Critical Mass (28 page)

“Nothing went on between my father and Kitty Binder.”

“What about the bank account in Lincolnwood?”

“How did you know—oh, what are you doing?”

“I’m coming upstairs, ma’am. This is too difficult a conversation to hold over the phone.”

I put my car flashers on and walked over to her building entrance.
The doorman called to announce me, most unwillingly: my careful grooming didn’t make me look any more trustworthy than I had on my first visit.

Herta was waiting in her doorway, one hand at her throat. She was using a cane, which she leaned on heavily as she led me to the living room—sighing equally heavily. When she had carefully lowered herself onto the white couch, I again pulled the tubular metal chair over near her.

“When did you find out about the bank account?” I asked.

“When Papa was dying,” she whispered. “I used to go down to Hyde Park two or three times a week to help Mama. Julius was useless, you’ve seen him, by that time he was just sitting in his bedroom playing the guitar and smoking—marijuana. He wouldn’t even come down the stairs to help Mama lift Papa to change his sheets.”

She was letting herself be distracted by old grievances, shying away from the hard part of the narrative. I sat very still, not an intrusive person at all, just one of her photographs, listening, not judging.

“One morning when Mama was at the grocery, Papa told me he needed my help. He wanted me to look after the bank account, but not to let Mama or Julius or my sister Bettina know about it.”

“Did he say why it had to be a secret?”

“He was afraid if I talked to Julius, he’d try to get the money, and he thought Bettina would tell Mama. She suffered so much from all those rumors about Käthe Saginor, he didn’t want to add to her pain. Better that she think she would never be bothered by the Saginors again.”

“Did he tell you why he’d set up the account?” I asked. “If the stories about him and Martina Saginor were merely rumors . . .” I let my voice trail away suggestively.

“Of course they were just ugly stories,” Herta said, indignant. “He felt terrible that Martina had been stuck in Austria during the war. Papa said that after the war, when he learned what had become of Martina Saginor, he owed it to her memory to do something for her
daughter. I protested that he owed Käthe nothing: she was married, she had her own life. And if Mama found out, she would have thought all the rumors were true, you know, what the neighbors said when Käthe came to the house back in 1956. But he said that was how he got Käthe to leave us alone, by giving her some money.”

Maybe that’s what Dzornen told his daughter Herta, but I didn’t think it was true, and I wasn’t convinced she believed it, either.

“Was the bank account for Kitty herself or for her child?” I asked.

“He gave Käthe a little money when she first showed up, so she and her husband could afford a down payment on a house, then when she had her baby, Papa put more in the account so Judy Binder could go to university, or get business training, whatever she wanted when she grew up. He could only put a little money in every quarter, otherwise Mama would have noticed, so he wanted me to promise to keep adding to the account. He gave me the account number and deposit slips. You know, it was before ATMs and everything.”

“And did you keep putting money into the account?” I asked.

Herta was twisting the cane round and round, digging a hole in the Chinese carpet at her feet. “No,” she finally whispered. “Stuart—my husband—he said Kitty was a blackmailer. Stuart sent one of his law firm’s investigators over to see what the Binders were like, so that we could decide whether Judy was worth supporting. Judy was thirteen but she was already, well, precocious if you know what I mean.”

I hadn’t heard the word used in that way for a long time. Precocious as in sexually mature for her age, not musically or mathematically.

“And we had three children, that wasn’t cheap, braces, you know, college education.”

“So you took the money out of the account and used it for your own children?” I tried hard to keep anger and judgment out of my voice, but I must not have done a good job because Herta flinched.

“It was our money,” she cried. “Papa was taking our money and giving it to Kitty and her drug-addict daughter. And then the daughter
found the passbook. She actually came down to the Greenwood Avenue house when Mama was still alive! It was terrible—she was drunk or on drugs. Mama called the police, she called me, it was such a shock, the first she knew about Papa stealing money out of her own children’s mouths. And Julius, he was
still
living at home, and he was almost forty by then! He asked if Mama thought it was worth murdering Kitty’s daughter. He sat and laughed and said he could do it for a fee.”

Herta’s face turned alarmingly red. I squeezed my eyes shut, knowing I shouldn’t blurt out the first thoughts in my own mind: How could you keep pretending after seeing the bank account that Kitty wasn’t your sister? And what happened to all that Nobel Prize money?

“When was that?” I asked instead. “When Judy was thirteen and already precocious enough to guess something was up with her mother and your father?”

“Not then, a few years later. Judy found the bank book and tried to get money from the bank. I don’t know how she found out that Papa had put money into the account—I wouldn’t put it past Kitty to tell her she should come down here and ask us for it. Judy came three times, I think it was: that first time, when Mama was still alive, and then when she saw the news about Mama’s death! She showed up at the funeral, oh my God, that was terrible!”

“Then Martin came, what a month ago? And you thought he was going to pick up where Judy left off.”

“He kept asking about Martina,” Herta whispered. “What did I know about her work? He was implying that Papa stole work from her! I knew then he wanted me to say the Nobel Prize should have been Martina’s! He was going to demand that we give the prize money to him.”

“Is that what he said, or what you were scared he would say?”

“I told him the police would be coming if he said one more word! The idea that Papa would steal, let alone that the ideas of a sewing woman’s daughter were worth stealing!”

This time I couldn’t stop myself blurting out, “What, the fact that Martina’s mother sewed for a living meant Martina wasn’t capable of creative thought? If your father’s ideas were as embalmed as your own, I imagine he did have to steal from his students.”

Not surprisingly, that ended our conversation. I tried to regroup, but Herta picked up the phone to call the doorman. I left before he came up to escort me out.

25

HIGH SHERIFF AND POLICE, RIDING AFTER ME

O
VER AT MY OFFICE,
I tried to piece together what Herta Dzornen had said with what I knew about Martin’s disappearance. When he went to Palfry, he found the bank book, which made Martin visit Herta and Julius Dzornen. Herta said Julius once offered to kill Judy Binder. Had that been a tasteless joke, or was that how Julius afforded the birdseed for all those feeders? Anyway, Judy was still alive, so if Julius was a hitman, he was singularly ineffectual.

I slammed my pen against the desktop in frustration. It was high time I started paying attention to my other clients. I jotted my notes from Herta into the Martin Binder case file and closed the folder.

True, it was Sunday, but equally true, I was days behind on my work. Around one-thirty, when I broke for lunch, I remembered that I’d sent an e-mail to the Cheviot labs, telling them I’d be bringing the drawers and the paper in. I left a message on my account manager’s voice mail to say the job was off.

I stopped a little before six, feeling incredibly virtuous with the amount of work I’d cleared. The most important report, for Darraugh Graham, was done and e-mailed. Most of the others were close to finished. I’d be able to send out invoices on Monday and end September in the black—if I didn’t count the six-figure legal bill I was paying down.

One of my friends plays on a tag football team on the South Side.
On an impulse, before going over to the park, I drove to Julius Dzornen’s coach house. A couple of kids were playing on the swing set, arguing in shrill voices. They stopped to watch me bang on the coach house door: I was a novelty, a visitor to the sullen recluse who lived behind them.

Julius again took his time answering, but finally opened the door. He was wearing baggy khakis and an old T-shirt, but no shoes or socks. “Herta told me you’d been over there bugging her about the Binder woman’s money. If you think you can get any out of me, you have the power to squeeze blood from a rock.”

I leaned against the jamb so that he wouldn’t be able to slam the door on me. “Nope. I’m not here about the money. Herta spent all Judy’s money on her kids’ orthodonture and I know you don’t have any. Herta told me you offered to kill Judy because she’d upset your mom so badly. Is that what happened fifty years ago? You killed someone but the detectives never arrested you?”

Julius’s face turned the color of putty and he swayed. For a moment I thought he might be going to fall over, but he held on to the doorknob.

“Fifty years ago,” he repeated. “Is that what I said? Maybe I meant sixty. Could have been seventy. I lose count. Fifty years ago, I was a dropout and a loser living in my mother’s house while my two sisters screamed their heads off about finding a job. When our mother died—and believe me, no one ever called her ‘mom’: Ilse definitely was not a ‘mom’ kind of woman. When she died I was disappointed to learn that she wore old-fashioned corsets: I always thought she had an exoskeleton that she’d bequeathed to Herta. I was softer, like our father. Prone to panic in a crisis. I doubt I could have killed Judy Binder, even if Ilse had ordered me to.”

“Did you think your father stole his Nobel Prize research from one of his students?” I asked.

Julius gave a crack of unpleasant laughter. “From Martina Saginor,
for instance? That would make a fine Dan Brown novel, wouldn’t it, conspiracy, death, Martina disappears so no one can check on who did the work. No. In his youth, Benjamin was a brilliant scientist. The record is there for anyone to see.”

“Is he the person you killed? Is that what the detectives who never came were supposed to investigate?”

His face contorted into a terrible sneer. “You could say Benjamin and I killed each other. He wasn’t a Nietzschean
Übermensch
, and neither was I. When we had to face disagreeable realities, we both collapsed. Unlike Edward and Cordell Breen, who flourished like that famous biblical tree. Tell that to Herta, and Martin, and anyone else who wants to ask. Good night.”

I moved out of the doorway. He’d pulled himself together; he wasn’t going to crack again, not until I had a better hammer and chisel to attack him with.

I went over to the park in time to cheer my friend through the final minutes of her football game, which entitled me to join the team for a vegan barbecue. It was past nine when I got home again, as happy as if I’d never heard of Binders or Dzornens or Nobel Prizes.

Mr. Contreras had been in the pocket handkerchief of a park up the street, giving the dogs their last outing of the day. We walked inside together, but Mitch insisted on pushing past me up the stairs. Peppy joined him, her tail waving like a red flag.

I called to them sharply, but they didn’t respond. I ran up after them. At the second-floor landing, I managed to step on Mitch’s leash, but he gave a short bark and broke free.

“You got mice, or a steak or something he’s smelling?” my neighbor said, stumping up behind me.

The two dogs were at the top by the time I reached the last landing. Mitch hurled himself against my front door, snarling and growling. Peppy began to bark in loud, sharp repetitions: beware, danger!

“Get downstairs,” I cried. “Call 911. Someone’s in my place.”

The old man started to argue with me: he wasn’t leaving me to face—

“Just go, just do it, I don’t want you shot.” I yanked the dogs back.

My arms were still weak from yesterday’s work. All I did was move the dogs into a potential line of fire. I let the leashes go and the dogs attacked the door again. I stood with my back flush with the wall, gun in my hand.

On the second floor, the Soongs’ baby began to wail. A newcomer to the building, a woman who sold bar appliances, appeared at the second-floor landing. “Those dogs are a major nuisance to everyone in this building. I’m calling—”

“Do it!” I shouted. “Call the cops! Someone broke into my apartment; that’s why the dogs are crazy.”

“Yeah, stop being a pain in the you-know-what,” Mr. Contreras added. “We’d all be dead if the dogs hadn’t—”

“Get out of the line of fire,” I screamed at him.

I pulled my cell phone from my hip pocket to dial 911 myself. “Home invasion.” I croaked out my address, repeating it twice over the dogs’ noise.

“Stay on the line, ma’am; we’ll get someone there as fast as possible. Keep talking, tell us what’s happening.”

My door has a steel core. You don’t hear much through it, but over the dogs’ noise, I could tell the locks were being rolled open. I made another desperate grab for the leashes, but I had to drop the phone.

A gun muzzle appeared through a crack in my door. I backed against the wall again, screaming at Mr. Contreras to get down.

Mitch broke from me and made another dash at the door. His weight forced it open. The gunman fired, but the shots went wide. Mitch knocked the man to the ground and stood with his forelegs on his chest, his muzzle near the man’s throat. I flung myself in after and squatted with my own gun next to the thug’s head. His eyes were rolling wildly.

A second man appeared in front of me. “Call off the dog or I’ll shoot him.”

The downstairs doorbell began to ring.

“That’s the police,” I said. “You can leave through the back. Or you can kill us all and then let the cops shoot you. Or you can put down your gun and come quietly.”

“Or you can call off your dog and then look at twenty years in Leavenworth for assaulting a federal officer,” the second thug said.