Critical Mass

by Sara Paretsky

  “Very likely,” I agreed: whoever had torn that house apart had been way more savage than Ricky’s poor dead dog.

  “Ricky Schlafly was bad news from day one, but I went to school with his older sister. She died of breast cancer three years back, or the house would have gone to her. I hate to think of how she’d feel, knowing Ricky had lain out in that field all day getting eaten by crows.”

  The pipe cleaner broke in her fingers, but she kept twisting the ends around. “All day long I kept looking over there. One time I saw this woman—” She broke off and the flush returned to her face. “That was you, wasn’t it? I thought you looked familiar. You have any idea what happened to that gal who’d been living there, the one who took off in the SUV? She didn’t go through town, or someone would have told us.”

  “She drove up to Chicago, to a drug house on the city’s West Side,” I said, “but she ran from there to her mother’s place. Whoever was after her caught up with her there. They shot her, but she’s still alive. Her mother, Martin Binder’s grandmother, died protecting her.”

  Roberta’s face softened in pain. “The things we do for our kids, even when they keep breaking our hearts. I know that story, beginning to end.”

  “Did you see Martin over there?” I asked, pointing toward the Schlafly place.

  She picked up a fresh pipe cleaner and started to wrap a piece of gauze around it. “I may have done. So many kids came and went there, buying drugs, you know, that I didn’t pay attention to one more than another. Still, a couple of weeks ago, about the time you say this Martin disappeared, there was a kid out there got into a fight with the woman. Judy, you say?”

  “Physical fight?”

  “Not exactly. They were arguing over some papers, an old envelope full of papers. He was pulling them away from her and she was hanging on to them. He ended up with them and took off.” She paused. “I don’t know if it’s any use to you, but a couple of ’em fell into that waste tank they’ve got dug out back.”

  I groaned. The last thing I wanted to do was climb into that pit. Besides which, after thirty minutes in that stew, paper would dissolve. Would anything be left after fifteen days?

  After watching me silently for a moment, Roberta put down her pipe cleaners and left the market. She came back about ten minutes later. She was carrying a bundle that opened up into a set of waist-high waders, arm-length rubber gloves and an industrial face mask.

  “We used to keep cows, until it got to be too much work. I kept these from when I went in to clean out the waste tank. You’re a bit taller than me, but these things are built generous.”

  I thanked her, without feeling any real gratitude. Still, I knew if I didn’t go into the pit, I would be haunted back in Chicago by the thought that I’d let an important clue go begging. I tried on the waders, just to be sure. She was right, they were built to cover layers of clothes and shoes. They went on over my jeans and running shoes with room to spare.

  When I carried them out to my car, Frank was waiting for me. “You know how to drive a stick? Figured you would. Take the pickup. It’s got a winch, case you need to haul up something heavy.”

  I looked at him narrowly. “You got something specific in mind, like a body?”

  He laughed, a rusty, hooting sound. “Nah, but Bobbie saw ’em throw chairs and such in there from time to time. They’d get high, who knows what they thought it was funny to toss around.”

  He climbed into the passenger seat of the pickup and watched while I fumbled with the clutch and the stick. The truck was old and the gears were well worn. Even so, I killed the engine a couple of times before I got it going.

  Frank rode with me to the end of the drive. I thought he was checking on me, but he wanted to show me a path across the field that lay between his house and Schlafly’s.

  “Not that it matters, with the corn crop destroyed by the drought, but there’s always a track alongside a field so you can drive equipment across without hurting the crop. You follow that, you’ll get to Schlafly’s back fence. The hole the killers cut is wide enough to drive the truck through.”

  He pulled an old receipt out of the glove compartment and found a pencil stub. “This here’s my cell phone. You’d best not drive the truck into the tank, since it’s got my winch on it. If you get in any other kind of trouble, give me a shout. Leave me the keys to that little Mustang of yours and I’ll drive over to get you.”

  I bumped the truck along the track he’d pointed out and drove through the hole in the fence behind the Schlafly house. Before putting on all the heavy rubber gear, I pulled out my gun and made a tour of the house. I’m not often afraid, or even very squeamish, but it took a lot of effort to go inside. I was sweating by the time I’d forced myself over the kitchen threshold, but the Rottweiler’s body was gone. All I found were cockroaches and a pair of starlings who’d taken advantage of the open door to build a nest on the light fixture in the front room.

  I did up the bolts to the front door so that anyone wanting to interrupt me would either have to break down the door or come up the side to the hole in the fence. Leaving my gun on the floor of the truck, with the door open next to me, I pulled on the waders, hooked the suspenders around my neck so the pants would stay up, and pulled on Roberta’s industrial shoulder-high gloves.

  The drought had mostly dried the bottom of the pit, which was about the only good thing to be said about it. I kept on the high waders, though, not just because my feet still sank into sludge patches, but to protect my legs from the ether, Drano and the rest of the revolting soup.

  Whoever had given the crime scene a once-over had tossed the murdered Rottweiler into the pit along with the towel I’d used to cover him. Insects had eaten most of the flesh; fur and bones fell out of the grappling hook as I tried to use Frank’s winch to lift him.

  “I’ll bury you later,” I promised him. “Even if you did go for Frank Wenger’s throat, you were only trying to please the people you were unfortunate enough to love.”

  I’d forgotten to bring my water bottle from the Mustang. After an hour in the September sun, I was thinking more about water and less about the stink and the toxins I was handling.

  As the morning wore on, I pulled out enough empty jugs and ether canisters to fill a large tarp that I’d found under the porch. As Frank said, the Schlafly menagerie had also tossed in chairs (two), two-by-fours (eleven), beer kegs (three) and dressers (one).

  I kept cooling my head and neck under a garden hose, but I couldn’t bring myself to drink any water connected to the meth house. Around one-thirty, I took off Roberta’s gear and drove the truck into Palfry. I stopped at a convenience store on the outskirts of town for two gallon jugs of drinking water. I sat in the car, resting, drinking, then remembered Lazy Susie’s BLT. Just what I needed to restore my salt balance.

  The lunch crowd had taken off; only one other person was at the counter.

  “You want that BLT?” Susie asked. “How’s it going at the death pit?”

  “And you know this because I stink like a chemistry lab?”

  “Just showing you that we all know what we’re all up to here in Palfry. You want fries with that or slaw?”

  I chose slaw, not from an obsession with health but because I could imagine the weight of all that starch in my stomach when I went back to work. Susie was right about her BLT: I’d never tasted better. I had a cup of her thin coffee before pushing myself off the stool. Susie gave me directions to Herb’s Hardware, where I bought more tarps and a fine-toothed rake.

  Back at the meth house, I used the rake to cull the bottom of the tank. I brought up a mass of rotted leaves. When I raked through it, I uncovered syringes, cigarette butts, the remains of a dozen or so KFC buckets and pizza cartons and a large collection of condoms, but no documents, at least none in any condition I could recognize.

  And no human bones. All afternoon long, as I’d shifted t
hrough the muck, I’d been terrified that I’d find some trace of Martin.

  I took off the gloves and finished my second gallon of water. My arms and legs were wobbly from exertion and salt loss. Pulling off the waders, I climbed into the pickup, where I tilted the passenger seat as far back as it would go. As I slumped there, my feet up on the dashboard, I figured at least I could head to Chicago knowing that I’d left no condom unturned.

  A blast from a car horn jerked me awake. I remembered where I was and reached reflexively for my gun. Frank and Roberta had pulled my Mustang up the track outside the Schlafly fence. I hastily slid the gun back to the truck floor.

  “You look like the sorriest piece of leftover detective I’ve ever seen,” Frank said. “We came over to see how you were doing. Also, Warren, our boy, is playing football tonight. We need the truck to go watch him, unless you want us to take your car.”

  I swung my legs over the side of the truck and lowered myself gingerly to the ground. My legs still wobbled, but at least they didn’t give way on me. “I’ve raked through that whole sludge heap and I didn’t see anything that looked like the papers Martin fought over with his mother.”

  Frank inspected the three tarps I’d covered. “I’d say you got just about everything that could be got.”

  “They threw this in?” Roberta had walked over to the dresser. “This was Agnes’s piece. She was Ricky and Janice’s grandmother, the lady who left the house to Ricky. This was an heirloom. Her great-grandmother brought this with her when they moved to Illinois in the 1840s, and she always said that it was the grandmother’s great-grandmother who brought it to Pennsylvania from Germany back in 1750 or so. This is terrible. Those beautiful inlays all damaged, and the drawer pulls—they were gold. I suppose Ricky tore them off and sold them and then dumped this in the pit because it wasn’t any use to him anymore.”

  Frank walked over and put an arm around her. “We can take it back with us, see if we can do anything to restore it.”

  He found a blanket behind the driver’s seat of the pickup and placed it on the truck bed. When he lifted the dresser up, the drawers fell out. I lumbered over to help Roberta pick them up. And found paper sticking to the undersides of two of them. I laid the drawers, bottom sides up, out on the baked clay of the backyard and squatted on my sore haunches to inspect them.

  Time with drain cleaner had taken a toll on the paper, but we could see that it was several layers deep. The top layer included fragments of unpaid bills, shreds of an ad for Pizza Hut, bleached-out photos that looked as though they were torn from a porn magazine. Roberta stuck out a hand to pull off the top layer, but I jerked the drawer out of reach.

  “We need something like forceps; otherwise we’ll destroy what’s underneath.”

  Her sandy eyebrows lifted in surprise, but she said, “I’ll drive over to my workshop. Got plenty of little tools there.”

  She climbed into the truck, saw my gun on the floor. “Were you planning on shooting your way through the trash in that pit?”

  I took the gun from her, smiling feebly. “I found Ricky Schlafly’s body, and that poor dog over there. I didn’t want to die in a meth pit.”

  23

  TRUNK SHOW

  ROBERTA’S EXPERIENCE in making miniatures had given her a sure touch with delicate material. Within an hour we had lifted most of the paper from the two drawers and laid it on a clean sheet of plastic that she’d brought from her workshop.

  There were only two items that might have been what Martin and his mother had argued over. One had bonded so tightly to the drawer bottom that we didn’t risk peeling it off, but it looked like the remains of an old savings passbook.

  I held my magnifying glass over it. “The address is something on Lincoln, I think.”

  Roberta looked over my shoulder. “Lincolnwood?”

  “It could be. That puts it close to where Judy Binder grew up. Her passbook, or her mother’s.”

  I thought of Kitty Binder’s outcry over the picture of Martina at the Radium Institute: Judy had stolen it along with Kitty’s pearl earrings and cash. Judy might also have stolen her mother’s savings book and drained the account.

  The other interesting paper was a photocopy of a government document, partly redacted. Roberta and I both hunched over it. The header was from an “Office of Tec . . . al Serv . . . es, Of . . . Ins . . . al,” in the “United St . . . De . . . n . . . Co . . . rce.” The date was illegible.

  “Technical Servers?” I said dubiously.

  “Services,” Roberta suggested. “We get memos from the Department of Commerce, so I’m thinking that’s the third line.”

  I thought that made sense, but neither of us could figure out “Of-Ins-al.” We studied the text together. Between the redaction and the Drano damage, we could only make out bits of it.

  “city of Inns . . . he . . . a chemical engineer . . . duct underground te . . . She was a member . . . if she was to work . . . luded a major bomb . . . orking and living co . . . Nor did [redacted] ever witne . . .”

  Frank coughed. “Kickoff’s in forty minutes, gals. Can you put that aside?”

  Roberta and I got reluctantly to our feet. We folded plastic sheets around the papers we’d loosened, including the redacted document, and laid the packet in one of the drawers to protect it. The drawer with the passbook welded to the bottom I wrapped in a blanket. I placed both in the Mustang’s trunk.

  Roberta protested. “Those were Agnes’s. I’d like to refinish them, find some new drawer pulls.”

  “I’ll get them back to you,” I promised. “I want to take the papers to a forensics lab in Chicago, to see if they can bring more of the letter or the bank book back to life.”

  Roberta frowned unhappily, but Frank put an arm around her. “Bobbie, that chest of drawers would have rotted away if this Chicago detective hadn’t spent a day in the pit. As for you, Detective, you look like the bad side of a dead cow. If you’re planning to drive back to Chicago tonight, you need to think that through a few more times. What you ought to do is find a motel, get a shower. In fact, you ever go to a high school football game?”

  “I played basketball; my cousin played hockey,” I said.

  “Tell you what: you check into the motel other side of town and come watch my boy play against Hansville.”

  When I shut my eyes to think it over, the world started spinning; if I looked even close to how I felt, bad side of a dead cow was a generous description.

  Roberta pulled a T-shirt advertising the Palfry Panthers from her bag. “You borrow that. You can wash it in Chicago and mail it back to me.”

  I took it meekly and followed them into town. Frank honked and pointed at the high school stadium, then to the road leading to the motel. When I’d checked in and showered away the worst of the stench, I longed to lie down and pass out, but Frank and Roberta had more than extended themselves for me today: I needed to drag my weary bones to the football stadium to watch young Warren.

  In the end, I was glad I’d gone. The September air cooled as the sun went down. The crowd was loud but friendly. When I made my way through it to Frank and Roberta, I found I was part of the entertainment.

  In a town suffering from a disastrous harvest, a Chicago detective who had found not just Ricky Schlafly—good riddance, was the general sentiment—but a version of buried treasure was better than a TV crime show. At halftime, while Frank stood in line for pizza, fifteen or twenty friends of the Wengers came by for a firsthand account of digging through the meth pit. Roberta was happy to add the embellishments of the missing gold drawer pulls.

  I stayed long enough after the game for an introduction to their son, Warren. I had dutifully cheered him during the game: he was a middle linebacker who made an interception and caused a fumble. Even though Hansville won on a late field goal, he was a cheerful junior version of his father, checking in with the family before heading out
for burgers with his buddies.

  Back at the motel, I stayed awake long enough to send an e-mail to the Cheviot labs, the private forensic lab I use. I wanted to drop the drawer and the fragment of letter off when I got to the city tomorrow; their Sunday skeleton crew could book them in and keep them safe.

  I tuned the app on my iPad to the Midnight Special, streaming from WFMT in Chicago, which made me feel that I was at home. I fell asleep in the middle of Gordon Bok singing “The Golden Vanity.” The music played through my sleep, and my dreams were pleasant, not the nightmares that had dogged me lately.

  Leg pains were what woke me, shooting across the feet and up the shins. As I massaged my calves, I heard noises in the parking lot. Four-eighteen, an odd time for people to be coming back to their rooms in a town whose bars all closed at midnight on Saturdays. I parted the curtains. Two men were taking a crowbar to the trunk of my Mustang.

  I pulled on jeans and a T-shirt and was in the hall, gun in hand, without bothering to find my shoes. I sprinted down the hall to the door that overlooked the parking lot, pushed it open just enough that I could see the men.

  The two froze briefly, then turned more energetically to my car. I dashed barefoot across the lot, but they had the trunk open before I got to them. They grabbed the drawers and were bolting toward their own waiting car when the papers I’d wrapped in plastic fluttered to the tarmac. I got to them first, but one of the punks ran back and tried to grab them from me. In the tug-of-war, the paper disintegrated.

  I slugged the thug across the jaw with the handle of my gun. He yelled in pain, his hands clutching his face. His partner had gotten into their car and swung it around for him. I tried grabbing him by the shoulder, but he broke free and made it into the car.

  I fumbled in my jeans for my car keys, but I’d left those inside along with my room key and my shoes. My trunk was open and empty. I had caught their car model, a Dodge Charger, but I’d been fighting so hard that I didn’t get the license plate. I was too angry with my own stupidity even to swear.