Critical Mass (27 page)

The two froze briefly, then turned more energetically to my car. I dashed barefoot across the lot, but they had the trunk open before I got to them. They grabbed the drawers and were bolting toward their own waiting car when the papers I’d wrapped in plastic fluttered to the tarmac. I got to them first, but one of the punks ran back and tried to grab them from me. In the tug-of-war, the paper disintegrated.

I slugged the thug across the jaw with the handle of my gun. He yelled in pain, his hands clutching his face. His partner had gotten into their car and swung it around for him. I tried grabbing him by the shoulder, but he broke free and made it into the car.

I fumbled in my jeans for my car keys, but I’d left those inside along with my room key and my shoes. My trunk was open and empty. I had caught their car model, a Dodge Charger, but I’d been fighting so hard that I didn’t get the license plate. I was too angry with my own stupidity even to swear.

Several people appeared in the doorway, shouting out confused questions. I stuck the Smith & Wesson inside my waistband at the small of my back.

“Someone was breaking into my car out there,” I said. “When I called out, they dropped their crowbar and took off.”

My fellow residents streamed past me, looking for damage to their own cars. I went to the front desk, where I had some trouble rousing the night clerk. I explained what had happened, but that in my haste to drive off the intruders I’d locked myself out of my room.

The clerk wanted proof of my identity, which was also in my room, but she finally agreed to come with me to open the door. She stood in the entrance and told me to describe what was in the room.

“I left a beige jacket and a rose-colored silk shirt on a hanger in the closet. The briefcase on the desk has my iPad and my wallet in it, and I have the code to unlock the iPad.”

Now that I’d gotten her up, she was determined to be zealous: she watched me unlock the iPad, which was now playing a Haydn sonata, incongruously enough, before returning to her desk to call the sheriff.

The night deputies, two men I hadn’t encountered before, met me at my Mustang. By then I was dressed again in my silk shirt and jacket and had my gun in my tuck holster. I’d double-checked all the surfaces in the room for my belongings. I didn’t have much—iPad, phone and Roberta’s Palfry Panthers T-shirt. I packed those into my briefcase, along with odds and ends like my picklocks.

When I told the deputies what had been taken from the trunk, they didn’t roll their eyes or give the blank stares I’d expected.

“Oh, yeah. You’re the Chicago detective who found buried treasure at Schlafly’s. How valuable was it, you think?” The taller, older deputy felt compelled to lean into my face, which meant I could read his name badge in the dim light: Herb Aschenbach.

“I don’t think it was valuable at all,” I said. “It had sentimental meaning for Roberta Wenger because the dresser once belonged to Agnes Schlafly.”

“Not what we heard,” Herb said. “Talk was about gold.”

I sighed. “Ms. Wenger said the drawers used to have gold handle
pulls. If someone passed that story along I suppose it could have grown into a stack of gold, but all I found were chicken bones, ether cans and tampons.”

As I’d hoped, the word “tampon” made Herb back away from me. “What were you looking for, anyway? Why did you take the drawers?”

“I’m not the one who committed a crime here,” I said. “I’m the victim. The punks drove off in a Dodge Charger, in case you have one zooming around the country connected to B-and-E’s.”

The two deputies looked at each other, startled. They knew the Dodge.

“You must have been looking for something,” the younger deputy said. “We went and took a look at that pit out back of Schlafly’s. You got it pretty well cleaned out.”

“Since you know everything I’ve been doing, Jenny Orlick must have told you I’m looking for a young man named Martin Binder. He was at the Schlafly house a few weeks ago. He might have dropped some papers in the pit which could shed some light on where he went next.”

“Seems like a lot of trouble for not much to me,” Herb said.

“Hard to argue with that, Deputy, especially since I also have a smashed trunk lock on top of not much. You can talk to Ms. Wenger in the morning, which is right now, come to think of it, and get her version.”

The night clerk came out through the back of the hotel. “Kyle, I got a whole bunch of nervous guests in there, wanting to know if their cars are going to be vandalized. Can you come talk to them?”

Kyle and Herb looked at each other, looked at the Mustang, nodded.

Kyle said, “Yeah, Tina, we’ll be right in. We can’t do anything for you here, Miss. I mean, we could dust the trunk lock for prints, but frankly that’s a waste of time, no matter what they say on those TV shows. We’ll file a report and tell the team to be on the lookout, case anyone hears anything about these drawers. I’m guessing someone who
heard the talk at the game last night got carried away, thinking you’d dug up gold, and went and helped themselves to it.”

Herb added, “We’ll send Jenny Orlick over to Wenger’s in the morning, see if Roberta remembers anything else. How long you fixing to stay here?”

“Not long, Deputy.”

“You stop by the station to sign a complaint before you head back to Chicago, okay? And don’t go leaving the jurisdiction without letting us know.”

“Right you are, Deputy.”

I watched while the two men followed Tina into the motel. I picked up the crowbar by one end and laid it in the trunk. I doubted it would show any prints or DNA, but you never know. The punks had damaged the lock so badly it wouldn’t stay shut; I had to fasten it with a bungee cord to keep the lid from swinging open.

Like the deputies, I didn’t think there was any point in doing anything else, such as signing a complaint, or getting permission to leave the jurisdiction. I slipped out the back exit, my lights off, gun on the seat beside me. Only when I was clear of the motel did I consult my iPad for advice on a route to Chicago. I wanted the old state highways and county roads. I was tired, my legs still hurt, I didn’t feel up to driving eighty on the interstate in the dark. I also wanted to make sure I was alone.

Night creatures skittered away from my headlights, raccoons, foxes, rat-like creatures. Now and then a tractor would rumble across the road to get on one of the tracks alongside the fields. Sunrise was still two hours away, but lights were on in many of the farmhouses I passed.

I didn’t think my punks were looking for buried treasure; I thought they wanted the bleached-out documents Roberta and I had found. Judy Binder and her son had argued over some papers, Roberta said: she’d watched them through her binoculars, but she hadn’t heard what they said. Invaders had torn Kitty Binder’s house apart, searching for—what?

I shifted uneasily in my seat, rubbing my driving leg. Was I ruling out the obvious because I wanted the subtle? Judy and Martin could have been fighting over her drug habit. They could have been fighting because he was furious that she’d rather be with crack and meth than him. Ricky Schlafly, that death had all the earmarks of a falling-out among drug dealers. And drug dealers were a wild, unstable bunch. Roberta and Frank Wenger had said there were a number of drug houses in the county. Other meth makers would have heard about my find at the football game: they could easily have believed a tale of buried treasure.

Even if that was the correct analysis, it didn’t answer one big question. Where had Martin Binder gone?

24

PAST DUE

D
AWN WAS JUST
BREAKING
when I reached my apartment on Racine. Early to bed, early to rise, leaves me cranky with rings under my eyes.

Mr. Contreras was up, puttering around his kitchen. I described yesterday’s drama to him, including the theft of the dresser drawers. It was a long narrative because the old man kept interrupting, partly to see if I was all right, partly indignant I hadn’t taken him along for protection.

When we’d finally hashed it over as much as I could stand, he went with me to the lake. I swam out to the far buoy with the dogs and floated in the water for a time, watching the gulls chase each other, until I got so cold I had to swim back at high speed. In a way, the hour in the water was more refreshing than a night in bed. Only in a way.

Back at the apartment, while Mr. Contreras and I shared a plate of French toast, we argued over the theft: Had it been dopeheads in search of gold, or someone more sinister in search of documents?

I thought again of Jari Liu’s slogan about God and data. The only data I had were two stolen drawers, a passbook to a bank that might have been in Lincolnwood on Chicago’s northwest edge, and a report from an Office of Technical Services.

I helped Mr. Contreras do the washing up, then went to my own
apartment to do some work on my laptop. The Department of Commerce website didn’t list an Office of Technical Services. Roberta and I might have misinterpreted the headers; after all, we’d merely been guessing.

I shut my eyes, slowed my breathing, tried to picture the redacted, bleached page. Bombs had been mentioned. A chemical engineer. A redacted name hadn’t witnessed something. A city of Inns. I couldn’t remember anything else.

I looked up “City of Inns.” Many towns advertised themselves as “cities of inns,” but Innsbruck popped up on the second results page. Innsbruck is in Austria. Martina Saginor, Lotty, Kitty Binder and Martina’s student Gertrud Memler had all come from Austria. And during the Second World War, according to the young librarian at the University of Chicago, the Nazi war machine had tried building nuclear reactors near Innsbruck. I liked it.

I found an article on the Innsbruck weapons site in the
Journal of Science and War.
In 1940, no one knew if you could have a self-sustaining chain reaction, which apparently was essential for turning atoms into bombs. Physicists like Heisenberg in Germany and Fermi in America built nuclear reactors to see if they could create a chain reaction. As we all know now, Fermi could do it; Heisenberg couldn’t.

Japan and England had also been trying to build a bomb; our history books never mentioned that. Every war room everywhere wanted the most devastating way to obliterate as many women, children, men, dogs and trees as they could.

Herta Dzornen said Martina had been dragooned into weapons work during the war, probably at Innsbruck. I knew I was creating a monumental pyramid without straw, but I wondered if Martin filed a Freedom of Information request about Martina. No, that didn’t make sense; she died before the war ended. The U.S. wouldn’t have files on her. If anything, Martin would have searched for her in the Holocaust
Museum. He must have been looking for Gertrud Memler, Martina’s Nazi student-turned-anti-nuke-activist—he’d learned about her in the book about the Cold War.

But if the Commerce Department document was something Martin had gotten through the Freedom of Information Act, he wouldn’t have been fighting his mother over it. Unless he brought it with him to show her, to demand what she knew about Memler or Martina. I could see Kitty, bitter toward both Martina and science, stonewalling her grandson. He’d had a last-ditch hope his mother might know something, drug-addled though she was.

More guesswork. I had a whole five pages in the Binder file devoted to “useless speculations.”

The bank book was more promising. It had been an old-fashioned passbook, created long before the Internet. I can still remember going every week to the Steel City Bank and watching my mother carefully push across the stacks of quarters she’d earned from giving music lessons. The teller would count them and enter the amount by hand in her passbook. My favorite part was the red date stamp that went next to the entry.

An old passbook from a Lincolnwood bank could have been Kitty’s, stolen by Judy. It was possible that Benjamin Dzornen had set it up to buy her silence back when she was creating such a stink on the South Side. The notion was a stretch, but a tempting one.

I put on a pair of good trousers, a knit top and a red-and-gold scarf and headed out. My first stop was the garage on Lawrence Avenue I use. Even though it was Sunday, Luke Edwards, who must be the most lugubrious mechanic on the planet, was in the shop, taking a transmission apart. He looked at the trunk as if I personally had taken a crowbar to the lock.

“Why’d you go and do that, Warshawski?”

“Just one of those fits that overtakes me sometimes, Luke, where I feel like taking an ax to my ride. How long do you reckon to fix it?”

“Depends how long it takes me to find the replacement parts. You know these older Mustangs, the fittings are different, can’t just order them from Ford.”

“But you’ll shake a few branches and see what falls out. I can’t lock the car with the trunk open. Any way to set the alarm on the door with the trunk lock broken?”

Luke gave me a withering look. “Of course not, Warshawski: anyone can get into the car through the trunk, so what would the point be? I’ll call you next week. It ain’t the car your old Trans Am was, but I’d still like to see you take better care of it.”

I grinned ferociously, in lieu of popping him one, and drove down to the Gold Coast. I called Herta Dzornen Colonna’s apartment while sitting in my car across the street from the entrance.

“Ms. Colonna: it’s V. I. Warshawski. We met last week.”

“Met? You call barging in on me ‘meeting me’?”

“I’m about to barge in on you again. I know that your father created a savings account for Kitty Binder. Can we talk about that?”

She was silent for a moment, then whispered, “What is it you want? Are you trying to get money out of me?”

“No, ma’am. All I want is information. Can I come upstairs to talk to you in person? Or do you want to continue this on the phone?”

“You’re outside my home,” she cried. “Oh, don’t do this to me!”

“Ms. Colonna, I don’t want to torment you, and I certainly won’t broadcast your secrets to the world, but if you told me what really went on between your father and Kitty Binder, it might put some old ghosts to rest.”