture.

I called Bobby Mallory next. Years of midnight emergencies brought him to the phone grouchy but coherent.

“I’m in Eagle River, Bobby. Renee Bayard just shot Benjamin Sadawi.” “Give it to me fast, Victoria. And straight, no frills.”

I gave it to him straight. Mostly straight. Not too many frills. I told him how Catherine ran away with Benji yesterday afternoon, at which he interrupted: How did I know? It wasn’t because I had known where Benji was and helped him escape?

I sidestepped that issue and told Bobby about the phenobarb, about

Calvin Bayard’s nurse with her seizures. I even told him about Calvin’s secret deal with Olin Taverner, although I choked over the words, hardly able to utter them.

“Renee helped broker that deal fortyfive years ago, Bobby. Marc Whitby stumbled on it and went to ask her about it. She wasn’t going to let Calvin’s secret see the light of day. She’d built her life around making him into the great man; she wasn’t going to let the world see him as lesser. She probably killed Olin, too.”

“Your say-so?” Bobby was sarcastic.

“The family lawyer has a copy of an agreement Calvin Bayard and Olin Taverner both signed. I don’t know its details, but the firm is Lebold, Arnofl: If he’ll let you read it, it may make everything clearer.”

Bobby grunted in my ear. “So what got the kid involved in this?”

“He saw Renee Bayard put Marcus Whitby into that pond last week. Right before he died, Benji said he saw Renee drive up in some kind of vehicle that wasn’t a car; he watched her put Marc’s body into the pond. Remember that golf cart I told you about on Sunday? It would have been so easy for her.”

I had been picturing how she’d worked it. She would have invited Marc to meet her-privately: “Keep it to yourself so there isn’t a possibility of Llewellyn hearing about it,” she would have said. “You don’t want to ruin your career by having him know you talked to me.” Marc played his cards close to his chest-everyone agreed to that-so Renee could have counted on his silence.

Catherine was spending that Sunday night in New Solway; Elsbetta had the night off. Renee invited Marc to Banks Street, gave him his favorite bourbon doctored with Theresa’s phenobarb. As soon as he started feeling ill, before he lost consciousness and couldn’t walk, she would have hustled him to his car-“I’d better get you to the hospital,” I could imagine her saying, the organizational genius at work.

When Renee reached Coverdale Lane, Marc would have been barely conscious. She could safely leave him in the car, go under the culvert, get a golf cart, push his body from car to cart and drive him to the pond.

Bobby listened to me all the way through, but he was skeptical when I finished. “Picturesque, but no proof.”

I almost stamped my foot in frustration. “If I’m right, that cart in the equipment shed will have evidence for your forensic techs to find. It would be great if they got to it before the golf course repaints it or trashes it.”

He paused. “All right. I’ll move that up the priority list, but what does your fairy tale have to do with the mess you’re in now?”

“Renee hightailed it up here to silence Benji, so he couldn’t identify her. But Geraldine Graham and I both heard him say he’d seen her put Marcus Whitby into the pond when he was up in the Larchmont attic.”

“Yeah, hearsay testimony of a dead terrorist. I’m not even going to try to take that into court.”

“Well, try some real evidence, then, with some real police work.” My temper was fraying. “Before Renee returns to Chicago as a triumphant heroine who killed a terrorist, it would be great to nail down Calvin Bayard’s nurse and the housekeeper, and find out how much of the nurse’s phenobarb is missing. Whether Renee’s prints are on the bottle. Whether they saw Renee last Monday night when she claimed to be in Chicago. Also, someone might have seen Renee go into Taverner’s place the night Taverner died. Also, someone might have seen Whitby go to Renee’s apartment last Sunday.”

“That’s a lot of mghs,” Bobby objected, adding with heavy humor, “and a hundred `mites’ don’t add up even to a flea.”

“The golf cart is pretty damned concrete.” I tried not to shout.

“Don’t swear, Vicki, it’s ugly in a woman. I told you we’ll look at the cart. We’ll do it today, but for the rest of it, you know I don’t like playing with your theories, especially not when they cross jurisdictions like this. And even more especially not with a wanted man like Sadawi involved.”

“And especially not with a family like the Bayards. But the Grahams will back me up on this. And I’m going to sic Murray Ryerson on it; if the police don’t find evidence, he will. It’s even possible one of the DuPage deputies will have the guts to go to the Bayard house if I tell her what I just told you.”

“I don’t stand for your threats any more than I do your insinuations, Vicki.” Bobby’s temper was also wearing thin. “You know damn well that my work is always by the books, regardless of who or what a suspect is. And you know, too, I’m going to have to talk to Jack Zeelander in the federal

attorney’s office about what happened to Sadawi, and I’m not going to feed him your line about the helpless orphan boy. You hear?”

“Oh, Bobby, if you were here now, if you could see Catherine Bayard, lying like Juliet in the tomb, you wouldn’t-“

“Okay, Vicki, calm down. You’ve had a long day, you’ve seen too much blood, you need to go to bed. I’ll tell Zeelander Sadawi’s dead and we’ll leave the rest until we’ve got some ballistics. Okay?”

“Thank you, Bobby.” His sudden switch to kindness made me want to cry again, which I couldn’t afford right now. “Will you talk to the officer in charge here, see if you can move him along? Ms. Graham’s lying down with this wound in her foot, and she’s ninety-one. She needs a doctor. I need a bed.”

Bobby talked to Officer Blodel. To my face he might poohpooh my detecting, but he would support me-support Tony and Gabriella’s daughter-to an outsider.

After talking first to Bobby, and then to the lawyer Freeman had recommended, the tenor of Blodel’s questions began to change. He stopped addressing me as cop to perpetrator, and began speaking as one law professional to another.

Finally, around six in the morning, someone collected Benji’s body to deliver to the county morgue. It took two officers to move Catherine away from him. When they finally lifted her from the table, she started to follow them to the hearse. One of the deputies picked her up and carried her back into the kitchen. She stumbled over to me, clutching me as an infant would. 1 put my arms around her and murmured those senseless coos one gives to aching children.

An ambulance came to take Geraldine to the local hospital. The EMS techs wanted to take Catherine with them as well, to treat her for shock and check on her wound, but she burrowed deeper into my arms, her cast digging into my breast.

Renee bustled forward, the Cannonball in full throttle. “Come along, darling. Let’s get you checked over by a doctor and then we’ll charter a plane for home.”

Catherine clung to me. “Go away! Don’t come near me. You shot Benji,

you shot him like he was a horse with a broken leg. I don’t want to see you again. Go away, go away, go away!”

I didn’t know if the law would ever catch up with Renee Bayard, but Catherine’s outburst shocked her as nothing else had all evening. For a brief moment, her face collapsed; she looked like a stricken old woman, not the brigadier in charge. This wasn’t retribution that I could offer to Harriet Whitby or Benji’s mother, but it was a small offering on the scales of justice.

Renee tried to argue with Catherine, but her granddaughter began to scream. Two officers hustled Renee away. They weren’t charging her with anything, they said, but they wanted to question her more about her gun.

Blodel saw that he couldn’t possibly take me to the station for a formal statement, unless he was prepared to deal with more hysteria from Catherine. In the end, he talked to me in the living room at the cottage while a deputy took notes. I finally had a chance to recount everything-well, almost everything-that had happened since Geraldine and I left Chicago. I left out the tape we’d found in the Saturn, because I wanted to take that home to Chicago with me.

While Blodel and I finished talking, a woman officer fetched clean clothes for Catherine from her own teenage daughter’s closet. She also roused a local motel owner to get us a bedroom.

In the motel, the woman officer helped me bathe and undress Catherine and get her into a nightshirt. I spent a long time under the shower myself, trying to stop my skin from feeling as though it were turning inside out. When I got into bed, I collapsed into sleep so fast I couldn’t even remember lying down. I woke once around noon, because Catherine’s cast was digging into my back, but was asleep again as soon as I turned over.

When I finally came to at three that afternoon, she was still sleeping, her narrow face gray and puffy. I stumbled to my feet and into my well-worn clothes, wishing the woman officer had brought something clean in my size last night.

I roused Catherine to tell her I was leaving to find food, but would be back within an hour. She blinked at me dopily and went back to sleep. When I returned with a bag of groceries and a hot pizza, I was stunned to find Darraugh Graham waiting for me. He had hired a small plane to

collect his mother, he said, and he planned to fly Catherine and me down to Chicago with him. I explained that I already had two cars at the cottage, but he told me he’d send up a team later in the week to drive them back.

“Mother told me what you did the last twenty-four hours. For her, for the boy, for Catherine. It’s enough for one week. I’m going to collect Mother at the hospital now; I’ll swing back for you and Catherine. My pilot is instrument rated, but it’s a small plane, it’s better to fly while we still have light.”

I said I needed to check with the local lawyer to make sure everything was settled with the local police, but Darraugh had taken care of that, too. I think I was twelve the last time anyone took care of things for me. I thanked him shakily and went down the hall to rouse Catherine.

On the flight south, we sat in a stupor for most of the journey. At the little airport on the lakefront where we landed, Darraugh had a car waiting. He sent his driver out to New Solway with his mother and escorted Catherine and me into the city in a cab. When he directed the cab to the Banks Street apartment, Catherine started sobbing again: she couldn’t see her grandmother, she wouldn’t see her father, not now, not after seeing Benji die and listening to everyone call him a terrorist. Finally, not knowing what else to do, I said she could come home with me.

CHAPTER 56

Death Notices

At my apartment, Darraugh paid off the taxi and walked us to the door, saying he wanted to talk to me.

“That’s good, because I want to talk to you, too,” I said. “I have to explain to my neighbor what I’ve been doing and get Catherine settled in. Do you want to meet tomorrow?”

“Tonight. I need to go to Washington tomorrow. I’ll use your phone while you do what you have to do.”

Mr. Contreras and the dogs boiled out of his apartment just then. Darraugh withstood the onslaught remarkably well. He and Mr. Contreras had met once or twice, but they had about as much in common as a fish and a giraffe-they were both animals, but that was as far as it went. Catherine, on the other hand, took to Mr. Contreras at once. Peppy helped, but Mr. Contreras’s direct, unpretentious personality reassured her as little else had these last few days.

My neighbor came upstairs with me to help set up a portable bed in my dining room for Catherine-and to hear the blow-by-blow details of our adventure. I had called him from Eagle River, but he wanted to know everything, from the moment Geraldine and I left Chicago, until we got on the plane to return this afternoon.

Darraugh sat in my living room with the phone while I showed

Catherine how to work the locks and where things like toilets and tea were. I wondered how long she’d be comfortable staying in four rooms, with no housekeeper to get the dust out of the corners or make sure she had the Bulgarian yogurt and particular tofu she required.

While I showed her around, Mr. Contreras had been poking in my refrigerator and cupboards. “You don’t have no food in here, doll. You been living on the fly, like I keep telling you is bad for your health. You going out with Mr. Graham? I’ll make spaghetti for this young lady.”

“No meatballs; she’s a vegetarian,” I said.

“Tomato sauce. I make my own tomato sauce and your own ma couldn’t do a better job, that’s a fact,” Mr. Contreras assured Catherine.

She smiled shyly, apparently not bothered by the reference to the mother who’d died when she was one. The old man took Catherine and the dogs downstairs. I changed out of my rank clothes and washed, putting on wool crepe trousers and a rose silk shirt. Whatever Darraugh had to say to me, I wanted to feel alert and attractive.

When I joined Darraugh in the living room, he wrapped up a complicated conversation with Caroline, his personal assistant. I offered him a drink, but he wanted to go out; he didn’t want Mr. Contreras or Catherine coming in on us midconversation.

We picked up a cab on Belmont and rode down to the Trefoil Hotel on the Gold Coast. Darraugh got us one of the little tables in the corner that overlooks Lake Michigan, ordered a dry martini for himself, Black Label for me, sent the waiter about his business.

He made a job out of his lemon peel, rubbing it around the rim of his glass, twisting it until it broke apart. I wasn’t about to try to help him. “Larchmont is a terrible house-sucks the life out of everyone who comes near it,” he said, tearing the peel into smaller pieces. “I should have known when Mother told me she was seeing lights-should have known disaster would follow. You did well. Under the circumstances, very well. No one else could have been as effective with my mother.”

“She’s a remarkable woman. It’s a pity she let your grandmother dominate her life.”

A muscle twitched in his jaw. “Laura Taverner Drummond was a

dreadful person. She did terrible damage to everyone around her. When my father died-she made my life hell. I didn’t talk to her for ten years, until I married and my wife insisted we make some kind of effort at reconciliation. And then my grandmother tried to belittle Elise in the eyes of everyone out in that wasps’ nest of a village. Elise was the gentlest person who ever lived, and Laura-but that’s neither here nor there.”

He swallowed half the martini, then spoke rapidly, not looking at me. “I found my father’s body. I know Mother told you that. She doesn’t know I found his suicide note.”

I put my glass down so fast that whisky slopped over the rim.

“It was meant for her, for Mother. If he’d known I was going to find his body, he would never have killed himself as he did, or where he did. Exeter sent us home in a hurry because three of the boys came down with polio. I didn’t bother to telegraph them. I was used to coming home alone and I knew Mother was in Washington. With Calvin.

“There’s a study on the first floor, where my father would read, watch television. I went to look for him when I arrived, hoping he was in. And found him hanging over the desk. It was-” He covered his face with his hands. The image was vivid in his head even fortyfive years later.

“I cut him down, I tried to give him artificial respiration-they taught us that at summer camp or someplace. All I could think was that Grandmother must not know. She hated my father using the study: it was a man’s room, she said, built by her husband for doing man’s work, so she would never enter it, once my father took it over. I covered his face with my coat. And then I saw the note.” He took his wallet from his breast pocket and removed a much-creased sheet of paper. A schoolboy’s round hand covered the page.

Did you begrudge me a little love, Geraldine? I never held your loves against you, but you’ve used mine to help your own lover. I know Olin and Calvin have always been at odds. I know Olin believes things that no right-minded person can support, but love’s a malady without a cure, and I loved Olin. Now that you’ve seen us together, and told Calvin, Olin plans to tell the world that I tried to seduce him, that I shocked him with my homosexual declarations.

The truth is-no one knows the truth. Olin and I recognized each other the first time we met. We fell in love. We snatched odd meetings in New York or Washington. And now he plans to betray me to the world to save his own skin-no, not even that, to gain advantage over Calvin.

I am sick in heart and body and mind and there is no cure, no way to continue on this planet, watching you helplessly in love with Calvin while he abandons you, watching Olin betray me, watching your mother watch us all with her malevolent glare. Only Darraugh ties me to the earth and he will soon be in the wider world, leaving me behind. Do as you will when you find me.

When I handed it back, Darraugh continued harshly, “We didn’t talk about homosexuality when I was a teenager, not the way they do now. I was shocked. Everything that afternoon was a shock. I was like young Catherine, reeling from watching my universe disintegrate. Sitting there with my father’s body, my one thought was to protect him. From my grandmother, my mother, Olin. I didn’t know anyone to talk to. In my panic I chose Renee. I thought she was an outsider, a newcomer, she could keep Olin from doing what he threatened. I showed her the letter and she said she could manage things to protect my father’s secret.”

“I see,” I said. “Renee must have used the letter to force Olin to end his interrogation of Calvin. I haven’t been able to understand why Olin kept Calvin’s sins to himself, even after homosexuality in public life ceased to be so shocking. But all these years Renee must have used the note as an enforcer: if Olin betrayed Calvin, she would show the world the kind of man he was-not his being queer, but his willingness to betray your father to save his skin. And he kept quiet, until Marcus Whitby came along.” Darraugh finished his martini and ordered a second.

“Did you tell her she could always get the letter from you if she needed it?” I asked.

“This is a copy. I wrote it out for myself and carried it with me, not knowing what I’d do with it. I lived on the streets of New York for a year. I lived-as a prostitute, I guess you could call it that. Yes, I tried to live my father’s life, but I finally knew it wasn’t mine and went back to Exeter.” He

gave his wintry smile. “I was fortunate it was before AIDS. As it was, I experienced other nasty diseases and maladventures.”

I reached across the table to clasp his hand. He squeezed his eyes shut, but not before I’d seen the glint of candlelight on the tears in them.

After a moment, I pulled my hand away. “Why were you so angry last week over where my investigation was heading? You were threatening me, in a way that left me wondering whether I would or could ever work for you again.”

“Renee called me. She told me you were trying to dig up all that old dirt on my father, on Calvin, on my mother.” He bit his lips and turned his head away for a moment, then looked back at me. “I loved him. MacKenzie Graham was a good man, he was a good father. His death, his life, that’s a scar on a wound that still hurts. I thought you were trying to slice it open. I should have known you better.”