On her home turf, Alison sounded older and more confident than she had at Kitty’s this morning. It was only when we got inside, and she stopped under the chandelier in the middle of the room, that I saw the lines of strain around her eyes and mouth.
“I’m glad I spotted you out there,” she said. “Dad wants to chew you out for corrupting me or misleading me or something totally stupid.”
The music room had been built back when Chicago’s robber barons were truly baronial. The high ceiling was covered with paintings of the muses playing music for the deities of Mount Olympus. A grand piano still stood in one corner, but the couches and chairs arranged in little islands made it look as though the Breen family used it for more ordinary entertainment.
A door opened at the far end of the room; a woman in a silvery sweater and black trousers appeared. “Alison, your father is looking for his visitors.”
Her tone held an undercurrent of warning, or perhaps pleading. Alison grimaced, but introduced us to her mother. Constance Breen was a slender woman about my own age who had the same amber eyes as Alison, and the same stress lines around them.
“We’re at sixes and sevens here tonight,” she apologized. “We weren’t expecting Alison to come home in such a dramatic way and Cordell is—Cordell and I are off-balance. Mr. Contreras, why don’t you and I have a glass of something in my studio while Ms. Warshawski talks to my husband.”
Her voice was slurred: she’d already had a few glasses of something. Mr. Contreras let himself be led off through one set of doors while Alison escorted me out another.
“Mom is a painter,” she explained. “She hasn’t had a public exhibition for a lot of years, so it will be fun for her to show her work to Mr. Contreras.” It was a gallant effort, but her tone was doubtful.
She took me to the door of her father’s office. It was the room of a modern technocrat, with a flat-screen TV on one wall tuned to world market reports and a battery of equally flat computer monitors on the glass-topped desk in front of him. The room faced the lake, but the windows were so thoroughly soundproofed that we couldn’t hear the water.
Breen didn’t bother to get to his feet or even to look up from his monitor. I guess being kept waiting was supposed to make me feel nervous.
“Good to see you too, Mr. Breen,” I said. “If that’s all, let’s get Durdon to drive me back to Chicago.”
As I turned to leave, I saw Alison’s eyes widen—admiration or alarm, hard to know. I gave her a reassuring smile.
Breen said, “You came up here to see me. You’ll wait until I’m ready.”
I paused in the doorway. “It’s true, I would like to see Edward Breen’s workshop. Alison, why don’t you take me up there while your dad plays games with his computer.”
“Neither Alison nor anyone else will take you to the workshop. The last time I let her take strangers up there, a valuable picture disappeared.”
“Dad, don’t start that again tonight, please,” Alison cried. “Martin did not steal the drawing. It was there at the end of the evening.”
“What’s gone?” I asked. “Your pet Picasso?”
“More valuable than that,” Breen snapped, “at least to us. Edward’s rough sketch of what became the BREENIAC, the Metargon-I, has vanished. Apparently angels or vampires made off with it, since Alison claims it was still here at the end of her irresponsible party with one of our employees. Who definitely should not have been in this house.”
“Dad, please!” Alison said. “We’ve gone round on this all day. Jari Liu has told you himself that Martin could dance rings around all the summer fellows, so why do you need to keep insulting him? Besides, he did not steal Granddad’s BREENIAC sketch.”
“Oh,” I said slowly. “Is that what Martin was looking at when he said something didn’t add up?”
Alison held up her hands, a gesture of helplessness. “I don’t know. It’s true that it’s vanished, but I’m sure it was here when the party was over. Besides, Martin was wearing a T-shirt and cutoffs to the barbecue; you can’t stick a framed drawing inside a T-shirt without it showing. One of the other fellows would have said something. Especially Tad: he goes to MIT. He couldn’t stand that a guy taking night classes at an urban campus could out-program him.”
“It’s why I don’t trust young Binder.” Breen smacked his desktop with his palm. It must have stung, heavy glass against skin, but he didn’t flinch. “He has a chip on his shoulder, he was taking over chunks of Fitora from other programmers. Maybe, as Jari says, he was only trying to improve the program, but maybe he was getting a handle on more of its components.”
“What does the sketch show?” I interrupted. “I thought it was just the outline for a computer that is completely obsolete these days. Is there something else on it that makes it worth taking?”