“He tried to take away her voting shares in the company,” Alison whispered. “We were having a big argument about that while the trial was going on. He was so angry that she was testifying against him. It was horrible in court. Daddy sort of apologized to me, but he was in a red rage, you know, and he kept telling me it was my fault for trying to fight him when he only wanted what was best for me and for the company.”
Her puffy eyes filled with tears. Alison had been subpoenaed by the state, which treated her gently. My ex-husband’s team had been less forgiving. If they’d painted her mother as an embittered drunk, they tried to make Alison look like a greedy young woman grasping for control of a fifty-billion-dollar business.
“Anyway, Daddy’s lawyers were trying to tie up her shares, but I don’t think they’ve been able to. Mother gave up the Lake Bluff house as part of their divorce, not that it had become final before—” Her mouth worked. “Last week, you know, when Daddy—but, anyway, Mother gave up the house.”
“Who inherits it?”
Alison shook her head. “I don’t know. Mother, if she hadn’t signed anything. Or me, I guess.”
I could see why the cops were interested in Constance Breen. She hadn’t seemed like the kind of person who wanted to be involved in a bitter fight over assets, but perhaps her husband’s attitude drove her into a more vindictive position. Or perhaps her friend Leila pushed her there.
“I’m sorry to talk to you about it clinically, Alison, but the shot that killed your father—that took a really skilled marksman. Is your mother that good a shot?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know!” she cried. “I thought I knew my father, but it turned out he was like some kind of monster, killing people who got in his way. So how can I say what I know about my mother?”
“Is that what you want me to do? Find out what your mother is really like?”
“If she turns out to be just as monstrous”—Alison tore at her cuticles, her voice a hoarse whisper—“how can I know what I might be like? Maybe I’m just as able to switch from nice girl to killer.”
“Alison, you’re true blue and disaster isn’t going to change that,” I said, “but I’ll find out what I can.”
4
Bobby Mallory is a police captain, with a secretary and a couple of sergeants at his beck and call, but in his rookie year, he was partnered with my dad. The two remained close until my father’s death: my Jewish mother was godmother to Bobby’s eldest Catholic daughter; Bobby was one of Gabriella’s and then Tony’s pallbearers.
When I started as an investigator, it felt like a slap to him—Bobby didn’t like to see women in nontraditional roles. He’s changed with the times, though, seen women become good police officers, seen me land on my feet in tricky situations, and the affection he felt for me because of my parents has lost its angry edge. Still, my arrival in his office at police headquarters didn’t make his face light up with joy.
“You must be in worse trouble than usual if you’re coming to see me,” he growled.
I bent down and pecked his cheek. “I’m not in trouble at all. I’m here as a very virtuous citizen giving you a heads-up. Alison Breen has hired me to find out what role, if any, her mother played in Cordell Breen’s death.”
“I knew the investigation could only get worse,” Bobby said. “I don’t suppose I could ask, plead, beg, or order you to tell Ms. Breen that we have the situation well in hand and no one will railroad her mother?”
I couldn’t help laughing, but I treated the question as rhetorical. “Is Constance Breen a person of interest? Can she shoot well enough to get one shot into a man from five hundred yards away?”
“How do you know the distance?” Bobby demanded.
“I figured the shooter had to be in the parking garage; there’s no place to take cover on the street, and there must be a hundred surveillance cameras on that stretch of California. Did you find the shell casing?”
“Every punk in America watches too many NCIS and CSI episodes; they all know they’re supposed to pick up their shell casings after they’ve murdered someone. But I don’t suppose it will derail the investigation if you know that the bullet came from an older hunting rifle, not from a fancy assault weapon. The shooter was either lucky or very good. It was a hell of a shot. Heck of a shot.” He corrected himself hastily: he’s accepted the fact that I’m a competent investigator, but not that I can listen to vulgarity and swearing without collapsing.
“And is Constance Breen that kind of shooter?” I asked.
“Hard to believe, but she won medals at the gun club she and Breen belong to. Belonged to. Of course, killing a man is different from hitting skeet, but shooting at a distance, you don’t see the blood or hear the lungs groaning for air, you could imagine it was one more clay target.”
“Does she have the weapon?”
“Her father did,” Bobby said. “It was a Mannlicher. Forensics says an antique, probably dating to the 1920s. Kind of thing Hemingway liked to carry around Africa.”
My eyes widened: Bobby had never struck me as a reader. He saw my expression and made a face. “That’s what the forensics chief said, not me. You could kill a lion with it, and Constance Breen’s father bagged his share.”
“So Constance Breen came from money as well as marrying it?”
“Her family was old money that they lost. It’s like something out of some crappy novel or movie: Cordell Breen the brash millionaire, Constance Hargreave the artistic last descendant of someone who came on the Mayflower or the Pinta or something. Breen’s dough let Constance’s father spend his life drinking whiskey and killing endangered animals. He died, oh, maybe ten years ago, and she got the gun collection because that was all Hargreave had to leave her.”
“You got enough to make an arrest?”
Bobby scowled at a fat file on his desk. “She’s a better candidate than anyone else we’re looking at. Breen was playing hardball over the divorce, and he was a smart and quick and dirty fighter. Your ex, of course, was a big help in that department. You never collected any alimony, did you?”
I made a face. “We didn’t have assets to parade for Global Entertainment’s benefit. But I didn’t want his alimony.” I’d like to think I could have beaten Dick in court, but probably not over a divorce settlement. Anyway, I hadn’t been able to beat him over Cordell Breen.
Bobby gave a half-smile: I guess he was entitled to a little smirking at my expense. “So Breen, or your ex, was able to shut down a lot of Constance’s accounts. Of course, she still has a few million, enough to buy a stable of her own legal advisers. And the kid, if she likes her mom, can bail Constance out to any tune you want to name.”
Meaning, justice may be blind, but she has an acute sense of touch: she knows when she’s about to bump into the kind of influence that makes a cop’s life hard.
When I got up to go, Bobby said, “You know something that will make us look in a different direction?”
“No. I know nothing. Where does Constance say she was when her husband was killed?”
“She was waiting for someone to pick her up. Potty-mouthed woman who won’t leave her side. Constance can’t prove it, but we can’t disprove it. No witnesses except the potty-mouth, who we figure would say anything.”
“You’re sure Cordell was the intended target?” I asked.
Bobby’s blue eyes narrowed to slits in his round face. “You do know something. What?”
“I really know nothing, Bobby. Just—the street’s lousy with drug dealers coming to see if their homeys are ratting them out. Someone could have missed, that’s all.”
“Be your age, Vicki,”* Bobby said. “Someone who could nail Breen over the heads of eleven camera crews and God knows how many flashing strobes was not missing a shot directed at a Latin King. If Breen had had a bull’s-eye painted between his eyes, she couldn’t have done better.”
5
I called Murray from my car. “I want to see all the video footage you have of the street.
”
“Any particular street, oh She Who Must Be Obeyed?”
“California Avenue, the day of Breen’s murder.”
“The cops have already subpoenaed copies and come up dry. What do you know that they don’t?”
“I’ve been told someone from the Cubs pitching rotation had a good enough aim to hit Breen. I don’t believe it, but I want to see if any of their starters were outside the courthouse.”
He was silent, thinking it over, wondering what I was hiding, but he finally agreed to show me the footage. “But I get to watch it with you. And you feed and water me.”
Murray drank Holstens, five bottles. I primly sipped Black Label. Murray objected that the bag of pretzels I set on my office worktable didn’t constitute food, but I told him I didn’t want grease or sauce on my big computer screen.
We looked at footage for two hours, slowly, stopping sometimes for a frame-by-frame view. Murray’s camerawoman had shot a lot of street footage while the crews waited for word to filter down from the jury room. Bobby was right—there was no sign of Constance Breen on the street.
The courtroom had been filled with senior staff from Breen’s company as well as families of people whose death Cordell Breen had helped engineer. I watched the head of one of the software divisions come down the stairs. Neighbors of Martin’s grandmother, who raised him, came to the trial. Members of the Dzornen family turned out in force—Herta, whose father had been a Nobel Prize–winning physicist, and who thought young Martin was trying to blackmail her: her father’s prize had been based on Martin’s great-grandmother’s work, which he’d never acknowledged. Herta’s children and grandchildren had flown up from Arizona, eager to protect the family name.
I saw Herta in court with her family every day of the trial: her younger brother Julius had grown up with Cordell Breen. He’d been one of the people killed in Cordell’s ferocious campaign to protect his billions. The day of the verdict, she seemed to have been alone. At least, on the video footage we were watching, she came out of the courthouse alone, walking slowly with the aid of her cane, her white hair sticking out around her head like dandelion pollen. Perhaps the daughter had gone to get the car to spare her mother a longer walk.
The woman I’d seen slowly pushing a walker up California Avenue the afternoon of the shooting had also had a corona of white hair.
“What are you staring at?” Murray demanded. “Herta Dzornen? You think someone with fingers like that could aim a rifle and pull a trigger?”
“I think you missed a chance to get a human-interest story out of her when you were fleeing the scene right after the murder.”
“You fled with me,” Murray said.
“Yep, so I did.”
We watched the cops push the camera crews back from the foot of the steps as the doors opened for Cordell Breen and his entourage. He stood at the top of the stairs in his ten-thousand-dollar custom tailoring, looking energetic, youthful, a man ready to go back to the boardroom and make new history in electronics, not like a ruthless killer in his seventies.
He exchanged some kind of joke with my ex-husband. The lawyers all laughed in a polite fakey way, and then Breen pushed them away and stood alone on the stairs for a moment, straightening the knot in his tie, looking straight at the cameras. When his face exploded, it happened almost in silence: the cameras were trying to pick up his conversation with his lawyers, and so the mikes didn’t catch the bullet and the recoil. Bobby was right: no one else could possibly have been the target.
“So what did you learn?” Murray demanded.
“It’s horrible to see a man die in front of your eyes. That image will stay in my head a long time.”
“But who killed him?”
“The cops think it was Constance Breen, but she must have left by a side door. The deputies will do that to keep someone out of the camera range, you know.”
“I know they’re looking at Constance’s bank accounts, and they’re inspecting the little arsenal she inherited from her old man. Tiger Hargreaves, that was what they used to call him.”
“‘They’ being all the hearty boys at his club who liked the spectacle of beaters shoving a tiger in front of a man with an arsenal.”
Murray glared at me. “Why do you have to be such a frigging killjoy all the time?”
“I didn’t like Cordell Breen, but that shot, the kill shot. That’s hard to watch. I guess the TV crews were kind of beaters, too, weren’t they, setting him up for someone with a rifle.”
“That is the fucking last straw, Warshawski. I did not lose a night’s sleep from covering his death, and I’m not going to have you guilt me into it now.”
“I wasn’t trying to,” I said. “I was thinking of something else and that came out.”
It wasn’t much of an apology and I didn’t blame Murray for stalking away in a major huff. When he’d left, I stared for a long time at the whisky in my glass. The cops were taking Constance Breen seriously as a candidate for murder. The evidence might be unsatisfactory, but people have been tried on less evidence than owning the right caliber rifle. They’ve been convicted on even less than that.
I swallowed the rest of the Black Label and drove over to the Gold Coast, to Herta Dzornen’s building. The doorman knew me by sight and didn’t like me, but when he called to announce me, Herta told him I could come up.
“The walker,” I said when we were sitting in her living room. “It had that little box thing that you can sit on. That’s where you put the rifle after you’d shot Breen, but where did you park the walker during the trial?”
She kneaded her hands, the gesture she and her half sister Kitty had in common. “How did you know?”
“I saw you pushing it up California, after they blocked off the street, but you came out of the courthouse just using your cane.”
“They inspect everything when you go in,” she said. “I knew I’d never get it past the metal detectors. I left it in the parking garage, chained to a railing with a bicycle chain up on the fifth floor. I thought it would be an omen: if someone stole it while I was in the courthouse, then Breen was intended to live. If it was still there, then, well, the opposite.”
“Where did you learn to shoot?”
Herta looked at me for a long pause, then said, “My mother’s father had been an officer in the German Army during the First World War. He taught my mother to shoot using his military rifle, and she taught me. It’s a Mannlicher; we brought it with us when we had to flee Vienna. Even after a century, it still handles beautifully. It’s Greek made, actually, not German, but the machining is perfect.”
“Why?” I asked. “I didn’t think you cared that much about your brother.”
Her mouth worked. “I cared about him deeply. How he was before Cordell Breen destroyed him, I mean. You don’t know what he was like—a sensitive joyous boy. He was passionate about science and music, and then he became a shell of himself.
“When you told me what the Breens had done, how they’d forced Julius to be part of their lies and murders, I thought my heart would break. And I thought, this one time, Cordell won’t succeed, I was sure he would be found guilty, but as the trial progressed, I could see that the jury didn’t like the state’s attorney, or didn’t trust her.
“I thought I would have one chance, that it would be too hard to find him in the open any other time than when he left the courthouse. I told my daughter I needed to hear the verdict alone, that I would be too upset to be with anyone if he were found not guilty.
“I left as soon as the foreman started saying ‘not guilty.’ When you’re old and disabled, no one looks at you. I made it into the garage and—it was amazing to me. I hadn’t been hunting since we moved to Chicago—we used to shoot when my father was at Los Alamos, my mother and sister and I used to go up into the mountains and shoot at small game, and I became very good. It was so strange, picking up the Mannlicher again, feeling it come to life. I cleaned it, found some shells, but I only needed one. And then I took i
t apart again, put it in the little sitting box of the walker, and became an invisible old woman again. The police were searching handbags and briefcases, but they wouldn’t bother an old lady with a walker.”
She blinked away tears. “Poor Julius. My poor brother.”
We sat in silence for a time. She finally wiped her eyes with a lace handkerchief.
“What will you do now?” she asked.
“I am an officer of the court. I cannot commit or condone perjury, but I am also not required to repeat everything I know. However, Constance Breen is under danger of arrest for her husband’s death. If you saw her, or think you saw her, get into a car and drive off before he was shot, I want you to tell this to the police. You’re an old invisible woman, you say, but you also have considerable stature in this city because of your father’s fame. They will listen to you.”
Herta blinked at me. “And then what will you do?”
“And then—I will spend a long time wondering if I’ve made a terrible mistake.”
I drove from Herta’s apartment to the lake and watched the black water break up and refract the moonlight. It is always best to follow the law in its confining constructs. If you start thinking you’re the equivalent of God, entitled to mete out justice as it suits your own interpretation, you leave a swath of destruction behind you.
I finally drove home, but I didn’t sleep much that night, nor for many nights to come. Alison Breen tried to pay me when the cops told her that her mother was no longer a person of interest. I couldn’t take the money. A few weeks later, there was a small paragraph in the paper, announcing Herta Dzornen’s death. The story recounted her family’s history in fleeing Europe, her father’s prize. I can’t say that brought me much comfort, either.
Note
Critical Mass (2013) was my homage to my husband and his friends’ and mentors’ work in their quest to find the heart of the atom. All the characters in this story were involved in the novel, but a lot of readers wrote to say they were unhappy that Cordell Breen walked away unscathed. I wrote this story as a present to these readers. “Is It Justice?” was first published in Suspense Magazine, December 2013.
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