Critical Mass

by Sara Paretsky

  “Murray, I’m knee-deep in the old Muddy, and I have to push on, so could you make this less twenty questions and more what your point is?”

  “My point, oh girl detective without peer, is that you could have called me about Julius Dzornen.”

  “What, about his car accident? It was already on the wires. I learned about it on NPR when I was driving home last night.”

  “And then you went to see him in the hospital.”

  “How do you know—oh, you talked to Herta, who is not one of my most fervent fans.”

  “I talked to her after he died,” Murray said. “The dead son of a Nobel laureate merits a line—”

  “He died?” I interrupted. “When?”

  Murray was suspicious. “You really didn’t know? It must have been right after you were there. The nurses said he seemed stable, so when a cop came along wanting to interview him, they thought it would be okay. He coded while the cop was questioning him.”

  Poor old guy, a sad life, a painful death, and all for what? I thought of Kitty Binder’s last words as she lay in my arms, the German that Lotty translated as “What was the point of it all?” The misery surrounding all those people from Vienna seemed unbearable.

  Murray was still talking; he’d tried calling Cordell Breen for a comment. “He and Julius grew up together, so I thought it would be a good angle. I’m hoping Global will buy my report, but I need to get ahead of the rest of the pack with some unusual angle. Breen wasn’t in, but I spoke to his wife, who seemed blitzed. She said it was all very upsetting because Julius had been visiting the house and ran off the road on his way home.”

  “Yes?”

  “And she added that you had been there.” Murray suddenly sounded savage. “Why couldn’t you tell me?”

  “Murray, why don’t you join Homeland Security in putting a GPS monitor on me so you know where I am at all hours of the day or night? Why on earth should I have told you?”

  “You could have told me what went on when Julius arrived.”

  I saw that my bill was growing on the computer. I copied all my reports to a data stick and logged off. “I wasn’t there. He drove up as I was leaving. I didn’t even know until later it was Julius at the gate.”

  “A crumb, Warshawski. I’m begging.”

  “It doesn’t suit you,” I said, but I relented and told him about Julius’s arrival, and his accusation to Breen about the library.

  “And had Breen?” Murray demanded. “Impersonated Dzornen, I mean?”

  “Go talk to the librarians at the University of Chicago,” I said. “That’s what I did yesterday.”

  “Save me a trip, Warshawski. You owe me.”

  “Murray, you know damned well I owe you nada. But I will tell you what they told me: they never, even with burning catalog cards stuck under their fingernails, reveal who has been in the archives. They won’t even tell you that I was there.”

  I hung up.

  45

  SUBTERRANEAN HOMESICK BLUES

  WHEN I GOT to the coach house, the Basier children were fighting over who got to sit in the front seat of the Volvo parked in the drive. They stopped kicking each other to stare at me as I used my picklocks on Julius’s front door. The lock turned easily; I waved to them; they quietly climbed into the backseat together. The parents should hire me.

  Their father appeared a moment later. I waited until he’d backed the car out before I went to the Subaru to fetch my supplies.

  I’d parked in the alley, not for secrecy, of which there was none in this neighborhood, but for expedience: I had gone home for a flashlight and my work boots and gloves, but I’d stopped at a hardware store to buy a crowbar, a pick, a shovel, a flex lamp and an industrial breathing mask. I didn’t think I’d find plutonium under the kitchen floor—Julius had lived here unscathed for thirty years—but mold and rats were a distinct possibility. I locked the dead bolt from the inside and went to look for the basement stairs.

  I was so sure that there was a root cellar under the kitchen that I was baffled when I couldn’t find a door. I probed the cupboards and looked behind the radiators. I pulled all the junk out of the narrow closet that held the coach house’s mechanicals but didn’t see anything.

  Maybe the entrance was outside, next to the barricaded back door. The door was blocked from the inside by the outsized trunk full of birdseed. I tried my crowbar but couldn’t budge the trunk with the load it was holding. I climbed over the side and was lifting one of the fifty-pound bags when I heard a banging on the front door.

  “Just a minute,” I muttered, straining to get the bag over the side.

  The door opened; the Basier kids’ father came into the kitchen.

  “Who are you? Do you have a right to be in here?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I gulped in air. “Do you have a key, or did you break in?”

  “I live in the main house; we were given keys to this place when we moved in. My daughter says she saw you—”

  I cut him off. “Come and give me a hand with this birdseed.”

  He stared at me. The bag tipped over the edge and fell to the floor, bursting and scattering seed all over the kitchen.

  Basier backed away. “What are you doing? Are you planning on cleaning this up before Julius gets home?”

  “Mr. Basier, I will clean up any mess I make but Julius isn’t going to be coming home. He’s dead. This is a very labor-intensive job I’m doing, so if you don’t want to help, leave. I have too long a day in front of me to waste time arguing with you.”

  “Julius is dead?” he repeated, stunned.

  “You know he was in an accident, right? He died last night.” I looked at the space where the bag had been standing and realized I was looking at linoleum. This wasn’t a trunk, but a cabinet built onto the floor.

  “Hand me the crowbar, will you please?” I said to Basier.

  He scowled, not sure whether to demand proof of my right to be in the house or not. After glaring for a moment to make sure I knew he could be tough if he had to, he turned on his heel and left.

  I sighed and climbed back out of the trunk to get my tools. Before going back to work, I relocked the front door from the inside.

  I plugged the flex lamp into an outlet behind the refrigerator and hooked it onto the edge of the cabinet. I brought two chairs in from the front room and put one on either side of the cabinet wall so I could get in and out more easily.

  With the crowbar and the shovel, I moved the bags around until I found the trapdoor. It could be opened with a ring sunk into a groove, but when I lifted the ring and tugged it didn’t budge. There wasn’t any lock; decades of dirt and warping had glued it into the floor.

  I gave it the same glare Basier had turned on me a few minutes before, but that didn’t open the trap. I stuck the crowbar into the ring, but still couldn’t move the door. Finally I grabbed the pick and started battering the middle of the trapdoor. After five minutes I managed to whack a fat splinter out of it. I could get the crowbar under that; I gave a last mighty heave and the door broke into pieces.

  I rubbed my shoulders, but I was too keyed up to waste time resting. I put on the mask and pulled the flex light over to hook on the broken edge of the trapdoor.

  Sure enough, steep stairs, little more than a ladder nailed into a rough frame, led to a cellar with a dirt floor. Oh, V.I., you are a detective without peer. Now detect what is down here.

  I started cautiously down the stairs with my digging tools. My shadow bobbed and weaved against the floor, with the end of the pick looking like Death’s scythe. Death had been following in my wake lately; I didn’t like being her harbinger. I flung the tools down the stairs; they landed with a dull thud on the dirt floor. I stuck up an arm for the flex light and brought it as far down as the cord would stretch.

  The room was small, just the size of the kitchen overhead. A spider
as big as the palm of my hand scuttled up the wall and disappeared through a crack in the boards overhead. I wished I’d brought a hard hat.

  The walls were lined with shelves, empty for the most part, except for some odds and ends of electrical work, screws, wires, a pair of clippers. Incongruously, in one corner stood a couple of jars of mushy gray stuff. Canned pears, a faded and peeling label said. I couldn’t hold back a shudder at the thought of what was in there now.

  I took my pencil flash out of my jeans pocket and started a meticulous search of the floor, looking for a place where the soil might have been dislodged to bury something half a century ago. Time hadn’t exactly leveled the floor, but it had made the minor hills and valleys uniform across its surface.

  I didn’t want to dig up the whole floor, and I didn’t want to start chopping at it with my pick, in case something fragile lay underneath. I finally went back up the stairs to rummage in Julius’s utility closet. He didn’t have much equipment, but he did have a few screwdrivers.

  I took the two longest down with me to use as probes, delicately twisting them into the soil up to their handles. About five feet from the bottom of the stairs, I struck something hard. I used the curved end of the crowbar as a makeshift trowel and started clearing dirt away from the spot. I shone my pencil flash into the hole I’d created.

  Something brownish, matted. I took off my right glove and stuck a tentative hand into the hole. Fabric, heavily layered with dirt. I pulled on it gently, but couldn’t bring it up. Bit by bit, I excavated along a line dictated by my probings with the screwdrivers. My neck was sore, my arms and hamstrings quivering, by the time I’d created a trough some three feet by two feet.

  I took out my knife and cut away a piece of the fabric, carefully lifting it so that the dirt didn’t spill on what lay underneath. I shone my flash again. It wasn’t a plutonium bomb, but a suit jacket, a woman’s jacket. Mold and damp had turned it a grayish-brown. Only the buttons still gleamed under my flashlight.

  I held my breath as I peeled the fabric back. It fell apart under my hand, revealing the bones underneath.

  “My God, Julius, you lived with this beneath you all these years? How could you?”

  I’d been alone for so many hours I spoke out loud, my voice startling me in the confined space. “Who was she? Martina? Gertrud Memler? Did you kill her? Is that why you thought a detective should come for you?”

  But this had been Breen’s house, Breen’s workshop. Whoever this was, however she’d come to be here, her death and burial were a secret shared by the four men, the Breens and the Dzornens.

  I don’t know how long I squatted, staring into the hole, unwilling to dig any further, but I heard footsteps overhead, men’s voices. I thought it might be Basier, made bold by company, and got to my feet.

  I started up the stairs, but my leg muscles had cramped up. As I stood on the bottom step, massaging my hamstrings, I heard a man say, “It’s not here. I left it right here.”

  A second man said, “Look under the sofa, maybe it fell out.”

  There was a scraping noise and a thud as they tossed Julius’s couch to one side. I’d heard the voices before but I couldn’t place them. I stuck up a hand and turned off the flex lamp so it wouldn’t cast my shadow. Crept up the stairs one at a time.

  “The girl over at the house said a detective was here yesterday, a female. That bitch Warshawski more than likely.”

  The second man grunted.

  I slithered through the opening I’d made in the trapdoor. A piece of wood broke loose and clunked down the stairs.

  The two men crossed into the kitchen. Rory Durdon. Glenn Davilats, the Palfry County deputy. I was so startled that Davilats pulled his gun before I could react. I dropped behind a bag of birdseed at the last second. He fired but the shots went into the bag. Seed started pouring out around my feet.

  “Damn it, man, don’t shoot in here, you’ll bring in the whole goddamn neighborhood. Use your Taser!”

  I picked up the bag and flung it wildly at the men. One swore as the bag got him in the face, but the other was over the side of the cabinet before I could get my gun out of my tuck holster. Durdon.

  I kicked his kneecap with my work boot. He grunted and punched at my head. I ducked, grabbed his foot, slipped in the loose birdseed and sprawled across another bag. He lost his balance but I still couldn’t get at my gun. I flung my flashlight at his head, grazed his temple, but Davilats had recovered. He aimed his Taser at me. I tried to vault over the back of the cabinet, but he fired. Every nerve in my body felt as though I’d been seared by a hot iron. I slumped over the cabinet side, unable to move.

  The two men picked me up and bundled me into the basement. One of them stuck his hands in my pockets, came away with my papers. I couldn’t lift a hand to fight them.

  They shone a flashlight on the papers and saw the copy of the BREENIAC sketch. “So you did steal the drawing, bitch!” Durdon said.

  Underneath the burning pain from the Taser, I felt very cold. The graduate student who minded the Basier kids said there’d been a cop at Julius’s door yesterday. Not someone from the CPD, checking on Julius, but Glenn Davilats, planting the sketch. And last night, when Julius died while a cop was questioning him, that had been Davilats, finishing the job for Cordell Breen. Tuesday night, when Alison was driving us home, a squad car had turned onto the street leading to the Breen house. Tan with brown markings. The colors of the Palfry County sheriff’s cars. Davilats driving out to Breen’s house to get his orders, or get paid.

  “What did you do with the drawing?” Davilats demanded.

  “What, you planted it here, and Cordell sent you down to get it back before the Chicago cops or the Basiers found it?” My words came out like shapeless gravel; I wasn’t sure they could even be understood, but the effort to speak left me short of breath.

  Davilats kicked me in the stomach, fingering his Taser. “Where is the fucking drawing?”

  “In my office,” I said as quickly as my heavy lips would move. “In my big safe in the back. Combination 09-19-06-08-07-27.”

  “Say it again,” Durdon ordered, pulling out a notebook.

  I’d used my parents’ and my birth dates. I repeated them slowly. Davilats kicked me again, just for emphasis. The two men climbed back upstairs. When they’d scrambled over the side of the cabinet, they pulled the top back on. I lay helpless as they hammered the top back into place.

  46

  THE PIT AND THE SKELETON

  I WAS FINALLY ABLE to move my hands. I sat up, slowly, painfully, massaging my fingers, which tingled, as if I’d bathed them in acid. My side ached where Davilats had kicked me. I could feel the darts, one in my left pectoral, the other in my thigh. I pulled the one from my thigh; my jeans had kept it from going in very deeply. The dart in my pec took some doing, first to grab the tiny protruding end in the dark, and then to yank it out. I blacked out briefly, but when I came to, I felt better.

  My poor body craved sleep, but I couldn’t rest, trapped in a root cellar with a skeleton next to me. I crawled up the stairs and pushed against the cabinet top, hoping I’d been mistaken about the hammering. The top didn’t budge.

  I’d thrown my flashlight in the struggle, but I couldn’t find it when I felt around the floor near the trapdoor opening. I thought I felt furry feet crawling across my hand and let out a stifled shriek. My fingers closed on the cord to the flex lamp. I held my breath, fumbling up the cord to the switch. The light didn’t turn on: my assailants had yanked out the plug on their way out.

  I felt sick with disappointment. I sat on the edge of the trapdoor, my head in my hands.

  When Davilats and Durdon broke into my office safe, they wouldn’t find the BREENIAC sketch; they would come back here to finish me off. If I sat here waiting, they’d finish me faster.

  I braced my feet on either side of the door hole and pushed with all my might, bu
t the top didn’t budge. I put spiders, rats, snakes, skeletons as far from my mind as I could and cautiously stepped my way back down the steep stairway. My throat was parched and my skin still burned. I put those as far away as I could, too.

  When I stepped off at the bottom, I stood on one leg and traced a circle with the other foot, feeling for my tools, but I was still dizzy and couldn’t keep my balance. I went down on my hands and knees and moved slowly around. My left hand went into the hole I’d dug and connected with matted fabric. I pulled away quickly, but kept feeling the threads, spider feet, clinging to my hand.

  At length I came on my burn phone. It didn’t get a signal down here, but in the light from the screen, I found my flashlight and my other tools. Flashlight under my armpit, ax and crowbar hugged to my chest, I hoisted myself to the top one painful step at a time. Ten steps. Ten years it seemed to take to reach the top.

  I had to sit again. My arms were already weary.

  “You have a lot of work in front of you, my friends,” I told them sternly. “No whining. Get to work.”

  I placed the flashlight in a corner where I wouldn’t step on it. Pushed the remaining bags of birdseed down the trapdoor opening to make room for myself.

  “Sorry,” I muttered to the skeleton at the bottom. “Didn’t mean to dump it on your head.”

  I couldn’t stand upright in the crate; I had to swing the pick from the top step while bracing myself against the opening. My shoulders shook with involuntary tremors. Dehydration, electrocution, not good for physical labor. How desperate would I get before I opened the jars of gray mush in the basement?

  Swing, thud, rest. The outer skin of the cabinet was metal, which was why it looked like a trunk. It bounced back at me every time I hit it.

  “I hope you were dead before you were buried,” I said to my companion. “If you promise not to tell Davilats and Durdon when they come back, I’m a bit scared. Never show fear, of course: vermin like those two can smell it on you.”

  I understood what had happened now, but not why. Swing, thud, rest. Max had said the equations on the BREENIAC sketch were written by someone who, like him, had been educated in Central Europe. Austria, say, although perhaps Germany or Czechoslovakia. Swing, thud, rest.