Even though I reached the Eisenhower at two-thirty, traffic was already heavy; by the time I’d found a place to park, found the right building in the massive shopping-office complex and used a ladies’ room to brush biscuit crumbs from my blouse, I was fifteen minutes late for my meeting. Larry Yosano whisked me straight into the senior partner’s office.
Julius Arnoff was a short, bony man, perhaps in his late seventies, with deep-sunk eyes under hooded lids. He didn’t shake hands with me, just waved Yosano and me to a couple of straight-back chairs on the far side of his desk. “I understand from young Yosano here that you are a Chicago detective? A private detective, not with the Chicago police?”
“That’s correct.”
He produced a cold smile. “You are not the first Chicago detective to be curious about our clients’ affairs.”
“I expect not,” I said. “From what Ms. Geraldine Graham’s been telling me, your clients could have kept an entire bureau of detectives busy.” Larry Yosano sucked in his breath and looked from me to Arnoff in dismay, but the senior lawyer said, “If Mrs. Graham has been confiding in you, then Yosano here can hardly add anything to what you know” “She’s told me fragments, not anything like a whole, coherent story. She’s told me about her battles with her mother, and that her mother…
persuaded her to marry MacKenzie Graham. She’s told me that Olin Taverner was a homosexual. I know that Calvin Bayard suffers from Alzheimer’s and that Renee Bayard is at great pains to keep the world from knowing he’s ill. But a lot of the connecting details are missing.”
“And you hope we’ll tell you what we wouldn’t tell the detectives and reporters who sniffed around here fifty years ago?” His tone was supercilious.
“My concern isn’t with New Solway’s fifty-year-old riff on Peyton Place, but with a couple of contemporary murders. I’m investigating Marcus Whitby’s death: he’s the man who died-“
“I know all about the man who died at Larchmont. Even though the Grahams sold Larchmont Hall, we continue to be involved with the property. I know that Rick Salvi believes the man committed suicide, and that you are out to force us into a murder investigation.”
“When murder has been committed, an investigation is usually a good idea,” I said mildly.
“Not always, young woman, not always,” he snapped.
“I’ve been wondering about that myself.” I assumed a thoughtful expression. “I discovered evidence at Olin Taverner’s apartment yesterday that makes me suspect he may also have been murdered. And yet, I have to ask whether that needs to be investigated. Does it matter that someone hustled an old man off the planet a few months before his time? Do I waste my energy on the death of a man who himself ruined many people’s lives?”
“Olin Taverner began his legal training in Theodore Lebold’s office,” Arnoff said. “He went on to more important matters before I joined the firm, but we have always held him in esteem here.”
“So you think his murder deserves investigation. But that Marc Whitby’s doesn’t.”
“Don’t twist my words, young woman.” Arnoff turned his hooded gaze to Yosano. “What do we know about Mr. Taverner’s death, Larry?” Yosano sat up straight. “Only that Ms. Warshawski found something unusual in his apartment, sir. She was going to explain the situation to me in our meeting this afternoon.”
“And that situation is-?” Arnoff turned back to me.
I leaned back in my chair, legs crossed, trying to establish that I wasn’t a surbordinate. “Someone was in Taverner’s apartment the night he died. That person took pains to cover up his, or maybe her, presence, but nonetheless left telltale traces. I know firsthand that someone broke into the place yesterday-I interrupted him. Unfortunately, he knocked me over and got away. I know Marcus Whitby consulted Taverner last Thursdaya week ago yesterday. And I know Taverner let him see some documents that he kept in a locked drawer. Those documents have been stolen from the apartment. I’m hoping you know what was in them.”
Arnoff slowly shook his head. “Our clients don’t always confide in us. We are the executors, of course, of the Taverner estate.”
“Who are the heirs, since he didn’t leave a family?” I asked. “Several foundations whose work he valued.”
“Including the Spadona Foundation? I wonder how Renee Bayard will feel, seeing her son use money from his father’s old enemy to set a policy agenda she and Calvin oppose.”
Arnoff smiled primly. “If Calvin Bayard had kept better track of his own documents, Edwards Bayard might not be in such opposition to him today.” “Meaning?”
“Meaning all these great families have something they don’t want anyone else to know. I’m sorry I can’t help you with Olin’s papers. I doubt I ever saw those.”
I asked what Arnoff knew about Kylie Ballantine’s connection to Taverner.
He gave his thin, supercilious smile again. “The African dancer? I don’t think it was Olin who had a connection to her.”
“Calvin Bayard, then?” I asked.
“Calvin supported a number of artists. I believe Ballantine was his protegee for a time. Before he married Renee, of course.”
The brief pause he gave before the word “protegee” was supposed to let me know they had been lovers. Everything in this office-in New Solway-was done by innuendo. I wondered how long it would be before young Yosano picked up the same skin-crawling habit.
“Renee Bayard was telling me this morning that Taverner had a bee in his bonnet about the Committee for Social Thought and Justice. There’s a rumor that Calvin Bayard gave them money.” A rumor I myself was just
starting, but he might have been the patron mentioned in the Ballantine archive.
“Oh, Calvin was generous with many left-wing groups in the thirties and forties. There’s never been any doubt where his politics lay. But just because he published known Communists like Armand Pelletier, I don’t think anyone ever seriously believed Calvin was a Communist himself Not even Olin, when he was hounding him back in the fifties. I think they were simply two men who didn’t like each other. Calvin was the flamboyant young success, Olin had to climb his way slowly. And Olin was hampered by the homosexuality you alluded to. By the way, I understand Darraugh Graham hired you to find who his mother was seeing in the Larchmont attic. Did you ever discover who was there?”
I shook my head slowly. Somehow I’d forgotten the original inquiry that had taken me out to New Solway. “Catherine Bayard told me it was her grandfather, that he had a key to the old Graham house.”
Arnoff made a sound like an engine starting in cold weather; I realized after a startled moment he was laughing. “So young Catherine has all the Bayard spirit. One never knows how the next generation will behave with so much wealth available to it.”
“But when I asked Darraugh about it, he became furious.”
“I’m afraid I’m not in Graham’s confidence, young woman; he took his legal affairs elsewhere,” Arnoff said. “He was much attached to his father, however, and Mrs. Drummond’s attitude when MacKenzie Graham died did cause Darraugh to run away that summer. He was something like fourteen or fifteen. Eventually he returned to Exeter to finish his education but I don’t believe he ever returned to Larchmont.”
“Was there something especially difficult about MacKenzie Graham’s death?” I asked.
“All deaths are difficult. But MacKenzie had hanged himself, as I understand it.”
“But why?” Larry Yosano was startled into speaking.
“He was at that age,” Arnoff said. “In my experience, the unhappy of the Earth either learn to live with it by the time they’re fortyfive, or they decide they no longer can make the effort. It was particularly unfortunate that Darraugh found his father’s body. I believe his father didn’t know Exeter had sent him home. MacKenzie was very attached to his son. I doubt he would have killed himself, at least not then, had he known Darraugh was there.”
I tried to digest this. “By Ms. Graham’s account, it was an unhappy household. Why did she and Mr. Graham marry in the first place? And why did they never move into a place of their own?”
“Had you known Mrs. Matthew Drummond, you would have understood the answer to both questions. Mr. and Mrs. MacKenzie Graham both caused their parents considerable anxiety when young, as Mr. Lebold explained the matter to me. Both Mrs. Drummond and Mr. Blair GrahamMr. MacKenzie’s father, that is-thought marriage would settle the two young people down. Of course, when I came into the firm, Mrs. Drummond was sixty-five, but she was still a formidable power. In fact, she refused at the outset to work with-” Arnoff broke off.
“She wouldn’t work with a Jewish lawyer?” I suggested.
“She had old-fashioned prejudices,” he said primly. “When Theodore Lebold made me a partner, a few took their business elsewhere, just as some did when we brought Yosano here into the firm, but most of New Solway saw then, as they do now, that Lebold, Arnoff still has their interests very much at heart.”