Critical Mass (9 page)

I had about two hours to get home, walk the dogs, and eat my own mushroom broccoli surprise. Instead, I picked up the phone and dialed an old friend at the public defender’s office. Stefan Klevic had stayed on long after the rest of us gave up in despair.

Stefan wasn’t any more excited than Jeanine Susskind at hearing from me. “I’m on my way home, Warshawski. Can’t it wait until morning?”

“A guy named Derrick Schlafly was killed down in Palfry yesterday morning,” I said.

“I’m fascinated. Especially since I never heard of Schlafly or Palfry.”

“A hundred miles down I-55. Schlafly was a meth maker.”

“If the killer is arrested in Cook County, I’ll put up a spirited defense of whoever shot him,” Klevic promised. “Now, Doug has dinner waiting for me, so if you don’t mind—”

“Schlafly operated around here for fifteen years or so. I need to find some of the scum he knew then, to see if any of them can help me find a woman who was living with Schlafly. About the time he was killed, she called up crazy scared, then vanished.”

Klevic sighed audibly. “Leave her to the police, Warshawski. Turn over the details to them. If she shot Schlafly, it’s the Palfry County PD’s job to look after her, not mine, assuming their budget extends to public defenders.”

“The missing woman’s name is Judy Binder,” I continued. “That’s B-i-n-d-e-r. She’s a protégée of Lotty Herschel.”

Lotty had saved Stefan’s sister’s life several years ago. I heard him grind his teeth, but he muttered that he’d see what he could find out.

“Thanks, Stefan,” I said. “I knew I could count on you.”

“You know you’re no better than a frigging blackmailer, V.I.”

“Am too,” I said. “A frigging blackmailer doesn’t get nearly as good results as I do. Say ‘hey’ to Doug for me.”

I checked my e-mail one last time before I left. My note to Martin had bounced back with the long message about “fatal errors” you get from sending to a nonexistent mailbox. I double-checked Jari Liu’s message, but I’d entered Martin’s address correctly. I tried the cell phone number Liu had given me. I was not astounded to learn that the number was not in service.

I forwarded my fatal-error message to Liu. “Any more recent address you want to share? Any other cell numbers? The one you gave me isn’t answering.”

As I locked up my office for the day, I wondered if I should call one of my contacts in the Chicago police as well. If Schlafly had a sheet, which was probable, they’d have his pals listed. Kitty Binder had been so insistent about not talking to the police that I hesitated: her daughter probably had a sheet, too. I could picture the tormented evenings when Judy was a teenager, the calls from the police, the fights with the daughter coupled with anger at the police. I’d wait to see what Stefan Klevic turned up before going to the boys in blue.

On my way home, I took a detour to the emergency vet to check on my waif. They’d done surgery to remove a ruptured spleen; while they were inside they took out her ovaries and uterus. She had some sepsis in the wound so she was on high-dose antibiotics for that. She had heartworm, which required a special regimen all its own. At some point in her short life—the vet reckoned she was about three—she’d broken a leg that had healed on its own.

“For all she’s suffering, and considering the abuse she took, she still has a pretty sweet disposition,” the vet said. “A little nervy, but she hasn’t tried to bite anyone, so you may be able to take her home.”

“Maybe,” I said doubtfully. “I have two dogs already and a full-time job. If she recovers in good shape, I’ll help find the right family for her.”

The receptionist asked me to pay the bill to date. Forty-eight hundred and counting, but I handed over my credit card without complaint. So many of the humans I work with have a tendency to bite no matter how well they’ve been treated that it seemed like a good expenditure to rescue an uncomplaining Rottweiler.

My own dogs—a golden retriever and her half-Lab son—greeted me as if we’d been separated for twelve months instead of twelve hours. I hadn’t been able to give them a proper workout the past two days, so
I took them over to Lake Michigan for a long swim. My downstairs neighbor, who shares them with me, rode over to the lake with us. I floated in the lake for a bit, letting the cool water ease away some of the stresses of the day.

Back on land, while I threw balls for the dogs, Mr. Contreras and I caught up on each other’s lives. He was less reproachful than usual over his exclusion from my adventures: he had received a long e-mail today from my cousin Petra. He adores her and was bereft when she left Chicago for the Peace Corps. Her remote El Salvadoran village doesn’t often get an Internet connection, so today’s e-mail had pepped him up.

When he heard my story, his main focus was on the Rottweiler. “What do you think we should call her, doll?”

“‘My Own True Love,’” I said brightly. “As in, ‘Fare thee well, my own true love.’”

Mr. Contreras looked at me reproachfully. “That ain’t right and you know it, cookie. It seems like it was meant, you going down there to find Dr. Lotty’s gal and saving this dog’s life along the way. We got two dogs already, how much trouble can a third one be?”

Mr. Contreras is almost ninety, with the energy and personality of a pile driver. Even so, his days of running big dogs are behind him.

I put an arm around him. “We’ll make a budget. We’ll see whether we can afford a full-time dog-walker, and whether Mitch and Peppy will welcome a half-feral outsider into their pack. For now, the Rottweiler has to be in segregation until she stops shedding heartworm larvae.”

Mr. Contreras’s lips were moving; I wasn’t sure he’d been listening to me. “We’ll call her Mottle, for ‘My Own True Love.’”

7

ROCKET SCIENCE

J
EANINE AND ZACHARY
Susskind met me at their front door together. Sort of together. Zachary was a bulky guy. Even though Jeanine was slim, she couldn’t fit herself quite next to her husband in the doorway.

Before I finished announcing myself, Zachary demanded to see my ID. Something about Skokie gave its residents a mania for inspecting my credentials. I handed him a card and showed him my PI license. He frowned over it but reluctantly decided I could be allowed inside.

“What’s this about? Why does Kitty Binder think my son should talk to a detective?” Zachary said.

His gut was pushing me against the edge of the open door. I leaned forward into him and he backed up a step.

I had my spiel about Martin’s disappearance down to a thirty-second sound bite. “Your son is the one person Ms. Binder says Martin was friends with,” I finished. “I’d like to talk to Toby to see if he knows where Martin was heading.”

“He doesn’t,” Zachary said flatly.

“Did you ask him? Did you know Martin was gone?”

Zachary scowled. “If Martin took off to do something illegal or dangerous, Toby is smart enough to stand clear. I don’t—
we
don’t—want you harassing our son.”

“I don’t want to harass him, just ask him if Martin talked to him.” I was tired. I’d ended up not having time to eat more than a few bites
of Mr. Contreras’s mac and cheese—sans broccoli and mushrooms—before heading north again. It took an effort to keep my voice level.

“If Martin turns up dead in a ditch and a few words from your son could have brought me to him in time, I won’t be a happy detective.” I decided not to put in the effort.

Jeanine Susskind said gently that we would all be more comfortable in the living room. “And we’ll all be more comfortable not threatening each other,” she added.

The Susskinds lived on the street behind the Binders, in a house that was bigger and airier. We went into a front room whose beige couches and armchairs made a suitable backdrop for a wall-sized abstract painting in blues and golds. A tray with coffee cups and a thermos sat on a glass table in front of a gas fireplace.

“Look,” Zachary said, when his wife had finished the coffee ritual. “Everyone knows that Martin Binder’s mother has a serious drug problem. When Martin and Toby were ten or so, she showed up one day and took them off to Great America without talking to Jeanine or to Kitty. She ended up driving her car into a streetlamp on Skokie Highway. It’s a miracle that everyone walked away from that outing, and she’s goddamn lucky we didn’t sue her behind to hell and back.

“I told Toby he was never to go anywhere alone with Martin again unless he talked to me or his mother first, and he’s been good about that, even when they got to be in high school. They went camping together a couple of times, but I was on the phone with Toby every day making sure that addict wasn’t anywhere near them.”

I rubbed the crease between my eyes. “Mr. Susskind, are you saying that Martin talked to Toby this past August and told him he wanted to visit his mother?”

“I—no.” For the first time, Susskind paid attention to what he was saying; when he spoke again the belligerence level in his voice had gone down. “But if Martin had talked to Toby about doing anything alone, Toby would have told me.”

“Zach, they’re twenty now, not ten. You can’t be sure of that,” Jeanine said.

“I don’t think Martin’s any less reckless or dangerous now than he was ten years ago,” her husband said. “Since Len died, there hasn’t been anyone to balance Kitty’s lunatic ideas. For all I know, she persuaded Martin to find the people she keeps claiming are following her.”

“That’s a persistent fear, is it?” I asked. “I wondered this morning if it stemmed from her childhood experiences, or if it had roots in something more recent, such as her daughter’s drug problems.”

“That’s it in a nutshell,” Zachary said. “With that kind of stepmother, or grandmother, I guess, it’s no wonder Martin grew up to be such a lone wolf. Jeannie feels sorry for him, but even she has to admit, some of what he got Toby involved in was downright dangerous.”

The coffee was weak for my taste. I took a few sips to be polite before putting my cup back on the tray.

Jeanine laughed softly. “It wasn’t dangerous, not in that way. Martin wanted to re-create the Challenger disaster. When he was around twelve or thirteen he got fascinated by the history. He and Len built a series of rockets; Martin wanted to see if he could replicate what went wrong and Toby couldn’t stay away, not when the boy across the alley was launching rockets!”

“He could have put out Toby’s eyes, or his own,” Zachary grumbled. “But you know darned well, Jeannie, they came close to suffocating when Martin filled the garage with CO
₂
.”

“Ms. Binder told me how much that episode distressed you,” I said.

“Zach,” Jeanine said. “Please. You’re giving Ms. Warshawski a very distorted picture here.”

She turned to me, leaning forward over her coffee cup. “Martin idolized Richard Feynman. Do you remember him showing us all on national television how the O-ring in the rocket broke when it froze in outer space? Martin’s enthusiasm infected Toby, who brought the story home to us.”

“It was the rockets,” Zachary said dryly. “No twelve-year-old boy could resist those rockets that Len was helping Martin build.”

“That’s true,” Jeanine admitted. “All the kids in the neighborhood who’d been calling Martin names all those years, they crowded around, they wanted to go to the lakefront when Martin and Len were going to fire them off.

“Anyway, Martin was trying to get his rockets to freeze, so he got Len to buy a huge vat of dry ice. They filled the garage with it and Martin left his rockets in there to freeze, that was all. He and Toby got a little light-headed, but nothing came of it.”

“And nothing came of the rockets, either, except one of them landed on the Tubman roof and set it on fire,” Zachary said.

“It was so cool!”

We all three jumped at the words: none of us had noticed the younger Susskind boy standing in the doorway. He had a mop of the thickest, reddest hair I’d ever seen on a boy.

“Voss!” Jeanine said. “Don’t you have homework?”

“I’m mostly done, honest, just history and physics left and—”

“Upstairs now,” Jeanine said. “I don’t want another night of you in bed after midnight.”

“Voss,” I interrupted, “do you know where Martin Binder was going when he took off last month?”

“Don’t question my son without my—” Zachary began, but his wife silenced him with a head shake.

“Voss, this is Ms. Warshawski,” Jeanine said. “She’s a detective, she’s trying to find out what happened to Martin.”

Voss nodded: he’d been listening ever since I arrived. He shot an uneasy glance at his father, who told him petulantly to go ahead.

“Me and Sam Lustic were—”

“Sam and I,” Jeanine interrupted.

“Sam and I, we were going over to the pool and Martin came out of the garage with his camping stuff strapped to his bike. You know, he
has that cool tent that folds up like a kite, so I guessed he was going camping. Only not with Toby.”

“Would that have bothered your brother?” I asked.

“I doubt it,” Jeanine said. “Toby has a lot of friends; he always did, whereas Martin was, well, he was kind of a one-friend person. If he went camping without Toby, it’s because Toby didn’t want to go. They haven’t been as close since Toby started college, anyway.”

“Martin’s been gone almost two weeks,” I repeated. “I’ve got to tell the police, even though Kitty feels very strongly that they not be involved.”

Voss was listening, mouth agape. “Has Martin been killed?”

“I doubt it,” I said with a heartiness I didn’t feel. “If he’d been killed someone would have told his grandmother by now.”

“Are you still here?” Jeanine said to her son. “This conversation is not for you or about you.”

When she’d shooed Voss up the stairs to his room, I asked about her earlier statement, the kids in the neighborhood who’d been calling Martin names. “What was that about?”

Jeanine looked troubled. “Kitty is so strange. The house was a difficult place to be in, so the kids wouldn’t go there, not even for Martin’s birthdays. Len tried a few times—he went around the neighborhood and invited everyone personally. No one showed up, except the little Gluckman girl, but she was even more desperate for friends than Martin.