“How long has he lived in the coach house?” I asked.
She gave a wintry smile, as if I’d finally figured out a clue in a complicated game. “Since his mother died.” She returned to her roses, but as I walked away she relented and said to my back, “That used to be Edward Breen’s home. He had his workshop in the coach house.”
I felt as though I’d been hit between the shoulders. Of course. Alison had told me Edward’s first workshop had been behind his old house in Hyde Park.
I walked back to the gardener. “Julius Dzornen is obsessed with a crime he thinks he committed around fifty years ago. Do you have any idea what that might be?”
She sat back on her heels and looked at me with the first real emotion she’d shown, but she shook her head. “I didn’t know him then, and I’ve never heard any talk about it—and this is a neighborhood where people are passionate about gossip. I only know that when Ilse Dzornen died, the daughters sold her house on Greenwood Avenue and Julius moved into Edward Breen’s workshop. We were all surprised that the Breens still owned the coach house.”
Her lips twitched in a contemptuous smile. “I suppose Edward wanted his workshop treated like a shrine.”
Breens and Dzornens, united even past the point where death might them part. It was an unsettling relationship, people unable to undo the toxic ties that bound them.
I continued down the street toward the campus. I collected another day pass. Special Collections, which housed the archives, lay along a corridor that connected the main library to its futuristic new reading room. I pushed open the door and found myself in an exhibition space.
The room was quiet in the way that makes you feel quiet yourself; for a moment I forgot Judy Binder’s anguish, Kitty Binder’s murder, Julius Dzornen’s bitterness. I stopped in front of an eighth-century Bible. I pictured monks tranquilly singing psalms in Latin while they copied lines onto vellum in handwriting so careful it could still be read today. Icons of the dead make us think they lived peaceful lives, but murder and chicanery existed long before Cain biffed Abel or Jacob cheated Esau.
A second set of doors led to the administrative area and the climate-controlled reading room beyond, where fifteen or twenty people were bent over boxes of documents.
Three women were sitting at a counter, hard at work over computer monitors. Carts holding blue document boxes stood near them. Several people came up to the counter as I did, one returning a giant box half as tall as he was, the others asking for material. I waited until they’d left before producing my driver’s license, along with my PI license.
“What can we do for you?” one of the women asked.
I looked at the ID she wore around her neck: Rachel Turley. “Ms. Turley, I’m a private investigator who’s looking into the death of a woman named Kitty Binder. I don’t know if you follow that kind of news, but she was killed in the middle of a home invasion about a week ago.”
Ms. Turley said she vaguely remembered seeing the story, but added, “We deal here in rare books and documents, not contemporary news, so I’m not sure what we can do to help you.”
“Ms. Binder had hired me to look for her grandson,” I explained. “He’s been missing for several weeks. I’ve been digging into the Binder family history, looking for people whom he might have contacted, and as I dug, I discovered that Ms. Binder’s father was Benjamin Dzornen.
“Someone came into Special Collections recently to look at Dzornen’s papers. He had an ID, claiming he was Dzornen’s son, Julius. Only he wasn’t. I’m trying to find out who it really was, and what part of the collection he was looking at.”
Ms. Turley and a woman at the other end of the counter exchanged startled looks, but Ms. Turley said, “We never reveal what anyone using our collection was researching. It’s an inviolable library law. Not just here. All libraries.”
“Even if your telling me could help find Kitty Binder’s killer?”
Turley shook her head. “Even if you could prove to me that it would help you or the police find her killer, I can’t tell you.”
“Ms. Turley, I appreciate ethical principles as much as the next person, but—”
“There’s no but. If you had a subpoena, I’d get the library’s lawyer to talk to you, but you’re private, not public, right? So you can’t get a subpoena. Scholars are a competitive and unscrupulous bunch; if they’re both on the track of some new data or theory, they’ve been known to steal each other’s research. They try to break into our files, or even bribe the staff to see whether Professor X is looking at the same material they are. So we protect everyone by scrubbing our servers to make sure there’s no trail of who’s been requesting what papers.”