Critical Mass (39 page)

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

W
HAT 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.”

“Don’t you guilt-trip me!” Judy’s eyes flashed. “I heard that morning, noon and night for the last thirty-five years.”

She repeated my words with savage mockery. “‘
I’m sure she was difficult to live with
.’ Yes, she was fucking difficult to live with. I never could have girlfriends over to play, she was so suspicious of strangers coming into the house. No one ever invited me to their birthday parties or anything because she was creepy. The other moms felt uncomfortable around her. She always thought people were following her. In high school I finally started finding my own friends.”

She was panting, the anger exhausting her frail body. She leaned back in the wheelchair, her face pasty, like buttermilk, with red flecks floating on it. I let her rest, but when she opened her eyes, just a bit, little slits studying my reaction, I started again.

“Who was following her?”

“Don’t ask me. She’d say the FBI was monitoring her mail, or sometimes it was the CIA. Like one blue-collar refugee from Austria was important enough for J. Edgar Hoover to snoop on.”

“She never talked about an old crime, something that happened before you were born?”

Judy seemed to realize this was an important question. She took time to think about it but finally shook her head. “Not unless you mean the Dzornens robbing her of her inheritance, she talked about
that plenty. It always upset my dad, he worked hard, he supported us, we lived as comfortably as anyone else around us: What did she want that guy’s money for, anyway? he used to say.”

Poor Leonard Binder. He sounded like a decent guy whose only crime had been marrying a woman badly scarred by life and war. At least he’d had those joyous moments with Martin, when they filled the garage with dry ice and set off the rockets.

“Your mother talked to you about the Painters. She also told you about the Dzornens, didn’t she? How they mistreated her? Did she think they were the people following her?”

“I told you I don’t know!” Judy tried to shout but she didn’t have enough strength in her abdomen; the words came out in a grating rasp.

“You knew a lot about her.” I kept my voice neutral, neither praise nor blame, merely a chance to open a curtain and see a new landscape. It actually got Judy to think: once again she cut herself off mid-curse.

“She wasn’t always angry. When I was little, sometimes we had fun, my dad and mom and I. My dad loved going to the park or the zoo, and he was good with tools, he could build things, mechanical things—Kitty always did the woodwork. They even made me a wagon with a motor. Kitty could sew anything. Once she made a wardrobe for my kitten. The girls at school were jealous when I brought Ginger with me to show-and-tell.”

“Do you remember what happened to change your mother?”

Judy looked at her knotted fingers, the fingers of a much older woman. “She wasn’t always happy, either, don’t go getting that idea! The first words I ever heard from her were how her birth mother didn’t like her, how she only cared about equations and atoms. Her mom liked Lotty better, Mom thought Lotty was a show-off.” She smiled slyly. “Of course that’s why I went to Lotty when I got pregnant; I knew it would piss off Kitty no end.”

I nodded. I didn’t like it, but I could understand it.

“And like you said, she lost everybody. I heard it so many times it
stopped being about real people, it was like a bedtime story, the nasty kind that gives you nightmares.”

I nodded again: Judy’s drugs made a certain sense to me. If your life had been filled with horror stories from the day you were born, you would want something to blunt the images. That made me think of “duck and cover.” I asked Judy how that came into her history.

She gave an involuntary glance at the door. “If I tell, you have to promise not to say.”

“That’s okay: I promise.”

“And shut the door. I don’t want those nurses listening in.”

I shut the door and pulled the visitor’s chair over next to her.

She looked from me to the door several times, deciding whether she was really ready to jump off the high dive, but she finally made the leap.