Free Blacklist by Sara Paretsky

including due dates. I entered this one in big red letters so I wouldn’t forget.
    Stephanie Protheroe from the DuPage County sheriff’s office had phoned at four-thirty. When I reached her, she said she thought I’d like to know that they’d identified the man I’d found.
    “His name was Marcus Whitby. He was a reporter for some magazine.” I could hear her rustling through pieces of paper. “Here it is: T-square. Someone at the magazine called in an ID when they saw his face on the wire.” “T-square,” I echoed. “What was he doing out in Larchmont?”
    “They either don’t know or won’t say. Lieutenant Schorr tried to talk to Whitby’s boss, but didn’t get anywhere. You know the magazine?”
    “It’s a kind of Vanity Fair for the African-American market-covers a mix of high-profile figures in black entertainment, politics and sports. They usually have a political section, too.” Tessa, my lease partner, has a subscription; they’d profiled her last year in “Forty Under Forty: Brothers and Sisters to Watch.”
    “Did he live out there?” I asked.
    “Uh, his address is somewhere in Chicago.” She fumbled with her notes again. “A street called Giles. Also, we got an autopsy result. He hadn’t been dead long when you found him, maybe an hour or two. And he died from drowning. They’re saying he got himself drunk and went to a place to die where he thought he could be private.”
    “They’re saying? That means they found blood alcohol levels of some alarming height?”
    “I haven’t seen the detailed report, so I can’t tell you that. All I know is, Sheriff Salvi talked to the press this afternoon. I guess it will be on the news tonight. His secretary says he told reporters that Marcus Whitby came all the way out to DuPage County to commit suicide. I thought you’d like to know”
    “Did they do a complete autopsy? Are they giving this a lick and a promise because he was a black man in white superpower country?” Hoarseness made it impossible for me to sound as forceful as I wished.
    “I can only tell you what I’m told. I’m not very high up the chain of command here, but the summary makes it sound like they did check his
    blood alcohol level. And we’d have found him through AFIS, anyway-it turns out he had a sheet. The sheriff slid that into his remarks.”
    I frowned, trying to put a record together with the quiet-looking man I’d pulled from the pond. Although I guess we all look quiet in death; I probably will myself.
    I tried to invest some enthusiasm in my thanks before hanging upProtheroe hadn’t had to call me, after all.
    What had Whitby been doing at the Larchmont estate to begin with? Did the sheriff, or even the New Solway police, care about that question? If the magazine wasn’t saying, did that mean they didn’t know, or that they wouldn’t tell? Maybe Marcus Whitby was thinking of buying Larchmont. Or writing a story about it for T-Square magazine. Or perhaps some wealthy black entrepreneurs had moved onto Coverdale Lane, and Whitby was doing a piece on what it was like to own the house that your mother could only enter as a housekeeper.
    Catherine Bayard could shed light on all these speculations. I needed to talk to her as soon as possible. I wanted to do it right now, this minute, but it was an interview I’d need my best wits to handle; the only thing I was smart enough to know right now was that I couldn’t corner a slippery teenager in my present condition.
    Instead, I returned to Nexis and looked up Marcus Whitby. He ownedhad owned-a house at Thirty-sixth and Giles, where he was the property’s sole occupant. No spouse, no lover, no tenant to share the mortgage.
    I looked up the address on my city map. Bronzeville. The part of Chicago where blacks had been confined when they first started migrating to the city in large numbers after the First World War. After decades of deterioration, the block where Whitby had bought was making a comeback. Black