Critical Mass

by Sara Paretsky

  Herta’s face turned alarmingly red. I squeezed my eyes shut, knowing I shouldn’t blurt out the first thoughts in my own mind: How could you keep pretending after seeing the bank account that Kitty wasn’t your sister? And what happened to all that Nobel Prize money?

  “When was that?” I asked instead. “When Judy was thirteen and already precocious enough to guess something was up with her mother and your father?”

  “Not then, a few years later. Judy found the bank book and tried to get money from the bank. I don’t know how she found out that Papa had put money into the account—I wouldn’t put it past Kitty to tell her she should come down here and ask us for it. Judy came three times, I think it was: that first time, when Mama was still alive, and then when she saw the news about Mama’s death! She showed up at the funeral, oh my God, that was terrible!”

  “Then Martin came, what a month ago? And you thought he was going to pick up where Judy left off.”

  “He kept asking about Martina,” Herta whispered. “What did I know about her work? He was implying that Papa stole work from her! I knew then he wanted me to say the Nobel Prize should have been Martina’s! He was going to demand that we give the prize money to him.”

  “Is that what he said, or what you were scared he would say?”

  “I told him the police would be coming if he said one more word! The idea that Papa would steal, let alone that the ideas of a sewing woman’s daughter were worth stealing!”

  This time I couldn’t stop myself blurting out, “What, the fact that Martina’s mother sewed for a living meant Martina wasn’t capable of creative thought? If your father’s ideas were as embalmed as your own, I imagine he did have to steal from his students.”

  Not surprisingly, that ended our conversation. I tried to regroup, but Herta picked up the phone to call the doorman. I left before he came up to escort me out.

  25

  HIGH SHERIFF AND POLICE, RIDING AFTER ME

  OVER AT MY OFFICE, I tried to piece together what Herta Dzornen had said with what I knew about Martin’s disappearance. When he went to Palfry, he found the bank book, which made Martin visit Herta and Julius Dzornen. Herta said Julius once offered to kill Judy Binder. Had that been a tasteless joke, or was that how Julius afforded the birdseed for all those feeders? Anyway, Judy was still alive, so if Julius was a hitman, he was singularly ineffectual.

  I slammed my pen against the desktop in frustration. It was high time I started paying attention to my other clients. I jotted my notes from Herta into the Martin Binder case file and closed the folder.

  True, it was Sunday, but equally true, I was days behind on my work. Around one-thirty, when I broke for lunch, I remembered that I’d sent an e-mail to the Cheviot labs, telling them I’d be bringing the drawers and the paper in. I left a message on my account manager’s voice mail to say the job was off.

  I stopped a little before six, feeling incredibly virtuous with the amount of work I’d cleared. The most important report, for Darraugh Graham, was done and e-mailed. Most of the others were close to finished. I’d be able to send out invoices on Monday and end September in the black—if I didn’t count the six-figure legal bill I was paying down.

  One of my friends plays on a tag football team on the South Side. On an impulse, before going over to the park, I drove to Julius Dzornen’s coach house. A couple of kids were playing on the swing set, arguing in shrill voices. They stopped to watch me bang on the coach house door: I was a novelty, a visitor to the sullen recluse who lived behind them.

  Julius again took his time answering, but finally opened the door. He was wearing baggy khakis and an old T-shirt, but no shoes or socks. “Herta told me you’d been over there bugging her about the Binder woman’s money. If you think you can get any out of me, you have the power to squeeze blood from a rock.”

  I leaned against the jamb so that he wouldn’t be able to slam the door on me. “Nope. I’m not here about the money. Herta spent all Judy’s money on her kids’ orthodonture and I know you don’t have any. Herta told me you offered to kill Judy because she’d upset your mom so badly. Is that what happened fifty years ago? You killed someone but the detectives never arrested you?”

  Julius’s face turned the color of putty and he swayed. For a moment I thought he might be going to fall over, but he held on to the doorknob.

  “Fifty years ago,” he repeated. “Is that what I said? Maybe I meant sixty. Could have been seventy. I lose count. Fifty years ago, I was a dropout and a loser living in my mother’s house while my two sisters screamed their heads off about finding a job. When our mother died—and believe me, no one ever called her ‘mom’: Ilse definitely was not a ‘mom’ kind of woman. When she died I was disappointed to learn that she wore old-fashioned corsets: I always thought she had an exoskeleton that she’d bequeathed to Herta. I was softer, like our father. Prone to panic in a crisis. I doubt I could have killed Judy Binder, even if Ilse had ordered me to.”

  “Did you think your father stole his Nobel Prize research from one of his students?” I asked.

  Julius gave a crack of unpleasant laughter. “From Martina Saginor, for instance? That would make a fine Dan Brown novel, wouldn’t it, conspiracy, death, Martina disappears so no one can check on who did the work. No. In his youth, Benjamin was a brilliant scientist. The record is there for anyone to see.”

  “Is he the person you killed? Is that what the detectives who never came were supposed to investigate?”

  His face contorted into a terrible sneer. “You could say Benjamin and I killed each other. He wasn’t a Nietzschean Übermensch, and neither was I. When we had to face disagreeable realities, we both collapsed. Unlike Edward and Cordell Breen, who flourished like that famous biblical tree. Tell that to Herta, and Martin, and anyone else who wants to ask. Good night.”

  I moved out of the doorway. He’d pulled himself together; he wasn’t going to crack again, not until I had a better hammer and chisel to attack him with.

  I went over to the park in time to cheer my friend through the final minutes of her football game, which entitled me to join the team for a vegan barbecue. It was past nine when I got home again, as happy as if I’d never heard of Binders or Dzornens or Nobel Prizes.

  Mr. Contreras had been in the pocket handkerchief of a park up the street, giving the dogs their last outing of the day. We walked inside together, but Mitch insisted on pushing past me up the stairs. Peppy joined him, her tail waving like a red flag.

  I called to them sharply, but they didn’t respond. I ran up after them. At the second-floor landing, I managed to step on Mitch’s leash, but he gave a short bark and broke free.

  “You got mice, or a steak or something he’s smelling?” my neighbor said, stumping up behind me.

  The two dogs were at the top by the time I reached the last landing. Mitch hurled himself against my front door, snarling and growling. Peppy began to bark in loud, sharp repetitions: beware, danger!

  “Get downstairs,” I cried. “Call 911. Someone’s in my place.”

  The old man started to argue with me: he wasn’t leaving me to face—

  “Just go, just do it, I don’t want you shot.” I yanked the dogs back.

  My arms were still weak from yesterday’s work. All I did was move the dogs into a potential line of fire. I let the leashes go and the dogs attacked the door again. I stood with my back flush with the wall, gun in my hand.

  On the second floor, the Soongs’ baby began to wail. A newcomer to the building, a woman who sold bar appliances, appeared at the second-floor landing. “Those dogs are a major nuisance to everyone in this building. I’m calling—”

  “Do it!” I shouted. “Call the cops! Someone broke into my apartment; that’s why the dogs are crazy.”

  “Yeah, stop being a pain in the you-know-what,” Mr. Contreras added. “We’d all be dead if the dogs hadn’t—”

 
“Get out of the line of fire,” I screamed at him.

  I pulled my cell phone from my hip pocket to dial 911 myself. “Home invasion.” I croaked out my address, repeating it twice over the dogs’ noise.

  “Stay on the line, ma’am; we’ll get someone there as fast as possible. Keep talking, tell us what’s happening.”

  My door has a steel core. You don’t hear much through it, but over the dogs’ noise, I could tell the locks were being rolled open. I made another desperate grab for the leashes, but I had to drop the phone.

  A gun muzzle appeared through a crack in my door. I backed against the wall again, screaming at Mr. Contreras to get down.

  Mitch broke from me and made another dash at the door. His weight forced it open. The gunman fired, but the shots went wide. Mitch knocked the man to the ground and stood with his forelegs on his chest, his muzzle near the man’s throat. I flung myself in after and squatted with my own gun next to the thug’s head. His eyes were rolling wildly.

  A second man appeared in front of me. “Call off the dog or I’ll shoot him.”

  The downstairs doorbell began to ring.

  “That’s the police,” I said. “You can leave through the back. Or you can kill us all and then let the cops shoot you. Or you can put down your gun and come quietly.”

  “Or you can call off your dog and then look at twenty years in Leavenworth for assaulting a federal officer,” the second thug said.

  “Yeah, right.” I kept my gun pointed at the man on the floor.

  Someone let the cops in. They pounded up the stairs, phones crackling, shouting questions. The woman who sold bar supplies was putting in her furious two cents, Peppy was barking. Mr. Contreras was shouting instructions to the cops. In another instant the room was filled with people in riot helmets and flak jackets. I backed away from the thug on the floor, grabbed Mitch’s leash and managed to haul him off the man’s chest.

  For a moment all was confusion: guns, shouted questions, dogs, neighbors, the Soong baby’s howls. The police made me and the two thugs hand over our weapons and then demanded an accounting.

  “We’re federal agents—” the second thug began.

  “I live here,” I interrupted. “I just got home. My dog sensed an intruder and when the guy on the floor opened the door to shoot us, my dog jumped him and knocked him to the ground. They’re pretending to be federal agents in the hopes you won’t arrest them.”

  “We shot because you were attacking—”

  “Shut up!” I snapped. “You do not break into people’s homes and shoot them when they return home. Not unless you are drug dealers pretending to be Feds. If you are Feds, you produce credentials, and even then you’d damned well better have a warrant, and even then you don’t break in. You wait for the homeowner to return.”

  “Okay,” the police sergeant said. “Let’s take this one at a time. Who is the homeowner?”

  “She is,” Mr. Contreras said. “Like she just told you, she just got home—”

  “Do you live here, sir?” the squad leader asked.

  “On the ground floor, but her and me, we share the dogs, see, and when we got in from their last walk—”

  A woman in the unit came over to Mr. Contreras and asked him to join her on my couch. “Let’s let the sarge sort this out, okay, sir?”

  The sergeant decided to start with the intruders. “What were you doing here?”

  The man who’d been on the floor had joined his partner over by my piano. I saw that they’d opened the back and had been searching in the strings and I felt my blood pressure start to rise.

  “What were you looking for in my piano?” I said. “If you’ve damaged the strings, I don’t care if it’s Janet Napolitano or Pablo Escobar you’re working for, you are paying for every dime of repairs—”

  “Ma’am,” the sergeant said, “I understand you’re angry, but let’s sit down and talk this through quietly.”

  “I want to search the apartment first,” I said. “If they broke down the back door I need to call an emergency service. I also want to see if there’s anyone else lurking in here.”

  The sergeant thought that was reasonable; one of his officers escorted me through my four rooms. I took Mitch with me; every time one of the thugs spoke, his hackles rose. I didn’t think Mr. Contreras could hold Mitch if the dog thought they needed another lesson in manners.

  The goons had pulled my old trunk out of my hall walk-in closet. They’d tumbled music and papers onto the floor, including Gabriella’s hand-marked score of Don Giovanni. Three or four pages had been torn in their carelessness. I blinked back tears of fury and grief.

  In my bedroom they had dismantled my dresser drawers, they’d searched the books on my bedside table. I glanced in the closet. They hadn’t stumbled on the safe behind my hanging shoe holder, that was one mercy.

  In the kitchen they’d dumped ten days’ of recycling onto the floor. I looked at the back door. All the locks were in place. They’d come in through the front, with some pretty sophisticated tools.

  In the dining room, where I use the built-in china displays as bookshelves, they’d pulled off most of the books and left them open on the table. A number had fallen to the floor. I squatted next to the cupboard where I keep my most precious possession, the red wineglasses my mother brought with her when she fled Italy in 1941.

  The glasses were safe; the rest of the wreckage I could deal with. I picked up the books and realized that my work papers were gone.

  “All the papers I was working on at my dining room table are missing,” I said. “I can’t tell at a glance if they’ve taken anything else—the chaos is too horrible,” I told the officer.

  The officer texted the information to her sergeant. We returned to the living room, where we found that the thugs had produced federal credentials.

  The sergeant looked sourly at the two men. “These may be legitimate, but I’m going to call to verify them. You were in here without a warrant and without the homeowner’s knowledge.”

  “We are conducting an investigation connected to our national security. This gives us certain warrantless rights.” This was the thug whom Mitch had knocked over. What a good dog.

  “And among those rights is the right to shoot the homeowner on her return?” It took a major act of will, but I kept my tone conversational.

  “We were acting on information and belief that you have documents that affect our national security.” That was Thug Two.

  “So you broke into my home and ripped up my mother’s music?”

  “We didn’t rip it up, we were looking for documents. It was a logical hiding place.”

  “And then you stole my work papers—”

  “We confiscated them,” Thug Two snapped. He had a nice mop of wavy brown hair that he clearly spent a lot of time tending.

  “Ooh, good one, Curly, confiscation. When I was with the public defender, a lot of my clients had confiscated cameras, jewelry and so on. I wish I’d known that we could have been pleading national security. ‘Your Honor, we held the plaintiff up at gunpoint and confiscated his belongings because we believe his wallet affected national security.’ I still have colleagues in the PD’s—”

  “That’s enough,” the sergeant said. “I don’t know who’s right and who’s wrong here, but even if you two are federal agents, firing a gun in a populated apartment building is a recipe for a disaster. There are babies in this building. There are old people.”

  He got a squawk on his cell phone, exchanged a few words, turned to me. “Looks like they are really federal agents, not scam artists, Ms. Warshawski. Beats me why they don’t have a warrant, but the local federal magistrate ordered us to stand down.”

  He looked at the thugs, or Homeland Security agents as they liked to be called. “You going to give the lady a receipt for those papers?”

  “When it’s an iss
ue of national security with a potential tie to terrorism, we don’t have to have a warrant or give a receipt,” Mitch’s agent said. Moe, for short.

  “I’ll include that in my report,” the sergeant said. “Ma’am, could you give me a list of what papers they’ve taken? If they’re valuable, and they show up somewhere, at an auction or something, we can produce a police report stating they were taken from you during a home invasion.”

  “It’s not a home invasion,” Curly said. “We had—”

  “Yeah, I know, I know,” the sergeant said. “Do you want to tell me how you got access to the lady’s apartment? I looked at the locks. You’d need safecracker tools, not just street-grade picklocks.”

  “Why are you so bent on obstructing our investigation?” Moe asked. “You verified our IDs, you know we have good reason to be here—”

  “That’s what I don’t know,” the sergeant said. “I don’t know why you think this lady’s ma’s music needed tearing apart. I know that this lady’s father trained my dad when my old man joined the force, and that Mrs. Warshawski, her ma, was quite a singer, according to my old man. There wasn’t a better officer in Chicago than Tony Warshawski, ask anyone from the old days. When I was a boy, my dad always quoted him to me: Tony used to say the only end that justifies the means is laziness. A lazy cop is as bad as a bent cop, that’s what Tony Warshawski taught my dad, and I’m betting he taught this lady here the same. Am I right?”

  I sat up straighter, blinking back tears. “Yes, Sergeant.” I’d cheated once on a social studies quiz. When Tony found out, he got me out of bed an hour early every day for a month to run errands for a housebound woman on our street. Your mother and I have been letting you get lazy. You run these errands for Mrs. Poilevsky and you’ll work the lazy out of your system. Don’t let me hear of you cheating a second time.