Critical Mass

by Sara Paretsky

  38

  NEIGHBORHOOD GOSSIP

  I FELT SORRY for Julius Dzornen, too, but I wished he would talk to me. I didn’t imagine he’d gotten much satisfaction last night from Cordell Breen, when he accused Breen of using his name to dig into the university’s archives. If I could learn who’d been impersonating Julius, and what documents they’d been reading, maybe I’d figure out something, like why the BREENIAC sketch mattered so much, or what the little design in its right corner meant. If I presented Julius with a platter of information, I’d have a better lever to pry his old crime out of him.

  Before driving to the South Side, I swung by my office. I wanted to see if any of the librarians could recognize who’d impersonated Julius, so I dug up online shots of Cordell Breen and Jari Liu. I wondered about Durdon, Breen’s driver-cum-attack-dog, although I didn’t picture him as an archival research kind of guy. Anyway, I couldn’t find a photo of him, just his first name, Rory, and his age, forty-three. I couldn’t even find out where he’d grown up.

  The only shot I found of Julius was about a decade old: he and his sister Herta had gone to an event at the Fermi Institute to celebrate the centennial of their father’s birth. Herta gleamed like an aircraft carrier ready for night landings: her silver hair was polished, the diamonds in her ears and around her throat sparkled. Julius, slouching next to her, looked morose in an ill-fitting sports jacket. I printed that picture, as well as more copies of Martin Binder’s head shot.

  I parked at the top of the street where Julius lived. It was a quiet time of day, late morning when everyone was at work or at school. The only person I saw was an elderly woman pulling microscopic weeds from an immaculate rose bed.

  I stayed in the car to call the Palfry County sheriff on one of my burn phones. “Sheriff,” I said when he’d gotten over the hearty guffaws of greeting. “Glenn Davilats gets around the countryside, always making friends and influencing people.”

  “What the hell are you talking about, PI?”

  “I just learned his prints are all over the pieces of a spandy new Lincoln Nav that got sawed up for parts near the drug shop I broke up last week. I hear your boy’s been driving a new Charger: Was that his replacement for the Nav?”

  For once, Kossel didn’t guffaw, but he was still loud, demanding to know what the expletive I was talking about: just because I couldn’t find one pimple-faced teenager was no need to cover his men with Chicago-style shit.

  I held the phone in my hand, away from my ear. When it stopped vibrating, I said, “The big question, Sheriff, is who was in the Nav with him? I hope it wasn’t Deputy Orlick; I’ve taken a liking to her.”

  “None of my crew has been anywhere near your cesspool of a city lately, PI,” Kossel snarled.

  “Didn’t say they were, Sheriff. Sorry I wasn’t clear. Deputy Davilats and a confederate drove out to the Schlafly place in the Navigator. They shot Schlafly’s dog and they chased Schlafly into a cornfield, where they killed him. While they were doing that, Schlafly’s girlfriend jumped into the car—they’d left the keys in the ignition, rookie mistake—and drove it to Chicago. But it’s your boy’s prints that we’ve ID’d so far. Any hints on the second party?”

  “Says you!” Kossel growled.

  “Sheriff, I don’t have any power or leverage, I can’t issue an arrest warrant or bring anyone in for interrogation. I’m only calling to offer you information ahead of the CPD. And to see if you know who else was in the Navigator. If your deputy is working for one of the other meth dealers in the county, don’t you want to know that?”

  Kossel didn’t say anything else, not even good-bye, just hung up with unusual quietness. Actually, he was right. I was lying. What if I was wrong about Davilats? Just because he drove a new muscle car and a Rottweiler growled at him didn’t make him guilty of murder. I was hoping Kossel would take it from here—interrogate his deputy, find out what meth dealer he worked with—unless, of course, Kossel himself was the other person in the Navigator. Had I plugged a hole or dropped a nuke into one?

  I left the phone in the car, where it could take messages from cops or robbers, and walked down to the big house in front of Julius Dzornen’s coach house. I wondered what kind of arrangement he had with the owners, why they let him live there. This hadn’t been Benjamin Dzornen’s residence when he was at the university—I’d checked that after my first visit: Dzornen had lived three blocks away, in one of the grand mansions on Greenwood.

  I followed the paving stones past the big house to the little one. When I pounded strenuously on the front door, the birds flew off from the feeders with an excited twittering, but Julius didn’t respond. I put my head through the ivy and tried to squint through the dirty window. I didn’t see any lights, or hear any signs of life. I was tempted to do some on-site research, to see if he’d kept a journal, but as I fingered my picklocks, I thought of the violation I’d felt when Homeland Security invaded my home. Better to go to the archives and see what I could find out by straightforward questioning.

  When I crossed the yard again to University Avenue, the elderly woman was still working on her roses a few doors down. I stood on the walk near her and waited until she looked up at me. Her eyes were as cold as the chilly air.

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” I said. “I’m a detective. I need to ask Julius Dzornen a few questions and wondered if you’d seen him lately.”

  “Do you have some kind of identification?” Her voice, although thin with age, was as cold as her eyes.

  I produced my PI license. She studied it, her nose curling in contempt. Because I was private? Because she was a grande dame and I worked for a living?

  “I don’t pay attention to his comings and goings, but he hasn’t been out while I’ve been here today.”

  “It seems odd that he would rent here, so close to where he grew up,” I said. “Almost as if he couldn’t bear to leave home, but he’s seventy-something now.”

  “People rent out their coach houses for income these days all the time,” the woman said dryly. “If you have a question about Julius Dzornen, ask it, otherwise, please leave. It’s cold and you’re keeping me waiting.”

  “How long has he lived in the coach house?” I asked.

  She gave a wintry smile, as if I’d finally figured out a clue in a complicated game. “Since his mother died.” She returned to her roses, but as I walked away she relented and said to my back, “That used to be Edward Breen’s home. He had his workshop in the coach house.”

  I felt as though I’d been hit between the shoulders. Of course. Alison had told me Edward’s first workshop had been behind his old house in Hyde Park.

  I walked back to the gardener. “Julius Dzornen is obsessed with a crime he thinks he committed around fifty years ago. Do you have any idea what that might be?”

  She sat back on her heels and looked at me with the first real emotion she’d shown, but she shook her head. “I didn’t know him then, and I’ve never heard any talk about it—and this is a neighborhood where people are passionate about gossip. I only know that when Ilse Dzornen died, the daughters sold her house on Greenwood Avenue and Julius moved into Edward Breen’s workshop. We were all surprised that the Breens still owned the coach house.”

  Her lips twitched in a contemptuous smile. “I suppose Edward wanted his workshop treated like a shrine.”

  Breens and Dzornens, united even past the point where death might them part. It was an unsettling relationship, people unable to undo the toxic ties that bound them.

  I continued down the street toward the campus. I collected another day pass. Special Collections, which housed the archives, lay along a corridor that connected the main library to its futuristic new reading room. I pushed open the door and found myself in an exhibition space.

  The room was quiet in the way that makes you feel quiet yourself; for a moment I forgot Judy Binder’s anguish, Kitty Binder’s murder, Julius Dzo
rnen’s bitterness. I stopped in front of an eighth-century Bible. I pictured monks tranquilly singing psalms in Latin while they copied lines onto vellum in handwriting so careful it could still be read today. Icons of the dead make us think they lived peaceful lives, but murder and chicanery existed long before Cain biffed Abel or Jacob cheated Esau.

  A second set of doors led to the administrative area and the climate-controlled reading room beyond, where fifteen or twenty people were bent over boxes of documents.

  Three women were sitting at a counter, hard at work over computer monitors. Carts holding blue document boxes stood near them. Several people came up to the counter as I did, one returning a giant box half as tall as he was, the others asking for material. I waited until they’d left before producing my driver’s license, along with my PI license.

  “What can we do for you?” one of the women asked.

  I looked at the ID she wore around her neck: Rachel Turley. “Ms. Turley, I’m a private investigator who’s looking into the death of a woman named Kitty Binder. I don’t know if you follow that kind of news, but she was killed in the middle of a home invasion about a week ago.”

  Ms. Turley said she vaguely remembered seeing the story, but added, “We deal here in rare books and documents, not contemporary news, so I’m not sure what we can do to help you.”

  “Ms. Binder had hired me to look for her grandson,” I explained. “He’s been missing for several weeks. I’ve been digging into the Binder family history, looking for people whom he might have contacted, and as I dug, I discovered that Ms. Binder’s father was Benjamin Dzornen.

  “Someone came into Special Collections recently to look at Dzornen’s papers. He had an ID, claiming he was Dzornen’s son, Julius. Only he wasn’t. I’m trying to find out who it really was, and what part of the collection he was looking at.”

  Ms. Turley and a woman at the other end of the counter exchanged startled looks, but Ms. Turley said, “We never reveal what anyone using our collection was researching. It’s an inviolable library law. Not just here. All libraries.”

  “Even if your telling me could help find Kitty Binder’s killer?”

  Turley shook her head. “Even if you could prove to me that it would help you or the police find her killer, I can’t tell you.”

  “Ms. Turley, I appreciate ethical principles as much as the next person, but—”

  “There’s no but. If you had a subpoena, I’d get the library’s lawyer to talk to you, but you’re private, not public, right? So you can’t get a subpoena. Scholars are a competitive and unscrupulous bunch; if they’re both on the track of some new data or theory, they’ve been known to steal each other’s research. They try to break into our files, or even bribe the staff to see whether Professor X is looking at the same material they are. So we protect everyone by scrubbing our servers to make sure there’s no trail of who’s been requesting what papers.”

  “What if one of them steals something from the collection? How do you find out who it was if you’ve been scrubbing the servers?” I demanded.

  “We have security precautions in place,” Turley said. “I’m not going to share them with you because for all I know, you’re pretending to investigate a murder when really you’ve been hired by one of our more contentious scholars to check up on his competitors.”

  Her bland smile seemed to say that she knew she was winding me up. I gave her a sour grimace, but pulled my collection of photographs from my bag and laid them on the counter.

  Several more researchers came up to the counter; they gave me and my photo collection sidelong looks while they handed in their request slips to the other librarian.

  “Do any of these men look familiar to you? One of them is the real Julius Dzornen; the other three are possible candidates for the imposter.”

  “Ms.—” She picked up the card I’d also placed on the counter. “Ms. Warshawski, the privacy of patrons is more fundamental than the law of gravity. I would not tolerate anyone who worked for me giving you a name or telling you if they’d seen one of these people, and I would expect to be fired myself if I did so.”

  By this time, everyone in the administrative area was frankly listening—the other staff members, the patrons, even someone from the janitorial staff, who was on a ladder in the corner replacing a lightbulb.

  “You’re not concerned about imposters in the library?”

  “If someone wanted to be in the library so badly that he created a phony ID, I’d like to shake his hand and ask him to make a public service announcement for the American Library Association,” Turley said. Her coworker nodded emphatically.

  When you’ve been beaten on all counts, don’t keep fighting. “In that case, I guess I need to look at the Dzornen papers myself, to see if I can figure out what my unscrupulous competitor is up to. How do I do that?”

  “You fill out a research request, with a brief description of what your project is.” Turley typed a few lines. “The Dzornen papers run to sixty-seven boxes; each one has about fifteen files in it. We limit our scholars to two boxes at a time, so why don’t you study the catalog record and see where you’d like to start. We’ve never had anyone list a murder investigation as a project, but we’ll certainly accept that.”

  39

  BYRONIC ODES

  I RETURNED MY ROGUES’ gallery to my briefcase and retreated to a counter with a computer terminal, where I grimly studied the record of Benjamin Dzornen’s papers: sixty-seven boxes (thirty-six linear feet, the catalog added helpfully). There was a personal biographical section that ran to five boxes. His honors, his lectures, his research and his students took up the remaining sixty-two. Many of the headers were in German.

  I scrolled through the lists of students and correspondents, looking for names I knew. Martina Saginor was there for the early thirties, as was Gertrud Memler, but neither name cropped up in the later boxes.

  When I checked for Ada Byron, I found a letter from her to Dzornen dated May 1969. This was the only mention of her name, but there were many folders that simply listed “Miscellaneous correspondence from Vienna,” or “Family letters from Bratislava,” or “Miscellaneous correspondence with students.” I’d have to go through those. Which meant many, many folders. I tried not to groan out loud.

  I needed an intern. I needed Martin Binder—I didn’t think Kitty had ever hired a nanny for him, but maybe Ada Byron was an old lover of Benjamin Dzornen who’d kept an eye on Martin for him. I looked her up online.

  According to six million hits on Metar-Quest, she was the long-dead daughter of the poet Byron. Ada played such an important role in the history of computers and programming, they’d even named a computer language for her. Since she’d been dead now for about a hundred sixty years, it was hard to see how she’d written to Benjamin Dzornen in 1969, or to Kitty a mere seven years ago.

  Martin knew who she was; he’d disappeared to go look for her. Or he’d been killed, a nasty voice whispered in my inner ear. I rubbed my forehead. The more I learned the stupider I felt.

  “Martin, why couldn’t you have laid down a trail of bread crumbs for me?” I snarled.

  I went back to the catalog record for Dzornen’s papers, but I’d had an exhausting morning and was having trouble keeping my eyes open. Philip Marlowe depended on his trusty pint of rye to get him going after he’d been sandbagged. My detecting was fueled by espresso. The coffee bar I’d gone to a week ago was only a ten-minute walk away.

  On my way from the reading desk, I saw a young woman who’d been near me when I’d been showing the head shots to the librarians. She was giving me the same sideways glance she’d given the pictures. I walked into the exhibition space, stopping in front of a newer Bible, a mere six hundred years old, written in Hebrew and Latin. I pretended to study it, long enough for a hesitating person to make up her mind.

  When I saw her walking toward the reading room exit, I moved s
lowly out into the hall. In the long corridor, I stood in rapt attention in front of a description of the exhibit. Finally, I heard the door open behind me. I waited another second, then turned to look.

  The woman appeared to be about Alison Breen’s age. She was wearing the frayed jeans and motorcycle boots that are the uniform du jour among Millennials. She moved from foot to foot but couldn’t figure out what to say.

  “I went to school here, but I never knew they had a Bible that was thirteen hundred years old,” I said. “I also never knew about Fermi surfaces. I sometimes think I wasted my scholarship by focusing on languages and politics.”

  She gave a nervous smile. “I heard part of your conversation with the librarian, about the Dzornen papers, you know.”

  “I don’t know how much you heard, but I’m a detective.” I showed her my ID and gave her a thumbnail sketch of Kitty Binder’s death and my search for Martin.

  “And you really think knowing who was pretending to be Julius Dzornen will help you find this lady’s murderer?” She was twisting a strand of hair, looking around to make sure no one was listening.

  “I don’t know,” I said frankly. “But I’ve been putting a lot of muscle into searching for Martin Binder and I’m not getting very far. If you know something, I can promise I will not reveal that I learned it from you.”

  “This is going to sound stupid,” she warned me.

  “I’ve been a detective for over twenty years and I’ve learned that the smallest, silliest things can be the most important. Would you like to get coffee so you don’t have to worry about who’s listening to you?”

  She nodded gratefully and led me along the corridor to the main part of the library. I followed her down a flight of stairs to a coffee shop. It was a Spartan space, part of the old stacks with tables and chairs and bright fluorescent lights. She let me buy her a cola, but I forwent coffee when I saw what it looked like. We sat in a corner where we could make sure no one was eavesdropping.