Last night, despite my exhaustion, I’d lain awake a long time. I kept turning pieces of information like a kaleidoscope, trying to make a comprehensible shape out of them. Julius, Cordell, Martin. Kitty, Martina, Judy. Benjamin Dzornen and Edward Breen. The meth house.
I went to my computer to see what unsolved crimes in Chicago dated back fifty years, with a few years on either side. I didn’t turn up anything that sounded as though it connected to Julius and Cordell.
Judy Binder had just been born fifty years ago, but Julius’s old crime was tied to Kitty and to the Breens. Her whole life in Chicago, Kitty had thought someone was spying on her. Lotty said it was a constant obsession with her; she wouldn’t have kept it a secret from her daughter.
Kitty had witnessed a horrible crime, or been the victim of a horrible crime, involving the Breens and the Dzornens when she first came to Chicago. They had bought her silence with the bank account that Herta Dzornen robbed, but Kitty was always afraid the Dzornens or the Breens would do something else to her. Judy might not know all the details, but she’d known enough to try blackmailing Herta.
I finally went to sleep, but in my troubled dreams, Martin’s skeleton was grinning up at me from a hole in the bottom of the meth pit. Alison Breen was weeping over his bones while Kitty Binder wrung her hands, crying, “I told you over and over, if you don’t know they’re after you, you’re not paying attention.”
I slept late, despite my unquiet dreams. When I finally got out of bed, the weather had turned, as it does in Chicago: heat-crusted drought one day, cold and rainy the next. I couldn’t bear to run in it, much as I needed the exercise.
I threw balls to the dogs from Mr. Contreras’s back porch, sipping a double espresso, trying not to resent Jake for sounding so happy when he called me from San Francisco: the Rautavaara had been a huge success. I was truly glad, but I wanted some successes of my own. They seemed hard to come by these days.
It was after ten when I finally got to the hospital, where Judy Binder greeted me with all her usual sunniness. She had just finished taking her first walk since the shooting, as far as the nurses’ station and back. I walked into her room in time to hear her snap at the nurse and therapist who’d applauded her progress: she wasn’t two years old, she wasn’t fooled by pretty words, so they could shut the fuck up.
The nurse helped her into a wheelchair, carefully arranging the IV stands so that the lines didn’t cross each other. Judy had four, which disappeared into the folds of her hospital gown. Her thin arms were scaly, with so many collapsed veins the nurses had had to go into her back for sites to insert the needles.
“If Martin wants to disappear, let him disappear,” Binder said when I tried to talk about her son. “He treated me totally disrespectfully the last time I saw him.”
“You don’t go out of your way to make people want to respect you, Ms. Binder.”
We both thought she was going to start screaming abuse at me, but she shut her mouth halfway through. “Goddamn bitch, mind your own—” Her face took on a puzzled look, as if she’d heard herself for the first time and wondered what she was saying. After a brief silence, she said sullenly that she had no idea where Martin was.
“I believe you,” I said, “but I need you to tell me every detail about the papers you and he argued over. He came to you because he’d seen an odd logo on an old drawing, a pair of linked triangles with something like a sunburst in the middle. He thought he’d seen the same design on a paper he’d once found in your possession. What did he say about it?”
“He came barging in, not even bringing me a flower or anything, the way you think a boy would do for his mother. He just demanded to see those damned papers.”
“These were papers that you found at your mother’s house when you went there for Martin’s bar mitzvah, right?”
“Are you saying I stole—”
“I’m not here to make any accusations. I need information, and I need it fast. Your son’s life may depend on it.”
She scowled. “Yeah, Martin’s life, what about mine?”
“You’re alive because your mother called me in time to save you. Now I’m asking you to do the same for your own child,” I said.
She tossed her wiry hair petulantly. “I think you’re letting Martin dramatize himself, but, okay, I found this envelope in Kitty’s underwear drawer. I started feeling unwell at the bar mitzvah party; I went to lie down and was looking for a—a clean handkerchief.”
She stopped, eyeing me to see if I was going to comment on her snooping, but I didn’t say anything. “So Kitty screamed the house down when she realized the papers were missing. But I was just preserving them!”