Critical Mass

by Sara Paretsky

  Several people appeared in the doorway, shouting out confused questions. I stuck the Smith & Wesson inside my waistband at the small of my back.

  “Someone was breaking into my car out there,” I said. “When I called out, they dropped their crowbar and took off.”

  My fellow residents streamed past me, looking for damage to their own cars. I went to the front desk, where I had some trouble rousing the night clerk. I explained what had happened, but that in my haste to drive off the intruders I’d locked myself out of my room.

  The clerk wanted proof of my identity, which was also in my room, but she finally agreed to come with me to open the door. She stood in the entrance and told me to describe what was in the room.

  “I left a beige jacket and a rose-colored silk shirt on a hanger in the closet. The briefcase on the desk has my iPad and my wallet in it, and I have the code to unlock the iPad.”

  Now that I’d gotten her up, she was determined to be zealous: she watched me unlock the iPad, which was now playing a Haydn sonata, incongruously enough, before returning to her desk to call the sheriff.

  The night deputies, two men I hadn’t encountered before, met me at my Mustang. By then I was dressed again in my silk shirt and jacket and had my gun in my tuck holster. I’d double-checked all the surfaces in the room for my belongings. I didn’t have much—iPad, phone and Roberta’s Palfry Panthers T-shirt. I packed those into my briefcase, along with odds and ends like my picklocks.

  When I told the deputies what had been taken from the trunk, they didn’t roll their eyes or give the blank stares I’d expected.

  “Oh, yeah. You’re the Chicago detective who found buried treasure at Schlafly’s. How valuable was it, you think?” The taller, older deputy felt compelled to lean into my face, which meant I could read his name badge in the dim light: Herb Aschenbach.

  “I don’t think it was valuable at all,” I said. “It had sentimental meaning for Roberta Wenger because the dresser once belonged to Agnes Schlafly.”

  “Not what we heard,” Herb said. “Talk was about gold.”

  I sighed. “Ms. Wenger said the drawers used to have gold handle pulls. If someone passed that story along I suppose it could have grown into a stack of gold, but all I found were chicken bones, ether cans and tampons.”

  As I’d hoped, the word “tampon” made Herb back away from me. “What were you looking for, anyway? Why did you take the drawers?”

  “I’m not the one who committed a crime here,” I said. “I’m the victim. The punks drove off in a Dodge Charger, in case you have one zooming around the country connected to B-and-E’s.”

  The two deputies looked at each other, startled. They knew the Dodge.

  “You must have been looking for something,” the younger deputy said. “We went and took a look at that pit out back of Schlafly’s. You got it pretty well cleaned out.”

  “Since you know everything I’ve been doing, Jenny Orlick must have told you I’m looking for a young man named Martin Binder. He was at the Schlafly house a few weeks ago. He might have dropped some papers in the pit which could shed some light on where he went next.”

  “Seems like a lot of trouble for not much to me,” Herb said.

  “Hard to argue with that, Deputy, especially since I also have a smashed trunk lock on top of not much. You can talk to Ms. Wenger in the morning, which is right now, come to think of it, and get her version.”

  The night clerk came out through the back of the hotel. “Kyle, I got a whole bunch of nervous guests in there, wanting to know if their cars are going to be vandalized. Can you come talk to them?”

  Kyle and Herb looked at each other, looked at the Mustang, nodded.

  Kyle said, “Yeah, Tina, we’ll be right in. We can’t do anything for you here, Miss. I mean, we could dust the trunk lock for prints, but frankly that’s a waste of time, no matter what they say on those TV shows. We’ll file a report and tell the team to be on the lookout, case anyone hears anything about these drawers. I’m guessing someone who heard the talk at the game last night got carried away, thinking you’d dug up gold, and went and helped themselves to it.”

  Herb added, “We’ll send Jenny Orlick over to Wenger’s in the morning, see if Roberta remembers anything else. How long you fixing to stay here?”

  “Not long, Deputy.”

  “You stop by the station to sign a complaint before you head back to Chicago, okay? And don’t go leaving the jurisdiction without letting us know.”

  “Right you are, Deputy.”

  I watched while the two men followed Tina into the motel. I picked up the crowbar by one end and laid it in the trunk. I doubted it would show any prints or DNA, but you never know. The punks had damaged the lock so badly it wouldn’t stay shut; I had to fasten it with a bungee cord to keep the lid from swinging open.

  Like the deputies, I didn’t think there was any point in doing anything else, such as signing a complaint, or getting permission to leave the jurisdiction. I slipped out the back exit, my lights off, gun on the seat beside me. Only when I was clear of the motel did I consult my iPad for advice on a route to Chicago. I wanted the old state highways and county roads. I was tired, my legs still hurt, I didn’t feel up to driving eighty on the interstate in the dark. I also wanted to make sure I was alone.

  Night creatures skittered away from my headlights, raccoons, foxes, rat-like creatures. Now and then a tractor would rumble across the road to get on one of the tracks alongside the fields. Sunrise was still two hours away, but lights were on in many of the farmhouses I passed.

  I didn’t think my punks were looking for buried treasure; I thought they wanted the bleached-out documents Roberta and I had found. Judy Binder and her son had argued over some papers, Roberta said: she’d watched them through her binoculars, but she hadn’t heard what they said. Invaders had torn Kitty Binder’s house apart, searching for—what?

  I shifted uneasily in my seat, rubbing my driving leg. Was I ruling out the obvious because I wanted the subtle? Judy and Martin could have been fighting over her drug habit. They could have been fighting because he was furious that she’d rather be with crack and meth than him. Ricky Schlafly, that death had all the earmarks of a falling-out among drug dealers. And drug dealers were a wild, unstable bunch. Roberta and Frank Wenger had said there were a number of drug houses in the county. Other meth makers would have heard about my find at the football game: they could easily have believed a tale of buried treasure.

  Even if that was the correct analysis, it didn’t answer one big question. Where had Martin Binder gone?

  24

  PAST DUE

  DAWN WAS JUST BREAKING when I reached my apartment on Racine. Early to bed, early to rise, leaves me cranky with rings under my eyes.

  Mr. Contreras was up, puttering around his kitchen. I described yesterday’s drama to him, including the theft of the dresser drawers. It was a long narrative because the old man kept interrupting, partly to see if I was all right, partly indignant I hadn’t taken him along for protection.

  When we’d finally hashed it over as much as I could stand, he went with me to the lake. I swam out to the far buoy with the dogs and floated in the water for a time, watching the gulls chase each other, until I got so cold I had to swim back at high speed. In a way, the hour in the water was more refreshing than a night in bed. Only in a way.

  Back at the apartment, while Mr. Contreras and I shared a plate of French toast, we argued over the theft: Had it been dopeheads in search of gold, or someone more sinister in search of documents?

  I thought again of Jari Liu’s slogan about God and data. The only data I had were two stolen drawers, a passbook to a bank that might have been in Lincolnwood on Chicago’s northwest edge, and a report from an Office of Technical Services.

  I helped Mr. Contreras do the washing up, then went to my own apartment to do some work on my lapto
p. The Department of Commerce website didn’t list an Office of Technical Services. Roberta and I might have misinterpreted the headers; after all, we’d merely been guessing.

  I shut my eyes, slowed my breathing, tried to picture the redacted, bleached page. Bombs had been mentioned. A chemical engineer. A redacted name hadn’t witnessed something. A city of Inns. I couldn’t remember anything else.

  I looked up “City of Inns.” Many towns advertised themselves as “cities of inns,” but Innsbruck popped up on the second results page. Innsbruck is in Austria. Martina Saginor, Lotty, Kitty Binder and Martina’s student Gertrud Memler had all come from Austria. And during the Second World War, according to the young librarian at the University of Chicago, the Nazi war machine had tried building nuclear reactors near Innsbruck. I liked it.

  I found an article on the Innsbruck weapons site in the Journal of Science and War. In 1940, no one knew if you could have a self-sustaining chain reaction, which apparently was essential for turning atoms into bombs. Physicists like Heisenberg in Germany and Fermi in America built nuclear reactors to see if they could create a chain reaction. As we all know now, Fermi could do it; Heisenberg couldn’t.

  Japan and England had also been trying to build a bomb; our history books never mentioned that. Every war room everywhere wanted the most devastating way to obliterate as many women, children, men, dogs and trees as they could.

  Herta Dzornen said Martina had been dragooned into weapons work during the war, probably at Innsbruck. I knew I was creating a monumental pyramid without straw, but I wondered if Martin filed a Freedom of Information request about Martina. No, that didn’t make sense; she died before the war ended. The U.S. wouldn’t have files on her. If anything, Martin would have searched for her in the Holocaust Museum. He must have been looking for Gertrud Memler, Martina’s Nazi student-turned-anti-nuke-activist—he’d learned about her in the book about the Cold War.

  But if the Commerce Department document was something Martin had gotten through the Freedom of Information Act, he wouldn’t have been fighting his mother over it. Unless he brought it with him to show her, to demand what she knew about Memler or Martina. I could see Kitty, bitter toward both Martina and science, stonewalling her grandson. He’d had a last-ditch hope his mother might know something, drug-addled though she was.

  More guesswork. I had a whole five pages in the Binder file devoted to “useless speculations.”

  The bank book was more promising. It had been an old-fashioned passbook, created long before the Internet. I can still remember going every week to the Steel City Bank and watching my mother carefully push across the stacks of quarters she’d earned from giving music lessons. The teller would count them and enter the amount by hand in her passbook. My favorite part was the red date stamp that went next to the entry.

  An old passbook from a Lincolnwood bank could have been Kitty’s, stolen by Judy. It was possible that Benjamin Dzornen had set it up to buy her silence back when she was creating such a stink on the South Side. The notion was a stretch, but a tempting one.

  I put on a pair of good trousers, a knit top and a red-and-gold scarf and headed out. My first stop was the garage on Lawrence Avenue I use. Even though it was Sunday, Luke Edwards, who must be the most lugubrious mechanic on the planet, was in the shop, taking a transmission apart. He looked at the trunk as if I personally had taken a crowbar to the lock.

  “Why’d you go and do that, Warshawski?”

  “Just one of those fits that overtakes me sometimes, Luke, where I feel like taking an ax to my ride. How long do you reckon to fix it?”

  “Depends how long it takes me to find the replacement parts. You know these older Mustangs, the fittings are different, can’t just order them from Ford.”

  “But you’ll shake a few branches and see what falls out. I can’t lock the car with the trunk open. Any way to set the alarm on the door with the trunk lock broken?”

  Luke gave me a withering look. “Of course not, Warshawski: anyone can get into the car through the trunk, so what would the point be? I’ll call you next week. It ain’t the car your old Trans Am was, but I’d still like to see you take better care of it.”

  I grinned ferociously, in lieu of popping him one, and drove down to the Gold Coast. I called Herta Dzornen Colonna’s apartment while sitting in my car across the street from the entrance.

  “Ms. Colonna: it’s V. I. Warshawski. We met last week.”

  “Met? You call barging in on me ‘meeting me’?”

  “I’m about to barge in on you again. I know that your father created a savings account for Kitty Binder. Can we talk about that?”

  She was silent for a moment, then whispered, “What is it you want? Are you trying to get money out of me?”

  “No, ma’am. All I want is information. Can I come upstairs to talk to you in person? Or do you want to continue this on the phone?”

  “You’re outside my home,” she cried. “Oh, don’t do this to me!”

  “Ms. Colonna, I don’t want to torment you, and I certainly won’t broadcast your secrets to the world, but if you told me what really went on between your father and Kitty Binder, it might put some old ghosts to rest.”

  “Nothing went on between my father and Kitty Binder.”

  “What about the bank account in Lincolnwood?”

  “How did you know—oh, what are you doing?”

  “I’m coming upstairs, ma’am. This is too difficult a conversation to hold over the phone.”

  I put my car flashers on and walked over to her building entrance. The doorman called to announce me, most unwillingly: my careful grooming didn’t make me look any more trustworthy than I had on my first visit.

  Herta was waiting in her doorway, one hand at her throat. She was using a cane, which she leaned on heavily as she led me to the living room—sighing equally heavily. When she had carefully lowered herself onto the white couch, I again pulled the tubular metal chair over near her.

  “When did you find out about the bank account?” I asked.

  “When Papa was dying,” she whispered. “I used to go down to Hyde Park two or three times a week to help Mama. Julius was useless, you’ve seen him, by that time he was just sitting in his bedroom playing the guitar and smoking—marijuana. He wouldn’t even come down the stairs to help Mama lift Papa to change his sheets.”

  She was letting herself be distracted by old grievances, shying away from the hard part of the narrative. I sat very still, not an intrusive person at all, just one of her photographs, listening, not judging.

  “One morning when Mama was at the grocery, Papa told me he needed my help. He wanted me to look after the bank account, but not to let Mama or Julius or my sister Bettina know about it.”

  “Did he say why it had to be a secret?”

  “He was afraid if I talked to Julius, he’d try to get the money, and he thought Bettina would tell Mama. She suffered so much from all those rumors about Käthe Saginor, he didn’t want to add to her pain. Better that she think she would never be bothered by the Saginors again.”

  “Did he tell you why he’d set up the account?” I asked. “If the stories about him and Martina Saginor were merely rumors . . .” I let my voice trail away suggestively.

  “Of course they were just ugly stories,” Herta said, indignant. “He felt terrible that Martina had been stuck in Austria during the war. Papa said that after the war, when he learned what had become of Martina Saginor, he owed it to her memory to do something for her daughter. I protested that he owed Käthe nothing: she was married, she had her own life. And if Mama found out, she would have thought all the rumors were true, you know, what the neighbors said when Käthe came to the house back in 1956. But he said that was how he got Käthe to leave us alone, by giving her some money.”

  Maybe that’s what Dzornen told his daughter Herta, but I didn’t think it was true, and I
wasn’t convinced she believed it, either.

  “Was the bank account for Kitty herself or for her child?” I asked.

  “He gave Käthe a little money when she first showed up, so she and her husband could afford a down payment on a house, then when she had her baby, Papa put more in the account so Judy Binder could go to university, or get business training, whatever she wanted when she grew up. He could only put a little money in every quarter, otherwise Mama would have noticed, so he wanted me to promise to keep adding to the account. He gave me the account number and deposit slips. You know, it was before ATMs and everything.”

  “And did you keep putting money into the account?” I asked.

  Herta was twisting the cane round and round, digging a hole in the Chinese carpet at her feet. “No,” she finally whispered. “Stuart—my husband—he said Kitty was a blackmailer. Stuart sent one of his law firm’s investigators over to see what the Binders were like, so that we could decide whether Judy was worth supporting. Judy was thirteen but she was already, well, precocious if you know what I mean.”

  I hadn’t heard the word used in that way for a long time. Precocious as in sexually mature for her age, not musically or mathematically.

  “And we had three children, that wasn’t cheap, braces, you know, college education.”

  “So you took the money out of the account and used it for your own children?” I tried hard to keep anger and judgment out of my voice, but I must not have done a good job because Herta flinched.

  “It was our money,” she cried. “Papa was taking our money and giving it to Kitty and her drug-addict daughter. And then the daughter found the passbook. She actually came down to the Greenwood Avenue house when Mama was still alive! It was terrible—she was drunk or on drugs. Mama called the police, she called me, it was such a shock, the first she knew about Papa stealing money out of her own children’s mouths. And Julius, he was still living at home, and he was almost forty by then! He asked if Mama thought it was worth murdering Kitty’s daughter. He sat and laughed and said he could do it for a fee.”