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.
The same thing has happened in South Chicago; I can hardly bear to return to the scenes of my youth because of my old neighborhood’s rotting buildings. But South Chicago has forty percent unemployment and the highest murder rate in the city, while Bronzeville is on its way back. True, many of the businesses around me were dilapidated, but an art deco building on the corner of Thirtyfifth and King had been turned into an insurance company, and the stately mansions that lined both sides of the boulevard looked well maintained.
Marcus Whitby had bought a town house on Giles, a short narrow street just west of King Drive. I found a parking space on the corner of Giles and Thirty-seventh, and walked back up the street to the address I’d found on Nexis. Some of the houses on Giles seemed to be teetering on their last beams, with broken windows and sagging roofs. Others had been restored even beyond their original beauty, with the addition of painted Victorian curlicues on the porches and window trim. Most, like Whitby’s own, fell somewhere in between.
I stood on the pavement, staring at it, as if I could learn something about Whitby’s life from studying his home. It had been built high and narrow to fit on a small lot. The dark red brick was old, cracked in many places, but freshly mortared, the modest porch and wood trim around the windows patched and painted. Louvered blinds were drawn on all three floors, making the house look forbidding, its empty eyes closed to the world.
Children straggled out of the nearby houses, backpack laden, on their way to school. They flowed around me like fish parting around a piece of piling-I was a grown-up, nonexistent. For the adults heading to work, it was a different story: I stood out as a stranger, and a white one to boot. Several people stopped to ask i? I needed help. When I told them I was just waiting for someone, they eyed me narrowly: white suburbanites come into the black South Side to buy drugs, so they can keep their own little towns clean and crime-free. I’d dressed soberly, in my greenand-blackstriped wool, to look both respectful of the dead and professionally competent-but that didn’t prove I wasn’t a crackhead.
If anyone probed further, I told them who I was, and asked what they knew of Marcus Whitby. People responded charily, not willing to discuss
the dead man with a stranger, but I got the impression his neighbors hadn’t known him well. Oh, yes, he got on with everyone, but he kept himself to himself. Not that he was mean in any way, not at all-if you needed your car jumped, or help installing a window, he pitched in. He just didn’t sit out on the porch at night joining in the neighborhood chitchat.
None of the adults who stopped remembered seeing Whitby on Sunday night, but a ten-year-old, waiting impatiently while her father questioned me, said she’d seen Whitby come home.
“He was out all afternoon, then on his way home he stopped at the corner for milk. We saw him because me and Tanya went up there to get a Snickers bar. Then he went out again. About nine o’clock.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Me and Tanya were jumping rope, we saw him walking up toward Thirtyfifth Street.”
“What? In the middle of the night?” her father thundered. “How many times-“
“I know, I know,” I cut in hastily. “It’s dangerous, but you do it in the street because you can see under the lights-my girlfriends and I always used to, no matter how many times my mother yelled at us not to. So you saw Marcus Whitby leave?”
She nodded, a wary eye on her father. “He locked his door, called to us to be careful and headed on up the street.”
“Was he in a hurry?” I asked.
She flung up her hands. “I don’t know. Me and Tanya, we didn’t pay special notice to him.”
“Maybe he’d parked up the street and drove off” I suggested. “Do you know what his car looked like?”
When she pointed at a green Saturn SL1 across the street, I said, “That’s what his looked like? A green four-door?”
“No,” she said, annoyed with my stupidity. “That’s his car.” “You’re positive? Is that where it was Sunday night?”
“I dunno.” She was tired of answering questions. “We didn’t think nothin’ of it. He took the bus to work most days. Then we saw he was dead. Daddy, I’m going to be late and Miss Stetson, she’ll give me detention. Please drive me, please?”
“Yeah, okay, but you know I don’t want you jumping rope in the street. And was Kansa part of your group Sunday night? Because if she was, you are definitely-“
They climbed into a car before I heard what she definitely was. I crossed the street to look at Whitby’s Saturn. Underneath a film of dust, the body was in mint condition, no dings or scratches, except for a dent in the left front fender.
I peered into it, cupping my hands against the glare. If I could believe the girls, he’d left on foot. Where had he been going? And how had he gotten out to New Solway?
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.”
“You spend a lot of time here?” I asked.
“We weren’t lovers, if that’s what you want to know,” Amy said roughly. “We were friends-Harriet and I were close at Spelman, I used to spend Christmas with the family, so even though Marc was six years older than us, I knew him through the family. When he moved to Chicago three years ago to take the job at T-Square, I introduced him to people. He was quiet, not naturally outgoing, not like Harriet. Unless he was working on a story-then he would feel comfortable calling people and talking to them. Later he developed this interest in Ballantine, which began absorbing his spare time.”
I followed her through a dining room to the kitchen and the back stairs, our feet echoing on the uncarpeted floors. Whitby had masks from one of Ballantine’s productions on the living room wall, photographs from the Swing Mikado along the stairwell. He even had a pair of Ballantine’s toe shoes under a glass bell on his dresser.
He’d also been rehabbing his house bit by bit. The kitchen walls were
scraped and painted. He’d put in a new stove and refrigerator, but stacked all his pots and dishes on a trolley instead of buying cupboards.
The refrigerator held half a cooked, skinless chicken breast, skim milk, orange juice and a carton of eggs. No beer, no wine, was in sight; only a bottle of Maker’s Mark, about a quarter empty, stood on a shelf with spices and pastas.
“His drink,” Amy said when she saw the bottle. “Bourbon and branch.” He’d begun work on a bathroom, had finished two upstairs rooms, his bedroom and the study, but the rest of the house was still either half-built, or untouched. Books were housed neatly on board-and-brick shelves. Most dealt with black history and theater, or with African art and dance. He didn’t seem to read much fiction. Next to his bed, though, he had a library copy of Armand Pelletier’s A Tale of Two Countries, the first novel Calvin Bayard had published when he’d taken over the press-Bayard Publishing’s first nonreligious novel.
Amy was right about the search. In this bare place, it took very little time. I pulled latex gloves from my bag and handed her a pair.
“We’ll quarter the room,” I said. “Everything you touch, you put back exactly as you found it.”
“You think there’s been a crime.”
“He left on foot Sunday evening. How did he get to New Solway? If he went out there to die, surely he would have driven, instead of taking a train to a remote town, followed by a five-mile hike to that pond. No one goes to that much work to kill themselves.”
“Then-the police?”
“If I can persuade one of my acquaintances there. But first let’s check this out ourselves.”
Amy was a scholar, a dogged researcher. She was willing to collect data before pushing me into further action. She was thorough, not as fast as me on her first search, but careful and tidy. We went through the drawers, shelves, looked in the books, looked behind pictures, under the neat stack of sweaters in his closet. Nothing. Nothing about Kylie, about the Federal Negro Theater, about New Solway. No datebook. No notebooks. We logged onto his laptop. The word-processing files had been wiped clean. Nothing anywhere.
Back in the kitchen, Harriet had somehow persuaded Rita Murchison and her mother to a cease-fire. Ms. Murchison was making coffee, her lips a thin angry line. Mrs. Whitby was in the living room, staring blankly at a photograph of her son in front of the old Ingleside Theater.
I had only seen Marc Whitby dead, by flashlight. In the picture, he was smiling, pointing at the theater doors, but his essential seriousness was still evident. Despite having his father’s height, he looked very like his mother, with her slender bones and bronze skin.
“I took that,” Amy said. “We went on a walking tour of Ballantine’s haunts, and of FTP sites, and he liked this one particularly.”
Mrs. Whitby clutched it to her breast, her face finally cracking into grief. “My baby, my baby,” she crooned.
Harriet and Amy pulled her to a chair and knelt on either side of her. I went back to the kitchen to confront the angry housekeeper.
“Did anything in this house look different to you when you came in this morning?”
“Don’t start in on me about the dust, I’ve had it. If it wasn’t for Mr. Whitby being dead and me knowing him all this time, I wouldn’t stay around here to be insulted.”
“I don’t care about dust or no dust,” I said. “It’s the house. I’ve been looking for his papers; they’re gone.”
“If you’re accusing me of stealing-” She smacked the coffeepot down so hard the glass carafe broke. “Now see what you’ve done.”
“Listen to me for a minute,” I said, my voice rising a half register in exasperation. “I know you and Mrs. Whitby have been in each other’s hair, but I’m not part of that fight. I want to know where he kept his papers. I want to know what you noticed when you came in. Maybe someone was here stealing them, or maybe he kept them someplace else.”
She began to pick up the pieces of glass. “The door. It wasn’t locked right. I thought, maybe he left in a hurry and forgot to put the deadbolt on, but he was a careful man, careful and saving, you know, because he didn’t make a lot of money at that magazine, and what he made he spent on this house, this house and that dancer he was so crazy about. But I never came here once all the years I’ve been working for him and found only the one lock on.”
I nodded. So someone had been in here. “Did you ever find anyone here with him when you came in? Or signs of a lover?”
“He was a man. He had a man’s normal instincts.”
I looked at her speculatively. She wasn’t that old, and beneath her frown and ostentatious bustle she wasn’t unattractive, but when I put out a tentative question she bristled. She’d been interested and he hadn’t? It might explain her aggressive possessiveness when the Whitbys arrived this morning. Something to ask the neighbors, whether anyone had come and gone at odd hours. An angry lover could have keys. She-he-could have driven Marcus Whitby out to a remote place to die.
In the meantime, I went through the motions here, asking Rita Murchison to come with me to the second floor to see what was out of place. She opened the drawers and cupboards Amy Blount and I had already inspected, but all she could tell me was that the stack of notebooks he usually had on his desktop was gone.