“You’re close to him?” I asked.
“No,” Alison said slowly. “He’s been with us since I was little, but—well, some of the staff, like Imelda, went out of their way when I was a kid, but Durdon, he always seems a bit—oh, like he’s polite because it’s his job, but he doesn’t really like me.”
“He lives in the house?” I asked.
“He and Imelda, she’s the housekeeper, they both have suites in the south wing. An outside contractor keeps up the grounds and Imelda has someone come in three days a week to do the heavy cleaning. Do you think someone from the cleaning service could have taken the sketch?”
“Something to keep in mind,” I said.
When she pulled up in front of our building, I asked if she thought she’d feel better spending the night with us, but she wanted to get back to Lake Forest; she was worrying about her mother.
“I ought to be getting ready to go back to Mexico,” she said. “But I kind of don’t feel like going until I see what’s—well, you know—Martin, the sketch—and there’s my mother—” She broke off unhappily.
Mr. Contreras gave her a rough embrace. “You just keep your chin up, Alison, leave the rest to Vic and me. We got your back, okay?”
She produced another gallant smile and hoisted herself back into the Land Rover. I went outside with Mr. Contreras and the dogs. It had been a long day and I was tired, but I tried to listen to my neighbor’s rambling: he’d had a long day, too.
Constance Breen had shown him her paintings while she worked her way through a bottle of chardonnay. “You’d think she might paint that gal of hers. Alison’s got the kind of face I’d like to hang on my wall, I told her. She laughed at that, said she’d do a portrait for me.”
He chewed it over in his mind, then added, “These pictures, they’re like they’re the inside of her head out there on a piece of canvas. Lots of gray paint with one spot of red, like it was a red dot of anger in the middle of her body.”
It was an impressive summary, which dovetailed with what Alison had said, her mother feeling shut off in the Lake Forest mansion, away from other artists, her husband lost in the world of machines and money. Her daughter, too, at least the machine part. I wondered about Constance Breen’s relationship with Durdon, the driver-mechanic-muscle-man. Did she like him, trust him, sleep with him, keep him at arm’s length?
I finally went up to my own place, where I’d started the evening three hours ago. I went back to the DMV site to check the license plate of the car that had been outside the Breen gates when Cordell hustled us out of his mansion.
It belonged to a seventeen-year-old Honda. Which was registered to Julius Dzornen. My jaw dropped. Julius demanding an audience with Cordell Breen? I rubbed my aching eyes.
Cordell had been dismissive of Julius tonight for crying over what he called sarcastically “the crime of the century.” However, Julius’s reason for driving up to Lake Forest took Breen by surprise: he didn’t know someone had used Julius’s name to get into the library. That in itself was an odd thing—why had it made Julius angry enough to drive so far late at night? Perhaps he was drunk. Or it was the last straw, the final insult in a half-century of them?
More interesting were the little triangles on the BREENIAC and King Derrick documents. Breen had looked surprised when Alison showed him the design, but I wondered if what surprised him was my connecting those two dots. I was supposed to be the imbecile that he could run rings around while he chewed gum, texted and played the tuba.
I didn’t believe anyone on the cleaning crew had stolen it—someone looking for quick cash wouldn’t think a page of equations had any street value. I needed to talk to Judy Binder again, to find out what she could remember about those documents she’d lifted from her mother. I wanted to see Julius, as well. I needed to find a way to get him to tell me what crime detectives should have dealt with all those years ago, when he and Cordell were both teenagers. It had to be connected to the drawing.
I groaned. It was late, I was exhausted. Unless I was going to drive down to Palfry and actually dig up the ground around the Schlafly house, I couldn’t do anything more tonight.
36
A CHILDHOOD OUTING
WHAT WILL YOU GIVE ME if I talk to you?” Judy Binder smiled at me slyly.
“Your son,” I said. “You are the only person who may know how to find him.”
“Doesn’t anyone care about me?” Binder said, her voice a high-pitched whine. “You come in here all worried about Martin, but what about me?”