Critical Mass (14 page)

Where had Judy scampered next? If drug dealers got killed or broke their heads wherever she appeared, none of her old associates would welcome her.

It would have been a squeeze for me to follow her, but I could have done it. Unfortunately, as the ferret had said, I wanted my gun. I went back inside and slowly climbed the stairs, massaging my calves every few steps. When I reached the kitchen again, one of Downey’s crew
was waiting for me. He didn’t comment on my side trip, just told me that the lieutenant was ready for me.

Downey was in a room that Freddie apparently used as an office. Computers, ledgers, locked cabinets—now opened to display an impressive amount of heroin, unless it was cocaine, as well as old-fashioned apothecary bottles filled with pills—a fifty-inch TV screen, a stack of license plates, a Bose iPod player, and an armchair covered in a black-and-red upholstery that made my eyes hurt.

Downey was sitting in the chair. Easier than looking at it, I guess. I rolled a desk chair over to face him.

He stared at me for a long moment. “I’m going to believe your story. For now. Looking at the video footage, we saw you ringing the bell, then Freddie and his doofuses filmed themselves laughing at you and calling you names. Then the screen went blank, so if you were picking the lock, there’s no way of knowing.”

It seemed prudent not to respond.

“What about the junkie you came looking for?” he asked.

“Judy Binder. I’m thinking she might have been a guest in the apartment next door. I found where she, or some woman, anyway, slid out the back door and under the fence. She fled another drug murder downstate two days ago.”

That got Downey’s attention. We spent a good ten minutes going over the Palfry murder, the connection between Freddie Walker and Derrick Schlafly, between Judy Binder and both men. I gave him Sheriff Kossel’s cell phone number down in Palfry, but added that I knew very little, that I was looking for Judy as a favor for her elderly mother.

“Thought you said a doctor was involved, Warchosi.”

So he’d been listening all along. “Warshawski,” I corrected.

He stared at me. “You related to the auto-parts people?”

“No.” I sighed, repeating my standard line, including the Yiddish writer. “Going back to Judy Binder, she called her doctor. I heard the
message on the answering machine. Judy was terrified. The doctor sent me to Judy’s mother. Sheriff Kossel down in Palfry asked me to check on Freddie Walker.”

I paused, but Downey only fingered his mustache. I added, “Judy Binder has a son, kid of about twenty, who’s also gone missing. I didn’t see any sign of him next door. Did you find anything to say he might have been around?”

“Warshawski the Yiddish-Writing PI, you know what it’s like in a drug house: guys and the occasional gal have been camping out in some of the empty apartments downstairs, shooting, smoking, snorting, leaving crap behind that I don’t want to touch with six pairs of gloves on. If the three Wise Men had been here we wouldn’t be able to tell except by the camel droppings. If you have prints from the kid, or a DNA sample, we’ll sort them out when the techs finish with the scene. I can tell you this much for nothing: someone broke into one of these drawers”—he gestured at the desk—“and helped themselves to a fistful of dollars. We found twenties and hundreds floating around. The sarge and I were sorely tempted, weren’t we, Rodman?”

Sergeant Rodman grunted, but didn’t smile. You don’t joke about tens of thousands of dollars in drug loot, I guess.

Downey kept me for another fifteen minutes, just because he was frustrated, but in the end he told Rodman to give me back my Smith & Wesson.

When the sergeant pulled my pistol out of his pocket, my picklocks came with it, jangling to the floor.

“If we keep these, you going to buy another set?” Downey asked me.

“More than likely.”

“Give ’em back,” Downey told Rodman.

“Looey—they’re crime scene evidence,” his sergeant protested.

“Nah, they’re evidence of some Yiddish-writing detective’s stupidity. I still don’t know what Rawlings sees in you,” Downey added as I stuck my picks into a vest pocket.

“I look better in the fresh air,” I said.

“I’ll take your word for it.” His phone was ringing; he pressed the talk button and forgot about me.

It was past five now, glue-time on the expressway. I stuck to the side streets. They took just as long, but weren’t as hard on the nerves. Kids were out playing, people were sitting on their porches talking. I passed boys shooting hoops and prayed that none of them would ever go through the door of a place like Freddie Walker’s apartment.

I swung by the emergency clinic to check on my waif and learned that Mr. Contreras had already been in. They’d let him visit the dog; he’d shelled out the seven hundred dollars they needed for her continuing care. The vet thought if all went well, we could take her home in another week, which made me realize life can always become more complicated.

Back in my own place, I took another fumigating shower, washing off the greasy glass, the cockroach eggs, the sight of all that spattered blood and bone, the sound of Ladonna’s racking cough. I was hoping to slip out for the evening, but I’d forgotten texting a reporter friend when I decided to go into Walker’s building.

Murray Ryerson arrived as I was putting on a black sundress and sandals.

“I thought your boyfriend was on the West Coast. You getting some action on the side?” Murray asked.

“Just when I’m feeling sorry for you, you remind me of why I shouldn’t,” I said, pushing past him to the door.

“Sorry, Warshawski, sorry!” He held up his hands, traffic cop style, to stop me. “Let me have the highs or lows or whatever of the shoot-out in Austin. I picked up the main points on the TV feeds, but you had a front-row seat.”

By the time I’d finished describing Palfry, my search for Judy, the gunfight I’d been in this afternoon, Mr. Contreras had shown up. He’d heard about the shoot-out on the six-o’clock news, so I had to go through
the story all over again. Mr. Contreras doesn’t like Murray, so he was annoyed that I hadn’t told him first. He spent ten minutes chewing me out for not taking him out to Austin with me. That was a good reality check: I hadn’t believed things could have been worse, but at least I’d been spared Mr. Contreras trying to intercept Freddie’s and Vire’s bullets.

The three of us went out, not for the lovely dinner at a slow-food trattoria I’d been imagining, but to the local cafe where Mr. Contreras and Murray could have the big burgers they were craving. After a day of guns and blood, hamburgers dripping red turned my stomach. I left the two men eating in uneasy silence and went home to cook up a pot of pasta. I had some good cheese, a half-drunk bottle of wine. I sat on the back porch with the dogs, listening to a CD of Jake’s High Plainsong group, and slowly felt some peace return to my spirit.

Jake himself called a little later. He hadn’t caught anything in his deep-sea expedition, but he’d had a lot of fun. I’d caught someone, but had had no fun at all. Which proves something, I’m not sure what. Still, while I sat on the porch, he played me a lullaby on his bass. I went into bed a happier detective than I’d been an hour earlier.

12

DON’T DO ME ANY FAVORS ANYMORE

M
Y SLEEP WAS FILLED
with unquiet dreams, with Freddie, Vire and Bullet chasing me through a cornfield filled with dead bodies, while Judy Binder played hide-and-seek behind the cornstalks. She was giggling, taunting me:
You’ll never find me, you’ll never find my son.

I got up early again, but this time drove the dogs to the lake for a swim. When I’d showered and changed, Mr. Contreras offered to buy me breakfast at the Belmont Diner.

“I’d love to,” I said, “as long as we don’t talk about Murray or the abandoned Rottweiler.”

“Yeah, doll, but you know, that dog has to live a quiet life until she gets rid of her heartworm, which means I could—”

I cut him off ruthlessly. He managed to make it all the way through a plate of French toast without a word about the Rottweiler. It was only when I ordered a BLT to take along for my lunch that he brought her up again.

I brushed his forehead with my lips. “I’m on my way downtown. Later, my friend. Thanks for the breakfast.”

My first appointment was with my most important client, Darraugh Graham. I parked at my office and took the L into the Loop. It was the morning rush hour; all the seats were taken, so I leaned against a pole, my briefcase wedged between my feet. I pulled out my phone to
check my messages, joining the other commuters in focusing on a world far from the one we were looking at.

I wondered if any of the other passengers were getting furious texts from police sergeants, demanding that they call at once. That was not only the first message on my phone, but the fifth, sixth and ninth. I knew it would be a stressful conversation, so best get it over with before Conrad Rawlings had a whole day to create a head of steam. As it was, he’d already built up plenty:

Had he or had he not told me not to go into that apartment on my own? He’d had to do major damage control with Ferret Downey, to assure him that if I’d killed Bullet, it had been a complete accident.

“Do not call me again for favors, Warshawski. I am fed up to my back teeth with your recklessness. The next time you want to go up against a West Side drug lord, take that weedy violin player you’re dating.”

“Understood, Sergeant. No more favors. Got it. Although Jake plays the bass, not a violin.”

“Violin, ukulele, what difference does it make. He’s still weedy, but you are a goddamn piece of work.” Conrad cut the connection.

There was something pleasing about knowing Conrad was jealous of Jake. I went back to my in box. A law firm I work for wanted an investigation into an imbalance in their receivables; a wine retailer wanted to know if merchandise was disappearing from deliveries before or after they reached their store.

Nadja Hahne, Martin Binder’s high school physics teacher, could see me today after three-thirty; she’d leave my name with the high school security department if I could make it. I e-mailed back an acceptance. The librarian at the University of Chicago had found names for all but one of the eight people in the photo of the metal egg on a tripod.

I called him at once. Even with the way cell phones flatten the emotions in the voice, I could tell Arthur Harriman was excited.

“Do you have the picture in front of you?” he asked.

“I’m standing on the L,” I said. “I can’t get at my computer.”

“Okay, try to visualize it. Remember the five guys who are standing? The one in the middle is Stefan Meyer, who was head of the IRF in the thirties, at least until the Nazis came to power. The lady in the middle, sitting directly in front of him, is a Norwegian physicist who did a lot of experiments with Meyer. Your Martina is on the Norwegian’s left, and Gertrud Memler, one of Martina’s students, is on the other side.

“But I’m sure the man you want is the one standing on Meyer’s left, Benjamin Dzornen. He won the Nobel Prize in 1934 for his work on electron states in transuranic elements, but the point is, he left Vienna in 1936, went to the University of Wisconsin, and then, in 1941, got involved in the Manhattan Project. After the war he spent the rest of his career here, at the University of Chicago.”

“And he obviously knew Martina Saginor, since they’re in the picture together,” I said.

“They all knew each other back then,” Harriman said. “But Dzornen supervised Martina’s thesis. She went to Göttingen the summer of 1929 to start work on her Ph.D. He was there at the same time and agreed to supervise her so she could finish her work back in Vienna.”

I saw with a jolt that I’d ridden past my L stop; I was heading west alongside the Eisenhower Expressway. Inattentional blindness, a growing affliction in the wired world. I thanked Harriman with more haste than grace and raced up the stairs to cross over to the inbound side.

I was almost ten minutes late to my meeting, which is inexcusable. Worse, I couldn’t resist entering Dzornen’s name into my search engine while I was supposed to be listening to questions about three candidates to head Darraugh’s South American engineering division. I promised to have a report back to the executive committee within five days, but when I left the meeting, I saw I’d written down “Martina Dzornen” instead of one candidate’s name. I had to go back to get the correct name from the internal security chief, who was not one of my fans.

By the time I returned to my office, my search engines had created
reports on Benjamin Dzornen. He’d been born in Bratislava in 1896, attended school there, served in the Austrian Army during the First World War. After the war, he’d left Czechoslovakia for Berlin, where he came under the spell of Einstein, Max Planck and their circle.

In Berlin, Dzornen married a German woman, Ilse Rosenzweig, who came from an affluent cultured family. In the 1920s, he moved on to Vienna to work at the Institut für Radiumforschung. He and Ilse had three children, two daughters born in Vienna in the twenties, and a much younger son born after they arrived in the United States.

I scanned down the report: sure enough, he’d been in Göttingen in 1929, working with Heisenberg on matrix algebra and quantum mechanics. Among the students involved in the project was one M. Saginor, sex not specified.

If Dzornen and Martina had been lovers, then Kitty’s claim that her father dined with the King of Sweden was true. But how could I possibly find out? I imagined creeping into Kitty’s bedroom in the middle of the night for a DNA sample, then darting up to one of Dzornen’s descendants at a party to stick a Q-tip in her mouth. There had to be an easier way.

I sat back in my chair. The question wasn’t whether Dzornen was Kitty’s father. It was whether she believed he was. The family romance, that was what Freud called the belief that you’d been separated at birth from your real parents, who were special, perhaps royal. My Granny Warshawski believed she was descended from Queen Jadwiga of Poland, and that those genes made her superior to every other immigrant working on the killing floor of Chicago’s stockyards.