Critical Mass

by Sara Paretsky

  She pointed to the Land Rover. “Mother told me to take this. The Miata’s mine, and I adore it, but one of you would have to curl up in the trunk. Probably you, V.I.; you’re more flexible.”

  She was trying to lighten her mood; Mr. Contreras and I both laughed obligingly. We climbed into the Land Rover, me in the backseat. Alison hit a button on the SUV’s steering wheel and the garage door opened onto a steep drive at the back of the house. I looked around for the car that had shown up on the monitor, but didn’t see it.

  Another tap on the steering wheel opened the gates at the end of the drive, letting us back onto the narrow road that skirted the ravine. The lighting was bad, but Alison drove so fast that Mr. Contreras demanded she slow down.

  “There’s a cop car at the light up ahead, case you hadn’t noticed,” he added.

  At the red light on Sheridan Road, I looked at the squad car, but the officer inside was focused on his tablet, not on reckless drivers. As Alison turned south onto Green Bay Road, the squad car turned right, toward the Breen house. I could see the markings, dark brown on tan, but couldn’t read the jurisdiction. Had Breen felt threatened enough by his visitor that he’d called the local cops?

  35

  PHISHING

  IT WASN’T UNTIL we were back on the Edens Expressway heading south that I brought up the logo we’d seen on the Innsbruck reactor report.

  “You realize, don’t you, that it’s that little design that must have upset Martin when he was here for your picnic,” I said.

  “I know,” Alison agreed, her voice small. “But that doesn’t mean he stole Granddad’s sketch.”

  “He might have borrowed it,” I suggested. “Here’s the thing: his mother stole a set of papers from his grandmother about seven years ago. Martin saw them at the time, but he was only thirteen or so; they didn’t mean anything to him. Those little triangles on the BREENIAC sketch made him remember the same design on those old documents. He could have taken the sketch down to where his mother was living, to compare it with the papers she’d stolen. After seeing his mother, he knew he had to go into hiding. Whether it’s because he’s afraid of Derrick Schlafly’s killers or some other reason, we won’t know until we find him.”

  Alison swerved around a line of cars, accelerating to eighty.

  “Slow down, gal,” Mr. Contreras said. “Vic don’t mean you no harm, and driving like that could get us all killed. It don’t matter so much at my age, but you got your life in front of you.”

  “Mine, too,” I murmured.

  “I thought Vic was my friend,” Alison protested.

  “I am your friend,” I said sharply. “But we can’t get anywhere if I have to play ‘Let’s pretend.’ You know Martin, I don’t. I believe you when you say he wouldn’t be interested in selling it or the Fitora code. He’s not a guy who cares about money, he cares about his work: I get that. I’m just saying he might have taken the sketch, fully planning to return it. Is that so awful?”

  “I guess not,” she agreed in a subdued voice. “But where could he be, after all this time?”

  Her father’s odd reaction when I’d said he, too, was clueless about Martin’s whereabouts, unless he’d shoveled him into a hole in the ground, came back to me. It wasn’t so much that he’d shown alarm as that he’d been taken off-guard. Surely Cordell Breen hadn’t murdered Martin. But what about Durdon, the muscle who could make it clear to late-night callers that they needed to stay strictly away? Would he murder on Breen’s orders?

  “Tell me about Durdon,” I said. “Is that a full-time job, driving for your dad?”

  Alison seemed happy to change the subject. “Driving wouldn’t keep him busy full-time, not when all three of us like to get around on our own. He’s a good mechanic, so he looks after all the cars and keeps on top of the plumbing and stuff in the house.”

  “It looks as though one of your machines fought back,” I said. “That was quite a bruise on his cheek.”

  “That was the first thing I saw when I came home this afternoon,” Alison said. “Durdon told me he’d been clumsy with one of the lifts in the garage.”

  “Must’ve been lying there funny to take it on the side of his face like that,” Mr. Contreras said. “He could have got his whole face crushed.”

  “Don’t!” Alison said. “It sounds terrible when you put it like that.”

  “You’re close to him?” I asked.

  “No,” Alison said slowly. “He’s been with us since I was little, but—well, some of the staff, like Imelda, went out of their way when I was a kid, but Durdon, he always seems a bit—oh, like he’s polite because it’s his job, but he doesn’t really like me.”

  “He lives in the house?” I asked.

  “He and Imelda, she’s the housekeeper, they both have suites in the south wing. An outside contractor keeps up the grounds and Imelda has someone come in three days a week to do the heavy cleaning. Do you think someone from the cleaning service could have taken the sketch?”

  “Something to keep in mind,” I said.

  When she pulled up in front of our building, I asked if she thought she’d feel better spending the night with us, but she wanted to get back to Lake Forest; she was worrying about her mother.

  “I ought to be getting ready to go back to Mexico,” she said. “But I kind of don’t feel like going until I see what’s—well, you know—Martin, the sketch—and there’s my mother—” She broke off unhappily.

  Mr. Contreras gave her a rough embrace. “You just keep your chin up, Alison, leave the rest to Vic and me. We got your back, okay?”

  She produced another gallant smile and hoisted herself back into the Land Rover. I went outside with Mr. Contreras and the dogs. It had been a long day and I was tired, but I tried to listen to my neighbor’s rambling: he’d had a long day, too.

  Constance Breen had shown him her paintings while she worked her way through a bottle of chardonnay. “You’d think she might paint that gal of hers. Alison’s got the kind of face I’d like to hang on my wall, I told her. She laughed at that, said she’d do a portrait for me.”

  He chewed it over in his mind, then added, “These pictures, they’re like they’re the inside of her head out there on a piece of canvas. Lots of gray paint with one spot of red, like it was a red dot of anger in the middle of her body.”

  It was an impressive summary, which dovetailed with what Alison had said, her mother feeling shut off in the Lake Forest mansion, away from other artists, her husband lost in the world of machines and money. Her daughter, too, at least the machine part. I wondered about Constance Breen’s relationship with Durdon, the driver-mechanic-muscle-man. Did she like him, trust him, sleep with him, keep him at arm’s length?

  I finally went up to my own place, where I’d started the evening three hours ago. I went back to the DMV site to check the license plate of the car that had been outside the Breen gates when Cordell hustled us out of his mansion.

  It belonged to a seventeen-year-old Honda. Which was registered to Julius Dzornen. My jaw dropped. Julius demanding an audience with Cordell Breen? I rubbed my aching eyes.

  Cordell had been dismissive of Julius tonight for crying over what he called sarcastically “the crime of the century.” However, Julius’s reason for driving up to Lake Forest took Breen by surprise: he didn’t know someone had used Julius’s name to get into the library. That in itself was an odd thing—why had it made Julius angry enough to drive so far late at night? Perhaps he was drunk. Or it was the last straw, the final insult in a half-century of them?

  More interesting were the little triangles on the BREENIAC and King Derrick documents. Breen had looked surprised when Alison showed him the design, but I wondered if what surprised him was my connecting those two dots. I was supposed to be the imbecile that he could run rings around while he chewed gum, texted and played the tuba.

  I didn’t believe
anyone on the cleaning crew had stolen it—someone looking for quick cash wouldn’t think a page of equations had any street value. I needed to talk to Judy Binder again, to find out what she could remember about those documents she’d lifted from her mother. I wanted to see Julius, as well. I needed to find a way to get him to tell me what crime detectives should have dealt with all those years ago, when he and Cordell were both teenagers. It had to be connected to the drawing.

  I groaned. It was late, I was exhausted. Unless I was going to drive down to Palfry and actually dig up the ground around the Schlafly house, I couldn’t do anything more tonight.

  36

  A CHILDHOOD OUTING

  WHAT WILL YOU GIVE ME if I talk to you?” Judy Binder smiled at me slyly.

  “Your son,” I said. “You are the only person who may know how to find him.”

  “Doesn’t anyone care about me?” Binder said, her voice a high-pitched whine. “You come in here all worried about Martin, but what about me?”

  Last night, despite my exhaustion, I’d lain awake a long time. I kept turning pieces of information like a kaleidoscope, trying to make a comprehensible shape out of them. Julius, Cordell, Martin. Kitty, Martina, Judy. Benjamin Dzornen and Edward Breen. The meth house.

  I went to my computer to see what unsolved crimes in Chicago dated back fifty years, with a few years on either side. I didn’t turn up anything that sounded as though it connected to Julius and Cordell.

  Judy Binder had just been born fifty years ago, but Julius’s old crime was tied to Kitty and to the Breens. Her whole life in Chicago, Kitty had thought someone was spying on her. Lotty said it was a constant obsession with her; she wouldn’t have kept it a secret from her daughter.

  Kitty had witnessed a horrible crime, or been the victim of a horrible crime, involving the Breens and the Dzornens when she first came to Chicago. They had bought her silence with the bank account that Herta Dzornen robbed, but Kitty was always afraid the Dzornens or the Breens would do something else to her. Judy might not know all the details, but she’d known enough to try blackmailing Herta.

  I finally went to sleep, but in my troubled dreams, Martin’s skeleton was grinning up at me from a hole in the bottom of the meth pit. Alison Breen was weeping over his bones while Kitty Binder wrung her hands, crying, “I told you over and over, if you don’t know they’re after you, you’re not paying attention.”

  I slept late, despite my unquiet dreams. When I finally got out of bed, the weather had turned, as it does in Chicago: heat-crusted drought one day, cold and rainy the next. I couldn’t bear to run in it, much as I needed the exercise.

  I threw balls to the dogs from Mr. Contreras’s back porch, sipping a double espresso, trying not to resent Jake for sounding so happy when he called me from San Francisco: the Rautavaara had been a huge success. I was truly glad, but I wanted some successes of my own. They seemed hard to come by these days.

  It was after ten when I finally got to the hospital, where Judy Binder greeted me with all her usual sunniness. She had just finished taking her first walk since the shooting, as far as the nurses’ station and back. I walked into her room in time to hear her snap at the nurse and therapist who’d applauded her progress: she wasn’t two years old, she wasn’t fooled by pretty words, so they could shut the fuck up.

  The nurse helped her into a wheelchair, carefully arranging the IV stands so that the lines didn’t cross each other. Judy had four, which disappeared into the folds of her hospital gown. Her thin arms were scaly, with so many collapsed veins the nurses had had to go into her back for sites to insert the needles.

  “If Martin wants to disappear, let him disappear,” Binder said when I tried to talk about her son. “He treated me totally disrespectfully the last time I saw him.”

  “You don’t go out of your way to make people want to respect you, Ms. Binder.”

  We both thought she was going to start screaming abuse at me, but she shut her mouth halfway through. “Goddamn bitch, mind your own—” Her face took on a puzzled look, as if she’d heard herself for the first time and wondered what she was saying. After a brief silence, she said sullenly that she had no idea where Martin was.

  “I believe you,” I said, “but I need you to tell me every detail about the papers you and he argued over. He came to you because he’d seen an odd logo on an old drawing, a pair of linked triangles with something like a sunburst in the middle. He thought he’d seen the same design on a paper he’d once found in your possession. What did he say about it?”

  “He came barging in, not even bringing me a flower or anything, the way you think a boy would do for his mother. He just demanded to see those damned papers.”

  “These were papers that you found at your mother’s house when you went there for Martin’s bar mitzvah, right?”

  “Are you saying I stole—”

  “I’m not here to make any accusations. I need information, and I need it fast. Your son’s life may depend on it.”

  She scowled. “Yeah, Martin’s life, what about mine?”

  “You’re alive because your mother called me in time to save you. Now I’m asking you to do the same for your own child,” I said.

  She tossed her wiry hair petulantly. “I think you’re letting Martin dramatize himself, but, okay, I found this envelope in Kitty’s underwear drawer. I started feeling unwell at the bar mitzvah party; I went to lie down and was looking for a—a clean handkerchief.”

  She stopped, eyeing me to see if I was going to comment on her snooping, but I didn’t say anything. “So Kitty screamed the house down when she realized the papers were missing. But I was just preserving them!”

  “Yes, so you said.” I tried to keep the impatience out of my voice. “What did you do with them?”

  “Nothing. I mean, nothing back then. I was looking for an aspirin, only then I saw there was a savings book in the packet, and it had my name in it! That was definitely mine. Kitty was coming up the stairs, and first I thought of asking her why she was stealing from me, but I decided to take the packet home with me to see if there were any other financial documents she was keeping for herself.”

  I didn’t point out that she’d first been looking for a handkerchief. “And were there any other financial instruments?”

  “No, just papers with numbers. I showed them to Martin one day when he came to see me, back when he was in eighth grade, I mean. He’s always been good with numbers, I thought they’d be, like bank accounts or something, but he said they didn’t mean anything to him. Then he wanted to know where I got them. He was only thirteen, but he had the nerve to accuse his own mother of stealing papers when they belonged to me in the first place. Kitty must have been whining about the papers disappearing.”

  Along with Kitty’s pearl earrings and a certain amount of cash, I remembered, but I didn’t want to toss a grenade on the conversation.

  “So I stuffed them into a drawer and forgot about them, but then, like I told you, a few weeks ago Martin came barreling down to Palfry, wanting to see them again. He tore the place apart looking for them. I kept telling him I didn’t even know if I still had them, but he found them with my birth certificate in this old shoe box in the front room. He got all excited and said, ‘These were supposed to come to me! Why didn’t you show them to me before?’

  “I told him I’d shown them to him when he was thirteen and he hadn’t been interested. Was I supposed to wait on him hand and foot, checking every morning to see if he cared about some stupid old papers?”

  Judy pounded the arm of her wheelchair with a feeble fist. “It was always like that with him, me, me, me. Why couldn’t he ever see I had needs, too! Even as a baby he was always selfish. It’s why I had to give him to my parents, I couldn’t cope with someone that selfish.”

  “Yeah, babies tend to be thoughtless that way,” I said, my throat so tight I had trouble getting the words out. �
��Why did he think the papers should come to him?”

  “Because he could understand some stupid equations in them. Then he started squawking at me; he said didn’t it mean anything to me when I read the cover letter and saw who asked them to be sent to Kitty?”

  “Who?” I felt my pulse quicken.

  “Some woman named Byron. Ada Byron. How special does that sound?”

  I felt let down: I’d been sure they were from Martina, or Benjamin Dzornen. “Was Byron a family name? I mean in your family, your dad’s mother, or the family your mom lived with in England?”

  “Oh, those people! No, their name was Painter.” Judy giggled unexpectedly, an unpleasant sound. “He was a builder whose name was Painter, pretty funny, huh? Painter the Builder. They adopted Kitty and she adored them.” The word was a honeycomb of sarcasm.

  “They were the man and woman with the girls in the snapshot your mother kept in the living room? What happened to them?”

  “Oh, she could never stop crying about it, even though it happened years before I was born. When the war ended, Painter the Builder wanted to put up a house on a bombed-out street in Birmingham. England, not Alabama. Kitty was at school when the mom and dad and sisters were inspecting the site. A few minutes before Kitty got there an unexploded bomb went off. So that was horrible, looking for her real family, as she always called them, and finding an ambulance and body parts instead.”

  She gave her repellent laugh again: her mother had described the scene many times and Judy had grown tired of hearing it. I jammed my hands into my pockets to make sure I didn’t leap up and shake her, but I had to wait a moment before I could trust myself to ask another question.

  “I know your mother was difficult to live with, but can you remember that her life was punctuated by horrifying losses?” I said at last. “Losing her birth mother and the grandmother who raised her. Losing the family that adopted her. And losing you to drugs.”