Critical Mass (12 page)

This, too, turned out to be a complicated search. Physicists in the 1930s were like migratory birds, flitting from Copenhagen to Cambridge, from California to Columbia, stopping en route in Göttingen or Berlin and Paris.

Harriman said, “You know, science didn’t get the kind of government research money in those days that we poured into it during the Manhattan Project or the Cold War, but these guys—and gals—must have received money from someone to travel the way they did.”

We looked at the list of Nobel laureates in physics and chemistry from the twenties through 1950. Any number of the laureates might have been in Germany or Vienna when Kitty Binder was born. Most of the European laureates had fled either to England or the U.S. during the war; Harriman said that any of them might have spent time in Chicago. Some, like Fermi, joined the University of Chicago faculty. Others worked here on the Manhattan Project, or had stints in Chicago as visiting scholars.

“Chicago was the hot spot for physics after World War Two. Fermi, Teller, they attracted the next generation of phys whizzes. Would the nationality matter?”

I shook my head. “Saginor had her baby in 1930 or ’31, so the father is someone she met either in Vienna or Germany in ’29 or ’30. From what you’re saying, it could have been anyone from Werner Heisenberg to Robert Oppenheimer.”

“Yes,” Harriman said, “but Heisenberg wasn’t here after the war, so it’s not really such a wide net.”

I didn’t add my private fret: that Kitty’s fantasies about her father might mean he hadn’t been any kind of scientist at all, let alone a Nobel Prize winner. He might really have been a Viennese builder who
already had a wife and two other children. The snapshot on Kitty’s credenza could have shown a day at a beach where the wife had been generous enough to include her husband’s lover’s child.

Harriman handed me back my laptop. I was closing the windows he’d opened when I saw the photograph. In the middle of one of the German articles Harriman had found was a copy of the print I’d found in the meth house down in Palfry, the giant metal egg on a tripod with serious men and women staring proudly at the camera.

“What is this? Who are these people?”

Harriman stared at me, my voice was so strangled, but he took back my computer. “An early proton accelerator designed at the Institut für Radiumforschung. What’s so exciting about it?”

“I just saw a print of this picture, in a place where I would bet good money no one ever heard of a proton accelerator, let alone cared about it. Who are the people?”

“There isn’t a caption,” Harriman said, “but they were all at the IRF. I suppose your Martina must be one of the women; that shouldn’t be too hard to work out. The second man from the right, I know his face. I think I’ve seen it in our archives.”

He looked at the clock on the wall. “I have to get to a meeting, but I can do a little checking after lunch. Even if you won’t let me carry a gun, I might be able to track these people down.”

I thanked him profusely: it was a relief to offload even one task. While he vanished into the bowels of the library, I found an empty carrel and sat down to check my messages.

Jari Liu had written back to say that was the only e-mail he had for Martin. He’d tried it himself and gotten the same error message.

Martin’s friend, Toby Susskind, had written me. He didn’t know where Martin was, but he included his own cell phone number. When I called, Toby talked to me in a halting, troubled way about why he and Martin had lost touch.

“Martin wanted to go to college, but his grandma, she was so
against it that he ended up staying in Chicago and getting a job. That made it hard for him and me to talk. I mean, I probably wouldn’t have gotten into Rochester if Martin hadn’t helped me write my high school senior project; and, well, it kind of made it hard, if you know what I mean.”

I murmured sympathetically: I could imagine Martin’s hurt, Toby’s embarrassment, the strain on a relationship that had never been close to begin with. I asked Toby whether he knew who might have hosted that August picnic.

“I need to talk to someone who saw Martin around the time he disappeared,” I explained, but Toby said he and Martin had barely seen each other all summer, and anyway, Martin had never talked about his coworkers.

“What did Martin tell you about visiting his mother?” I asked.

“He never mentioned it. Of course, everyone knew she was a drug addict. Some of the kids rode Martin pretty hard about it, so I guess if he went to see her, he kept it to himself.”

Martin must have learned to put up a shield at a young age; maybe his grandfather was the only person who ever really got behind it. I thought of the two of them grinning at Martin’s first-place science fair exhibit.

Toby was edgy: he needed to get to class, he needed to take another call, he couldn’t really tell me anything. He didn’t have a cell phone number for Martin. Ms. Hahne, who taught AP physics over at the high school, might know Martin’s plans; Toby thought Martin had been close to her.

Nadja Hahne was in class. The receptionist took a message, promising that she would get it to the teacher. While I had a sandwich and a surprisingly good cappuccino at one of the little cafes near the campus, Stefan Klevic, my old pal from the PD, sent me an e-mail: he had found Ricky Schlafly’s Cook County sheet and scanned it for me.

I read it, trying not to drip hummus on my keyboard. Schlafly had
been arrested a number of times for possession, for dealing, for breaking and entering. He’d taken part in a botched armed robbery of a convenience store. No one had been seriously hurt, but he bought himself five years in Stateville that time.

Schlafly’s last known Chicago address, right before he headed back to Palfry, was in Austin, at the far end of the city’s run-down West Side. The lease was in the name of a man named Freddie Walker.

Stefan closed his e-mail by saying, “Walker doesn’t have a record but Oak Park and Chicago PDs both say he’s the muscle behind a lot of the coke moving around that part of town. You now know everything I do, but if you plan to go visiting, I’d put on my best Sunday Kevlar.”

Not only did I return home for a vest and my handgun, I even mentioned my expedition to one of my acquaintances in the Chicago PD, although Conrad Rawlings’s district, down on the southeast side of the city, where I grew up, was at the opposite end of the map from Austin.

We’d been lovers for a time in the misty past. Our breakup hadn’t been happy, especially since Conrad took a bullet in the process, but in some deeply buried chamber of his heart, Conrad still cares if I live or die.

“I hope you don’t imagine I’m going to escort you to a meth house, Ms. W. If you want that kind of thrill, you can come down to my turf any old afternoon.”

“I wouldn’t dream of taking you from the Latin Cobras, Conrad. I thought you might let some of your buddies in the Fifteenth know I’m coming so they don’t arrest me when they see me going into that address on Lorel. Also, I’d like someone to look after my dogs when I’m gone.”

“I’ll say the tear-jerkiest eulogy you ever heard, at least if you were alive to hear it, but I will not take those damned dogs. The male, what’s his name? Mitch? He’s come way too close to my manhood way too many times. What’s this really about, Vic?”

I told him about Derrick Schlafly’s death, and Judy’s cry for help. “I’m trying to find where she ran to when she couldn’t reach Lotty.”

I could hear Conrad tapping a keyboard at the other end of the phone. “Missing person in a drug murder case, don’t you dare go into that apartment, Warshawski. I’m sending a message to Ferret Downey; he’ll get a warrant to check out the place.
You
leave it alone. This is why they pay us cops the big bucks. You got that?”

“Aye, aye, Sergeant,” I said.

“Don’t be a wiseass, Vic, it isn’t becoming at your age. If I find you’ve gone in there on your own, I will shoot you myself.”

10

IMPULSE CONTROL

I
TOOK MY GUN
into the kitchen to clean it. I hadn’t been at the range since the beginning of summer. If I was going to be butting heads with drug lords on a regular basis, I’d better start taking target practice every day, and invest in Tasers and automatic pistols as well.

There’s no end to the armory I could get by hanging out in the right bars, but I seldom carry the one gun I do own. Having a weapon makes you want to use it, and if you use yours the other person wants to use theirs, and then one of you gets badly hurt or dead, and the one who survives has to spend a lot of time explaining herself to the state’s attorney. All of which takes time from more meaningful work, although you could argue that killing a drug dealer constitutes meaningful work.

Conrad’s warning had been a prudent one. Only a wiseass who behaved in a way unbecoming to her age would disregard it. I put on a leg holster, easiest for me to reach if I was ducking or rolling away from an attack. Ferret Downey, I wondered as I left my apartment. That had to be a nickname that Conrad had used inadvertently.

I considered stopping at Mr. Contreras’s place to pick up Mitch so I had a little backup, but then I remembered the dead Rottweiler at the meth house in Palfry. Besides, if I told Mr. Contreras what I was going to do, he’d insist on picking up a pipe wrench and joining me.

“‘She travels the fastest who travels alone,’” I announced grandly to
myself. Although she shouldn’t travel so fast she plunges over the edge of a cliff.

As I got on the expressway, I tried to estimate times. Say Ferret Downey read Conrad’s message right away and took it seriously. Applied for a search warrant. Or overlooked that formality—the Supreme Court has been giving the police alarming latitude in breaking into people’s homes, cars, and even our brassieres merely on suspicion.

I was guessing that even if everyone cared enough to move at warp speed, it would take at least four hours for the police to arrive at Freddie Walker’s building. My worry was that no one would bother to check for a day or two. Police are stretched thin, they have a routine, a missing junkie wasn’t likely to generate heavy interest, either in the district or with the state’s attorney.

When I reached the stretch of Lorel where Walker operated, there were no signs of blue-and-whites, or of much else. The street had the exhausted air of too much of Chicago’s West Side. Weed-filled vacant lots, boarded-over doors and windows, a handful of emaciated men sitting on curbs, staring profoundly at nothing.

Walker’s six-flat looked as run-down as the rest of the block, the brickwork badly in need of remortaring, the paint on the window frames peeling, chunks of the concrete sills crumbling. The windows were intact, though, and had thick bars across them. The front door was solid. A camera in the lintel surveyed the front walk. The intercom by the door held only one button; no names or numbers were listed.

I stared at the entrance, trying to imagine what kind of sales pitch would not only get me inside, but back out again as well. I pressed the buzzer. No answer. I pressed again.

One of the men on the curb was watching me. “You buyin’ or sellin’?”

“Does that affect whether I can get in?”

He blinked, slowly, like a tortoise. The whites of his eyes were yellow, streaked with red—he’d been buying for far too long.

“Don’t make no difference. Nobody been answering all day. But if you’re selling, I might could arrange a buyer.”

I looked over the heavy front door. It had two locks, dead bolts of the kind that take a certain amount of effort to undo.

“Camera’s a fancy unit,” I said to my companion. “Wireless. Freddie must do a good business.”

“I guess he does okay,” the man agreed.

I don’t usually perform for an audience, but I didn’t think this yellow-eyed man would be able to describe me to anyone who asked. I went back to my car for my picklocks and a roll of duct tape.

My new friend followed me back up the walk, offering to hold the tape or my picklocks or do anything I needed. After tearing off a small piece of tape, I handed the roll to him. His hands shook badly; he kept dropping it, but watched with keen interest as I covered the camera eye.

As if he’d sent out a wireless signal himself, a few more people trailed up the walk behind us, a couple of guys and a heavyset woman about my age who was gasping for air by the time she reached us.

“What she doing, Shaq?” the woman asked. The harsh rasp in her lungs sounded painfully like my father, who’d ended his smoking life with emphysema.

“Don’t know, Ladonna,” Shaq grunted. “She breaking in, I guess. Look how she cover up the camera, simple as pie.”

Not only did I not want an audience, I didn’t want an escort, but I couldn’t think of any way to hint to my quartet to leave. I lugged over an abandoned car battery to use as a stool and started work on the top lock.

“Freddie ain’t gonna like this,” one of the other men said.

“Freddie ain’t gonna like what, Terrell?” Someone had come around the corner of the building so fast and silent he took everyone, including me, by surprise. The .45 in his hand made my entourage back away.

“Told her she shouldn’t be doin’ this, Bullet,” Shaq said, nervously
sticking the roll of duct tape into a trouser pocket. “She’s like, I gotta get into this place, and I’m telling her, ‘Worth your life. White girl like you got no business here,’ but she in—”

“Yeah, Shaq, you’re a hero,” Bullet growled. “We been watching your parade of losers coming up to the door all day, but you know Freddie’s policy, man, no credit! We know when you get your Social, so you fuck off until the first of the month. You, too, Ladonna, Terrell. And you, white girl, you better explain to Freddie what you’re doing, messing with his camera and all.”

He waved the gun at me. I stepped down from the car battery. Impulse control. When would I ever learn?

Bullet pushed the buzzer, once short, twice long, and someone inside released the lock. He poked the gun into my back, the spot where the T-1 vertebra connects the neck to the torso. The hairs stood up on my neck. Fear—another impulse I couldn’t control.