Critical Mass (4 page)

“I didn’t ask you to drive down to Palfry. If I’d been in the clinic, I would never have bothered you.”

“Lotty, don’t try that on me. If you’d been in the clinic, you know darned well that your first call would have been to me, to ask me to trace the call, which, by the way, I lack the legal authority to do—you can sic Ms. Coltrain on the phone company in the morning, if you want to find out where Judy was calling from. And then you would have said,
Victoria, I know it’s an imposition, but could you possibly check up on her?
”

Lotty grimaced. “Oh, perhaps. Just the way you come in every time someone puts a bullet through you and say,
I know it’s an imposition but I don’t have enough insurance to pay for this.
”

I sat up in the Barcelona chair and stared at her. “You want to start a fight to keep me from asking about Judy Binder. I’m too tired for that. I’m not leaving until you tell me who she is. Rhonda Coltrain says you feel responsible for her. Here I’ve been knowing you thirty years and never once heard you mention her name.”

“I know a lot of people you’ve never heard of,” Lotty said, then gave her twisted smile, a recognition that she was being petulant. She put down her coffee cup and walked over to the long glass wall that overlooked Lake Michigan. She stared at the dark water for a long time before she spoke again.

“Her mother and I grew up together in Vienna, that’s the problem.” She didn’t turn around; I had to strain to hear her. “That’s the story, I mean. Käthe, her mother’s name was in those days, Käthe Saginor. So when Käthe’s daughter Judy began needing extra attention, running away from home when she was only fifteen, getting involved with one abusive boy after another, then needing her first abortion when she was sixteen—she came to me for a second when she was twenty-two—I felt—I can’t even tell you what I felt.

“I didn’t see that much of Judy as a child, so why should I feel responsible, or even affectionate? But I did feel some of both, along with a dash of schadenfreude over Käthe’s failure at motherhood. I only know that against all my own beliefs or my normal course of action, I kept trying to rescue Judy.”

She turned to look at me. “In an Uptown practice, I see many people caught in the thralls of addiction to one thing or another. I know if they are going to be saved they have to want salvation, which, to be honest, I never saw any sign of in Judy. I don’t know why I thought my own willpower could imbue her with the desire.”

“She was the daughter of a friend from your childhood,” I said, thinking I understood. “That can—”

“I don’t like her mother.” Lotty cut me off sharply. “Käthe Saginor was always a whiny, nervous girl. I hated that my grandmother thought I should play with her. I was never very nice to her on the days Käthe’s grandmother—Kitty, I mean, she changed her name in England—Kitty’s grandmother brought her over to our flat on the Renngasse. After the Anschluss, when we had to leave the flat, it was worse because we were stuck next door to each other in those cramped slums in the Leopoldstadt. Käthe used to tell her grandmother—oh, never mind that!”

Lotty flung up a hand, as if brushing a cobweb out of her hair. “Why am I dwelling on those petty old slights and wounds? Still, when my
Opa
put Käthe on the train to London with Hugo and me that spring before the war started, I was scared Käthe would jinx the trip. I worried that she would cry and complain so much that the German guards would throw us off the train, or even that the English would be so cross with her that they’d ship Hugo and me back to Vienna with her. It was a relief when we reached London and she was sent on to Birmingham.

“In the turmoil of the war years, I forgot about her. Then, without warning, she appeared in Chicago, around the time I was doing my obstetrics fellowship at Northwestern. She’d become Kitty—I don’t know why I can’t remember that. After all, I anglicized the spelling of my own name.”

“Did she come to Chicago to find you?” I asked.

“No—she had her own complicated story, which I got tired of hearing. She was married by then, she’d gone back to Austria after the war
to interpret for the British Army and married an American GI. They came to Chicago because Kä—Kitty thought her own mother was here, that was her story. I couldn’t
bear
hearing about all the people who’d mistreated her, or lied to her, how she found her mother, she hadn’t found her mother, her mother left Chicago without seeing her, her mother was dead. We all had our dead to mourn, our lives to build, no one was holding my hand and I didn’t want to hold hers!”

I sat still: if I’d gone to her at that moment she would have pushed me away like another cobweb.

Finally she walked back to her chair. “I liked Len—Leonard Binder, that was Kitty’s husband. Judy was their only child. Len died about eighteen months ago and that was the last time I saw Judy, at his funeral. She told me she’d joined a commune downstate, that she was turning her life around, and I wanted to believe her even though I was pretty sure she was high at the time.”

At that I did go over to her, knelt next to her chair, put my arms around her. Lotty’s breath slowly returned to normal. She sat up abruptly and said, “Didn’t you say the sheriff down there had never seen Judy? What if she wasn’t part of that drug house at all?”

I walked over to the couch where I’d left my handbag and pulled out the two photos I’d found in the wreckage in Palfry. I handed Lotty the one of the mother with a baby.

Lotty looked at it briefly. “Oh, yes. Judy with the one baby she carried to term. Poor thing, she gave him to Len and Käthe when he was a year or so old.”

I looked at the bleached-out picture again. It was hard to make out Judy Binder’s expression, but she seemed puzzled, like a dreamer who doesn’t understand where she’s woken up. She’d given the baby to her parents, but she’d kept the picture; that must mean something.

I showed Lotty the picture of the metal pod on stilts that had been on the floor of the meth house. “Do you know what this is?”

“It looks like a child’s design for a spaceship. But the people—” She
frowned over the photo. “I feel as though I should recognize them, but—I don’t know, I think it’s the clothes. They make me think of my childhood.”

I took back the pictures and put them in a folder in my bag. The mantel clock chimed eleven, startling both Lotty and me. It had been a long day; I was more than ready for bed. As she walked me to the elevator, Lotty thanked me formally for all the trouble I’d taken.

When the car arrived, she held my arm and said with her self-mocking smile, “Victoria, I know it’s an imposition, but will you go see Käthe—Kitty, I mean—and see if she knows anything?”

3

FAMILY PORTRAITS

K
ITTY BINDER LIVED
in Skokie on Chicago’s northwest border in a tan brick house. Most of her neighbors had small front gardens, with marigolds and rosebushes set around squares of perfect grass. At the Binder place, a few patches of unmown grass warred with dandelions in the dry ground. The trim around the windows was peeling; squirrels had bitten holes underneath the eaves. Depression, age, lack of money, or all of the above. I sucked in a breath to buoy myself and rang the bell.

Two fingers cautiously parted the blinds in the front window. After a moment, I heard the lock’s tumblers clunk as the dead bolts were undone; the front door opened the length of a stout chain. Through the crack I could just make out a shadowy face.

“Ms. Binder? I’m V. I. Warshawski. We spoke earlier this morning.”

It had been a difficult phone call. At first, Kitty Binder said she wasn’t interested in her daughter, she had no idea where Judy was, and furthermore, why had I let Charlotte Herschel involve herself in affairs that were no business of hers?

When I described Judy’s terrified message on Lotty’s answering machine, Ms. Binder became even fiercer. She wished she had a nickel for every threatening phone call Judy had made over the years. Judy played on Lotty’s sympathies like Isaac Stern with a Stradivarius. Judy knew
that she, Kitty, wouldn’t stand for such nonsense, so Judy turned to Lotty instead.

“Not that Charlotte is gullible. She sees plenty of drug addicts in that clinic of hers. She knows exactly what’s going on. She just wants to make me look bad in my daughter’s eyes by acting as if she were a saint.”

I flinched at my end of the phone. Lotty and Kitty definitely were not best friends forever. I didn’t want to have to listen to decades of grievances from either of them, so I cut Kitty off abruptly.

“I went down to Palfry yesterday, to the house where your daughter has been living. I didn’t find Judy, but the house had been torn apart and I’m sorry to say that I came on the murdered body of a man who’d been living there. I think this time your daughter may have—”

“A murdered man?” Kitty interrupted me in turn, her voice rising in fear. “Who was it?”

“I don’t know; I couldn’t find any ID on him.” I didn’t want to say I hadn’t looked for any ID with the crows descending on me, claws and caws ordering me away from their feast.

“Come at noon.” And she’d hung up.

Here it was, noon, which I’d managed only by rearranging a couple of client visits. Instead of letting me in, Ms. Binder demanded proof that I was V. I. Warshawski. I didn’t argue with her, just showed her my various licenses to drive cars, shoot firearms, investigate crimes.

She finally undid the chain bolt. As soon as I was inside, she did up all the bolts again. The house smelled of unopened windows, overlaid with the scent of the face powder Kitty Binder was wearing. The only light in the entryway came through a dirt-crusted transom above the front door. I had trouble making out Ms. Binder, but I could tell she was short, with close-cropped white hair. Despite the hot day, she had on a thick cardigan.

Instead of inviting me all the way in, she startled me by demanding to know if anyone had followed me to the house.

“Not that I know of. Who were you expecting?”

“If you’re really a detective you would have kept an eye out for tails.”

“If you were really Kitty Binder, you’d want to know about your daughter. You wouldn’t be lecturing me on the fine points of detection.”

“Of course I’m Kitty Binder!” It was hard to make out her expression, but her voice was indignant. “You’re violating my privacy, coming into my home, asking impertinent questions. I have a right to expect you to be professional.”

Everyone in America is watching way too many crime shows these days. Juries expect expensive forensic work on routine crimes; clients expect you to treat their affairs as if they worked for the CIA. Not that Kitty Binder was a client yet.

“Is it the DEA you’re worried about?” I asked. “If they’re looking for your daughter they’ll already have a wiretap in place, so they don’t need to follow someone like me around.”

I thought Ms. Binder’s eyes grew round with alarm. “Are you saying that my phone is being tapped?”

“No, ma’am.” I was beginning to feel that I’d gotten lost in a conversational thicket the size of yesterday’s cornfield. “I’m just saying that we should talk about the murdered man I found yesterday. Who do you think he was?”

“You’re the one who found him,” she said. “You tell me.”

“He either was living in the house with your daughter, or he was one of the invaders. But you know or think you know who it was, because it was only after I mentioned him that you agreed to talk to me.”

“Charlotte sent you here to spy on me, didn’t she?” Her voice
quavered, as if she were trying to whip up anger as a cover to whatever she was afraid of facing.

“Ma’am, could we sit down? If someone’s been bothering you, following you, or threatening you, I can help.”

“If you’re a friend of Charlotte Herschel’s, you’ll go back to her and tell her what I said so the two of you can have a laugh at my expense.”

“No, ma’am, I can promise that if you tell me something in confidence, I will keep it confidential.”

Lotty’s last words to me came into my mind: the baby Judy had carried to term, she’d given him to Len and Kitty. Could he possibly be the man I’d found in the field? I wondered how old the grandson was by now.

Kitty was biting her lip, unable to make up her mind whether to talk to me or not. I moved past her into the house and stopped at the door to a living room. The blinds were drawn so tightly that I could only make out ghostly shapes of chairs and a couch, the gleam of a TV screen. I could smell the dust.

“Where are you most comfortable, Ms. Binder? In here? Or should we go to the kitchen?”

Ms. Binder pushed past me into the living room. A pity: she might have unbent more in the kitchen. She turned on a table lamp and gestured toward an armchair whose arms and back were covered with lace doilies. Lace dripped over most of the other furniture, including a side table that held a series of photos, some formal, in frames, but most old snapshots. The room was tidy, if crowded, but a layer of dust had settled over the table and television.

“Did you make these yourself?” I fingered the lace covering the arms of my chair.

“Oh, yes. I wasn’t a pampered house pet like Charlotte Herschel. We worked in our home. My grandmother made sure I could knit and
make lace before I turned five. It’s not a skill you forget, not when you’re taught it that young. Even my own mother—”

Kitty bit the sentence off, as if it were a thread she was snapping in her teeth. I waited, hoping she might add something.

“When did you last see your daughter?” I finally asked.

Kitty’s lips tightened. “She came to her father’s funeral. She showed up in black, wearing a big hat, and crying as if she’d been nursing Len day and night. Of course, he was always soft with her, so soft you’d have thought she might come around more when she learned he was sick. Or maybe she did, she probably went to see him at the shop more times than he let on to me. He knew I didn’t like him giving her money. I don’t imagine a drop will fall from her eyes when I’m gone.”

And if she’s dead, will a drop fall from your eyes? I wondered.